UK government about to start monitoring personal data on social network sites

[Skybird]

Privacy in the digital age? Forget it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7962631.stm

All in the name of security, of course.

Freedom and security are antagonists. You can't have both.

[UnderseaLcpl]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Privacy in the digital age? Forget it.
Freedom and security are antagonists. You can't have both.

That is only true if the state is trusted to provide both.

[Respenus]

Originally Posted by UnderseaLcpl

That is only true if the state is trusted to provide both.

The government is also considering proposals to store all communications data on a single database, which may be run by a private company.

Yes and the fact that the UK government has lost its data more times than I could count doesn't really help. Also don't forget they mentioned the data would be stored on private servers and not on government one's.

I dislike social networking sites and I believe they bring nothing good, yet I am against such blatant attacks on personal liberties.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by UnderseaLcpl

That is only true if the state is trusted to provide both.

Really?

If the state only deals with security issues, he necessarily can only do so at the cost of freedoms. It is a side-effect you cannot avoid.

If the state only is about guaranteeing freedom, security will be compromised, agaion as an unavoidable side-effect.

It does not matter whether the state is the only actor, or shares responsibility for both factors with some other player.

And who should that other player be? Private business...? If so, then help us God (if that is not a hidden irony in there...) Private business minds it's own interests only, that's in it's very nature in a capitalistic order. where it should provide security, you have business lobbies formulating future laws and regulations. you have security companies, from parkdeck-guards to mercenary corporations. And where business is seen as a function to influence culture and shape of a society for more freedom (ignoring for a moment how that freedom from a business-oriented perpsdeltive gets defined: the trade with rare African ores in civil war regions, or blood diamonds, also is understood to be liberal trade), business will necessarily try to ease security barriers in order to get a greater liberalisation of the market (and eventually it nevertheless will demand protectionistic measures to shield itself from unwanted competition reducing it's profits).

So I cannot see in what way your remark is relevant.

[SteamWake]

Wait a minute... what do you mean 'start' ?

Oh there just now publicly announcing it... I get it.

[UnderseaLcpl]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Really?

If the state only deals with security issues, he necessarily can only do so at the cost of freedoms. It is a side-effect you cannot avoid.

If the state only is about guaranteeing freedom, security will be compromised, agaion as an unavoidable side-effect.

It does not matter whether the state is the only actor, or shares responsibility for both factors with some other player.

You are too readily discounting the role of the individual in assuring his own freedoms and security. The state is required to provide some security, of course, but its' role should be as limited as possible to prevent the resultant damage of freedoms.

Originally Posted by skybird

And who should that other player be? Private business...? If so, then help us God (if that is not a hidden irony in there...) Private business minds it's own interests only, that's in it's very nature in a capitalistic order. where it should provide security, you have business lobbies formulating future laws and regulations. you have security companies, from parkdeck-guards to mercenary corporations. And where business is seen as a function to influence culture and shape of a society for more freedom (ignoring for a moment how that freedom from a business-oriented perpsdeltive gets defined: the trade with rare African ores in civil war regions, or blood diamonds, also is understood to be liberal trade), business will necessarily try to ease security barriers in order to get a greater liberalisation of the market (and eventually it nevertheless will demand protectionistic measures to shield itself from unwanted competition reducing it's profits).

So I cannot see in what way your remark is relevant.

You miss my point, entirely. I am not advocating the empowerment of private corporations to decide issues of security and freedom. I only support the freedom of such firms and the freedom of consumers to choose amongst them.
You too readily discount the fact that the state also minds its' own interests, entirely. You even mention how business uses the state, and yet you fail to see the harms of the state.

The powers of the state in any regulatory capacity must be very strictly limited, and must also be subject to public scrutiny. Where you see the state an opponent to private intersts, I see a dangerous corroberation.
The free market cannot be stopped. It will always exsist. Where the state interferes, it will seek advantage. Where the state destroys it, it will simply resurface outside the authority of the state. When either of these things happen, the rest of us suffer, because we are denied a choice in the market.

Since the market cannot be regulated much without causing undue economic duress, the state must be regulated . It must be prevented from interfering with and cooperating with the market.

The goal should be the preservation of individual freedoms. True, some people make the wrong decisions and suffer, but it is only their own doing and it affects only them and those who choose to aid them. When the state chooses wrong, or worse, when business chooses wrong and the state is in its' employ, everyone suffers.

The one question that continually irks me is; who do you trust to decide these policies, if not the conflicting wills of billions of individuals? Which group amongst them should be given the power to govern? How will such a group prevent harms that are not inherent in the system, if not exacerbate them? It is one thing to have an intelligent outlook on things, it is quite another to devise a reliable sytem of realizing it.
History has proven time and again that the state is not the answer, so what is your answer?

[Skybird]

You need to balance both the interests of the community (as being represented by an elected government with the power to regulate the market) and freedom for markets.

If you leave it to a self-regulating state, you have a dictatorship by politicians turning into tyrants. If you have an economy regulating itself, you have a tendency to slavery, monopolism, and economic anarchy driven by unlimited selfishness - the total and nihilistic materialism you get additional and for free, then. Therefore, you need both as lomng as you do ot live alone on the planet. Business and community are antagonists. Social community wants business to serve it'S interests. Business wants community to serve it's interests. In a capitalistic order, you have to add: business wants no competition, but monopolism. The stronger your monopole, the more power you have to enforce your profit interests onto the community. the more competiton, the more compromise oyu have to accept, at the cost of your profit interests. In such a setting, the demand for selfregulating markets has nothing to do with freedom anymore. Monopolism prevents freedom, including the freedom of choice. You have seen that in the five-year-plan economies of the european East. Here, the state was political tyrant and economic monopolist at the same time.

As little regulation as possible, so that business can unfold and be creative, and can compete. As much regulation as needed to prevent monopolism and lacking competition, and protect the interests of the community from being thrown over by interests of the economy.

The idea of unregulated markets is dead since the current crisis at the latest. No matter what attempts there are in argument to blame other factors, the primary problem has been a financial system that has been left to itself to regulate itself - everything else is just an excuse attempting to avoid putting this holy golden cow of "self-regulating markets" into question. Unlimited greed, total lack of sense of responsibility, and maximum, criminal egoism has been the result. It simply does not work that way. It only works that way at the cost of the community, when the many have to repair the damage, and compensate for it, that is done by the few in the name of their own egoism. Self regulating market - that would only work if man would be a reasonable, altruistic being by nature and essence. But in fact, man is unreasonable, driven by irrational emotion, and a born egoist. we are Homo Sapiens - no rational Vulcans.

But all this and what you said has nothign to do with the basic principle of that statement: the more security, the less freedom - the more freedom, the less security. The more anti-terror-laws, the more limiting of basic rights. The more basic rights, the less prevention against terrorism.

You can't have both. you need to find a balance that you can live with. That means to not look at the individual event (or lack of), where the probabilities already have sprung to either 100 or to 0%, but to find a balance where the overall general probablities are such that you can accept the resulting ammount of limitations to your freedoms, and the remaining threats of terrorism.

That is the price of having an open society basing on the individual, instead of having a totalitarian one, where the state is all and the individual counts nothing.

[Kapitan_Phillips]

Yeah, havent you heard? Terrorists put "Occuptation: Terrorist" on their Facebook pages now.

[UnderseaLcpl]

Originally Posted by Skybird

As little regulation as possible, so that business can unfold and be creative, and can compete. As much regulation as needed to prevent monopolism and lacking competition, and protect the interests of the community from being thrown over by interests of the economy.

Well we are in agreement about this much, at least. I suspect that we disagree on how much regulation is needed, however.

The idea of unregulated markets is dead since the current crisis at the latest. No matter what attempts there are in argument to blame other factors, the primary problem has been a financial system that has been left to itself to regulate itself - everything else is just an excuse attempting to avoid putting this holy golden cow of "self-regulating markets" into question.

Are you certain that you considered that opinion objectively? First amongst the many arguments against regulation is that it often causes the problems to begin with. In terms of the current crisis, one cannot make the case that the U.S. financial markets were unregulated, or even minimally regulated. How many pages of pre-crisis financial regulations would you like me to find for you? 1000? 10,000? 100,000? The Library of Congress has an extensive database.
When confronted with that type of regulation, in addition to heavy taxes, and the army of expensive lawyers required to comply with those regulations, is it any wonder that so many institutions seized upon the opportunity to use government-created initiatives for profit? Even then, the regulations and regulators failed in their task, obviously.

The idea of the unregulated market cannot exsist, (if it ever really did) you are correct in that, imo. But very minimally regulated markets make billions of unregulated transactions every day without fail. They are regulated only by supply and demand. And when the market does fail, we have recession, but recession is a good thing. It adjusts the market quickly and effectively.

At this point, I have a hard time arguing anything further because I don't know what kind of regulations you would like to see, and who should execute them and how. It is one thing to say that business should accept responsibility for community affairs outside of what is inherent in market dynamics, it is quite another to say that agency A should pursue policy B overseen by C to achieve effect D.


I'm sure that both of us would agree that strong anti-fraud regulation is required, provided that it is not overly expensive to maintain or too pervasive. I would favor a system of very harsh penalties for clear cases of fraud. We can agree on that, yes?
I feel the best system would simply be to implement harsh penalties for fraud that is exposed and reported, rather than detailing (and trusting) the state to deal with cumbersome and costly preventative investigation.
That is the main form of regulation I would support. I would even go so far as to agree that some (limited) anti-trust regulation could be used, to foster competition.

Unlimited greed, total lack of sense of responsibility, and maximum, criminal egoism has been the result. It simply does not work that way. It only works that way at the cost of the community, when the many have to repair the damage, and compensate for it, that is done by the few in the name of their own egoism. Self regulating market - that would only work if man would be a reasonable, altruistic being by nature and essence. But in fact, man is unreasonable, driven by irrational emotion, and a born egoist. we are Homo Sapiens - no rational Vulcans.

The same could be said of the state, with a lot more empyrical proof. Even at the worst of times, most free-market states tend to suffer less.
And Vulcans would make terrible businessmen.
The key to the free-market is harnessing man's flaws through competition to provide the best result for everyone.

But all this and what you said has nothign to do with the basic principle of that statement: the more security, the less freedom - the more freedom, the less security. The more anti-terror-laws, the more limiting of basic rights. The more basic rights, the less prevention against terrorism.

You can't have both. you need to find a balance that you can live with. That means to not look at the individual event (or lack of), where the probabilities already have sprung to either 100 or to 0%, but to find a balance where the overall general probablities are such that you can accept the resulting ammount of limitations to your freedoms, and the remaining threats of terrorism.

That is the price of having an open society basing on the individual, instead of having a totalitarian one, where the state is all and the individual counts nothing.

Once again, you too easily discount the effectiveness of private interests in security roles. One must employ the selfish nature of man to create security without the sacrifice of freedom. An armed populace, and the freedom of private interests to manage their own security affairs will create a superior system that harms neither liberty nor safety and is regulated only by the direct choice of the people.

Unlike the state, private industry is directly accountable for any failures. Take the example of 9/11. Airlines suffered for years, through no fault of their own, because the state was entrusted with administering and regulating security protocols, and failed. However, the state ballooned after its' failure, to the tune of billions of dollars of taxpayer money, and remains not only ineffective but vexacious as well, in the form of the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security.

To give or fail to strictly limit power to the state will always yield similar results in due time and always has. I think we agree on some basic principles, but until you provide some superior system of keeping the state in check and avoiding the occasional harms of the market, I can't say whether or not I can agree with you.

[jumpy]

A bit too much text to read there guys

Suffice it to say, this government is a dick.
End transmission.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by jumpy

A bit too much text to read there guys

Consider it a pas de deux anyway.

[jumpy]

hehe

[Skybird]

I would like to point attention to this indepth analysis of the current (conflict-heavy) status quo from which the current G20-summit has to start.

Not encouraging.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...616269,00.html

and a short collection of brief comments by economists:

http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fo...cke-41142.html

[NeonSamurai]

Yes indeed a pleasure as always , Apologies for coming in late like this but I hadn't had time until now. I'll try not to drag it on to much more

I don't disagree with you on the state being a problem, but I do believe that its the money men behind everything that are the real problem. Before I head to business I want to touch on the concepts of state first.

I don't disagree with the need for strong checks and balances for the governmental system, but I'm not sure it would be enough to stop the corruption (It seems able to worm its way into any system)

The biggest problem with most forms of modern governance is the lack of true accountability and transparency. This is especially problematic on the large scale as all the forms we use tend to work best at very small scale (populations of a few thousand). At the small scale (say the greek city states) its very difficult for corruption to form, for one thing the difference in wealth in the populace would be much smaller, second its much harder to conceal corruption, and third its much easier to remove problem people from the system of governance. But the larger it gets the less and less the above works.

Unfortunately I can't think of a way of disentangling corruption from large countries as almost everyone is vulnerable to being corrupted and the big money people will always be there corrupting and manipulating things to their gain. I do generally agree that the state should not have too much control over the populace. But someone needs to keep the money making machine in check or it will run rough shod over us.

Perhaps the best (and most extreme) example of what happens when business runs with out any restriction would be Victorian England at the height of the Industrial Revolution. At this time period, business was running completely out of control. Conditions for the workers was unimaginably bad both at work and at home. Disease and pollution was rampant, injury and death common place, and there were regular periods of no work lasting years. Basically the industry worked on a cyclical base, the industry would start up, demand for workers would be high, wages would be high (relatively, most wages were barely above subsistence levels during this period), and the industries would be pumping out as many goods as possible. Over time this would slow down as the industry flooded all the markets with goods, prices would drop with demand, and wages would fall below starvation levels before the industry closed its doors. People would rapidly run out of money and starve to death, the population would drop dramatically, and then when the goods were finally consumed a year or 2 later the cycle would start over again. The industrialists were literally making themselves incredibly wealthy by working their workers to death and exploiting every little bit they could get out of their workers (some of the most unscrupulous companies payed workers company money that was only good at the company store where the prices were heavily inflated).

Now Walmart... Yes Walmart is more efficient, so efficient that no small or medium business can even hope to compete with them. This is exactly why they are so destructive, because they set up, kill virtually all the local businesses and force most of those people to work at Walmart for minimum wage. They also don't tend offer more jobs (it takes less workforce to operate 1 giant store then 20-30 small stores) and the jobs they do offer are much lower paying then before (particularly since they refuse to allow unions and use all kinds of dirty and hardly legal tricks to do it including even closing the store in question). They are also notorious for sucking all the wealth out of smaller communities then closing shop and pulling out. The lowest prices are not always a good thing.

Back to corporations, the biggest problem with them is they lack any form of a moral center. They lack it because there is no ultimate person who is responsible for things, and so they can pass the moral buck around. The ability to excuse ones actions by being "unaccountable" has lead to some of the worst examples of humanity, including genocide, as the people who did the actual killing could say that they were only following orders. It's this sort of thing that enables large corporations to do all the horrible things they do, not because the people inside them are inherently evil but because those people are not directly connected and responsible for anything.

My main concerns are that business needs to be regulated to prevent monopolies, price fixing and other unfair business practices. And they must offer fair wages, and prevent destructive practices (environmental and community related and being overly greedy). Last they must offer safe work environments without long term long term harm to the employee.

Personally I would prefer fair governance and fair business practices. It would be nice if some day we could get beyond exploiting each other. Shame it is almost certain never to happen with our species.

[Skybird]

Another interesting on the G20 summit, an interview with Jospeh Stiglitz (Nobel for economy).

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...616743,00.html

SPIEGEL: The leaders of the 20 largest industrial nations are meeting in London this week to discuss the regulation of financial markets. Will the meeting be successful?

Stiglitz: I'm skeptical. The American government does talk a lot about stricter regulation of financial markets. I doubt that it's serious, though. The Americans have always been masters at changing a supposed regulation measure into further deregulation.

SPIEGEL: Do you expect this of the new Obama administration as well?

Stiglitz: Obama himself has made clear in many speeches that he wants to prevent prospecting in the American financial industry. But Obama is under pressure from Wall Street. Even within his own administration, there are a lot of officials who are only for cosmetic corrections.

SPIEGEL: The US is against too much regulation in the financial markets, Germany and Japan would prefer no further economic stimulus packages. Can much come out of the G20 summit?

Stiglitz: The governments will find the words to put a positive spin on the conference. If they can do anything, they can do that. Everyone will say that more regulation is necessary and that balance is needed between national sovereignty and common action in a globalized world. But how much substance will lie behind their words? I'm skeptical.

SPIEGEL: The economic crisis has severely damaged the economic model of finance-driven turbo-capitalism. Will this lead to a renaissance in the state economy?

Stiglitz: I don't think so. The fall of the Berlin Wall really was a strong message that communism does not work as an economic system. The collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 15th again showed that unbridled capitalism doesn't work either.

SPIEGEL: Could authoritarian systems like in China be the future?

Stiglitz: Besides the two extremes of communism and capitalism, there are alternatives, such as Scandinavia or Germany. The Chinese model has succeeded very well for their people, but at the price of democratic rights. The German social model, however, has worked very well. It could also be a model for the US administration.