Blighty's National Crime Agency nabs first crook ...for £750k cyberscam The new National Crime Agency has caged its first criminal - a crook who netted hundreds of thousands of pounds using a phishing scam. Olukunle Babatunde, 27, of Croydon, South East London, was sent down for five years and six months at Inner London Crown Court after admitting swindling £751,229 from more than 700 online …
Oh goody this sounds wonderful
"NCA '[will] not comply with freedom of information requests.' According to a government fact sheet on the NCA (PDF, 5 pages, easy read) the agency's employees will be authorised to use covert surveillance powers under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000"
according to the Independent newspaper – which adds that the NCA “[will] not comply with freedom of information requests.”
It would no doubt compromise National Security for them to reveal how often they trawled (fished if you like) through the GCHQ/NSA archives of everyones online activities... or some other such lame excuse.
"The perp went down but what happened to the money ? Do the NCA just split it between them ? It would be a novel way of funding their own department."
I think you'll find that the UK has something called the "Proceeds of Crime Act."
TL:DR version. All your loot belong to them.
If they can find it.
Bloody hell, that's impressive!
Set up on Monday and within 72 hours the NCA has investigated a crime, arrested a suspect, brought him before the beak and seen him sent down for over 5 years.
At this rate, there'll be no criminals left in 6 months time.
Either that or the NCA will be No 1 in the Vacuous Spin charts.
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"The Daily Telegraph notes that the head of the NCA is, legally speaking, the most powerful law enforcement agent in the UK, with the authority to insist that chiefs of Britain's domestic police forces obey his orders. In addition, the NCA's boss reports directly to the Home Secretary, rather than to independent oversight bodies as its predecessor the Serious and Organised Crime Agency did."
Sounds like the Home Secretary has just acquired his very own police force which very handily seems to be accountable to him alone. That'll put an end to that tricky due process crap in no time.
So the police are shifted to political control? If they all answer to him, and he's shifted to be under Home Office control, and Home Office answers to Cameron, then Cameron has just appointed himself head of the police.
Can he even do that without an act of Parliament?
Judging from yesterdays anti- Guardian propaganda, they'll go after Guardian first. Daily Mail is already under thumb, Murdoch always was cooperative. Maybe the BBC after that.
@Roo - It's all very well to bitch about new powers that you think the Home Secretary has obtained, but if you're so politically out of touch that you don't know that the Home Secretary is a woman, it's just noise.
I'm getting fed up with the amount of people who mewl about politics and politicians, but have little or no knowledge of what's actually happening in politics, other than "down with this sort of thing."
This shit is important. Theresa May has frighteningly right wing authoritarian views and it looks like she's on track to be the next leader of the Tory party. It's either her or Boris, who also, despite the buffoon like reputation is another swivel eyed right wing nutjob, just with good PR, rather than good shoes.
"Home Secretary is a woman"
Fair point and you are quite correct to call me on that, although the sex of the Home Secretary's it is somewhat tangential to the point I was trying to make...
If the Home Secretary was a man, woman, goat or block of Stilton the fact is the Home Secretary now appears to have full control over some of the most powerful plods in the country and the voting them out thing really isn't sufficient oversight, a sufficiently motivated nutjob (such as May) can dispense an awful lot of injustice in the 4+ years between every election.
The thing that makes May so dangerous is she prefers to continue breaking stuff she has no comprehension of rather than admit she might be wrong. Not a unique thing in a Politician but it's the thinly veiled malicious intent behind her actions and the utter contempt she holds for the public (as evidenced by the way she seems to prefer to shout down opposition or critique rather than engage with them) that sets her apart.
Theresa May talks so much rubbish that it looks as though I have been ignoring her odious existence. I should pay more attention, I hate to think that she might be missing out on some ridicule and lynchings because no one takes her seriously. Thank you for pointing out my mistake so vehemently. :)
Quotes given in the Independent's story indicate that commercial confidentiality is behind the NCA's decision simply to decide that Freedom of Information doesn't apply to it: 'We’re also going to increasingly rely on the relationship with the private sector. There’s a very real danger that being required to operate in line with freedom of information could fracture some of those relationships'.
I work for a university. Quite a lot of what we do involves 'relationships' with the private sector. Where that's the case and commercial confidentiality is an issue we have a clause covering it written into that particular contract. We certainly don't take the view that because some of our work involves commercial confidentiality we have the right to act as if it all does. Freedom of Information applies to us, and the burden of proof is on us to establish good reasons for it not to apply in specific cases. It should be the same for everybody.
It obviously suits the NCA that we should be left with no way of knowing what it is we're not allowed to know, nor of knowing (or challenging) the basis upon which we are not allowed to know it. The fact that a law enforcement body is talking in this way and seems to take it for granted that it's fine really ought to worry somebody, somewhere.
http://www.arlindo-correia.com/081203.html
"The GDR was a furtive and insidious tyranny. Through the Stasi it pried into every aspect of your life. It possessed armies of spies, paid and unpaid. Some estimates run as high as one for every six and a half members of the population. Any attempt to achieve success in East Germany involved a pact with the devil - you paid with your soul, "
"It must have been a pen-pusher's heaven. The Stasi had files on everybody; most of them would have made dull reading. Any foreigner who exchanged his or her 25 Deutschemarks for the same number of useless Ostmarks and entered the Russian sector might have ended up with a dossier in Berlin-Lichtenberg. "
"One of the worst aspects of culture shock for the East Germans who, overnight, found that their country no longer existed, was dealing with the revelation that the state's spies were their neighbors, family, friends, lovers, co-workers. That's what East Germans have learned from Stasi documents"
"Like all the stories and statistics "Stasiland" relates, those numbers bespeak a paranoia that's both comic and horrible. One former Stasi official tells Funder that by the end of East Germany, 65 percent of the clergy were working as informers. And 65 percent of the members of one particular East German resistance group were informers."
"So we have here the ultimate absurdist spectacle, a state spying apparatus so far-reaching that it nearly ran out of things to spy on. Which isn't a problem in terms of a totalitarian mind-set that can see enemies anywhere. The function of the Stasi was, as Funder relates, to arrest, imprison and interrogate anyone it chose, to open all mail, intercept phone calls, bug hotels, spy on diplomats, run its own hospitals and universities, and to train Libyan terrorists and West German members of the Red Army Faction."
Hard hitting drama based on the filth on the UK's street, featuring the new, upcoming cleanup squad...
"In 2013 a crack police unit was disbanded for quotas they didn't uphold. These men (and women) were promptly moved from their stations to the UK underground. Today, still used by the government, they operate as soldiers of the Home Secretary. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire...
The N.C.A."
It's all going a little too far too quickly. Despite the fact that the head of MI5 can communicate with credibility that they need help to counter terrorism, this is just money. Banks are insured. Why do we need the Home Secretary's Praetorian Guard to be chasing a (comparatively) footling amount of cash?
And that doesn't mean I necessarily agree with the head of MI5; although the first point of any government is to protect the citizens against attack, what limits to privacy are we prepared to accept?
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