Police on Friday detained five people in Istanbul, the source told AFP, including a suspected close associate of the notorious Isis militant known as “Jihadi John” who Washington believes was likely killed in a recent drone strike in Syria. Aine Lesley Davis - like “Jihadi John” a British citizen who guarded foreign prisoners in Syria - was among the IS suspects detained in a swoop in Istanbul. Davis, a London-born British Muslim who turned to Islamist militancy, has been described by British media in the past as a key figure in the network of IS in Syria. Davis and the other four fellow jihadists had crossed into Turkey from Syria at an unspecified date. Turkish authorities are investigating if the foiled plot had any links with the Paris attacks which killed 132 people, the Turkish official said.
I agreexwith you and Fran. There is a balance to be struck though. , I have no problem whatsoever with cctv in public areas though.
I'm interested to know how you perceive freedom though. I completely get and respect what you're saying, but I wouldn't feel my freedom is jeopardised by the government snooping at what I'm doing. If I then do something wrong and the government act accordingly and a lot faster because they have these capabilities does that not then come down to ethics of right and wrong rather than freedom? To take a more crude view, by stopping the government seeing what we are doing that merely gives people the 'freedom' to be terrorists. Furthermore they will then be unlikely to face any justice for wrongdoings if they take their own lives after atrocities.
The premise to your theory implies that the government is the ethical arbiter on what is right and wrong. I have grave problems with that notion. Without going into political bias one way or another it is clear to me that most of the governments of my life time have been interested in maintaining their grip on power rather than doing 'what is right'. If our only freedom is to vote every five years without the necessary safe guards to protect our privacy then democracy becomes a very fragile concept.
I used to say that I have nothing to hide so I'm not worried by surveillance. Then someone pointed out to me that the logical extension of that is that I should be OK with a camera in every room in my house; after all, I have nothing to hide. It might be extreme but it's an illustration that between no cameras and a camera in every room there is an acceptable dividing line. The line's different for everyone and probably differs for the same people over time (e.g. a couple of days after a terrorist attack in France versus after a long period of calm). I don't think we do too badly in this country. I don't see too many people complaining about intrusive surveillance and I don't see too many terrorist attacks. Common sense says we probably have the balance about right. Vin
I'm quite happy for my emails, internet, texts, phone calls and anything else to be monitored if they really want to, but I very much doubt if they had the power to do so that it would be mine they would go to the trouble of looking at. As for impinging on my freedom, well my freedom to live in a country where they are doing their best to protect me and my family from being shot and blown up is more important to me I'm afraid.
Spot on. And, governments which are determined to hold on to power at all costs tend to clamp down on any kind of subversive campaigners, who themselves are often only helping to publicise shady dealings by the government, like arms deals with dodgy regimes, or reneging on climate change agreements and so on. In a democracy it is government which must be accountable to the people, not the other way round.
Very true, I realise that it is a theory on them deciding right and wrong, but then who does decide right and wrong other than humans having their own moral compass? I still don't know which freedoms of mine are lost through increased involvement in my privacy though other than one freedom of privacy itself, which would be counterbalanced by the increased protection of my freedom to walk the streets without fear of an act of extremism. It's a tough debate, because then you have to draw the line on invasion of privacy (ie a private ballot every 5 years) but I'm not sure what the alternative is right now.
I'm gonna weigh in and say - if they can snoop on everyone - is it okay for them to actually be monitoring everything the media is doing too? I refuse to believe that any government would be able to resist a look at what's happening if it means they could cover their collective backsides, as when the expenses scandal started hitting the pages and so forth. It's a slippery slope and I'm not sure how I feel about it. I think we're striking a good balance right now, as said above. Of course, you can use the argument that perhaps the government ought to have known about certain section of the national media acting wrongfully in recent years, but then again that is the minority. Swings and roundabouts, I guess. (discussed this at university the other day, strangely enough!)
I agree with some of this, but would ask you who is our ethical arbiter? Do we have one? Should we have one?
On the data thing it's not just about doing something illegal though is it? Edward Snowden said a year or so ago that NSA agents pass around nude pictures of people that they find while scanning data. The first five minutes or so (from 21:31) that play in the video below are amusingly on the mark about how people think about this and the next 4 minutes are spent talking about which US security programmes can see what you're sending.
