Sunday 1 April 2012

How long do you give me?



Breaking news:  G.C.H.Q. - the Cheltenham based UK spy monitoring headquarters - is drawing up plans to legally allow it to monitor the emails, web traffic, text messages and social media accounts of EVERY man, woman and child here in the U.K.

Should you over there in the U.S. be concerned about this?  No, not really.  G.C.H.Q. have been up the arse of the CIA for about 20 years now, so nothing has changed as far as you are concerned.  It's part of the special fucking relationship.


Should we here in the UK be worried about it?  No, not really.  G.C.H.Q. has been doing just that for the last 20 years anyway, so making it legal isn't going to make too much difference.

Should terrorists be worried about it?  No, not really.  G.C.H.Q. has - as said above - been monitoring all Trans-Atlantic calls since well before 9/11, and they are not very good at understanding what little intelligence they gain from the practice, so it will be a case of 'carry on as normal', I am afraid.

Should China be worried about this?  Maybe.  Since China has imposed severe limitations on web-traffic due to Google making all sorts of deals to be allowed to break into their market,  this might mean that the UK and the US have an edge over them when it comes to industrial espionage, and China will not like that one bit.  They may even impose embargoes, once we have come to rely on their shoddy goods over and above the EU equivalent.

Should I be worried about this?  I hope not.  I don't think I have anything to hide, but that will be decided by others, not me.

9 comments:

  1. I need to cut down on my swearing when I make those calls to 'home', now I'm blushing :)
    Figures.....
    ~Jo

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  2. I thought it was a ConDem job creation scheme. I mean - the vastness of what happens over the internet every day is mind-boggling and to monitor it all properly they'd need a workforce as big as the population of Wales. Have you got that all down Taffy?

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    1. They will have a workforce about twice the size of Wales, because every local council authority and police force will have the unfettered right to monitor all searches and phone calls. Since the police have had the right to 'intercept' mobile messages without accountability, how many times do you think this eavesdropping has resulted in a conviction, or thwarted a terrorist attack? You could count them on one hand I think.

      Of the 250,000 intercepts that have been admitted by the force last year, how many then?

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  3. Its pretty creepy how there is little collective outrage these days, just a worn resignation to threats of invasion of our privacy.
    Still at least the govmint is keeping us safe from terrorists. Feel so much beTter about that.
    The west Australian govmint recently introduced a dob in a bikie day, so can all ring in and dob on where bikies work, play and drive. Funny, the police already knew all that stuff but they are happy for us to be good citizens and help them out.

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    1. Sounds as though the same policies exist in Oz as well. What has been mooted as 'The Big Society' here, is just another way of saving a bit of money by getting everyone to spy on everyone else, cutting the workload of the authorities whose job it is to keep us all safe in our beds.

      Everyone justifies the nanny state by saying, "If it just saves one life, it is worth it" Bollocks.

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  4. From now on please read 'shoot' instead of 'buy', and 'copper' instead of 'coke', OK?

    So, I'm just popping over to Columbia to shoot some coppers. No, that doesn't seem to work, either.

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    1. Everyone is now screaming, "THE INTERNET IS OUT OF CONTROL!!!" I thought that was the whole point? Well it was about 30 years ago, when the internet was invented by the military, and built to survive a nuclear attack.

      In order to make as much money out of it as possible, the servers have been forced to tolerate a bit of organised crime, including child pornography, adult pornography, fraud, terrorism, etc. etc.

      For everyone else, the illegal activities are so blindingly obvious when carried out by criminals, that they are difficult to avoid. For the world police, they seem to be effectively invisible, so maybe we should help the poor bastards out by pointing them in the right direction every time we turn on our computers? I thought we were supposed to do that anyway?

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  5. Is this their solution to the problem of unemployment, do you think?

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