Originally Posted by merle haggard

which is garda incompetence in a city wre gardai were too busy bringing wrongful prosecutions against a man who had the temerity to make a complaint to gardai that the minister of defence punched him and proceeded to try and strangle him in a public bar .

Originally Posted by Factorem

Under the Surveillance Bill, thousands and thousands of hours of conversations are to be bugged and listened in to, stored indefinitely, and searched through using state-of-the-art semantic search engines. It's like something out of an Orwell novel.

These kinds of laws only impinge on the right to privacy of law-abiding citizens. The scumbags in Limerick will find ways around the surveillance, whilst innocent people get picked out by the automated software systems and their private conversations are listened in on.

How will the speech recognition systems cope with the Limerick knacker accent? If the Moyross locals think their calls are being recorded and stored, they'll speak with even worse knacker accents so the automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems will go haywire. The gardai/army will need to put huge effort into training their systems to recognise Limerick/Dublin knackers and it's unlikely they have the expertise – i.e. it's the innocent people who speak normally are the ones who are going to end up being picked out for saying something slightly “out of the ordinary”. Also, if I'm picked up by one of these algorithms, how long are my private conversations going to be stored on some Garda computer?

Mary McAleese would want to grow a pair and send this bill back to the Supreme Court. I don't want to live in a parnoid surveillance state where everyone is looking over their shoulder all the time. She's made little impact sofar and this would be a chance for her to make some kind of a mark.

The Limerick knackers won't be long getting themselves 3G-enabled phones with a readily available encrypted chat/voice package installed. The Gardai/Army won't be able to do a thing about that unless they've got some quantum computer in the basement of Harcourt Street. Innocent people certainly won't be using counter-surveillance technology.

Then there's those laser microphones that are used by police forces all over the world. If you know the Gardai have the technology, it's not hard to protect yourself against their intrusion.