So our politicians will go and stand shoulder to shoulder with millions of people on a march to defend our right to freedom of expression… as long as we give up all our rights to privacy. If you remember, this all happened off the back of 9/11 too. Governments the world over jumped on the opportunity to get away with eroding our freedoms and privacy and rights for our own sakes. it’s pretty fucking sick, really, to take advantage of mass murder like this.

So now they insist that – for our security – they need to have the capability to snoop on every word we exchange privately between individuals. Or, at least, that’s what they think they will achieve by potentially banning encrypted apps like WhatsApp.

Uhuh. I might be naive here, but I don’t personally believe that terrorists plot 9/11 style attacks on WhatsApp.

So, given that people send encrypted email – which is a far more likely method for terrorists to communicate via than whatsapp – we should presumably ban email altogether?

I think all this really proves is that the government know absolutely fuck all about technology. Which is actually the most unsettling thing about it – how the fuck can we expect them to protect us through technology?

Any actual would-be terrorist cells almost certainly know far more than our government apparently do about secure technologies and would likely run their communications through Tor, or use 256bit encryption via an IRC server.

The only way round that would be to ban the internet entirely, I guess.

But that’s silly. Isn’t it? That couldn’t happen in the name of freedom of speech and for our security..? Could it..?

If there’s a war on terror, then the terrorists are winning by a country mile.