31–40 of 67 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a very off topic tangent, but that makes me quite curious. What is the difference between "veterans" and "retired military personnel"?
“Retired military personnel” have completed their 20+ years of service and retired with full pension. “Veteran” refers to anyone who has served in the armed forces.
> Private intelligence firms claim that illegally obtained information is routinely submitted to courts in the U.K., with the third industry figure telling POLITICO there are “ludicrous cover stories put in front of judges” where people are trying to “launder stolen information into court proceedings.” This sounds like "parallel construction" with fewer steps.
Outsourced parallel construction. The world seems to be moving away from long-established (and established slowly over a long time) rules and regulations around law and due process due to it feeling slow and inconvenient. Haven't crime rates been declining in the West for quite a while now?
Yes but not for the reasons you think. More crime is going unreported, unsolved, unenforced than ever before. It started during Covid and hasn’t really gotten any better. The Leo’s that are die hard are now out there wearing masks looking for people of a specific skin color.
> [The company] appointed investigative agencies to surveil me, initially covertly and then overtly with vehicles and cameras placed outside my house. Isn't that just stalking? Why didn't they just call the cops?
I'm guessing because none of it happened. Seriously an anonymous client, talking about an anonymous company, hiring another anonymous company, stating that a credible professional (the senior lawyer) said it was a big issue but not actually confirming with the lawyer that they knew of this case and had said that?
I'll post one such case to corroborate the article, since it was big news in my community: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Hong_Kong_trade_office_sp...
Allegedly involved are Hong Kong government, multiple private security and private investigators from the UK with ex-military/law enforcement background, and a mysterious death after the whole scandal was exposed.
Which sounds exactly like what the article is describing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a very off topic tangent, but that makes me quite curious. What is the difference between "veterans" and "retired military personnel"?
“Retired military personnel” have completed their 20+ years of service and retired with full pension. “Veteran” refers to anyone who has served in the armed forces.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Outsourced parallel construction. The world seems to be moving away from long-established (and established slowly over a long time) rules and regulations around law and due process due to it feeling slow and inconvenient. Haven't crime rates been declining in the West for quite a while now?
>Haven't crime rates been declining in the West for quite a while now? Yes but not for the reasons you think. More crime is going unreported, unsolved, unenforced than ever before. It started during Covid and hasn’t really gotten any better. The Leo’s that are die hard are now out there wearing masks looking for people of a specific skin color.
Many say the opposite. Crimes are more often reported especially if suspects have a „specific skin color“.
Bit of a mess of an article IMHO. Intelligence agency staff leave their roles, just like anyone else does. Unregulated? They're as regulated as the rest of us. Then you have the article casting aspersions on them for doing so, it must be about money and malign foreign influences. Of course foreign states use proxies; so does the UK. Why's that even mentioned as if it's implying ex-intel staff are the proxies - which…
I have no idea how regulated “the rest of us are.” This brush-off does not convince me that private spying is good, or that regulations are sufficient to stop it. In fact, the existence of an article in Politico makes me strongly suspect this is part of a discussion in which someone argues for more regulation. Fortunately I don’t live in the UK. Unfortunately I’m not convinced that is a barrier. ETA: the argument “wh…
There are people offering their services to find kidnapped children, I struggle to see that as a bad thing. Private investigatory work has a long history in the country of Sherlock Holmes (or at least Dr Joseph Bell). You have figures as far back as Harry Philby flirting with foreign governments after their time within the UK government.
They're not offering government services, they're offering their own capabilities.
> Private intelligence firms claim that illegally obtained information is routinely submitted to courts in the U.K., with the third industry figure telling POLITICO there are “ludicrous cover stories put in front of judges” where people are trying to “launder stolen information into court proceedings.” This sounds like "parallel construction" with fewer steps.
Outsourced parallel construction. The world seems to be moving away from long-established (and established slowly over a long time) rules and regulations around law and due process due to it feeling slow and inconvenient. Haven't crime rates been declining in the West for quite a while now?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Haven't crime rates been declining in the West for quite a while now? Yes but not for the reasons you think. More crime is going unreported, unsolved, unenforced than ever before. It started during Covid and hasn’t really gotten any better. The Leo’s that are die hard are now out there wearing masks looking for people of a specific skin color.
Any source for that? Many say the opposite. Crimes are more often reported especially if suspects have a „specific skin color“.
Bit of a mess of an article IMHO. Intelligence agency staff leave their roles, just like anyone else does. Unregulated? They're as regulated as the rest of us. Then you have the article casting aspersions on them for doing so, it must be about money and malign foreign influences. Of course foreign states use proxies; so does the UK. Why's that even mentioned as if it's implying ex-intel staff are the proxies - which…
Run their articles through NLP and ask about facts and cited evidence to support those facts and most of the time their will be 'very' little. Ask which type of audience the articles are written for, and you will find the writing style alligns with an audience driven by emotional appeal rather than fact or reason.
And yes, most of our media has devolved in the same way, but nearly every time I come across a POLITICO article, it seems to go out of its way to confirm this and then some.