Big Brother & Law, Some Tendencies of the Times
Law, State, Policing, Justice, Free Market. Here I present a number of more or less connected points, supplementing my previous articles on politics and justice. For full understanding of how all this is connected, please also read "related articles" (links after the article).
I. For Whom is the Law?
Does Big Brother act in accordance with his own law? Do not count on it. Rather expect the opposite. Let me give you one example.
In the autumn 2005, there was a campaign against the EU's (then) suggested legislation on further monitoring people's activities on the Internet and through mobile phones. Right now we need not concern ourselves with the exact contents of that suggestion or the directive that was the result, the point here is something else entirely.
At that time, I were discussing this "new" policy with some high police and intelligence officers in a couple of major EU countries. Their attitude is very well illustrated by what one of them said. He did not understand what people were fussing about at all, "after all this is something we have done for years, now it is just about making it legal".
To these officers it is the most natural thing in the world, that they can do anything they want, no matter if it is legal or not, as long as nobody notices. When it is beginning to get sensitive and too well known, they want it legalised, to avoid too much trouble.
There might be another reason as well, as we shall see in the next section. But first note this: If you want to protect your privacy, you can not base that protection on what the snoopers may do (according to law), but on what they can do, or what is at all possible, or what can possibly be possible! And this goes for everything else than privacy too. Do not ever expect Big Brother to follow his own laws!
II. Policing Made Private
"This, gentlemen, is the art of the police, which is believed to be so complicated and which, nevertheless, appears so simple, as soon as you see that it consists in getting your work done by people who have nothing to do with the police."
(M. de Commissaire de Police Mifroid, in The Phantom of the Opera, by Gaston Leroux)
The effect of the EU directive was not that the snoopers got access to more information, they have had it all the time. They now could get it legally and - and this is important - they now can let others collect it and store it for them! Do these others getting paid for doing that? Of course not, they may pay for it. This is solved differently in different countries, but the point is that the private entrepreneur (in this case Internet service providers, and mobile phone operators) would get much of the trouble and the costs.
This is a general tendency. Bankers in most of the world have been treated like this for years. They are not only expected to collect and store a lot of information (that they themselves have no use for or interest in), they are even under obligation explicitly to spy on their customers and report "suspect" behaviour, which need not be criminal, only unusual. Thus banks have become a branch of police and intelligence, without wanting it, and they may themselves pay the costs. Or, in the end, the customers may pay for it. YOU pay your bank for spying on YOU, on behalf of Big Brother.
The Postal Service of many countries are stuck in this mess too, as are various brokers, money exchangers, gambling companies, etc., etc., ...
Isn't that smart? Let people control one another, and have most of the trouble and costs themselves. Expect this to develop further...
III. Two Guiding Principles of a Police State
1. Let people control one another, and never let anyone feel safe and "unobserved".
2. A police state thrives on an overabundance of laws, whose purpose is not to protect people or express any form of justice - but to make so many laws available, often contradictory to each other, that whoever they want to prosecute, they can always find some applicable law to base the prosecution on.
IV. Over-legislation & Legal Instability
The amount of laws in a "modern" country is so huge, that it is impossible for any one individual to even read them all during a normal lifetime. Most of them are not needed, and would be better abolished. As it is, more than 95% of them are used to violate people's rights, individually or collectively, and as a tool for Big brother to shape and form society after his mad fantasy.
Modern society also suffers the worst legal instability in human history, in the meaning that laws are created and changed and changed and changed again in a speed that is close to impossible to follow. Try to plan for anything in a long future perspective! Your life, retirement, inheritance, whatever... it is almost impossible, because the rules are floating, and cannot be trusted to last even for ten years, even less for a lifetime.
V. Guilty Until Proven Innocent
Another tendency of the time is that fundamental principles of justice are neglected, changed or even reversed. Most notably, the old and sound principle that someone standing accused is always "innocent until proven guilty", is now more and more reversed. This started in the tax legislation of certain European countries some years ago, where the accused taxpayer was claimed guilty until proven innocent, and he had the burden of evidence himself!
VI. Free Market?
In wide circles it is held today that free-market economy won over Communism (and its sibling Socialism) when the Soviet Union was dissolved. But is that really true? Did Communism/Socialism really lose? [Communism and Socialism are similar in their ends, it's just the means that differ. Communism, at least in its pure form, wants to change society by violence, Socialism want to change it by "democratic process" (read brainwashing and indoctrination).]
And what about free-market economy? Did it win? Then show me where it is!
Today it is even a view spread that market economy has failed to solve the world's problems and must be replaced. That is nonsense. Free market economy did not win, and it hasn't failed, because (apart from a few private systems and very limited applications) it hasn't been tried during the last 100 years! What is today called "free market" is a legal fiction and a deceptive use of language.
If you listen or read carefully, maybe you have noted that sometimes another expression is used; "regulated free market"! This expression alone should be enough to make the alarm bells ring. How can something that is regulated at the same time be free? What we have is a regulated market. There is nothing free about it, but by using that word, the whole concept is made more attractive to certain parts of the gullible masses.
Related articles:
Justice, Law & The State As a Self-Contradiction
Discrimination & The Legal Fiction of Private Ownership
Assorted Absurdities of Democracy
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