This afternoon, we went up to Notting Hill for a late lunch.

Sitting to the right of us was a softly spoken american couple. Many americans in London have loud voices where the letter ‘R’ is brutally over pronounced and the work ‘like’ is used liberally and inappropriately. These two were not of that type. The female was reading a Sunday Tabloid paper, and spontaneously started tutting loudly.

I bit.

“Thats why I don’t read newspapers in the UK”.

“Oh! I know, they are so TERRIBLE!”

Then it came to, via a circuitous route, to the 2008 election.

They did not know who Ron Paul Was.

It transpired that these two people are using ‘The Undecided Voter’s Guide to the Next President: Who the Candidates Are, Where They Come from, and How You Can Choose‘. as their method of deciding who to vote for.

They did not know that america is borrowing money from China to run the war in Iraq.

They did not know that the head of the GAO is, in an unprecedented move, sounding the alarm about america’s debt crisis.

I told them that it would be useful for their decision making process to look up Ron Paul on the internets.

The man sitting to our right said that he is supporting John McCain, because, “He (John McCain) is against the earmarks and pork spending of Washington.”

I pointed out that John McCain wants to keep troops in Iraq for 100 years. I also pointed out again that america doesn’t have the money to pay for this, and that america is borrowing money from China to run this ‘war’.

“Even if you agree with John McCain in principle, who is going to pay for this adventure?”, said I.

He said, “america needs to keep troops all over the world. The Soviet Union fell because of those troops, and they help spread democracy. I’ll pay for it.”, said the man.

And we petty much left it at that.

This is the level of insanity and pure ignorance that the american public is operating at, and these people were not the lowest common denominator, but very educated, well spoken types.

Then the female came out with, “what is the central part of Ron Paul’s platform?”.

“Obey the Constitution, small government, no nation building, don’t be the policeman of the world. You can see him talking about this all over the internet, and when you read up about him and his background you will see that he is not like any other candidate”, I replied.

“Does that mean he is for americans being able to own guns, because if he follows the constitution, that means he is for guns, and I am against guns”.

I’m not making any of this up.

This is a person who has just been told that america is about to go bankrupt, there is a dream candidate whose voting record is perfect, who wants to end the insane wars and hatred that is (rightfully) tilted against america, that america is borrowing from China to run its wars….and she is concerned about GUN OWNERSHIP.

That is like a rat being concerned about finding a warm place to sleep on the Titanic.

They both promised that they would ‘Google Ron Paul’, being intrigued as to why it was that they had not heard or read about a man who has just won second place in the Nevada caucus.

Once thing is for certain; american international adventurism is over. The question now is how is it going to end. The idiots who still believe in the lies and false reasoning of the type that John McCain spouts are going to get a nasty wake up call in the future if they do not wake up right now. In any case, the world is a much bigger place than the usa; there are more genius level people in China than there are people in the usa and there are more people learning English in China than the entire population of the US. The world will go ahead without america; she will become a dream, a thing of the past, with only a flag on the moon to remember her by…and that will be plucked out of the lunar soil by Chinese lunar colonists.

People like this charming couple have a choice. They either wake up and hunker down, or have america subsumed after a disastrous crash the likes of which they have not got the brains to imagine.

All of this in around ten minutes.

What a life!

The Telegraph

Surveillance cameras do little, if anything, to prevent late night alcohol-fuelled crime and violence on Britain’s high streets, the country’s most senior police officer in the field has admitted.

[…]

He also admitted the public had been “misled” into believing that installing camera systems would have a big impact on anti-social behaviour.

The article goes on to say only those thinking ‘rationally’ about CCTV surveillance will be deterred from criminal activity. In fact most people don’t think about CCTV, never mind rationally even when sober – as a general tool it is bound to be a remarkably ineffective deterrent.

To combat the problem, Mr Gerrard said he would like all camera owners and operators to be required by law to produce high quality images using a standardised system so the police could use them effectively in court.

Unfortunately Mr Gerrard fails it. Higher quality images will not increase the ‘rationality’ of the ‘law-abiding’ general public. Higher quality images will not remedy the problem of indiscriminate (non-targeted) CCTV capturing irrelevant images of the public.

by Lew Rockwell
It was always Murray Rothbard’s argument that while we might from time to time be short-term pessimists, we should always be long term optimists, for many reasons from economics and history.

And look at what Ron Paul has done. Building on an unmatched record in public life, and decades of serious study of Austrian economics, foreign policy, American history, and constitutional law and philosophy, he has led a movement that is rightly called a revolution.

That revolution has touched the hearts of young people–and not only young people–across the country and the world. The ideals of peace, free trade, non-intervention, the gold standard, free markets, private property, and civil liberties have never been spread so well and so widely.

The fact that up to 10% of the Republican Party base, people who have historically supported war, empire, managed trade, central banking, business regulation, and the police state–“red-state fascists,” as I have called them–is really something quite extraordinary. Among independents and some Democrats, we will do much better.

Libertarians have long exulted in Ed Clark’s almost-one percent. Ron has improved on Ed by 900%. The political fight is far from done, of course. Ron will campaign hard in Michigan, Nevada, South Carolinia, and all the Super Tuesday states. He will not give up. He will never give up.

From the standpoint of the right and good, Ron Paul and our ideas should have an easy victory. But when has that ever been true, in all of human history?

Ron and his revolutionaries face not only bad ideas from neoconservatism to socialism, but a vast apparatus of entrenched rip-off artists from the Fed and its big banks and investment houses, to the military-industrial complex. There is, we could say, much work to do, and Ron Paul will do it.

Through the primaries, the convention, and beyond, Ron and his movement will stand for liberty against its enemies. He will get more and more votes, and more and more supporters, to add to the hundreds of thousands already onboard. His presence on the national scene will only grow, and so will libertarian ideals. Murray loved Ron Paul, thought the world of him as a candidate in 1988 and as an intellectual, and so do all real libertarians and pro-liberty conservatives.

And now, by the way, on to Michigan, where people are really feeling the pain of the Fed’s deepening recession, and will be especially ready to hear Ron’s message of sound noney and no business cycles under freedom.

“Wilkes and Liberty” was the cry of English and American classical liberals in the 18th century, naming a parliamentary champion of free speech, free press, and civil liberties against government tyranny. From now on, the cry of every libertarian will be, “Ron Paul and Liberty”! We have much work to do.Roll up your sleeves and join our champion!

[…]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/018458.html

There are the problems of the vast apparatus of entrenched rip-off artists from the Fed and its big banks and investment houses, to the military-industrial complex, but there is also the problem of the army of sheeple, of Eloi, of nincompoops, of people who are physically incapable of thinking (low IQ), the hard headed, the habituated, the delusional. These people, all of them, HAVE THE VOTE.

People in the 18th century had common sense. Men who did not own property could not vote. What we have today is a population that is too stupid to vote. That anyone, anywhere in the world, other than his relatives, could vote for John McCain is (yet another) testament to the utter stupidity of the american public.

Am I advocating the disenfranchisement of vast swathes of the american public? Hmmm! What is the inevitable outcome of the current crop of imbeciles having the vote and unthinkingly electing anyone other than Ron Paul? It means the disenfranchisement of ALL americans forever, as america is dismantled and its broken carcass subsumed into a North American Union and then a world government like human flesh absorbed into The Blob. Wouldn’t it be better if we took away the vote from these cretins BEFORE america is lost forever? In the final analysis the phrase, ‘live free or die’ if taken literally means that a free man could not and can not tolerate what the mass of dunderheads are unleashing upon him and his family.

And there you have the thinking behind the people who are determined to absolutely control everyone everywhere. They came to this conclusion decades ago, and are making sure that no one can ever cast a vote that will take away their liberty, which in this case, is predicated upon their absolute control over the population. Either that, or its all happening at random and I’m not sure if that is a worse proposition to contemplate.

Back to John McCain…

This is a man who says that it “would be fine with me” if the americans stay in Iraq for 100 years. Out loud. In public. Quite apart from all of his other insane policies, this one phrase alone should scare the flesh off of any american. What he is advocating is literally, the complete extinction of America. This is the same public that now knows that the pretext for invading Iraq was a lie. This is the same public that now believes that ‘911 was an inside job‘. Wether or not you believe that 911 was an inside job or not, if the majority of people believe that it is true, how is it possible that anyone other than Ron Paul is getting the majority of votes in these primaries? How can he possibly be equal in numbers to Judy Ruliani, arch warmonger / fearmonger whose whole campaign centers around the very 911 that they all believe is at the very least, fishy?

It boggles the imagination.

A very clever man said just before he died:

[…]

We have had the two worst Prime Ministers in our history – Edward Heath (who dragooned us into the Common Market) and Tony Blair. The harm these two have done to Britain is incalculable and almost certainly irreparable.

Whether the public can be blamed for letting them pursue their ruinous policies is debatable.

Short of assassination there is little people can do when their political masters have forgotten the true meaning of the democracy of which they are forever prating, are determined to have their own way at all costs and hold public opinion in contempt.

[…]

Daily Mail

When The Daily Mail prints an article saying that the only solution left is assassination, you know that there has been a sea change.

Live free or die. That phrase doesn’t mean ‘live free or commit suicide’. It means that you are willing to do anything unto death in order to be free. Disenfranchising the population, assassination, secession, suddenly people are actually talking about these options; not through desire for carnage and chaos and upheaval, but because every decent person has been backed into a corner and there is no way out.

A decent man with sons would not let the bovine majority cast a vote condemning his boys to be drafted into an insane man’s insane war. He has a few choices, and we all know that these choices have all been exercised in the recent past:

• Assassination,
• Disenfranchisement,
• Secession,
• Mass murder,
• Escape,
• Run for office and change the world (work in progress!),

Have I left anything out?

Oh yes:

• Join the winning side in the new feudal system!

Think about it; you keep everything you own, you get to own whatever else you like, you become one of the bosses, and there are no repercussions because the long pigs are too stupid to understand what is going on right in front of their faces.

Now, less of the horrorshow.

There have been great movements on this planet that have achieved monumental change without catastrophic bloodletting. I have said it before over and over, the only thing that you need to do to defeat the warmongers is NOTHING. No marching, no confrontation, simply remove yourself, (O.U.T.), no more participation, no more contribution, no more cooperation, no more passive obedience, no more of anything or action that helps the system work, unless the country is completely restored, all unconstitutional laws struck down and America returns. This ‘Do Not’ idea, when propagated widely is so profoundly disruptive, so powerful and unstoppable, it can topple any infrastructure. Since it is an idea, you cannot kill it. No on is marching in the streets to be arrested. No one is pitting themselves against armored personnel of the war machine. There is nothing to attack, no one to peruse, no head to cut off and nothing to capture..except the minds of your neighbors.

I do not believe that violence is right or necessary. You can get everything you want without so much as a fist fight. Assassination, disenfranchisement and other forms of violence are what our enemies use; they are the solutions of the imagiiantionless, the weak minded, mean spirited…the bad guys.

Thanks to the way democracy works, there is going to be a permanent unrepresented majority who are fed up to the teeth. It is this huge population of people, numbering in the high tens of millions, who are the constituency of the free, the people who can tip the balance and force change. They are the artists, the writers, business men, scientists, the better educated, the smart; they are the ones who make everything run, and they are the ones who can bring it all to a halt should they choose to do so.

All without firing a shot, clenching a fist or appearing in public.

The dream scenario is that the system works and America changes course and the world is put off of high alert. But I have always said that, “dreams are for those who sleep” either way the power to end this is in our hands, at the ends of our fingertips.

So let’s end it.

One of the most important qualities a human being can posses is empathy:

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1) – Cite This Source – Share This
em·pa·thy [em-puh-thee] Pronunciation Key – Show IPA Pronunciation
–noun
1. the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.

A human being that lives without a capacity for empathy is able to remorselessly torture dismember and kill other humans, in the way that mass murderers and serial killers do.

Ron Paul keeps asking the ‘Republican’ candidates running against him to imagine what it would be like if america was invaded by the Chinese, in a vain attempt to make them understand the true source of the bitter hatred that exists against america. He tries to get them to imagine that the Chinese occupy america with troops for the best of good reasons, and that they, in their occupation, say to all americans, “you must adopt our system of government and way of life because its for your own good”.

Any human being with an intact capacity for empathy with other people would shudder at the thought of invading another person’s country and telling them how to live. That Ron Paul even has to bring this example up is astonishing, (though hardly surprising given the low quality of his competitors).

They would also instantly understand the Iraq Freedom Fighters and their struggle to evict the invading american crusaders. Anyone with imagination problems should see the film ‘Red Dawn’ if they want a vivid example of how the americans would respond to a successful invasion of their country.

Americans resisting a colonizing army on american soil would blow up enemy vehicles with IEDs, snipe enemy soldiers with hunting rifles, blow up bridges, assassinate enemy officers, execute collaborators (puppet government traitors, ‘Quislings‘), take to the hills and then film it all, edit it into stirring calls to arms with amazing music and distribute it on DVDRs and over the internets to all loyal and patriotic americans.

This is EXACTLY what the Iraqis are doing; they are doing what the americans would do if their country were occupied by a foreign power. The Iraqis said time and time again that there were no WMDs in their country, and that the pressure being put upon them was unfair, unwarranted, immoral and motivated by the lust for oil. They were invaded anyway. Imagine if that happened to YOUR country? You would not just sit down and do nothing, you would do what the Freedom Fighters are doing, you would fight back with everything at your disposal. There was no justification for this attack, they knew it, even if everyone everywhere else did not. The pain they must feel at this injustice must be almost beyond understanding; its such an outrage though it should be easy for anyone to feel just a small part of it.

Anyone who does not understand this does not have an intact sense of empathy. He must, by definition, think that Iraqis are inferior to americans, and that they have less rights to self determination than americans do.

That is what the Fred Thompsons of this world cannot do. The Giuliani’s of this world are just insane warmongers, as an insane person, we cannot expect rational thought from his mind or reason to emanate from his mouth. Mitt Romney is a reanimated Richard Nixon. Mike Huckabee is the most terrifying prospect out of the bunch. I believe that he would be a worse president than ‘W’. And that is saying something.

Speaking of Mike Huckabee, I was curious to see wether or not he had ever travelled outside the USA; he seems to be an unexposed, parochial ‘never been out of the usa’ type of man. To find out, I used the googles, and stumbled upon one of his more outrageous and insane policies; he wants to stop americans with dual nationality from using their other passports, and he wants to forbid dual citizens from voting in the elections of other countries.

I’m not making this up:

Now, in the midst of a Republican nomination battle in which many voters seem strongly opposed to illegal immigration, Governor Huckabee has veered to the other extreme, and proposes to crack down on legal immigrants, as well as native-born Americans. Item 8 of his “[1]Secure American Plan” promises to:

Impose civil and/or criminal penalties on American citizens who illegitimately use their dual status (e.g., using a foreign passport, voting in elections in both a foreign country and the U.S.).

Let’s consider the second item first: a few countries (such as Italy) which recognize dual citizenship allow non-resident nationals to vote in their elections. Indeed, the Italian parliament even has [2]several seats which are elected by Italian citizens living abroad. It seems obvious that encouraging American citizens who can vote in foreign elections to do so would be in the strategic interests of the United States. A person who resides in America, and who is a citizen of both of the United States and Italy, is probably going to be a stronger supporter of Italo-American friendship than is an Italian-only citizen living in Italy.

[…]

Like I said before, this man is not qualified to be the president. This becomes more and more clear as you dig deeper and deeper into his insane ‘policies’ and his ‘Islamo Fascist’ war forever speak. Even the green Obama would be a better candidate than Huckabee; at least he will have SOME understanding of cultures other than america’s, and that is what is sorely needed in the White House.

After reading this dual citizen nonsense I didn’t bother to try and find out if that bumpkin had ever left the usa or if he even has a passport.

Some of the panelists on the recent ABC News Republican Debate From New Hampshire talked about fingerprinting all foreigners and giving them tamper proof ID cards, and being able to push a button and check someone out at ‘Homeland Security’ and employers being able to see if someone is employable upon presentation of a secure card. None of these people of course, say the words that we have been saying for ages; if you give one group of people ID cards, then EVERYBODY has to have them or the system cannot work. If an employer is required to check if you are legally entitled to work in the USA, then ALL workers must be verified in this way, and EVERYONE must be ‘in the system’ for it to work. That means a National ID card for all americans. Period. If any of them say otherwise, then they are LIARS and should not be in office or they do not understand the implications of what they are proposing and they should not be in office. Either way, anyone who proposes identity management as a solution to social problems is an enemy of Liberty. Full stop.

Our new Holford Myths site is launched today – this has been developed to counteract false information about Patrick Holford.

Anyone who challenges today’s drug-based medical paradigm effectively is a likely target for attack. Notably, since the publication of Food Is Better Medicine Than Drugs by Patrick Holford and Jerome Burne, certain drug industry funded organisations and drug-oriented individuals have campaigned to discredit Patrick Holford by spreading false allegations. The main opponents have been Ben Goldacre in the Guardian, pharmacology professor David Colquhoun, the anonymous Holford Watch and certain dieticians.

The associations with the pharmaceutical industry and/or organisations funded by the pharmaceutical industry are explored in the free e-book Cultural Dwarfs and Junk Journalism: Ben Goldacre, Quackbusters and Corporate Science by Martin Walker for those who want to understand the modus operandi of the organised lobby against alternative and nutritional approaches within medicine.

Responses to false allegations about Patrick Holford plus direct links to extracts about Ben Goldacre, David Colquhoun, Holford Watch and certain dieticians from the above e-book can be found on www.holfordmyths.com

[…]

Patrick Holford is a man who owns a company that makes and sells vitamins and dietary supplements. He writes books, and sells them.

This is an affront to people like Ben Goldacre and his ilk. The only food you should be eating is the food that SCIENCE says you should be eating. The only thoughts you should be thinking are the ones that SCIENCE says you should be thinking. Anyone who eats anything else, who thinks anything else, who says anything other than what they believe, who does not swallow the dogma is ANTI-SCIENCE and is to be…

BURNED AT THE STAKE

Rational people are not frightened of Vitamin Sellers or book writers. They make their case cleanly and then STFU. If the thinking behind Bad Science is so great, then let them write a diet book, sell it, and then make people thinner…[booming voice] WITH SCIENCE [/booming voice]; what need have you to personally attack, ridicule and seek to destroy other people? What do you gain out of it? Who appointed these sub human monsters the protectors of the general public? Once again, if they have something better to offer, OFFER IT, do not pump the world full of negative vibes (man [or is that hairless monkey?]).

The fact of the matter is, none of these people have anything to offer, other than rancid bile, calls to disbelief and personal attacks. It goes like this; you have posts on your blog about UFOs, therefore, ALL your stuff is garbage. That is a stupid skeptic trick. That is junk science. I say “God does not exist” and so you are a fool to believe anything else. That is how they work; they do not have a better diet for you, or a better set of supplements, a different, greater belief to follow (except their utterly fallable, incomplete, and downright deadly dogma) the only thing they have to offer is ‘DO NOT DO THAT’ ‘DO NOT BELIEVE THAT’ ‘DO NOT EAT THAT’, and of course, there is nothing that you can DO with that negativity, and the newspaper it is printed on is fit only to light up your fire.

I can tell you something straight – anyone who writes a column like ‘Bad Science’ is on my shitlist from the first speck of ink on the paper. Anyone who runs other people down, who uses Stupid Skeptic Tricks is a TOTAL SCUMBAG.

Lets be clear:

Should they be burned at the stake? No.
Should they be stopped from writing in that RAG the Guardian or any other rag? No.
Are they the worst examples of human trash ever? Yes!

The point is, these attacks on Vitamin Sellers are direct attacks on MY LIBERTY. They are an affront to decent people everywhere, who just want to mind their own business and who do not want to be told what to do, what to think and what to eat and who to trade with.

People who are against Patrick Holford are Fascists. They want to forbid you from taking vitamins, they want the law to ban the sale of dietary supplements. They want you to not read his books; in effect, they want to censor him, and prevent the free flow of information across the world. They are as bad as the Chinese Government, or those guys who burned books in the 1930s.

All free people have the absolute right to publish what they want, and free people have the right to read what they like. Free people have the right to control what goes into their bodies; that means that they can eat whatever they like, inject whatever they like, smoke whatever they like, and it is no one’s business. It is not the business of Ben Goldacre and the corprophiliacs at The Guardian. It is not the business of Bayer, GSL, Novartis, Monsanto, Uncle Sam, HMG or anyone else.

Anyone who tries to shut down writers like Patrick Holford are on the side of Fascists and Fascism. They are against Liberty and against the freedom to read and to learn (and no, learning does not mean only learning what is ‘right’).

I am fed up to the teeth of the attacks on vitamins and food supplements. I am tired of reading about the weasel words of the corporate shills defending the indefensible, trying to take away my right to interact with whomever I want in whatever way I want.

In the end, these people must be put down like diseased dogs. Fox news is learning what it means to defy the force of Liberty unleashed. Their stock has taken a dip thanks to the boycott that is now running against all the sponsors of that evil station. This can be done to any company, and certainly, if the vitamin eaters and supplement takers decide to boycott a newspaper that is attacking them, the effects will be felt. Newspapers can publish whatever they like, and everyone has the right to buy and sell whatever they like…including stocks.

Some may say that I go in too hard on these subjects; part of the style of this blog during its nearly seven years of operation is to go in with all guns blazing if thats what you like. Nevertheless, in the past, when people tried to take away the liberty of free men the result was war and killing and that is what The Guardian, Skeptics and corporate shills are doing; literally attacking millions of free people; trying to erase their liberty, poison them and destroy their lives. That they are subjected only to some bad language and shouting is very lucky for them; in another age they would lose their lives…in any case, they have lost. More people than ever are turning away from Industrial Pharmaceutical Medicine and The Medical Industrial Complex. This is why they bring out the big guns to try and shoot down people like Patrick Holford – though in the case of Goldacre we are talking about a .22 not The Guns of Navarone… but I digress; the publishers of that garbage had better think twice about running hit pieces against people who are doing nothing but mind their own business – there could be big economic consequences for them, just like Fox is feeling right now.

For those morons out there who say that vitamin sellers are defrauding the public, that is not your business. There is plenty of legislation dealing with poisoning and poisoners to take care of people who sell things that actually harm buyers under the guise that it is medicine. We have enough law on the books to take care of almost every possible situation. It is you baying and whining morons who create the monster governments that stop at nothing to control everything that you do down to how and when you piss.

Make up your own minds, eat what you want, publish what you want, read what you want, think what you want and DOWN with the anti vitamin fascists!

UPDATE!

a lurker sends this

> this snippet should have been in your post:
>
> At this point it is perhaps worth pointing out
> that Goldacre won a British Science Writers (BSW)
> award, in 2003. At this time, the BSW was funded
> by Glaxo Wellcome and called the Glaxo Wellcome
> BSW Award, the very year that he began working
> for the Guardian. The drug AZT was made by
> Burroughs-Wellcome, now GlaxoSmithKline.
>
> and check out this book:
>
> http://www.slingshotpublications.com/dwarfs.html

What a nasty, foul and loathsome piece of work!

‘Riders told they face having their homes raided and bikes confiscated if they post clips of speeding bikes on the web’

Riders who post clips of themselves speeding on the internet face having their homes raided and computer equipment and even motorcycles seized police have warned.

They say that are monitoring film sharing sites such as YouTube and will leave no stone unturned in the search for culprits.

The warming came after a clip emerged of a motorcyclist hitting an indicated 180mph.

The clip on the website LiveLeak.com appears to show a Kawasaki ZX-10 at 110mph over he national speed limit on a dual carriageway in Buckihghamshire. It is thought to be the most serous speeding offence ever recorded on UK roads.

The rider overtakes one car with 170mph on the clock and wheelies past others at over 140mph. It has been viewed more than 112,000 times.

The police warning came after officers raided the home of a man who posted a 176mph clip on the same site.

[…]

He denies being the rider.

He said, “I had it on a CD that was given to me with other motorcycle clips on it. After seeing clips on Liveleak.com I thought I would share it.”

His home was searched after he volunteered to cooperate with a police investigation.

[…]

South Yorkshire Police said, “As part of the investigation we traced the person who had uploaded the footage on the internet and siezed the computer for examination.”

[…]

Last year a man whose home had been searched by police over yet another clip told MCN he felt he had been treated like a peadophile or murderer.

John Parrott said police had told him to either admit to being the rider in the clip or, “We rip your house apart, seize your computer, your motorcycle, and your video camera.”

[…]

Motorcycle News

I’m not going to type any more of this article, it is SO OUTRAGEOUS it is dirtying my hands transcribing it.

The police cannot raid a person’s house because they upload a clip of someone speeding; uploaded clips do not constitute sufficient evidence that the uploader was the speeder.

Its almost as if the police are running under one set of laws and the public are running under another. Do the police have such a light caseload that they can actually spend time ‘monitoring’ YouTube and LiveLeak for speeding offences? I can scarcely believe the words as printed.

There is no speed limit in Germany. The same sort of speeds on a German road would not raise an eyebrow, but here, people are THREATENED by the police; not after being caught speeding, but because they have FILM OF MOTORCYCLES SPEEDING IN THEIR POSSESSION. It is totally absurd that there should be speed limits on any highway anyway; are German drivers better than drivers from other countries ones? Use the googles and read for yourself.

In any case, this is not about wether or not speeding is good or bad; this is about the rules of evidence, the rule of law and the police making up the law as they go along.

Here are two clips of the police doing just that; making up bespoke law on the spot to suit their mood. In that case, the cameraman knew his rights. This guy knew his rights, but was arrested anyway.

The police do an amazing job. There are countries in the world where you cannot just pick up the phone, call the police and then five minutes later they turn up to help you. They should be paid more money, and have better perks. The majority of the police are decent people, doing a hard job with an intact sense of duty. They are harassed, put in danger, sometimes killed, vilified and disrespected by all sides as thanks. What is entirely wrong is that they are used badly by the state, made to enforce laws that are at best petty and at worse completely insane. It is a waste of their time, and a part of the reason I am sure, many of them act like they are completely ga-ga.

What they should not be doing, is making things WORSE by engaging in stunts like this ‘YouTube Racer’ farce.

MAJOR UPDATE

CNN says:

China limits Internet video to state-controlled companies

HONG KONG, China (AP) — China has moved to restrict videos online, allowing only state-controlled sites to post any — including those shared by users — and requiring Internet providers to delete and report a variety of content.

It wasn’t immediately clear how the new rules would affect YouTube and other providers that host Web sites based in other countries that are accessible from China.

A spokesman for San Bruno, California-based YouTube said the restrictions “could be a cause for concern, depending on the interpretation.”

Tudou.com, which claims to be China’s largest video sharing Web site, didn’t immediately respond to an e-mail requesting comment.

The new regulations, which take effect on January 31, were approved by both the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television and the Ministry of Information Industry and were described on their Web sites Thursday.

Under the new policy, Web sites that provide video programming or allow users to upload video must have a permit and be either state-owned or state-controlled.

The majority of Internet video providers in China are private, according to an explanation of the regulations posted on Chinafilm.com, which is run by the state-run China Film Group.

Video that involves national secrets, hurts the reputation of China, disrupts social stability or promotes pornography will be banned. Providers must delete and report such content.

“Those who provide Internet video services should insist on serving the people, serve socialism … and abide by the moral code of socialism,” the rules say.

The permits are subject to renewal every three years and operators who commit “major” violations may be banned from providing online video programming for five years.

Adhering to the new rules could be daunting for YouTube, where about 10 hours of online video covering a wide range of topics is uploaded to the site every minute.

The video-sharing site, which is owned by Google Inc., already faces allegations that it should do more to block the distribution of clips that infringe on copyrights.

None of YouTube’s video-hosting computers is in China, but the government there could still block access to the site from within China.

YouTube hopes the rules won’t cut it off from the rapidly growing number of Chinese residents with Internet access, spokesman Ricardo Reyes said.

“We believe that the Chinese government fully recognizes the enormous value of online video and will not enforce the regulations in a way that could deprive the Chinese people of its benefits and potential for business and economic development, education and culture, communication, and entertainment,” Reyes said.

China ranks as the world’s second largest Internet market with a total audience of about 164 million, including people who surf the Web from public computers, according to the research firm comScore Inc.

Only the United States, with about 182 million Internet users, boasts a larger online audience.

YouTube says people around the world watch more than 200 million videos on its site each day. It declined to specify how much of its traffic comes from China.

[…]

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/01/03/china.internet.video.ap/index.html

I am not for or against what the Chinese do in their own country; that is their business, and good luck to them. What that country does, if it were to apply to me however, is another matter, and any government that emulates them in a country where I have interests is pure evil.

This YouTube Racer / motorcycle story is yet another sign that US/UK is desperate to move to a Chinese style of government, where they simply ban anything they do not understand, do not like, or think is a threat to their absolute power.

And today on El Reg, there is a story saying that UK wants to outlaw “Hacker Tools”:

By John Leyden
The Register
2nd January 2008

The UK government has published guidelines for the application of a law that makes it illegal to create or distribute so-called “hacking tools”.

The controversial measure is among amendments to the Computer Misuse Act included in the Police and Justice Act 2006. However, the ban along with measures to increase the maximum penalty for hacking offences to ten years and make denial of service offences clearly illegal, are still not in force and probably won’t be until May 2008 in order not to create overlap with the Serious Crime Bill, currently making its way through the House of Commons.

A revamp of the UK’s outdated computer crime laws is long overdue. However, provisions to ban the development, ownership and distribution of so-called “hacker tools” draw sharp criticism from industry. Critics point out that many of these tools are used by system administrators and security consultants quite legitimately to probe for vulnerabilities in corporate systems.

The distinctions between, for example, a password cracker and a password recovery tool, or a utility designed to run denial of service attacks and one designed to stress-test a network, are subtle. The problem is that anything from nmap through wireshark to perl can be used for both legitimate and illicit purposes, in much the same way that a hammer can be used for putting up shelving or breaking into a car.

[…]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/02/hacker_toll_ban_guidance/

This is the same inept, computer illiterate and incompetent government that lost two DVDRs of of peoples personal and sensitive data. The first image that poops into their minds when you use the word ‘web on computers’ is a TV screen with cobwebs all over it.

But I digress.

China is trying to make water run up a waterfall; once they are on the internets, and everyone has a mobile phone, there is going to come a point where viral propagation will make it impossible to stop information flowing. They might be able to execute a couple of people for being seeders or introducers, but once the idea is out, they can never get it back. Trying to control video sites like this is simply absurd, and will do nothing to stop the flow of information that will eventually topple that country’s leaders – that is the tactical error they are making, if their aim is to maximize the amount of time they are able to stay in control as a group.

As for Britain, their government is already universally despised by anyone with a single brain-cell, which is the majority of the country. They are despised precisely because of measures like the one above, and the countless other betrayals and interferences that they have initiated, Chinese style, on this beautiful island.

Karen Selick

An open letter to Rob Nicholson, Canada's Minister of Justice

Dear Mr. Nicholson,

On January 21, 2008, an extradition hearing will begin in Vancouver for Marc Emery, Canada’s pre-eminent activist for the legalization of marijuana. Marc has been charged in the U.S. with conspiring to manufacture and distribute marijuana, and conspiring to launder money. If convicted under U.S. law, he faces possible life imprisonment without parole.

Should Marc be extradited to the U.S.? The Canadian court will almost certainly say yes. It has little choice under the Extradition Act. Marc
openly admits selling marijuana seeds over the Internet to customers around the world, including the United States, for years. His conduct would have been grounds for criminal charges here, although Canadian authorities never chose to charge him. But that’s enough under the Act to make it mandatory for the judge to commit him for surrender to U.S. authorities.

That’s where you come in, Mr. Justice Minister. Once the court has ruled, the Extradition Act gives you discretion to refuse to surrender Marc if it “would be unjust or oppressive having regard to all the relevant circumstances.”
Here are some of the circumstances you might consider relevant.

From 1999 until he was arrested in 2005, Marc declared on his income tax return that his occupation was “marijuana seed vendor.” He paid $578,000 in income taxes into federal and B.C. government coffers. He gave Canada Revenue Agency access to his bank statements and explained all his cash flows to them. The CRA graciously accepted his money without ever taking any action to put a stop to all this criminal activity.

If you believe that all Canadians benefit from taxes being collected and governments spending that tax money (I don’t, but most Canadians do), then logically you will have to concede that Marc has been a huge benefactor to the Canadian people.

As for the money laundering charge, maybe all Canadians should face U.S. indictments for having conspired with Marc to transform Americans’ outlays on recreational drugs into Canadian outlays on health care, roads, schools, etc.

Marc has helped Canadians in other ways, too. When Canada was compelled in 2000 to legalize medical marijuana by the R. v. Parker decision of the Ontario Court of Appeal, confusion reigned. Although the court had said that individuals suffering the daily pain of illnesses such as epilepsy, glaucoma, multiple sclerosis, cancer and AIDS could use marijuana with their doctors’ approval, there was nowhere they could legally acquire it.

Authorized users who asked Health Canada how to get their marijuana were given the suggestion that they purchase it online from Marc Emery.
For eight years, Marc sent every federal Member of Parliament a free subscription to his magazine Cannabis Culture. Every issue included a copy
of his seed catalogue. Every single MP and all of their office staff turned a blind eye to his activities, just as Canada Revenue Agency and Health Canada had done.

The prohibition against selling marijuana seeds in Canada went unenforced for years, but the benefits of those seed sales were accepted unhesitatingly by Canadian authorities. It would be the height of hypocrisy and injustice for this country to now hand over its benefactor to a foreign government for a prosecution it declined to pursue itself.

But there’s more. Go to any internet search engine and enter “marijuana seeds.” You’ll find many seed vendors still operating without prosecution in
British Columbia and other Canadian provinces. Why is the U.S. government not seeking the extradition of these vendors? Why just Marc and his two employees Michelle Rainey and Greg Williams?

I think the answer is obvious. The so-called “BC3” have taken a principled, public stand against the U.S. government’s war on drugs. Marc in particular is a highly effective spokesman for his cause. He was never in this business primarily for financial gain, and generally kept only enough of his marijuana seed profits to live on. Instead, he has donated over $4-million and countless hours to fund court challenges, establish compassion clubs for medical marijuana users, pay medical bills for activists, sponsor conferences and protests, fund ballot initiatives, fund political campaigns and so on. For over a decade, he has been a huge thorn in the side of politicians and bureaucrats who disagree with him on the political issue of legalizing marijuana.

The Extradition Act requires you, Mr. Justice Minister, to refuse to surrender a person if the request for extradition is “made for the purpose
of prosecuting or punishing the person by reason of their…political opinion….” Please consider Marc’s long history of idealistic activism and
tell the U.S. government that you won’t let them haul this politically motivated Canadian hero off to one of their jails.

Karen Selick is a lawyer in Belleville, Ontario. kas@karenselick.com

[…]

National Post

The year starts off with a bang and a puff of smoke.

New Jersey has a thing for Eggs…only this time, its Eggs that have been fertilized and that are growing into human beings:

N.J. Orders HIV Testing For Pregnant Women
Some Groups Call Law Unneeded and Intrusive

By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 28, 2007; A03

NEW YORK, Dec. 27 — New Jersey this week launched one of the most ambitious efforts in the country to control mother-to-child transmission of HIV, making screening tests mandatory for all pregnant women in the state beginning next year.

A bill signed into law Wednesday by the Senate president, Richard J. Codey, in his capacity as acting governor, requires two tests for pregnant women, at the beginning of the pregnancy and again in the third trimester, unless the mother objects. If the mother objects, the objection will be noted and the newborn will then be tested for HIV, with the only exception being on religious grounds. Newborns will also be tested if the woman tests positive.

Just four other states have mandated testing for pregnant women, and three more– including New York — require screening of newborns. But New Jersey’s law appears to go further by requiring both.

The mandatory screening has raised privacy concerns. The American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey and the state’s chapter of the National Organization for Women both questioned whether the mandated tests violate a woman’s right to privacy and the right to make her own medical decisions.

Riki E. Jacobs, executive director of the Hyacinth AIDS Foundation, a New Jersey nonprofit helping people living with AIDS, said the law is unnecessary and comes when the state should be focused on expanding care for pregnant women. “I am adamantly opposed to this bill. New Jersey already reduced the perinatal rate of transmission with mandatory counseling of pregnant women,” she said. “The issue is getting those women who are not in prenatal care in for services and testing.

“I definitely think it is an invasion of privacy,” Jacobs said. She said women choose to test their babies in 98 percent of cases, so the new law’s mandatory provisions for testing children are not needed: “The fact that we assume women won’t choose to test is ludicrous and wrong.”

But in the end, lawmakers decided that the risk of exposing children to the infection outweighed those concerns.

While men represent the majority of new HIV and AIDS cases in the United States, women now account for an increasing share, from just 8 percent of new diagnoses in 1985 to 27 percent in 2005, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Of the estimated 1.2 million people living with HIV/AIDS in the United States in 2005, about 300,000 were women, and the vast majority of them were between 25 and 44 years old.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among other groups, has been recommending that HIV screening become a routine part of prenatal tests. The CDC recommended HIV tests become a routine part of the battery of prenatal tests, and that there be no separate written consent required.

Mother-to-child transmission of the disease — during pregnancies and through breast-feeding — peaked in the United States in 1992, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, which reported that the number of cases since then has dropped “dramatically” because of early detection and the increased use of antiretroviral therapy, which lowers the risk of transmission to less than 2 percent.

The majority of those new cases that still occur are mostly among black Americans, reflecting the changed demographic of the epidemic since it was first identified.

According to the CDC, 100 to 200 children a year are infected by their mothers. As of 2005, the last year for which figures are available, there were 6,051 people in the United States living with HIV/AIDS who had been infected perinatally — during pregnancy or breast-feeding.

Of those, 66 percent were black and 20 percent identified as Hispanic.

In New Jersey, a June report by the state’s health department reported 78 percent of those with HIV and AIDS were members of minority groups. That report also found that New Jersey has a significant female population living with the disease, 37 percent of the total.

In signing the bill at a local hospital, Codey said, “We can significantly reduce the number of infections to newborns and help break down the stigma associated with the disease.”

He added: “For newborns, early detection can be the ultimate lifesaving measure.”

New Jersey records about 115,000 births each year. While there were no recorded mother-to-child transmissions this year, as of the June report, there were two children born infected in 2006 and seven born infected in 2005, according to the health department.

[…]

Washington Post

The state has no business mandating that anyone be tested for any disease.

What we need is a simple chart that can instantly show how a law like this is wrong to even the thickest of the lowest common denominator.

Hmmmmmmm!

And of course, all these HIV testing kits need to be paid for and replenished. I smell another scam!

BBQ is at it yet again, with another ‘story’ by a ‘professional lying paid pro-id scumbag’ using PR scripted false logic to prop up the dying and decomposing corpse of the ID card scheme:

ID sites ‘aid underage drinkers’
By Chris Page
BBC Radio Five Live Report

Underage drinkers are making use of websites which churn out false driving documents and proof-of-age cards for as little as £10 each, the BBC has found.

Oh really? The BBC has ‘found’ this?

A simple search reveals a huge number of websites selling “100% convincing” fake IDs “guaranteed to fool anyone”.

And these printers have the absolute right to print whatever they like, and they have the absolute right to sell it to whomever they like. You, on the other hand, have no moral right to steal money from license payers and then publish propaganda on the behalf of PR companies and the government.

The sites carry legal disclaimers stating the cards are “novelty” products, not copies of official IDs. But youth workers told Radio Five Live Report they believe the cards are being marketed to underage drinkers.

That is a lie. ‘Fake’ IDs have been commercially available for decades all over the world. They exist for a reason and as a direct consequence of the insane and illiberal laws that try and micro manage everyone’s lives.

The very idea that there can be a ‘fake’ id is fallacious. There are many false assumptions wrapped up in the phrase ‘fake id’; the first is that a card can contain or represent your identity, that is false. Secondly there is the false idea that only an authority like the government can issue a ‘real’ ID and that all other issuers are somehow illegitimate.

Your identity cannot be reduced to a card. No matter who prints it, all of these cards have the same semantic value. A card issued by a government is no more legitimate than any other card produced by any other person.

By deliberately failing to say this, this reporter is re-enforcing the false paradigms of popular ID mythology; that a piece of paper or plastic legitimizes you and can represent you in any way. This is the big (and subtle) lie of this article and all articles like it.

Rigorous checks

Mike Davis, who owns a convenience store in Polzeath in Cornwall, seized 100 fake IDs in just six weeks during the school holidays. “I tell parents I’ve taken a fake ID from their child and they don’t know they’re available on the internet,” he said.

You have no right to seize or confiscate anything from anyone. You are not a police man Mr. Davis; in fact, you are a thief. You stole the property of those people who tried to buy alcohol from you, when all you were legally required to do is to refuse to serve them. People like Mr. Davis are part of the problem. They think it is their right to police the behavior of others; they are a major cause of the decline of Britain.

There is no reason why alcohol should not be sold to anyone who has the money to pay for it. Parents should be able to send their children out to the store to buy a quarter of whiskey if needed. They were able to do this for generations, and there is no difference between the people of today and the people of the past. The idea that alcohol is dangerous and to be feared is what causes the uniquely British form of rowdy alcoholism that plagues this country, evidenced by the innumerable splotches of curry colored vomit that you can find in the streets and doorsteps of every city on a Saturday or Sunday morning. All of them produced by people who are old enough to drink as defined by bad law. The French attitude to alcohol is far more sensible; drinking is just another part of life, not a big deal. But I digress.

But the websites appear to be well known to many young people under the legal drinking age.

Citation? Only BBQ can get away with this sort of lying, and then of course, they say that Bloggers are ‘not real journalists’!

After midnight in Belfast City Centre, one 17 year old said he had been spent several hours drinking in a bar after gaining admission with a fake student card.

This is just before he was about to be shipped out to Afghanistan to murder on behalf of a government that will forbid him to get drunk, but which will put a rifle in his hands to kill.

Plenty of others said they had just turned 18, but had been getting into nightclubs and bars for several years. In Liverpool, it was a similar story.

…and so what? So what if some teenagers have a beer or two? Its not the end of the world, and it certainly is not enough of a pretext to bring in universal compulsory biometric ID cards backed by a central database.

Which is what this low life scumbag article is all about.

“What else are you supposed to do at that age?” said one teenage drinker who started using fake ID when he was 15.

Hmmmm! “What a question”. They always pick the thickest, least representative voice to make some cheap point. This garbage is meaningless, in every way that something can be meaningless.

In both cities, most late night venues seemed to examine ID rigorously. But some clubs reportedly have a reputation as being an easy place for under-18s to have a drink. Door staff at these venues do not seem to be inspecting ID closely, despite many of their customers looking as if they could have been under 18.

They have such a struggle to stay in business with the swingeing taxes, absurd opening regulations, draconian smoking bans etc., they had better let in any and every punter because every penny counts. Just think about it; the immoral smoking ban has caused pubs to install outdoor heating so that the pub can extend its activities outside. These units use up an enormous amount of energy, the majority of which is wasted. The electricity and gas bills for this ‘outdoor heating’ must be a large burden for these beleaguered drinking houses. I feel their pain, and understand perfectly why they are doing what they are doing. In the final analysis, they will be driven out of business by government, who will no doubt in the future launch ‘incentives’ to, “restore the unique pub culture that once thrived in Britain”.

Strict laws

If licensed premises are caught serving under-18s, they face heavy penalties – including losing their license and fines of up to £5,000. The British Beer and Pub Association recommends that its members ask for ID if the customer looks 21 or under. It says that the licensed trade is turning away a million young people a year for being underage or having no ID.

One million people a year, who would be buying, say three pints each at three pounds each, that £9,000,000. And don’t forget the crisps. At one pound per bag.

“In the vast majority of bars and clubs, it’s impossible to get a drink if you’re under 18,” says Paul Smith, chief executive of the Bars, Entertainment and Dance Association.

Is it easier to buy a gun or a drink in the UK?

I wonder.

Five Live Report ordered a fake “driving permit” online and showed it to Inspector David Connery, the head of crime prevention at the Police Service of Northern Ireland. “It really worries me these fakes are out there,” he said, pointing out anyone found using one faces getting a criminal record.

Of course, that is absurd. Many companies produce ID cards that are no more ‘fake’ than the ones you can buy or make yourself with a laminating kit.

In the absence of bad laws that try to conrtol human nature and urges, the rationale behind ID cards disappears and these dirty lying articles disappear with them.

“The more discerning doorman will know it’s false – but on a busy night it could easily fool people. “If you are caught using a false ID getting into licensed premises you will be reported.”

You are in violation!

He also warns anyone “lending” their own genuine ID to underage drinkers could be charged with aiding and abetting an offence.

I think we can safely say that no one is paying attention to these bad laws, just as in the days of prohibition, the majority of people simply broke the law. And we know what the result of THAT was.

The BBC contacted several fake ID firms for an interview, but none responded. The site which comes out on top when you search for fake ID through leading internet search engines carries a warning addressed to the press. “We discourage the attempted use of our cards for the purposes of misrepresentation, both here and in the documentation supplied with our delivered fake ID products,” it states.

Bollocks. Why should they respond to a bunch of habitual liars who are out to misrepresent them and destroy their legitimate businesses? They say that they are producing ‘fakes’ in line with your own fallacious logic, so what more do you want? Of course, they want them out of business and state issued mandatory ID cards to be brutally enforced.

But youth workers and publicans say they are in no doubt that the fake cards are marketed to underage drinkers.

This is just hearsay, and totally irrelevant to the true thrust of this absurd piece of paid for trash ‘journalism’.

They argue that the firms selling the cards are immoral and endangering people’s licenses and livelihoods.

This is a perfect example of ‘in the box’, ‘night is day’ thinking.

Everyone has the right to print whatever they like. Everyone has the right to sell what they print. It is immoral to try and prevent people from printing what they like and selling what they print to whomever they wish. Publicans should not need a license to sell alcohol. The regulation of pubs is what is endangering peoples livelihoods, not the selling of food and drink, which is the very purpose of a pub.

Bill McComb, who runs several alcohol and drugs awareness programmes in Ballymurphy in West Belfast, says: “The companies know that young people are using these cards for an illegal purpose.”

And so? Once again, this is an assertion, not a fact, and even if it were a fact, this is not the point. The point is that the laws controlling alcohol in the UK are immoral, and they are being used as a another pretext in the arsenal of bullshit that is being trotted out to boost the case for total control everyone through the introduction of a totalitarian ID card.

A final point of interest; when you surf to the BBQ page where this rubbish lives, you will notice how it is formatted so that it is almost free of paragraphs. This article is designed for the lowest common denominator. Each lying thought is a single sentence on its own, so that the thickest most asleep reader can easily swallow the fallacies being rammed down their throats.

Five Live Report: The Faking Game will be broadcast at 1930 GMT on Sunday, 16 December. Or download the podcast from the Five Live Report website.

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7144972.stm

We will give that one a miss, thanks.

Bastards.

How to Secure Your Computer, Disks, and Portable Drives

Computer security is hard. Software, computer and network security are all ongoing battles between attacker and defender. And in many cases the attacker has an inherent advantage: He only has to find one network flaw, while the defender has to find and fix every flaw.

Cryptography is an exception. As long as you don’t write your own algorithm, secure encryption is easy. And the defender has an inherent mathematical advantage: Longer keys increase the amount of work the defender has to do linearly, while geometrically increasing the amount of work the attacker has to do.

Unfortunately, cryptography can’t solve most computer-security problems. The one problem cryptography *can* solve is the security of data when it’s not in use. Encrypting files, archives — even entire disks — is easy.

All of this makes it even more amazing that Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs in the United Kingdom lost two disks with personal data on 25 million British citizens, including dates of birth, addresses, bank-account information and national insurance numbers. On the one hand, this is no bigger a deal than any of the thousands of other exposures of personal data we’ve read about in recent years — the U.S. Veteran’s Administration loss of personal data of 26 million American veterans is an obvious similar event. But this has turned into Britain’s privacy Chernobyl.

Perhaps encryption isn’t so easy after all, and some people could use a little primer. This is how I protect my laptop.

There are several whole-disk encryption products on the market. I use PGP Disk’s Whole Disk Encryption tool for two reasons. It’s easy, and I trust both the company and the developers to write it securely. (Disclosure: I’m also on PGP Corp.’s Technical Advisory Board.)

Setup only takes a few minutes. After that, the program runs in the background. Everything works like before, and the performance degradation is negligible. Just make sure you choose a secure password — PGP’s encouragement of passphrases makes this much easier — and you’re secure against leaving your laptop in the airport or having it stolen out of your hotel room.

The reason you encrypt your entire disk, and not just key files, is so you don’t have to worry about swap files, temp files, hibernation files, erased files, browser cookies or whatever. You don’t need to enforce a complex policy about which files are important enough to be encrypted. And you have an easy answer to your boss or to the press if the computer is stolen: no problem; the laptop is encrypted.

PGP Disk can also encrypt external disks, which means you can also secure that USB memory device you’ve been using to transfer data from computer to computer. When I travel, I use a portable USB drive for backup. Those devices are getting physically smaller — but larger in capacity — every year, and by encrypting I don’t have to worry about losing them.

I recommend one more complication. Whole-disk encryption means that anyone at your computer has access to everything: someone at your unattended computer, a Trojan that infected your computer and so on. To deal with these and similar threats I recommend a two-tier encryption strategy. Encrypt anything you don’t need access to regularly — archived documents, old e-mail, whatever — separately, with a different password. I like to use PGP Disk’s encrypted zip files, because it also makes secure backup easier (and lets you secure those files before you burn them on a DVD and mail them across the country), but you can also use the program’s virtual-encrypted-disk feature to create a separately encrypted volume. Both options are easy to set up and use.

There are still two scenarios you aren’t secure against, though. You’re not secure against someone snatching your laptop out of your hands as you’re typing away at the local coffee shop. And you’re not secure against the authorities telling you to decrypt your data for them.

The latter threat is becoming more real. I have long been worried that someday, at a border crossing, a customs official will open my laptop and ask me to type in my password. Of course I could refuse, but the consequences might be severe — and permanent. And some countries — the United Kingdom, Singapore, Malaysia — have passed laws giving police the authority to demand that you divulge your passwords and encryption keys.

To defend against both of these threats, minimize the amount of data on your laptop. Do you really need 10 years of old e-mails? Does everyone in the company really need to carry around the entire customer database? One of the most incredible things about the Revenue & Customs story is that a low-level government employee mailed a copy of the entire national child database to the National Audit Office in London. Did he have to? Doubtful. The best defense against data loss is to not have the data in the first place.

Failing that, you can try to convince the authorities that you don’t have the encryption key. This works better if it’s a zipped archive than the whole disk. You can argue that you’re transporting the files for your boss, or that you forgot the key long ago. Make sure the time stamp on the files matches your claim, though.

There are other encryption programs out there. If you’re a Windows Vista user, you might consider BitLocker. This program, embedded in the operating system, also encrypts the computer’s entire drive. But it only works on the C: drive, so it won’t help with external disks or USB tokens. And it can’t be used to make encrypted zip files. But it’s easy to use, and it’s free. And many people like the open-source and free program, TrueCrypt. I know nothing about it.

This essay previously appeared on Wired.com.

Why was the UK event such a big deal? Certainly the scope: 40% of the British population. Also the data: bank account details; plus information about children. There’s already a larger debate on the issue of a database on kids that this feeds into. And it’s a demonstration of government incompetence (think Hurricane Katrina). In any case, this issue isn’t going away anytime soon. Prime Minister Gordon Brown has apologized. The head of the Revenue and Customs office has resigned. More fallout is probably coming.

[…]

http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0712.html

UK’s privacy Chernobyl:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article2910705.ece
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7104945.stm
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/economics/story/0,,2214566,00.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article2910635.ece
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/21/response_data_breach/

U.S. VA privacy breach:
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2006/05/70961

PGP Disk:
http://www.pgp.com/products/wholediskencryption/

Choosing a secure password:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/01/choosing_secure.html
http://www.iusmentis.com/security/passphrasefaq/

Risks of losing small memory devices:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/07/risks_of_losing.html

Laptop snatching:
http://tinyurl.com/fszeh

TrueCrypt:
http://www.truecrypt.org/

Of course, we now know that authorities cannot tell you to decrypt your data for them in the USA. If you insist on working for and in fascist countries or countries with fascist legislation like the United Kingdom, Singapore and Malaysia, then you must expect that your rights disappear the moment the tires of the airplane touch the landing strip in these places, and that you may be subject to a decryption order. Much better to carry a blank laptop with you and then log into your system over an encrypted link rather than carry fully loaded email clients with you.

You can fully expect all of these bad laws to be dropped once businessmen from the United Kingdom, Singapore, Malaysia and other countries get their laptops copied wholesale, or when people stop doing business with them out of principle…ummmm probably not going to happen, right?

Avid readers of BLOGDIAL will remember the utter nonsense of the Sudanese government stealing laptops:

The government of Sudan started seizing and quarantining laptop computers for inspection last week, ostensibly to stem the import of pornography and seditious material.

remember now?

Apparently it occurred to government officials that they didn’t understand what was in the devices and that the devices might be the conveyance for objectionable material.

A beautifully understated assessment :)

The immediate effect of the quarantines and data inspections is sure to be a dampening of business interest in an already risk-fraught environment. Over the long term, however, silly rules regarding technology tend to be corrected by individuals’ use of even more advanced technology. Governments rarely win this sort of oneupsmanship.

And so on:

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=453

I have been encouraging the adoption of PGP/GPG for ages. The tools to use it are now as easy as switching a light on and off, even if the underlying concepts remain impenetrable to all but people with A-Level maths. If you have the time and the need for it, you can use it with ease. It is possible to do everything you need to do without it, but do not complain that people are reading your email; those complaints are what is unacceptable today.

There has never been a time in man’s history where you could communicate in complete, guaranteed privacy over any distance. No surveillance system can break into properly deployed PGP/GPG communications. All those who complain about the government monitoring their email but who do not use PGP/GPG do not get and cannot expect any sympathy.

You have an umbrella, yet you prefer to get soaked to the skin when it rains.

You have fire, but you choose not to light it and to stay damp and wet.

That is called STUPIDITY and there are no two ways about it.

Text of article: http://www.news.com/8301-13578_3-9834495-38.html

A federal judge in Vermont has ruled that prosecutors can’t force a criminal defendant accused of having illegal images on his hard drive to divulge his PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) passphrase.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Jerome Niedermeier ruled that a man charged with transporting child pornography on his laptop across the Canadian border has a Fifth Amendment right not to turn over the passphrase to prosecutors. The Fifth Amendment protects the right to avoid self-incrimination.

Niedermeier tossed out a grand jury’s subpoena that directed Sebastien Boucher to provide “any passwords” used with the Alienware laptop. “Compelling Boucher to enter the password forces him to produce evidence that could be used to incriminate him,” the judge wrote in an order dated November 29 that went unnoticed until this week. “Producing the password, as if it were a key to a locked container, forces Boucher to produce the contents of his laptop.”

Link to court opinion: http://www.volokh.com/files/Boucher.pdf

Orin Kerr’s this-ruling-is-wrong post: http://volokh.com/posts/1197670606.shtml

Link to Michael Froomkin’s old law review article touching on this: http://osaka.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/seminar/papers/anon/intlaw_paper.html

The most basic principles of a free country make RIPA bad law.

This is another example of why america was such a great country and why its Founding Fathers are so rightly revered; its constitution was so perfectly written that its provisions work on technologies and scenarios two hundred and thirty years after it was devised.

I can imagine a scenario where an american with a laptop containing a PGP encrypted volume ‘invokes The 5th’ somewhere in the world and the out of jurisdiction court accepting this – they accept american jurisdiction for everything else, like carting people off to torture prisons, so why not the Fifth Amendment?

The police understand intimately how reports are forged, corrupted, accusation falsely made, evidence planted and the ‘criminals’ stitched up. That is why they are shrieking like Abu Grahib inmates at the idea that their DNA should be put in the database:

PLANS to force police to give DNA samples have sparked a rebellion among rank-and-file officers.

It is understood all eight of Scotland’s police forces are about to demand that in future new recruits hand over samples to be included in a national genetic database.

This would allow any body matter, such as hair or saliva, found at a crime scene, to be compared with the DNA records of officers, so investigations are not thrown off course through accidental contamination by officers working there.

This is the same reason that they want everyone in the UK to be put on this database. What is interesting is that these police men obviously thought that as police, they would be excluded from the national DNA database. Are they in any way different from other members of the population? If everyone else is being made to go into this database, what on earth would make them think that they have an ‘opt out’?

But rank-and-file police fear that calculating criminals with a grudge against members of the force could manipulate the system to damage the careers of innocent officers.

Actually, what they think is that calculating police men with a grudge against members of the force could manipulate the system to destroy the careers of officers. There. Some substitution for you.

Members of the Scottish Police Federation believe criminals could deliberately contaminate the scene with officers’ DNA, either to implicate them in serious crimes or to give the impression that they had planted evidence. A federation spokesman said: “A point made by many of our members is that it is relatively easy for anyone so minded to obtain DNA traces of a police officer – for example from a discarded cigarette butt – and to deliberately contaminate a locus with it.

If that is the case, and police are to be exempted, then everyone in the UK who has not been convicted of a crime should also be exempted, because the same threat to the reputations and careers of ‘ordinary’ citizens exists for the man in the street and the police man.

“Apart from the suspicion which may or may not fall on the officer, it has the potential to diminish the evidential value of any DNA traces of the real perpetrator of the crime.”

If this is true of the police being on the register, then it is true for the members of the public, and even moreso, because the vectors for fraud increase exponentially when everyone in in the database; ANY cigarette butt or used condom instantly becomes a means of diverting attention away from the perpetrators of crime; every bin in the street becomes a gold mine of DNA to be sourced. If no one is in the database except criminals then this threat disappears, and in fact, when you get a match to a known criminal, the database does what it is meant to do; catch repeat offenders.

Last night the officers’ fears were dismissed as “far fetched” by a source close to the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland, which is driving the new plan forward.

But the possibility of framing police officers is an extremely sensitive issue for the force. A policewoman lost her job after being wrongly accused of leaving her fingerprint at a murder scene. All officers already have to provide fingerprints as a condition of appointment.

Former Strathclyde WPC Shirley McKie was accused of contaminating the scene of the murder of Ayrshire woman Marion Ross, who was found stabbed at her Kilmarnock home in January 1997.

McKie maintained that although she was one of the first officers to arrive at the scene, she had never been in Ross’s house.

Despite the defence argument that the murder scene had been contaminated by police incompetence, David Asbury was convicted on other fingerprint evidence and sentenced to life imprisonment. But 10 months after the conviction, McKie was charged with perjury and suspended by Strathclyde Police for allegedly lying on oath, although she was later fully acquitted.

And there you have it. A perfect example of how someone can have their lives trashed by false evidence.

Civil liberties campaigners last night voiced concerns about the DNA testing plan. John Scott, the chairman of the Scottish Human Rights Centre, said the move was “an intrusion into personal privacy”.

He said it would be easier to justify checking samples against police DNA when the need arose, rather than impose blanket DNA testing.

and the same is true for everyone in the population, not just the police.

Scott also agreed a determined criminal could attempt to frame a police officer with a stolen DNA sample. “There have been cases where it has been suspected that fingerprint evidence has been planted,” he said. “If you have access to someone’s DNA it allows greater scope for the possibility that evidence can be planted.”

The police federation also doubts whether the planned DNA database represents good value for money. It has suggested it may be cheaper simply to obtain samples as required from an individual officer if it is suspected he may have contaminated a crime scene.

Note how they are using all the attacks that the ordinary people use to get themselves off of the slippery slope towards the biometric net. This is a perfect example of ‘first they came for the communists….there was no one left to defend me’. All those police who called for universal DNA collection now have the light shined on them, and they do not like it when the horror of it is applied to them.

Typical.

But the Scottish Executive, which is prepared to change the law to allow the testing regime to begin shortly, rejected such concerns. An Executive spokeswoman said: “The creation of such a database has clear benefits in terms of providing operational, time and financial savings.”

The requirement for new recruits to provide a DNA sample as a condition of appointment has been in place south of the Border since last summer.

Under the Scottish plan, samples would be stored on a database to be searched only if a senior investigating officer had reasonable grounds to believe that innocent contamination of a scene of crime might have taken place.

Once again, special treatment for the police. Outrageous.

Supporters say because technological developments had produced highly sensitive analytical techniques, there is a risk that a DNA profile could be inadvertently contaminated – for example as a result of an officer sneezing, coughing or shedding a stray hair.

OR, deliberately, through planting of evidence.

While this may not lead to a wrongful conviction, it could delay an investigation or at worst prevent the real offender being identified.

Backers of the policy say that if investigators could quickly identify such innocent contamination using the DNA database and discard it, inquiries could proceed quicker.

A spokeswoman for Acpos confirmed that following a meeting last week, all forces had agreed to require new recruits to take a DNA test and follow the English model, although Scotland’s biggest force, Strathclyde Police, is considering requiring all its officers to provide a sample.

A source close to the association said: “The fact that you’ve got someone’s DNA at a crime scene does not mean people will believe that person is responsible.

Well, we know that is a lie don’t we?!

“It is simply an indication that the person may have been at the locus. It would merely start an investigation which would require to look for corroboration.”

[…]

http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/scotland.cfm?id=902562003

The key here is MAY and thanks to the way thick people (‘cumpuuta sez nooooooooooo’) treat anything coming off of an LCD as the gospel truth, there is a real problem with the perception of DNA evidence mixed with computer delivery.

One thing is for sure, there are people out there who understand how insane this is, and as the injustices mount up and the people wake up the inevitable conclusion is that the plans will be completely scrapped.

Lets hope it is BEFORE they collect the DNA and not AFTER.

Everyone now seems to be waking up to what we and other people have been saying for four years.

What they are NOT doing, is going far enough.

Once again the following must be totally SCRAPPED in order to protect the privacy of the British Public:

• The NIR – the National Identity Register that backs the ID Card.




• Mass Fingerprinting – Compulsory fingerprinting for access to anything must be outlawed.




• The NHS ‘Spine’ – The NHS SPine must be scrapped, as it suffers from the same vulnerabilities as all centralized databases do.




• ContactPoint – The database of all children in the UK must be scrapped, as it is no different to any of the other databases listed above.




• Project Semaphore – The plan to collect 53 pieces of data on all travellers flying to the UK (a mirror project of USVISIT) must be stopped. USVISIT has cost the american people BILLIONS of dollars and only 1500 people have been caught, millions have been subjected to humiliation and violation and none of the people caught have been identified as ‘terrorists’. No one in the UK has done a cost benefit analasis of Project Semaphore and USVISIT; had they done so, they would have found that it is a total waste of money.

All of these projects MUST BE ABANDONED and the contracts terminated, even if there are penalties to be paid.

It’s good news to hear that people are FINALLY waking up, and I know that we have done our own small part in getting the word out about what a disaster this is in the making. Now lets FINISH THE JOB. No signing up for ID cards, demand that your doctor remove your records from his system, and NEVER give your fingerprint to anyone for ANY reason.

This rabid mania for ‘registers’ should now be put out of the minds of the brain dead subhumans who run the government, PERMANENTLY.

Who would have thought that four .25p DVDRs could bring down billion pound contracts and a fascist police state control system?!

The fact of the matter is that these corrupt regimes and their infernal tools are as weak as spiders webs. All it takes is one touch and the whole thing can be brought down. In this case, the biometric net is the weak premise being destroyed.

As I said to you some time ago, the state will take your children from you if you refuse to promote their propaganda to your children. Read this:

Foster child to be taken away because Christian couple refuse to teach him about homosexuality

They are devoted foster parents with an unblemished record of caring for almost 30 vulnerable children.

But Vincent and Pauline Matherick will this week have their latest foster son taken away because they have refused to sign new sexual equality regulations.

To do so, they claim, would force them to promote homosexuality and go against their Christian faith.

The 11-year-old boy, who has been in their care for two years, will be placed in a council hostel this week and the Mathericks will no longer be given children to look after.

The devastated couple, who have three grown up children of their own, became foster parents in 2001 and have since cared for 28 children at their home in Chard, Somerset.

Earlier this year, Somerset County Council’s social services department asked them to sign a contract to implement Labour’s new Sexual Orientation Regulations, part of the Equality Act 2006, which make discrimination on the grounds of sexuality illegal.

(Article continues below)

Officials told the couple that under the regulations they would be required to discuss same-sex relationships with children as young as 11 and tell them that gay partnerships were just as acceptable as heterosexual marriages.

They could also be required to take teenagers to gay association meetings.

When the Mathericks objected, they were told they would be taken off the register of foster parents.

The Mathericks have decided to resign rather than face the humiliation of being expelled.

Mr Matherick, a 65-year-old retired travel agent and a primary school governor, said: “I simply could not agree to do it because it is against my central beliefs.

“We have never discriminated against anybody but I cannot preach the benefits of homosexuality when I believe it is against the word of God.”

Mrs Matherick, 61, said they had asked if they could continue looking after their foster son until he is found a permanent home, but officials refused and he will be placed in a council hostel on Friday.

She said: “He was very upset to begin with. We are all very close, but he’s a mature young man and he’s dealing with it.”

The couple, who have six grandchildren and one greatgrandchild, are both ministers at the nonconformist South Chard Christian Church.

When they first started fostering they took in young single mothers and their babies.

More recently they have been caring for children of primary school age.

Mr Matherick added: “It’s terrible that we’ve been forced into this corner. It just should not happen.

“There are not enough foster carers around anyway without these rules.

“They were saying that we had to be prepared to talk about sexuality with 11-year-olds, which I don’t think is appropriate anyway, but not only that, to be prepared to explain how gay people date.

“They said we would even have to take a teenager to gay association meetings.

“How can I do that when it’s totally against what I believe?”

Religious campaigners say the couple are the latest victims of an equality drive which puts gay rights above religious beliefs.

Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders have complained that the rules force them to overturn long-held beliefs.

The Mathericks are planning to fight their case in the courts with the backing of the Lawyers’ Christian Fellowship.

The same organisation is backing Christian magistrate Andrew McClintock who resigned from the family courts in a row over gay adoption.

He says he was forced to resign because he was not allowed to opt out of cases where he might have to send a child to live with gay parents.

The Mathericks’ case comes at a time when there is a chronic shortage of foster parents, who work on a voluntary basis.

An extra 8,000 are needed to plug the gaps in the service.

Researchers have found that continually moving children from home to home can have a devastating impact on their education and general welfare.

But a report last year revealed that the shortage of carers meant that some children in care are being forced to move up to three times a year.

David Taylor, Somerset County Council’s corporate director for children and young people, said: “No decision has been made about the deregistration of Mr and Mrs Matherick.

“The council is committed to promoting the interests of children and young people and welcomes foster carers from all backgrounds and faiths.”

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/

Now, imagine a situation where people in the UK who choose to home school are forced to sign an agreement that they will follow a state authored curriculum or face sending their children to school by force.

You can bet that such a curriculum will include philosophies and lifestyles of the kind that the Matherics do not agree with, and of course this has nothing to do with any subject in particular, but instead has everything to do with the principle of the state mandating what must and must not be taught to children. The fact that the Matherics are Christians and that they object to Homosexuality is irrelevant, and a distraction.

In the post describing a child kidnapped from its parents by council workers because the child was ‘fat’ we have an example of prejudiced council workers exerting their arbitrary will over decent people. The same is bound to happen again, and to home schoolers, on just about any pretext you can imagine – it is only a matter of time, and as home schooling is adopted in greater numbers the prejudiced and insane workers at local authorities all over the country will feel obliged to butt their ugly heads in and micro manage the lives of home schoolers.

It is essential that home schoolers in the UK refuse any and all involvement by the state. Some home schoolers welcome inspection by the ‘LA’ but this is an error; once you let them in consensually, they can then make an assessment of you and home schooling, extrapolate to all home schoolers, and then before you know it, you will all be compelled to sign agreements to teach what they want you to teach, and by teach I mean indoctrinate. Specifically, we are talking about indoctrinating your children with their beliefs on:

• Citizenship
• Religion
• Sexuality
• Culture
• Politics
• Gender
• Insert what you believe and they don’t here

Letting people into your home to inspect you as you home school is not a simple matter, and it is not a good idea. It is the thin edge of the wedge. It is the door to door salesman wedging his foot in your door. Once they have access to you, they are obliged to find fault with you no matter what you are doing, otherwise, they have no purpose and no job to do. That means that they will by default, come up with ways to interfere with you by at the very least issuing guidelines and at worse, coming up with legally required contracts of the type that foster parents must sign.

Legalise all drugs: chief constable demands end to ‘immoral laws’
By Jonathan Brown and David Langton
Published: 15 October 2007

One of Britain’s most senior police officers is to call for all drugs – including heroin and cocaine – to be legalised and urges the Government to declare an end to the “failed” war on illegal narcotics.

Richard Brunstrom, the Chief Constable of North Wales, advocates an end to UK drug policy based on “prohibition”. His comments come as the Home Office this week ends the process of gathering expert advice looking at the next 10 years of strategy.

In his radical analysis, which he will present to the North Wales Police Authority today, Mr Brunstrom points out that illegal drugs are now cheaper and more plentiful than ever before.

The number of users has soared while drug-related crime is rising with narcotics now supporting a worldwide business empire second only in value to oil. “If policy on drugs is in future to be pragmatic not moralistic, driven by ethics not dogma, then the current prohibitionist stance will have to be swept away as both unworkable and immoral, to be replaced with an evidence-based unified system (specifically including tobacco and alcohol) aimed at minimisation of harms to society,” he will say.

The demand will not find favour in Downing Street. In his conference speech this year, Gordon Brown signalled an intensification of the existing battle. “We will send out a clear message that drugs are never going to be decriminalised,” the Prime Minister told the party.

The Tories also rejected the proposals. David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, said a more effective move would be the creation of a UK border police force to stop drugs getting into the country as well as expanding rehabilitation centres. He added: “We would put police on the streets to catch and deter drug dealers and we would ensure sufficient prison capacity so they could actually be punished.”

Mr Brunstrom, whose championing of speed cameras has made him a hate figure among some motoring groups, also found his suggestion that the war on drugs was unwinnable dismissed as a “counsel of despair” by the Association of Chief Police Officers. “Moving to total legalisation would, in our view, greatly exacerbate the harm to people in this country, not reduce it,” an Acpo spokeswoman said.

But the 30-page report, entitled Drugs Policy – a radical look ahead, includes a number of persuasive voices. Today Mr Brunstrom will urge his colleagues to submit the paper to Westminster and the Welsh Assembly. In it, he quotes the findings in March this year of a Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts commission, which stated that “the law as it stands is not fit for purpose” and argues for the replacement of the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act with a new Misuse of Substances Act.

That would mean scrapping the ABC system introduced by the home secretary James Callaghan with a new scale that assesses substances, including alcohol and tobacco, in relation to the harm they cause – although he admits banning booze and cigarettes is not likely.

But he notes that figures from the Chief Medical Officer have found that, in Scotland, 13,000 people died from tobacco-related use in 2004 while 2,052 died as a result of alcohol. Illegal drugs, meanwhile, accounted for 356 deaths. The maximum penalty for possessing a class A drug is 14 years in prison while supplying it carries a life term.

Mr Brunstrom indicates that there is a growing mood for change. He cites the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology, which criticised the Government for failing to switch to an evidence-based policy approach. The report also includes quotes from former home secretary John Reid, admitting “prohibition” doesn’t work, and the Olympics minister, Tessa Jowell, conceding “it drives the activity underground” . There is also supportive evidence from former Chief Inspector of Prisons Lord Ramsbotham, a retired High Court judge, and Scotland’s Drug Tsar, Tom Wood.

As well as hitting the country hard in economic terms – class A drug use in England and Wales costs the country up to £17bn a year, 90 per cent of which is due to crime – there are also a series of socially damaging knock-on effects, he says.

He argues that prohibition has created a crisis in the criminal justice system, destabilised producer countries and undermined human rights worldwide. By pursuing a policy of legalisation and regulation, he concludes, the Government will “dramatically reduce drug-related criminality and will enable significant funds to be transferred from law enforcement to harm reduction and treatment procedures that are known to work.”

There was a mixed response from groups that work with users. Danny Kushlick, a director of the charity Transform Drug Policy Foundation, praised Mr Brunstrom for his “great leadership and imagination”. But Clare McNeil, a policy officer for Addaction, said talk of legalisation distracted attention from the more important issue of rehabilitation. “We have some sympathy with his views and the reasons and why he believes this but we are not in favour of legalisation,” she said.

Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said it was ” significant” that a senior police officer had spoken out although he too thought the police chief’s views went too far. “Where he is absolutely right is that the Government’s drugs policy is failing and failing spectacularly. The refusal of the Government to think radically means we are letting thousands of young boys and girls down.

“I am not persuaded that full legalisation is the way forward but what is necessary is that a more logical and evidence-based approach is needed which is less susceptible to whims of individual home secretaries … The system does not work as it is.”

The Chief Constable’s verdict

• British drugs policy has been based upon prohibition for the last several decades – but this system has not worked well. Illegal drugs are in plentiful supply and have become consistently cheaper in real terms over the years.
• The number of drug users has increased dramatically. Drug-related crime has soared equally sharply as a direct consequence of the illegality of some drugs. The vast profits from illegal trading have supported a massive rise in organised crime.
• The ABC classification of drugs is said by the RSA Commission to be indefensible and is described as “crude, ineffective, riddled with anomalies and open to political manipulation”. Most importantly, the current ABC system illogically excludes both alcohol and tobacco.
• Mr Brunstrom says: “If policy on drugs is in the future to be pragmatic not moralistic, driven by ethics not dogma, then the current prohibitionist stance will have to be swept away as both unworkable and immoral. Such a strategy leads inevitably to the legalisation and regulation of all drugs.”
• The chief constable asserts that current British drugs policy is based upon an unwinnable “war on drugs” enshrined in a flawed understanding of the underlying United Nations conventions, and arising from a wholly outdated and thoroughly repugnant moralistic stance.
• He concludes: “The law is the law. In the meantime, I will continue to enforce it to the best of my ability despite my misgivings about its moral and practical worth.”

Independent

What struck me about this story is that the police man behind it says that prohibition is immoral.

Anyone with one working brain cell knows that prohibition is not only immoral, but that it is the very mother and engine of ‘organized crime’.

The Mafia in the USA was born out of the prohibition era when the manufacture, buying and selling of alcohol was outlawed.

That includes beer and wine.

The ‘war on drugs’ has been nothing more than a flimsy pretext to bring in police state measures and absurd ‘money laundering’ laws and surveillance that impact the ordinary person more than any ‘criminal’.

I single quoth criminal because no one today would say that Seagrams and any brewwer of beer is a criminal, yet, if you grow a single plant in your own garden, you can be sent to gaol for a long time. It is completely absurd, and what’s more, everyone knows it, including the poor beleaguered police who have to waste their time enforcing these insane laws.

This article says that there is a ‘growing mood for change’. This is true not only about the bogus, immoral, stupid and pointless war on ‘drugs’ but about everything. It is the same mood that is behind the mass exodus from this country. It is the same mood that is behind the meteoric rise of Ron Paul.

Everyone, everywhere has HAD ENOUGH, and they are slowly waking up, asking the right questions, and, more importantly, taking steps to do something about it.

Boy in court on terror charges

A British teenager who is accused of possessing material for terrorist purposes has appeared in court.

The 17-year-old, who was arrested in the Dewsbury area of West Yorkshire on Monday, was given bail after a hearing at Westminster Magistrates’ Court.

It is alleged he had a copy of the “Anarchists’ Cookbook”, containing instructions on how to make home-made explosives.

His next court hearing has been set for 25 October.

The teenager faces two charges under the Terrorism Act 2000.

The first charge relates to the possession of material for terrorist purposes in October last year.

The second relates to the collection or possession of information useful in the preparation of an act of terrorism.

He stood in the dock wearing a baggy, blue hooded top and only spoke to confirm his name and date of birth.

After the 40-minute hearing, the teenager was released on bail under several conditions.

A second 17-year-old who is facing similar charges has already been remanded in custody and will also appear at the Crown Court on 25 October.

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7030096.stm

So, there is a young man in court for posessing a book that people have read for over three decades:

This is a book that you can get from many places on the internets, for example:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/89607/Anarchists-Cookbook-IV-4-14

And I guarantee you that once news of this case becomes widespread the number of places where you can get it will triple.

It is absurd on several levels that this book should be illegal. Firstly, you have been able to get it for thirty years. Two, it is your right to read any book that you like. Three, you can get it anywhere via the internets.

Are they now going to say that sites on the internets cannot store and serve this book? Pathetically and predictably, ‘yes’ is the answer.

They will never succeed, firstly because america’s first amendment rights protect books like this, and there is no way that you can block the internets….but you know this.

What is so appalling is that this poor chap is being hauled over the coals over a book, over his right to posses and read a book.

And leave it to BBQ to give the story a misleading title. It should have read, “Boy in court for possessing thirty year old book”.

…The Dark Times!

New laws going into effect today in the United Kingdom make it a crime to refuse to decrypt almost any encrypted data requested by authorities as part of a criminal or terror investigation. Individuals who are believed to have the cryptographic keys necessary for such decryption will face up to 5 years in prison for failing to comply with police or military orders to hand over either the cryptographic keys, or the data in a decrypted form.

After the ‘perpetrator’ comes out of gaol, does the ciphertext magically decrypt by itself?

Part 3, Section 49 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) includes provisions for the decryption requirements, which are applied differently based on the kind of investigation underway. As we reported last year, the five-year imprisonment penalty is reserved for cases involving anti-terrorism efforts. All other failures to comply can be met with a maximum two-year sentence.

We know that these laws written specifically for ‘terrorism’ are routinely used for everything OTHER than that, like shutting up 82 year old hecklers.

The law can only be applied to data residing in the UK, hosted on UK servers, or stored on devices located within the UK. The law does not authorize the UK government to intercept encrypted materials in transit on the Internet via the UK and to attempt to have them decrypted under the auspices of the jail time penalty.

So, if you run an IMAP account with the servers in another country, there is nothing they can do to force you to decrypt your email. Similarly, if you have a .Mac account and keep all the files encrypted, HMG cannot compel you to decrypt those files, even though they appear as a mountable drive on your laptop or desktop.

It is completely absurd on its face.

The keys to the (United) Kingdom

The law has been criticized for the power its gives investigators, which is seen as dangerously broad. Authorities tracking the movement of terrorist funds could demand the encryption keys used by a financial institution, for instance, thereby laying bare that bank’s files on everything from financial transactions to user data.

Cambridge University security expert Richard Clayton said in May of 2006 that such laws would only encourage businesses to house their cryptography operations out of the reach of UK investigators, potentially harming the country’s economy. “The controversy here [lies in] seizing keys, not in forcing people to decrypt. The power to seize encryption keys is spooking big business,” Clayton said.

“The notion that international bankers would be wary of bringing master keys into UK if they could be seized as part of legitimate police operations, or by a corrupt chief constable, has quite a lot of traction,” he added. “With the appropriate paperwork, keys can be seized. If you’re an international banker you’ll plonk your headquarters in Zurich.”

Not only will they relocate to Zurich, but they will run all their corporate email from there. Essentially, all this data will ‘go dark’. HMG will have to enact laws saying that any banking that happens here must be done on servers located here. That is clearly undoable.

The people who wrote this nonsense legislation are computer illiterate and clueless. They do not understand the world they are living in, and they do not have the sense to take advice from the people who do understand the complexities.

The law also allows authorities to compel individuals targeted in such investigation to keep silent about their role in decrypting data.

This is a page straight out of the PATRIOT act.

Though this will be handled on a case-by-case basis,

All crime is handled on a case by case basis. This is nonsense speak.

it’s another worrisome facet of a law that has been widely criticized for years. While RIPA was originally passed in 2000, the provisions detailing the handover of cryptographic keys and/or the force decryption of protected content has not been tapped by the UK Home Office—the division of the British government which oversees national security, the justice system, immigration, and the police forces of England and Wales. As we reported last year, the Home Office was slowly building its case to activate Part 3, Section 49.

here comes the bullshit:

The Home Office has steadfastly proclaimed that the law is aimed at catching terrorists, pedophiles, and hardened criminals—all parties which the UK government contends are rather adept at using encryption to cover up their activities.

Paedophiles, if they were locked up permanently when caught, would not be a problem. But I digress; sex criminals cannot be stopped by decrypting files. If they have enough evidence to suspect that someone is engaged in this unforgivable activity, like, credit card info (which is how they caught thousands of people recently) they do not need to decrypt files all they need to demonstrate is that the person bought access. These people are serial offenders; it is easy to catch them if the police are willing to do REAL police work. That means setting up honeypot sites, compromising the owners of sites that sell the images and then locking them up FOREVER and not just for three or four years.

Terrorists do not use encryption. That is a fact. They do not use Steganography, PGP, GPG or any of those tools. We have been over this a million times. This is about maintaining access to banking information in real time. It has nothing to do with any of the Cause célèbre that HMG is trotting out.

Yet the law, in a strange way, almost gives criminals an “out,” in that those caught potentially committing serious crimes may opt to refuse to decrypt incriminating data. A pedophile with a 2GB collection of encrypted kiddie porn may find it easier to do two years in the slammer than expose what he’s been up to.

[…]

http://arstechnica.com/

Which is what I said.

This law is not about porn. It is not about ‘terrorism’. Those are pretexts. RIPA is bad law that is being shoehorned onto the books, whose real purpose is financial surveillance.

Money sees laws like RIPA as damage and it routes around it…or more accurately, it runs away from it. People will move their money into jurisdictions that are business and privacy friendly. Britain will suffer until it comes to its senses, and it will come to its senses, just as France did with its absurd ban on 128 bit SSL encryption.