Plans to monitor emails, phone calls and websites are vital to track down and convict killers like Ian Huntley, the Home Secretary has said.
Listen you ignorant trollop. That you did not need the new powers to track down, capture and convict Ian Huntley means that you do not need the new powers to tack down, caputure or convict killers like Ian Huntley.
Is Ian Huntley the most expensive criminal in UK history?
He was the inspiration behind the Vetting and Barring quango, too. £200 million down the pan before it was dropped.
I just recovered two stolen computers thanks to Google’s Street View’s snooping of WiFi data. During that process, I came to realise how incompetent the police are when you hand them; a photo, google map, address, WiFi SSID and name. In fact, so incompetent that days passed, one of the computers was sold on and I had to track it down to a new location. Some excellent policeman, some dreadful ones; but all working within a system that is fundamentally broken.
Stupid or mendacious politician, as always. Probably, a bit of both.
Huntley was well known to the authorities and was not supposed to be allowed to work near children. The masses of information available under the new system would have served no purpose whatsoever.
Only a politician would advance a case which proves their very expensive pet project superfluous.
“Huntley was well known to the authorities…”: not in Cambridgeshire – my memory is that the records were mainly paper files in a basement in Humberside, but he had never been convicted of anything. “… and was not supposed to be allowed to work near children…”: where he worked was irrelevant. He knew the girls because his woman worked in the village primary school.
Tim, it’s not the criminals they are after. Criminals are not locked up or punished anyway. This government is entering Philip K Dick territory and seems to think it will be able to detect pre-crime.
Well, they are doing a bang up job on the ‘people being disrespectful on Twitter’ crime wave, I suppose…
The Tories are abject EU crawlers. They will appear to be dumb (well they are dumb) no, double-dumb, just to keep the EU’s name out of the limelight. This shit is because of the 2006 EU directive about snooping on the citizens– Huntly has zero to do with it. And yet May (the cow-ugly “hier to Jar-key Smiff”) will go on tv and make an even bigger fool of herself rather than admit that the EU is the cause.
Huntley is irrelevant to this. The official inquiry report didn’t recommend we monitor everyone’s communications just in case someone starts talking on Skype about murdering little girls. On the contrary, it criticised the police, social services and teachers for having crap processes and not properly using the systems they already had.
Daily Mash is spot on, as ever.
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/totally-inept-losers-confident-they-can-lock-down-the-internet-201204035088/
If every one strap-lines their e-mails : jihad, bomb, American Embassy, bus, underground, it will info-drown them.
I expect a knock on the door at 2am tonight…
Nick Luke: email jamming is only marginally effective. If, on the other hand, you use Tor, OpenPGP and anonymous remailers then the task of the snoopers is rendered well-nigh impossible (unless they can somehow subvert these services).
David,
Tor and anonymous remailers are already fairly well subverted. Given the difficulties, commercial PGP is enjoying being CAPS certified for anything other than full disk encryption, I wouldn’t bet against it (Open or otherwise) being sufficiently flawed to be trivially broken, either.