Home Secretary Theresa May has defended the collection of vast amounts of phone and internet data – as exposed by US whistleblower Edward Snowden.
“If you are searching for the needle in the haystack, you have to have a haystack in the first place,” she said.
Jesus, it’s almost impossible to know where to start with such illiberal fuckwittery. No, you do not need a haystack. What you need is targeted intelligence – clearly the latter commodity being in short supply. What you do not do is drown out that intelligence in a sea of noise. What you do not do is invade the civil liberties of the population in order to feed your desire for more power and to frighten us with your latest bogeyman.
Sure, there are jihadists intent upon causing mayhem. But by far the greatest threat to our liberty and well-being is not the jihadist but the state that will sacrifice our liberty and privacy for a phantom war against a largely ineffectual insignificant threat.
She told a Parliamentary committee citizens did not give their explicit consent to have their data harvested by the security services.
But there was an “unwritten agreement” that it was needed to “keep us safe”.
No, there isn’t. I have entered into no such unwritten agreement. Unwritten agreements aren’t worth the paper they are written on.
Mrs May argued that collecting and storing phone and internet records was not the same as “mass surveillance” because “most of the data will not be looked at at all, will not be touched”.
Sophistry.
Am I prepared to sacrifice my liberties and have the state following my conversations in order that it might catch a bad guy? No. Not ever. I’d rather the bad guy got away than to have my liberty eroded yet further. The greatest threat we face is not the lone jihadist, it is the state, the (un)civil service, the security agencies and the politicians who listen to the poison dripped into their ears. I fear Theresa May and the scum she is in bed with a damn sight more than I am of terrorists. I’ll take my chances rather than give up my liberties. I don’t want May’s protection, thanks very much. The price is too high.
Theresa May dresses like a whore, lies like a whore, and looks about 70.
But what a pity that she’s only 58.
Because “middle-aged whore” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it?
Theresa May is a right fighter, someone who shouts louder than the next person to prove her point, and who believes if she says it enough it will all become true.
Scarey they she was almost party leader.
Mind you they are all terrifyingly stupid self obsessed power hungry idiots.
May is not alone in her delusions of grandeur.
Anyway if they hadn’t let all these bloody terrorists in in the first place we would not all be being mass monitored, though I suspect they would have found some other excuse to pry into everyone’s lives.
The lunatics have taken over the asylum and the guards are out of antipsychotropic drugs to control them.
Mrs May argued that collecting and storing phone and internet records was not the same as “mass surveillance” because “most of the data will not be looked at at all, will not be touched”.
The data does not need to be looked at. It will be subjected to data mining techniques. That is still surveillance, even if a human being doesn’t look at it at first. The data is still being analyzed. She would soon recognize it for surveillance if we did that to her phone records.
No amount outraged rhetoric will stop governments spying on their own populations, The only solution is for internet users to encrypt their data and meta data. Unfortunately this is not yet a user friendly operation. The greatest service the hacker community could bequeath to the world would be to make it so. Once a significant proportion of internet traffic is encrypted, we are all “hiding in plain sight” and there is little the authorities can do to prevent it. They cannot ban encryption technologies and they cannot realistically pass laws to prevent users from using it – they would look ridiculous. At present they rely on people being too busy to hide their traffic.
The most potent weapon any ‘terrorist’ has is a smartphone (with payg sim). All they have to do is post a few threats re social media apps and then sit back and laugh at the mayhem caused as the authorities run around like headless chickens …. causing more damage to the liberties of the population of the UK than any supposed bogeyman-terrorist could even dream of!
That Theresa May attempts to justify the industrial scale snooping, collection, storage and data mining the phone, web and email records of over 70 million people in order to persue no more than at best a few thousand tells you everything you need to understand about how she views “proportionality” and the privacy, freedom of communication and liberties of the 99.998% of the population who are not under suspicion.