One in 10 of Glasgow’s call centres has been infiltrated by criminal gangs, police believe.

The scam works by planting staff inside offices or by forcing current employees to provide sensitive customer details.

The information is then used to steal identities and fraudulently set up accounts or transfer money.

The Customer Contact Association played down the extent of the problem but admitted it was a concern to those in the industry.

Det Ch Insp Derek Robertson of Strathclyde Police told the BBC’s Newsnight Scotland programme that there were a large number of call centres in the Glasgow area.

Recruit volunteers

“We have 300-plus, and we know that number is growing,” he said.

“I would say approximately 10% have been infiltrated in the past and we are working very hard to reduce that number.”

Detectives believe that criminal crews are sent out to recruit volunteers to work in the centres.

Once they agree, they are asked to supply financial information in return for a fee.

Another tactic is to identify pubs where call centre workers visit and intimidate the employees to pass on the details.

Det Ch Insp Robertson said: “There are a number of different ways to do it.

“We know of organised crime groups who are placing people within the call centres so that they can steal customers’ data and carry out fraud and money laundering.

“We also know of employees leaving the call centres and being approached and coerced, whether physically, violently or by being encouraged to make some extra money.

“And of course you have the disgruntled employee who may turn their hand to fraud just to benefit themselves.”

However, Anne Marie Forsyth of the Customer Contact Association played down the extent to which criminal gangs had managed to manipulate the industry.

She told the programme: “I think what Derek is talking about is the financial services sector, but the contact centre sector is far wider with travel, health, insurance and lots of others.

“Nevertheless it is obviously a concern and it’s a concern for all businesses.

“CCA membership has been very active over the last couple of years over sharing and exchanging data in this area. There is lots and lots to learn because business has got to be one step ahead as fraud increases.”

Call centres have become an increasingly important source of jobs.

Scottish Enterprise estimates that the industry employs about 18,000 people in Glasgow alone.

Across the UK the number is closer to 800,000. Median wages for those answering the phones are about £14,000.

The union, Unison, said that most call handlers working for established companies would be well trained and well monitored.

Dave Watson, their senior regional officer for Scotland, said that the biggest concern over security centred on out-sourcing companies which had high staff turnovers.

Mr Watson told Newsnight Scotland: “I think the real issue here is there are opportunities for criminal gangs to infiltrate staff where you’ve got high turnover and employers are desperate to recruit anyone to fulfil a particular contract.

“So what companies need to do is maximise their in-house operations and where they are using out-sourced providers they do that with the same standards that they require with their in-house operations.”

Det Ch Insp Robertson said call centre fraud was now a top priority.

His officers regularly monitor local jobs pages and contact new call centres.

He said: “That’s the only way to get ahead of the criminal – by pro-actively targeting the organisation before they recruit their member of staff. We are actively working on that.” […]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/6089736.stm

And surprise surprise, no mention of the NIR, the previous scandal of Identities for sale from inside Whitehall, and we have been here before.

The habitual and deliberate failing to connect the dots practiced by BBQ imbeciles, in this case, one ‘Raymond Buchanan’ is simply appalling.

It doesn’t take a genius to extrapolate from this and previous examples to see that if the NIR is rolled out as planned, it will be a piece of cake for anyone to get into the most intimate details of a a British citizen. It will be even easier than is the case in this ‘article’, because NIR access will be widespread, with terminals everywhere, plastered with Post-It® notes sporting privileged user passwords….

You get the picture.

For you people that DONT get it (BBQ dunderheads who lurk on BLOGDIAL) this is just the tip of the iceberg. If the NIR is rolled out, people will be able to investigate you without having to commit any sort of crime or deception. The NIR will provide a ‘service’ where you, the man in the street, can check if someone has a criminal record or not. If you think that it is outrageous that ‘criminals’ are getting into call centres, imagine the scenario (you do have SOME imagination dont you?) where all you have to do is pay to get access to anyone’s details, and its all perfectly legal. The logical conclusion will be that if you are allowed to access this part of a person’s life (criminal record), why not let people access everything else? This WILL happen if the NIR is put in place, and people stupidly enroll in it.

By not connecting the dots, by brainlessly boosting the idea of biometrics, by letting it slip again and again, deliberately, and with malice of forethought, you, you ignorant BASTARD are a part of the PROBLEM.

Or maybe I have it all wrong.

Maybe BBQ Glasgow exists in a parallel universe, where there is no Whitehall, no Bliar, no NIR, nowhere else that HMG IT has been corrupted from the inside, no broken DVLA, where Google is actually ‘Google Glasgow’ where you can only search inside that universe, where the police have never sold surveillance to criminals. You get my point, and there are many more that I could have sourced and quoted. If I felt like it, I could even extrapolate this story to the call centres in other countries, that have the billing records of millions of Britons on tap.

But why go there?

This is irresponsible journalism…or it would be if what BBQ did really was journalism, and not wildly biased propaganda on behalf of every punter with a fist full of fifties.

This story was brought to you by an very vigilant virologist, its veracity verified and its verse vectored to me for vilification.

Beer fingerprints to go UK-wide

The Register | October 23 2006

The government is is funding the roll out of fingerprint security at the doors of pubs and clubs in major English cities.

Funding is being offered to councils that want to have their pubs keep a regional black list of known trouble makers. The fingerprint network installed in February by South Somerset District Council in Yeovil drinking holesy is being used as the show case.

“The Home Office have looked at our system and are looking at trials in other towns including Coventry, Hull & Sheffield,” said Julia Bradburn, principal licensing manager at South Somerset District Council.

Gwent and Nottingham police have also shown an interest, while Taunton, a town neighbouring Yeovil, is discussing the installation of fingerprint systems in 10 pubs and clubs with the systems supplier CreativeCode.

Bradburn could not say if fingerprint security in Yeovil had displaced crime to neighbouring towns, but she noted that domestic violence had risen in Yeovil. She could not give more details until the publication of national crime statistics to coincide with the anniversary of lax pub licensing laws on 24 November.

She was, however, able to say that alcohol-related crime had reduced by 48 per cent Yeovil between February and September 2006.

The council had assumed it was its duty under the Crime and Disorder Act (1998) to reduce drunken disorder by fingerprinting drinkers in the town centre.

Some licensees were not happy to have their punters fingerprinted, but are all now apparently behind the idea. Not only does the council let them open later if they join the scheme, but the system costs them only £1.50 a day to run.

Oh, and they are also coerced into taking the fingerprint system. New licences stipulate that a landlord who doesn’t install fingerprint security and fails to show a “considerable” reduction in alcohol-related violence, will be put on report by the police and have their licences revoked.

Offenders can be banned from one pub or all of them for a specified time – usually a period of months – by a committee of landlords and police called Pub Watch. Their offences are recorded against their names in the fingerprint system. Bradburn noted the system had a “psychological effect” on offenders.

She said there had been only been two “major” instances of alcohol-related crime reported in Yeovil pubs and clubs since February. One was a sexual assault in a club toilet.

The other occurred last Friday when an under-18 Disco at Dukes nightclub got out of hand after the youngsters had obtained some alcohol from elsewhere. A fight between two youngsters escalated into a brawl involving 435 12-16 year olds

A major incident is when 15 police attend the scene, said Bradburn. She was unable to say how many minor incidents there had been but acknowledged that fights were still occurring in the streets of Yeovil.

The Home Office paid for Yeovil’s system in full, with £6,000 of Safer, Stronger Communities funding.

Bradburn said the Home Office had paid her scheme a visit and subsequently decided to fund similar systems in Coventry, Hull and Sheffield.

The Home Office distanced itself from the plans. It said it provided funding to Safer, Stronger Communities through the Department for Communities and Local Government’s Local Area Agreements. How they spent the money was a local decision, said a HO spokeswoman.

[…]

Propaganda Matrix Quotes The Register

I swear to you right now, that I will NEVER give my fingerprint in order to have a drink. My local can fuck off to hell if they think that I am going to do it. DEATH to all publicans to go along with it…and if it does get rolled out, then farewell O England…I fought for thee….

[S]till they keep coming, those hubristic monuments to big government,
the living dead that walk the well-trodden path from Downing Street and
the Treasury to New Labour’s graveyard of initiatives.

The NHS computer: delayed, disorganised, a £20 billion shambles.

Forced police mergers: the direct opposite of the community policing we
need.

And then the perfect example.

ID cards.

When a half-way competent government would be protecting our security by
controlling our borders…

…these Labour ministers are pressing ahead with their vast white
elephant, their plastic poll tax, twenty Millennium Domes rolled into
one giant catastrophe in the making.

They’ve given up trying to find a good reason for it.

Last week Tony Blair said that ID cards would help control immigration,
when new immigrants won’t even have them.

Does he even know what’s going on in his Government?

ID cards are wrong, they’re a waste of money, and we will abolish them. […]

Conservatives

Well, it looks like Tories are the only way to go next time, if only for this single reason; jettisoning the ID card and the NIR. I am sure that many people will not be for the Tories, but will be against the ID card, against the warmongering, against the sweaty, stocky, unctuous, murdering ‘grotesque’ Brown. For whatever reason, the ID card is so central to complete tyrrany, the first and absolutely essential step, the key to lock you and your children up forever – it alone is reason to abandon all your previous loyalties and support the Tories, because if they lose and ID cards and the NIR are introduced, it is THE END of Britain on a level and at a depth that few people can imagine.

You think that shouting CCTV cameras are bad? Imagine a shouting CCTV system that shouts your NAME OUT as it tells you to ‘move along you are not allowed to gather here’…or… ‘stop kissing your secretary JANE, MR. THOMPSON, your wife PEG has been informed’.

Yes, that will happen. They will be able to access the NIR automagically and correlate your CCTV image with your NIR entry, which will pull up your name, address, marital status, workplace, EVERYTHING, all in the name of ‘stopping crime’ or ‘security’.

Of course, if you are not in the NIR, or even better, there is no such thing as ‘the NIR’ then none of this dystopian crap can ever happen to you. You can shag your secretary right there in the street, and no one will ever know.

You know what I mean.

You will be free from a type of insidious, invasive, unnecessary, vile, inhuman, dehumanizing, revolting, voyeuristic and monstrous surveillance, that no decent person would ever have thought was fit to roll out.

Without the NIR as the key to your activities, without that locus, that single identifier, that binding element, Oyster becomes less of a threat, Nectar becomes less of a threat, your cellphone becomes less of a threat – because you can control how you identify yourself to all of these people. They will not be able to DEMAND that you present your NIR linked ID card. The biometric net will be broken, and you will be able to protect yourself as you move freely between services by compartmentalizing your valuable personal information. The service providers will have no choice but to deal with you on your terms, or lose your money.

And they will never do that.

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

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

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

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

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

The Register reports:

The headmaster of Porth County Comprehensive School in South Wales has defended fingerprinting all 1,400 of his pupils days after their parents were told about the scheme last Wednesday.

[…]

Porth County Comprehensive headmaster Stephen Bowden told El Reg: “As far as we were concerned, it wasn’t necessary for us to seek parental consent in this. It’s a system that has been approved by the DfES and it’s supported by Capita SIMS.”

[…]

The system, called Vericool, was developed by Anteon, a subsidiary of General Dynamics, a firm that specialises in developing systems for the military and intelligence services.

It will register children for lessons by scanning their fingers when they enter a classroom at the start of a lesson.

Bowden said it would give the school a means of “effective administration” and help in “reducing the bureaucratic burden” of staff taking registrations themselves. It had cost the school £25,000.

“By the time I’ve put this together, I can assure any parent that their child is safely in school and on the premises…or we can purely or simply track students to see if attendance affects their progress,” he said.

But Bowden said he would not know how much more efficient the system would be than a manual register until after its installation was complete in January.

[…]

What a despicable creature this Stephen Bowden is. How utterly repugnant that someone in charge of educating a rolling total of 1400 children believes they should learn to be treated like unthinking livestock. What sort of example does it show to overrule or blatently disregard viewpoints of these children’s parents.

What a dangerous man he is to institutionally abuse so many children?

Now, of course the parents who have complained about this should remove their children from this school until this system is withdrawn, with a bit of luck they will have the sense to link this nonsense with the daily impositions that the National Identity Register will cause and they will be motivated to resist that also.

Did you know…

… that the notorious No Child Left Behind Act includes a sneaky section that requires high schools to turn over private information on students to military recruiters?

And that the Pentagon has created an illegal database of 30 million 16-25 year-olds, including names, addresses, email addresses, cell phone numbers, ethnicities, social security numbers, extracurricular activities, and areas of study?

Yikes. What do we do? Any way you look at it, this is a family privacy nightmare, another strong-arming of our local schools, and a creepy warm-up to a possible draft. However, it’s also a great reason to get together and take action.

So, whether you’re a parent, teacher, school administrator, veteran or just another adamant American concerned about privacy rights, look for an action that you like and JOIN US!

http://themmob.org/lmca/

How about if you refuse to pay for these ‘services’ that you don’t need or want?

If you want a preview of how ‘helpful’ the trails of information gained by NIR trawling will be take a look at this article at nth position. It goes into detail about an active project in Bedfordshire which agregates information about crime levels, ambulance reports et al. in house-to-house detail. As you will see these records are rather simple to access and there are plans to allow public access via the internet to a range of data gathered:

Surely, I thought, in the name of all that is most sensible, those cannot really be emergency service logs? Later that day, Bedfordshire County Council’s press office kindly supplied me with a CD-ROM of the presentation. Yes, the spreadsheets glimpsed in the presentation really were pages from emergency service logs.

The level of detail included:
* X and Y co-ordinates allowing pinpointing of crimes and accidents on Ordnance Survey maps
* Details of crime victims including address, age and sex
* Ambulance data including patient problems
CDRP: Ambulance data, redacted for patient data privacyIn this last category, the medically confidential information had been shaded over for presentation to the council. However on examination it was easily readable, allowing me to zero in on the locations of the following incidents, all from October 1, 2005
* 12 cases of ‘assault/rape’
* One case each of ‘overdose/poisoning’ and ‘stab/gunshot wound’
* 16 cases of ‘specific traumatic injuries’ [nthposition has redacted the personally identifiable data.]
Information from the fire and rescue service also give OS grid references, street addresses and notes on whether fires are considered accidental or deliberate.
Information from the council’s environmental services includes unprocessed reports pinpointing complainants’ addresses.
From information on council trading standards ‘enforcement visits’, it could be seen that four specific shops in nearby towns had provided drink and/or tobacco to underage children. In the council’s words: “Data on crime and anti-social behaviour incidents is extracted from the partner systems and replicated into a central data store and a common application has been created to provide user access.”

Such is the CDRP’s belief in data protection that they lifted pages of this data store for a slide show, and then simply handed it out to the public on request. And this is the sort of information that is going to be pinged back and forth between the CDR partners. Bedfordshire’s CDRP also plans to show reported incidents of anti-social behaviour on a website map giving house-to-house detail. These maps will be available online to the public.

You will notice that enthusiasm for the project already means ‘institutional ignorance’ of data protection concerns is in place.
The ‘Geographical Information System’ in Bedfordshire is by no means alone. see this Home Office report (pdf) for introduction to the scope of another few (via crimereduction.gov). Interestingly at least one of the Systems (COSMOS – covering the Birmingham area) has a vanilla http login page the insecurity of which should be obvious. This doesn’t exactly make one feel comfortable.

So that is where we are now. The fundamental question to pose with these systems is are they necessary? That question is not actually about whether they will aid the authorities which they almost certainly will but whether the information they gather is any more useful than limited research projects. It is the question of what amounts to ongoing mass surveillance is actually more beneficial than spending money on a research programme and then acting in advance of crime and antisocial behaviour – because whatever these systems do they are absolutely useless if no one actually learns from the data gathered. It should be pretty clear to most people that sink estates and higher crime areas share certain characteristics and the findings of research in one location can be applied with a bit of critical thinking to another area. The idea that ongoing mass surveillance is in any way more responsive or accurate than limited research is fallacious, moreover ‘unguided’ systems such as these may obscure potential solutions to problems that ‘guided’ research may uncover – indeed it is like finding a cure for ‘the common cold’ by counting how many people buy cough medicine.

Secondly we have the issues of security and privacy, as the writer from the nth position found, the regard towards data protection aspects is minimal, and has been sidelined in the interests of interoperability, with this approach the underlying assumptions are that everyone has a legitimate use for information gathered and that it is being requseted ‘innocently’.
Additionally in these systems it is unclear how accurate these databases will become once opened up to the public, as the nth position discusses:

Using a special page on the CDRP sites, members of the public will be able report instances of alleged anti-social behaviour. At present, Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (Asbos) can be made by local courts. They are yet another of Labour’s quick fixes: where prosecution might otherwise fail, or even where no specific crime has been committed, Asbos can be slapped on instead. The bald truth about Asbos is unpalatable enough: they can be (and in fact, are designed specifically to be) applied to anyone magistrates consider to have behaved legally, but badly enough to warrant legal restraint. Now, in a sort of post-modern nightmare, Orwell’s Big Brother has been ousted by Bazalgette’s Big Brother.

The public will be the ones doing the state’s spying, and ‘voting off’ fellow citizens.

You shouldn’t worry unduly about this, because (as one CDRP officer put it): “These reports will be sanity-checked.” What might ‘sanity-checking’ entail? On the face of it, emailed reports of pink elephants leaping over office blocks might not make it on to the map. Then again, you may remember the case of Caroline Shepherd, a woman from East Kilbride served with an Asbo in 2005 for answering her own front door while wearing a nightdress. Or perhaps the luckless would-be suicide who repeatedly jumped in to the River Avon and was hit with an Asbo preventing her from going near any body of water in the vicinity – her name is public knowledge, but I can’t see any benefit in repeating it. (Then there are the cases of Michael Donockley, David Gaylor and David Boag… but I fear that no-one will believe those actually happened: stick their names plus ‘asbo’ into a search engine and find out for yourself).

So on to the future.
If the NIR is implemented ‘successfully’ it will be possible for people/companies with access to GIS technology, and who have bought government database access to overlay ‘public’ and commercial information to create a ‘live profile’ of anyone registered on the NIR database. A criminal will be able to identify high crime areas, perhaps with poor police response times and correlate the data with people recently buying a new car/financial services with PNR flight data they could check if occupants are on holiday etc, etc. Obviously the converse data matching could be employed by the government for their own reasons (we shan’t be handing out any more ideas here I’m afraid). Even if access to this sort of information is more secure (https? phut!) it won’t prevent the internal compromises such as those reported this week at the Identity and Passport Service (the future gateway to NIR informtaion no less).

Naturally an ‘I told you so’ when the NIR fails will be a response that won’t address the problem of its creation. Much like using mass surveillance technology to respond to crime.

Confidential bank details scavenged from computers dumped in British rubbish tips and recycling points are being traded for cash in Africa, according to a new investigation.

Personal data, including passwords, sort codes, account numbers and even family names and birth dates, are being offered for sale by fraudsters in Nigeria for less than £20.

The information is being taken from the hard disks of PC’s abandoned at waste tips and local authority recycling points which are then shipped to Africa for repair.

Although the owners believe that they have deleted any confidential information before throwing away the computers, the data can usually be retrieved easily and quickly.

Telegraph

Banks will be among the many institutions that will be able to access NIR related information, qed we shall see this story repeated with far more sensitive & personal information if the NIR database goes ahead and people register on it. Of course the increased usage of computer records in the NHS and other State agencies means a potential agglomeration of personal data from recycled/waste PCs.

Transparent bags

The Department for Transport set out the details of the security measures at UK airports.

Passengers are not allowed to take any hand luggage on to any flights in the UK, the department said.

Only the barest essentials – including passports and wallets – will be allowed to be carried on board in transparent plastic bags.

“We hope that these measures, which are being kept under review by the government, will need to be in place for a limited period only,” the statement said.

British Airways said that passengers who do not wish to fly on Thursday could rebook on flights leaving over the next two weeks.

At Stansted airport, more than 2,000 passengers, clutching their plastic bags, snaked around the terminal queuing to pass through customs. […]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4778575.stm

These transparent bags for your ID, wallet and toothbrush are symbolic of what they are trying roll out in the entire society on a permanent basis. When they say, “We hope that these measures, which are being kept under review by the government, will need to be in place for a limited period only” this is the big lie. They want everyone at all times to have their entire lives in transparent plastic bags. They want your bank account transparent to them. They want your health records transparent to them. They want all of your purchases transparent to them. They want the precise details every journey you make to anywhere, no matter what the destination or distance, transparent to them.

In a perfect world, all the people in that airport would go home, leaving it empty and the flights empty and the hollidays cancelled. When this happens, people lose money. Business is damaged. THEN people listen. THEN policy changes. Britain can keep its disasterous ‘relationship’ with the usa because, so far, it is not losing any money out of it. As soon as that changes, then the story is very different. Sadly, we are not in that perfect world. We are in the world of sub humans like ‘Tony Shield from Chorley’, who intones in his brutish grunting animal voice:

“This disruption is one of the short term limits on freedom that are needed”

And that, my friends, is a BIG part of the problem. Subhuman scum who will drag us all to hell with them because they cannot string more than two consecutive thoughts together in a chain of logic. Literally, like sheep.
George Galloway talks about the vast sums of money being put down on gambling tables in London by Arabs in that MEMRI clip. They, of all people, are still coming here despite……but I digress.

I had a Skype call this morning to ask me how to take a laptop on a plane, “since you are not allowed to carry hand luggage anymore; 8 people tried to blow up planes last night”.

The reaction to this, the plstic bagging and the ban on luggage, is completely absurd. The fact is that if this plot is true, they ‘caught’ who was going to do it. There is no need to make a soap opera and spectacle out of it. Its like the insane bans on metal cutlery after the mythical ‘911’. Elal, the Israeli airline never did this of course, because they have a better grip on real security, and for all their legion of sins are not in the throws of hysterical security theatre like the keystone kops at M|5 are.

Note how the utterly stupid and useless M|5 ‘threat level’ was up and running just in time for this apalling charade, and how it has been seamlessy integrated into all the stories about this ‘event’.

Finally, note how this was ‘foiled’ on the tenth and not the eleventh. Amateurs!

If you read this blog you’re no doubt aware of the AOL search history debacle. Now that we learn at least one person has been identified as a result of their search history we can see the unfortunate consequences of accruing information about a person’s ‘habits’. Of course I refer to the audit trail the NIR and attendant databases will create (and this will happen despite government protestations to the contrary – police officers will be required to fill in a form every time they request to see an ID card and will this information will have to be stored for quality control and verification – companies will be able to buy NIR information and cross reference it with their own credit/loyalty card databases; most supermarkets/companies sell financial services these days and will request ‘identification’ before selling these products so don’t think ticking a little data protection box will help you much).

You know very well that NIR information will be extrapolated to form an ‘aura’, of course as we stand an individual’s argument holds sway until sufficient evidence can be brought to bear and tsuch an ‘aura’ could be refuted easily but the whole basis of the NIR twists this relationship so the individual has to bear the burden of providing the State with accurate information (i.e. the computer is right unless notified otherwise).

Whoever is put on the NIR will have ‘their’ data routinely accessed and this will eventually be accessed by corrupt individuals who will be able to use such information for blackmail, stalking and fraud amongst other crimes. Of course for AOL the writing has been on the wall for a while and certain people are saying “FFS it’s AOL what do people expect?” in a respect they are right and people should be using a different ISP, however with the NIR there is only one guarantee of not having your life ruined in a similar way and that is to not register.

Incidentally anyone who has had access to their bank account suspended for a couple of weeks for ‘security reasons’ will know how much of a PITA it is to carry out things with whatever small change you happen to have. If you are dependent on a form of identification that controls access to State services and becomes a requirement for a number of financial transactions and can be revoked at will (as NIR records will be) you will feel the pain 3bn-fold (as an example consider this story but with your medical history requiring a suspended NIR number).

And we didn’t even mention Echelon!

From Statewatch

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you are leaking to the press or broadcast media, they invariably want some documentary proof of what you are telling them, e.g. a document or memo or advance copy of a report, or an email. etc.

1. Do not use your @homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk email address from work to pass on whistleblower material to politicians, journalists or bloggers.The Home Office, as your employer, is perfectly within its rights to analyse the log files of its own email systems. They do not need to wait for a “serious criminal investigation” which would require a warrant signed by, wait for it, the Home Secretary, or as recently delegated under the Terrorism Act 2006, any nameless offical that the Home Secretary delegates the renewal of long running intelligence agency or electronic interception warrants, which almost certainly include the “protection” of the Home Office IT systems themselves.
2. If you are relatively IT literate, you may be able to master how to send an email through a Mixmaster Anonymous Remailer chain , but, we suspect that the number of people who are confident enough to do this currently working at the Home Office and who might become whistleblowers is very small.
3. Similarly, a whistleblower could use Pretty Good Privacy public key encryption, but again, this requires some effort to install the PGP software, on your own PC (not on your Home Office workstation !).PGP encryption will protect the content of of your correspondence with whoever you are whistleblowing to, but not the fact that your are in communication with say, David Davis, or ther Sun newspaper or even a political blog.Unfortunately it is only Spy Blog and a few other technical security and privacy related blogs which publish a PGP Public Encryption Key, something which we encourage other bloggers, journalists and members of Parliament to do as well. – Spy Blog PGP public encryption key
4. PGP also does Disk Volume Encryption, which may be of use to a whistleblower’s home PC.
5. A good compromise for the non-technical civil servant who wants to be a whistleblower could be a Hushmail account.This has the advantage of being based in Canada, Ireland and the tax haven of Anguilla, and is a web based email system which uses the SSL/TLS encryption used to protect credit card and internet banking transactions from snoopers.You may have to install the Sun version of Java if you have a recent version of Windows XP which no longer supports Java by default.You can sign up for a free , anonymous Hushmail account, (with 2Mb of storage space) which needs to be accessed at least every 3 weeks to keep it active . You can pay $30 a year for a full account.Hushmail to Hushmail traffic is strongly encrypted, but using Hushmail to say, email your Member of Parliament will be plaintext like other emails.Hushmail do have a “pre-shared secret” challenge/response email system called Hushmail Express which can be useful for non-hushmail replies, but it is a bit less secure.
6. Do not use your Home Office landline telephone or fax machine for the same reasons as above.
7. Do not use your normal mobile phone to contact a journalist or blogger from your Home Office location, or from home.The Cell ID of your mobile phone will pinpoint your location in Marsham Street and the time and date of your call.This works identically for Short Message Service text messages as well as for Voice calls.Such Communications Traffic Data does not require that a warrant be signed by the Home Secretary, a much more junior official has the power to do this, e.g. the Home Office Departmental Security Unit headed by Jacqueline Sharland.
8. Buy a cheap pre-paid mobile phone from a supermarket etc..Do not buy the phone or top up phone credit using a Credit Card or a make use of a Supermarket Loyalty Card.Do not switch on or activate the new mobile at home or at work, or when your normal mobile phone switched on (the first activation of a mobile phone has its physical location logged, and it is easy to see what other phones are active in the surrounding Cells at the same time..Do not Register it.Do not store any friends or familiy or other business phone numbers on this dispoable phone – only press or broadcast media or blogger contacts.Set a power on PIN and a Security PIN code on the phone.Physically destroy the phone and the SIM card once you have done your whistleblowing. Remeber that your DNA and fingerprints will be on this mobile phone handset.Do not be tempted to re-use the SIM in another phone or to put a fresh SIM in the old phone, unless you are confident about your ability to illegally re-program the International Mobile Equipment Electronic Identity (IMEI).Just in case you think this is excessive paranoia, it recently emerged that journalists in the USA and in Germany were having their phones monitored, by their national intelligence agencies, precisely to try to tracjk down their “anonymous sources”,Why would this not happen here in the UK ?

   See Computer Encryption and Mobile Phone evidence and the alleged justification for 90 days Detention Without Charge – Home Affairs Select Committee Oral Evidence 14th February 2006

9. Choose your photcopier carefully. Some of the newer, high end photcopiers, especially colour ones, have built in anti-counterfeit US currency routines in the software.Some combined photocopiers and printers are capable of printing tiny yellow seral numbers (e.g. Canon) on each sheet or a special series of dots (e.g. Xerox DocuColor, which makes tracing which machine was used to help to “leak” a document , if the original printout or photocopy is seized, quite a bit easier.Many typewriters, computer printers and photocopiers do leave characteristic wear and tear imperfections on the documents they produce, which a forensics laboratory may be able to match to a machine a work or your personal machine at home, if it is ever seized as evidence in a “leak inquiry”.
10. Redaction or censorship. Adobe .pdf documents have been published online, where some of the personal details e,g, email addresses have been “blacked out” using Adobe .pdf software , which has effectively simply put an extra layer on top of the supposedly censored words. Simply copying and pasting into say Windows Notepad or Wordpad or Word etc. has revealed the hidden data.Anybody publishing such stuff online needs to be aware of this, to protect their Home Office or other sources.
11. Similarly Adobe .pdf documents or Microsoft Word documents, Excel spreadsheets etc. may well have Meta information (see the Document Properties) showing the author of the leaked document (which may in turn lead back to the “leak source”).
12. Microsoft Word Documents, especially draft documents worked on by several people, often have the Version feature enabled. Sometimes examining the changes made to a document, and by whom gives extra clues about policies or coverups etc.The same feature on a whistleblowe’rs own computer, could, of course betray their identity. by adding their default name propertiesit to any document which they edit or view, before passing it on.
13. Older versions of Microsft Word (and other Office products like Excel or Powerpoint) can also betray the MAC Address of the Ethernet card of the computer on which a document was created or edited on, as part of the Global Unique ID data, embedded in the document. Most people will not have changed the MAC addresses of their computers (often possible through software), and there are likely to be inventory records or network logfiles which will pin point which MAC address belongs to which computer either at work or at home.Microsoft do now make available some tools to remove such GUID and other hidden meta data, versios, comments etc. from final published Microsoft Office products. e.g. the Microsoft Office 2003/XP Remove Hidden Data Add-in
14. Photo images. Your source or the “anonymous” publisher of a leaked document online may use a Scanner, but they may, nowadays use a Digital Camera.There is often camera make / model identifying Meta data embedded in the raw digital images taken by many types of Digital Camera. These may be used as “evidence” if your Digiital Camera is seized during a “leak inquiry” investigation.
15. You wish to blank out or censor items in .jpg or .gif or .bmp graphics image.Again, there is a temptation by the uninitiated to use, say, a Photoshop pixellation or motion blur special effect filter. Remember, that these standard filters effects can often be reversed.Since Digital Camera images and Scans of documents are usually much too large for web pages, you might want to reduce the number of colours and probably the size of the images, before publishing them as thumbnails and even as larger images on a blog or website.Remember to apply your Photoshop pixellation etc. after reducing the image size and number of colors, i.e. after you have thrown away some of the identifying data, so as to reduce the chances of the filter effects being reversed.
16. It is possible to literally cut and delete the words from an image or the identifying features of a face or address or car number plate etc. in a photo image.There have been successful guesses / recovery of “censored” words, which have been cut and and deleted from graphics image files, but, not very well, leaving tell tale spaces between words and not completely hiding the presence or absence of the tops and bottoms of individual letters.
17. File deletions.Hiding incriminating evidence (either of your “leak” or of the actual malpractice, incompetence, corruption or other criminality which you are trying to draw public attention to) is not as simple as hitting the delete key on your computer keyboard.At a simple level, some people forget that file deletions can be recovered from the “wastebasket”, and with a hexeditor or recovery utilities, many files can be “undeleted”, simply by changing the first character of the deleted file name, provided that it has not yet been overwritten.”Secure” deletion utilities repeatedly write binary patterns over the deleted filespace several times, to try to frustrate even the more sophisticated magnetic disk surface reading equipment, which can pick up the “shadows” of previous patterns of zeros and ones. However this does take quite a long time to do thoroughly.
18. Deleting corporate emails e.g. Microsoft Exchange is not a simple mayyer either. Very often deleted emails can be simply recovered from the “wastebasket” deleted folder. Anything that has remained on the system for more than a few hours, is likley to have been backed up to other backup storage media, and so may also be recoverable during a “leak inquiry” investigation.
19. Make sure that you delete the Browser History and Temporary Files (Tools / Internet Options / Delete Files / Delete all offline content and Tools / Internet Options / Clear History in the Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser) – it is not just your internet browsing which is monitored, it is yourintranet web browsing, search engine queries and document downloads which are potentially monitored.
20. USB keys and SmartMediaThese are useful to spies or to whistleblowers for smuggling out electronic copies of documents. Given the size of the memory capacity these days, which is often larger than hard disks of only a few years ago, a very large amount of data can be carried.They are small and easy to hide, and can also legitamtely be hidden in cameras or MP3 players etc.Some Government Departments e.g. the Ministry of Defence do tend to use modified operating systems software which controls access to floppy disk drives, CDROM, DVD or USB devices, either totally preventing their use, or logging all such uses to a central audit server.We suspect that not every desktop PC in the Home Office is protected in this way.However, if you are caught with a USB key or MP3 player or SmartMedia memory stick or card, which uses Flash Memory, they are nigh on impossible to securely erase, and there is a good chance that data on them , even if “deleted” can be foreniscally recovered
21. If you decide to meet with an alleged “journalist” or blogger (who may not always be who they claim to be), or if a journalist or blogger decides to meet with an “anonymous source”, then you should switch off your mobile phones, since the proximity of two mobile phones in the same approximate area, at the same time, is something which can be data mined from the Call Data Records, even if no phone conversations have taken place. Typically a mobile phone will handshake with the strongest Cell Base Station transmitter every 6 to 10 minutes, and this all gets logged, all of the time.
22. Similarly choosing a suitable location for a meeting needs some care. Nipping down to a local pub near to to the Marsham Street Home Office complex may be convenient, but your presence and that of the journalist etc. is likely to be noted by some of your work colleagues.

This is not quite a comprehensive list of hints and tips to help with sucessful whistleblowing – do any of our astute readers have any other suitable hints and tips ?

We have kept a few techniques back (email us, using if you want to know more).

None of these tips really matter for a whistleblower, unless it is Top Secret stuff which is being passed on to a politician, journalist or blogger, but they might make it less likely that a whistleblower, or the publisher of their revelations, will be harassed by the Home Office (or other Government Department).

[…]

http://www.spy.org.uk/spyblog/2006/05/home_office_whistleblowers_hin.html

Impressive. Here are some more:

1. Become computer literate. That is the one sure way to almost eliminate the risk of getting caught; know what you are doing.
2. Stop using Windows, and switch to Ubuntu. Windows is an insecure OS. If you use it, you leave yourself open to attacks both published and unpublished. It is widely held that the NSA has backdoor access to all copies of Windows. Ubuntu is free, secure, has higher performance than Windows and you can do everything (in fact far more) with it that you can do with Windows.
3. Install Mozilla Firefox as your browser.
4. Install TOR for Mozilla Firefox if you want to leave an anonymous comment on a website or access anonymous webmail. When you are using TOR, you can leave documents anonymously online for retrieval by journalists.
5. Install Thunderbird as your email client. It is the best email client out there, and there are security plugins for it that are easy to install, like Enigmail, throug which you can manage GPG.
6. Install the Enigmail plugin for Thunderbird. It is simple to do. You will then be able to send and recieve encrypted email seamlessly.
7. Use dropload to send files anonymously. Use this from a disposable email address you connect through via TOR.
8. Use GhostView to sanitize PDFs. You can use GhostView to sanitize PDFs, and even to remove the security from them so that they can be printed and converted into other formats.
9. Create a whistleblower identity for yourself in a separate user account on your computer. Many operating systems set document author fields as the name of the person who is logged in. If you cannot sanitize a document manually, this false name will be used instead of your real name. This goes against No.1 of course. There is nothing like drama to promote your message. Adopting a whistleblower name will propel your story to the front pages.
10. Create a GPG keypair that uses this whistleblower name. Then, when you need to send subsequent messages to the media, they can verify that it is indeed you sending the message, and not a Home Office damage limitation agent. This of course needs a computer literate journalist on the other end of the communication…heh good luck.

Wouldn’t it be great if a newspaper published its own GPG key so that people could communicate with it in private? Which paper do you think would be the last one to publish such a key?

And btw if any of this is wrong, please email me so that I can correct it.

updated January 7^th 2009
updated September 15th 2013

Police DNA database ‘is spiralling out of control’

Secret emails show private firms store genetic data from innocent victims

Antony Barnett, investigations editor Sunday July 16, 2006 The Observer

The security of the police National DNA Database is in question following the disclosure of confidential emails which reveal that a private firm has secretly been keeping the genetic samples and personal details of hundreds of thousands of arrested people. Police forces use the company LGC to analyse DNA samples taken from people they arrest. LGC then supplies the information to the National DNA Database. Yet rather than destroy this afterwards, the firm has kept copies, together with highly personal demographic details of the individuals including their names, ages, skin colour and addresses.

In a separate twist, evidence has emerged that the Home Office has given permission for a controversial genetic study to be undertaken using the DNA samples on the police database to see if it is possible to predict a suspect’s ethnic background or skin colour from them. Permission has been given for the DNA being collected on the police database to be used in 20 research studies […]

The Home Office emailed LGC with its concerns: ‘From a [DNA Database] custodian and Data Protection Act perspective, it is important that there are no demographics linked to these retained profiles. Otherwise, suppliers would be building up subsets of the National DNA Database.’ The company admits that is has been doing this. It states: ‘All the information is on [our system]. We do in effect have a mini-database.’ One of LGC’s directors is Lord Stevens, the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, and it has several contracts with companies in the pharmaceutical, biotech and chemicals industry. Although there is no evidence that the firm has used the DNA records for other commercial purposes, opposition MPs are calling for the Home Office to launch an investigation. Lynne Featherstone, the home affairs spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, said: ‘This might be more cock-up than conspiracy, but the Home Office must investigate whether DNA taken from thousands of innocent people has not been abused.’ […]
The genetic research is being carried out by Jon Wetton of the Forensic Science Service. An FSS spokesperson said the aim of the research was to reduce the time taken to identify a suspect .’ […]

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/politics/story/0,,1821749,00.html

My emphasis.

At last, we see the results of the DNA database, and government databases in general as they reveal their true natures; Racist tools of absolute control.

Not only has this data been illegally and imorally retained by the contractor that was doing the work, but a secret, Nazi style race experiment was ORDERED by the Fascist Bliar government.

At any other time between the end of world war two and the end of the twentieth century, any politician involved in such a disgusting, immoral and wrong project would instantly resign and then be aressted, but today, they simply get away with it.

All you sheeple, you morons, you Facist Facilitators, you Upstream Warmongers™ THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT.

You can see from the link to Jon Wetton’s name above that he is publishing his research:

Inferring the population of origin of DNA evidence within the UK by allele-specific hybridization of Y-SNPs.

Wetton JH, Tsang KW, Khan H.

The Forensic Science Service, R&D, Trident Court 2960, Solihull Parkway, Birmingham Business Park, Solihull B37 7YN, UK. jon.wetton@fss.pnn.police.uk

Marked differences in Y-SNP allele frequencies between continental populations can be used to predict the biogeographic origin of a man’s ancestral paternal lineage. Using 627 samples collected from individuals within the UK with pale-skinned Caucasian, dark-skinned Caucasian, African/Caribbean, South Asian, East Asian or Middle Eastern appearance we demonstrate that an individual’s Y-SNP haplogroup is also strongly correlated with their physical appearance. Furthermore, experimental evaluation of the Marligen Signet Y-SNP kit in conjunction with the Luminex 100 detection instrument indicates that reliable and reproducible haplogrouping results can be obtained from 1 ng or more of target template derived from a variety of forensic evidence types including, blood, saliva and post-coital vaginal swabs. The test proved highly male-specific with reliable results being generated in the presence of a 1000-fold excess of female DNA, and no anomalous results were observed during degradation studies despite a gradual loss of typable loci. Hence, Y-SNP haplogrouping has considerable potential forensic utility in predicting likely ethnic appearance.

Now, if this research has come from the immorally stolen DNA of the British public, then anyone who works with this data has comitted a crime. Scientists are morally obligated not to use the results of work done on people without their consent. If PubMed have published this immoral work, then they are culpable. Anyone who derives anything from this work is also culpable.

This article is being sold for Thirty Dollars. Anyone who is selling this document, if it is tainted, is culpable.

As for Lord Stevens, it should come as no surprise to anyone that the ex Metropolitan Police Commissioner “…the most successful Commissioner in modern times” is the head of the private company that won the contract to fleece the British people of their DNA for their racist, immoral, unpardonable, unspeakable, hideous, Mengeloid madness. That is the least surprising aspect of the whole sordid affiar.

According to this article it costs between $100-150 to get a DNA profile done. That means that with three MILLION profiles on file, they have charged at least THREE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS for this ‘service’, and now that ANY OFFENCE is arrestable, it means that MILLIONS MORE people will be DNA swabbed at this same price. That my friends, is what we call a licence to print money.

It’s all bad business. Note finally that the enemies of the people the members of parliament call only for another toothless investigation and not the wholesale destruction of the databases.
DIE DIE DIE you animals!

From the guardian pipes:

NHS database ‘will damage privacy’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–

Part two (Salami fascism):

From the guardian’s film section;

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

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

Reg Says

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

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

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

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

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

Hmmm, start with the lowest of the low…

John Snow Says Program Tracking Millions of Financial Transactions Is Vital to War on Terrorism

By JEANNINE AVERSA AP Economics Writer

WASHINGTON Jun 23, 2006 (AP)— Treasury Secretary John Snow on Friday said a program tracking millions of financial transactions was not invasion of privacy of Americans but “government at its best” and vital to the war on terrorism.

Snow told a news conference the program, run by the CIA and overseen by the Treasury Department, was “responsible government, it’s effective government, it’s government that works.”

“It’s entirely consistent with democratic values, with our best legal traditions,” Snow said.

The once-secret program, which has been going on since shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, has drawn protests from Democrats in Congress, who said it raises concerns about intrusions on privacy and who saw it as the latest step in an aggressive Bush administration expansion of executive-branch powers.

Snow defended the newly disclosed program, saying it was an effective tool in tracking the financial operations of terrorists.

“By following the money we’ve been able to locate operatives, we’ve been able to locate their financiers, we’ve been able to chart the terrorist networks and we’ve been able to bring the terrorists to justice,” he said.

“If people are sending money to help al-Qaida, we want to know about it,” Snow said.

[…]

abcnews.com

Lets take this to the final conclusion. The riteous seeking vengeance, having nothing left but their bare hands, band together into kidnapping groups, dedicated to renditioning american men women and children and cutting their heads off with knives in groups of no less than twenty three at a time in front of a mini HD camera, the footage then getting posted on the interweb, complete with rousing male chorus music.What are you going to do about that?

The whole idea that drives these people is to take vengeance, to get payback, blood for blood. They can do this with kitchen knives. No american will be safe on any street anywhere.

For the one thousandth time, if you want to end all of this, KNOCK IT OFF and get out of the affairs of these idiots who are ruining our party! Go cold turkey with the oil addiction. Forget nukular weapons spending and put all your money into renewable energy.
In the end, it will all seem like a bad dream, and we will never have to deal with them again.

The ability of RFID

to link physical objects

to digital networks

potentially allows for a new form of waste management.

Just a phrase from this article that caught my eye.