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That explains the massive number of terror attacks we’ve seen in London then. The most effective way we reduced terror attacks in the past was with negotiated

That explains the massive number of terror attacks we’ve seen in London then. The most effective way we reduced terror attacks in the past was with negotiated peace in Northern Ireland. Effectiveness of attacks was also reduced with physical security like cast iron/concrete bollards making truck bombs (or more recent developments like driving a van into lots of people) harder. Terror attacks in the U.K. today tend to come from poorly organised Islamists and neo-nazis who don’t really do significant amounts of harm (but maybe you would disagree with me on that—the IRA were mostly interested in harming property rather than people unlike today’s attackers) and I’m not really suggesting negotiated peace here. I suspect that increased prosperity (and people being optimistic about their futures) in the U.K. and perhaps certain places abroad would reduce attacks but obviously that is hard to achieve and any effect is hard to measure. Perhaps technology companies and encryption would be a bigger deal if terrorists were more competent but at the moment their opsec seems poor with many foiled plots (apparently—maybe these plots were exaggerated or never really viable) and only minor successes.

the-dude 5y ago
Do you have examples of the neo-nazi attacks?
- eynsham 5y ago
  Off the top of my head, broadly right-wing attacks include the murders of Jo Cox and Md Saleem. There was also this incident: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/man-stabbed-during-violence-as-polish-neonazis-storm-tottenham-music-festival-9556346.html https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/man-stabbed-during-vio.... I may have forgotten some.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- OneEyedRobot 5y ago
  Is that a problem there? Looking at this long list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in_London https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in... all I'm seeing is "a neo-Nazi with paranoid schizophrenia carried out nail bomb attacks over three weekends" in 1999.
  - hogFeast 5y ago
    Yes, there are a number of banned neo-Nazi organizations in the UK. Combat 18 is probably the most well-known (British Movement, White Wolves...there are a few). These groups are offshoots of political parties, as fascist parties started to splinter in the 90s as it became less acceptable to be overly racist/fascist. Under Tyndall the BNP, which was a political party, was very violent (Combat 18 supposedly provided "protection" for their rallies). No terrorism but organising attacks on minority groups certainly (in the early 90s before Nazi groups went underground, there was a strong link with football hooliganism as certain clubs had groups that were overtly racist...Birmingham's firm is the only one I am aware of that wasn't racist). Tbh, these groups are more like criminal gangs in the US than anything else (and they had very little electoral success until Griffin moved the party away from overt fascism). Also, it is worth pointing out that Copeland was a member of the BNP. He was obviously a nutjob but he was closely associated with the party, and the overt racism/violent rallies was still part of the BNP until the late 90s (and even after Griffin took over). The UK also had a brief period in the early 2000s, before Islamic terrorism really took off and after right-wing groups started to really lose steam, where environmental terrorism was the main source of attacks. Environmental groups sent anthrax to academics who experimented with animals, and groups (iirc, ALF) were trying to bomb animal testing facilities (that is why animal testing facilities in the UK usually have multiple rings of barbed wire 20ft high, guard posts, cameras everywhere...I actually live near one of these places, and it was built when this was picking up: no signposts at all, tiny one-car road down to the facility, forest completely surrounds it so you can't see it from anywhere else, not built near any main road). Btw, the whole premise of the original argument is ludicrous...these groups know they are being watched. I am sure that online communications are used after suspect has been identified but indoctrination is largely happening within in-person groups. With Islamic fundamentalism, it is same mosques, it is the same groups of people. I don't think any level of surveillance will stop lone wolf attacks either.
    - OneEyedRobot 5y ago
      That's a good answer, although the neo-Nazi groups appear more dangerous in terms of what they might do not what they do. It seems to me that the real threat here isn't so much terrorism (or things that rhyme) but given the amount of surveillance in the UK just which sorts of terrorism are allowed by the government. Groups that are allowed to do bad things become a sort of defacto government paramilitary. That's the case where there's a real force multiplier.
- enteeentee 5y ago
  Not sure if by Neo-nazi you mean right wing terrorist attacks, but a growing number have been foiled. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58512901 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58512901
  - dan-robertson 5y ago
    Right, Neo-nazi was too specific a word to use. I was generally referring to far-right (or often the mix of far-right and some psychological condition) attacks. A recentish example is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Finsbury_Park_attack https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Finsbury_Park_attack
  - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
    >a growing number have been foiled The lesson here being that plots are foiled without breaking encryption for everyone. I'd sooner trust an honest police chief who just admitted "Look. What we really want is to be able to snoop thru your personal data anytime we like, preferably w/o any oversight."
- PaddleFish 5y ago
  UK has a massive elephant in the room when it comes to terrorist attacks in the UK as the vast majority come from a certain minority group in the UK. The UK has to skew figures convicted people of right wing terrorism for literal thought crime. A guy was charged for his political views and for owning legal to own books the judge even said he didn't have any evidence the man was going to commit a terroist act. Unfortunately all videos on crimebodges YouTube channel have been hidden so I can't find the link
calpaterson 5y ago
> the IRA were mostly interested in harming property rather than people unlike today’s attackers I think this is an exaggeration. Some IRA bombs damaged only/mainly property but the IRA also killed hundreds of people and not by accident. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provisional_Irish_Republican_Army_campaign#Casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provisional_Irish_Republican_A... I don't really agree that IRA attacks were ended by a negotiated settlement (GFA) either. That's a bit like saying that the the USSR dissolved because the Berlin wall came down.
jon-wood 5y ago
> Effectiveness of attacks was also reduced with physical security like cast iron/concrete bollards making truck bombs. Somewhat off topic, but I do wonder if some of these have been a net negative in terms of people injured. Shortly after someone drove a van along the pavement on Westminster Bridge all the major bridges had concrete barriers built between the road and pavement, and while I see the reasoning for it, it does seem to me that cyclists who could previously fall relatively harmlessly onto the pavement if caught alongside a bus or other vehicle are now going to be dragged along a concrete blockade instead.
- amanaplanacanal 5y ago
  There are some that think that cyclists should have their own separated ways the same way pedestrians do.
- dan-robertson 5y ago
  Yeah I dislike a lot of the barriers on the bridges. Even the large iron/concrete barriers on the pavement are inconvenient for pedestrians (they are narrow choke points if a lot of people are crossing and must be particularly bad for those in wheelchairs.) I would much rather they were bollards that were easier for people to pass between but perhaps they would be insufficient at stopping motor vehicles.
snarf21 5y ago
The most revealing thing about all these calls for back doors "for the children" and "to stop terrorists is that I never truly realized that child exploitation and terrorism were invented around 1996. It is also interesting that we never caught any criminals involved in these things before 1996. Pay phones were a pretty hard thing to track and monitor back in the day and we never had calls to outlaw them. Solarwinds gives me no incentive to trust in the technical competence of any law or government group.
- dan-robertson 5y ago
  This is nonsense. The word terrorism dates back to the French Revolution and Britain dealt with many bombings from the IRA before 1996 (as well as earlier Irish republicans, militant suffragettes, etc.) Child exploitation has been a known problem for a long time too. I think it is easy to brush off as a problem that doesn’t really exist if it is very distant from your experience of the world (eg how many paedophiles do you know?) but my understanding is that tech companies with user-generated-content deal with an absolutely horrific amount of CSEM. I don’t think it is reasonable to simple talk about liberty and brush the problem away when it comes up. Internet-based communication and encryption change the possibilities for communication and it seems hard for laws to be particularly helpful in achieving a state that is good for liberty and good for society. Personally, I think it is a good thing that, end-to-end encrypted group chats are somewhat limited in size, 256 for WhatsApp and 1000 for signal. I think 1000 is too many. In liberal democracies, I think at some group size, free speech ought to be semi-public speech too (though I guess it can be with informants within the group)
  - rektide 5y ago
    while i agree that these are not new concepts entirely, them being wheeled out incessantly to support the developmemt of a much much wider survelliance state does seem semi novel in the 90's. the miltary-industrial-congressional complex needed new boogeymen to scare the nation with, to justify their existence over, after the collapse of the soviet union. terrorism & child molestation feel like a replacement terror, after the old one fell.
tomp 5y ago
> Perhaps technology companies and encryption would be a bigger deal if terrorists were more competent but at the moment their opsec seems poor with many foiled plots Exactly, attackers usually have piss poor OpSec but the police is even more incompetent. That’s why even for the few successful attacks it’s usually later reported “the attacker was known to the police” or “under surveillance by security services “, and yet… not sure how more surveillance would help, it seems they already have more leads than they can act upon. (Disclaimer: I don’t know how many unsuccessful attacks there are, so maybe they’re not as incompetent as it seems from outside.)
- dan-robertson 5y ago
  I assume lone wolf attackers are harder to foil. Personally I don’t really mind if security services are stretched a bit thin as it makes overreaching harder (but perhaps being stretched thin makes them want more mass surveillance)

the-dude 5y ago

Do you have examples of the neo-nazi attacks?

eynsham 5y ago
Off the top of my head, broadly right-wing attacks include the murders of Jo Cox and Md Saleem. There was also this incident: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/man-stabbed-during-violence-as-polish-neonazis-storm-tottenham-music-festival-9556346.html https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/man-stabbed-during-vio.... I may have forgotten some.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
OneEyedRobot 5y ago
Is that a problem there? Looking at this long list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in_London https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in... all I'm seeing is "a neo-Nazi with paranoid schizophrenia carried out nail bomb attacks over three weekends" in 1999.
- hogFeast 5y ago
  Yes, there are a number of banned neo-Nazi organizations in the UK. Combat 18 is probably the most well-known (British Movement, White Wolves...there are a few). These groups are offshoots of political parties, as fascist parties started to splinter in the 90s as it became less acceptable to be overly racist/fascist. Under Tyndall the BNP, which was a political party, was very violent (Combat 18 supposedly provided "protection" for their rallies). No terrorism but organising attacks on minority groups certainly (in the early 90s before Nazi groups went underground, there was a strong link with football hooliganism as certain clubs had groups that were overtly racist...Birmingham's firm is the only one I am aware of that wasn't racist). Tbh, these groups are more like criminal gangs in the US than anything else (and they had very little electoral success until Griffin moved the party away from overt fascism). Also, it is worth pointing out that Copeland was a member of the BNP. He was obviously a nutjob but he was closely associated with the party, and the overt racism/violent rallies was still part of the BNP until the late 90s (and even after Griffin took over). The UK also had a brief period in the early 2000s, before Islamic terrorism really took off and after right-wing groups started to really lose steam, where environmental terrorism was the main source of attacks. Environmental groups sent anthrax to academics who experimented with animals, and groups (iirc, ALF) were trying to bomb animal testing facilities (that is why animal testing facilities in the UK usually have multiple rings of barbed wire 20ft high, guard posts, cameras everywhere...I actually live near one of these places, and it was built when this was picking up: no signposts at all, tiny one-car road down to the facility, forest completely surrounds it so you can't see it from anywhere else, not built near any main road). Btw, the whole premise of the original argument is ludicrous...these groups know they are being watched. I am sure that online communications are used after suspect has been identified but indoctrination is largely happening within in-person groups. With Islamic fundamentalism, it is same mosques, it is the same groups of people. I don't think any level of surveillance will stop lone wolf attacks either.
  - OneEyedRobot 5y ago
    That's a good answer, although the neo-Nazi groups appear more dangerous in terms of what they might do not what they do. It seems to me that the real threat here isn't so much terrorism (or things that rhyme) but given the amount of surveillance in the UK just which sorts of terrorism are allowed by the government. Groups that are allowed to do bad things become a sort of defacto government paramilitary. That's the case where there's a real force multiplier.
enteeentee 5y ago
Not sure if by Neo-nazi you mean right wing terrorist attacks, but a growing number have been foiled. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58512901 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58512901
- dan-robertson 5y ago
  Right, Neo-nazi was too specific a word to use. I was generally referring to far-right (or often the mix of far-right and some psychological condition) attacks. A recentish example is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Finsbury_Park_attack https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Finsbury_Park_attack
- WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
  >a growing number have been foiled The lesson here being that plots are foiled without breaking encryption for everyone. I'd sooner trust an honest police chief who just admitted "Look. What we really want is to be able to snoop thru your personal data anytime we like, preferably w/o any oversight."
PaddleFish 5y ago
UK has a massive elephant in the room when it comes to terrorist attacks in the UK as the vast majority come from a certain minority group in the UK. The UK has to skew figures convicted people of right wing terrorism for literal thought crime. A guy was charged for his political views and for owning legal to own books the judge even said he didn't have any evidence the man was going to commit a terroist act. Unfortunately all videos on crimebodges YouTube channel have been hidden so I can't find the link

calpaterson 5y ago

> the IRA were mostly interested in harming property rather than people unlike today’s attackers I think this is an exaggeration. Some IRA bombs damaged only/mainly property but the IRA also killed hundreds of people and not by accident. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provisional_Irish_Republican_Army_campaign#Casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provisional_Irish_Republican_A... I don't really agree that IRA attacks were ended by a negotiated settlement (GFA) either. That's a bit like saying that the the USSR dissolved because the Berlin wall came down.

jon-wood 5y ago

> Effectiveness of attacks was also reduced with physical security like cast iron/concrete bollards making truck bombs. Somewhat off topic, but I do wonder if some of these have been a net negative in terms of people injured. Shortly after someone drove a van along the pavement on Westminster Bridge all the major bridges had concrete barriers built between the road and pavement, and while I see the reasoning for it, it does seem to me that cyclists who could previously fall relatively harmlessly onto the pavement if caught alongside a bus or other vehicle are now going to be dragged along a concrete blockade instead.

amanaplanacanal 5y ago
There are some that think that cyclists should have their own separated ways the same way pedestrians do.
dan-robertson 5y ago
Yeah I dislike a lot of the barriers on the bridges. Even the large iron/concrete barriers on the pavement are inconvenient for pedestrians (they are narrow choke points if a lot of people are crossing and must be particularly bad for those in wheelchairs.) I would much rather they were bollards that were easier for people to pass between but perhaps they would be insufficient at stopping motor vehicles.

snarf21 5y ago

The most revealing thing about all these calls for back doors "for the children" and "to stop terrorists is that I never truly realized that child exploitation and terrorism were invented around 1996. It is also interesting that we never caught any criminals involved in these things before 1996. Pay phones were a pretty hard thing to track and monitor back in the day and we never had calls to outlaw them. Solarwinds gives me no incentive to trust in the technical competence of any law or government group.

dan-robertson 5y ago
This is nonsense. The word terrorism dates back to the French Revolution and Britain dealt with many bombings from the IRA before 1996 (as well as earlier Irish republicans, militant suffragettes, etc.) Child exploitation has been a known problem for a long time too. I think it is easy to brush off as a problem that doesn’t really exist if it is very distant from your experience of the world (eg how many paedophiles do you know?) but my understanding is that tech companies with user-generated-content deal with an absolutely horrific amount of CSEM. I don’t think it is reasonable to simple talk about liberty and brush the problem away when it comes up. Internet-based communication and encryption change the possibilities for communication and it seems hard for laws to be particularly helpful in achieving a state that is good for liberty and good for society. Personally, I think it is a good thing that, end-to-end encrypted group chats are somewhat limited in size, 256 for WhatsApp and 1000 for signal. I think 1000 is too many. In liberal democracies, I think at some group size, free speech ought to be semi-public speech too (though I guess it can be with informants within the group)
- rektide 5y ago
  while i agree that these are not new concepts entirely, them being wheeled out incessantly to support the developmemt of a much much wider survelliance state does seem semi novel in the 90's. the miltary-industrial-congressional complex needed new boogeymen to scare the nation with, to justify their existence over, after the collapse of the soviet union. terrorism & child molestation feel like a replacement terror, after the old one fell.

tomp 5y ago

> Perhaps technology companies and encryption would be a bigger deal if terrorists were more competent but at the moment their opsec seems poor with many foiled plots Exactly, attackers usually have piss poor OpSec but the police is even more incompetent. That’s why even for the few successful attacks it’s usually later reported “the attacker was known to the police” or “under surveillance by security services “, and yet… not sure how more surveillance would help, it seems they already have more leads than they can act upon. (Disclaimer: I don’t know how many unsuccessful attacks there are, so maybe they’re not as incompetent as it seems from outside.)

dan-robertson 5y ago
I assume lone wolf attackers are harder to foil. Personally I don’t really mind if security services are stretched a bit thin as it makes overreaching harder (but perhaps being stretched thin makes them want more mass surveillance)