The thing is that most people condemn the "spraying random Frenchmen with machine guns", but applaud when the day after France carpet bombs Raqqa, a Syrian city with a population of over 200000 with the civilians being trapped in the oppression of ISIS.
Apparently, then the death of dozens of innocent civilians which had no choice other than getting trapped between bombs falling from the sky or ISIS militants controlling the city borders, is justified because "look what happened in Paris!".
From what I read, it seemed like the French were not given the option to carpet bomb Raqqa but instead got to fulfill a long list of kill orders on strategic targets instead of the usual method of doling them out to different allies to take care of.
It doesn't justify it, but what it does do is undermine our moral authority. "Why do you condemn the Paris terror attacks and at the same time help prop up regimes that chop peoples' heads off in public? Isn't that almost the same thing?"
Does that in turn justify bombing innocent children in hospitals in Syria? France just nuked the whole country. Why are innocent children being roped into this?
And what about France's own colonial and terrorist in Africa that no one wants to talk about?
>That's their angle: use the panopticon to get blackmail material on 100% of people, then anyone who is inconvenient or needs to be controlled can be dealt with painlessly.
Right, France is a totalitarian government, no proof necessary. You cannot fight nonsense with nonsense.
I didn't say that they were totalitarian, merely that they had taken a step in that direction. Powers are abused, 100% of the time, even if you don't find out. Steps against free society add up.
Criminals do much more actual harm to society, and yet no is calling for local police to have access to everyone's email and phone records.
Imagine how many crimes local police could prevent if they did have access? Unlike finding small terrorist cells among tens of millions of people, busting local criminals is very easy if you can spy on their communication.
They could probably save thousands of children from serious abuse. They could definitely save some people from being murdered.
And yet, it's still not worth it because we would be living in a police state, not a free society.
> > no is calling for local police to have access to everyone's email and phone records.
> They are calling for mass video surveillance of everyone's encounters with police.
That's because there are serious problems with police accountability. Citizens benefit because bad police (which we hope are a minority) are discouraged from acting poorly, due to pervasive evidence, and the police benefit because there is a clear documented record of What Happened, which helps prevent spurious claims of police misconduct.
It's something that most of the police seem not to want, judging from reactions towards journalists and people with cameras, so it's not the __police__ asking for more surveillance. (Well, I mean, they are, but not in this way.)
There may come a point at which police officers have such powerful gear (see: spider drones from Minority Report) that they can effectively monitor the population, but that's nowhere close to what we have with current bodycams.
"Mass surveillance is the intricate surveillance of an entire or a substantial fraction of a population in order to monitor that group of citizens."
We had an example not even a month ago. In many cities, there are enough parking spots for everyone, so many citizens will leave their cars for the night near their homes in places where they do not cause significant disturbance, and the police will tolerate this behavior and not ticket them for it. This is a win for everyone: the citizens have a spot to park, and the mayor doesn't have to spend public funds to set up parking spots.
In completely unrelated news, the city of Beauvais voted 67% against the municipal police force carrying weapons. The municipal police retaliated by not tolerating night-time parking anymore, resulting in a significant increase in parking tickets in locations that had been safe for years.
And while the mayor did apologize for this, the municipal police said it was "just doing our job".
Thanks to a spectacularly complex legal system, we all break plenty of laws each day. If our every action is recorded, then so are those currently inconsequential violations of law, giving whoever controls the panopticon the ability to pick and choose who to prosecute with near impunity.
Why? If laws are so complex that at any given time anyone is breaking at least one, then a surveillance dragnet gives you cause to indict anyone at any time.
France is not totalitarian, at least for now, but their political system is statist with a tendency for enacting authoritarian policies without regard for individual liberties.
I have been following a lot of French people on Twitter following the terrorist attacks and I didn't sense from them any caution or worries of giving the govt and security forces a carte blanche with the state of emergency and even for the upcoming constitutional referendum.
They seemed very naive and trust their government blindly to the point of trading their freedom for the illusion of safety and not learning the hard lesson endured by their American peers with the Patriot Act and the ensuing mass surveillance following the 9/11 attacks.
>the true goal of all the governments and agencies involved is not "preventing the next terror threat" but a power-play for the control of information.
This is a laughable statement but typically upvoted on HN. Politicians have to appear to have done everything possible to prevent these attacks. They are not dictators, if the public feels they were soft on terror they are gone, no pentaverate necessary.
People don't spray random other people with automatic weapons because of the marginal level of welfare benefits. The fact that you can even entertain that opinion is mind boggling.
What I've never understood is if these people believe so strongly in their God, and that he will punish them for apostasy, then why the hell do they have to kill them? It undermines their alleged faith.
More and more of the West are wanting to just pull out and "let them all kill each other", but that seems a little cruel doesn't it? Damned if you do damned if you don't.
Personally I think cruelty or compassion don't have place in this kind of calculation. We are calculation about faith of maybe million's of million's people.What is best for all of us ? What is best for humanity ? fucking around in middle east and randomly bombing some dude's which may or may not thinking about attacking west or end this non sense and let middle east to fight for himself.
