GCHQ: We can't track crims any more thanks to Snowden The Snowden revelations harmed GCHQ’s ability to monitor the communications of crime lords, leading to some vanishing off the grid and the abandonment of other surveillance operations, sources have told a British newspaper. Intelligence officers claim to be blind to more than a quarter of the actions of the UK’s worst crime …
Have to ask: does anyone know what policy change they're trying to sneak in while we're all too full of stuffing to notice? Why else would they be feeding rabble rousing scum like the Telegraph this recycled 'news'?
And does anyone believe they were successfully tracking anything but amateurs?
Assuming that being a drug lord is somewhat Darwinian, one would assume that the most successful ones are reasonably high tech - these are people who can afford private submarines, after all.
So the NSA and GCHQ were probably only increasing the fitness of the cleverest ones by eliminating the less competitive.
Tax and regulate, supply high quality drugs of known potency through legal outlets, and before you know where you are these guys will be legal CEOs. And with their ruthless efficiency, we can let them sort out the competition.
Prof. Nutt and the guy who wrote Freakonomics in charge of drugs policy. There's a thought.
Any dispute of the fact that such a transaction would offer a probable return of £3500 minus $350 and any postage and packing expenses. Now that is most certainly an absolutely fabulous ROI which would be hard to beat and decline in these sad and pathetic times of politically inept and badly engineered austerity and ponzi stock and intellectually bankrupt government bond market manipulation.
I'm sure that with modern technology we could design a society where it was virtually impossible to commit a crime without being caught. Such worlds have been considered many a time in fiction, and just think what some of the fascist regimes of the past could achieve with modern tech.
I presume this whitehall official will be volunteering to be the first to have the 24/7 monitored cameras installed in every room in his house?
There certainly are some horrible, nasty, exploitative people out there. Always have been and always will be. Some of them even work in government.
Get warrants, employ more people and treat everyone equally.
If the security services don't act within the law it makes them no better than the other criminals they are trying to catch.
Yes, and as you suggest the balance is in part between private and government crime. In the USA, it's known that government departments -- notably the CIA, but surely others -- have broken and continue to break national and international laws against torture, assassination, and bribery. Among other malfeasance.
The question for Brits may be, how much latitude does the GCHQ get to commit criminal acts in an effort to prevent criminal acts?
The CIA (or equivalent intelligence agencies) is up to it's neck in gun running and drug smuggling, as advisers and getting people out of trouble. Because it's more important for national security that the various organised smuggling groups carry on their trade, but keep an eye out for the "wrong" stuff being smuggled in.
Of course there is actual gun running to the various militant groups, but I'm pretty sure that's a fundamental part of your intelligence agency, support the faction that you prefer to win.
After abusing their powers for years they lose their easy catch-all abilities and have nobody but themselves to blame. I was wondering how long it would take them to throw out the two trump cards of terrorism and paedophiles and the answer is not too long. They'll have to go back to the older ways of spying now that involves more work than grabbing all communications sent over X network on Y days and hoping for something to stand out.
A senior security official said: “Being caught with our hand in the till illegally monitoring absolutely fucking everybody in case they might be guilty Snowden has been very damaging to our work. We have specific evidence of where key targets have changed their communication behaviour as a direct result of what they have read.”
FTFY
As they have conceded they can't readily read what the real baddies are doing, they should now stop spying on the rest of us. We all know they won't do that so although the innocent have nothing to hide, we do like our privacy so in order to maintain it we need to enhance our use of cryptography and start encrypting data at rest as well as in transit.
If they didn't want an arms race they shouldn't have carpet bombed us.
Precision strikes with minimum collateral damage would be the way to go. Mass surveillance just gives the baddies more places to hide.
I somehow think that drones equipped with hellfire missiles would be ineffective in the backstreets of Manchester, and consider that using them to take-out drug dealers in the City of London would meet with less meaningful collateral damage; damage that anyone cared about that is. While they're at the hellfire-and-drone, have a stab at Westminster as well. Absolutely no average Joe would give a monkeys at that.
The budgets of GCHQ et al should be at least tripled and new stiff penalties brought in for those that report any action of the security agencies. Jail for the reporters and heavy fines for anyone that reads such rubbish.
We must do all we can to help the security agencies bring to justice all the criminals, terrorists and paedophiles, then we can live in a safe protected society.
I wonder why they didn't catch them all before Snowden though?
"GCHQ could redeem themselves by spying on bankers and bringing a few to justice."
Or maybe just reveal what they now about Westminster paedophile rings (apparently now including alleged murders?) dating back as far as Cyril Smith, and as far back as the era of Jeremy Thorpe and maybe further.
Or Jimmy Saville.
Sorry GCHQ, you lose. Same goes for the police. Undercover police spying on peaceful protest organisations, police in general fiddling with evidence, from the Birmingham pub bombings via Hillsborough to Ian Tomlinson, dodgy phone "hacking" inquries promptly followed by the inquiry leader getting a job with the paper in question, etc, etc.
If these people want the public on their side (which currently appears to be dubious) they need to be seen to play a fair game.
Hmm, I don’t believe the ‘Intelligence Community’ when they wheel out the ‘we are here to save you from the paedophiles’ line.
Say, for example, an intelligence organisation uncovered conclusive evidence of paedophile abuse and even murder perpetrated by powerful individuals, are they going to ‘bring that person to justice’, or use what they know to control that person and the power the wield as an ‘asset’? Blackmail is major currency in intelligence.
On the other hand, say that individual is of no real consequence (as an asset, of course it is of major consequence to the victim(s)), would they bring them to justice and risk compromising their precious techniques?
"use what they know to control that person and the power the wield as an ‘asset’? Blackmail is major currency in intelligence."
Indeed.
Very shortly after the death of Jeremy Thorpe a couple of weeks ago, a clearly long-suppressed documentary went out on BBC Radio 4, with a couple of specific recent updates following his death.
You might like to listen to it. But you can probably guess the kind of thing that was going on in and around Westminster back then (in terms of the 'intelligence' services anyway), and is probably still going on now.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04wz633
"Not sure about bankers, it would be popular but the far more popular choice would be for them to start monitoring all the FIFA execs."
The question is how much damage do they do? FIFA results in fairly local damage. Globally they only deal with a couple of billions so that's hardly a burden to society.
On the other hand banks have put whole countries into poverty. Just think of Spain or Greece or the UK. Banks are responsible for Austerity politics which do nothing else than making the problem worse.
However the big problem is, that banks mainly stay within their legal boundaries. Therefore it's near impossible to prosecute them.
Yes we have seen how well the yanks in general respect the laws of other countries, just look at injustice nut case trying to get information of Ireland by illegal means.
I'm sure Florida1920 will read that and realise the folly of their ways, or just be slightly disappointed that they got passive aggressively put down a little, purely because of what their government does. Good job my government (I'm on team Brit (fuck everyone else, yay!)) doesn't do anything bad.... Oh shit.
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Are you referring to a bear's choice of pooping locale or the Pope's Catholicity? Because in either case the apostrophisation looks pretty good to me.
'Cos on the other hand...now that is a crime against the apostrophe. The Greek island does not begin with a rough breathing.
So as a result of Snowden they say they are some percentage down in trackings and operations. Would it help their cause if they gave us some regular updates (in a general way) on how many operations they are running, how many succeed and so forth, so we can see what we are paying for.
Given that:
A) British public safety figures haven't gone to Hell in a handbasket in the year-and-a-half that the Snowden revelations have been coming out.
B) That GCHQ is completely opaque on who they are targeting and why.
Then I have to wonder how much targeting of criminals was really being done by the GCHQ in the first place.
Seems like more "We're not actually going to provide the public with accountability on the shit we pull, but maybe we can scare them back into compliance" bullshit.
They should do what all good Hollywood detectives do; They know that Top crims always meet in giant abandoned quarries or on deserted docks so they just have to stake out or install surveillance equipment at all places like that.
And leave the rest of us the fuck alone!
You forgot 'in a park, by a lake, feeding the ducks'.
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