Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by akater 4484 days ago
At least UK has independent courts. Human rights activists should hire good lawyers, get them in touch with experts on networks and cryptography, and start example cases, adding nice proper focused coverage on top of it all to form a public opinion. The precedents should be set until it's too late.

UPD: I should probably have mentioned that I'm from Russia.
2 comments
madaxe_again 4484 days ago
> At least UK has independent courts

Sorry, we have secret, closed courts now, without juries. They were intended for terror cases, but are being used a lot more broadly than most think. A barrister friend who raised concerns about this had his career assassinated-by-media last year, and is now a hate-figure.

I'm afraid it's too late.

Edit: This piece demonstrates quite nicely how this variety of assassination happens - you know, writing things in such a way that they look like direct quotes, when they're not, and getting every paper to carry the same story - http://barristerblogger.com/2013/08/29/criticism-robert-colo...

link
smm2000 4484 days ago
It's a good joke
link
akater 4484 days ago
Sorry but unless you live in R. as well, I know better. Internet users of the West have plenty of ways to fight back, and yet they don't really use any. They don't value the freedom they have — so they will soon lose even that. The strategy I suggest is completely valid. It worked in the past, and it would work now if executed properly.
link
avmich 4484 days ago
I guess, if you live in an oppressive regime and have to use whatever means are available, you get a good training. Alternatively, if the society is comparably more free and you don't use your rights, you tend to forget about them - why, most of the time it works by default. But when suddenly something doesn't work - you don't know what to do.

Compare to approaches Russian opposition is taking. They have to know law, often know (much) better than judges which don't follow the law anyway - but at least the opposition reasoning and their logical constructions could be heard. I guess, not anymore - state-controlled media isn't going to provide objective coverage of "criminals" in courts.

link
democracy 4484 days ago
This is true. There is a belorussian website charter97.org and it lived through offline and online closures, attacks, and all sorts of filtering by using numerous techniques. They should do online training.
link