Now I am one for a good debate, I enjoy it - much as a duellist would take his preferred weapon and out think and out-smart his opponent.
Yet I see in the UK that this isn’t the case any more - to coerce the public into a way of thinking politicians are using the death of people to make you understand their flawed argument.
The linked piece in one of these times. But, as always, John Reid, the author of the piece, doesn’t quite get it.
The tragic death of Sana Ali was a murder, and John Reid used it to promote why the UK government needs to spy on all those who use the internet, email, use texts on mobile phone, log all phone calls etc.
Now, before I go on:-
Mobile text messaging - UK:
217 million messages per day, and more than 6.5 billion texts per month (that’s 78 billion a year!), says the report by the Mobile Data Association.
E-mail:
A new study details how spammers – the bane of our email inboxes – still make pots of money, despite only receiving a response to one in every 12,500,000 emails they spam out.
That’s 12.5 million spam mails per day alone. Add to that the literal millions of genuine email per day some estimates are double the amount of spam - and more. That is in the region of 40 million per day.
The number of phone calls is mind-boggling. So as we look over that very unscientific set of numbers, because there will be someone who knows the exact(ish) amounts - we have to go back to what John Reid, and indeed, what Smith is saying now.
They want this surveillance to stop crime - how are they going to do that if all this messaging, calling, emailling, is not under constant scrutiny. How is it possible even with super-computers checking so many terybytes of information being used per day/week/month or year?
It simply cannot.
Yes, I agree if you have one, two, three or maybe more computers under surveillance by a dedicated team you can catch out the criminals or terrorists. And there are very few people who would disagree with that taking place, hell - people would actively encourage that.
But just summarily snooping on millions of computers - “Just in case” is not just odd, but outright stupidity and not only draconian, it is tantamount to a police state. This is why so many are against this - it means that the government is keeping tabs on what perfectly innocent people are doing rather than doing what they are supposed to do.
Sana was murdered - and her killer was caught, as always with murder, after the fact when police officers were doing their job.
The conviction was easier because of the evidence, true - but if the police can do that now, why the hell are people like John Rein and Jacqui Smith trying to scare the rest of society into believing that they are going to stop crimes being committed by holding all this information that they have to sift through - after the crime is done?
Detective work should be employed, no?
What this means, with Reid having his say is “we are watching” so don’t do anything bad!
That just doesn’t cut it with your everyday organised criminal nor committed terrorist! They don’t care what you are storing because they know that you won’t be looking until something has happened. That much is as plain as the nose on your face.
None - NONE of this would have stopped Sana being killed - as tragic as her death was her murderer was caught AFTER she and her unborn child were dead!
Using her and her unborn child’s murder in such a way is not quite inhuman - but, to me, it is a heartless act.
John Reid on the “super-database” to track email and internet use | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.
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Posted in Big Brother Britain, Blah!, Civil Liberties, Comment, Democracy, Media, Modern Liberty, New Labour, Personal Opinion, Personal philosophy, Politics, Technology
