The article focuses largely on the technical difficulties and implementation risks that make this goal impractical. I would like to point out that the goal in question is explicitly Orwell-style surveillance.
If we assume that May is competent and not exploiting a tragic attack to engage in jingoistic gesture politics for the election on Thursday, then this can only be about making sure that law-abiding dissidents cannot communicate with each other in secret to hold the powerful to account.
The rational response is, more people die from falling off ladders than domestic terrorism. Can we look at this problem seriously in a way that includes the economics, without insisting that people be scared little bunny rabbits? Apparently we're not so inclined toward Vulcan logic, this silly primate species.
We saw similar pushes for strengthening Canada's Surveillance State when they had two terrorist acts. Canada's PM didn't even hesitate.
When an attack or an event happens that puts people in a state of shock and fear, politicians know their nefarious ideas have a higher probability of slipping through the public's filter. UK's PM is doing what has now become an automatic response to any kind of act. Expand government's power at all cost.
Consider two countries at war with the other. Now imagine that both are part of the same territory but the planes still fly and the bombs still fall on the same places. It is clear that this is economic and political madness. So as a combined system, the two warring countries are better off not engaging in war. But if one country can make money from war then it is beneficial for it to be at war.
The answer is for those who govern to think in terms of the whole system, i.e. both countries. That is unpopular with patriotic voters who accuse such leaders of being traitors.
For example, China/Taiwan, North Korea/South Korea, which no longer fight.
It seems to me more and more that people are living in some kind of lala land today.
They seem to believe that military action against some group of people will not result in some kind of recoil. Especially when part of the group they are engaging military action against is living among them or has free access to enter the country.
I think that this is pretty disconnected thinking.
Asking intelligence agency to do better job feels is kind of ridiculous. They just have to follow too many people to be 100% effective.
This kind of verbal white-washing causes all kinds of problems when the inevitable adjustment happens which shows that we can play word games all we want but it won't make an actual difference.
A draft would change this. But the military is a product like anything else. It's not civil service. It's not something that every family suffers from. The U.S. professional military is overwhelmingly middle and lower class. There's no meaningful representation of aristocratic families in the military. They have nothing to lose by supporting politicians who in turn support interventionist policies abroad.
The problem with calling this a war is that the right-wing press are calling this a war. This is not an existential threat to us in the way, say, WW2 was to the Soviet Union or to the UK once we had engaged militarily. We could withdraw from bombing campaigns in the middle east tomorrow and see almost no immediate detrimental domestic repercussions. That is probably a sign that this is not so much a war but something else. If it was domestic we would call it a massacre.
The more we go down the road of annihilation, the more costly that peace process will be and the more people will die purely for war. That includes our own.
WW2 was an existential threat to the Soviet Union. It was so existential that this became the largest part of the identity of Russians.
But WW2 was not an existential threat to UK. UK could have exited from the war at any time. No battle took place on the soil of UK mainland.
I am not saying the people in UK did not suffer - they just did not suffer comparably to the people in the middle of the conflict. In a way the war was rather distant to the people living in UK.
Well, that's because the battle eventually took place in (mostly) France. But it's not as if that battle would not have eventually happened in the UK if the Germans had managed to gain air supremacy over the UK or if they had managed to pull a reverse Normandy. The UK could not have exited from the war at any time at all, their shipping would have been sunk and they would have been under siege from the moment they did so.
The larger cities were receiving a good number of aerial bombardments and V2's (ok, also a form of aerial bombardment). And then there was the shipping tonnage sunk with all hands.
War very much came to the UK, even if the eventual battle took place in France, Belgium, NL and eventually Germany (where whole cities had been obliterated).
Not so for the USSR, since it had been designated as "Lebensraum".
When discussing foreign policy on an internatioal medium it would be helpful to formulate your responses by specifying the hypothetical combatants and coalitions explicitly rather than implicitly (i.e 'we' is an ambiguous definition in this context).
...falling on deaf ears. I have been saying for years that hacker culture needs to develop greater emotional intelligence and meet people where they are instead of lecturing them with arguments that make their eyes glaze over. Politics is not a function of logic.
Your best option, if you live in the UK, is to roll your eyes eyes and vote for the beardy communist despite his obvious faults. Logical arguments are not compelling to people in the grip of an emotional rush. The inability to assess and adjust to peoples' emotional states is a kind of social stupidity.
You say it like it's a major indictment - people just don't understand probability and low probability events occur all the damn time. On the flip-side people also play the lottery.
A lot of factors contribute to poll errors: sample group is never perfectly representative of actual voters, people lying on their voting intention if they feel it's not socially accepted, &tc. That does not make polls worthless.
Now I don't believe this makes any sense in this era (criminals will have crypto, ordinary people/dissidents/journalists etc will not) but I can very much appreciate where they are coming from. It's not a simple issue.
There was no ability for the government to read everyone's (or anyone's) mail at once in the past.
It's obvious to me that cryptography shouldn't and realistically cannot be outlawed. That doesn't make any sense. On the flip side, I think that most people would accept that targeted surveillance of criminal suspects is a reasonable tool.
The thing is, if it becomes the default for all messages to be encrypted end-to-end – obviously a good thing – then this effective tool becomes useless.
I think any proposals to restrict cryptographic software are obviously wrong and doomed to failure, and I will continue using such software regardless of what laws are passed in the UK. But it is a complex issue, and I wish there was some more acknowledgement of how the field of surveillance has changed.
We need more actual police officers to do more actual police work.
- Running investigations, police officers being known and trusted "faces" in their community, and surveilling people in meatspace
To
- Running grep on every TCP packet of 65 million people, then asking a relatively small number of LEOs to "do something" when analysts see something that could be suspicious
The former seems more likely (to me) to succeed.
> capable of being monitored when there was a reasonable
> suspicion of a crime about to be committed.
Does is imply that politicians will have crypto?
Trying to pretend you can is one of the most dangerous things a politician can ever do.
I look forward to whenever politicians work out that people not under their legal jurisdiction can muck about on their internet thereby making their intent of constraint irrelevant.
Because that's the only politically correct thing they can do.
This is not even wrong. There is a long list of 'politically correct' things the government could do which are inconvenient (timing-wise) as they would highlight their fallibility/incompetence. First on the list is to stop the drastic cuts[1] they instituted to the police force. A close second is to stop exporting jihadists (that's right: exporting civilian British nationals[2]) to wage war in Islamic countries. It is unfortunate that saving face in light of the impending snap-elections is preventing real solutions from being implemented; instead, we get security theatre that sounds good to the electorate but wouldn't even have prevented the previous attacks - a necessary factor for the action to be considered as an improvement at the very least. Right now the issues are totally unrelated; just opportunistic legislation.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/02/inspectorate...
2. https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/the-manchester-bombi...