Slashdot Mirror
Lord Blair Calls for Laws To Stop 'Principled' Leaking of State Secrets
An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from the Guardian: "Tougher laws are needed to prevent members of the public from revealing official secrets, former Metropolitan police commissioner Lord Blair has said. ... The peer insisted there was material the state had to keep secret, and powers had to be in place to protect it. The intervention comes after police seized what they said were thousands of classified documents from David Miranda – the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has been reporting leaks from the former US intelligence officer Edward Snowden. ... He warned there was a 'new threat which is not of somebody personally intending to aid terrorism, but of conduct which is likely to or capable of facilitating terrorism.' He cited the examples of information leaks related to Manning and WikiLeaks."
Flying your jet into a building: Terrorism
Blowing up yourself in a marketplace: Terrorism
Leaking information about government crimes: Terrorism
Google "where to buy a pressure cooker": Terrorism
Picking your nose: Terrorism
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Next /. poll:
Who are you most afraid of?
-Terrorists
-My government
-The voices in my head
-CowboyNeal
All Snowden and Manning did was tell the truth. We should be *very* careful about outlawing the truth in America.
There were reporters that knew the date of the Normandy invasion, D-Day, in World War 2. They didn't reveal it. If they had revealed it, that would have been "telling the truth." It also would have likely turned the invasion into a disaster, and possibly resulted in a different outcome to the war.
Great Britain was in danger of being starved into submission by the German U-Boats in World War 2. The U-Boat menace was brought under control because the Allies were able to break the Enigma code system and read German Navy communications. Some Germans suspected from time to time that their communications were compromised, but they were always mollified by the apparent strength of Enigma. When the truth was finally revealed in the 1970s, the Germans were stunned. Had that information been revealed during the war, it still would have been "the truth." But the revelation of that information during the war against the U-Boats would have enabled the Germans to take effective countermeasures quite easily since the ability of the Allies to decrypt Enigma codes always hung by a thread. If the German radio traffic with the U-Boats would have been unreadable, it is possible that the British Isles could have been starved into submission. That would have meant a much more difficult war than it already was, and possibly one with a different outcome.
You're right, America (and the UK) should be *very* careful about outlawing the truth. By the same token, great care needs to be taken regarding the handling of some types of truth, otherwise it may be your fleet on the bottom of the ocean in the future. Had war come with the Soviet Union in the 1970s to 1980s, that is probably where much of the US fleet would have ended up. John Walker and his spy ring gave the Soviet Union the means to read American naval codes. NATO would probably have been either forced to use nuclear weapons in Europe - which it was and is prepared to do, or surrender.
A man telling his wife or girlfriend that a pair of jeans make her butt look big is telling the truth too. Who is going to sign up for that? Improperly revealing national security secrets is far more dangerous than telling a wife or girlfriend her butt looks big in a pair of jeans. The feedback loop just tends to be longer, if you're lucky.
Iran Warns U.S. Against Syria Intervention, Revolutionary Guard General Predicts 'Severe Consequences'
Syria crisis: UK and US move closer to intervention
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Many Prime Ministers have been members of the house or Lords, we just dont see it these days.The last one was Douglas-Home but he ended up giving up his peerage and stood for election to the commons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alec_Douglas-Home
"Friends help you move, Real Friends help you move bodies"
"lord" Tony Blair had an eighty-year-old man roughly handled and thrown out of the Labour party conference for heckling him, by police, citing the "anti-terrorism act" as just cause.
The man is the worst kind of self-serving, money-grabbing blow-hard, seeking only to cover his own backside. He is shaking in his boots that someone will leak the truth about his foreknowledge of the total absence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq before he green-lit British forces going in.
He's a lawyer. Making up laws to cover himself AND provide a revenue stream. I call that motive.
I understand the point you were trying to make, but British Prime Ministers are all in fact Lords.
What?
As far as I know Mr Cameron has no peerage, and therefore no right to vote in the House of Lords.
By tradition, every former prime minister, regardless of their affiliation and the affiliation of whoever is in power, is granted a peerage. They have to wait until they're ejected though.
His job title has "lord" in it, but he's not a lord.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Pretty lousy cop too: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2008/oct/02/ian.blair.resigns very political and not very coply [to use Jess Stone's lovely word].
On y va, qui mal y pense!