[version_five]

There's two separate issues here. Privacy should be a right, I agree. But also we shouldn't tolerate our countries becoming authoritarian police states. It's already happened in the UK early, Australia and Canada are well on the way, and the US isn't far behind. Good privacy as a substitute for a government that isn't batshit crazy is not going to work in any event. Advocate privacy, but also advocate not letting giving power to insane elements of our society like this.

[bemusedthrow75]

I find this notion that the UK is a police state quite hilarious.

Ours is not the country where the police bring guns to seemingly every minor dispute and fairly often draw them. Ours is not the country where police kill you for resisting arrest, stand by while your kids are murdered in a school, or seize your money out on border roads without needing cause. Ours is not the country with a toxic plea bargaining system that throws the book routinely and a 90% conviction rate, or prosecutors who run for election on promises to be ever tougher. Ours is not the country with three strikes laws, death penalties, tent prisons run by fascist antiheroes, rampantly profiteering private prisons, corrupt local sheriffs, newspapers getting raided when they investigate the local police chief, Stand Your Ground and SWATting.

Yeah. We overpolice people being rude. It matters when you have the equivalent of one fifth of the population of the USA crammed into a country a bit smaller than Michigan.

Batshit crazy is clearly subjective, right? Try looking at things from a different perspective.

[ekianjo]

If its not a police state why do you need widespread videocamera surveillance?

Seems like you have an arbitrary definition of what a police state should be.

If the police just needs to take interest in you to find something to jail you because you are breaking hundreds of laws everyday anyway, this is a police state.

[bemusedthrow75]

We don’t really have it in the way people in the US and those places influenced by their perception have come to believe. My experience is that US people tend to think that the police can follow you all over the place in real time using cameras. They cannot. They might be able to get the legal right to CCTV footage of all sorts of cameras but they will have to have the paperwork and knock on doors, not unlike the way they could in the USA. This is regulated by law.

Government and the police owns surprisingly little of the cameras in the UK. The vast majority are in private hands, and there is no “network” of them. Basically this perception of CCTV in the UK is unfounded.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite...

> If the police just needs to take interest in you to find something to jail you because you are breaking hundreds of laws everyday anyway, this is a police state

Then the UK is not one, because this is your imagination. It bears no resemblance to the reality of life in the UK. It sounds like a closer fit for the plea bargain culture of the USA. Plea bargains are not a general part of our judicial process or culture.

So if the government wants to use the threat of a dozen other violations to make you talk, they will have to get the CPS to take them to trial, because as a general rule the system does not allow you to be pressured into pleading guilty on something else in return. Our system has a much lower conviction rate.

I do not, in fact, have an arbitrary definition of what a police state is. But this is the point. US commentators define “police state” to mean something narrow that does not overlap with the justice and incarceration culture of the USA, which has more police corruption than most of the developed world, and which is more unequally applied than most.

[miracle2k]

> If the police just needs to take interest in you to find something to jail you because you are breaking hundreds of laws everyday anyway, this is a police state.

Is it still a police state if you are breaking three laws every day?

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/...

[ekianjo]

If it is used against you, probably yes