Now in the relations between man and man, the worst that can hapen is for one to find himself at the mercy of another, and it would have been inconsistent with common sense to begin by bestowing on a chief the only things they wanted his help to preserve. What equivalent could he offer them for so great a right? And if he had presumed to exact it under pretext of defending them, would he not have received the answer recorded in the fable: ‘What more can the enemy do to us?’ It is therefore beyond dispute , and indeed the fundamental maxim of all political right, that people have set up cheifs to protect their liberty, and not to enslve them. ‘If we have a prince,’ said Pliny to Trajan, ‘it is to save ourselves from having a master.’
Politicians indulge in the same sophistry about the love of liberty as philosophers about the state of nature. They judge, by what they see, of very different things, which they have not seen; they attribute to man a natural propensity to servitude, because the slaves within their observation are seen to bear the yoke with patience; they fail to reflect that it is with liberty as with innocenceand virtue; the value is only known to those who possess them, and the taste for them is forfeited when they are forfeited themselves. ‘I know the charms of your country,’ said Brasidas to a Satrap, who was compaing the life at Sparta with that at Persepolis, ‘but you cannot know the pleasures of mine.’

[…]

We cannot therefore , from the serility of nations already enslaved, judge of the natural disposition of mankind for or against slavery; we should go by the prodigious efforts of every free people to save itself from oppression. I know that the former are forever holding forth in praise of the tranquility they enjoy in their chains, and that they call a state of wretched servitude a state of peace: miserrimam servitutem pacem appellant. But when I observe the latter sacrificing pleasure, peace, wealth, power, and life itself to the preservation of that one treasure, which is so disdained by those who have lost it; when I see free-born animals dash their brains out against the bars of their cage, from an innate impatience of captivity; when I behold numbers of naked savages, that despise European pleasures, braving hunger, fire, the sword, and death, to preserve nothing but their independence, I feel that it is not for slaves to argue about liberty.

Jean-Jaques Rousseau, A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

I don’t know much about fell running, but I know what I don’t like – the sensationalised scaremongering surrounding the washed-out mountain marathon in the Lake District. The overreaction revealed less about the risks facing the runners than the risk of us walking into a society where nobody is allowed to be “unaccounted for”.

When the Original Mountain Marathon was abandoned amid terrible weather on Saturday, police reported 1,700 of the 2,500 competitors “unaccounted for”. The implication was that all must be in peril. On Sunday fears were still being expressed for more than 900. By that afternoon all were safe.

It turned out that the 1,700 “unaccounted for” could account for themselves, having sheltered in farms, a school and a slate mine. A dozen were treated in hospital, which can hardly be unusual for such an event. Others reported only that the car park was flooded and “our credit cards are still in the car”.

Yet they were met with a chorus of official condemnation, as a spokesman declared: “We have come within inches of turning the Lake District mountains into a morgue. We need to learn from it.” The lesson, it seems, is that all must be accounted for, with no freedom for running wild.

These were not children lost on a school trip, but experienced, well-equipped runners who enjoy extreme conditions. As a race organiser said: “They are capable of looking after themselves.” That is seen as madness today when, notes the OMM website, “the idea of self-reliance isn’t a popular one” so that “the fact that 900 people are said to be unaccounted for” must mean “they are lost and in trouble, which is not the case”.

This is all another sign of a culture where people are not trusted to cope without support, supervision and surveillance from above; where mobile phone calls and e-mails must be accounted for, and soon you may be unable to buy a phone without a passport or to breathe without appearing on a DNA register.

As one who would think twice about walking fells in summer, I can still see that the attraction of running them in a storm must involve being “unaccounted for”. That’s why running free through woods and fields appealed to the borstal boy in Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, or to Bobby Sands, as seen in the film Hunger. Weekend reports suggested that it was a problem the runners were out of mobile phone range, but that was probably why some were up there.

No doubt Socrates was right to suggest that “the unexamined life is not worth living”. But the “unaccounted-for life” certainly is.

The Times

Quite so, and a reminder that even people with ‘nothing to hide’ are never exempt from prying minds.

Batman fails it, as does Lucius Fox, or rather we should say the Nolans fail it.

The Dark Knight obviously wants to comment on the nature of contemporary policing/governmental security and the portrayal of Batman as a hot headed vigilante on the side of ‘good’ has parallels with leaders of various western governments.

But the failure is not so much the vigilante/unilateral actions of Batman which include unlawful extradition, money laundering to amass an armoury and numerous traffic offences. Thanks to Bruce Wayne’s R&D department Lucius Fox has developed a technology which uses cellphone tracking technology to create a sort of sonar system for the caped crusader to use in his exploits.

Towards the end of the film we see this technology has been reconfigured by Wayne to make every cellphone in Gotham act as a sonar device giving him, actually Fox, the ability to track the movements of everybody in Gotham. Quite rightly (for it is Morgan Freeman and he usually represents ‘truth’ wherever he lands) Lucius Fox tells Bruce Wayne that this use of technology is horrendous and evil. So far so good, but then the Nolans make him fail it by saying ‘OK, but just this once’.

However, ‘just this once’ is not a stand, it is a fall. and if you are indeed sending a message to millions of people about Bush on a futile hunt against Osama Bin Laden by indiscriminantly unfair means you have to portray it as such. To have people think that ‘Just this once’ is either a principle or a way to counter wrong headedness is dangerous, irresponsible and part of the problem.

It is also irresponsible to allude to the generalised surveillance which has happened over over a period of years to no good result with an evening of Batman/Fox surveilling the population with a known and credible pay off.

Anyone can say ‘just this once’ which then slides into ‘the end justifies the means’ and ‘if I don’t do it someone else will’, bad attitudes one and all.

Some things we’ve been playing to feel cool:

Oval – Dok
Biosphere – Substrata
The Hafler Trio – Hljóðmynd
Morton Feldman – String Quartet II
CM von Hausswolff – Operations of Spirit Communication
Scott Walker – Tilt
Mika Vainio – Kajo
Esther Venrooy – Shift Coordinate Points
Coil – ANS

Most of my life, say since the age of fourteen, I have used only one brand of toothpaste (except emergencies). One of the common ones, but probably the least popular in that it doesn’t taste of birthday cake or doughnuts. I chose it because it made my mouth feel good and was neither too sweet nor tasted of week-old chewing gum.
Now over time the packaging has changed and so has the formulation, you notice now and then as you pick up the tube but it is similar enough to the last iteration to be called the same thing and your mouth doesn’t complain.
I mentioned that it was probably the least popular variety and recently it was nowhere to be found, so we got a ‘natural’ toothpaste, nice taste of fennel – how surprised I was – anyway my gumline complained a little so I went out and got MY toothpaste.
Except now it wasn’t MY toothpaste anymore, into my mouth it went and what a shock, what chemical hodge-podge was this that was like napalm on my tongue, like bleach on my teeth and a blowtorch to my gums? What subtle changes had accumulated to take MY toothpaste away from me and replace it with this simulacrum, which although appearing to be MY toothpaste, in name, in colour, in active ingredients, was no longer anything of the sort.

I’m sure there’s a lesson in there somewhere…

I read a few lines. There was not a single line of stereotyped abuse that had not been drummed into me for years till I was sick and tired of it.
‘No,’ I said, ‘it doesn’t bother me. I was used to it long ago. Now and again I have expressed the opinion that every nation, and even every person, would do better, instead of rocking himself to sleep with political catchwords about war-guilt, to ask himself how far his own faults and negligences and evil tendencies are guilty of the war and all the other wrongs of the world, and there lies the only possible means of avoiding the next war. They don’t forgive me for that, for, of course, they are themselves all guiltless, the Kaiser, the generals, the trade magnates, the politicians, the papers. Not one of them has the least thing to blame himself for. Not one has any guilt. One might believe that everything was for the best, even though a few million men lie under the ground. And mind you, Hermine, even though such abusive articles cannot bother me any longer, they sadden me all the same. Two thirds of my countrymen read this kind of newspaper, read things written in this tone every morning, and every night, are every day worked up and admonished and incited, and robbed of their peace of mind and better feelings by them, and the end aim of it alll is to have the war over again, and it will be a good deal more horrible than the last. All that is perfectly clear and simple. Anyone could comprehend it and reach the same conclusion after a moment’s reflection. But nobody wants to. Nobody wants to avoid the next war, nobody wants to spare himself and his children the next holocaust if this be the cost. To reflect for one moment, to examine himself for a while and ask what share he has in the world’s confusion and wickedness – clearly nobody wants to to do that. And so there is no stopping it, and the next war is being pushed on with enthusiasm by thousands and thousands day by day.[…]’

Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf

The Telegraph seems to have a feast of articles today:

Home Office plans to create ‘Big brother’ database for phones calls, emails and web use

This appears to be either a whistleblower or a ‘feeler’ leak about yet another attempt by the Home Office to ‘store the details of every phone call made, every email sent and every web page visited by British citizens in the previous year’ – even as other countries tighten the protection of their citizens online activity.

Once again it is allegedly in the cause of fighting terrorism, so nothing to be worried about when every single piece of online activity you have made has been kept, that’s not just which website you have been to, but every unencrypted email will be available – searchable – somewhere out of your control. even if you send each of your emails encrypted you will still likely receive many unencrypted, e-receipts being the most bothersome culprit.

Out of your control? Once on a database, you can almost guarantee the data no matter how sensitive will be copied and carried across the country only to be lost who-knows-where, thusly:

NHS disc containing sensitive data lost

A computer disc containing the medical records of more than 38,000 NHS patients went missing when it was sent to a software company to be backed up – in case the records got lost.

The information, which dates back 10 years, was mislaid somewhere between London and Sandown Health Centre on the Isle of Wight.

It was given to courier company City Link in March, but the health centre only spotted it was missing in May.

A spokesman for the South Central Strategic Health Authority said the courier company – which is supposed to track every item at every stage – demonstrated a “clear failure” by losing all record of the disc once it passed into their hands.

Perhaps time to trust a ‘non-evil’ private company?

I would say not, the only people who should ‘host’ your healthcare record should be yourself or your personal doctor and it should not be networked in any way.

Finally the Conservative Party seems to be turning towards the right direction on CCTV but only partially:

Tories pledge to curb use of CCTV cameras

Unfortunately whilst looking to restrict the amount of CCTV they still echo the opinion of the Met that the solution is higher resolution CCTV rather better forms of policing i.e. more active police actually on the streets, replacing the ‘need’ for CCTV surveillance.

A point of interest: in cities such as Amsterdam, these bikes are regularly stolen by junkies. No one seems to get upset. One simply whisks round to the thieves’ market and buys a similar bike, perhaps even the very one that was stolen, for around £20. It is almost a form of socialism.

Richard Ballantine, City Cycling

50. Forever associated with a desire for “the Moderate Way”, the urban communities of the Centre Edge wished to curb what they saw to be the excesses of Gestures Theatre.

Its freely developing growth, largely unregulated from within, and certainly not regulated from without, irritated their sensibilities.
They attempted first of all to make a move to regulate the Gestures Drama companies through the only perceivable representative body, the Jatchett Registry, which to avoid plagiarism in the industry and to look after authors’ rights, had instituted a loose book-keeping system. But the Jatchett Regisry was a voluntary institution arranged for mutual benefit and had no legal standing or constitution that could be enforced. The supporters of the Moderate Way, lead by the ledger-clerk Antimonius Bricker. surreptitiously researched the Jatchett Registry’s very incomplete archives to find a means to legislate. Not finding the tools for the restrictions they wanted, they started to interfere with various public and private sources of income and support for Gestures Drama by forms of persuasion which some might call intimidation. They contrived to limit certain public services to Gestures Drama managers and supporters.
Antimonius Bricker drew up a list of limitations that included a refusal to collect street horse-dung, to limit the cropping and felling of dangerous trees, to delay the implementation of the maintenance of roads and tracks, to introduce adverse re-routing of open drains, and to enforce a biased use of public lighting to make access to the homes and workplaces of Gestures Drama supporters difficult, problematic and possibly dangerous, and certainly aesthetically unsatisfactory.

In some cases, to rid themselves of these restrictions and prohibitions, theatre managers succumbed to pressure, and agreed to pay small fees that both parties agreed to consider as theatre taxes.

[…]

And when, because any interfering alternative was worse, by force of habit, voluntary subscriptions became more or less acceptable, the Moderators made them compulsory.

[…]

Peter Greenaway, The Rise and Fall of Gestures Drama

WordPress doesn’t like my commnt on the Breed for Greed post, maybe you do:

Civilization depends totally upon innate intelligence.

‘Civilization’ is not an entity, it does not have rights and cannot be used as a bargaining chip over individuals (that are entities and can demand rights).

Simple: the least-intelligent people are having the most children.

The less educated (and so poorer) portions of the population have always had more offspring – in the past without social welfare many of the offspring would have died in childhood. Perhaps with the ‘best of the worst’ surviving to create the next generation?

So what should society do? That’s the important question…

Although a ‘passive’ eugenecist could argue that not supplying anyone with free medical care, etc. would be the best way of ‘standing idly by’, and allowing the cream of the crop to rise (and the unfit to whither on the vine). They may also point out that poorer, less intelligent (it is about intellect, right?) people generally have shorter lives.
If they are a more active eugenecist they may reach for Plato’s Republic to show a template for ‘eugenic’ separation of certain classes of people, without the need for sterilisation.
It is of course an incredibly flawed template, in all guises throughout history. In fact the state structures for societal/state support of the ‘stupid’ would be nothing to those required for eugenic separation or selection of the population. The eugenic state has to continuously monitor its population to prevent ‘degeneration’, its people have to give up their individual corporeal rights and submit to the state approving their right to reproduce, the state selected career path, the state will need to ensure that certain sets of mind are trained to not question eugenics so political programming would be required from an early age and continue throughout life

Of course ‘society’ has no natural right to demand that certain people do not reproduce. Just as I feel those who cannot naturally reproduce have no natural right to demand state funded IVF treatment, is that so different from saying that those who cannot afford children should not have them – it seems the only the proactive nature of the intervention is different.

Again eugenecists seem to assume that their offspring will be worthy, just as those who talk of overpopulation find ways to justify their own procreation and those who don’t oppose ID cards/NIR suppose the state could never disapprove of their own actions.

So what should society do? How should it enforce that the money we provide is being used positively and not wasted in ways that get our backs up?
If the state does nothing in this type of case what happens?
– Perhaps the parent starts stealing to support their ‘lifestyle’ (but maybe we feel that our taxes are being stolen anyway) and has a wider negative impact.
– Perhaps the children can’t be looked after and suffer neglect, I would say this is what ‘society’ most wishes to avoid.
– Perhaps even the ‘parent’ is still living with their parent(s) as the state has not provided any support at all.

This was the state of the slums before the welfare state existed. Would we let civilisation slip that far back if the state no longer provided, or would we support charities to a larger degree to prevent this would explicitly charitable support be any better focussed?

Via the Guardian/Observer

Primary school children should be eligible for the DNA database if they exhibit behaviour indicating they may become criminals in later life, according to Britain’s most senior police forensics expert.

Hmm, eligible, how grand – sounds almost postive. Now shall we count the number of ways a primary school child may exhibit criminal tendencies? No, let’s not suffice to say that young children are at a stage of life where they are full of energy, interact in the world in ways that are ‘irrational’ and ‘unlearned’, basically they make ‘mistakes’ as part of growing up. It is not a reason to target them as future criminals.

We can also think of further injustices in how this would be implemented – children of ‘high-risk’ adults would receive preferential ‘eligibility’ so presumably children of poor brown skinned muslim immigrants would be in there ASAP.

Gary Pugh, director of forensic sciences at Scotland Yard and the new DNA spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), said a debate was needed on how far Britain should go in identifying potential offenders, given that some experts believe it is possible to identify future offending traits in children as young as five.

Why is a debate needed? Perhaps there should be a debate on how best to behead forensic police officers, after all ‘We Have The Technology’.
Some experts? How large a percentage and what research have they done, did the ‘experts’ say that criminal behaviour could be educated out or otherwise removed without the need to submit their DNA to a criminal database.

Does Gary Pugh even believe in ‘free will’?

‘If we have a primary means of identifying people before they offend, then in the long-term the benefits of targeting younger people are extremely large,’ said Pugh. ‘You could argue the younger the better. Criminologists say some people will grow out of crime; others won’t. We have to find who are possibly going to be the biggest threat to society.’

But what does this have to do with DNA databases? In any case the vast majority of criminal activity can be dealt with without recourse to DNA profiling

Pugh admitted that the deeply controversial suggestion raised issues of parental consent, potential stigmatisation and the role of teachers in identifying future offenders, but said society needed an open, mature discussion on how best to tackle crime before it took place. There are currently 4.5 million genetic samples on the UK database – the largest in Europe – but police believe more are required to reduce crime further. ‘The number of unsolved crimes says we are not sampling enough of the right people,’ Pugh told The Observer. However, he said the notion of universal sampling – everyone being forced to give their genetic samples to the database – is currently prohibited by cost and logistics.

Pugh thinks that he (and his computer profiling) is in a better position to control a child’s future than the parents and teachers of the child – people with real human interaction. Having said that in the future any teacher is likely to have submitted to the NIR database (as being a person in a ‘position of trust’) so probably not not a reliable judge of character and rights.

Hardly gratifying to know Pugh’s only real concern about enmeshing the whole population is limited to cost and logistics, perhaps his ‘debate’ is only intended to further raise the profile of DNA databasing in government departments.

Civil liberty groups condemned his comments last night by likening them to an excerpt from a ‘science fiction novel’. One teaching union warned that it was a step towards a ‘police state’.

So many ‘steps toward’ over the last few years maybe we got to the zoo and haven’t noticed the lion closing its jaws around the hand of the fools offering snacks through the railings.

Pugh’s call for the government to consider options such as placing primary school children who have not been arrested on the database is supported by elements of criminological theory. A well-established pattern of offending involves relatively trivial offences escalating to more serious crimes. Senior Scotland Yard criminologists are understood to be confident that techniques are able to identify future offenders.

And why does Pugh want to initiate ‘debate’ with the government rather than ‘the country’? Because he knows he needs the knuckle of POWER to enforce his hideous ideas.

A recent report from the think-tank Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) called for children to be targeted between the ages of five and 12 with cognitive behavioural therapy, parenting programmes and intensive support. Prevention should start young, it said, because prolific offenders typically began offending between the ages of 10 and 13. Julia Margo, author of the report, entitled ‘Make me a Criminal’, said: ‘You can carry out a risk factor analysis where you look at the characteristics of an individual child aged five to seven and identify risk factors that make it more likely that they would become an offender.’ However, she said that placing young children on a database risked stigmatising them by identifying them in a ‘negative’ way.

Well this may or may not be true but it has nothing to do with DNA databases

Shami Chakrabarti, director of the civil rights group Liberty, denounced any plan to target youngsters. ‘Whichever bright spark at Acpo thought this one up should go back to the business of policing or the pastime of science fiction novels,’ she said. ‘The British public is highly respectful of the police and open even to eccentric debate, but playing politics with our innocent kids is a step too far.’

From the mistress of gross understatement this should be read as a damning condemnation!

[…]

Pugh, though, believes that measures to identify criminals early would save the economy huge sums – violent crime alone costs the UK £13bn a year – and significantly reduce the number of offences committed. However, he said the British public needed to move away from regarding anyone on the DNA database as a criminal and accepted it was an emotional issue.

Thus hoist by his own petard, this idiot shows that he wants a database that is NOT a criminal but a general databse, this man doesn’t believe in the principle of ‘innocent until PROVEN guilty’, he doesn’t care that a police database of the general population is an erosion of habeas corpus and the similar rights that have had to be fought for.

‘Fingerprints, somehow, are far less contentious,’ he said. ‘We have children giving their fingerprints when they are borrowing books from a library.’

And this is Right?

Last week it emerged that the number of 10 to 18-year-olds placed on the DNA database after being arrested will have reached around 1.5 million this time next year. Since 2004 police have had the power to take DNA samples from anyone over the age of 10 who is arrested, regardless of whether they are later charged, convicted, or found to be innocent.

And this is Right?

I repeat we are already at the zoo today, not tomorrow – and YOU are there too.

Concern over the issue of civil liberties will be further amplified by news yesterday that commuters using Oyster smart cards could have their movements around cities secretly monitored under new counter-terrorism powers being sought by the security services.

Of course this is further generalised surveillance that will not stop anything related to terrorism, there is no underground station or bus stop called ‘how to do jihad’, nor ‘semtex R us’, nor ‘At the age of five I spat on a dog’.

From the Guardian

Passengers travelling between EU countries or taking domestic flights would have to hand over a mass of personal information, including their mobile phone numbers and credit card details, as part of a new package of security measures being demanded by the British government. The data would be stored for 13 years and used to “profile” suspects.

‘Profile’ what? A mobile phone number or credit card number tell you nothing unless you are also monitoring their usage, so can we assume that the government is interested in collecting blank data? Or that it monitors credit card activity and mobile phone usage? ECHELON suggests the latter, no?

Brussels officials are already considering controversial anti-terror plans that would collect up to 19 pieces of information on every air passenger entering or leaving the EU. Under a controversial agreement reached last summer with the US department of homeland security, the EU already supplies the same information [19 pieces] to Washington for all passengers flying between Europe and the US.

Two wrongs etc.

But Britain wants the system extended to sea and rail travel, to be applied to domestic flights and those between EU countries. According to a questionnaire circulated to all EU capitals by the European commission, the UK is the only country of 27 EU member states that wants the system used for “more general public policy purposes” besides fighting terrorism and organised crime.

This is an absolute disgrace and basically shows that the British government are bunch of power crazed authoritarian shits. It implies that some ‘validation’ would be required for any movement by air, sea or rail. This is only possible where you have a population with an ID card and attendant database. It also implies that you will need to ‘validate’ your credit cards, mobile phone purchases (and ‘up to’ 17 other things) within the same system. This is not so stealthy way of introducing the ‘need’ for mandatory ID systems through other legislation.

The so-called passenger name record system, proposed by the commission and supported by most EU governments, has been denounced by civil libertarians and data protection officials as draconian and probably ineffective.

The scheme would work through national agencies collecting and processing the passenger data and then sharing it with other EU states. Britain also wants to be able to exchange the information with third parties outside the EU.

Read the US, where your personal details are not subject to strong (but soon to be ineffective?) data protection laws

Officials in Brussels and in European capitals admit the proposed system represents a massive intrusion into European civil liberties, but insist it is a necessary part of a battery of new electronic surveillance measures being mooted in the interests of European security. These include proposals unveiled in Brussels last week for fingerprinting and collecting biometric information of all non-EU nationals entering or leaving the union.

If they insist where is the guardian’s reporting and analysis of their statements? An even better question is do you think these people have to justify their insistences to democratic scrutiny?

All airlines would provide government agencies with 19 pieces of information on every passenger, including mobile phone number and credit card details. The system would work by “running the data against a combination of characteristics and behavioural patterns aimed at creating a risk assessment”, according to the draft legislation.

“When a passenger fits within a certain risk assessment, he could be identified as a high-risk passenger.”

We have said numerous times that data doesn’t predict actions, there is sufficient legislation to identify and track suspects without collecting data about the general public. It is a fact and doesn’t become any less so when faced with increasingly irrational demands.

A working party of European data protection officials described the proposal as “a further milestone towards a European surveillance society.

Not towards, we are already there, this would simply make surveillance more extensive.

“The draft foresees the collection of a vast amount of personal data of all passengers flying into or out of the EU regardless of whether they are under suspicion or innocent travellers. These data will then be stored for a period of 13 years to allow for profiling. The profiling of all passengers envisaged by the current proposal might raise constitutional concerns in some member states.”

… but these will be ignored in the face of business lobbying and strongarm tactics from the US and it’s EU representitive, the British government?

The Liberal Democrat MEP Sarah Ludford said: “Where is this going to stop? There’s no mature discussion of risk. As soon as you question something like this, you’re soft on terrorism in the UK and in the EU.”

It will stop when people do not comply, these officials and bureaucrats think nothing of the general public, their job is to legislate and they legislate in accordance with their job description not democracy nor liberty nor egalitarianism nor any high ideals (and for the wrong sort of crazy dreams).

Britain is pushing for a more comprehensive system based on the experience of a UK pilot scheme that has been running for the past three years. Officials say Operation Semaphore, monitoring flights from Pakistan and the Middle East, has been highly successful and has resulted in hundreds of arrests.

The scheme has seen one in every 2,200 passengers warranting further investigation, with a tenth of those “being of interest”. British officials say rapists, drug smugglers and child traffickers have been arrested and want the EU scheme to cover “all fugitives from crown court justice”.

0.045% warrant further investigation, and so 0.0045% are of further interest. This is for flights to an area of the world where you may expect their to be an above average ‘level of interest’ 2.7 million ‘interesting people’ worldwide at that rate which of course would be an overestimate. And we haven’t even drilled down into ‘terrorists’ yet.

But Ludford said: “If you ask the UK government how many terrorists have been picked up, I don’t think you get a very straight answer.”

Because it is too embarrassingly small to mention? Because it contradicts the Climate of Fear? Because it is bad for business?

EU officials have asked the Home Office minister Meg Hillier for information about the arrests of suspected terrorists.

As ever once the US presidential hopefuls get into the news it’s not long before certain types of people start talking about the disproportionate level of influence of US foreign policy and then go on to suggest that everyone else in the world should have a chance to vote or veto the final choice.

Of course this is an eminently unworkable proposal and doesn’t bear scrutiny at any level (unless perhaps you are dead set on the first Chinese US president!)

No, the interesting thing is that by their nature these people are tired of the US government intervening in places where it has no jurisdiction – so of course the only natural remedy to this is for the rest of the world to stick its nose in where it has no right to be.

If you push a little you find that a good number of these people favour a ‘world government’ or the expansion of ‘world instituitions’ to give top down vetoes on nations policies. They want the EU writ large – which as we know is hardly a bastion of accountability, efficiency or light handed bureaucracy

In fact they think they can force a particular type of Post-Enlightenment thinking on the rest of the world (and Oh!, how thankful we will be).

These people basically show the same arrogance and lack of empathy for other cultures they espouse to dislike, when they want to establish THEIR personal standards over OTHER people. A bit of self-criticism is in order before such stupid ideas are spoken or written.

Some unscrupulous litter-bug left a copy today’s Guardian on the floor of a train, but the proverbial silver lining is that my eyes were drawn to an article about a person under witness protection.

“The Witness Protection Scheme is designed to look after people who have essential evidence about some of the most serious offences, and who therefore face a real threat to their safety […] some of these are innocent bystanders […]
Individulas living under the scheme have to trade in their old life for a new one […] and changing their identity, with medical records and educational qualifications under a new name …”

I have mentioned (in passing) before that the NIR database cloud/grid/mesh will make maintaining the credibility of the Witness Protection Scheme very difficult. Currently your ‘identity’ can be decomposed and reconstituted quite easily by altering your official paper trail – and yet the witness protection scheme does not provide full untracability:

“In 1999, the IRA supergrass Martin McGartland survived an attempt on his life while living under an assumed identity in Whitley Bay”

Now consider that the ‘selling point’ of the NIR project is that your unique biometric information will be stored on the database and prevent people from assuming multiple identities. You run into a problem, in that there has to be the capability to completely expunge the record of a person – possibly across a number of linked (even transnational) databases and create a false history (which in turn will have have its own history forged – think timestamps!). Either the NIR has to be designed to be compromisable or schemes such as WPS have to be compromised.

—

And they didn’t deface the crossword either!!

Students will be “blackmailed” into holding identity cards in order to apply for student loans, the Tories have warned.

According to Home Office documents leaked to the Conservative party last night, those applying for student loans will be forced to hold identity cards to get the funding from 2010.

Anyone aged 16 or over will be expected to obtain a card – costing up to £100 – to open a bank account or apply for a student loan.

The document says: “We should issue ID cards to young people to assist them as they open their first bank account, take out a student loan, etc.”

The only ‘difficulty’ in opening a bank account these days is the insistence on ‘official’ identification, and that requirement was a result of government legislation rather than the banks. It is quite simple to verify if a student attends a college or university by liaising with the admissions department, the combination of a university issued card and letter of enrolment should suffice.

Unfortunately these children will probably have been inured to the various incursions into their ‘privacy’ that we have all read about – metal detectors at school entrances, fingerprinting to use library books or at registration, etc.

The government had planned to start issuing the ID cards to people applying for a passport from 2010, but confidential documents confirm that the scheme will be delayed to at least 2012.

Not good enough, especially if the NIR ‘linked databases’ are being bedded-in anywa before then, and ‘voluntary’ cards issued almost immediately.

The biometric cards are due to be introduced for foreign nationals later this year, with the first expected to be issued to UK citizens on a voluntary basis from 2009.

As you see ‘2012’ is a red herring.

From next year, they will also be issued to people in “positions of trust” such as airport workers.

Edit to add: The government should also not be directly intervening in the terms of employment between a person and a private company. At most a private company that operates in a ‘secure environment’ should demonstrate the principle and efficacy of the company’s security audits when it tenders for its contract. As we know ID cards and biometric databases tell you nothing of a person’s intentions and as such should not be a condition of employment in any case.

The revelations have led to concerns that the government is planning to collect the fingerprints and other biometric details of more than two million young people entering higher education each year by stealth.

This is so ridiculous that anyone should see that the ‘need’ to create such a database is non-existant

Shadow immigration minister Damian Green called the plans “straightforward blackmail” to bolster “a failing policy”.

… and we reaffirm our commitment to dismantle the project completely?!?

“This is an outrageous plan. The government has seen its ID cards proposals stagger from shambles to shambles. They are clearly trying to introduce them by stealth.”

Indeed, they are so unpalatable that they would be rejected outright otherwise.

Guardian