privacy vs terrorism

It is a very simplified and silly question. It is not a choice we need to make at this point.

Look at the backgrounds of most of the people who have been radicalised and committed crimes in the west and you will see a pattern to their lives.

Spend the money on education and to tackle the social reasons why people turn to this ideology rather than on building a massive state snooping infrastructure to punish everyone.
 
fatboy128 said:
If our great grandfathers who fought and died in the war for our freedom could see how easly we now just give them away under the flimest excuse of protection from terriorism not only would they **** themselves laughing I think they would also be a tad dissapointed
what we do or say is none of the goverments business and nor should it ever be
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So there were no wire taps or interceptions of any communications during WW2? Is that what you are saying?
 
[TW]Fox;27475724 said:
I think people get a bit carried away here. It's not 'mass surveillance' in the sense that we'd understand it to be.

20 years ago for example with the appropriate court warrant the authorities could listen to every phone call we made, read any letters we sent. This was the extent of 99% of peoples communications. So, for all intents and purposes, everything we said to others remotely could, if the right person could convince a judge that we were reasonable suspects of various offences, be read by somebody else.

Fast forward 20 years.

Nobody really uses land lines to call mates. Nobody sends letters. The methods we use to communicate have shifted. But the powers have not. The ideas being tabled, IMHO in a rather bungled and badly explained fashion, seek to update the powers to give them the equivalent of what they had 20 years ago but no longer have now. Backed up by a solid legal system and the requirement for warrants etc, it's not quite the surveillance state referred to in the above reddit post.

Politicians are not experts in this sort of stuff. They seek advice from those who are - legally and technically. Sadly what has happened here is we have politicians knee-jerking around subjects they do not understand. Which leads to the PM saying stupid things and the media running ridiculous stories about how sending cat pictures via WhatsApp is going to be made illegal.

We trusted our authorities not to use the legal powers they had to intercept mail and tap telephones 20+ years ago to use those powers for political gain. And they didn't do this. Nobody in the UK was made to vanish because they said they were going to vote Labour on the phone in the late 80's. Provided we can still trust the authorities in this country not to use such powers for things as perversely wrong as silencing those who wouldn't vote for them or whatever, then how is it different?

Yes, such powers in certain countries would undoubtedly lead to big problems for the citizens of that country. But then the ability to tap phones and read letters lead to big problems for citizens of certain countries throughout the last 50 years - though not ours.

The story here is the annoying habit our politicians have of speaking out before they've actually bothered to look into something and the amazing habit our media has of blowing everything out of all proportion. Not that suddenly people are going to vanish in the night because they support UKIP and tell mates about it over Whatsapp.

I know it's really trendy and hipster to beleive our government is evil, it's all a sinister plot, etc etc, but we do live in a country where we can be reasonably certain of privacy. The police couldn't care less that you might tell your mate you copied his DVD last night or that you hate David Cameron. I don't think we realise quite how lucky we are to live in a country like ours.
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There is an issue to be tackled though whereby people use encrypted communications in order to facilitate their crime.

But just banning Whatsapp et al isn't the answer.
 
anything I don't mind said:
Total security from electronic surveillance is completely unattainable. There will always be a means to communicate outside of the government electronic drag nets. Even if they ban end to end encryption, not only will it be near impossible to enforce, it will also not stop people finding different encryption tools.

They already have everything they need. Billions of £ in resources, excellent training, updated laws that have voided centuries old rights that took wars to achieve.

It seems the more electronic snooping gadgets and tools the intelligence sector gets, the less real investigative work they actually do. Maybe it is time they stop farting around drag netting people sharing recipes over facebook and whatsapp and started targeting people who have malicious intent.

Only so much should be done in the name of security, I would rather have the risk of a terrorist attack hanging over me than have to live in a society where everything is over the top monitored and all the authorities are armed to the teeth at every biometric checkpoint. If it wasn't for the likes of clegg standing up for age old liberty and common sense, we could see an absolute ridiculous expansion of the police state. Of course by living in a police state society we are only allowing the terrorists to win and how is a society like that even worth fighting for?
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Its amazing how much ignorance (and stupidity) shown by some of the things they are trying to enforce. (Any properly organised terrorist organisation these days is fully capable of building their own, propitiatory encrypted system and wouldn't have to use whatsapp or whatever).

I dunno if it still exists (I got out as it was being hijacked for increasingly more dubious purposes) but back in the day there was an interesting project that worked underneath the actual IRC protocols/systems, sending innocent looking data using the normal communication mechanisms i.e. seeded keep alive/ping transactions which where infact encrypted network messages or likewise dcc connections where the handshaking itself was actually passing encrypted text strings (i.e. instead of the length of the file or filename, etc.) and then denied - pretty much impossible to detect or prevent without shutting down the entire legit software working on top of it.

Which leads to where they have to enforce signed programs and basically lock down the entire OS and what can access the internet by which point if we allow it we've pretty much sleep walked into complete state control of anything we do on a PC.
 
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For me it comes down to, I may not like what you have to say but I will defend your right to say it. Free speech should be free, the question is if people are under surveillance is it free speech? If you move from a society with no surveillance to one with total surveillance - at what point during the transition do people start to not say things or type things because they know someone somwhere is watching, listening, reading. At the point that becomes a consideration free speech is dead! Unfortunately I am not sure we haven't already crossed that point.

I like the plans to introduce back doors into things like Whatsapp or ban them but it is exactly because of the Edward Snowden / NSA that we need to keep private communication.

Edit: I should clarify. I am not saying that under warrant etc that the communication should not be read. Simply that it should not be open to be searched for key words etc.
 
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Greboth said:
Edit: I should clarify. I am not saying that under warrant etc that the communication should not be read. Simply that it should not be open to be searched for key words etc.
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This is entirely my position, too. Full access on the instruction of a court? Go for it. Random trawling without a warrant? Absolutely not.
 
What makes you think you have privacy now?

Governments want to legalise intelligence gathering that it's probably already doing illegally. There was all that fuss about GCHQ last year I think it was, and all I kept thinking is "Surely we'd be in a worse state if they weren't sniffing about in people's information?"
 
[TW]Fox;27475820 said:
This is entirely my position, too. Full access on the instruction of a court? Go for it. Random trawling without a warrant? Absolutely not.
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They access mass acquired data now without a warrant.
 
I cant believe how riled up people have gotten over my silly comment. :eek:

I stand by it though, I don't think the government have resources to waste monitoring every form of communication of every citizen regardless if they are suspected to have any affiliation to a terrorist cell or not so why would they want to pry on normal folk. And if they did it still doesn't really bother me.

The way the majority of people these days like to ram their lives down each others throats via social media, I thought a lot of people would enjoy the attention! :p
 
We don't need to give up any privacy. Mi5 where perfectly capable of catching, on audio and video tape, 12 dissident Republicans planning to murder police and judges in a house in Newry that they'd bugged last year.

Not a single ****ing law relating to internet privacy had to be changed to do it.

Now... stop people going to and coming back from the middle east for training, or to fight. That would be a good ****ing start.
 
It won't just stop at terrorists though, next it will be people who disagree with the government, then people with ginger hair, etc. etc. until camoron is dictator
 
OhEsEcks said:
We don't need to give up any privacy. Mi5 where perfectly capable of catching, on audio and video tape, 12 dissident Republicans planning to murder police and judges in a house in Newry that they'd bugged last year.

Not a single ****ing law relating to internet privacy had to be changed to do it.

Now... stop people going to and coming back from the middle east for training, or to fight. That would be a good ****ing start.
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Except that the security services don't have unlimited resources available to them so it's about making things easier for them, rather than the terrorists. We've just seen these awful attacks in Paris where the perpetrators should have been being watched but weren't. If it turns out that the reason they weren't being watched closely was because of a lack of resources then surely anything that utilises resources more effectively can only be a good thing.
 
scorza said:
Except that the security services don't have unlimited resources available to them so it's about making things easier for them, rather than the terrorists. We've just seen these awful attacks in Paris where the perpetrators should have been being watched but weren't. If it turns out that the reason they weren't being watched closely was because of a lack of resources then surely anything that utilises resources more effectively can only be a good thing.
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But there must be a limit. If the have to watch another 100,000 innocent civiliens in order to watch the right people, then is that a good thing?

What about if they watch the whole population?
 
It took centuries to develop magna carta and trial by jury, one terrorist attack and this was all written away with a stroke of a pen. Why was magna carta invented? was it to give people fair trial? no. It was to take the power away from the authority at the time, the monarchy, to prevent the monarchy from over stepping its power and to keep the monarchy in place.

https://mega.co.nz/#!oMczRShI!65ZhKUy4JajVVI-oFM55C1RYc0nxZBwk4A5s9Zeia_Y

The true meaning of the words, nee super eum ibimus, nee
super eum mittemus, is also proved by the " Articles of the
Great Charter of Liberties" demanded of the king by the
barons, and agreed to by the king, under seal, a few days
before the date of the Charter, and from which the Charter
was framed.* Here the words used are these:
" Ne corpus liberi hominis* capiatur nee imprisonetur nee
disseisetur nee utlagetur nee exuJetur nee aliquo modo destruatur
nee rexeatvel mittat super eum vi nisi per judicium
pariutn suorura vel per legem terras."
That is, " The body of a freeman shall not be arrested, nor
imprisoned, nor disseized, nor outlawed, nor exiled, nor in any
manner destroyed, nor shall the king proceed or send {any
one) against kirn WITH FORCE, unless by the judgment of his
peers, or the law of the land."
The true translation of the words nee super eum ibimus, nee
super eum mittemus, in Magna Carta, is thus made certain, as
follows, " nor will we {the king) proceed against him, nor send
(anyone) against him WITH FORCE OR ARMS."

page 29
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The unfortunate truth is that no entity should be granted that sort of immunity and power because people are far too easily manipulated. This very system setup to monitor and analyse and predict will be used again the people eventually one way or another. It would very foolish to think that could never happen now that uk is so intelligent and amazing.
 
Might be worth trying to put things into perspective. How many british people (as an example) have lost there lives due to terrorist attacks per year for the last 20 years?

lets say for arguments sake, 5? (I have completly pulled this figure out of my ass)

if we spend £10,000,000 a year upping survalence in order to reduce that by 1, then is that worth it? What if the donated that £10,000,000 to water aid or whatever, how many lives would that save? And on top of that we have maybe thousands of inosent civilians monitored?
 
new boy said:
But there must be a limit. If the have to watch another 100,000 innocent civiliens in order to watch the right people, then is that a good thing?

What about if they watch the whole population?
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But that's not what is being proposed, the manpower that would be required to watch the whole population precludes it from being taken seriously.
 
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