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posted by LaminatorX on Thursday November 06 2014, @09:38AM   Printer-friendly
from the war-on-error dept.

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”.

 
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  • (Score: 1) by Darth Turbogeek on Thursday November 06 2014, @11:35AM

    by Darth Turbogeek (1073) on Thursday November 06 2014, @11:35AM (#113485)

    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

    by edIII (791) on Thursday November 06 2014, @06:54PM (#113607)

    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":

    To engage in, enable, or otherwise promulgate views and information, granting the ability for a citizen to obfuscate their communications preventing government from being able to monitor and control said use.

    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.