repression

Repression: British lawmakers have announced 15 years in prison for taking part of banned literature. However, the threat of prison only covers new story formats that lawmakers think don’t deserve the same kind of protection as old-fashioned books: it’s only people who watch video on the Internet who will be put in prison, and only when they watch something that promotes terrorism, whatever that means this week.
The BBC reports that people reading banned books will face 15 years in prison.

Global: Governments are still using “terrorism” as a scareword to get any insane law passed – like Britain’s digital book-burning law. But with its other hand, those same governments are expanding the definition of terrorism way beyond what the public could possibly imagine: the government’s own training material says that peaceful street protests in disagreement with administration policies are examples of terrorism.

From The Age of Transitions:
Pearse Redmond joins Aaron Franz for a conversation about the bizarre political climate we find ourselves in today. This is the first Bonus Podcast episode of Trans Resister Radio.

Even as the state government’s repression on Bhim Army continues, most of its leaders still in jail and some forced to leave Saharanpur, a committee has been formed for the defense of Bhim Army. (For background information, please see the ‘Note on Bhim Army’, appended at the end of this post, which carries links to … Continue reading Committee for the Defense of Bhim Army Formed Amidst Continuing Repression

Australia: This month, Australia’s law mandating telecommunications data retention went into effect. It is clear that Australia learned absolutely nothing from Europe’s abysmal 10-year failure with this exact law before it was finally struck down by courts as utterly incompatible with human rights at the core of its idea. Here’s how Australia can fail a little faster on this horrendous concept by realizing it’s just not inexcusable, it doesn’t even work.

In groups of people there are always bullies who feel entitled, for no particular reason, to want more than the rest and to dominate the others in complete disregard of the common good. Fortunately for convivial people, bullies tend to have the psychological subtlety of dominant male gorillas who beat loudly on their chests and fight over food and females. Therefore bullies often annihilate each other. The more serious social problems occur when they collaborate to gang up on others.

Repression: The United States Congress has decided that Internet Service Providers shall be Common Carriers but without the obligations of a Common Carrier. Specifically, which was the shocker recently – telephone secrets don’t apply as they do with other telecommunications providers, and ISPs are also free to modify anything they like without liability for it. This was an unexpected development of the FCC upgrading the Internet to a so-called Title II Utility.

Repression: It’s interesting to watch people rushing to defend the legal processes in last week’s story about a man jailed indefinitely for refusing to decrypt, and who are asserting that everything is in order. In doing so, they point at individual details of the legal process and say there’s nothing odd about the details, and disregard the outcome that somebody is in fact indefinitely in jail, without charges, for encryption.

Repression: All governments of the world are cracking down on privacy and increasing mass surveillance, sometimes in the name of copyright enforcement, sometimes in the name of fighting terrorism, sometimes because they just want to. There’s a pattern here of similar things in the past – something is horrible, horrible, horrible, until the point where fighting the phenomenon just looks silly, counterproductive, and inhumane.

Repression: Ethel Hülst had saved for some old-age luxury all her life, cash-in-mattress style, and wanted to exchange her old-issue-note savings for new-issue banknotes. Faced with demands of proving where her cash came from, she could not produce receipts that would have been older than a decade. The Central Bank denied her an exchange of issue, having her life savings expire into invalidity.