As Socialist and Democrat spokesperson on Justice and Home Affairs in the European Parliament, I know that the European Union has been pushing hard to create the first piece of international legislation on data protection – the Data Protection Regulation and Directive – which would help enshrine much needed citizen’s protections in the internet age.
Besides denying people their privacy on such a scale, in the US is behaving unconstituionally. Those who have broken the constitution are the very ones demanding the person who exposed their criminality be locked up. Kafka would have relished this.
Regardless of what you think of Edward Snowden’s actions (fairly honourable, in my view), the attempt to hide out in countries with some fairly questionable records on media freedom is raising eyebrows.
Is Barack Obama as bad as, or even worse than George W. Bush?
This question has been asked by many liberals since the Prism revelations. One way to answer this question is to look at a range of policies (torture, detention without trial, regime change, extra-judicial killings), figure out which is the ‘Left’ position and the ‘Right’ position, and then plot where Bush and Obama belong on the spectrum.
Due to the willingness of nation states and international terrorist organisations to increasingly conduct their activities within the domain of communication technology, in particular the internet, it is clear that surveillance remains a necessary evil.
The United States of America is not one for letting things go. So when Edward Snowden – a 29-year old CIA employee seconded to the NSA – leaked classified information on highly-secretive surveillance systems, he will have known that his days of anonymity and free-living were numbered.
As we blogged a few days ago, one of the things Eurosceptics are probably rather uncomfortable with at present is the fact that it’s the European Union which is acting as a bulwark against American attempts to snoop on the browsing habits of us Europeans.
In a piece for Slate magazine, Matt Yglesias has pointed out a potential problem for Eurosceptics on the back of the Prism surveillance scandal. Essentially, the European Union is acting as a bulwark against American attempts to snoop on the browsing habits of us Europeans.
Those who hate the state love leaks of the sort The Guardian has been publishing. They justify their ‘Big Brother’ view of all that is supposedly bad about government.
