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A top secret report to the British prime minister has recommended that a new international treaty be negotiated to force the cooperation of the big US internet companies in sharing customers' personal data, the Guardian has learned.
Privacy campaigners said the decision to classify the report, written by the former diplomat Sir Nigel Sheinwald, as top secret was designed to bury it and said its key recommendation for an international treaty could provide a legal, front-door alternative to the government's renewed "snooper's charter" surveillance proposals.
It is believed the former British ambassador to Washington concluded that such a treaty could overcome US laws that prevent web giants based there, including Facebook, Google, Twitter, Microsoft and Yahoo, from sharing their customers' private data with British police and security services. It would also mean not having to revive the powers – which require British phone companies to share data from the US giants passing over their networks – from the 2012 communications data bill that would enforce their compliance.
Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group said: "The Sheinwald report should be published. Any attempt to hide it can only be interpreted as an attempt to close down debate about whether the snooper's charter is really needed. A new international treaty is the right approach to cross-border requests for data by law enforcement agencies. This approach undermines Theresa May's claim that there is a need for a new snooper's charter when there is a simple, transparent and workable solution."
But the Cabinet Office defended its decision to keep the report secret [sic]. It said Shinewald "reports on progress to the prime minister but... is not undertaking a public review". The Guardian understands the report has been classified as top secret by the Cabinet Office because it goes into the detail of each company's operations. Shinewald was appointed by Cameron in September 2014 as his special envoy on intelligence and law enforcement data sharing.
Original Submission
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday June 03 2015, @05:21PM
I believe that what you are saying, is that people are to emotionally involved to argue the separate issues. Yeah, you're probably right. Regarding slavery - with or without the civil war, slavery was going to end within the next generation. All the rest of the world had already discovered that it's cheaper to pay a workman a substandard subsistence wage, and send him home at the end of the day, than to maintain a slave in good health.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tibman on Wednesday June 03 2015, @05:46PM
Slavery ending because it was financially cheaper is not the correct reason to end it. Not only that but it isn't guaranteed to end all slavery, only most of it. A worker making a substandard wage still has the ability to improve him/herself and get a better job. They can have children and not have someone else steal them away. They can write a book, paint, invent something, and create music and also own the copyrights/patents to those works.
I could only agree with slavery if it was un-coerced opt-in and the slave retains all freedoms guaranteed by law. Just like a contract. There would also have to be a mechanism to leave service.
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(Score: 5, Informative) by ikanreed on Wednesday June 03 2015, @05:54PM
And this is an outright fabrication.
It's just not true. It's a thing lost-cause-of-the-south types lie to each other about so much they actually start believing. There's no substantiation to the claim that slavery was dying out. It was being rightfully restricted and limited by sane governments all around the world at the time. But the regionalists of the south were not among them.
(Score: 3, Touché) by maxwell demon on Thursday June 04 2015, @09:29AM
In other words, if it was not slavery.
It's like saying I could agree with death penalty if nobody gets killed.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Thursday June 04 2015, @06:20PM
I'd argue that a crime is the un-coerced and opt-in part to qualify for the death penalty.
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