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Comment by noja | Hacker News Reader

Oh for fuck's sake, really. And the LibDems agreed to this? Fuck them too. WTF.

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And there I was feeling a little sorry for the LibDems after their euro defeat, hoping that they still had some sense of morality.

The main UK parties are siding this and fracking. The political landscape in Britain is looking very bleak.

All the more reason to encourage a vote for an independent Scotland on Sept 18th. You'll be doing Scotland a favour and there will be a friendly place to stay if things get too fucked up south of the border.

I'm seriously considering that as an option at the moment.

England is turning into a surveillance state (something I have been warned many a time to keep one eye on by a good friend who lived through some bad shit in East Germany), half the population is out for the blood of anyone darker than a sheet of A4 paper, military awareness and propaganda is at an all time high and the economic disparity between the rich and the poor is INSANE.

It's rife for an explosion of sorts soon. I don't want to be here when it goes.

Scotland I believe would survive this if independent.

Yes, this is definitely true. All of the issues that rich countries have with their governments and privacy will certainly not apply to that mystical, magical, tartan land, whose politicians shit rainbows.

It's simply a matter of scale. You can ignore the fantasy economics touted by the politicians. For the most part, unless the country becomes a Banana Republic there simply won't be the resources available (and hopefully the will) to run a surveillance state. I also adhere to the, almost certainly naive, view that smaller European countries (at least in the vicinity of our close friends in Scandanavia) are generally better run with less likelihood of vested interests running amok.

EDIT: It can't be any worse than the path we are already on.

When it comes to surveillance, Scandinavia is not a beacon. Sweden has their notorious law that allows any signal passing the borders to be intercepted by military intelligence. Since most of Norways traffic out of the country goes via Sweden, that's caused a few issues...

And Norwegian security services have decades worth of history of blatantly illegal politically motivated surveillance (basically anyone to the left of the Norwegian equivalent of Labour used to be under extensive surveillance - some of it so blatant it was clearly intended to intimidate rather than uncover anything; it was supposedly stopped in the mid 90's, but given that the security services were illegally monitoring the head of the parliamentary committee investigating them while he was investigating them gives me zero confidence anything has changed)

Oh come on, digital copying is very, very cheap.

So your argument is: you hope Scotland will vote for independence, because you think they'll be too poor to do digital surveillance?

(Well I don't get a vote being south of the border. But I do hope that Scotland does get its independence. (I'm not really sure why I feel like that. I'm not anti-europe. Shouldn't the sum be greater than the parts?) Sadly that will most likely leave England, stuck with the Tories and UKIP. Shudder. I still think Salmond only got in because Blair pooch screwed Labour. The Scottish debate has been pretty pathetic so far from both sides, will watch with interest.)

Labour agree to it too.

This is the government changing the law to make the illegal surveillance they do already "legal". Retaining and using the data they make telecomms companies keep used to be legal under EU law but the EU recently repealed said law, so now the government need something of their own.

>Labour agree to it too.

Labour are not considered champions of personal privacy to the same degree the Lib Dems are...

I wonder what would be happening in government now if David Davis hadn't resigned as Shadow Home Secretary to protest against Labour's intrusions into personal liberties, but instead made it to be Home Secretary.

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