I would be very concerned if your knitting grandma was an active member of a drugs and arms dealergroup.
I am pretty much against surveillance in the form of drag nets, but none of that applies here. Instead, this is exactly how a functional state should work.
(And note that no exceptions are made for Pavel because he is rich and well-connected.
Contrast that with brittle countries where politicians rely on tech billionaires to fund their campaigns.)
I sympathize with you being an Aussie; I can see where your allergy comes from, but in this case it is misplaced.
Australia is part of the five eyes, many Australians with, say, a signals intell background will have seen things that may or may not make your eyes bleed wrt crime and|or state actions.
Yes, functional states should have extremely good oversight .. in reality they "mostly do" but with cracks that allow unwanted behaviours to sneak through and sometimes become normalised.
eg. recent revelations that SASR types are "blooding" new members with unsanctioned kills in war zones.
Or regular joe LEO types using surveillance powers to stalk ex's. Or total innocent gets railroaded by tangential "evidence" simply because they chance to tick all the boxes for a needed arrest and the actual perp was overlooked | unseen.
> I would be very concerned if your knitting grandma was an active member of a drugs and arms dealergroup.
And yet an actual sergeant at arms type of an organised biker gang based in Australia used knitting terminology key phrases in just such a group to organise international transfers of "packages".
The person in question was a NZ background stone cold killer with a special forces background.
( Yes, most crims are "dumb" | "lazy" and yet a good few understand covert messaging, not all can be caught with a fake encrypted phone honey net trap )
These are all real concerns and examples of things that have actually happened.
Yes, no disagreement here. The Five Eyes is a poignant example of what happens if your essential view on societal ordering is that ordinary people are there to serve the select few. The problem for the US and Australia is that they inherited all the flaws from the UK, which till this day is still quite a class based society.
This is also why the US did not inherit a real, solid concept of personal privacy. Instead, ordinary people are increasingly becoming sort of property of corporates. You can see that if you contrast the Rheinland model (state reigns in corporates, protect people rights) with the Anglo-sphere, which is much more suited to a few select capital holders extracting value from the workforce (compare holiday allowance, fire at will etc).
This doesn´t mean that in Europe the Rheinland model is not under active threat, far from it. And look at collective self harm: watch this space (HN) if the EU sometimes takes measures against abusive monopolies. It is a very difficult fight.
I am pretty much against surveillance in the form of drag nets, but none of that applies here. Instead, this is exactly how a functional state should work.
(And note that no exceptions are made for Pavel because he is rich and well-connected. Contrast that with brittle countries where politicians rely on tech billionaires to fund their campaigns.)
I sympathize with you being an Aussie; I can see where your allergy comes from, but in this case it is misplaced.