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GCHQ Warns It Is Losing Track of Serious Criminals
An anonymous reader writes The Telegraph reports, "GCHQ has lost track of some of the most dangerous crime lords and has had to abort surveillance on others after Edward Snowden revealed their tactics ... The spy agency has suffered "significant" damage in its ability to monitor and capture serious organized criminals following the exposes by the former CIA contractor. Intelligence officers are now blind to more than a quarter of the activities of the UK's most harmful crime gangs after they changed their communications methods in the wake of the Snowden leaks. One major drug smuggling gang has been able to continue flooding the UK with Class A narcotics unimpeded for the last year after changing their operations. More intense tracking of others has either been abandoned or not started because of fears the tactics are now too easy to spot and will force the criminals to "go dark" and be lost sight of completely."
Please remember that "serious criminals" included the entire population.
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"We can't do our jobs, while obeying the law."
--Gang leadership, er, correction, GCHQ leadership
I thought the enhanced NSA and GCHQ surveilance was about combating terrorism. Or is that rationale just given in the United States?
So the intelligence officers let three quarters of the UK's most harmful crime gangs operate peacefully in spite of being in on their communications? If they are not doing anything about them, it can't be that important.
At any rate: if the criminals avoid the eavesdropping anyway, how about stopping the eavesdropping on the law-abiding citizens?
> One major drug smuggling gang has been able to continue flooding the UK with Class A narcotics unimpeded
And how is this different from the last 40 years?
This just shows that gchq have lost track of some of the criminals it knew about but had not gained enough intelligence to form a case (or the crimes were not considered serious enough). It has not lost track of the criminals that weren't using the communications channels it had a viewport on because it didn't have them tracked in the first place.
Seems like they became complacent and sat waiting for the evidence to appear in front of them. Rather than following up the leads in the old school methods.
Essentially: c+ must try harder.
Had GCHQ/NSA, etc. been spying ONLY on terrorists, drugs dealers, etc., then we wouldn't be reading this.
But they broke the law and got caught. Don't blame Snowden for having some integrity and doing the right thing. These agencies could learn a lot from Snowden.
As for the 'war on drugs', the Taliban declared opium poppy cultivation illegal just before the US/UK invasion of Afghanistan. Opium production - and by extension heroin production - was reduced to almost nothing.
In effect, the Taliban dealt the single most effective blow to the so-called "war on drugs" since its inception decades ago.
Since then the UK/USA invaded and allowed opium to be produced again - and now they produce record levels of opium and heroin. Billions of dollars of drugs. All controlled by UK/USA.
Now it seems that GCHQ can't monitor all of the drug dealers they'd like to. Are they worried that someone might be taking a slice of their pie?
You reap what you sow.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
You also seem quite wedded to the idea that the world is a simple matter of "who's to blame" and that you can just stick simple labels on people, like Snowden is a "whistle-blower" (and not, therefore, a traitor of the highest order). Sadly for this naive view, Snowden didn't blow any actual whistles, he just dumped a ton of documents and ran.
Exposing corruption is not being a traitor, no matter how many times you try and claim it. I realize that in propaganda school they teach you to lie until people believe it, but in this case we never will. Snowden did not release names of agents or criminals, he exposed the high level slide shows used to train people to perform illegal surveillance. These documents demonstrated that the agency is not worried very much about "Drug Gangs" as TFA tries to claim, it's worried about people who question what their own Governments are doing.
If the GCHQ was not having agents sift through email and tweets looking for people trying to organize for protests (you know, exercising free speech) they could actually focus on crime. If they were not trying to silence journalists questioning policies, they may be able to catch drug gangs. They could do so legally because they would have the resources available to do so. Instead, you have these agencies working to stifle free speech and collaborate with other countries to help them stifle free speech in their countries as well.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
You must be thinking of the USA where the following offences merit mandatory jail time:
(1) driving while Black.
(2) walking while White.
(3) possession of a Penis.
You forgot that
(1) walking while black and
(2) selling loose cigarettes while black and, my favourite,
(3) carrying a toy gun in a toyshop while black
are punished by on-the-spot execution.
The hilarious part of (3) is that he was shot for carrying a toy rifle in an open carry state.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
I'd say that the abuse of methods used by the authorities against normal citizens was revealed and that has also caused some trouble for the authorities when trying to monitor criminals.
This is a common syndrome in erstwhile free societies: the police are always complaining that they can't catch criminals, that they need more leeway and exemptions from the law themselves in order to do so.
And when people believe them, the inevitable result is less freedom and more Big Brother.
Anybody who thinks Snowden did not ultimately do us all a huge favor isn't seeing straight.