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

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3789279.stm

Saw this this morning and thought "What a completely and utterly stupid idea!"

"Police in the UK, US and Australia will make use of the different time zones to monitor the web 24 hours a day."

Ok, so, with the limited resources our police forces already have, they're now supposed to shut themselves in an office with a computer and monitor the _millions_ of chatrooms around the world.

"If a dialogue is potentially dangerous, officers may warn both online parties."

Ok, anyone come up with anything more potentially dangerous than this little conversation on a chatroom...

Child: Hello? Who are you!
Complete stranger: I'm a policeman, you can trust me!

And if anyone says that can't or won't happen - given ten minutes with the search engine I could point you to where someone pretends to be a police officer on this very site!

Plus of course all the juristrictional and legal issues - some chatrooms are private or by invitation only - now, do the police lie to get into them? If so, can they legally use any information they get?

Is it just me or does this idea sound like it comes from a politician and not a policeman?

It's an interesting headline isn't it.

How do they plan to monitor them? Will there be a police officer actually present in the room, or will they have a bot monitoring the rooms and alerting them to 'suspicious' conversations?

Will they be able to monitor private conversations?

Will they have to follow-up hundreds of false alarms as genuine 14 year olds arrange meets?

How many hundreds of working hours will be spent on an endeavour that will probably have a low success rate?

"A symbol may appear on computer screens to let chatroom users know that they are being overheard"

AKA "come back later when it's safe"

My other half used to host a teen's chat room.

I know what the twisted little bstards are like - they'll be having deliberately risque conversations just to waste the police's time.

i read somewhere that a surprising percentage of ALL the world's phone calls are monitored by pentagon computers. all you need to do is say "ben laden" or "plastic explosives" or "ralph nader" and a recorder switches on.

at the end of the line, each analyst gets a 2 car garage full of documents in 12 different languages every morning with their first cup of coffee. us military intelligence (don't laugh) had all the info they needed about kenya & tanzania, the cole, and 9/11 before it happened.

the problem is not getting the intelligence, it's acting on it. so what should be done is give these cybercops control over batteries of cruise missiles to eradicate automatically terrorist hot spots like, for example, hootoo

Hmmm, it does seem like a bad idea. I suppose every time a pair of kids chat on the internet, the police will have to track them down just to check one of them isn't an adult posing as a child.

Hello, constable!

'"People say 'what about civil liberties?' but you have a virtual world out there - we have to police that to make it as safe as we can," she said.'

Which, whether the conclusion is true or not, looks like a classic example of a non sequitur.

What I'm surprised by is that you're reacting like this is new.

This already happens, folks

I think it's the idea of a wide, 'official policy' scheme that bugs people.

Spill the beans Jimster. Where?

I'm not sure it happens as a matter of course - or at least, I'm not sure it's been publicly admitted. All you have to do is remember where the internet came from and work out from that how unlikely it is that government / authority observation hasn't been maintained over time...

'Officers entering chat rooms will use an icon to alert other users to their presence.'

Does this happen already anywhere?

Jimster... Believe me, there's a heck of a difference between internet traffic being automatically monitored for certain 'national security related' key words (Bin Laden, Bomb, Oil well destruction, airline crash, etc...)*
and then any 'dodgy' traffic being passed on to a trained analyst for perusal and the police trying to do this manually... Firstly, how the heck do you set up automatic keyword searches on conversations where someone is trying to sound normal? Alarms ring everytime anyone on the internet uses the phrase "shall we meet up", "where do you live"... The police just wouldn't have the resources available to follow up on all the possible contacts...

The Security Services can take a rapid glance at a text and immediately decide if it's worth following up on or not - If the police were serious about trying to catch adults posing as children on the web they'd have to manually monitor every single conversation on the net... do you really think they could?








* This post should start alarm bells ringing in Cheltenham by the way

I'm sorry but how the L are they gonna make an icon appear on the screen? I can't see how they'd do it? Too many people out there with good home PC security that would block anything like that. Or do they mean there will be an icon printed on every single conversation thread? And how to make sure everyone has read it?
Mind you, a flashing blue light icon that appears in your main window whenever the cops are near. And thery could make the computer play a siren sound if a sound card is detected!

I think I'd prefer policemen to monitor places where children are real, not virtual. I asked Blues Shark once, and he said in his experience, most men who are that way inclined go out and get jobs as scout leaders, or volunteer to help out at kids bands and things like that.

It would be nice to see policemen getting to know families on their beat, so that kids at risk grow up to trust them, not to be in fear of them.

The internet is too easy to target! Why I don't deny this goes on (I've seen the evidence myself) I'd feel safer if my child knew a real policeman, rather than know one was in a chatroom with him.

A cunningly chosen thin end of a very big censorship wegde is what I think .

Wasn't one of the policeman involved in the Soham murder investigation was later found to have dodgy material himself?

Should any policeman volunteering for this duty should automatically be disqualified from be allowed to do so?

RF

The officer in the Soham murder enquiry was cleared of all charges, so I should be careful bandying that one about if I was you.

Indeed it does. The police pose as children in internet rooms to catch paedos. I guess what they are trying to do is some how avoid allegations of entrapment - ha, strike that! - make the Daily Mail readers believe that they can and are doing something.

Sounds like a Chris Morris sketch to me.

One of the Soham officers was cleared, the other officer was jailed for 6 months

<.>http://www.innocenceindanger.org/innocence/news103/news_ukpornenquiry.htm<./>