The way I see it and it have stated before is that it's about control and keeping in power. By being able to listen in on any communication and being able to track who is talking to whom, they are able to catch and suppress leakers and whistleblowers. Thereby making sure that if they themselves do anything wrong it can be covered up easily and indefinitely.

thanks for the mental image of clown-terrorists :( as if either weren't bad enough on their own.

Isn't it obvious? This has got f-all to do with terrorism. The bad guys have always hidden their communication.

What's getting the security services all riled up is that ordinary law-abiding citizens are suddenly encrypted.

And, of course, there's no way out of this. Either encryption is secure, or it's broken. If it's secure, it's secure for everyone. If it's broken, it's broken for everyone. Now we have open-source encryption methods that are trivial to implement, anyone can build a securely end-to-end encrypted communication system. [1]

The cat's out of the bag, spooks. You can't read people's mail any more. You'll have to find other ways of gathering intelligence.

[1] within reason - clown-like incompetence will always mess up. Or even just ordinary-coder levels of incompetence. But it's still harder than plaintext.

i'm not even sure about that. i think i remember the story about islamic terrorists in europe last year using plain old SMS to coordinate their attack. didn't make a difference though, their communication was only analyzed after it happened.

so for the average imbecile just using whatsapp, signal or a self-hosted service would actually make a difference, but if it'd make a difference for law enforcement is a different matter. having access to billions of messages and actually doing something with them are two different kinds of beasts.

>thanks for the mental image of clown-terrorists

Have you not seen Four Lions?

> The vast majority of terrorists are clowns.

Perhaps if you're referring to home grown Islamic terrorists. However Britain does have a problem with an experienced group of rather professional terrorists called the IRA.

And the lesson people keep refusing to learn is that the conflict in NI was ended not by military or legal action but by political action, including the establishment of human rights in law there as insurance against arbitrary state actions.

The IRA are and were very different from the Islamic terrorists, who are much less organised and more resemble isolated self-radicalised far right extremists.

Also banning encryption would have bo effect on IRA. They were super effective without it...

They were effective even with STAKEKNIFE embedded in the organisation at a high level.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakeknife

When was the last IRA attack, Manchester 1996?

27 March 2017.

http://www.irishnews.com/news/northernirelandnews/2017/03/27...

A republican bomb maker was convicted literally yesterday. This isn't ancient history.

That's interesting. Looks like he was a member of the Continuity IRA[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuity_Irish_Republican_Ar...

I don't know how much of this you know, but there are several "dissident" republican and loyalist terror groups that have remained active since the Good Friday Agreements. The Omagh bombing, with the biggest loss of life of any attack in the Troubles, was carried out by dissident republicans after the agreement. The last republican bombings on British soil (not in Northern Ireland) were by the Real IRA in 2001, but they've continued in Northern Ireland, including in the past few years.

I know about the IRA in general from the news & living in the UK. I hadn't realised splinter groups were still at it.

I don't tend to read the news -- so haven't heard much about Sinn Fein[0] recently, for example. Looking up SF, I've just learned they are left-wing. I'd assumed they were right-wing nationalists.

Guess the answer to how much I know about this subject is, a wee bit.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinn_F%C3%A9in

here are the sentencing remarks: https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/judgments/sentencing-remarks-of...

The research & library creation is illegal. That's a bit much:

'Research resulting in the creation of a library of documents providing information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism — specifically information regarding the manufacture of explosive substances, the construction of explosive devices, and tactics used by terrorist organisations.'

You missed a critical bit: "...with the intention of assisting another to commit acts of terrorism..."

My quote was the entirety of Count 1. I believe a count is a distinct offence[0].

[0]http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/count

> My quote was the entirety of Count 1.

No, it's not. It's the entirety of the first numbered point (of six) on page 1; all six of the numbered points there, as well as the paragraph leading into the numbered list and all but the last two paragraphs of page 2 address Count 1. Count 2 is addressed in the penultimate paragraph of page 2, and Count 3 is addressed in the final paragraph of page 2, which carries over onto page 3. The remainder of the document is not recounting the offenses but discussing other sentencing factors.

There are only 3 counts (as stated at the very beginning of the document), so even if the beginning of the discussion of each count weren't explicitly marked in a parenthetical, it would be easy to see that the numbers of the six-item numbered list could not be count numbers.

All the numbered paragraphs are subject to the rider "As the Particulars of that offence make clear, with the intention of assisting another to commit acts of terrorism, you engaged in conduct in preparation for giving effect to that intention namely:"

The relevant legislation is here: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/11/section/5

I don't know enough about the subject to defend my position.

Guess I'll just concede: assigning a reasonable probability of you being correct.

If we fuck up Brexit badly enough, maybe we'll see them back in action.