Friday 19 February 2010

Spies in the Shell (the macbook shell)

Pennsylvania district accused of using remote-control laptops to photograph teenage students at home without their knowledge. Now this is an area where America is desperately behind its British compatriots, the area of spying on your citizens. They are at best amateurs at worst ignorant of the technology used by their British counterparts to keep the great masses under surveillance. Another area where we could export technology.
Subtler and more far-reaching means of invading privacy have become available to the government. Discovery and invention have made it possible for the government, by means far more effective than stretching upon the rack, to obtain disclosure in court of what is whispered in the closet.
-US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, 1928

Most people do not seem to have grasped that we have lost our rights. All we are doing now is making sure that they know how it feels.

2 comments:

Captain Ranty said...

We trade rights for priveleges all the time.

Those same priveleges can be, and are, taken away at a whim.

Our rights are inalienable. They can never take them away. But you can (and do) voluntarily give them up.

CR

PS-thanks for the link.

13th Spitfire said...

Well problem is that they have the key argument which they have been using since the beginning of the last century; security. It is for our own security that we must be strip searched, stopped for no reason, displayed but naked at the airport, have more than 1,000 different bodies who are legally entitled to enter our homes.

It will not last though, it never does, sooner or later someone will have enough of the state and it will get messy. It might you be a couple of guys on the piss who are having a jolly time walking home from the pub who are stopped and searched under section 44. In their drunken state they consider this to be just that; enough. What they do is up to them but the state takes its retribution and it is then, most likely, followers will join in - so at least I hope.