The people at Bizarre magazine have pointed out to their readers, the details of a most illogical, immoral, unjust, unworkable, idiotic, ill conceived and undemocratic piece of legislation, to be debated in October.

This bill is an illiberal bill, which no free society would even dream of tabling for debate.

It is part of the the new Criminal Justice Bill, which will make it illegal to possess certain images.

Lets take a look at what the bill says, and tear it to pieces.

64 Possession of extreme pornographic images

(1) It is an offence for a person to be in possession of an extreme pornographic image.

(2) An “extreme pornographic image” is an image which is both ~

(a) pornographic, and

(b) an extreme image.

First of all, its a good thing that the servant of satan David ‘scumbag adulterer’ Blunkett is no longer in high office; we would have no one to finally determine what is or is not pornographic or extreme.

People have been over this for the entire twentieth century. Careers and lives ruined, businesses trashed and yet, ‘here we go again’. If two people want to create an image, whatever it is, it is their business, it is also their business if they want to publish those images and it is their absolute right.

The laws of copyright are enough to protect people who publish images (model releases etc etc) and the criminal laws covering violence of all kinds are adequate to protect people whose images are taken during acts of violence.

This law is simply not needed. It is yet another knee-jerk jack-boot reaction. More on that downwards.

(3) An image is &quotpornographic” if it appears to have been produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal.

Nonsense. People can be aroused by anything, including pictures of feet. This definition does not work.

(4) Where an image forms part of a series of images, the question whether the image appears to have been so produced is to be determined by reference to ~

(a) the image itself, and

(b) (if the series of images is such as to be capable of providing a context for the image) the context in which it occurs in the series of images.

(5) So, for example, where ~

(a) an image forms an integral part of a narrative constituted by a series of images, and

(b) it appears that the series of images as a whole was not produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal, the image may, by virtue of being part of that narrative, be found not to be pornographic, even though it might have been found to be pornographic if taken by itself.

So, if you have a movie where there is a plot where something bad happens that’s OK, but if you take a still from that film and distribute it, then that is a crime.

That is INSANE.

(6) An “extreme image” is an image of any of the following ~

(a) an act which threatens or appears to threaten a person’s life,

so all the stills of people being killed in Iraq who have their shoes off are now illegal. Very smart!

(b) an act which results in or appears to result (or be likely to result) in serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals,

This line says more about the people who drafted this bad bill than any decent person would care to know. What about serious injury to a persons feet? As we all know, there are people who are obsessed in a sexual manner with feet; why are these parts of the body singled out? It is just irrational nonsense.

(c) an act which involves or appears to involve sexual interference with a human corpse,

First of all, corpses do not have rights. Secondly, you cannot do violence to an inanimate, non-living object which is what a corpse is. This bill is written by someone with no experience of life, the arts or the history of pornography, and dare I suggest, the law.

(d) a person performing or appearing to perform an act of intercourse or oral sex with an animal, where (in each case) any such act, person or animal depicted in the image is or appears to be real.

This is entirely problematic.

By extending these rights to animals, you go down a slippery slope ending in the banning of meat. But I digress. This part of the bill not only outlaws the depiction of images of real bestiality, but it outlaws, simulations of bestiality you can never, ever ban the depiction of something from someone’s imagination, that is the ultimate restriction of your right to free thought and expression.

An image of an act, conjured from the imagination is protected speech. There are no victims, no animals are harmed; there is no crime, unless you consider thinking to now be a crime.

Then there is the aspect of images conjured from the imagination that are not staged photographs, i.e. simple drawings made with paint, or crayons or computer graphics. Those images too would be subject to this absurd legislation.

Your first thought when you read about this is that it is designed to prevent the ‘Mr. Sebatians‘ of this world from making and distributing images of their consensual S&M fun and games, but actually, it encompasses everything, and not just those works.

(7) In this section “image” means ~

(a) a moving or still image (produced by any means); or

(b) data (stored by any means) which is capable of conversion into an image within paragraph (a).

This is interesting from a technical point of view; all files can be turned into images and sounds; what you need is the right tool to do it. Going into the details here would be a major digression, but suffice to say, you can (circular) file this in the same place where the arguments covering DVD decoding codes (strings of nummbers) and DCMA violating t-shirts are stored. Use the Google.

(8) In this section references to a part of the body include references to a part surgically constructed (in particular through gender reassignment surgery).

???!!!

It is a defence if

(c) that the person ~

(i) was sent the image concerned without any prior request having been made by or on behalf of the person, and

(ii) did not keep it for an unreasonable time.

What is a reasonable amount of time?

It’s all garbage clearly.

Now on to the reason why this part of the bill exists.

A woman’s daughter was brutally murdered by an insane man who liked to look at ‘violent images’. This grieving mother modeled herself on Mary Whitehouse and collected 50,000 signatures in a petition that caused this bad law to be written.

I have some questions.

Why is it that a petition of 50,000 people results in a new law being written, an absurd and bad law, but if MILLIONS of people sign a petition against road pricing, that is TOTALLY IGNORED?

How is it that two million people can march in the streets of London in the biggest ever demonstration in this country’s history against an immoral illegal and predictably murderous war, and they are TOTALLY IGNORED?

Those are rhetorical questions of course, as we know the answers.

This is another piece of knee jerk legislation, as is the way in this country, where the law is created by newspaper editors and grieving parents with a disproportionately loud voice.

We see it with the ban on dangerous dogs (brought in after a child was savaged), and the ban on handguns (after some nutter killed some children, in that case, with a gun). The same process unfolds every time; the parents ‘go public’ the newspaper editors get behind them and pressure parliament to ‘DO SOMETHING’ or look like they are soft on crime.

The only law that comes out of this is bad law, and it is bad law every time.

What is also shocking (actually, not really shocking because this is normal behavior for them) is that the government gives the excuse (as Bliar did for his police state measures) that only a small number of people will be affected by this legislation.

This is astonishing and evil in equal measures.

If one person has their rights taken away by this law, we all suffer. Thats like saying, “we will only exterminate a small number of people to solve this problem”. Everyone’s rights are as precious and important as everyone eles’s and you cannot take away someone’s rights and then justify it because the numbers of the victims will be small.

I’m not making this up.

And you can read all the other lies and deceptions that they regularly take out of the Fascist Neu Labor toolbox at that link.

Needless to say, no one will obey this law should it come into force. Thanks to the internets, you can look at whatever you like in the privacy of your own home, and no one will know what you are looking at as long as you are computer literate and take the necessary precautions.

The days of risking mail order to get your copies of ‘Piercing Fan International Quarterly‘ are over, and so are the days of legislation like this being enforceable.

You BASTARDS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

http://washingtontimes.com/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is a post on Dare To Know featuring ‘Tony Mooney’, and another more important one on Gloucestershire’s Local Authority who are telling the DfES that visits to home educators must be mandatory or at least that the LA should have automatic rights of access.

Tony Mooney is the Bogeyman of HE in the UK. Sadly there is no organized professional PR effort to debunk his rentaquote nonsense. Whenever they (BBC or anyone in the media) want someone who is against HE to provide a ‘balancing’ argument they call him, and he is the only one they ever call.

There is widespread ignorance about HE in this country both in terms of how well it works for children and families on every level and how well it is performing abroad. Sadly, most people get their misinformation and opinions from newspapers – this includes MPs.

I have argued before that we need a permanent professional PR company to promote the facts about HE in this country as a long term educational strategy (!!) focussed on getting everyone in the UK to understand what HE is.

Look at this clipping from the Washington Times:

More and more colleges are actively recruiting homeschooled students; each year there are an estimated 50,000-plus homeschool high school graduates who find work or go to college, and thousands of new curriculum products have become available over the past five years. Meanwhile, the number of homeschoolers continues to grow by 7 percent to 15 percent each year; more states are reforming their laws to remove the burdens from parents who want to home educate, and homeschoolers continue to excel in national competitions as well as on standardized tests. In short, homeschooling is a major success story.

Now, for the first time, homeschooling has been recognized in an opinion by a U.S. Supreme Court justice as a viable educational alternative. Morse v. Frederick, which recently made national headlines, involves free speech and whether a public school can regulate what a student says. The 5-4 decision said that the school principal, Deborah Morse, did not violate the free speech rights of Joseph Frederick when she took down his pro-marijuana banner, which said “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.” The student had violated school policy and was advocating illegal drug use.

While the Home School Legal Defense Association agrees with the ruling in this specific case, it is a reminder to all families that when your child enters the public school, you have virtually ceded your parental rights to the public school.

The clearest explanation of this view was expressed by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Fields v. Palmdale, when it said, “While parents may have a fundamental right to decide whether to send their child to a public school, they do not have a fundamental right generally to direct how a public school teaches their child.”

This is the reason many parents have chosen to homeschool, especially those parents who have a religious worldview, because they know their children will be taught secular values by the public system.

In Morse v. Frederick, however, Justice Clarence Thomas said, “If parents do not like the rules imposed by those schools, they can seek redress in school boards or legislatures; they can send their children to private schools or home school them; or they can simply move.”

This is the first time the Supreme Court specifically has recognized homeschooling as a viable educational alternative. HSLDA has worked for 24 years to advance a parent’s right to homeschool and to promote homeschooling to the general public.

After 24 years, it is gratifying to read the words of a Supreme Court justice who rightfully placed homeschooling on a level playing field with public and private schools. This kind of recognition is tremendously significant to the homeschool community.

It’s another step on the long road to raise homeschooling to the point where, when the terms public, private or homeschool are used in the same sentence, they all will be seen as mainstream educational alternatives.

[…]

Washington Times

Now in the UK, journalists are still writing about the doubts concerning HE, when in fact, there are only positive things to say about it, and it is growing wildly in the US, so much so that it is transforming the way people think about education.

Very soon in that country, the the underachievers will come predominantly from the state school system as parents switch en masse to HE.

The control of perception and growth of HE has not happened by accident. It has taken place thanks to the hard work of the HSLDA and other professionally run HE groups whose work has actually created new law to protect the rights of HE families.

The quote from this article says it all:

Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong—these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history. — Winston Churchill, speech, House of Commons, May 2, 1935

We should not be waiting for the next interview with Tony Mooney; we should be preemptively pushing out the HE message with a dedicated team of professional PR workers so that, say, in five years there will be no one in the UK who does not agree with HE, because they already understand what it is all about.

It will then be much more difficult for MPs to pull shenanigans in the House of Commons to whittle away our rights, though they might certainly try.

It is important to understand how newspapers and the media work when considering this argument. Newspapers get their stories and features almost exclusively through PR companies trying to promote a product or idea. Imagine there is a special filter through which you can see different types of media and imagine that this special circle of glass highlights all articles placed in newspapers by PR companies red. If you were to look at a newspaper through this special piece of glass, you would find that a paper like The Guardian is a dense patchwork of red.

Most of the articles in a newspaper or even at a website like the BBC are placed by PR companies. Journalists sit down and have material fed to them on a constant basis, and depending on the combination of the relationship they have with the person ‘selling the story’ at the PR firm, the hotness of your story idea and the slowness of the news at the time, your story either gets in immediately or is deferred.

This symbiotic relationship works well for the PR company and the journalist, who is eager to fill her quota of words and who also wants to be the person who wrote a very widely read and syndicated story. Hot stories can start in one paper, get read by other journalists who then pick it up and repeat its ‘facts’ verbatim in their own papers; the original source however is usually a PR company who provided the original material in the form of a press release or story idea.

There is absolutely no reason why this tool, professional PR, cannot be used by people wanting to promote HE. All it takes is some money and the will to do it. I have often asked HE people if they would pay a small amount of money after the enacting of some bad legislation restricting Home Education in the UK to reverse it, and the universal reply is ‘yes’. What these people need to understand is that it is better to spend that money in advance of such an attack to prevent that legislation being drafted in the first place. I don’t think £20 a year is too much to pay towards making bad legislation an remote possibility, and something of that order spread between 1000 families would more than do the job.

As HE grows in the UK, the government will feel obliged to step in and control it. They do not like anything to be outside of their influence, and something as fundamental to the national character as education will not go unregulated if a large percentage of the children of the UK begin to home educate. It is therefore imperative that the awareness and perception about HE is steered by the people who are practicing it, and not the people who are pathologically hostile to it.

The proportion of HE families vs schooling in the UK is relatively huge, and the law in the UK very liberal compared to some of the other countries in this list:

Australia

Bulgaria

Cambodia

China

Dominican Republic

Guatemala

France

Hong Kong

Hungary

Indonesia

Kenya

Malaysia

Netherlands

Poland

Singapore

South Africa

Thailand

Ukraine

Bahamas

Brazil

Canada

Chile

Czech Republic

Germany

Ireland

Israel

Japan

Lithuania

Macau

Mexico

New Zealand

Philippines

Romania

South Korea

Switzerland

Taiwan

United Kingdom

Germany and Brazil stand out immediately as countries where HE is banned outright.

Your rights in the UK are precious and need to be cherished and defended. You should not take it for granted that you have these rights, and you should work to preserve them using all the tools available to you.

When the consultation document is published, if it the complete opposite of what you require, what are you going to do to undo it? Only a few people have submitted their opinions out of the many tens of thousands of parents that are out there; what would you pay to undo the bad things that are on the horizon?

That is what you need to ask yourself.

The offences admitted to would be subject to various penalties
More than six out of 10 people regularly commit crimes against the government, their employers or businesses, research suggests.

Keele University researchers said it showed petty crime was rife among the middle classes and exposed the “law-abiding majority” to be a myth.

Their poll of 1,807 people in England and Wales found 61% had committed one of a series of offences.

They included paying “cash in hand” to avoid VAT and stealing items from work.

The study found that around one-third of those questioned (34%) paid “cash in hand” to avoid taxation and about one in five (18%) had taken something, such as stationery, from work.

Other findings included:

• One in 11 had wrongly used identification for their own gain
• 7% of those questioned had padded out an insurance claim to get more money
• One in 10 (11%) avoided paying their television licence
• A total of 8% did not disclose faulty goods in second-hand sales
• And 6% asked a friend in a bureaucratic job to bend the rules

Of those who admitted to an offence, nearly two-thirds (62%) had broken the law on up to three occasions and 10% admitted to nine or more offences.

The study’s author, Professor Suzanna Karstedt, said: “Contempt for the law is as widespread in the centre of society as it is assumed to be rampant at the margins and among specific marginal groups.

“Anti-social behaviour by the few is mirrored by anti-civil behaviour by the many.

“Neither greed nor need can explain why respectable citizens cheat on insurance claims or in second-hand sales, and do not hesitate to discuss their exploits with friends in pubs.”

The study, of people aged 25 to 65, was published by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King’s College, London.

[…]

So says BBQ

The truth of the matter is that people in the UK understand that they are being screwed. If everything was fair, no one would bother paying cash just to save VAT, but they do so, wherever and whenever they can because they feel in the marrow of their bones that they are being cheated at every turn.

Those that can, escape. Those that cannot, take every opportunity to get back at the system that treats them like property.

And if you think it’s bad now, just you wait.

The straightjacket that is the Quantized Human Pleb Grid will so incense and outrage the souls of the British that the stored rage pent up for decades will eventually explode into rioting and mass destruction, of a type never before seen in this fair land.

The British are not stupid. They know what is being done to them. They also know that patience is a virtue, and that they ultimately have the power to change everything should they see fit to do so.

This report explicitly states what everyone has known privately for ages; the law is totally discredited, and it is ignored where and when the public sees fit to ignore it, and the majority of people only obey the laws that they think are reasonable. Everything else is simply shrugged off or actively broken, like the hunters, who have carried on doing what they have done for generations.

The question is, will this country reach a tipping point, where everything bad is ignored. Will everyone simply stop responding to traffic camera bills for example? What could anyone possibly do if everyone just stopped paying attention to that grossly unfair money making scam of a system? The answer is that the only thing they could do is dismantle it. This would not be a reaction caused by any submission to the will of the electorate (as they would no doubt spin it) but it would be instead, an act of staving off, of preventing a rapid spread of general disorder.

I had a chat with a seventy seven year old Englishman, who during our talk rattled off every single righteous complaint about Bliar and Murder inc., incandescent with rage as he spelled it out perfectly. This man was not in any way radicalized, or ‘up on his internets’ or in any way one of the usual suspects. He is pensioner, and a gentle soul, and he represents the sort of mild mannered, tolerant, reasonable Englishman who has had enough. When he spontaneously started to lay into Bliar and the Murder Cabal, and I felt is seething rage, I immediately had the impression that it was possible for everything to change.

This conversation was triggered by the EU Constitution and its shoehorning by the venal anti-democratic and brazen leaders, who, not having gained the consent of the population, are simply going to do it anyway, via a treaty.

That they believe they can get away with this, and that they have done this at all shows that they are not fit people, and that they and their experiment really has no legitimacy. The Italians have much to teach us about how to live in a stifling bureaucracy, and it seems the British are moving into that framework. It is much better however to live without having to lie and hate all the time. It degrades your spirit, and makes people less human.

Now that YouTube has money behind it, Google can expect legal action from a whole bunch of people… some of it justified.

That was truly insightful, at least for me.

Google’s core business model revolves around “fair use” and similar provisions of copyright law. I think they are most vulnerable in this area– look at Belgium. So Google needed to buy YouTube for a couple of reasons related to this.

The first is because YouTube’s business model also revolves around many of the same “fair use” provisions, and if YouTube loses its upcoming court cases, the fallout could fatally poison Google’s business model. It would be very hard for Google to immunize itself from any judgments against YouTube that changed the interpretation of copyright law. Purchasing YouTube allows Google to directly counter such an attack with all its resources. It also decreases the likelihood of such an attack, since all the ambulance chasers who were smacking their lips in anticipation of an easy meal from YouTube’s carcass are now slinking away, looking for easier prey that won’t be able to fend them off for years with delaying tactics.

The other reason that occurs to me is that the most important part of strategizing any conflict is choosing your battlefield carefully. Google is under constant threat of serious litigation over copyright concerns. Google has just bought a battlefield where these litigations can be played out, that is comfortably distant from the fields of green where Googles’ cash cows graze.

I expect that Google is developing the muscles it needs to directly influence copyright legislation, and I expect it is also going to be increasingly influential in copyright litigation as well (intervening with friend of the court briefs, etc). This all seems to be part of Google’s mission statement: [google.com] “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

[…]

Scribd

A Swedish couple has run into trouble with authorities for trying to name their baby Metallica.

Michael and Karolina Tomaro are locked in a court battle with the country’s National Tax Authority about naming their daughter after the rock band.

The six-month-old has been baptised Metallica, but tax officials have dubbed the name “inappropriate”.

Under Swedish law, both first names and surnames need to win the approval of authorities before they can be used.

Offensive, unsuitable or inappropriate names, as well as those that could “cause discomfort for the one using it” cannot be used.

Last month, Goteburg’s County Administrative Court ruled there was no reason to block the name, adding that a Swedish woman already has the middle name Metallica.

Name battle

However, the Tomaro family ran into trouble when they tried to register the name with tax authorities before applying for a passport.

Tax officials objected to the decision, sending the case to a higher court.

“We’ve had to cancel trips and can’t get anywhere because we can’t get her a passport without an approved name,” said Mrs Tomaro.

Baby Metallica is not the first Swedish child to fall foul of Swedish name laws – the names Ikea and Veranda have also been rejected in the past.

The name Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116 – pronounced Albin – was also rejected by authorities in 1996. The boy’s parents had chosen the name as a protest against Swedish naming laws.

But, the name Google managed to pass muster in 2005, when Oliver Google Kai was named by his parents, search engine expert Kelias Kai and his wife Carol.

BBQ

Well, what can we say about this? ‘Sucks to live in Sweden’.

I wonder what the reaction would be if my blog title was the actual title of the story…probably nothing, since it appears that anything is now acceptable as long as it comes from the state.

In many cultures, names are not just ways to identify a person. They have power, literal power, in some cultures, in others they are used to identify the place of the child in the family, and in yet others, they are used to honor the ancestors. For whatever reason you name your child, in a free country, you can name your child whatever you like; it is your child and not the property of the state.

That is why you have people named Zowie Bowie, Fifi Trixibelle, Peaches, and anything else that you can imagine, and some things you cannot.

It is clear that naming a child ‘Metallica’ will do no damage to the child, but this is not the point. The parents of that child have the right to name him or her whatever they want. The state is a servant who should merely write down the child’s name and then that is it.

Heaven knows what other nonsense the poor Swedes have to put up with; one thing that I do know about is the absurd state of alcohol laws in Sweden:

In order to limit the consumption of alcohol and reduce alcohol related harm, Sweden has adopted the ’alkohollag’ which rules on all aspects of production and trade of alcohol. Within this framework, Sweden has established a retailer monopoly. Products that are not displayed in the shops can be requested by the consumer. If the products are from other countries, the import taxes must be paid by the client. Up to 2005, the monopoly could refuse to import alcohol. This provision has been removed from the law since then.

In other words, individuals do not have the right to import alcohol by themselves, unless it is restricted to their personal consumption.

The case is based on request from Mr Rosengren who tried to import Spanish wines without a licence. He ordered Spanish wines through a Danish website as well as directly in Spain therefore bypassing the national alcohol monopoly.

[…]

The Google

Crazy isn’t it? And why do they put up with any of it?

Just what kind of people are these?

The latest Conservative Party proposals about policing have hit the news, they purport to be about decentralistaion and cutting bureaucracy (as you’d expect). Let’s rummage around.

Police authorities would be replaced by directly-elected commissioners who would take control of budgets, target setting and policing plans, leaving chief constables in “operational control” only of their force.

Failing police chiefs should be removed but replacement by election seems unwarrented, the role of the police is to uphold the law impartially (for better or worse, this is the case), therefore the efficacy of a police chief is primarily a matter of professional ability rather than policy (this being limited to how to prioritise resources) – it would seem that professional interview would be more effective than election. Additionally elections are unnecessarily costly with the need to fund the losing candidates, they also distract from the upholding of law and refocus upon populist agendas.

Under the Tory proposals, residents would get a “right to policing”, including cash to tackle local crime and safety issues by “hiring” a police officer or buying equipment.

A community has an absolute “right to policing”, in terms of ‘rights’ any group of people has the ‘right’ to employ anyone else to enforce any contract between themselves – including what they deem to be ‘the law’, as long as ‘the law’ is accepted by guests within the group or visitors upon its private properties (i.e. by the clear posting of bye-laws) then it can be further applied to these people too.
Back to the real situation, the impartiality of a police officer acting ‘for’ a certain community is compromised and may reduce the validity of their evidence in court.

And forces would also face tougher scrutiny from a new independent watchdog to look at value for money as well as standards.

Independent scrutiny is important but only worthwhile if it informs local decision making

It calls for more graduates to be recruited as well as professionals from outside the force, a new military-style senior staff college and a revamped promotion system.

Military-style in relation to the police seems un-British and makes me distinctly uneasy. In any case senior police officers need experience of day-to-day policing and combined with elections for commissioners you could be left with ‘career officers’ in charge of delivery with no real experience of community wishes (much like the UK Government)

More work should be handed over to civilian staff and private firms in a bid to allow officers more time on the beat, it says, to the point of paying commercial security firms to guard crime scenes, hunt down people who jump bail, monitor “at risk” prisoners and carry out security checks.

As I wrote, in theory there is no problem with private firms upholding private contracts, however these proposals will give private companies jurisdiction over third parties, i.e. ‘society’ as a whole which, in the UK, has not explicitly consented to anything.
Additionally in the light of NIR and the police DNA database these private companies will presumably have easy access to the personal details of many innocent persons.

Bits from the guardian

Instead of fiddling with the police service and presumably turning it into a political tinker toy as the NHS has become all political parties should be looking at removing unecessary laws and politically motivated knee-jerk regulations which the police are compelled to implement, they should be removing all apects of politicisation from the police so it reverts to being a simple public service.

Checks will be made on all children to identify potential criminals under a further extension of the “surveillance state” announced by Tony Blair today.

‘potential criminals’ actually means people who haven’t committed a crime, in a law court this would mean presumption of innocence, so why not on the street?

A Downing Street review of law and order policy also called for greater use of sophisticated CCTV, an expanded DNA database and “instant justice” powers for police.

‘Instant justice’ is an invitation to lowest common denominator policing and is easily abused and a hassle for those charged to resolve. We know about the inefficiencies of CCTV and the evils of (the police) DNA databases.

The review is intended to chart a course ahead for the next 10 years by focusing more “on the offender, not the offence.”

Most crime is committed by a small number of prolific offenders who could be identified almost from birth, ministers believe. After 10 years concentrating on tougher sentences, the review paper said it wanted to tackle the “underlying causes..through better targetting.”

Ministers can believe what they want but to impose their spurious beliefs on innocent people and their families is unjust and should not be tolerated. Surprisingly for a ‘social-democratic’ government this notion implies that education of these ‘future offenders’ is in effect worthless in terms of sociability and ‘morality’. 10 years of failure is also implied, why should anyone consider these fools to come up with the right answer now?

Vulnerable children and those at risk will be identified by “trigger” factors such as parents in jail or on drugs. They will be subject to personalised measures, including home visits from specialist practitioners. But the Government says the net should be cast as widely as possible “to prevent criminality developing.”

This means if any of your relatives are in jail or live in certain areas your children will probably be ‘loosely monitored’ in case they pick up any nasty habits which they may have missed picking up through their genes [HA!]

It proposes to “establish universal checks throughout a child’s development to help service providers to identify those most at risk of offending.” The document added: “These checks should piggyback on existing contact points such as the transition to secondary schools.”

This means constant monitoring at school, probably without informing or asking consent of parents. FWIW Home-schooled children probably will have a big fat black mark on their file anyway.

The plan will be beacked up by a new database for all children due to be up and running by 2008. It will contain basic information identifying the child and its parents and will have a “facility for practitioners to indicate to others that they have information to share, are taking action, or have undertaken an assessment, in relation to a child.”

Hmm 2008 sounds sounds suspiciously close to the NIR implementation.
‘child AND parents’ so everyone with a child will be databased too, I imagine this will be via the school asking children to fill in forms about their parents.
‘facility to share’ means minimal Data Protection regulations

New child checks to identify future criminals

By Philip Johnston, Home Affairs Editor
Last Updated: 1:38am BST 28/03/2007

# The main proposals

Checks will be made on all children to identify potential criminals under a further extension of the “surveillance state” announced by Tony Blair today.

A Prison Officer, Tony Blair will today stage a dramatic U-turn on Labour’s crime policy by conceding that too many offenders have been sent to jail since he took office 10 years ago
Mr Blair began his premiership promising to be tough on crime

A Downing Street review of law and order policy also called for greater use of sophisticated CCTV, an expanded DNA database and “instant justice” powers for police.

The review is intended to chart a course ahead for the next 10 years by focusing more “on the offender, not the offence.”

Most crime is committed by a small number of prolific offenders who could be identified almost from birth, ministers believe. After 10 years concentrating on tougher sentences, the review paper said it wanted to tackle the “underlying causes..through better targetting.”

Vulnerable children and those at risk will be identified by “trigger” factors such as parents in jail or on drugs. They will be subject to personalised measures, including home visits from specialist practitioners. But the Government says the net should be cast as widely as possible “to prevent criminality developing.”
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It proposes to “establish universal checks throughout a child’s development to help service providers to identify those most at risk of offending.” The document added: “These checks should piggyback on existing contact points such as the transition to secondary schools.”

The plan will be beacked up by a new database for all children due to be up and running by 2008. It will contain basic information identifying the child and its parents and will have a “facility for practitioners to indicate to others that they have information to share, are taking action, or have undertaken an assessment, in relation to a child.”

The database was ostensibly proposed to prevent another tragic death such as that of Victoria Climbie but now appears to be the basis for cradle-to-adult monitoring. It is not clear when data will be erased from the database.

Good old function creep/salamitactik, unless there is a serious effort by the peple who topple Neu Labour to dismantle these databases the data is unlikely to be erased for the simple reason it takes more effort to do so than to leave the audit trail ‘intact’.

The Government believes children can be prevented from becoming offenders if early intervention is targeted at those who displayed certain behaviours. These include having a short attention span or behaving aggressively or living in a difficult or deprived environment.

It does not believe this or educational or other measures which assist rather than stigmatise would have been put in place to rescue these children from their ‘original sin’.

Some children who show signs of becoming criminals are logged and monitored by dozens of early interventions schemes. Those aged 8-13 may be referred to a Youth Inclusion and Support Panel if they are thought to be potential offenders and data about them is held on an information system.

This will simply devalue the role of parental responsibility in the eyes of the children. It will foster a mentality that in the end the State rather than ‘people’ will intervene. It will devalue respect for other people and short circuit community responsibilities.

[…]

Telegraph

Yet another catch all scheme that will be ineffective, expensive and impose on everybody innocent or not at the same time as destroying liberty, respect and imposing conformity.

From a Home Schooling mailing list comes this astonishing story:

We have just returned from a weekend away. At Liverpool Street station on Thursday (when we left) we were approached by a truancy officer together with a helmeted uniformed officer. There were also two other uniformed officers stood behind at close-ish range.

They asked us if we were on holiday and if we had permission for Reuben to be out of school. I explained that we were home educating and that we were on holiday. They had no problem with this but asked us to fill out a rather lengthy form which they would then send to check us out with the local authority. I explained that we were not known to our local authority as this was not a legal requirement. They said this wouldn’t be a problem. The LA would just check that we were not ‘out’ of one of their schools.

The details of the form were as follows:

Child’s name
Address
Local authority
Date of birth
Telephone number
Date child last attended school
If child was excluded – date of exclusion
Whether child was with parent
Reason for being out of school
Name and address of parent
Ethnicity

There may have been a few other things that I can’t remember.

I was unsure about filling in these details. I had hoped to remain unknown to the LA for at least a while longer.

In the event, our train left in 10 minutes, so we filled it in to avoid hold-ups.

Has anyone else been approached like this? Is there a formal response that I should have been aware of? Do you think that the LA will put us on their register now? Or perhaps, as Ian thinks, it will be lost in a mountain of paperwork and never touched again.

I will let you all know if we are contacted for an inspection, as this would be the only route to it as far as I know.

There is no way that people in this country know that this is going on, because if they did, they would surely be outraged. Parents are responsible for their children. If a child is with its parents, by definition the child is not a truant, because truancy means absent without leave from school:

n. pl. tru·an·cies
The act or condition of being absent without permission.
Dictionary.com

Not only were these children not truant because they were accompanied by their parents, but there were a total of four salaried people there to intercept them. Four people who were wasting their time questioning parents about on their own business in their own country.

Great Britain has gone totally MAD.

The most worrying thing about this is that this person stated that there was no legal requirement to fill this form, but filled it anyway instead of saying point blank that she would not comply.

This is the greatest problem that we face; any government can enact legislation; the thing that gives it force is obedience. If the home schooling community of the UK will not stand up for its rights, then it will have no rights.

And that is a fact.

By Peter Sayer, IDG News Service

The French Constitutional Council has approved a law that criminalizes the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. The law could lead to the imprisonment of eyewitnesses who film acts of police violence, or operators of Web sites publishing the images, one French civil liberties group warned on Tuesday.

The council chose an unfortunate anniversary to publish its decision approving the law, which came exactly 16 years after Los Angeles police officers beating Rodney King were filmed by amateur videographer George Holliday on the night of March 3, 1991. The officers’ acquittal at the end on April 29, 1992 sparked riots in Los Angeles.

Dear oh dear; France is not in the USA you simpleton. They have their own problems, their own anniversaire mauvaise; why on earth do you think that Rodney ‘cant we all jus get along’ King has anything whatsoever to do with FRANCE.

If Holliday were to film a similar scene of violence in France today, he could end up in prison as a result of the new law, said Pascal Cohet, a spokesman for French online civil liberties group Odebi. And anyone publishing such images could face up to five years in prison and a fine of €75,000 (US$98,537), potentially a harsher sentence than that for committing the violent act.

There you are. I found one for you and linked it for you. No need for a bogus transcontinental Rodney King anniversary after all.

Senators and members of the National Assembly had asked the council to rule on the constitutionality of six articles of the Law relating to the prevention of delinquency. The articles dealt with information sharing by social workers, and reduced sentences for minors. The council recommended one minor change, to reconcile conflicting amendments voted in parliament. The law, proposed by Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy, is intended to clamp down on a wide range of public order offenses. During parliamentary debate of the law, government representatives said the offense of filming or distributing films of acts of violence targets the practice of “happy slapping,” in which a violent attack is filmed by an accomplice, typically with a camera phone, for the amusement of the attacker’s friends.

‘happy slapping’… a British Invention I believe.

The broad drafting of the law so as to criminalize the activities of citizen journalists unrelated to the perpetrators of violent acts is no accident, but rather a deliberate decision by the authorities, said Cohet. He is concerned that the law, and others still being debated, will lead to the creation of a parallel judicial system controlling the publication of information on the Internet.

The government has also proposed a certification system for Web sites, blog hosters, mobile-phone operators and Internet service providers, identifying them as government-approved sources of information if they adhere to certain rules. The journalists’ organization Reporters Without Borders, which campaigns for a free press, has warned that such a system could lead to excessive self censorship as organizations worried about losing their certification suppress certain stories.

Well.

France has a long history of getting the internets wrong. They banned 128bit crypto, and then reversed its policy when someone pointed out to them that it was the basis of all e-commerce.

There are lots of other stuff too. Google it. France is not perfect. No country is. But I can tell you right now that France, and in particular Paris as a place that welcomes people and that is human in its feeling is about ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND TIMES SUPERIOR to anywhere in the us or the uk.

I am loath to take the side of Paris bureau chief Peter Sayer who Reports on ‘Services; Enterprise hardware; Apple’ when it comes to pointing the finger at a country for passing repressive laws. Interesting; Sayer is in Paris, but cant find an example of french police repression being filmed. hmmmm anyway, I have no idea wether this guy is an american or not. If he is, he should STFU about france and go drink a tizane. He is in one of the most beautiful cities on earth, in a country that is one of the last decent places in the west. Concentrate on your own myriad problems.

In any case, as we have seen, France can change its mind for the good. They will do it, so lay off Bon à Rien american!

There are 2.1 million families in the USA who home school. They sometimes come under attack from simpletons and busy bodies who report them anonymously to the authorities. Clearly, a massive educational campaign on what home schooling is needs to be mounted, so that everyone everywhere understands that not only is it harmless, but that it is superior to sending your child to a school.

Read this account of how a home schooling family was falsely accused, and how they stood up for their rights. Sadly in a country like Germany or the UK where there is no constitution at all, you have no rights.

Social Worker Applauds Family for Standing on Constitutional Rights!

In our 24 years of dealing with social workers and anonymous tips, we’ve found it is extremely rare a social worker ever recognizes or seeks to protect a family’s rights. Well, one HSLDA member family recently investigated for false allegations had a happy ending!

The Hayes family from Lapeer, Michigan, was surprised to find themselves under investigation for child abuse. A social worker came to their door, asked if they were homeschooling and was told there were allegations against them that they were “isolating” and “not taking care of their children.”

Although the family was indeed homeschooling, the allegations of abuse were completely false.

The Hayes called the Home School Legal Defense Association and spoke with Senior Counsel Chris Klicka. Klicka told the family about the importance of standing up for their constitutional rights and recommended they have people in the community send reference letters to the social worker. Klicka then explained to the social worker their Fourth Amendment rights in a follow-up letter.

Based on this information, the Hayes did a wonderful job of showing social worker that they were not hiding anything by refusing entrance to their home, but were merely exercising their constitutionally guaranteed rights.

Although the Hayes had been told by relatives who are social workers that they should just do whatever the social worker wanted or they would think they were guilty, the Hayes took the advice of Klicka. They firmly but politely told the social worker that when they talked with her it would be outside of their home.

The social worker was at first leery of this unusual insistence, but soon realized that the family was just exercising their constitutional right to be secure in their home and free from unreasonable searches. By taking Klicka’s advice and politely standing on their rights, the family was able to talk with the social worker and have the investigation completed right then on their doorstep—without the earlier demand to interview their children!

HSLDA Social Services Contact Policy

We desire to assist and advise our members in every contact with a social worker and/or police officer in the investigation resulting from allegations of abuse or neglect. If homeschooling is an issue, we will represent our member families until the issue is resolved. On Fourth Amendment unreasonable search and seizure issues, HSLDA will assist and advise our members whenever the privacy of their home is violated by forced or coerced entry for the purpose of an unsubstantiated investigation. HSLDA membership benefits do not extend to court actions resulting from non-homeschooling matters. However, in circumstances where there is a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment, HSLDA may, as we have done in the past, choose to take the case in an effort to establish legal precedent.

[…]

http://www.hslda.org/hs/state/mi/200703020.asp

And there you have it. In a country with a properly written constitution you can point to clearly defined rights beyond which the state cannot go. Any agent of the state has to show probable cause to enter your house; they cannot just show up and then demand to enter your house because some anonymous caller said, “bad guys live there”. This is essential to the rights of man, and a properly written constitution protects everyone so that they do not have to fight every day of their lives for their natural rights, like the poor suckers in the UK do.

This is why it is such a terrible tragedy that the constitution is being dismantled in the USA…but I digress. Home schoolers in the UK need to be aware that it is their right to educate their children in whatever way they wish. This is not a matter of the efficiency or inefficiency of the state school system, but rather one of your fundamental rights as a human being. Your children are not the property of the state. They are your responsibility. The state has no right to impart its philosophies onto your children. They have no right to indoctrinate them. They have no right to specify what you should or should be teaching as a home schooler. They have no right to inspect you. They have no right to compel you to register as a home schooler. If they try and do any of the above, they are essentially turning you and your children into property.

Their property.

I doubt very much wether the DfES would order that Islamic schools should teach that all religions are equal (for example). And this is another factor of this intrusion. First they will set the precedent with home schoolers that the state has the right to set the curriculum for all children. Then they will go after the schools that do not follow the national curriculum and compel them to do so. There are several schools in the UK which are philosophy based and which do not follow the national curriculum; if the goal of this totalitarian government is to create a uniform population, then these schools must be made to conform or be closed down.

This sinister, and purely evil policy must be disobeyed by all. That much is clear. What is also clear is that we need to mount an information war against this emerging policy. It would also be a good idea to set up a toothed organization like this one that actually has the power to protect its members from abuse:

Superintendent Demands Homeschoolers Register

The George* family recently started homeschooling. However, right after they began their homeschool program, Mrs. George received a phone call from the district’s regional superintendent. The superintendent informed Mrs. George that he needed to meet with her and Mr. George so that the family could show him their curriculum, assignments from their son, as well as any tests that they gave to him. The superintendent indicated that he must meet with them in order to verify that the Georges were, in fact, giving their son a quality education.

Mr. and Mrs. George’s homeschool program fulfills all requirements of Illinois law, and thus is a legal private school program. As the administrators of their private school, the parents are qualified to verify the student’s educational status. Nowhere in the law does it state that the superintendent has the right to demand to meet the administrators of a private school or to see the curriculum, assignments, and tests of a private school.

When HSLDA was informed of the superintendent’s demands, HSLDA’s Senior Counsel Chris Klicka immediately sent a letter to the superintendent explaining that Illinois law does not give him any legal right to take responsibility for a homeschool family.

The family has not been bothered further by the school district.

* Name changed to protect family’s privacy.

My emphasis.

It seems like the ‘George’ family have had to jump through some hoops to protect their rights, but they are able to do so, and when they came under attack, there was someone there upon who they could call to vigorously defend their rights, and put pay to the interfering tomfoolery of the state.

If the British Home Schoolers do not wake up and start to get angry, they will be steamrollered and their children made into property.

This is absolutely hilarious!

Makes you think that the hip, young advisors at the Home Office are suggesting  these things to Dr Reid just to make him look like the idiotic, out of touch dinosaur we all know and abhor.

The BBQ ‘expert’ speaks…

“He said the government’s move was a step in the right direction and the industry would co-operate – but opportunities would arise for organisations to market “premium” – allegedly untraceable – e-mail accounts.

If everyone had a single internet identity for life, like a National Insurance number, this would make it far easier to track people, he said.” Mwah hahahahahahaha!!! PMSL.

The UK Statute Law Database

The UK Statute Law Database (SLD) is the official revised edition of the primary legislation of the United Kingdom made available online. For more information about SLD and what it contains see Help

Statute Law Database

I remember reading a post on Blogdial maybe two years ago to the effect of this, putting all laws online for the public to see. This database has been online since late December and it’s a good START… and as much as they trumpet its success, there is still a problem:

Where’s the interaction?

Where’s the Wiki? Why can’t I add comments? How come we can’t vote on the laws in a digg-like fashion? Why aren’t challenges to the laws posted? Because none of this is any good when a list of many of the horrible laws that are in effect cannot be questioned and challenged within the powerful internet forum – does the gov’t think the public is just going to say “oh it’s really powerful to be able to look at my laws! Now I really now how to be good!” People want INTERACTION and EFFECT. Not just a list.
So while it’s nice that all the statutes are linked together, and are updated to reflect not-yet-enacted legislation, replete with amendments… without the “citizen-input” this program is incomplete. Nice though, to see a non-commercial copyright use program. Though I fail to see why commercial reproduction of the laws requires licensing… though that’s something I don’t quite have the time to fully look at.
I still have in my mind an idea for a citizen-made public wiki-type thing for all the laws in Canada… if only I had the capital and the programming chops. Maybe one day!

Greetings from Edmonton, in the middle of the first blizzard of the year. Stay warm, peeps.

On the seventh floor of a tan, rectangular block building in Norwalk, Calif., behind a locked door, sit rows of cubicles—each one supplied with a PC, a phone that makes voice calls over the Internet, and double flat-panel monitors. In a few cubicles, analysts work intently on the computers. In the others, idle monitors display a silver ring encircling an American flag and a bald eagle flying out of a bell-shaped speaker. Images pour into the room—from a bank of six flat-screen TVs suspended from the ceiling that are tuned to Al Jazeera and five other newscasts; and from the smart boards, giant electronic whiteboards that hang around the walls beneath computers fixed with projectors. They flash air traffic updates, maps of the Los Angeles area, a picture of the Statue of Liberty.
ADVERTISEMENT

Since Sept. 11, the government has been trying to collect and share information across geographical and political boundaries to prevent another terrorist attack. This place—the Joint Regional Intelligence Center (JRIC), near Los Angeles—is the latest plan.

[…]

Now there’s the Joint Regional Intelligence Center, an idea that started in the LAPD’s anti-terrorism unit and won backing from the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department and the FBI before it was adopted by other agencies in the region. It’s taken more than three years to plan and launch. Ultimately, it is supposed to connect agencies across seven Southern California counties—fire departments, public health agencies, port police, airport police and many others—with international law enforcement agencies and local companies, like Disney, that oversee potential targets or important pieces of local infrastructure.

Analysts who work in the center think it’s an idea whose time has arrived.

Information technology has advanced since 2001, and the center benefits from that. Newer standards like Global Justice XML, which creates a common language for justice and public safety data; and service-oriented architecture, which exposes that data across different computer systems, make it faster and easier for agencies to share information. Right now, the chief software at the center—Memex, made by Glasgow, Scotland-based Memex Technology—is based on these standards.

[…]

In the end, the FBI helped build the center because the federal government had the specifications and knew what to do, Salas explains. The sheriff’s department contributed desks, PCs and telephones, and the LAPD (which is also using Memex) provided information-sharing technology, including software and TVs.

Today, center workers use a variety of analytical tools—Google Earth, ESRI’s ArcView GIS software, and Microsoft SQL, among others—to sift through information.

[…]

At A Glance: JRIC
Headquarters: 12440 E. Imperial Highway, Norwalk, CA 90650
Business: Establish networks and policies for sharing information across agencies in the seven-county Los Angeles area to improve public safety and thwart terrorist attacks.
Technology Chief: Mario Cruz, project manager
Financials: $2 million contribution each from the Los Angeles Police Department, Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and the FBI, plus contributions from the state of California and the Department of Homeland Security.

[…]

Baseline Mag

Combine this with the new dictatorial powers of Lord Bush, and you have a system that is very difficult to resist, should the people who run these systems not understand that: “DICTATORSHIP….BAD”.

If REAL_ID and the biometric net are rolled out, they will dovetail seamlessly into this and every other ‘dot-connected’ total surveillance system.

Not surprisingly, this article is uncritical, unthinking and slobbering over the details…the ‘Gee Whiz’ effect. Like standing in awe of a spectacular lightning storm that is about to show its power to you up close and personal.

It seems that there is no free public access to a complete database of all the laws in the UK. The Guardian reported in August 2006 the following:

Shhh – don’t pass it on. It’s the kind of secrecy one might expect for a database of proposed nuclear reactors or plans to go to war. But a database containing the laws of the land? Surely the only way to obey the law is to know what it is in the first place? On August 2, the government rolled out the second stage of a long-delayed project to make the consolidated law of parliament accessible to the people. So how does it look? The public – who paid for the whole project – can’t get a look in. […]

No free public access sites have been granted permission to view the current system and testers of the database – predominantly from commercial legal publishing firms – have been told not to share their login and password. Even so, some testers are not entirely happy with what they’ve found after logging on to the top secret database of our country’s laws. […]

Firstly, an astounding Crown copyright notice greets the reader: “The Statute Law Database and the material on the SLD website are subject to Crown copyright protection. The Crown copyright waiver that applies to published legislation generally does not apply to SLD because it is a value-added product. Any reuse of material from SLD will be the subject of separate and specific licensing arrangements. No such arrangements have yet been entered into. Users should not therefore reproduce or reuse any material from SLD until further guidance is issued.” […]

No matter that the value was added by public officials at taxpayer expense. Small commercial legal publishers and democracy advocates are outraged. “It is appaling that a government feels it should sell the laws it makes to the general public who must obey them,” said developer Francis Irving, who last month won two New Statesman new media awards for his web sites www.writetothem.com (the contribution to civic society award) and www.pledgebank.com (advocacy award). “Because the DCA’s data cannot be reproduced, it makes it impossible for anyone else to compete by providing new and innovative ways of accessing and learning the law.”

Irving had hoped to create a free, user-friendly legal database to rival his previous successes. As such he filed Freedom of Information Act requests last year asking for the raw data held by the Department for Constitutional Affairs. Instead of thanking Irving for his interest, the DCA denied his request. Matthew Elliot, the chief executive of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, is appalled by the government’s response: “Any information collected by the government at taxpayers’ expense should be freely available to the public. If private organisations are willing to collate information at no expense to the taxpayer, why on earth is the government spending money doing exactly the same thing?” […]

US law is copyright free

This is not how it could, or should, have happened. In the US, where information compiled at public expense by public officials is copyright free, the public has had access to consolidated law for decades. Since 1992, the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University in New York has been the leading online resource for US law and Supreme Court decisions. “The raw material for our United States Code collection is provided us by the law revision counsel’s office in the House of Representatives,” says institute director Thomas R Bruce. “They have actively helped us with the things we publish.”[…]
The Guardian

I was aware that crown copyright exists on documents created by the state; when helping prepare a database of all the schools in the UK we found that none exist for download as a single SQL file, and the companies that compile and rent lists charge one hundred pounds per 1000 entries, for a one time use.

We managed to put together an entire list by hand. The same needs to be done with the law.

Look at this:

© Crown Copyright 2002

Acts of Parliament printed from this website are printed under the superintendence and authority of the Controller of HMSO being the Queen’s Printer of Acts of Parliament.

The legislation contained on this web site is subject to Crown Copyright protection. It may be reproduced free of charge provided that it is reproduced accurately and that the source and copyright status of the material is made evident to users.

It should be noted that the right to reproduce the text of Acts of Parliament does not extend to the Queen’s Printer imprints which should be removed from any copies of the Act which are issued or made available to the public. This includes reproduction of the Act on the Internet and on intranet sites. The Royal Arms may be reproduced only where they are an integral part of the original document. […]

Which is from the Office of Public Sector Information.

it seems that you CAN make available the law free of charge as long as you do not use the Queen’s Printer imprints or Royal Arms. This means that it is doable to make a complete and accurate copy of the entire UK law, to make it available to the public for free, and to do interesting things with it in a Web 2.0 context.

It needs now, to be compiled by hand. It is as simple as that.

If we cannot get a hold of the raw SQL dump of all the laws in the UK we will have to build this database ourselves, by hand, with a front end (a Wikipedia of UK law?) and lots of volunteers. We will license this work under a GPL style license, meaning no copyright on our work (crown copyright will continue to persist), and if you want to use any of our work (the typing out, the SQL dump), what you make must also be made available in an SWL dump.

The Guardian article in typical fashion, does not say how big the law is; how many laws there are, and how long it would take for an army of volunteers to type it all in to a database. It doesn’t quote the copyright statement from the site that the article itself links to. As usual they talk only about ‘the problem’, without describing it in detail, and don’t even attempt to offer a solution, and this is in the Technology section. Same old Guardian!

Now, we have some choices to make. Should be create a wiki of laws that we want removed, or create a wiki of all the laws and then build the Web 2.0 service that is described in this post. Its a chicken and egg problem; how can you create a service to prune bad law when the entire text of the law is not freely and easily available to search and read?

hmmmmmmm!

I just saw this webisite thanks to SpyBlog. It is from the Liberal Democrats who are proposing a ‘Great Repeal Act’ to sweep away unnecessary laws.

“We need a single act to roll back a generation of illiberal legislation and illiberal regulations; a single act to dismantle the apparatus of authoritarianism that has been forced on the nation,” says Nick Clegg.

Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats have identified a list of the top ten laws we don’t need, but you can also submit your suggestions, whether they are for a small piece of annoying detail, laws that have been overtaken by events or laws that were never a good idea.

Now. I know for sure that somewhere on BLOGDIAL I talked about setting up a website where people can enter legislation that they want removed from the statute books and vote on other laws that other people have inserted, but I cannot for the life of me find the post, either in the new or the old BLOGDIAL. A lollipop to the person who finds the text.

Either way, here is the LibDem List:

1. Restrictions on protests in Parliament Square
Sections 132 to 138; Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005

The police can now impose any restrictions they think fit on demonstrations in the vicinity of Parliament Square. Citizens of this country should not have to ask for the right to protest outside the Parliament that they elect.

2. Identity Cards
Identity Cards Act 2006

Identity cards are unworkable, expensive and illiberal. Labour is already spending £95,000 a day on developing the project but it will not stop terrorism, crime, illegal immigration or benefit fraud.

3. Extradition to the US
Part 2, Extradition Act 2003

This act makes it much easier for the US to extradite people from the UK than it is for the UK to extradite people from the US. Not only is the treaty unbalanced, but it means that British citizens can extradited without any evidence being provided.

4. Conditions on public assemblies
Section 57, Clause 123, Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003

Labour has given the police the power to impose conditions on any protest or gathering even if just two people attend. Until 2003, these restrictions could only be imposed on larger gatherings, of 20 people or more. There is no reason to curtail the right to protest in this way.

5. Criminalising trespass
Sections 128 to 131, Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005

Thanks to this part of the act, a Home Secretary can make trespass a criminal offence on any land where they say it is in the interests of national security. This is defined very broadly however – and there is no need for them to justify their decision. If there is a need for restrictions like this they should be agreed democratically.

6. Control orders
Section 1, Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005

These allow restrictions, potentially going as far as house arrest, to be imposed on the mere basis of ‘reasonable suspicion’. They can be made for up to 12 months and renewed indefinitely. The Home Secretary can also decide to opt-out from the European Convention on Human Rights and issue control orders that amount to detention without trial. Liberal Democrats would repeal the law and start again: the Home Secretary should not be allowed to opt out of our human rights agreements, or impose control orders outside the judicial system.

7. DNA retention
Sections 78-84, Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001
Sections 9-10, Criminal Justice Act 2003

The UK has the largest DNA database in the world, but many of those stored on the system have never been charged with, let alone convcited of, a crime. Thousands of innocent children are on the database – because the police have the power to take DNA when they arrest someone and then keep it permanently, even if the person turns out to have done nothing wrong. Ethnic minorities make up 8% of the UK population but 24% od the database. We understand the case for keeping DNA of the convicted, but innocent people’s DNA should not be kept indefinitely.

8. Public interest defence for whistleblowing
Official Secrets Act 1989

It is important that national security is protected, but sometimes it will be the case that it is in the public interest that malpractice or illegal activity is exposed. The Official Secrets Act includes no public interest defence, however – so whistleblowers remain unprotected, even if their action is very much in the public interest. Part of the reason for this was a series of high-profile embarrassments for the Conservative government of the time; ministers’ embarrassment should not be allowed to overrule the public good.

9. Right to silence
Sections 34-39, Public Order Act 1994 – England and Wales

It was a long-established principle of a fair trial that defendants had the right not to be forced to incriminate themselves. In 1994, however, the Conservatives allowed juries to draw adverse inferences from a defendant’s silence. This represented a major attack on the idea of “innocent until proven guilty.”

10. Hearsay evidence
Sections 114-136, Criminal Justice Act 2003

Protections against the use of hearsay evidence were in place to ensure that a trial was decided on the facts of the case. Hearsay evidence cannot in practice be cross-examined in court, which removes a vital safeguard for the accused. Labour, in 2003, widened the circumstances in which it could be used. We would repeal these changes and return to focussing on securing fair trials and reliable convictions.

Applicability: this item refers to the UK. […]

Liberal Democrats

Amazing, the first one is the LEAST OF OUR PROBLEMS, and the most symbolic.

Liberal Democrats have their hearts in the right place (hell, they HAVE a heart unlike the other monsters!) but sadly are as thick as shit…..

Before we fire up Rails, lets add to this list shall we?

• The Maastricht Treaty
• R.I.P.A.
• The Criminal Justice Act of 1994
• All drug classification law that makes ‘drug taking’ illegal
• Parts of the Wireless and Telegraphy Acts
• Computer Misuse Act 1990

Oh dear, there are SO MANY.

To repeat, in case no one finds my original text, you do this list by setting up a website, where the entire legislation of the country is stored. You then invite people to go there and search for law that is bad. They are then presented with some radio buttons and a form to post comment in that is attached not only to the ‘top’ of every law, but to every clause and section of each piece of legislation.

The radio button will give you two choices;’keep’ and ‘discard’. Votes are tallied and we present a REAL top ten THOUSAND of laws that need to be repealed.

The comment boxes are for posting your rationale for any piece of law being kept or discarded.

Its that simple. Some MySQL, Rails (or PHP) and its done. Then we can …. hmmmmm … I might have found it:

What we need to do now is to complete these documents using the above guidelines. We then need to take the next step, which is to prune the existing legislation of the UK, removing all offensive and illiberal laws. We do this by writing down a list of laws that are to be removed from the statutes at the next election on an emergency basis.

We will charge the conservatives with this task since that is the easiest route; should they balk or refuse, we will create our own party with this sole agenda. If we win the same number of votes that Bliar did to gain power, we will consider ourselvs the winners, and then assert our rights. Parliament would be nullified and our new government put in place by default; a government created by the electorate and obedient only to the electorate. […]

BLOGDIAL

Which takes care of the ‘Liberal Democrats will never win an election’ problem.

While I’m at it, the LibDems want to remove ID cards, but they want you to pay a LOCAL INCOME TAX to replace your rates, which means that every council has to get into your private stuff; another layer of mass intrusion. Like I said, they are not very smart people. BUT they seem to be getting smarter…by definition, anyone that moves towards the BLOGDIAL position is smarter.

But you know this!

UPDATE

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

America Freedom To Fascism

There are many great documentaries out there today. We are finally seeing the critical mass of both near zero cost distribution and  super cheap filming and editing equipment coming together in a runaway chain reactoin of information that is literally changing the world before our eyes.

Now all we need is the next element to go critical; the mass refusal of the population to engage with the global insanity that has gripped this world. A world-wide chain reaction of non cooperation with the nonsense, warmongering, waste and unrefined sleaze that makes all of our lives less pleasant than they should be.