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Cameron Accuses Internet Companies Of Giving Terrorists Safe Haven
An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from The Guardian: "Internet companies are allowing their networks to be used to plot "murder and mayhem", David Cameron has said in response to the official inquiry into the intelligence agencies' actions ahead of the killing of Lee Rigby. He demanded that internet companies live up to their social responsibilities to report potential terror threats and said there was no reason for such firms to be willing to cooperate with state agencies over child abuse but not over combatting terrorism. His comments to the House of Commons came after the parliamentary intelligence and security committee concluded that the brutal murder of Rigby could have been prevented if an internet company had passed on an online exchange in which one of the killers expressed "in the most graphic terms" his intention to carry out an Islamist jihadi attack.
The scary thing is these guys either don't understand, or don't care, about how much they're undermining the rest of the law and society.
Sure they care. They care a lot. They just don't care in the way that you care. They care about whether their efforts to maintain the status quo succeed. That's it. But undermining the law is very much part and parcel of that maintenance. The people running our countries are career criminals and if the law were to catch up with them, they would be in trouble. They must continually erode the law, or they will be labeled as what they are. Thieves, crooks, con artists, frauds.
This article tells you all you need you know about the establishment's reaction. From TFA:
"The report also reveals that the two killers had been investigated seven times by different agencies and that MI5 cancelled surveillance of one of the murderers, Michael Adebolajo, just a month before the attack."
But the report then concludes that MI5 (and the other security services) are blameless and it's all the fault of some Internet company. Simultaneously whitewashing the security services failure and justifying (in their minds) further cranking up of mass surveillance.
Slippery slopesters you two.
Actually, it's the argument from exaggeration, I think there's a better name for it, but I haven't formally studied logical fallacies. I didn't formally study to learn to read, either. Instead, I read stuff. I can't diagram a sentence for you, because I don't care and because we spent maybe one day on that in my entire school career, IIRC, with no homework. I can tell you when a sentence is broken, and usually suggest multiple ways to fix it. And I can tell you when logic is broken, and suggest that someone fuck off :)
The point of making the extreme example (a form of hyperbole) is to illustrate a point — where do you stop sliding down the slippery slope? Because history tells us that mission scope tends to creep, and that like any organization law enforcement agencies tend to acquire power when possible and give it up only at gunpoint. Oh, sorry, that was more hyperbole. I imagine you're crying into your Kix now.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"