100,000s Of Private Conversations To Be Recorded

[Factorem]

Took the Irish Council for Civil Liberties long enough to come out and make a statement against these new proposed laws.

[perprojustice]

Exactly. The Gardai/Army have to be seen to be "moving with the times".

When it comes down to it, they haven't a clue and I wouldn't be surprised if there are back-handers and international junkets left right and centre.

Give the Air Corps a g-suit and they think their state-of-the-art. Give the Garda a semantic search engine and off-the-shelf voice recognition technology and they think they're working in a real-life episode of CSI Miami.

The last radio system that the gardai bought was a system that was rejected by another police force, I think the French, as unworkable.

It was a disaster. It poor performance often left Gardai without urgent backup thus endangering their lives.
Why did they think it could work here when it failed to even come near the expectations of the other police forces?

[asset test]

Might be the keystone cops equipment failure or falling asleep listening to the eejits that will make this not work, but the THREAT of covert surveillance is enough to drive the crims a bit mad (madder than they are now)and that is worse than tailing someone. They'll never know when it is being done or not done. You can't carry a laptop into Limerick prison to Skype someone.

We have nothing to worry about, if we have done nothing to worry about. Behave yourselves and you'll be OK. So what's the worry about the cops tailing and taping criminals? I'm all for it, and if they get me in the net that would be so funny.

[Factorem]

Might be the keystone cops equipment failure or falling asleep listening to the eejits that will make this not work, but the THREAT of covert surveillance is enough to drive the crims a bit mad (madder than they are now)and that is worse than tailing someone. They'll never know when it is being done or not done. You can't carry a laptop into Limerick prison to Skype someone.

We have nothing to worry about, if we have done nothing to worry about. Behave yourselves and you'll be OK. So what's the worry about the cops tailing and taping criminals? I'm all for it, and if they get me in the net that would be so funny.

Mobile phones in prison are not uncommon. I have encrypted chat on my mobile phone since mid 2008. Now imagine if I conducted all my chats through a Tor network -- the Gardai wouldn't know where to begin.

If only the Gardai would get their priorities right, they wouldn't have to spend X million on CSI Miami style IT projects and training people to work on covert ops. Then again, it's far more enjoyable to go on junkets and "roll out" new projects than do the ground work of searching people properly on the way into prisons and weeding out corruption amongst officers in the prison service.

[Factorem]

We have nothing to worry about, if we have done nothing to worry about. Behave yourselves and you'll be OK. So what's the worry about the cops tailing and taping criminals? I'm all for it, and if they get me in the net that would be so funny.

You're one of these people who leaves the door open when taking a dump, right?

[Thranduil]

A lot of abuse in the original post, referring to Limerick People as 'Knackers' and the use of that word itself. Yes there are run down places in Limerick, there are such places in Dublin, Cork etc. In even the most lawless estates the problems are caused by a small minority which everyone else is terrified of (and would very much like removed), if this is a problem find out how to identify and excise these cancers efficiently, don't go down the lazy route of ascribing the problem to a community or even an entire city.

Civil Liberties concerns are important, i personally don't care one iota if a genuine piece of scum has his civil liberties infringed - far as i can see he acts like he is in a jungle anyway, obviously i care when such powers to 'go beyond' are misapplied or misused against decent people. I like to think the civil liberties people have this foremost in mind too when they compose their letters of protest and are not just being a 'fly in the ointment' on what is an important issue.

[perprojustice]

Might be the keystone cops equipment failure or falling asleep listening to the eejits that will make this not work, but the THREAT of covert surveillance is enough to drive the crims a bit mad (madder than they are now)and that is worse than tailing someone. They'll never know when it is being done or not done. You can't carry a laptop into Limerick prison to Skype someone.

We have nothing to worry about, if we have done nothing to worry about. Behave yourselves and you'll be OK. So what's the worry about the cops tailing and taping criminals? I'm all for it, and if they get me in the net that would be so funny.

There is a lot to worry about. Start with POLICE STATE

[bugibba]

War against terror + climate change = tax revenue for governments

[drkpower]

[/B]

There is a lot to worry about. Start with POLICE STATE

How does this Bill result in a Police State?
What does a Police State mean to you?
Do you really believe that Ireland is anywhere close to becoming a Police State?
If so, explain why?
If not, why use such inflammatory language?

[Gruffalo]

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.

For this to happen, the Irish Government would have to be able to purchase technology which works. Think e-voting machines. Nothing to fear here.