News - Most online encryption is transparent to NSA and GCHQ

[aidanjt]

You asserted that IF there had been successes, we'd know it because it would have been shouted about.

We would now that it's all blown up in their faces. The politicians involved in these programmes would be clambering to cover their asses. Because if there's anything you can be sure politicians are good at is covering their asses so they don't lose votes. And that's a very safe bet.

[Saracen]

We would now that it's all blown up in their faces. The politicians involved in these programmes would be clambering to cover their asses. Because if there's anything you can be sure politicians are good at is covering their asses so they don't lose votes. And that's a very safe bet.

And they're fond of keeping their asses out of jail, and in high-power jobs, too. The OFA has teeth.

As I said before, there have been claims, by ex-HomeSec's, of several dozen foiled plots. But unless those plots come to court, like the fertiliser case, we don't, and shouldn't expect to, hear about it.

Yes, politicians have big mouths, but it's one thing leaking budget plans, or mooted political policy changes, and entirely another breaking the OFA by revealing classified information .... which would be on a fairly limited distribution list in the first place.

What we do regularly get, when old documents are eventually released, are some eye-opening demonstrations of that, while there's much ministers do blab, there's a LOT that they don't. And also as I said before, the intelligence services are generally extremely tight-lipped ... some more than others, but none of them are exactly publicity whores.

[aidanjt]

I didn't say anything about leaking. Politicians involved have formal processes available to declassify and publish secret information. And they haven't been above doing so in the past, and still aren't today. How the intelligence agencies feel about it is irrelevant, they're servants to the state.

[Saracen]

I didn't say anything about leaking. Politicians involved have formal processes available to declassify and publish secret information. And they haven't been above doing so in the past, and still aren't today. How the intelligence agencies feel about it is irrelevant, they're servants to the state.

Even if your right and that the "trumpeting" you refered to was preceded by following such formal processes, you are still assuming that it WOULD happen.

My point is simple. We don't know if there have been these numerous successes or not, because the nition that, whether leaked or declassified and published for short-term political gain, you're assuming that that motivation would be sufficient and that "trumpeting" would necessarily follow.

And I'm pointing out it is simply an unsupported, and unproveable assumption, not a certainty.

We don't know if these intelligence "infringements" of civil liberties and/or personal privacy are effective at catching terrorists or not, and odds are, we never will. And it's lazy to just assume that we'd have been told by opportunistic politicians in CYA mode if they were having successes.

[aidanjt]

I never asserted certainty of anything. What I did do is point out the clockwork nature of the career politician as being suitable enough evidence to dismiss bare assertions made by them. That's before we even touch on basic logical burden of evidence requirement (which is actually *much* lazier, and yet *entirely valid* argumentation).

[Saracen]

I never asserted certainty of anything. What I did do is point out the clockwork nature of the career politician as being suitable enough evidence to dismiss bare assertions made by them. That's before we even touch on basic logical burden of evidence requirement (which is actually *much* lazier, and yet *entirely valid* argumentation).

Well, on 'certainty', you said

Right, we don't know for sure because the government *could* be keeping it all a secret, which is as good as it never happened, for the same reason that debating the current state of Russell's teapot

On whether we'd know if there had been successes, you said

We would now that it's all blown up in their faces. The politicians involved in these programmes would be clambering to cover their asses. Because if there's anything you can be sure politicians are good at is covering their asses so they don't lose votes. And that's a very safe bet

Not that we might, or that we probably would, but that "we would know".

As for "dismissing bare assertions", on that, I half agree. I would 100% agree on not just accepting such bare assertions as gospel, and I'd 100% agree that a politician could, and might well, use a base assertion like that, justifying it with "intelligence" and kniwing full well that it's impossible to dispute because we don't have access to the sata it's based on, for "national security" reasons.

And that is the point I was making right from the start. We simply don't know.

What this, I suspect, comes down to is whether we can trust what our politicians tell us. And to that, my answer (and yours, I'm sure) would be .... hell, no. But nor can we assume they're 100% lying.

And because the intelligence services aren't about to publish what they know, we have NO basis for deciding if :-

a) there have been no successes, and politicians are lying about it to justify the programs, or

b) there have been loads of successes resulting directly from these programs, but we dismiss it because politicians aren't trusted.

And at least for me, and I suspect for many people, that is Tony Blair's fault.

I didn't believe that a British PM could possibly be so deceitful, over a matter as serious as going to war, as subsequent events proved he had been in the way he portrayed the "intelligence". I have long distrusted all politicians, but that was a low point, and the result is that never again will I take ANYTHING said by ANY politicians as true, just because they say it.

So when a politician says there's been numerous successes, I don't take it as necessarily true, but I don't dismiss it either. But I also don't dismiss that it COULD be true, onthe assumption that politicians would have blabbed about it for their own petty self-interest if it was.

In other words, that's their justification for these intrusive programs, and we just DON'T KNOW whether it's true, or utter hogwash. We don't know, and probably can't know.

[aidanjt]

It doesn't matter if we don't know for sure. It doesn't matter for the same reason debating Russell's teapot doesn't matter. Because without proof of the claim, the claim is entirely without merit. For reasons of brevity in rational debate, we simply don't acknowledge or even as much as entertain the existence of the teapot at all. It isn't good enough to claim something is true, you have to be able to demonstrate it to be true, that's why hard scientists bust their butts collecting, sorting through, and condensing boatloads of evidence for publishing with their theories. And I don't accept 'national security' as a get-out-of-discussing-it-free card just because it's the government invoking it, especially in a democracy. For the purposes of discussion, if there's no proof, it didn't happen, even if it did happen. That isn't certainty, that's just simple logic discarding useless idle speculation.

I really can't be any clearer on this.