h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

McKay, you seemtobe saying two contradictory things here.

"Surely if an MP is selected to represent a party, they should be confident that he will vote in the best interests of his constituents, with regard to party policy.

Presumably by "they" you mean the people who live in a particular constituency, but how can they honestly expect anyone selected by others to represent a pzarty to closely stick to their individual ideals or even moorals. Especially when there are thousands of other people too in thatconstituency.

What people end up voting for is a candidate who think is going to deliver the closest to what they want across a range of issues, well if they have any grip on reality they do.

It might sond nice to some to have an M.P. who has his ear to the ground and changes tack on the (often multifaceted) whims of the constitunets, but in reality this is neither practical nor realistic. Its not going to happen for two reasons largely; because as you have said most M.P's. know which side their bread is buttered on and because most people arent politically engaged enough to put enough presssure on to vote one way or another.

Lots of people in this country would be more than happy to se suspected terorists of the, lets face it, radical Islamist variety locked up forever just for being radical Islamists and dont really mind about the errosion of basic rights.

Take a real look around. Was there a thread on here called "Rita Chakarabatti for PM"? No it was "Jeremy Clarkson for PM", heck more people in this country would probably vote for Jeremy Kyle ahead of her.




Having read this thread through again and still holding onto what I said about Davies motives I can now also see his other motives or atleast appreciate that there might be other outcomes to his stand. Blimey, how I hope there are!

Hopefully people will take a closer look at the issues h'es quit over, but just yesterday Jack Straw announced "same as usual" over party funding. So the chances of a more closely representative democracy are a long way off by the looks of things.

one love

There's an annoying tendency amongst some leftists to fret about the support Davis is getting and to wail "oh noes! David Davis is a RIGHTWING! He is authoritarian and against gay rights and stuff!!!1" which spectacularly misses the point. Davis might well be wrong about a whole host of stuff but he is RIGHT about 42 days and that's the issue at stake here and the issue his by-election will be fought over. Besides, if Labour don't field a candidate and the Sun put MacKenzie against him it's vital MacKenzie and his Fleet Street masters are given as bloody electoral nose as possible.

What annoys me more is this idea that we have to either support David Davis or not. Why not just say, as I do, that we agree with him that 42 days is bad, and that we disagree with him about gay rights, economics, etc.

>What annoys me more is this idea that we have to either support David Davis or not. Why not just say, as I do, that we agree with him that 42 days is bad, and that we disagree with him about gay rights, economics, etc.

Exactly. Most of the people on the left who support Davis *on this issue* have made it quite clear that they don't necessarily support him on others (although I don't quite understand why this is necessary; he isn't arguing about gay rights, for instance, in this case).

I can understand it - the whole debate is about liberty, and Davis is not a consistent supporter of it. I think it's worth making that point too.

Hmm, just saw this video and now I'm thinking maybe we really shouldn't be supporting David Davis after all:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7-zVk7roDM

As I think I said earlier in this thread, Davis supporting 28 days doesn't impact on his opposing 42; the whole point is that he thinks there should be a limit on any "emergency powers" and the government keeps claiming to have a limit then demands it be increased. As Davis said in his resignation speech, the arguments the government makes for 42 days aren't satisfied with 42 days any more than they were with 28 days; it's less an argument for emergency holding for a limited time and more an argument for indefinite holding which would effectively mean habeus corpus and the rule of law being thrown away (as they have with Guantanamo Bay, for example, although the rule of law finally appears to be making grounds there).

In other news, it seems the Sun's candidate-in-waiting Kelvin MacKenzie has decided not to stand. I presume the paper realised he would probably be defeated and decided that its (many) enemies would have a field day and its self-styled populist image would be badly tarnished.

I thought he'd supported 28 days as a purely political manoeuvre to stop 90 days from winning out, so I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt about having voted for 28 days. But, from that video clip it looks like he wholeheartedly supported it. Someone in that clip that said "Look, you either support habeas corpus or you don't", and Davis doesn't. His argument for 28 days as an extension on 14 (which is also too long) was that the police said they needed it. Well guess what, they say they need 42, 90, etc. This attitude suggests that he is using this campaign for some other end rather than really believing in it.

Perhaps - and I know this is unthinkable - he has seen the light. Maybe the arguments have made him see that what he thought was defensible simply isn't.

The point is that this goverment has eaten further and further into what we have always regarded as our rights.

The assumption of innocence in court ~ the right to protest ~ the right to know what you are being charged with ~ the right to silence.

Davis' response to that QT video:

http://www.daviddavisforfreedom.com/index.cfm?fa=contentNews.newsDetails&newsID=61590&from=list

So he supported 28 days and thinks 42 is more than necessary.

So he thinks that pushing for more, in context with ID cards, Databases with personal details open to all & sundry, etc is too much and is eroding personal freedom.

So?

So who's the fool - the one modifying his opinion with changing circumstances or the one who knocks him because he did?

He hasn't changed his opinion. And the reason I I knock him is because he's unprincipled. There is no principle that distinguishes between 28 days and 42.

I don't know if this takes the argument out of the circle, but I found this post from elsewhere - from a poster I respect - to be thought-provoking.

"I've really weighed up the arguments. If Gordon Brown said we needed to drink beer, I'd never touch a drop again, so I don't believe HIM when he says we need 42 days. Some very intelligent and admirable people have said we don't need 42 days - Elish Angionlini Scotland's Lord Advocate is one, and I have never heard anything other than common sense and good judgement from her mouth before.

But, like Lin and Trubble, I kept asking 'but what is the case for 42 days? Why would we need 42 days'?

Then I got told the answer by a very, very ,very senior police officer who I find trustworthy.

He was involved in a case (when he was in one of the Southern English police forces) where the key to cracking the terrorist plot was on one of the suspect's computer. They printed out every piece of information from that computer including logs of contacts made, and so on. The subsequent pile of paper filled a large room at a police station. Millions of tiny pieces of information.

Every single sheet had to be read. And furthermore, it had to be read by a very small team of people. Because there was no point in person 1 knowing A had contacted B on such a such date, but only person 2 knew who B was. The same people had to read it, so that they could link things together. Only by constructing the narrative from all these disparate pieces of information could they get sufficient proof to charge the suspects.

In order to meet the 28 day deadline he had his officers sleeping on the floors for a few hours, because there wasn't time to let them get home. He said 28 days is simply not long enough to sift through all the pieces of information on a computer.

I believe him.

So I finally had the answer as to why they needed more than 28 days.

We have a Human Rights Act in place. The human rights of terrorist suspects are absolutely protected by that. To increase the time limit from 28 to 42 days will not breach the current Human Rights Act.

42 days is human rights compatible."

So lets grab the computers of anyone we think is dubious ~ BNP voters say ~ lock them up for 42 days and trawl through their computers.

I'm sure you're familiar with the 6 steps to Kennedy process, whereby everyone is 6 contacs away from the President, now lets try applying that to every piece of information on a computer.

We're all guilty.

This is a totally spurious argument, if you don't have the evidence to charge the person in the first place, this sort of fishing expedition is a poor excuse for police work.

Agreed with McKay.

The issue is not whether or not it would be useful to have 42 days. It would be 'useful' for the police to have indefinite detention without trial. Habeas corpus was suspended during WW2 and maybe that was justifiable, and because of the IRA, which certainly wasn't justifiable. To argue that it should be suspended now you need to be facing similarly extreme circumstances to WW2, and you'd have to be completely deluded to think that was true.

That said, I'll comment on SWL's story:

"Then I got told the answer by a very, very ,very senior police officer who I find trustworthy. He was involved in a case (when he was in one of the Southern English police forces) where the key to cracking the terrorist plot was on one of the suspect's computer. They printed out every piece of information from that computer including logs of contacts made, and so on. The subsequent pile of paper filled a large room at a police station. Millions of tiny pieces of information."

See now, this says to me: this story is made up. Is this really how the police do computer forensics? or more likely, is this an insulting analogy invented by the police or their PR people to try to get across the scale of how difficult computer forensics is? My guess is the latter, because it's incredibly implausible technically speaking, and because it's strikingly similar to another claim I've heard. During the debate about 90 days back in 2005, Labour MP Janet Anderson (Rossendale and Darwen) said the following:

"Like other Lancashire Members of Parliament, I have a letter from the acting deputy chief constable of Lancaster, Julia Hodson, who urges us to support the Government so that she and her colleagues can protect the public in the way that they wish. ... In their recent evidence to the Joint Committee on Human Rights, the police referred to one case in which, if they had printed out the computer data that they had recovered, it would have made a pile 66,000 ft high. That is the sort of challenge that the police face and they need our help to meet it."

You can see that in this version of this story, the pile of paper was 66,000 foot high and certainly wouldn't have fit in one room in a police station, but it's also a hypothetical version of the story: it says "IF they had printed out..." (my emphasis). This looks to me like a story that has been making the rounds, changing slightly as it moves from place to place, more because it sounds impressive than because of having any basis in fact.

So my response would be: why should we believe the rest of the story when it starts off with a fabrication?

But look, we don't need made up nonsense to tell you that getting information out of a computer is hard. You can embed information into any of the files on your entire computer. Open up your windows folder and start counting how many there are, go into all the subfolders, etc. OK, you think that was a lot? No, it's much worse than that, because most of the files are binary files and you wouldn't even be able to look at them and work out whether or not they had relevant information in them, they're just strings of 0s and 1s. But hey, it's worse than that, because not only might there be information in any of those files, but that information might be encrypted. And cracking strong encryption with the most powerful computers in the world would take longer than the lifetime of the universe, unless the person using it has made a mistake (which happens). But even suppose you could crack that encryption, you still don't even know whether a file has any encrypted information in it or not. There are free programs out there that can encode information into a photo by imperceptibly changing the colour of some of the pixels in the picture. So how are you going to detect that? I could go on. It's absolutely true that the task is incredibly difficult.

And that's why we should reject this stuff about needing 28/42/etc. days to do it. If the terrorists are half competent - and if we're assuming that they're technically competent enough to build bombs that could kill large numbers of people, they'd better be half competent - then they can hide information on these computers that the police will never be able to crack no matter how hard they look.

And the stuff at the end about the Human Rights act just confirms that it's nonsense.

Oh the bit about 48 days being HRA compatible is true - because the government can do this IF IT THINKS IT'S JUSTIFIED - it's English law they're changing - not the HRA.

Oh phooey.

Are there not programs to scan & correlate? Are they not among tools of surveillance?

Can the police apply to the courts for extensions?

Surely the nub of this discussion is (or should be?):
Do we agree that Government should be able to erode our freedoms without protest?
If not, then what does it matter who makes the initial protest?
If you don't like the man Davis, who *would* you trust? Anyone?

"Are there not programs to scan & correlate?"

Of course, and they do some incredibly clever things, but if someone has been careful there's still nothing they can do about it.

"If not, then what does it matter who makes the initial protest?"

I have some sympathy for this as I said earlier in the thread. I wouldn't go so far as to actively oppose him, that would be a bit too sectarian. But, equally I wouldn't put any effort into supporting him, because I wouldn't want him to become the focal figure in the fight for liberty. In the long term, that would be a real mistake because the man has shown he doesn't believe in it on principle.

"If you don't like the man Davis, who *would* you trust? Anyone?"

Any of the 290 MPs who voted against 28 days?

"See now, this says to me: this story is made up. Is this really how the police do computer forensics? or more likely, is this an insulting analogy invented by the police or their PR people to try to get across the scale of how difficult computer forensics is? My guess is the latter, because it's incredibly implausible technically speaking, and because it's strikingly similar to another claim I've heard..."

Sorry, but I really don't think you can base a whole argument around something which is conjecture. SWL said he heard this from a senior policeman (if it was a story in a round robin email then I'd agree that it's time to put the disbelieving hat on but if SWL's telling the truth then that's not the case) and you've simply dismissed it with "well, I don't believe that because...". Arguing it might not be the case is fine, but to claim it's simply not true and then argue a position based on this completely unproven statement puts you on very shaky ground.

"And that's why we should reject this stuff about needing 28/42/etc. days to do it. If the terrorists are half competent - and if we're assuming that they're technically competent enough to build bombs that could kill large numbers of people, they'd better be half competent - then they can hide information on these computers that the police will never be able to crack no matter how hard they look."

Well, yes and no. Competent terrorists are likely to encrypt things in such a way that makes it extremely difficult for the police to break them (or, more likely, just not be stupid enough to store incriminating evidence on their computer) but terrorists aren't often that competent. You don't actually need to be a master criminal to be a good terrorist. The worst terrorist attack in history was perpetrated not by heavily-armed guerillas but by a group of men with some flight training armed with box cutters. The Admiral pub bombing in soho (the worst neo-nazi attack in recent memory) was just some disgruntled bloke with a bomb in a sports bag. It doesn't take competent evil geniuses to kill lots of people or create social and political unrest.