Jason Singh, an officer with Northumbria Police, was the ringleader of a team attacking ATMs with power tools in professional, well planned raids across Tyne and Wear.

The 23-year-old police constable even used confidential information obtained from a Northumbria Police computer to target a vulnerable woman’s £30,000 savings.

[…]

Telegraph

Yet again this a demonstration of how ‘insiders’ can misuse database information, and how the importance being able to control access to personal information should be paramount.
Now if you consider that the government is doing as much as possible to convince businesses to use NIR/ID card information as proof of identity this will allow someone somewhere to correlate bank account numbers with NIR entries. Now if your bank starts deploying fingerprint activated atm machines it will take the minimum of effort for such an insider to link NIR stored fingerprint data to a certain bank account.
In addition this shows how detailed NIR information can become ‘valuable’ in it’s own right – in order to allow secondary crimes to occur.
The ‘proposal’ (assuming it already isn’t happening) to allow departments access to each other’s data will both make it easier to accumulate disparate data and for ‘insiders’ to hide their tracks more effectively.

Blair launches new drive to let officials share data on citizens

Tony Blair will today spearhead a fresh government initiative to persuade voters they have nothing to fear from consenting to a relaxation of “over-zealous” rules which stop Whitehall departments sharing information about individual citizens.

How are people going to give ‘informed consent’? Is it not more likely that officials will be told to assume consent has been given unless specifically denied (and how effective is this likely to be)? And how will all this be regulated?

But the exercise was denounced by opposition MPs as a further lurch towards a Big Brother state even before the prime minister announces the formation of five citizen panels, each with 100 members, to examine the merits of such a change.

Just examine the merits? will these ‘citizen panels’ be fed with the sort of half truths and incomplete information that Civil Servants/Select Committees would rightly reject?

Officials were keen to emphasise that talk of a “single massive database” is misconceived. What is at issue is allowing individual departmental systems to talk to each other.

What is at issue is the ability for an individual to limit/prevent the damage caused by disclosure of personal information to all and sundry.

One official derided the condemnation likely to come from civil liberty lobbies, insisting: “At present we have some ridiculously artificial demarcations in government when Tesco and the credit agencies know more about us all than government agencies which are there to help you.”

Tesco is not a monopoly service provider and the information it gathers can be controlled to an extent by Data Protection laws which help prevent it gaining third party information. In principle and to a large degree Tesco only gathers the information you supply it with or allow to be made public. YOU CAN OPT OUT OF SUPPLYING TESCO WITH INFORMATION especially by not shopping there. In addition a lot of information held by State controlled agencies is potentially more damaging than that held by Tesco et al. (and I don’t even include covertly gathered ‘intelligence’).
There is no comeback from not supplying Tesco with information – it can’t fine you for not having a clubcard, or for not having a TV License, it doesn’t have powers to curtail freedom of movement or protest. It’s a shop – it just sells things.

The first target of the reforms is bereavement, when families under stress are required to notify a range of agencies that they have lost a loved one.

Work is still under way to establish the technical changes that would be necessary to make reporting a death a one-stop call. It is claimed such changes would help “early identification” and thus give warning that a family is struggling.

Surely it is better to question why so many officials need to be informed of a death.

But the Tories and Liberal Democrats have brushed aside promised safeguards and denounce the change as “an excuse for bureaucrats to snoop”. The NO2ID campaign to resist government plans for universal ID cards calls the proposals “the abolition of privacy”.

Manifesto commitments to overturn this please, all else is hot air.

It reverses the historic presumption of confidentiality, the campaign argues, something ministers deny. But the office of the information commissioner, whose task is to promote public access to official data – and to protect personal data – is taking a more benign view. The government’s intentions have been debated within Whitehall and were signalled as part of the reform of public service delivery in the documents published as part of Gordon Brown’s pre-budget report in November. “Citizens should be able to access public services in relation to changes in their personal or family life events through a single point,” said a document which promised a delivery plan in 2007.

If public services were handled at a local level more then the burdens would be easier to bear on both sides

Inside Whitehall the lead department on the proposed change is work and pensions, whose secretary of state, John Hutton, yesterday used an interview on BBC1’s Politics Show to deny that the change were too intrusive. The potential benefits were considerable, he said. “The government already stores vast amounts of data about individual citizens [why??? – mm] but actually doesn’t share it terribly intelligently across various government agencies. I had a case in my department about a family where someone had unfortunately died in a road traffic accident, and over the space of six months, on 44 separate occasions, they were asked by elements of my department to confirm details of this terrible tragedy.”

This burdensome red tape is entirely because the government is already too involved in people’s lives.

[…]

Guardian

This all follows on from the relaxation of Data Protection controls last July and is most likely a prelude for the most questioning Census ever in 2011. It’s like a real version of the boogeyman stories about drugs, the soft stuff leads onto the hard stuff and BAM! you’re hooked.

Government intrusion? Just Say No!

—

Hmm, I was trying to ‘Detox’

It is hardly surprising to me that a report on how to tax driving written by an ex-chairman of British Airways favours ‘road pricing’ over a system based on fuel taxation. I’ve mentioned my views on fuel tax before (in the comments here)

[…] If fuel duties could be determined at regional level it would have a greater impact on congestion/road usage, it would also get rid of the complaints of rural users being disproportionately affected if Birmingham could increase fuel duty without affecting rural Warwickshire. And you wouldn’t need a network of electricity gobbling cameras […]

(I obviously don’t trust a centrally levied and collected tax to be used effectively)

In any case a report from a person who has been successful in an industry that enjoys minimal taxation is hardly likely to want to promote it anywhere else. I’m not pro-taxation per se, however ‘road pricing’ will have exactly the same economic effect as fuel taxation but be more costly to run, more intrusive to the driver (as it will depend on mass surveillance infrastructure), not easily linked to the actual performance of drivers and their cars, etc.

With fuel tax as high as it is anyway, there would obviously be no appetite for a higher rate (which is no doubt why Rod Eddington was appointed to return this sort of report) when the government is so obviously failing to spend such tax money effectively on transport infrastructure.

Blair to announce his ‘new tomorrow’ for ‘Slave Grid’

By George Jones, Political Editor (Telegraph)
Last Updated: 1:28am GMT 27/11/2006

Tony Blair will today announce his “new tomorrow” for Britain’s role in the Slave Grid but will stop short of issuing a full contract.

The Prime Minister’s personal recommendation comes as the Government prepares to set out its plans to complete the biometric grid next year as part of Britain’s decision to re-establish slavery.

John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, has been drawing up ideas for the March 25 ceremony including the possibility of a “statement of intent” for Britain’s involvement.

However, the Government has already ruled out a formal strategy despite pressure from some back-benchers and community leaders.

In remarks appearing in the Labour Party newspaper, NewSpeak, Mr Blair says: “It is hard to believe what would once have been a crime against liberty was enacted at this time.

“I believe the biometric database offers us a chance not just to say how profoundly useful the Slave Grid will be — how we will conform utterly under its existence and praise those who fought for its legislation — but also to express our deep sorrow that it may never have happened and rejoice at the better times we live in today.”

Government officials said the remarks were intended to set the tone for events to mark the inauguration, which will be set out in a written ministerial statement to Parliament this week.

Britain will the second big Slave-Gridding nation (after the U.S.A.) to implement the practice in 2007.

In February, the Church of England General Synod voted to pray for the souls of slaves.

Before the official start of the Grid, Britain spent more than £3bn on enrolling slaves a year on air-conditioned planes to the Americas. It legalised the Grid in 2006 as there were still huge profits to be made.

From the beginning of 2008, the Royal Navy will patrol off the coast of East Anglia searching for illicitly trading ferries, boarding them and ‘gridding’ new slaves.

—

Clearly Blair has no ‘authority’ to express his sorrow at the slave trade when he is simultaneously intent on eroding individual freedoms to a point where the UK is a grim termite mound full of drones existing simply to support and fuel a controlling State bureaucracy.

Slavery is a condition of control over a person against their will, enforced by violence or other forms of coercion. Slavery almost always occurs for the purpose of securing the labor of the person concerned. A specific form, known as chattel slavery, implies the legal ownership of a person or persons.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery

Otto Dix, War Cripples Playing Cards (1920)

Guardian reports:

A new contract between the state and the citizen setting out what individuals must do in return for quality services from hospitals, schools and the police is one of the key proposals emerging from a Downing Street initiated policy review…

Even from the beginning this is yet more topsy-turvy posturing from the Government. Once an individual has paid for State services they should be provided to anyone entitled without qualification.

[…]

The aim is to build on the government’s rights and responsibilities agenda, and papers released yesterday by the Cabinet Office speak of seeking “a new more explicit contract between the state and the citizen on agreed public outcomes”.

Explicit Contract? Well literalism is always the touchstone of the stupid, inept and authoritarian. But again it would not be individuals driving legislation/writing the contract it would be government definitions of rights and responsibilities, and we know how fucked up Neu Labour‘s ideas of ‘social responsibility’ are.

[…]

The review is likely to examine fundamentally the future relationship between citizen and state. The public service commission has been asked to consider “whether it is possible to move from an implicit one-way contract based on outputs, to one based on explicit mutually agreed outcomes”. It asks “should we be aiming for a more explicit statement of the contract that covers both the service offered by the public sector (what is in and what is not) and what is expected from citizens (beyond paying taxes and obeying the law)”. It also asks “whether these explicit and binding contracts could work not just for individuals and communities”.

The big question this raises is what happens when you refuse to sign such a ‘binding contract’ will the State ‘allow’ you to get O-U-T or will they attempt to fine/jail people into their ‘slave grid’ contract?

I think you know the answer.

Hacking through the jungle of “haven’t we heard all this before?” , wading through the river of “Is there anything more to say?” and adjusting our hat to avoid the bright rays of “PRopaganda dressed as news” seems to having an effect on one’s system. The daily news once more seems to me a set of evolving illusions – popular tropes that need regular spinning lest they fall off needle thin spires of truth – just as it did in the mid-90s.

Anyway I caught the end of the Toady programme this morning which had some news about the introduction of portable fingerprint detectors. In the first instance I was dumbfounded by the sheer futility of the excercise as it will stand:

Experts hope the device will save massive amounts of police time and money by allowing officers to identify suspects on the roadside without having to take them to the station.

A pilot scheme – called Project Lantern – will be used in Luton, Bedfordshire, by officers targeting motoring offences.

The gadget allows officers to search 6.5 million fingerprints archived on the National Automated Fingerprint System, with the trial aiming to give them a result within five minutes.

The Home Office’s Police Information Technology Organisation (Pito) calculates it could save more than £2.2m a year.

Fingerprints can only be taken from the public voluntarily using the Lantern system because the law will have to be changed before officers can force people to give prints on the street.

Guardian

So for the system to ‘work’:
1) a person needs to alreday be on a police database.
2) said person needs to give their consent (incredibly likely, no?)

Additionally the spokesman on the Toady programme informed us that new fingerprints would not be added to the database and records would be deleted at the end of the day or on request (actually a good thing – not as good as prints not being taken though).

But then what does the system ‘working’ mean? Presumably it will allow truth-telling people with a criminal record to be identified more quickly. Hooray.

NO.

That is not what this device ‘working’ means.

This is part of the softening up procedure to make ‘procedural’ fingerprint taking and police access to a population database acceptable. Remember:

Fingerprints can only be taken from the public voluntarily using the Lantern system because the law will have to be changed before officers can force people to give prints on the street.

And believe me this Government will be all too ready to change the law to follow the technological ‘solution’.
This Government wants acceptance of a fully populated ‘criminal’ database (that is everyone has a criminal record, empty or otherwise)
This Government wants it’s NIR-centred biometric databases to be complete and pervasive.

But I’m sure we’ve said this before.

The information commissioner signalled a crackdown last night on companies that steal and sell sensitive details of people’s private lives after a prosecution exposed the growth in data theft.

This is certain to increase exponentially once State imposed registers are integrated with the proposed National Identity Register.

Richard Thomas, the official privacy watchdog, said he was investigating a number of organisations that have bought personal data such as details of bank accounts, tax returns and mortgage payments.

All this will become trivial when the NIR is implemented and people are coerced into using it to authorise financial transactions, (inter)national travel, access NHS records and the like.

He warned of raids and prosecutions after the conviction yesterday of a husband and wife who made £140,000 a year selling private financial information obtained by deception.

This is value is just for selling data nevermind its further misuse for fraud. Once the NIR is implemented this value will soar as inherently non-revokable biometric information on those who register will become available to those with the contacts/skills.

The Guardian has learned that two of the country’s leading law firms – Mishcon de Reya and Arnold & Porter – were linked to the couple’s scam. The firms deny any knowledge of illegal activity, but confirm they hired private detective agencies to find out information for their clients.

Showing that it will be easy to dupe those companies who legally pay for access to NIR information (in order that the project remains self financing). Once the foot is in the door this information can be used to leverage more and more information which will allow access to the correlated NHS, etc. databases.

The privacy watchdog suspects some big companies are exploiting the trade in personal data, which has been driven by the growth in computer databases and call centres operated by banks, utility companies and government departments.

Mr Thomas wants to widen his investigations to pursue those who buy personal data, as well as those who make a living selling it.

As you can see the activity of personal data theft/trading is directly linked to it being on the databases that are used by organisations ipso facto if you are not on a database your data cannot be stolen. If you do not register on the NIR and refuse to acknowledge it in your private transactions its cancer will not spread to private the databases you may consent to be on. (Incidentally the centralised biometric database should cause serious worries for certain institutions that already rely on privately held biometric authentication devices).

He will also campaign to persuade Lord Falconer, the constitutional affairs minister, to increase penalties. He wants jail terms for data thieves but is opposed by some newspapers, who say it would be a threat to free speech.

“These are serious offences, which are highly damaging to the individuals concerned. People’s personal details ought not to fall into the wrong hands,” Mr Thomas’s office said yesterday.

The wrong hands are anyone’s who would punish you into complying with an inherently damaging system.

A court heard how Sharon and Stephen Anderson had made a career out of bogus phone calls to penetrate the details of people’s bank accounts and tax returns all over the country.

This will be more serious with NIR and linked databases.

In what Mr Thomas has described as a thriving black market in personal information, the pair were hired as sub-contractors by three detective agencies, Carratu International, Fleet Investigations and Keypoint Services, all of which denied knowledge of the couple’s crimes committed on their behalf.

Guardian inquiries reveal that the ultimate clients in yesterday’s case included a Japanese air-conditioning firm, Daikin, and a US insurance company, CNA. Those firms too, say they were unaware illegal methods were being used.

Data theft is an international problem and whilst our government wuld wish otherwise it does not have the international jurisdiction to enforce the safety of its proposed NIR database

The victims of “blagging”, as such bogus calls are known, included David Hughes, former chairman of the collapsed football shirts empire Allsports, and Jon Sanders, a Manchester insurance broker. They were both said to be indignant that their privacy had been invaded.

In the fully-documented society no one will be safe, people such as those above will carry out business from abroad and most likely emigrate once the stupidity of NIR and it’s invasiveness into daily affairs is fully comprehended.

At Huntingdon magistrates court yesterday, where the Andersons pleaded guilty to breaching the Data Protection Acts and were ordered to pay £14,800 in fines and costs, their lawyer said their firm, based in St Ives, Cambridgeshire, was purely devoted to commercial disputes. They denied ever acting for warring spouses or newspapers on what they said were “ethical” grounds.

But Phil Taylor, prosecuting for the information commissioner, said: “People have the right to feel their information is safe and secure”. He told the magistrates: “There is a real risk information can be used for sinister purposes.” Bogus callers could be used to extract personal information from databases on behalf of criminals, or to intimidate witnesses.

Quite, and with interlinked databases and non-essential demands for NIR authentication or other ways of gleaning biometric information (set up a night club and get fingerprinting?) it is likely most person’s could be gleaned remotely.

Too much Legislation? Dump it at once, urges minister

Tuesday November 14, 2006
The Guardian

Fed up with cctv cameras on black plastic trees? Tired of nosey community officers in tight-fitting plastic jackets? Have you had enough of fingerprinting in bars? Then, according to a government minister, you should ignore the offending legislation – and dump it at once.

Stakeholders were urged yesterday to take direct action to force Government to cut the excessive and wasteful legislation that intervenes directly in private life from the shop shelf to the household bin. The environment minister Ben Bradshaw advised good citizens to ignore excessive legislation at all costs and to report the Ministers’ double standards in an attempt to cut the amount of unnecessary laws enforced by police officers.

He said citizens were “bombarded” with excessive legislation and warned that he would consider a Motion to force ministers to repeal bills if they had not voluntarily made reductions by 2010.

His hardline approach was announced after a meeting with the UK’s 13 leading ministers to discover what progress they were making in cutting back. Mr Bradshaw said it was “unacceptable” that legislation had increased by 3000 acts between 1999 and 2005, and enforcement accounts for one-third of an average household’s total taxation.

The Opposition signed up to an agreement last year, called the Courtauld commitment, to slash legislative waste within five years and also to tackle the amount of tax that goes to war.

So far, the 13 ministers have only cut legislative wording by 35,000 words, according to figures from the government’s We Are Right Programme. However, the WARP target is for cutbacks of just 340,000 words by 2010.

Yesterday the Prime Minister’s Press Office confirmed that three of the biggest FEAR manufacturers – Blair, Reid and Brown – have aimed their sights at the Courtauld pledge.

Mr Bradshaw said it was important for citizens to be aware that registration [on governemnt databases] was not actually a good option. “[Form filling] is better than throwing information away, and registration [schemes] are worse still,” he said.

He illustrated his comments with examples of wasteful legislating – such as instant ASBOs, wrapped in good intentions and presented as community support – which cannot be enforced. He acknowledged that all the Government departments had come up with excessive legislation, but said: “We need to question the necessity of those schemes. We need to see quantifiable reductions.”

While saying he would like to see targets for State reduction spelled out in and included in annual reports, Mr Bradshaw also urged citizens to force the Government to move faster by taking direct action. After asserting their rights, citizens should scorn “excessive and unnecessary” laws and leave them behind.

[…]

(I was thinking of some good wordplay for the title but the plain quote can’t be bettered)

The Telegraph

John Reid yesterday compared the technological advances needed to fight Islamic terrorism to Britain’s battle against the Nazis.

The Home Secretary invoked the spirt of great wartime scientists like Barnes Wallis, the inventor of the bouncing bomb, as he spoke of the ”enduring struggle’’ facing the country.

‘Enduring…’ oh dear, the shoddy rhetoric starts early, let us read into ‘enduring’ costly, irrelevant and misplaced.
This is the same government that tells us these “religious fantics” cannot be “reasoned with”?

And of course such unobjective faith in the power of technology belies the ‘irrational’ basis of government policy.

Mr Reid said he was setting up a taskforce drawn from business and the academic world to pool ideas that would keep one step ahead of al-Qa’eda, which is increasingly sophisticated in its use of computers and weaponry.

So Neu Labour Politician wants to ‘do something’:
1. Form a quango of acolytes
2. (If you haven’t been lobbied recently) ring up business for a product/’solution.
3. Comission a report to see if it is technically sound.

Western governments are already two steps behind their al-queda golem never mind one step ahead.

”It is a race between those who would find the weaknesses in our defences and use that to wreak havoc on our society; and those of us involved in a constant search to defend our country, our freedoms and our democracy,’’ he said in London. ”Just as the innovators Barnes Wallis, Alan Turing and Tommy Flowers were vital in our battle to beat the Nazis, so now we must be able to utilise the skills and expertise of all in our battle against terror.’’

Constant improvement of defences? I refer you to the W.G. Sebald passage I quoted last year

The comparison of the counter-terrorist campaign with the Second World War marks a step change in the rhetoric being deployed by ministers about the nature of the threat.

Mr Reid said, notwithstanding the prospect of obliteration during the Cold War or the IRA’s 30-year bombing campaign, that ”in the UK we are living through the most sustained period of severe threat since World War Two.

The only threat is that maintained, overseen and fed by this government.

He added: ‘This assessment is the diligent product of intelligence professionals. It is no exaggeration. On the strength of such an assessment it would be easy to pump up the politics of fear. But this is not the basis for advancing our values today.’’

Left is the new Right.

Mr Reid was attending a conference of businessmen and specialists from the security sector which has been developing new technology to combat terrorism and decrypt encoded computer programs.

The Home Secretary said that in the past in five years, 387 people had been charged with terrorist offences. Of those, 214 have already been convicted, with a further 98 awaiting trial.

How many people have been temporarily held/harassed by police using anti-terrorism legislationwithout final charges being brought? where all 214 convicted for ‘terrorism’ or rather for subsequent charges?

He added: “That is an indication of the scale of the threat which we face. In responding to it, the struggle has to be at every level, in every way and by every single person in this country. It is easy between trials and between headlines to forget just how deep this on-going struggle is.”

Mr Reid said the current threat was even more worrying than during the Cold War. ”For all the potential horror of Mutually Assured Destruction, the dangers were both stark and, in retrospect, the risks straightforward,’’ he said. ”It is folly to assume that the struggle to advance the values we prize most came to an end with the defeat of Soviet totalitarianism…We cannot underestimate the rate at which those who would do us harm innovate.’’

Coming from a ‘former communist’ the phrase “It is folly to assume that the struggle to advance the values we prize most came to an end with the defeat of Soviet totalitarianism” is rather terrifying is it not?

Mr Reid was shown some of the new security measures now being developed, including a screening device called a Tadar, which uses the body’s naturally-released electromagnetic radiation to see beneath the clothes of suspect passengers – though with a ”fuzzy’’ picture to preserve their modesty.

Concealed objects such as guns, knives or explosives – even those that are non-metallic – are exposed. Stephen Phipson, managing director of Smiths Detection, part of the group that organised the conference, said the machine, costing between £80,000 and £100,000 generated images with no risk to the person being inspected.

No,no,no! The point is not the dignity of whether some jobsworth can ‘see’ your tackle. It is that of ‘innocent people’ being able to live their lives without intervention (and being hammered into F.E.A.R. driven complicity).

He also envisaged architects building security devices into the design of buildings in future and welcomed Mr Reid’s idea of a taskforce to bring together inventive expertise from business and the academic world.

Architects should concentrate on not creating ugly rabbit hutches No one should pander to govenment rhetoric when going about their private business.

Wednesday November 1, 2006
The Guardian

Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge University, believes that patients do have legal rights over their medical records: “Write and insist that you are not put on the NHS data spine,” Prof Anderson says. “If enough people boycott having centralised NHS records, with a bit of luck the service will be abandoned.”

If you are concerned, you should discuss it with your GP. You can put a block on your own data by writing to:

The Secretary of State for Health
Richmond House
79 Whitehall Terrace
London SW1A 2NS

And send the same letter to your GP.

It should say:

Dear Sir/ Madam

I require you not to begin processing my sensitive personal data to the proposed NHS Summary Care Record on the Spine. It is likely to cause me substantial unwarranted distress because:

1. No ‘sealed envelopes’ yet exist to limit access

2. No online patient system yet exists to correct errors

3. Data uploaded may include genetic, psychological or sexual information

4. It is intended to make my data available to social workers, researchers and commercial firms

5. My consent will not be asked before beginning processing

6. Adequate criminal penalties against abuse do not yet exist

7. Police and other agencies can gain access to a potentially unlimited range of information about me. There is abundant evidence that computer databases – including police, vehicle licensing and banking computers – are routinely penetrated by private investigators on behalf of clients, including media organisations

8. 250,000 smart cards have been issued granting access to the Spine

9. The department threatens to withhold appropriate medical care to objectors

10. Doctors say there is no necessity to design the Spine in this way

For these reasons, among others, I strongly fear that I am in danger of having false or damaging health information fall into the wrong hands. My privacy is being unnecessarily violated.

Yours faithfully

[…]

Via Blogzilla

Personally I think points 5, 7 & 10 are compelling enough reasons for why this scheme is ‘bad news’ and point 2 (implicitly requesting online access) could actually make data safety worse.
Hopefully this means a progression in the mainstream media from the simple reporting of undesirable schemes and legislation into a more robust way of enabling their readers to oppose wayward Statist interventionism.

Now they need to do the same for the looming NIR roll out – and soon.

I recently had a questionnaire posted to me by the council. It was to guage my physical activity and full of the sort of personal questions the Census misses out (but I jump ahead of myself here). It is for a scheme branded ‘Smarten Up”. I have a chance of winning a mountain bike if I hand over these details to quite whom I don’t know.

When I used to get this sort of marketing profile survey from private companies my second thought would invariably be what database this information would have been put on, and who the information would be shared with. So of course after temporarily rescuing it from the recycling pile I got to thinking how this information could be used for ‘my benefit’.
We’ll skip past the fantasy thought the council might dig up the local drive-through burger shop and replace it with a local swimming pool and such like. The question of whether the government’s relaxation of inter-agency data sharing restrictions is relevant at local government level is an issue but conceivably my GP could be notified of my wonderous athletic talents and send out a request for a check up at some appropriate moment, maybe a social worker could visit if my putative family doesn’t appear to be getting the exercise it so richly deserves.

Now, as I mentioned, these questionnaires for various issues fill in the Census gaps about how people are going about their business, taken individually, anonymously and with limited scope they could possibly help the council direct tax funds to provide ‘better services’, however we are most definitely on the cusp of an age where these non-anonymous (remember the bicycle bribe?) surveys can be aggregated and linked with some identifier like, oh… let us say, your NIR number. Yes that’s a good one because then any state agency can quickly find out about your lifestyle, and it can be transferred to some central data store so it may ‘follow’ you when you move from one authority to another. Hooray!

He leads me around the corner to Wardour Street. We enter a dark and dank warehouse and negotiate our way past men making a mighty din as they fill metal cages with brown boxes of consumer stuff. We take a lift – which stinks – two floors down to the sub-basement. There, we walk through sub terranean concrete corridors, past industrial-sized dustbins emitting odours of rotting food, towards a pristine wooden door that seems out of place in this sewer-like setting. Brown taps in a code, and we walk through.

Interesting critique of CCTV from the New Statesman with a few factoids:

I ‘knew’ this one: 12 number of people per CCTV camera in Britain

But this is quite astounding: 20 per cent of all the world’s CCTV cameras are in the UK

Also the Telegraph has a report that shows the non-effect of speed cameras on vehicle accidents.

“We will go where we please, we will discuss what we like, and we will never be browbeaten by bullies. That’s what it means to be British.”

Yes John Reid, we will.

We will;

not submit to State interference of our lives
not register our ‘identity’ on the NIR
not contribute to the charade that is the ‘war on terror’
not allow the government to define and limit our rights
never believe talk of liberty and freedom from a party devoted to centralism

conduct our private business in private
continue to resist and inform of the deceit at the heart of UK politics
repeal or ignore the legislative burden of government

And if you don’t like it you can fuck off to Belarus

The ban on liquids such as toothpaste and perfume being carried through airport security in hand luggage will be lifted at UK airports in November.

This is inadequate, either there is a (non-)credible threat from liquid explosives or there is not. As there is not, neither practically nor created by F.E.A.R. then there is no reason for the ban to lifted IMMEDIATELY. It took a matter of days to ease the total ban on hand luggage, why so long for liquids.

The banning of all-but-essential liquids in hand luggage was introduced after an alleged plot to blow up planes was thwarted last month.

Under a new Europe-wide agreement to be approved next week, passengers will be able to carry on board 100ml containers of liquid in a transparent plastic bag.

So despite the ‘lifting of the ban’ the impositions and subtle degredations of passengers will continue. People are supposed to feel grateful that they are now allowed a simulacrum of ‘normaility’?

Since the tightening of restrictions on Aug 10, passengers leaving UK airports for all destinations except the United States have been allowed to take liquids in carry-on luggage as long as the items were bought after travellers have passed through security checks.

But those travelling to America cannot take liquids on board even if purchased at “airside” outlets.

Good, good continue to shoot yourselves in the foot.

Earlier this week, US authorities said liquids could be taken on board flights leaving America if they were purchased from secure airport stores.

The UK’s deception still subject to junior role in the ‘special relationship’.

On Aug 10, all carry-on bags were banned, leading to huge queues at airports and numerous flight delays and cancellations.

After a few days, smaller hand luggage was permitted to be taken on board and last week the DfT announced that larger bags would once again be permitted on planes.

This is not the road back to normality. This is the road to the State increasingly defining/controllling perceptions of normality.