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Edward Snowden Leaks Could Help Paedophiles Escape Police, Says UK Government
An anonymous reader writes "Paedophiles may escape detection because highly-classified material about Britain's surveillance capabilities have been published by the Guardian newspaper, the UK government has claimed. A senior Whitehall official said data stolen by Edward Snowden, a former contractor to the US National Security Agency, could be exploited by child abusers and other cyber criminals. It could also put lives at risk by disclosing secrets to terrorists, insurgents and hostile foreign governments, he said."
Those demagogical assholes are the worst terrorists of all.
Is there anything that they won't use the 'think of the children' line on?
Pathetic.
Sent from my PDP-11
Now we know they're desperate, hate the population, and have entirely run out of arguments.
Time to recall this government. Failing that, maybe just kick them some more while they're down. It's what they'd do to us, after all.
The old, "Associate your target with helping pedophiles" approach.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
The secret police state is at risk!
Let's see.
"Save the children"? Check.
"Terrorism"? Check.
"For your own good"? Check
If you can't smell the heavy miasma of bullshit wafting off this, you need a new fucking nose.
It's an interesting twist: instead of claiming spying is essential for the nation's foreign intelligence capabilities and security when faced with nation state adversaries, they are now claiming spying is needed to combat internal, run-of-the mill criminals. So they are basically admitting they are building a surveillance state where every possible law that the leaders imagine can also be enforced.
If we are to configure our society so that every sicko that enjoys child molestation videos in the privacy of his home is immediately apprehended, then it seems to me any type of dissent of conspiracy against the government becomes impossible. Good luck explaining to the public that's a bad compromise.
First, they said he was a traitor.
Then, they accused him of stealing.
Followed closely with the accusation that he has been a Soviet spy.
Now ?
Edward Snowden, according to them, is aiding pedophile and all other sexual perverts, especially those "exploiting innocent children", to evade surveillance by the "GOOD GUYS", namely, the spooks/cops/big brothers.
In other words, Edward Snowden, to some, is a de-human-izer.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Give it a couple of weeks and Snowden will be labeled a pederast
Doubtful that many in the target audience know what one of those is, considering the trouble they've had with "paedophile" and "paediatrician" in the past.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
For confirming that nothing Snowden has leaked did actually endanger anyone.
Because if it had, we'd be hearing about that 24/7.
What do you mean "the down side"? There is no up side.
You can't point at other regimes and decry their dictatorial policies, and then have a secret arm of government of your own acting with the power of all three arms of government, with no oversight or accountability.
Wake up. The dictators aren't in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt or wherever else you may think they are. The most insidious dictators are right here, ruling YOU.
If you're a banker or other criminal type with inside connections to the survellance complex, the up-sides clock into the trillions.
It is only a matter of time before the men in charge of the NSA and GCHQ start getting invited to City dinners, if they aren't there already.
May the Maths Be with you!
And you're just being a demagogue.
To claim there is no need, no value, no "up side" to having a strong national intelligence organization marks you as irrelevant to the discussion as the blind patriots knee-jerking that "it's fine because I have nothing to hide".
There IS a tremendous value to a strong intelligence capability.
But our society was built on the need for responsible oversight, generally delegated to our elected representatives.
The blame here I place (as usual) on Congress. If they were exercising responsible, firm, intrusive oversight - with absolute, immediate, and unremitting punishment for the people involved (firing certainly, prosecution as required - and not a bunch of chattering ninnies that have proven their inability to be trusted to keep secrets secret (so as to remain closely advised by the agencies without fear of destroying the value of intel and methods with self-serving 'unattributed' leaks), I don't believe we'd have this problem.
But now we have self-interested politicians, committed to maintaining a political divide and advantage at ANY cost (even to the republic), who thus cannot really be trusted with anything important and who block each other (despite both sides' recognizing the need) from reforming anything substantively. I guess we lose then.
-Styopa
And you're just being a demagogue.
To claim there is no need, no value, no "up side" to having a strong national intelligence organization marks you as irrelevant to the discussion as the blind patriots knee-jerking that "it's fine because I have nothing to hide".
There IS a tremendous value to a strong intelligence capability.
But our society was built on the need for responsible oversight, generally delegated to our elected representatives.
If I had to choose between living in 1984 -- which is what we're doing -- and the consequences of not having any secret spying at all, I'd go with the consequences. I think I'm more likely to be arrested for expressing my Constitutional rights than I am to be killed by terrorists.
That's disingenuous. Best you can do is blame the population for not offering principled people who run for office, or in the rare cases where this happens, blame the population for not supporting those guys in favor of the typical establishment stooges.
How do you blame people when they are intentionally mislead, uninformed, and outright lied too? The take over of journalism started a long long time ago, and the last of the "journalists" for large print and television happened decades ago. You could blame the people that ignored the laws that allowed the monopolization of media in the 70s maybe, but corrupt journalism was rampant in the 60s even without monopolization.
People warned us that when the AP becomes the only source of "News" we are fucked, but those voters didn't even know that there were laws being cooked because the "News" prevented those laws from becoming public knowledge. If you didn't pay attention to comedians like George Carlin you simply didn't know.
Hell, if the Internet was censored as people in power want, you would still not know about any of these programs.
I agree that it's disingenuous to blame just congress, but it's just as disingenuous to blame a public that has no knowledge unless they are actively seeking it. It should bother you that "News" agencies collaborate and release stories that the administration approves of. It should bother you that instead of Television "News" programs talking about real issues, the programming focuses on celebrities first, propaganda second, and misinformation third.
The answer goes back in time and requires us to cut the strings tying all of these agencies together. Media monopolies need to be broken up, and journalism needs to once again become journalism. With an informed public we have a chance for reform. With an ignorant public there is no chance of reform, it will just be a few people that see reality bickering on sites like Slashdot.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.