[pjc50]

Was wondering how democratic Ethiopia was, and:

> The EPRDF won the 2010 elections by a landslide, taking 499 seats, while allied parties took a further 35. Oppositions parties took just 2. Both opposition groups say their observers were blocked from entering polling stations during the election on Sunday, May 23, and in some cases the individuals were beaten. The United States and the European Union have both criticized the election as falling short of international standards. Additionally, the EPRDF won all but one of 1,904 council seats in regional elections.

[dmix]

Ethiopia is also an early adopter among developing nations to adopt NSA style surveillance. And like all countries with weak or nonexistent judicial oversight or independent courts, it was used immediately to target the ruling parties political adversaries phones. Including journalists and lawyers.

Citizen Lab based out of Canada did a lot of great research exposing it. Of course the Ethiopian gov bought it all from that Israeli “we don’t sell to bad guys” NSO and other western companies.

From my understanding the recent election switched the ruling tribe which has resulted in some positive movement and economic development. One of their big issues recently was the ruling tribe suppressing one the other major ones which resulted in big protests and protestors getting killed. I believe that tribe got into power or at least in a better position.

[dragonwriter]

> And like all countries with weak or nonexistent judicial oversight or independent courts, it was used immediately to target the ruling parties political adversaries phones. Including journalists and lawyers.

To be fair, that was done in the US (though not immediately, that came to light), which is why we have FISA.

[dmix]

I don’t consider secret courts like FISA sufficiently comparable to independent judicial oversight. It’s oversight theatre.

The FISA rulings and arguments never become public, most of the domestic surveillance warrants are justified merely by the fact the people will never find out they were surveilled and therefore won’t be “harmed” by such behaviour (this was the exact argument which Yahoo was given and lost trying to fight it in one of the only public FISA rulings available online).

Most importantly only the NSA government lawyers gets to argue the grounds for surveillance is justified. There is never a point in time where it is critical analyzed by outside parties so we put 100% of the trust in the FISA judge panel doing their due diligence and standing up for American citizens rights.

But as we saw with the recent Carter Page FBI investigations the feds can feed the FISA courts complete crap and they’ll sign off on it anyway. Multiple times.

I love when people act like this isn’t some rubber stamp court and is actually sufficient to protect Americans constitutional rights. It so obviously isn’t and you’d have to be a serious military authoritarian hawk not to see through that nonsense.

These secret courts live and die because the average person doesn’t understand how it works and the government is just telling everyone to ”shut up and trust us”... including decades of congressman on the House Intelligence Committee.

[dragonwriter]

> I don’t consider secret courts like FISA sufficiently comparable to independent judicial oversight.

I never said they were, that's a different discussio. I said the concrete fact of abuse of the national security surveillance apparatus against political opponents when we didn't have even that is why we have FISA (the law, which involves a lot more than the two courts it creates.)