The Met commissioner: Tech giants make it impossible to stop terrorists
bbc.com
bbc.com
Her main achievement prior to becoming commissioner was heading up a botched anti-terrorism operation that ended up with an innocent Brazilian plumber being shot in the head.
Her main achievement since becoming commissioner was obstructing an investigation into police corruption: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/jun/15/daniel-morga...
I think you have your answer. She’s a “team player” as far as the police ans the government are concerned. As with any organisation, promotions are contingent not on doing a ‘good’ job, but on doing what the higher ups consider to be in their interests. It would seem the senior management in her department have made their priorities clear
He was wearing a suspiciously big jacket when he left his flat. He lived near someone who was being surveilled in relation to the attacks, and word went over the radios that a guy was coming - the guy is coming - he's going into the tube - look at the jacket, he must be wearing a bomb belt... he was rushed by cops, pinned to the ground(!) and shot in the head. That was that for Jean Charles. Another innocent fallen on the home front of the terror wars.
There was a dragged out, unsatisfactory investigation, and some grumbling, unconvincing placement of blame, no punishments and no change to procedures. All these years after it still makes me mad as hell.
See eg
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/tube-shooting-wh...
I actually also heard that the police man shouted "yippie ki-yay, motherfucker" before firing, maybe I'll start repeating that one instead.
I remember thinking at the time that whomever was in charge and responsible for the attempted coverup and the lies would have to be fired.
Still cant quite believe they'd be fully in charge and lecturing us about how to catch a terrorist a decade later.
The most effective way we reduced terror attacks in the past was with negotiated peace in Northern Ireland. Effectiveness of attacks was also reduced with physical security like cast iron/concrete bollards making truck bombs (or more recent developments like driving a van into lots of people) harder. Terror attacks in the U.K. today tend to come from poorly organised Islamists and neo-nazis who don’t really do significant amounts of harm (but maybe you would disagree with me on that—the IRA were mostly interested in harming property rather than people unlike today’s attackers) and I’m not really suggesting negotiated peace here. I suspect that increased prosperity (and people being optimistic about their futures) in the U.K. and perhaps certain places abroad would reduce attacks but obviously that is hard to achieve and any effect is hard to measure.
Perhaps technology companies and encryption would be a bigger deal if terrorists were more competent but at the moment their opsec seems poor with many foiled plots (apparently—maybe these plots were exaggerated or never really viable) and only minor successes.
Looking at this long list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in...
all I'm seeing is "a neo-Nazi with paranoid schizophrenia carried out nail bomb attacks over three weekends" in 1999.
These groups are offshoots of political parties, as fascist parties started to splinter in the 90s as it became less acceptable to be overly racist/fascist. Under Tyndall the BNP, which was a political party, was very violent (Combat 18 supposedly provided "protection" for their rallies). No terrorism but organising attacks on minority groups certainly (in the early 90s before Nazi groups went underground, there was a strong link with football hooliganism as certain clubs had groups that were overtly racist...Birmingham's firm is the only one I am aware of that wasn't racist). Tbh, these groups are more like criminal gangs in the US than anything else (and they had very little electoral success until Griffin moved the party away from overt fascism).
Also, it is worth pointing out that Copeland was a member of the BNP. He was obviously a nutjob but he was closely associated with the party, and the overt racism/violent rallies was still part of the BNP until the late 90s (and even after Griffin took over).
The UK also had a brief period in the early 2000s, before Islamic terrorism really took off and after right-wing groups started to really lose steam, where environmental terrorism was the main source of attacks. Environmental groups sent anthrax to academics who experimented with animals, and groups (iirc, ALF) were trying to bomb animal testing facilities (that is why animal testing facilities in the UK usually have multiple rings of barbed wire 20ft high, guard posts, cameras everywhere...I actually live near one of these places, and it was built when this was picking up: no signposts at all, tiny one-car road down to the facility, forest completely surrounds it so you can't see it from anywhere else, not built near any main road).
Btw, the whole premise of the original argument is ludicrous...these groups know they are being watched. I am sure that online communications are used after suspect has been identified but indoctrination is largely happening within in-person groups. With Islamic fundamentalism, it is same mosques, it is the same groups of people. I don't think any level of surveillance will stop lone wolf attacks either.
It seems to me that the real threat here isn't so much terrorism (or things that rhyme) but given the amount of surveillance in the UK just which sorts of terrorism are allowed by the government.
Groups that are allowed to do bad things become a sort of defacto government paramilitary. That's the case where there's a real force multiplier.
Also, the reason why these groups exist is because they splintered out of political organizations. They weren't tolerated at any time but the BNP did not broadcast the violence or their links to it publicly. There is a distinction between a group like Britain First, which has people who are clearly dangerous but they retain a political profile, and Combat 18 who are active neo-Nazis like Atomwaffen in the US. Terrorist organizations are banned in the UK, there is a huge amount of surveillance of these groups.
The lesson here being that plots are foiled without breaking encryption for everyone.
I'd sooner trust an honest police chief who just admitted "Look. What we really want is to be able to snoop thru your personal data anytime we like, preferably w/o any oversight."
I think this is an exaggeration. Some IRA bombs damaged only/mainly property but the IRA also killed hundreds of people and not by accident.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provisional_Irish_Republican_A...
I don't really agree that IRA attacks were ended by a negotiated settlement (GFA) either. That's a bit like saying that the the USSR dissolved because the Berlin wall came down.
Somewhat off topic, but I do wonder if some of these have been a net negative in terms of people injured. Shortly after someone drove a van along the pavement on Westminster Bridge all the major bridges had concrete barriers built between the road and pavement, and while I see the reasoning for it, it does seem to me that cyclists who could previously fall relatively harmlessly onto the pavement if caught alongside a bus or other vehicle are now going to be dragged along a concrete blockade instead.
Solarwinds gives me no incentive to trust in the technical competence of any law or government group.
Child exploitation has been a known problem for a long time too. I think it is easy to brush off as a problem that doesn’t really exist if it is very distant from your experience of the world (eg how many paedophiles do you know?) but my understanding is that tech companies with user-generated-content deal with an absolutely horrific amount of CSEM. I don’t think it is reasonable to simple talk about liberty and brush the problem away when it comes up.
Internet-based communication and encryption change the possibilities for communication and it seems hard for laws to be particularly helpful in achieving a state that is good for liberty and good for society.
Personally, I think it is a good thing that, end-to-end encrypted group chats are somewhat limited in size, 256 for WhatsApp and 1000 for signal. I think 1000 is too many. In liberal democracies, I think at some group size, free speech ought to be semi-public speech too (though I guess it can be with informants within the group)
Exactly, attackers usually have piss poor OpSec but the police is even more incompetent. That’s why even for the few successful attacks it’s usually later reported “the attacker was known to the police” or “under surveillance by security services “, and yet… not sure how more surveillance would help, it seems they already have more leads than they can act upon.
(Disclaimer: I don’t know how many unsuccessful attacks there are, so maybe they’re not as incompetent as it seems from outside.)
Personally I don’t really mind if security services are stretched a bit thin as it makes overreaching harder (but perhaps being stretched thin makes them want more mass surveillance)
Don't be. It's the only sensible opinion on this.
Terrorism and violence has nothing to do with the police failing at their jobs or the upper classes gutting local communities, quality of life, art and spirituality or mismanaged and murderous foreign policy, or anything like that -- just give us more control and you will be happier and safer.
If I had private security and my house were broken into, I'd fire the security people and find new ones who could do the job, not let them move into my living room. Given the tools and resources they already have, the government should reduce police budgets and workforce every time there is a purse snatching so that they have some skin in the game.
Furthermore, I'd argue that the real 'bad guys' in the present day is LE its self. The acts that are punished these days are things like personal drug use, protesting, unfair tax evasion, human rights demonstrations, and whistle-blowing. All things that the people would like to engage in but the government wants to squash at all costs.
Again, who are the actual criminals??