Fancy a bit of terrorism? Well, here are a few sayings linked to terrorism: Bomb, Osma Bin Laden, al-Qaeda, nitrogen fertiliser, plutonium, dirty bomb, suicide bomber, dynamite and car bomb. That little line up of terrorist tools should, by now, be keeping a load of bods in half a dozen back offices tucked away in MI6, MI5 and other Government snooping departments in a frenzy of activity for an hour or so.
Why should anyone want to mention all these links to terrorism? The reason, my little spied on friends, is down to Government plans to snoop on literally every e-mail sent, every telephone call made and every Internet session on a database - there will be no secrets kept from 'Big Ears' Brown and his Orwellian army of Government curtain twitchers.
The Home Office is proposing the installation of "black boxes" in telephone exchanges to copy all telephone and web data that passes through them, which will then be stored on a massive central database - there will be no escape for anyone who uses the telephone or Internet, literally everything will be watched, recorded and monitored. We know there are already systems in place which flag up key words and phrases used in telephone conversations and e-mails, but this system will be something else.
Yet once again this massive prying project is being proposed as a means of preventing terrorist attacks, but it will also be very convenient for the Government to be able to build quite detailed files on each and every one of us - it will probably know more about our lives and activities than members of our own families. Hence the use of the words above.
If the Government wants to pry on our affairs in this way , and we know that such sensitive words as those above will set alarm bells ringing all over the place in their offices, lets give them something for our taxpayers money. If every e-mail, telephone call, new upload on web-sites and any other method of electronic communication has one or more of those words in them, or other phrases used in terrorist acts, then the people would have the opportunity to strike back and hit this snoopers charter where it hurts, their systems would be massively overloaded and would most probably crash. If this was done by literally everyone on a daily basis they would never be able to cope - we could swamp them. It's time for a little urban terrorism.
2 comments:
Dear Derek. I've been meaning to get back to you on other issues but I think that can wait for now as I was highly amused at this article.
I'm sure I could take great pleasure at pointing out your technical ignorance but I'll try to enlighten you as you clearly don't quite understand all this stuff in the hope that you might either do research before writing ill informed rubbish or at least refrain from writing on subjects of which you clearly know nothing.
Here's how it works and I'm sorry if this doesn't quite fit into your paranoid evil big state delusion but what this scheme attempts to achieve is already in place.
Yes, shock horror I know. Every phone call you make is already logged, your phone company has to do this. Equally all of the sites you choose to visit (unless you're technically clever enough) are also washing around in your ISP's server logs.
Shockingly those evil enforces of state terrorism, or the police as they're often referred to have the right to access this information (for a small administration charge from said ISP).
This comes in very handy when needing to track down paedophiles, terrorists and other assorted naughties.
What these records contain is simply the log of you visited this site, you sent an e-mail to this e-mail address (e-mail is a bit more complex but we won't go there now) or you made a phone call to this number.
What it does not contain is the content of said communication and nor does this stupid database thought up by someone in the Home Office do this either.
So I'm sorry if your attempt to place keywords in your post leads you to the impression you're actually doing something practical to combat this but you're not. All you're doing is cocking up your search engine rankings.
In addition to this, your recommendation that people should try to overload the system is false because we are not dealing with large amounts of data.
The logged element comprising a tiny amount of data, couple of Kb at most and even taking into account the large number of communications that take place every day in the UK, it would not be that hard to scale a system up to handle the load. ISP's and telecommunications companies already do this and they have to carry the actual content traffic as well.
We will agree I'm sure on one thing and that such a system shouldn't be implemented. Not because I have any particular civil liberties concerns because I actually understand how this all works but that there is very little actual benefit to be gained at what is a considerable cost.
Don't quote me on this figure but for some reason £190Million comes to mind as to the total cost last year of law enforcement agencies paying ISP's and telecommunications companies to gain records.
This will probably rise in the future as intelligence based investigations become more important in an increasingly digital world but even on the basis of these current costs, against the implementation cost of such a database system it is simply more cost effective to stick with the way things are at present.
The Penguin strikes again. So, now we all know, as a Labour Party supporter his civil liberties are not of importance to him.
It's all very well taking sides with those who care little for our liberties, but when they turn on you and you find you have no liberties you will be squawking a different tune then. The Communist revolutionaries turned on their own as did the French revolutionaries - you have to be careful who you play with in case your playing with fire.
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