I have a lot of respect for Malcolm Rifkind. He has always come across as a politician of integrity, but his participation in the 'Facebook' smokescreen that is being put up divert attention away from the failings of MI5/6 with regard to Lee Rigby's killers gets us nowhere.
I suspect that he hardly knows what Facebook is, let alone, what it is capable of. Certainly he is not able to comprehend that the algorithms utilised by FB to monitor erratic or suspect traffic are deeply unsophisticated. They can scan for keywords and their repetition but there's no 'brain' behind the software. On Newsnight this evening he kept on pressing the point that FB refer possible paedophile traffic to the authorities, so why not terrorism (though he actually had no statistics to suggest what quantity of referrals might be bona fide).
For goodness sake, someone get him a ticket for 'The Imitation Game' and he might have an idea of the impossible scale of detection via social media; or better still, he might just stick to the main criticisms of his own report which centre on the failings of the intelligence services. If such an advanced and sophisticated community can't find a needle in a haystack (and who else could?) then what the hell does he really imagine Facebook is capable of?
I suspect that he hardly knows what Facebook is, let alone, what it is capable of. Certainly he is not able to comprehend that the algorithms utilised by FB to monitor erratic or suspect traffic are deeply unsophisticated. They can scan for keywords and their repetition but there's no 'brain' behind the software. On Newsnight this evening he kept on pressing the point that FB refer possible paedophile traffic to the authorities, so why not terrorism (though he actually had no statistics to suggest what quantity of referrals might be bona fide).
For goodness sake, someone get him a ticket for 'The Imitation Game' and he might have an idea of the impossible scale of detection via social media; or better still, he might just stick to the main criticisms of his own report which centre on the failings of the intelligence services. If such an advanced and sophisticated community can't find a needle in a haystack (and who else could?) then what the hell does he really imagine Facebook is capable of?
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