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UK Telcos Went Above and Beyond To Cooperate With GCHQ
An anonymous reader writes with this news from the Guardian: "GCHQ lobbied furiously to keep secret the fact that telecoms firms had gone 'well beyond' what they were legally required to do to help intelligence agencies' mass interception of communications, both in the UK and overseas. GCHQ feared a legal challenge under the right to privacy in the Human Rights Act if evidence of its surveillance methods became admissable in court. GCHQ assisted the Home Office in lining up sympathetic people to help with "press handling", including the Liberal Democrat peer and former intelligence services commissioner Lord Carlile, who this week criticised the Guardian for its coverage of mass surveillance by GCHQ and the US National Security Agency."
This morning I saw a British politician claiming that without the ability to tap into all devices, then the public is never going to be able to be safe from terrorism. This argument fails when inevitably, knowing human nature (absolute power corrupts absolutely), the only end result must be a police state.
What makes you think they can't? Clearly you haven't considered the possibility that despite what they say that isn't actually the agenda. This is about control of the flow of power and money. They couldn't care less how safe the world actually is. In fact they probably relish a bit of bloodshed now and then because scared sheep move much faster, and in predictable directions.
Physics?
Seriously? Do you even know what Physics is, or do you just like to throw out buzzwords in the hopes that you'll sound smart and/or relevant enough to get an Insightful/Funny score?
The actual answer is, "Limitations of communications technology." For instance, that Twitter can't convey a message that hasn't been tweeted yet. The attack happened before anyone had a chance to so much as type a "What the shit!?" Calling Police isn't any faster.
The pair were known about, even monitored, but a patrol car could have been sitting across the street and the cops still wouldn't have been able to stop them from ramming Rigby with their car. They might have been able to shoot the pair down before they started hacking into Rigby, but firearms accuracy under pressure drops way down, and the chance of hitting a bystander goes way up. And again, that's assuming that there was a cop car right there and available to intervene, which there wasn't.
They are just being honest. The "War on Terror" is a complete non-issue. For one thing, terrorism is not a relevant threat. For another, surveillance does not help against it at all. And, and that is the real issue, why would the GCHQ do anything about terror? Whenever the population goes stupid because of another overblown terror scare, they get more money and power. While they have not (yet) sunk so deep as to create their own fake terrorists as the US TLAs have, they doubtlessly have thought about it.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The "War on Terror" has not had the jingoistic power in the UK it enjoyed in the USA. The UK was dealing with domestic terror attacks by the IRA in recent decades, and learned harsh lessons on domestic terror involving small weapons or personal explosives. Their civilian security is generally no-nonsense, and has had centuries of dealing with violent protest by under-armed civilians from occupied territories. They have certainly not always _won_ such conflicts: the USA itself was once just such a remote territory, first engaged in guerrilla warfare, later in open revolt, and certainly including what would not be called "terrorist attacks".