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Originally Posted by Schroeder
(Post 2285642)
The difference is that the police car in front of your house or the surveillance unit next door needed some form of justification to be there. Now everyone is presumed guilty by default and gets spied on. That's not exactly what should happen in a state of law.
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No, I do get what you mean and I don't like it either, but generally speaking it's only used in extreme examples, namely terrorism cases. What defines terrorism is another good question, and that's a slippery slope alright, but as it stands with the risk of extremists coming back from the likes of Syria and that, how on Earth do you combat this breed of terrorism without having to intrude deeply into peoples private lives?
The average domestic police, at least in the UK, have limits on their technology, which can be detrimental to their case. For example, I did jury service recently, and we had the case of a chap caught in procession of three counts of Class A narcotics, and one Class B, he'd confessed to intention to supply the Class B, but denied intention to supply two of the Class A. However, the police had seized two mobile phone devices and were able to retrieve text messages which they used in their case against him, however they were unable to retrieve the contents of vocal phone calls, only the existence and length of them, and they were also unable to retrieve CCTV footage from the betting shops he'd claimed to have visited (he was arrested with two amounts of cash which he'd claimed to be from betting shops which he provided slips from...but honestly they could equally have been collected from someone else and just used as defence) because the footage is only kept for a week before being overwritten and the police didn't get the receipts given to them for a month or so after the initial arrest.
Now, if they had had as much evidence as people think the police are capable of getting then they would have had a much tighter case and we wouldn't have debated for six and a half hours over whether or not he was intending to supply Class A drugs.
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That still doesn't give a private company the right to listen into my private living room.
That Samsung TV is outright disgusting. Next step will be to report what stuff you're watching to the GESTAPO and take pictures of you.
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I concur, but the genie is out of the bottle. Catfish asks when was too late...well, I'd say it was too late post-9/11 when things like the Patriot Act started appearing and the anti-Terrorism measures went into full swing. If there was a time to protest loss of freedoms that would have been it, but we were all too intimidated by the spectre of the Twin Towers collapsing and the Pentagon in flames and we meekly accepted (well, the majority of the public) that such measures were necessary to protect us from the spectre of terrorism. From those measures the big businesses leapt onto the bandwagon, as they are want to do, and brought in information gathering systems through the guise of convenience, and from that we slowly shuffled to where we are now, and will continue to shuffle on. Some people will turn away, will be scared of where this will go, just as many have done in the past with other forms of technology. Other people will work within the system to try and make them secure from businesses snooping, and others will just carry on as normal.
Let's face it, by logging on to the internet you're already giving up a fair sized chunk of privacy, by logging onto Subsim that's more information going out into the ether and by posting your political viewpoints that's another clump of information for whoever is interested to hoover up.
As Dowly put it, the internet is a two way street, you receive information but you also put it out, in ever increasing quantities.