Is our Prime Minister really this dense?

And of course there is the technology.

It is a bit like the phone system. Can you imagine every word you spoke on the phone being filtered through a system which flagged up the use of words that may be connected with you having an affair on the side? How would you react ? (apart from ditching either the suspicious husband or the luscious fancy man)

You would evolve a code, that's what.
You would say "Oh hi, Elizabeth, nice to hear from you (Wow Mike, you hunk! It's been a long time since Tuesday).
Yes, I'd love to meet for coffee this afternoon. ^(I am panting with desire!)
See you at the coffee shop at 2.30. (See you at that discreet hotel where we met last time)
If you are there first, order me a latte and a lemon drizzle cake. (Order a bottle of champagne)

Not to mention the millions of surveillance operators with redhot ears pinned to all the lines to interpret the possible meanings of all our exchanges.

Human beings are more subtle than electronic filters. They can tell when "sex" means "sex" and when it is a part of "Middlesex" or "sextuplets"

There`s a place for principles and a place for pragmatism. Now`s the time to be pragmatic and deploy every means we can to help to defend us against whatever terrorist plan they can come up with. Thank God "they" found out about the ghastly plans to behead someone/anyone on Remembrance Sunday. Just thinking about the tempting prospect (to a terrorist keen to make a point) of Oxford Street at Christmas, Hogmanay in Edinburgh and so much more. All hands to the pump everyone! Its our country at risk not just Cameron`s or MI5s!

Of course codes would be used.
And criminals work ahead of surveillance.

But a lot of the work done or being done is done by computer in the first instance.

Elegran Your imagination shocks me sometimes

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/11253450/MI5-cannot-blame-internet-firms-for-Lee-Rigbys-murder.html

Con Coughlin places the blame squarely at the door of MI 5 and MI 6 and says if they did their job properly, draconian security measures wouldn't be required.

If Alan Turing could crack the Enigma code in WW2 with the help of minimal technology I am sure your secret (philanderer) code could be cracked in no time Elegran

Computers are no better at working out what people mean when they say something completely different than human beings are.

Deciphering codes which rely on a connection known only to the sender and the receiver is not the same as deciphering a cypher which works the same way on each message, word for word and letter by letter, and can be translated mechanically by a programme which looks for patterns.

To return to my previous post, If I agree with someone in advance that when I say "The cosy coffee shop" I mean "The Rent-a-Room-By-The-Hour Hotel behind the carpark" and if I say "Don't clean the conservatory next time, it doesn't need it " I mean "My husband just came home so I am speaking to you as though you are the window cleaner", then the hunk at the other end of the line can interpret, but not anyone listening in.

An automatic filter relaying suspicious messages to Mi5 would not forward anything that does not seem suspicious.

(I must add here that I have no personal experience of making secret assignments. It is all just for illustration)

What Alan Turing was deciphering were cyphers - they worked to a system, which was very complicated and changed daily, but followed patterns. Once a German sender made a mistake and used a keyword which could be identified, the way the patterns worked could be deduced and future messages deciphered.

A code replaces whole chunks, sentences and ideas with something known only to the sender and receiver. Perhaps the details of a strike are worked out in person between conspirators, and only the place and time not fixed. They could have a known substitute for NY or London, and for the date, and just send that at the last minute. The unpredictabilty and the human factor make it difficult for a computer programme to reproduce, they can only do what the programmers design in.

My "Alan Turing" post was meant to be tongue in cheek Elegran

I do hope that "the philanderer" code will be only ever spoken in private (in a car park or in the middle of a forest) or you can bet your bottom dollar it would easily be picked up.

You could just google :

what does it mean when someone says "I am cleaning the conservatory next Tuesday"

answer: It means they are going to clean their conservatory, next Tuesday

OR

They are meeting Mrs X in the local Travelodge.

DC should just have Googled - he would have found out all about the terrorist plans!

Elegran yes. silly man mustn't have thought of that.

Unless of course he did try googling and they were not cleaning the conservatory that week.

gillybob, of course it's possible to monitor individual words. I'm not disputing that. I'm saying that is not the job of a commercial social media company for a start and secondly that it wouldn't be as easy as some people seem to think. Software programs to filter through all of FB traffic would not be easy to write and, without special security, they would easily be hacked into and all sorts of trouble would probably ensue.

MI5 had info on the murderer but they didn't have anything they could charge him with. THEY said that it wouldn't have helped if FB had informed them. One either believes them or one doesn't, I suppose.

You need to ask the question, if the authorities had known that this man, a known terrorist suspect, had plotted openly online, with other terrorist suspects, to kill a soldier, would they have allowed him to walk the streets unhindered?

Of course they wouldn't jings or would it have been against his human rights to arrest him before he did anything

Although second thoughts.... He was known to the authorities and they did let him walk the streets.

Yes, but there was never quite so specific a threat.

Although I don't know why they don't deport all these known suspects. Sod human rights.

Me neither jingl

Quite agree jingl

Padraig Reidy doesn't think surveillance is the answer either. I do not feel happy about giving a Home Secretary so much 'abitrary' power.

Good article Bags
I like this sentence:
"Curiously, the Church of England is exempt from this duty to stop radicalisation, which makes one worry: what if they’re planning something?"

But the point that politicians in the form of the Home Secretary, rather than the Courts, should have the power to decide who should be excluded from the UK is a very valid concern.
It flies in the face of the British Constitution.

What would the C of E be planning?

Joke, jingle, joke.

Lame.