Re: Short memories
It is to give normal policing a chance of actually tracking down paedophiles, people who convince young men to become terrorists, drugs dealers, financial fraudsters, etc, before they cause too much harm to others, or at least make it considerably harder for them to carry out their acts unidentified or undetected.
The thing you need to combat those is not mass surveillance, it is evidence and intelligence-led policing. Mass surveillance of mobile phones would give you a very narrowly focused, but very large volume of mostly irrelevant data, which is essentially useless for 99.9% of police work. Much better value is to spend money on policing itself. In this country, there have been large cuts to police budgets, resulting in fewer police working longer hours who are also responsible for a wider range of tasks. There have also been cuts to police staff, including analysts who are the ones who can actually look at patterns of behaviour and evidence and direct the investigations towards the right people.
The important distinction between the police and the security services, is of course, that the work of the police is open to public scrutiny, whereas the security services are not. You can apply right now to your local force to go on a 'ride-along' with officers. You can go and attend court sessions and see what goes on. Complaints are investigated by an independent body (the IPCC), and warrants are issued by a court. There may be flaws here, and arguments that the system is not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than the mess that politicians want, who seem to be hell-bent on eroding the distinction between judiciary and legislature, and on doing things in secret with no oversight.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
