These two articles by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (a interesting and brave lady from what I can see) are fascinating incidentally, the first written after the firebombing in 2012, and the second a couple of days or so ago.
Of course, Charlie Hebdo has employed similarly "childish" and "petulant" satire to mock figures from all political and religious orientations, without ever being accused of "begging for" a violent reaction. Previous issues of the magazine have featured scatological cartoons of world leaders and caricatures of Jesus and the Pope. Time magazine itself, like all media, also delights in caricaturing religious and secular icons. Individuals offended by these images, however, have never reacted with violence, and therein lies the inescapable upshot of Mr. Crumley's piece: In a free society, a newspaper can ridicule and stigmatize whomever it chooses, except those who demonstrate a willingness to respond with violence. Extremist groups must be exempt from satire and criticism -- or the blame for the ensuing carnage falls squarely on the shoulders of the offending publication.
"The more we oblige, the more we self-censor, the more we appease, the bolder the enemy gets."
What's happened to Sadiq Khan on this? Promotes himself as a 'bridge' to Muslim Britain and yet, as far as I can see, he has made only a single comment on the Paris massacres - that was a tweet about 'standing shoulder to shoulder with Paris' on Sunday. Is he on holiday, or in hiding? Or maybe he's keeping his mouth shut for fear of offending his Tooting constituents. Well, as one of those constituents, I'd like to know his views, and with his being a candidate for high office from May, I think all voters need to know them.
Remember when Osborne was accused of stoking inflation ?
All those pieces on the Spectator from Fraser Nelson about the certainty of high inflation etc....
FYI - I've gone balls deep on Burnley winning/qualifying tomorrow night.
You can thank me now.
Umming and ahhing about backing Everton tonight.
quite agree - we're still enjoying the 5-3 and having failed to win against burnley and palace since then, quite expecting defeats tonight and vs sunderland at the weekend too....
still .... 5-3!
All I need now is Spurs to agree a swap deal for Lloris and Balotelli and Spurs will become my second club.
"'You're all mad,' explained Ford. ‘You’re absolutely barmy,’ he suggested. ‘You’re a bunch of raving nutters,’ he opined."
And they are if they think that is going to help with anything but the stupidest wannabee terrorists, meanwhile making the haystack twice as big, and intruding into the privacy of millions of people. I think my sofa is going to get my vote.
Boris was being an authoritarian oaf the other day as well. Fighting terrorism isn't just about stopping them killing people, it's about preserving our way of life.
Miss Plato, d'you have that new button thingummyjig? It seems pretty widespread (and unwanted).
Edited extra bit: Mr. Indigo, now I feel victimised.
He wants them to be able to do it without any checks and balances.
Really? Citation needed.
You could start here:
Previous governments had backed away from going down such a route, Mr Cameron said, but he believed this would have to change so that, "in extremis", such material could be obtained with a signed warrant from the home secretary.
He said this would mirror existing powers enabling the police to get hold of conventional forms of communications, such as letters and other correspondence, in criminal investigations if legally sanctioned.
war·rant (wôr′ənt, wŏr′-) n. 1. An order that serves as authorization, especially: a. Law A judicial writ authorizing the search or seizure of property, arrest of a person, or the execution of a legal judgment.
I suppose we're going to have to start using the tautology of a "judicial warrant" given the Orwellian language of some people describing a warrant as something the government gives itself.
A signed warrant from the home secretary Clearly the home secretary is an objective and independent check on executive power!
It is exactly the same as the current system. There is, as we have discussed before, an independent commission (led by a former senior judge) who oversees the system, and a parliamentary select committee - with powers and remit strengthened by the current government - also scrutinising what happens.
He wants them to be able to do it without any checks and balances.
Really? Citation needed.
You could start here:
Previous governments had backed away from going down such a route, Mr Cameron said, but he believed this would have to change so that, "in extremis", such material could be obtained with a signed warrant from the home secretary.
He said this would mirror existing powers enabling the police to get hold of conventional forms of communications, such as letters and other correspondence, in criminal investigations if legally sanctioned.
You are possibly willfully missing the point though. The Snoopers Charter was talking about storing the information for 12 months incase the police produced a warrant, so that there was a history of information for them to look at. With this extension this means the internet companies would have to store the content of everyone's internet communications for 12 months incase the police should happen to turn up with a warrant, and of course we know that internet providers never get hacked, or their content stolen.
war·rant (wôr′ənt, wŏr′-) n. 1. An order that serves as authorization, especially: a. Law A judicial writ authorizing the search or seizure of property, arrest of a person, or the execution of a legal judgment.
I suppose we're going to have to start using the tautology of a "judicial warrant" given the Orwellian language of some people describing a warrant as something the government gives itself.
The judiciary provides no real protection, the FISC in the US has hardly ever said no to warrants. Some will say that demonstrates how law abiding the NSA/CIA/FBI are, but many others say that it demonstrates how little legal protection there is and how wide ranging the scope of surveillance powers have become.
A signed warrant from the home secretary Clearly the home secretary is an objective and independent check on executive power!
It is exactly the same as the current system. There is, as we have discussed before, an independent commission (led by a former senior judge) who oversees the system, and a parliamentary select committee - with powers and remit strengthened by the current government - also scrutinising what happens.
So, in short, you were talking bollocks.
See RCS1000 yesterday for a more concise explanation than I could come up with.
Re surveillance: real terrorists have known how to use PGP and the like to encrypt messages for 15 years, and to use secure email services like Lavabit email and web anonymising networks like Tor. And - just like drug dealers - mobile phones are unlikely to be used for more than a few days at most.
Simply put, there is no way a government can track the communications of any but the most stupid of terrorists.
The surveillance intrusions we enact, therefore, manage to be (a) ineffective, and (b) allow the snooping on millions of (almost by definition) innocent people.
Price of diesel now as low as it was in March 2010. If we assume that at some point in the future the oil price will rebound, there's a lot of inflation ready to create questions for whoever is Chancellor at the time.
In my mind the combination of a low inflation rate and a stubbornly high deficit means that an increase to the VAT rate soon after the election is a near-certainty, whatever the result. The Treasury needs the money and the extra couple of percentage points on inflation won't force an increase in interest rates when the underlying level is so low.
Just like in 2010, expect them all to deny it, of course.
Overall the polls look pretty steady - a modest Syriza lead, the new centre-left party Potami doing well, the Communists and Golden Dawn just staying above water, and everyone else stuffed. The Greek system gives a bonus to the largest party, so it'll come down to whether ND can catch Syriza or not.
I think that's right: my money is on SYRIZA by 2-3 points, but with the requirement to team up with Potami to form a government.
That will be followed by three months of negotiations with the IMF/the EU/the ECB, and will be followed by Greece agreeing to continue to run a primary budget surplus, and in return all the bond holders will agree to a maturity extension and a cut in coupon payments.
All side will declare victory, and they'll then have to organise another bail out of the Greek banks (who own the bulk of Greek debt).
There will be absolutely no impact on BNP/SocGen/etc.
See RCS1000 yesterday for a more concise explanation than I could come up with.
That's a different point, which relates to the effectiveness of any measures, not the principle (and certainly not to Socrates' claim that there are no checks and balances).
Sunday Times economist David Smith and his mad bunch of "shadow MPC" fools having their pants pulled down by these inflation numbers.
Perhaps time to bet on a rate cut?
Why? The effect of falling oil prices is completely temporary, it would be reactive in extremis to cut interest rates on the back of today's figures. Anyway, I thought you wanted lower inflation, cost of living crisis and all that no?
See RCS1000 yesterday for a more concise explanation than I could come up with.
That's a different point, which relates to the effectiveness of any measures, not the principle (and certainly not to Socrates' claim that there are no checks and balances).
So in principle you are in favour of operating surveillance over the whole population, on the off chance that the home secretary decides to sign a warrant, and the remote chance that any information retrieved is actually decodable, and hope it doesn't subsequently turns out to be a recipe for potato chips ?
Never mind the minor detail that all of Facebook, Yahoo, Gmail and G+ are going to be end-to-end encrypted this year.
All the analysis by race in the US also needs to appreciate the big difference between southern Whites and non-southern whites. The GOP running up their white margin is almost entirely in the south and Appalachia, where they're absolutely killing it, but there's not much evidence they're more competitive in places like Virginia (no longer majority southern in culture), Ohio and Michigan.
Yeah, discussing national trends with an electoral system as messed up as America's is close to pointless.
See RCS1000 yesterday for a more concise explanation than I could come up with.
That's a different point, which relates to the effectiveness of any measures, not the principle (and certainly not to Socrates' claim that there are no checks and balances).
Having the power to investigate and sign warrants in the hands of the executive is open to abuse. It should be up to the judiciary to sign warrants for electronic wire-taps, not the home secretary.
A signed warrant from the home secretary Clearly the home secretary is an objective and independent check on executive power!
It is exactly the same as the current system. There is, as we have discussed before, an independent commission (led by a former senior judge) who oversees the system, and a parliamentary select committee - with powers and remit strengthened by the current government - also scrutinising what happens.
So, in short, you were talking bollocks.
God, it's like banging your head against a brick wall. How many times must we repeat the same points? The current system is an authoritarian nightmare. Extending the same system to new areas by claiming it's the same as the current system doesn't make it any better:
- The government needing to get a warrant from the government is not a check on power. - The government being overseen by a person hand-picked by the Prime Minister is not a check on power (especially when the person in question doesn't seem to understand the technology they're regulating!) - The government being overseen by a parliamentary committee, with members picked by the Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister and the likely next Prime Minister is a check on power, but only the slimmest of ones
All that we want is for each search, whether internet, mobile app or telephone, to require a warrant from an independent judiciary - an organisation that is not dominated by the executive. This is basic democracy theory of checks and balances. Not fake ones for appearances.
So in principle you are in favour of operating surveillance over the whole population,
I'm in favour of accuracy. Socrates claimed Cameron "wants them to be able to do it without any checks and balances". If I were a Kipper, I'd say it's a lie, but since I'm not, I'll simply point out that it is bollocks.
Incidentally, I have a bet on Gillibrand at 34 for the Democratic nomination, so if that happened I'd be quite happy. Only a few pounds, of course, but still.
Mr. Indigo, leaving aside the entire correct concerns you raise about theft of data, just imagine how much that information is.
All internet browsing/communications for 12 months for over 60 million people. It's horrendous in both scale and stupidity.
See RCS1000 yesterday for a more concise explanation than I could come up with.
That's a different point, which relates to the effectiveness of any measures, not the principle (and certainly not to Socrates' claim that there are no checks and balances).
So in principle you are in favour of operating surveillance over the whole population, on the off chance that the home secretary decides to sign a warrant, and the remote chance that any information retrieved is actually decodable, and hope it doesn't subsequently turns out to be a recipe for potato chips ?
Another brilliant thing about the government's proposals is that it will effectively let any would be jihadist know what the good and bad cryptographic systems are. Anything on the approved for use in the UK list is obviously not to be trusted, and the stuff the government is playing whack-a-mole with (trying to block or get taken down*) is the stuff you should use.
* That will be as effective as government attempts to stop piracy on the internet.
A signed warrant from the home secretary Clearly the home secretary is an objective and independent check on executive power!
It is exactly the same as the current system. There is, as we have discussed before, an independent commission (led by a former senior judge) who oversees the system, and a parliamentary select committee - with powers and remit strengthened by the current government - also scrutinising what happens.
So, in short, you were talking bollocks.
As usual you have totally missed the point which is not whether it needs a warrant but that the communication has to be in a form they can read. This means controls on encryption indeed he has already talked about banning whatsapp and snapchat amongst others.
Before you waffle on about that just meaning you need to produce keys anyone who knows anything will tell you that won't work as it is quite possible to have encrypted data which will take more than one key. The first key decrypts the message to an innocuous one the second key decrypts to the real message.
This is the clipper chip and government key escrow all over again. In addition this will only affect the innocent as there are a million and one places to hide an encrypted message such that the authorities won't even suspect there is one. For example there are many freeform text fields within the udf structure on a dvd. It would be simplicity itself to place an encrypted message spanning the various parts of that and have a companion program that can scan it and decrypt the message. The dvd to all intents and purposes however would look and play like a perfectly normal dvd. Most file formats such as mp4 also contain fields in which you can hide data.
Criminals and terrorists will have plenty of ways to get around this. At best this is security theatre at worst it is a power grab to gain control over the data of an entire population. The net result of it all is people like me will release software to get around this for the population and the security services will have an ever harder job as more and more people take up obfuscatory methods merely to keep their privacy.
I feel sorry for the poor guys and gals at GCHQ having to go through every whatsapp message and look at squillions of selfies and blokes sending pics of their todgers.
As an aside, my prediction for 2015. Beaten to death by a selfie stick will be a leading cause of death in this country.
Mr. Indigo, leaving aside the entire correct concerns you raise about theft of data, just imagine how much that information is.
All internet browsing/communications for 12 months for over 60 million people. It's horrendous in both scale and stupidity.
That is what we are alluding to when we talk about multiplying the size of the haystack, I believe its an illusion to something Snowden said about how the security services were collecting many times more data than they ever had any chance of processing, in effect, because they can. Even now, he said, trying to find the right bit of information was like looking for a needle in a haystack, and the haystack just keeps being made bigger.
So in principle you are in favour of operating surveillance over the whole population,
I'm in favour of accuracy. Socrates claimed Cameron "wants them to be able to do it without any checks and balances". If I were a Kipper, I'd say it's a lie, but since I'm not, I'll simply point out that it is bollocks.
I'll retract the claim. "Without any serious checks and balances" then:
The oversight committee:
A recent report 27 by the Home Affairs Committee of the British Parliament was overtly critical of the current oversight mechanisms. They found the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) to be too cosy with the executive, despite recent changes to its statute.
The commissioners - appointed by the executive:
According to the report, the independent commissioners tasked with monitoring the security services simply do not have the capacity to deal with the hundreds of thousands of surveillance requests in place every year.
I won't even bother going into the joke of warrants provided by Theresa May.
God, it's like banging your head against a brick wall. How many times must we repeat the same points? The current system is an authoritarian nightmare. Extending the same system to new areas by claiming it's the same as the current system doesn't make it any better:
- The government needing to get a warrant from the government is not a check on power. - The government being overseen by a person hand-picked by the Prime Minister is not a check on power (especially when the person in question doesn't seem to understand the technology they're regulating!) - The government being overseen by a parliamentary committee, with members picked by the Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister and the likely next Prime Minister is a check on power, but only the slimmest of ones
All that we want is for each search, whether internet, mobile app or telephone, to require a warrant from an independent judiciary - an organisation that is not dominated by the executive. This is basic democracy theory of checks and balances. Not fake ones for appearances.
It is indeed like my banging my head against a brick wall. You've managed three schoolboy howlers in three bullet points. Not bad.
For various reasons I will have to close this discussion, but please try to be accurate in future. If you mean 'I think the existing checks and balances should be changed to include the requirement that warrants should be signed by an independent judge', then say so. It will save a lot of posts if you stick to the facts, not fantasy about things Cameron didn't say.
For various reasons I will have to close this discussion, but please try to be accurate in future. If you mean 'I think the existing checks and balances should be changed to include the requirement that warrants should be signed by an independent judge', then say so. It will save a lot of posts if you stick to the facts, not fantasy about things Cameron didn't say.
The fact you're reduced to quibbling over terminology and can't actually respond to the multitudes of posters criticising the system itself says it all.
I feel sorry for the poor guys and gals at GCHQ having to go through every whatsapp message and look at squillions of selfies and blokes sending pics of their todgers.
They can't, which is why Dave is talking about banning it. For the same reason he would have to ban Snapchat, Facebook, Yahoo, Gmail, G+ etc., sounds like a sure fire election winner to me never mind the recording and privacy aspects.
You remember that UK tech revolution, Google business park near London etc.... those people will be the first on the plane looking for a new country to set up in.
So in principle you are in favour of operating surveillance over the whole population,
I'm in favour of accuracy. Socrates claimed Cameron "wants them to be able to do it without any checks and balances". If I were a Kipper, I'd say it's a lie, but since I'm not, I'll simply point out that it is bollocks.
Requiring the home secretary to sign a warrant is not an adequate check or balance. It is a cop out. Why not put the judiciary in charge, not a former judge or a commission, but supreme court judges?
Because they will see it for the bollocks it is and not sign off on any warrants. Look at the cover up of paedophilia within Westminster that has happened, now imagine giving the power to electronically wire-tap anyone's email, phone or instant messaging account to the home secretary. Giving these powers to the executive is absolutely stupid and illiberal. The government is a very poor adjudicator of it's own actions.
What you are arguing is that the government is policing itself, which we know doesn't work. I still don't understand why you won't see sense and realise that putting judges in charge of this would be better for everyone. The home secretary is a government minister, the role is not unbiased and without agenda, handing someone like that so much power to investigate ordinary people would be disastrous.
Mr. Socrates, indeed, the widespread abuse of RIPA fills one with dread at the prospect of yet more wide-ranging powers being given to the police.
Good morning, Mr. D. Now, is there evidence of widespread abuse of RIPA? If there is it must have passed me by and I would be grateful if you, or anyone else, could point me to it.
I suspect what you perceive as abuse is in fact councils and other such agencies using the powers they were granted under RIPA. The problem being that the legislation was very badly drafted and allowed organisations to use powers that they should not have and do not need to discharge their prime function.
Furthermore, I would suggest that a major check on the use of power by public authorities is not being used because of the ignorance or cowardice of the legal profession. Due to the Human Rights Act no public organisation may do anything unless it is legal, necessary and proportionate. The number of challenges that should be mounted on the grounds of the last two beggars belief (if the lawyers got their act together they could bankrupt most police forces).
I suspect what you perceive as abuse is in fact councils and other such agencies using the powers they were granted under RIPA. The problem being that the legislation was very badly drafted and allowed organisations to use powers that they should not have and do not need to discharge their prime function.
This must be some new use of the term "badly drafted" I hadnt met before, the agencies granted those powers were explicitly named in a schedule of the legislation.
Good morning, Mr. D. Now, is there evidence of widespread abuse of RIPA? If there is it must have passed me by and I would be grateful if you, or anyone else, could point me to it.
-
I could give you lots of examples, but here's some examples of misuse of RIPA
BBC and Royal Mail 'using Ripa terror powers to spy on public'
Public bodies have sought to use the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) on nearly three million occasions in the past decade to snoop on people.
The list of cases includes a council which spied on a family to make sure they were not cheating on school catchment area regulations, and scores of households suspected of flouting bin rules.
Campaigners warned that plans to curb council snooping do not go far enough and the UK's surveillance laws should be overhauled to stop "unnecessary, unwarranted and unchecked state intrusion”.
More than 20,000 warrants for the interception of phone calls, emails, and internet use have been issued since the Ripa came into force in 2000, the human rights group Justice said.
Five councils in Wales have spied on staff using undercover surveillance, BBC Wales has learned.
Gwynedd, Cardiff, Bridgend and Denbighshire councils said staff had been put under surveillance in "exceptional circumstances" such as when fraud may have been committed.
Caerphilly council stopped using undercover surveillance in April.
One teacher who was monitored while on sick leave said it had left her feeling vulnerable and violated.
Councils can conduct surveillance under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, often referred to as "anti-terror legislation".
I feel sorry for the poor guys and gals at GCHQ having to go through every whatsapp message and look at squillions of selfies and blokes sending pics of their todgers.
They can't, which is why Dave is talking about banning it. For the same reason he would have to ban Snapchat, Facebook, Yahoo, Gmail, G+ etc., sounds like a sure fire election winner to me never mind the recording and privacy aspects.
In principal, if Cameron actually tried to follow through on his statements, it would mean blocking, banning, and modifying tens of thousand of applications and services, every modern OS, a great deal of computer hardware including most recent CPUs, every modern OS SDK, many programming libraries, and somehow keeping some quiet basic knowledge out of the public domain.
It is frankly a bonkers proposal. It will only weaken the services that you and I rely on, whilst helping the bad guys out by making it clear what services the government has trouble with intercepting and reading.
To be fair to the PM I don't really expect him to understand all of this sort of thing, but his advisers are whispering nonsense in his ears.
Robert's point seems fairly critical to me in this. What is the point of giving a broad range of powers to the executive if they only people they can use them against is Joe Public rather than terrorists, drug dealers etc?
Any intrusion into our liberty has to be a balance between the cost and the benefit. The benefit here is far from apparent so why bother?
Personally I do not like the fact that TOR and other networks makes it possible for serious criminals and terrorists to communicate with each other in a way that we cannot trace or read. The potential for harm is clear and obvious. But unless and until we can overcome the secrecy on such networks or the power of modern encryption I see very little benefit in the Authorities having the right to read what the rest of us are doing.
So I have sympathy with Cameron's desire that the State should, with proper safeguards, be able to read anything that might be pertinent to an investigation of serious crime or terrorism. It is just not the world that we live in, unfortunately.
So in principle you are in favour of operating surveillance over the whole population,
I'm in favour of accuracy. Socrates claimed Cameron "wants them to be able to do it without any checks and balances". If I were a Kipper, I'd say it's a lie, but since I'm not, I'll simply point out that it is bollocks.
Requiring the home secretary to sign a warrant is not an adequate check or balance. It is a cop out. Why not put the judiciary in charge, not a former judge or a commission, but supreme court judges?
Because they will see it for the bollocks it is and not sign off on any warrants. Look at the cover up of paedophilia within Westminster that has happened, now imagine giving the power to electronically wire-tap anyone's email, phone or instant messaging account to the home secretary. Giving these powers to the executive is absolutely stupid and illiberal. The government is a very poor adjudicator of it's own actions.
What you are arguing is that the government is policing itself, which we know doesn't work. I still don't understand why you won't see sense and realise that putting judges in charge of this would be better for everyone. The home secretary is a government minister, the role is not unbiased and without agenda, handing someone like that so much power to investigate ordinary people would be disastrous.
Indeed. All four overseeing people or bodies - the two commissioners, the select committee and the home secretary - are all directly appointed by the PM.
Cameron is being deliberately dishonest here. Everyone supports the intelligence services being able to read communication when there is grounds to do so and with a warrant. But he doesn't just want the government being able to read it. He wants them to be able to do it without any checks and balances. It's a disgrace to centuries of English and Scots constitutionalism.
The man's a charlatan that no genuine conservative should vote for. He goes on about liberal democracy, but he has only the most superficial understanding of the concept.
Cameron is heavily influenced by the last person that spoke to him. If they have subject matter expertise and sound like they know what they're talking about, he'll take that at face value and adopt that position.
What he lacks is an ability to discern between two credible, but conflicting, perspectives, weigh up the alternatives against what he feels he and his government's principled and priorities are, and make a reasoned decision he can subsequently defend.
Robert's point seems fairly critical to me in this. What is the point of giving a broad range of powers to the executive if they only people they can use them against is Joe Public rather than terrorists, drug dealers etc?
Any intrusion into our liberty has to be a balance between the cost and the benefit. The benefit here is far from apparent so why bother?
Personally I do not like the fact that TOR and other networks makes it possible for serious criminals and terrorists to communicate with each other in a way that we cannot trace or read. The potential for harm is clear and obvious. But unless and until we can overcome the secrecy on such networks or the power of modern encryption I see very little benefit in the Authorities having the right to read what the rest of us are doing.
So I have sympathy with Cameron's desire that the State should, with proper safeguards, be able to read anything that might be pertinent to an investigation of serious crime or terrorism. It is just not the world that we live in, unfortunately.
I think this government, like other governments before it, are working on the principle of it is better that 60 million have their privacy violated, than let one terrorist get away with it.
I feel sorry for the poor guys and gals at GCHQ having to go through every whatsapp message and look at squillions of selfies and blokes sending pics of their todgers.
They can't, which is why Dave is talking about banning it. For the same reason he would have to ban Snapchat, Facebook, Yahoo, Gmail, G+ etc., sounds like a sure fire election winner to me never mind the recording and privacy aspects.
In principal, if Cameron actually tried to follow through on his statements, it would mean blocking, banning, and modifying tens of thousand of applications and services, every modern OS, a great deal of computer hardware including most recent CPUs, every modern OS SDK, many programming libraries, and somehow keeping some quiet basic knowledge out of the public domain.
It is frankly a bonkers proposal. It will only weaken the services that you and I rely on, whilst helping the bad guys out by making it clear what services the government has trouble with intercepting and reading.
To be fair to the PM I don't really expect him to understand all of this sort of thing, but his advisers are whispering nonsense in his ears.
I wondered if Theresa May had somehow managed to bend Cameron's ear on this before Osborne got wind of it. It's almost impossible to imagine Osborne agreeing to it - the consequences for technology businesses and especially things like fintech that the government are knocking themselves out trying to attract would be horrific.
Bloody secessionists wanting more air time during the election
The Cornish nationalist party Mebyon Kernow has claimed it would be “absurd and undemocratic” for it to be denied a party political broadcast during the election campaign.
MK is arguing that because it is fielding candidates in all six seats in the “historic nation of Cornwall”, it ought to qualify for airtime.
Draft criteria from the BBC Trust state that a political party would qualify for one party election broadcast if it stood in at least one-sixth of the seats up for election in one of the home nations. This equates to 89 seats in England, 10 in Scotland, seven in Wales and three in Northern Ireland.
I think this government, like other governments before it, are working on the principle of it is better that 60 million have their privacy violated, than let one terrorist get away with it.
I think this government, like other governments before it, are working on the principle of it is better that 60 million have their privacy violated, than let one terrorist get away with it.
If the terrorists succeed in having ancient rights, protections and liberties taken away from tens of millions of innocent Britons, they will have gotten away with it.
I think this government, like other governments before it, are working on the principle of it is better that 60 million have their privacy violated, than let one terrorist get away with it.
And that's why they do not deserve our votes.
The thing is, people like Churchill, Lincoln and FDR took away a lot of the civil liberties when they were in charge and the country was at war.
Bloody secessionists wanting more air time during the election
The Cornish nationalist party Mebyon Kernow has claimed it would be “absurd and undemocratic” for it to be denied a party political broadcast during the election campaign.
Maybe ITV WestCountry could show it for them on their Cornish transmitter ?
Robert's point seems fairly critical to me in this. What is the point of giving a broad range of powers to the executive if they only people they can use them against is Joe Public rather than terrorists, drug dealers etc?
Any intrusion into our liberty has to be a balance between the cost and the benefit. The benefit here is far from apparent so why bother?
Personally I do not like the fact that TOR and other networks makes it possible for serious criminals and terrorists to communicate with each other in a way that we cannot trace or read. The potential for harm is clear and obvious. But unless and until we can overcome the secrecy on such networks or the power of modern encryption I see very little benefit in the Authorities having the right to read what the rest of us are doing.
So I have sympathy with Cameron's desire that the State should, with proper safeguards, be able to read anything that might be pertinent to an investigation of serious crime or terrorism. It is just not the world that we live in, unfortunately.
I think this government, like other governments before it, are working on the principle of it is better that 60 million have their privacy violated, than let one terrorist get away with it.
And if that were sufficient to stop the terrorist I might have some sympathy with that view even at your extreme. Robert's point is that the terrorist is not stopped and the only people the government gets to spy on is the 60m.
One of my favourite statistics in this area is the number of terrorists who have been caught world wide as a result of the sustained harassment we all put up with every time we go through airport security. This would seem to have the prospect of a similar level of success.
Good morning, Mr. D. Now, is there evidence of widespread abuse of RIPA? If there is it must have passed me by and I would be grateful if you, or anyone else, could point me to it.
-
I could give you lots of examples, but here's some examples of misuse of RIPA
BBC and Royal Mail 'using Ripa terror powers to spy on public'
Public bodies have sought to use the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) on nearly three million occasions in the past decade to snoop on people.
The list of cases includes a council which spied on a family to make sure they were not cheating on school catchment area regulations, and scores of households suspected of flouting bin rules.
Campaigners warned that plans to curb council snooping do not go far enough and the UK's surveillance laws should be overhauled to stop "unnecessary, unwarranted and unchecked state intrusion”.
More than 20,000 warrants for the interception of phone calls, emails, and internet use have been issued since the Ripa came into force in 2000, the human rights group Justice said.
Five councils in Wales have spied on staff using undercover surveillance, BBC Wales has learned.
Gwynedd, Cardiff, Bridgend and Denbighshire councils said staff had been put under surveillance in "exceptional circumstances" such as when fraud may have been committed.
Caerphilly council stopped using undercover surveillance in April.
One teacher who was monitored while on sick leave said it had left her feeling vulnerable and violated.
Councils can conduct surveillance under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, often referred to as "anti-terror legislation".
Mr. Eagles, were the organisations granted powers under the Act to collect the data? If so then it is not an abuse of the Act, it is people doing what they have been allowed by Parliament to do. Please do read my post.
Of course if the legal profession did its bloody job and looked after the interest of its clients then a lot of the problems would not arise. However, expecting conservative-leaning lawyers admitting that actually the Human Rights Act does provide protections is probably asking too much. They would first have to admit that politically things aren't as simple as they like to portray and secondly that they are not actually very good at doing what they are paid for.
Cameron is being deliberately dishonest here. Everyone supports the intelligence services being able to read communication when there is grounds to do so and with a warrant. But he doesn't just want the government being able to read it. He wants them to be able to do it without any checks and balances. It's a disgrace to centuries of English and Scots constitutionalism.
The man's a charlatan that no genuine conservative should vote for. He goes on about liberal democracy, but he has only the most superficial understanding of the concept.
Cameron is heavily influenced by the last person that spoke to him. If they have subject matter expertise and sound like they know what they're talking about, he'll take that at face value and adopt that position.
What he lacks is an ability to discern between two credible, but conflicting, perspectives, weigh up the alternatives against what he feels he and his government's principled and priorities are, and make a reasoned decision he can subsequently defend.
The same was said about Blair.
Which led to the joke:Who is the most dangerous person in Britain? The last one who spoke to Tony Blair.
Robert's point seems fairly critical to me in this. What is the point of giving a broad range of powers to the executive if they only people they can use them against is Joe Public rather than terrorists, drug dealers etc?
Any intrusion into our liberty has to be a balance between the cost and the benefit. The benefit here is far from apparent so why bother?
Personally I do not like the fact that TOR and other networks makes it possible for serious criminals and terrorists to communicate with each other in a way that we cannot trace or read. The potential for harm is clear and obvious. But unless and until we can overcome the secrecy on such networks or the power of modern encryption I see very little benefit in the Authorities having the right to read what the rest of us are doing.
So I have sympathy with Cameron's desire that the State should, with proper safeguards, be able to read anything that might be pertinent to an investigation of serious crime or terrorism. It is just not the world that we live in, unfortunately.
Modern encryption and obfuscation make it largely impossible for governments to engage in widespread surveillance, and there is literally nothing you can do about it.
Let me give you an example. You could have a chat room like this, or like Twitter. People sign messages with a public key and put the messages into the chat room. Only the person with the private key can decrypt the message. All you know about the person you're communicating with is their public key, which acts as the addressing mechanism. When you see a new message in the chat stream you attempt to unlock it with your private key; if it decodes, it's for you.
Assuming you use high strength encryption, it is literally impossible for anyone to know who you're communicating with, or what you are saying.
And the tools are available now, for free, on the Internet. And any half way competent technical person (not a professional programmer) could recreate the software even if the government did "ban" it.
Why is the past participle of slay not slayed but slew?
A truly epic reminder of the excess that results from nationalisation / monopolies / public ownership of things that are best done outside the control of government.
With petrol nearing £1 per litre, ~75p of that will be tax. On R4 Today, a man from the Midlands was saying that the latest petrol prices save him about £300 per month. Also domestic heating oil has significantly reduced in price - but has not been so well publicised.
So will EdM propose an increase in fuel taxes (or restore the escalator) to help fill his large budget gap?
No, this is bad news. This is the start of a deflationary spiral...
I think this government, like other governments before it, are working on the principle of it is better that 60 million have their privacy violated, than let one terrorist get away with it.
And that's why they do not deserve our votes.
The thing is, people like Churchill, Lincoln and FDR took away a lot of the civil liberties when they were in charge and the country was at war.
Silent enim leges inter arma
And both Churchill and Lincoln (FDR died during the war) only did so because they were in wars for national survival, and very quickly returned those liberties when we were at peace again, realising the extreme danger of such things becoming entrenched. They would never have put such things on a permanent footing for a terrorist threat which could easily last a century or more.
Robert's point seems fairly critical to me in this. What is the point of giving a broad range of powers to the executive if they only people they can use them against is Joe Public rather than terrorists, drug dealers etc?
Any intrusion into our liberty has to be a balance between the cost and the benefit. The benefit here is far from apparent so why bother?
Personally I do not like the fact that TOR and other networks makes it possible for serious criminals and terrorists to communicate with each other in a way that we cannot trace or read. The potential for harm is clear and obvious. But unless and until we can overcome the secrecy on such networks or the power of modern encryption I see very little benefit in the Authorities having the right to read what the rest of us are doing.
So I have sympathy with Cameron's desire that the State should, with proper safeguards, be able to read anything that might be pertinent to an investigation of serious crime or terrorism. It is just not the world that we live in, unfortunately.
I think this government, like other governments before it, are working on the principle of it is better that 60 million have their privacy violated, than let one terrorist get away with it.
What will happen is that we will still be attacked by terrorists and have no freedom to go with it. I highly doubt that any of the powers proposed by Cameron will have even the slightest effect on terrorist communication for all but the most stupid ones. As we have seen time and again the computing skills of ISIL are very well developed and they have countless computer science graduates from the west who have become jihadis all on the payroll. It would be very surprising if they were using the likes of Whatsapp or any public messenger for their communication.
I have never made an Android app before, but it would take me literally less than a few hours to whip up a messenger based on public protocols with high level encryption. They will be using messengers and apps that don't even exist in the real world because they will all be custom made.
The real issue is that the government doesn't understand the internet and now it is seeking to control what it doesn't understand. Honestly if they handed internet policy over to Google at least we would have people in charge who know what they are talking about. The PM is clearly clueless about this subject and his advisers are probably worse.
Mr. Eagles, were the organisations granted powers under the Act to collect the data? If so then it is not an abuse of the Act, it is people doing what they have been allowed by Parliament to do. Please do read my post.
In the same way people are going to be extremely sceptical that these messages and email that will be stored as a result of this proposal will be restricted to the security services, and will expect that the government will add other interested parties onto the list of people able to apply, just as in RIPA.
How many people are going to be happy at the possibility of say HMRC being able to read their correspondence with their accountant or their business partners. How many people have a messy break up with their wife are going to be happy that social services might be able to apply for the contents of their IM chat, or their email records, and might those records then find their way into a court hearing and thereby to the newspapers and the public record.
With petrol nearing £1 per litre, ~75p of that will be tax. On R4 Today, a man from the Midlands was saying that the latest petrol prices save him about £300 per month. Also domestic heating oil has significantly reduced in price - but has not been so well publicised.
So will EdM propose an increase in fuel taxes (or restore the escalator) to help fill his large budget gap?
The next Tory slogan: Go Go deflation!
You suggesting cheaper petrol is bad news Ben ?
For me it is about £12- £14 on a full tank for a large six cylinder engined SUV, it is hardly going to change my way of life and given the dire predictions on jobs etc it will do more harm than good for most people.
With petrol nearing £1 per litre, ~75p of that will be tax. On R4 Today, a man from the Midlands was saying that the latest petrol prices save him about £300 per month. Also domestic heating oil has significantly reduced in price - but has not been so well publicised.
So will EdM propose an increase in fuel taxes (or restore the escalator) to help fill his large budget gap?
No, this is bad news. This is the start of a deflationary spiral...
Hard to believe people think it is a good thing.
If it is deflation that allows money to be spent on other productive activities, then it is OK.
Isn't the answer to this it is good if the speed of money is constant or increases?
Of course if the legal profession did its bloody job and looked after the interest of its clients then a lot of the problems would not arise. However, expecting conservative-leaning lawyers admitting that actually the Human Rights Act does provide protections is probably asking too much. They would first have to admit that politically things aren't as simple as they like to portray and secondly that they are not actually very good at doing what they are paid for.
Hi Llama, O/T - you have email, when you get a moment?
Why is the past participle of slay not slayed but slew?
A truly epic reminder of the excess that results from nationalisation / monopolies / public ownership of things that are best done outside the control of government.
Mark Wallace has pointed outJack Jones was a Soviet Spy
Robert's point seems fairly critical to me in this. What is the point of giving a broad range of powers to the executive if they only people they can use them against is Joe Public rather than terrorists, drug dealers etc?
I suppose the argument is that they will identify one or two naive (or careless) would-be terrorists and then use human surveillance to catch others.
We're not going to put cryptography back in the box, so we need to focus on the human weak links. I do have some sympathy with the government as it's never been easier for like-minded criminals to plot, even whilst in the host country. However it's not all that inspiring to see DC proposing essentially unenforceable restrictions..
I think Warren is fantastic - and she's far more personable than the "Harvard professor" accusation suggests. In polls, she ranks at the top of candidates people would like to have a drink with.
However, I don't buy that she's really running. It would need a hell of an effort to overcome the Clinton machine and, unlike Obama in 2008, it's extremely high risk. Given her age, she would unlikely to be able to run again should HRC get in, and the Clintons are brutal in terms of punishing 'disloyalty'. Warren would be frozen out of an HRC Whitehouse. It's in Warren's interest to keep the speculation going, as it raises her profile and influence, but I don't think it's going to get beyond that.
It's not just good for her, it's great for the groups that are backing the campaign, because they're raising money and gathering data that they presumably won't be giving back in the event that she decides to stay out of the race.
Robert's point seems fairly critical to me in this. What is the point of giving a broad range of powers to the executive if they only people they can use them against is Joe Public rather than terrorists, drug dealers etc?
Any intrusion into our liberty has to be a balance between the cost and the benefit. The benefit here is far from apparent so why bother?
Personally I do not like the fact that TOR and other networks makes it possible for serious criminals and terrorists to communicate with each other in a way that we cannot trace or read. The potential for harm is clear and obvious. But unless and until we can overcome the secrecy on such networks or the power of modern encryption I see very little benefit in the Authorities having the right to read what the rest of us are doing.
So I have sympathy with Cameron's desire that the State should, with proper safeguards, be able to read anything that might be pertinent to an investigation of serious crime or terrorism. It is just not the world that we live in, unfortunately.
Modern encryption and obfuscation make it largely impossible for governments to engage in widespread surveillance, and there is literally nothing you can do about it.
Let me give you an example. You could have a chat room like this, or like Twitter. People sign messages with a public key and put the messages into the chat room. Only the person with the private key can decrypt the message. All you know about the person you're communicating with is their public key, which acts as the addressing mechanism. When you see a new message in the chat stream you attempt to unlock it with your private key; if it decodes, it's for you.
Assuming you use high strength encryption, it is literally impossible for anyone to know who you're communicating with, or what you are saying.
And the tools are available now, for free, on the Internet. And any half way competent technical person (not a professional programmer) could recreate the software even if the government did "ban" it.
It needs lateral thinking. Like requiring all new laptops and computers to have keys that can open them when authorised by a warrant. I don't regard this as some new wonderful freedom that has been given to me. I regard the existence of such technology and systems as a threat to my way of life. But I am at a loss as to what our government can do about it.
It needs lateral thinking. Like requiring all new laptops and computers to have keys that can open them when authorised by a warrant. I don't regard this as some new wonderful freedom that has been given to me. I regard the existence of such technology and systems as a threat to my way of life. But I am at a loss as to what our government can do about it.
The key in question isn't physical, its just a large prime number, and you can change it any time you want. Something like this
-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: PGPfreeware 6.5.8 for non-commercial use mQGiBDp1yy0RBADVlyDewVwltBs7HnHCG3bXlVUODFkn/00TdbM2SPnOAIkj4giB
and about another dozen lines of code, then an end message.
I think this government, like other governments before it, are working on the principle of it is better that 60 million have their privacy violated, than let one terrorist get away with it.
If the terrorists succeed in having ancient rights, protections and liberties taken away from tens of millions of innocent Britons, they will have gotten away with it.
What ancient rights and protections are we talking about here? The right to communicate in private? Such a right has never existed, all governments from time immemorial have intercepted the communications of people they suspected of conspiring to harm the common good and rightly so.
The argument is about what degree of oversight and permission should accompany such activity. Presently we have a greater degree of oversight, control and transparency than ever before in our history. RIPA was brought in to provide a statutory footing and control over what was happening in a free for all manner anyway. In my view it went too far in terms of granting permissions to organisations and not far enough in terms of oversight and control.
Why is the past participle of slay not slayed but slew?
A truly epic reminder of the excess that results from nationalisation / monopolies / public ownership of things that are best done outside the control of government.
Mark Wallace has pointed outJack Jones was a Soviet Spy
A decade ago I had Google as a client - Their social networking HQ didn't want anyone to know where they lived. And that's before they were *evil*. I also knew the guys in charge of BT's architecture security [AKA the ones who are friends with spooks]. This was as RIPA was being framed. It was scary stuff.
After being with the CT plod, BBC Monitoring and visiting Mi5 too - it's a whole other ball game. I really don't think most peeps have a clue how sophisticated it all is. Or how creepy.
Assume the worst and hope for the best would be my assessment.
I feel sorry for the poor guys and gals at GCHQ having to go through every whatsapp message and look at squillions of selfies and blokes sending pics of their todgers.
They can't, which is why Dave is talking about banning it. For the same reason he would have to ban Snapchat, Facebook, Yahoo, Gmail, G+ etc., sounds like a sure fire election winner to me never mind the recording and privacy aspects.
You remember that UK tech revolution, Google business park near London etc.... those people will be the first on the plane looking for a new country to set up in.
I think this government, like other governments before it, are working on the principle of it is better that 60 million have their privacy violated, than let one terrorist get away with it.
If the terrorists succeed in having ancient rights, protections and liberties taken away from tens of millions of innocent Britons, they will have gotten away with it.
What ancient rights and protections are we talking about here? The right to communicate in private? Such a right has never existed, all governments from time immemorial have intercepted the communications of people they suspected of conspiring to harm the common good and rightly so.
People involved in confidential correspondence with their lawyer, priest, accountant or elected representative might be a little surprised to hear that.
Assuming you use high strength encryption, it is literally impossible for anyone to know who you're communicating with, or what you are saying.
For general messaging apps that are out there whilst I have a high confidence that the message contents are secure I have zero confidence that the message meta-data (time sent, recipients, etc) are secure. The meta-data is the goldmine and can tell you so much that the message contents are almost irrelevant.
This is the sort of article that I have to laugh at. First, it's not true that UKIP have been especially quiet Secondly, it was only 3 days ago that the Lab/Lib/Con leaders were railing against Farage when he spoke the truth about Charlie Hebdo and Islamist terrorism in general.
Mind you the Lab/Lib/Con leaders are making arses of themselves with their fatuous talk.
I think this government, like other governments before it, are working on the principle of it is better that 60 million have their privacy violated, than let one terrorist get away with it.
And that's why they do not deserve our votes.
The thing is, people like Churchill, Lincoln and FDR took away a lot of the civil liberties when they were in charge and the country was at war.
Silent enim leges inter arma
And both Churchill and Lincoln (FDR died during the war) only did so because they were in wars for national survival, and very quickly returned those liberties when we were at peace again, realising the extreme danger of such things becoming entrenched. They would never have put such things on a permanent footing for a terrorist threat which could easily last a century or more.
TSE loves using only half truths. They are easier to slide by the eye, than absolute lies.
Comments
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/ayaan-hirsi-ali/prophet-muhammad_b_1079880.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ayaan-hirsi-ali/how-to-respond-to-paris-attack_b_6433260.html What's happened to Sadiq Khan on this? Promotes himself as a 'bridge' to Muslim Britain and yet, as far as I can see, he has made only a single comment on the Paris massacres - that was a tweet about 'standing shoulder to shoulder with Paris' on Sunday.
Is he on holiday, or in hiding? Or maybe he's keeping his mouth shut for fear of offending his Tooting constituents.
Well, as one of those constituents, I'd like to know his views, and with his being a candidate for high office from May, I think all voters need to know them.
‘You’re absolutely barmy,’ he suggested.
‘You’re a bunch of raving nutters,’ he opined."
And they are if they think that is going to help with anything but the stupidest wannabee terrorists, meanwhile making the haystack twice as big, and intruding into the privacy of millions of people. I think my sofa is going to get my vote.
n.
1. An order that serves as authorization, especially:
a. Law A judicial writ authorizing the search or seizure of property, arrest of a person, or the execution of a legal judgment.
I suppose we're going to have to start using the tautology of a "judicial warrant" given the Orwellian language of some people describing a warrant as something the government gives itself.
So, in short, you were talking bollocks.
In my mind the combination of a low inflation rate and a stubbornly high deficit means that an increase to the VAT rate soon after the election is a near-certainty, whatever the result. The Treasury needs the money and the extra couple of percentage points on inflation won't force an increase in interest rates when the underlying level is so low.
Just like in 2010, expect them all to deny it, of course.
Never mind the minor detail that all of Facebook, Yahoo, Gmail and G+ are going to be end-to-end encrypted this year.
Has to be analysed on a state by state basis.
- The government needing to get a warrant from the government is not a check on power.
- The government being overseen by a person hand-picked by the Prime Minister is not a check on power (especially when the person in question doesn't seem to understand the technology they're regulating!)
- The government being overseen by a parliamentary committee, with members picked by the Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister and the likely next Prime Minister is a check on power, but only the slimmest of ones
All that we want is for each search, whether internet, mobile app or telephone, to require a warrant from an independent judiciary - an organisation that is not dominated by the executive. This is basic democracy theory of checks and balances. Not fake ones for appearances.
Mr. Indigo, leaving aside the entire correct concerns you raise about theft of data, just imagine how much that information is.
All internet browsing/communications for 12 months for over 60 million people. It's horrendous in both scale and stupidity.
* That will be as effective as government attempts to stop piracy on the internet.
Before you waffle on about that just meaning you need to produce keys anyone who knows anything will tell you that won't work as it is quite possible to have encrypted data which will take more than one key. The first key decrypts the message to an innocuous one the second key decrypts to the real message.
This is the clipper chip and government key escrow all over again. In addition this will only affect the innocent as there are a million and one places to hide an encrypted message such that the authorities won't even suspect there is one. For example there are many freeform text fields within the udf structure on a dvd. It would be simplicity itself to place an encrypted message spanning the various parts of that and have a companion program that can scan it and decrypt the message. The dvd to all intents and purposes however would look and play like a perfectly normal dvd. Most file formats such as mp4 also contain fields in which you can hide data.
Criminals and terrorists will have plenty of ways to get around this. At best this is security theatre at worst it is a power grab to gain control over the data of an entire population. The net result of it all is people like me will release software to get around this for the population and the security services will have an ever harder job as more and more people take up obfuscatory methods merely to keep their privacy.
As an aside, my prediction for 2015. Beaten to death by a selfie stick will be a leading cause of death in this country.
The oversight committee:
A recent report 27 by the Home Affairs Committee of the British Parliament was overtly critical of the current oversight mechanisms. They found the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) to be too cosy with the executive, despite recent changes to its statute.
The commissioners - appointed by the executive:
According to the report, the independent commissioners tasked with monitoring the security services simply do not have the capacity to deal with the hundreds of thousands of surveillance requests in place every year.
I won't even bother going into the joke of warrants provided by Theresa May.
For various reasons I will have to close this discussion, but please try to be accurate in future. If you mean 'I think the existing checks and balances should be changed to include the requirement that warrants should be signed by an independent judge', then say so. It will save a lot of posts if you stick to the facts, not fantasy about things Cameron didn't say.
You remember that UK tech revolution, Google business park near London etc.... those people will be the first on the plane looking for a new country to set up in.
Because they will see it for the bollocks it is and not sign off on any warrants. Look at the cover up of paedophilia within Westminster that has happened, now imagine giving the power to electronically wire-tap anyone's email, phone or instant messaging account to the home secretary. Giving these powers to the executive is absolutely stupid and illiberal. The government is a very poor adjudicator of it's own actions.
What you are arguing is that the government is policing itself, which we know doesn't work. I still don't understand why you won't see sense and realise that putting judges in charge of this would be better for everyone. The home secretary is a government minister, the role is not unbiased and without agenda, handing someone like that so much power to investigate ordinary people would be disastrous.
I suspect what you perceive as abuse is in fact councils and other such agencies using the powers they were granted under RIPA. The problem being that the legislation was very badly drafted and allowed organisations to use powers that they should not have and do not need to discharge their prime function.
Furthermore, I would suggest that a major check on the use of power by public authorities is not being used because of the ignorance or cowardice of the legal profession. Due to the Human Rights Act no public organisation may do anything unless it is legal, necessary and proportionate. The number of challenges that should be mounted on the grounds of the last two beggars belief (if the lawyers got their act together they could bankrupt most police forces).
"Unions want to vet politicians' speeches"
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B7Odx2JCUAAih3V.jpg
Why is the past participle of slay not slayed but slew?
I could give you lots of examples, but here's some examples of misuse of RIPA
BBC and Royal Mail 'using Ripa terror powers to spy on public'
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/bbc-and-royal-mail-using-ripa-terror-powers-to-spy-on-public-8070057.html
Public bodies have sought to use the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) on nearly three million occasions in the past decade to snoop on people.
The list of cases includes a council which spied on a family to make sure they were not cheating on school catchment area regulations, and scores of households suspected of flouting bin rules.
Campaigners warned that plans to curb council snooping do not go far enough and the UK's surveillance laws should be overhauled to stop "unnecessary, unwarranted and unchecked state intrusion”.
More than 20,000 warrants for the interception of phone calls, emails, and internet use have been issued since the Ripa came into force in 2000, the human rights group Justice said.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8868757/Councils-have-mounted-millions-of-snooping-operations-in-past-decade-finds-report.html
Five councils in Wales have spied on staff using undercover surveillance, BBC Wales has learned.
Gwynedd, Cardiff, Bridgend and Denbighshire councils said staff had been put under surveillance in "exceptional circumstances" such as when fraud may have been committed.
Caerphilly council stopped using undercover surveillance in April.
One teacher who was monitored while on sick leave said it had left her feeling vulnerable and violated.
Councils can conduct surveillance under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, often referred to as "anti-terror legislation".
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-24721256
It is frankly a bonkers proposal. It will only weaken the services that you and I rely on, whilst helping the bad guys out by making it clear what services the government has trouble with intercepting and reading.
To be fair to the PM I don't really expect him to understand all of this sort of thing, but his advisers are whispering nonsense in his ears.
Any intrusion into our liberty has to be a balance between the cost and the benefit. The benefit here is far from apparent so why bother?
Personally I do not like the fact that TOR and other networks makes it possible for serious criminals and terrorists to communicate with each other in a way that we cannot trace or read. The potential for harm is clear and obvious. But unless and until we can overcome the secrecy on such networks or the power of modern encryption I see very little benefit in the Authorities having the right to read what the rest of us are doing.
So I have sympathy with Cameron's desire that the State should, with proper safeguards, be able to read anything that might be pertinent to an investigation of serious crime or terrorism. It is just not the world that we live in, unfortunately.
What he lacks is an ability to discern between two credible, but conflicting, perspectives, weigh up the alternatives against what he feels he and his government's principled and priorities are, and make a reasoned decision he can subsequently defend.
The Cornish nationalist party Mebyon Kernow has claimed it would be “absurd and undemocratic” for it to be denied a party political broadcast during the election campaign.
MK is arguing that because it is fielding candidates in all six seats in the “historic nation of Cornwall”, it ought to qualify for airtime.
Draft criteria from the BBC Trust state that a political party would qualify for one party election broadcast if it stood in at least one-sixth of the seats up for election in one of the home nations. This equates to 89 seats in England, 10 in Scotland, seven in Wales and three in Northern Ireland.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jan/13/cornish-nationalist-party-election-broadcast
Silent enim leges inter arma
One of my favourite statistics in this area is the number of terrorists who have been caught world wide as a result of the sustained harassment we all put up with every time we go through airport security. This would seem to have the prospect of a similar level of success.
Of course if the legal profession did its bloody job and looked after the interest of its clients then a lot of the problems would not arise. However, expecting conservative-leaning lawyers admitting that actually the Human Rights Act does provide protections is probably asking too much. They would first have to admit that politically things aren't as simple as they like to portray and secondly that they are not actually very good at doing what they are paid for.
Which led to the joke:Who is the most dangerous person in Britain? The last one who spoke to Tony Blair.
Let me give you an example. You could have a chat room like this, or like Twitter. People sign messages with a public key and put the messages into the chat room. Only the person with the private key can decrypt the message. All you know about the person you're communicating with is their public key, which acts as the addressing mechanism. When you see a new message in the chat stream you attempt to unlock it with your private key; if it decodes, it's for you.
Assuming you use high strength encryption, it is literally impossible for anyone to know who you're communicating with, or what you are saying.
And the tools are available now, for free, on the Internet. And any half way competent technical person (not a professional programmer) could recreate the software even if the government did "ban" it.
I have never made an Android app before, but it would take me literally less than a few hours to whip up a messenger based on public protocols with high level encryption. They will be using messengers and apps that don't even exist in the real world because they will all be custom made.
The real issue is that the government doesn't understand the internet and now it is seeking to control what it doesn't understand. Honestly if they handed internet policy over to Google at least we would have people in charge who know what they are talking about. The PM is clearly clueless about this subject and his advisers are probably worse.
How many people are going to be happy at the possibility of say HMRC being able to read their correspondence with their accountant or their business partners. How many people have a messy break up with their wife are going to be happy that social services might be able to apply for the contents of their IM chat, or their email records, and might those records then find their way into a court hearing and thereby to the newspapers and the public record.
Isn't the answer to this it is good if the speed of money is constant or increases?
The EU VAT nonsense is one such example, as was Bob Crow's desire for a 1p tax on every e-mail sent.
We're not going to put cryptography back in the box, so we need to focus on the human weak links. I do have some sympathy with the government as it's never been easier for like-minded criminals to plot, even whilst in the host country. However it's not all that inspiring to see DC proposing essentially unenforceable restrictions..
That makes my brain hurt!
-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: PGPfreeware 6.5.8 for non-commercial use
mQGiBDp1yy0RBADVlyDewVwltBs7HnHCG3bXlVUODFkn/00TdbM2SPnOAIkj4giB
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The argument is about what degree of oversight and permission should accompany such activity. Presently we have a greater degree of oversight, control and transparency than ever before in our history. RIPA was brought in to provide a statutory footing and control over what was happening in a free for all manner anyway. In my view it went too far in terms of granting permissions to organisations and not far enough in terms of oversight and control.
After being with the CT plod, BBC Monitoring and visiting Mi5 too - it's a whole other ball game. I really don't think most peeps have a clue how sophisticated it all is. Or how creepy.
Assume the worst and hope for the best would be my assessment.
This is the sort of article that I have to laugh at.
First, it's not true that UKIP have been especially quiet
Secondly, it was only 3 days ago that the Lab/Lib/Con leaders were railing against Farage when he spoke the truth about Charlie Hebdo and Islamist terrorism in general.
Mind you the Lab/Lib/Con leaders are making arses of themselves with their fatuous talk.