It is another blunderbuss approach. Shortly after 9/11 some jumped up baggage check-in guy insisted that my 12 year old daughter could not hand carry her small bag with floppy dog and floppy bunny (!) and had to be checked. The point being that measure were not targeted. We were assumed to be a white, middle class suicide family until proven otherwise. Security is a multi billion dollar industry which dances to its own tune.
a man walks in to a police station and says, hi my name is bob and i would like to report some suspicious behavior. policeman, what kind of suspicious behavior? bob, he is a Muslim and always got mates round.and carry's a dogy looking black case. policeman, really? anything else? bob, yes he is a doctor, really friendly, loves his garden and is always happy to talk about Celtic humping Saint Mirron. policeman, good work he is obviously a threat and will be taken care off, now fuck off you racist pig and get a life.before we charge you for wasting police time.
But if you wanted to get something on to a plane, you would put it in the least suspicious place possible. I wouldn't give my knife-teddy to a Dark skinned, beard toting, turban wearing, Taliban sympathiser. I'd give it to the middle-class, white, recent Muslim convert's innocent looking daughter who no one would think twice of stopping. They stop everyone because that's how effective security works. As soon as you identify someone not worth checking, you have identified a way to beat the security.
Bang on. The taliban have used people with mental disabilities to wander into markets wearing jackets full of explosives, and detonated them remotely. There is absolutely nothing they wont stop at, so the harmless floppy bunny is of course a perfect concealment for either drugs or explosives. Never underestimate how low people will stoop. Not looking like a terrorist is the best option, if no one under 16 was ever searched or had their stuff x rayed, you might s well abandon all security. Two women recently prostituted their one year old children to a pedophile for sex (Ian Watkins), so getting a kid to unknowingly carry a knifey bunny is definitely not out of the realms of possibility. Al Qaeda in Iraq uses disabled women in Baghdad bombings - The Long War Journal
Sigh. Spying on every citizen is not the same as paying taxes. Its not to prevent terrorism either. Because it doesn't. Concerted and concentrated intelligence does the best job. Its for control, the same reason some think we are at war with terrorism, the perpetuation of 24/7 news and constant bombardment of what is allegedly going on. Who is terrorism?! Last time i looked, there wasn't a country named Terrorism... Govt 's and their agencies are corrupt and if you think for a second at some point it wont affect you directly, you're deluded
The difference being I take an active decision to fly knowing the level of security involved and can make a choice about whether I go by air and all the consequential invasion of my personal privacy or whether I use a different method of travel. Having widespread if not universal inspection of all of our electronic communications offers us no such choice. This is the sort of thing that can and does happen
I think a terrorist would need to be pretty determined to blow a fully laden ferry out of the water with some homemade liquid explosive
But your entire car could be a bomb. Ditto the Channel Tunnel. I am expecting some beardy plot on that in the future.
So what's the problem here then , this couple weren't beaten up dragged off never to be seen again. Key words brought up this raid and search , due to the Boston bomber using A pressure cooker , so what , that was another thing for the security related searches to look for , these people were just unlucky pressure cooker and backpack coincided with what was used to commit the bombing . Buy each one separately or pay cash and maybe nobody would have picked up on it. Individuals will always get flagged up innocently , if you want security this is an acceptable inconvenience inmho.
You are right that concentrated intelligence efforts are the best way to prevent to prevent terrorist acts being carried out, but how do you think that the first lead, that ends up with a concentrated operation, should be found? That's what the data scouring is for. I think it is you that is deluded to think that the majority of these people who wish to carry out atrocities can be discovered in any other way. (Respectfully, of course bradders, I mean no real offence) The other team play smart, they don't follow the law either and you be handicapping yourself if you insisted that you stuck to the rules any way. It is only by having access through backdoors with data companies knowledge that they will always be able to win over the smart bad people. It's the only thing they will never be able to have. Maybe my own exposure to some things colours my opinion but Im astounded that people can't see this for what it really is. No one wants to control you or fuck you over. It's to catch people planning on doing bad shit. And I do think it affects me every day, as I'm walking around wearing a military backpack and I'm not getting my head cut off in the street. Imagine how much worse things could have been on the streets of Britain if there wasn't a surveillance system in place.
Security is much like meat. People love to see meat on their plate, they just don't like to think about how it got there. You can just as easily remove yourself from surveillance - sell your computer and your mobile phone and buy everything in cash. Terrorists don't really have this option as they need integrated communication amongst large groups of people. As I mentioned earlier what truly amazes me is that people thought emails phone calls and the Internet were private to begin with. Since the invention of the telephone there has been phone tapping, and I'm sure no one has missed the phone hacking scandal. No one ever pretended the Internet was secure.
Seems to me that the primary use of the surveillance system is that of issuing fixed penalties for 'compliance' offences - that may not have been the original intention? but whilst they are used so, such systems will continue to be held in contempt...
The problem with finding acceptance from surveillance seems to be that you can't see it working, you can only see other negative consequences such as a parking fine or the noise the newspapers make about civil freedoms etc. However, if you were randomly assaulted in town I think you'd be pretty pleased if it was caught on tape. (As long as you didn't give your attacker the good news.) You'd be pretty pleased that the idiot who knocked you off your bike posted something about it on twitter and you could find their email history to prove their guilt in court. You'd be grateful if the people who hacked your bank's network and stole all your personal details and all your money used the Tor Network to sell the details but unencrypted emails to advertise. Then you'd be dead chuffed that the authorities could read what ever they wanted. If, as a random example, some people hijacked a few planes and used them to kill several thousand people in one go, and caused billions of pounds of damage in a few seconds, there would be a public outcry, demanding to know why the authorities didn't do something. Maybe, if the scale of system that is now in place was in place at that time it could have been prevented. This kind of thing isn't designed to catch one baddie every five minutes, its designed to catch one really seriously messed up baddie once a decade. In the mean time, it gets you a parking fine.
It's unbelievably easy to avoid these by not committing the offence. While I don't pretend for a moment it's never going to happen to me, I've managed 18 years of cars and bikes without so much as a parking ticket, so it's quite possible. It nay seem petty but the difficulties presented to emergency vehicles by illegally parked cars is immense. Of course some of it is revenue generation, but you can avoid that if you try - free parking is available in most towns, you just gave to look for it. I did my Christmas shopping on sat 20th and gad no trouble at all parking legally for free in the city centre. Places like Oxford are a nightmare for parking, so you need to consider that sort if thing when choosing to live there. I hated the poor and expensive parking in Bedford, along with its limited employment, high crime and limited shopping. Rather than bitching about it I moved.
A young lad I used to work with was badly beaten up outside a nightclub, the whole incident was watched/recorded on CCTV at the Police station - which is about 100metres from the club. Ten minutes or so after the beating when the Police turned up they commented that they were expecting to be picking up a body rather than a live person after having watched the incident on CCTV. So whilst there was film evidence of the offence (there were witnesses anyway), the offence was neither prevented or stopped so it does make you wonder, given that an officer could have got there in less than a minute, what is the point?
Police stations aren't filled with coppers with their feet up drinking tea. In rougher areas is an incredibly demanding job, sometimes there really isn't anyone available. No consolation at all to the victim, but that is unfortunately the world we live in. Of course, the cops time is routinely wasted with gobby teenage tw@&s thinking they are the mutts nuts and causing grief. Perhaps if they had been better disciplined as kids they would be better adults leaving the police to tackle more serious crimes. Of course, you can't discipline a child any more, you have to ask them if they wuddunt mind being lovely wuvley wittle people, and if they turn into indisciplined thugs, well that's just everyone else's fault. The police are not the enemy, and neither is security.
