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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."
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By the way, "Lord Blair" is a top-ranking policeman, like our head of the FBI, and is not related to the ex-prime minister, AFAIK. In fact, a "lord" cannot be a prime minister. It's his job to beg for police rights to violate privacy, restrict citizens from video taping arrests, and of course punish anyone who would reveal police secrets. This isn't really news worthy. It's like saying the Queen is in favor of constitutional monarchies.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
Unlike your earlier links (about Syria and Iran), this one actually is on topic... But the interesting bit of your link, in my opinion, is not what this unnamed official says (there is zero information in that because it is entirely predictable) I think the more telling quote is from a named source, viz Snowden:
"Anyone in the positions of access with the technical capabilities that I had could suck out secrets, pass them on the open market to Russia; they always have an open door as we do. I had access to the full rosters of everyone working at the NSA, the entire intelligence community, and undercover assets all over the world. The locations of every station, we have what their missions are and so forth," he said.
"If I had just wanted to harm the U.S. You could shut down the surveillance system in an afternoon. But that's not my intention," he said.
He could be lying about that, I suppose, but it does seem consistent with his actions as far as I can see (which, like all of us, admittedly isn't very far). Also, while I am obviously in no position to know either way... The one person who does, Snowden himself, has indicated that he is seeing stories that did not originate with him, suggesting that these are being planted specifically to be able to say, "look! Real damage due to this whistleblowerleaky traitor"
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)