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Comment by hutzlibu | Hacker News Reader

In allmost all terrorist attacks in europe(also 9/11), the police had alarming data about the attackers before and in some cases even recieved explicit warnings about the attackers - yet the attacks still happened.

But still every politician demandes MORE surveilance, even though they allready had all the data. So maybe they need more personal. But not more surveillance.

It would not surprise me, if this case is similar.

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Conclusion: they don't want the surveillance to stop terrorism. It's against someone else.

It's refreshing to know I'm not the only one who can see this obvious thing.

It's not exactly an obscure or novel view.

Tell that to the British electorate.

You are far from the only one.

It must be for political use, as there's nothing more those people care about.

Devil's advocate:

They have lots of non-actionable data on thousands of individuals ("individual X is a potentially violent extremist but hasn't committed any actual crimes yet").

One could make an argument that what they are after here is to get actually actionable data ("individual X is plotting an attack next week together with individuals Y and Z").

I don't think this is devil's advocate arguing.. There's a slippery slope from what you describe to the concept of "thought crime", which sounds hokey and conspiracy-ish but given the level of surveillance we have, we're not that far off.

Thought crime already exists for a long time already. Planning to commit murder (thinking about it) is punished nearly as harshly as succeeding. Is it really so controversial?

I suppose machine learning could study communication patterns to see what patterns are there before an attack.. e.g. if suddenly they started talking about birds when they never did before, did they just establish some code words? The dark part is the computers will need training data...

Can we please stop this trope that "machine learning" is the solution to everything?

There's a genuine reason why machine learning seems to be the Holy Grail - man has dominated this planet, solved his problems and overcome challenges by his intelligence (ability to learn and adapt). Bequeathing these same abilities to machines is a big deal and might be the solution to everything.

That's not actionable. The dark part here is the serious threat of applying oppressive prior restraint policies at will. Employing machine learning in the process would only offer a false sense of legitimacy.

> But still every politician demandes MORE surveilance

Because that's the only politically correct thing they can do.

I suspect that they have this kind of alarming data on so many people they don't have the resources to act on all of it or it would require to round up entire communities which is politically infeasible.

Since 2010 the UK government has reduced the police force by 19k officers. The border force by another huge number I don't have to hand...

After the Manchester attacks they ran so short of police they had to call the army in to do routine guard work ('had to', perhaps chose to?)

If they wanted to actually act on intelligence a foil plots then they would need more police to follow, watch analyse wouldn't they? I wonder if it is actually as simple as the idea that bulk surveillance might be cheaper than real police officers, and is actually more effective at keeping the public quiet?

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