Because nobody makes any money with civil liberties...
"Police will have powers to enter private homes and seize posters, and will be able to stop people carrying non-sponsor items to sporting events." The second part is just as scary in my opinion
They had that power and more for Vancouver.
They even copyrighted a line from the national anthem.
What made Vancouver such a success is the low key policing. 6000 police + RCMP + army and they made 93 arrests (mostly drunk+disorderly), one policeman was slightly hurt when he broke a window stopping a fight.
The result is the best press for the VPD in living memory.
Now picture the Met's response to any sort of demo in London.
If the venue is privately owned the second part doesn't scare me. I believe any privately owned property has the right to refuse entry to anyone they wish, and that that right trumps civil liberties. WHICH is why the first part of the story is a terrifying encroachment on liberty. No warrant? No laws broken? To have them simply enter and dictate what you're allowed to display on your own property? No way to refuse entry?
What's frightening is that it's specifically a police power. If the private property owner wants to enforce private rules, they should pay for private security guards to do it. Why should public money be used for this?
EDIT: On further thought, it's worse. The article implies that police will have the power to remove items from people on the way to an event. That would be hideous if true. I want a corroborative source before I get too worked up about this, though.
Yea but how many policeman are actually going to do that?
They already refused changes to enable them to possess guns due to the problems it would cause them.
I wonder if they'd refuse to do this or not, or just "pretend" to do it and not actually bother.
That's still way too close for comfort. "Oh, don't mind these laws, we don't actually enforce them except when it's really necessary. We're on your side! Just trust us."
It's just a small step from suddenly "needing" to question what constitutes "really necessary". We should be resisting tyranny as it creeps up on us, not remain complacent until after it becomes a true crisis.
I doubt anyone will be seizing your Pepsi if the games were sponsored by Coke, but they might have a case for not letting you set up your Pepsi-points gear under the coke sign.
This might happen and some sort of the does happen in Cricket. During the Cricket world cup the TV channel showing the event isn't allowed to show competitor's ads. Also, the players are not allowed to be part of any kind of competitor ad for the entire duration of the tournament. And yes, the English are used to this.
I hope their is a growing backlash to this type of behavior. I think more and more people are seeing the ridiculous positions of copyright holders and are losing respect for them. We see this in file sharing, and people upset that they cannot access content from another country -- eventually the IP laws will change.
I also think people are waking up to SCAM that is the olympics. The IOC is private organization that profits from the games, by stealing taxpayer money to fund their events. I don't know why anyone would want to host the olympics anymore.
My home town Atlanta was a total ghetto before the Olympics, it forced the city to reinvest into the downtown and it has been vibrant and a nice place to live since then. Perhaps cities shouldn't wait till an olympics comes to rebuild the city ;)
Let's be honest; if Atlanta, on its own, dumped billions into revitalizing itself, no one would care except residents. Having a stage like the olympics to draw the world in, however, shows people the city and makes it more likely they will return.
Likewise with Vancouver; one of our major downtown streets, Granville, got a complete overhaul. Gone were the old, broken stones, the cracked sidewalks, the run-down streets and sickly trees. It's now a much better place to walk around and explore.
We also have a new mass-transit line connecting our downtown core with South Vancouver and Richmond, as well as the airport. Catching a flight used to be $25-35 by taxi, or god knows how much in parking. Now, it's about $4 per person, and that gets you there and back if you're dropping someone off. The project was a public-private partnership that was within budget and opened fifteen weeks early, and has made Richmond far easier to travel to and from (making everyone's life easier). The project was a no-brainer improvement to the region, but I doubt we would have had as much support and funding if we hadn't had the olympics coming to town.
Whether the other renovations to the city will prove useful, it's hard to tell yet, but I'm cautiously optimistic that they will.
Olympics are rare enough that I don't know if any formal study has been done.
However, similar arguments are made all the time in support of building new sports stadiums. And at least in those cases, the arguments simply don't hold water: the beneficiary is the team ownership, NOT the taxpayers.
See http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-339es.html :
The economic facts, however, do not support the position that professional sports teams should receive taxpayer subsidies. The lone beneficiaries of sports subsidies are team owners and players. ... Indeed, the results of studies on changes in the economy resulting from the presence of stadiums, arenas, and sports teams show no positive economic impact from professional sports -- or a possible negative effect.
Kind of aside the main discussion, but the Canada line was approved at 1.35 billion, cost 1.9 billion, and had it's scope significantly reduced in order to manage that. It being a p3 allowed hiding 'competitive' information such as cheaper but disruptive construction and single track sections from the public, and the cities involved until after it was approved. I like having new mass transit, but I'm not sure this can be used as an argument for the economic benefits of the olympics. Though it could be an argument that the olympics give political cover to push through large projects irrespective of the problems/benefits and that may or may not come out well.
I don't know if you can say the new line made commuting around Vancouver any easier—more modernized, perhaps, but until it opened there were bus lines running down the same "track" with the same carrying capacities/latencies (98s and 424s.) They also removed many long-distance "shortcut" buses in the process, meaning that getting from, say, 1 Rd. in Richmond to Granville & Broadway turned from one bus to three (2 + the train line.) It was definitely extra capacity required for the Olympic duration, but it's mostly a wash now that it's over.
Other ways to spend the money? Well, anyone living in Atlanta now will tell you this winter's rainfall showed them just how bad the city's sewer system is. Its well known that Atlanta has major sewer problems for perhaps 100 years...think "massive sink holes that can suck down an entire building".
When your spending on beautification to show the world your city for 3 weeks, major infrastructure projects like sewer systems aren't high on the list.
I'm from Georgia and moved to Atlanta in '87 to go to Georgia Tech. I was a part of the student group that put together the Olympic bid. I stayed in Atlanta through the '96 games.
My view is different than yours.
I do feel Atlanta did a good job hosting the '96 Olympics. However, your perspective that "Atlanta was a total ghetto before the Olympics" is far off. The "ghettos" can be restated as "poor black communities". These did not go away. They just relocated. This gentrification process was in place prior to the Olympic prep. The prep simply added more money to accelerate the process.
What I wonder is why they go about it so badly and stupidly. By chance, I took part in one of the first guerilla marketing exercises of this type about 20 years ago. Af enduring a night in the rain waiting to buy tickets for a tennis match at London's wimbledon, in the morning some nice people came along with a bunch of Batman t-shirts (the Time burton version was just being released) and of course chilly wet tennis fans were delighted to have another layer of clothing - and there were lots of Batman logos in the crowd when the match was televised later that day.
I understand organizers of sporting events and people who have paid a lot of money for broadcast rights (public money, in the case of the BBC) don't want to give free advertising to other brands surfing on the popularity of the Olympics...but surely the way to approach this is to hold the brand owners responsible, and agree that organized displays outside normal commercial channels (front gardens vs. billboards along a marathon route, say) are the commercial equivalent of graffiti.
Letting police come into people's houses because they can see objectionable material from the outside will end in tears. Sure, it's inappropriate if someone decks their house with ads for candy or cheap beer, but between poorly-drafted rules and over-enthusiastic police officers, I feel pretty certain that non-commercial displays of everything from political views to portraits of people who look overly sad or gloomy will become grounds for police censorship.
I lived in the UK for about a decade and loved it. But between the plethora of security cameras and things like this, I just can't imagine living there now. Neither Labor and Conservative governments over the years have shown any real respect for civil liberties.
Thinking some more about this, I come to the conclusion that there is only one way to incorporate civil liberties into nowadays world: We need an international tax that companies and organziations pay whenever they prune civic rights. Hard to get that one through all kinds of legislature, but I think it might work, once done.
The problem is when governments violate civil liberties, and you can't fix that by making a bigger government to enforce laws against the smaller governments.
Its basically a weasel strategy to keep "civil rights" on the books, yet practically emasculating those same rights in the courts. Welcome to global fascism.
(Remember fascism means the union of the corporate and the state. Egomaniacs in funny uniforms and goose stepping is optional.)
Quote: "Moves to safeguard company trademarks and stamp out ambush marketing, to preserve the monopoly of official advertisers and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) logo, are raising concerns among civil liberty groups.
Police will have powers to enter private homes and seize posters, and will be able to stop people carrying non-sponsor items to sporting events."
I wonder how far non-sponsor items goes. If I bring a Pepsi to the games and Coca Cola is an official sponsor, are they going to make me throw it away? What about clothing?
If the Vancouver olympics are any indication (and I suspect they are), then you won't be allowed to bring competing products (e.g. pepsi vs. coke), though they can't/shouldn't do anything about clothes (turning you away because you're wearing the wrong shirt seems excessive).
We were once told that we couldn't bring in the chocolate bars we had stashed in my girlfriend's purse because they weren't sponsor products, even though there's no official chocolate sponsor of the 2010 Olympics (I suspect it was just a general 'no outside food or drink' rule). The Minute Maid cranberry juice I had, was ok, since it was a coke product. Her Dr. Pepper was not.
That said, the security guy was just doing his job, and was human - after a half-hearted plea ('Seriously? Come on man, we'll be done it all in like two minutes.') he let us through regardless.
I guess what it comes down to is what kind of people they hire: helpful, courteous people, or power-hungry rule jockeys.
I think that people are interpreting that as you encouraging them to 'concede to the man.' When you're just trying to get people to realize that the security guard they are talking to isn't 'the man' and people should realize that in their interactions with them.
I really don't get how people see that as a concession though. Sneaking 'unapproved' products into the Olympics isn't taking any sort of stand against their ridiculous policies. Why? Because it's under the radar. You can't encourage change by secretly resisting the policies you hate in the dark where no one can see you. The purpose of change would be better served by boycotting the Olympics altogether, or loudly and visibly protesting their policies.
I get that some people might feel that when people take a job, they willingly buy into what they are asked to do, and should be held accountable for it. I don't completely disagree, but I wish that life so clear and simple.
I spent many years working in the security field. Typically, it attracts low-skill workers, often recent immigrants. You can end up spending a lot of time on your feet, often in shit weather. But it pays the bills and feeds your family. I imagine some guy who had steady work watching a warehouse or a train yard, putting in his time, keeping to himself, and planning to make a better life for himself. Then one day he's told they need people over at the Olympics, time and a half OT, let's get going.
What's he supposed to do? Raise a fuss? Quit? Get fired?
Have a heart.
As you say, if you want to fight this, keep your money away from the event and its sponsors. Choose your battles and pick your targets.
And get a clue: Making a stink over a confiscated Snickers bar is not speaking truth to power. If you're so concerned over the stupid rules, what the fuck are you dong there? Go demand a refund and leave. Don't leave it to the other guy to make the hard choices.
Ironically in Vancouver it wasn't
They couldn't hire enough minimum wage security guys so a lot of city+provincial workers got seconded.
Because they couldn't release people actually doing any
day-day work they had to use managers - including my boss and his boss.
So a lot of the security guards, helpers and people on the street have $100K salaries.
I would assume that the posters in question would be non-sponsor advertising posters facing sites associated with the games, although the original article doesn't elaborate.
Nonetheless, the tendency of governments to violate civil liberties to prevent "ambush marketing" at big sporting events is quite disturbing.
While I have immense respect for the United Kingdom, in the United States, you could almost certainly put up a poster saying "The government says it has the right to prohibit me from saying 'Go Nike'. The Constitution says I have the right to say 'go suck eggs'."
(Even the most ardent defender of the Supreme Court's commercial speech jurisprudence -- which is in my mind largely mistaken -- would have a hard, hard time finding against a private citizen for political commentary of that nature.)
> Even the most ardent defender of the Supreme Court's commercial speech jurisprudence -- which is in my mind largely mistaken -- would have a hard, hard time finding against a private citizen for political commentary of that nature.
Huh?
The commercial speech argument is that folks who gather together for commercial activity have the same free speech rights as other folks in other circumstances. That argument doesn't imply anything about stopping other people from saying things.
Here's the difference. The commercial speech argument says that any company can say "nike sucks", that the govt can not impose anti-disparagment rules. It doesn't say that Nike can insist that other folks not say "nike sucks".
I'd like to say that I don't understand how anyone can confuse the two, but we do have lots of folks who think that their free speech rights are being violated when someone else criticizes them. (If you're one of those folks, you're wrong. Your right to speak does not restrict my right to speak.)
You misunderstand what I'm saying. This is a description of fact: the United States Supreme Court has a well-established body of law which holds that the Constitutional protections afforded to speech of a commercial nature are less extensive than the Constitutional protections afforded to speech of a non-commercial nature. Therefore, there is at least theoretically a risk of the government being allowed to do something analogous to this in spite of the First Amendment against speech restrictions, on the theory that the prohibited speech was commercial in nature.
However, it is unlikely that that action would be in the mainstream of constitutional interpretation in the US, and it is vanishingly unlikely it would be upheld if the commercial speech was also political, such as if the speech self-referentially criticized the government.
This is a statement of opinion: non-withstanding the well-established body of case law, I believe that the Supreme Court is wrong and that commercial speech has and deserves full protection under the First Amendment.
> The commercial speech argument is that folks who gather together for commercial activity have the same free speech rights as other folks in other circumstances. That argument doesn't imply anything about stopping other people from saying things.
I think the argument is simpler, it is that "Congress shall make no law" actually means Congress shall make no law.
If people don't like what the 1st says, they should propose a new amendment, not try to pretend they can ignore what it currently says.
> If people don't like what the 1st says, they should propose a new amendment, not try to pretend they can ignore what it currently says.
That ship sailed a long time ago.
One interesting thing about 1st amendment interpretation is that actual political speech (which pretty much everyone agrees was the point of the 1st amendment) is significantly more restricted than pornography even though pornography's"lack of restrictions" is justified on the basis that it is political speech....
I'd support them if the proposal was to take people using their properties for commercial advertising to court to find out is they were allowed to remove it (I suspect they would be told they cant... but you never know).
I don't see why this would make a difference. The only reason it would, is if the tenancy agreement of those private individuals banned them from using their space for commercial reasons. Even then, this would be a civil offence and not a criminal offence.
“specified municipality” means any of the following:
(a) the City of Richmond;
(b) the City of Vancouver;
(c) the Resort Municipality of Whistler.
32 (1) Subject to this section and section 34, an officer or employee of a specified municipality or a person authorized by the council of a specified municipality has the authority to enter on property, and to enter into property, without the consent of the owner or occupier for the purpose of enforcing, in accordance with subsection (4), the specified municipality’s bylaws in relation to signs.
(1) Subject to subsection (2), the Council may make by-laws for the purposes of enforcing its by-laws, including establishing one or more of the following penalties to which a person convicted of an offence in a prosecution under the Offence Act is liable:
(a) a minimum fine;
(b) a maximum fine of up to $10 000;
(c) in the case of a continuing offence, for each day that the offence continues either or both of
(i) a minimum fine under paragraph (a), or
(ii) a maximum fine under paragraph (b);
(d) imprisonment for not more than 6 months.
---
This conversation occurred despite the The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Fundamental Freedoms section 2b: "Everyone has the freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication."
My understanding is that said conditions were removed in the revision of the bill.
Section 32(1) is blatantly unconstitutional, not under Section 2 of the Charter that you quote, But Section 8: "Everyone has the right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure."
The conversation occurred until a lawyer looked at it and said, "Folks this is going to cost a crapload of money".
This power was also given to police during the Vancouver 2010 games. It isn't about personal posters, more about large banners hung over buildings which are promoting competitors or anti-olympic protests.
The 'enter private homes' makes one think they mean 'remove from the interior of private homes', but in Vancouver it meant 'remove from private buildings'.
The wording is of course vague enough to be used for purposes other than the intention, but I never actually heard of somebody having a problem in Whistler or Vancouver.
At the same time, it is a HUGE civil liberties issue, and I with there was another way to handle this. Nobody should really have the right to take down a massive pepsi flag if I feel compelled to cover my building with it.
As far as 'non-sponsored items', I don't recall that being a discussion at Vancouver or Sydney, but you couldn't bring food or drinks into a venue, so that pretty much took care of that 90% of the time. If Omega is the timing sponsor, and I'm wearing a Timex, I can't imagine security is going to take my watch.
All officers need a warrant to enter private property unless they have probable cause that a crown offence is going to be committed (IE murder/suicide). Being that advertising is at most a civil offence, the police would never be able to enter the interior of a persons property without a warrant and any entry and removal of property would open the police up to the easiest case of a suit against them for illegal search and seizure, any charges laid against the individual would have to be dropped as the evidence wouldn't be viable in court and the police could face up to 6-figure claims against them.
Shouldn't they? If your building isn't supposed to have advertising on it in the first place, why wouldn't the municipality have the right to remove the advertising? This is not merely a question related to Olympic powers, but if your Pepsi banner is an illegal advertisement, it should come down. (Frankly, not enough of this is done here in Toronto.)
Where I'd have a problem with this is if you had a LEGAL advertisement space in the Olympic area and they prohibited you from showing whatever advertisement would be permitted in your space regardless. If Pepsi were willing to pay your normal rate for a billboard that you legally have on your building, the city should not be able to remove it under any circumstances.
It's worth noting that cities DO occasionally enforce outdoor advertising regulations and that some folks (e.g., http://illegalsigns.ca/) think it's a good thing. I happen to agree.
> If your building isn't supposed to have advertising on it in the first place, why wouldn't the municipality have the right to remove the advertising?
That's a dangerous argument for any political party in the UK to make, given that they run huge campaigns before every election to get supporters to put up posters advertising their party in home windows or on boards outside supporters' private property. Hypocrisy, much?
Sure. I skimmed the article about the British police and the Olympics in 2012. It did not mention anything that seemed to me like hacker news: not programming, not computers, not electronics, but also not anything clever, like new kind of bicycle or solar panel.
However, it was near the top of the HN front page, and the ~10 comments on the article all discussed the the article as if it was interesting (which I presume it was for the commenters). This made me feel sad, because I don't know of another place that I can find thoughtful discussion of news that appeals to people like me. I generally find it sort of irritating when people post comments saying "This is not hacker news," because it's just a complaint.
Instead, I thought that pretending to praise the story for its valuable content (I chose to pretend it mentioned Ruby, a popular programming language) would be a funny way to lament the situation while also amusing the other folks who were reading the comments and thinking, "What the hell is going on here? Is mainstream media coverage of future British law enforcement policies interesting for some reason that I don't see?"
But, I wanted it still to seem like a plausible comment to the readers who were having a great time discussing the 2012 Olympics, Britain, and media projections of the state of their civil liberties (particularly in regard to posters) in the future. For this reason, I added the "edit."
For better or worse, "beware the coming fascism/totalitarianism" seems to be a topic that consistently gets upvoted here. Extra points if it involves IP.
You know what I think is hillarious? Let's say Nike is an official sponsor for whatever event. Let's say I go there with a different brand of sneakers, underwear, pants...everything!
What are they going to do? Strip down! You are wearing a non-Nike pair of undies! REMOVE THEM AT ONCE!
Your shoes are staying with us! They are NOT NIKE!
And then comes the other hilllarious part. The mobile phone. Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Apple, Motorola and such are probably always sponsors everywhere. What if I get some obscure brand of mobile phone - Alcatel and Sagem are two easy examples, but think REALLY obscure:
Actually, I think people will make a purpose out of going there with the wrong items. Saying loud and clear that people are supposed to "preserve the monopoly" and "stop people carrying non-sponsor items" will really top people's bull!@#$ meters. They might organize groups of such people.
After all, no matter how private it is and how much money sponsors put into it, the audience paid for the ticket. That means they have the same rights before the check-in gate and after it.
This is probably long past the old purpose of the Olympics. It's probably about luring people into forceful submission to corporate fascism. I might be wrong, though. I mean maybe the police won't "police" people into obedience toward corporate interests. I wouldn't know.
I'm hoping that this is just there in case the powers are needed to shut down criminal activity related to the Olympics. Having a law is one thing, how it is enacted is another.
Some of these articles are alarmist. It remains to be seen how the police or the government will enact any of these powers.
It's not clear what the criminal activity would be, the law is often made to allow the police to act quickly. Say the Olympic brand were used in some sort of con, the police would have powers to disassociate that activity from the Olympics.
To assume this is to be used to create a monopoly could be cynical at this point.
The comments about Vancouver 2010 are all valid. I had to laugh during the closing ceremonies when I noticed that one of the bands had been forced to cover the logos on their Marshall amps with black tape. Marshall obviously did not pay any money to have their brand seen by 3 billion viewers.
In Vancouver, people "associated" with the olympics and such could not bring Pepsi products to the office, only the officially sponsored drinks. They had to put tape on gear to hide logos from nonsponsoring companies -- including laptops from HP, IBM, or Dell.
Because much of the funding comes from the tax payers, hundreds of millions of dollars as it turns out, the people are subsidizing the erosion of their freedoms.
As written, one thinks of a poster on a person's wall; but it might be about a person with a stock of bootleg posters for sale. Such rules tend to be specific, but we can't know without seeing them. EDIT or they could even be non-sponsor posters, the commercial concern being an organized attempt to cash in on the free publicity of the games.
BTW: Non-police search for IP infringement has long been allowed, as an Anton Piller order. I am guessing that the test may also have been lowered - and this is cause for concern. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Piller_order
And the news website reports this abuse as if it was an acceptable and respectable decision! Is there any doubt that mass media's role is just social control?
"The atmosphere at the Olympics is gonna be great, a big party, just like Vancouver. Oh, did we mention the police will be enforcing Corporate Fascism? And there will be a really neat stadium, too!"
Well in a sense the security at events in Vancouver were supposed to enforce that. They did, with a thankfully human touch (you could persuade them to let you bring in things like chocolate bars, etc., but nothing overt like a bottle of Dr. Pepper).
At most (non-sporting) events in Vancouver, you didn't even get a pat down. Dump your change in a bin, go through a metal detector, get your stuff and leave. Anything non-ferrous in your pockets went unnoticed.
I love a good freedom of speech rant as much as anyone else, but I think the reaction here is completely overblown. The idea is not, of course, to remove posters from inside walls of people's homes. It is to remove advertising on the outside of those homes, and presumably the only reason the police would go inside is to effect the removal of that advertising upon the owner's refusal or absence.
Advertising on houses and buildings is not a matter of free speech; it is a matter of neighbourhood amenity and dominated by local by-laws. I am not allowed to put huge advertising posters on my balcony right now, of course. To do so would enrich me while depriving my neighbours, be an eyesore, push down property values, etc. I can't play super loud music at 3am, either, which doesn't really seem like a breach of my right to free speech either.
My guess is that the planning committee in London thinks that during the Olympics certain people might consider the fines they get for illegal advertising insufficient to deter the act, so they're temporarily allowing the cops to tear them down, and if that requires property access, fine. Probably accompanied by a temporary regulation adjusting the aforementioned advertising controls.
Free speech? Give me a break. Either you consider all anti-eyesore visual appearance regulations to be "against free speech", or you are probably able to concede that a temporary upgrade of enforcement is pretty reasonable considering the stakes.
Given that to many locals, the entire Olympics is causing vast amounts of disruption, inconvenience, eyesores and so on, I have absolutely no sympathy if the organisers of the Olympics don't like people putting up whatever the hell they want on their own property for the duration of the games. If you don't like it, go hold your Games somewhere where the people do not have such freedoms, and see how much advertising revenue you can bring in there.
Bah. I'm sure if you held a fair vote over the whole affected population, a clear majority would favour the games going ahead. There will always be some who are inconvenienced but that's just a fact of life. It's a numbers game - the greatest good for the greatest number.
And the simple fact is that the appearance of your home, especially regarding commercial advertising, is and always has been regulated by local government. Why would anyone think the rules have suddenly changed, just when the media of the world is focussed on the area?
There's legitimate criticism and then there's just whining. For me, the attitude you're describing falls pretty squarely into the second column. The Powers That Be have decided that the Olympics will be great for London, a decision with which I tend to agree, so stiff upper lip, eh?
> I'm sure if you held a fair vote over the whole affected population, a clear majority would favour the games going ahead.
Why are you sure of that? It seems like every time another country wins an Olympic bid, the vocal local voices are those who don't want it at all, not those who are welcoming it with open arms for the benefits it will bring. Maybe that's because those who live in the typically downtrodden regions chosen for Olympic "regeneration" are frequently displaced afterwards, as more wealthy folk move into the newly updated area post-Olympics.
> It's a numbers game - the greatest good for the greatest number.
Sure, and in surveys, nearly everyone wants a reduction to 20mph speed limits by the parks their kids play in, yet when observed, the majority will happily drive at well over that speed through residential neighbourhoods other than their own.
> And the simple fact is that the appearance of your home, especially regarding commercial advertising, is and always has been regulated by local government.
You're playing games. There is no law, under normal circumstances, that prevents me from putting a poster in my window advertising a product or making a political statement.
> Why would anyone think the rules have suddenly changed, just when the media of the world is focussed on the area?
Because the rules have suddenly changed. Indeed, IIRC it is now a condition of winning an Olympic bid, imposed by the IOC, that the appropriate government take steps to prevent ambush marketing, including legislation if necessary. Yes, you read that right: an external, commercial organisation is dictating to an elected government what laws it must pass.
> The Powers That Be have decided that the Olympics will be great for London, a decision with which I tend to agree, so stiff upper lip, eh?
Our Powers That Be don't exactly have a great track record of doing things that will be great for London, or anywhere else, just lately -- unless you count bailing out those who pursued failing business models.
Flagging this for altered title, both in words and spirit. IT says police will have that power, not that they will do it, and that's not even remotely what the article is about.
You are of the opinion that the granting of a police power does not necessarily mean it will be used? I would like to suggest you familiarize yourself with the history of how police powers generally work.
As to your second point... If this article instead contained a brief mention of how a tech company had shared personal information of anti-Olympic protesters with the London police, would you still flag it because that was not the main point of the article?
This is a straw man. I wasn't commenting on whether the power is right or wrong or will or will not be used. I was commenting on the editorialized and misleading title. It says "Police to..." as if they have announced plans to or something. More appropriate would be "Police granted right to..." One's accurate, one is linkbait (or here, commentbait).
I'd flag anything that has a title that I feel is baiting.
"Police will have powers to enter private homes and seize posters, and will be able to stop people carrying non-sponsor items to sporting events."
Ok, so change the title to "may", not "will". And the article discusses a number of things, one of which happens to be what the rest of us are talking about here.
