Is the West Building Its Own Iron Curtain? 337
New submitter pefisher writes "The British are apparently admitting that they track their citizens as they travel the world (through information provided by intelligence agencies) and are arresting them if they have been somewhere that frightens them. 'Sir Peter, who leads the Association of Chief Police Officer's "Prevent" strategy on counter-terrorism, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that those returning from Syria "may well be charged and investigated, but they will be put into our programmes".' The program seems to consist of being spied on by the returnee's cooperative neighbors."
Well, duh... (Score:5, Informative)
Gee, ya think? What has it been, like over a decade since the Patriot Act and people are just now figuring it all out?
I'm glad that the totalitarian impulses of the global elite are finally starting to penetrate peoples' realityTV-addled brains. Maybe pretty soon they'll figure out that it's just a mechanism to promote the redistribution of wealth upwards.
Then it will get interesting. I can't really fault people for taking a long time to figure out that ubiquitous surveillance and a corporate/government surveillance regime is a bad thing. I didn't want to believe it myself until around the middle of last decade, when it became impossible to deny.
But it's one of those things that once you see it clearly for what it is, you can never un-see it. Now, it's impossible to see practically any major news story without seeing the effect of developed, industrial nations turning into gulags.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:No (Score:5, Informative)
Re:For everyone who said "what do you have to hide (Score:3, Informative)
Don't know what happened to the poster to whom you're responding, but I always answer the census form only with the number of people here. I've gotten personal visits from census takers; I tell them, "I've told you all I'm going to tell you, good day." I have not yet been dragged off to Gitmo for doing so.
The Constitution authorizes an enumeration, not an interrogation. Other demographic information that the feds may legitimately desire -- it is useful to base policy on data, after all -- can be obtained via voluntary anonymous surveys.
Re:No (Score:5, Informative)
For the fully documented stuff proved beyond question we have idiocy like one part of the CIA running guns to Castro and another opposing him. We also have an agency in the US selling weapons to Hezbolla less than a year after they had killed off more than one hundred US Marines. That sort of thing made the USA look very weak. It's the sort of thing that showed Bin Laden that he had a chance.
After that we've got less well documented stuff with extremist middle east groups, hard core Islamists that stand against everything the USA stands for, getting US weapons, just to make some Saudis doing backdoor deals with US companies happy. That sort of thing, and the far better documented Iran-Contra, are directly opposed to the interests of the nation state but are of benefit to individuals. I don't know what to call it, because treason now means playing chess against the wrong person or exposing abuses to the constitution. Selling weapons to declared enemies with a recent high body count of your own people is now seen as the act of a "patriot".