Social networks (including this site) are closely watched by BBC Monitoring in Caversham, SE England – anything blatantly illegal they note (which doesn’t end up on some investigative documentary) is passed to the Police and/or GCHQ depending on severity. if its involves overseas events its left to the Met as to whether to notify the foreign authorities. They’ve been doing that even before the Internet existed, in the 80s it was CB radio frequencies and pirate broadcasters they listened to on powerful receivers and huge antenna arrays.
However, the chaps who worked at Caversham back then (I used to live just 5 minutes away!) were like forerunners of Ed Snowden and actually told me and my mates exactly how far you could push things and how to keep out of trouble (even if you weren’t behaving like saints). But these guys have all retired now; replaced with younger more ambitious “journalists” from posh middle class backgrounds who have no problem about working with the authorities. (Some of their activities have been exposed in the STRATFOR hack recently).
On a related note I’ve just read two articles on BBC which have been taken straight from Reddit and similar places via Caversham. Both were light hearted subjects but this bit of Auntie can go in a lot heavier when it wants. It even monitors the rest of the BBC for compliance, another thing they me and friends in the 80s “under the table” as we then hoped to work in media production was to give certain “star” presenters like Jimmy Saville (and some others!) a very wide berth….
That said I think these two were most likely nicked due to coming to notice of their local cops and/or being grassed up by their own so-called friends.
In Europe the seniors do their own smuggling; even so they are regularly caught at border controls and sent to jail (ironically though if they are >70 and into downers/opiates they are likely to ultimately end up in the nursing homes where they will be legally given as much as their bodies will stand..)
A few years ago this chap in his 70s from one of the local amateur radio clubs took a package holiday to one of those “Ibiza” type destinations with his wife; it was cheap and he knew his wife would only want to walk along the beach for a few days and spend the rest of the time in the hotel room watching British TV and complaining about the heat. So he got a room in one of those tower block hotels high up and facing the sea; as he could test out a new portable Japanese radio he had recently bought (with which he was talking to folk in Australia and all sorts of far away places).
As soon as he set foot back in Blighty the Border Force called him and his wife aside, they were taken to a room where literally every piece of luggage they had was searched through; they even got an Ofcom man in to check his log book, stored frequencies and that all the spare batteries were just that and didn’t contain any “souvenirs”.
As he wasn’t committing any crimes he thought it more amusing than anything and could understand why it happened (as he would have after all grown up during the 1960s/70s)
Other folk of his age round here who are into restoring old sound equipment who innocently buy prog rock vinyl LPs and electronic components from the Netherlands are forever having their parcels delayed for extra checks – the other half of British society still hasnt’ forgiven this generation for the social changes in the 1960s and perhaps never will.
