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And of course this is being billed as "not a significant extension of police powers" because the police already has the power to abduct innocent people carry out preventative arrests.

And now Dansk Folkeparti want Big Brother to listen on entire housing units [translation courtesy of GoogleTranslate, with minor modifications].

Intercepts everything

Monitoring is technically feasible by using a so-called false base station, which can collect and record the identity of all mobile phones in the area around the false base station.

It is also possible to intercept the content of conversations, SMS and data traffic from mobile phones in the vicinity.

Handy suspicion

The purpose of telephone scanning is that the mere idea that there is something interesting going on in a particular area should allow the police to launch an interception of all people in a particular area,

Time to dust off those Stasi 2.0 stickers.

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Wed Dec 2nd, 2009 at 01:54:04 PM EST
[ Parent ]
BTW, JakeS, could you give us some background on this resp. this?

*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.
by DoDo on Wed Dec 2nd, 2009 at 03:17:15 PM EST
[ Parent ]
My tea-leaf reading is that the Social Liberals are using it to secure a bargaining chip that they can use the next time they fancy growing a spine and standing up to our Benevolent Imperial Overlords. And they know perfectly well that there's no (legal) way to apply it only to brown people who speak funny, the way the Popular Party wants to.

But the Social Liberals are flirting with the 2 % additional member cut-off for parliamentary elections, and parties tend to start hitting panic buttons when that happens. Which makes them a bit unpredictable. So this tea-leaf reading should be taken with an even larger grain of salt than is usually the case.

The Popular Party, meanwhile, is grandstanding. They get a soundbite where they get to show how tough they are on brown people, and by the time it gets killed in Parliament (by my count, R and DF have all of 20 % of the MPs between them...), everybody will have forgotten about it.

On the off chance that they can rope in a majority, the government's lawyers will tell them that they can't legally apply such rules only to brown people. Then the Popular Party will probably drop it. With the mandatory hissy fit about The Unelected (EUropean) Courts/Lawyers/Bureaucrats obstructing The Will Of The People, As Expressed By The People's Anointed Representatives - namely, the Popular Party. Or they'll carry it through on the (depressingly justified) expectation that they have been able to pack the Ausländeramt with enough quasi-skinhead goons to ensure preferential treatment of white Americans anyway.

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Wed Dec 2nd, 2009 at 04:04:16 PM EST
[ Parent ]
And they know perfectly well that there's no (legal) way to apply it only to brown people who speak funny, the way the Popular Party wants to.

I'm not clear about this point: do you mean they don't advocate such a line (and perhaps distinguish themselves from the DF over that explicitely); or that they go along with the DF but don't play up this point?

*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.

by DoDo on Thu Dec 3rd, 2009 at 01:22:51 AM EST
[ Parent ]
It's not exactly clear from the soundbites in the news reports, but the Social Liberals are talking about "the same rules for Americans that the Americans have for Europeans" while the Popular Party are talking about "checking people from the US more closely - especially brown people."

Such subtlety is generally lost in the astonishment that R and DF have managed to agree on the general outline of a law. There's so much personal animosity between those two parties that it'd be a newsworthy story if they agreed that the sky is blue.

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Thu Dec 3rd, 2009 at 07:38:25 AM EST
[ Parent ]

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