UK Politics Mega-thread - Page 298
Forum Index > General Forum |
In order to ensure that this thread meets TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we ask that everyone please adhere to this mod note. Posts containing only Tweets or articles adds nothing to the discussions. Therefore, when providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments will be actioned upon. All in all, please continue to enjoy posting in TL General and partake in discussions as much as you want! But please be respectful when posting or replying to someone. There is a clear difference between constructive criticism/discussion and just plain being rude and insulting. https://www.registertovote.service.gov.uk | ||
LegalLord
United Kingdom13774 Posts
| ||
{CC}StealthBlue
United States40989 Posts
| ||
Zaros
United Kingdom3673 Posts
| ||
KwarK
United States40728 Posts
| ||
Reaps
United Kingdom1280 Posts
Infact the vast majority of terrorists attacks the past few years have been known to authorities, one of which was even on an electronic tag at the time. There are things that could of prevented these but we chose not to for whatever reason. Rip to the victims. | ||
bardtown
England2313 Posts
| ||
KwarK
United States40728 Posts
On March 23 2017 04:23 Reaps wrote: In this case there was plenty of prevention that could of been done considering the attacker was abu izzadeen a well known hate preacher. Infact the vast majority of terrorists attacks the past few years have been known to authorities, one of which was even on an electronic tag at the time. There are things that could of prevented these but we chose not to for whatever reason. Rip to the victims. His name had not yet been released when I wrote that but I stand by it none the less. He was a British born guy who was able to commit this attack due to his access to a car and a knife. How would you have prevented it? Should he have been deported? If so, where to? Or perhaps he should have been arrested? We could always come up with a charge afterwards. It might not convince a jury, but who says we need to bother with those. You don't have to respond to every attack by trying to throw out the baby with the bathwater. | ||
Makro
France16890 Posts
| ||
Reaps
United Kingdom1280 Posts
On March 23 2017 04:29 KwarK wrote: His name had not yet been released when I wrote that but I stand by it none the less. He was a British born guy who was able to commit this attack due to his access to a car and a knife. How would you have prevented it? Should he have been deported? If so, where to? Or perhaps he should have been arrested? We could always come up with a charge afterwards. It might not convince a jury, but who says we need to bother with those. You don't have to respond to every attack by trying to throw out the baby with the bathwater. We have laws against hate speech in the UK, him and many other religious extremists constantly break these laws (look at london protests in 2012? i believe) yet there is almost never any arrests made. Deporting a British born person wouldn't make sense so no, not that. @Bardtown how about not tolerating religious fanatics, or any fanatics for that matter. | ||
KwarK
United States40728 Posts
On March 23 2017 04:33 Reaps wrote: We have laws against hate speech in the UK, him and many other religious extremists constantly break these laws (look at london protests in 2012? i believe) yet there is almost never any arrests made. Deporting a British born person wouldn't make sense so no, not that. @Bardtown how about not tolerating religious fanatics, or any fanatics for that matter. And would you have locked him up for life for his speech? Because if not I'm still not getting how imprisoning people for what they say stops this. Furthermore hate speech is pretty narrowly defined, as it should be. | ||
Reaps
United Kingdom1280 Posts
On March 23 2017 04:36 KwarK wrote: And would you have locked him up for life for his speech? Because if not I'm still not getting how imprisoning people for what they say stops this. Furthermore hate speech is pretty narrowly defined, as it should be. Not at all, i simply think there is more to be done to combat people like him, specifically hate preachers, what do you suggest though, just let them preach their hatred and potentially radicalise more muslims? | ||
Zaros
United Kingdom3673 Posts
On March 23 2017 04:23 Reaps wrote: In this case there was plenty of prevention that could of been done considering the attacker was abu izzadeen a well known hate preacher. Infact the vast majority of terrorists attacks the past few years have been known to authorities, one of which was even on an electronic tag at the time. There are things that could of prevented these but we chose not to for whatever reason. Rip to the victims. | ||
Dan HH
Romania8844 Posts
On March 23 2017 04:23 Reaps wrote: In this case there was plenty of prevention that could of been done considering the attacker was abu izzadeen a well known hate preacher. Infact the vast majority of terrorists attacks the past few years have been known to authorities, one of which was even on an electronic tag at the time. There are things that could of prevented these but we chose not to for whatever reason. Rip to the victims. Old but very relevant article quoting a former MI5 director about those reasons + Show Spoiler + After the Boston Marathon bombing and the killing of a British soldier on the streets of Woolwich in London, it emerged that suspects were known to the security services - prompting concern from critics. But how feasible is it for the spies to monitor everyone on their watch list? Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale's names have become well known since they became key suspects in the killing of Drummer Lee Rigby in a street attack in Woolwich on 22 May. But it has transpired that they were already familiar names to the British domestic intelligence service, MI5. The UK Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee is to investigate the agency's actions in relation to the case. Boston bomb suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, meanwhile, was questioned in 2011 by the FBI amid claims he had adopted radical Islam. But is it practical - or even possible - to keep close tabs on every person who comes to the attention of the security services? No, according to Dame Stella Rimington, former head of the of MI5. To see that, she says, you just have to look at the numbers. It's not known how many people are on the terrorism watch list in the UK. But it has been said to be around 2,000. To keep a constant watch on just one of those people, you would need a team of at least six surveillance operatives, Dame Stella says. But of course they couldn't work 24 hours a day, so you would need three teams of six. And those operatives couldn't just sit outside a suspect's house. So, you'd need an additional person to, say, sit in a nearby house, and alert the team of six when the suspect left the house. Then there's the control centre, where staff receive information from the mobile operatives and give them directions. And finally, there's a desk officer in charge of the case. "Doing that 24 hours a day, seven days a week - well, you do the sums, it's an awful lot of people," Dame Stella says. And if 2,000 people were to be followed like that, we'd be talking about 50,000 full-time spies doing nothing but following suspected terrorists. That's more than 10 times the number of people employed by MI5. The numbers don't add up. As a matter of simple economics, then, it's not possible to follow every suspicious character around the clock. Surveillance technology offers an alternative - but it also presents mathematical problems of a different kind. Imagine that the intelligence services had unlimited resources and could monitor everyone's phone lines. Imagine they could detect would-be terrorists within the first three words they utter on the phone with a 99% degree of accuracy. There would just be one small problem, according to Howard Wainer, Distinguished Research Scientist at the National Board of Medical Examiners in the United States. Suppose there are 3,000 terrorists in the United States, he says. If the software is 99% accurate, you would be able to pick up almost all of them - 99% of them. However if you were listening to everybody - all 300 million US citizens - 1% of the general population are going to be picked up by mistake. "So mixed in with the 3,000 true terrorists that you've identified are going to be the three million completely innocent people, who are now being sent off to Guantanamo Bay," Wainer says. That is, for every terrorist you would have 999 innocent, but very angry people. In reality, Wainer says, your terrorist detector would be nowhere near 99% effective. But, on the other hand, the security services do not in fact monitor everyone. Still, if you narrow your target population to the point that there is one actual terrorist per 100 people wiretapped, and assume a 90% effective test, the chance of a false positive remains high. Even when someone triggers an arrest, Howard Wainer says, the odds are 11 to one that they're not a terrorist. It's hard to predict who will become radicalised, and who will go on to commit an act of violence, according to Nigel Inkster, who used to work for MI6, the UK's secret intelligence service abroad and is now employed by the International Institute of Strategic Studies, a London think tank. "With the wisdom of hindsight, everything always looks clear, but when you are looking at the situations as they unfold, you are operating in a climate of considerable uncertainty," he says. Technological advances mean intelligence services can use computers to sort through lots of information to help target the right people. Algorithms are used to search social media for key words, or to spot suspicious patterns in airline travel records, for example. But these techniques may be of limited use, according to Louise Amoore, a professor at Durham University specialising in data and security. "You may already begin to think about how the algorithms used to detect possible risky connections might be adapting," she says. "For example, post-Boston there may be more attention in the US to travel to particular parts of the world, perhaps including Chechnya and Dagestan. We could imagine, post-Woolwich, that there might be greater attention in the refining of algorithms to think about patterns of travel and links to deportation. "But of course, it's using data from past events. Our research is suggesting that the tuning of the algorithm reflects almost always past events." In other words, the algorithms are always fighting the last war. And, as for the useful information that can be gleaned from the data, there is a risk it can be lost in the noise. Big data is one of the challenges that security and intelligence organisations around the world now face, according to Nigel Inkster. "You're able to amass large quantities of data, beyond what is possible for one individual or group of individuals quickly to analyse and assimilate," he says. "Algorithmic approaches are being adopted to try and triage this information, but I don't think you are ever going to be able to develop algorithms which can substitute for or improve upon human judgement." Dame Stella points out that this is a well-known problem - it happened to the East German Stasi. They "overdosed" on information, she says. "Intelligence services can strangle themselves if they have too much information, because they can't sort out from it what they need to know and what they don't need to know. So in all this search for information you've got to be pretty focused and targeted." http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22718000 | ||
Reaps
United Kingdom1280 Posts
I checked multiple reputable sources before i made that post, interesting though, we'll see in time. | ||
Plansix
United States60190 Posts
But I understand the desire. It is hard to see this kind of violence and accept how powerless we are to stop all of it. But we do stop a lot of it. | ||
KwarK
United States40728 Posts
On March 23 2017 04:40 Reaps wrote: Not at all, i simply think there is more to be done to combat people like him, specifically hate preachers, what do you suggest though, just let them preach their hatred and potentially radicalise more muslims? Yes. Because patriotism and believing in British values sometimes means being willing to risk death before giving them up. There is speech we can do without, like advocating for ethnic cleansing or organizing a lynch mob, but we should absolutely err on the side of caution when it comes to restricting speech. Freedom of speech is at the heart of a working democracy and Britain is the birthplace of modern democracy. I'll happily take a one in a million chance of being killed as a result of freedom of speech being abused before seeing it taken away, and I'll ask any patriotic Brit to do the same. Whenever one of these attacks happens a crowd is always desperate to demand to know which freedoms they need to give up to avoid the chance of being made to bleed in defence of those freedoms. And they should always be ashamed. The freedoms that make these attacks possible are freedoms worth enduring these attacks for. | ||
Reaps
United Kingdom1280 Posts
On March 23 2017 04:47 KwarK wrote: Yes. Because patriotism and believing in British values sometimes means being willing to risk death before giving them up. There is speech we can do without, like advocating for ethnic cleansing or organizing a lynch mob, but we should absolutely err on the side of caution when it comes to restricting speech. Freedom of speech is at the heart of a working democracy and Britain is the birthplace of modern democracy. I'll happily take a one in a million chance of being killed as a result of freedom of speech being abused before seeing it taken away, and I'll ask any patriotic Brit to do the same. Whenever one of these attacks happens a crowd is always desperate to demand to know which freedoms they need to give up to avoid the chance of being made to bleed in defence of those freedoms. And they should always be ashamed. The freedoms that make these attacks possible are freedoms worth enduring these attacks for. I am a massive believer in freedom of speech, more than you know, so i could do without the straw man, do you know what kind of "speech" he was preaching? how about sexual slavery of all women, or is that ok and organizing a lynch mob is not? they both seem pretty fucked up to me. No one is asking you to give up freedom of speech, that is one thing we have that we should all be proud of, what im asking is for the laws he broke to actually be reinforced. At the very least, be banned from preaching his bullshit. Edit: if this was in america he actually wouldn't of broken any law. | ||
KwarK
United States40728 Posts
On March 23 2017 04:54 Reaps wrote: I am a massive believer in freedom of speech, more than you know, so i could do without the straw man On March 23 2017 04:54 Reaps wrote: At the very least, be banned from preaching his bullshit. Seems to me a lot like you're a fan of freedom of speech you agree with which isn't actually the same thing as freedom of speech. Unfortunately the speech that is most important to be allowed in a functioning democracy is speech you disagree with. | ||
Plansix
United States60190 Posts
EDIT: The last time the US responded to terrorism, we passed this nightmare law call the Patriot Act and created a nightmare agency that we are still trying to get a handle on. Be careful what you wish for. | ||
Zaros
United Kingdom3673 Posts
| ||
| ||