Thank heaven, Jultra is back, with his usual, beautiful and inspiring English:

[…]
Let’s just quickly look at this: Blair’s recent attack effectively on blogs like this. I guess that means we have won the arguments then.

The speech contains the usual obvious soundbytes to set the tone like ‘changing context’ and ’21st century’ (see this) and so on.

Although Blair starts with the mainstream media, naturally, none of this is aimed at the BBC, or the Daily Mail, or the ‘Independent’ (who Blair duplicitously pretends to complain about) all of whom by far on balance, carry out the will of the same consituency Blair represents pretty much most of the time.

The mainstream media is either so utterly impotent or so totally complicit that it poses no threat at all and can usually be relied upon to comformatably blindly report spin from the government as news or fudge the issues of the day into crap like ‘Germans put bugs in our wheelie bins’. It can be relied upon to be pro ID-cards (BBC), pro CCTV (BBC), pro European world government (BBC) and so on, pro ‘War on Terror’ (Telegraph, BBC) etc. It can’t quite be too overtly pro- Iraq war these days, although privately, with the exception of ITN and perhaps one or 2 other outlets, the integrity of the MSM’s ‘anti-warness’ has to be questioned.

So this whole stream of waffle by Blair is aimed squarely at the alternative media, and what Blair is trying to do is blame everyone else for the correctly appalled response to his vile crimes, the crimes of his party and supporters and backers.
Blair says:

“The damage saps the country’s confidence and self-belief; it undermines its assessment of itself, its institutions; and above all, it reduces our capacity to take the right decisions, in the right spirit for our future.”

Sure, so you can get a nice compliant green light to drop bombs on Iran ? So you can get guillable British citizens to line up to join the quantized human pleb grid. So no one questions what happens when a ‘terrorist event’ occurs and all dotingly rally behind the government and start worshipping it again ?

But it is the country, not some nebulous desirable ‘relationship between media and public life’ that is wholly damaged, and it is Blair and his vile supporters that have willfully and with enormous and giddy glee caused that damage to the country and to its institutions. None of that is an accident, or some misunderstanding, on the contrary it’s all quite deliberate.

[…]

And the only remedy for this terrible damage is in the alternative media, not in the ghoulish grotesque ambition of the stained Gordon Brown ever sweatily fumbling for power and trying to distance himself from the attrocities in Iraq when it is politically expedient to do so, or the outgoing speeches of a vile disgraced sociopath like Blair, or the hopeless projection of worthless ideas from various pro-regime Guardian columnists onto the rotting goverment.

The country is badly badly damaged as I’ve said here for a long time now, there’s no point arguing about it, or denying it. It’s just the reality, and a dangerously reality where it is becoming altogether undesirable to live here at all or even be associated with this country.

It is a really serious situation. The rule of law is badly damaged, the meaning of the state is enormously damaged, and the governement is irrepairrably damaged because of its own horrendous actions and it is so seriously compromised as an entity now, that quite honestly it is difficult to see what point there is in contributing to this mess anymore.

It should come as no surprise that such a rotting demonic monster, this conduit of global evil Mr Blair (with the approval of Mr Murdoch and buddies) instead still has the sheer audacity to try to spin it all around and blame everyone else for his own sickening behaviour and crimes against the world and this country. And again this should serve as an another reminder of why Blair is either so corrupted personally by forces acting on him, or who’s own judgement is so monstrously flawed and distorted that he is basically incapable of making a judgement at all.

[…]

Jultra

Without people like Jultra writing, linking and thus informing, all is lost.

This very article demonstrates how important people like Jultra are, and how much of a real threat Bloggers are.

It also demonstrates how important it is to keep up regular posting, and to not become disheartened, fatigued or disillusioned. It is hard work. It takes up your time. It puts you at risk because these words will last forever. Despite all of this, it needs to be done, if only to be able to say, “I didn’t sit there quietly and take it”.

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

“This blog does not allow anonymous comments.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But there is much worse about these people….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

Similarly, Joining Liberty will achieve absolutely nothing at all.

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

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

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

But you know this!

We read in today’s Guardian that (the) UK housing market has reached (a) tipping point.

There is a much more interesting tipping point that has been reached however.

This Blog, BLOGDIAL, as well as many other blogs (some of which are in our blogroll) have reached a tipping point; any time you read a story like the one below, one of our blogs has covered the story in detail previously, and at a much higher quality level than any national newspaper.

Take a look at the usual boring, insufficient, stylistically dead, threadbare, dim witted, one dimensional, stupid, dead-end, pointless and imagination-less dross in this piece:

Civil rights fears over DNA file for everyone

Campaigners say Whitehall wants even litter-droppers on crime database

Jamie Doward, home affairs editor
Sunday May 27, 2007
The Observer

Civil liberties groups are warning that the details of every Briton could soon be on the national DNA database, raising fresh concerns of a ‘surveillance society’. Controversial plans being studied by the government would see the DNA of people convicted of even the most minor, non-imprisonable offences, such as dropping litter, entered on the national database.

The proposals are part of a wide-ranging government review of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (Pace), which campaign groups warn may have profound ramifications for society. ‘The danger is that if we start adding the details of people convicted of these sort of minor offences to the database we’ll come to a tipping point,’ said Gareth Crossman, director of Liberty. ‘The government will say: “Actually it’s a bit unfair some people aren’t on the database; maybe everyone should be on it.”‘

The DNA database is already proving controversial with some politicians and police officers raising concerns about its use. Liberty claims that, per head of population, the UK has five times as many people on the DNA database as any other country. The government estimates that even if the database is not expanded to include the details of minor offenders, some 4.5 million people will still be on it by 2010.

[…]

Observer

and then do a google search for “Blogdial litter DNA” or “litter dna infowars” or “litter dna “police state” blogger” you are returned many posts, all of which outperform the Guardian/Observers drivel by any metric you care to apply.

So what does this mean? It means that the power of Bloggers and networked, intelligent writers needs to be applied. Thinking right off the keyboard, it probably means swarming of some kind, enabled by mobile devices (phones).

If we do not do this, what history will show is that we were like passengers on the Titanic who saw that the ship was sinking but who did not try to escape. We saw what was coming, did not avoid the ice berg, felt the crash, saw the water gushing in, and simply described what was happening eloquently as we all drowned.

No donning of life jackets.
No rowing away in life boats.
No Mayday signals.

And you can be sure that the captain and officers will not go down with the ship.

Even RATS know when to leave a sinking ship; if we do not act, galvanize and eventually destroy this emerging police state before it gets settled into place, those who cannot afford to escape will be VERY SORRY that they did not do something.

I used to often say, when speaking to people about Home Schooling, “would you pay £100 to restore the present situation and remove all the draconian measures HMG is proposing if they should be put into place?”. The answer is always an instantaneous ‘yes’, and yet, these same people are insanely reluctant to mount a professional pressure campaign because they don’t want to dip into their own pockets or ‘put their head above the parapet’.

I’m not making this up obviously.

This is the nature of the worst of the modern British; cowering, frightened, beaten down, fear soaked, gutless, in love with being stupid, hypnotized, and thick as shit. Even when you prove to them that something is worth doing, they cower away because of some illusory ‘thing’ that might come and get them. Its rather like the Shortwave Magazines that refused to publish logs of Numbers Stations for fear of ‘someone’ coming to their publication and doing ‘something’. Of course, that fear was totally unfounded, as are many of these self restricting fears; and the police state relies on the self control and automatic fear response of the public for the majority of its power. Think of it as a Sterling Engine of Control; the heat of your own body runs the engine that keeps you enslaved (check out that video of the Sterling engine running at the bottom of the page).

The Guardian is one of the worst criminals in the fight against the police state.

On the one hand, it wines in its very boring style about the erosion of civil liberties, and then in the very same paper, publishes opinions (that are total lies) that can only facilitate the establishment of a police state.

Take a look at this utter, unmitigated rubbish:

Should going to school be compulsory?

Interviews by Hester Lacey
Tuesday May 22, 2007
The Guardian

Angela Fuller
Teacher, Staffordshire

I considered educating one of my daughters at home. Home schooling offers relative freedom to construct an appropriate, non-Sats-driven curriculum, and sidesteps problems of bullying and peer pressure.

At the same time, I can see why there is concern. It encourages mutual over-dependence. Parent and child can suffer the sense of isolation that affects other home-workers. It is difficult to switch off and relax when home doubles as a classroom. Schools have facilities such as science labs, music centres and sports facilities that would not be available in a home setting. The deciding factor for me is the limited opportunity for a home-schooled child to socialise with peers. Do I think that going to school should be compulsory? No, but there had better be a darn good alternative.

Lie number one “It encourages mutual over-dependence”
Lie number two “Parent and child can suffer the sense of isolation”
Lie number three “It is difficult to switch off and relax when home doubles as a classroom”
Lie number four “The deciding factor for me is the limited opportunity for a home-schooled child to socialise”

There is a better alternative you IMBECILE, and as we have been saying, millions of people are taking advantage of it. Obviously ‘Hester Lacey’ knows nothing about home schooling, to the extent that she has never looked it up on the internets, otherwise, she would never let the ignorant ranting of someone who obviously knows NOTHING about home schooling to appear as an informed opinion.

Teachers are always rabidly anti-home schooling, because it is a direct threat to their personal status. People like this ‘Angela Fuller’ do not care about the welfare of children; if she did, and she saw that home schooled children outperform state schooled children in every way, she would endorse it because it is better for child, but instead she is against it because home schooling takes the meat from her machine, and diminishes her value as a person (in her mind).

This is like asking a cyclist if the congestion charge is a good thing or not. How utterly stupid.

Adam Alderson
Parent, Birmingham

I can’t think of a good reason why it shouldn’t be. Children who don’t go to school miss out on social interaction. Also, there’s the quality of teaching. Secondary school teachers are specialists in a range of subjects and you would have to be exceptional to cover all that. And there’s the discipline.

When you’re a parent, particularly in the early years, you wonder what your child is up to – it’s the first time they’ve been away from you for that length of time. Sometimes they will meet something they’re not happy with, but they have to face up to it, because they will meet adversities later on in life.

Lie number one “Children who don’t go to school miss out on social interaction”
Lie number two “Also, there’s the quality of teaching.”
SUPER LIE “And there’s the discipline.”

I have never read such ignorant, piss poor arguments against home schooling in all my trawls of the internets. The previous two people must have been scraped from the bottom of an street bums seven week old beer can filled with spit, insects and cigarette ends.

Anyone who would let this sort of drivel through their ‘editorial process’ is either ignorant, delusional or fanatically against home schooling….or all three.

Lindi An Edis
Aged 15, from Barnsley

I can see both sides. Going to school, you get the social skills you need, as well as the academic side. But for some people, going to school wouldn’t help them socially, and I can see why they wouldn’t want to go. If a child isn’t going to gain anything extra from school and is going to come home upset, it’s perfectly fine to be taught from home. School can have a negative side; there can be bad influences as well as good.

I can also see why some people would say school should be compulsory. If a parent isn’t qualified or doesn’t know enough about the subject, you won’t have the same start in life. I’m coming up to GCSEs and I’ve had a lot of input from my teachers: they mark your work, show you where you’ve gone wrong, and help you see the mistakes you might make in the exam.

A half lie “you get the social skills you need”
A clever lie “If a parent isn’t qualified or doesn’t know enough about the subject, you won’t have the same start in life.”
another clever lie “I’ve had a lot of input from my teachers: they mark your work, show you where you’ve gone wrong, and help you see the mistakes you might make in the exam.”

This one is a bit more clever than the other two; hers would be clever ‘Guardian level’ lies if she were not 15 years old; by saying that you won’t get the same start in life, implies that going to school puts you on a level playing field, which does not exist in this or any other Universe I’m afraid. Being 15 years old means that you probably would not know that. The other subtle misunderstanding implies that parents who home school do not mark the work of their children once again, a deep misunderstanding about the reality of home schooling, to be forgiven since the respondent is 15. What is totally unforgivable is using the words of an innocent 15 year old like this to make a cheap and nasty anti home schooling point.

Hester Lacey may intone that she was approaching the subject from three different angles ‘to present a balanced view’, but the fact is this is a BBQesqe propaganda technique, where different voices are presented, all from the same side or totally ignorant, that on the surface appear to be different and diverse, but which are in fact all on the same side; the side of the editorial prejudice.

[…]

Guardian Education Weekly

The fact of the matter is the Guardian is ostensibly against the police state, but then it is FOR compulsory schooling, which requires universal registration of all children for 100% compliance, the entry point for NIR, ID cards and the police state.

With friends like this, we do not need enemies.

The Guardian Education Weekly is an astonishingly ignorant part of the paper, run by people who clearly do not have the ability to educate themselves about the very subject that they are in charge of. If they were able to do this, simply by using the internets, they would never allow these bald faced lies to appear in their section.

They write as if the internets do not exist, and as if the outside world does not exist; only what they think in their office is real, which is why ‘home education means poor socialization’, when of course, the opposite is true. But then again, the Guardian is not about the truth, it is about ‘Guardian Truth®’, and whatever that is, it has nothing to do with liberty or anything that we believe in or that is real.

If there is a tipping point that needs to be reached, and quickly, it is that of the popular disgust with the emerging police state. If this tipping point is not reached before the tipping point of total control is reached, then all is lost.

Should ‘our’ tipping point come first, the police state and all of its apparatus will be demolished and permanently outlawed, out of fear of a vengeful violent and virtuous population that has simply had enough. Should ‘their’ tipping point be reached first, it will forever (or at least for a generation) prevent ‘ours’ from happening. There will then be a final brain drain from this country, where everyone with common sense, decency and a real human spirit will flee for their lives.

What will remain will be the weakest minded, least British population ever on this beautiful island. Britain will cease to exist, as all its best people will have escaped to places where real people still live and breathe. Britain is nothing without these people. And you know it.

And this country will be a tramp in a dingy concrete underpass, singing about this once great place as he is being kicked in by those remnants.

Or not…

Some people don’t understand why we oppose a national ID card. “It’s just a piece of paper,” they say. “What does it matter?”

Historian and law professor Eric Muller of the University of North Carolina has been trying to find out exactly what happened to his great-uncle Leopold Muller, who was deported from his home in Germany in 1942 and never heard from again by those of his family who survived. Most likely, he was eventually murdered at the death camp called Belzec.

Recently, in the course of his research, Eric found his Uncle Leopold’s German national ID card. He also found his Uncle Leopold’s medals for his service in the German army in World War I, during which he lost the use of one arm. But his Kemmkarte identified him boldly on the cover as Jew, not a decorated war veteran. Perhaps that’s why he arrived at the “evacuation” center without his ID card:

The Jew Leopold Israel Müller … will be evacuated to the East on April 25, 1942. He alleges that on April 24, 1942, he lost the kennkarte that he formerly had in his possession…. Müller is therefore without identification papers.

Was the ID card “just a piece of paper” to the Nazis? Was it sufficient that they had the person they wanted in their custody, and would soon send him to his death? No. They immedietely sent the police to search his empty house, find his kennkarte, and dutifully forward it after him (although by the time it arrived, he had been sent on, presumably to his death). The card itself mattered. To “lose” the card was, perhaps, to escape the fatal consequences of the definition it imposed.

Eric tells the story much more eloquently than we could. But what we think is noteworthy in contemporary context is the importance the national ID card played in defining the individual, and involuntarily binding the actual person to the designation (in his case, “Jew”) at categorization imposed on him by the government.

We are people, entitled to define (and redefine) ourselves. We are not, and we should not be, “identified” solely by which pigeon-hole(s) a government decides to put us in.

Snarfed from Papers Please.

And I completely agree with the idea that no one has the right to define you, and then force you to to be identified only by a means imposed by the state.

There are millions of these stories, from all over the world…

No one in the UK can say that they were not warned.

‘Orwellian’ CCTV in shires alarms senior police officer

· Benefits of wide-ranging surveillance questioned
· Deputy chief constable criticises DNA rules

Rachel Williams
Monday May 21, 2007
The Guardian

Britain risks becoming an “Orwellian” society as CCTV cameras spread to quiet villages with low crime levels, a senior police officer warned yesterday.

Ian Readhead, Hampshire’s deputy chief constable, said he did not want to live in a country where every street corner was fitted with surveillance devices.

And so, at long last, the penny drops.

Even THE POLICE in Britain do not want to live in a country that is a Police State.

You cannot make this stuff up.

He also criticised rules which meant DNA evidence and fingerprints could be kept for the rest of a teenager’s life once they have been arrested for an offence, even if they never get in trouble again, and said there was a danger that speed cameras were seen by the public as a revenue-generating process rather than a genuine effort to reduce casualties.

Everyone deserves a second chance. A country where everything you do is forever marked down against your ‘record’ is not a fit place for human beings. Even the Police, the group that supposedly all of this is being set up to aid, are against it.

What took them so long to come out and SAY ALL OF THIS?!

Mr Readhead highlighted the town of Stockbridge in Hampshire’s rural Test Valley, where parish councillors spent £10,000 installing CCTV, as an example of a situation where the benefits of surveillance were questionable.

Crime went up slightly in the town after the system was installed, Mr Readhead said, although between 2005 and 2006 there were only two violent crimes against people over 60 and no one was injured in either incident. “I have to question: does the camera actually instill in individuals a great feeling of safety and does it present serious offences taking place?” he said in an interview for the BBC’s Politics Show.

Like most people in the UK, these councillors are in the grip of a feverish mania; ‘Security Madness’. They have no understanding of security, what the difference between real security and Security Theatre is. They also clearly have no understanding of what a free country is, and do not value Britain for the country that it has been for generations.

There are plenty of these thick people about sadly, they all speak with the same type of voice, hold the same ignorant opinions and they all have the vote. Sadly.

“I’m struggling with seeing the deployment of cameras in our local village as being a benefit to policing; I understand why the local public say this is what we want, but I’m really concerned about what happens to the product of these cameras, and what comes next? If it’s in our villages – are we really moving towards an Orwellian situation with cameras on every street corner? I really don’t think that’s the kind of country that I want to live in.”

Bravo, at last.

Stockbridge parish council yesterday defended its decision to install CCTV, with its former chairman revealing that police and traders had each contributed £4,000 to the cost of installing the three surveillance cameras in the town.

David Baseley, who was parish council chairman for the past nine years, said he was amazed by Mr Readhead’s comments. “I think a lot of police would disagree with him, the police have paid for some of it and the police have been behind it,” he said. “We were concerned about the vulnerability of the place, although we haven’t had any real crimes.”

The weather used to be the mainstay of conversations in this great country, now, it is ‘security’. ‘Security’ and ‘Health and Safety’ permeate every thought and every corner of everything and every place, to the extent that you cannot even cook food because of “Health and Safety”.

This nauseating mania for everything to be rendered harmless, for every possible eventuality to be covered, to prevent all accidents, no matter what the cost is un-British, inhuman and TOTALLY INSANE.

There are an estimated 4.2m CCTV cameras in the UK.

Not for long there are.

On the retention of DNA evidence, Mr Readhead said: “My concern is this – we are in a society at the moment where the police have the power that if they arrest a 15-year-old for a recordable offence we can retain their DNA and their fingerprints.

“That information would be kept for life unless there were exceptional circumstances, such as it being proved that no crime was committed.

“My real worry is this. Fifteen years from now we are still holding that DNA and that arrest information – should we be doing that?” Mr Readhead asked. “Is it right that that may impede that person – who’s never been arrested again – from getting a job? I’m not sure that sits comfortably with me.”

Well, the question that comes next is, “WHat are you going to do about it Mr. Readhead?”.

Shami Chakrabarti, director of the human rights group Liberty, welcomed Mr Readhead’s comments: “Politicians like to present the police as ever hungry for more powers. Yet even the police are concerned that we are losing the value of privacy.”

The Police Federation’s vice-chairman, Alan Gordon, said he shared some of the concerns about the extent of CCTV use. “I have sympathy with members of the public who are not going to be committing crimes and feel they are being spied on. It should be down to consultation with people locally,” he said.

No it should not you imbecile.

The public spaces should not be surveilled, full stop. Surveillance does not prevent crime. In the many decades before the mania for ‘Security’ the crime rate in the UK was very much lower than it is today.

The causes of crime must be addressed. The Surveillance system must be dismantled, because it has destroyed the quality of life that we have in the UK.

Profile: Stockbridge

Stockbridge’s wide high street has its roots in the ancient market town’s position on a drovers’ road that was once one of the south’s main east-west routes. Some 200 years later it was that same hub-like position – now the junction of the A30, A3057 and A3049 – that helped convince traders, fearful of outsiders raiding their shops and making a swift escape towards Salisbury, Andover, Winchester or Romsey, that they needed a CCTV system. The high street, with its tourist-friendly groceries, tea rooms, and antique shops, rarely suffers from yobbish youths loitering outside convenience stores.

The little crime there is consists largely of break-ins, and in 2004 the chamber of trade, police and local figures stumped up for three cameras. They have not led to any arrests, and crime has not been eradicated. Thieves broke into the Vine Inn in October to take cash from a fruit machine, and across the road the Co-op was targeted twice in a year. […]

Guardian

And there you have it.

Gordon Brown, BACK DOWN!

Cancel the NIR.
Remove all CCTV from public spaces.
Return to non Biometric Passports.
Cancel the ID Cards scheme.
Repeal all Orwellian Blair era legislation.
Remove all Speed Cameras.
Dismantle the Congestion Charging system in London.

and by all means, you can add to this list yourself.

Criminals will target ID cards as the ”gold standard” of identity theft, a police chief said yesterday.

The assumption that they are foolproof will make them more enticing for forgers, said Colin Langham-Fitt, acting chief constable of Suffolk.

He also questioned the erosion of individual liberties and privacy.

“There should be a debate about the ongoing erosion of civil liberties in the name of the fight against terrorism and crime,” he said.

“Are we all happy to have our cards monitored wherever we go, to be on CCTV and to have our shopping tracked?”

Mr Langham-Fitt added: “With all this surveillance available, the question needs to be asked – are we happy with that? Does it make us feel better and safer?

“I haven’t got the answers but I would welcome the debate beyond the cliched response of, ‘If you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to worry about’.”

His comments undermine Government claims that the police support ID cards and other surveillance measures.

Mr Langham-Fitt, in an interview with the East Anglian Daily Times, said the cards could become “the gold standard of ID crime” and “it could raise the standards and stakes for those who wish to clone them or subvert the system”.

A Suffolk police spokesman said Mr Langham-Fitt was not representing the views of the force but expressing “personal” opinions.

A Home Office spokesman said: “The Government recognises that some people are concerned about the scheme infringing their civil liberties – that is why there are stringent safeguards built into the Identity Cards Act.”

Further questions were raised over the security of confidential information with the disclosure that the personal details of Indians applying for British visas could be obtained via the Foreign Office website. Channel 4 News reported that an identity thief or a terrorist could obtain sensitive information that could be used to apply for an ID card.

Damian Green, the Tory immigration spokesman, said: “This is yet another IT shambles from the Government with serious implications for security.”

Mr Green added: “This Government cannot even run a simple online visa application system without betraying all the sensitive information.

“What hope has it got of protecting the integrity of the National Identity Card Register?”

[…]

Telegraph

I choked on my Espresso when I read this.

When the police come out against something like this you can bet that it is in serious trouble.

He may be expressing his ‘personal opinions’ but it is clear that Mr. Langham-Fitt understands PERFECTLY what the NIR and the ID Card scheme means to ‘The British way of life®’. It means its end.

It is heartening that someone in the police is bucking the current mania for ‘security’ (which in the case of ID Cards is actually Security Theatre) and is actually THINKING about what is really happening. He cannot be the only one. I certainly hope that pieces like the Frances Stonor-Saunders email have been circulated amongst his colleagues. If the police come out against it, it cannot EVER possibly work.

Gordon Brown…BACK DOWN!

You read that phrase here first!

DHS proposes guidelines for proving one’s identity and residence when applying for a Real ID card. Yet while the department concedes it’s a monumental task to prove one’s domicile or residence, it leaves it up to the states to determine what documents would be adequate proof of residence–and even suggests that a utility bill or bank statement might be appropriate documentation. If so, a person could easily generate multiple proof-of-residence documents. Basing Real ID on such easy-to-forge documents obviates a large portion of what Real ID is supposed to accomplish.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly for Americans, the very last paragraph of the 160-page Real ID document deserves special attention. In a nod to states’ rights advocates, DHS declares that states are free not to participate in the Real ID system if they choose — but any identification card issued by a state that does not meet Real ID criteria is to be clearly labeled as such, to include “bold lettering” or a “unique design” similar to how many states design driver’s licenses for those under 21 years of age.

In its own guidance document, the department has proposed branding citizens not possessing a Real ID card in a manner that lets all who see their official state-issued identification know that they’re “different,” and perhaps potentially dangerous, according to standards established by the federal government. They would become stigmatized, branded, marked, ostracized, segregated. All in the name of protecting the homeland; no wonder this provision appears at the very end of the document.

One likely outcome of this DHS-proposed social segregation is that people presenting non-Real ID identification automatically will be presumed suspicious and perhaps subject to additional screening or surveillance to confirm their innocence at a bar, office building, airport, or routine traffic stop. Such a situation would establish a new form of social segregation–an attempt to separate “us” from “them” in the age of counterterrorism and the new normal, where one is presumed suspicious until proven more suspicious.

Two other big-picture concerns about Real ID come to mind: Looking at the overall concept of a national identification database, and given existing data security controls in large distributed systems, one wonders how vulnerable this system-of-systems will be to data loss or identity theft resulting from unscrupulous employees, flawed technologies, external compromises or human error–even under the best of security conditions. And second, there is no clear guidance on the limits of how the Real ID database would be used. Other homeland security initiatives, such as the Patriot Act, have been used and applied–some say abused–for purposes far removed from anything related to homeland security. How can we ensure the same will not happen with Real ID? […]

And there you have it, from Shneier.

Attention needs to be drawn to the similarities between the Apartheid system’s Pass Laws and ID cards. People think that there is no similarity because the reason for the laws is not explicitly ‘race’. What they fail to understand is that the effect of these ID cards is the same as racist Apartheid, only it applies to everyone. Everyone becomes ‘black’ (underprivileged) and only the state is ‘white’ (elite class).

US ‘wants British Pakistanis to have entry visas’

Matt Weaver
Wednesday May 2, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

The American government wants to impose travel restrictions on British citizens of Pakistani origin because of concerns about terrorism, according to a report today.

In talks with the British government, the US homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, called for British Pakistanis to apply for a visa before travelling to the US, according to the New York Times.

The newspaper claimed that US officials were concerned about the number of terrorist plots in Britain involving citizens with ties to Pakistan.

But today the Foreign Office made it clear would resist the idea. It said it would oppose any attempt to exclude particular ethnic groups from the US visa waiver scheme that allows citizens from 27 countries, including the UK, to travel to the US without a visa for up to 90 days.

Like they ever care about what you think, you bloody idiots!

A spokesman said: “We are in close touch with the US about entry clearance, and they are aware of our view that changes to the visa waiver programme could cause economic damage to both our countries without materially enhancing the security controls over immigration.”

They are going to do it, wether you like it or not. You are poodles. You will now forever be poodles. It is too late to turn yourself from jellyfish into men.

He added: “The Muslim community in the UK, including those of Pakistani origin, are an important part of our society and we would oppose strongly any proposal to single them out in response to the actions of terrorists. Furthermore, we will oppose any measure based on broad categories of religious, ethnic or other criteria, and will continue to emphasise the importance of the current risk-based approach.”

You will ‘oppose’ it? And WHAT EXACTLY WILL THAT DO?

These are the same people whose cousins and brothers you have MURDERED in the HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS. Where were your beeding heart words when everyone told you not to even THHINK about going into Iraq?

And as for measures based on broad categories of ‘religious, ethnic or other criteria’ you have been violating the very people you claim to be wanting to protect yourselves, in your poodleish participation in the bogus ‘war on terror’.

COME ON GUYS, if you are going to lie, you have to do it better than that.

Mohammad Sarwar, the Labour MP for Glasgow Central, described the proposal as “unbelievable and shocking. Every British citizen must have the same rights. I don’t think America has any right to interfere in this way.”

Labour MP finds it ‘shocking’. You cant make shit like this up.

Mr Sarwar, who was born in Pakistan and became Britain’s first Muslim MP in 1997, urged ministers to reject the idea.

Ahmed Versi, the editor of Muslim News, agreed. He said: “They [the Americans] are trying to paint the whole Muslim community with the same brush. It’s racist. There would be a huge outcry from all Muslims whether they are Pakistani or not.”

see below about this.

He pointed out that many British Muslims were already put off from the travelling to the US for fear of the unwelcome reception they would receive.

They should not be traveling there anyway, out of principle, but then again, all of the middle east is in a mess precisely because they are unwilling or incapable of unifying under a single banner, even on the smallest matter that does not take any effort.

The report of America’s concerns follows the conviction earlier this week of five British men for planning a series of attacks across the UK. Four of them were of Pakistani origin. But according to the New York Times, talks on travel restrictions for British Pakistanis have been taking place for some “months”.

Last month, Mr Chertoff held talks with the home secretary, John Reid. It is believed they discussed the visa waiver scheme that allows citizens from 27 countries, including the UK, to travel to the US without a visa for up to 90 days.

In an interview with the Daily Telegraph on the eve of the talks, Mr Chertoff said: “We need to build layers of protection, and I don’t think we totally want to rely upon the fact that a foreign government is going to know that one of their citizens is suspicious and is going to be coming here.”

At the time he did not mentioned restrictions on British Pakistani, but he expressed concern that the terrorist such as the July 7 bombers, three of whom were of Pakistani origin, could have used the visa waiver scheme to enter America.

[…]

Guardian

Now, lets do what the Guardian cannot do, and actually think about this.

If you are going to require VISAs for people of Pakistani origin, that means that you must identify them all. You cannot rely on the persons name alone; for example ‘shoebomber’ Richard Reid, has the same surname as the current Home Secretary.

That means that you will need to put the NIR in place, and on it, mark everyones ‘racial profile’ or ‘racial origin’. This will mean that the UK will have a system like South Africa, where people’s race was marked down in their ID card.

This raises some interesting problems; for people who do not have ‘Pakistani names’ they will have to find a way to determine wether or not they are ‘Really British®’. Actually, this is quite a soluble problem for which there are precedents.

In South Africa, they used a pencil.

When the authorities put a pencil through your hair, if it fell out, you were ‘White’. If not, you were ‘Not White’.

I’m not making this up:

A type of test used by authorities during the apartheid era in South Africa to “ascertain” a person’s ‘race’ (see Coloured and Passing (racial identity).) In the absence of any centralized method, this and other subjective tests were used in various places across South Africa as part of the Population Registration Act of 1950. A pencil would be placed in a person’s hair, if it fell through they were classified as “White” (or “Coloured“, depending on other subjective classification considerations); if the pencil did not fall through, they were classified differently (“Coloured” or “Black”, also depending on other subjective classification considerations). Members of the same family who had different hair textures would find themselves in different race groups as a result of this test. This presented serious consequences for many families (see Population Registration Act, Pass Law, Group Areas Act, District Six). [2] [3][4] [5]

[…]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pencil_test

Check the Google too.

This is what the americans are asking the UK to do. Micheal Chertov is an Apartheid style racist, and the worst thing about this is that the americans started all this, poodle dog bliar dragged this once great country kicking and screaming into the mess and now those fascist american animals want Britain to lower itself to the level of the Apartheid state to salve their paranoia.

Doing this will create an active Apartheid society, with first class citizens (so called ‘whites’), second class citizens (‘pakistanis’) and third class citizens (illegal immigrants, refugees etc).

There will be all the confusion bitterness and hatred caused by that system, as people are sifted, marked and categorized by the state, and don’t you believe for a single second that the private sector will not use this ‘racial’ information in its daily operations.

It will be an unmitigated DISASTER for this country,

and the only way they can pull it off, is with the NIR

. Just use your brain for a minute; this means that British people ‘of Pakistani origin’ will have to have visibly different passports from everyone else so that they can apply for a VISA under these rules.

Do you understand what that means?

The NIR is now Britain’s Pandora’s box. If it is opened….

Out of this box will come every evil, every excess, every violation you can imagine (if you remember the Apartheid system, even as an observer from afar) and some modern violations that we will soon discover the taste of.

Now there are those who say, “All of this is worth it. If we can stop just one act of violence, its worth these people saying who they are and then applying for screening for the good of society. Their so called ‘freedom’ is not worth anything.”

And I say that people who say that are the bad guys.

Everyone’s freedom is ‘worth something’. I am not a Pakistani, but when a Pakistani born in Britain with a British passport is forced to apply for a VISA, it violates ME as much as it does HIM, because, unlike the people who throw away freedom like empty crisp packets, I understand that we are BOTH HUMAN BEINGS.

The ability to empathize with other human beings, the ability to imagine another person’s pain is absolutely crucial to peace. If you cannot imagine another person as ‘a real thing’, you do not care if their rights are violated; they are an object, a concept, not a real person. That is how Iraq can be destroyed beyond recognition, dozens killed every day and no one cares, but when 50 people are killed in London, it is suddenly the end of the world.

This story about Pakistanis being essentially given yellow stars to wear in Britain should have every decent person puking in their Wheatabix.

It is so contrary to decency, to Britishness that it staggers the imagination that John Reid allowed the words to be said to him without immediately terminating the meeting. But then we know that he is one of the Murder Inc. Criminal Genocide Gang, and this is NOTHING to pigs like him.

Now, having said all that, I am sure that a discrimination lawsuit will very quickly follow any introduction of Apartheid style legislation in Britain. Heavens above, did I actually type that?

There is no way that they will get away with this, and if they DO introduce that legislation, heaven help them.

And furthermore, the american government is putting the onus on the British to segregate and mark out all Pakistanis for VISA treatment, because they are too squeamish to take harsh Apartheid measures themselves on their own soil.

If the British do not comply, that means that the americans are going to either:

1/ require that ALL british people need a VISA to travel to the USA (and anyone who has had to make that application will know what a horrible experience THAT is)

2/ Selectively block ‘Pakistani types’ at the airport using the Apartheid racial identification ruleset. That means many million dollar lawsuits.

Dirty Racist Murdering Bastards.

Lantern, the project that allows hand-held, mobile fingerprinting has been awarded the Government Computing Award for the best government to government project at last week’s ceremony in central London. This is the second year in a row a police IT project has won the award.

Lantern, managed by the National Policing Improvement Agency, enables the capture of fingerprint details suitable for identifying individuals in an operational environment for the first time. It allows real-time searching of the 6.7 million fingerprints on the national automated fingerprint system (IDENT1) and is being trialled in 10 forces nationwide.

The project’s overarching purpose is to establish a person’s identity using their fingerprints, away from the police station, thus increasing the time officers spend on the frontline. At present, an officer would need to arrest a person and take them to a suitably-equipped custody suite to do this. Annual savings of over £2.2 million through time saved in pursuing false identities have been forecast.

Barry Taylor, Deputy Chief Constable at Dyfed-Powys Police and Senior Responsible Owner for Lantern, said: “Lantern has revolutionised the way police officers work and early results from the trials are showing great savings and efficiencies for the police service. This project once again shows that the NPIA together with the police are leading the field in providing information and communication solutions. Everyone has worked very hard on this project and we are thrilled to receive this award.”

At last year’s ceremony, The Violent Offender and Sex Offender Register (ViSOR) was given the same award for succeeding in joining up the criminal justice system.

NPIA launched on 1 April 2007. The agency takes over a wide range of responsibilities from the Police Information Technology Organisation (PITO) and Centrex, the police training and leadership body. Both organisations ceased to exist at the end of March. Lantern was one of the projects novated into the NPIA from PITO.

NPIA also takes over responsibility for other areas of work that currently sit outside of these two bodies including police information sharing under the IMPACT Programme and the introduction of Neighbourhood Policing.

[…]

Public Technology

Meau² told us about this Dark Lantern® previously, and as in that post, if you are NOT in the database, what action will the police take? They cannot instantly ‘identify’ you, and so you will need to be hauled down to the police station to be identified, simply because you are not in the DB. The very fact that you are not identifiable will make you an anomaly, an ‘unknown quantity’, dangerous, unpredictable.

This is just one reason why it is such a bad idea.

When you combine this technology with the legislation that makes any offense an arrestable one, it doesn’t take much imagination to understand that eventually, everyone in the UK will eventually end up on this database.

If the Tories do not dismantle this system, along with the NIR, and forbid the immoral and wrong use of these vile techniques then they will have demonstrated that they have failed to understand the pernicious and corrosive nature of this combination of technologies.

Wired Blog Network
Monday, April 30, 2007

Like any dictator worth the title, Saddam Hussein kept good records on his people — dossiers that included fingerprints. Now the occupying forces in Iraq have digitized his fingerprint files in order to screen potential recruits for the Iraqi police force using Automated Fingerprint Identification System technology, according to reporter David Axe’s post at Aviation Week’s ARES blog, cross-posted to Wired’s DANGER ROOM.

AFIS is a widely used technology to compare one print against a database of prints, and is used by local, state, national and foreign law enforcement agencies.

So by digitizing those records and looking for matches among recruits, the police trainers have been able to catch scores of former felons, Ba’athists and other ne’er-do-wells before they donned the blue uniform, according to U.S. Army Brigadier General David Phillips. “We have caught people coming straight out of jail.”

This is a great example of re-using old data with new systems to achieve a result no one had anticipated when the data and the systems were created. Still, this does not represent a major success for proponents of battlefield biometrics. What we need is tough handheld enrollment devices for building new databases about current populations … and we need universal databases for Iraq so that trainers, military police and everyone else are on the same page.

Actually, having an unwanted occupying force re-using a dictator’s secret spy files, “building new databases about current populations” and creating “universal databases” sounds pretty creepy to me — justified, I assume, with the idea that the end justifies the means.

There are some core accepted practices around personal data usage — data should be thrown out at a certain point, data collected for one purpose should not be re-used for another reason without permission and individuals should have the right to see and contest the accuracy of data in their files. Those principles are universally accepted in the free world as necessary checks and balances on government data collections, even as the U.S. government continually finds ways to opt its databases out of those requirements domestically.

Starting up a new system to take the fingerprints of people convicted of a crime is one thing. Digitizing the secret spy files of a murderous dictator and enrolling new people simply detained by local cops or foreign soldiers? I can taste the freedom from here.

[…]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/april2007/300407biometric.htm

This article encapsulates everything that is wrong with biometrics and national identity cards.

The original was data supplied by Iraqis as a ‘normal’ part of their lives. They did it to be a part of their society, ‘for the good of society’. It was used for years ‘normally’. Then, the nightmare scenario began; their country was invaded.

Their data is being reprocessed and repurposed without their consent by a fascist hoard of satanic invaders. They are now suffering precisely the scenario that people are warning about here in the UK. You might (if you are COMPLETELY INSANE) trust Tony Blair and his government to keep your data private and not abuse it, but in the future, another government of liars, murderers, fascists, control freaks, poodle dogs and venal incompetents could easily be elected, and then your data will be abused, used against you, sold to anyone with money etc etc.

That is what the poor suffering Iraqis are getting a taste of right now.

And as for the ‘handheld enrollment devices’ we have seen the precursors of these right here.

And as for ‘smelling the freedom from here’, well, its not surprising, because the STENCH you are detecting with your badly damaged olfactory glands is the rotting corpse of YOUR OWN DEMOCRACY and FREEDOM. Your own REALID and RFID passports are stinking up the air right there in america, so, by all means, sniff out the fascist horrors that are going on in Iraq at the hands of your soldiers and government, but do take a look outside your own front door, and bury your own dead!

And you forgot to put the word ‘democracy’ in single quotes. Doh.

Medical students’ personal details leaked

Junior doctors’ details exposed online

The Medical Training Application Service or MTAS is a computer system where student and junior doctors apply for jobs – a system they were repeatedly assured was secure.

The same assurances as for the NHS ‘data spine’ and National Identity Register.

Today Channel Four News can reveal that since at least 9 o’ clock this morning, the details of medical students applying for foundation course posts – the first year to become a junior doctor – were openly available to the public.

This is astonishing. Not only can we see what they wrote in their applications; their addresses; their phone numbers; who their referees are. We can also see if there were white, heterosexual, gay Asian, Christian, Jewish or Hindu, and we can also see if they have got police records and what the crime was.

[…]

Contrary to the report this is not ‘astonishing’ it was entirely predictable in the same way we have been predicting the failure of the National Identity Register, etc. What is astonishing is that junior doctors are being asked to give personal details such as sexual orientaton and ethnic background as these details have absolutely no bearing on their suitability to be doctors.

No Minister was available for interview tonight. Instead they issued this statement:

“We apologise to any applicants whose details have been improperly accessed. This URL was made available to a strictly limited number of people making checks as part of the employment process.

Of course this is only true if the URL has been blocked to spiders and other web searching utilities, the fact that access to the URL was limited is only due to the violation of privacy being flagged up, this could have easily been noticed by some unscrupulous person. You can be certain as a result of this people will be targeting such sites in the future on a speculative basis.

Experts say the level of data included in the applications makes it a gold mine for identity theft and fraud.

Incidentally, good to see that channel4 uses the word experts rather than BBQs usual ‘critics’.

On BBQs Toady program this morning this was indeed highlighted and at last the interviewee (possibly Andrew Lansley) got airtime to make the connection to NIR and the data spine.

One issue about this failure is that it relates to a set of details that aren’t even shared between government departments, financial institutions, foriegn intelligence services, police, local authorities, estate agents, schools, etc, etc. which the Neu Labour government want to extend the NIR/Identity Card scheme to. The wider the access to any database the higher the risk of information being leaked, the NIR will be trawled remorselessy for such information and whatever the government say the NIR ID will make its way onto records that contain personal information such as sexual orientation, ethnicity or any other information that is prised out of you by the State.

Cautious Brown keeps option of scrapping ID card scheme
Richard Ford, Home Correspondent

Gordon Brown has left open the option of scrapping the identity card scheme if he becomes Prime Minister.

The Chancellor has refused to approve the multimillion-pound budget for the whole scheme and has given the Home Office permission to spend only a set amount of money towards developing it, it was disclosed yesterday. The overall cost, set at £5.4 billion by the Home Office, will exceed the spending limit set by the Treasury.

Before John Reid, the Home Secretary, can press ahead with issuing millions of the cards, he will have to seek further permission from the Treasury. Mr Brown’s decision to keep his options open by refusing to authorise payment for the total cost was revealed in a written parliamentary answer to Mark Francois, a Tory backbencher.

Stephen Timms, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, said that the Home Office had been authorised to “commit resources up to certain defined limits”, which would be exceeded by the total cost of the scheme. He said that completing the scheme would require Treasury approval, adding: “Approval will be sought at an appropriate stage in the project planning process.”

By last summer the Home Office had spent £46 million on preparing for the scheme.

David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, said yesterday: “This is a stunning admission that Gordon Brown has not yet backed the ID card project. It is hard to know what the Treasury thinks is an ‘appropriate stage’ in the planning process since millions of pounds has been spent and is continuing to be spent on this ill-designed and poorly planned multibillion-pound waste of money.

“This suggests that the Home Office has not submitted a robust costing plan, casting real doubts on their claim that this system would cost less than the £20 billion that independent experts estimate.”

The Government plans to start issuing biometric resident permits to foreign citizens next year and to start issuing identity cards to Britons in 2009.

A Home Office spokesman said: “The Home Office, like other government departments, are required in certain cases to refer business cases for large projects to the Treasury for approval. There is nothing unusual in this.”

[…]

The Times

So, GB the scourge of GB is preparing an exit strategy for the doomed ID card scheme, so that the Tories cannnot use it to crowbar his fat backside out of power.

We win either way…unless of course you are FOR ID cards, since, [whine]it’s good for society[/whine]

And any attempt to force ID cards on foreigners exclusively will be taken to the court of human rights, since it is blantant (yes, ‘blantant’) discrimination.

Next comes the dismantling of the NIR, and fingerprinting for passports, and then we are done!

April 11) — A handheld device that can tell in a second whether a person is on one of 140 wanted or watch lists is being hailed by police as a crime-fighting breakthrough and flayed by civil libertarians as an intrusion on the innocent.

The sheriff’s office in Clermont County, Ohio, is the first civilian law enforcement agency in the nation to test the portable fugitive finder.

Police say Mobilisa Inc.’s m2500 Defense ID system shows promise of saving them time and helping them fight crime. Critics say it intensifies questions about privacy.

The Port Townsend, Wash., wireless technology company says its handheld electronic scanner can identify within a second whether someone is a fugitive from justice, has a violent criminal past or is a convicted sex offender.

The scanner reads the magnetic strip or barcode on state-issued ID cards, passports and driver’s licenses. It uses the information to determine whether a person shows up on wanted or watch lists, including ones from the Drug Enforcement Agency and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The databases are downloaded when the scanner is placed on a Mobilisa charger. In the field, the scanner operates wirelessly.

“It’s a technology whose time has come,” says Nelson Ludlow, Mobilisa’s CEO. He says he came up with the idea for the scanner after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks for use at military bases. He quickly realized it would benefit all law enforcement agencies.

Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, says the scanner raises concerns about privacy. The Cato Institute is a non-profit, public-policy research foundation in Washington, D.C., that promotes limited government.

Harper says use of the scanner emphasizes the need for society to decide whether average, law-abiding Americans should be stopped and checked for warrants as they go about their business. “The Framers of the Constitution suggested that they shouldn’t be when they wrote the Fourth Amendment,” he says.

Personnel at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland started using the Defense ID in mid-January. Air Force One, the president’s plane, is housed at the base.

“The Defense ID is a powerful security enhancement,” says Sgt. Gregory Striejewske of the Visitor Control Center at Andrews.

So far, 108,432 identification credentials have been scanned, finding 286 hits of people who were wanted or had expired or terminated identifications, he says.

Clermont County Sheriff A.J. “Tim” Rodenberg says, “This is the future of crime fighting.”

John Paxton, chairman of Mobilisa’s board of directors, lives in Clermont County and is a friend of the sheriff. Paxton arranged for the department to begin testing the scanners late last year at no cost. The scanners cost $6,700 each, plus a $148 monthly service fee.

Between Jan. 1 and March 14, 1,277 identifications were scanned, and 33 resulted in arrests on warrants or came up as a sex offender. Another 18 people had expired driver’s licenses.

Cincinnati attorney Martin Pinales, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, calls the Defense ID “another closing in of Big Brother.”

He says showing identification to police during a traffic stop is one thing, but the scanner puts a private company in the encounter.

“Government has the right to contract with private companies, but this brings into question who controls the information,” Pinales says. “What happens to the data collected?”

Ludlow says activity on a scanner can be recorded and searched by investigators for law enforcement purposes. The data remain the property of the law enforcement agency using the scanner, he says.

AOL News

[…]

Coolidge reports daily for The Cincinnati Enquirer.

I told you that this would be developed four years ago.

The pure evil that it represents is unambiguous. Look at the manufacturer’s website.

Interesting….Mobilisa VS Doe.

And the army is in on it: Mobilisa, Inc. is pleased to announce the addition of Major General Jack A. Davis USMCR to their Board of Directors.

On the surface, the Air Force and Navy contracts they scored were cheap to buy.

It is of course the Mobilisation of pure evil.

Robert Winnett and David Leppard

The government is predicting that some 15m people will revolt against Tony Blairs controversial ID card scheme by refusing to produce the new cards or provide personal data on demand.

The forecast is made in documents released by the Home Office under the Freedom of Information Act. The papers show ministers expect national protests similar to the poll tax rebellions of the Thatcher era, with millions prepared to risk criminal prosecution..

The documents, quietly released during parliaments Easter break, also show that the government is planning to make ID cards compulsory in 2014, despite the expected revolt.

The first cards are due in 2009, alongside new passports. Labour has said it will make the scheme compulsory if it wins the next election.

[…]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1626768.ece

Nice try Robert and David, but you fail it.

First of all, MILLIONS are going to refuse to provide fingerprints and information for the NIR, which is the true evil and backbone of the system.

As we have been saying for years, once you are registered in the system, your body becomes the card. The physical card is just a vestigial token that everyone will eventually be weaned off of once they innately understand how the system really works…or at least, thats the plan if they manage to pull it off, which they will not.

Secondly, you failed to mention that the Tories will scrap the entire system if they are elected. I say ‘entire system’ because any failure to scrap the NIR is a failure to scrap the real heart of the system; the biometric net.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Michael Chertoff, who arrives in Britain tomorrow for talks with John Reid, the Home Secretary, said the US was determined to build extra defences against so-called “clean skin” terrorists from Europe.
“We need to build layers of protection, and I don’t think we totally want to rely upon the fact that a foreign government is going to know that one of their citizens is suspicious and is going to be coming here,” he said.

Mr Chertoff insisted that the US required additional information, including email addresses and credit card details, to vet European passengers and rejected “the idea that we’re going to bargain with the European Union over who’s going to come into the United States” under the visa waiver scheme.

“We have an absolute right to get this, in the same way that if someone wants to be a guest in my house I have a right to ask them who they are and get identification.”

The July 7 tube and bus bombs nearly two years ago had shown that Britain had a problem with its Muslim immigrant population that America did not share, he argued.

“Our Muslim population is better educated and economically better off than the average American. So, from a standpoint of mobility in society, it’s a successful immigrant population. To some degree, the whole country is a country of immigrants, and therefore there’s no sense that we have insiders or outsiders. In some countries [in Europe], you had an influx of people that came in as a colonial legacy and may have always have felt, to some extent, that they were viewed as second-class citizens, and they’ve tended to impact and be kind of clustered in some areas.”

Mr Chertoff, a former federal prosecutor, said that one of his biggest worries was that “unknown terrorists” – such as most of the 7/7 bombers, who were British citizens with no criminal record or intelligence traces – could use the visa waiver scheme to enter and attack America. […]

InfoWars

What does this really mean?

It means that not only do they not trust people in their dirty database of ‘terrorists’ but that everyone who is NOT in that database, the ‘clean skins’ is ALSO a suspect.

This is obviously as unsustainable as the absurd and insane ‘threat level’ meter that has now been abandoned, and I predict that this ‘strategy’ will be abandoned as unworkable, useless and a total waste of money, as is the case with the utterly offensive USVISIT.

Once again, the vendors are pushing for an upgrade of technology. There is not a single case of someone being missed by USVIST because they only have two prints instead of ten. This is a totally made up reason for retrofitting the system. But you know this.

What is going to happen is that they are going to run out of strategies. When that happens, they will simply give up. Like the scene from The Man Who Fell to Earth where Newton is simply abandoned, because they could not get anything out of him, couldn’t do any thing with him….they just left the secret facility one day and that was it; no explanation, no rationale, just over.

The database, which can only be used to harass and abuse people will be dismantled. The public will become fed up with surveillance and harassment, just like the people living under the Soviets did. This whole episode will be seen as a monumental failure and a waste of astronomical sums of money.

Shame on them all for participating in it.

Irdial’s foolproof secure passport system has been mentioned on numerous occasions, although only in relation to border control. Last night an application came to mind which would be an easy way of demonstrating the principles of the system in a real world, small-scale situation.

The application involves the issuing of a secure card that authorises the user to access a service. The card can then be checked by a different individual to access the service. This is analogous to IPS issuing a secure passport and passing through border control.

The application is a secure and anonymous mailbox/deposit box company.

Issuing

The client registers in one office and has a digital photgraph taken, they also have the option to include a passphrase and PIN. Becaus ethis is a commercial application the company assigns client ID and box number and key. All this information is encrypted and put on the card.
No information needs to be printed onto the plastic card so its function remains unknown to a third party (although for a passport various bits of information could be displayed), the information on the chip cann only be decrypted by the issuer who only needs to database the client ID and box number (for billing purposes).

The client is unknown to the company except for the client ID, a third party can use the card to pay bills (a remote card reader and secure website could be used to send bill payment and the the encrypted ID to the mailbox company) but not access the mailbox (as the photograph they cannot access would not fit), furthermore the client can pay in cash and thus remain anonymous whilst continuing to access the service.

Validation

The mailbox room has a security guard to control access, the client presents their card to the guard who can then use a terminal to display the photograph and any additional measures the client wanted to be included. The client ID can be read and sent to the accounts database so access can be denied if they have not payed their bills.

If the validation is successful the client can use the encrypted key on their card to access the mailbox and retreive their mail.

Er.. that’s it.

This would be a good demonstration because:
It is directly analogous to how passports should be issued and validated.
It allows cash payment and so can provide a client base whose identity could not be otherwise compromised.
It is scalable.
It is open to competition without compromising security (analogous to different countries being able to use the system).
It provides a useful service in itself.

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.”
advertisement

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.