ID card-based criminal record checks get thumbs up

Gemma Simpson

Tuesday October 02, 2007

Plans for a new service using the government’s controversial ID cards scheme to speed up criminal record checks have met with approval from volunteers involved in a trial of the technology.

The volunteers piloted two potential online services developed by the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) and the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) which could be used to authenticate the identities of and information supplied by job applicants.

At the trials, all volunteers went through a simulated experience of applying for a position requiring a CRB check. The participants met a prospective employer, filled out the CRB disclosure application form and had their identity authenticated by a counter-signatory. Their criminal record information was then disclosed to the company requesting it.

Each volunteer completed two legs in the trial — one using a passport and one using an ID card.

The passport-based system would use an applicant’s UK passport with information from the IPS to make sure the data provided is correct — with this system likely to come into effect before the second system. The second online service would use ID cards issued to UK citizens and foreign nationals residing in the UK for more than three months with information from the IPS to check application data. This system could be introduced in the longer term.

Nearly all (96 percent) of the 160 volunteers said the passport-related service is an improvement on the current arrangement and 71 percent rated it as a “great improvement”.

Nearly nine out of 10 volunteers said the ID card-linked service is even more robust than the passport-linked process.

But Phil Booth, national co-ordinator of the NO2ID anti-ID card campaign, criticised the trial because he said it tested the customer experience of the CRB check in isolation, while “glossing over the inconvenience and intrusiveness of the ID system as a whole”.

Booth said: “IPS is trying to sell a so-called benefit without any reference to actual cost or reality.”

[…]

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/

Well well well.

It looks like the contents of the ‘Frances Stonor-Saunders’ email are confirmed as correct yet again:

[…]

There will be spaces on this database for your religion, residence status, and many other private and personal facts about you. There is unlimited space for every other details of your life on the NIR database, which can be expanded by the Government with or without further Acts of Parliament.

[…]

Private businesses are going to be given access to the NIR Database. If you want to apply for a job, you will have to present your card for a swipe. If you want to apply for a London Underground Oyster Card, or a supermarket loyalty card, or a driving license you will have to present your ID Card for a swipe. The same goes for getting a telephone line or a mobile phone or an internet account.

[…]

http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=1207

ID cards were sold to the public on the basis that they would only hold a small amount of information. Now we see that they are to be used for CRB checks.

You can now guarantee that they will indeed hold residence status, religion, criminal record and everything else that they can possibly store on you.

Once again, for the thousandth time, if you do not register for this card they cannot include you in the database.

Meanwhile, David Cameron has reiterated his promise to scrap ID cards. He will of course, have to scrap the NIR and biometric passports to really come through on this promise.

Astonishingly, CNN has published on its front page, a BLOGDIAL style Substitution, of the kind we know and love:

Iran’s parliament votes to label CIA, U.S. Army ‘terrorist’ groups

(CNN) — The Iranian parliament on Saturday voted to designate the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Army as terrorist organizations, IRNA, the country’s state-run news agency, reported.

The CIA and the U.S. Army “trained terrorists and supported terrorism, and they themselves are terrorists,” the parliament said, according to IRNA.

The Iranian parliament said the condemnation was based on “known and accepted” standards of terrorism from international regulations, including the U.N. charter.

The parliament said it condemns the “aggressions by the U.S. Army, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan” and calls on the United Nations to “intervene in the global problem of U.S. prisons in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and secret jails in other countries,” IRNA reported, quoting a statement from Iranian lawmakers.

The Iranian parliament also decried the CIA’s and U.S. Army’s involvement in the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, U.S. involvement in the Balkans, Vietnam and the U.S. support of Israel.

Of the condemnation, Paul Gimigliano, a CIA spokesman, said, “There are some things that don’t even deserve comment. This is one.”

National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said he declined to comment “on non-binding resolutions passed by parliaments in countries with dubious records on human rights, democracy and that are state sponsors of terror.”

There was no immediate response from the U.S. State Department.

Washington and U.S. military leaders have long accused Iran of training and equipping insurgents in Iraq. The United States and Iran have not had formal diplomatic relations since 1980 after Iranian militants stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held Americans hostage for 444 days.

The Iranian lawmakers’ condemnation was in apparent retaliation for the U.S. Senate’s resolution Wednesday requesting that the United States designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, or Quds Force, as a foreign terrorist organization.

The Senate resolution passed a day after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the U.N. General Assembly that an agreement reached last month between his country and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) over its disputed nuclear program has, in the Iranian view, settled the matter.

Iran says its nuclear program is necessary for civilian energy production. The United States and other Western nations have accused Tehran of trying to build a nuclear weapon.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/09/29/iran.parliament/index.html

You can’t make stuff like this up.

First of all, Paul Gimigliano is a lying bastard silly goose. The CIA itself says that it used terror tactics (including and not limited to bombs in public places) in its own declassified documents.

Secondly, this is not just a historical blip of immorality; CIA is using terror in this way right now, and they are threatening Iran with these tactics right now:

Presuming that you are not actually ignorant enough to desire war with the United States, you might be well advised to read the history of the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine in Havana harbor in 1898 and the history of the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964.

Having done so, you will surely recognize that Americans are reluctant to go to war unless attacked. Until Pearl Harbor, we were even reluctant to get involved in World War II. For historians of American wars the question is whether we provoke provocations.

Given the unilateral U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, you are obviously thinking the rules have changed. Provocation is no longer required to take America to war. But even in this instance, we were led to believe that the mass murderer of American civilians, Osama bin Laden, was lurking, literally or figuratively, in the vicinity of Baghdad.

Given all this, you would probably be well advised to keep your forces, including clandestine forces, as far away from the Iraqi border as you can. You might even consider bringing in some neighbors to verify that you are not shipping arms next door. Tone down the rhetoric on Zionism. You’ve established your credentials with those in your world who thrive on that.

[…]

Huffington Post

The Gulf of Tonkin incident was a False Flag Operation staged to get america into war. Gary Hart is explicitly warning Iran that they have the will to kill americans to achieve their ends and will kill Iranians without hesitation or provocation.

The CIA did these operations and it does these operations. Lying about it is just SILLY.

Thirdly, and this is where the Substitution comes in, america designated Iran’s Revolutionary Guards a ‘terrorist organization’. Out of the two, on a sheer number count, CIA is far more of a terrorist organization, and far more deadly than the Iranian Revolutionary Guards…but I digress; this article is the same as a BLOGDIAL operation where we substitute words to find out what the truth is behind an article Burroughs style; its amazing how this works so often.

This line:

National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said he declined to comment “on non-binding resolutions passed by parliaments in countries with dubious records on human rights, democracy and that are state sponsors of terror.”

Is absolutely pure substitution; its almost as if we wrote it as a substitution, and yet this is from the actual article.

It just cannot get any weirder!

[…]
Fingerprints
T5 will have shops, cafes and bars like any other airport, and some of those are already fitted out – Harrods to name one.The terminal also has some new features, particularly in the area of security.

HEATHROW TERMINAL FIVE SECURITY

Every passenger will have their photograph taken and fingerprint scanned at passport control. Their fingerprint will be checked again at the gate before boarding.

“It’s so we can make sure that the person who turns up at the gate is the same one who checked in,” Mr Pearman says.

Another state-of-the-art addition involves X-ray scanners which screen hand luggage before they enter departures.

Never used before, the Advanced Threat Identification system is designed to detect explosives and liquids in baggage and automatically divert suspicious bags to one side for further examination.

In fact, the entire building is designed with security in mind: “We’ve been able to work security in, rather than try to add it on afterwards,” Mr Pearman says.

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7015785.stm

This is of course, a total lie.

This building has been built with Security Theatre in mind…but you know this, because we have written about the abomination that is Terminal 5 before.

This nauseating piece of propaganda from BBQ by the completely ignorant ‘Victoria Bone’ is astonishing in its breathless promoting of Terminal five in nothing but glowing terms.

She completely leaves out any negative consequences to the fingerprinting of criminals passengers, and this is in the light of the huge fight against biometric ID cards that is going on in this country. Such an omission can only be by design, and that therefore means this article is pure propaganda and part of a ‘softening up’ exercise for the British population, who, if they were told about what this really means to them, might refuse to fly out of Terminal 5 altogether.

Richard Rogers has made one of the worst buildings in the history of mankind. His firm is going to be responsible (unless the building is retrofitted and fixed to work correctly) for a violation of humans on a scale bigger than the concentration camps of Germany; Up to 30m passengers will travel through Terminal 5 every year.

Millions of people are going to be processed through this infernal machine, by his design, humiliating, violating and dehumanizing them for no other reason than that it was possible to do.

History will judge this building and its designer after the biometric fad and ‘security’ (Security Theatre) hysteria are over over.

They will say that what Richard Rogers has done with this Terminal 5 was pure evil, architecture in the service of Fascism and it will cast a dark shadow over any other building or success he ever had.

I for one, I will never travel through this building. I will not submit to this Fascism and inhuman architectural experimentation.

SHAME SHAME SHAME once again on BBQ for this blatant piece of propaganda.

SHAME on Richard Rogers, who has designed this Fascist monstrosity.

I pray that the truth about this building gets out and that people refuse to mover through it.

And for you people who do not know anything about identity and security, a quick recap.

There is absolutely no reason to take people’s fingerprints and photographs as they check in.

First of all, this is being done not only for international flights, but for ALL FLIGHTS including domestic ones. That means that if you, a British Citizen, want to fly to Manchester you have to be fingerprinted.

Inside your own country!

That is INSANE.

The reason why they are doing this is that travelers on international flights and domestic flights are mixed in one large unsegregated departure lounge, unlike any other airport in the world, where passengers flying on domestic and international flights are normally separated by walls. If someone got on a flight that connects through terminal five, it could be possible for them to get onto a domestic flight and then evade immigration control since the passenger area is mixed. To fix this problem with the building, they are fingerprinting EVERYONE so that this loophole is closed.

This has to be the stupidest mistake ever in the history of architecture.

The article above does not mention this of course, since it is propaganda.

Secondly, when you check into an international flight in a properly designed airport, you go to the international departure lounge and show your passport, which has your photo in it. The staff check your face against the picture in your passport. The name in your passport is checked against your name in your ticket. You are let through.

When you get to the gate, you show your passport again and your ticket stub, and the staff check your face against the photo in your passport, and the name on the stub. You are let onto the flight.

Fingerprinting you is nothing more than Security Theatre; this extra step adds no extra security to the normal process of checking in, and similarly, taking another photo of you in addition to the one you have in your passport adds no extra security whatsoever.

This is total Security Theatre, insanity and vendor driven garbage.

And there you have it.

By all means, tell everyone you know about this outrageous and vile building.

Accept HillaryCare or Face Homelessness

Kurt Nimmo
Wednesday September 19, 2007

“Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton said Tuesday that a mandate requiring every American to purchase health insurance was the only way to achieve universal health care but she rejected the notion of punitive measures to force individuals into the health care system,” reports News for clueless Yahoos.

Sure, Clinton rejects “punitive measures,” that is if you consider homelessness and the prospect of starvation, enforced by the government, something less than punitive. Clinton said “she could envision a day when ‘you have to show proof to your employer that you’re insured as a part of the job interview—like when your kid goes to school and has to show proof of vaccination,’” Yahoo News continues. In other words, you’ll need HillaryCare in order to get a job, no word on how you’ll be able to afford it after months of unemployment. Call it a Catch-22, one the scribes over at the Associated Press did bother to mention.

Incidentally, for a presidential selectee, Clinton is awful stupid, even though former fed mob boss Alan Greenspan thinks she is a genius. Every single state in the United States allows for vaccination medical exemptions and a few even permit philosophical and/or religious exemptions, although the American Medical Association is attempting to put an end to this and force your children to be injected with thimerosal (i.e., mercury), formaldehyde, aluminum, and other toxins.

In other words, your children are not required to “show proof of vaccination” to enter school, although not going to a federal “education” indoctrination center may be considered a blessing.

Clinton is not stupid, of course. Rather she is an accomplished liar—on par with her war criminal husband—and a conniving Bilderberg doorstop, determined to impose the globalist agenda, even if it results in your kids ending up autistic, thanks to a mercury cocktail lovingly injected.

“On Tuesday, Clinton began airing a 30-second ad statewide in Iowa and New Hampshire promoting her new health care plan. The ad reminds viewers of her failed effort to pass universal health care in the early 1990s, trying to portray a thwarted enterprise as one of vision,” News for Yahoos continues. “The ad also highlights her support as senator for an expanded Children’s Health Insurance Program and for more affordable vaccines…. Her health care plan would require every American to buy health insurance, offering tax credits and subsidies to help those who can’t afford it. The mandatory aspect of her proposal, however, gets glossed over in the ad.”

It stands to reason Clinton’s plan will be “mandatory”—under penalty of taser-wielding, ninja-black drabbed SWAT cops—and, soon after she is selected by way of Diebold, Clinton will make sure millions of kids are stricken with Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, seizures, mental retardation, hyperactivity, dyslexia, and other developmental disorders, such as autism.

[…]

http://adereview.com/blog/?p=48

Kurt! Kurt! Kurt! Kurt! Kurt! Kurt! Kurt!

An NHS primary care trust has warned of a new risk to the confidentiality of medical records stored under the National Programme for IT [NPfIT] after a celebrity was admitted into hospital and more than 50 staff viewed the patient’s records.The warning by North Tees Primary Care Trust raises questions about whether hundreds of thousands of NHS staff who would be able to view electronic records under the NPfIT would have their accesses to information policed robustly.

Systems that support electronic patient records – a central part of the NPfIT – produce audit trails of who has accessed what information. But it’s unclear whether busy NHS employees would have adequate time to police audit trails

And Computer Weekly has published evidence of a culture in the NHS that is incompatible with tight lax security. Smartcards have been shared so that busy doctors can share PCs without having to log on and off each time. This means it can prove difficult to establish who has accessed confidential patient information.

North Tees Primary Care Trust says that the unauthorised access by staff of patient records presents a “new security risk” under the Department of Health’s Care Record Guarantee – which gives an undertaking to patients that their confidential data will be protected from unauthorised access.

The trust says in a paper to the Board:

“A new security risk … has been identified as part of the Care Records Guarantee. This risk is around staff inappropriately accessing [a] patient’s records who are not part of their care load. It was noted in an audit that a recent admission of a celebrity to a hospital had revealed over 50 staff viewing the patient record… Staff should only access records of patients with whom they have a legitimate relationship.”

The document paper adds that trusts have to demonstrate that regular audits are undertaken and that they have “disciplinary procedures in place to deal with breaches”.

If staff wanted to access the medical records of a well-known individual or anyone else they were interested in, the risk with paper-based medical records would be smaller because the files would ordinarily be held in one location, and may not be accessible remotely. It’s unlikely that dozens of staff could view a paper record without drawing attention to themselves.

Evidence on the security risks of electronic records was submitted to the House of Commons’ Health Committee by the UK Computing Research Committee, which is an expert panel of the British Computer Society, the Institution of of Engineering and Technology and IT-related scientists.

It said: “As a general principle, a single system accessible by all NHS employees from all trusts maximises rather than minimises the risk of a security breach. It increases … the opportunity for access to any one patient’s data from some point on the extended system… it is important that a formal analysis is carried out to identify risks and show that they have been reduced as low as reasonably practicable.”

A spokesman for North Tees Primary Care Trust said the accessing of a celebrity’s records took place elsewhere, not within the trust. The spokesman was unable to give any details of the incident or where it took place.

Links:

Smartcard sharing by an NHS trust – a breach of IT security or a practical way around slow access to the NHS Care Records Service?

Care Record Guarantee [for example on the confidentiality of patient data]

Loss of 1.3 million sensitive medical files in the US – possible implications for the NHS’s National Programme for IT

Department of Health and Connecting for Health security flaws

Major reports on NHS and NPfIT

Evidence submitted by UK Computing Research Committee to the Health Committee on the Electronic Patient Record

Report raises further NPfIT concerns – British Computer Society [Security]

Computer Weekly

My emphasis.

And of course, if the spine is implemented as they desire, you can multiply the 50 Hippocratic violators, nosey parkers, scumbags by 1000 as every terminal connected to the spine will be able to see everyone’s records without restriction.

The same goes for ContactPoint, the child violating database, and of course, the nearly aborted NIR/Identity Card.

All of these systems will be abused from the day they go online.

One can only hope that some brave person leaks the personal details of every member of parliament and the house of Lords and their many offspring, so that we can see whose daughter had an abortion, which of their children is on anti-psychotics, who has been beating their wife, which MP is infertile, which MP(s) have Gonorrhea / Syphilis / HIV etc etc.

THEN we will start to hear loud howls of disdain for the system, with rapid moves to dismantle it and then blame the previous administration(s) for the failure.

In the meantime, you really must have your records physically deleted from your GPs computer, so that the data does not get snarfled into the NHS Spine. If you do not even bother to ask, then you only have yourself to blame, when all of a sudden you are surprised when your new employer says, “I hope that we wont have any more skiing accidents while you are working with us; we need your commitment to us to be 100%”.

Yes.

Your employer got a hold of your medical records and saw that you broke your leg whilst on holiday in the Alps two years ago.

How did he do it?

YOU LET HIM you JACKASS!!!

UPDATE

Of course, this is not a ‘new security risk’ as the report fallaciously states; this security risk is inherent to these poorly designed systems

Anti-terrorist programs depend on technology — remotely controlled cameras, automatic license plate readers, interception of cell-phone signals and high-tech explosives detectors.

It might pay to ask: Is this high-tech surveillance security or security theater? Does it provide enough additional safety to justify the added intrusiveness? Or do the bad guys just find a way around it?

For example, if terrorists don’t know that the National Security Agency can intercept their phone calls in remote parts of the world, the intercepts will be useful. Once they know, they stop using cell phones.

This is doubtless a nuisance to them, but hardly a show-stopper. If they know about automated monitoring of e-mail, again, they stop using it or, depending on what they are doing, use an anonymous, disposable Hotmail account.

The inability thus far to capture Osama bin Laden demonstrates the ease of circumventing surveillance techniques.

For a while people talked about combating steganography — the hiding of messages in, say, Web pages by various coding schemes. At least some security folk wanted specialized software to examine pages for messages exchanged among terrorists. Useful sometimes, perhaps — unless the bad guys know about it.

Then they communicate by prearranged codes. For example, a post on a classic-car site looking for a blue 1957 Chevy six-cylinder means one thing, whereas looking for a red 1958 Ford means another.

If a suicide bomber (which seems to be the threat we face) thinks he can’t get his bomb past nitrate sniffers and specialized X-ray machines at the airport, he simply blows himself up in a crowded part of the terminal. If the point is to protect airplanes, security may work.

If the point is to stop terrorism, it is useless.

There is no way to stop a guy with a backpack from getting on Metro at rush hour.

New York is set to spend $90 million on more cameras and license plate readers. What will this accomplish? A CNN story on the system quoted Steve Swain, a security specialist who spent years working with London’s net of cameras, who said, “I don’t know of a single incident where CCTV [closed-circuit television] has actually been used to spot, apprehend or detain offenders in the act.”

Cameras aid in the investigation of a crime already committed, he said, and “you need to do this piece of theater so that if the terrorists are looking at you, they can see that you’ve got some measures in place.”

But catching the offender is of trivial importance compared with preventing the terrorism. Is the theater aimed at the terrorists, or at the public? Surveillance increases apace. From the Times Online of London, “An ‘intelligent’ CCTV camera designed to predict when a person may be about to commit a crime is being tested in high streets and shopping centres.” I have encountered brain-scan research endeavoring to determine moods thought to be associated with terrorists.

According to a recent ABC News poll, the public favors surveillance by almost 3 to 1. Governments from federal to local want to integrate cameras and similar devices.

Concern with terrorism makes it difficult to oppose new measures. And there is big money in making the equipment. All of this contributes to the acceptance of more and more surveillance, without anyone asking, “Wait, what are we really going to get out of this? Will it work?” In the words of Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York ACLU, “Technology is an unstoppable train. The question is whether we can maximize the benefits and minimize the harms.”

[…]

http://washingtontimes.com/

And there you have it; another Post Tipping Point Post^®

We have been saying this for years, as have many other people.

It must be pointed out that the ‘terrrorists using Steganography’ hysteria was just that hysteria. Not a single Steg image has ever been found in the wild by researchers and, certainly not a single image has ever been traced to a ‘terrorist’.

You can guarantee that if they ever found a ‘terrorist’s’ laptop with encrypted data on it, using any of the popular crypto wares like GPG/PGP that uncle sham would trumpet this from every one of their ‘news’ outlets and use it as an excuse to bring in some sort of ’90s style insane controls.

And then of course, if these people need to use telephones, all they need to do to have secure, untracable calls where NSA will not even know that a call is being made, is to use Asterisk in a private telephone network.

Finally ACLU Donna Lieberman is wrong to say that, “Technology is an unstoppable train.”. STUPIDITY is an unstoppable train, and as everyone knows, trains run on rails, and those rails eventually reach the ‘end of the line‘.

Stupidity (them/they) WILL come to an end, and reason (us/we) WILL prevail.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the modern home education movement was in its infancy. At that time, most Americans viewed home-styled education as a quaint tourist attraction or the lifestyle choice of those willing to endure more hardship than necessary.

What a difference a few decades makes.

Homeschooling has undergone an extreme makeover. From maverick to mainstream, the movement has acquired a glamorous, populist sheen.

Flip through a few issues of Sports Illustrated, circa 2007, and there’s no shortage of news about photogenic homeschoolers who make the athletic cut. Like Jessica Long who was born in Russia, resides in Baltimore, and is an accomplished swimmer. At 15, Jessica became the first paralympian to win the prestigious Sullivan Award, which honors the country’s top amateur athlete. Then there’s the dashing Joey Logano who, at 17, has already won a NASCAR race.

Even presidential hopefuls and their spouses have jumped on the school-thine-own bandwagon. Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas) has offered enthusiastic support for homeschooling families, and Elizabeth Edwards, wife of Senator John Edwards (D-North Carolina) told the Wall Street Journal that this fall she plans to home educate the couple’s two youngest children “with the help of a tutor.”

As for scholastic achievements, this national competition season was remarkable, seeing home scholars crowned as champs in three major events. A twelve-year-old New Mexican named Matthew Evans won the National Word Power competition, sponsored by Reader’s Digest. Thirteen-year-old Evan O’Dorney of California won the Scripps National Spelling Bee, and fourteen-year-old Caitlin Snaring of Washington was christened the National Geographic Bee champ.

Then there’s Micah Stanley of Minnesota who has yet to receive any lessons in a brick-and-mortar classroom building. For the past few years, he’s been enrolled in the Oak Brook College of Law, a distance learning law school headquartered in Sacramento. This past February, he took the grueling, three-day California general bar examination (California allows correspondence law students to sit for the bar), and he can now add “attorney” to his resume. In his spare time, he’s finishing up a book titled, How to Escape the Holding Tank: A Guide to Help You Get What You Want.

Micah is 19.

A teenage lawyer/budding author, however, wouldn’t surprise John Taylor Gatto, an outspoken critic of compulsory education laws and a former New York State Teacher of the Year. Writing in Harper’s Magazine, Gatto forthrightly argued that “genius is as common as dirt.”

Perhaps. But it’s also understandable that when everyday folks hear about the homeschooled Joeys and Caitlins and Micahs, they become a tad intimidated — as if this educational choice were the exclusive domain of obsessive-compulsive moms and dads with money to burn, time to spare, and a brood of driven, Type-A offspring.

Although it’s commendable when the young achieve Herculean goals, homeschooling has always been more about freedom and personal responsibility than winning an Ivy League scholarship or playing at Wimbledon. In general, it has attracted working-class families of all ethnicities and faiths, who have been eager to provide a nurturing, stimulating learning experience.

Of course, the unabashedly adventuresome are always an endearing staple of the movement. The Burns family, of Alaska, set out on a 36-foot sailboat this summer to travel the world for three years. Chris Burns (the dad) told the Juneau Empire he hopes “to connect with Juneau classrooms and host question-and-answer sessions while at sea,” as well as homeschool the two Burns children.

In a legal sense, homeschools serve as a glaring reminder of a complex issue that has become the stuff of landmark Supreme Court cases: does the state have the authority to coerce a youngster to attend school and sit at a desk for 12 years? Whether said child has the aptitude and maturity for such a long-term contract (or is it involuntary servitude?) remains an uncomfortable topic because, in the acceptable mantra of the day, “education is a right.”

Such a national conversation is long overdue, as there are plenty of signs — costly remedial education and rising dropout rates, to name two — to indicate that the status quo public school model isn’t kid-friendly.

Homeschooling, after all, began to catch on with the masses because a former US Department of Education employee argued that children, like delicate hothouse plants, required a certain type of environment to grow shoots and blossoms, and that loving parents, not institutions, could best create the greenhouses.

It was 1969 when the late Dr. Raymond Moore initiated an inquiry into previously neglected areas of educational research. Two of the questions that Moore and a team of like-minded colleagues set out to answer were (1) Is institutionalizing young children a sound, educational trend? and (2) What is the best timing for school entrance?

In the process of analyzing thousands of studies, twenty of which compared early school entrants with late starters, Moore concluded that developmental problems, such as hyperactivity, nearsightedness, and dyslexia, are often the result of prematurely taxing a child’s nervous system and mind with continuous academic tasks, like reading and writing.

The bulk of the research convinced Moore that formal schooling should be delayed until at least age 8 or 10, or even as late as 12. As he explained, “These findings sparked our concern and convinced us to focus our investigation on two primary areas: formal learning and socializing. Eventually, this work led to an unexpected interest in homeschools.”

“Above all, the merit of homeschooling is that it allows for experimentation, flexibility, and trial & error.”

Moore went on to write Home Grown Kids and Home-Spun Schools. The rest, as they say, is history. The books, published in the 1980s, have sold hundreds of thousands of copies and offer practical advice to potential parent educators.

Nowadays, there’s a sea of such self-help material, scores of commercial products, and online opportunities solely dedicated to encouraging families to learn together in the convenience of their homes. Homeschooling has graduated into a time-tested choice that allows children to thrive, learn at their own pace, and which frequently inspires other success stories. As our nation is famous for encouraging immigrants to reinvent themselves and achieve the American Dream, so home education does for youngsters whether they are late bloomers or are candidates for Mensa.

Above all, the merit of homeschooling is that it allows for experimentation, flexibility, and trial and error. Here is the great contrast with state-provided education. As with all systems hammered out by bureaucracies, public schools get stuck in a rut, perpetuate failures, respond slowly to changing times, and resist all reforms. Errors are not localized and contained, but all consuming and system wide. It’s bad enough when such a system is used to govern labor contracts or postal service; it is a tragic loss when it is used to manage kids’ minds.

[…]

http://www.mises.org/story/2682

Before the measles vaccination, measles used to be considered like chicken pox is today, a nuisance, and nothing more. Why, just because we have a vaccination for it has it suddenly become worthy of HUGE FRONT PAGE HEADLINES? Will chicken pox get the same treatment when the drug peddlers come up with a vaccination against it? Smacks of hysteria and sheep shearing to me.

Irdial; Blogdialian Blarchive, July2nd 2002. http://www.irdial.com/blogger/archive/2004_09_05_blarchive.html#109455661950837288

You can find more preminiscences on Chickenpox vaccines, and our early discussions on their proposed by using the Blarchive search.

Their relevance is cranked up a notch today by this story, the thrust of which we will now deconstruct:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6990643.stm

Children may get chickenpox jab
The Department of Health is to consider a mass vaccination of children in England against chickenpox.
There are now 2 chickenpox vaccines, licenesed for use in the UK since 2002. But the market is tiny, as it costs 60-90 pounds sterling from a private clinic. Which means GSK and Sanofi are missing out on a few quid.
Experts have been drafted in to weigh up the benefits following a recommendation from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI).
http://www.advisorybodies.doh.gov.uk/jcvi/members.htm

This bit of the article makes it sound like the JCVI is acutely concerned about varicella infection rates and mortality. However, there is nothing on their site about a varicella vaccine report. The minutes of 18th October 2006 say “The JCVI had proposed that subgroups be set up to look at rotavirus vaccines and varicella zoster vaccines. This had not yet been possible they but would be set up shortly.”

From 2001: “Varicella Vaccine

The Committee discussed varicella (chickenpox) vaccine and its potential use in the UK. The Committee agreed that, as far as the vaccine’s use in the wider population was concerned, there was insufficient information on which to make any recommendations. However, the vaccine’s use in health care workers could be considered more immediately as data on its use in this group was available. The vaccine was not yet licensed for use in the UK. A sub-group would look at this further.”

And from 2002, when the vaccine was licensed:

“Effectiveness and cost effectiveness of varicella vaccination This paper suggested that the key factor in the effectiveness of any varicella immunisation programme is the impact on zoster. Based on the assumptions in the paper and the available evidence, the case for routine infant or pre-adolescent immunisation had not been made.

The Committee welcomed the paper. It was suggested that the data offered very much a minimum estimate of the burden of disease. However, based on the current data available the paper’s conclusions were reasonable.”

So what has changed their collective mind? According to the most recent study in the British Medical Journal, deaths from chickenpox are decreasing.

http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/324/7337/609/a

In context, so as not to scare you with the word ‘deaths’ or an image like this:

Chickenpox can be fatal

it should be noted that deaths predominate among the very immunocompromised, and are often ‘varicella-associated’, which means you die from a secondary infection such as pneumonia while trying to fight off chickenpox or shingles.

Peanuts can be fatal.
Ballpoint pens can be fatal.
It’s all about context.

So then, in 2006;

“13. VARICELLA
The Committee recognised that varicella was an area of increasing importance with recent evidence that vaccine prevented shingles in the elderly. However this is a complex area because of the potential impact of chidhood infection on transmission dynamics at older ages. It was agreed that a sub-group should be setup in the near future to consider the issues.”

This advisory committee are not convinced, are they? But just a few months later and here we are, front page of BBQ News, and about to jab every kid in the land.

From The Telegraph we discover that the news is actually that,

“The Govenment’s advisors, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation have set up a sub-committee into chicken pox and will meet later this year or early next year for the first time.

It will investigate the impact of a vaccination programme for all or selected groups and the cost effectiveness of such a plan.
Advisers have previously rejected calls for chicken pox vaccination in the UK.”

Which is what was in the JCVI minutes from almost a year ago. So what does this lead us to conclude? That someone has fed this story to the press, to increase it’s profile. The Daily Mail will, no doubt, have horror stories about chickenpox spreading like a rash across it’s pages as you read this.

We have, of course, told you before of the major reason behind MMR and now varicella vaccination, and it is money. It is cheaper for the NHS to give you a jab than it is to send a doctor to see your sick child. This is the monetary justification of HMG.

It is essential that the shareholders of GlaxoSmithkline, Merck et al., who make these vaccines, recoup their R&D costs and make substantial profit. Their ideal target market is EVERY PERSON ALIVE. Trebles all round for them, and for the PR companies working on their behalf, if (no, WHEN) HMG adopts a policy of vaccination against chickenpox. The greed of these companies and their financial clout, allied with the corrupt thinking of HMG mean it is all but inevitable that you will be “offered” chickenpox vaccination very soon.

But is there a health-based reason for choosing to vaccinate? In short, no.

The chance of complications from chickenpox are insignificantly higher than the chances of complications from the vaccine.
The protection from natural infection is lifelong. Vaccine-mediated protection is estimated at 9 years. Or if you believe the optimists, 10-20 years.

Since a major reason behind the vaccine is to cut adult deaths (at 40-years plus, in the main) the vaccine is, useless.

So there we go.

Once again the public are being lined up to take a shot in the arm simply to fill the boots of a drug company, at the behest of the government. And they will do it in their droves!

But they can’t say they haven’t been warned.

[…]

From the lab of the scientist and Immunologist Dr. Alun Kirby, “the man who keeps BLOGDIAL honest”.

“My love/hate relationship with Bill Maher fluctuates wildly from episode to episode. Though I love his politically incorrect sense of humor and the fact that he provides a forum for people with differing views to debate, I do hate his scapegoat arguments and constant contradictions. Still, last night’s Real Time with Bill Maher was a classic episode, mostly due to the always charismatic Mos Def, whose off the cuff bluntness drew applause and laughter in juxtaposition to Maher’s counterproductive defense of the establishment.

I’m afraid of having my account deleted for posting the full episode, but Tullycast seems to have it all if you’re interested:”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rO1w1H3iZUU

This is a truly wonderful and vivid example of the slavery inured, corporate brainwashed, ostrich posturing american who despite everything, every piece of evidence, every vibration of common sense, still believe that 2 + 2 = 5.

This Bill Maher, who makes the right noises, appears to do so only because it is in vogue to be ‘alternative’, because there are ratings in it. This is why he believes Islam is a religion of violence above all others, and refers to some author to back up his nonsense. Bill Maher is part of the problem, not only because he has a popular TV programme and is himself asleep and therefore no threat, but because he is an ordinary citizen that cannot wake up, and it is people like him that keep the nightmare going, individuals believing the nightmare is reality, that day is night, that hot is cold, that water is dry…people like him who have their finger in the Dyke, believing that if they remove it thy will die and every thing will end when in fact, they are on the wet side drowning and taking their finger out will release and violently launch them them into dry land and the world of the waking.

Note Bill’s posture (leaning away from his guests like they are going to explode) as he speaks to these two men, and note also how his english deteriorates when he talks to them…I’m sure its all completely involuntary.

Read this ‘we are doomed to live like animals’ screed from Anti-War. It is a complete lie of course and this ‘Norman Solomon’ needs to shit or get off of the pot. War is not inevitable, and neither is the so called ‘Warfare State’. Its imagination-less people like him that create, support and bolster the ‘Warfare State’ by their negativity, self-centeredness and lack of vision.

COUPEZ!

Let’s Face It: The Warfare State Is Part of Us
by Norman Solomon

There is no ‘us’. It is YOU that accepts the ‘Warfare State’, it is YOU that is defeated and resigned to murdering other people, not US.

The USA’s military spending is now close to $2 billion a day. This fall, the country will begin its seventh year of continuous war, with no end in sight. On the horizon is the very real threat of a massive air assault on Iran. And few in Congress seem willing or able to articulate a rejection of the warfare state.

First of all, it is two billion a day of YOUR MONEY (or at least money from China that YOU will have to pay back). This fundamental misunderstanding about how war is funded and waged is a key reason why your illegitimate government is able to get away with waging it. YOU are the people who cannot see the wood for the trees; YOU are the people who fund this insanity, and you are the key to stopping it.

There can be no attack on Iran without money to do it. If you continue to pay for it, it will happen. You are personally responsible for this, and this article, by not focussing on the permanent solution to this problem is actually a call for the war that you claim that you do not want.

While the Bush-Cheney administration is the most dangerous of our lifetimes – and ousting Republicans from the White House is imperative – such truths are apt to smooth the way for progressive evasions. We hear that “the people must take back the government,” but how can “the people” take back what they never really had? And when rhetoric calls for “returning to a foreign policy based on human rights and democracy,” we’re encouraged to be nostalgic for good old days that never existed.

Actually, it is your generation that is the most dangerous in the lifetime of the republic. Your singular failure to assert yourself, protect your rights and stand up for the truth with action is the cause of all our problems, and this article is another pimple on the acne scarred face of your generation; it is the symptom of your failure, your lack of will and guts. Americans have always owned their government and to say this is not the case is just a lie. The ‘good old days’ that you talk about did exist, it is your failure to understand this that is the problem. Even if they never did exist, that time is an ideal that you should be striving for, and that actually, you have the power to achieve. It will not come to pass however, on the back of cowardice, retreat and ingrained weakness.

The warfare state didn’t suddenly arrive in 2001, and it won’t disappear when the current lunatic in the Oval Office moves on.

This is another lie. If the ‘current lunatic’, your lunatic, the one you deserve, is replaced by a sane man, then sanity will flow from the Oval office. That is a fact, wether you accept it or not.

Born 50 years before George W. Bush became president, I have always lived in a warfare state. Each man in the Oval Office has presided over an arsenal of weapons designed to destroy human life en masse. In recent decades, our self-proclaimed protectors have been able – and willing – to destroy all of humanity.

And of course, all time began when you were born, and there was nothing before that.

We’ve accommodated ourselves to this insanity. And I do mean “we” – including those of us who fret aloud that the impact of our peace-loving wisdom is circumscribed because our voices don’t carry much farther than the choir. We may carry around an inflated sense of our own resistance to a system that is poised to incinerate and irradiate the planet.

There is no ‘we’ in this instance. There are many people whose actions (or inactions) make a difference, and if people like you only followed, our problems would be over. As for an inflated sense of importance, each drop of rain in a downpour does its part in creating a landslide. Each one is as important as the next, and all of them, together can cause great devastation or crops to grow. Your imagination is broken. You have no grasp of scale. You have no concept of your place in that country and its singular importance. This is why you fail.

Maybe it’s too unpleasant to acknowledge that we’ve been living in a warfare state for so long. And maybe it’s even more unpleasant to acknowledge that the warfare state is not just “out there.” It’s also internalized; at least to the extent that we pass up countless opportunities to resist it.

It is not in any way internalized, and not everyone passes up opportunities to resist it. Two million people marched in London to resist it. They and the millions of others who are against this insanity are not defeated; they simply do not have the correct tactic to hand. Once they discover the correct, twenty-first century tactic to defeat the ‘Warfare State’ then it will all be over. You are not helping with your corrosive negativity which offers nothing but a belly ache.

Like millions of other young Americans, I grew into awakening as the Vietnam War escalated. Slogans like “make love, not war” – and, a bit later, “the personal is political” – really spoke to us. But over the decades we generally learned, or relearned, to compartmentalize: as if personal and national histories weren’t interwoven in our pasts, presents and futures.

What you should have learned and what many people today have learned is that your failure is the greatest instruction that we could receive. It means that we will not and should not repeat your mistakes and failures. It means specifically that Demonstrations are pointless and the other things that we have been talking about on BLOGDIAL for years.

One day in 1969, a biologist named George Wald, who had won a Nobel Prize, visited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – the biggest military contractor in academia – and gave a speech. “Our government has become preoccupied with death,” he said, “with the business of killing and being killed.”

That preoccupation has fluctuated, but in essence it has persisted. While speaking of a far-off war and a nuclear arsenal certain to remain in place after the war’s end, Wald pointed out: “We are under repeated pressure to accept things that are presented to us as settled – decisions that have been made.”

Today, in similar ways, our government is preoccupied and we are pressurized. The grisly commerce of killing thrives on aggressive war and on the perverse realpolitik of “national security” that brandishes the Pentagon’s weaponry against the world. At least tacitly, we accept so much that threatens to destroy anything and everything.

Only you accept this, there is no ‘we’ that accepts this. Stop pulling decent people into your personal nightmare of failure and despair.

We do not accept ‘the perverse realpolitik of “national security” ‘ we understand that this world view is totally false and engineered. We understand how governments are doing it, and how they are financing it. We understand what must be done to undo it.

WE are not like YOU.

As it happened, for reasons both “personal” and “political” – more accurately, for reasons indistinguishable between the two – my own life fell apart and began to reassemble itself during the same season of 1969 when George Wald gave his speech, which he called “A Generation in Search of a Future.”

Political and personal histories are usually kept separate – in how we’re taught, how we speak and even how we think. But I’ve become very skeptical of the categories. They may not be much more than illusions we’ve been conned into going through the motions of believing.

Learn to use the backspace key.

We actually live in concentric spheres, and “politics” suffuses households as well as what Martin Luther King Jr. called “The World House.” Under that heading, he wrote in 1967: “When scientific power outruns moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men. When we foolishly minimize the internal of our lives and maximize the external, we sign the warrant for our own day of doom. Our hope for creative living in this world house that we have inherited lies in our ability to re-establish the moral ends of our lives in personal character and social justice. Without this spiritual and moral reawakening we shall destroy ourselves in the misuse of our own instruments.”

The facts of the matter are that on the one hand, there are an astonishingly small number of people who are responsible for our problems, an on the other, since we are responsible for allowing it all to happen, a huge number of people who are equally responsible. But I digress. The people who commission the making of weapons and who make the policy are very small in number, and they can be controlled and their power destroyed very easily. This is a fact. The first step is to define the problem and then design a solution. This article doesn’t do this. It doesn’t even give us the benefit of your precious experience from the 1960’s which would be invaluable to us so we do not end up like you.

This article doesn’t help, doesn’t educate, offers no solutions, no analysis and so it is literally pointless. At a time when we have, by your own words, an insane man in the Oval Office, this is not the time for pointless writing on AntiWar.

While trying to understand the essence of what so many Americans have witnessed over the last half century, I worked on a book (titled Made Love, Got War) that sifts through the last 50 years of the warfare state… and, in the process, through my own life. I haven’t learned as much as I would have liked, but some patterns emerged – persistent and pervasive since the middle of the 20th century.

Your logic is flawed. You are unable to put together the pieces to this puzzle because you have not defined the problem the way that weapons designers and scientists define problems. Once you do that, you can take it all to pieces with a few simple actions. None of this is going to be found in your navel.

The warfare state doesn’t come and go. It can’t be defeated on Election Day. Like it or not, it’s at the core of the United States – and it has infiltrated our very being.

Almost correct, save the nonsense about ‘our very being’. You are partially right that it cannot be defeated on Election Day, and you are completely correct that it is at the core of the USA. What you fail to offer is a way to ‘destroy the core‘.

What we’ve tolerated has become part of us.

Nonsense.

What we accept, however reluctantly, seeps inward.

Hippy talk.

In the long run, passivity can easily ratify even what we may condemn. And meanwhile, in the words of Thomas Merton, “It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared.”

Meaningless, especially to people being murdered as bombs are dropping from YOUR government.

The triumph of the warfare state degrades and suppresses us all. Even before the weapons perform as guaranteed.

[…]

AntiWar

More twaddle.

What ‘The triumph of the warfare state’ ACTUALLY DOES is cause bridges to spontaneously collapse, causes your rights to be destroyed, causes you to be hated in the world, and causes MASS MURDER.

If you are not willing to address this problem, you should not be wasting electrons and time with stories on AntiWar that are nothing more than shoe gazing garbage.

AntiWar needs to tighten up its editorial policy…if it really exists to put an end to war. Its name however, might give a clue to its real function, to be anti-war it exists because this situation exists; it is not there to stop it, but thrives because of it. People are starving for the solution, the way out of this. They are desperate to be shown the light switch. AntiWar and StopWar drip feed them dead matches masquerading as light. Neither of these people really want to put a permanent end to the war machine. If they did, their actions would be completely different; they would actually be proposing and taking effective actions.

This has been another post tipping point post, typed out at an astonishing pace….

On 23 July, the text of the EU’s draft Reform Treaty was released in French only. The English-language texts were released on 30-31 July, and to date (9 August) the draft Treaty is still not available in any other of the EU’s 20-odd languages.

The draft Reform Treaty would repeal or amend every single Article of the 62 Articles of the current Treaty on European Union (TEU) and would make 296 amendments to the 318 Articles of the current Treaty establishing the European Community (TEC). It would also amend or repeal most of the current 36 Protocols to the current Treaties as well as many Articles of the separate Treaty establishing the European Atomic Energy Community (the Euratom Treaty). Finally, it would add a number of new Protocols and Declarations to the Treaties.

The EU summit meeting (European Council) decided in June that these far-reaching amendments should be agreed by the end of 2007 and that the Reform Treaty should be ratified by June 2009 at the latest. In fact, the intention of the Portuguese Presidency of the Council is to agree on the text of the Treaty by mid-October. Taking account of the summer break this leaves very little time for civil society, national parliaments and the European Parliament to examine the draft text before it is agreed – and then once it is agreed, the Treaty will be presented to parliaments on a “take it or leave it” basis.

Moreover, the text of the Reform Treaty is completely unintelligible unless it is read alongside the existing Treaties. Furthermore, the full impact of many of the amendments to the Treaties set out in the draft Reform Treaty needs further explanation. Finally, there has been much public discussion of whether or not the draft Reform Treaty is essentially identical to the EU’s Constitutional Treaty of 2004.

In order to further public understanding of and debate upon the draft Reform Treaty, the following Statewatch analyses make the text of the draft Treaty comprehensible, by setting out the entire texts of the existing TEU and TEC and showing precisely how those texts would be amended by the draft Treaty. There are explanatory notes on the impact of each substantive amendment to the Treaties, and each analysis includes general comments, giving an overview of the changes and pointing out exactly which provisions of the draft Reform Treaty were taken from the Constitutional Treaty, and which provisions are different from the Constitutional Treaty.

There are 3 analyses, divided into ten parts.

Analysis no 1
– focusses on the issue of Justice and Home Affairs

Analysis no. 2 is the amended text of the TEU, and is divided into 2 parts:
– the non-foreign policy part of the Treaty (basic principles and key institutional rules of the EU) and
– the foreign policy part of that Treaty

Analysis no. 3 is the amended text of the TEC, and is divided into seven parts more or less following the structure of the Treaty:
– Part One of the Treaty on general provisions
– Part Two on non-discrimination and citizenship
– half of Part Three on the internal market and competition(except for the JHA clauses, which are the subject of analysis no. 1)
– the second half of Part Three, on other internal EU policies (such as social policy, monetary union and environment policy)
– Parts Four and Five, on the associated territories and external relations (including trade and development policy)
– Part Six, on the institutional rules(including the rules on the political institutions, the Court of Justice and the ‘flexibility’ rules)
– Part Seven, the final provisions

Analyses of the Protocols and Declarations, and the Euratom Treaty, will follow later.

[…]

Statewatch

Well well well.

On the fifth page of the first PDF, we have this:

Article 61 [67] (III-257)

1. The Union shall constitute an area of freedom, security and justice with respect for fundamental rights and the different legal systems and traditions of the Member States.

Sounds good doesnt it? but wait…

2. It shall ensure the absence of internal border controls for persons and shall frame a common policy on asylum, immigration and external border control, based on solidarity between Member States, which is fair towards third-country nationals. For the purpose of this Title, stateless persons shall be treated as third-country nationals.

WTF? Booooooooooooooooooooooommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!!!!!!!!

My emphasis.

A common policy on asylum? Lets let that one lie for the moment.

This part of the document is not only outrageous, for a legal document, it is extremely vague. As far as I know, there is no legal relationship known as ‘solidarity’. This sort of language does not belong in a legal document, unless it is defined somewhere else with great precision.

This part also uses the phrase ‘which is fair’. This is entirely nebulous. What the Germans consider to be fair is anathema to the decent English. This treaty, if it is filled with this sort of garbage, is a dead document. Any lawyer who looks at it will destroy it without getting past the first five pages.

3. The Union shall endeavour to ensure a high level of security through measures to prevent and combat crime, racism and xenophobia, and through measures for coordination and cooperation between police and judicial authorities and other competent authorities, as well as through the mutual recognition of judgments in criminal matters and, if necessary, through the approximation of criminal laws.

This cannot work, because the laws of Austria are reprehensible if applied to an Englishman. There cannot be mutual recognition of Germany’s laws for example, because they have outlawed Home Schooling; should a Home Schooling family flee to the UK for freedom, if this treaty were in place, they would be extraditable for something that is not a crime in the UK.

4. The Union shall facilitate access to justice, in particular through the principle of mutual recognition of judicial and extrajudicial decisions in civil matters.

Once again, there is no way that the UK can recognize the myriad bad law that exists throughout the EU. It is not a problem that these countries have what we think is bad law, you simply do not subject yourself to them by no going there to live or do business. What is entirely wrong is that they want to force their law down our throats.

Article 62 [68] (III-258)

The European Council shall define the strategic guidelines for legislative and operational planning within the area of freedom, security and justice.

Unelected, unaccountable, undemocratic and totally insane.

Only a traitor would sign such a document.

There cannot be a referendum on this because no one in their right mind would sign up to it. This can only be brought in by compulsion, which will make all of its provisions void on their face.

In effect, this is a soft coup. You have no obligation to obey any of its provisions, and any government that ratifies this treaty is illegitimate.

ID cards – some of the main corporate beneficiaries so far

Some in the IT industry are concerned about facets of the ID cards programme: the costs, the lack of a robust business case, and uncertainties over how well the technologies will work when applied to millions of people.

But not everyone is complaining. Indeed a by-product of the government’s decision to award a plethora of contracts under the ID Card scheme is that parts of the IT industry have signed up to non-disclosure terms, which has reduced significantly the number of cognoscente who could speak openly about the scheme even if they wanted to.

These are some of the organisations and individuals that have won contracts so far under the Identity Cards scheme …

PA Consulting (in part including Electronic Commerce Associates Ltd.) Approx £29.5m to £33.5m
Capita Resourcing – up to £5m
Field Fisher Waterhouse Appox £1.1m
Atos Origin IT Services UK Ltd – £1m+
Parity Resources – up to £1m
Glotel Technology – up to £1m
Sirius consortium (Fujitsu Services Ltd and Global Crossing Ltd and PWC) – £184,000
CESG Communications Electronic Security Group – £140,000+
Veredus London — £135,000+
Ernst and Young – £111,000
Partnerships UK – £93,000+
KPMG – £90,000+
Cornwell Management Consultants – £48,000
Shreeveport Management Consultancy – £43,000+
Sigma – £37,000+
The Metropolitan Police – £35,000
Axon Group Plc – £29,000
Excel Recruitment – £20,000
Whitehead Mann Ltd – £17,000
Alan Hughes – £16,000+
Office of Government Commerce – £12,000
Abbey Consulting – £4,000
Interleader Ltd – £2,000

Contracts worth up to £500,000

Adecco UK Ltd
Allen Lane
ASE Consulting Ltd
Capita Interim Management
Chamberlain Beaumont
Computer People
Crystal UK Ltd
Elan Computing Ltd
Electronic Computer Associates (novated from PA Consulting contract)
Hays Accounting
Hedra Ltd
Hudson Global Resources Ltd
Kelly Services
Logica CMC
Methods Consulting
Montpelier Contracting and Consulting
Northern Recruitment Group plc
OGC Accounting Service
Pendragon Information Systems
Real-Time Consultants plc
Ruillion Computer
Sand Resources
Search Total Recruitment Solutions
Security Printing Systems Ltd
Spring Technology
TAG TPS Ltd
The Nesco Group

Contracts under £50,000:

Angela Mortimer plc
Anite Public Sector
Beamans Ltd
British Print Industries Federation
Brook Street
Buchanan and Darby Associates
Business in the Community
Callcredit plc
CE Williams
Central Office of Information
Centre for Accessibility
Diane Bailey Associates
Donaldson’s
Drivers Jonas
ER Consultants
Equifax Ltd
Excel Recruitment
Home Office Cashiers
Ian Farrand HR Management Consultants
Ideas UK
Identix Ltd
Insight Consulting
Josephine Sammons Ltd
Kingston Communications plc.
Lambert Smith Hampton
Manpower
Michael Page UK Ltd
Minority Matters Recruitment
McCrindle Associates Ltd
OCS
Officeforce Ltd
Parity Training Ltd
Partnerships UK
Plain English Campaign
PicnicBox
Procurement Services Ltd
QDOS Computer Consultants
Q1 Consulting
Reed Accounting Personnel
Resource Analysts Ltd
RNA Ltd
Robert Walters
Security Services Group
SGS UK Ltd
Siemens Business Services
St. John’s Ambulance Services
Step Ahead
Streamline Financial Solutions
Telelogic UK Ltd
TK Cobley
The Whelan Partnership
The Whitehall and Industry Group
Turner and Townsend Project Management Ltd
White Young
Yale Data Management Consultant Ltd

[…]

http://www.computerweekly.com/

It doesn’t matter how many people they corrupt and who have signed NDAs. It is the people who are going to suffer at the hands of these companies who matter. It is their rights that are central to this, and despite what anyone says, the answer to all of this is ‘NO’ and HMG is wasting your money because in the end, this scheme will be dismantled if it ever goes into production.

There are some other interesting aspects of this list; the potential points for leaks are high in number. It cannot be possible that every one of the thousands of people who are going to be working on this will keep quiet. We can expect some leaks, if anyone decent works in any of these companies.

And finally, all the talk about open government (not that anyone with a single brain cell believed it) is further put to rest by everyone in this list being held under an NDA.

If this ID card scheme is so secure, then, like peer reviewed crypto (GPG etc) it should be possible for everyone to know how it works without compromising security. Security through obscurity is no security at all.

But you know this…

And now you can read about why this scheme is doomed to failure:

BBC’s File on 4 reveals defects in ID Cards scheme – with wide implications for government IT

Analysis/comment

A BBC Radio Four “File on 4” programme on 31 July 2007 on ID cards gave a useful insight into how ministers approve a major new IT-based project, then leave the rest to committed civil servants who have no clear what they’re supposed to be doing.

The broadcast included an interview with Computer Weekly’s news editor and several experts from the identity and IT community. It was apparent from the interviews that co-ordination and genuine accountability were lacking, or even absent, from the ID cards scheme, and that civil servants were trying to implement something indefinable that their leaders had decided to implement, nobody having a clear idea of the task that lay ahead.

This was the government machine at its worst: working in secret, having meetings whose minutes were secret, keeping secret “gateway” reviews of the scheme, and nobody having to account to ministers, stakeholders, the public, Parliament or the public over any decisions taken or not taken.

Carl Jung said that in all disorder there’s a secret order. Not in the case of the ID cards scheme, I suspect. Listening to the experts interviewed by the BBC I began to visualise the ID cards scheme as clusters of arms convulsing on an empty floor, none of them attached to a torso.

Peter Tomlinson an IT consultant and specialist in smart card technology told File on 4 he had attended government meetings where the ID card programme was discussed.

He was puzzled when officials from the Home Office, which was the department in charge of ID cards, didn’t appear to be present. “The meetings were called by people in the Cabinet Office. There were topics on the agenda that were set by people in the Cabinet Office and we kept on thinking: why are we not seeing people from the Home Office. Why are we not seeing technical people from the Home Office, or people involved in technical management? Eventually they began to come along but they never produced anyone who had any technical understanding of large-scale systems. We were just completely puzzled.”

File on 4’s researcher asked Tomlinson what questions had been asked at the government meetings he’d attended.

“Other government departments were asking the basic question: how will we use this system, and never getting an answer. No answer at all. ..It was my first real introduction to silo government. Individual government departments were completely independent of each other and now they were going to have to start working together. But they just did not start to do it.”

One of the government’s business justifications for the ID card scheme is that departments will be able to link into the National Identity Register to verify that citizens are who they say they are. But File on 4 found that departments have not assessed the costs of providing systems or software upgrades that integrate with the register.

Neil Fisher, vice president of identity management at Unisys, was also interviewed for the broadcast. Unisys is one of the companies that hope to join consortia bidding for ID scheme contracts.

Fisher had been talking to the Home Office about other computer projects he was involved in. He believed that work on these projects should have fed into the identity scheme. He, too, criticised a lack of co-ordination. He said it was difficult to find out who was in charge.

“I think there has been a realisation, as they have gone through this, that there are a lot of projects, even within the Home Office, being run by awful lots of different and smaller divisions in perhaps immigration, in law enforcement, in passport, and in ID cards, all of whom have a sort of relationship which was ill-defined.

“So [when I went] into a meeting invariably the wrong person from the wrong department would be there who could not speak for their colleagues in some other silo.”

He added that suppliers liked to talk to those who work within a well-organised chain of command. “But it just isn’t like that. I am not giving away any secrets here. The Home Office is quite a difficult department to run. It is like a herd of cats and it’s very difficult to herd cats as you know.”

Tomlinson said that as he sat listening to officials discussing the ID project at Cabinet Office meetings, he began to wonder whether it had really been thought through.

“We were asking questions like: how does one government department that is not the Home Office connect up to the identity card system? Where are the specifications for the communications protocols? How does the equipment get to be security certified? There was no work going on any of these technical topics…

“If you are going to design a large-scale system like this you first go and look at the volumes of transactions that are going to take place, how often are they going to take place and then we would see roughly how big it was going to be. You can’t specify a system unless you have these figures. There were about four of us who used to go to those meetings and we were all very puzzled. We said that this project is empty. It has no content.”

None of this can be blamed on James Hall, the affable, experienced, open and business-minded Chief Executive of the Identity and Passport Service. James Hall did not join the ID cards scheme until last October – three years after its inception; and in any case no individual civil servant, however deft his skills, can resolve the deep-rooted problems on the ID cards scheme which are arguably more to do with the anachronistic, cosy, closed-door culture of government than the action or inaction of any one person.

Several times during the File on 4 programme, Hall ably defended the scheme saying that it would continue to evolve. But some of those listening to him could be forgiven for thinking that he was saying in essence: things are not clearly defined at the moment and we’re at least partially reliant on suppliers defining things for us.

It’s the salesmen and consultants from suppliers that have pushed for ID cards; and so it will be, it seems, the technical people from some of the same companies that will be largely responsible for setting the specifications they will contracted to deliver against.

Very odd.

James Hall told the BBC’s researchers: “We have published a plan laying out our approach to the national identity scheme last December. Since January we have been in continuous dialogue with the technology industry and we have taken on board some of their thinking about the shape of the scheme and that’ll be reflected in procurement activity. And I have no doubt that once we into the procurement process we will continue to get innovation and good ideas from the market which will continue to refine our thinking about the precise details of how we deliver this.”

Martyn Thomas, a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and visiting professor of software engineering at Oxford University Computing Laboratory, said the requirements for the ID cards scheme “are still not being articulated”.

He added: “Without a very clear statement of what the requirements are it won’t be possible to build a system that meets those requirements cost effectively.”

File on 4’s programme was specific to ID cards, so it’s easy to forget that there are much wider implications of the disclosures made in the broadcast. The civil servants we have met have been bright and committed. But it’s not their fault if they work without clear tasks, without leadership and in secret – so mistakes and inefficiency are hidden.

If the machinery of government is in such poor condition – and some parts of it seem to be – how can it be exploited for the purposes of huge, complex, risky, costly and ambitious IT-projects such as ID cards?

[…]

http://www.computerweekly.com/

Tony Collins is really on the ball. Astonishing stuff.

Doreen Lawrence attacks Tory frontrunner, saying black people will not vote for him

Patrick Wintour, political editor
Saturday August 4, 2007

Doreen Lawrence, the mother of the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, yesterday launched a fierce personal attack on Boris Johnson, saying he would destroy multicultural London if elected mayor, and that no informed black person would vote for him.

Ms Lawrence, who does not normally become involved in party politics, said she had been moved to make the criticisms by her anger at Mr Johnson’s attitude to the Macpherson inquiry in 1999 into the Metropolitan police’s failure to bring her son’s killers to justice 14 years ago.

Her intervention comes as David Cameron, the Tory leader, steps up his efforts to woo the black vote in the capital.

Ms Lawrence said: “Boris Johnson is not an appropriate person to run a multi-cultural city like London. Think of London, the richness of London, and having someone like him as mayor would destroy the city’s unity. He is definitely not the right person to even be thinking to put his name forward.

“Those people that think he is a lovable rogue need to take a good look at themselves, and look at him. I just find his remarks very offensive. I think once people read his views, there is no way he is going to get the support of any people in the black community.”

Mr Johnson wrote a series of articles at the time of the Macpherson inquiry, claiming some of its recommendations were born of political correctness and that the furore around the murder had created the whiff of a witchhunt against the police. The inquiry team found the police institutionally racist.

Mr Johnson was especially condemnatory of a “weird recommendation that the law might be changed so as to allow prosecution for racist language or behaviour ‘other than in a public place’.”

“Not even under the law of Ceausescu’s Romania could you be prosecuted for what you said in your own kitchen,” he wrote. “No wonder the police are already whingeing that they cannot make any arrests in London. No wonder the CPS groans with anti-discrimination units, while making a balls-up of so many cases.”

He argued that “the PC brigade, having punched this hole in the Metropolitan police, is swarming through to take over the whole system” and went on to say that he feared “what started as a sensible attempt to find justice for the family of Stephen Lawrence has given way to hysteria”.

In his articles – mainly in the Daily Telegraph – Mr Johnson also made it clear that he believed there had been “grotesque failures in the Lawrence murder case, and they may well have originated in racism”, adding the police officers “may have jumped to the wrong conclusions due to a racialist mindset”.

In another article, presumably for stylistic effect, he has referred to children as “piccaninnies” and described the “watermelon smiles of black people”.

Ms Lawrence said such remarks made it surprising that Mr Cameron was backing Mr Johnson. “[David Cameron] says he is trying to change the Conservative party from its past, and support multiculturalism, and bring in new communities, then supporting Boris Johnson is not a way of doing that.”

[…]

Guardian

This woman is insane.

Under ‘Red Ken’ Livingston, London has been turned into the very model of dehumanized surveillance grid living, where everyone’s privacy is violated routinely by a system that he personally implemented; the ‘Congestion Charge’. It was Red Ken who extended it despite the explicit objection of the majority of Londoners.

Under people like him, the so called ‘blacks’ will have an increasingly hard time as the biometric net / Quantized Human Pleb Grid is rolled out. They will be the ones routinely stopped and fingerprinted. They are already the ones most represented in the appalling and unprecedented DNA database. It is people like Boris who are for removing these monstrosities; she should be FOR him not AGAINST him.

This woman simply is not thinking:

She added: “He felt that people should be entitled to say what they want. It sounds to me that what he believes is that because something is said and done in private it is acceptable, but clearly it can never be acceptable to hold those views. Anyway, what is said in private normally manifests itself out in public.”

See what I mean?

Not once does this deranged person mention a single policy that Boris wants to implement. But this is not about policy. This is about the inmates taking over the asylum.

What has happened to her is unbelievably sad, but it has clearly caused her to become irrational. The media have made her into a sort of saint figure, and they listen to and print her every word uncritically. This is crazy. Her suffering of an unimaginable injustice does not qualify her to set the standards by which we should all live, and I deeply despise people who want to control what we can and cannot say.

Boris Johnson, as a British man® is free to write whatever he wants. This is the freedom that people in Britain have, and just because he has a sense of humor that someone somewhere might find offensive, this does not exclude him from running for office, and it does not mean that he would not make a brilliant Mayor of London. I would rather have a ribald Boris as Mayor of London tearing down the Congestion Charge system, anonymising the Oyster Card system, mandating that busses take cash, reinstating the Routemaster, overturning the smoking ban … returning London to what it is meant to be, than some politically correct, fascist police state facilitator who is turning the entire city into a giant concentration camp.

Increasingly, people are going to have to accept that people ‘say things’. All sorts of things. The internets can bring you these things instantly. This woman would have us living in a paranoid world where everyone is thinking one thing and writing another; where everyone is writing as if they are under surveillance, where their freely expressed thought can come back to ‘haunt them’ in the future, as PC witchunters Google their words for expressions of forbidden thought.

That is not a world where any decent person wants to live and work. It is the world of fascism, and people who say things like she does are the absolute enemies of mankind … and she has every right to say it, as wrong headed as it is. This unelected figurehead has the right to say whatever she wants, and so does Boris. That is freedom of speech in a free country. She should not be toppled from her position as a ‘community leader’ for spouting twaddle, and Boris should not be put off the list of Mayoral candidates for using his own unique brand of expression. Everyone can choose for themselves who they want to control London…that is where the person is elected.

But I digress…

Everyone is going to have to accept that people write what they write, and this has no bearing on the sort of person they really are, or what their policies are and how efficiently they implement them. If we do not accept this, then only the people who have never written are going to be ‘fit to be employed’ or ‘fit for office’. If someone doesn’t write, keeping their innermost ghastly thoughts (if a thought can be ghastly) secret and to themselves, this doesn’t mean that they are ‘nice’, or that they will be able to do the job well. If someone only writes smooth things, does this mean that we can trust them more? Of course not. What we have to talk about are ideas applied to problems and then performance and execution. Writing for fun or employment has nothing to do with either of those things, and these personal attacks on Boris Johnson are just childish, stupid and pointless. Opinion must always be separated from Policy. Informal thought written down is NOT POLICY.

Lets see what Boris wants to do with London / what he is informally thinking shall we?

Transport

A dedicated cyclist, Boris Johnson wants to get rid of “Ken Livingstone’s 18-metre-long socialist frankfurter buses” and speed humps “which necessitate the need for 4x4s”. He has attacked legislation on car booster seats for children as “utterly demented”.

He has bemoaned “the unbelievable and chronic chaos on the tube” and the state of the railways, observing: “The fundamental problem is not that the train companies are monstrously abusing the travelling public, though they are … Gordon Brown and the Treasury are … making them pay so much for the franchise that they simply don’t have enough to invest in services.”

I agree with all of this.

Marriage

“David Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith are plainly right to extol the benefits of marriage, and, if a £20 tax credit would really begin to bubblegum together our broken society, then that would clearly be a price worth paying … It is outrageous that the benefit system should be so heavily skewed in favour of single parent families,” Johnson wrote recently.

Marriage is good!

Diversity and integration

The Tory MP has argued that society must “inculcate … Britishness, especially into young Muslims”, adding: “We should teach English, and we should teach in English. We should teach British history. We should think again about the jilbab, with the signals of apartness that it sends out, and we should probably scrap faith schools.

“We should forbid the imams from preaching sermons in anything but English … we cannot continue with the multicultural apartheid.”

Last year he said localism could lead to sharia law because “large chunks of the Muslim population” did not feel British. He added: “Supposing Tower Hamlets or parts of Bradford were to become governed by religious zealots believing in that system?”

The Mayor of London cannot forbid people from preaching in Arabic… or Latin for that matter. This is just TALK. Real democracies have checks and balances in place so that no matter what the personal opinions of elected officials are, they cannot violate your rights. Sadly, the Mayor of London can violate your rights willy nilly, and there is nothing that you can do about it. If a bad man, like Red Ken is in charge, then bad things like the Congestion Charge can and will happen. The rights of people in the UK need to be enshrined….but thats another blog post.

Inequality

He admits the low tax rates enjoyed by many in the City are “odd”, but argues: “Without their efforts, there would be no squillions, and a windfall tax might simply kill the goose.” He suggests philanthropy should be encouraged instead.

He has accused Labour of waging a middle-class war against “the bottom 20% of society – the group that supplies us with the chavs, the losers, the burglars, the drug addicts and the 70,000 people who are lost in our prisons … They keep them snared in a super-complicated system of means-tested benefits … They tax them an exorbitant proportion of their incomes.”

Completely correct, and he is completely right about Philanthropy, as are others.

The environment, Housing, Health its all good. This is a man who has some common sense, who is not in thrall to political correctness, which means that he is free thinking. We need free thinkers…heavens above, we need people who can THINK. That is why Boris Johnson should be Mayor of London. ‘Shock Jock’ Nick Ferrari is just thick, and anyone who used to be ‘ShowBiz Reporter at The Sun’ shouldn’t be left in charge of a ten penny piece let alone one of the greatest cities mankind ever created. Ken Livingston has been an unmitigated disaster. Whoever the lib-dems are fielding they are unelectable thanks to their absurd local income tax ‘ideas’.

and finally, a nifty comment from a real person:

Bye ken, and welcome Boris, who is someone who will say what we all feel, and not scared by the do gooder groups, who so many bow down to now!

– Graham, Southend on sea, UK

from This is London

See what I mean?…again?

U.N. rapporteur raps Britains’s law on fingerprinting foreigners
BC-UH-Britain-Racism
By Sara Sasaki

LONDON. July 18 – A special U.N. rapporteur on racism on Thursday criticized Britain’s new immigration legislation on fingerprinting and photographing all foreign visitors as a process 0f treating foreigners like criminals.

Ooudou Diene. on his last day of a six-day visit to Britain to conduct a follow-up of his report on racism, said at a press conference in London the immigration bill that just passed through Parliament on Wednesday “illustrates something I have been denouncing in my reports for four years.”

“It is the fact that, especially since Sept. 11. there has been a process of criminalization of foreigners” all over the world, he added.

The enacted legislation will allow immigration officials to take biometric data from foreigners age 16 and above as pari of measures to light terrorism, enabling them to check for past deportees and anyone designated as a terrorist by the justice minister.

But Diene warned that the fight against terrorism is being used against foreigners worldwide and governments are criminalizing them when they are actually supposed to protect them.

The measures of the new legislation exclude ethnic Irish and other permanent residents with special status, those under 16, those visiting Britain for diplomatic or official purposes, and those invited by the state.

But foreigners living in Britain without special permanent residence status such as those on a work visa will also be fingerprinted and photographed at immigration upon arrival.

Alter his visit t to Britain last July, Diene said racial discrimination in Britain is “deep and profound,” and expressed concerns over the treatment of Scottish indigenous people, Muslim and Hindu minorities living in Britain and new immigrants originating from Asia, the Middle East Africa.

[…]

http://www.debito.org/kyodo051806.jpg
http://www.debito.org/rapporteur.html

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.

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!

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!