Privacy, security and public opinion

[David Hansen]

On 6 Jun 00, at 21:08, Owen Lewis wrote:

> From: "Pete Mitchell" <pete@dmed.demon.co.uk>
>>If the govt of the time was confident that the bill > would
>> command public support, why not make the rationale clear? And if > it
>> wasn't confident, what was it doing enacting it?
> 
> Because it is axiomatic that matters of operational security should
> not be publicly debated.

This may or may not be the case, one can argue it many ways. 
However it isn't an answer to the point raised. There is no problem 
with "operational security" in discussing the rationale behind 
proposed legislation. Any claims that there are from government are 
simply a way of trying to avoid scrutiny. The Home Office are 
getting good at this in the area of crtptography, presumably this is 
behind their lack of recent missives.

> How would you reconcile the publication of this information
> to those who would harm us and, taken with other information similarly
> released to all and sundry, who would then use it to their advantage
> and our detriment?

This assumes that government is protecting society from "those who 
would harm us". There are many problems with such an assumption. 
For example government has announced that anti-road and animal 
rights protestors are amongst those who would harm us and have 
said they are directing the state against such people. This is 
outrageous and stupid as there is a genuine debate on these 
issues.All government will do is harm itself by such measures.

The rosy world of us and them may alow people to think that there 
are "outsiders" which the "nice people" need protecting from. This 
may have been true in the past with little information being available 
to the public (the abdication crisis being an example), but it is no 
longer the case. In management bullshit terms there has been a 
paradigm shift and government needs to think out of the box. It has 
failed to do so, RIP being a spectacular example of old thinking. It's 
interesting that it has been perpetrated by party politicians who go 
on about new thinking and modernisation. I doubt if they would know 
new thinking if it bit them.

> I think you could find that eavesdropping has proved enormously cost
> effective over many years;

A cleverly constructed sentence. One could find all sorts of things, 
but it's only by open dabate that people will get to the bottom of 
things. They may still not agree of course.



 David Hansen | davidh@spidacom.co.uk  | PGP email preferred
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