Happy Face

A United Kingdom The political maneuvering on both sides (UK & Bottswana) and the difficult decisions of the real Labour and Tory leadership were much more interesting to me than the love story or the Davenport character portrayed as a vindictive racist.

No, i don't think it's any sort of scoop. I added it to the Mike Ashley compendium of Contradictions back in 2010, based on stories that came from the "Club Insider" and The People and what you were saying. http://nufc-ashlies.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/schweinsteiger-deal.html IIRC you were pretty unequivocal at the time it was the club (Ashley/Wise/Llambias) that promised Schweinsteiger and reneged, not that Keegan was coming up with mad unacheivable names he could never get in. Think it's the first time I've seen anyone officially corroborate that on the record though.

Terry Mac D has been talking about this deal recently http://www.themag.co.uk/2016/10/interesting-new-info-mike-ashley-dennis-wise-forced-keegan-must-read-kevin-keegan-newcastle-united-terry-mcdermott-bastian-schweinsteiger-liverpool/

When I was at school 20 years ago a few of the lads broke in and shit in the biology teachers kettle yet none of my 6 younger cousins have ever appeared in the news for dildo related high jinx. All are well balanced in work and long term relationships. i wouldn't make too many overarching assumptions about da yoof based on anecdotal extremes of young misbehaviour.

It didn't bother people who supported the Stasi either.

The biggest revelation of the Snowden leaks remains how shit the NSA are on powerpoint mind

Why do you say not corporations? The collection posture is outlined on a slide Snowden leaked... ALL of it! As mentioned, corporations are targeted, here is a link to the Pretrobas story. They were snooped on just as Brazil were about to auction oil fields.... http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-security-snowden-petrobras-idUSBRE98817N20130909 The added benefit is being able to look at everyone's mails. Whether journalists, lawyers, eco warriors, political party members, criminals. mistresses or ex-girlfriends.

Yahoo refusing to scan personal emails would not mean allowing terrorism to increase. The societal impact of terrorism in the current age is less about an increased number of attacks on western soil or our ability to stamp them out or not. It's more to do with coverage of what attacks there are changing to suit a 24/7 rolling news cycle. "allowing terorism to increase"? Our governments take many actions in full awareness that it will increase the terrorist threat, they disregard the threat as identified by advisors when making policy. You're ignoring the fact that the planners of terrorist atrocities don't use yahoo to defend Yahoo sharing all their customer emails with government. Nonsensical.

So it's not a case of weighing the risk against the loss of liberty at all for you. There's no point at which you would think it was overkill. No matter how diminshed the threat ever was, you would want the government reading yours and everyone's emails and feel safer for it, because you're law abiding and anyone else doing anything they shouldn't should be weaseled out. It's a strange view when we all know that any terrorist with the intelligence to pull off an attack never is or was ever ever ever going to use Yahoo though.

But still less than what you guessed to be the current risk. How low would the risk need to be for you to oppose blanket surveillance of private citizens?

Superb dual threads within a thread here mind. Did anyone else think it was a put up insurance job?

Yes and the weight will almost always be heavier on it being better to be free. People don't stop driving or crossing roads, although the risk posed by them doing so is higher.

Risk analysist writing about France in the independent calculated the risk over the last 2 years and says you're 5 times too high with that estimate. Risk is "less than two ten-thousandths of one per cent" - 0.0002% in the European nation to have suffered most in the last couple of years. http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/nice-attack-do-you-feel-like-youre-more-likely-than-ever-to-be-hit-by-a-terror-attack-this-is-why-a7140396.html

good blog post on slippery slopes in light of the Yahoo reveal... https://medium.com/@_decius_/about-yahoo-email-scanning-and-robocop-48c29bfbb0ee#.61rozfgwr

..and as loathe as I am to agree with Parky, much of what he says is true, if presented in crazed terms. The blanket dredging of ALL communication around the globe isn't being done to target you or I or to target terrorists or child pornographers. That's a positive side effect or a useful justification. It's technology that has the primary use of spying on other governments and their top corporations, friendly or not. It's there so that people at the very top of government can have any edge in the competition between nation states. Merkel, Petrobras, the Swift network for global bank transfers, the French foreign ministry have all been shown to be targets outside of the "legitimate" security uses.

I've been very specific I think. I don't refer to "they" at any point. Given examples where FBI, NSA and that have implemented secret programs (where it's shocking what abilities they have branded legal) and abuses of those programs that extend into illegality. All private citizens communications should be entirely private. All investigations into private citizens private affairs should be court (Not FISA court) approved and only applied from the point of obtaining the warrant where wrongdoing has been identified as probable. The ironic thing is that the backlash would not have occurred to the extent it has if security services made legal court approved approaches specifically targeting those they have reason to target. There would have been no Snowden if that were the case. Unencrypted service providers could openly respond to those requests and people would be reasonably safe in the knowledge that their modern comms weren't being intercepted unless they were suspected of crimes. No more privacy loss than they would have with their phone calls or post 30 years ago. As it is, the blanket approach of secretly sweeping up every piece of correspondence on the globe pushes anyone with any concern for privacy towards encrypted services that cannot provide courts any content whatsoever, even if they want to. It harms the security services ability to find information assumed to be private as wrongdoers ensure anything they do is certainly private.

To be fair to Renton, I'd say it's clear his view is that of the vast majority and I appreciate his efforts to justify that view, all while thinking it's a bankrupt argument.

No, I've covered this and you've misrepresented what I said intentiaonally with block capitals for emphasis. There is evidence that many folied attacks are actually facilitated by security services. Any number of foiled attacks presented to the public should therefore take that into consideration on the sensible conclusion that some of the attacks would never have taken place anyway without the help of security services. There is always a risk of terrorist attacks. No "war on terror" can EVER be won or seen as temporary in response to a short lived escalation, so the question is what is a proportional response to the actual danger faced that balances security and liberty. I'm sure you are well aware of the statistics on the liklihood of being killed by various things which places terror attacks among the lowest threats we face daily. I don't agree with it being the justification for a litany of erosions to our freedom. From emails snooping to travel bans, from outlawed protest to criminalised whistleblowing.

I think the security services could point to evidence of all the incidents they say they have thwarted. The problem is that the security services are heavily involved in facillitating many of those incidents in the first place http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/opinion/sunday/terrorist-plots-helped-along-by-the-fbi.html How many would have happened without that support? On security Vs Liberty, I agree with Benjamin Franklin Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

Incognito keeps the information off your computer (so the wife and kids can't find it) and Google's advertising algorithm (so nowt embarrassing appears during normal browsing). The history is all retained on Google servers though.

There are companies that protect privacy... Apple have been excellent on privacy. Whatsapp provide encryption. As I mentioned Signal, protonmail, duckduckgo, Tor. Mega encrypt your cloud storage. Companies that use open source encryption rather than proprietary should allay any fears Parky has that such security is just lip service. The secret service will not be restrained in their pursuit of our information or open about the tools and companies they use to do so, their mantra is "collect it all". The problem is that even when the information on what is happening is available a majority either don't pay attention or aren't that bothered by it and are happy enough with the trade off of getting simple, free, cross platform syncing communication tools and losing their privacy.

https://theintercept.com/2016/10/05/fbi-secret-methods-for-recruiting-informants-at-the-border/ Story on the Intercept yesterday with documents showing that the US border patrol shares passenger information with the FBI on people in no way linked to any crime. Intention being to detain and interview these people at the border and turn them into informants if they can be useful, depending on where they come from, where they travel, what they do for work and that. This isn't the odd rogue fbi worker abusing power to the detriment of law-abiding citizens, this is the policy of how to use private information on law-abioding citizens.

np To wade in on the "big brother" argument between Renton and SEW, the fact that we are living in a surveillance state doesn't mean that any government (and subsequent governments) have moved forward on a policy of implementing a surveillance state with ominous intent. What we end up with can be a byproduct of genuine intent to fight crime. The intelligence community have created tools that make it easier for them to find information on criminals, both before and after they commit crimes. Nothing that Renton would hear any argument against. It would be easier to fight crime if we all had cameras in all of our homes monitoring everything we do in private as well though. No-one would seriously advocate that. Haven't we gone too far when everyone's email is not only collected but also scanned for buzz-words? Even if you think it has not, then you must worry about who you vest with these powers. As I mention above the FBI have illegally obtained emails from a four star general in a salacious sex story that saw him forced to resign. Would these tools be used with restraint by Richard Nixon? Or by Donald Trump? It's not conspiratorial to imagine that the powers are being abused routinely, beyond the examples we have seen. Nor is it logical to assume that they will only be used against those in power or fighting power violently. Journalists and lawyers are especially in danger of having legitimate work pried upon. Beyond that though, regular members of the public with no ties to any cause whatsoever have had their calls monitored by NSA staff reaching beyond what anyone would consider reasonable use of their tools... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/27/nsa-employee-spied-detection-internal-memo The extent to which these tools invade on privacy and where they can be effective and how that should be implemented is one thing and a valuable debate that should be had. To have them shrouded in secrecy is another. Without any public recognition of which tools leave your liberty at risk and which tools have the security to protect your liberty we are not free people able to make informed choices on whether we like what our leaders are doing or should be replaced.

A replacement Samsung Galaxy Note 7 device, deemed safe by the firm, has reportedly caught fire on a Southwest Airlines plane. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-37570100