I do hope so. The UK is among the most monitored nations on the planet and there are still terrorist incidents. The terrorists and the paedo's are just the tip of the iceberg. They are worried that the rest of us might not put up with this crap for much longer. A case in point being the excessive police investigations into green activists, over the construction of a power station. We have lost the right to protest, unless the police give us permission.

That Germany, has lived through two surveillance societies in the last century, they are very sensitive about such things.

What happened to the 'good old days', where we knew there were terrorists and just got on with living our lives?

MI5 feared GCHQ went 'too far' over phone and internet monitoring





http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/2 ... nt-too-far

All that data and it didn't stop the two loons who killed Drummer Rigby, the marathon bombing, bomb and gun attacks in my own country...

Yeah. This bit isn't actually true. If either the source or destination IP is international, then it'll go through seafloor fibre (or possibly up via sat link, depends on the load at the time). If the source and destination are both domestic, do you really think any ISP is going to pay to send those packets down expensive trans-national cables only to see them come straight back again? The fact is the majority of UK net traffic goes down those wires because the majority of traffic goes to Google (inc. youtube), Apple, Microsoft and Netflix, all of whome operate outside the UK. But the idea the people running transatlantic fibres don't understand basic network routing is bordering on silly.

All that proves is that it is not 100% effective, it does not prove that it is ineffective.

Fair point, but (playing devil's advocate for a mo) you could suggest that, if the price is the loss of privacy this represents, then it better had be pretty near 100% effective.

This, and the quoting was a bit selective

There has't been a terrorist attack in the UK since 7/7, the killing of Lee Rigby was an attack on one person, motivated by Islam in the mind of a delusional social outcast, terrorism here is a euphemism for religious attack. As the "war on terror" is a euphemism for "the war on militant Islam".

So if I was being selective, you certainly were being selective by not quoting those attacks that the government intelligence agencies have foiled.

When we leave the house our neighbours watch us, they look at our behaviour and judge us for acting anti-socially. Is that an invasion of our privacy? What if they were cameras. Ah now suddenly that's different.

How exactly? A proxy for neighbours' eyes, with a record function.

If a policeman is patrolling in a park, looking for signs of any illegal activity. He sees innocent people who aren't aware they are being watched, and he ignores them. It is OK if they ignore innocent behaviour. So monitoring in itself is not necessarily bad, it is not inherently corrupt. And to be effective, to actually catch criminals, it has to be somewhat secretive, hence why you can always tell if the local police have "sent the noobs out" because they will go to a disturbance with their sirens on, and they won't catch anyone.

I don't actually give a [LIFTED], and I don't subscribe to that guilt-trip, usually accompanied by a Lincoln or Orwell quote, that says something along the lines of "ooh it's OK until they come knocking for you". As if I'm being purely selfish and ignorant, when really I'm adopting a "stand back and monitor the situation and watch out for lines being crossed" attitude.

And by crossed lines, I mean the criteria for criminal behaviour, not the monitoring tactics themselves, but the reaction to detecting a "crime". If I agree it's a crime, then *shrug* don't really care how it was seen, how it was detected.

I was only joking with the selectiveness bit, I tried to make that clear with the Smilies.

My perspective is most of us here know how quickly technology advances - you're talking about an ability to electronically monitor billions of people, eventually, by those who are traditionally money, knowledge and power mad. The sort of people who used my country, part of the United Kingdom, as a training and killing ground against innocents and terrorists alike.

Snowden seemed to have a very cushy life (intelligent, extremely well paid job, stripper girlfriend) and seems far from naive, yet at the age of 29 he risks everything. That's either the world's most deranged ego, or someone who couldn't live with the knowledge of what was coming. That's my guess.

We only have one other case that went to court. So we have to take their word that there were other cases. In the US the majority of cases were instigated by the FBI as agent provocateurs. The terrorists will have changed tactics and GCHQ are impotent against such tactics.

This is an example of when they cross the line:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/2 ... ice-smears

Disgusting.

I'll counter that with an American President:

And why the police will find it very hard to get rid of that racist smear.

Germany seeks UK surveillance assurances

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23048259

Mine does, at least twice. My main email address was originally in San diego but is now in Manilla. That is a forwarding account and that is forwarded to my mac.com account which runs through the NSA prism pickup.