London's police asked Big Tech for comms data over 700,000 times last year

WTF?

“Most [CD] applications relating to sensitive professionals were submitted because the individual had been a victim of a crime.”

So ... a journalist gets robbed, and the the police use that as an excuse to grab the phone numbers of everyone which that journalist called or was called by?!

Chief Cuntables pizza arrived late and was delivered by a very dark skinned man, spoke little English and had Pro-Palestinian flags on his bike, time for a CD to Deliveroo !

Seriously?

What on earth are "racialized people"? An offensive concept if ever I heard one.

As for the Met's behaviour, it is hardly surprising that in the increasingly authoritarian UK, the police are always looking for people to prosecute for what they say or who they know. The only thing which surprises me is that they even bother asking. They can just ask GCHQ for anything that anyone does with their phone or computer.

Wayne Couzins, David Carrick......Met Police...........

Yup......Police enforcement is on the side of citizens..................NOT!!!!!

Sigh!!

And the Measurable Results are...?

As someone who considers themselves a law-abiding citizen, this type of metric, if accurate, represents a critical erosion in the most basic principle of a free society: the presumption of innocence. There is simply *no way* that the Met could handle that many potential crimes and actually function.

It would be interesting [but annoyingly unlikely] if we could see a breakdown of these requests by crime type: how many were for burglaries, rapes and sexual assaults, general assaults, shoplifting, speeding, other motoring offences, etc. It would be interesting if we could see what percentage of these requests were associated with cases that actually resulted in charges being brought, and/or the number associated with convictions.

It would be even better if His Majesty's Inspector of Constabulary performed a detailed analysis of the Met's use of data requests in order to confirm that all were legitimate, proportionate and supported by a solid legal foundation.

Colour me cynical, but if those numbers are accurate, I suspect... not.

But I think there's another dimension to this. From active reporting by the BBC over the last few days, we have seen that a tiny handful of investigative reporters have managed to bust open a nationwide people smuggling ring - and have learned how the small boat operations are funded, how much money they raise ... and who the masterminds are. At this stage in things we are frankly at the point where the Metropolitan Police Commissioner needs to be sacked and we need to replace them with the lead BBC journalist who cracked the smuggling story.

Because the measurable evidence suggests the BBC journalists are capable of doing a better job.

As a whole, I feel very grateful for the fact that we live in one of the safest nations on earth, with comparatively low crime rates and a comparatively stable, civil society. I have several friends who are serving police officers and I respect and admire all of them. But that doesn't mean that there is something fundamentally wrong here. Hundreds of thousands of British citizens fall victim to crime every year. Scam calls, malware, people smuggling, illegal fly-tipping, contraband cigarettes/booze/vapes have become problems of epidemic proportions.

I appreciate that the Met doesn't have a national remit, but what on earth are they spending their time doing?

And perhaps more than that: who is responsible for their oversight? And what are THEY doing? For as bad as the Metropolitan Police may be - and the evidence leans in that direction - those responsible for the oversight are an order of magnitude worse. Hmm... Apparently Google says that the "Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime" (MOPAC) is responsible for oversight and responsible for holding the Met Commissioner to account.

And a completely useless job that body is doing, for sure.

Data networks are the infrastructure of the surveillance state.

If they have access to all data, they can use AI to do the donkey work. The future is Orwellian and is already here.

Migrants are today, globally, what Jewish, disabled and gay people were in 1930s Germany. It's what happens when the economy sinks and extremists exploit it.

As in China, so in the UK. Smile, nod, wave a flag, pay your taxes and keep your head down. Governments are steamrollers. Stay out of their way.

Don’t Tell the Met

So this was data harvesting then?

When the Met says they obtained data for Proton VPN, they most likely got the data from upstream ISPs or other companies that purchase bulk netflow data (I.e., Team Cymru resells access to net flow data purchased from transit providers with a fancy interface). This can be used to fairly easily identify the IP address behind a VPN user, especially if it's only a single hop.