You thought your boss was bad?

[Heid the Ba]

The Police Service of Northern Ireland has published the names and addresses of all its officers. All of whom are targets for dissident Republicans. Many of whom have kept their employer secret from neighbours, friends and even family for very good reasons. This is a fucking shite storm.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-66455475
There is a good series on the tellybox which covers this tangentially, though with some humour like when the Catholic officer "comes out" to her friends.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/ ... lue-lights

[Heid the Ba]

Cunting pissflaps. No this is not a joke, this is people I know.

[Arneb]

It was bad enough even to make it to our news sites here. Massive failure of the State to protect its most-threatened servants.

[Heid the Ba]

It is unbelievable, and the repercussions are incalculable. I know people from the Bad Old Days and I row with some people in Norn Iron clubs who have never said they are PSNI, but they are. If you were in you can tell.
Amusingly if you ever want to know how to convince people you are a Mason I can talk you through it. I never was but so many people thought I was that I know the calls and responses.

[Richard A]

It is truly astonishing. Even more in that it follows a modest (only by comparison) data breach when a computer containing the details of a mere 200 PSNI officers went astray when the car containing it was stolen. I don’t know why anyone would continue working for the PSNI after this.

[Heid the Ba]

And dissident Republicans have the information.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-66479818

[tubeswell]

But everyone knows we will all love one another and get along like one big happy trusting PC family if the Government is more transparent about public sector employee details.

[Richard A]

And dissident Republicans have the information.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-66479818

That was a given. You publish the details like this and there's no way the paramilitaries are not going to get hold of it. These are people who are capable of finding out that a senior police officer coaches at a local sports club, when he'll be there and shooting him in the car park. At least some of the dissidents were in the old Provisional IRA and will have learned their intelligence skills there. A little anecdote from the old days to show what they were capable of, told by the then chaplain at the jail concerned.

Among the IRA prisoners held at Magilligan Prison near Londonderry/Derry was one Miller. Even by IRA standards, he had a particular contempt for the prison officers and didn't bother hiding it. One of the officers had enough and decided to show him who was boss by telling him that his regular copy of the Daily Mirror would be withheld until he changed his attitude. Then at the end of his shift, drove home - 60 miles away as part of the common security precautions. The next morning, he went to his car, checked underneath it for a bomb as he always did. Good, nothing there. So he opened the car door, ready to get in and go to work. Although the doors had been locked, there on the driver's seat was a copy of the Daily Mirror with a note: "Give this to Miller. Final warning."

[Heid the Ba]

The IRA were certainly the most competent of the paramilitaries and had a lot of training overseas. The difference is that in the bad old days the RUC was 95% Protestant and nowadays the PSNI is about 35% Catholic, those are the officers and staff most at risk here. When the PSNI talk about newer officers who are not used to threats that is who they mean, younger officers living in Catholic areas. The older Protestant officers have lived with this all their careers, in many cases they are second generation.
I strongly suspect that there are a lot of shouty conversations going on between the PSNI and dissidents along the line of the Sean Connery speech in The Untouchables. Yes, the dissident Republicans know who the PSNI staff are but by the same token the PSNI know who the dissident Republicans are. There was at least one of the IRA - Real IRA feuds of the 1980s was manufactured by MI5 and the RUC to make a point. Of course it helped that the head of the IRA's counter intelligence unit was an MI5 plant.

[Heid the Ba]

Might be co-incidence but the BBC are making a song and dance about a dissident bombing twenty five years ago. They're will be a "both sides" piece by lunchtime though.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-66503382

[Мастер]

I wouldn’t have been surprised if the boss at my last full-time job did something like this deliberately.