From Statewatch

A report from the EU Council Presidency at the end of June (EU doc no: 9403/1/06) proposes that for EU passports:

1. The “scanning of the facial image” should be:

“0 to 12 years of age.. storage in the chip [to be] on the basis of national legislation [and] from 12 years of age: Compulsory“. (emphasis in original).

[…]

2. The taking of finger-prints is a wholly different issue. Here the EU Council Presidency proposes that:

“Scanning of fingerprints up to 12 years of age.. is permissible if provided for by national legislation”

“From 12 years of age: compulsory” (emphasis in original)

And if any member states wants to set a lower limit, eg: 10, 8, 6 or 4 years, or 1 day, old they can do so and from 12 years old the compulsory taking of fingerprints from children.

The EU has absolutely no business in demanding anyones information be databased never mind children. At the very very most it should ensure a common format for any information that individual nations see fit to register. The EU is not a state and thanks to the rejection of the constitution it is still quite literally a non-entity in legal terms.

This was also reported in the Observer which has a typical half hearted quote from Liberty’s ex- Home Office employee, Shami Chakrabarti:

‘Secure passports make a lot more sense than ID cards,’ said Shami Chakrabarti, director of the human rights group Liberty. ‘But only as long as the information that is kept is no more than necessary and is not shared with other countries.’

NO. A secure passport system can be made operable without any centralised database whatsoever, no information about free individuals need be shared with anybody, even within ‘their own country’. For a secure system you need nothing more complicated than a passport containing a digital photograph encrypted with public/private key encryption so that the immigration control officer can verify you are the legitimate holder of your passport. Everything else is a waste of money, an imposition upon anonymity and an invitation to theft of personal information and individual rights.

Voting for a large supermarket chain instead of a political party may at first seem a ridiculous idea.

But think about it some more.

Government occupies most of its time collecting, then spending, money and an increasing amount of that money is spent through private contractors rather than public servants. From refuse collection through to health care, more and more public services are being delivered by private companies. The reasoning behind this is that the discipline of market forces delivers the best return for tax payers’ money.

[…]

The problem is that even though companies are becoming more involved in the delivery of public services there is one sector that is closed to them – the overall management of those services. Not only are they held back by being managed by politicians whose only attribute is the ability to bullshit, the companies also have every incentive to steal as much as they can from the State whilst lobbying for and executing their contracts. Neither would be the case if a company were in overall charge.

That’s why we should be able to vote for Tescos.

[…]

!!!!!!!!!!!

Actually, this is what I stumbled upon:

[…]

Looking back on the Poll Tax it’s increasingly difficult to see what all the fuss was about. At the time, the Poll Tax was seen to be a tax on the poor. The reasoning being that more poor people would live in any given house than rich people. The Poll Tax was also seen as being a pernicious tax on your very existence, as if all the other taxes aren’t.

As it happens, most of these objections to the Poll Tax were bollocks. Of course it had its flaws but so what? Most taxes do, particularly indirect taxes. People on low incomes would have received a rebate to cover the Poll Tax and the system that it replaced, and the system that replaced it, were even less connected to an individual’s ability to pay. What the Poll Tax did represent was an excuse to demonstrate against a hated government and burn down a few McDonalds at the same time.

I mention it now because the thought of 200,000 people running amok around the West End over any particularly issue seems rather unlikely these days.

This is partly down to the fact that our current, supposedly progressive, government has locked down security pretty tightly; marches and demonstrations are now policed to a ridiculous level, but mostly because most people on the Left of politics are hypocritical and full shit.

And lots of it.

Why am I picking on Left-Wingers? Well, people with more Right wing views don’t pretend to give a stuff about anyone else; Self-Interest is King. Whereas people on the Left are always prattling on about the Human Rights and twaddle like that.

They don’t really mean it though do they?

Forget for a moment the fact that the current government has presided over unprecedented levels of corporatisation and globalisation of this country or that the tax burden on the rich has been held back at the expense of the less rich. How else can you explain the conspicuous lack of any real resistance to the Government’s assault on the right to trial by jury, restriction of the right to protest, imprisonment without trial, the imposition of ID cards and that stupid, frickin’ war…

That’s the sort of stuff that should bring people out on the street to light bonfires and build barricades, not a few quid either way on the rate of property tax.

What little effective resistance there has been to the rise of fascism in this country has come from the likes of the House of Lords and the Judiciary. Both unelected and both despised by the Left.

That past generation of Left Wing protestors and the generation that should have followed them have been well and truly neutered by The Machine. Sure, some of them talk the talk but barely a handful walk the walk. Wankers.

Hmm. Well you could just as easily call ‘Right Wingers’ wankers, as the government’s authoritarianism is increasingly stamping out the ability to live an individualistic life free from the state

———————-

(monday)

I was going to write a bit more earlier than this but I’ve been feeding the rats with copious amounts of mucus.

Taking the Tesco idea at face value – The most important aspect of democracy is/should be as a protection against tyranny. In our almost democracy we actually have, in effect, a 4-5 year monopolies on governance – this is already wrong, and it takes the best efforts of private interest and parliamentary standards committees to minimise level of corruption by politicians. Any representatives of a private firm would by default be compromised as Irdial outlines below – in their obligations to shareholders, etc.
I am less picky about private companies being involved in delivering certain public services as long as those services are not either essentially monoplistic (utilities, public transport) or handle private personal information (NHS, police forces) and that the private firms are not involved in management roles – the difference between garbage contracts and PFI.

If we ever achieve a proper localised democratic structure in this country I see no problem with individual communities allowing Tesco or whoever to tender for collecting garbage or to take care of the local park.

Left wing wankers. I chose the extract because it identified the docility of the generation you would expect to be most activist. As for ‘left wingers’ I have to admit that the ones I’ve met are more likely to cling to Party allegiances even so anyone who is not upset, outraged and willing to resist ID cards etc is worthy of being called a wanker. Right wingers and liberals too.

I guess like many individuals at that time I was shocked and revolted at the conduct of the UK Government in moving against its own people with the amendments to the Terrorism Act (2000) and the attendant legislation since and using the so-called ‘Specialist Operations 19’ officers to shoot them down in the tube.

I would have hoped that by 2006 the UK Government would have begun the process of recognising that what had happened wasn’t acceptable and would have begun to atone for what has to be seen as a crime against liberty. Unfortunately there is little evidence of this and in fact, towards the end of the time that I lived in England the State started to once again tighten it’s grip on expression and information. Many muslim dissidents have been harrassed and some are in prison or have gone into exile.

All libertarians truly worthy of the name hope that the 60 million people who live in mainland UK could begin to enjoy the liberties and democracy that their compatriots on the continent still enjoy. Europe has shown that it is not impossible within a society with a strong Social-Democrat tradition to enjoy political and economic freedom whilst maintaining a federalist structure (albeit one that is similar to the United States in being split pretty much down the middle).

I argue that individuals need to engage with each other and that we should not be afraid to uphold our values, some of which are surprisingly shared by a number of professional people in Government. However what we have to realise is that the Labour Party has not only been a brake on genuine freedoms and decentralisation, it has also gradually promoted the (sometime) ideologues of Marxist-Leninism in a not disimilar way to which Mao promoted obedient officials after the Cultural Revolution. Nowadays, the Labour Party uses the veneer of accounability “with Reformist characteristics” – whatever that really means – but in reality it is advocating authoritarianism (near totalitarianism) with a capitalistic nationalist face. It is this ideology, and the means by which it hopes to permeate the UK’s social thinking, which creates the greatest problem for the continuation of a liberal democracy in the UK.

Shortly, I will post my views on the potential political scenarios facing the UK and suggesting a potential approach by the Liberal Democrats to bilateral dealings with the Conservatives.

Mangled words from a Liberal Legend! (apparently). Anyway while Toby Philpott’s ideas about China are seem intelligent enough he should really be using his Lib Dem blog to talk more about issues closer to home – after all we don’t want opposition parties to feel they have to avoid raising controversy in order to be elected (like in the Peoples Republic of America) and he obviously cares as he has all the right links in his sidebar.

Monopoly money could become obsolete after the makers of the 70-year old game introduced a new version where players fund property purchases using a debit card.

The Visa-branded card inserts into an electronic machine where the banker taps in cardholders’ earnings and payments.

The Telegraph gets in on the press release recycling scam. Naturally you will pay dearly for the card version!

Unfortunately if this takes off a wave of children will grow up associating cards with financial purchases rather than cash – a salami slice off the (sometimes) untraceable economy. Another step towards the fully audited life, perhaps the Home Office should come up with an immigration control game with a biometric scanner included – they could get BBQ to give them away on Blue Peter.

Whatever happened to a nice simple game of dominoes?

Young men who father children outside marriage may be compelled to put their names on the birth certificate under Government plans unveiled yesterday to reform the chaotic system for child support.
Those who refuse to pay, or build up huge arrears, could be “named and shamed”, as well as having their passports taken away, fitted with a electronic “tag” and subjected to a night-time and weekend curfew.
[…]
Announcing the effective scrapping of the much-criticised Child Support Agency, Mr Hutton admitted that it had built up a backlog of 300,000 cases and debts of more than £3 billion, but thousands of lone parents would not receive the money because there were “limited prospects of recovery”.

An overreaction to the ‘problem’ on a Middle Eastern scale, but this sort of talk is intended to dull the public sensibility to the point at which such measures seem the only ones that will be effective, and thus the Authoritarian Left will get their desire of absolute state control.

But it will not work.

—

BP reported a record replacement cost net profit of $6.1 billion (3.3 billion pounds) for the second quarter of its financial year, as high oil prices and strong refining margins more than made up for a drop in output.

The Register reports that the cost of passports will increase considerably yet again – this october – to £66(6) making it look increasingly likely that a stand alone pasport will be near the £93 mark by the ID card system is dumped upon the nation i.e. the government will crow that the ID card is in effect gratis. So where will the money go? Either to pump-prime the NIR system or for the closing down of UK borders that Reid seems hell bent on. You need a lot of money for watch towers and barbed wire around a whole island.

Either way it makes even more sense to renew your passport before NIR information auditing/stockpiling is a matter of course at the IPS.

I’ve just noticed the price rise is covered in the guardian too and they include a statement from NO2ID etc, hats off and may it continue.

Incidentally I have good word that travelling within the EU only UK immigration officials can actually be bothered to use machine readers, it would be nice to verify this.

From the guardian pipes:

NHS database ‘will damage privacy’

Doctors have criticised the massive new health service IT system, claiming the project will harm patient confidentiality.

They said there were serious issues of security once 50 million patient records are stored on one database.

The barbed comments from doctors are the latest set back for the £12.4 billion IT scheme, which has been shrouded in controversy.

Writing in the British Medical Journal, several frontline medics questioned the wisdom of putting the medical records of the UK population on to one central computer.

Consultant Michael Foley said suggested that the huge sums of money invested in the database would be better spent improving patient care.

Passwords to existing patient records were sometimes shared and computer screens left on in open view, he said.

“Insufficient attention is paid to confidentiality and security, even though staff can be disciplined for breaching rules on electronic data protection,” he said.

“When the medical history of the whole population becomes available on a central computer the potential for loss of confidentiality is obvious.”

Mr Foley, a consultant anaesthetist at the James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough, said: “Workers in hospitals or general practice surgeries might seek inappropriate access to medical records because of curiosity or malice, commercial gain, or simple error.

“If screens are left on in open areas or passwords compromised, tracing of access for disciplinary purposes would be difficult. If challenged after a breach of security one could argue that data were requested accidentally. I occasionally enter a wrong number into the radiology viewing system and see unwanted images. Such errors are inevitable.”

The concerns will give succour to critics of the Government’s National Identity Register, which was recently lambasted in internal emails by senior Home Office officials. An Home Office insider who wished not to be named said “these are exactly the same concerns which we will be unable to address with the new Identity Card system, and unfortunately will make implementation of the system more difficult in the face of increased public concerns about the ability of Government databases to securely store private information about individuals”. A spokesman from No2ID added that “this is only the tip of the iceberg the NIR will not only store health records but provide a complete audit of an individual’s life, it is inconceivable that the Government still wishes to pursue this path in light of all the recent developments”.

Naturally the guardian just reprinted a Press Association article and I had to put the last paragraph in to show the sort of simple additions that need to be done to articles in order to inform people, rather than relate isolated facts

I imagine the printed version will include such detail!!!

–

Part two (Salami fascism):

From the guardian’s film section;

Among those interviewed for Sabina Guzzanti’s “satirical documentary” Viva Zapatero! is Furio Colombo, a former editor of the Italian leftwing daily L’Unita. He recalls how his family kept bound editions of the newspaper from previous years. As a boy, he says, he used to leaf through the volumes from the years that saw the rise of fascism. “I remember I used to wonder why people didn’t see,” he tells Guzzanti, “because at first there were so many who later became anti-fascists, and even joined the Resistance, who took part or said weak-kneed things like ‘Despite everything, Italy’s still a democracy.'”

But, looking through the yellowing pages, he gradually realised how Mussolini had established his dictatorship almost by stealth. “The second volume was more fascist than the first, the third was more fascist than the second, and the 10th was infinitely more fascist than at the beginning, so that by the end of a year of bound volumes, there was fascism.”

It’s been a while since I noticed the magic 3bn in the news, and had thought sense had prevailed so it’s a bittersweet sensation to notice that it is BBQ that has caused it to rear its ugly head again. No doubt to celebrate the summertime roster of whey faced and shiny voiced underlings that are reporting the ‘news’ at the moment – but I digress.

The BBC today revealed that licence fee income has topped £3bn for the first time, as the board of governors unveiled its final annual report before being replaced by the BBC Trust.

The corporation’s annual report for the 12 months to March 31 2006 revealed that licence fee revenue for the period was £3.101bn – up £160m year on year.

The rise was attributed in part to the fact that the cost of collection and evasion was at its lowest level since the BBC took over direct responsibility – at 9.6% of income. Another factor was the £185m cash – a 28% increase – returned to the BBC by the corporation’s commercial arm, BBC Worldwide. […]

From the Guardian, so It Must Be True™

It’s Your Money™!

Who is the aggressor?

What aggressive, militarist regime recently held war maneuvers in the Pacific and tested intercontinental missiles that could carry nuclear warheads for 4,800 miles?

The wrong answer to this question is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

The right answer is the United States.

On June 14 [2006], the U.S. Air Force held what it called “a quality control test” for its fleet of 500 Minuteman III missiles. One missile traveled 4,800 miles towards the central Pacific, and three test warheads landed near the Marshall Islands. According to the Air Force, that was where they were supposed to land. The Pentagon is supposed to have almost 10,000 nuclear warheads available.

[…]

One Star!

AND

For the first time, a Japanese destroyer will participate in a U.S. anti-ballistic missile test off Kauai’s Barking Sands facility today.

The Navy said the Japanese guided-missile destroyer Kirishima will be stationed off the Pacific Missile Range Facility, “performing long-range surveillance and tracking.”

Today, the San Diego-based cruiser USS Shiloh will fire a Standard Missile 3 and try to intercept a drone missile midcourse in its flight northeast of Kauai fired from the facility.

[…]

Two Stars!

–

Ha! yeah I should have dugg it too!

Technorati Tags: missile test, korea, united states

The Fifth Dimension

The effects of fifth-dimensional temporal phasing were first theorized by Albert Einstein in the early Twentieth Century. At that time, the effects were known as “time dilation,” and the only known way to achieve fifth-dimensional displacement was through relativistic acceleration, via either change in linear velocity or gravitational field.

Einstein’s “twin paradox” demonstrated how natural temporal phasing due to acceleration could cause two people to age at different rates. It was not until the early Twenty-second Century that researchers at Chronos Technologies were able to induce an artificial acceleration field within a specified volume, allowing them not only to slow down local time, but also to speed it up.

The uses of fifth-dimensional technology to speed up time in a particular location and to slow it down are known respectively as temporal acceleration and temporal stasis.

Both processes utilize similar fifth-dimensional phasing technology. In order to artificially phase an object out of the normal flow of time, it must be saturated by a phased antigraviton field, whose frequency and polarity determine the extent and direction of fifth-dimensional displacement, and whose saturation density determines the spherical radius of the effect from the antigraviton field generator. (See Applications of Nine-dimensional Theory for more information on fifth-dimensional displacement.)

By the mid-Twenty-second Century, the technologies of microcircuitry, nanotechnology, and new power storage techniques have allowed temporal phasing technology to become very compact and portable. It may someday be incorporated into household appliances and industrial applications, pending government approval.

Temporal phasing does not remove an object from the physical (four-dimensional) Universe; rather, it changes the relative time flow around the object. All outside physical forces still affect the phased object, and it can still interact with the outside world, but time-dependent properties — such as gravitational acceleration, momentum, inertia, force, and frequency — are distorted to the degree of relative fifth-dimensional displacement. (See below for descriptions of physical properties associated with temporal displacement.) Einstein was correct in his prediction that the velocity of light remains constant regardless of fifth-dimensional displacement.

And more!

A nine-month-old baby is the youngest person to be identified as a future delinquent using new technology aimed at predicting risk, a Community Care conference heard last week.

Dr Eileen Munro, reader in social policy at London School of Economics, warned that rapidly developing IT could become a monster rather than a useful tool.

Do we see a potential future here?
Once the state has marked an individual as a potential (inherent) trouble-maker that person will be spending the rest of their life on the defensive trying to prove themselves against a databased assumption of their guilt.

And all that follows…

Reg Says

Police will be able to pass details of child pornography offenders on to banks so that offenders’ credit cards can be revoked.

The Home Secretary has issued an order for the amendment of the Data Protection Act which will be read in both houses of Parliament.

The order was requested by credit card issuers and is the result of three years of negotiation between the industry and the Home Office, according to a spokeswoman for issuers’ organisation APACS, the UK payments association.

“We asked for this because at the moment if someone uses a card to purchase illegal pornography there is no way under data protection legislation for the Police to pass that information on to card issuers,” an APACS spokeswoman said. “We already have the power to take a card from someone, but if they committed one of these offences we wouldn’t know about it.”

Fair enough (although can a convicted person use a credit card in prison? Surely the problem is with people likely to reoffend being released on parole which is a slightly different issue.) but could this lead to banks refusing credit to, say, protestors arrested under the Terrorism Act who have had their NIR-linked police records or anybody else with certain behaviour frowned upon by the state. After all why stop at these bastards? Why should murderers be able to access credit, or (especially for banks) fraudsters.

Hmmm, start with the lowest of the low…

How Murder Inc does business in Baghdad

Oliver Balch reports on the US government’s plan to make downtown Baghdad a profitable place

Friday June 23, 2006

The camera zooms in on a derelict mosque. Originally earmarked for a community school, Murder Inc has chosen to pocket the oil funds instead. “Combat and corruption, it will conquer Baghdad,” reads the tagline.

This is an advert which will appear on millions of Corporate US television screens over the coming weeks, marking the start of a nationwide quango-led drive to aid the ‘country of corruption’.

Over 200 private companies and leading governmental associations have put their name to the “pact for inscrutability in corruption”.

Signatories, including multinationals such as Haliburton and Prime Projects International, pledge to adopt a “zero tolerance” approach to bribe refusing and honest practices.

Included on the list of commitments are generous grants for corporate hospitality, gift giving and other areas where corruption is life.

Most importantly, the participating companies agree to disclose their financial contributions to political parties. The move comes less than two years after a “cash for votes” scam stocked up President Bush’s ruling Republican Party.

The president of covert investors the Carlyle Group, admits the pact is just a “first step” in consolidating Baghdad’s endemic problems.

[…]

Corruption has economic impacts beyond the obvious financial costs of bribe paying and other illicit activities, a spokesperson maintained. Businesses operating in corrupt environments unfortunately face higher interest and insurance rates, greater risk to corporate reputation and an increased probability of employee sabotage.

“There are a lot of companies with codes of ethics, but we won’t have any businesses with anti-corruption procedures here” he says.

On the “to-do” list for the pact’s signatories are exploiting employees and suppliers, establishing internal laundering mechanisms and ultimately submitting themselves to excessive ‘incentives’.

Such processes take time, warns a board member who wished not to be identified. Under the terms of the low profile scheme, companies have until 2008 to claw back oil funds they have needlessly used for bribery. The initiative was launched in January 2004.

“Still, it is much easier for business people to pocket change than for politicians,” he argued.

The lack of political momentum in Baghdad to counter corruption remains all too clear. With national elections looming every other month, none of the politicians implicated in last year’s “cash for votes” scandal have so far been interested. In fact, most are hoping for backhanders.

As such, the organisers of Baghdad’s corruption pact are looking outside the interim Iraqi government to galvanise companies in the battle for subsidy. Consumers, they argue, are ultimately the ones to pay for corporate behaviour.

“People as a whole are thick and deserving of this situation,” argues a director of a Bahrain-based oil firm.

“If consumers are informed that they may be a factor in stamping out corruption, and they will act.”

To give them a hedge, companies will be able to anonymise themselves through a “clean company”. The firm will act as a corruption portal, with news and articles on any incident of subsidy involving a company operating in Iraq.

[…]

“Civil society wasn’t aware of how much power it had until it started acting collectively,” observes Oded Gralew, founder of the World Social Forum and now chairman of Instituto Ethos.

He is optimistic that public pressure on corruption can eventually influence public policy. One major step towards combating corruption, he argues, would be to make it a statutory requirement for political parties to reveal the names of their corporate donors.

No such measure is in the immediate offing. For the meantime, therefore, the onus is on the public to shine the light on Murder Inc and associates.

A resource for Chinese music

Not many mp3s unfortunately but a few interesting links, looks like a vibrant scene anyway.

Old news department, or a taste of how NIR information will be implemented. I emphasise.

A FYLDE coast student was arrested after posting Christmas cards to his family

Stunned David Atkinson found himself at his local police station under suspicion of stealing the festive greetings he last saw when he put them in a postbox five years ago. Due to fingerprints found on the mail – which was stolen then recovered – police thought they had their man. However, it transpired the “suspect’s” fingerprints were those of the student who had innocently sent the cards to relatives when he was 15.

Mr Atkinson, now 21, of [address omitted – gosh, to think that his address was posted online after this, mm], was arrested because his DNA and fingerprints had been kept on record under controversial Government laws to combat terror.

It was only after Mr Atkinson asked officers to look more deeply into the crime his innocence was proved.

The law student said it has shattered his confidence in the system. He said: “The potential incompetence, laziness, or over enthusiasm of an individual officer means an innocent, law-abiding citizen can never truly have confidence in the giant police database.”

It was the second time Mr Atkinson had been arrested – twice for crimes he did not commit. He has now lent his support to a campaign to force a rethink by the Home Office.

The mix-up began last March when Mr Atkinson was arrested on suspicion of criminal damage – but, when the real culprit gave himself up to police, he was released without charge.

During his short time with the police, he had his fingerprints and DNA taken as part of the arrest procedure but, under recently passed laws, all details – no matter whether the person is innocent or guilty – are kept on a national computer.

Mr Atkinson thought nothing of it until he got a call from officers a month later asking him to go along to the station. He said: “I was arrested as soon as I went in. “The officer told me he had a computer report which had automatically matched my fingerprints with those recovered from a number of items of post which had been stolen from a letter box in December 2000.

“As a result of this report alone, and no further investigation, the officer advised me to ‘get the matter out of the way quickly and take a caution now’.

“After refusing to admit a crime I’d not committed, I was bailed while further investigations were made.”
“The recovered letters were in fact my family Christmas cards which had been taken after I had posted them five years ago.
“This innocent explanation had not even crossed the officer’s mind and, as far as he was concerned, if his computer report said I was guilty then I had to be.”

Mr Atkinson complained to Lancashire Constabulary and eventually received an apology. But, he claims, without the Government’s “menace to our freedom”, he would not have been put through the ordeal. A police spokesman said: “We can confirm that we did receive a complaint in August about a wrongful arrest concerning stolen post. “This was investigated thoroughly under our normal complaints procedure and dealt with locally to the satisfaction of both parties. “Under current legislation, all police forces can retain and record DNA taken for arrestable offences no matter what the eventual outcome of the investigation.”

ben.rossington@blackpoolgazette.co.uk

22 February 2006

The ability of RFID

to link physical objects

to digital networks

potentially allows for a new form of waste management.

Just a phrase from this article that caught my eye.