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"Yesterday, you were defending thieves; today, you're defending terrorists." With these words, uttered early this morning, the leader of Poland's ruling conservative party silenced the parliamentary opposition. Not five minutes later, Poland had a new counterterrorism law — the terms of which go beyond what most of the democratic world has thus far seen.
The bill establishes a battery of eyebrow-raising security regulations that limit freedom of assembly in vaguely defined crisis situations and allow for the arbitrary detention and surveillance of foreign citizens. In the digital realm, it gives the country's powerful intelligence service, the Internal Security Agency (ABW), the mandate to block websites deemed a threat to national security. When a (vaguely defined) state of emergency is declared, the new regulations also enable the police to disable all telecommunications (an equally vague term that could refer to anything from phone lines to internet access) in a given area. The law also grants intelligence operatives unencumbered access to key data on Polish citizens — all this in a country that hasn't seen a major act of terrorism since 1939.
[...] A common thread runs through both the Polish bill and some recent legislation in other countries: ambiguity. In a newly published report on freedom of expression in the digital age, David Kaye, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, decries vague laws on digital issues as gateways to abuse. Poland's new bill is a case in point. It extends the definition of "terrorist acts" to any real or planned criminal activity, punishable by more than three years in prison, that is devised with the intention of spreading fear, disrupting the activity of the Polish government, or compelling it to act on a given issue.
Source: Foreign Policy
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 15 2016, @05:30AM
Meh. Seems like they finally realized that everyone else already has these countermeasures. Obama has an internet kill switch and access to as much info on anyone he wants through the NSA, as well as proposing new "hate speech" laws to add "anti-Islam" along side the existing "anti-Semitic" qualifiers for extremists. You know, because if you're getting shot up by radical Muslims you shouldn't be able to say mean things about it.
UK? One word: Superinjunction.
Germany? You go to jail if you question the 6 million (which became 4 million and the Red Cross just unsealed a report after 70 years claiming 125 thousand total [truedemocracyparty.net] Jews "gassed" in the holocaust). Merkel made a deal with Fakebook's Nark Suckerberg to silence anti-immigration views.
Snowden revealed that everyone from Spain to France, the UK, Australia and more are all essentially on the same page WRT spying on civilians and sharing the info with each other ala 5 Eyes / ECHELON program. That's just the shit we know about. I wouldn't be surprised if the Spanish Inquisition unexpectedly popped into the frame to secretly interrogate someone at any moment of any day.
But Poland is horrible because the right wing is in power and the left is scared shitless that the crap they've been doing to the right will get done to them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 15 2016, @06:17AM
Why do gripes have to so often involve partisan name calling? It isn't left vs. right, its the people fighting against abuses of power.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 15 2016, @07:40AM
While fundamentally, you are correct; in practice, you are wrong... In practice (and in Europe), it *is* left vs. right with the right being a sack of autocratic and dictarorial lunatics. Actually, scrap that 'and in Europe' bit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 15 2016, @07:03PM
s/with the right/with both sides/
Why are you ignoring 50% of the problem?