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Comment by doc_holliday | Hacker News Reader

As much as I wish they did, I am not sure they will.

A large portion of the UK has no idea how encryption helps them and believe that criminals and terrorists should "have nowehere to hide".

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If there's one thing that stops criminals and terrorists, it's making the things they do illegal!

Same as drugs. Making them illegal really sorted things out and now no-one takes drugs and there's no more criminal activity because people fear the outcomes of breaking the law.

Agreed, smart criminals will just use private channels.

But what about dumb criminals? From what I read both the London Bridge attackers and Manchester bomber are dumb as dogs__t. They'd probably use whatsapp even if it wasn't private simply because it's popular.

(I support private communication, and think not being able to catch some criminals is a reasonable price, but many others do not)

For both recent attacks the authorities already had information on them, they were already on watch lists.

That's pretty much always been the case with most of these attacks. Which is the very same reason why I think that "more surveillance/data collection" will make the problem only worse.

As is, many government agencies databases seem to be filled to the brim with false-positives, making it impossible to spot the actual dangerous people among the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of "suspects".

Maybe they believe that more data will make it easier to figure out who the really dangerous people are? But that whole idea is still based on concepts which pretty much boil down to precognition of how individual humans gonna act, an impossibility.

Guess a few people took Minority Report a tad bit too seriously and didn't get the message at all.

If you are having trouble finding a needle in a haystack, adding more hay is a bad idea.

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9_PjdU3Mpo

That's a good one, reminded me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdIA0jeW-24

They were probably on watch lists at least in part due to the ease of monitoring their communications.

Come, come.

The reason you make it illegal is that then you can, with Rule of Law, take action against it.

You're (extremely naively) correct in saying making Terrorism (and associated activities) illegal is likely to have little direct effect, but if it isn't illegal then authorities subservient to the Rule of Law are impotent to act against it.

Assuming your comment is not that naive, what's the purpose of the comment? Unless you're advocating return to feudalism I can't see anything positive in your thinking here.

What am I missing?

I'm certainly not advocating against the rule of law, rather that we already have plenty of counter-terrorism laws, the sum total of which doesn't seem to stopped terrorist attacks from happening. I believe that in order to reduce the threat of terrorism in the UK, what we need is not more laws against it, but spend that time and energy tackling the root causes of radicalisation - poverty, mental health issues, education, wartime atrocities committed overseas, and other factors. Preventing people from becoming radicalised is safer and much more cost-effective than trying to find and track people who already are. Both approaches are necessary, but all the rhetoric is focussed on the latter, the former being not such a vote winner as a 'tough on crime/terror' stance.

Aye, but you specifically said "making the things they do illegal" with the implication being that such actions are entirely unnecessary. My point is they are necessary in a society that cares about the rule of law.

You're right to contend that simply adding more laws doesn't help further in general. But that's a considerable climbdown from the position implicit in your post upthread.

You can try taking a broader stance and consider the criminalization of related things that otherwise innocent people would still want to use. E.g. encryption.

The jaded tone is likely due to laws being created for the 'drug war' and 'terrorism' quickly impacting ordinary citizens, while having relatively little effect on the groups they were purportedly created for.

The latest attackers have given plenty of clues, like appearing in documentaries about extremism, being violent to their neighbours and actually stating their intentions for whomever wanted to listen

But I guess it's "racist" to take action on that

Can you give an actual example where someone in authority said they would or could not follow up a lead into a terrorist plot because it would be racist to do that?

Not terrorism, but race was one small factor that caused the Rotherham child sexual exploitation rings to not be rigorously investigated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit...

This was a long running set of crimes that had severe impact on the victims, and there were very many victims.

Investigating people before they are terrorists is complicated by things like human rights. But raping children is always, unambiguously, wrong.

Those are decisions made by social workers and local government, that's a long, long way from the Met and MI5.

Parent post doesn't mention the Met or MI5, and I'm not sure how the Met s relevant for eg Manchester bombing.

Those decisions not to investigate or prosecute were also made by police in Rotherham. Police were well aware of the extent of the criminality, and chose not to investigate or prosecute.

http://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/1407/independent_...

> Within social care, the scale and seriousness of the problem was underplayed by senior managers. At an operational level, the Police gave no priority to CSE, regarding many child victims with contempt and failing to act on their abuse as a crime. Further stark evidence came in 2002, 2003 and 2006 with three reports known to the Police and the Council, which could not have been clearer in their description of the situation in Rotherham. The first of these reports was effectively suppressed because some senior officers disbelieved the data it contained. This had led to suggestions of coverup. The other two reports set out the links between child sexual exploitation and drugs, guns and criminality in the Borough. These reports were ignored and no action was taken to deal with the issues that were identified in them

[...]

> Some at a senior level in the Police and children's social care continued to think the extent of the problem, as described by youth workers, was exaggerated, and seemed intent on reducing the official numbers of children categorised as CSE

etc etc.

Of course he can't. Note the use of quotes around racist, smacks of "I'm not racist but" mindset IMO.

No, it's an "intelligence" failure, and a direct result of austerity cuts.

Clearly they had the intelligence information, so it's not an intelligence failure.

It was lack of authorisation to act, and even that does not come from any "austerity cuts". It comes from the difficult balance of citizen's rights to "freedom of expression" and "privacy" and "right to family life" and so on.

The silly part is simply that foreign citizens can preach violence but they can't be deported.

I have tried to explain this to many people and I agree. People are entirely ignorant. I have actually given up now. I will have to vote with my feet at some point.

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