zlacker

>>tokai+(OP)
Is Europe sliding into feudalism? The impression is that the government/megacorp complex are the lords, everyone else should accept their place as a serf and do whatever they’re told.

>>cobbzi+Sf
Where is the difference to the US, China or the UK?

Governments often try that kind of nonsense. Usually against organized crime, terrorism, child abuse.

But in the end it’s just used for the heavy crimes like copyright infringement

>>croes+5g
The US, at least, has a Bill of Rights that would make this illegal, it would definitely violate the 4th Amendment and maybe the 1st too.

>>cobbzi+kg
The 1st, 4th and 5th have been repeatedly and systematically weakened both in practice and through the courts though.

1st - gag orders issued by secret courts, no trial, no apeal, can't even talk about it (can't even talk about the gag orders themselves, basically a gag order on a gag order). We only found out about it because Yahoo (out of all of them, the least you'd think would fight this) briefly tried to fight it. All the top CEOs got them. Yahoo briefly tried to fight it at some point and some court docs got out, but it wasn't much.

4th - multiple cases of confiscating cash without a trial, probable cause or anything of the sort. It's called "civil forfeiture", it's been done at both state and federal level, and it's so insanely full of mental gymnastics that at some point they tried to argue in court that "the person is not suspected of anything, the money is suspected of a crime". Bananas.

5th - there's a case where an executive was caught up in some investigation, and she was being held in contempt (jailed) over not divulging an encryption password. I haven't checked on the case in a while, but the idea of holding someone in contempt for so long defeats the purpose, and the idea of having to divulge passwords vs. having to provide a safe combination was apparently lost on the courts.