WikiLeaks founder arrested in U.K. - Page 54

On August 17 2012 04:54 BadgerBadger8264 wrote:


Who do you think is sitting there looking at your information? The government isn't some magical entity. There are people working there. Do you trust all of them unconditionally just because they were hired by the government? That sounds really, really stupid.

As for your "what is there to manipulate and abuse", the answer to that is everything. I'll just go off on a little rant here, because you seem to think very little of your personal information, which is extremely stupid. Any bit of information can be used against you. How do you think facebook earns so much money? They have hundreds of millions of users and have no advertisements at all, yet they make billions of dollars every year. Why do you think that is? Simple. They sell your personal information to companies and people that want to abuse said information. That's how much personal information is worth. It's literally a multi-billion dollar a year industry. They can use your information to target advertisements at you, or to send you spam mail (real life or email), or to attempt to scam you, or to steal your identity or impersonate you.

Do you honestly trust every single person at the government to not sell your information or to abuse it for their own good? If so, why in gods name would you trust random people with it? You said you wouldn't post your information online on TL because people you don't know would see it, so why would you trust random people working for the government with it? Do you really think massive amounts of information on every citizen in the country would only be handled by CIA professionals or something of the sort? Hell no, they'll be handled by any guy that applies for a job there.

So why do you think the government will not leak out this information to others? This thread was originally about discussing wikileaks, essentially a large collection of government secrets that they couldn't keep safe at all. Why do you think they will do better with your personal information exactly? They'll probably do worse. Much worse. And all your information will get stolen from the government sooner rather than later.

Now, you said you did nothing wrong, correct? Here's the thing. You did not "do nothing wrong'. You think you did nothing wrong. And there's a big difference between the two. Namely, it doesn't fucking matter that you think you did nothing wrong. The person looking at your information does not care about your view of "right" or "wrong". I personally think there is nothing wrong with being gay, and that there's nothing wrong with being black, or with masturbating, or with eating bacon, or with having sex before marriage. Here's the thing, millions of people disagree with me, and people will attack gays/blacks, or destroy their property, or threaten them. It doesn't fucking matter that you think you did nothing wrong, others think otherwise. Imagine not being hired for a job because your employer doesn't agree with your political views, or if they have a record of you using a competitors product. What about them firing you because you said something bad about the company once? That would be a lot easier if everyone knew everything about everyone, no?

As a good example of this, I'll bring up a piece of history. In my own country, the Netherlands, we have kept a list of every registered citizen for a very long time together with information about them, facts such as their name, place of residence and religion are kept here, and we've been keeping this list for more than a century. Now, when the Germans invaded in WW2, over 80% of all Jews in the Netherlands were taken to concentration camps. A large deviation from the 50-60% of the Jews that were taken in most other countries. Why do you think the Nazi's captured and murdered so many more Jews in the Netherlands than they did in other countries? It was because of the list of registered citizens. They had no trouble finding every Jew all around the country as there was a nice list telling them who was Jewish, and where they lived. (Source)

Now, when you would ask a Jew prior to WW2 living in the Netherlands whether or not he was okay with the government keeping his name/address/religion, he'd probably say, "yea, why not, I've done nothing wrong". And immediately the fault of this argument becomes apparent. What happens when such information falls into the wrong hands? You trust your government (for little good reason, too), but what happens when your information is stolen from their servers?

- What happens when a group of White supremacists suddenly acquire a list of all the black people living in their town together with their addresses?
- What happens when Iran happens to have information on you saying that you don't like their country, and they capture you when you're on holiday in the middle east?
- What happens when the government stops being in a good relationship with their people, and they have information on you that you might not like them and might be participating in a revolution?

And here's another question for you, why do you think the government will use this information to protect you? Why do you put so much blind faith into them?

On August 17 2012 05:26 screamingpalm wrote:


lol.. oh man, again I am reminded... There was a Fox & Friends episode where they quoted Jack Bauer and used clips of 24 to justify torture. I'm not even joking.

On August 17 2012 05:42 Scheme wrote:

Strawman there. I didn't say its okay to lie. I just think that are other ways to catch this people that don't involve giving up an in my opinion fundamental right.


Thats true, there has to be some trust. I guess that how the whole system is based tbh. I just think that by creating a system with complex and thorough check and balances, we can avoid having the system abused. But I think we also need to trust people a bit. Not everyone in benefits are thieves or everyone applying for schools are trying to cheat the system(I know you didn't say this, its just an example). I would like to think that the majority of people aren't dishonest.



I have never been against the idea of listening to someone else call,etc... I'm just against how these powers are granted. Well, I guess that in this case it would be in the judgement of an agent(jack bauer in this case) to act or not. The same way a police officer may choose to shoot someone he thinks is puling a gun out of their pocket. He bares that responsibility and has to face its consequences.

In your scenario: even if he acts without judicial approval, there can at least be a judicial request. So that the government can keep tabs on its agents.

snooping without judicial approval in my opinion is fundamentally wrong and I think its pros don't out weight its cons. I guess it comes to a difference of opinion. I think its worth pointing out that the only reason the Arab spring didn't die in like 10 hours is because the government couldn't keep track of what everyone was doing at the same time. If that was the case, they would still have a corrupt tyrant regime in power.

The last reason is cost....the actual financial cost.....
EDIT: typos + clarification

On August 17 2012 06:02 BadgerBadger8264 wrote:


It's a well known fact facebook has sold and continues to sell personal information, a quick google search should reveal that. They've even been approached by the European Union several times about them doing so.


Never said that. English is your native language, yet you seem to have a very difficult time reading it. Why is that?



The government is not a single entity, stop pretending it is. The government is made up of people. People like money. People will do things for money. Is this a hard concept to understand? You're very ignorant if you think this would be the first time employees of the government sold information they obtained there. It has happened before, and it will happen again, and the more information they have on you the worse this will be.



I never said the government will sell it to him specifically, I said the information might leak out unintentionally and he might get his hands on it. As for being fired for saying bad stuff about the company you're working for, there have been numerous stories about this happening on facebook (employee complains, employer finds out, person gets fired), it's not hard to imagine they might do some background checks if the information is out there to be easily found.


This has nothing to do with my points or with the conversation.


We do. We trust everybody around us to be innocent and not to hurt us. That's the basis of our entire society. Innocent until proven guilty.

You seem to have misplaced your trust, as instead of placing it on citizens,you place it on your government, and your way of "trusting" them is giving them complete control over everything in your personal life, as opposed to having the government have some control, but not taking all of it away from the people they should be serving. What do you think is a greater risk, putting a group of people in complete power over everybody so they might have a slightly improved chance of capturing a vast minority (0.01%) of the population for bad things they do/did, or simply trusting people around you to a reasonable degree?


It happened because the government kept too much information about their people's private lives, so yes, the government is to blame for that. It really can't be any simpler than this, yet you still fail to comprehend this.


And they have the power to do so. The question here isn't whether or not you want them to stop those people, the question is, how much of your basic human rights are you willing to sacrifice just so the government has a slightly improved chance of capturing a very small minority of the population that does bad things? Are you willing to give up any sort of privacy (that has the risks I stated above) just because one in a thousand people isn't obeying the law to the full extent? Are you willing to put such a ridiculous large amount of faith into the government, basically stating they will do nothing but good with an extremely large amount of power, just for those few people?

On August 17 2012 06:23 Scheme wrote:


A person being dishonest has significantly less impact than a person of power being dishonest. Hence the stricter checks for them using this power. Although what common people lack in power they have in numbers.
In the situation I presented, you still need to trust the judge to make the right call, but that means that are extra people to asses the situation and detect abuse. So we are talking about obtaining the information the same way, I just think that a very strict process to allow this information to be obtained should be in place. Just so that it is not abused.


I'm not talking about persecution. This is very hard as there is no formula. It would be up to a judge to asses the situation and put it into context. I mean this happens now, say if a police office shoots someone. But there lacks a lot checks for the invasion of privacy bit.


Well,

before the thing really kicked off, if they had been snooping around everyone and kept track of political association, political party, connection,etc... when the revolution started, the government could have identified key people and arrested them before the revolution gained momentum.

Suppose it still went on anyway, then going from monitoring all information to blocking selected information is not a huge step, so there is a good chance that people outside wouldn't even know exactly what was happening and therefore would have made an intervention unlikely. As well as easily arresting anyone involved.

Twitter pretty much was getting the message out of the country for quite sometime. Obviously, the UK is no where near that, but I don't think its necessary(or safe as we don't know who will come into power) to move in that direction.

On August 17 2012 06:29 KentHenry wrote:
Information should be free and available to the masses. Release this man, he did nothing wrong; and before anyone says revealing secret information about their country is unpatriotic, perhaps the person who leaked it should have been more patriotic. The founder of wikileaks should not be held responsible for allowing information to be hosted on his servers.