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The Guardian reports:
Theresa May has reportedly moved to quash an attempt by her cabinet colleague Sajid Javid to improve mobile phone coverage by warning that the plans could aid terrorists, according a leaked letter.
[...] May argues in the leaked internal Whitehall letter that Javid’s plans to end “not-spots”, by allowing customers to roam between rival networks, could aid criminals and terrorists. The Times reported that May’s objections centre around concerns that roaming would make it more difficult for the agencies to track suspects.
In the letter, extracts of which have been published in the Times, May says that national roaming “could have a detrimental impact on law enforcement, security and intelligence agency access to communications data and lawful intercept”.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 06 2014, @09:39AM
I wonder what they've got on her...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 06 2014, @09:41AM
Step 1: forbid the terrorists from speaking English.
Step 2: shoot all the non-English speakers.
Terrorst problem solved, guv!
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Thursday November 06 2014, @10:42AM
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Thursday November 06 2014, @10:00AM
I know I'm starting to sound like a broken record about this but these people just don't care anymore how transparent their "teh terrorists!" crap is. They know it's transparent and they know that you know it is, but they just don't care. Especially in the UK. How depressing.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Thursday November 06 2014, @11:31AM
I'm sure the daily mail loves her, but I'm always reminded of Norah Satie, hopefully we're close to the breakdown [youtube.com]
(Score: 1) by Darth Turbogeek on Thursday November 06 2014, @11:35AM
She actually said this utter crap?
..... No words. Seriously just how can you respond to someone so fucking stupid?
(Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday November 06 2014, @06:54PM
She's not stupid. She, along with many others in positions of power, have absolutely no regard in any way, shape, or form, for their fellow citizen's human rights of anonymity and privacy.
She FULLY knows that it doesn't aid terrorism at all. "Aiding terrorism" is just a code word:
"Aiding Terrorism":
Governments and intelligence agencies have already discovered the fruits of Big Data programs sifting through all the metadata collected. They've already *seen* first hand the rather dramatic evolution in their capabilities by adding more and more data.
Our real problem is that is has almost nothing to do with terrorism. These programs are used to input the desired patterns and logic, and then be presented with a "short list" of actors involved in your "situation". Do we really think the "input" is "find the terrorists"? Do we really think *they* have ever put that input in? I don't. They didn't find Osama for 10 years, and that *might* be because they weren't freakin' collecting any information from those locations in Pakistan. If *only* we had been capturing his web browsing activity and phone calls, we could have picked him up getting take-out down the street right?
So if these truly amazing tools, being a product of our ever increasing sophistication, are only as valuable as the information being fed into it, just what are we feeding into it?
All communications data we can get our hands on regarding our fellow citizens . Just by its very nature it's a piss-fucking-poor terrorist detector since it can only work on information gathered through traditional channels, and terrorists are using anything but traditional channels. The theory is that by understanding all of the communications occurring in a country, we could isolate communications with terrorists externally, and somehow isolate terrorists communications with endpoints and routes entirely within that country. Except, it doesn't actually work very well in practice and is defacto security theater.
Most of the tools we have success with finding terrorists (your standard tools used before computerization), don't require the collection of metadata in mass surveillance.
One big huge information system that erases our privacy, just to detect a couple of edge communications in a tiny drop of captured communications. It's the stupidest use of resources imaginable for the goal of capturing terrorists.
Also, who gives a crap about terrorism anymore? It's ISIS now, and they evolved way past just simple terrorism now. Do we need these tools to find ISIS? Do these people like this twatwaffle bureaucrat not own a globe?
No, this lady understands what she is saying. You don't understand what she is saying.
She is saying that you shouldn't be able to hide yourself from her eyes for any reason, and is calling on all of us to alter our technologies and abrogate our contract with human rights and freedoms to enable her to serve us, and she will use every logical failure in the book to do it.
Well, I don't know about you, but she and the others can kiss my heinie hole, since they don't serve us at all. They serve themselves. Repeatedly. How many examples of malfeasance do we need before it's proven that officials will always abuse information capabilities like this to serve their own interests?
Take a good look at her again, Comrade. You don't see the piggish features and the walking on two legs? She cares nothing for you, and will send you out to be made into glue, since you are only an animal to her now.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by cafebabe on Thursday November 06 2014, @12:39PM
So, roaming currently defeats surveillance? Any foreign GSM SIM provides roaming and European regulations make this option quite affordable. So, if a terrorist wants to avoid being tracked, they should use a foreign GSM SIM. Likewise for anyone who really cares about their privacy.
1702845791×2
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MrNemesis on Thursday November 06 2014, @01:34PM
Indeed, I had no idea that GCHQ's panopticon was so weak as to be defeated by something that's been in the GSM network since the year dot.
Reading between the lines, all I can think of that would make anything harder would be a slight change in the monitoring procedure so that when a flag it put on terrieristX who subscribes to networkY you'd also need to submit to networkZ as well. Since there are only three major networks in the UK (vodafone, O2 and EE [themselves a coalition of orange and t-mobile]) this would make next to no difference.
More telling is the glee the mobile operators are displaying at the prospect of a speed bump. They've already had their outrageously overpriced roaming charges to/from europe limited, and they've been just as scared of having to open up their towers to access from everyone in the UK. A cynical person might wonder if the incumbent mobile networks had had a quiet word in the gov's shell-like to do anything possible to stymie such a move under any pretence whatsoever, and May always gives great value for money in that regard.
"To paraphrase Nietzsche, I have looked into the abyss and been sick in it."
(Score: 1) by purple_cobra on Thursday November 06 2014, @12:49PM
Cheese helps terrorists too! Ban cheese!
(Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Thursday November 06 2014, @01:10PM
Cars help terrorists move around different locations - we should ban them
FFS
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 06 2014, @01:45PM
Actually, pen and paper allow terrorists to write down and exchange messages which cannot be caught by remote surveillance at all! We urgently must forbid pen and paper, or teh terrorists will win!
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday November 06 2014, @05:27PM
That's why you have the cloud, citizen.
You do not need local storage. Local storage could be used to store improper or unpleasant thoughts, citizen.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 06 2014, @11:49PM
If you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to fear.
If you've something to hide you shouldn't even be here.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by WillR on Thursday November 06 2014, @03:18PM
"May argues in the leaked internal Whitehall letter that the London and North Eastern Railway's electrification plans - which would allow trains to travel long distances without coal and water stops - could aid anarchists, saboteurs, and criminals by letting them effortlessly outrun constables on horseback."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 06 2014, @01:10PM
If they did exist, they would be running all over the world spreading Ebola.
The Gatun Dam in Panama would have been blown up by now.
So fucking tired of people waving a "what terrorists COULD do" flag.
Can we just shoot these people and save the world?
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Thursday November 06 2014, @05:25PM
Insightful
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1) by Captain Black on Thursday November 06 2014, @01:48PM
.. Are the British Government, specifically Theresa May, using scaremongering "think of the children" and "because terrorism" language.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 06 2014, @02:02PM
and if the entire population doesn't commit suicide, that might help terrorists, as well.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by wonkey_monkey on Thursday November 06 2014, @04:11PM
UK Home Secretary: Project to End Mobile "Not-Spots" Could Aid Terrorists
They do seem to be having a pretty hard time terrorising, or even injuring, anyone in the UK using the existing mobile networks.
Not that there's a minimum acceptable number of deaths from terrorism, but when you've got 0 of those in the past 12 months in the UK[citation needed]*, versus how ever many hundreds it is from alcohol, random acts of violence, car accidents... well, you know where I'm going with this.
*Wikipedia lists five terrorist incidents in the UK since 2010. All five occurred between April and July 2013. Four were committed by the same person. Grand total: two deaths.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Thursday November 06 2014, @05:57PM
The 7/7 attacks killed 52 people [wikipedia.org] so I'm sure that random mass threat seems more concerning than routine things like alcohol abuse and car accidents.
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