Apple and NSA

That intelligence has come from sources other than personal, private communications in the past so why is that not good enough now?

You are missing the point that what both the NSA and GCHQ are doing right now is illegal as well as immoral.

As has been pointed out previously, if you want to make it legal then put it through Parliament.

 

So its not illegal or immoral to collect information on someone if it doesn't come from the internet then? I'm not missing that point, far from it, if you read my previous post i stated that i have a right to privacy that i want protected. My point is that to arrive at just cause you need a level of information, that information could be construed as private and therefore illegal and/or immoral to collect whether its gathered from the internet or not. So when is it ok to gather that information?

 

I said before no, i have a right to privacy that i want protected. But if the intelegence agencies cannot gather intelegence we might as well disband MI5, MI6, GCHQ and the police. Surely there must be a point where it is acceptable to gather information to protect the public? Where is that level? There are a lot of people on here screaming leave me alone but nobody suggesting an acceptable solution...

 

Are you suggesting an entirely reactive system? Because to suspect a crime is about to be commited you need intelegence to come to that conclusion, how to you collect that personal information?

 

I can see where atilla is coming from. MI5 or whoever need to move with the times, long gone are terrorists using landlines and pigeon to communicate. Some level of intervention is needed, at some point, in order to create suspicion to go to a judge to obtain said warrant.

But...they must have intelligence aplenty, and use other means such as undercover, paying off informant or whatever, which they then present to gain warrant and tap what they like.

My biggest worry is what is legal today may be illegal tomorrow, and who knows what will happen with laws in the past being used retrospectively. Plus tbh I like my privacy. I dont want everyone to know what I'm doing: mu boss, my wife, my friends and certainly not an agency adopting a shoot first ask second mentality to guilt (it disgusts me there are people still held without trial in far away lands by USA yet we whinge when China do it?!). Have i got something to hide? Not that i know.

 

That's what this debate comes down to: targeted intelligence gathering on risky people, vs wholesale intelligence gathering on everyone. Because if you accept the latter, then you will (a) sooner or later be found guilty of something, however trivial it may be and (b) the power will be abused by jobsworths who have nothing better to do. We live in an age of conformity, to be non-conformist is increasingly unacceptable.

What hasn't yet been discussed on this thread yet is that much of the surveillance work is contracted out to private companies, who work for all sorts of different governments. So when your mail is being checked, it might not be by GCHQ and a government dept over whom you might think you have a tenuous democratic control, but by some American firm who is also doing business with regimes throughout the world you might feel less cosy with.

Whilst Tesco and people have to respect certain laws with regards to the use of your data, spy agencies know no such laws or flout them. Your data, once gathered, can be sold to anyone. Well, they won't be interested in little old you. No, they probably won't. But a situation might arise where they will be. People are drawing spurious distinctions between breaking into your house to go through all your papers and photo albums and just hacking into your computer to go through the virtual files of the same info. Why are you so unhappy with one, but totally OK with the other? It baffles me.

Say you want to go on holiday to Disneyland in Florida with your kids. You apply online for a visa, only to find it is mysteriously refused. Perhaps it was those emails you sent to your brother criticising American intervention in Iraq. Who knows? But we are moving in a direction when such scenarios are likely to be commonplace.

 

I think this debate comes down to this:

How much of your freedom are you willing to give up so that other members of society may have a little more safety?

Society is based on working together, on sacrificing a little bit for the greater good. We all skim a little money off of our wages to pay taxes. I like having refuse collection, police, a fire service, schools, hospitals and other public ally funded amenities and services. I'm happy to pay a 1/5 of my wages each month to have that, even though that 1/5 would make a big difference to my own day to day life.

There is a clear distinction between some machine scanning your emails for key words and some people coming round and rummaging through your drawers. It's entirely non-invasive, a human only gets involved if your up to something suspicious and you probably don't have anything interesting to say any way.

The idea of someone openly saying they would rather that some other human beings would die rather than submit to a little surveillance astounds me as completely inhuman and selfish.

To argue for a principle for the sake of the principle alone is to completely ignore the existence of real life, that in reality people can do exactly what they like. Laws are just words written on paper that we all agree to follow. That doesn't mean we have to follow them in the same way we must obey the laws of physics.

 

Im glad someone else picked up on that, i thought id somehow misread it as i couldn't believe what i was reading - it seemed so far from reality it was surely written for shock value only?
I've pretty much pulled away from this thread, as some of the replies were verging on madness. When people suggest keyword and keyword pattern scanning ends up the 'them' putting things in your food and making you disappear in the middle of the night it's genuinely time to seek help.

 

But you can see the link between the two with the concept of accepting something which is a little bit bad for you (some loss of data freedom / a loss of part of ones income) in exchange for something which is very good for you (a lower terrorism threat / a hospital to go to when you are sick)

 

Its like you're saying they must use the evidence they find, but they can't look in the place they will find it? That criminals must have a chance of getting away with it and you only want the security services to have some kind of clue if they make a mistake, which then means we can go and look at the proof which we knew was there all along?

Crazy.

 

This has been going on since computers and computer communication first existed, so its quite obvious that it doesn't encroach on freedom at at. There is no secret at all that every keystroke you make on the Internet can be traced - its a useful and highly successful tool for tracing paedophile rings.

People are getting worried about loosing a privacy they never actually had anywhere but inside their heads.

The thing that really amazes me is that people thought they had privacy on the Internet at all!

 

Everyone who wants to take a flight has to have a body scan and get their stuff X-rayed.

Do you kick up a fuss about the infringement on your personal freedom to have what you like in your pockets when traveling on a plane because you're not a bad guy and so they shouldn't search you?

There is an obvious air travel threat, so everyone gets checked because you don't know which person is the baddie.

In my eyes it it's exactly the same concept,