[Gllug] Police want new powers

Peter Grandi pg_gllug at gllug.for.sabi.co.UK
Fri Jul 22 17:15:34 UTC 2005


[ ... greater police powers on shutting down web sites and
making it a crime to refuse to provide encryption keys ... ]

steve> It already is a criminal offence, [ ... ]

However minimal, there are _some_ limits to the powers under the
RIP, so I suspect that the new powers sought are ''at whim'',
like the powers of extraditing people to the USA or Guantanamo.

Look at it this way perhaps: to contain terrorism effectively
the government would have to spend a lot more money, on more
people, on bigger computers for decryption, on inflitration; all
this could result in better collection and analysis of evidence,
without risk to civil liberties.

Or it can save all that money and make headlines by giving
nearly arbitrary powers to the security services, basically
powers to round up all the ''usual suspects'' and lock them
away, which saves all the money that would be needed to get
the evidence to convict the subset of the ''usual suspects''
actually planning or executing nasty things.

steve> Vote Labour, people.

And this is is the key -- the problem is that many people do,
or vote for the other hang/flog party.

If there were votes in upholding civil liberties, whether IT
related or not, you can be sure that especially New Labour,
very attentive to opinion polls, would uphold them.

But ''the country'' in effects is demanding, by a significant
majority, creeping fascism, ranging from ASBOs (as long as they
hit poor defenceless drunkards, not posh Oxbridge students with
parents who can afford top lawyers), and most voters are keen on
spending money on things like their health care, and not on the
civil liberties of annoying minorities.

  If the alternative were between spending money on shorter hip
  operation queues while locking up a number of innocent but
  nasty looking ''pakis'' along with the few guilty ones, or
  spending that money on finding good evidence to convict only
  the actual culprits -- what would Aunt Marge vote for?

In case anybody missed the trends of the past 20-30 years, as
the UK population is aging and having fewer kids, more and more
voters are relatively wealthy and old (and in general female, as
they live longer than men), and having achieved home ownership
and a nice retirement they see the world in terms of threats to
avoid and fear of losing what they have, rather than in terms of
opportunities to take and problems to solve, like younger people.

The future is gray...

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