The illegal we do immediately.

jejv
jejv Posts: 566
edited June 2013 in Commuting chat
The unconstitutional takes a little longer.

How I'm missin' yer

Anyway.

Anyone else ROFL at David Blunkett complaining about the NSA bypassing UK law ?

He's a busy man. He must have decided to stick his nose in HOP between appointments.

OTOH, perhaps he thought it in his commercial interests - he does have a fiduciary duty to himself, after all - to show he can chuck a small spanner in the works.

Comments

  • merkin
    merkin Posts: 452
    jejv wrote:
    The unconstitutional takes a little longer.

    How I'm missin' yer

    Anyway.

    Anyone else ROFL at David Blunkett complaining about the NSA bypassing UK law ?


    He's a busy man. He must have decided to stick his nose in HOP between appointments.

    OTOH, perhaps he thought it in his commercial interests - he does have a fiduciary duty to himself, after all - to show he can chuck a small spanner in the works.
    IDKWYAS



    I don't know what you are saying
  • rick_chasey
    rick_chasey Posts: 75,661
    In fairness to Blunket, he's got first hand experience with this.

    What he's suggesting is that there is a way to share information between agencies that strictly speaking doesn't break the law or protocol but shares the sensitive information anyway. Which, if it is true, means Hague's robust defence was better crafted than we first thought.

    I believe he implied this in a tweet he put out too, which was then retweeted by a former NSA (or GCHQ I can't remember).

    If anyone is reading this who actually knows stuff, I gleaned this all from the guardian live blog.
    _
  • daviesee
    daviesee Posts: 6,386
    I am only surprised at people's surprise. :o
    None of the above should be taken seriously, and certainly not personally.
  • rjsterry
    rjsterry Posts: 29,336
    Quite a good analysis of Hague's statement here

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/10/william-hague-spying-scandal-nsa-statement

    Also interesting to see how the implication of Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc., and their subsequent denials will pan out.
    1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
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    Part of the anti-growth coalition
  • jejv
    jejv Posts: 566
    I was just amused to hear of Mr Blunkett's conversion to the cause of civil liberties.
    Does this mean he now thinks expressively nasty policies, and the state sticking it's nose in everywhere are a bad idea ?!?
    Has he had a Damascene moment ?
    Ohhh I see. He's in oposition now. Silly me.

    Maybe the NSA's budget would be better spent:
    - Reducing traffic-related death rates in the USA to the level of - say - Germany (Let's not be too ambitious).
    - Reducing firearm-related death rates to the level of Switzerland
    - Persuading US citizens to stop smoking
    - ...
  • jejv
    jejv Posts: 566
    More about PRISM here:
    http://unhandled.com/2013/06/07/a-taxon ... ibilities/
    And here:
    http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2013/06/r ... laims.html

    - The possibilities for corrupt or bogus use of mass data are endless. I occasionally listen to Hitler speeches on Youtube, so I'm obviously a fascist. I buy Eisenstein DVDs, and listen to Stalin, so I'm a communist. All that. Which plays well in a common law system that repudiates rational evaluation of evidence, prefering mere rhetoric.
    - But who needs evidence, if yer a wog, and yer look at someone in a funny way ? Habeas Corpus shouldn't be for wogs.
    - How long before the next media scandal based on corrupt access to trawled data.
  • rick_chasey
    rick_chasey Posts: 75,661
    jejv wrote:
    I was just amused to hear of Mr Blunkett's conversion to the cause of civil liberties.
    Does this mean he now thinks expressively nasty policies, and the state sticking it's nose in everywhere are a bad idea ?!?
    Has he had a Damascene moment ?
    Ohhh I see. He's in oposition now. Silly me.

    - ...

    Don't think he's said this much has he?
    _
  • rick_chasey
    rick_chasey Posts: 75,661
    The issue is that if you store it en mass, then there is always the chance someone / some people can retrospectively use that information for stuff that isn't anti-terrorism.

    I mean, if they need to monitor stuff for anti-terrorism and they can prove to relevant people that it genuinely works, fine. It's the storing of the information indefinitely which is the problem.
    _
  • jejv
    jejv Posts: 566
    Another Bayes link
    Rick Chasey wrote:
    The issue is that if you store it en mass, then there is always the chance someone / some people can retrospectively use that information for stuff that isn't anti-terrorism.

    I mean, if they need to monitor stuff for anti-terrorism and they can prove to relevant people that it genuinely works, fine. It's the storing of the information indefinitely which is the problem.
    The sheer volume is a problem.

    Some politician/exec says "Oi! Go find all these turrsts ! Now!"
    So some analyst in fear of their job goes and does some data mining. And keeps on going until the requisite number of turrsts turn up. Then they all go on a no-fly list.

    A Psychology academic who's a bit low on citations might try the same thing - keep trying different hypotheses on the dataset until p < 0.05, then write a paper. Some grad students might find out that the paper isn't reproducible, but their paper won't get published. Kindof a big problem in Psychology.

    There is a statistical point in "Probable cause".

    In the US, the police can have a look at the evidence on this turrst, say "it's a bit shonky", and try a plea-bargain: You grass up the big turrst cheeses, or you're going down for a long time. Of course they don't know any, so they have to make up these big cheeses, or even start a turrst plot to create them.

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