She’s thirty-six US military bases in a country a third of the way around the globe. She’s over half a century old but the warhawks and the chickenhawks love her – she’s that sweet Korean Model. You know, the one they use as a model for Iraq.

President Bush (what a source!) has referred to the “Korean Model” for Iraq. Also, in discussing plans to keep US troops in Iraq, John McCain stated: “We’ve been in South Korea… for 60 years.” and Defense Secretary Robert Gates: “So I think that the reason that Korea’s been mentioned is – and it’s been mentioned in contrast to Vietnam, where we just left lock, stock and barrel.” and White House Press Secretary Tony Snow last year mentioned it too:” … in South Korea, where for many years there have been American forces stationed there as a way of maintaining stability and assurance on the part of the South Korean people against a North Korean neighbor that is a menace.”

Maintaining stability? Oh, yes, like against democratization movements. From the CIA Factbook: In 1993, Kim Young-sam became South Korea’s first civilian president following 32 years of military rule. To many South Koreans, the long American presence in their country is a reminder of tacit U.S. support for a series of ruthless despots. “South Korea between ’61 and ’89 was ruled by some of the worst military dictators created during the Cold War,” [Chalmers] Johnson says. “Finally the Koreans got rid of them and have quite a healthy democracy now. But all the credit goes to the Koreans – there is a terrible tendency for Americans to mislead themselves about the good things they have done in East Asia.” During that period, Korean history was marked by the The Gwangju Democratization Movement, a popular uprising in the city of Gwangju, South Korea from May 18 to May 27, 1980. During this period, citizens rose up against Chun Doo-hwan’s military dictatorship and took control of the city. During the later phase of the uprising, citizens took on arms to defend themselves, but were crushed by the South Korean army. Senior officials in the Carter administration approved South Korean plans to use military troops against pro-democracy demonstrations ten days before former General Chun Doo-hwan seized control of the country in a May 17, 1980, military coup, according to newly released U.S. government documents.

So our guys helped in domestic repression, but the South Koreans need help defending against the menace of North Korea, right?

Not exactly. South Korea currently ranks 12th in the world militarily, whereas North Korea is 18th. South Korea has twice as many men available to the military (24 million to 11 million) and roughly twice as many under arms (657,000 to 382,000). Economically the South ranks 13th in the world with a GDP of $982b (just above Australia), the North ranks 156th with $2b (just above Greenland). North Korea‘s gross national income was valued at $26.7 billion last year, with its per capita gross national income at $1,152, according to the Bank of Korea. By contrast, South Korea‘s $971 billion economy grew 5 percent last year, giving it a per capita income at $20,045.

Nevertheless, about 27,000 U.S. troops are stationed in South Korea, a legacy of the 1950–53 Korean War. The two Koreas (and the US) are still technically in a state of war since the 1950–53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty.

But while the US is technically still at war with North Korea, it no longer considers Korea to be a combat zone. In fact, the US Defense Secretary considers the country to be safe.

News report: Seoul, South Korea – Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Tuesday [June 3, 2008] that he supported extending the tours of thousands of troops stationed here to three years and allowing their spouses and children to live with them during their assignments. His endorsement adds momentum to a policy shift favored by commanders to improve the quality of life for most of the 28,500 troops assigned to South Korea on unaccompanied 12-month tours because South Korea was considered a combat zone, but that has changed. “I don’t think anybody considers the Republic of Korea today a combat zone,” Mr. Gates told reporters earlier this month.

Despite South Korea’s emergence as one of the most modern, progressive and democratic nations in the world over the past 55 years, the United States still rotates its troops here as through it’s still an active combat zone, Army Gen. Walter Sharp, who has recently taken command of U.S. Forces Korea, pointed out to the Senate Armed Services Committee during his confirmation hearing in April. At the time Defense Secretary Gates said that extending tours and allowing troops to bring their families to Korea would send the message that South Korea is safe, and would bring assignment policies in South Korea in line with those in Japan and Europe.

So South Korea is like Japan and Europe, not threatened and now just a nice safe place for US troops to bring their families. Nobody knows this better than the leaders of North and South Korea. The South and the North are reconciling.

Relations improved following the 1997 election of Kim Dae-jung. His “Sunshine Policy” of engagement with North Korea set the stage for the historic June 2000 inter-Korean summit between President Kim and North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. President Kim was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000 for the policy, but the prize was somewhat tarnished by revelations of a $500 million dollar “payoff” to North Korea that immediately preceded the summit. The United States, according to the US State Department, believes that the question of peace and security on the Korean Peninsula is, first and foremost, a matter for the Korean people to decide.

And they’ve done it. The leaders of North and South Korea last year signed a joint declaration calling for a permanent peace deal on the Korean Peninsula. South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun and the North’s Kim Jong-il issued the declaration after a three-day historic summit in Pyongyang.

The Korean people also want reunification. Christine Ahn testified to the US Congress on January 25, 2005, including the following. The Korea Institute for National Unification, or KINU, a national research policy institute, recently conducted a public opinion poll of 1000 South Koreans citizens and 300 leaders from political, media and civil organizations. It found that 84 percent of the public and 96 percent of opinion leaders believed that unification was an urgent task for the nation, and 85 percent of the general public and 95 percent of opinion leaders approved of North-South economic cooperation. Tourism has also been booming in North Korea. In 2005, over 275,000 South Korean tourists visited Mt. Kumgang resort in North Korea, bringing the total to over 1.1 million. That year, over 10,000 Koreans, not counting tourists, had social and cultural exchanges in the north, a doubling from 2002 to 2004, when an average of 5,000 Koreans met per year. Together, they reconstructed Buddhist temples and Christian churches, and held meetings to discuss intellectual property rights of literature and a common dictionary. Last year, North Koreans watched a South Korean opera, and this year, South Koreans will watch “Sa-yuk-shin,” a North Korean drama on TV.

Ahn’s testimony continued: Perhaps the most emotional aspect of this historic process is the meeting of families, many who have not seen their relatives in over 50 years. Last year, 660 separated family members were reunited in person, and 800 family members were able to see and speak to each other through webcast, a new technology that has helped the elderly who can no longer travel far distances. Koreans, seeing the significant gains in peace and reunification, are no longer willing to accept America’s Cold War mentality. On January 18th, the Journalist Association of Korea, the largest journalist group with 6,000 members, asked U.S. ambassador Alexander Vershbow to “stop making anti-North Korean remarks that do more harm than good,” and to apologize for his remarks, which they viewed as “an intrusion in domestic affairs.” South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun also recently made clear that he did not endorse U.S. sanctions against North Korea. If the Bush administration continues hostile regime change policies, Roh said, “there will be friction and disagreements between Seoul and Washington.”

And how do the Korean people feel about the continuing US presence?

One group of young Koreans claims that since 1945, U.S. soldiers committed over 100,000 crimes against South Korean civilians. Between 1993 and April 2000, these crimes averaged 820 incidents per year or 2 to 3 incidents per day. Yet, the South Korean government has only been able to bring to trial 20 or 3.56% of the 562 crimes committed in 1999 alone.

Obviously it doesn’t serve US interests for Korea to re-unite. Permanent war is better. But, despite what the White House says, if there is no threat and the South can handle a threat that arises, and the people and governments want to re-unite, then why does the US maintain troops in Korea fifty years after the war? Could it be financial? Could be, but the current expensive changes in US basing have caused a stir.

South Korea’s financial burden sharing for a multi-billion dollar project to relocate U.S. military facilities is expected to reach some 9 trillion won ($8.8 billion), a figure far higher than the originally estimated 5.6 trillion won. Last year, Seoul and Washington agreed on a master plan for the estimated $11-billion project under which South Korea was to pay about 5.6 trillion won. Under a 2004 land-swap pact, the United States is required to return 170 square kilometers of land housing 42 military bases and firing ranges across the country by 2011. In return, Seoul is required to offer 12 square kilometers of land to help triple the size of Camp Humphreys to some 15 square kilometers housing 500 buildings. The expanded Camp Humphreys, located 70 kilometers south of Seoul, will accommodate more than 44,000 U.S. servicemen, their families, base workers and South Korean reinforcements, according to the master plan.

The United States has called on South Korea to pay more to reach the 50-50 level in tune with the country’s growing economy and increased responsibility for national defense. “Defense burden sharing is advantageous to both partners. For the United States, the Republic of Korea’s willingness to equitably share appropriate defense costs is a clear indicator that the United States Forces in Korea are welcome and wanted,” USFK (US Forces Korea) Commander Gen. B. B. Bell said in a statement presented to the House Armed Service Committee on March 12. Under the Land Partnership Plan (LPP) reached in 2002, the United States promised to pay for moving the bases of the 2nd Infantry Division, north of Seoul, to Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province, where a consolidated U.S. military base will be built. On the other hand, Seoul agreed to bear the cost for relocating the Yongsan Garrison in Seoul under the Yongsan Relocation Plan (YRP) finalized in 2004. Under a master plan drawn up by the two governments last year, Seoul agreed to spend about $5.2 billion on the program to move U.S. bases to Camp Humphreys, which will be tripled in size to accommodate more than 44,000 U.S. service members, their families, base workers and KATUSAs (Koreans serving with the US Army).

General Bell told Congress on March 12 that South Korea had paid “about $2 billion” in a relocation effort “that’s going to cost them around $10 billion.” His comments caused an uproar in South Korea, which had pledged to pay only about $4.5 billion toward the move. Bell blamed his comments on a “misstatement or mischaracterization” in a transcript of his speech, but the news service that provided the transcript said it reported his comments accurately.

And the landowners subject to land confiscation for base expansion weren’t happy either. From a 2006 news report: Daechuri, South Korea – Here in the marshy heartland of the Korean Peninsula, the rabble-rousing rice farmers of this tiny village are engaged in their own little war against the U.S. military. With American forces in the midst of their largest regional realignment in decades, the farmlands of Daechuri have been condemned to make room for the expansion of a nearby U.S. base. While about half the residents have quietly accepted a lucrative cash-for-land deal being offered by the South Korean government, a core group of about 70 holdouts have rebuffed all efforts to buy them out. Their refusals to make way for the base – or give in to what many of the farmers are calling “American bullying” – have won them instant hero status among some South Korean labor unions and student groups. Over the past several weeks, protesters have held the largest anti-American demonstrations in South Korea in four years, turning Daechuri into a symbol of their struggle to drive U.S. troops out of the country. “We are sick of being treated like America’s servants!” said Cho Sun Yeh, a fiery 90-year-old rice farmer. Her first home in the area was bulldozed to make room for a U.S. base during the 1950–53 Korean War.

So much for Tony Snow’s “assurance on the part of the South Korean people.”

The US is currently expanding its military forces and needs its overseas bases because there is no room for these troops in the United States, and it’s financially advantageous to dun our allies for half the cost of maintaining these troops and their families. The US needs these bases so badly, in fact, that it has put a terribly increased burden on the troops in Iraq (stop-loss, extensions, recalls etc.) just to keep these overseas bases in operation and the Empire in business. Not only that, but when it comes to newly invaded and occupied countries the US can use these anachronistic examples to justify more new and permanent bases in more countries. The US is in a self-perpetuating military empire mode with no end in sight, with the Korean Model as a prime example. And the new bases in Korea will accommodate fifty percent more troops than are currently stationed there! For three-year tours, with their families! Think of it – new schools, child development centers, gymnasiums, swimming pools – and two towns up from me the kids go to school in temporary trailers, just big boxes. Go figure. Edward Abbey: “As war and government prove, insanity is the most contagious of diseases.”

Incidentally, the sweet Korean model being used for a policy in Iraq may not be accepted by the Iraqis. Trudy Rubin, Philadelphia Inquirer, on the proposed Status of Forces Agreement: “A surge of Iraqi nationalism . . . spurred questions about whether the Iraqi parliament would deliver the required two-thirds vote to endorse an accord.”

Of course Miss Korea isn’t the only model that’s struttin’ her stuff – besides her there are enough other models to fill the runway: Germany, 75,603 US troops; Japan, 40,045 troops; Afghanistan, 17,900 troops; Italy, 13,354 troops; UK, 11,801 troops; Qatar, 3,432; Bosnia-Hercegovina, 2,931; and Iceland, 1,754 troops. Is that all? No. According to the US Postal Service there are about 3,000 overseas military ZIP codes.

So the warhawks and chickenhawks should lay off the Korean Model. She’s still sweet, but she’s no longer useful and she’s no longer wanted. Like Japan and Germany, and a hundred other places, she’s high maintenance and not worth the trouble. Bottom line – she sets a bad example, if you know what I mean. Give her the hook.

June 24, 2008

Don Bacon [send him mail] is a retired army officer who founded the Smedley Butler Society several years ago because, as General Butler said, “war is a racket.”

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig9/bacon7.html

This is an image of a girl, spinning to clockwise or anti clockwise, depending on the type of brain you have.

If you are left brain dominant, she will turn one way.

If you are right brain dominant, she will turn the other way.

A small minority of people can see her turning both directions.

The TRUTH is, that this is not a picture of a girl at all.

‘She’ is not spinning left or right.

There IS no ‘left’ or ‘right’; they are an illusion, in this optical illusion, brain fooling image.

Only a small minority understand the truth of this.

Topical!

Boris Johnson, alcohol banner and Knife warrior, has written a piece for The Telegraph in his usual style:

I came out of my house the other week and saw that it was a perfect day for cycling to work. The clouds were high and fleecy, the sky was blue, the road was dry.

I hitched my rucksack, tucked my right trouser leg into my sock and was about to clamber aboard the King of the Road when I realised there was something terribly wrong with my appearance. I clapped my head. My helmet! I’d forgotten to wear the symbol of my new deference to correct thinking.

It was only a month or so since I had decided to capitulate to the pleas of the health and safety lobby. My wife was for it. My old chum Ken Livingstone was always harping on about it. And every day I would meet someone at a traffic light who would say, “Tut-tut, poor show, where’s your helmet?” You should be setting an example, they would say. You’re a public figure now, they would say.

In other words, they appealed to my sense of self-importance, and of course I started to think they might be right. How could I live with myself if people started to copy my helmetless insouciance and thereby put themselves in danger?

I imagined the bereaved mothers of impressionable children. I foresaw motions of censure. I winced, and got myself down to the bike shop. For £16.99 I was able to coddle my cranium with the latest superlite carbon fibre bonce-protector, raked like the skull of the creature in Alien.

As I cycled around, I felt a surge of bonneted righteousness. I was socialised; I was showing a proper sense of community, and that is why I turned around on my doorstep, and within another three seconds I would have gone back to get my helmet, and I would have fastened the chinstrap of social obedience … except that for some reason I didn’t. After weeks of helmeted conformity, I had a spasm of rebellion – and it is hard to say exactly why.

Of course I accept the case for cycle helmets, although the only time I have had a serious prang in almost a decade of cycling in London, a helmet would have made no difference whatever.

[…]

BANG!

You LOSE Boris! There IS NO ‘CASE FOR CYCLE HELMETS’!

[…]

Here, then, is the political position. In my efforts to do the right thing, I have ended up giving offence to both opposing factions. As soon as I started to wear a helmet, I was denounced as a wimp, a milquetoast, a sell-out to the elf and safety lobby, a man so cravenly attached to his own survival that he was willing to wear this undignified plastic hat.

As soon as I was pictured not wearing a helmet, I was attacked for “sending out the wrong signal” and generally poisoning the minds of the young with my own reckless behaviour.

The situation, my friends, is a mess. I have been convicted beyond all reasonable doubt of complete incoherence on the question of cycle helmets – and complete incoherence, therefore, is what I propose to defend.

In so far as I am confused between the competing imperatives of safety and liberty, it is a confusion we all share. Look at the polls.

Last week, the public was asked what it thought of the Government’s plan to lock people up for 42 days without charge. Yeah! said a stonking 69 per cent of the YouGov sample. Bang ’em up. Better safe than sorry, was the message of the electorate.

This weekend, the public was asked what they thought of my friend David Davis’s heroic act of auto-defenestration, and his decision to call a by-election to oppose the 42 days measure. Yeah! said the public – 69 per cent of them, according to ICM. Good on yer, David, they said. You stick up for our liberties!

Now if 69 per cent of the public is in favour of 42 days’ detention without charge, and 69 per cent are in favour of David Davis and his opposition to 42 days, it is a mathematical certainty that a large chunk of the electorate is hopelessly muddled.

We want to be protected from terrorists, yet we have a feeling that the state is everywhere eroding our ancient liberties – bossing, bullying, photographing us at every corner.

We need to be clear about the trade-off. The price of liberty is a small but appreciable loss of security; the price of security is a loss of liberty. In the case of the 42 days, the increase in security is obviously too small to justify the loss of a freedom such as habeas corpus.

As for cycle helmets, we should be allowed, in our muddled way, to make up our own minds. Sometimes we will go for hatless, sun-blessed, windswept liberty; sometimes for helmeted security.

The important thing is that we assess the risk, we make the decision, and be it on our own heads – or, in the case of my helmet, sometimes not.

[…]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/06/17/do1701.xml

There is a person in a muddle here, and it is BORIS.

You cannot on the one hand, make the argument against 42 day detention on the above basis, and then say that alcohol consumption on the underground should be banned by your diktat to ‘increase safety’. You cannot declare ‘War on Knife Crime’ because the tiniest fraction of people in London get stabbed, resulting inevitably in completely innocent people going about their business being compelled to walk through metal detectors in the street en masse.

A man with a consistently applied philosophy would say that trading liberty for security is ALWAYS bad (especially when the trade is made by a dictator for someone else’s good) and then he would ACT accordingly; some people drink to excess on the underground and cause trouble. They are one twenty millionth of the regular underground using population (at a wild guess, by all means give me the right number) and so, to catch that tiniest of fractions of miscreants, you introduce a measure that will not catch them, but oppress everyone even further in this over surveilled police state city….not very intelligent or consistent.

A few people in the worst, unrepresentative, areas of London get stabbed, and so, you say that all innocent Londoners are criminal suspects and must be scanned on the street for knives. That is not only immoral, breaking the innocent until proven guilty principle, but it will not stop knife crime in any way.

Boris Johnson is old enough to remember the REAL London, the London before CCTV, the criminal scam ‘Congestion Charge’, ‘War on terror’ hysteria, hideous people-trapping busses and every other avoidable ill that Londoners now suffer.

That his goal is not to restore London to its former glory is lamentable. That he is going to make it even worse is inexcusable.

And did you know, that this man reads… Lew Rockwell?

I just cannot believe it!

We need a mayor that is not in thrall to public opinion, or to newspaper editors and their shrieking headlines. We need a mayor that reads Lew Rockwell and actually BELIEVES what is written there, and who is willing to act on those beliefs and deeply held convictions.

We need a mayor who would never buy a bicycle helmet in the first place.

We need a mayor who THINKS before he ACTS.

I think there’s a good reason to vote for Obama (if Ron Paul isn’t given the Republican nomination) even though he’s black, and even if you don’t like blacks . . .
Why? Because:

• The Neoconservatives are exploiting, oppressing and manipulating the average white American like slaveowners used to exploit black people

• The imperialists are trying to silence average, patriotic, family-loving Americans like the slaveowners used to demand that the slaves spoke only when spoken to

• The tyrants are raping the American treasury, stealing our possessions (by wrecking the economy with high inflation, which drains our wealth), and stripping us of our liberty and our dignity, as the slaveowners did to the slaves

This is just an analogy, and I am not trying to overstate the comparison. But in a certain sense, we are all black . . .
And to the extent that Obama follows through on his promises to restore our freedom and dignity, to restore the Constitution and the rule of law, and to liberate America from our wanna-be lords and masters, he’s got my vote.

Disclaimer: I’m a white guy. So I can’t speak to the black experience. And I understand there are huge racial tensions in America.
But what’s more important: Your anger and hatred? Or protecting yourself from the anti-American tyrants?
If you are black, I didn’t use the phrase “African-American” because this essay is aimed at White racists, so please cut me some slack.

[…]

http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2008/06/why-obamas-got-my-vote.html

Consider your slack cut.

I like George Washington’s Blog. The person who writes it doesn’t hold back when he writes. He sounds like a Real American.

Sadly, (and ‘George Washington’ certainly knows this) Obomba is no ‘choice’ at all. He is just as insane as Bush, as the ever reliable and inert Pilger says concisely:

Understanding Obama as a likely president of the United States is not possible without understanding the demands of an essentially unchanged system of power: in effect a great media game. For example, since I compared Obama with Robert Kennedy in these pages, he has made two important statements, the implications of which have not been allowed to intrude on the celebrations. The first was at the conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), the Zionist lobby, which, as Ian Williams has pointed out, “will get you accused of anti-Semitism if you quote its own website about its power”. Obama had already offered his genuflection, but on 4 June went further. He promised to support an “undivided Jerusalem” as Israel’s capital. Not a single government on earth supports the Israeli annexation of all of Jerusalem, including the Bush regime, which recognises the UN resolution designating Jerusalem an international city.

His second statement, largely ignored, was made in Miami on 23 May. Speaking to the expatriate Cuban community – which over the years has faithfully produced terrorists, assassins and drug runners for US administrations – Obama promised to continue a 47-year crippling embargo on Cuba that has been declared illegal by the UN year after year.

Again, Obama went further than Bush. He said the United States had “lost Latin America”. He described the democratically elected governments in Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua as a “vacuum” to be filled. He raised the nonsense of Iranian influence in Latin America, and he endorsed Colombia’s “right to strike terrorists who seek safe-havens across its borders”. Translated, this means the “right” of a regime, whose president and leading politicians are linked to death squads, to invade its neighbours on behalf of Washington. He also endorsed the so-called Merida Initiative, which Amnesty International and others have condemned as the US bringing the “Colombian solution” to Mexico. He did not stop there. “We must press further south as well,” he said. Not even Bush has said that.

It is time the wishful-thinkers grew up politically and debated the world of great power as it is, not as they hope it will be. Like all serious presidential candidates, past and present, Obama is a hawk and an expansionist. He comes from an unbroken Democratic tradition, as the war-making of presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Clinton demonstrates. Obama’s difference may be that he feels an even greater need to show how tough he is. However much the colour of his skin draws out both racists and supporters, it is otherwise irrelevant to the great power game. The “truly exciting and historic moment in US history” will only occur when the game itself is challenged.

http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=492

You are damed if you vote for Insane McCain, and you are damed if you vote for Obomba. The only act you will not be damed for is if you ‘DO NOT‘.

Which option is better; a world wide economic meltdown precipitated by the destruction of the dollar as the reserve currency, that will be over in a few years, resulting in the end of the Evil Empire, ‘The Great Satan’, OR a devastating World War and every evil that will come out of it, started by either Onset Alzheimers McSlay’in or Secret Overt Musilm Murderer Obomba?

The people who control the american government will not, it seems, back down. The good people of that great country are being prevented from getting the truth so that they can do the right thing, as is their nature to do when the have the facts.

The only option left is the complete abandonment of the dollar, should even a single bullet be loaded in preparation to be fired against Iran. Once the dollar is destroyed the attack cannot happen, they will make their excuses for backing off in order to save face, and the dragon will have been caged.

If anyone has a better idea, by all means, point it out. For certain, we know who does NOT have a better idea.

Imagine – if you can – not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken.

And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools.

Now add to this strange fantasy the ability to conceal from other people that your psychological makeup is radically different from theirs. Since everyone simply assumes that conscience is universal among human beings, hiding the fact that you are conscience-free is nearly effortless.

You are not held back from any of your desires by guilt or shame, and you are never confronted by others for your cold-bloodedness. The ice water in your veins is so bizarre, so completely outside of their personal experience, that they seldom even guess at your condition.

In other words, you are completely free of internal restraints, and your unhampered liberty to do just as you please, with no pangs of conscience, is conveniently invisible to the world.

You can do anything at all, and still your strange advantage over the majority of people, who are kept in line by their consciences will most likely remain undiscovered.

How will you live your life?

What will you do with your huge and secret advantage, and with the corresponding handicap of other people (conscience)?

The answer will depend largely on just what your desires happen to be, because people are not all the same. Even the profoundly unscrupulous are not all the same. Some people – whether they have a conscience or not – favor the ease of inertia, while others are filled with dreams and wild ambitions. Some human beings are brilliant and talented, some are dull-witted, and most, conscience or not, are somewhere in between. There are violent people and nonviolent ones, individuals who are motivated by blood lust and those who have no such appetites. […]

Provided you are not forcibly stopped, you can do anything at all.

If you are born at the right time, with some access to family fortune, and you have a special talent for whipping up other people’s hatred and sense of deprivation, you can arrange to kill large numbers of unsuspecting people. With enough money, you can accomplish this from far away, and you can sit back safely and watch in satisfaction. […]

Crazy and frightening – and real, in about 4 percent of the population….

The prevalence rate for anorexic eating disorders is estimated a 3.43 percent, deemed to be nearly epidemic, and yet this figure is a fraction lower than the rate for antisocial personality. The high-profile disorders classed as schizophrenia occur in only about 1 percent of [the population] – a mere quarter of the rate of antisocial personality – and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that the rate of colon cancer in the United States, considered “alarmingly high,” is about 40 per 100,000 – one hundred times lower than the rate of antisocial personality.

The high incidence of sociopathy in human society has a profound effect on the rest of us who must live on this planet, too, even those of us who have not been clinically traumatized. The individuals who constitute this 4 percent drain our relationships, our bank accounts, our accomplishments, our self-esteem, our very peace on earth.

Yet surprisingly, many people know nothing about this disorder, or if they do, they think only in terms of violent psychopathy – murderers, serial killers, mass murderers – people who have conspicuously broken the law many times over, and who, if caught, will be imprisoned, maybe even put to death by our legal system.

We are not commonly aware of, nor do we usually identify, the larger number of nonviolent sociopaths among us, people who often are not blatant lawbreakers, and against whom our formal legal system provides little defense.

Most of us would not imagine any correspondence between conceiving an ethnic genocide and, say, guiltlessly lying to one’s boss about a coworker. But the psychological correspondence is not only there; it is chilling. Simple and profound, the link is the absence of the inner mechanism that beats up on us, emotionally speaking, when we make a choice we view as immoral, unethical, neglectful, or selfish.

Most of us feel mildly guilty if we eat the last piece of cake in the kitchen, let alone what we would feel if we intentionally and methodically set about to hurt another person.

Those who have no conscience at all are a group unto themselves, whether they be homicidal tyrants or merely ruthless social snipers.

The presence or absence of conscience is a deep human division, arguably more significant than intelligence, race, or even gender.

What differentiates a sociopath who lives off the labors of others from one who occasionally robs convenience stores, or from one who is a contemporary robber baron – or what makes the difference between an ordinary bully and a sociopathic murderer – is nothing more than social status, drive, intellect, blood lust, or simple opportunity.

What distinguishes all of these people from the rest of us is an utterly empty hole in the psyche, where there should be the most evolved of all humanizing functions.

[…]

http://www.cassiopaea.com/

And that, My Friends™ perfectly sums up Brown, Blair, Rice The Murder Inc Cabal and John McCain.

6 June 2008

It has been learned that UK local authorities have been using RIP to spy into citizen communications and private data despite the assurances of Charles Clarke MP, in the attached letter, that this would not happen.

File names and title by Cryptome.
__________

Please feel free to publish the attached letter and/or this covering email.

This letter was sent about eight years ago as a reply to my Member of Parliament, Bill Cash, in response to the second of two letters I wrote complaining about the Regulation of Investigatory Powers bill that was then being considered by Parliament.

As you can see from the second paragraph on the second page, the Minister of State responsible for the legislation categorically denied that access to ‘communications data’ would be extended to local authorities.

As we’ve seen from recent media reports, this assurance has turned out to be entirely worthless.

—
Richard Lamont http://www.lamont.me.uk/

OpenPGP Key ID: 0xBD89BE41
Fingerprint: CE78 C285 1F97 0BDA 886D BA78 26D8 6C34 BD89 BE41

__________

Charles Clarke MP Letter: http://cryptome.org/clarke-rip-lie.pdf (4pp, 823KB)

Once more, we are taught the lesson that New Labour lies and lies and lies again. That is not a new lesson for anyone in Great Britain.

A more fresh lesson is that legislation must always be hermitically sealed; there must be no open ended provisions, no means to add to provisions in any way or change the meaning or scope in any way. If legislation that is leaky is passed, new provisions (in this case, allowing Local Authorities onto the list of organs who can use RIPA) WILL be added and there will be nothing anyone can do about it.

We must always remember; people who are willing to participate in mass murder are capable of doing any act that is less serious than murder, and turning Britain into a police state is less than murder…even though it can be likened to murdering Britain itself.

Even if you take the words of the porcine liar Charles Clarke at face value, this is another example of ‘good’ people bringing in power legislation that is later abuseable by bad people.

If there is anyone left who thinks that ID cards are not going to be used as a tool to abuse millions of people like RIPA is now being used beyond its original scope, they are completely, totally and probably mercifully, delusional.

ID card abuse will make these Local Authority RIPA abuses look like a 1950’s clip round the ear by the local bobby. They are going to unleash violations on an unimaginable scale and depth of penetration into the lives of the abused.

Remember the warnings of The Anonymous Email, that Andy Burnham said were:

Suggesting the Government will have knowledge of, and control over, your life through the National Identity Register is untrue. It is also nonsense to suggest either that “every outpost of the state” or private enterprises will have access to the register. The Bill sets strict terms on the limited number of public bodies with access to the register, while private organisations will be able to conduct verification checks only with the consent of the cardholder.

What we can take from this is that the Government will have knowledge of, and control over, your life through the National Identity Register, It is correct to suggest either that “every outpost of the state” and private enterprises who will also have access to the register. The Bill is unlimited in terms of the number of public bodies with access to the register, and private organisations will be able to conduct verification checks without the consent of the cardholder.

There. Via substitution he is being made to tell the truth.

We can see from these similar assurances of limited scope that everything anyone connected to the government has said about ID cards is a lie, and that they will break any promise they make to do with how they will be used, should they be rolled out.

Essentially they will bringing this sickening and immoral process to a national scale, affecting every single person in the UK, where a small college of twerps with overactive imaginations will determine wether or not anyone “digs with the wrong foot”.

We have been over this many times, and so have other people, at length.

You have been warned, and you know what to do.

Lecturers defy government over ID cards

Anthea Lipsett
Wednesday May 28, 2008
EducationGuardian.co.uk

Lecturers voted overwhelmingly to oppose and defy the government’s plans to introduce identity cards at the University and College annual congress in Manchester today.

The government plans to pilot the controversial identity cards with international students, which lecturers warned could deter them from choosing to study in the UK.

In January, the Tories accused the government of “blackmailing” students into holding identity cards in order to get student loans.

Dave Goode from Cambridge University, who proposed the motion that was passed, talked of the “horror and contempt” of identity cards and called on members to back the NO2ID campaign.

Mike Cushman, from the LSE, had led research into identity cards and called on members to oppose their introduction as “citizens and members of society, as trade union members and education trade union members”.

He said the Home Office would like society to believe that identity cards would “end terrorism … benefit fraud … illicit health service use … identity theft … and there would be no more queues and constant sunshine in Manchester”.

To applause he said the government wanted to “delegitimise dissent” and union members should fight back.

“We know it’s going to be piloted on non-EU international students – another barrier to students coming to our universities at a time when we’re facing greater international competition,” he said.

Malcolm Povey from Leeds University said: “We live in the most disciplined and rigid society throughout the history of human evolution. Every aspect of our lives is subject to control by the state. These cards are yet another step in this direction.

“To me, these cards will form part of the scapegoating and divisive agenda of government and employers. We’re already seeing this as a challenge to academic freedom.”

For instance, he said lecturers in Palestine would be subject to very strict controls if they were to get a job in the UK.

[…]

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/news/story/0,,2282476,00.html

This is great news, but I don’t know about students from other countries being put off from coming here; no Chinese student would see being forced to be fingerprinted and enrolled in the NIR as a barrier of any kind.

Which takes us nicely to this; take a look at these extraordinary clips…uh oh, they have been removed from YouTube ‘TOS Violation’

tap tap tap…

and we find:

here’s a summary:

Foreigner: I’d like to know why you’re taking my photo and fingerprints. Also, could you explain what you’ll be doing with them? What if I refuse?

Japanese Woman: 9/11. MULTIPLE SIMULTANEOUS TERRORIST ATTACKS. MASSIVE CASUALTIES. If you refuse to be fingerprinted or photographed, you will be denied entry into Japan.

Foreigner: That sounds fantastic! Hooray!!!! I’m going to go tell all my friends how awesome it is to get my fingerprints/photo taken and stored away somewhere by Japanese authorities! Banzai!

I was worried about my rights before watching this video, but now I’m totally relieved. Getting fingerprinted sounds like loads of fun, right?!

http://www.japanprobe.com/?p=2281

and here it is for you to watch.

Sickening.

tap tap tap…tap tap tap…

WTF? Make up your minds!!!!

Japan Ends Fingerprinting of Many Non-Japanese

After years of bitter protests and debate, the Parliament passed a bill today that will eliminate routine fingerprinting of permanent foreign residents, a practice that many non-Japanese have regarded as a humiliating symbol of government-sanctioned discrimination.

While the news was welcomed by many foreigners, especially the Korean residents who will be the principal beneficiaries, many insisted the bill leaves in place an extensive system of unfair controls on non-Japanese residents.

For instance, foreign residents can still be arrested if they are found without their alien registration cards, or face criminal prosecution if they fail to report changes of address or jobs to the Government within two weeks. Permanent foreign residents, many of whose families have been in Japan for generations, also complained that they would still be denied the right to work for the Government or to vote.

“I’m pleased with this change, but if you look at other elements of the law, you will find it still includes many forms of discrimination,” said Sohn Chung In, an official of the Korean Residents Union of Japan. “This is a step forward, but not a change in the society.”

About 602,000 Korean and Taiwanese residents, many of whose families were brought here forcibly when their homelands were occupied by Japan, will no longer have to submit to routine fingerprinting in order to work, study and live in Japan. About 43,000 other foreigners who have qualified for permanent foreign resident status will also be exempted, according to the Government.

The bill passed the lower house of the Parliament last month, and was passed today by the upper house. The changes are to take effect in January.

Immigration officials have wide discretion in determining who gains permanent residence; thus, many foreigners who have been here 10 years or more, and in some instances their entire lives, will not qualify.

The Parliament originally proposed eliminating the hated fingerprinting once and for all, but a compromise was reached after the National Police Agency refused to budge in its insistence that it needed to continue some fingerprinting to insure public security. The bill has a provision that the Government should try to eliminate fingerprinting in 1998.

Thus, for the time being, 320,000 foreign residents still must be fingerprinted. In the past, the Government has sought to lessen the anger over the practice with a variety of gestures.

For instance, prints were once taken of all the fingers, but are now done of just the left index finger; the alien registration cards all foreigners must carry are now placed in a plastic sleeve with a blue seal that discreetly covers the print.

But most objectors have not been moved by these steps, or the law’s revision. Continuing the Battle

Kathleen Morikawa, an American married to a Japanese, has faced prosecution because of her refusal for 10 years to be fingerprinted. She said today that the revision still discriminated against a class that she has fought hard to help — spouses of Japanese — who rarely qualify for permanent resident status.

“The whole issue of how foreigners are treated has not gone away with this,” she said.

Koreans have long faced the most persistent discrimination. Even those who seek Japanese citizenship, which means adopting Japanese names, find they are denied jobs with major corporations and are frequently unable to marry Japanese. There is a whole industry in Japan of private detectives who, on behalf of prospective employers or spouses, try to discover if people are of Korean or Chinese descent.

Mr. Sohn of the Korean association said his group was still struggling to gain the right of Koreans here to vote, work in Government jobs and learn about their heritage in public schools, a course that is not currently taught.

[…]

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE7DE113EF932A15756C0A964958260

From 1992.

???!!!

Sticking to the point of the terror hysteria, honestly, the Japanese government and industry MUST be smarter than this. They are already waking up out of the stupor caused by the mythical ‘911’; they should destroy this inhuman, mass violation system and show the world that they are above this degrading, useless nonsense.

I just came across a site called News Sniffer, whilst looking for examples of the stamps of Rudolph Hess manufactured by the Deutche Post custom stamp service. They produced twenty stamps, and that is enough to send them into a blind panic. But I digress.

New Sniffer came up in a google search and provided this page:

http://www.newssniffer.co.uk/articles/124994/diff/1/2

Which does a ‘diff’ between two different versions of a BBQ piece on this story.

Absolutely brilliant.

What this means is that we now have a service that will cache BBQ propaganda, and all of the revisions that they do to try and cover their tracks, and ramp up the lies. We can go back and see how they lie, how they censor and what a bunch of scum they really are.

News Sniffer, in addition to, “monitor(ing) corporate news organisations to uncover bias.” Tracks BBQ ‘have your say’ to see how many comments are being censored. They are currently monitoring 1,186,509 comments and found 15,120 censored.

Check out the comments that they retrieved and cached before they were censored.

And, quite appropriately, they have an image of Pinocchio in their header.

Look at this page, where an article from ‘bbc’, was first published or seen on Fri May 23 14:37:14 UTC 2008 and has 13 versions.

THIRTEEN VERSIONS IN ONE DAY.

No newspaper has the luxury of re writing their pieces THIRTEEN TIMES. Interestingly this is a story about MP’s expenses.

A fabulous idea, beautifully executed, very useful….well done boys!!!!!!!

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved legislation on Tuesday allowing the Justice Department to sue OPEC members for limiting oil supplies and working together to set crude prices, but the White House threatened to veto the measure.
ADVERTISEMENT

The bill would subject OPEC oil producers, including Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela, to the same antitrust laws that U.S. companies must follow.

The measure passed in a 324-84 vote, a big enough margin to override a presidential veto.

The legislation also creates a Justice Department task force to aggressively investigate gasoline price gouging and energy market manipulation.

“This bill guarantees that oil prices will reflect supply and demand economic rules, instead of wildly speculative and perhaps illegal activities,” said Democratic Rep. Steve Kagen of Wisconsin, who sponsored the legislation.

The lawmaker said Americans “are at the mercy” of OPEC for how much they pay for gasoline, which this week hit a record average of $3.79 a gallon.

The White House opposes the bill, saying that targeting OPEC investment in the United States as a source for damage awards “would likely spur retaliatory action against American interests in those countries and lead to a reduction in oil available to U.S. refiners.”

The administration said less oil going to refineries would limit available gasoline supplies and raise fuel prices.

Foreign investment in U.S. oil infrastructure has declined in the last decade. But the state-owned oil companies of several OPEC nations are owners of U.S. refineries, and those investments could be affected if the legislation becomes law, said Arlington, Virginia-based FBR Capital Markets Corp.

The bill also requires the Government Accountability Office to carryout a study on the effects of prior oil company mergers on energy prices.

The Senate would still have to approve the House measure.

The Senate previously approved similar legislation as part of a broad energy bill. However, the OPEC-suing provision was removed after White House opposition in order to get the underlying energy legislation signed into law.

[…]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080520/pl_nm/congress_opec_dc

Imagine all the Islamic countries declaring that the people in the USA would face Sharia justice, simply because that is the law in their lands.

That is what the Congress of the USA is declaring in this TOTALLY INSANE piece of legislation, which is tantamount to an act of war.

The laws of the USA stop at it’s shores. Anyone that thinks otherwise is delusional, like the IMBECILES who voted for this bogus, tawdry and highly provocative legislation. It is a great pity that the endless supply of stupidity that The House of Representatives generates cannot be substituted for oil; america’s fuel problems would be over in a single day.

Of course, what will happen next is that officers of OPEC will be arrested at US airports should they be stupid enough to travel to the USA for any reason. Or maybe they will just kidnap OPEC officers and have them flown to the US for retribution. They will do ANYTHING other than face the truth, which every sixth former knows now; the dollar is in decline, and this is the real cause of skyrocketing prices.

The insular, ignorant, arrogant, lying, murdering congress seems to be hell bent on the complete destruction of that once great country. They are a body without empathy, without wisdom or understanding, bereft of their collective senses (with one notable exception) and frankly, will ultimately get what they deserve.

Which is not what we want!

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.

Am avid lurker writes:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/13/aids.hiv

The most interesting thing I read today. It has significant implications regarding scientific funding, not to mention funding of public healthcare which she implies is worthless. Furthermore, it strengthens the argument that US ‘aid’ to ‘the Africa’ – that great nation! ;-) – is merely propping up the profits of drug companies by maximising and subsidising the market for ARVs. In South Africa this has come through voluntary licensing, which means Glaxo et al still get their cut without any manufacturing costs. Then there is the whole ‘faith-based’ aid agencies… and yet again today (Lebanon and Gaza, Burma and the whole HIV-infected sphere is highlighted in just one day) we see how the US just cannot keep its interfering dirty great stinking hooter out of other peoples business.

And I quoth:

“HIV is mostly about people doing stupid things in the pursuit of pleasure or money,” declares the cover on a proof copy of the book. “We’re just not allowed to say so.” She suspects she will never work in the Aids industry again for saying so. “But it’s true.”

Pisani, 43, spent 10 years working in the field of HIV, first for Unaids and then for a non-governmental organisation (NGO) in Indonesia. As an epidemiologist, she quickly identified the risk of the virus spreading among drug injectors, gay men and the sex trade across Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe – underdeveloped countries with inadequate resources to prevent an epidemic. That placed 100 million at risk in Asia alone – equivalent to a third of the population of the Africa. But the data was clear: “HIV wasn’t going to rage through the billions in the ‘general population’. And we knew it.”

Like most of her colleagues, however, she also quickly realised that “governments don’t like spending money on sex workers, gay men and drug addicts”. So she put her skills as a former journalist to work, and began producing the sort of reports that persuaded politicians in Washington and the west that it is not “wicked people” but “innocent wives” at risk. “Aids couldn’t be about sex and drugs,” she explains. “So suddenly it had to be about development, and gender, and blah blah blah.”

The strategy was more successful than she could ever have imagined. “All these obsessively politically correct things started getting introduced.” HIV publications and conferences began devoting more time and attention to issues such as poverty, gender, development, vulnerability, leadership – what Pisani calls “sacred cows” – than to condoms and clean needles. “I’m just waiting for ‘climate change and Aids’,” she jokes sarcastically in her book – and sure enough, this week a headline appeared in an Australian newspaper: “Global warming set to fan HIV.”

[…]

As the veneer of political correctness starts to fade….

When people like this start to wake up and then go on to expose the nonsense, a large scale abandonment of brainwashing cannot be far behind.

Say goodbye to ‘hate speech’, political correctness, the surveillance mania, the terror fad, security theatre, cult environmentalism, [prefix] o phobia, [prefix] o fascism, the health and safety fad, the police state, and all the other garbage that has erupted like ear to ear scarlet acne on the beautiful face of Britain.

WASHINGTON — A German graduate student in oceanography at M.I.T. applied to the Transportation Security Administration for a new ID card allowing him to work around ships and docks.

What the student, Wilken-Jon von Appen, received in return was a letter that not only turned him down but added an ominous warning from John M. Busch, a security administration official: “I have determined that you pose a security threat.”

Similar letters have gone to 5,000 applicants across the country who have at least initially been turned down for a Transportation Worker Identification Credential, an ID card meant to guard against acts of terrorism, agency officials said Monday.

The officials also said they were sorry about the language, which they may change in the future, but had no intention of withdrawing letters already sent.

“It’s an unfortunate choice of words in a bureaucratic letter,” said Ellen Howe, a security agency spokeswoman.

Ms. Howe and Maurine Fanguy, who oversees the new ID card program, said that most foreign students did not qualify for the identity cards, but that the letters were not intended to label the recipients as potential terrorists. (Some applicants are also turned down because of criminal records.)

Mr. von Appen, 23, one of at least four oceanography students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who received identical letters, said he was stunned by its language.

“I was pretty much speechless and quite intimidated,” said Mr. von Appen, whose research is supported by a $65,000-a-year grant from the National Science Foundation.

A British student at M.I.T. who was rejected, Sophie Clayton, 28, said that at first she was amused at what appeared to be a bureaucratic absurdity. But as she pondered the designation, Ms. Clayton said she grew worried. “The two words ‘security threat’ are now in the files next to my name, my photograph and my fingerprints,” she said.

My emphasis.

You will get no sympathy here.

You have no business being in the USA, where they fingerprint you like a criminal just to enter. It is people like you, who blithely behave like there is nothing wrong with USVISIT that have made it so deeply entrenched.

Now that you are tasting what it REALLY Means, you are ‘worried’. You should have been worried BEFORE you submitted to the humiliation and violation of being fingerprinted. Now you are in their system, marked as a ‘security threat’ for THE REST OF YOUR LIFE, and as we can see below, there is nothing you can do about it, the government is unrepentant, and refuses to correct your records.

Institute officials were also disturbed. The agency controls airport security, and “our students travel in and out of the country a lot,” said Danielle Guichard-Ashbrook, associate dean and director of the international student office at M.I.T.

And the agency is part of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees immigration matters, including student visas.

Ms. Guichard-Ashbrook said the security agency should remove the misleading language from all files and issue new letters formally withdrawing the “threat” label.

But Ms. Howe, the agency spokeswoman, said that the letters were legal, if flawed, and that there were no plans to send replacements.

She said she did not believe the denial letters would cause students any problems with visa renewal or airport security checks. They will even be able to enter secure ports and ships for their work as long as they are accompanied by someone with the new ID, Ms. Howe said.

The Transportation Worker Identification Credential requirement is being phased in starting Oct. 15. The cards cost the applicant $132.50 and have been issued to 275,000 people so far of 1.2 million people expected to receive the credential, officials said.

My epmhasis once again.

What the last bold words mean, is that this very stupid girl could have saved herself the besmirching of her records and simply gone with someone who had the ID. Not only that, but if anyone can go into these ‘secure’ areas simply by being vouched by someone who has the right ID, the whole system is worthless as a means to secure an area.

This is a perfect example of Security Theatre.

It is beyond stupid, beyond absurd, and everyone that goes along with it, like ‘Sophie Clayton‘ helps solidify the insanity.

Do you remember our first taste of Barak Obama? The speech that thrilled everyone in July of 2004?

There was a BLOGDIAL back then, and of course, we wrote about that speech, and this strange man who appeared out of nowhere with smooth and empty words, who now threatens to further dismantle The United States of America:

Now let me be clear. We have real enemies in the world. These enemies must be found. They must be pursued and they must be defeated. John Kerry knows this. And just as Lieutenant Kerry did not hesitate to risk his life to protect the men who served with him in Vietnam, President Kerry will not hesitate one moment to use our military might to keep America safe and secure.

Now. This sort of totally absurd talk does not inspire one with confidence in the incoming US regime. Amercia has no enemies in the world. That is a fact. The American Government has bitter enemies, and it is that entitiy that is dragging the innocent American population into harms way, the way it did during Kerry’s youth.

There is no one out there that needs to be “pursued and defeated”; everyone in the entire world (including you, as in “But you know this”) except American politicians knows this. Perhaps this man should spend some time outside of America to re-acquaint himself with the real world. Spain will do; they are now off of the shit list because they, the Spanish population, have the common sense to elect people who will mind Spain’s business.

You know the song by Bread, the one with the lyric “Dreams are for those who sleep”; well, the American dream sounds like a dream of sleepers when it is spoken about in this way. They had better wake up to the real danger caused by the reckless, racist and insane foreign and internal policy that their government has put into high gear, and elect a government that will put the breaks on and do a u-turn before there is nothing left to save.

It would be much more comforting to have a candidate who had refused to go to Viet Nam rather than one that reveled in that pointless and illegal “war” … beggars cant be choosers.

Whatever happens, the entire world will still be faced with an unexposed and untraveled loose cannon congress, a society gripped by xenophobia and extreme paranoia rubber stamping their every misguided vote for aggression, and no real way out in sight.

Warm and fuzzy feel good speeches simply will not cut it. The world wants to know the answer to a very simple question; are you going to knock it off?!
posted by Irdial , 5:24 PM Þ

um, hey akin: the ‘world’ isn’t electing the new american president.

Perhaps if the whole world elected the american president, you might be given one that is reasonable. Certainly if a country is to be the policeman of the world, the very same world should have direct control over that country and its election process.

and this bullshit about ‘national security’ is what the american populous is currently most interested in.

Hence my point about the hysterical false concerns over security. The answer to this “problem” is clear, and has been demonstrated by Spain. Let me put it in terms anyone can understand; if you poke around in a hornets nest, you are going to get stung. There. Leave the hornets to do what the hornets do, and live life that you deserve, free, peacful, without fear and hopefully long.

i agree with what you have to say — honestly — but trust me, electability is just as important as being truthful right now.

So, the whole world should sit by and say nothing while one bunch of idiots replaces the last bunch? I think not. No one in the world would care if the americans voted Luke Skywalker of 2 Live Crew as their president (at least he has a passport uunlike half of the congressmen) if their government minded their own business, but it seems that they refuse to, and even intelligent people appear to be saying that we all have to put up with this hysteria and the interference that stems from it (and which caused it) “until we are done with it”. Not good enough.

after your whole tirade against nader, one would think ‘you would know this.’

I was responding to that template-made feelgood claptrap speech which did not impress or move me in the slightest bit. Bush has to go, at the very least, to cut off his freinds businesses from world access; we all know he will never face a war crimes tribunal, in the end, that wont matter, because its far more important that he will no longer be there pushing the world towards the precipice . We all want Bush to be replaced. Nader is insane for threatening this; thats just logic. Now, imagining that Kerry is going to win, we casually take a close look at him and find him utterly wanting, even on the surface. Still we would prefer him, just to see Bush and the Neocon armageddonite puppeteers thrown into the garbage where they belong.

kerry won’t get elected if he says our new foreign policy won’t include kicking ass. (and yes, i think thats despicable)

So, Kerry, to be elected, must promise to break international law, ignore treaties and pledge to continue america’s suicidal pre-emptive foreign policy just to be elected, and we must all put up with it in silence, because “its just like that”.

This is not reasonable.

And you know this.

At the very least, apologise for this dreadful state that the world has been deliberately thrown into, and beg forgiveness and forbearance from the civilized world while you clean your house out. It would be only words, but if that is all you have, we will gladly take them. Telling the world to “MYOB” about this election is just too outrageous for words!
posted by Irdial , 9:00 PM Þ

[…]
And I can tell you this; everyone everywhere is more tired of your warmongering government than you are of hearing how much we hate it.
[…]
posted by Irdial , 11:27 AM Þ

That was the way we did it.

Americans are now in the position of having a real choice in the presidential election; Ron Paul or anyone else (since all the other candidates represent the same faction).

They have the benefit of hindsight, a population that is more awake than it was in 2004 and an identical crisis on the horizon, in the form of an insanely murderous attack on Iran.

John McCain is promising more war “My Friends”; Hillary Clinton is using phrases like ‘obliterate Iran’ on television. Obama has an invasion of Pakistan on the cards. These people are INSANE.

Hillary is particularly offensive, because even in her own upside down reality of misremembered and misspoken events, she is a total idiot; this is the same monster who only a short time ago said that Obomba was “naïve” on foreign policy for his declaration on a hypothetical scenario involving Pakistan, yet this harpie uses phrases like ‘obliterate Iran’, when the whole world is watching.

All three of these people are so manifestly inappropriate for the job, how could anyone possibly get it wrong this time?

The answers are, in case you are too thick to understand:

• If you are going to vote, vote for Ron Paul and NOT Hillary Clinton or Barak Obama or John McCain.
• Do not under any circumstances permit Iran to be attacked.
• Do not march in the streets to try and prevent an attack on Iran.

Obomba has americans so deeply hypnotized that it might be hard to derail him.

As for preventing an attack on Iran, we now know definitively that marching in the streets and vigils and every other 20th century tactic is useless; that is how the illegal, immoral, insane Iraq invasion and mass murder was given license to happen. You now know this to be true. If you march again, or hold a candle lit vigil, or do ANYTHING that was done before and shown to be useless, you are a COMPLETE IDIOT.

Ron Paul received more donations from active military than all the other candidates combined. All of these military personnel swear an oath:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to the regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God“

How is it that they can sit around watching America being dismantled and do absolutely nothing at all? Surely they must understand, up to the highest levels that ‘enemies domestic’ are in full operation, and that it is their sworn duty to excise them? Why has not a single shot been fired, why has there not been a breaking of ranks?

It is BIZARRE.

They are on the edge of engaging in another war crime, in historical terms, a page turn after Iraq, and not one of them is acting? No one is that stupid.

I would love to read an explanation for this inexplicable silence, this immoral inaction, this nauseating inertia; there must be an explanation – even the act of a lone maverick would exonerate them, but there is not one soldier amongst them (it seems) that actually understands what America really was.

Even the Nazis had high ranking soldiers willing to kill their despot. In their failure, they achieved the greatest honor for being on the right side of history.

In fact, we see that the army is doing exactly the opposite of what their oaths demand; they are preparing to take over the country and put decent people into concentration camps.

If only it were all a bad dream…

House Approves New Property Seizure Law

The criminals in the federal government are now trying to legalize the seizure of computers and other property under the guise of strengthening intellectual property laws. HR 4279 or the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2008 which was recently passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, will give the government draconian powers to do just this. This legislation gives the government the power to seize property that facilitates the violation of intellectual property laws. The legislation also mandates the formation of a formal Intellectual Property Enforcement Division within the office of the Deputy Attorney General to enforce this madness. In addition, a new office called the Office of the United States Intellectual Property Enforcement Representative is created within the Executive Office of the President. If you boil it down to brass tax, this legislation allows the U.S. government to lawfully seize your computer if it has one unauthorized mp3 file on its hard drive. It also provides the authorization for the creation of offices within the executive branch to enforce a law that is impossible to enforce.

Below is taken from section 202 of HR 4279 that gives the federal government the authorization to seize property that may have been used to facilitate an intellectual property violation. The language in this section indicates that a violation would include downloading a single unauthorized mp3 file on to a computer.

d) Unauthorized Recording of Motion Pictures- Section 2319B(b) of title 18, United States Code, is amended to read as follows:

`(b) Forfeiture and Destruction; Restitution-

`(1) CIVIL FORFEITURE PROCEEDINGS- (A) The following property is subject to forfeiture to the United States:

`(i) Any copies of a motion picture or other audiovisual work protected under title 17 that are made without the authorization of the copyright owner.

`(ii) Any property constituting or derived from any proceeds obtained directly or indirectly as a result of a violation of subsection (a).

`(iii) Any property used, or intended to be used, to commit or facilitate the commission of a violation of subsection (a) that is owned or predominantly controlled by the violator or by a person conspiring with or aiding and abetting the violator in committing the violation, except that property is subject to forfeiture under this clause only if the Government establishes that there was a substantial connection between the property and the violation of subsection (a).

This is the 1980s equivalent of the government being given the legal authority to seize cassette recorders if they were used in recording a song off of the radio. Under this legislation, downloading even a single mp3 file unauthorized by the copyright owner will give the federal government the power to take your computer. There is no way that the federal government can enforce this. In fact, it is insane that the U.S. House of Representatives is more concerned about keeping the record and movie industry happy by passing this legislation than they are with real issues. Incredibly, this bill was passed by a vote of 410-11. Two of the dissenting voters included Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul.

John Conyers a fascist and anti-Constitutionalist member of the U.S. House of Representatives who originally introduced this bill made the following statements describing the purpose of the legislation. His statements were republished in a Billboard Magazine report.

(1) prioritize intellectual property protection to the highest level of our government;

(2) make changes to IP law to enhance the ability of IP owners to effectively enforce their rights;

(3) make it easier to criminally prosecute repeat offenders;

(4) increase penalties for IP violations that endanger public health and safety.

Basically speaking, Conyers believes that downloading illegal mp3 and movie files endanger public health and safety. Conyers is either an insane individual that belongs in a mental institution for making such a ridiculous statement or he and everybody else who voted for this bill is in the back pockets of the RIAA, the MPAA and the rest of the music and movie industry. Common sense would dictate that such a law is unenforceable and should have not been seriously entertained. This is just another sign that this country is run by a bunch of fascists who are trying to find as many ways to undermine civil liberties under the guise of enforcing the law. What is really ridiculous about this, is the fact that the Constitution which is the supreme law of the land is violated by these fascist tyrants in Congress every single day of the week. If they were actually serious about enforcing the law, why are they not following the Constitution? Why do they reject it?

Maybe if the movie and music industry stopped putting out horrible content, their sales would be a little better. It seems as if they are trying to blame people who download unauthorized mp3 and movie files for their shortcomings in business. Perhaps they should do what smaller independent music and film production companies have done and embrace the technological revolution instead of stifling it by trying to push this anti-American legislation down our throats.

It is understandable to go after people who are illegally profiting off of selling material that isn’t their own but there really isn’t a need for government involvement. The record industry should sue those people if they believe that there are groups or individuals who are unfairly profiting off of their work. A court can decide if the claims they present are valid. However, to give powers to an already corrupt government to seize private property from people who are violating copyright laws by merely having downloaded mp3 files or movie files on their computer is unenforceable and beyond the scope of government. Section 301 of the bill establishes the Office of the United States Intellectual Property Enforcement Representative and section 501 of the bill establishes the Intellectual Property Enforcement Division within the Department of Justice under the office of the Deputy Attorney General. These particular offices will be established to serve as the enforcement arm for this legislation.

How many more powers is this corrupt legislature going to give to a renegade executive branch that is already engaging in perpetual war, setting up a police state, authorizing torture, destroying national sovereignty and other horrors? The federal government is full of petty bureaucrats and tyrants that can’t do anything right to begin with, and the U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to expand government again through this legislation. With 410 of these tyrants voting for this legislation, it is doubtful that we will be successful in defeating this bill in the U.S Senate or if it goes to the dictator in chief.

[…]

Lee Rogers at Rogue Government

Pure unadulterated evil.

Let the ‘War on Piracy‘ begin!

A lurker writes:

You may know all this, but here are some details which may be of interest otherwise:

THE INTELLIGENT AIRPORT (TINA) PROJECT

Researchers from the universities of Leeds, Cambridge and University College London have teamed up with 10 companies on The INtelligent Airport (TINA) project, funded by The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), led by Professor Jaafar Elmirghani of Leeds University.

‘It will link a number of separate systems including wireless biometrics and RFID … We are going to put a demonstrator system into the new Heathrow terminal five to see how the system works.’ – Professor Jaafar Elmirghani
http://www.theengineer.co.uk/Articles/303000/Travel+tracker.htm

This project aims to develop a next generation advanced wired and wireless network to meet the potential requirements for future “intelligent airports”.
TINA website: http://intelligentairport.org.uk/

Travel Tracker 12 November 2007, The Engineer online:

Such a system is set to be installed and trialled at Heathrow’s terminal five, where an ‘intelligent gate’ will demonstrate, among other things, accurate passenger position estimation through active and passive RFID and radio over fibre (RoF) where the RFID is part of the boarding pass and/or passport.

Predictions suggest a terminal-wide network would have to support 10 million sources of information, from individual tracking units for passengers and staff to technology such as biometric gates. It is believed the system will have to deal with a peak data rate of 100Gbit/s as it tracks people, luggage, aircraft and all the information generated by those sources. …

Elmirghani : ‘It will link a number of separate systems including wireless biometrics and RFID, which could be put into boarding passes and will soon be put in passports. Passengers can be processed a lot faster and tags could be used to track luggage so it can be handled in a more efficient way — tracked from arrival to being put on a plane.’ …

‘The system will use a radio-over-fibre distribution network with a distributed antenna system creating a unified structure. We are looking at passive kinds of radio frequency distribution. This will allow the basic systems of the infrastructure to be easily upgraded and updated. We are going to put a demonstrator system into the new Heathrow terminal five to see how the system works.’ …

‘People will probably have issues with the technology but you have to weigh the benefits with any down sides,’ added Elmirghani. ‘This kind of information is already available if you have a mobile phone. Your position can be triangulated but that information hasn’t been available to airports. Overall there can be more benefits than some of the losses.’

full article here: http://www.theengineer.co.uk/Articles/303000/Travel+tracker.htm

Next Generation of Airports are on the Horizon , Leeds university website

A remote biometric scan that removes passport queues, airport lounge chairs that “nudge” passengers to remind them that their flight is due to board and boarding passes that locate passengers and provide automated access could be among the next generation of airport technologies that will transform airports and air travel in the future. Other new technologies developed in the project include radio frequency tags attached to baggage to help stop luggage from being lost. The same radio frequency tags will be given to passengers and coupled with wireless biometric devices, these will enable security staff to know where everyone is and who they are, helping make airport security more stringent and efficient, and also ensuring that passengers make it to the departure gate on time. Wireless technology could also allow passengers to use a portable inflight entertainment terminal which could be used in the departure lounge as well as on the plane. …

“We are hoping to achieve this within the next six years” – Professor Jaafar Elmirghani

full article : Faculty of Engineering, University of Leeds http://www.engineering.leeds.ac.uk/news/index.shtml (scroll down)

TINA Project system technology

RF-ID Tag Location Using RF-over-fibre Techniques , UCL paper

from the conclusion :

…The detection mechanism could be a small capacitively-coupled current across the sealed wrist-band which is interrupted if it is either cut or removed. […] However, public acceptance of the use of wristbands for this purpose may well be an issue, so exactly how the tags are deployed remains open at this stage. … The system may also find application in a range of other arenas, including hospitals (e.g., maternity units), theme parks, exhibition halls and concert venues.”

PAPER:

RF-ID Tag Location Using RF-over-fibre Techniques
P. V. Brennan, A. J. Seeds, and Y. Huang
University College London, UK

Abstract:
Security and efficiency at airports has, in recent years, become a critical issue in the eyes of the general public, security services and politicians alike.. This paper presents a high-resolution, indoor location technique, based on RF-over-fibre, that is ideally suited to the monitoring of a high density of people and/or objects in such a situation.

extracts

[…]

The basic concept is for airports to be fitted with a network of combined RF-ID tag readers and high-resolution panoramic cameras, spaced at around 15–20m intervals, which are used to monitor the movements of people around the terminal building or buildings. Each passenger carries or wears an RF-ID tag, which can allow location to an accuracy of around 1m, and the video and tag data merged to give a very powerful surveillance capability with a wide range of potential benefits. The tags developed at UCL are transmit-only devices that do not store any data but emit a beacon with a unique ID at frequent, randomised intervals, at least once per second, and this is cross-referenced to passenger information already stored on the system — such as name, flight number and perhaps even biometric data. This gives the effect of intelligence in the tags — passenger information can appear to be ‘read’ from them though it actually resides on the computer system. The tags and reader infrastructure allow convenient monitoring of passenger flows and identification of late-running passengers.

The system can offer a number of benefits; it can be used to control entry to secure areas, allow the precise automated-tracking of certain individuals, help to evacuate the building in the event of an emergency, provide rapid location and imaging of lost children and help to ensure that large aircraft are boarded efficiently by detecting and locating stray passengers. The Optag/ TINA consortium have calculated that cost of flight delays due to late-running passengers amounts to some 150M Euros per year in Europe alone, so considerable savings are possible with a system of this nature. A high degree of functionality can be built in to the system, dependent largely on the ingenuity of the user interface.

PROTOTYPE SYSTEM DESCRIPTION
The prototype Optag / TINA camera comprises a cluster of eight 1600 ×1200 pixel CMOS sensors, producing a 9600 ×1200 panoramic image. A portion of this image, or a lower-resolution panorama, is streamed to the central monitoring station using gigabit ethernet with the UDP protocol. The camera resolution allows recognition of a human face to 6m and detection to around 30m.

The tag system is rather challenging in that it is required to operate at relatively long range (10–20m), perform location estimates and simultaneously identify large numbers ( >1000) of tagged people or items in any given cell. To meet these challenges, the Optag/ TINA team have designed a unique tag protocol that sends short bursts of data, at randomly-varying intervals, with a mean update rate of twice per second. Each tag reader uses direction finding to establish the bearing of the tag and then two or more bearings are used to establish the location. The prototype tag board, operating at 5.8GHz, is shown in Figure 2. The peak tag output power is 10mW, but the mean output power is very much lower — around 20µW, many orders of magnitude below the threshold of emissions that would constitute any conceivable health risk. The prototype tag is a little larger than a credit card, but with miniaturization, could be very compact and easily incorporated in a small card or unobtrusive wristband.

The tag readers, shown in Figure 3, are based on four antennas and receivers mounted at 90-degree spacings, which perform amplitude-comparison direction finding [3] on each tag burst. This straightforward approach provides a reasonable accuracy of around 1m within a 10m radius. However, the effects of reflections, signal blockage in crowded environments and other propagation artifacts are likely to be significant and will most likely diminish the achievable accuracy.

[…]

The prototype system is designed with a 0.5s repetition interval equating to a mean update interval of 0.9s —indicating that the position of all tags can be determined and updated on a second-by-second basis. Thus the system can easily accommodate 1000 tags in any given cell, which is probably close to the limit of the number of people who can possibly be squeezed into a 10m radius area! …

[…]

A range of trials have been conducted in the departure lounge at Debrecen airport , Hungary. Both the camera and tag systems have been evaluated based on three cells each containing a camera and RF-ID tag reader unit. As far as the tag system is concerned, the location accuracy was assessed with the tag readers mounted both centrally and in the corners of the rooms and with a ‘passenger’ wearing the tag in a variety of locations and facing in several directions. Measurements were repeated in crowd situations in which the tag-wearing person was surrounded by other people.

The general conclusions of this trial were that the best positioning of the tag readers is in the corners of the room, location errors are indeed dependent on tag orientation and obstructions due to other individuals, and operating range exceeds expectations — 25m being easily accomplished even under the most adverse conditions.

CONCLUSION
The Optag / TINA projects have demonstrated the feasibility of a combined RF-ID tag and panoramic video monitoring approach in an airport environment, including a proof-of-concept trial in a Hungarian airport building. All indications are that the concept is sound, though any future adoption will require further development and commercialisation, in particular the network infrastructure and associated software to both operate the Optag/ TINA system and interface with existing airport computer systems and databases. The mode of deployment of the tag element of the system is controversial and somewhat critical to certain areas of operation. For instance, in a security context, it would be crucial to ensure that each person carries his/her own tag and does not lose or swap them. One way in which this can be achieved is to incorporate the tag in a wristband that sends an alert code should it be removed. The detection mechanism could be a small capacitively-coupled current across the sealed wrist-band which is interrupted if it is either cut or removed. With suitable circuit miniaturisation, the wristband could be small and unobtrusive, perhaps made of thin card. However, public acceptance of the use of wristbands for this purpose may well be an issue, so exactly how the tags are deployed remains open at this stage.

Current work is focusing on an alterative tag and reader implementation involving TDOA location exploiting RF-over-fibre transmission, which offers the prospect of significantly improved location accuracy and multipath mitigation Another area that has huge potential for future development is the user interface, where a whole host of features could be incorporated including, for instance, an additional, simple interface at departure gates to alert staff to late-running passengers; an automated monitoring and announcement system to contact such late-running passengers as and when required; extensive archiving facilities to store tag and at least a subset of video data; seamless linking of tag ID, personal data and biometric data and market research analysis of data, to aid the design of airport layouts for instance to optimise passenger flows or to feed into charging models for the various retail outlets. It is clear that, once such an infrastructure is in place, there is huge potential to make use of the capabilities in a variety of different manners, many of which have probably not yet been foreseen. The system may also find application in a range of other arenas, including hospitals (e.g., maternity units), theme parks, exhibition halls and concert venues.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank EPSRC and the European Commission, particularly Jean-Pierre Lentz, for their encouragement and support during this work

PDF : http://piers.mit.edu/piersproceedings/download.php?file=cGllcnMyMDA3cHJhZ3VlfDJQM18wMjU1LnBkZnwwNzAzMDkwODUyNTk=
HTML : MIT

TINA Project summary
from the EPSRC website (page for Cambridge University grant 2006-2009 )

Abstract:
Diverse applications are expected to appear in the future with complex and often varying service requirements, traffic profiles and user expectations. These will require extremely advanced adaptive computing and communication systems to provide users with mobile, secure and automatic means of conducting business. A prime application area is in international travel which continues to grow supported by a significant investment in infrastructure, such as Heathrow Terminal 5. An intelligent, adaptive, self-organising wired/wireless infrastructure is essential in this environment. It is anticipated that the considerable growth in the complexity of this infrastructure will not just be due to the proliferation of established fixed equipment such as wireless base stations, surveillance cameras, security detection equipment, display and terminal equipment. The requirements will also be for a much wider deployment of more compact portable equipment, for example, location and control equipment on a wide range of transportation equipment. Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags supported by a transparent optical-RF network can be used to sense, locate and track an array of objects including luggage, mobile assets and commercial goods and can provide additional features such as boarding pass auto-tags and access control tags. These active RFID tags will operate at low data rates, typically 64 kbit/s, but an airport environment can be expected to contain a few million of them. Mobile biometric sensors will be widely deployed in this environment providing advanced features. A range of fixed and mobile terminals will provide additional security measures such as chemical detection and analysis, while other terminals, fixed and mobile, will support passenger information and entertainment services on transit. The infrastructure will support an array of personal passenger and staff wireless media rich devices. The wired/wireless network envisaged will thus be huge and complex, supporting perhaps 10 million information sources, with an anticipated peak aggregate data rate of order 100 Gbit/s in a relatively local access environment. This is beyond the capability of any current network and research is needed to understand the principles upon which an effective system could be constructed. As this is such an ambitious and multidisciplinary project, a collaborative programme is proposed. The project has strong industrial involvement and support from Laing O’Rourke who will provide the application context, share design experience, user requirements and architectural constraints and Marconi who will contribute expertise in complex communication system design. At the outline proposal stage, we received feedback from EPSRC that they would welcome additional collaborations with those involved in airport operations. We are delighted that, in response, BAA and Boeing have agreed to become involved in the project, and within UCL links have been made to Dr Paul Brennan, who will contribute substantial knowledge of RfID, being involved in a major European project in the area. Finally we have additionally sought to involve the equipment company Motorola and the installation planning company Red-M to ensure that we can receive expert advice across all areas within the project.

SOURCE http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk/ViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/D076803/1

[…]

Thank you to the lurker who emailed this.

Right off the bat, this leaps from the screen:

‘People will probably have issues with the technology but you have to weigh the benefits with any down sides,’ added Elmirghani. ‘This kind of information is already available if you have a mobile phone. Your position can be triangulated but that information hasn’t been available to airports. Overall there can be more benefits than some of the losses.’

This is the same old argument, proffered by imbeciles, anti intellectuals, ostrich posturers and dumbasses. “They are already half way up your ass, so why not push it all the way in“. These people cannot distinguish between the tracking your position as a consequence of delivery of a service you subscribe to (cellular telephones) and one that is compulsory, imposed by a government or its proxy. You can always turn off your cellular telephone at any time to hide your location. Compulsory tracking is an entirely different matter. Triangulation data from cellphones is not available to airports because they do not need it, cellphones have nothing to do with the operation of airports and there is no cross over whatsoever between the two services.

There are no benefits to giving up your liberty for security, especially when the security you are getting is not really security at all but Security Theatre, which is a lie and way to rob people of their human dignity.

I find it to be disgusting that there are people out there who think that they have the right to say what rights are worth losing for the general public, and then to blithley impliment systems that take away those rights, in the belief that they are doing what is good for everyone. Imagine that Jaafar Elmirghani believes, “..that overall there can be more benefits to society than some of the losses if we compulsorily circumcise all females in Britain.” There is no difference between that belief and the belief that tracking everyone everywhere at all times is worth the losses of personal liberty because ‘society’ benefits overall.

That is the true face of the thinking of these monsters.

As for ‘probably’ have issues, why, yes indeed professor, we do have a BIG problem with your snake-oil Security Theatre, and as we have seen, Terminal 5 has had to climb down on its absurd fascist fingerprinting plan.

I am convinced that all of this snake-oil is going to go the way of the dinosaurs. When the number of people being hurt by these systems reaches a critical mass, they will be abandoned, in the manner that I have previously described.

Airline passengers are to be screened with facial recognition technology rather than checks by passport officers, in an attempt to improve security and ease congestion, the Guardian can reveal.

This means they can eventually fire all the immigration staff, who have blithely gone along with all this nonsense. They should have watched, The Man in the White Suit before they went gung ho for the biometric net….

From summer, unmanned clearance gates will be phased in to scan passengers’ faces and match the image to the record on the computer chip in their biometric passports.

Border security officials believe the machines can do a better job than humans of screening passports and preventing identity fraud. The pilot project will be open to UK and EU citizens holding new biometric passports.

What they are saying that is for the decades that humans have been comparing faces to passports, it has not been working well.

What utter nonsense.

Computer programmers have been working for years to make software that can match the human brain’s ability to recognize faces, and they still have not got it right. The best tool for recognizing a face is a human brain in a living person. What this is actually about is automating the checking of innocent people against criminal databases. This system does not simply check that the person carrying the passport is the person in front of the machine; it checks wether or not the police want you, which is nothing to do with plain immigration. Immigration controls work well without biometric passports. The first control should be getting out of Shengen and the other damaging EU treaties that allow anyone to enter your country from almost anywhere.

But there is concern that passengers will react badly to being rejected by an automated gate. To ensure no one on a police watch list is incorrectly let through, the technology will err on the side of caution and is likely to generate a small number of “false negatives” – innocent passengers rejected because the machines cannot match their appearance to the records.

And this is what we have been saying for years; the computer will say wether or not you are guilty or wanted. When a false positive comes up, what sort of extra checks will they make? Will they DNA swab you, harshly interrogate you (both of which means detaining you) all on the say of a COMPUTER.

This, my friends, is total insanity.

They may be redirected into conventional passport queues, or officers may be authorised to override automatic gates following additional checks.

Why take the risk of being embarrassed in that way? Why not just queue normally and not have your details checked against the criminal computer?

Ministers are eager to set up trials in time for the summer holiday rush, but have yet to decide how many airports will take part. If successful, the technology will be extended to all UK airports.

Ministers are retarded. Period.

The automated clearance gates introduce the new technology to the UK mass market for the first time and may transform the public’s experience of airports.

Ahhh, a Guardian fluff line!

Existing biometric, fast-track travel schemes – iris and miSense – operate at several UK airports, but are aimed at business travellers who enroll in advance.

And?!! GET TO THE POINT YOU SIMPLETON.

The rejection rate in trials of iris recognition, by means of the unique images of each traveller’s eye, is 3% to 5%, although some were passengers who were not enrolled but jumped into the queue.

SIMPLETON SIMPLETON SIMPLETON SIMPLETON SIMPLETON SIMPLETON SIMPLETON SIMPLETON SIMPLETON SIMPLETON SIMPLETON SIMPLETON SIMPLETON SIMPLETON SIMPLETON!

The trials emerged at a conference in London this week of the international biometrics industry, top civil servants in border control, and police technology experts. Gary Murphy, head of operational design and development for the UK Border Agency, told one session: “We think a machine can do a better job [than manned passport inspections]. What will the public reaction be? Will they use it? We need to test and see how people react and how they deal with rejection. We hope to get the trial up and running by the summer.

I want to see how Neu Labour deal with rejection….ha!

Some conference participants feared passengers would only be fast-tracked to the next bottleneck in overcrowded airports. Automated gates are intended to help the government’s progress to establishing a comprehensive advance passenger information (API) security system that will eventually enable flight details and identities of all passengers to be checked against a security watch list.

My emphasis.

The Guardian is one of the guilty parties for using this sort of language unchallenged. What on earth do they mean by ‘security watch list’? Who says who goes on it, who maintains it, etc etc. The americans are having a hell of a time with their own misguided ‘security watch lists’ that have nothing whatsoever to do with security, but which have everything to do with what sort of books you read.

Phil Booth of the No2Id Campaign said: “Someone is extremely optimistic. The technology is just not there. The last time I spoke to anyone in the facial recognition field they said the best systems were only operating at about a 40% success rate in a real time situation. I am flabbergasted they consider doing this at a time when there are so many measures making it difficult for passengers.”

And even if it worked 100% of the time, is it moral? This is the question we will never see asked outside of the internets.

Gus Hosein, a specialist at the London School of Economics in the interplay between technology and society, said: “It’s a laughable technology. US police at the SuperBowl had to turn it off within three days because it was throwing up so many false positives. The computer couldn’t even recognise gender. It’s not that it could wrongly match someone as a terrorist, but that it won’t match them with their image. A human can make assumptions, a computer can’t.”

And they are not using this to find ‘terrorists’ because those people are not on the system as criminals. They only get onto the system AFTER they have done a martyrdom operation. These systems are snake oil, and once again, they are not for ‘terrorists’ they are for YOU the ordinary person, so that they can control and monitor YOU, to force you to comply with the smallest of laws.

Eventually, the ‘security watch list’ that this journalist glosses over will be accessible to every council worker who will be able to put your name on the list so they can apprehend you and your children for, say, not attending school, or putting the paper garbage in the glass bin.

If you do not think this will happen, then you are insane. Just as RIPA is being used to spy on parents trying to get their children into good schools, these biometric gates, ‘the biometric net’ and ‘security watch lists’ will be used in every conceivable…and inconceivable…way.

Nothing to hide, nothing to fear, right?

Project Semaphore, the first stage in the government’s e-borders programme, monitors 30m passenger movements a year through the UK. By December 2009, API will track 60% of all passengers and crew movements. The Home Office aim is that by December 2010 the system will be monitoring 95%. Total coverage is not expected to be achieved until 2014 after similar checks have been introduced for travel on “small yachts and private flights”.

The best laid plans….here is another scenario.

After massive public rejection of the surveillance state, and country wide vandalism of the millions of CCTV cameras in the UK, it was decided to remove all traces of the monitoring apparatus that cast a debilitating fog over life in the UK. Like the fall of East Germany and the STASI, the changes came overnight as the revulsion over the mutated form of British life became universal and ‘went nuclear’.

“We are not going to live like this anymore. Britain has been turned into a prison, and we have had enough”

Parliament has drawn up a list of all ‘database state’ laws going back to the early days of the now discredited Blair government, all of which are to be struck off the books in one fell swoop.

“This has been a long time in coming, but the writing has been on the wall for years; the silent grumbling of the British public has turned into an earthquake of non-violent dissent. Just like the Berlin Wall, the database state has been dismantled one camera at a time in a single day, without any opposition from the police.”

So far around 8m to 10m UK biometric passports, containing a computer chip holding the carrier’s facial details, have been issued since they were introduced in 2006. The last non-biometric passports will cease to be valid after 2016.

Can you hear the sound?

Home Office minister Liam Byrne said: “Britain’s border security is now among the toughest in the world and tougher checks do take time, but we don’t want long waits. So the UK Border Agency will soon be testing new automatic gates for British and European Economic Area [EEA] citizens. We will test them this year and if they work put them at all key ports [and airports].”

And if they DONT work?

That is an interesting question!!!!!

U.S. to Insist That Travel Industry Get Fingerprints

By Spencer S. Hsu and Del Quentin Wilber
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, April 22, 2008; Page A08

The U.S. government today will order commercial airlines and cruise lines to prepare to collect digital fingerprints of all foreigners before they depart the country under a security initiative that the industry has condemned as costly and burdensome.

The proposal does not say where airlines must collect fingerprints — at airport check-in counters, departure gates or kiosks somewhere in between. But the government estimates the undertaking will cost airlines $2.3 billion over 10 years, a U.S. homeland security official said.

The overall economic impact on companies, passengers and the government is expected to exceed $3.5 billion, industry lobbyists said, at a time when carriers are struggling with safety concerns, high fuel costs and passenger complaints.

Formal announcement of the plan to track the departure of foreign visitors, as part of the Homeland Security Department’s US-VISIT program, comes after an extended battle between the security agency and airlines.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff linked the effort to enforcing the nation’s immigration laws recently, saying airlines were obstructing the measure for commercial reasons.

“If we don’t have US-VISIT air exit by this time next year, it will only be because the airline industry killed it,” Chertoff said recently. “We have to decide who is going to win this fight. Is it going to be the airline industry, or is it going to be the people who believe we should know who leaves the country by air?”

Doug Lavin, regional vice president for the International Air Transport Association, which represents major U.S. and international carriers, said the government, not airlines, should collect fingerprints. “This is ludicrous,” Lavin said. “We can’t afford anything in the billions to support a program that should be a government program.”

Fingerprinting an estimated 33 million departing foreign passengers a year will result in “delayed departures, missed connections here and around the world,” Lavin said.

Launched after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, US-VISIT is intended to automate the processing of visitors entering and exiting the country, using fingerprints and digital photographs to help find criminals, potential terrorists and people who overstay visas and join the nation’s illegal immigrant population.

While the program has succeeded in recording nearly 100 million people entering the country since 2004, the DHS has struggled to implement the exit portion. Frustrated at the department’s slow pace, Congress last year set a June 2009 deadline for DHS to collect fingerprints from departing air passengers in a law to implement recommendations of the 9/11 Commission.

Otherwise, Congress said, the government cannot expand the Visa Waiver Program, under which residents of 27 friendly countries can visit the United States without a visa. Inclusion is a priority for nations including South Korea and Greece, and the tourism industry has also targeted South America for expansion.

The proposal will be open for a 60-day comment period. DHS could decide after that time where fingerprinting must be conducted, or it could leave the decision up to airlines, a U.S. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the proposal has not been formally announced.

[…]

Washington Post

We all know that US-VISIT is a completely useless and bogus waste of time that violates millions of people.

We also know that the USVISIT ‘exit system’ is not in place.

USVISIT is a costly boondoggle. The penny has dropped about this, and Uncle Sham does not want to spend any more money on it.

Instead of building the infrastructure of the exit systems themselves, they are going to shift the burden on making it work to the airlines.

Like it says in this post, the exit system is currently VOLUNTARY. That is clearly insane, almost as insane as the USVISIT itself.

Pocket Satan Chertoff now says that, “If we don’t have US-VISIT air exit by this time next year, it will only be because the airline industry killed it,”. Once again, we have a government putting ‘border security’ (which this clearly is not, it is Security Theatre not real security) in the hands of private companies, and, quite absurdly, claiming that if the system is not in place, it is the fault of those companies, not the government. This is exactly what the UK government has done with fingerprinting at Heathrow Terminal 5.

If USVISIT is so very important, a key part of the US ‘security strategy’, and if the ‘terrorist threat’ was real, then to leave its complete implementation to the will of private companies is insane, and blatantly negligent.

The fact is that the living bag of bones Chertoff knows very well that USVISIT is a failure, that it has cost over $1.3 billion, apprehended only “1,200 criminals and immigration violators” and that any further money spend on this immoral, useless, wasteful, disgraceful, awful, satanic, abominable, monstrous, insane and stupid project would be indefensible, even to the expert and frictionless lie machine of ‘Homeland Security’.

Our only hope is that the airlines grow a backbone and stand up for the rights of their customers. Certainly, BA will be very reluctant to go along with this, after having been stung by their Terminal 5 fingerprinting fiasco, which is set to cost them some money, never mind the embarrassment.

The biometric fad, the most recent in a long line of snake oil solutions to non existent problems, is going to be consigned to the dustbin of technology history, along with 8 track tapes and other obsolete contraptions that seem absurd today. This fad is going to dies faster as more people wake up to what these tools really mean, and how corrosive they are to human society.

The East Germans know all about this.

And so do you.

One can only hope that the economic collapse of the USA will make it impossible for them to maintain this foolishness as their empire implodes and there is no money to run these insane programs. File under the spinoffs and benefits of Imperial collapse.