Re: Meh
>>" >>"as the government is only likely to be listening in, if it has a warrant, and has cause that you are doing something wrong".
>>"Tell that to Jean Charles de Menezes, oh! you can't tell it to his family instead..."
/Bit/ of a non sequitur there - they weren't listening in to him - the whole thing was nothing to do with Big Brother surveillance of innocent people, and everything to do with incompetent policing misidentifying someone leaving a building and also apparently not realising (despite presumably doing all kinds of training) that misidentification someone in a serious case (which has happened in the past, and will likely happen again in the future) could be pretty much to signing an innocent person's death warrant if that person was to do something as commonplace as get on public transport.
In any case, even if you were actually giving a relevant counterexample (possibly like the Zircon one), giving a counterexample isn't actually a great argument against someone saying '...only likely to be...', since that already suggests that there *will* be some counterexamples.
And in the Zircon example, it is kind-of related to national security, even if much motivation may be arse-covering for the defence industry. Even if entirely true as presented, it's not actually an argument against the suggestion that the government doesn't really have the ability to meaningfully snoop on /everybody's/ phone calls, since this obviously wasn't just some random citizen.
Doesn't make it right, but it's not evidence for a universal Big Brother either.
>>"encrypted communications between offices in Switzerland and the UK were not to be routed through France as the French didn't allow encrypted traffic on their networks."
>>"How did they know it was encrypted??????"
>>"To add insult to injury, I believe the line concerned was a leased dedicated private line as well."
Do you think a leased line between Switzerland and the UK involves a guy with a ladder walking across France putting up a special private piece of wire?
For whatever reason, if they decide to ban encrypted traffic on their network, that'll be likely to include *all* traffic.