Corruption: In what can only be described as an all-out declaration of war with the Internet, the Swedish Supreme Court has denied the final hearing in the trial of the original The Pirate Bay operators. This means that the Appeals Court verdict stands, unless appealed to the European Court of Justice.

This case and trial was political from day one. The astounding arrogance displayed by the establishment showed that it was nothing but theater; there was never a shred of justice involved, only a hellbent desire from the entire establishment to show who’s boss once and for all.

Let’s recap:

In a country where police is constantly in short supply and cases with the derogatory label everyday violence are routinely dropped, fifty (!) police raided a server hall and took all (!) servers — over 150 of them. Many entrepreneurs went out of business. The copyright monopoly lobby gleefully commented in media with “you have to be aware who your neighbor in the server hall is, or face the consequences” in the best and worst of mafia style.

In the raid, over a dozen violations of the constitution were committed; among others, the legal counsel of The Pirate Bay gets his DNA permanently registered with the State, and a constitutionally protected publisher is shut down (though restored a few days later).

The investigation was led by an openly bribed policeman, Jim Keyzer, who was bribed with a job with Warner Brothers, one of the plaintiffs (!) for six months and then went back to the police force.

In the District Court, the corrupt judge Tomas Norström was in the same interest group as the plaintiffs – the Swedish Association For Copyright – which argues politically against the defendants. That means he was meeting the copyright monopoly lobby regularly and on a personal basis, and sharing a personal interest in a guilty verdict. He was completely nonplussed as to the later accusations of bias and corruption, and was later cleared of such charges of bias, by a person in the Appeals Court who was also a member of the same interest group. Therefore, the District Court verdict was not declared a mistrial.

In the middle of everything, the unrelated Carl Lundström is dragged in as a defendant, a person who has had absolutely nothing to do with The Pirate Bay but who happens to know the people involved and also own a lot of money. The verdict determines damages to pretty much all of Lundström’s fortune, to be paid “in solidarity” – a legal term meaning that the person with the money pays, and the defendants get to sort it out between themselves later. This was a design just to rob one person of their fortune and scare everybody away from even talking to The Pirate Bay. (Of course, it didn’t work, but it shows the arrogance.)

The negotiations in the Appeals Court are placed just days after the 2010 General Elections, instead of before as expected, because that’s “the only days that the plaintiffs were able to attend the hearings”. If placed before the elections, The Pirate Bay trial had been an election issue and received tons of attention. The Appeals Court defends this decision as “standard procedure”. Nobody is surprised.

On the negotiations in the Appeals Court, a sign in the doorway showing today’s trials showed just how misplaced the entire theater was. The screen listed trials for aggravated assault, murder, rape, armed robbery… and in the middle of it all, there was an “aiding and abetting copyright violations”.

The judge in the Appeals Court had also been a member of the Swedish Association for Copyright, but “wasn’t any longer”. The damages were raised substantially in the Appeals Court and the prison sentences lowered somewhat, but nobody really cared about the Appeals Court negotiations, as the coming Supreme Court negotiations would be where the final and interesting battle would stand.

And so today, we are notified that the final battle has been cancelled, as the case isn’t interesting enough, which is such an outright display of arrogance from the establishment that it’s mind-boggling. They didn’t even care to consult the European Court of Justice on the immunity of a middleman. So while everybody was looking the other way, this is essentially a “haha, did you really think we’d allow this?”.

This complete arrogance from the establishment, essentially saying “we don’t give a fuck about justice or freedom of speech, we can do whatever we want and get away with it, and we like to show off that ability”, is nothing less than a declaration of war with the entire internet.

Today, the monopolist lobby is showing off in Swedish oldmedia, while also threatening Internet Service Providers that don’t bend to their will. This is not just unacceptable; this is an all-out declaration of war.

At this point, we need to bring everything decentralized. DNS, networking (wi-fi meshes), file storage, everything.

See also the TPB blog and TorrentFreak on the matter.

Yes, I’m pissed.

(As a side note, the Swedish Supreme Court is leaking like a sieve. I was fairly certain this would be coming, days in advance. Yet another sign of arrogance: they didn’t even care to guard the normal secrets of process of law.)

UPDATE: Also read BrokeP’s take on this: Maintain. Hardline. Kopimi.

Corruption: The ACTA awareness and debate has finally heated up. But in such a huge, convoluted and deliberately complex document, how can you determine for yourself whether it’s good or bad? It turns out that there’s a very straightforward way to tell.

The easiest way to determine the nature of ACTA comes not from the document itself, but from the behavior of the people advocating it.

Everybody involved in pushing and rushing through this agreement have insisted that it will mean no changes at all, won’t require any changes to law (or possibly minimal ones to trademark law, as in Sweden), and overall, insist that it’s no big deal.

At the same time, these players are throwing all their weight behind its passage. The key question that results stands out like a sore thumb:

If ACTA doesn’t change anything, why are they pushing for its passage as if their life depended on it?

And that contradiction, in itself, is enough to de-mask the entire ACTA and what it stands for. It was negotiated in secret by the copyright industry and other monopolists. Even now, as lawmakers come to a vote, they are not allowed to understand what the document says – for it defines many new terms, that are only understandable in terms of the negotiation protocols. But those are secret.

If the copyright industry is pushing for its life for something to pass, while pretending it’s not a change at all, and preventing lawmakers from understanding the concepts defined, what do you think it contains?

This is the industry that thinks it’s reasonable for legislators to give them the power to kill a legal competitor in a foreign country by killing their income, website, and advertising at the pointing of a finger.

This is the industry that thinks it’s reasonable that they should be legislated to the top of search results, and their free competitors downranked by law.

This is the industry that demands under threat of law – a private industry – to wiretap an entire population, just to see if they do something that industry doesn’t like, and if so, censor that population’s communications at will.

This is the industry that argues that citizens should be actively prevented from exercising their fundamental rights, such as freedom of speech and expression, if that may possibly interfere with that industry’s business.

This is the industry that thinks it’s reasonable to sue a small Karaoke manufacturer for 1.2 billion dollars. Oh, and a student for over 4 million. Oh, and a dead grandmother.

This is the industry that uses child pornography as a legal ram to pave the way for their own censorship, in ways that actually hurt children and promote child abuse.

This is the industry that planted rootkits on people’s music CDs and took complete control of their computers, millions of them – including web cameras, microphones, files on the hard drive, everything. They forced their way into people’s homes and got eyes and ears there.

This is the industry that, once you think they’ve sunk as low as morally and humanly possible, keeps coming up with new creative ways to surprise you.

If this industry wants this legislative package so incredibly badly that they’re fighting for their life to get it, while pretending it’s no big deal, all while not even telling lawmakers what it is, that should be enough for anybody to realize it’s a bag of the darkest bloody horrors. Expect it to codify the examples above. And more. Expect it to be much, much worse than SOPA.

Corruption: A study by MediaMatters confirmed the gut feeling we all had: there is indeed a mainstream media blackout going on over the SOPA law that would censor the Internet in the United States. It’s not just a gut feeling, it’s happening.

The good folks at MediaMatters just list the facts without going into causes: if a news station is owned by a SOPA-supporting company, it does not mention SOPA as a matter of fact. Techdirt points to how badly the SOPA discourse fits media logic. I think it’s easier than that. It’s about the age-old power of information advantage, and it is in their strategic business interest to keep this off the newsradar.

To put this in context, we need to look at the concept of functional literacy and then compare to a recent situation in Italy.

What’s “Functional Literacy”?

There is this concept of functional literacy that goes a little bit above literacy, which is “the ability to read” in all simplicity. Functional literacy, however, is a meter of whether you are able to read well enough to take in the information you need in your daily life and take part in society.

The people who are literate but not functionally literate can read and parse this:

I am hungry.

The other football team won.

However, they cannot read and parse this (regardless of eventual solving capability):

Assuming that wood pieces weigh 2.0 kg, and that all rodents can sustain an average throwing force of 2.0 kN for 1.0 seconds per piece until their energy reserves of 0.50 MJ are depleted, how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck would chuck wood?

Also, perhaps a better meter, functionally illiterate people would be incapable of reading and understanding this very article, and in particular, of correlating it to their daily life. They can’t read job ads, banking statements, past-due notices, or any political discourse.

Why is this relevant?

It is relevant because the rates of functional illiteracy are higher than you would expect in the industrialized parts of the world. Much higher, in fact. Approaching 50%.

In Italy, I was told that the functional illiteracy rate there was 43%. While this was a word-of-mouth number, I quickly located a CBS report saying that the rate in Detroit is 47%, picking a random major city when searching for the United States. Granted, Detroit is a past-due-date industrial city, but if I had told you that half of Detroiters can’t read this article, would you have believed me?

This means that roughly half the US population don’t just get all their news from TV, but that they are also incapable of seeking other news sources such as newspapers or the net. This puts television news broadcasts in a particularly privileged position, becoming the well of truth.

Let’s view this in the light of what just happened in Italy.

Berlusconi’s Last Stand

There was a referendum in Italy recently about revoking a certain legal immunity for Silvio Berlusconi, the former Italian Prime Minister, an immunity that he had uptothere enjoyed. To understand Italy’s context, in order for a referendum to pass, it requires a majority of “yes” votes — but it also requires over 50% of voter turnout.

That means there are two ways to defeat a referendum in Italy: keep the “no” votes up, or keep voter turnout down. So assuming you’re running a country with 43% functional illiteracy and don’t want a referendum to pass, and you also just happen to own six out of the seven television networks as Berlusconi does, what is the result?

On these six television networks, the referendum was simply not mentioned. Not once. Deemed not newsworthy.

At the end of the day, this enraged the Italian people enough to bump voter turnout over 50% anyway, and the referendum passed. Very shortly thereafter, having had his immunity revoked, Berlusconi stepped down.

Are we starting to see parallels to the SOPA blackout yet?

Conclusion

If you control what other people know, if you control the village newswell, then you control the entire village. The Catholic Church was in this privileged position before the printing press (which is also why they demanded harsher and harsher penalties — up to and including the death penalty — for unauthorized copying of knowledge in their time).

The one thing that can threaten TV news networks is the Internet and the ability for people to communicate directly, bypassing the judgment of the now-famous 1% to determine what knowledge befits the masses. We learn from history that all such power is always used to maintain and strengthen itself first. So, SOPA basically kills that ability of the everyday person to bypass the 1%.

Therefore, it is in the economic and political interest of today’s newswells to kill a strategic threat to their privileged position, and to act just like Berlusconi did in Italy: to actively not bring the topic up onto people’s radar.

In other words, Corporate United States is just as corrupt as Berlusconi’s Italy was, and is acting just like the Catholic Church did when they tried to kill the printing press.

Corruption – Travis McCrea: With the passing of S.1867 - National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 the United States Senate has declared its overwhelming belief that all citizens of the United States are suspected terrorists and that constitutional rights don’t apply anymore.

Before everyone cries out in fear, this has not passed the house yet (which it must do), and the president hasn’t signed it yet (so he can veto it). It does not change the fact that the Senate of the United States stands directly against freedom. People who live outside of the United States have long known that freedom from the United States was a sham, the United States has no respect for freedom or human life otherwise they wouldn’t be a afraid of wikileaks.

I am a domestic terrorist and promote peaceful, non-violent, resistance to an abusive government. I don’t believe that property damage is violent and I believe that demonstrating your anger through the use of damage is an acceptable form of protest. I believe the in the words written within the declaration of independence that says:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness—-That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

ALL men are created equal, and ALL have basic human rights including, but not limited to; Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That those people who shall be ruled must only be ruled by those who THEY recognize as authority and when a government stands against its citizens then it would be not only acceptable, but an obligation to dissolve those chains of oppression and start anew, regardless of the difficulty… to ensure that a new government can protect the citizens and provide safety and happiness.

I am an EcoTerrorist, because I understand the basics of the environment and know when you eliminate one part of the chain, every organism is affected. Whales are sentient creatures and I believe that they should be protected, and while a whales life is no more important than a humans life, it is an acceptable risk to protect a creature which can think and feel but not protect itself. I believe the Japanese’ actions in Taiji are horrible and should be stopped immediately by whatever actions nessesary. The United States raping the land of the natives just to seek out more resources, instead of promoting a way of life that does not need those resources should be viewed as a crime against humanity.

I am a treasonist and believe that people should question government, I believe that to make a fair vote for a leader I should have full knowledge of what that leader has done. I respect whistleblowers, and feel that they should be the ones who get to live in the ivory tower, not those who torture and lie. Information should be free, and the world is waking up to that… but the United States and governments around the world stand by the notion that spreading truth should be against the law. I am also a treasonist because I don’t find my government perfect, here in Canada we live under a dictatorship. There is no democracy in a system where one man can tell over half of parliament what to vote, and then they vote for it.

I am an education terrorist and I give away knoweldge for free that a corrupted copyright system tries to hold, monopolize over, and keep for power and money. I am in the business of tearing down those established systems for a new system which allows all humans to have access to all knowledge of the world. Education shouldn’t be something that is profited from, and our books and culture shouldn’t be deprived from other people because they live in other countries. Knowledge wants to be free, and I will free it.

Finally, because I suggest that we should live in peace and because the United States and many other nations around the world profit on war… I am a terrorist of love… and I will declare my love jihad on every government in the world. I am Travis McCrea, I am a terrorist, but more importantly I am a pirate.

Civil Liberties – Henrik Alexandersson: The harshly criticized ACTA agreement (which, among other things, may result in severe limitations in the freedom of the net) has been reviewed by the Legal Services of the European Parliament. Rumors state that the resulting report is very critical of the agreement.

The report has been classified as restricted (meaning secret for all intents and purposes).

A discussion about this report was announced for today’s meeting with the European Parliament’s committee for international trade, INTA.

Behind locked doors.

Of course, this led to protests — from Members of the European Parliament as well as from activists on the outside. Somebody got cold feet, and it was announced that the discussion had been postponed until the next meeting.

But late last night, INTA’s coordinators had a meeting — and decided to go anyway, on the meeting right this morning. (Which is to say: at the same time as all the “troublemakers” believe that the issue has been removed from the agenda.)

As the meeting started this morning, Carl Schlyter (Swedish Green Party) demanded that the meeting would be held in public. The demand was denied. So he demanded that the INTA committee would vote about opening the meeting to the public. Again, denied.

So. We have a controversial agreement on the table, with legislative effects. The analysis whether it is legal or not is kept secret. The discussion is held behind closed doors. Everybody who may have relevant objections is tricked into believing that the issue will not be discussed today. And when that happens anyway, the committee isn’t even allowed to vote whether the meeting is public or kept behind closed doors.

And then, our elected leaders wonder in concern and confusion what they should do about the democratic deficit in the European Union.

This is ridiculous! This is unworthy behavior in the democratic process!

Corruption: One of the key insights of the Pirate community is that power is expected to corrupt people. It is not just that it is possible, rather, it is near inevitable. Therefore, you can’t trust people to not be people; instead, you must design the system to survive human nature.

I had one such epiphany last week as I got a routine mail from one of many seeking contact with me. Since stepping down from party leadership, my role has primarily been to connect people, observe and give feedback, and think aloud — acting as a classic senior Greycloak without any formal decision power.

Now, our movement is clearly in an underdog position against an establishment who are defending its positions of entitlement. We do not want to fix their structures; to them, we are the problem, not the fix. Therefore, being regarded as a disease in the system, you come to expect that your rights are ignored and the privileges of the nobility upheld; a two-tier justice system is enforced with violence. You cannot meet this on the playfield of enforcement violence where you are outnumbered and outgunned; whether we like it or not, we are rightsless. Court proceedings are rigged in every way imaginable; legislative processes scheduled to make it impossible for citizens to be heard. Instead, you must meet this with sunlight and public opinion, which is our home arena where we are unbeatable. Corruption thrives in the dark.

In this, we share a lot with the contemporary Occupy movement.

So I was not surprised when I got yet another mail last week that called my attention to this two-tier justice system. It was from a large bitcoin player in Asia who asked me to put sunlight on the fact that German police are harassing bitcoin enthusiasts, seizing their money and putting them through no ends of trouble just for using a disruptive technology that could upend the privileges of the ancien regime.

Well, this is the kind of things I do. And in this case, it makes sense for everybody. I connect these people with the German Pirate Party, who can call public opinion to this fact and strengthen their role as progressive against entitlements of the old nobility. The bitcoin player gets to strengthen the bitcoin community, the enthusiasts in Germany get to pursue their hobby without clueless police beating them for the fun of it, and the German Piratenpartei gets another feather in the hat with the German public ahead of the next elections.

Then it hits me. It hits me like a truckload of bricks being dumped on top of me without warning; I just stare dumbfounded for several minutes as I try to wrap my head around the concepts.

Damn, I hear myself say. This is what it looks like, isn’t it?

Let me rewrite what happened. A bank of our generation, a net-gen bank in a large economy in Asia, had trouble with law enforcement harassing their customers. “The law enforcement agents are misguided and misinformed in their efforts”, they might have written, “and we would like to help them understand the issues”. Rather than connecting with German law enforcement, where I have no connections, I see an opportunity for personal friends of mine who run a major political party in one of Europe’s key economies to gain from this, embarrassing law enforcement through a public media campaign to stop harassing the bank’s customers, all while gaining votes for the next election. All of my friends win and the Police look stupid.

This is indeed what it looks like, isn’t it? The very behavior we are trying to fight?

Now, I’m not utilitarian to the fingertips. The behavior we are fighting is unjust because it combines the power of lawmaking and law enforcement with that of personal and business interests; we don’t do that and can’t do that. But just because we are underdogs now — everybody in this story from the bank to the bitcoin enthusiasts to the German Piratenpartei — and trying to upend the privileges of the old, that doesn’t give us the right to take their place to defend a contemporary we live in against the next generation after us if we could. We, too, will grow old. Right now, we are saying that sunlight and transparency will prevail. At the same time, those of us who founded and started these movements are getting hyperconnected among ourselves and with all the major players building the structures of the next generation.

(As a measure of the ridiculous extent of connectedness, I’m not only connected to that bank in Asia — I am also a good customer there, and I personally know the people who designed that bank’s security systems. I used to work for them and we have even received the same awards. I don’t think the bank is aware of that fact, though.)

What is to say that we won’t just become the old, behave like the old, in 30-40 years when we have grown into much more senior positions in society where our movements have grown into power, and we all know one another and help one another stand above the law when, like above, there is a “misunderstanding with law enforcement”?

Events like the one last week are tests. Tests of whether we stand true to our ideals. Being aware of our human nature is a first step of standing true to them in the long run.

Most importantly, I am aware that our movements will start to flood with career-hungry people once there are good careers to be made in organizations like the Pirate Parties, and us idealists will gradually grow marginalized. That’s just the way things work. This is why, in my closing keynote to the Pirate Parties International earlier this year, I chose to focus on this fact. “Every 40 years”, I said, “democracy is reconquered by new idealists. Their movements are eventually taken over by career politicians. So will ours.”

Therefore, I ended by asking for a favor. “Forty years from now, those of us who are still around, I’d like to ask you for a favor“, I said. “Odds are that when our parties are flooded with career politicians forty years from now, and we are living comfortably in our retirements, a bunch of spoiled young brats will organize out of nowhere and appear to demand everything for free in ways that are both reprehensible and incomprehensible.”

“Help them.”

Corruption: A quote flashed by in the night in my Twitter flow: We Demand Separation Of Corporation And State. This was the most mediagenic soundbite I’ve seen in a long time, one that I took immediately to heart. While it was quoted in a context of Occupy Wall Street, it relates to everything we do.

In the Swedish Pirate Party, we sometimes talk about Lessig’s Journey and how it relates to our experiences. Lawrence Lessig started out by creating Creative Commons, and after ten years, realized that more is needed to fight the creepage of the copyright monopoly; that it is a symptom of a much larger problem. He is now fighting corruption full-time instead. Our experiences are similar, although we have chosen a different route: where Lessig and similar people tries to fix the system from the outside, we try to fix it by flushing corrupt politicians and their power from the inside.

The problem isn’t necessarily Parliament; the problem is that Parliament doesn’t have the real power in the first place. Yes. Read that sentence again: the problem is that Parliament doesn’t have the real power in the first place. During the fight against software patents in Europe, our now-MEP wore a T-shirt with the slogan “Power to the Parliament”. It is very pertinent.

Here’s the thing.

We elect people to Parliament to make decisions that are in the public interest. The problem is that no human can possibly have knowledge in all domains, and so, elected decisionmakers are dependent on decision support material to analyze the situation in the light of their ideologies and priorities. This support material is provided by civil servants, who are supposed to be apolitical.

This is where corporate lobbying comes in. They know to court the unaccountable, invisible civil servants and provide them with “helpful material” that gives these people a completely lopsided view of reality. Because they know what the Catholic Church knew in the middle ages before the printing press: if you can control a decisionmaker’s background knowledge, you control their decisions. This happens completely under the radar and corrupts the entire system.

Therefore, Parliament isn’t really in power. The people who supply people in Parliament with decision support material are. Nameless. Unaccountable. Courted.

Also, and much worse: the civil servants all too frequently appear to have agendas on their own. I sometimes meet such servants who deal with the copyright and patent monopolies; when I spoke to one such civil servant, Christoffer Démery in the Justice Department, he said something I’ll never forget: “Well, our views on the topic [of the copyright monopoly] aren’t the same as yours.” He openly had a strong political opinion on a subject where he supplies decision-support material to the actual and elected decisionmakers. Stefan Johansson, one of his colleagues, have often given presentations at the Swedish Association For Copyright. Both of them have ties to the American industry interests for a stronger copyright monopoly (hint: the links).

This process is indicative of clear corruption of the system as such, not just of the individuals named.

It gets even worse when the executive politicians don’t even see it as a problem. When the Swedish Minister of Justice, Beatrice Ask, announced new powers for the copyright industry that even surpasses those of the Swedish Police, she held the press conference in the very offices of the copyright lobby — with the lobbyists as support personnel who explained the details to the assembled press! When corruption has reached the level that ministers don’t even reflect on the fact that this is Very Bad Corruption right in front of the TV cameras, and that a minister in the cabinet shouldn’t present a new law like this, then things have gone completely bonkersway off the road.

So, yes:

We demand a Separation of Corporation and State.

Copyright Monopoly: Among the treasure troves of recently released WikiLeaks cables, we find one whose significance has bypassed Swedish media. In short: every law proposal, every ordinance, and every governmental report hostile to the net, youth, and civil liberties here in Sweden in recent years have been commissioned by the US government and industry interests.

I can understand that the significance has been missed, because it takes a whole lot of knowledge in this domain to recognize the topics discussed. When you do, however, you realize that the cable lists orders for the Swedish Government to implement a series of measures that significantly weakens Sweden’s competitive advantage in the IT field against the US. We had concluded this was the case, but had believed things had come from a large number of different sources. That was wrong. It was all coordinated, and the Swedish Government had received a checklist to tick off. The Government is described in the cables as “fully on board”.

Since 2006, the Pirate Party has claimed that traffic data retention (trafikdatalagring), the expansion of police powers (polismetodutredningen), the law proposal that attempted to introduce Three Strikes (Renforsutredningen), the political trial against and persecution of The Pirate Bay, the new rights for the copyright industry to get subscriber data from ISPs (Ipred) — a power that even the Police don’t have — and the general wiretapping law (FRA-lagen) all have been part of a greater whole, a whole controlled by American interests. It has sounded quite a bit like Conspiracies ’R’ Us. Nutjobby. We have said that the American government is pushing for a systematic dismantlement of civil liberties in Europe and elsewhere to not risk the dominance of American industry interests, in particular in the area of copyright and patent monopolies.

But all of a sudden, there it was, in black on white. It takes the description so far that the civil servants in the Justice Department, people I have named and criticized, have been on the American Embassy and received instructions.

This will become sort of a longish article, as I intend to outline all the hard evidence in detail, but for those who want the executive summary, it is this: The Pirate Party was right on every detail. The hunt for ordinary Joes who share music and movies with one another has been behind the largest dismantlement of civil liberties in modern history, and American interests have been behind every part of it.

At the middle of this, we find the US cable Stockholm 09-141, recommending Sweden to not be blacklisted by the US on the so-called Special 301 list, and outlines why. The Special 301 is a list that the United States compiles every year that names and shames countries that haven’t been friendly enough to American industries. A majority of the world’s population is on the list, Canada and Spain among them. It’s quite nice company to be in, actually.

Since the 1980s, the US has aggressively threatened trade sanctions against countries who don’t give American companies sufficiently large competitive advantages — this is described in detail in the book Information Feudalism about the origins of the TRIPs agreement and WTO, for those interested in gory details. In practice, it works like this: industry associations in the US go to the Trade Representatives, who go to the myriad offices dealing with Foreign Policy, who go to the embassies, who talk to national governments (including the Swedish one) and demand changes to national law to benefit American corporations.

This sounds like fiction, right? But here are the documents. This document comes from the copyright industry’s trade association IIPA, mainly consisting of record and movie companies. They have listed six demands on the Swedish Government, which stand to find in the linked document:

1. Adopt the copyright law amendments on injunctive relief against ISPs and a “right of information” to permit rights holders to obtain the identity of suspected infringers from ISPs in civil cases
2. Prosecute to the fullest extent the owners of ThePirateBay [sic]
3. Increase the prosecutorial and police manpower devoted to criminal Internet piracy enforcement
4. Commence a national criminal enforcement campaign to target source piracy and large scale Internet pirates
5. Ensure that rights holders may pursue the new civil remedies easily and quickly
6. Take an active role fostering ISP-rights holder discussions to effectively prevent protected content from being distributed without authorization over the Internet

Now, these steps are written in copyright industry legalese. Some key words that sound harmless are cause for alarm once you recognize their meaning. Translated into ordinary language, this says:

1. Adopt “Three Strikes” making it possible to disconnect prople from the internet without a trial (“injunctive relief“), and implement the IPRED directive in a way that the copyright industry can get internet subscriber identities behind IP addresses (which was not mandatory, my note).
2. Prosecute to the fullest extent the owners of The Pirate Bay. (This doesn’t really need translation, except that it’s very noteworthy that the executive branch is ordered to interfere with the work of the judicial one, which is illegal in Sweden too.)
3. Transfer scarce police resources from investigating real crimes and devote them to safeguarding American monopolistic interests against ordinary citizens.
4. Take large-scale initiatives against people sharing music, movies and porn.
5.  Make it possible for the copyright industry to sue people (“pursue new civil remedies“) with a minimum of hassle.
6. Abolish the messenger immunity, making Internet Service Providers liable for copyright monopoly infractions happening in their wires, and force them to interfere with the traffic.

All this seems eerily familiar. With one exception, it looks like a checklist followed to the letter by the Swedish Government. The American Embassy confirms that it is, and even explains that exception.

The cable Stockholm 09-141 reads, along with my comments:

1. (SBU) Summary. Embassy Stockholm recommends that Sweden 
continues to be placed in the Special 301 Initiative, and not be on 
the Watch List for 2009. We are aware of the differing 
recommendations of the International Intellectual Property Alliance 
(IIPA) and PhRMA. Post recommendation is based on: 

-- The progress made by the Government of Sweden (GOS) in five out 
of the six items identified in the Special 301 Initiative Action 
plan we communicated to the GOS last year; and

Here, the Embassy (“Post“) writes straight out that the Swedish government has been given a checklist.

-- The sensitive domestic politics that the GOS needs to manage in
order to step up internet piracy enforcement in Sweden. The GOS
struggles, with good intentions, against a very negative media
climate and against a vocal youth movement. For example, we want to
highlight the risk that negative media attention on the file sharing
issue gives the Pirate Party a boost in the EU Parliamentary
elections in June 2009.

Apparently, it is a “vocal youth movement” that fights for basic civil liberties. Also, it is interesting that the Embassy expresses preferences on which parties should be elected by the Swedish people.

2. (SBU) This cable reviews the progress Sweden has made on the
Special 301 Initiative Action plan which we presented to the GOS at
the conclusion of the Special 301 review 2008 (Ref B). Post
continues to engage very constructively with the GOS, and has good
access and a good working relationship with key senior and working
level GOS officials. The actions taken since last year's review
strengthen the legislative framework and provide better enforcement
tools for combating piracy. The Pirate Bay trial is currently being
heard in the district court in Stockholm. The last day of the trial
is March 4, and the verdict can be expected on or about March 25.

The Embassy notes specifically that they have good access to civil servants. In other cables, these are named; among others, the Embassy has contact with Stefan Johansson, the civil servant in the Justice Department who drafted the IPRED legislation giving the copyright industry access to internet subscriber identities.

3. [...] The Justice Ministry, with primary responsibility for this issue, is
fully on board and well aware of what is at stake. It is currently
battling with the Ministry of Enterprise, Energy, and Communication
about the next appropriate steps to curb internet piracy. Now that
the Enforcement Directive implementation will finally enter into
force on April 1, and there will soon be a first District court
decision in the Pirate Bay case -- the Justice Ministry will turn
its attention to other key issues, primarily the ISP liability issue
and extra resources to investigative capabilities. [...]

Here, we see in cleartext that the Justice Department is working to abolish the messenger immunity and make ISPs liable for the traffic in their networks, so that we will have a serious amount of unaccountable extrajudicial censorship. This is one of the most serious threats to the basic civil liberties and to the foundatory principles of the net today. Also, note the expression that the Justice Department are essentially American lapdogs in this area.

4. [...] Post conveyed a Special 301 Action plan to the GOS,
covering six items where the [US Govt] hoped to see progress during 2008.

5. (U) The Special 301 Initiative Action plan 2008 contained 
recommendations in six specific areas. The GOS has acted, in 
various degrees, in five of those areas. A review of progress in 
the six areas follows in paras 6-11:

The Embassy says that it will go through these steps one by one and explain how the Swedish Government has done as asked.

Step-by-step walkthrough of lapdoggery

(At this point, I shuffle the cable paragraphs a bit to match the checklist from the American copyright industry’s organization IIPA, and bring its points in for reference. The numbers before the paragraphs are thus intact from the cable, and show the referenced paragraph. The IIPA checklist is quoted from the top down.)

IIPA checklist says:

1. Adopt “Three Strikes” making it possible to disconnect prople from the internet without a trial (“injunctive relief“), and…

Embassy says:

7. (U) Injunctive relief: The one item without any progress is 
Action plan item 2, Injunctive relief. The GOS maintains that there 
are adequate provisions currently on the books in Sweden, and does 
not intend to introduce new legislation. (Note that industry claims 
to the contrary were supported by the recommendations of the Renfors 
Commission, a government study commissioned to look into the file 
sharing issue. The GOS has declared that it will not further 
implement Renfors' recommendations. End note.)

Comments: The Embassy says in cleartext that Three Strikes (“injunctive relief” in legalese) is the only point Sweden hasn’t fulfilled. The referenced Renfors Commission produced the law proposal that explicitly wanted to disconnect people from the net without trial — the infamous Three Strikes. Its secretary, Johan Axhamn, is now lobbying hard within the copyright industry’s lobby organization Netopia to introduce extrajudicial censorship through another one of IIPA’s six points. The Renfors Commission acted very lopsidedly in its directives and execution from the get-go, and now we know why.

IIPA checklist says:

…and implement the IPRED directive in a way that the copyright industry can get internet subscriber identities behind IP addresses.

Embassy says:

8. (U) Implementation of the Enforcement Directive: The bill was 
approved by Parliament on February 25, and the new provisions will 
enter into force on April 1, 2009. The political sensitivities made 
the final handling of the Bill very delicate for the Alliance 
government. Much of the debate and negotiations have been done in 
public, and there has been tremendous pressure put on individual 
MPs. The passage of the implementing legislation is therefore a 
much greater victory for the GOS than it might appear. Major 
changes, compared to the original proposal, are: 

-- the law will not be retroactive. [...] 

-- The court will make a proportionality assessment, i. e. weigh the 
need of the rights-holder to get access to the personal identity 
against integrity aspects of the person behind the IP number. The 
law now stipulates that a certain scale of infringement will be 
needed for the court to decide that the information should be handed 
out. Normally, that would be the case when the infringement 
consists of up-loading a single film or musical piece [...]

-- The law includes provisions that the GOS intends to observe and 
assess how the law is used [...]

Comments: This was fulfilled to the letter. But we note three things in this cable: First, it is clear that the United States were behind the controversial parts of the IPRED implementation that have become synonymous with the entire law in Swedish language — the parts giving the copyright industry access to subscriber identities behind IP addresses. This part is entirely voluntary in the directive.

Second, we should be careful whenever the government discusses “large-scale file sharing”, because it says here in cleartext what that means: uploading one single movie or music track, something that 250 million Europeans do pretty much on a daily basis.

Third, note the tone of significant disappointment over the law not being made retroactive.

IIPA Checklist says:

2. Prosecute to the fullest extent the owners of The Pirate Bay.

Embassy says:

12. (U) After the raid on Pirate Bay on May 31, 2006, the issue of 
internet piracy was fiercely debated in Sweden. Press coverage was 
largely, and still is, unfavorable to the positions taken by 
rights-holders and the USG [US Govt]. The Pirate Bay raid was portrayed
as the GOS [Govt of SE] caving to USG pressure. The delicate situation made it
difficult, if not counter-productive, for the Embassy to play a 
public role on IPR issues. Behind the scenes, the Embassy has 
worked well with all stakeholders. After 18 months of 
investigation, the prosecutor filed indictments against four 
individuals for contribution to copyright infringement because of 
their activities administrating the Pirate Bay bit torrent webpage. 
The case is currently being heard in the district court in 
Stockholm, and the trial is scheduled to be completed on March 4. 
The sentence is expected on or about March 25, i.e. before the 
conclusion of the Special 301 review process. However, we fully 
expect that any outcome will be appealed to a higher court, which 
means that the final verdict will not be known for several years.

Comments: At the time of the raid against The Pirate Bay, May 31, 2006, there were clear indications of the Swedish authorities cowing to US pressure. It could only be indicated, not proven in a court of law. Here, it’s in black and white on a checklist handed to the Swedish Government, along with the notes that the Justice Department is “fully on board”.

The Embassy also notes that they have worked behind the scenes with “all stakeholders”, meaning the stakeholders in a negative outcome for The Pirate Bay and Sweden’s competitive IT industry. Some of these are named in other cables, specifically the plaintiffs’ lawyers in the Pirate Bay trial.

IIPA checklist says:

3. Transfer scarce police resources from investigating real crimes and devote them to safeguarding American monopolistic interests against ordinary citizens.

Embassy says:

10. (SBU) Police and prosecutors: There are now two full-time 
prosecutors dedicated to IPR/copyright issues. Police officers 
have been trained, but we understand that they are not allowed to 
devote attention to IPR/copyright issues. They are back in their 
regular line of duty in their districts, where there are conflicting 
priorities. We have understood that the prosecutors have alerted 
that this is a problem for their work - they are "stuck" with a 
backlog of old errands and without the support of investigative 
officers. The prosecutors ask for investigative officers that are 
exclusively devoted to IPR issues, today there are no such 
investigative capacities. The Justice Ministry has repeatedly asked 
the Head of the Swedish Police for information about how he plans to 
come to terms with the investigation deficiencies. Although the [Govt] 
recognizes the needs, the budget bill for next year will likely not 
contain significant increases for law enforcement, given the harsh 
economic conditions. This is an area where post can work with the 
[Govt of SE] and [the copyright] industry to highlight the significant
impact additional resources in this area might have.

Comments: Chalk another one up. News just today (September 5, 2011) announced a new national super-unit in the Swedish Police aimed only at people sharing movies, music and porn. News in Swedish here, translated here.

IIPA checklist says:

4. Take large-scale initiatives against people sharing and downloading music, movies and porn.

Embassy says:

11. (SBU) Public education: In the fall of 2008, the GOS released a 
new information material, primarily aimed for youth, which will be 
broadly distributed in Swedish schools. Justice Minister Ask's 
staffers are currently considering the pros and cons of engaging 
Cabinet members in the public debate. Given all the negative 
attention around the Enforcement directive and the Pirate Bay trial, 
the determination thus far has been to keep a low profile. The [Govt] 
recognizes that there is a real risk that the window of opportunity 
was lost already several years ago -- when leading [politicians] 
didn't take the debate. How to engage at this point is a delicate 
matter.

Comments: The Justice department embarked on “public education” against sharing, aimed at youth. We criticized this material heavily as it was published (rough translation). The Justice Department sent “educational material” with lopsided copyright monopoly propaganda to high schools and junior highs as education material! This had never happened before, and I criticized the material on point after point for being politically biased, only tell half the story, or be directly and factually wrong. Now, we know that this action was commissioned by the United States.

IIPA checklist says:

5. Make it possible for the copyright industry to sue people (“pursue new civil remedies“) with a minimum of hassle.

Embassy says:

9. (U) Granting police and prosecutors the right to identities 
behind IP numbers of individuals potentially implicated in copyright 
crimes of lower dignity, i.e. fines rather than prison sentences: 
The Justice Ministry has also worked towards the goal of changing 
legislation so that police and prosecutors can get access to 
information about identities behind IP numbers in cases where the 
crime could lead to a fine (rather than a prison sentence). The 
usual Swedish term for this type of crime (punishable by fine, not 
prison) is "crime of lower dignity." At present, law enforcement 
officials are only allowed to get such information if the 
infringement could lead to a prison sentence. The [Govt] has agreed to 
change the legislation, and it was made part of a study commissioned 
to propose the steps needed to implement such a change. The 
proposed changes were recently separated out from the rest of the 
study, and were reported in advance to Justice Minister Ask late 
January 2009. Although the slow legislative process is 
disappointing, the GOS has already agreed on the necessary changes 
that will strengthen the investigative tools of enforcement 
officials.

Comments: The Embassy’s text describes a lengthy process on how this mechanism for the copyright industry was moved from bill to bill. It surfaced again this winter, when Minister of Justice Beatrice Ask announced “step 2″ of traffic data retention, when its usage would expand from just combating organized heavy crime to also include combating petty-fine crimes like (specifically) file sharing. Thus, this cable is not stale by far; the government is still ticking off its checklist.

It is interesting that the Embassy notes that “the Government has agreed to change the legislation”: changing laws is Parliament’s job, not the cabinet’s. At least Parliament has the puzzle piece now that this is American-made mail-order legislation.

IIPA checklist says:

6. Abolish the messenger immunity, making Internet Service Providers liable for copyright monopoly infractions happening in their wires, and force them to interfere with the traffic.

Embassy says:

6. (SBU) Industry consultations/ISP liability: The GOS [SE Govt] held a 
series of industry consultations in the summer/fall of 2008, with 
the explicit aim to discuss a voluntary industry agreement involving 
ISPs and right-holders organizations. Industry contacts reported 
that the ISP's were not willing (they claim they are not able) to 
take on any action on a voluntary basis. The first round of 
consultations was concluded without results during the fall of 2008. 
The Justice Ministry is currently working internally in the GOS to 
get acceptance for a second round with a clear incentive for 
progress, i.e. threatening with legislation in the absence of a 
voluntary agreement. There is some resistance in the Center party 
led Ministry of Enterprise, Energy, and Communications, and 
negotiations are on-going at senior GOS-levels.

Comments: Maybe not a full mission accomplished on the checklist, except a George Bush carrier-style one, but ordering participants to talks under a threat of legislation is at least a very good effort. This is one of the ugliest imaginable way of destroying the Net as we know it. It’s as if the Postal Service would be made responsible for the contents in a letter — for the words on the paper! — or if telecom companies would be held responsible for aiding and abetting crimes planned over the phone. If this were to come, they would only be able to allow certain predetermined, approved and harmless things to be communicated. “Press 1 to say bye.” Otherwise, they would be liable for everything said.

Needless to say, this is the American copyright industry’s dream.

The concept is completely foreign. The only thing helping somewhat against file sharing would be to kill the entire net, and this would be such an action.

The copyright industry’s lobby association Netopia is working intensely to push for exactly this, trying to spin it as “intermediary responsibility”.

Conclusion

So there it is. All in black and white, in excruciating and incriminating detail.

All the attacks on civil liberties and dismantlements of rights in Sweden, rights that have been and should be taken for granted, have been a demand from American trade interests. And these attacks continue to this date.

This takes some time to digest, as MEP Christian Engström writes (translated: “Tinfoil Hats Off for Sweden’s Puppet Government“). But now, we know that the politicians lied, all the time. Everything was mail-order legislation, violating Swedish citizens to benefit American industry. Just as we have claimed since 2006, but haven’t had the clear proof to show for it until now.

Corruption – Zacqary Adam Green: Unrest is brewing in republics worldwide. As nations are ravaged by socioeconomic crises, the people no longer feel served by their elected officials. Is this a temporary hiccup, or an inevitable result of traditional representative democracy?

Across the world, people left disenfranchised in the face of their leaders’ decisions have begun to lash out. It’s happening peacefully in Spain, with the nonviolent protests of the indignados. It’s happening violently and chaotically in Britain, with riots, looting, and arson. Greece is somewhere in between, fluctuating between peaceful protests and police-provoked violence. All are results of an elected leadership that seems not to care about the problems of its people.

Yet in the United States — one of the most disenfranchised and democratically disillusioned nations in the world — there has been relatively little response. In the US, the problem is so bad that it has gone past making the people angry and frustrated, and made them hopeless and nihilistic. Two superficially different parties control everything, and are propped up by bribes and manufactured consent from monolithic corporations. To many, it seems pointless to revolt, let alone vote.

But corporatocracy in the US and out-of-touch reactions to social inequality in Europe are just symptoms of the real problem. How did it get to this point? Why don’t the people stop things like this before they happen?

Disconnection.

In a representative democracy, citizens are fundamentally disconnected from the decision-making process. Their powers of self-determination end once they have pointed at somebody and said, “lead us.” Until the next election, their opinions no longer matter. The process of making, enforcing, and interpreting laws is left entirely up to the rulers.

Theoretically, a leader has an incentive to do a good job and actually represent the interests of the people; if they don’t, they lose the next election. In practice, the disconnect between politician and citizen leads to apathy.

The bourgeois argument in favor of representative democracy asserts that the “unwashed masses” lack the knowledge and intelligence to properly govern, and therefore must allow only the most educated to make decisions. This ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy; representatives, being actively involved with the process of governing, have more information from which to work with than their constituents.

In reality, the constituents are more than capable of understanding all of this government-y stuff, if it were only explained to them and opened up to them. This often doesn’t happen. The people aren’t kept in the loop, and don’t feel that their voices are heard. They have no way of knowing whether or not their leaders’ decisions are truly for the best. With all of the information technology we have at our disposal today, it’s absurd that there are so few avenues to make a real connection with elected leaders.

But simply slapping the Intertubes on top of representative democracy isn’t enough. Representatives have had plenty of easy avenues of communication open to them for decades. Letter-writing, phone calls, personal meetings; all of these allow representatives to open a dialogue with their constituents. Yet the disconnection remains. No matter how much citizens can communicate with their leaders, they still must put their full faith and trust in an authority above themselves to make decisions. Outside of an election, citizens have no real power, and they know it.

This lack of power breeds apathy and ignorance. Until it breeds violence.

The process of making, enforcing, and interpreting laws isn’t a part of most people’s lives. They don’t see it, they don’t experience it, and therefore they don’t feel invested in it. And they don’t notice when it’s about to go wrong, until it’s too late. How long before a well-run, functioning representative democracy stumbles and falls prey to the disenfranchisement of its citizens? Corruption can be fixed, but how long until it just comes back again?

As this cycle continues, people are hurt, environments are destroyed, wealth is hoarded, futures are ruined, and it becomes harder and harder to fight each time. How much longer can this go on?

This cycle can be broken. The dichotomy between “the government” and “the people” needs to disappear. No more pointing at people, telling them to lead, and sitting back while they have the fate of society in their hands. Governments need to be built around citizen participation and inclusion. Informal representatives might emerge organically on a case-by-case basis, motivated not by a cushy job but by a desire to help their fellow citizens achieve goals. Everyone would have a hand in their future.

It would be a government by the swarm.

Corruption – Andrew Norton: 

Andrew Norton.

Corruption – Andrew Norton: As the smoke clears after riots in several cities in the UK, including my own home city of Liverpool, the underlying question has to be asked ‘why did this happen?’ While some will pass it off as ‘they just want to rob’, that overlooks the question of WHY.

As the smoke clears after riots in several cities in the UK, including my own home city of Liverpool, the underlying question has to be asked ‘why did this happen?’ While some will pass it off as ‘they just want to rob’, that overlooks the question of WHY.

I grew up in a ‘not great’ area of Liverpool, and just down the road is one of the most deprived areas, not just of Liverpool, but of the UK and Europe, with less than 6% going on to higher education, and over 70% of households below the poverty line. The main secondary schools in the area, were around my house, so their students all came (those that could be bothered) past my house.

Now, most of the people I keep in touch with from my area growing up did go to those schools, and did not take part in the ‘activities’ last night. No-one is saying that just because of the socio-economic conditions growing up, people are going to riot, certainly not me. Nor is it 100% true what the DJ on the major local station was saying while this was going on “They just want to rob”. There is some aspect of that, yes, but unless you address the why, you’ll never come close to addressing it.

The problem is one of CONSEQUENCES.
The basis of law is that society decides something, which is codified in laws. Those laws apply to everyone, and they have a consequence (a punishment) for violating them. In the UK, this has broken down, badly.

Firstly, Laws are over-broad, and getting worse. Secondly, the enforcement of the laws is being applied unequally. Thirdly, the consequences are often dialled back in many cases, and taken way beyond sanity in others. Fourthly there seems to be a distinct lack of accountability within the police, and the government. The result is the sort of contempt for laws that we see in the violent actions over the last few days.

The incident that sparked this, the police shooting of Mark Duggan is a good example of some of this. Immediately after he was shot and killed, news stories came out about him being ‘in a gunfight’, that he’d fired at a policeman. Evidence released in the last 24 hours indicates that Duggan’s gun was never fired, and might not even have been immediately accessible. The policeman who was shot, was shot by another cop. The use of deadly force was thus not warranted. Will the police officer be arrested, put on remand and charged with Murder/manslaughter? Unlikely, even though this, if the latest evidence is true, a ‘gun crime’.

Experience tells us no. In 2009, Ian Tomlinson was attacked by a police officer and died, during a protest. He was not involved in the protest, and was walking past on his way home, yet an officer struck him several times with a baton, and pushed him over. He later died a short distance away. At first statements by the police claimed he had ‘collapsed around the corner’, and that police officers went to give him medical help but were being pelted with rocks and bottles. Over the next week or two, video clips were discovered that showed a very different story. They showed Tomlinson hit by a police officer, thrown to the ground, and then protesters offering medical help, while a single (plastic) bottle is thrown. An unprovoked attack, leading to death, and the initial reaction was not to prosecute. Only after significant public pressure was a decision to even take it to court made, which will happen in October 2011, some 42 months after the incident. For most of this time, the officer has been suspended on full pay. Similar issues arose in 2005 with the investigation into the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005. In these situations, a mere ‘belief’ was acceptable justification for their actions. The News International scandal has also tarred the reputation of the police further. It’s emerged that the newspaper employees had frequent contact with police officers, who they would pay for information, from £200 for looking up a car number plate, on up to £30,000

Yet it’s not the London police’s (Met and City of) fault alone. Police elsewhere are similarly viewed with distrust. Last week, five members of Merseyside Police’s ‘Matrix’ task force were fired after an investigation into inappropriate behaviour, and thefts by officers at raid locations. British police reality shows (such as ‘Police Interceptors‘ and ‘Traffic Cops’) have also shown police officers exceeding their authority, stretching laws, or using reactions to illegal orders as justification for arrest.

Now, it’s not all the police’s fault. While they’re being overzealous, the court system is failing society too. A series of ‘initiatives’ have removed any sort of consequence from the system at all. The care worker/blogger /writer winstonsmith33, for instance, paints a picture of youth offender systems that are utterly dysfunctional. Far from enforcing any sort of consequence, the system often encourages the assistance, and covering up of further lawlessness. Young teens who want to get drunk, are driven by their youth workers to get alcohol, even if the teens are already drunk. A youth offender, high on drugs, smashing up an office and threatening the staff at his hostel? He might lose his good behaviour bonus.

So we have a police force that expands the laws to suit themselves, and then a justice system that spits them right back onto the streets, to carry on at the tax payers expense. Is there any surprise then, that there is little respect for the police from these groups? The unequal way the police enforce laws, their lack of accountability, coupled with the glaring indifference the police often have for concerns of the public, mean the general public now have general contempt for them.

There is another aspect as well, a seeming political indifference. Banker bonuses were a huge bone of contention, as bankers which caused a massive crisis, were paid off with massive bonuses and pensions (such as Sir Fred Goodwin, who was head of the Royal Bank of Scotland when it crashed and had to be rescued at taxpayer expense, yet walked away with a £700,000/year pension). Another issue that raised public ire was the MP Expenses Scandal. The thought that MP’s, some of them Ministers, committing what was essentially fraud, yet going unpunished was a major kick to credibility of the politicians. More than 100 were guilty of one crime or another, from tax avoidance/evasion, to false accounting and fraud, but only five were charged. All 5 were convicted, but the maximum sentence handed out was 16 months in prison., and three are out after serving only 4 months. The rest just had to pay some of the money they STOLE back, easy to do when you earn £60k+/year.

So, with a combination of over-aggressive police, a pathetic justice system for dealing with the convicted, groups of people (police and politicians) effectively above the law. Financial cuts to areas of public interest, while MPs and bankers gorge themselves at the public purse. Is it any wonder parts of the country are breaking down into violence.

The police want more powers, or worse, blanket immunity. Will that work? No. It will just breed more resentment, more violence. Already police officers have too much power, which is frequently abused. The police needs to be held more accountable for their actions. The public trust has to be regained, the key word there is TRUST. More powers won’t do it, instead the police need to be held to a standard which is not just the same as the general public, but higher. The role of police officer, is the embodiment of trust to uphold law and order. When that trust is broken by the officer, as well as the crime committed, the breach of the public trust has to be considered. Many countries increase punishments for actions committed against law enforcement officers, so let’s apply the reverse. Likewise, we need to do the same with our politicians and judges. No-one is above the law. There comes a breaking point where police actions are deemed unacceptable, and the public snaps, as in this video clip from (I believe) Portugal.

Secondly, the criminal justice system in the UK needs reform. Instead of trying to bribe the under-classes into behaving, and excusing behaviour, it needs to be dealt with, and discouraged. Those ‘robbing’ are doing so because they have nothing but contempt for the police. They know that if they are caught, they will often be sent to a ‘home’, where their every whim will be catered for at the tax payers expense.

So what’s left is the poor people in the middle. Those who are not poor enough to be considered ‘so poor’ that the state takes care of them, but not rich enough to be above justice; the taxpayer. Politicians more concerned with themselves, their own holidays, and keeping their friends in jobs and contracts, while thumbing their nose at the taxpayer. The taxpayer that, if targeted by police can lose everything, because they don’t know how to game the system that sustains the yobs. A system that keeps the yobs as yobs to justify their continued existence.

In a Britain this Broken, these ‘riots’ were inevitable. Bad politicians, untrustworthy police, a government sponsored underclass. All a product of a lack of consequence. As with medicine, you treat the disease, by treating the cause, not the symptoms. Bringing in ‘The Army’, rubber/plastic rounds, water cannons etc. might put an end to the violence now, but the cause of it will still be there, ready to explode at the next flashpoint. To fully deal with the situation, we need to address these wider issues, and we need to do it soon, while there’s still a Britain to save.

However, that’s not what we’re going to get. MP’s have broken their holidays off early, and a special session of Parliament will convene tomorrow. Will we get a response that takes in the facts and accepts their own culpability in causing this? Unlikely. Instead we’ll get speeches about how they’re ‘upset’, and ‘condemn‘ the rioters. We’ll get more laws, and they will almost certainly be bad laws, passed in a knee-jerk fashion to stop the violence, rather than prevent it. You can stop a car with no brakes by crashing into something, but unless you fix the brakes, it will run away again the next time.