UK police use terror powers to seize BBC Newsnight journalist's laptop
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
The democracy we have is a Frankenstein version of the democracy many think we have. And in the same way you would hesitate at calling Frankenstein human, I would hesitate at calling what we have a democracy.
I'll still have it over the alternatives but what a mediocre state we've ended up in.
Needs to be fixed.
What it's not supposed to be is what everyone wants, fair, right or ensuring people's information is kept secret from the government.
In short, politicians do what their voters demand.
But for certain issues they line up behind the government. The Snowden files story was initially fully covered only by the Guardian -- who have since had a change of Editor after their offices were raided by the security services and equipment smashed. There has been (until now) almost no coverage that the government wants to pass the snoopers charter soon. There is no coverage that the 'emergency' DRIP bill from last year is due for renewal before Christmas. Due to the way that DRIP was rammed through Parliament last year in defiance of normal procedure my MP promised me a robust debate before the renewal. It looks like it will go through without so much as whisper.
EDITED as the telegraph currently has a front page article on the snoopers charter on its website. I hope that there is time for people to lobby their MPs (which is what killed it off last time).
As for Snowden, even on this website where people actually understand the potential of surveillance techniques it's the stories about his personal situation and options, as widely run in all UK newspapers from all angles, that seem to have captured the imagination more than the details of what was revealed. And I'm not sure he and his allies, who sought to carefully control how PRISM was reported, even offered the files to other UK newspapers...
Are they? If they are it's irrational, you're far more likely to be killed by a falling fridge or alcohol induced liver damage. Attacking a bogyman in an attempt to take eyes off what your government is really doing is quite sickening.
Everyone would be significantly better off if we stopped parading around with 'defense' funding and put it to something with a perceivable impact like public healthcare. It's ridiculous that people are justifying this sort of enormous waste of time and resources as worthwhile.
Unfortunately they will be on this site as well and although the mods work hard on detecting voting rings and shills I doubt that they'll be able to detect state level work.
You ask what they're actually afraid of and it's knife crime, snakes and dying alone. Dying in a terrorist attack is probably, like, #75 on that list.
Try telling that to someone who doesn't drink.
The thinking goes, its ok for the government to snoop on the everybody in the name of catching terrorists.. because I am not a terrorist and they won't snoop on me.
If you look at the number of seizures under the terrorism act and compare that to number of terrorist attacks over the same period, i bet there have been more seizures than attacks.
Both of the terror attacks in question were stabbings of individual victims (Mohammed Saleem and Lee Rigby). Both were killed.
So in fact, assuming conditions remain as they've been for the last five years (and for several years before that), one appears to be at least as likely to have ones laptop seized than getting harmed in a terror attack. On the other hand, the harm of the latter is still clearly worse, given that both victims were murdered.
There were also 3 bombing attempts (all by the same far right extremist - Pavlo Lapshyn - trying to kill muslims, but spectacularly failing because nobody were present when his bombs went off).
A further two planned attacks never happend (one involved a plan to bomb an EDL rally, but the would-be terrorists arrived to late and left without doing anything; one involved plans that were never attempted set into life at the time the people in question were arrested). The calibre of would-be terrorists in the UK thankfully seem to be rather low.
[1]https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/terrorism-prevent...
For example, when you're comparing prices at a store, you might be so rational that you perfectly compute the expected payoff for each product and choose the optimal one. But does your brain work the same way when deciding whether to steal the product too? If the expected payoff for that was higher, would you just go ahead and steal it?
Don't you think people might not think the same way about the more common cases and the less common cases?
The media constantly harassing the population with the big bad scary terrorist who's out to get you, of course people watching said media are going to be scared of that, even if the chances are remote.
People "want" this because they are scared of a primarily fabricated threat. What people really want is for the "threat" to go away, but that's as simple as having better media that doesn't distort truth for financial gains.
I did not mean simple in terms of implementation; you're absolutely right :)
> and restrict freedom of the press while you're doing it
Yeah. I think there's better ways. There's a lot to it... we need to incentivize media to report on the facts without twisting them, criminalize abuses of trust and power, create meaningful "trust rating" systems that actually impact audiences' willingness to follow certain sources (like we have with restaurants).
"You can't say x" is a pointless game of whack-a-mole and has the arbiter as a single point of failure. We need a better system altogether.
Sadly, politicians quite like the ability to manipulate the public via their friends in the press, and very few of them are going to campaign for making that less effective.
I believe that media outlets used to have to compete on credibility - a little critical thinking distributed throughout the population made a difference. But with so much consolidation of mass media, especially behind the scenes, one is left picking between only a few fundamental options. If they're all trash, where else are you going to go? It much tougher to take a principled stand and reject all mass media outlets rather than the easy route of identifying with the ones that better stroke your biases.
Contrast this to media entities, in a position of trust, twisting the world to conform to whatever they gain most out of. Do you yourself feel that the mass media sources you are familiar with fairly represent and report on the issues they address?
In theory, I definitely support a surveilance state, with powerful law-enforcement agencies. In practice, none of the states on Earth are trustworthy enough not to abuse that power.
How? Does the UK majority believe they are not entitled to protect their lives and liberty with effective tools?
I suppose you're one of these poor bairns who quakes under his bedsheets at the thought of the ghost of Bin Laden coming back to be Muslim in your presence?
The actual fear these days is pretty low. The government manufactured consent for "chasing terrorists" by 9/11 and is now relying upon political inertia to keep and gradually expand those powers.
>In short, politicians do what their voters demand.
Or rather, politicians try to shape voter opinion in such a way that they accept the reforms being rammed down their throats without too much protest.
I really balk at these fatalistic one-liners. Voters vote for packages of politicians and views. Particularly in the UK with its silly voting system there are very few options for voters to tell the politicians what they feel with any acceptable degree of nuance.
Politicians do stuff the majority disagree with all the time. That alone shows your statement to be false.
A common issue is, of course, that the solutions politicians come up with for problems we want solved, doesn't always agree with us.
E.g. the fact that we do not want paedophiles in our lives doesn't mean that we want the politicians to cover up scandals like Jimmy Savile. It is a perversion of intent. Or would you claim that that is what the voters demand?
There are no meaningful checks on the surveillance powers of GCHQ, it has broken the law with impunity, and surveils the very people supposed to keep it in check.
While I agree the UK is still democratic (for what that's worth), I think you'd find it hard to prove that people want terrorism laws to be misused or extended, but they are certainly indifferent to it unless it affects them clearly and directly. The population did not vote for dragnet surveillance or draconian terrorism laws, because they never had a choice - both major parties have proposed and passed draconian counter-terrorism laws, and misused them for other ends and on people who are clearly not terrorists.
So you're incorrect in stating that voters demanded this.
It's always strange to me to compare the response to Islamic terrorism with the response to IRA terrorism. The latter was more deadly in the UK, but the illiberal response was mostly contained within Northern Ireland itself. Yet people seem far more scared about Islamic terrorism and far more willing to encourage a brutal response. Is this simply down to racism?
(Censorship has long been an issue though. See: Spycatcher, the Zircon affair, Matrix-Churchill, and "Gerry Adams' words are read by an actor")
After reading the "Welcome" page, this post should probably be deleted, even though I think it is at least vaguely relevent, but is effectively comedy. Sorry about that.
The 3.5k killings perpetrated by all sides over the course of the Troubles over many years also rather pales in comparison with the body count in the overseas conflicts that ISIS is also recruiting for.
This is absolutely true and the security services have largely refused to learn the right lessons from NI.
The thing about the overseas conflicts is that they're overseas, and there are many more countries and intelligence services involved on various sides. That makes them a lot harder to tackle and purely domestic solutions somewhat futile.
Because I remember a million voters marching against the iraq war in 2003 and the politicians did nothing about those voters demands, what they did was whatever tony had agreed with george 12 months earlier regardless of the will of the people.
Completely off topic nit-pick, and not to devalue your point (which I fully agree with), but Frankenstein was the scientist not the monster.
Side note: well worth a read. Fascinating 19th century look at the psychology of man.
Journalists and researchers into Islamic groups like IS, should be left in peace to carry out research into how these militant groups operate and function.
The security services have struggled to make inroads on these groups. Unable to place effective spies and get Intel, especially on home grown cells.
Journalists therefore provide a double function in these challenging times. They provide the public with valuable insights into the psyche behind these groups, and in parallel they gain important access to people in these groups that no one else can.
The flip side of this coin, is that journalists need to be acutely aware that they are not used as an IS marketing and propaganda platform.
If journalist fear arrest from the state in order to divulge their sources then these groups stop talking to them.
My gut feeling is that this was exactly the security services intention. The article hints at the journalists links to an alleged pro-militant employer, so it is quite possible that they view him as a sympathiser.
One needs to understand the psyche of people who work in the security services and special branch. They are very polarised in their beliefs and their opinions. They tend to be racist, xenophobic and have a tendency to group people in tidy mental boxes. They see the world in black and white. There is no grey. They are massively insular and have very much an "us and them mentality". They have comparatively a large amount of power, and enjoy using it. They know that they can bend rules like this and will only get a public slap on the wrists and a quiet pat on the back from their superiors. Therefore they know that they can for a warning shot across this young Muslim journalist's bow, and get away with it.
My two cents.
Not surprising, but disappointing.
For the avoidance of doubt, no, I don't support what's happened here. It's ill-judged (no pun intended) to say the least.
What you just said serves no purpose. Can you please provide sources and alternative viewpoints people can actually discuss, rather than belittle someone for commenting on a story?
It's also a bit strange to hear someone accusing the police of all being black and white thinkers, who like putting everyone in little boxes, enjoy using their power, and being extremely insular. You could say the same about the kind of progressives who think all police are racists.
There probably is an element of truth, in that law enforcement does have black and white thinking. If someone is a suspect, they can act like it's their job to haul them in at all costs, unless breaking the rules would hurt the case. Yes, it's an adversarial legal system, but sometimes the police and prosecution can seem to lack discretion.
Also, the amount of funding they have to clamp down on terrorism is quite disproportionate. There's a lot of police tracking down a tiny number of needles in a haystack, so anyone who looks remotely like a terrorist risks being treated as a suspect.
http://www.theguardian.com/careers/careers-blog/spy-career-s...
http://www.varsity.co.uk/news/3180
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/forget-bon...
For starters. They're not normal people, in that they're recruited by elitist institutions from other elitist institutions. Not dissimilar to how branches of our industry work, although the profile for who they want is somewhat different. But for the most part, in terms of personality, they're fairly normal people.
There aren't any mustachioed villains sitting around wondering how best to abuse their powers. Yes, there's some who enjoy wielding the power they have, but the same is true in business, and doctors like performing surgery.
Mischaracterising people like this does no service to the reader, no better than people who take controversial political figures and characture and demonise them. In the end, it just makes for a lower level of discourse and a worldview lacking in nuance. Ironically, what the poster was complaining about.
Coming here is like entering a weird extremist alternate-reality echo chamber on the weirdest issues the tech industry seems to have a hard-on for. Poll us on any issue relating to technology or politics and you will find we are so radically different from the general population.
And we're (almost) all white, middle-upper class Indian or East Asian men. If the intelligence community is anything like that I'm much more afraid than before I read your post.
And the fact that you start out by saying they are cherry-picked from elite institutions and then you go on to say they are normal -- the first notion completely contradicts the second. Elite institutions often come with narcissism, a notion that you know better than the rest of the world, a single-minded determination that it takes to excel in a particular area (the educational system) eschewing any other considerations it takes to be a full, complete normal human being.
I'm curious as to how you came to know enough people in the intelligence community to come to this conclusion. I don't see any public evidence of any of what you are talking about, even in cases like this or the nastiest of the Snowden revelations. I could easily see these actions as those that are not power hungry, and who do not spend their time sitting in leather chairs and petting cats menacingly.
People rarely cast themselves as the villains of their life story, and I could definitely imagine this resulting in people in the security services following this logic:
1. We are the good guys. 2. More information always means we can better do our job.
∴ grab the laptop, mass wiretapping, etc.
Now, I don't agree with second premise at all, and I think the first premise overextends "we" to all the people in your organization, now and in the future. But I do think that it is possible many of the people at the NSA, GCHQ, CIA, etc. are actually good people, even the one calling the shots in situations such as this.
If your plan for opposing their actions is to assume that they are twirling their mustaches as we speak, and they are not in fact twirling said mustaches, you are putting yourself at a disadvantage. In this case, putting Polonium-210 in strategically placed jars of mustache wax will not work, and neither will trying to expose them as evil power brokers.
Vilifying your enemy may help if you're planning on military warfare against them, but if your plan is more reasoned understanding those you oppose is likely more useful.
I obviously didn't mean to imply that the security services are "spending their time sitting in leather chairs and petting cats menacingly".
They are busy people. They have somewhat a limited number resources at their disposal (unless Downing Street have a crisis on their hands that makes them look bad in the eyes of the public) and they are required to maintain a control on the country's security.
When you work day-in day-out on actual, but mostly perceived threats, you have a tendency to evaluate people quickly and then categorize using learned and automatic cognitive processing methodology. I.e. "Threat, no threat, suspicious, flagged, threat, no threat" etc.
As an example: 20-30 years ago all people entering the UK from Eire or (especially) Catholic northern Irish were considered potential threats. It didn't matter if you had intel on a person or not, the suspicion was still there based on their passport. You still had real Irish intel came from paid informants, so we would know who the problem people were and would watch them from the moment they landed. Ideally we didn't lose them whilst they were here otherwise we have scenarios like lorry bombs going off in Canary Wharf. Now we've moved on from "the Irish problem", and the Irish intel desks are almost all disbanded. All the resource has been moved onto Islamic fundamentalism and a bit is maintained on watching the Russians. In between the Irish Peace Accord and 9/11, when we ran out of things to do, there was some focus on internal radicals like the Animal Welfare groups. It sounds clichéd, but you need to have a target group, or where are you going to spend next year's budget?
I'm not taking away that they are good people in the security services, but their insular jobs lead them to be an insular group of people. Much of what they do is never seen by the public. When you hear of a group of people arrested under the Anti-terrorism legislation, more than likely there was a credible threat. How they do their job is often sailing close to the wind. When it comes to the blanket surveillance, there are obvious benefits to the security services and maintaining the security of the country. It is a very very useful tool. It is unfortunately not beneficial for any other purpose, and is contrary to our beliefs concerning privacy and a right to live without being persistently monitored when innocent.
I also forgot to note earlier, but there is somewhat a difference between desk officers (intel analysts) and operational officers. Operational officers are even worse, but they are constantly dealing with people that are dangerous and real threats to the public and the officers. They have to compartmentalise in order to save their own lives. Any law enforcement officer that carries a gun will tell you that.
Are there any experiments and research on this subject that I can read about? Preferably published in a peer-reviewed journal. Anything that could be reproduced. Because if we want to make an informed decision about policies, we need more than personal anecdotes.
Let's see how an example research would look like. Ideally, we would have a control group consisting of a random sample of the general population. Then we would compare them with the members of the security services and see if there are any differences in behavior. We could give both groups a questionnaire with dozens of statements and a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 4 (strongly agree) or observe them in an interactive situation. If their answers have more 1s and 4s than the control group, then maybe they are more polarized. It's not perfect; there's a risk of self-reporting bias and the observer effect, but it's a start. Maybe there's public data like aggregated reports that would help eliminate said biases.
If there's a difference in behavior between the security personnel and the public, we will have new questions. Is this behavior consistent across all representatives of the security industry? Are they equally racist, xenophobic, and insular in both private and public sector? What if we compare members of the security services in different countries? Are they just as racist in Canada as in the UK, Switzerland, Japan, Singapore, or Brazil? What if we compare it with the experience? Are people who work for over 10 years in the security services more insular than those who worked there less than a year? Do they become more insular as they work longer or is just the industry that attracts such individuals? Do they share similar characteristics with other groups who enjoy comparatively a large amount of power, like CEOs, politicians, or judges?
The only experiment that comes to mind is the Stanford prison experiment. But that was more about authority than security services per se. And if my memory serves me right, there was nothing particular about racism or xenophobia. Plus, it has a fair share of controversy.
> "It did not resist Thames Valley's application for an order under the Terrorism Act in court because the act does not afford grounds under which it could be opposed.
> "It is troubling that this legislation does not provide the opportunity for the media to mount a freedom of speech defence."
I get what you're saying but the BBC plays both sides of this argument.
The worst/only criticism of the BBC that I have read (from e.g. Mrs Thatcher's autobiography) is that the BBC should have double-checked with the PM's office to make sure they'd not really been so incompetent as to 'unintentionally' announce news of an impending operation.
Even here in Germany the historic lessons somehow seem to be at least partly forgotten.
We have a lot of outspoken people against right winged extremists, but there are regions here, where the right populists patrol the streets in the name of securing against raiders from eastern countries (south eastern Saxonia for example). There the police is not able to protect people against car theft and such, so that they flock to these who promise protection. And with overwhelming majority they oftentimes get voted into local governments.
I really hope such tendencies do not spread further. But clearly historic lessons seem to be forgotten in these regions.
I mean, what else would you call close collusion between "loyal" industry and state? WWII wasn't "freedom v. fascism" - it was one lot of fascists against the others - and the ones that won just had better branding. Fewer skulls on uniforms, just as much pomp and pageantry, more economic fascism than social.
Nonetheless, I find it hard to believe people exist who want to live in a world like this, where privacy and free speech mean nothing. And, yet, when given the chance to build a world like this, so many weaselly little tyrants in bureaucratic roles take every opportunity to push people around, making the world sadder and more bleak for everyone.
So the pattern is basically, pass insane laws because "terrorist" then use the incredibly broad and overreaching laws beyond abuse for anything they want to do.
Exactly the pattern law enforcement does with every single tool they are given, physical or virtual.
TLDR; storm in a teacup.
Exactly this.
I'm British and I'm completely fucking tired of living here and watching how right-wing, xenophobic, poor-bashing and just all-round ignorant and unpleasant people are and are becoming.
I feel absolutely no kinship with my countrymen, because most seem completely unwilling to think for themselves. It semms like they would rather just be told who to hate on any given day by a media known for its lies, and by politicians known for their utter greed and contempt for the people.
I'm currently looking into moving away and possibly even renouncing my citizenship in future.
The problem is, where to move to?
Because the UK I know from my history readings has things like the cold war, the Falklands war, massive tribal struggles between political left and right, and if you go back to Orwell's time you find he found it tough to get published because the idea that Stalin was a bad guy was deemed terribly gauche.
The UK has not had any truly evil governments for a very long time (perhaps, if we judge them by the standards of their day, the answer might be that it's never had an unusually evil government). It's not like Germany where they're super sensitive about privacy and democracy thanks to their experiences the Nazis and then the communists. So not very surprisingly, British people tend to be very trusting of their governments as they never saw how bad things can really get. See: popular support for Cameron executing a British citizen by drone strike, merely because he was in Syria and GCHQ promised cross-our-hearts-and-hope-to-die that he was a Bad Guy™.
This lack of experience doesn't excuse things, mind you .... just explain them. British people (like me) should look to the experiences of other countries to learn from their mistakes and should make sure to avoid them.
But modern UK is not significantly worse than even the recent past where it did things like run a global empire, persecuted gay people, had no minimum wage, etc. And Cameron, for all his faults, has actually been a pretty centrist PM (for a Tory). Certainly more than his backbenches would like.
My personal and political beliefs seem to be completely at odds with most of the British public and I feel like I would be crazy to stay. I mean, we have a monarch and an unelected upper house of parliament. What the hell am I doing here?
My identity as a British person means very little to me. I was born on this patch of dirt, someone stamped 'British person' on my arse and here I am.
Yes, there's a monarch. Who does diddly squat other than putting on a dog and pony show for visiting dignitaries - which happens to be useful for trade purposes (see recent visit of the Chinese president) - giving people entertainment and attracting tourists. So the monarchy is tolerated. That tolerance would vaporise if say Charles came to the throne and started trying to fuck with government policies. You'd pretty quickly see the monarchy put in a purely ceremonial role and the country transition to a kind of pseudo-republic which would be a republic in all but name, in which people still pretend to be loyal to the King even though he has no power at all.
So I wouldn't worry about that.
The house of lords has such limited power I wouldn't worry about that either: it can slow legislation down but can't stop it due to the Parliament Act. Like the monarchy, it's a tolerated holdover from earlier times that doesn't really impact much of anything.
If these are the worst things about Britain you can think of, I'd suggest you have a case of grass-is-always-greener syndrome (btw, I'm British and I live in Switzerland ... but not because I thought the UK sucked so bad I had to get out).
The two I mentioned I mostly symbolic, true but that's even more reason to get rid of them. Screw the financial benefit.
They are representative of obscene wealth, privilige and elitism and have no place in a democratic society, symbolic or not.
What do you suggest we do?
We can have million-person marches in London, just gives the Met Police more practice at kettling.
We can write to our MPs and receive form answers. When was the last free-vote without whip in Parliament? They do as theiy are told by their masters, not by their electorate.
We can vote for non-party candidates at elections and see them crushed by the parties, either in the elections or in Parliament.
So what's left?