Charlie Hebdo - Cameron Reaction Stupid

Having gone over to France on Sunday to walk with all those other world leaders - not all of whom were as enthusiastic about freedom of speech as those who run the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo - in support of that freedom, one might have thought that Young Dave would behave more in the spirit of the occasion when it came to addressing the issue of keeping the UK safe, but not constraining our liberty.

No Dave, that isn't a flying data packet over there

But that thought would have been misplaced: like his great hero, the blessed Tone, Cameron is all too ready to fall into the trap of using events like those in France last week to puff out his chest and sound, as they say on Merseyside, dead hard. And, not for the first time, his speech in reaction will, ultimately, make no difference at all. Nil. Zero. Zilch. Nix. Nada. Not a sausage. Bugger all.

What Dave appears to be saying would be A Jolly Good And Indeed Spiffing Idea can be broken down into three areas, and each one is either impractical, batshit crazy, won’t get past a Commons vote, or all three. Thus the level at which this former PR man is being permitted to operate. That should worry anyone and everyone. But let’s start at the very beginning - a very good place to start.

“Do we want to allow a means of communication between people which we cannot read?” asked Dave, and there is his problem in a nutshell. Does he mean that we can’t have encryption? In that case, how does he expect anyone to make a financial transaction online without leaving themselves open to being hacked? Or does he expect all the crims to be jolly good chaps and leave off as an act of patriotism?

It gets worse: if it isn’t a lack of encryption, the only other way to get into all those messages that might be carrying bad things round the Net is to get a backdoor into the software concerned. And that just takes us back to the same problem as having no encryption at all, because if you let the spooks in, you let in everyone else able to operate at a similar intellectual level, whatever their intention.

Or perhaps Cameron just wants to assist the passage of the so-called “snoopers’ charter”, and that isn’t going to get a free pass, either, as Corporal Clegg has made very clear. The Lib Dems are highly unlikely, once they think over what the talk around encryption means, to pass anything going in that direction, either. All of that suggests that it was hardly worth Dave’s while turning up and expending all that hot air.

But that is to misunderstand Cameron’s purpose. Yes, he’s talking guff, and this may be because he doesn’t have the first clue what all those technical boffin chappies get up to. But his swerve across the clueless barrier will - he hopes - soon be forgotten, and right now he has to sound tough, because, well, it’s written. And if he doesn’t, the even more clueless press will kick off. Otherwise, all those Scary Muslims (tm) will come after us.

Or perhaps Dave is just telling us the spooks still haven’t cracked David Miranda’s laptop.