David Cameron Says Fictional Crime Proves Why Snooper's Charter Is Necessary

An anonymous reader sends this story from TechDirt: "You may recall the stories from the past couple years about the so-called 'snooper's charter' in the UK — a system to further legalize the government's ability to spy on pretty much all communications. It was setting up basically a total surveillance system, even beyond what we've since learned is already being done today. Thankfully, that plan was killed off by Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg. However, Prime Minister David Cameron is back to pushing for the snooper's charter — and his reasoning is as stupid as it is unbelievable. Apparently, he thinks it's necessary because the fictional crime dramas he watches on TV show why it's necessary. Cameron said, 'I love watching, as I probably should stop telling people, crime dramas on the television. There's hardly a crime drama where a crime is solved without using the data of a mobile communications device. What we have to explain to people is that... if we don't modernise the practice and the law, over time we will have the communications data to solve these horrible crimes on a shrinking proportion of the total use of devices and that is a real problem for keeping people safe.'"

Idiocy.

[MajikJon]

By that logic, the best way to prevent 9/11 would have been to cover up the small thermal exhaust port on the World Trade Center that led directly to the main reactor.

You know what else we need

[russotto]

Warp drive. Lawyers with a conscience. Guns which never need reloading. And magic infinite photo enhancement. When do we get those, huh?

I'm sorry, but

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

When did "keeping us safe" become the primary function of government? Oh, that's right, George Bush and John Ashcroft used that as an excuse to make us live in a police state right after 9/11. Now it has spread to the whole democratic West. Good thing the terrorists didn't win.

1984 was fiction too

[c0d3g33k]

Not to defend him by any means, but in this instance his statement is no more stupid than invoking 1984 or other dystopian works of fiction as the reason the Snooper's Charter is to be avoided. Fiction they may be, but these works portray possibilities that inform how things might turn out in reality given a course of action, even if the actual outcome resembles the fictional scenario only in kind, not in actual detail. The ability to gain insight into ourselves is one of the many reasons we find works of art valuable in the first place. The key is not to confuse fiction with reality which admittedly many do.

Also true for the Steve Jackson Games raid

[billstewart]

The Feds really did have to raid Steve Jackson Games [wikipedia.org], because otherwise dangerous computer hackers might use their site to learn dangerous hacking techniques, like "Roll 3d6. If you get better than 15, your probe breaks through the firewall undetected!".