Labour's spin Watergate finally arrived?

[beagle]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/11/damian-mcbride-forced-to-quit

Funny, I always thought that the spin bubble would burst in the Blair years, but like the economic one it stagggered on a bit longer

So how exactly will Brown defend invented sexual slurs about a woman whose young son has just died? Will he still go for the "rogue" solution, given who was apparently on the cc list?

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Isn't that politics as usual? Good that he was caught but hardly surprising from any party on any country, really.

[Kaliayev]

Derek Draper is pure poison for the Labour Party.

My only worry is that his political incompetence, plus the already existing antipathy of the base, will mean he will get booted before he can do even more serious damage.

Also Zono, while such things are not out of the ordinary per se, UK politics are usually nowhere near as partisan and bitter as those in the US.  Certain conventions are adhered to, and to bring the non-political family members of party leaders into such a smear campaign would be considered across the political spectrum as a breach of such things.

The other thing of course is that Labour is stupid.  Look at Guido Fawkes, who was mentione in the article under his more legal name, Paul Staines.  The Thatcherite wing of the Tory party's own guided missile, yet because he blogged anonymously, cultivated links with the press and adopts an anarchistic persona in his writing, he can get away with smearing Mark Oaten as a pedophile, for example, without it coming back onto the party.  Here, on the other hand, they have official standing, in addition to their long-term links with the Labour leadership.  They screwed up because they got caught.

[Griffin NoName]

.... They screwed up because they got caught.

But why did they get caught?  Why does no one seem concerned about security of these emails? That should be a scandal, even given one should never put such stuff in emails in the first place.

[Kaliayev]

.... They screwed up because they got caught.

But why did they get caught?  Why does no one seem concerned about security of these emails? That should be a scandal, even given one should never put such stuff in emails in the first place.

Its still unclear, as far as I know.  Logic suggests either the computers were hacked, or someone close to Brown leaked it.  Given general computer security, at the national level, is pure crap, either is plausible.

Computer security should be a scandal, but its not.  Its been going on for so long now, its become one of those things people feel they can ignore, because the Netpocalypse has not yet arrived.  The lesser point, that everyone from the French to North Korea (and several nations inbetween) will use such weaknesses to advance everything from trade deals to major security negotiations, and the UK becoming a leaky sieve of information will cause American intelligence to turn their back on us (even more than currently) is apparently never considered.

[Griffin NoName]

Re. the lesser point, perhaps we better consider which countries have secure email systems and would hence be US allies when we get dropped by them for that reason.................

Of course, Mary of Scotland got the chop for supposed email equivalents so all we need do is look to history (I believe there are other examples).

[Kaliayev]

Some U.S. strategists have already suggested that our economy and current military spending make us a liability to the USA, and that increasingly, Japan and Australia are going to be important to the US.

Oh, there are plenty of examples.  The CIA had the Russian computer system bugged through and through during the 90s, because of their insistence on using Windows (obviously a little harder to slip such backdoor programs on Linux...though that simply may be due to the fact you need a fairly good grasp on computers to use Linux in the first place).  Information control is paramount....just look at how much damage Kim Philby wrecked on UK intelligence for a number of years.