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from the keeping-tabs-on-everything dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
A petition to Parliament requesting the repeal of the Investigatory Powers Act has received the 100,000 signatures required to make Parliament "consider" debating the issue.
Although the Investigatory Powers Act doesn't actually exist at the moment — it remains a Bill of Parliament which will not become an Act until it achieves royal assent — the deep unpopularity of the surveillance legislation has already provoked over 100,000 people to sign a petition against it.
This means it meets the threshold for Parliament to "consider" debating its proposition, though in practice debates are rarely carried out resulting from such petitions, and the repeal of the Investigatory Powers Act is ultimately extremely unlikely.
Created by someone calling themselves Tom Skillinger, and titled "Repeal the new Surveillance laws (Investigatory Powers Act)" the petition described the legislation as "an absolute disgrace to both privacy and freedom".
Skillinger wrote:
"With this bill, they will be able to hack, read and store any information from any citizen's computer or phone, without even the requirement of proof that the citizen is up to no good."
"This essentially entitles them to free reign [sic] of your files, whether you're a law-abiding citizen or not!"
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 30 2016, @06:07PM
Make them consider debating! I think I know how this will go, "All in favor of continuing the debate?" *a few hands go up* "All those opposed" *nearly everyone raises hand*
They try really hard to make us think the general public is incapable of thinking for themselves and hiding behind secrecy to keep us from knowing how exactly they're screwing us over. I think the easiest method to start fixing politics in general is to require transparency on all government activity. Anything hidden behind national security should have decent explanations and include a rough expiration such as "when operations are complete and operatives lives are no longer in danger we will reveal full details."
If the details are so horrible that it would cause civil unrest or military conflict with another country, well god damn it I say the public REALLY should know at that point. The powerful elite are using entire countries as their chess pieces, and the resources and people are thrown away to suit financial plans of various organizations.
It is all a big farce, more and more people are seeing that this is how things really are, and we're headed for dark times unless the "elites" realize they need to embrace the concepts of honesty and integrity.