“I take the view that it is part of being a good citizen, proving who you are, day in day out,”

The words of Andy Burnham, the treacherous pirate in charge of the NIR/ID card scheme, whose poison is can be read here.

Mr Burnham was asked why Labour had not told voters that the cards would be compulsory. He replied: “Actually, we did. […]

Whilst this is true of the actual legislation and there have been many posts on Blogdial and elsewhere to highlight this, the Neu Labour lie machine have also remorselessly spun the concept of a ‘voluntary phase’ and a secondary vote being required (before punishments can be implemented). It is a tragedy that the mainstream media have largely been unquestioning (I mean *real* questions) in the spun accounts and only now that the House of Lords are providing a wafer thin bulwark against the legislation are the government being asked to account for the true picture.

“The irony is that if we were to listen to what the Lords are saying, we would actually create two biometric databases: one for the passport system and one for the new National Identity Register. […]

This is another deception, the international requirement for biometric passports can be satisfied by simply having a machine readable version of your passport photo – there is no need for any other extra information to be collected by the passport agency to fulfill this requirement, and certainly not the level of information the government wants for NIR.
Secondly only last week it was announced that the government were looking at distributing the NIR database between various companies in their cackhanded way of addressing a ‘decentralised’ database.

Additionally this morning he came up with the old chestnut of the ‘unelected chamber defeating the will of [20%] of the people’.

Now back to ‘being a good citizen’, his words describe the sort of country where people will have to use ID cards to access public/stakeholder services – imagine that you have to submit your NIR number to;
gain tax credits – and every time you actually want your child to use a nursery or pre-school creche you have to have your ID card scanned (for quality control);
or what if petrol (or travel mileages) were to be rationed, every time you buy a train ticket or go to the petrol station you have to submit ID;
Access public buildings – e.g. borrow a book from a library;
Use an internet cafe (ID already required in Italy);

These and other scenarios may seem bizarre, but I ask, in what other sorts of circumstances will ‘good citizens’need to be “proving who you are, day in day out”.

—–

Admin – how do you get large text to work in wordpress?

Apparently The Glorious Benefactor finally wants to complete the reform the House of Lords in order that cloven-foot-&-mouth snakeoil salesmen like himself cannot use their business contacts to fill the Upper Chamber with supine cronies.
Whilst he may pretend that he has been committed to full reform for some time, it is demonstrable that his regime has been using the ‘unelected representatives’ as a handy stick for threatening the use of the Parliament Act in order to push through his treacherous legislation. Like all the other reforms related to Parliamentary procedures he only shows interest when his personal position is questioned and will no doubt only look at proposals as far as this is secured, or tread water until he resigns.

Rant Over.

—

Edited to add ‘badly painted’ picture:

What does a ‘stakeholder society’ mean in terms of political powerplay?

By inducing people to use ‘stakeholder services’ provided by the State (or private companies tenbdering for public contracts) instead of private sector provision, there becomes an increased reliance on the State by the individual. If the State provides these services through general taxation and ‘Credits’ then it can increase it’s share of the market by the efffect of people having to pay twice for private provision – once for unused State services and once for the private services.

Stakeholder service provision goes beyond old style public service provision which is largely aimed at helping those with true hardships and begins to universalise State provision in mid/upper socio-economic groups – the bulk of the voters.

Increased reliance on the State will mean that people perceive they have more to lose in making the State unstable (they risk the loss of a stakeholder service or have to pay twice). By inducing the notion that people are reliant on the State when in fact they are simply giving money to government in order to receive it back in the form of ‘credits’ for leading life in the State sanctioned way.

Now an unpopular government could use this ‘dependency’ to leverage unpopular legislation upon stakeholders who are in a tenuous position for example a family requiring tax credits to send their

—-

And ‘their’ I stopped.

But I pick up the theme because reading the post below on ID cards I am minded to believe that tax credits will be authorised/audited against NIR records, this will mean that the government will be gaining leverage over the majority of parents, pensioners, in fact anyone who wishes to be a ‘stakeholder’ and receive tax credits, which if the Chancellor continues his current course will be practically everyone. I belive this is how the government will induce NIR registration (rather than relying on the ‘voluntary’ choice of renewing passports).

Technorati Tags: stakeholder, tax credits, ID cards

GnuPG does not detect injection of unsigned data
================================================
(released 2006-03-09, CVE-2006-0049)

Summary
=======

In the aftermath of the false positive signature verfication bug
(announced 2006-02-15) more thorough testing of the fix has been done
and another vulnerability has been detected.

[…]

Impact:
=======

Signature verification of non-detached signatures may give a positive
result but when extracting the signed data, this data may be prepended
or appended with extra data not covered by the signature. Thus it is
possible for an attacker to take any signed message and inject extra
arbitrary data.

Detached signatures (a separate signature file) are not affected.

All versions of gnupg prior to 1.4.2.2 are affected.

[…]

GPG [announce]

Those of you using earlier versions of GPG will no doubt want to upgrade.

A NATIONAL identity card scheme will be a “present” to terrorists, criminal gangs and foreign spies, one of Britain’s most respected former intelligence agents has told ministers.

[…]

Baroness Park, who was made a peer by Margaret Thatcher, passed a withering verdict on the proposed cards, ridiculing ministers’ suggestions that the system will make people safer. In fact, she said, the complete opposite is true.

“The very creation of such an enormous national identity register will be a present to terrorists; it will be a splendid thing for them to disrupt and blow up [!!!-mm],” she said.

“It will also provide valuable information to organised crime and to the intelligence services of unfriendly countries. It will be accessible to all of these,” she said.

[via bribery and database cracking, but of course peoples lives will be disrupted by ‘functionally fit’ false ID without the need for accurate NIR information – because some companies or institutions will accept the cards at face value]

The warning about the risk of foreign spying comes at a time when MI5, the domestic security service, has cut its counter-espionage budget, prompting concerns among MPs who oversee the UK intelligence services.

Baroness Park concluded: “I find it extraordinarily difficult to believe why anyone would voluntarily and enthusiastically come forward and say: ‘Do let me join this dangerous club’.”

Baroness Park is not the first former intelligence officer to question the value of a national ID card. Dame Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5, last year said she did not believe the cards would make Britain any safer from terrorist attack; they would quickly be copied, she said.

Whereas Dame Stella’s background was in combating internal threats, especially the IRA, Baroness Park has extensive experience of foreign intelligence operations.

[…]

From The Scotsman

–

In other news another government IT project has failed it – but this time due to ‘user non-compliance’, ;

At the meeting, the head of the watchdog, Sir John Bourn, said his report will say the government project had failed to win the “hearts and minds” of the NHS staff required to use it.
The project’s failure to “take the people in the National Health Service with them” meant it had become a “focus of dissension” amongst GPs and consultants.

And of course I mean;

At the meeting, the head of the watchdog, said her report will say the NIR project had failed to win the “hearts and minds” of the public required to register.
The project’s failure to “take in the people of the country” meant it had become a “focus of dissension” amongst Citizens and Residents.

What with all the controversy about occult loans to the labour party leading to nominations for peerages it has been suggested by some quarters that there should be consideration of taxpayers fnding political parties (Bliar and Prescott it seems)

This is entirely the wrong solution and if polls are to be believed thankfully 73% of the country are ‘against’ such moves. Although given that 80% didn’t vote for labour politicians at the election Bliar will probably view this as an ‘overwhelming mandate for reform’.

Firstly the current scandal is not that political parties are receiving large, private donations; it is that these loans are being used by the political parties to cover up their funding and for the government to be perceived to be using loans as a tool of patronage – to repeaat in neither case is the act of receiving private funding a problem and it is not this aspect that requires attention.

Secondly political parties are not required for a (true) parliamentary democracy to exist, the fact that independent members and members of very marginal parties have been elected to parliament show that it is not necessary to have the support of a large party to be elected. Of course parties make easier to identify what sort of promises will be broken by each MP and in any case we are talking about funding and not the abolition of politival parties (now!).

Thirdly if by some tragedy tax funding of politics were to be extended many of the activities that political parties currently undertake such as (commissioning think tank) reports and policy studies could be organised ‘independently’ by Select Commitees rather than political parties, that way we could possibly get less partial findings and avoid replication of spending.

What with the cold weather and assorted other things I’ve noticed if I’m not smiling (or on the positive side of neutral) when I’m wearing earphones the sound is much flatter and deadened. It must be because smiling pushes your ears out slightly and changes the resonant space in your ear slightly.
Maybe the ‘iPod effect’ is owners of new toys being happy whilst listening to their music and noticing the improvement in the sound. Maybe it’s not smugness after all, just satisfaction.

Talking of which I think African Head Charge’s ‘Hymn’ must be the happiest piece of music I’ve heard.

While most media organisations are cutting back frantically to compete with the internet, the BBC is demanding “inflation plus two and a half per cent” from the government to prop up its ratings. The claim is absurd. The licence fee already yields a stunning £3bn. The BBC recently said it could lose 3,700 staff with no loss of broadcast quality; so who hired these useless people? The BBC bureaucracy is the common agricultural policy of the air, filling silos with overheads to cushion its eventual collapse into one gigantic pension fund. Come the digital revolution in a few years, the Cotswolds will be settled entirely by wealthy BBC pensioners all listening to Classic FM.

Simon Jenkins

Who would have thunk it? A supremely great paragraph methinks, “the CAP of the air” wonderful.

Relatedly it seems that the BBQ is thinking of localising it’s free online content, now it would seem perfectly reasonable to give UK resident’s the choice of accessing online content via the license fee or on the same terms as overseas browsers – in fact any system that doesn’t introduce a BBQ tax on the sale of computers or broadband connections

The BBC is set to begin commercialising traffic to bbc.co.uk, two strategies the company is considering are charging overseas users to access the site, and running commercials on the site. David Moody, director of strategy ad new media at BBC Worldwide has asserted that “Now is the right time to look at commercialising international traffic to bbc.co.uk.”

The BBC has also used the services of consulting firm Accenture to investigate ways to “make money from people who use its services but don’t pay the license fee.”

Mr. Moody has hinted that even license fee payers may have to pay an extra fee for certain types of online content, for example they might have to pay to view video material after the expiry of the current seven day window period offered by the online interactive media player.

http://www.editorsweblog.org/news/2006/03/bbc_may_charge_for_web_access.php

I started to draft this back in the day and ran out of steam:

What is a passport anyway?
It says that to officials of another country that you are afforded legal protection in a foreign country by the country of issue.
In which case the idea of a passport as a prerequisite for travel is unsound (there is no obligation to buy travel insurance when going abroad, so why should one be required to have the ‘insurance’ of the State when going abroad?
Certainly when travelling within the EU where legal frameworks are almost homogenous anyway.)

The truth is that the mass British Passport has always been an identity document:

The modern passport system really began at the time of the First World War, when states began to issue passports as a way of distinguishing their own citizens from those they saw as foreign nationals.

The British Nationality and Status Aliens Act 1914 was part of this process.

—————————-

History of British Nationality Law

The UN charter relating to stateless persons

… The personal status of a stateless person shall be governed by the law of the country of his domicile or, if he has no domicile, by the law of the country of his residence…

…Article 27. – Identity papers

The Contracting States shall issue identity papers to any stateless person in their territory who does not possess a valid travel document.
Article 28. – Travel documents

The Contracting States shall issue to stateless persons lawfully staying in their territory travel documents for the purpose of travel outside their territory, unless compelling reasons of national security or public order otherwise require, and the provisions of the schedule to this Convention shall apply with respect to such documents. The Contracting States may issue such a travel document to any other stateless person in their territory; they shall in particular give sympathetic consideration to the issue of such a travel document to stateless persons in their territory who are unable to obtain a travel document from the country of their lawful residence…

This little piggy deployed marksmen
This little piggy should stay schtumm
This liilte piggy creates a load o’ grief
This little piggy comes undone
‘cos this little piggy taped Lord Goldsmith as they spoke on the phone

As the originator of the “Iran Oil Bourse” I hope you can spare me some space to comment in relation to Ms. Berg’s recent articles.

The original concept five or so years ago was not of an “Iran Oil Bourse” but of a “Middle East Energy Exchange” providing a new Gulf benchmark price which would not be manipulated by investment banks and oil traders – as is the case with the North Sea “Brent” crude oil complex and has been for at least 10 years.

It makes no sense at all – and never has – for crude oil coming out of the Gulf and going to the Far East to be priced against a North Sea benchmark – but Brent has always been used since it is the “least worst” solution.

From personal experience – including very high level conversations – I think that there is no prospect whatever that Iran would unilaterally attempt to create a crude oil benchmark contract whatever currency it may be priced in. A domestic market in products, petrochemicals, and so on, is another matter.

The current global market in oil is owned, controlled, and operated by intermediaries for their own benefit and is fast deteriorating – as I warned it would five years ago – into an “ICE-bound” (ICE = Intercontinental Exchange, currently completing an audacious but brilliant strategy by applying the coup de grace to NYMEX) global monopoly extracting ever increasing profits at the expense of producers and consumers. Barclays Capital recently estimated that intermediary profits from commodity markets (of which energy is a huge component) will double to $26bn in the next three years.

Moreover, this market is now awash with hedge fund money, and despite Ms. Berg’s confidence in NYMEX and IPE/LCH, I believe that these centralized institutions face little-appreciated systemic risks as “single points of failure” in the face of the unregulated, opaque, and massive off-exchange, or “OTC,” market in energy and energy derivatives.

The difference between the LTCM near-meltdown in the financial markets and an energy market crisis this winter or next is that the Fed can’t print oil to bail out the system.

In relation to clearing, Ms. Berg is unfamiliar with the concept of a “Clearing Union” because no partnership-based “enterprise model” (i.e., legal and financial structure) enabling one has ever existed. Naturally, market users would have to back up a mutual guarantee in some way, whether through margin, collateral, or otherwise.

It’s just that there isn’t the “central counterparty” Ms. Berg is used to.

In a nutshell, I believe that the future lies in the creation of a neutral global oil trading network and “Energy Clearing Union” owned by ALL market constituencies: and this concept is beginning to get across. Certainly the Norwegians were interested in it: “Norwegian Bourse Director wants oil bourse priced in euros” – a development which followed a paper I submitted at the request of their consul-general in Edinburgh.

~ Chris Cook, formerly a Director of the International Petroleum Exchange and now a member of the Wimpole Consortium tasked with creating an energy exchange for Iran

Antiwar.com letters page with reply

This is a nice greasemonkey script to add mirrors to digg links. I found another one to remove adverts from digg but since I use adblock I didn’t even know digg had ads (although I thought the large white space under the header was a bit screwy).

There was a report on the radio this morning about a European (read EU blighted) search engine ‘Quaero’ to be set up as an alternative to Google. After googling around I found, typically for BBQ, that this was old news dressed up in mouton clothing.

Anyway, the idea of an EU-centric search engine to rival google almost made me choke on my breakfast – until recently the EU website had the single worst search tool I’ve ever seen online (It is now marginally better, and almost useful).

The reason why there is not a ‘Google equivalent’ is that whereas US taxes, financial regulations and competitive research programmes have not discriminated against startup companies almost every equivalent piece of work/employment legislation coming from the EU runs counter to small and new companies. All the blustering of Chirac (whose announcement it was that BBQ relayed) will not change this if he adheres to the typical EU top down imposing of ‘solutions’.

Marks and Spencer seems to be exploiting the goldfish attention span of the media today, last week it was reported;

Marks & Spencer suppliers have reacted angrily to the retailing giant turning the screw on them, just one year after demanding better terms from all its food, textile and accessory manufacturers.

“People are being squeezed to the bone. There will come a point where we will either go bankrupt or throw in the towel and walk away,” said one small textile supplier.
[…]

whereas today M&S proudly announce;

Marks & Spencer is to stock only Fairtrade coffee and tea from next month as it extends it commitment to ethical sourcing.

…

Stuart Rose, chief executive of Marks & Spencer, said: “Our customers have told us they care about how our products are made and we want to help them make Fairtrade part of their retail habit.” M&S, as an own-brand-only retailer, was in a “unique position” to make the change.
[…]

Call me a stickler for consistency but it seems somewhat two-faced to force UK suppliers to be barely profitable and at the same time call yourself ethical for stocking Fairtrade products from countries where the cost of being ‘ethical’ is markedly less. (Anyhow the UK suppliers are free to take their trade elsewhere – given that all the other supermarkets operate on similar lines maybe they should try local independent retailers).

An analogous doublethink situation to the government calling for ‘freedom and democracy’ abroad whilst imposing repressive legisaltiuon at home?

It’s beem snowing in Leeds!

It’ll be front page news on BBQ when it causes traffic mayhem in Essex, no doubt.

via digg (The big DRM mistake)

After it arrived, I took out the first DVD and stuck it in my Linux box, expecting that I could start looking at the collected issues
[…]
It turned out that The New Yorker added DRM to their DjVu files, turning an open format into a closed, proprietary, encrypted format, and forcing consumers to install the special viewer software included on the first DVD. Of course, that software only works on Windows or Mac OS X, so Linux users are out of luck (and no, it doesn’t work under WINE … believe me, I tried).

via Spyblog (re Computer Misuse Act):

For the purposes of subsection (1)(b) above the requisite intent is an

intent to do the act in question and by so doing—

(a) to impair the operation of any computer,
(b) to prevent or hinder access to any program or data held in any computer, or
(c) to impair the operation of any such program or the reliability of any such data,

whether permanently or temporarily.

I’m sure that the DRM problems described in the first story fall into the emboldened sections of the legislation.

Does this mean UK government will be outlawing DRM? It’s a nice thought anyway.