| [Tags**|germany, nsa, politics, surveillance, switzerland, uk] [Current Location** |
Switzerland] [Current Music |
Mark Knopfler, Sailing to Philadelphia (whole album)] [Current Mood |
snarky]A friend asked me: I'm wondering if I should move out of the UK over the surveillance stuff. Can you offer advice, what are Germany and Switzerland like for surveillance, and what's it like as a place to live and work as ex-pats? Frankly, I'm almost hopelessly underqualified to give an answer to that: my grasp of German politics is almost entirely filtered through Akeela, and I don't believe I can realistically have the faintest idea of what the Swiss are up to. Fortunately, since this is the Internet, I get to give my answer anyway, no matter how misinformed it may be. The Germans have a strong sense of privacy and civil liberties, substantially betrayed by a government that, like so many others, seems irrationally hell-bent on passing increasingly intrusive surveillance and data-recording measures, in defiance of any visible democratic mandate. Like the American constitution on which it's modelled, the German state has a lot of checks and balances, but it's looking increasingly like the only remaining line of defence is the supreme Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, which has a redoubtable history of upholding civil rights but seems increasingly overburdened by the insuperable torrent of bullshit cascading from every orifice of the legislature. Like so many other nations, the Swiss are known to have collaborated with the NSA in bulk surveillance efforts. Nominally, they're supposed not to have spied on Swiss citizens, but it's hard to trust any government's word on that nowadays. To their merit, however, the Swiss benefit from one of the world's closer approximations to a functioning democracy. If reasonable support can be garnered for them, it's even feasible to enact constitutional amendments to protect privacy. Naturally this can cut the other way too—the Swiss are infamous for having passed some ball-achingly nasty constitutional amendments in the recent past—but, given their relatively non-fuckwitted populace and the fact that most of the crazy-eyed rednecks are myopically fixated on their own xenophobia rather than the progressive implementation of a really good autocracy, the Swiss seem to stand a better chance than most of withstanding the current pervasive governmental craze for wilfully antidemocratic total surveillance of the entire populace. In short, all our governments are out to get us; our future comes down to the resilience of our democratic institutions; and, for this purpose, UK < Germany < Switzerland. Plus, Switzerland's prettier.—This post was made on dreamwidth.org, here. If you can, please comment there (it's simple with OpenID), because LJ's bugs make it gratuitously hard for me to answer your comments on LJ. |