MI5 boss: We NEED to break securo-tech, get 'assistance' from data-slurp firms MI5's recently appointed boss has placed the ability to intercept communications at the centre of the security agency's counter-terrorism efforts. Andrew Parker's most detailed justification of the controversial surveillance programmes by GCHQ and the NSA, came in a pre-planned speech (transcript here) to the Royal United …
"I’ve said before and I’ll say again MI5 does not browse through the private lives of the population at large."
Just those using Yahoo visual chat. Or maybe that was GCHQ, not 5?
"You should not imagine that MI5 is always arguing for new powers or more tools"
No imagination required. We keep seeing them do just that.
I'd like to see him start again and specifically address:
Due process. Maybe he could find a date to tackle this one in June when we'll be celebrating the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta which brought this into English law. Restoring it would be a good contribution to those celebrations.
Presumption of innocence. If the population at large are to be presumed innocent than he doesn't need blanket powers. If he doesn't presume the population at large to be innocent then he should come clean and admit he rejects one of the basic precepts of British law.
Reasonable expectations of personal and commercial privacy. If organisations we use in the course of regular - innocent - communication are to slurp data how does he propose to prevent this being (a) sold for corporate profit by those organisations, (b) sold for personal profit by individuals working in those organisations, (c) passed, for profit or otherwise, by his organisation and his confrères as industrial espionage and (d) secured against intruders who might grab the data to be sold for profit.
"A key part of the evidence which brought the plotters to justice was coded conversations by email, forensically retrieved by police following their arrest"
They should probably mention something about how these people came to be on their radar instead of telling us that the evidence was gathered AFTER their arrest.
It doesn't lend much to their argument for live mass surveillance if this information was gathered "offline".
Just look at the disgusting attacks in France, or Boston - these people were already on their scope anyway - does that not prove that mass surveillance doens't work?
I am getting very bored with this whining from the securocrats. I know your job has got quite hard. No amount of whining will change that. Come back when you have:
1) Cleaned up. Owned up about the out-of-control years. Heads have rolled. Some people are in jail (yes, really -- there are no excuses for what has been going on and justice needs to be seen to be done).
2) Changed. Stopped untargetted surveillance. Reduced data retention to 30 days. Got warrants. Put in place an overview regime we can actually trust (yes, that is hard to do -- work out how to do it).
3) Come back with a realistic plan for how you will do your jobs to protect us given that technology means that the bad guys will have access to perfect encryption, high performance dark nets, etc (even if you make them illegal). Note: "I believe in fairies" is not a plan.
According to the speech there are 600 returned jihadists. Even if all of them managed to radicalise 100 other people, those 60,000 would be less than 0.1% of the population. That is not a justification for snooping on 64 million people. At those odds I am happy to take the risk of becoming the victim of a terrorist and just close down GCHQ.
Dudes, let's all wake up to the fact that If we get close to throttling the Combine's march towards martial law like ranks of Hitlerjugen with picks and shovels on their shoulders, they'll just blast another World Trade Center to smithereens. How can we chop off the Beast's head if we don't even know where it is? What's that, we DO know where it is but are just too ding dong comfy in our mentally sandbagged revetments to lift a finger? But yah, kvetching is soo cathartic and feeling good about...whatever...has supplanted our collective ethical backbone.
You are stationed at Uxbridge, August 1940, you hear the claxon. Do you
A) Hold an inner debate on the safest course of action?
B) Fly the bloody Hurricane?
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Talking of fascists, WaterAlter, and we all know that they are always on the road to nowhere fast and will always be comprehensively defeated, here is a former US presidential hopeful exposing the truth about their existence in plain sight .......... http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-01-10/ron-paul-reality-now-setting-america-it-was-all-based-lies-ignorance
Are Cameron and Blighty raving fans of the system? Avid ignorant supporters of lame duck presidential executive office actions showing one and all that intelligence is missing in the nation and thus be ripe for novel and catastrophically disruptive and/or destructive attack vectors in vital sectors, for that is surely what the future is guaranteed to bring along with ITs SMARTR Solutions in Media Hosted Tales ...... Noble News Worthy Events that only the Earnest Fool and Useless Tool would Choose to Ignore and Avoid in Open Free Debate ....Sublime IntelAIgent Networking Chatter?
That is the New Real Present Normal and IT pays no Wasted Attention nor Dues to the Aged Past and Ye Olde Worlde Orders of SNAFU.
Uh... Wut? [That's to the OP, not amfM1 for once]
My answer's A followed swiftly by B, because A doesn't take that long: If I refuse to do B, then I expect they'll bally well court-martial and/or shoot me for deserting, the rotters. Unless I'm not actually an airman, in which case maybe A but probably not B.
Also, how do you throttle a march? Especially when you're already carrying a pick and a shovel?
As for this "Beast" of yours (assuming that means global terrorism and not David Cameron; you're not entirely clear here), what on earth convinces you that it has only one head? To whom, then, does it belong? Ask anyone in mid-September 2001 and they might well answer Bin Laden; yet it took over a decade to decapitate, and even more strangely, the Beast still seems to be alive and kicking, running around knocking things over in fact. Is this Beast like a very tough chicken? Inquiring minds want to know!
To be honest, I just re-read your whole post again, and I'm still not quite sure whether you're bitching at ter'rists, Dave, ethical self-examination in general, Milquetoasts, the shit-scared, the security services, Hitler, or all of the above. Care to clarify? In language that focuses a bit less on making you seem well-read?
Here's one for you. You're George W Bush, reading a storybook to some children in September 2001. An aide whispers in your ear that a bunch of Saudis just fucked with your country, because they weren't happy about you and your predecessors fucking with theirs, or others a similar distance away. Do you:
A) Immediately up the level of other-country-fucking-with in response, because that'll work;
B) Prepare to make an unpopular but honest admission that though their methods were abhorrent (and the crime will be investigated and punished per civilian law), they have a point, and it's time to stop being the world's corrupt policeman already, because it appears that's only making matters worse;
C) Continue reading the storybook, hoping an answer may be found within, followed by A because Dick, Don and Paul all think that's the best thing to do.
Imagine that mass surveillance (including metadata collection) was 99% efficient at finding terrorists. That would be really good, right?
Say that there are 6,000 people in the UK who are potential terrorists (I suspect that the number is actually a lot lower than that).
The surveillance would get all but 60 of them. Success! Until those 60 do something bad.
Meanwhile, 1% of the innocent population are being falsely labelled as dodgy. That's 600,000 people. Good luck finding those 5,940 true positives amongst that lot.
So in fact, most of the terrorists identified as such by mass surveillance won't be hindered by it, and many innocent people would be caught up in the dragnet and have their lives ruined.
This of course is before you factor in the fact that non-idiot terrorists will be able to evade the surveillance.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why mass surveillance is doomed to failure
