EU Draft Digital Signature Directive

[Ian G Batten]

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In article <000301bdcb55$f58d9fc0$966adec2@FortyTwo>,
Brian Gladman <ukcrypto@maillist.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> As I have remarked before, this is the equivalent of asking a pack of hungry
> hyenas to protect a flock of lambs from slaughter by lions.    I can only

Note the MI5/MI6/GCHQ product of late.  We have the David Shaylor farce,
the slightly less farcical Richard Tomlinson case, and for all their
much vaunted espionage and SIGINT skills, and an open budget of about
half a billion pounds, we have 28 people dead in Omagh as the
culmination of a sequence of attacks by a republican splinter group that
hardly seems to have operated in deadly secret.

Likewise, with far larger budgets, the NSA, CIA and so on couldn't stop
two major bombings against their own embassies, the Oklahoma bombing,
the World Trade Centre bombing, and so on.

The cozy `oh, we protect you from all the bad things' line is a little
hard to take.  The `oh, you don't know how many other bad things would
have happened had we not been here' line may fool the tabloid newspapers
and, indeed, Jack Straw, but it's essentially proof by vigorous
assertion.  _What_ other bad things?

It would be interesting to know what would happen to crime,
international or not, were half a billion pounds to be put into
conventional policing by well-trained people recruited for the task,
rather than James Bond wannabes still fighting the war against communist
subversion.

Look at the way Kim Philby was protected by his friends in the security
services, and you'll realise that their main role is not to protect you
and I, but to provide handy sinecures for those that still wish to play
the great game.  Their loyalty is to class, not to country.  Those that
lose sight of this, and regard them as perhaps a slightly wayward
policeforce, miss their basic nature.

ian
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