Edward Snowden Leaks Could Help Paedophiles Escape Police, Says UK Government 510
An anonymous reader writes "Paedophiles may escape detection because highly-classified material about Britain's surveillance capabilities have been published by the Guardian newspaper, the UK government has claimed. A senior Whitehall official said data stolen by Edward Snowden, a former contractor to the US National Security Agency, could be exploited by child abusers and other cyber criminals. It could also put lives at risk by disclosing secrets to terrorists, insurgents and hostile foreign governments, he said."
And so it begins (Score:5, Interesting)
Give it a couple of weeks and Snowden will be labeled a pederast and it will play over and over in the news until it is true.
Yes, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, the publicizing of the NSA and GCHQ's surveillance capabilities COULD in theory help paedophiles avoid detection... but I suspect that most paedophiles are not so technically savvy that the details will be important to them. For the majority of them, just as for the majority of the general population, the message they will take away is that "Big Brother Is Watching You", and if they do not assume that from the very start, then they are very naive.
The other side of the coin would be an interesting one - perhaps a Freedom Of Information request to GCHQ, to ask how many man-hours as a percentage of their total work is spent tracking and investigating paedophiles. I would wager a lot of money that, if they were to give an honest answer to that, it would be 0. GCHQ are not, and never will be, interested in tracking paedophiles.
Re:May they burn in hell. (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, it worked before. The British have this fabulous web-filters for content, which allow to control the delivered content. A clear censorship mechanism. They defended it with the child porn argument and the keep porn away from children argument. It worked. In Germany it did not, but they only used the child porn argument and were caught lying, about its effectiveness. and yes it was only a scheme to gain votes for the conservatives. However, Cameron that little anti-democrat tries to transform the UK in one of Orwell's fantasies to finally abolish any opposition to his classistic view of the world. Poor Britain. :-(
I read this on Techdirt: (Score:5, Interesting)
(Copied from a Techdirt comment):
I wonder if the CIA distributes pedo material the same way they get Swiss bankers to drink-drive?
Imagine you are a UK minister. Like most men you look at porn because you're biologically programmed to like pictures of woman doing stuff. Like most ministers you pretend porn is vial and evil, because that's how you get elected.
CIA wants to turn you into an apparatchik, so they do their 'redirect' attack, the one they use to MITM Google in one of the leaks. CIA redirects them to a kiddy porn server in Orlando, now the logs of both GCHQ and NSA show them visiting a kiddy diddling site.
CIA man visits minister and explains the shock and outrage at finding this, but assures minister that he's a good man and therefore the CIA won't tell.
Minister can't go to MI5 because Parker could be a CIA apparatchik (he is doing an attack on the free press FFS). Indeed he can't get help at all, because all it takes is ONE apparatchik among the people in the know and he is gone.
It may sound fanciful, but the mechanisms are already in place. Also read a few leaks. The plan to attack Greenwald & Wikileaks.
http://www.thetechherald.com/articles/Data-intelligence-firms-proposed-a-systematic-attack -against-WikiLeaks/12751/
The leverage they got over a Swiss Banker:
http://www.businessinsider.com/edward-snowden-describes-cia-tricks-2013-6
The weird way ministers are behaving.
And yet - AKA Slashdots Ohanian moment? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you can't smell the heavy miasma of bullshit wafting off this, you need a new fucking nose.
And yet, the demonize Snowden rhetoric made it pas Slashdot editors to make front page. How many times is that now even just in the last few days? [slashdot.org]
Wikileaks has shown us that Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian was attempting to abuse his position, sell out and leverage reddit users by working for Stratfor [startpage.com]. They turned him down apparently due to already having the area covered. Could we now be witnessing Slashdots Ohanian moment, now directed they peddle pathetic anti-Snowden properganda to the front page?
Re:The Surveillance State is now official (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually I think the public do get it, the problem is that the public's threshold for saying enough is enough is just that much further down the line than that of the typical Slashdot poster.
We saw it under Gordon Brown's government where the move towards a surveillance state simply went too far and it actually became an election issue. Labour lost the last election in part because for many people ID card databases, an ever expanding CCTV network, terror laws that were used by councils to spy on people who didn't pick up their dog's poo and to seize Icelandic government assets, attempts to get everyone on the DNA database indefinitely, the government's greenlighting of Phorm and such, internet monitoring programmes and the digital economy act were just too much. Brown's government also regularly used the "think of the children" argument and it did in fact wear thin with voters quite quickly.
Of course it didn't do us much good as the guys that followed still had their flaws, and whilst they cancelled the ID card program, dealt with excessive DNA retention of people not convicted of crimes, and put curbs on some of the anti-terror laws they've still clearly let GCHQ spy on everyone and anyone, and although to be fair they seem to have delayed some of the Digital Economy Act ideas such as 3 strikes almost indefinitely at this point they still haven't scrapped it altogether.
But fundamentally I think it showed that the public does have it's limits in terms of not wanting a police state, those limits just tend towards a lot less freedom and a lot more surveillance than most of us here would like though the public in general would still not accept that type of encroachment on freedom and rights that Gordon Brown and friends wanted. Unfortunately though that's the cost of democracy, it means we don't get our way as a minority, even if we genuinely believe that what we believe makes more sense. Freedoms and rights weren't the most important election issue, it still fell behind the way more important economy arguments, but it was definitely enough of an issue to be brought up in debates, policy, and papers a fair bit - it made it onto the radar precisely because people had had enough.
This is why personally I don't really fear an out and out police state here in the UK - the general public wouldn't tolerate it, even with the paedo argument getting put forward, though I do fear things being a little more towards that direction than I'm personally comfortable with - we're already at that point.
I guess I can do without pointing out (Score:5, Interesting)
how much this reeks of the average smokescreen "how can we possibly paint him as evil since, well, he is not evil for those that we try to influence". Pretty much anyone here has read the same kind of spiel a billion times, and how $technology or $whatever_big_business_hates helps terrorists and pedophiles, from filesharing to 3D printing to whatever else the powers that are don't like because it hurts their profits and/or reduces their power.
The problem is that we're preaching the choir here. It's patently pointless to point it out here. Everyone here knows that it's the usual "paint the good as bad" spiel. Problem is that a lot of the people out there actually believe this bull. They didn't learn that it's bull back when they tried to pull the stunt with some technology that we know and hence know that it's not "evil", and that the claims of its potential use to "bad guys" is skewed, at best, and more likely simply a bunch of baloney.
Because they don't know the technology.
They could not debunk it back then, and to them it was either believing politicians or us. And, well, why believe the geeks? We just wanted to keep our free songs and movies, even if it means that pedos sneak up on every kid and terrorists flood our cities, right?
I just hope that the people wake up before it's too late.