MI5 helps Met find looters who used BBM
(The Guardian): The security service MI5 and the electronic interception centre GCHQ have been asked by the government to join the hunt for people who organised last week's riots, the Guardian has learned. The agencies, the bulk of whose work normally involves catching terrorists inspired by al-Qaida, are helping the effort to catch people who used social messaging, especially BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), to mobilise looters. A key difficulty for law enforcers last week was cracking the high level of encryption on the BBM system.
Category: World News
Now the Brit government needs to prosecute some easy-target scapegoats to make themselves look good and avert all the horrid PR they have received lately because they were impotent to stop the mayhem and fiddled while Rome burned.
Instead of cracking the heads of looters at the time of the crime, they watched as opportunistic hoodlums went about destroying businesses and private property. But now the British government is going to get real scary tough: MI5 and GCHQ are going to leave off nicking petty criminals like terrorist plotting to divebomb an Airbus into 10 Downing Street and begin focusing on the truly hard core criminals – you know, all those villianous Instant Messagers who texted on their dreaded BlackBerry's of death.
How much more sorry can a government possibly be?
No bloody wonder the criminals are winning in the Cayman Islands, just take stock of how many senior law enforcement officers here are from the UK. You know, that place with the police system that is afraid of using rubber bullets: "We would not want to bruise the blokes while they carry away a shop's inventory, now would we?. The shock of it might cause them to drop one of their flat screen telleys." And they refrained from using water cannons: "Oh no! It wouldn't do to soak the chaps as they put the torch to merchants' businesses, now would it? I say good man, water cannons might have put out the fires the poor blokes took so much trouble to start. Good god, no! They might catch their death of cold running about in wet hoodies at night."
Heaven forbid the police should have exposed themselves to danger and intervened in a forceful and meaningful way while rocks and flames were flying. Now they can sit comfortably behind their desks and look for "cyber criminals".
They are going to seek out the people who "organised" the riots? Oh, c'mon now! As if this was some sort of meticulously planned plot conceived by a highly centralised group of sinister masterminds. Who the hell is the British government trying to fool? My god! What a sorry lot.