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Comment by bede | Hacker News Reader

I feel obliged to once again refer to Home Secretary Theresa May's on-record statement to a government committee only seven days ago:

"The UK does not undertake mass surveillance".

Make of this what you will.

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Well hey, it's not actual surveillance until a human listens or reads. Machine access doesn't count. That's how the NSA likes to style it, anyway.

This is what IMHO one can make of it:

> "Ms May either doesn't know what "mass surveillance" means, or she has perjured herself to Parliament." http://boingboing.net/2016/01/14/443636.html

She is technically correct, but it's a very misleading technicality. Surveillance is monitoring, and the government can claim that what they actually do is mass recording of Internet traffic.

I think that is what mass surveillance is commonly understood to mean.

Trying to shift the meaning so that the GCQH can technically say there's no surveillance seems incredibly dishonest to me.

If one needs to resort to pedantry to appear to be right, then there is no better justification for their views than a fallacy.

Oh, I agree. I think it's totally misleading, but this is the way they are describing the surveillance that we have.

The other word to play with is "mass", who is to say what is or isn't mass.

Funny thing about the "Big Lie", it only works if it's repeated enough successfully.

James Clapper was able to repeat the big lie long enough to avoid charges of lying to congress. Ms. May has her own rodeo to deal with now. let's see how she ends up.

What she _obviously_ means is that they don't weigh the mass of the whole population.

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