Terror by email
Not feeling fearful enough of your fellow man? Worried you’re losing touch with the world from inside your terrorism-proof bunker? Well the Ministry of Love MI5 have a helpful new service just for you. All you have to do is sign up on the MI5 website and a helpful spook will email you whenever the UKs threat level changes.
All very comforting. Having said that, our protectors don’t have a great track record when it comes to predicting terrorism. The threat level was lowered prior to the July 7th attacks and John Reid’s warning that a terror attack was “highly likely” over the Christmas period came to nothing more than a fireworks display. So, if the warnings are so frequently wrong why bother in the first place? Because as a hawkish home secretary or a budget minded spy you can’t lose. Say the threat level’s low and there is an attack, well that proves how sneaky the terrorists have become and justifies a budget increase for security. Get the threat level too high and have no attacks - you’ve proven what a good job you’ve done and (guess what) justified a budget increase for security to keep us even more safe. The thing to take away from this, in my opinion, is that (not unlike terrorists) threat levels are best ignored. Stay watchful citizens.
January 9th, 2007 at 6:04 pm
I watched a film the other night – A Blast from Past – which, before it descended into a ridiculous love story between Brendan Fraser and Alicia Silverstone (tag line ‘She was a woman of the world; he had never been around the block’), was actually quite an interesting comment on how Americans in the 1950s were in such a state of paranoia at the nuclear threat that they would hole themselves up in a nuclear bunker for 35 years after mistaking a plane crashing on their house for an a-bomb. These are the sort of people who will use this email service from MI5: people who, through some sort of ridiculous contortion of their normal routine, claim that they ‘could have been on that bus that blew up’ or delight in being a part of something significant, provided they escape from it unscathed. Ie, people who get a frisson of excitement out of being scared. So if there is someone to tell them when to be scared by email (Re: Threat Level SEVERE, prepare to soil undergarments) then surely this means that the rest of the time they can kick back and not worried about being scared. This, as far as I can see, is a good thing. It means I can abdicate any responsibility for making my own judgements and can just leave it in the hands of the State. Excellent. So don’t begrudge them the budget, Jonny.
January 10th, 2007 at 11:53 am
MI5, the Security Service, part of whose remit is supposed to be giving protection advice against electronic attacks over the internet, is sending all our personal details on the email registration (forename, surname and email address) unencrypted to commercial third party e-mail marketing and tracking companies which physically and legally in the jurisdiction of the United States of America, and is even not bothering to make use of the SSL/TLS encrypted web forms and processing scripts which are already available to them.
http://thejournal.parker-joseph.co.uk/blog/_archives/2007/1/10/2637047.html
January 17th, 2007 at 2:30 am
Resistance is futile