David Cameron: TV crime dramas prove we need warrantless electronic surveillance

http://boingboing.net/2014/01/30/david-cameron-tv-crime-dramas.html

by gb • 12 years ago

19 27 12 years ago

bdfh42• 12 years ago

I don't know. His parents spent all that money to send him to a public school (that's private for most of the world) and then a top university. And it turns out he gets all his ideas from newspapers and TV drama.

Ygg22• 12 years ago

Wat.

blinks Wat.

This must be stupidest thing I've ever read in my entire life. It's like saying that we should all affix a gun to our hand because it works so well in FPS.

Or that hiding in a corner makes you recover from cancer. I don't care if he didn't say it really.

I blame either him for saying or the journalist for writing so illogical.

gb• 12 years ago

The exact quote from the linked BBC article is:

"In the most serious crimes [such as] child abduction communications data... is absolutely vital. I love watching, as I probably should stop telling people, crime dramas on the television. There's hardly a crime drama where a crime is solved without using the data of a mobile communications device."

Ygg22• 12 years ago

Ok, then the writter is just a moron.

It's a weak position, but he is using an analogy, so that makes (slightly) more sense.

I wonder how much of such data can be used in a police investigation? I'm actually Ok that they use it to prevent a crime, but charging you for it, if they don't have any legal evidence is also fine by me.

KiwiCoder• 12 years ago

From the BBC article referenced by boingboing - "He said TV crime dramas illustrated the value of monitoring mobile data."

From the boingboing article - "David Cameron: TV crime dramas prove we need mass warrantless electronic surveillance"

Squarel• 12 years ago

I am not sure that makes it any better.

Crime dramas illustrate many things, not all of them related to reality.

collyw• 12 years ago

Yes, all passwords can be cracked by using a unix terminal and typing fast enough.

DateK• 12 years ago

The April Jokes season is starting early this year.

fit2rule4• 12 years ago

This is so typical of the British attitude - its on TV, so it must be true, or have weight, or .. something.

I cannot fathom how an entire nation of people can allow themselves to be duped so well, by so few. The entire 'keeping people safe' position is a button that gets pushed and pushed - do the English really fear for their lives so much that they are willing to give up so much freedom, and to allow a powerful elite to rule them? The answer, centuries old: YES.

It is my belief that the English zeitgeist is so riddled with guilt over what IT did to its colonies and foreign possessions, that it is currently in the death throws of a society crippled by its own crimes against humanity. This notion of the elite nature of the British Empire serves no purpose other than to polarize the people of that tiny nation against all others .. and this is terribly shocking.

The British people will never be truly safe for as long as they continue to deny their own empires criminal behaviour. What England did to Ireland; what it did to its colonies; what it continues to do in foreign lands, daily - this is the true source of danger for the English people. No amount of pontificating/Mind Control being force-fed on the British public will ever address the dire straits in which England has forcefully left millions of people, not subjects of their empire but nevertheless victims, all over the world.

lewispollard3• 12 years ago

I cannot fathom how an entire nation of people can allow themselves to be duped so well, by so few.

The same reason as in every western democracy, including the US: massive marketing budgets & the media.

It is my belief that the English zeitgeist is so riddled with guilt over what IT did to its colonies and foreign possessions, that it is currently in the death throws of a society crippled by its own crimes against humanity.

What absolute nonsense. So many countries have committed atrocities on a similar level, and many more recently than the British empire. Should the Norwegians be crippled by guilt for the actions of the vikings? Should the Americans be crippled by guilt for crimes against the native people? Should the Japanese and Germans be crippled by guilt for atrocities committed in WW2? People don't live in the past.

fit2rule4• 12 years ago

Nobody should be crippled by guilt - but todays generations ought to damned well be held responsible for the wealth they enjoy as a result of the slaves their parents owned. It wasn't that long ago, and we still have people in modern society who are responsible for atrocities, yet are nevertheless getting away with it - because, as you say, 'people dont live in the past' ..

coldtea• 12 years ago

What absolute nonsense. So many countries have committed atrocities on a similar level, and many more recently than the British empire. Should the Norwegians be crippled by guilt for the actions of the vikings? Should the Americans be crippled by guilt for crimes against the native people? Should the Japanese and Germans be crippled by guilt for atrocities committed in WW2? People don't live in the past.

Yes, they should be crippled by guilt. Guilt is good -- it prevents you doing the same bad things again and gives you a perspective of what you did.

People might not live in the past, but countries carry their past with them.

The fact that the actual people that started the Vietnam war have died, doesn't mean that the country and the organisations that they worked in died with them. Those should carry the guilt forward. (Of course, instead they usually carry forward the same long term strategic planning that led to their previous attrocities).

What I mean is, countries are not discreet: they are continuous. A country has a history like a person has. Its history doesn't die and start from zero with each generation.

That's even an accepted norm of international relation even when the change inside a country is from a state to another (e.g the US after independence) etc. It's called "succession of state")

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Succession_of_states

Now, of course the truth is that they are not crippled by guilt at all -- they never stopped doing crimes on humanity and on their own citizens ever. Look what they are doing to the native americans in Dakota still. Look at Zimmerman.

gazrogers• 12 years ago

1) British!=English.

2) David Cameron is in no way representative of the British or the English.

Please stop painting us all with the same brush.

fit2rule4• 12 years ago

David Cameron is in no way representative of the British or the English.

Right, because you don't have a representative government. At all.

cs02rm0• 12 years ago

I'm not buying whatever you're selling.

Most English people today don't know anything about what's supposedly been done to Ireland in their name. Neither are they duped by the rhetoric, but democracy is sufficiently weak that they don't have a voice.

I don't think most people around the world have an issue with colonial Britain either.

fit2rule4• 12 years ago

I don't think most people around the world have an issue with colonial Britain either.

Maybe you haven't been paying attention, but many outside the western world consider the UK to be one of the chief evil influences in the world.

nly• 12 years ago

It's not fear, it's ignorance. Most people here have no interest in this topic. Snowden? Who's that? A lot of Brits still rely on newspapers and the evening news for their primary source of news, if they follow it at all. This stuff typically doesn't reach paper outside of the Guardian unless the Daily Mail are in a shit-stirring mood. Most of the coverage of Snowden for instance has focused on the politics and drama, relationships between Germany, us and the US etc, not what he has unveiled.

Once you start stepping on our rights we stand up like the best of them though. See recent stories about a guy who got told by his bank that he couldn't withdraw his money unless he told them what he wanted it for. That made dinner table conversation amongst my family. Net neutrality, data protection and privacy in the digital age is all too abstract though.

That said, it's pathetic that there are regular arrests here for people being mean to one another on Twitter (death threats aside). There's a large celebrity base calling for more of this, and it relies on the polices ability to access ISP records quickly for very little.

DanBC2• 12 years ago

You spun all of that out of a misquote?

mavus• 12 years ago

The actual BBC article linked on boingboing is less editorialised and contains the actual quote: "In the most serious crimes [such as] child abduction communications data... is absolutely vital. I love watching, as I probably should stop telling people, crime dramas on the television. There's hardly a crime drama where a crime is solved without using the data of a mobile communications device."

While I strongly oppose any warrant-less surveillance bills. I can agree with the statement. Nothing makes me a sympathise with the police more than crime dramas. So much to the point where I feel some American TV procedurals are almost propagandist and a lot of people assume the police have more rights than they do because of TV. But this is reality and things aren't as black and white as that.

bengillies• 12 years ago

"There's hardly a crime drama where a crime is solved without using the data of a mobile communications device."

All you can really tell from that statement though is that script writers enjoy adding in wiretapping, etc as it's both reasonably engaging to watch and really easy to write about. It says nothing whatsoever about actual policing or indeed the ramifications involved.

cyphax• 12 years ago

I have to admit that I think I understand where this idea comes from. I watched The Wire a while back. In the series, the ability to tap phone lines is vital to uncovering the criminal activities they seek to end. So vital, in fact, that they named the whole show after it. It proved to be an important tool.

The problem is that it is fiction, so I don't worry all that much about privacy of characters, because they don't exist. It is also absolute, in terms of us knowing who the bad guys are, and why. So while it might be a realistic enough view on events that happen in real life, it's still bound by it being a TV show and therefor I'm not too sure if we could ever use it to illustrate, let alone prove anything this important (our privacy).

I should hope that the prime minister of the UK makes this distinction, too, before basing any actual decision on it.

DanBC2• 12 years ago

Shitty source means people are not commenting on what he actually said. The actual law any how right / wrong it is is ignored; what happens if that law is broken is ignored.

This is a type of article that Hacker News fucking sucks at - ignorant flamebait attracts indignant comments which get many upvotes. Ignorance is spread and people don't bother finding out the reality.

cafard2• 12 years ago

Damn. I look forward to his thoughts on driving.

David Cameron: TV crime dramas prove we need warrantless electronic surveillance

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