Hacker News Reader

> 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

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.)

I assume lone wolf attackers are harder to foil.

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)

Do you have examples of the neo-nazi attacks?

Off the top of my head, broadly right-wing attacks include the murders of Jo Cox and Md Saleem. There was also this incident: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/man-stabbed-during-vio.... I may have forgotten some.

Not sure if by Neo-nazi you mean right wing terrorist attacks, but a growing number have been foiled.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58512901

>a growing number have been foiled

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."

Right, Neo-nazi was too specific a word to use. I was generally referring to far-right (or often the mix of far-right and some psychological condition) attacks. A recentish example is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Finsbury_Park_attack

Is that a problem there?

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.

Yes, there are a number of banned neo-Nazi organizations in the UK. Combat 18 is probably the most well-known (British Movement, White Wolves...there are a few).

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.

That's a good answer, although the neo-Nazi groups appear more dangerous in terms of what they might do not what they do.

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.

I grew up in this environment. These people are extraordinarily violent: football hooligans are violent, and English hooligans are notorious throughout Europe (someone was killed during Euro 2020). In the 90s, some grounds were genuinely unsafe. And I lived in London when Copeland was planting bombs...it went on for weeks, a guy running around the city planting nail bombs in crowded areas. Jo Cox murdered. Combat 18 were linked to the murder of a politician in Germany last year. As these groups have gone underground, they have become more dangerous not less.

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.

> Effectiveness of attacks was also reduced with physical security like cast iron/concrete bollards making truck bombs.

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.

Yeah I dislike a lot of the barriers on the bridges. Even the large iron/concrete barriers on the pavement are inconvenient for pedestrians (they are narrow choke points if a lot of people are crossing and must be particularly bad for those in wheelchairs.) I would much rather they were bollards that were easier for people to pass between but perhaps they would be insufficient at stopping motor vehicles.

There are some that think that cyclists should have their own separated ways the same way pedestrians do.

> the IRA were mostly interested in harming property rather than people unlike today’s attackers

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.

The most revealing thing about all these calls for back doors "for the children" and "to stop terrorists is that I never truly realized that child exploitation and terrorism were invented around 1996. It is also interesting that we never caught any criminals involved in these things before 1996. Pay phones were a pretty hard thing to track and monitor back in the day and we never had calls to outlaw them.

Solarwinds gives me no incentive to trust in the technical competence of any law or government group.

This is nonsense. The word terrorism dates back to the French Revolution and Britain dealt with many bombings from the IRA before 1996 (as well as earlier Irish republicans, militant suffragettes, etc.)

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)

while i agree that these are not new concepts entirely, them being wheeled out incessantly to support the developmemt of a much much wider survelliance state does seem semi novel in the 90's. the miltary-industrial-congressional complex needed new boogeymen to scare the nation with, to justify their existence over, after the collapse of the soviet union. terrorism & child molestation feel like a replacement terror, after the old one fell.