BRITISH visitors to America will be required to register their travel plans online 48 hours before departure, according to a bill expected to be passed by the US Congress this week.

This will cause even more people to choose other places to vacation, study, etc etc. Already people are turning their backs on the USA, and this will make it even worse.

Online registration will give US authorities the chance to reject travellers before they leave their home country. Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, said: “It will avoid the problem where somebody shows up at the airport in the US, winds up getting rejected and has to fly back.”

How many times does this happen, out of the millions and millions of people who persist in visiting that country? What are the facts?

The form will ask for passport number, flight number, purpose of journey and place of stay. It will be similar to the one passengers currently fill in mid-flight and, said Chertoff, would “probably be good for a year or so”.

Probably… ‘Or so’… Nice!

It could cause problems for visitors travelling at short notice although there will be some provision for last-minute bookings. The new 48-hour rule is expected to be implemented next year.

It WILL cause problems for visitors and what it will do is put the USA down on the list of places that immediately come to mind when you want to go somewhere just for fun. From now on, only people with a compelling reason will go to that place.

Chertoff denied the system was draconian in comparison with some European security laws. “In various parts of the continent if you don’t carry an identification card you’d be put in jail whereas in this country that would not be tolerated,” he said.

This line is the one that caused me to post this wretched garbage.

Everyone knows that the usa is trying to bring in a de-facto ID card, and that the states are, one by one, enacting legislation to forbid REALID. Everyone knows that you cannot get on an internal flight in the usa without ID. Everyone knows that the police can demand ID from you and if you do not comply, you get not only put in gaol, but tazered Check out the video of this very thing happening and read some posts on Papers Please! to find out what the truth about this really is.

Pocket Satan living dead faced Chertoff, consummate lair, fear-monger and un-American bastard has no business admonishing Europeans for their (admittedly very bad) ID policies when in his own country what they are doing and what he is personally responsible for is far far worse.

Travellers to America are already subject to photograph and fingerprint checks, causing long queues on arrival.

and ‘Sarah Baxter’, who wrote this garbage, forgot to say that this is the cause of the sharp and sustained decline in the visitor numbers to the usa.

The measure would apply to Britain and 26 other countries, mostly from the European Union, whose citizens are allowed to travel visa-free to America for up to 90 days.

And it is the money from tourists and businessmen from these 26 countries that is being blocked by this insanity.

The bill is part of a series of tighter border controls being introduced.

[…]

Times

No, it is part of the insanity that has gripped the usa. Get it right you idiot!

UK’s Brown won’t rule out military action in Iran

LONDON (Reuters) – British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said on Monday he would not rule out military action against Iran, but believed a policy of sanctions could still persuade Tehran to drop its disputed nuclear program.
ADVERTISEMENT

“I firmly believe that the sanctions policy that we are pursuing will work, but I’m not one who’s going forward to say that we rule out any particular form of action,” Brown told a news conference, when asked if he would rule out a military strike against Iran. […]

Brown said he believed the current sanctions were having an effect, but he thought there would still be a third resolution.

“There will probably be a third resolution in relation to Iran soon … I appeal to the Iranian authorities to understand the feelings that other countries have about the development of a nuclear weapons program,” he said.

[…]

Yahoo News

That didn’t take long did it?

And now, we have the response from StopWar:

Don’t Attack Iran

We demand that the British government oppose and condemn any form of military confrontation with Iran.

The US sabre-rattling over Iran is not only serious and disturbing, but also has uncanny resonance with the lead-up to the Iraq war. The dossier prepared by the US on Iran’s supposed involvement in destabilising Iraq is based on the same imaginary foundations and presumptions as the WMD dossier. The reality in Iraq is complex and evidence shows that the majority of foreign insurgents captured or found dead are Saudis. What does remain clear is that the Iraqi civilian death toll has reached 600,000, with January recording the highest number of civilian deaths since the invasion in 2003. As highlighted in a major report launched this week, any attack on Iran would export this misery and disaster on the Iranian people and have economic, environmental and security repercussions worldwide.

StopWar

[…]

“Why oh why are you posting this garbage you moron?!” I hear you cry.

Yes, yes…

My emphasis.

You all know what I think about StopWar. Use the google if you cannot remember.

These people cannot connect the dots. Clearly.

They say there is an uncanny resonance with the lead-up to the Iraq war. And so, what is their response?

To do exactly what they did before which did nothing to stop the ‘Iraq war’:

If there is an attack on Iran…
Stop the War Coalition will call for immediate national protest action.
There will be an emergency protest outside Downing Street at 6pm on the day of the attack or 12 noon on the weekend.

This is so …. weird!

What was it a great president of the United States of America said?

“Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again”

Well, these wise words obviously do not apply to the sublime thoughts of Tony Benn, the ‘President’ of StopWar, who it seems is just a gatekeeper put there to ensure that nothing oblique emerges from that very large and potentially dangerous organization.

Financial Appeal by Tony Benn, President of Stop the War Tony Benn
We depend entirely on your donations to fund all our anti-war activities.

demonstrations, vigils, public meetings, people’s assemblies, etc. However large or small a donation you can make
will be much appreciated and is very necessary.

Yours in peace, Tony Benn

What. The. Fuck?

Demonstrations, vigils, public meetings, people’s assemblies, and certainly ‘etc.’ are not ‘anti-war activities’. None of the above stopped the illegal and murderous invasion of Iraq, everyone knows it, and yet, someone as old and experienced as Tony Benn DARES to suggest ‘more of the same’ as a way to stop the destruction of Iran.

Let me tell you something about these people.

Even better, let me remind you of how they mocked ‘comical ali’ and derided the Iraqi military, lied about them, put on kangaroo trials, murdered them and treated them like they were not even human.

NOW you see what the result is; a Vietnam style total defeat for Murder Inc. and stirring calls for Jihad to be spread to all the lands of the muslims. You don’t have to be able to understand a single word of what is being said in that video, to imagine how the passion in its delivery must be stoking up the hundreds of thousands of people who are watching these and the many other martyrdom operation videos. Going into Iran with anything other than a pen is PREMEDITATED SUICIDE.

NOW you see what the result is; Britain on tenter hooks, shooting people in the streets, dismantling liberty, destroying this beautiful country.

What a shame!

The fact of the matter is young Iranians are hungry for rock and roll, tight jeans, and Maybeline. If you go in there and try and FORCE them to wear makeup, tight pants and listen to Buddy Holly, they will resist, and you will end up with another Iraq style debacle.

There is no excuse whatsoever to even be saying the words ‘attack Iran’. Unless you want a new islamic super-state created from the combined ashes of both Iraq and Iran.

He knew about it from the beginning:

I am not sure if this is still the case, but certainly a year or two ago among the plans for the new Terminal 5 at Heathrow was an elaborate and supremely high-tech tracking system for passengers.

The architect from the Richard Rogers partnership told me about it with a gleam in his eye. It was difficult not to feel caught up in his enthusiasm. It worked like this: the terminal, a highly evolved amalgam of building, computer and machine, would know about you before you arrived.

When you had bought your ticket, an image taken from your passport would already have entered its systems. As you arrived, flustered and anxious in the way only airports can make you, Terminal 5 would look at you through its myriad cameras, compare your face with the large number of faces on its database, measure and recognise you – the word “biometric” was not yet common currency at the time – and then, even through the fluster, know you for who you were.

[…]

The Telegraph – from 2003

What follows is a good article of the type we have all read many times.

What this article, sent to me by email, proves, is that Richard Rogers knew from the beginning that dehumanizing fingerprinting and photographing tools were to be used to corral passengers at Terminal 5. That firm was not only complicit in this shameful place, but enthusiastic about it.

Instead of using the design of the building to segregate passengers and do the work of keeping immigration rules in place, they deliberately broke the design of the building to facilitate an experiment in managing crowds through Orwellian identity documents.

Berthold Konrad Hermann Albert Speer immediately comes to mind; an architect whose work served to promote and enshrine the bad guys of his time. Now Richard Rogers can be classed with him; this Terminal was designed to promote boost and brainwash the people who pass through it into accepting the police state system of ID cards, universal surveillance and everything decent people loathe.

This building might not be destroyed as some of Germany’s buildings were after the war. They might however have their design flaws fixed by refurbishing so that the building does what it is meant to do, as all other airports have done very successfully, without violating the very people they are meant to serve.

This article says:

Five’s beautiful alertness and responsiveness will transform the experience of an airport, or so the liberal, civilised, imaginative architect maintained, from a horrible, authoritarian, mass experience into something subtler, gentler, more individual and more pleasant.

This is, of course, doubletalk.

What it actually means is this:

“The vile ever-present eye of complete surveillance will transform the experience of an airport, as designed by the illiberal, uncivilized and unimaginative architects Richard Rogers. What they are planning is horrible, authoritarian mass humiliation and subjugation that obvious and brutal in its reduction of the individual into mere numbered cattle. Very unpleasant.”

When people like Richard Rogers, who really should know better, actively design to encourage and foster authoritarian systems it makes it hard to explain to the ‘the busy people’ why these systems are so wrong. They cannot separate the private from the public, the voluntary from the compulsory; they see only the surface, and as it looks the same, they accept both as being equal when they are not.

What is so wrong about this is that there is a better way to control passenger flow, and this layer of Security Theatre is superfluous and unnecessary; it is inefficient, onerous, pointless and frankly, evil.

There is nothing worse than an arrogant architect. I do not like to use the word ‘arrogant’, and very rarely employ it, but in this case it is completely appropriate.

This man is deliberately using human beings as part of an experiment, and he has put himself and his ideas above the rights and dignity of of the people who his buildings should be protecting and serving.

It is very rare that a building is designed to violate and humiliate the people who use it, and that this is being done in a context where millions will be systematically violated puts Richard Rogers up there with some of history’s worst ‘professionals who misused their art’.

Capgemini (Euronext: CAP) is a major French company, one of the world’s largest information technology, consulting, outsourcing and professional services companies with a staff of 75,000 operating in 30 countries. It is headquartered in Paris (Rue de Tilsitt) and was founded in 1967 by Serge Kampf, the current chairman. CEO Paul Hermelin has led the company since his appointment in December 2001.

Capgemini’s regional operations include North America, Northern Europe & Asia Pacific and Central & Southern Europe. Services are delivered through four disciplines for Consulting, Technology, Outsourcing and Local Professional Services. The latter is delivered through Sogeti, a wholly owned subsidiary.

Wikipedia

So that is who got the contract to build ContactPoint.

The children of Britain sold to a French company that operates n 30 countries.

The database set to contain information and carers’ contact details for every child in England will cost £41 million (US$84 million) a year to run on top of its £224 million implementation costs, the government has admitted.

Capgemini was awarded the £40 million, seven-year contract to set up and manage the ContactPoint database and online directory earlier this week.

But children’s minister Kevin Brennan has revealed that the ongoing costs of the database — accessible to more than 330,000 education, health, social care and youth justice professionals — will dwarf the contract price.

ContactPoint will contain basic identifying information about all children in England from birth until age 18, along with contact details for their parents or carers and for professionals providing support services to them.

Brennan confirmed that the total costs of implementing the system are estimated at £224 million, with £28.4 million already spent on the project in 2006-07 and a further £11.2 million in the first three months of 2007-08.

The implementation costs include the price of adapting the government IT systems that will supply the data and the adapting of systems used by professionals working with children so they can access ContactPoint, Brennan said in a parliamentary written answer. It also includes the cost of ensuring security and data accuracy, along with staff training.

“Running costs thereafter are estimated to be £41 million per year. Most of this will go directly to local authorities to fund staff to ensure the ongoing security, accuracy and audit of ContactPoint,” Brennan said in response to questions from shadow children’s minister Tim Loughton.

By the end of next year, ContactPoint is expected to be available to all English local authorities, child protection agencies and a group of children’s charities.

An initial deployment will roll out the database to 17 early adopter authorities and Barnardo’s in April. “Progress towards readiness to receive access to ContactPoint is on track” among local authorities, Brennan said.

[…]

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,134926-c,kidsteens/article.html

So, ContactPoint will cost:

224,000,000 / 11,900,000 = £18.82 per child

and then

41,000,000 / 11,900,000 = £3.46 per child per year

What a bargain!

Of course, this is not what these numbers really mean. What they really say is this is the price that HMG puts on the heads of every child in this country when they come to sell them to the highest (or lowest) bidder to be fleeced en masse.

That this database will violate children is beyond dispute. What is astonishing is that ContactPoint will contain data that is worth far more than £18.82 per head.

Data brokers would pay ten times that amount for the database, because they would be able to sell it again and again and again; and lets remember, this is going to be the closest thing to a complete database of all children and their parents, it will be without precedent, unparalleled.

At least, not for long.

You can find out about how data brokers work by trying to get hold of or buy a list of all the schools in the UK. The dfes has a list, but they are not allowed to sell it to you or give you access to it because doing so would compete with the data brokers that rent these lists commercially. They sell the lists at £100 per thousand entries, and then you do not get to keep the data, you only get to use it for a single purpose.

Imagine how much money ContactPoint will be worth in this case. Once the data escapes ContactPoint, companies will rent it over and over in small parcels, with sets of data sorted by postcode, age single parent or not, you name it. It will be a license to print money, and the junk mail that families will begin to receive will be indistinguishable to the mail-outs that they already get; they wont even realize that they have been ‘ContactPoisoned’.

The only people who will be immune to all of this are the celebrity families and VIP families who will not be in the ContactPoint system “for their own protection”.

Now read this:

A £224m national database of all 11 million children in England, which is being set up in response to the murder of eight-year-old Victoria Climbié, is to be designed by Capgemini.

The national Information Sharing Index is due to be ready by the end of 2008. The database, which will cost £41m per year to operate, will include addresses and telephone numbers for children and their parents – and will enable social services and doctors to share vital information about a child’s health and education across local authorities.

The child database was recommended in a report by Lord Laming after Climbié was killed by her great-aunt despite having been examined by social workers, doctors and police.

The Department for Education and Skills awarded the contract to Capgemini under a long-term agreement between the two organisations which began in 2002 and which is annually benchmarked for value.

A fully-costed design of the technical architecture is due to be completed by the end of this year.

Silicon dot com

My emphasis.

No database will prevent crime. Full stop. The sad story above shows that even when the social services are in full contact the bad stuff still happens. It happens very very rarely, and ContactPoint is no proper response to this.

And finally, a good comment on this story:

Name: Anonymous

Location: Midlands

Occupation: IT Developer

Comment: Lets see now…

Server 2,000
Oracle Lic 1,000
DBA for day 1,000
CapGemini profit 223,996,000
========
Total 224,000,000

That’s how it works, is it?

Right on the money!

Heathrow to check fingerprints

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 21/07/2007

Terminal 5 passengers will have fingers and faces scanned, says Jeremy Skidmore.

Fingerprinting of passengers, a process that has irritated many visitors to the United States, will soon be happening on some domestic flights within Britain.

Domestic passengers departing from Heathrow’s Terminal 5, which opens in March, will have to give a fingerprint and have their faces scanned as part of a security check before take-off. The checks are being brought in because both domestic and international passengers will share a common departure lounge and there are fears that those arriving on international flights may be able to bypass immigration control by booking an onward domestic flight to a regional airport.

This is total insanity.

Firstly, whenever someone gets off a plane, they go straight from the plane to immigration, where they are checked. They should then go to a waiting room that does not physically connect with domestic flight passengers.

The architects that designed Terminal 5 (Richard Rogers Partnership) should be sued for extreme negligence; can you name me a single airport where domestic and international passengers are allowed to freely mingle in a unified departure lounge?

This is one of the biggest design blunders ever in the history of airport design, and now, passengers flying on domestic flights are going to have to submit to fingerprinting just to travel in their own country.

International passengers departing through Terminal 5 will be subject to the normal checks and controls but will not undergo face scans or have to provide a fingerprint. At Gatwick, which also has a shared departure lounge for all passengers, domestic travellers already have their photographs taken.

Did you know this?

A spokeswoman for Terminal 5 said the new fingerprinting systems were a way of taking security to the next level. “At the moment there are no plans for any other passengers to be fingerprinted, but it is the way of the future. We work closely with the Home Office on security issues,” she said.

This is just total bullshit. USVISIT has been a total failure, costing billions only to catch a few people (1500 out of tens of millions of people violated) who have outstanding parking tickets.

From this autumn, those arriving at 10 US airports, including New York JFK, Chicago, Miami and Boston, will have to give fingerprints of all 10 fingers, raising fears of increased delays.

Note how the delays is the only thing concerning this writer.

Bob Mocny, the acting director of the US-Visit Programme, which runs immigration security, said the new technology would improve safety

That is a lie, and it is demonstrated by the figures.

and, eventually, be a fast system. He said the same system would be introduced across Europe in the future.

And from what crystal ball did he glean this information?

However, the Home Office said this week that it has no plans to insist on fingerprints for incoming passengers.

They will not be able to justify it using the USVISIT numbers – they just don’t add up.

“We take fingerprints across 80 different countries from people when they apply for visas and have stopped 4,000 people from coming in,” said a spokeswoman.

That is a totally different scenario. It has nothing to do with fingerprinting EVERYBODY whenever they want to travel.

Recent improvements in security at Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted include the introduction of flat scanners that can read the new biometric indicators in e-passports.

That is not an improvement in security, it is more Security Theatre.

Extra checks on passengers have been introduced following the recent attempted terrorist attacks at airports, leading to fears of increased delays for passengers this summer.

And none of them will be of any use. All of them are Security Theatre.

Telegraph

[…]

I have to say, that this is close to the most absurd and insane thing I have ever read. A firm of architects opts to create a single departure lounge with international and domestic passengers unsegregated, and as a result, to fix the problem, people flying inside their own country have to be fingerprinted like criminals.

This is absolute, complete, cant-make-shit-like-this-up INSANITY.

Architecture should serve the people who have to live work and go through it. By failing to segregate domestic and international passengers, not only has Richard Rogers Partnership failed to consider the dignity of passengers who are going to go through Heathrow Terminal 5, but they have failed to understand the brief.

Security at an airport, at a minimum means ensuring that immigration rules are followed. It means carefully considering the flow of passengers and their status. By failing to implement passenger flow correctly by creating a shared departure lounge, Richard Rogers Partnership has created a building that will not only fail to serve the people who use and pass through it, but which will violate and humiliate millions of people. It will serve as yet another way to soften up the people to the idea of regular fingerprinting for even the most simple of things.

This is one of the greatest architectural disasters ever.

Alcohol laws set to be reviewed
Laws making possession of alcohol a largely non-arrestable offence could be reversed, Gordon Brown has said.

The prime minister told MPs a consultation on reclassifying alcohol will be launched next week as part of a review of the entire UK alcoholism strategy.

Alcohol was downgraded to class C – which includes things such as anabolic steroids – from class B, which includes things like amphetamines, in 2014.

But there are fears more harmful forms of alcohol have become available.

A Home Office spokesman said the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) will be asked to review reports that danger from alcohol is increasing due to wider availability of more potent strains such as “Whiskey”.

There is concern stronger varieties of alcohol can cause mental health problems.

Medicinal use

Mr Brown said the Cabinet had discussed the issue and Home Secretary Jacqui Smith would publish a consultation document next week about the UK alcoholism strategy.

Mr Brown told MPs at prime minister’s questions: “She will be asking the public to comment on new ways in which we can improve alcoholism education in the country, give support to people undergoing treatment… and give support for communities who want to chase out brewers from their communities.”

He was responding to a question from Labour MP Martin Salter who, referring to the medicinal use of alcohol, urged an alcoholism policy that did not “criminalise the sick but tackles the alcohols that do the most harm”.

Shadow Home Secretary, David Davis, commenting later for the Conservatives, said: “We would welcome the reclassification of alcohol. Alcoholism is a scourge on society and a major cause of illness and accidents which Labour has failed to tackle.

“We have long called for the reclassification of alcohol based on the science and evidence available which shows all too clearly the real damage alcohol abuse can do to people – especially young people.

“But it is not enough to simply consult on this – the government must also secure our porous borders to stop hard alcohol (like pochine from Ireland) flowing into the country and seriously strengthen alcohol rehab treatment for those already on the bottle.”

The issue of downgrading – or even decriminalising – alcohol has proved controversial and has already been reviewed once by the Home Office.

Urgent research

The original move from Class B to Class C was made when David Blunkett was home secretary.

His successor Charles Clarke asked for a review in 2005.

At that time the ACMD said that while alcohol was undoubtedly harmful it was still less harmful than other recreational drugs like amphetamines which are in Class B. It recommended no change.

But it also called for urgent further research on the potency and pattern of alcohol use.

If the ACMD were to back a change in classification and the Home Office accepted its recommendation, it would require agreement of both houses of Parliament to become law.

Potent varieties

A Home Office spokesman said: “We will be asking the ACMD to review the classification of alcohol, given the increase in strength of some alcohol strains and their potential harms.

“It would be wrong to prejudge that review which shows how seriously we take our priority of reducing drug-related harm.”

The Home Office’s alcoholism information website, Frank, includes details of new more potent varieties of alcohol.

It says: “Recently, there have been various forms of herbal or grass-type drinks that are generally found to be stronger than ordinary ‘hooch’, containing on average two to three times the amount of the active compound, alcohol.

“These include ‘Jack Daniels’ (a golden liquid distilled in copper pots), homegrown ‘Vodka’ (which has a particular strong smell) and ‘Bitter’.”

[…]

BBQ

The US VISIT programme, which is intended to record the entry and exit of every visitor, is still not working nor is there any prospect of it doing so. While most of the the 300 air, sea and land “points of entry” are operating “biometrically enabled” entry records “comparable exit capabilities are not” said a report on the evidence presented to the US House of Representatives by officials from the Government Accountability Office (GAO): Homeland Security: Prospects For Biometric US-VISIT Exit Capability Remain Unclear Over the past 4 years $1.3 billion has been spent on the system.

The report says that:

“The prospects for successfully delivering an operational exit solution are as uncertain today as they were 4 years ago.”

The Department of Homeland Security is committed to providing exit records at air and seaports it has produced no plans or analyses to achieving this and:

“acknowledged that a near-term biometric solution for land POEs is not possible”

Even where biometrically enabled system were available at 11 air and sea pilot schemes:

“on average only about 24 percent of those travellers subject to US-VISIT actually complied with the exit processing steps.”

This was because compliance was “voluntary”.

The biggest long-term problem is the land exit schemes.

“According to program officials, no technology or device currently exists to biometrically verify persons exiting the country that would not have a major impact on land POE facilities. They added that technological advances over the next 5 to 10 years will make it possible to biometrically verify persons exiting the country without major changes to facility infrastructure and without requiring those exiting to stop and/or exit their vehicles.”

Indeed land exit capabilities are “being deferred to an unspecified future time”

The report’s overall conclusion is that:

“there is no reason to expect that DHS’s newly launched efforts to deliver an air and sea exit solution will produce results different from its past efforts—namely, no operational exit solution despite many years and hundreds of millions of dollars of investment. More importantly, the continued absence of an exit capability will hinder DHS’s ability to effectively and efficiently perform its border security and immigration enforcement mission.”

And what of the overall effectiveness of the US VISIT scheme? Last autumn the Acting Director of Homeland Security said that out of 63 million recorded visitors “1,200 criminals and immigration violators” had been denied entry – this report says the figure has risen to 1,500.

[…]

http://www.statewatch.org/news/2007/jul/o2usa-goa-exit-report.htm

You
Can’t
Make
Shit
Like
This
Up!

So they are counting people in, but not out? The exit system is VOLUNTARY?!

Look at the HUGE expense just to catch 1,500 people, all of them minor ‘criminals’. Use the Google to find out what we said about this before. This article demonstrates that the VAST MAJORITY of people coming to the usa are not in any way criminal. This means that they should never be treated as criminals. Period.

This is a monumental waste of money, a mass violation of people’s rights, and yet another example of ‘Vendor Hypnosis’. You can work out what that phrase means can’t you?

SHAME SHAME SHAME on the USA!

Whitehall officials strongly defend the security of the large centralised database that is being built as part of the Care Records Service of the National Programme for IT [NPfIT]. NHS Connecting for Health, which runs a major part of the NPfIT, points out that nobody can access it without leaving a trace in the audit trail. But who is going to police the audit trail in a busy NHS. And what if nobody polices it even if they’re supposed to?

This is what we have been saying all along.

Perhaps disciplinary action can be taken against misuses of the database, but by then it may be too late to protect the confidentiality of personal data. If the security at a local GP practice is breached, it will not affect huge numbers of files. But a national database will contain millions of records.

Precisely. And everyone who works on building this system knows this. You need to remove your data from your GPs computer as a matter of urgency. Lets say (for sake of argument) that the spine upload will be made from the latest backup set; if you delete now, long before the update, you will be left out of the upload.

This is one of the lessons of the lapse of security at the Department of Veterans Affairs. It is one of the few healthcare organisations in the world that has very large centralised and regional databases of medical records. So an apparent minor lapse of security can have major implications.

The disappearance of one external hard drive – the sort one can buy in PC World for about £100 – contained 1.3 million sensitive medical records.

In England a loss on this scale could not happen with a breach of security at a GP practice. But the NPfIT’s Care Records Service is due to store 50 million patient records.

Just like ‘Frances Stonor Saunders’ said, “These databases, which can easily fit on a storage device the size of your hand…”. All it takes is for one leak to happen for the whole system to be compromised. Now imagine trying to cobble together a database of all the NHS patients in the UK by compromising each GPs office one at a time. It would be hugely expensive, take years, and you would probably get caught. Thankfully the government is making it easy for criminals to get the job done; they are putting it all in one place for you!

The Department of Veterans Affairs had a general policy of ecrypting patient data so that if it were to go missing it could not easily be read. But the controls were not applied properly.

Even if they were encrypted, all that means is that a disc removed without taking the decrypting keys would be useless. A clever person would take the drive and make sure she had the decrypting keys too. It also doesn’t stop people copying entries on a ‘to order’ basis, something particularly sinister when you think about what ContactPoint holds: DATA ON CHILDREN.

Could the same happen in England?

Could? Lapses, leaks, abuse and thefts have have already happened in the UK. Use the Google!

a) In the NHS, password sharing is endemic and doctors do not always have the time to log on and off computers to protect the integrity of the system.

And there you have it password sharing is ‘ENDEMIC‘ : “characteristic of or prevalent in a particular field, area, or environment”. That means that it is in the nature of the NHS environment to share passwords. WHen they get a hold of ContactPoint access, they will not suddenly change their behavior.

b) If national systems are made too secure doctors and nurses will not use them.

Makes sense; in order for something to be useful, you have to be able to use it without having to think about it.

c) It’s unclear whether the Department of Health will provide enough funds to ensure that money and staff are available to police rigorously the audit trails of the Care Records Service, if a such a national system works.

Exactly. There are not enough people to watch the 330,000 people who will be making millions of accesses per week on ContactPoiint. Trying to find instances of abuse will be like looking for a needle in a haystack, and when we talk of ‘instances of abuse’ we mean paedophiles getting a hold of a child in the worst case scenario.

Perhaps these matters should have discussed openly and honestly before the NPfIT was announced in early 2002

Perhaps the whole idea should be scrapped? And by whole idea I mean the NIR, ContactPoint and the NHS Spine.

Computer Weekly

ContactPoint access, according to the Draft Contact Point Guidance – Version 1 (65 pages – PDF 388kb), is going to be granted to authorized users by ‘secure token’, username and password.

They define it as:

Security token – an item or device which provides one of the elements of information required for authentication. Examples include a frequently changing numerical code generator or a single-use numerical sent to your phone.

I have seen one of these random number tokens in use by a director of Chase as he accessed his work account over a dialup telephone line while using his laptop.

They work by using time to synchronize a random pin number on this token, to an authentication server on the system where your account sits. You have to use your user name, password and the random number displayed on your token to gain access. This part of the authentication keeps out people who write scripts to try and brute force accounts.

This is the most expensive version. Obviously if you are going to roll this out to 330,000 people, HMG will be loathe to order all of those tokens at, say $69.50 per user. And since they expire every three years they will all have to be replaced regularly.

See below for what this means. Meanwhile, lets look at the ‘Security Principles’ part of the document:

1.10 Security

Keeping the information on ContactPoint safe and secure and ensuring that it is only accessed by people who have a right to access it is of paramount importance, this too is a requirement of the Data Protection Act. Everyone who uses, administers and manages ContactPoint must act in ways that preserve the security of ContactPoint.

What this actually means is that the 330,000 people who will be given access to ContactPoint will be given the responsibility of keeping the data safe and secure. Since all of these people will be able to access all of the ContactPoint data, it effectively means they all have superuser status to look at everyone’s accounts no matter who they are or where they live. On a UNIX system, only the superuser can look into everyone’s files; individual users can only look at their own files, and in the case of a Local Authority (for example) they should really only be able to look at the details of people who live in their catchment area, if we were to agree to the principle of ContactPoint in the first place. It is insane that all 330,000 users can see every record.

2.1 Security Principles

Security of ContactPoint and the information held on it is of critical importance. Everyone who uses ContactPoint must take all practicable steps to ensure that their actions do not compromise security in any way.

This is crazy. Imagine if your bank allowed its all of its users to access bank details from any computer at any time over the internets. That would be a recipe for disaster, just like ContactPoint is. Banks that take security seriously, only allow access to their network from terminals inside branches, which are private networks. Of course, even if the architects of contact point specified that terminals must be inside secure buildings, that would not make ContactPoint OK because it is a compulsory system that violates your rights.

Some might say that being on this database is no different to being on the database of people who own passports. The difference is that having a passport allows you to travel, entitles you to consular services when you are abroad, and the database is used only to administer the issuing of passwords, etc etc; in other words, you get something out of it. Everyone on ContactPoint gets nothing out of it, in fact, you LOSE your privacy in return for absolutely nothing.

2.2 To ensure that only legitimate users access ContactPoint, a password and a physical security token (see Glossary), are both required to authenticate identity. This is known as 2 factor authentication.

This is better than a username and password, but it does not eliminate the problems associate with databases and the nature of data. The ‘things you must not do with ContactPoint’ bears this out:

2.3 A number of key principles should be observed, as a minimum, by everyone with access to ContactPoint. These are:
• Adhere to any local organisation policy/guidance on IT security;

What does this mean exactly? If you can access it from anywhere, it doesn’t matter WHAT guidelines are given; you are free to break them whenever you like.

• Never share user accounts, passwords or security tokens with others;

This is going to happen. We KNOW it is going to happen. ContactPoint tokens are going to have a monetary value, multiplied by the number of searches you want to do. There cannot be a single person who does not believe that ContactPoint will not be abused from the first day that it goes online…if it goes online.

• Do not write down your password and take care when entering it to ensure your keyboard is not overlooked;

We all know that shoulder surfing is done all the time. If someone is accessing ContactPoint from their laptop, their home computer or anywhere where there are people around, shoulder surfing will happen. As for writing down passwords, if they are going to use secure tokens, writing down a password will not be useful, since the token number changes every minute. Do they really understand what all of this means?

• Keep security token with you or securely locked up;

People are going to keep their ContactPoint security tokens on the keychain that they use for their house. Many of them are sold with metal rings to facilitate this. No one is going to keep their token in a safe or some other such place. Secondly, they have to deliver 330,000 of these tokens to the users. If even one of them goes astray in this distribution process then copies of the entries can be made. It is well known that identity theft and credit card fraud happens because post is stolen in transit.

• Never leave ContactPoint logged in when you leave your desk;

So, if someone has accessed 100 ContactPoint records on their laptop, and it is stolen, and these records are kept in the browsers cache, then those 100 children are compromised. This will happen.

• Ensure any reports or information you print from ContactPoint are stored securely and destroyed when no longer required;

On the first day that ContactPoint goes online, and all the 330,000 tokens have been distributed, a minimum of 330,000 children will have their records accessed. If these are printed out, they have escaped the database and are in the wild. Unless they are going to supply 330,000 secure shredders to all the ContactPoint users, you can guarantee that these printouts will be lost, sold and misused.

• Do not let others read ContactPoint information from your computer screen, particularly if working within a public environment; and

This will happen. Also, machines that are compromised will be turned into copying stations where ContactPoint information leaks into the hands of bad guys. By the way, every time I use the phrase ‘ContactPoint information’, or ‘ContactPoint entries’ or any other such phrase, remember we are talking about the private and sensitive information of children.

• Do not use public terminals (e.g. internet cafes, public reception areas) to access ContactPoint.

This will happen. For sure. And there is no way for ContactPoint admin to know when this has taken place.

2.4 Users It is your responsibility to prevent others from gaining access to, or making use of, your account. You must not share your password or security token with others. If you intentionally facilitate unauthorised access to ContactPoint, it is likely you are committing an offence under the Computer Misuse Act 1990 (see A10). You are likely to be committing an offence under this act if you make unauthorised or inappropriate use of ContactPoint yourself.

None of this will stop abuse of ContactPoint. No sanction will put the data back in the database, or repair the harm done to a child after the fact.

You must keep your password secret and look after your security token. Failure to do so may result in suspension or closure of your ContactPoint account. You may also be subject to your organisation’s disciplinary procedures. If you forget your password or cannot gain access to the system, contact your user account administrator – they will reset your password if appropriate.

If the token is the password, then this is not correct. Is this three factor authentication (username, password and token) or two factor authentication? see the comment below for the precise reason why this paragraph is here, and how it makes ContactPoint and this method of authentication even more insane.

If you think your password may be known to others, or you have lost your security token then you must inform your user account administrator immediately to enable them to take appropriate action. Any access using your password or security token, will register in the audit trail as activity carried out by you.

So all you have to say is that your stuff was stolen for 48 hours as your account is used to trawl through thousands of records. This is unacceptable by any standards, and of course, once the data is out there, it is out there for good. Or evil, as in this case.

2.5 Staff Managers You should ensure that all users you manage are aware of the importance of security, understand good security practice and act in a way which will not compromise ContactPoint. If you suspect a staff member is breaching security, you should contact the ContactPoint Management Team to discuss necessary steps, which may include disciplinary action.

Horse. Stable door. Bolted. Get me?

2.6 ContactPoint Management Team LA and partner organisation user account administrators – You are responsible for administering user accounts and the security arrangement related to user accounts. User accounts and security tokens must only be issued to individuals who meet ContactPoint access requirements (See 2.7).

so the distribution of the tokens is not going to be centralized, but farmed out to LAs and ‘partner organisations’ whatever that means. This gets worse by the line.

Where a user reports the loss of their security token or the possibility that their password may be known by others, you must suspend the user account immediately to prevent any unauthorised access. You can only reactivate a user account after the user has been provided with a new, secure password and/or token as required.

And the data returned to the database.

2.9 The requirement to have an enhanced CRB disclosure which is renewed every three years is specific to ContactPoint and does not replace existing organisational policies for non-ContactPoint users. Individuals who do not have an enhanced CRB disclosure or have one which is more than 3 years old will have to apply for a new disclosure to become ContactPoint user. Applications for enhanced CRB disclosures should be made in sufficient time to receive it before access is needed (or a previous disclosure reaches 3 years). If evidence of a renewal is not received before the 3 year period the user account may be suspended.

MAY be suspended?

3.9 Misuse of ContactPoint

Using ContactPoint for other purposes than to support practitioners in fulfilling specific duties (see 1.6) or in a manner contrary to this guidance is likely to be misuse (see flowchart at B13). For instance, it would not be appropriate for ContactPoint to be used to assess applications for school places, or to pinpoint an adult suspected of tax-evasion. Nor is it appropriate for ContactPoint users to access records of their own children, or those of their colleagues, friends and neighbours, unless they have a legitimate professional relationship as a provider of services to that child.

There is no way for ContactPoint admin to know why a record on a child is being accessed. They are basically trusting that the 330,000 who will have access will not disobey the guidelines. This database is going to be used for everything and you can guarantee that there will be a special class of account that has no audit trail, for use of the ‘security services’ and the police. If anyone thinks that ContactPoint users will not access the records of their own children, they are COMPLETELY INSANE; that is the first thing that every new user will do. They will check to see that their children’s records are not incorrect, then they will check on all of their relatives and friends. This is a perfectly natural reflex reaction to being in front of a system like this, and there is no way that any admin will be able to sift through the tens of millions of log entries to find these ‘abuses’. This system, because it is accessible by 330,000 people will rack up audit trails into the tens of millions within the first two weeks of it being online. It will be impossible to police, and even if they do catch someone looking at the records for their own children, then what? are they going to gaol them for doing so? kick them off of the system? suspend them? fire them? I don’t think so, and of course, once the violation has happened, it cannot be undone.

These are some of the things that will go wrong are wrong with ContactPoint:

Stolen token access
People will have their tokens and usernames and passwords stolen. All it will take is a few minutes to compromise the system and put children in danger.

Reproduced printouts
No matter what arrangements you have to secure access, if the data is on a screen it can be copied and printed. This means that ContactPoint can never be secure, and any child in it is in danger.

Insider breaches
Insiders will leak information from ContactPoint. This has happened in every other government database, and ContactPoint will be no different.

Rich still able to opt out
This proves that ContactPoint is not and cannot ever be secure, and that its users are not trustworthy and can never be trusted. The rich and famous will be able to opt out of ContactPoint. If ContactPoint were secure, there would be no need for this opt out option for the rich.

One insider mega breach is all it takes
All it takes is for one person to leak the database and then it will be out there forever. No matter how secure the access arrangements are, this will always be true.

Tokens for sale: the new money
As I said above, the tokens to access ContactPoint will become a sort of currency. People will sell and rent them to gain access.

Tokens shared over phone in the one minute window
Depending on how it is set up, people will be able to share the random number on the token over the phone. When the session expires, the person selling access can sell a new random number to the scumbag who wants to get access to the data. In this way, the ContactPoint user can keep her token, limit access to her black market data clients and still remain in the system on a long term basis.

Finally, all of this is VERY expensive (expiring tokens needing to be replaced etc), and will not solve the any of the problems associated with child protection; it will in fact cause more problems, and the worst thing about it is, once they decide that ContactPoint is a bad idea, it will be too late; the data will be out there circulating on the black market forever. It will be impossible to shut down or erase. This is the main problem with this idea; it cannot ever be taken back.

Philosophically ContactPoint is indefensible. It usurps the role of the parent, and replaces the parent with the state. No parent should be denied the right to opt out of this system, especially since children of rich will be out of it.

You have every right to remove yourself from this Database, and you should do everything in your power to make sure that you are not put into it.

Note the new category; ‘Post Tipping Point’. This is shorthand for, “we are not going to link back to BLOGDIAL articles on this subject inside this post that you should already have read or should be able to find with the google”.

Here we go….

Watchdog seeks an end to ‘horror’ of personal data security leaks

Business leaders oppose stronger powers to investigate breaches

Phillip Inman
Wednesday July 11, 2007
The Guardian

Phillip Inman; you fail it.

Britain’s data watchdog sparked a row with business leaders yesterday when he called for more powers to confront companies that fail to protect personal information held on computers. He wants a new rule that would allow investigators to look at files without the permission of company directors.

His plans ran into immediate opposition from business leaders who said his request for increased powers were a heavy-handed response to the problem.

The information commissioner, Richard Thomas, said that a “horrifying” succession of data security breaches in recent years at high-profile companies – including mobile phone operator Orange, building society Nationwide and mail order retailer Littlewoods – had shown that many companies failed to understand the risks to their customers and to their own reputations of keeping vast databases without adequate security.

The fact of the matter is that Richard Thomas is a busybody beurocrat twiddling his thumbs in his office while the government puts together ContactPoint, which will be a database delivered over the internets, via browsers (read Internet Exploder) and available to 300,000+ people who will be authenticated by a username and password.

THIS should be his main concern. THIS is where he should be putting his ‘expertise’ to good use; to stop the greatest child protection disaster ever from being rolled out.

Instead, this anti-business Neu Labour aparachick loser wants to punish business, that people engage with voluntarily, for lapses in their security.

How pathetic.

Mr Thomas said giving him the power to conduct an inspection and audit to ensure compliance with data protection laws would allow him “to force the pace” and encourage more companies to change their behaviour. Now, he must gain the consent of an organisation before starting an investigation. He also questioned whether companies should be obliged to report data security breaches in the same way the banks are forced to report suspicious money laundering.

How about government agencies who hold data on citizens involuntarily being forced to submit to independent audits? How about obliging every government agency using a database being obliged to report data security breaches? This is far more important because the databases that the British public are forced into are just that, by force, they make it impossible or very very hard to get yourself removed from the most simple databases.

Did you know that your personal and private medical records are the property of the department of health and that if you want to get your records deleted from any of their systems, you have to have the written permission of the secretary of health to do so?

In the commercial world, where all your stuff is voluntary, you can reduce your data shadow considerably, by following some simple rules. For example, use an alternate name everywhere and anywhere you can. Use a pay as you go mobile phone. All of these things can be done, and you would be surprised at how friendly these companies are when you ask them about deleting your account. Businesses are more responsive to the needs of their customers than the government is, and frankly, Richard Thomas needs to get off of his ass and implement citizen friendly data practices throughout government, like an end to biometric passports, cancellation of ContactPoint, and of course, the complete cancellation of the NIR and ID cards.

“Over the last year we have seen far too many careless and inexcusable breaches of people’s personal information. The roll call of banks, retailers, government departments, public bodies and other organisations which have admitted serious security lapses is frankly horrifying.

Whatever you scumbag. What is FAR MORE HORRIFYING are the numerous breaches of GOVERNMENT DATABASES (the ones that we know about) where insiders have leaked information, violated privacy, and just been plain incompetent; we have documented and dissected some of these on BOOGDIAL of course.

Wrong hands

“How can laptops holding details of customer accounts be used away from the office without strong encryption? How can millions of store cards fall into the wrong hands? How can online recruitment allow applicants to see each others’ forms? How can any bank chief executive face customers and shareholders and admit that loan rejections, health insurance applications, credit cards and bank statements can be found, unsecured in non-confidential waste bags?”

Mr Thomas, who was speaking before the publication of the commission’s annual report today, signed a deal with the banks last year that effectively gives him access to inspect and audit their systems without permission. He extracted the concession after a series of high-profile breaches at prominent high street banks and building societies.

This is utterly outrageous. This man has no business going into a private company and auditing their security (which means of course, looking at all the accounts, finding out where the back doors are, so that even ‘security through obscurity‘ will not work). Anyone who knows about the systems used by banks understands that they are hugely complex, written in a variety of old and new languages; unless this Richard Thomas has expertise in these languages, and is given access to the source, he cannot possibly be able to audit the systems. Even if he did get access to the source, it would take years to audit it all, and the government does not have this expertise; that is a FACT.

That the banks have signed this agreement is also very very weird. I would like to read it….but I digress. Obviously they signed it to try and stop some new legislation coming into force. This is a bad, bullying bastard government.

In one instance, Halifax allowed details of 13,000 mortgage customers to go astray after the briefcase holding the documents was stolen froma member of staff’s car.

That has nothing to do with computers. No audit would catch this sort of insider blunder.

The incident came after Nationwide’s lax security procedures put thousands of customers at risk from fraud. A laptop was stolen from a long-standing Nationwide employee in a domestic burglary. The employee reported its loss and then went on holiday, but it took three weeks for the building society to realise that the laptop contained confidential customer information.

All this sort of event requires is the writing of guidelines, i.e., you do not put customer data on laptops. Ever.

Mr Thomas said a similar agreement allowing his inspectors access to companies in all sectors would prove to be more effective than spending the next few years painstakingly negotiating with each area of industry and commerce.

Richard Thomas is a moron. What this means is that anyone running a database (presumably over a certain number of rows in size) would be liable to one of these audits. Any company with even half a brain cell would immediately leave the UK for more sensible shores. There would be nothing that Richard Thomas and his army of ‘experts’ could do about it, and in fact, this is already happening. Banks, telephone companies (BT) have moved their data processing to India. When you get a call from an Indian call centre, they have your name, account number, date of birth, address and everything else they need to serve you.

There is nothing that Richard Thomas can do about it, and frankly that is a good thing. If Britain wants to become a business unfriendly zone, all modern businesses from LastFM to Orange will simply go elsewhere. Its all transparent to the user and the company, so why not? Why put up with these zealots and idiots and control freak morons who do not know the difference between what is public and what is private?

He said he also needed a more effective sanction where there are “flagrant, far-reaching breaches of the law”.

The ultimate sanction is a lawsuit, and customers leaving you. That is what you should facilitate. After you have cleaned up your own house.

Debt collectors linked to a financial services subsidiary of General Motors and private equity firm Cabot Square Capital were named in a court case this year over the illicit market in private information stolen from government databases.

And there you have it.

What I have been saying all along about copies of databases, illegal trading of data etc etc. and yet, this brain dead journalist cannot connect the dots and pull Richard Thomas up on the shenanigans that he is a part of, and the danger he is putting the 11 million children of Britain in.

Its is sickening, like watching an avalanche bearing down on you in slow motion as jabbering idiots throw snowballs at each other.

The commissioner brought a prosecution against a private investigator who was used by companies chasing vehicle hire purchase and bank debtors. The private investigator posed as another member of staff in telephone conversations in a practice known as “blagging” to gain access to personal information. The companies say they told the private investigator at the time not to break the law.

It is not called ‘Blagging’ you cretin, it is called ‘Social Engineering‘, and Kevin Mitnick wrote a very good book about it (which I have read) that everyone like Richard Thomas and Phillip Inmann should read. If they have read it, then double shame on them for not taking it seriously.

Mr Thomas said he was concerned that a market in stolen data was growing despite recent adverse publicity. “During a recent investigation we turned up at the offices of a private investigation agency and while we were there the fax machine leapt into life. It was a request from another firm asking them to find out if a woman had cancer. It also asked the agency to check a list of clinics to see if another woman had had an abortion.

This is astonishing. Does Richard Thomas really think that the underground market in stolen data is going to stop growing because of adverse publicity? And does he truly believe that if ContactPoint, the NIR and ID Cards are rolled out that this market will shrink?

Is he that delusional?

“In this instance we are not talking about a small misdemeanour. This is the illegal soliciting of personal information and the kind of thing that we need to investigate thoroughly.”

Bastardy mixed with ignorance. What needs to be done is to stop the compulsory aggregation of personal data into monolithic systems that are widely accessible by civil servants. That means no ContactPoint, no ID Cards and no NIR. Period.

But the CBI said enhanced powers to investigate alleged breaches of the data protection rules would have wider implications. “The nature of business is changing dramatically, so the way companies handle customer data is increasingly important,” said the employers’ body spokesman Jeremy Beale. “Some firms need to improve their data policies but there are no easy answers or silver bullets and the CBI wants a national debate to help identify where the responsibility for different aspects of data protection lies. By calling for the ability to inspect firms’ files without consent, the information commissioner is in danger of leading businesses into the very surveillance society he is heeding against.”

Exactly. And looking at files has nothing to do with laptops escaping offices or garbage being thrown out un shredded.

Mr Thomas said this year he was concerned that the vast amount of data being collected on individuals meant we were sleep-walking into a surveillance society. He said he lacked greater powers only because when the government translated the EU data protection directive into law it left out crucial elements. “The EU wants the government to give us the powers. Our experience tells us we need the powers,” he said.

Our experience, which is greater than yours simply through reading, is that:

• You people don’t know what you are doing
• You say one thing (protect data) and then do another (collect children’s details in an open system)
• You do not admit to data breaches, and take no responsibility for them
• You have no expertise in this area at all
• You have nothing of substance to offer
• You use this and every possible excuse to get into people’s private affairs

The Ministry of Justice is responsible for overseeing the Information Commissioner’s office. Yesterday it said: “We believe that the Information Commissioner already has adequate powers.”

Amen. What this dunderhead needs is TRAINING and EXPERIENCE in the systems he is trying to get to grips with, so that he can read and write best practice documents and then implement them INSIDE HER MAJESTY’S GOVERNMENT.

Don’t bank on banks to keep your secrets

For consumers who have been studiously shredding their old credit card statements and other sensitive data, the information commissioner’s move cannot come soon enough.

Despite repeatedly warning their customers to be careful about what they put in the recycling bin, several banks and other institutions have shown a disregard for their customer’s important financial data.

Two years ago the Guardian exposed how the Grand hotel in Brighton – bombed during the 1984 Conservative party conference – had thrown thousands of its customers’ credit card details, home addresses, and phone numbers in a skip outside its back door. Passers-by were helping themselves. We were able to ring up some of the former guests and read out their credit card numbers – to their initial bemusement, and ultimate anger. In some cases we even had their passport numbers. And the Grand was by no means alone.

The Grand Hotel in Brighton is not a bank, last time I chequed.

Since then, banks have been caught leaving bin liners full of customers’ details out in the street. Others have allowed staff to take unprotected laptops containing sensitive data home, which have subsequently been stolen.

In the usa there are now services that lock down your stuff and make it harder for thieves to use your accounts, should they get hold of your SSN. The market responds to these challenges and people are willing to pay for them. Like I predicted, ‘Dorian Grey’ services will begin to emerge onto the markets, where your identity will be shielded for a fee. You can do all your shopping and everything else you need to do whilst using an alternative managed and disposable identity. This will be the only way to keep yourself out of the legal and illegal databases, making you freer and more flexible.

A further concern was the case last year of Abbey’s call centre staff who were selling its customers’ bank details in an underpass near Bradford. In fact, this happens far more often than is realised because the banks always hush up breaches of security.

And what about the NIR, Identity Cards and ContactPoint you simple minded numbskull pinheaded journalist loser? Did it not occur to you, with that vivid image of people sneaking around in an underpass that this is the way perverts are going to trade ContactPoint data?

Honestly!

Sri Lankan staff in petrol stations recently perpetrated a £30m chip and pin fraud after they recorded details and then cloned several customers’ bank and credit cards.

Did that happen in Sri Lanka or the UK? Why mention the country that the bad guys were from? Nasty!

The government is another culprit. In one instance, temporary staff at the Child Support Agency were allowed access to one of the country’s three main credit reference agencies. The staff could ask for credit checks on individuals and get other personal financial information. To make matters worse, they were able to continue accessing the Equifax database for several months after their contracts ended.

That was a breach of Equifax, not a breach of a government database. Anyone can pay to get access to Equifax, so this example is totally bogus and garbage.

Next week HM Revenue & Customs is expected to announce that its tax credit system suffered fraud and error worth £1bn in 2005/2006. In its first three years the level of fraud and error will reach almost £3bn.

Irrelevant. Obviously Phillip Inmann has run out of examples because he actually doesn’t know anything about this subject, and also, cannot even use the google to find relevant examples. What a complete jackass!

So you are far more likely to be the victim of identity fraud because of something an institution holding your details has done – or not done – than you are from not shredding your documents at home.

The brain dead, computer illiterate, irresponsible, useless Guardian

[…]

What a pathetic conclusion. The majority of people do not suffer identity theft. That is a fact. It is also a fact that people in the UK are less vulnerable because there is no single identifying number attached to everyone’s name as there is in the USA, with their despicable Social Security Number. Britain is better off than the USA in this respect, and idiots like you keep failing to connect the dots and point this out whenever you get the chance. Don’t worry; there are many people who are doing your job for you, who actually know what they are talking about, and in fact, they have had a bigger audience an influence than any of your lackluster articles have had.

Ah yes, the second use of our new category ‘Someone Stupid Said’, and a most perfect example to boot.

Beverley Hughes, Minister of State for Children, Young People and Families, and soon to be the orchestrator of the largest mass abuse of children in the history of the world, said some very stupid stuff in a letter printed in the Guardian, in response to this letter authored by Jonathan Shephard (Independent Schools Council), Ross Anderson (Foundation Information Policy Research), Simon Davies (Privacy International), Becky Hogge (Open Rights Group) and Terri Dowty (Action on Rights for Children).

Here we go…

The ContactPoint system is secure

Tuesday June 26, 2007
The Guardian

Those who claim ContactPoint is open to abuse (Letters, June 22) should look more closely at the systems.

Actually we understand PERFECTLY how databases work, which is why we are able to make the assessment that ContactPoint cannot ever be secure. It is YOU who are a computer illiterate schaufensterpuppen without a single clue about what you are talking about or allowing to be planned.

If you publish the actual specification, then everyone can make a judgement, except maybe you, since you clearly don’t know the difference between a television and a computer.

The design and operation of ContactPoint will adhere to the new international standard for information security management systems as well as conforming with relevant government security standards and will continue to be reviewed by independent security experts during the system build.

So. What you failed to do is provide a link to to or properly name (give the ISO number) for this standard. Do you even know what a link is, we ask. As for ‘conforming to the relevant govenment security standards’, we have seen how they work and they do not work at all. Those standards are actually implimented (and very probably designed) by the contractors that you use to get these revolting jobs done. No department in the government has the capacity to be able to design and run these systems, and even if they did, this does not address the issue of rogue workers releasing information.

You say that security will be reviewed ‘during the system build’. What this REALLY means is that you have no idea how it is going to be rolled out and secured in advance of doing it, and you will be making it up as you go along, fixing any problems as you build it.

This is like saying you are going to build a new model of passenger jet, and that you are going to work out the details like center of gravity, air flow, where to place the engines, seating arrangements, materials, avionics etc etc during the aircraft build. You really are, one of the stupidest people on the planet if you are going to do what you are planning to do in the way that you have described in this pathetic letter.

We are confident we are doing all we can to ensure security.

And it is this suicidal overconfidence that will be the undoing of this project.

It is true that, in some limited situations, records of children whose circumstances may mean they are at increased risk of harm may be subject to shielding.

What this means is very clear. ALL CHILDREN SHOULD NOT BE PUT IN THIS DATABASE. A paedophile values ALL children. This is not a limited situation, but something that makes ALL children vulnerable. We know that the children of celebrities (and no doubt, the children of very member of Parliament) are going to be exempted from this database. The fact is that YOUR children are not more special, valuable or worthy of protection than any other child.

This admission is not only wrong, but it is a sickening demonstration of your true nature, as exposed by those hypocritical ministers who say that the state school system is good enough for everyone while they segregate their own children into private schools because their local schools are actually totally unacceptable, (Ruth Kelly, Diane Abbott, Harriet Harman). No one’s child should be put in this database by force. Every parent should have the right to opt IN to it should they want to. Opting in is the only correct and moral way to run such an abomination, and of course, you will never do this, because no one in their right mind would deliberately add their children to yet another government database.

These decisions will be taken on a case-by-case basis and this approach was backed by the information commissioner. The information commissioner’s office has been consulted at every stage of the development of the procedures surrounding the use of ContactPoint.

The foxes consulted with each other about access to the chicken coop. We feel so much better now!

Access to the system will be restricted to authorised workers who need it as part of their job and who have been security-checked, trained and have the necessary authentication

You really are one disingenuous liar of the first order.

The ‘authorized worker’ you desctibe are actually an army of 330,000 people. That is not ‘restricting’ the system, that is giving it to every Tom Dick and Harry.

The ‘security checking’ will not stop anyone of this army of users from copying and compromising the security of children on the database. If you knew anything about databases and how they are used you would understand this. If you claim to understand this, then you are an evil monster for pushing ContactPoint, and a liar because you are claiming that ‘ContactPoint is Secure’ when you know that this can never be the case. If you do not know anything about this, you should, at the very least, not have written this letter, and you should not be trying to rollout this disaster on wheels. Either way, you are in the wrong.

they will be made aware of the penalties for misuse, including disciplinary and criminal proceedings.

None of these penalties will reverse the damage done by this system. Period.

ContactPoint will contain only basic administrative information about children in England – their name, date of birth, and contact details for their parents or carers, for their school, GP and other services working with the child or young person. There will be no case information and no subjective opinions about a child or parent.

This is more disingenuous garbage. The private, sensitive and personal details of human beings (who they are related to, where they live, their ages) are not ‘basic administrative information’. This is PRIVATE INFORMATION that is the property of the citizen, and you have no right to store it, abuse it, collect it, distribute it or do anything with it without the written consent of the person. Certainly you have absolutely no right to short circuit the responsibility of a parent to their children by stealing this information and using it willy nilly. You are evil for doing this, you are evil for thinking this, and there are no two ways about it.

You are demonstrating that you are anti family, by doing this, coming between the sacred relationship that exists in a family between the child and the parent. These details are private. They should remain private, and they should only be used by consent.

It’s important not to forget the reason we are bringing this system in. It implements an important recommendation made by Lord Laming and is designed to be a practical tool to support better communication between practitioners so they can see quickly and easily who else is working with the same child and how they can contact them.
Beverley Hughes
Minister of State for Children, Young People and Families

This is utter nonsense. The fact is you don’t know why this database is being proposed. You have not got a clue about the forceful vendors pushing their ‘solutions’ onto HMG and the public, the dirty deals to sell the population like sheep. You have no idea about the long term agenda to neutralize any opposition to the creation of the Quantized Human Pleb Grid. Once again, if you DO know about all of this, you are completely evil for promoting it. If you do not, then you should not be promoting it from a place of total pig ignorance.

Beverley Hughes is the anti-Family minister. She has no idea of what the word ‘Family’ means; anyone that claims they know what that word means could never propose what she is proposing. Anyone that is pro-Family is for the protection and preservation of family bonds and responsibilities and they do not, reflexively, do anything that dilutes those bonds and responsibilities.

What Beverley Hughes is proposing is not only wrong, it is very dangerous. But she doesn’t care.

Look at her record:

How Beverley Hughes voted on key issues since 2001:

• Moderately against a transparent Parliament.
  votes,speeches

• Moderately for introducing a smoking ban.
  votes,speeches

• Strongly for introducing ID cards.
  votes,speeches

• Very strongly for introducing foundation hospitals.
  votes,speeches

• Strongly for introducing student top-up fees.
  votes,speeches

• Strongly for Labour’s anti-terrorism laws.
  votes,speeches

• Very strongly for the Iraq war.
  votes,speeches

• Very strongly against investigating the Iraq war.
  votes,speeches

• Very strongly for replacing Trident.
  votes,speeches

• Very strongly for the fox hunting ban.
  votes,speeches

From this record it is clear that Beverley Hughes is against everything decent people are for. The only reason why she is there is because 7,851 couldn’t tell night from day at the ballot box.

That she is in this particular job is astonishing and frightening….though not really surprising, all of Neu Labour are as mad as hatters, and the deeper you go the more cut off from reality they are.

Added: Saturday, 30 June, 2007, 10:18 GMT 11:18 UK

Completely safe, thank you.

And even if I didn’t, I would not be prepared to give terrorists any victory by changing my habits or pandering to any ‘increased security’ in response to their threats.

Megan, Cheshire UK

Recommended by 215 people

———————

Added: Saturday, 30 June, 2007, 10:06 GMT 11:06 UK

Statistically and practically you have more chance of being hit by a bus on Oxford Street than being a victim of these deranged, brainwahsed psycopaths. Lets get on with our lives and don’t give them the satisfaction of thinking we’ll change of behaviour or way of life. As someone regularly in London on business I will continue to use the tube and visit nightclubs when socialising and these spineless cowards won’t stop me.

john smith, leeds, United Kingdom

Recommended by 193 people

———————

Added: Saturday, 30 June, 2007, 11:28 GMT 12:28 UK

Ooooh, I’m SO scared! Please, Mr Brown, pass some more draconian laws which limit our freedom.

I’m sick of being made to feel fearful by clowns who failed their “car bombing 101” course.

During the WWII blitz, when the danger was very real, the message wasn’t one of fear and angst, but “Keep Calm and Carry On”. I wish we had that message in today’s phony war on terra.

Marc Brett, London, UK

These are the most recommended answers to the question “How safe do you feel in the UK”, as asked at BBQ.

Its as if the usefulness of these acts are being tested by BBQ as part of a carefully coordinated planned study of effectiveness. As you can see, no one is buying it.

Everyone now understands that giving up your rights for safety is bullshit. Even more people understand that the people engineering these ‘attacks’ are the same people who are taking away your rights.

Watson has an interesting and insightful thing to say about this:

If we were really at war with Islamic terrorists then the British government would impose stringent controls on letting Muslims into the country in the first place and would deport others en masse – but instead the opposite has happened, while everybody’s rights are violated and abused in the name of security.

No one can say that this is a lie. People up and down the country are saying it openly. It cant be long before the newest buzzword in the UK is ‘Repatriation’. Denmark have already swallowed hard and said the words:

1.2. The Danish Repatriation Scheme

In Denmark repatriation is considered a voluntary matter. For repatriation to be successful, it must be carefully prepared. A decision to return is never easy, but often a lengthy process for the individual who has to consider many aspects. It must be ensured that the decision is made on an as sound and well-informed basis as possible.

The current repatriation scheme gives refugees and immigrants the opportunity to apply for financial support towards resettlement in their native country or former country of residence and towards the costs of the journey. In addition the scheme contains a fixed-term right to regret for refugees. […]

reintegration.net

Now look at this.

See what I mean?

But I digress. The focus is going to be moved, wether the grotesque ‘Uncle Joe’ Gordon Brown likes it or not, to eliminating ‘the enemy within’ and no one is going to accept even more useless legislation, which is literally useless at stopping crime.

James Meikle
Friday June 22, 2007
The Guardian

Misuse of an electronic database holding sensitive information on 11 million children in England could lead to millions of breaches of security each year, it is claimed today. Privacy campaigners and independent schools have warned of the “enormous” potential for abuse of the huge IT system to be launched next year.

In a letter to the Guardian, they appeal to the government to reconsider “this hugely expensive and intrusive scheme”. The Guardian revealed on Monday how the system would be open to at least 330,000 people as part of an effort to prevent deaths such as that of Victoria Climbié by helping children’s services work together.

Critics fear it will breach the right to privacy and are concerned about security. It will be accessible through the internet with a two-part authentication.

But today’s letter, signed by representatives of the Independent Schools Council, Action on Rights for Children, the Foundation for Information Policy Research, the Open Rights Group and Privacy International, says that the problems of “a potentially leaky and inadequate system” must be solved before the plan goes further. It claims that evidence from Leeds NHS trust last year suggested that in one month staff logged 70,000 incidents of inappropriate access. “On the basis of these figures, misuse of the ContactPoint system could run to 1,650,000 incidents a month.”

[…]

The computer illiterate Guardian

My emphasis.

Firstly, these moronic journalists have no idea about how to tell these stories because they are computer illiterates. Only a computer illiterate would use a phrase like ‘two-part authentication’ in this context. The correct phrase is:

‘only a user name and password’

When you use the correct phrase, it is then easy to paint a picture of people sharing usernames and passwords to gain entry into this system, which will be live over the internets.

This means that anyone with the url, a leaked username and password and the intent, can get onto the system, and then start to copy the entries one by one.

In fact, a smart person could write a simple PHP script to scrape the entries one by one over a long period of time, prompting the user for an alternative username and password should the one he is supplied with cease to be useful.

Everyone knows about Bugmenot, the service that supplies you with usernames and passwords to many sites on the internets. I’m sure that the Bugmenot Admins would NEVER allow usernames and passwords to ContactPoint on their system, but what Bugmenot demonstrates is that it is easy to not only share usernames and passwords, but it is possible to automate the sharing of these usernames and passwords.

Of course, none of this is in this article. It is not vivid in even the most simple area, that of using the correct terminology, which everyone is familiar with since most people in the UK have some contact with internet accounts and logging into them with a user name and a password.

Even that journalist must have experience of logging into his email account; how is it that these people cannot make the insight jump to the next logical point in the argument against this?

Because they are THICK AS SHIT.

330,000 users to have access to database on England’s children

• Family campaigners raise concerns over security
• Index is intended to avoid another Climbié case

Lucy Ward, social affairs correspondent
Monday June 18, 2007
The Guardian

A giant electronic database containing sensitive information on all 11 million children in England will be open to at least 330,000 users when it launches next year, according to government guidance.

A final consultation on the plan reveals that the index, intended to help children’s services work together more effectively following the death of Victoria Climbié, will be accessible through any computer linked to the internet, whether at work or at home, providing users have the correct two-part security authentication.

Guidance on the £224m project warns those authorised to use the system not to access it in internet cafes or on computers in public reception areas, and instructs them never to leave the database logged on in case of unauthorised use.

Though it stresses the sophistication of the electronic security surrounding the databank, it acknowledges: “No system can be 100% guaranteed against misuse.” The government was warned by family campaigners that parents would be concerned about the number of people able to search the database, and about the potential security risk.

Mary MacLeod, chief executive of the Family and Parenting Institute, said: “Our research with parents suggests they will have great anxiety about the proposals.”

The universal database, forecast to cost £41m a year to run, has prompted controversy since the government set out its legal underpinning in the 2004 Children Act. Ministers argue the system will help prevent the lack of communication between children’s services revealed in the Laming inquiry into the death of eight-year-old Victoria Climbié, and will boost early intervention where children need it.

However, critics argue it breaches a child’s right to privacy, while others have raised concerns about security.

The database, named ContactPoint, will store basic identifying information including date of birth, address, name of parent and an identifying number for each child up to the age of 18. It will also hold contact details for services involved with the child, including school and GP practice but also others, though consent is required for details of sensitive services such as sexual and mental health.

No one will be allowed to opt out of the database, but children or their parents will have the right to ask to see information about them and challenge it if it is wrong. Children’s details can also be electronically “shielded” if they are considered to be at increased risk – an exemption which, controversially, could extend to the offspring of high-profile figures.

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2105187,00.html

Every Child Matters, but it seems, some children matter more than others.

The right to CHALLENGE information if it is wrong is completely different to being able to CHANGE information if it is wrong, and if this insanity goes ahead, you can imagine the horrible process that would be involved in any such ‘challenge’.

And of course, they will use these unique numbers and roll them over into the NIR, creating a system that automatically populates it from birth from now (2008, if they manage to create this database) on.

This is pure evil, and the fact that they are going to ‘shield’ the identities of the children of the rich and famous proves that this database is dangerous to every child.

From the policy document:

Objectives of ContactPoint

4. The objectives of ContactPoint are to:
• help practitioners identify quickly a child with whom they have contact, and whether that child is getting the universal services (education, primary health care) to which he or she is entitled;

and then:

Which children and young people will be covered?

9. ContactPoint also supports the policy objective of identifying early those children with additional needs which should be addressed if they are to achieve the Every Child Matters outcomes, and then addressing those needs swiftly and effectively. It is estimated that at any one time 3-4 million children have such needs.

10. ContactPoint will cover all children and young people in England.
This is because:
• it is not possible to predict in advance which children will have needs for additional services;
• any child or young person could require the support of those services at any time in their childhood; and
• all children have the right to the universal services (education, primary health care), and the basic data will show whether or not they are receiving, and will then, as necessary, support local action to ensure they do receive them.

What this says is very clear; every child has the right to education, and this system will make sure that they will be forced to receive these ‘rights’.

If it is shown that a child is not receiving the ‘right’ to go to school, then the system will flag them, and the ‘right’ to attend school will be enforced.

Note how they justify putting EVERY CHILD in the system because, “it is not possible to predict in advance which children will have needs for additional services”, in other words, every parent is a potential criminal, and every child is a potential victim, and so we must put everyone under surveillance.

They understand that people do not like to be surveilled:

In order to ensure universal coverage, and also to ensure that the most vulnerable children have a record, inclusion of a child or young person on ContactPoint will not be subject to consent. However, where a practitioner is delivering a sensitive service to a child or young person, inclusion of that practitioner’s contact details on the child’s record will be subject to the informed and explicit consent of the young person, or, in the case of a child, the parent. Access to this information, once placed on the child’s record, will also be tightly restricted. Sensitive services are specific services in the fields of sexual health, mental health, and substance abuse. The purpose of this approach is to prevent children and young people being deterred from accessing these services.

Once everyone with a sensitive medical problem understands that touching this system in any way marks you forever, they WILL stay away from it, becauase they will understand that anyone can find out everything about them. And this will be carried over into adulthood:

ContactPoint will cover children and young people up to their 18th birthday. To help ensure that the transition from youth to adult services is managed smoothly, it may also be desirable to make provision to retain some basic information for young adults with multiple needs, (for example care leavers and young people with disabilities), beyond their 18th birthday, with their consent.

So, your consent to be kept on this database can be asked if you are 18; does this mean that the records pertaining to each child as it reaches its 18th year will be deleted?. Also, why is it that parents cannot opt out of this system on behalf of their children, but children themselves can do so when they reach 18? If it is good for you when you are less than 18, surely it is good for you after you are 18; why should you be given the choice to opt out then, and not before?

Parents have the absolute right to care for their children in the way that they see fit. By saying that the parent does not have the right to opt their children out, the state is taking on the role of the parent in saying what is and is not of benefit to the child which is totally unacceptable to any decent person. They are making the children of the UK into property.

Parents have an obligation to protect their children from harm. This database constitutes real harm, and so, all parents who object to it, should opt out of it by any means necessary.

People with money (people with means) will now have to find private doctors who use only paper to keep records, and who are true to their Hippocratic Oath. This database violates the privacy of children, puts them in harms way, damages them and their families and so therefore, all doctors should refuse to engage with it in any way.

And the people without money? I guess they will just have to vote Tory next time round.

How are they going to populate this database?

To avoid double-inputting of data and to ensure high standards of accuracy, information will be drawn from and updated through, a range of existing national and local systems, using proven technology.

This means that it is going to be a total mess. Which is a good thing, because if it does not work, eventually it will be shut down as non cost effective.

And what if people abuse the system? (other than the hackers who will be able to own this system within 15 minutes of it going live)

A range of sanctions are available to manage inappropriate use, and can include disciplinary action, fines and custodial sentences.

Of course, none of these sanctions will put the data back in the database. Once it is out there, it is out there forever, and no amount of prison time, fines, disciplinary action or any thing else will change that.

This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of data, and it also shows a lack of understanding of the risk such a system poses.

By assembling this system, they are putting ALL THE CHILDREN OF THE UK AT RISK because a statistically small number of children are being mistreated. By creating this system, they are abusing ALL THE CHILDREN OF THE UK, where they were not before being abused and violated.

This government has, through this project, become the single biggest abuser of children in the history of Great Britain.

And finally:

18.

During the implementation phase, each Local Authority will be funded to provide a small team to support data migration, matching and cleansing during roll-out. There will also be a role for authorities to communicate and consult widely in their areas and to locally promote ContactPoint. Each Authority will maintain a small team to support ongoing data migration, matching and cleansing, and technical support for authorised users. This team would be responsible for service management, systems administration, data management, professional support and administration of local access. Local authorities will be supported by the central project team through this process, and will receive training, guidance and support to carry out this important role.

So there will be hoards of people given access to this database as it is being created, who will sift and sort through everyone, looking through everyones personal details as they ‘match and cleanse’. This is a total nightmare.

LEts think about some security breach scenarios, many of which we have discussed on BLOGDIAL before:

Casually shared login details:
We all know about the sharing of logins and passwords that is rampant throughout many systems world wide. All it will take is one person to allow their account to be used for the entire system to be compromised, and of course, once the data is out there, it is out there FOREVER.

Hackers Owning the DB:
I guarantee you that some hackers will own this database within minutes or days of it going online. They will then do an SQL dump of the whole database, and then all of it, records of every child in the UK will be out there, FOREVER. This is a scenario that WILL take place.

Duplication by increments:
This database and its entire contents will be duplicated over time, as every small breach and copying of a record means that particular record is out there forever. Over 10 years (if this nightmare goes ahead) we will see near complete copies of this database in private hands.

This database is not only extremely valuable to sex monsters, but it is literally millions of times more valuable to toy, clothes and book manufacturers who would pay anything (even fines and jail time) for access to the clean database of names ages, genders and addresses of all the children in the UK, so that they can market to them directly and individually. This database represents a business opportunity without precedent. And you can guarantee that the selling of it will be proposed as a way to offset the cost of running it.

Bad insiders:
Bad insiders; we have talked about them on BLOGDIAL before, and there is nothing that you can do about them. No amount of ‘enhanced criminal records checks’ will be able to predict which of these 330,000 people will crack under pressure. Criminal records checks only tell you the people who have not yet committed a crime, they cannot predict the future.

This government is totally insane to be doing this. No doubt about it.

The ultimate question for all parents is, what are you going to do to protect your children and to keep them out of this database? How far are you willing to go to do it?

The new film ‘Taking Liberties‘ is all about everything anyone with a brain-cell has understood for years. What is interesting is that on its weblog, when you want to publish a comment it is set to:

“This blog does not allow anonymous comments.”

Nice one. Anonymity and the ability to publish anonymously is an important right:

In the legal tradition, the right to anonymity is integrally related to an individual’s freedom of expression guarantees. Historically, many authors publish anonymously because their message is too controversial and they risk persecution or social ostracization for the content of their speech. Fundamental principles upon which the US Constitution is grounded were first espoused in The Federalist Papers , by “Publius”, the famous moniker used by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton when they wished to publish anonymously. Ironically, George Orwell, author of 1984 and Animal Farm , concealed his name and identity, Eric Blair, out of fear of political backlash for his views. The historical and political use of anonymous speech demonstrates that it is a vital part of freedom of expression and freedom of the press.

Like the right to distribute thoughts and ideas, the right to anonymous publishing is an essential component to freedom of expression guarantees. It protects the most valuable speech in a free society: the views that challenge the status quo, the majority, or government.

The US Supreme Court has historically recognized that the constitution’s freedom of expression guarantees protects a publisher’s right to anonymity. According to the US Supreme Court, the right to speak anonymously, “exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and the First Amendment in particular.” ( McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Comm ., 514 U.S. 334 (1995). According to Justice Stevens, anonymity is a prerequisite for speech in some cases. He pointed out that the motivation for anonymous publication may be to avoid social ostracism, to prevent retaliation, or to protect privacy. It is anonymous speech that shields individuals “from the tyranny of the majority … [It] protects unpopular individuals from retaliation – and their ideas from suppression – a the hand of an intolerant society.” Id.

In Watchtower Bible & Tract Society of New York, Inc. v. Village of Stratton , 122 S. Ct. 2080, 2090 (2002), the US Supreme Court ruled that a municipal ordinance requiring pamphleteers to disclose names implicates “anonymity interests” rooted in the First Amendment’s freedom of expression guarantees. The US Supreme Court also struck down a law requiring citizens to wear identification badges because it violated citizens’ First Amendment right to anonymity. ( Buckley v. Am. Constitutional Law Foun., Inc. , 525 U.S. 182 (1992).

Lower federal courts have specifically extended the right to publish anonymously to the Internet, ruling that “the constitutional rights of Internet users, including the right to speak anonymously, must be carefully safeguarded,” ( Doe v. 2TheMart.com, Inc ., 140 F. Supp.2d at 1097). The First Amendment right communicate anonymously over the Internet was also upheld in ACLU v. Johnson , 4 F. Supp.2d 1029, 1033 (D.N.M. 1998), aff’d, 194 F.3d 1149 (10 th Cir. 1999) and in ACLU of Georgia v. Miller , 977 F. Supp. 1228, 1230 (N.D. Ga 1997), which additionally recognized the constitutional right to communicate pseudonymously on the Internet.

Canadian courts have likewise extended the right to speak anonymously to the Internet:

“Some degree of privacy or confidentiality with respect to the identity of the Internet protocol address of the originator of message has significant safety value and is in keeping with what should be perceived as being good public policy.” Wilkins J. in Irwin Toy v. Doe (2000), 12 C.P.C. (5 th ) 103 (Ont. S.C.J.) […]

But there is much worse about these people….

What is most galling about them is their ‘what you can do‘ page.

As you know being an avid reader of BLOGDIAL, we understand that demonstrations are totally ineffective, and anyone who asks you to demonstrate is actually a part of the problem.

The only way we can permanently stop war is to think obliquely use common sense and do not do anything that will not permanently fix what is wrong.

We had this debate on BLOGDIAL before the historic march organized by StopWar. Demonstrations are pointless because they do not achieve their ends, and the people who go on them are nothing more than stupid monkeys; the people who organize them are actually working for the enemy. Time and time again we have said this, (and other stuff) and had it proved, sadly.

Now the directors of this film, after everything we have said and witnessed are asking everyone to:

Join Amnesty
Visit and sign up online:
web.amnesty.org/pages/join-eng

Join Liberty
Visit and sign up online:
www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/join

Email Your MP
Demand to know what they are doing about the issues raised in the film:
www.writetothem.com

Join the Mass Lone Demos
Demonstrations take place 5pm to 7:30pm on the third Wednesday of every month, forms [MS WORD] [PDF] must be handed in or sent by recorded delivery 1 week beforehand.

[…]

Joining Amnesty will not cause one law to be repealed, nor will it stop new bad legislation from being enacted.

Similarly, Joining Liberty will achieve absolutely nothing at all.

Emailing the very people who pass the laws that enslave you is just STUPID.

And joining demonstrations we know about, don’t we?

Telling the truth is not enough. Acting is not enough. Correct Action is the only thing that will change what you want changed.

But you know this!

This is the first ‘post tipping point’ post. It is about the absurd ‘Department of Homeland Security’, USVISIT and their true purposes; to control the united states population, and to intercept ‘criminals‘.

Like the Germans that they are emulating, uncle sham’s obsessive record keeping will come back to haunt them, and in twentieth century style, this haunting comes back in near real time.

Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) has a detailed analyses of precisely what ‘DHS’ has been doing, and as we and everyone else has been saying, it has nothing whatsoever to do with ‘terrorism’, and the numbers prove it.

Lets think about this.

If a huge amount of money was spent fighting a phantom menace, and then those people found (by doing the same statistical analysis that TRAC has done) that, actually, there is no terrorist threat at all then they would find themselves in a great dilemma. Firstly, none of them would have jobs if the DHS was found to be an unneeded knee jerk response to the mythical ‘911’. Secondly, it would be a huge embarrassment to the people who demanded that it be created. The second is less important than the first.

Now that this juggernaut has been created, it will be very difficult to shut it down. It has no real need to exist, other than to feed its employees and guarantee their pensions, to pay monies to contractors; to be a part of the ‘security ecosystem’ in which the citizen is the plankton and DHS, USVISIT etc are the baleen sporting monster whales.

In any other field of human activity, if something was not working correctly for the task it was designed to fulfill, it would be dismantled immediately lest it waste MORE money. But this is not about efficiency, common sense or anything else decent. It is about implementing the infrastructure of fascism in the united states.

And they are doing a very good job at it.

Secret plans to turn staff into STASI informers
Francis Elliott, Chief Political Correspondent

Council workers, charity staff and doctors will be required to tip off STASI about anyone whom they believe could commit a violent crime, under secret Home Office plans.

Civil liberties campaigners last night said that the proposal raised the prospect of people being placed under surveillance and detained even though they have committed no offence.

And a senior Kremlin official, who leaked the plans to Pravda, said that it would entail a mass of personal information, including sensitive medical records, being passed around many different agencies — even if there was no firm evidence of any potential risk from an individual.

The draft set of proposals on “multi-agency information sharing” was circulated around The Kremlin by Simon King, head of the violent crime unit at The Kremlin. The document states: “Public bodies will have access to valuable information about people at risk of becoming either perpetrators or victims of serious violence. Professionals will obviously alert STASI or other relevant authority if they have good reason to believe [an] act of serious violence is about to be committed. However, our proposal goes beyond that, and is that, when they become sufficiently concerned about an individual, they must consider initial risk assessment of risk to/from that person, and refer [the] case to [a] multi-agency body.”

It suggests that two new agencies — one for potential criminals, the other for potential victims — might be created to collate reports from the front line and carry out “full risk assessments”. But the draft does not spell out what action could then be taken to head off violent attacks.

Mr King admits that a number of issues need to be resolved, including what should trigger an initial report and what should count as a serious violent crime. He also says that laws would have to be created to place frontline staff under a statutory duty to alert STASI to the potentially violent. Currently those working with the public do not have such a duty, even if they believe that a crime is imminent.

Jago Russell, Policy Officer at the Liberty campaign group, said: “These proposals leave too many questions unanswered. What does The Kremlin propose to do with the people who have committed no crime but who fit a worrying profile? How far are we willing to go in pursuit of the unrealistic promise of a ‘risk-free society’?”

Danger signs used to identify an individual as a potential perpetrator might include a violent family background, heavy drinking or mental health problems. A potential victim might come to the attention of the monitoring agency on seeking treatment for stress-related conditions from a GP.

Supporters of the plans say that they would build on existing local arrangements that are already helping to head off domestic violence before it happens. It is claimed that better information-sharing might have prevented the Peredelkino murders.

Ian Huntley had been the subject of complaints of violence, a fact that had not been passed on to the authorities in Vladivostok, where he became a school caretaker.

Both the Huntley case and the death of Victoria Climbié, 9, who was killed despite repeated warnings to social service staff, kick-started efforts to pool personal information held across different agencies.

However, the latest plan goes beyond anything so far proposed. It would require primary legislation to make local authorities, STASI, GPs and other frontline workers share information on potential perpetrators or victims of serious violence among themselves.

The leaked draft suggests that existing Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships “could be well placed to manage and co-ordinate this work”.

However, some senior Kremlin officials are concerned at what they consider to be a significant extension of information-gathering which will, in any case, be ineffective. There are concerns too, that the system could be used to spread malicious smears.

More controversial still are the issues of where information on members of the public judged “at risk” should be kept and for how long.

David Davis, the Shadow Kremlin Securitat Officer, said: “Do our STASI not already have a difficult enough administrative burden without requiring them to wade through file after file of speculation and guess-work? And do we not already have enough of a surveillance society without recruiting council staff and charity volunteers to snoop on their customers?”

Dominic Grieve said that he could see little benefit in the scheme. “The proposals look as if they would set up a system of great complexity with absolutely no evidence that it could deliver results.”

A Kremlin spokesman said last night: “It is not our general practice to comment on leaked documents. However, The Kremlin has its duty of public protection as its top priority. These proposals are still in development and no decisions have been made.”

[…]

The Times

Not perfectly substituted, but you get the idea.

‘no decisions have been made’? How can you even be considering this insanity you animals?

And of course…

It suggests that two new agencies — one for potential criminals, the other for potential victims — might be created

Pre Crime!