Once again, the spooks and hard-of-thinking politicians want to snoop on our conversations-despite trying to convince us otherwise.
MI5 boss Andrew Parker has asked that the government be given new powers to monitor communications, which could lead to the banning of WhatsApp and iMessage.
Arguing that the terrorist threat to the country is at its highest in three decades, Mr Parker said that internet firms like Facebook and Twitter had a “responsibility” to share information about their users. But that could also require the use of strong encryption in apps to be ruled illegal — a ruling that would likely lead to apps that use the technology like WhatsApp and iMessage being banned.
Bollocks. They most certainly should not have such powers. If they have a suspect in sight, then get a court order and tap their phone calls. Otherwise, fuck off. The biggest threat we face is not terrorism, it is the security services. The state is the enemy. All terrorists have to do is create a threat. The state will do the rest and they are doing a grand job of it, too.
Parker said that encryption was “creating a situation where law enforcement agencies and security agencies can no longer obtain under proper legal warrant the contents of communications between people they have reason to believe are terrorists”.
Tough. This is not an excuse to weaken our privacy, so fuck off.
You see, if I wanted to plan a terrorist offence, I wouldn’t use mobile communications at all (let alone social media). I’d resort to simpler means – a letter with a stamp on it. Let them monitor that…
I forget, is it Eurasia we are at war with today or is it East Asia? We seem to have been at war with one or the other forever…
>All terrorists have to do is create a threat.
They don’t even need to do that. Just asserting there’s a threat will be enough. And if not, dispatch a local asset to create one.
By far the easiest way to ‘hack’ a system is to hack the people. Humans are always the weakest link in any form of IT-related security. (Many still think “password” is a brilliant choice of password today.)
What’s more, if an intelligence agency worthy of the name genuinely suspects somebody of excessive naughtiness, they know full well that anything that is encrypted has to be *decrypted* at some point before anyone at either end can read it. This means the easiest method is to covertly install suitable software (or discrete hardware) on the relevant computers involved. (And yes, they *can* work out where those computers are: when encrypted messages are sent, the address on the outside of that virtual envelope cannot, by definition, be encrypted, because the Internet wouldn’t know where to send it.)
The only reason these agencies want encryption to be banned is because they are either lazy or under-resourced. If it’s the former, heads should roll. If it’s the latter, the solution is better funding. The third possibility is that those in charge are either pig-ignorant and / or staggeringly incompetent.
I know what I’d put my money on, if I had any left.
Thick as pig-shit and staggeringly incompetent?
Got it in one.