Met launches net café spy operation Internet café owners are being asked to spy on their customers as part of the Met police's terrorism prevention efforts. Under a pilot project in Camden some have agreed to monitor their customers' internet habits for evidence of interest in Islamic extremism, the BBC reports. They are intalling police screensavers and putting …
As if mixed communities didn't have enough stress points. The most frightening part of this is the increasing capacity of govt and police for almost infinite self-justification and self-righteousness.
Mr Kundnani is right in that this is a profoundly dangerous development. What perhaps he hasn't grasped is that it's supposed to be. In the current climate of security theatre, the very people who should be trying to heal the rifts in our communities are thinking of newer and bigger wedges to drive in.
The terrorists' primary aim is to divide and polarise - they're doing very well thank you without our police and govt pitching in to help.
"In the current climate of security theatre, the very people who should be trying to heal the rifts in our communities are thinking of newer and bigger wedges to drive in.
The terrorists' primary aim is to divide and polarise - they're doing very well thank you without our police and govt pitching in to help."
Dead right. But it's worse than you think
The 'terrorists' are actually doing very badly - mainly because they don't seem to be trying at all. The very few attacks we have seen are entirely home-grown, with no support from external sources. The attacks we have seen are actually directly caused by the response to the Security Service actions.
The reason for this is not hard to discover. Security Service ware nearly out of a job after the Berlin Wall came down in 89. They spent the next few years looking for a threat - any threat - that they could justify their existence with. They found one with the twin towers, and they are now milking it for all it's worth. Otherwise, it's the dole....
"Café owners are asked to use their own judgement as to what amounts to extremist material."
What could possibly go wrong?
Will all the ones that spy have the posters? Because obviously no business user should go near them as their commercial confidential material will be spied on.
The big companies had better issue warnings to all their staff straight away that these places must not be used under any circumstances..
"Café owners are asked to use their own judgement as to what amounts to extremist material."
errr... didn't a university send it's own students to prison for reading materiel that was hosted by the US government and was, in actual fact, in the list of *allowed* materiel? if yes, how can an internet cafe operator know better?
The fail is on you, nothing would be acheived by having a mini rant in a cafe and chucking your coffee on a chair.
No one is going to be looking over your shoulder, all internet cafes have VNC style remote monitor software built in and the ability to use it on their PCs is bult into the terms of use. So all you wil lget from your solicitor is a bill.
I can only hope that some bright spark sees the publicity opportuinty here and markets themselves as "The internet cafe that will not monitor what you do!" not only will that approach give customers a piece of mind, but will raise customers suspicion that other cafes do moinitor them.
That approach might work, for people that know enough to care. The rest of the sheep however...
They are the armpits of the world.
No prospect of the owner's friend (who will of course be paying tax and NI, because they do have a right to work in the UK) showing any interest in anything than making sure the owner gets rent for usage, and then only just....
Don't you lot all sip latte in Caffe Nero, using your 3G dongles, pretending to update your spreadsheets?
(Have I missed anybody...?)
"Hello officer... yes, there are a couple of young islam men here playing CounterStrike and I think they're enjoying it too much..."
I love hearing about it when people get charged with wasting police time, when stories like this clearly show us that they must have plenty of time to waste.
Because not everyone's idea of suspicious behaviour is the same. You might be looking at something perfectly innocent that someone else considers dodgy. Then you're stuffed. Of course you can tell them that you're innocent, but that's what guilty people say, isn't it?
It's trying to officially sanction paranoia, which isn't healthy for anyone and will achieve very little in terms of protecting the public, much like terror policy in general.
...wondering why people might not want to have their every move monitored, whilst posting anonymously.
"Everyone is always up in arms about this kind of stuff. I have no idea why..."
Perhaps because we just don't like the idea of our everyday activities, regardless of whether they're legal/moral/socially acceptable/etc or not, monitored by an ever growing brigade of official and unoffical busybodies?
Perhaps because we're concerned about the real prospect that this increasing level of prying, combined with the growing levels of fear and mistrust (partly genuine, but mostly fuelled by the media and official campaigns like this), makes it more likely that innocent people are going to end up incorrectly labelled as suspects simply because their behaviour patterns don't fall into some puritanical/unattainable definition of what's normal?
Perhaps because many of us grew up during the Cold War, worrying about the threat of nuclear annihilation, rejoicing as we watched the first cracks appear in the iron curtain, then learning about how the ordinary citizens in the former Soviet bloc nations lived their daily lives and thinking "thank god for Western freedoms"... When Germany reunified and we learned just how much time and effort the GDR regime spent gathering information about its citizens, who in the UK could have imagined that we'd start behaving in the same way?
So you might not see why stuff like this is a big deal to so many people, but that doesn't mean it isn't a big deal to us all. We should all be worried, very worried, about the way we're being persuaded bit by bit to spy on one another. It's not exactly the sort of thing you expect from an allegedly free and democratic country (though perhaps our current leadership takes its definition of democratic from the aforementioned GDR...), and dash it all, even worse than that it simply isn't British!
"Most of the people complaining are just concerned that they are going to get caught doing something they are not allowed to be doing."
You are full of shite.
I'm not concerned about getting caught doing something i ma not allowed to be doing. I am concerned about getting caught doing something *is* allowed, but which some uptight ass decided they don't like. Or worse yet; something that was allowed for my entire life, but someone decided is now suddenly against the law.
The goalposts move around , and many people decide their personal sense of right and wrong should be the determining factor in how others should behave. What if you are in the middle of ridiculous-uber-christian-fundementalist-ville and trying to get the address for an abortion clinic? Or a gay bar? What if you are trying to find out how to make a small flash-bang for a science experiment, or a gag at a campfire? (I have been known to embellish my ghost stories with flash powder; legal at least in my jurisdiction, but not in some others.)
What if you are a visitor to another country, taking the opportunity to look up the local laws to find out if your favourite sexual activity/drinking game/fireworks display/stunt driving/whatever is legal in this jurisdiction, and the café owner decides this is suspicious and you are a terrorist? Hey, maybe you are in a cyber café in a mall somewhere, and you just passed one of those stores where they sell all sorts of nifty sharp weapons. You decided you would like to learn more about a few of them, possibly with an eye to buying one or two. You sit down to do some research, and next thing you know you’re being hauled off as a terrorist.
I’m not afraid of getting caught doing things I’m “not allowed” to. If I wanted to engage in that sort of activity…I guarantee you they’d not find me. (I’m a network admin by trade, and paranoid as a hobby. They’re light-years behind the leading edge tinfoil hatters, and you can browse the internet with impunity if you plan it even halfway well.)
No, I’m afraid of overzealous pompous ****s who might call the cops on me as a terrorist/naked crazy child rapist/murder/whatever simply because they don’t like what I research on the internet. Even if that research is perfectly legal.
"Not allowed to be doing"? Allowed by whom??
There's a lot of things that a lot of people in this would would like to "not allow" others to do, be that being gay, freely protesting outside Parliament, looking at "extreme" pornography (ie something that the person advocating the law doesn't like) or visiting websites about the Tiananmen Square massacre.
If you really have no idea why people are "up in arms" about this, I suggest you consider the words of George Santayana: "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it".
Or maybe just being sarcastic, but in case anyone thinks you're actually being serious (or even actually are being serious) you really don't see anything wrong with asking group a (in this case internet cafe owners) to spy on group b (in this case, their customers) and reporting anything that group b is doing that group a think is dodgy?
I don't see anything wrong with this either. In fact I believe anyone should be available for stop and search, complete body scan and search of internal organs on the grounds that a police officer believes to you have been looking at him in a funny way.
I believe that everyone over the age of 2 should be bar-coded, microchipped, tagged and registered on the national criminal database.
I believe that you're guilty until proven innocent, that anyone who disagrees with the government is a potential terrorist, that MI5 should have the inalienable right to tap anyone's phone at any time and/or to keep detailed records on said persons for no other reason than that they look 'unusual'.
I also believe that you, sir, are an automaton and a lady - a LADY, sir - who at the behest of a man in a white coat would willingly inflict electrical shock treatment on someone else</Stanley Milgram's Experiment Pointlessly Repeated By French Television>
I also believe the moon to be made of cheese, my head to be constructed by aliens from the future, and this to be the end of my post. Good day, sir.
It seems inappropriate to describe this as a measure intended to help win the "battle of ideas", although it is part of a broader strategy which does support engagement with radical ideas by "respectable" clerics and their ilk. This is basically the only option besides net filtering to prevent websites that would be illegal in the UK from being accessed in the UK, and whilst it may seem unpalatable, it could be described as representing the middle ground on this issue, and it can only be hoped that it is successful, so the government doesn't end up doing something a lot harsher. Nobody except crazy socialists actually want there to be a police state in order to enforce the state agenda, and whilst the radicalization of Muslims is mainly an educational problem, there is also a sharp end to their actions, so it is not enough simply to offer them a carrot. Remember, in the UK, these sorts of websites would be shut down, so people wouldn't even have the opportunity to visit them.
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If cafe owners are going to be snooping through your data, shouldn't they therefore be displaying this very clearly somewhere so as not to fall foul of other laws? And leaving security up to the subjective judgement of an untrained proprietor is, as has already been mentioned, a recipe for disaster.
It's a delightful irony that this 'initiative' arrives on the day that one of Parliament's own committees is saying the Government is overdoing the security measures.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8583643.stm
what 30 years of avoiding any sort of serious technical education leads to. This idea has clearly come from the same place "sex offenders will have to register their email addresses with the police" one did.
Er ... TOR ? Anonymous (offfshore) proxies ?
And besides, if any terrorist really wanted to ensure privacyt, he'd just handwrite his notes in arabic, and fax his mates ....
What sort of terrorist uses an internet cafe? I mean, really. They caught on a long time ago to chaneg their cell phones regularly to prevent monitoring, and I suspect anyone serious out there in the terror club will have worked out that having an operative in an internet cafe where the screen can be viewed by strangers etc etc is probablt not the way to do things. ("Oh noes! Agent X did not get his 'Dont-Go' message because there wasn't a PC available down at Sri's Payless Groceries and Internet cafe!")
But how will a non-arabic speaking internet cafe owner know what an arabic language website is about?
1. Muslim goes into internet cafe
2. Muslim navigates to perfectly reputable arabic language news site
3. Shop owner calls police
4. Police don't know what the page is about either
5. Muslim man is arrested
Genius.
What there's an annual contest for really dumb ideas?
Clearly this one's not intended to win over any wavering hearts or minds within the Muslim 'community', or frankly any other one. Presumably any cafe owner pulling this stunt is going to haemorrhage business sharpish, because most people really, really hate nosey fuckers for entirely normal un-fundamentalist reasons. I'd be astonished if one of them doesn't end up with a few loose teeth.
How can it plausibly be a good idea to give the power to finger people to those with no more knowledge of what qualifies as 'fundamentalist' than the man on the Clapham omnibus? This is nothing but a recipe for the kind of cheap score-settling that must have plagued the stasi, and at least a couple of steps more stupid than the Met's "photographers are terrorists" poster campaign.
"I despair" is getting overused, but really, I do.
Perhaps our snooping overlords should join forces with China, develop an approved-site-only intranet and disconnect from the rest of the world. They could then divert their talents to something more productive like installing nanny-chips in rubbish bins.
When you've all got over your hang up with moaning about the state of things in China some of you might just get round to doing something about this on our own doorstep. However, I think it more likely in the not so distant future that it will be the people of China who will be sneering at the lack of freedom of expression in the UK and consider intervention to save us from ourselves.
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Brrrrr Brrrrrr..... Brrrrr Brrrrrr......
Hello, Police ?
I'd like to report this bloke in a turban.
Thats right..... I saw him accessing the Nu-Labia website.
What's that ?,
You will send SO-19 around to give him a Brazilian ?
Right you are gov'nor. Just doing my bit for Blighty.
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