You must admit, threatening to get a court order is a far cry from threatening to have jack-booted thugs smash the printing presses. Not only that, but of course there are thousands of other channels Snowden could use. Such a court order would do nothing to stem the bleeding.
What violations of international law has Snowden revealed?
Attacking the source (Snowden) hasnât worked. Ignoring it hasnât worked. Telling everybody to not worry hasnât worked. And now people are really getting angry. Only thing left, I guess, is to shoot the messenger. That always works, doesnât it?
They already tried Jackbooted Thugs. The problem with pixels, hard to stomp out.
Well Cameron would have to convince a judge to issue an injunction. Iâm not sure whether the UK has a system of kangaroo courts like the FISC court in America. I doubt whether a judge would actually rubber-stamp a gagging order, if the only effect is to prevent the government being embarrassed.
âitâs very important the press feels it is not pre-censored from what it writesâ ⌠âBut if they donât demonstrate some social responsibility it would be very difficult for government to stand back and not to act.â
So which does he mean - pre-censored, or not pre-censored? He certainly has a lah-di-dah view of the dangers of censorship.
Or maybe he doesnât think it works. He is, after all, the prime example.
They in fact did literally try jack booted thugs. They had thugs walk into the press office and destroy the information. Thankfully, such thugs failed to understand how easy it is to copy digital information.
[quote=âBoundegar, post:2, topic:13062â]Not only that, but of course there are thousands of other channels Snowden could use. Such a court order would do nothing to stem the bleeding.
[/quote]
No shit.
Cameron is a fucking idiot. I think that that man might be more of a fucking idiot than Bush was. He apparently doesnât realize that everything he does is just going to result in free press. The idea that Glenn is going to stop, is so laugh out loud funny, I have no words. Cameron can try and fail to shut down the Guardian and Glenn is just going to go to a nation that doesnât give a shit and keep on shouting. Hell, they can black bag Glenn, and it isnât going to stop as I am sure there is more than one âinsuranceâ file floating around. At least Obama knows enough to keep his mouth shut and take it.
Cameron is not Bush, Cameron more intelligent - you may not agree with him, but unlike Bush, you canât simply dismiss him as a feckless moron who somehow stumbled into office.
Cameron is in a lucky position because the leader of the opposition in Britain is ridiculously weak, and Cameron is a more compelling leader than the present opposition leader. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown between them have shafted Labour in the UK by involvement with the Iraq war, and by wasteful overspending, and Labour realise they are out of office for a decade. Theyâve left a vacillating kid in charge as a caretaker leader in the interim. The more competent of the Milliband brothers has left politics for the present, leaving his halfwit brother to man the fort. When Labourâs electoral prospects recover, Ed Milliband will be out the door.
Is it really? Court orders are only effective because theyâre backed by the implicit threat of men with guns enforcing them. Cameronâs basically saying âhereâs a warning; do it again, and youâll get a stronger, more official warning; again after that, jackbooted thugs smash your presses.â
(All that aside from the fact that Cameron already did literally have thugs literally smash stuff at the Guardian.)
Good question. Yet very close to a straw man, since itâs utterly irrelevant to the ongoing attack against freedom of the press.
âThe approach we have taken is to try to talk to the press and explain how damaging some of these things can beâ
Specifically, damaging to chances of re-election.
True, Cameron is not an idiot. But he is being a fool in this matter.
âlah-di-dah, airy-fairy viewâ
omfg.
DC is like the PR rep for a clothes detergent company, confidently finding himself in the limelight after the discovery of a corrosive ingredient in 30% of their boxes.
No real person could actually come out with this garbage without cracking a sweat. No real person could voluntarily put this stuff on the record. No real person wouldnât laugh manically at this every time they opened their spinny little mouth.
Has Ed Miliband stepped up and criticised directly on this?
Times are gettinâ harder.
Whatâs incredible is the doubling-down. Either DC is phenomenally sure of re-election, or of the opposition Labour Party not using this issue to gut him even if they do get power, that he can continue this tyrannical spiel.
Someone said Stalinist. Quite bloody right.
How beautifully put. I may well employ that in future, pretty much verbatim.
Seen Thank You For Smoking?
I havenât seen it - but itâs been on my list! Will hunt it down, thanks for the reminder.
If we can explain (if they are not already more than aware) that they are most definitely candidates for interception 'bots, due to their station, and what âmetadataâ is, then it could be quite entertaining and far from a rubber-staamp jobâŚ
Heâs not an idiot, in that he has some advanced circuitry present upstairs. But he makes me think of a Roman emperor, maybe Nero, or some senior snivelling member of the senate.
We expect him to be a master politician, and I find myself befuddled, because master politicians like Obama play a broad, intelligent game in the modern world. DC and Co have harkened back to an earlier very British era, relying on splintering the electorate into vehemently opposed particles, rather than operating on a number of key influential segments and creating support. Itâs a real, raw, numbers game. (heâs not winning it in the polls).
Recently, a vast majority of Londonâs Chinatown went âon strikeâ - restaurateurs, shop owners, all sorts of businesses that cannot afford to shut down even for an hour. Protesting against, and raising profile about, Theresa Mayâs disgusting methods for diminishing âillegal immigrantsâ. I eat there frequently, and saw the immigration vans myself - Iâd never seen one - and in talking to the restaurants, found they were carting off a few people each time.
OK, so they may have been illegal. But they work damn hard. They werenât criminals - and we have a lot of those, thanks - they were just workers.
So rather than working to reduce crime of any serious nature, DC & Co were simply getting profile in the market segment they wanted to, in order to get numbers they could feed to the Daily Mail, to amp up the excitement in the Blue Rinse brigade. Itâs all very finessed in a PR spinny way, but utter fucking nonsense in any sense of politicians working on behalf of their entire electorate.
Really, these are dark times.
