Boris Johnson's Blog, page 25

William Hague: It would be wrong to rule out arming Syrian rebels

“This has now been going on for nearly two-and-a-half years. We really shouldn’t be in the business of ruling out any options.

“There are no palatable options, I want to be clear with the whole country about that.”

David Cameron faces growing political opposition at home amid suggestions that he is in favour of joining the Americans in helping to assist rebels. He has been warned that he could be defeated in the Commons if he tries to win a parliamentary agreement for Britain to arm the rebels.

Mr Cameron clashed with the Russian president at a Downing Street press conference on Sunday.

Asked by reporters whether he had “blood on his hands” for arming the Assad regime, Mr Putin said that his nation had acted in accordance with international law by delivering arms to the Syrian government.

He added: “I believe you will not deny the fact that one should hardly back those who kill their enemies and eat their organs – all that is filmed. Do you want to support these people? Do you want to supply arms to these people?”

The Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg also cautioned Mr Cameron against arming the Free Syrian Army, saying that if it were a good idea, Britain would have done it already. The former head of the Army, Lord Dannatt, said he feared any such assistance would lead Britain into further intervention, while the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, urged Mr Cameron to “tread very warily”.

In a round of TV interviews at Lough Erne, Mr Cameron said: "Let's be clear - I am as worried as anybody else about elements of the Syrian opposition, who are extremists, who support terrorism and who are a great danger to our world.

"The question is what do we do about it? My argument is that we shouldn't accept that the only alternative to Assad is terrorism and violence.

"We should be on the side of Syrians who want a democratic and peaceful future for their country and one without the man who is currently using chemical weapons against them.

"What we can try and do here at the G8 is have further pressure for the peace conference and the transition that is needed to bring this conflict to an end."

The Prime Minister added: "We haven't made a decision to give any arms to the Syrian opposition but what we do need to do is bring about this peace conference and this transition, so that people in Syria can have a government that represents them, rather than a government that's trying to butcher them.

"What we are doing right now is helping the official Syrian opposition - people who have signed up to democracy and human rights, who want that sort of future for Syria.

"We are advising them, helping them and we are assisting them - and we should.

“President Assad wants us to think that the only alternative to him is extremism and violence. Yet there are millions of people in Syria who want a peaceful and democratic future. We should be on their side."

Boris Johnson: Don’t arm the Syria maniacs

But it is Mr Johnson’s comments that will do most to undermine Mr Cameron’s position on the issue.

Writing for The Daily Telegraph, Mr Johnson says the only solution in Syria is a “total ceasefire” and claims that it will be “impossible” to arm the rebels without weapons ending up in the hands of “al-Qaeda-affiliated thugs”.

“This is the moment for a total ceasefire, an end to the madness,” Mr Johnson writes. “It is time for the US, Russia, the EU, Turkey, Iran, Saudi and all the players to convene an intergovernmental conference to try to halt the carnage. We can’t use Syria as an arena for geopolitical point-scoring or muscle-flexing, and we won’t get a ceasefire by pressing weapons into the hands of maniacs.”

The crisis in Syria is threatening to overshadow the G8 Summit in Northern Ireland which begins on Monday.

Mr Cameron clashed with the Russian president at a Downing Street press conference on Sunday.

Asked by reporters whether he had “blood on his hands” for arming the Assad regime, Mr Putin said that his nation had acted in accordance with international law by delivering arms to the Syrian government.

He added: “I believe you will not deny the fact that one should hardly back those who kill their enemies and eat their organs – all that is filmed. Do you want to support these people? Do you want to supply arms to these people?”

Mr Cameron faces growing political opposition at home amid suggestions that he is in favour of joining the Americans in helping to assist rebels. He has been warned that he could be defeated in the Commons if he tries to win a parliamentary agreement for Britain to arm the rebels.

Mr Clegg insisted that the Government will not arm the rebels because it is not the right thing to do at the moment. “We’ve taken no decision to provide lethal assistance so we clearly don’t think it is the right thing to do now, otherwise we would have decided to do it,” Mr Clegg told the BBC.

Lord Dannatt, former head of the Army, warned that supplying arms to the Syrian opposition could turn into a “much larger intervention”.

“It’s a very complex situation,” he said. “And I think there is a real danger of an arm going in a mangle.”

He said the risk of supplying small arms is that it “becomes the thin end of the wedge”.

The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, warned that arming the rebels could be a “naive position to take” because it is impossible to know who the “good guys” are.

Julian Lewis, a Tory MP, said it would be “suicidal” for Britain to hand arms to an opposition known to include extremist elements.

We’ve left it too late to save Syria – this conflict can never be won

Odious, twisted, hate-filled thugs; arrogant and inadequate creeps, intoxicated by the pathetic illusion of power that comes with guns; poisoned by a perversion of religion into a contempt for all norms of civilised behaviour.

They are fighting not for freedom but for a terrifying Islamic state in which they would have the whip hand — and yet there is no dodging or fudging the matter: these are among the Syrian rebels who are hoping now to benefit from the flow of Western arms.

How is it supposed to work? How are we meant to furnish machine guns and anti-tank weapons to one set of opposition forces, without them ending up in the hands of men like the al-Qaeda-affiliated thugs who executed a child for telling a joke? The answer is that we have no means of preventing such a disaster, any more than we can control what kind of “government” the rebels — if they were successful — would form in Damascus.

What is happening in Syria is one of the greatest human and cultural catastrophes of our age. For two years the mortar rounds have been pulverising the cradle of civilisation. When I think of the happy days I have spent roaming the souk of Aleppo or the Umayyad mosque of Damascus, I am filled with grief, and I hear such awful tales of destruction that I almost dread to go back. The dead are said to number 93,000 just in the past two years. But what else could we possibly have done?

Perhaps if we had piled in with the rebels at the beginning, it might have been possible to topple Bashar al-Assad and his nightmare regime. Perhaps we could have installed some sort of pluralist and democratic government, before the Syrian opposition became contaminated with jihadis.

You only have to raise that option to see that it was never on the cards — not after Iraq. We know what happens when you topple the regime of a Ba’athist strongman. You expose the fault lines of a state that was invented, in 1916, by the British colonial office, and you unleash an unbearable cycle of sectarian violence.

No one was going for a military option in 2011, certainly not the White House. With dozens of people being murdered every day in Iraq, no one was calling for us to repeat the experiment. So we sat back, without a strategy, hoping vaguely for the best — and now we have the worst of all worlds. The Assad regime has suffered all kinds of defeat and humiliation, but it has not yet lost.

Indeed, it has just recaptured the strategically important town of Qusayr, with the help of Hizbollah. We are now on the verge of a disastrous escalation, in which Syria becomes the centre of a regional if not a global power struggle.

On one side we have the rebels, including al-Qaeda, and they seem to have support — to a greater or lesser degree — from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the United States, the European Union and an assortment of extraordinarily unpleasant fundamentalist preachers who are very keen on establishing an Islamic state.

On the other side we have the Assad regime, and they have the support of Lebanon’s Hizbollah militia, Iran and Russia, which has always regarded Syria as part of the Russian sphere of influence. Both sides are now symmetrically raising the stakes. The EU has decided to lift the arms embargo that has been in place since May 2011; the Iranians are now threatening to send in 4,000 troops.

Surely to goodness it is time to recognise that no one can win this conflict, because it has become at least partly a religious conflict, between Sunni and Shia. No one can win that conflict because it is almost beyond reason. It is an argument about the protocol that surrounded the succession of the Prophet Mohammed — in the seventh century AD! One side or the other might technically “win”, and impose a government over the whole country. But unless that government has the approval of both Sunnis and Shias, we are doomed to sectarian violence and reprisals forever.

This is not the moment to send more arms. This is the moment for a total ceasefire, an end to the madness. It is time for the US, Russia, the EU, Turkey, Iran, Saudi and all the players to convene an intergovernmental conference to try to halt the carnage. We can’t use Syria as an arena for geopolitical point-scoring or muscle-flexing, and we won’t get a ceasefire by pressing weapons into the hands of maniacs.

The proud moment when I realised I was worth hacking

Shock horror! Hold the front page. It turns out the internet is a gigantic snooperama, a sinister governmental periscope inside your most personal electronic possession – by which THEY can keep a watch on YOU. Even now there are men in dark glasses in Langley, Virginia, whose task is to track the websites you visit, chortling with incredulous laughter. Out in Beijing, there are special agents building your psychological profile from the stuff you like to buy from Ocado. It’s a global conspiracy to invade your privacy, my friends.

It seems that the big US internet companies have been helping the American security services with a Big Brother-type probe called Prism; and the suggestion now is that UK spooks may somehow have been using the results. Everyone is getting understandably worked up. The champions of liberty are in full cry, and in principle I am with them all the way. An Englishman’s laptop is his castle, and all that kind of thing.

My only question is: what on earth did you expect? I have never trusted the security of the internet, or emails, or indeed texts – because it was obvious from the very dawn of what was once called the information superhighway that any data you sent to some server or database or gizmo could no longer be in any sense private. It was no longer shared between you and one recipient. It was stored in the memory of some vast global intermediary. It was out there, in the ether, just waiting to be hacked or lost or stolen or accidentally blurted to your enemies. That is why I have always rather assumed that any email I send should be drafted as if for public consumption, and that all kinds of people could be reading it – should they wish so to fritter their lives – as soon as I pressed “send”.

One night, a few years ago, I was working very late in China, when a hilarious warning sign came up on my screen informing me – I have forgotten the exact words – that “other users” were on my machine. I felt very proud. Someone thought I was worth hacking! I am afraid I just forged on with whatever I was doing, and it may be that the moles are still there in the innards of my laptop, secretly relaying useless information to their masters. Maybe the only way to get rid of them is to take out the hard drive and melt it down, rather as Arnie kills the Terminator. But then I will need a new machine, and that, too, will be immediately vulnerable to infestation.

The whole point about the internet is that everything is, as they say, everywhere; and that makes it hard for anything to be properly private. I see that Larry Page, the CEO of Google, claims it is “completely false” to say that his company gives away information about your internet activity. Pull the other one, Larry. If that is the case, how come all users of your Gmail email accounts get those advertisements pinged at them – ads triggered by words in the very CONTENT of the emails themselves? I don’t give a monkey’s whether it is a machine or a person: someone out there is monitoring my thoughts, as reflected in my emails, and that someone is trying to sell me stuff on the basis of what they have gleaned from my PRIVATE BLOOMING CONVERSATIONS!

I think if I were Shami Chakrabarti, or my old chum David Davis, I might get thoroughly aerated at this point; and I have some sympathy with their general position. But then I am afraid I also have sympathy with our security services, and their very powerful need to use the internet to catch the bad guys – the terrorists, the jihadis, the child porn creeps. There is a trade-off between freedom and security, as Barack Obama rightly says; between the citizen’s right to total internet privacy, and the duty of the state to protect us all from harm.

The question is where you draw the line, and how you enforce it; and in the meantime, I have two suggestions for those libertarians who have been scandalised by the revelations from America. The first is to look at the bestseller lists, and the amazing success of a sweet little book called Letters to Lupin – the gin-sodden epistles of Home Counties racing buff Roger Mortimer to his wayward son.

People adore this book because it evokes those men who fought in the war – Dear Bill characters whose conversation involved dirty jokes, the state of the lawn, the soundness of horses, what the dog had done on the carpet and the general insanity of their wives and other female relatives. They remind us of a generation now fading, capable of stiff upper lip but also of expressing great love and devotion; and they remind us of how that love was expressed. The letter was an event in itself. It wasn’t just a piece of information pinged into your inbox. It was a lovely hodge-podge of gossip and news and jokes, an art-form that needs to be revived, and so all those who want to beat the internet snoops – just get out the old Basildon Bond, suck the end of your biro, assemble your thoughts carefully and do as our grandparents did.

Failing that, there is clearly a massive business opportunity for a British tech company. Look at all these US tech giants: I don’t need to name them – you know who I mean. They don’t pay their fair share of tax; they collaborate with US snoopers; they are altogether too big and powerful. They have had a lot of paint chipped off them lately. We in Britain have produced all sorts of technological breakthroughs – indeed, Tim Berners-Lee actually came up with the World Wide Web. But we have not yet produced a giant on the American scale – and now the gap yawns for a British internet provider that somehow roots out the terrorists and the child molesters, and yet allows the blameless punter to send an email in complete security. We want a British Google that cracks the freedom vs security conundrum. Come on, you Tech City brainboxes, it can’t be that hard!

Jo Johnson’s first No 10 policy blip is to wear jeans to work

John Galliano speaks: "It’s the worst thing I have said in my life, but I didn’t mean it"

Speaking for the first time since he was fired from Dior for an anti-Semitic outburst, John Galliano insists he is not racist, talks openly about his battle with drink and drugs and says he is "grateful" for what happened.

Crossrail: A project that stands tall with Everest? Just look under your feet

The Hillary Step is so congested that they are thinking of installing a ladder. In fact, there are so many octogenarians climbing Everest to raise money for the church roof that they might as well fit one of those chair-lifts you see in colour supplements.

As a monument to derring-do, Everest no longer qualifies; so what does that leave? We have plumbed the sea; we have probed the darkest recesses of the rainforest; we have circumnavigated the globe – even now there are probably gap yah students criss-crossing the oceans blindfolded in a pedalo to raise money for some good cause or other.

Perhaps we should make sure a Briton is on the next trip to Mars (and perhaps we could all club together to sponsor Ed Balls). Or instead, perhaps we should concentrate on the amazing things we are already doing, and that we hardly even notice – things right under our feet.

Last week I went to see the Crossrail excavations at Canary Wharf, four years after we had officially got them going, and I remembered how fragile the project had seemed. There was a time when we had to fight for Crossrail, when senior cabinet ministers were denouncing it as a mad plan to build a pointless trench across London. It was an easy way to save £16 billion, they said. Axe it now, they said, and no one will even miss it.

Well, thank heavens we didn’t listen to that guff. Crossrail’s tunnel is now a giant and growing fact, that will revolutionise east-west transit in the greatest city on earth, pinging you from Heathrow to the City in about half an hour. Its fast air-conditioned network will run from Maidenhead in the west to Shenfield in the east.

Crossrail will increase London’s rail capacity by about 10 per cent, and generate an estimated £42 billion worth of growth across the country. Even in its construction phase, Crossrail is good for the whole of Britain. Of its 1,600 contracts, 62 per cent have gone to firms outside London – more than half of them small and medium enterprises (SMEs). There are bridges from Shropshire, cranes from Derbyshire, grouting from Coventry, piling from Oldham, lifts from Preston and vast quantities of lubrication from Bournemouth.

The project is responsible for about 55,000 jobs across the country, and it would have been utter insanity to cancel it – not just because of the jobs it creates, but because it is essential if we are to cope with the demands on our transport network.

London will have a million more people in the next 10 years, and without Crossrail the Central line would become so packed and overheated that it would not be fit, under EU rules, for the transport of live animals. It is a vivid and powerful lesson in the vital importance of investing in transport infrastructure, and of driving on ruthlessly with essential schemes: the

Tube upgrades, new river crossings, Crossrail Two, and others. They are not just good for London, but for the whole of Britain.

And yet none of these Crossrail statistics do justice to what is being achieved. When Patrick McLoughlin, the Secretary of State for Transport, and I went into the new station box at Canary Wharf, I felt a sense of primeval awe, like a Neanderthal stumbling into the gloom of Lascaux. It is akin to a gigantic subterranean cathedral several times the size of Chartres. The boring machine is like a colossal steel-toothed remora or lamprey, grinding her way through the clay.

I stood beneath her jaws, and fingered some of that thick black Bournemouth lube, and they told me how the machine had driven with such accuracy that when she entered the station box she was only 5mm off target. This is the biggest engineering project in Europe, an amazing advertisement for British construction; and when you look at it you wonder why we are sometimes so prone to self-doubt.

When the next coronation rolls round, we won’t need a new mountain to climb. We’ll have the joy and excitement of Crossrail Two, as she chomps her way from Hackney to Chelsea; and unlike climbing Everest, the scheme will be of practical benefit to all.

In the meantime, we need a proper name for Crossrail, the vast new line on London’s underground network – and who better to give her name to that line than someone who has served her country so unfailingly and well for 60 years?

A project that stands tall with Everest? Look under your feet

The Hillary Step is so congested that they are thinking of installing a ladder. In fact, there are so many octogenarians climbing Everest to raise money for the church roof that they might as well fit one of those chair-lifts you see in colour supplements.

As a monument to derring-do, Everest no longer qualifies; so what does that leave? We have plumbed the sea; we have probed the darkest recesses of the rainforest; we have circumnavigated the globe – even now there are probably gap yah students criss-crossing the oceans blindfolded in a pedalo to raise money for some good cause or other.

Perhaps we should make sure a Briton is on the next trip to Mars (and perhaps we could all club together to sponsor Ed Balls). Or instead, perhaps we should concentrate on the amazing things we are already doing, and that we hardly even notice – things right under our feet.

Last week I went to see the Crossrail excavations at Canary Wharf, four years after we had officially got them going, and I remembered how fragile the project had seemed. There was a time when we had to fight for Crossrail, when senior cabinet ministers were denouncing it as a mad plan to build a pointless trench across London. It was an easy way to save £16 billion, they said. Axe it now, they said, and no one will even miss it.

Well, thank heavens we didn’t listen to that guff. Crossrail’s tunnel is now a giant and growing fact, that will revolutionise east-west transit in the greatest city on earth, pinging you from Heathrow to the City in about half an hour. Its fast air-conditioned network will run from Maidenhead in the west to Shenfield in the east.

Crossrail will increase London’s rail capacity by about 10 per cent, and generate an estimated £42 billion worth of growth across the country. Even in its construction phase, Crossrail is good for the whole of Britain. Of its 1,600 contracts, 62 per cent have gone to firms outside London – more than half of them small and medium enterprises (SMEs). There are bridges from Shropshire, cranes from Derbyshire, grouting from Coventry, piling from Oldham, lifts from Preston and vast quantities of lubrication from Bournemouth.

The project is responsible for about 55,000 jobs across the country, and it would have been utter insanity to cancel it – not just because of the jobs it creates, but because it is essential if we are to cope with the demands on our transport network.

London will have a million more people in the next 10 years, and without Crossrail the Central line would become so packed and overheated that it would not be fit, under EU rules, for the transport of live animals. It is a vivid and powerful lesson in the vital importance of investing in transport infrastructure, and of driving on ruthlessly with essential schemes: the

Tube upgrades, new river crossings, Crossrail Two, and others. They are not just good for London, but for the whole of Britain.

And yet none of these Crossrail statistics do justice to what is being achieved. When Patrick McLoughlin, the Secretary of State for Transport, and I went into the new station box at Canary Wharf, I felt a sense of primeval awe, like a Neanderthal stumbling into the gloom of Lascaux. It is akin to a gigantic subterranean cathedral several times the size of Chartres. The boring machine is like a colossal steel-toothed remora or lamprey, grinding her way through the clay.

I stood beneath her jaws, and fingered some of that thick black Bournemouth lube, and they told me how the machine had driven with such accuracy that when she entered the station box she was only 5mm off target. This is the biggest engineering project in Europe, an amazing advertisement for British construction; and when you look at it you wonder why we are sometimes so prone to self-doubt.

When the next coronation rolls round, we won’t need a new mountain to climb. We’ll have the joy and excitement of Crossrail Two, as she chomps her way from Hackney to Chelsea; and unlike climbing Everest, the scheme will be of practical benefit to all.

In the meantime, we need a proper name for Crossrail, the vast new line on London’s underground network – and who better to give her name to that line than someone who has served her country so unfailingly and well for 60 years?

Boris Johnson hails Crossrail milestone

A milestone in a £14.8 billion rail scheme was reached today with the breakthrough of a 1,000-tonne tunnel boring machine.

Named Elizabeth, the machine broke through a wall at the new Canary Wharf station in London which is being created as part of the Crossrail project.

With its sister machine, Victoria, Elizabeth is creating more than five of the 26 miles of tunnelling beneath central London that are being dug for Crossrail.

The 73-mile long route runs from Maidenhead in Berkshire in the west, through London to Shenfield in Essex in the east.

London mayor Boris Johnson,said: "Many thought it would never happen, it seemed almost unimaginable. But now, with the arrival of this gigantic tunnelling machine in the heart of Canary Wharf, grubby with mud and rubble, we can be in no doubt it's on its way."

Passing through 37 stations, Crossrail will be ready by 2018.

Boris Johnson: Ban Islamic groups teaching segregated university lectures

Mr Johnson also said that politicians had to “make a hard and sharp distinction between that religion – and the virus of ‘Islamism’.”

He said: “This is a sinister political agenda that promotes a sense of grievance and victimhood among a minority of Muslims.

“The Islamists want universal Sharia law, and other mumbo jumbo. Above all, they want power over others: and so they prey on young men who feel in some way rejected by society, and they fill those young men with a horrible and deluded sense of self-importance.

“They tell these people that they are not alone in suffering injustice; that they belong to a much wider group of victims – the Muslims – and that the only way to avenge these injustices is jihad.

“These Islamist evangelists have no allegiance to the western society they live in and whose benefits systems they abuse: far from it – their avowed intent is to create a sexist and homophobic Muslim caliphate.”

Mr Johnson continued: "We must not give the killers the thing they crave above all – the prize of dividing us. They say they want a “war”, or, as others have put it, a “clash of civilisations”. That idea is bunk, and we can show it.

"To prevent any such temptation, we must be clear in our heads that there is no sense whatever in blaming Islam, a religion that gives consolation and enrichment to the lives of hundreds of millions of peaceful people."

By standing united, we can isolate the virus of Islamism

(3) So we need to make a hard and sharp distinction between that religion – and the virus of “Islamism”. This is a sinister political agenda that promotes a sense of grievance and victimhood among a minority of Muslims. The Islamists want universal sharia law, and other mumbo jumbo. Above all, they want power over others: and so they prey on young men who feel in some way rejected by society, and they fill those young men with a horrible and deluded sense of self-importance. They tell these people that they are not alone in suffering injustice; that they belong to a much wider group of victims – the Muslims – and that the only way to avenge these injustices is jihad. These Islamist evangelists have no allegiance to the Western society they live in and whose benefits systems they abuse: far from it – their avowed intent is to create a sexist and homophobic Muslim caliphate.

(4) You cannot hope to solve the problem of Islamism by accepting their invitation to enter into some debate or discussion about British or American foreign policy, even if that were desirable. People who suggest as much are, alas, playing the game of the Islamists. The only realistic option is to try to help immunise the vast, innocent and law-abiding majority of the Muslim population from the virus of extremism, and at the same time to try to stamp out that virus.

(5) It is very important not to exaggerate the plague. It is hard to estimate the number of people who have succumbed to the Islamist virus in this country, and there are various degrees of infection. But the security services would probably put the number in the very low thousands; and when you consider that there are about a million Muslims in London alone, you can see how the reputation of a whole community is at risk of suffering from the actions of a tiny, tiny fraction.

(6) But it is also vital not to be complacent, and to understand that the security services do an extraordinary job of dealing with a problem that has proved tough to eradicate. There remains a hardcore of activists and agitators, many of whom were associated with the now-banned organisation al-Muhajiroun. They cause real difficulties for mosques in London, some of which have had to resort to long and expensive legal actions to keep them out. The vectors of the virus may not even make much physical contact with their targets: since the arrival of the internet, we have had to deal with miserable young people “self-radicalising” – simply by watching sermons and other material on the web.

(7) We need to recognise, loudly and publicly, the good work of the vast majority of Muslim organisations in helping to crush the problem. If they are going to show zero tolerance of Islamism, they need support and encouragement.

(8) We need to keep on with the work of the “Prevent” programme, an initiative aimed at catching the most vulnerable young Muslims, and helping them before they can contract the virus. “Prevent” has recently been reviewed so as to focus its efforts on stopping the bad guys from recruiting, rather than just giving cash, in a general way, to Muslim community groups. But in some London boroughs there is clear and encouraging evidence that these programmes are working – saving young people from the catastrophe of being brainwashed by the Islamists. We need to keep immunising where we can, and we need to stamp out the virus.

(9) People like Abu Qatada should be put on a plane, and those that preach hate and violence must be arrested. The universities need to be much, much tougher in their monitoring of Islamic societies. It is utterly wrong to have segregated meetings in a state-funded centre of learning. If visiting speakers start some Islamist schtick – and seek either to call for or justify violence – then the authorities need to summon the police.

(10) The police need all the assistance they can get. The officers who attended the crime last week showed exemplary coolness and courage, and it is a fine irony that one of the firearms squad who helped to immobilise the alleged killers was a WPC: a fitting rebuttal of the ghastly sexism of the Islamist ideology. I have no idea whether the police would have benefited, in the Woolwich case, from the powers they now seek under the Communication of Data Act. But I have much sympathy with their basic desire to keep up with criminals, and make use of technology that is now instrumental in solving thousands of crimes.

That is how we are going to prevail in this struggle: by keeping our heads, by not falling for the tricks of those who want to provoke us, and by coming down hard when necessary. We know we are going to win, and they know it, too.