Here we go….

Rethink on ID card computer plan

This is yet another lie. Saying that it is a ‘rethink’ implies that there was thought given in the first place. This is demonstrably not the case.

The government has abandoned plans to build a new computer system as part of the national identity cards scheme.

Instead information will be held on three existing and separate databases.

So, we will have three times as many points of access than before. Well done! And in any case, these three DBs will have to be synchronized for the real time magic to happen, so it will for all intents and purposes act like a single database.

This data, wether it is held on one or a thousand different computers should not be held at all. That is the thing that needs to be understood by HMG.

Home Secretary John Reid denied this was a “U-turn” saying it would save money, lead to greater efficiency and lower the risk of fraud.

Lies lies and more lies. They now know for sure that these measures will not prevent people from getting fake ID issued to them, complete with bogus NIR entry. The whole thing is a sham and a lie, and they all know it. This is being done to line the coffers at Schlumberger and the other vendors who look to make a trans-generational killing on the fleecing of the UK citizenry.

All non-Europeans already in the UK – not just those arriving from 2008 – would have to register biometrics, such as fingerprints or iris scans.

This is bollocks. Imagine a piece of legislation saying that you had to be fingerprinted like a criminal just to enter or stay in the UK…uh oh, thats exactly what they are talking about. When the millions of people who came to live here did so over the last forty years, they did so on the premise that they were coming to live in a free country. Now they are changing the agreement, and saying that you must now sign up for their fascist police state, or get out. This is so wrong it beggars belief.

The controversial National Identity Register (NIR) was originally proposed as a single “clean” computer system built from scratch to avoid repeating mistakes and duplications in the government’s computer systems.

We have been through this garbage soooo many times, and over such a length of time….now we are winning. Finally.

‘Lower risk’

Now the information will be spread across three existing IT systems, including the Department of Work and Pensions’ (DWP) Customer Information Service, which holds national insurance records.

Once again, it will be held between three different systems, all of which will need to be synchronized. It is a disaster times three, no doubt about it.

Mr Reid denied IT companies had wasted millions on preparation work for an entirely new system, saying the industry had been consulted on the move.

AT WHOSE INSTRUCTIONS WAS THIS MONEY WASTED you dirty swine? And now you are going to spend MORE money putting in a system that millions will reject out of principle, knowing full well that it will do nothing to stem the tide of people, stop any crime whatsoever etc etc.

“Doing something sensible is not necessarily a U-turn,” Mr Reid told reporters.

White is black, day is night, right is wrong, up is down, hot is cold, war is peace, freedom is slavery.

“We have decided it is lower risk, more efficient and faster to take the infrastructure that already exists, although the data will be drawn from other sources.”

YOU have decided this? Upon consultation with whom? Based on what parameters? This is more bullshit….and they know it.

Iris scans

The move was welcomed by campaign group No2ID.

Spokesman Michael Parker said campaigners had been warning the Home Office for years about the dangers of “putting all your eggs in one basket” when storing data.

Indeed.

Biometric information will be stored, initially, on systems currently used for asylum seekers, while biographical information will be stored on the DWP’s system.

So, your prints (should you be stupid enough to hand them over) will be stored with asylum seekers, where, thanks to the imperfections of biometric systems, you can be mistaken for someone who is not British, and who is in fact, the lowest creature in the Neulabour mind-set. That MIGHT be OK if you are not brown. And I don’t mean Gordon Brown.

Other information, on the issue and use of ID cards, will be stored on the existing passport service computer system.

Which we already know is a broken system that can allow near instant cloned passports, and which of course is open to all the insider abuse that Whitehall is already renowned for.

Mr Reid also announced proposals to force foreign nationals from outside the European Economic Area (EEA), who are already in the UK, to register their biometrics, such as fingerprints and iris scans.

And just how is he going to do that, and who in their right mind is going to agree to it?

This is already due to happen for those applying for visas to come to the UK from 2008, but Mr Reid said: “We are going to look at how we could do it for people who are already here.”

I would suggest that you look very hard at all of this and then throw it all in the garbage. There is no way that any self respecting person is going to knuckle under to your fascist bullshit.

Fake identity

He said the ultimate aim was to make all foreign nationals from outside the EU to register their biometric details but the scheme would begin with people re-applying to stay in the UK.

This will be challenged in court, and they will fail. You cannot treat people like criminals. Period.

He said he wanted to tighten up exit controls at ports and airports, as well as entry requirements.

“We want to count everybody in and count everybody out,” said Mr Reid.

Why? What will this achieve? What crime will it prevent? The answer is there is no reason for this, it will achieve nothing and that it will not prevent a single crime.

Foreigners from outside the EU would not be able to get a National Insurance number unless they have a biometric identity.

Like they even CARE. All the illegal workers DONT WANT A NATIONAL INSURANCE NUMBER YOU NUMBSKULL.

Immigration Minister Liam Byrne said a consultation paper would be published in the New Year.

Will this be like the previous consultation, where 5000 ‘noes’ were counted as one ‘no’ simply because they originated from a single website? Like that consultation that got all the facts right, that you are admitting were right only after MILLIONS of pounds have been wasted?

Don’t even PRETEND that this consultation paper will have any weight, its just an insult, and we are tired of these insults and your lies you dirty bastard.

Mr Reid said ID cards would help tackle illegal immigration, identity fraud, fight organised crime and terrorism, help protect vulnerable children by allowing better background checks and improve public services.

He said that? really?!?!?!?!?

They would not stop people having a fake identity, he conceded, but would prevent people having multiple identities, which he said were most often used by “crooks, terrorists and fraudsters”.

You have GOT to be kidding!!!!!! This is the STUPIDEST thing I have ever heard from Fascist Labor. If your prints are in the DB and a system operator is compromised, then you can have multiple identities. Period.

“You can go around claiming the first time you are John Reid, but you can not then come round a second time claiming you are Liam Byrne,” he said, by way of illustrating his point.

No one, would ever claim to be John Reid. That is just ABSURD. Honestly, even CRIMINALS have some shame.

Civil liberties

The plans were laid out in an action plan which Mr Reid said was a “countdown” to the introduction of ID cards.

The only thing we are ‘counting down’ to is the end of your evil regime you dog.

ID cards are due from 2009, becoming compulsory for anyone applying for a passport from 2010. Critics question their cost and the impact on civil liberties.

The card will contain basic identification information including the name, address, gender, date of birth and photo of the cardholder.

A microchip would also hold biometric information.

BBQ

And yet again, (and no surprise) BBQ fails to live up to its responsibilities, and lets this all slide by.

Pure unadulterated evil, and its ever compliant supporter.

SHAME ON YOU!

The Guardian has a piece today, as Jane Affleck reports, which trails plans to offer patients an opt-out from having their details uploaded to the NHS ‘Shared Care Record’ next year:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,1973338,00.html

There is a story on the BBC website that tells the exact opposite story, namely that no-one will get an opt out except in the most extreme circumstances:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6184043.stm

Isn’t this curious?

We suspect that the Department of Health is planning to announce on Monday an opt-out that they know will be attacked as fraudulent, and is trying to see to it that by Monday the story will be ‘old news’.

The background is this. We understand that the firms writing the software to support the opt-out have been instructed to use the following algorithm:

(1) Each GP’s surgery records will first be uploaded to a hosting centre run by a department of Health contractor;

(2) Then a program will trawl through the data creating a ‘Shared Care Record’ for upload to a central system; this will contain your current prescriptions and things like that;

(3) In respect of each patient who has ‘opted out’, a blank shared care record will then be created and uploaded ‘on top of’ the first one to the central system (whose audit facility will ensure that the original upload can still be reconstructed).

This clearly makes a mockery of the concept of ‘opt out’. If you don’t opt out, then your medical data will be available to any hospital that gives you emergency treatment, and also to the Department of Health. If you ‘opt out’, the data will be available to the Department, but not to a hospital treating you. This is clearly the wrong way round.

The shared care record is just the first step in creating a ‘Care Records Service’ which will unify GP and hospital records, but whose main function is to allow health data to be siphoned off for many other uses. (See yesterday’s BCS report on NHS computing at http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/BCS-HIF-report.pdf). That is the cornerstone of the NHS IT strategy and no change in it is proposed.

There is a press release from TheBigOptOut.org at

www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/tboo-pr-2006dec16.pdf

So it seems the BBC has a better grasp of what’s going on than the Guardian (though to be fair to them, their usual health man seems to be away this week),

Ross Anderson

A new civil liberties controversy has flared up over the news that police chiefs are considering using high-powered microphones to “eavesdrop” – as critics will see it – on crowds at the London 2012 Olympics.

A high-ranking officer told the BBC the proposal to strengthen security by using microphones alongside closed-circuit TV involved “taking public surveillance to an entirely new level”.

But the former home secretary David Blunkett called publicly on the government to block the scheme.

He told BBC Radio Five Live’s Weekend News programme that the suggestion was “simply unacceptable”, and smacked of the “surveillance state”.

As you walk down the street you expect to be able to have a private conversation
David Blunkett

Mr Blunkett said the idea echoed the fictional authoritarian Brave New World of Aldous Huxley’s novel.

“As you walk down the street you expect to be able to have a private conversation,” he said.

“If you can’t guarantee that – and here is someone speaking who has been pretty tough in terms of what should be available to protect society – I believe we have slipped over the edge.”

As you walk down the street, you expect to be able to have a private conversation.

This simply CANNOT be real.

Does the subhuman adulterer actually think this? Is he joking? This is the very same loathsome David Blunkett that did all the evil that we railed against…..

But Mimi Majick chimes in:

Its because he is BLIND; sound to him is equivalent to sight for us. That is why he understands this. It shows you why you shouldn’t have somebody who is disabled in a position like Home Secretary, because they cannot represent us. He cannot possibly understand what having CCTV cameras in the street means, because he has no sight.

And I agree totally, and have said this before; a blind Home Secratary cannot judge what is obscene and what is not obscene because he cannot see porn.

But I digress.

This BASTARD now wants to defect from the dark side (no pun intended) and join the side of what is right?

What utter rubbish.

This proves yet again that the people behind the push for ID cards, biometrics and all that other hogwash simply don’t understand what it is that they are doing. They don’t understand the consequences, the ramifications, the results, and if it all gets rolled out, the police will be in charge and they will have the power to silence any politician that goes up against them because they will be able to see into every bedroom, every bank account and every nook and cranny of this great country. No one in any position of power will dare defy them because it means, as in the case of asshole Blunkett, that adulterous affairs will be exposed, and in the case of Bliar, bribery uncovered.

Told you so!

and this from Bruce’s November newsletter:

We can’t turn back technology; electronic communications are here to stay. But as technology makes our conversations less ephemeral, we need laws to step in and safeguard our privacy. We need a comprehensive data privacy law, protecting our data and communications regardless of where it is stored or how it is processed. We need laws forcing companies to keep it private and to delete it as soon as it is no longer needed.

And we need to remember, whenever we type and send, we’re being watched.

Foley is an anomaly. Most of us do not send instant messages in order to solicit sex with minors. Law enforcement might have a legitimate need to access Foley’s IMs, e-mails and cell phone calling logs, but that’s why there are warrants supported by probable cause–they help ensure that investigations are properly focused on suspected pedophiles, terrorists and other criminals. We saw this in the recent UK terrorist arrests; focused investigations on suspected terrorists foiled the plot, not broad surveillance of everyone without probable cause.

Without legal privacy protections, the world becomes one giant airport security area, where the slightest joke — or comment made years before — lands you in hot water. The world becomes one giant market-research study, where we are all life-long subjects. The world becomes a police state, where we all are assumed to be Foleys and terrorists in the eyes of the government.

http://tinyurl.com/ymmnee

Yes indeed. What you are describing is not a ‘giant airport security area’ but a Prison Planet.

Me too Me too!!!! :

Passengers at Heathrow had their fingerprints taken for the first time yesterday, in tests which could lead to routine biometric scanning at Britain’s airports.

A high-tech scanner was unveiled by the Government and eventually all passengers could be required to have iris and face scans.

Initially, passengers are being invited to have their fingerprints scanned in return for skipping boarding queues. If the scheme, known as miSense, proves succesful, it could be rolled out across the UK…

Telegraph

Copycat imbeciles!

Telegraph Online

By Philip Johnston, Home Affairs Editor
Last Updated: 2:33am GMT 04/12/2006

The first signs of a significant popular revolt against the Government’s identity card scheme have been uncovered by a YouGov poll for The Daily Telegraph.

It suggests that hundreds of thousands of people, maybe even millions, would refuse to register on the proposed database that will underpin the scheme, even if this meant a fine or going to jail.

Despite ministerial claims during the passage of the ID Cards Act through parliament that there was widespread public support for the multi-billion pound plan, the opinion survey shows a country split in two on the issue. It also indicates growing public concern at the encroachment of the so-called “surveillance society”, with large proportions suspicious of the Government’s intentions…

Telegraph

The sleeper is awakening!

Hacking through the jungle of “haven’t we heard all this before?” , wading through the river of “Is there anything more to say?” and adjusting our hat to avoid the bright rays of “PRopaganda dressed as news” seems to having an effect on one’s system. The daily news once more seems to me a set of evolving illusions – popular tropes that need regular spinning lest they fall off needle thin spires of truth – just as it did in the mid-90s.

Anyway I caught the end of the Toady programme this morning which had some news about the introduction of portable fingerprint detectors. In the first instance I was dumbfounded by the sheer futility of the excercise as it will stand:

Experts hope the device will save massive amounts of police time and money by allowing officers to identify suspects on the roadside without having to take them to the station.

A pilot scheme – called Project Lantern – will be used in Luton, Bedfordshire, by officers targeting motoring offences.

The gadget allows officers to search 6.5 million fingerprints archived on the National Automated Fingerprint System, with the trial aiming to give them a result within five minutes.

The Home Office’s Police Information Technology Organisation (Pito) calculates it could save more than £2.2m a year.

Fingerprints can only be taken from the public voluntarily using the Lantern system because the law will have to be changed before officers can force people to give prints on the street.

Guardian

So for the system to ‘work’:
1) a person needs to alreday be on a police database.
2) said person needs to give their consent (incredibly likely, no?)

Additionally the spokesman on the Toady programme informed us that new fingerprints would not be added to the database and records would be deleted at the end of the day or on request (actually a good thing – not as good as prints not being taken though).

But then what does the system ‘working’ mean? Presumably it will allow truth-telling people with a criminal record to be identified more quickly. Hooray.

NO.

That is not what this device ‘working’ means.

This is part of the softening up procedure to make ‘procedural’ fingerprint taking and police access to a population database acceptable. Remember:

Fingerprints can only be taken from the public voluntarily using the Lantern system because the law will have to be changed before officers can force people to give prints on the street.

And believe me this Government will be all too ready to change the law to follow the technological ‘solution’.
This Government wants acceptance of a fully populated ‘criminal’ database (that is everyone has a criminal record, empty or otherwise)
This Government wants it’s NIR-centred biometric databases to be complete and pervasive.

But I’m sure we’ve said this before.

The information commissioner signalled a crackdown last night on companies that steal and sell sensitive details of people’s private lives after a prosecution exposed the growth in data theft.

This is certain to increase exponentially once State imposed registers are integrated with the proposed National Identity Register.

Richard Thomas, the official privacy watchdog, said he was investigating a number of organisations that have bought personal data such as details of bank accounts, tax returns and mortgage payments.

All this will become trivial when the NIR is implemented and people are coerced into using it to authorise financial transactions, (inter)national travel, access NHS records and the like.

He warned of raids and prosecutions after the conviction yesterday of a husband and wife who made £140,000 a year selling private financial information obtained by deception.

This is value is just for selling data nevermind its further misuse for fraud. Once the NIR is implemented this value will soar as inherently non-revokable biometric information on those who register will become available to those with the contacts/skills.

The Guardian has learned that two of the country’s leading law firms – Mishcon de Reya and Arnold & Porter – were linked to the couple’s scam. The firms deny any knowledge of illegal activity, but confirm they hired private detective agencies to find out information for their clients.

Showing that it will be easy to dupe those companies who legally pay for access to NIR information (in order that the project remains self financing). Once the foot is in the door this information can be used to leverage more and more information which will allow access to the correlated NHS, etc. databases.

The privacy watchdog suspects some big companies are exploiting the trade in personal data, which has been driven by the growth in computer databases and call centres operated by banks, utility companies and government departments.

Mr Thomas wants to widen his investigations to pursue those who buy personal data, as well as those who make a living selling it.

As you can see the activity of personal data theft/trading is directly linked to it being on the databases that are used by organisations ipso facto if you are not on a database your data cannot be stolen. If you do not register on the NIR and refuse to acknowledge it in your private transactions its cancer will not spread to private the databases you may consent to be on. (Incidentally the centralised biometric database should cause serious worries for certain institutions that already rely on privately held biometric authentication devices).

He will also campaign to persuade Lord Falconer, the constitutional affairs minister, to increase penalties. He wants jail terms for data thieves but is opposed by some newspapers, who say it would be a threat to free speech.

“These are serious offences, which are highly damaging to the individuals concerned. People’s personal details ought not to fall into the wrong hands,” Mr Thomas’s office said yesterday.

The wrong hands are anyone’s who would punish you into complying with an inherently damaging system.

A court heard how Sharon and Stephen Anderson had made a career out of bogus phone calls to penetrate the details of people’s bank accounts and tax returns all over the country.

This will be more serious with NIR and linked databases.

In what Mr Thomas has described as a thriving black market in personal information, the pair were hired as sub-contractors by three detective agencies, Carratu International, Fleet Investigations and Keypoint Services, all of which denied knowledge of the couple’s crimes committed on their behalf.

Guardian inquiries reveal that the ultimate clients in yesterday’s case included a Japanese air-conditioning firm, Daikin, and a US insurance company, CNA. Those firms too, say they were unaware illegal methods were being used.

Data theft is an international problem and whilst our government wuld wish otherwise it does not have the international jurisdiction to enforce the safety of its proposed NIR database

The victims of “blagging”, as such bogus calls are known, included David Hughes, former chairman of the collapsed football shirts empire Allsports, and Jon Sanders, a Manchester insurance broker. They were both said to be indignant that their privacy had been invaded.

In the fully-documented society no one will be safe, people such as those above will carry out business from abroad and most likely emigrate once the stupidity of NIR and it’s invasiveness into daily affairs is fully comprehended.

At Huntingdon magistrates court yesterday, where the Andersons pleaded guilty to breaching the Data Protection Acts and were ordered to pay £14,800 in fines and costs, their lawyer said their firm, based in St Ives, Cambridgeshire, was purely devoted to commercial disputes. They denied ever acting for warring spouses or newspapers on what they said were “ethical” grounds.

But Phil Taylor, prosecuting for the information commissioner, said: “People have the right to feel their information is safe and secure”. He told the magistrates: “There is a real risk information can be used for sinister purposes.” Bogus callers could be used to extract personal information from databases on behalf of criminals, or to intimidate witnesses.

Quite, and with interlinked databases and non-essential demands for NIR authentication or other ways of gleaning biometric information (set up a night club and get fingerprinting?) it is likely most person’s could be gleaned remotely.

My 14-year old daughter asked me to ask you this question: Which ID card should she go for to show that she is entitled to concessionary fares on public transport.

She is in the process of opting-out of random drug testing at school because she believes that the swab will be used to collect DNA

~SLip

Tony Bliar talks trash in The Telegraph about ID cards.

Let us tear him to bits:

On any list of public concerns, illegal immigration, crime, terrorism and identity fraud would figure towards the top.

Illegal immigration: Close the borders
Crime: Lock up the criminals
Terrorism: Stop terrorizing other people in their countries
Identity Fraud: not the business of government

In each, identity abuse is a crucial component. It is all part of a changing world: global mass migration; easier travel; new services and new technologies constantly being accessed.

The world is not changing; what HMG has done is opened the floodgates to migrants instead of thinking about the future carefully. It is this open borders policy that has caused the ‘problem’. The world has not changed at all; people are exactly the same as they used to be. Had you not, Mr Bliar Mass Murderer, invaded Iraq, we would not be on the top of the list of skunk nations. That is a fact. If the UK removes itself from Shengen and the EU, then the migration problem goes away. That is a fact. No matter how easy travel is, if you are stopped at the border, all the woes of unchecked immigration melt away.

As for new technologies being accessed, where these are transactions between private entities, the government has no place butting its terrorist head between the two parties. Period.

The case for ID cards is a case not about liberty but about the modern world.

The case against ID cards is all about liberty in the modern world, murderer, traitor and betrayer Bliar.

Biometrics give us the chance to have secure identity and the bulk of the ID cards’ cost will have to be spent on the new biometric passports in any event.

Biometrics do not solve the ultra flexible list of problems you are trotting out, scumbag, and as for the bulk of the ID cards’ cost having to be spent on new biometric passports, this is a blatant lie. The new passports, in order to conform to the international standards need only have a digital photograph in them. Everything else you are doing is by the design of your criminal vendors.

I am not claiming ID cards, and the national identity database that will make them effective, are a complete solution to these complex problems. That is the tactic of opponents who suggest that, if their introduction is unable to prevent all illegal immigration or every terrorist outrage, they are somehow worthless. What I do believe strongly is that we can’t ignore the advances in biometric technology in a world in which protection and proof of identity are more important than ever.

They are certainly not worthless. They have a great value to HMG as a tool of absolute control and surveillance. You have completely lost this argument you bastard Bliar, thanks to ‘Frances Stonor Saunders’: the thread in that link is highly representative of what happens to people when they find out what your bogus ID Card scheme really means. Once people understand the true horror of it, they turn against it 180°. Precisely this conversation and millions like it have appeared up and down the country. You have LOST this argument Bliar, and the more people are informed of precisely what you are doing, the less likely it will be that your evil scheme will be pulled off.

Nor is the Government alone in believing that biometrics offer us a massive opportunity to secure our identities. Firms across the world are already using fingerprint or iris recognition.

That is a PRIVATE matter between customer and business. It is not by compulsion that they identify themselves in this way to a business, and if it is, that is a matter for them to deal with. Also, providing this information to a business is not by compulsion of the law, and neither does doing it expose ALL of your personal details to millions of civil servants, criminals, the police and every busybody in the UK.

Providing your biometric to a business is completely different. Not only do you have a choice, but if you do decide to be identified in this way to them, they have a legal obligation to keep your details secret, and if they fail in this obligation, you can seek redress in the courts. As we have shown on BLOGDIAL again and again, HMG doesn’t give a DAMN what damage they do to you. If you are mistakenly branded a criminal or an alcoholic, “TOUGH SHIT, we don’t care” is the response.

You can hardly claim that this is of benefit to the British public…oh, I’m sorry, yes you can, because you are a pathological liar.

More than 50 countries are developing biometric passports. France, Italy and Spain plan to make their ID cards biometric.

I have just covered this. This means only a digital photo. You are misrepresenting this, as expected.

Visitors to the United States now digitally record their fingerprint, and new UK passports from last month must carry a facial biometric.

I’m glad that you mention USVISIT, because that evil system shows EXACTLY what this ‘biometric net’ is going to be used for; catching innocent people, like the heads of the absolutely legal internet gambling businesses who were intercepted thanks to USVISIT.

USVISIT is not about stopping terrorists, its about arresting people who are in no way a threat to the USA, but who represent a way to extort monies from foreigners trying to visit that beleaguered and once great country.

It is also not about stopping illegal workers, since those are able to WALK into the USA in their MILLIONS on an annual basis.

This is the truth about USVISIT and these systems in general:

Since January 2004, US-VISIT has processed more than 44 million visitors. It has spotted and apprehended nearly 1,000 people with criminal or immigration violations, according to a DHS press release.

I wrote about US-VISIT in 2004, and back then I said that it was too expensive and a bad trade-off. The price tag for “the next phase” was $15B; I’m sure the total cost is much higher.

But take that $15B number. One thousand bad guys, most of them not very bad, caught through US-VISIT. That’s $15M per bad guy caught.

Surely there’s a more cost-effective way to catch bad guys?

Yes indeed there is, and it does not involve this faddish Biometric madness.

USVISIT is a lie, just like your ID card scheme is a lie. It is there to control the decent people, the people with disposable cash who are economically active.

We also know how effective it can be. In trials using this new technology on visa applications at just nine overseas posts, our officials have already uncovered 1,400 people trying to get back into the UK illegally.

So, for 1,400 people, the liberty of the ENTIRE UK is going to be flushed down the toilet. BILLIONS are going to be spent setting it up, and we are going to have all of our details recorded and made available to anyone who wants to see them, for life.

I don’t think so.

A national identity system will have direct benefits in making our borders more secure and countering illegal immigration.

That is a lie. Illegal immigrants WILL enter this country, and they WILL find work. If they are not able to find work, and are not able to leave, then they will turn to crime to survive, unleashing a crime-wave the likes of which this isle has never before seen.

Biometric visas and residence cards are central to our plans and will be introduced ahead of ID cards. I also want to see ID cards made compulsory for all non-EU foreign nationals looking for work and when they get a National Insurance number. This will enable us, for the first time, to check accurately those coming into our country, their eligibility to work, for free hospital treatment or to claim benefits.

Biometric residence cards for EU citizens are illegal. In France, the ‘Carte de Sejour’ was found to be in contravention of EU law for anyone with EU citizenship wanting to live in France. This will be challenged and it will be put down.

I am convinced, as are our security services, that a secure identity system will help us counter terrorism and international crime. Terrorists routinely use multiple identities – up to 50 at a time – to hide and confuse. This is something al-Qa’eda train people at their camps to do.

More lies. All the Madrid bombers had valid ID, as did the ‘hijackers’ in ‘911’ and the people who perpetrated ‘7/7’. ID will do nothing to stop these outrages, and you know this Bliar you mass murderer. This argument has been defeated many times since it was first trotted out by the adulterer Blunkett. It was a lie then and it is a lie now, which is why you have written it like it is the truth. You are a liar. That is what you do.

It will also help us tackle the problem of identity fraud, which already costs £1.7 billion annually – a figure that has increased by 500 per cent in recent years.

‘Identity Fraud’ is a problem of service providers and the customers they serve. The market will take care of it in a highly efficient way. For example, the market for paper shredders has skyrocketed because discarded paperwork is one of the root causes of people having their identities taken over. Remove the discarded paperwork, the threat is greatly diminished. That is the market solving problems efficiently. It is not the place of government to guarantee the identity of anyone to a business. Of course, this is not your true aim. Your true aim in this is to have a frictionless taxation system, where everyone and every penny they earn is taxable and transparent to you.

But that is another blog post.

Building yourself a new and false identity is all too easy at the moment. Forging an ID card and matching biometric record will be much harder.

But not impossible. Meaning that the small number of ID thieves that are working now will simply tool up to the next level, while the bleating UK population are fleeced, and the crime carries on unabated. And of course, since all the IDs of everybody in the UK will be in one place, criminals will have a one stop shop to get your ID from, and staffers in Whitehall will be happy to facilitate them, as they have been proven to be in the past.

There will also be the added ‘bonus’ to you, Bliar, of being able to look into everyones lives at will; you and the millions of people around the world who will be able to buy info on any UK citizen from the illegally created databases that will emerge, not to speak of the journalists, and corrupt civil servants who will make a fortune out of this gold mine.

The National Identity Register will help improve protection for the vulnerable, enabling more effective and quicker checks on those seeking to work, for example, with children.

The only evil here is you, Bliar. What this sentence actually means is astonishing. We have said on BLOGDIAL before how this will work. Everyone in this system will have a criminal record (even though the legislation does not provide for this). It will either be blank or not. Every company, individual an entity in the UK will be able to check wether or not you have a criminal record, simply by telephoning a service and dictating your number or asking you to swipe your card.

It should make it much more difficult, as has happened tragically in the past, for people to slip between the cracks. Crime detection rates, which fell steadily for decades, should also be boosted. Police, who will have access to the national database, will be able to compare 900,000 outstanding crime-scene marks with fingerprints held centrally.

This is total speculation. Bliar says it SHOULD make it more difficult, crime detection rates SHOULD be boosted. Its a gamble, and a gamble with the liberty of every British person in the land. It is unacceptable, even if the detection rates went up; after all, they do not keep criminals locked up long enough to make a difference, so this is totally absurd.

This is how a national identity system will help tackle some of the major challenges facing our country. However, I believe its benefits go beyond helping us counter problems. Biometric technology will enable us, in a relatively short period of time, to cut delays, improve access and make secure a whole array of services. By giving certainty in asserting our identity and simplicity in verifying it, biometrics will do away with the need for producing birth certificates, driving licences, NI and NHS numbers, utility bills and bank statements for the simple task of proving who we are.

The problem with all of this, is that in each of these scenarios, the government keeps a record of when you identified yourself, and where you were when you did it. They track you, keep you under surveillance, and none of this is needed to prove your identity. Systems can be developed that do not require a central database to verify identity but which are 100% infallible and accurate. Of course, these systems empower the user and leave the government with no way to centrally track you, which is why they were not pursued. This is a project of control, pure and simple, designed from the outset to facilitate the needs of government surveillance.

A national identity system will quickly become part of the national infrastructure. It should prevent us having to tell every agency individually when we move house. In future, we could be automatically alerted when our passports are running out.

Just because everyone might become used to it if it becomes reality doesn’t mean that its right. The people in the USSR were used to living in their totalitarian state for decades, so much so that when it ended, some of them wanted it to be brought back.

This line also demonstrates amply that every agency will know your address, because they are watching you.

So these are the benefits against which we have to gauge the disadvantages of introducing a secure national identity system. There are three main lines of attack — the civil liberties argument, effectiveness and cost. I know this will outrage some people but, in a world in which we daily provide information to a whole host of companies and organisations and willingly carry a variety of cards to identify us, I don’t think the civil liberties argument carries much weight.

It doesn’t outrage us Bliar. After participating in the murder of 650,000 this is peanuts. Your points need to be shot down nonetheless.

Just because we CHOOSE to give our private data to organizations and companies, and because we WILLINGLY CHOOSE to carry a variety of cards for clearly defined purposes, doesn’t imply that YOU and your murderous cabal of genocidal traitors have the right to COMPEL us to carry YOUR CARD.

This is the difference that totalitarianists cannot understand; we choose what we want to do in a free society, and we let the market solve our problems. If there was a need for a centrally controlled database where your every move was under surveillance, accessible to every civil servant criminal and busybody, someone would have created it and sold it to the public. That is guaranteed. And what’s more, it would work VERY WELL unlike the IT projects that HMG perpetually fumble. NO one wants this when they find out what it really means. You know this, you liar.

More than two million shoppers in the US already use a “Pay by Touch” system that links their fingerprints to their bank accounts, and a similar system is on trial here in the UK.

Not compulsory, and your entire life is not laid bare to everyone through it, though your shopping habits are. These systems are facing opposition, which is due to grow exponentially once people find out what it really means to hand over your fingerprints like a criminal.

Parliament has attached important safeguards to the scheme, which should meet reasonable concerns.

Bhwaahhaahhahahahahahha!!!!!

Individuals will have the right to see what information is held on them; the register will not contain medical records or tax and benefits information;

That is a lie. We now know that the personal and private medical data of everyone in the UK is about to be uploaded to the NHS spine in 2007 (unless something is done about it) and to think that the NIR unique number that is issued to you will not be used as your universal patient number is simply absurd. 250,000 people will have unfettered access to the spine, meaning that once these two systems are up and running as designed, it will be trivial to match you with your medical records, and literally, millions of people will be able to see everything about you, including and not limited to, your medical records.

One of the reasons why this system is being built is, ostensibly, to cut benefit fraud. That means that anyone in the DSS system will have their NIR unique number in that database, meaning that all the people who have access to that system will be able to pass your information on that database to anyone else.

Any database run by HMG where your NIR unique number is attached to your name creates in effect, a virtual database, that is trivial to ‘short circuit’ into a connected single database, accessible as if it were a single entity. Everyone knows this.

This is an experiment not only in mass surveillance, but in how much intrusion and violation a civilized population will take before it breaks. That is why it is vital that no matter what the consequences, we all absolutely refuse to let it happen, by denying access to our GP records, not registering in the NIR by renewing our passports right now and not applying for new ones should the system come on stream. If we don’t do this, the message is, “fleece us, we don’t care”.

full accreditation will be required for any organisation that wishes to use the data – and they will have to get consent from each individual before they access their details.

That is bullshit not only because of what I just wrote, but consent in this case means handing over your card for a swipe, which will be construed as consent for your records to be accessed. ‘Full accreditation’ in this case means anyone who can pay the trivially small fee for accessing the Identity verification service, which will be an online service, and if you are not accredited, you simply pay someone who is. More lies from the Maximum Liar.

It was also very clear from last week’s arguments about surveillance and the DNA database that the public, when anyone bothers to ask them, are overwhelmingly behind CCTV being used to catch or deter hooligans, or DNA being used to track down those who have committed horrific crimes. And that’s what surveys suggest, too, about their position on ID cards.

The surveys that have been done have been shown to be wholly inadequate because the questions used did not address what the ID card scheme actually means to the interviewee. Questions like, “If an ID card could cut crime, would you be for it?” does not tell us anything at all about the real opinion of the interviewee, and the people who ran these polls knew this when they conducted them. As I said before, people are waging their own infowar on this subject, and the facts about this system are so chilling people go ballistic when they understand what it all really means.

Then there is the argument that ID cards and the national register simply will not work. This rests largely on the past failures, which I accept exist, of IT projects of all governments. This, however, seems to me an argument not to drop the scheme but to ensure it is done well.

‘Done well’? Bliar, you have absolutely no understanding of databases and computers; in fact, you are computer illiterate. This is clearly demonstrated by your statements on this subject. You are a luser. An asshat, and a murderer. Your next victim will not be the freedom of the British.

There are plenty of examples of how this can be achieved. The Passport Service database, which holds 70 million records, has already issued 2.5 million biometric passports since March.

See? A total moron.

That leaves the cost to the individual. Here, too, there has been some confusion. I simply don’t recognise some of the figures that have been attached to ID cards which, too often, include the costs of biometric passports. This is unfair and inaccurate.

You will be MADE to ‘recognize’, Bliar!!!

We will have no choice but to have a biometric passport, if we want to travel abroad.

That is a lie. We DO have a choice. ‘Biometric Passport’ means only a digital photo as the minimum requirement to qualify as ‘Biometric’. All the rest of it, the eye scans, fingerprints etc is all optional.

The United States has started to require them.

Yes, and we should REALLY follow them further into the abyss shouldn’t we?

This will soon be the case throughout the world. On present estimates, biometric passports make up 70 per cent – or around £66 – of the cost of the combined passports/ID cards we want.

and will not get.

The additional cost of the ID cards will be less than £30 — or £3 a year for their 10-year lifespan. Not a bad price for the problems I am convinced they will help us tackle and for the benefits they will bring. […]

Telegraph

My God, the evil of this man is beyond belief. The lying bastardy, the baseness, the misdirection, omission, ignorance…The only price that matters in this bogus equation is that of LIBERTY and FREEDOM. The value of liberty and freedom are infinite. That means you cannot use them in an equation of any kind where you are trying to do a cost benefit analysis. You traitor. And even if we were to take your figures seriously, which we do not, they are totally bogus. The cost of running the system must be taken in aggregate and not on the individual level, since that is the context in which the money is going to be spent. Also, the benefit is not to the individual, but to the state, and since the man in the street is being made to pay and not the state (yes, they really are two separate things, now more than ever) HMG is getting a total surveillance system for free. The only people who are benefitting financially are the venal vendors.

Tony Bliar is a bad guy. With this scheme, he is single handedly throwing away what greater men than him died for in two world wars. He is a traitor to this nation, as are all the people are helping put this together, and those who voted for it.

It is not too late however to dismantle the whole thing. It has been done before, right here in the United Kingdom There is no justification, no excuse, no rationale that can be trundled out to justify enslaving people.

That is the bottom line. That is what this system is; a radical dehumanizing slave grid. The answer is ‘no’ and this scheme will be destroyed; mark it well nunckle.

Normally, discussion pieces leave us with that empty feeling of, ‘yes, but what are you going to DO about it?’.

Well, here’s a piece – the leader piece in today’s online Grauniad – which fills that gap.

Warning over privacy of 50m patient files

Call for boycott of medical database accessible by up to 250,000 NHS staff

What you can do

!!! Immediate, and so unexpected as to be almost missable, is the link to The Proposed Solution.

David Leigh and Rob Evans
Wednesday November 1, 2006
The Guardian

Millions of personal medical records are to be uploaded regardless of patients’ wishes to a central national database from where information can be made available to police and security services, the Guardian has learned.Details of mental illnesses, abortions, pregnancy, HIV status, drug-taking, or alcoholism may also be included, and there are no laws to prevent DNA profiles being added.

The uploading is planned under Whitehall’s bedevilled £12bn scheme to computerise the health service.

After two years of confusion and delays, the system will start coming into effect in stages early next year.

Though the government says the database will revolutionise management of the NHS, civil liberties critics are calling it “data rape” and are urging Britons to boycott it. The British Medical Association also has reservations. “We believe that the government should get the explicit permission of patients before transferring their information on to the central database,” a spokeswoman said yesterday.

And a Guardian inquiry has found a lack of safeguards against access to the records once they are on the Spine, the computer designed to collect details automatically from doctors and hospitals. The NHS initiative is the world’s biggest civilian IT project. In the scheme, each person’s cradle-to-grave medical records no longer remain in the confidential custody of their GP practice. Instead, up to 50m medical summaries will be loaded on the Spine.The health department’s IT agency has made it clear that the public will not be able to object to information being loaded on to the database: “Patients will have data uploaded … Patients do not have the right to say the information cannot be held.”Once the data is uploaded, the onus is on patients to speak out if they do not want their records seen by other people. If they do object, an on-screen “flag” will be added to their records. But any objection can be overridden “in the public interest”.

Harry Cayton, a key ministerial adviser, warned last month of “considerable pressure to obtain access to [the] data from … police and immigration services”, but he is confident that these demands can be resisted by his department.

Another concern is the number of people who can view the data. The health department has issued 250,000 pin-coded smart cards to NHS staff. These will grant varied access from more than 30,000 terminals – greater access for medical staff, and less for receptionists. Health managers, council social workers, private medical firms, ambulance staff, and commercial researchers will also be able to see varying levels of information. Officials say the data will be shared only on a need-to-know basis. But Guardian inquiries show a lack of safeguards.

Although data protection laws supposedly ban unnecessary build-ups of computer information, patients will get no right to choose whether their history is put on the Spine. Once uploading has taken place, a government PR blitz will follow. This will be said to bring about “implied consent” to allow others view the data. Those objecting will be told that their medical care could suffer.

The government claims that computerised “sealed envelopes” will allow patients selectively to protect sensitive parts of their uploaded history from being widely accessed. But no such software is yet in existence.

It is being promised for an unspecified date. Some doctors say “sealed envelopes” may be too complex to be workable. The design also allows NHS staff to “break the seal” under some circumstances. Police will be able to seek data, including on grounds of national security. Government agencies can get at records, according to the health department, if “the interests of the general public are thought to be of greater importance than your confidentiality”. Examples given of such cases include “serious crime and national security”.The department’s guidelines say: “The definition of serious crime is not entirely clear … Serious harm to the security of the state or to public order, and crimes that involve substantial financial gain or loss will … generally fall within this category.” The health department says confidentiality can already be breached in such cases.At present, police have to persuade a GP, who knows the patient, to divulge limited facts, or insist on a court order.

Under the new system, data may be disclosed centrally and anonymously, at the touch of a button. Health department privacy advisers say they do not wish to allow police to have clinical information. But they are prepared to disclose patients’ addresses.Another safeguard initially promised was that all patients would be able to check their records on the internet for mistakes. But a system involving the issue of smart cards to patients has not yet been tried out.

Current criminal penalties are so weak they have failed to stop tabloid journalists and private detectives raiding such data on an industrial scale, according to a recent special report by Richard Thomas, the information commissioner.

Sir John Bourn’s National Audit Office also wrote a recent report warning of significant concerns among NHS staff “that the confidentiality of patient information may be at risk”. But officials persuaded the NAO to delete the warnings in the published version.The original draft said: “Patient confidentiality remains a controversial issue among critics … both as regards the adequacy of the planned safeguards to protect information, and whether patients should have a right to opt out of having their information recorded”.

Stunning! That those charged with serving your best interests treat you with such open contempt. You are meat. You are data. You are a commodity belonging to the nation, and anything you have or hold can be stolen and sold for ‘the public interest’. Are you ready to sold?

So, coming back to the good and bad of this article… it is a good stand-alone piece. However, no database now stands alone. It is clear from the above how police, immigration et al want access to every detail of peoples lives. This cannot be pointed out strongly enough. And it must be resisted with every fibre.

No apathy, apathy is complicity. No compliance, compliance is treachery. No NIR registration, registration is slavery.

What can you do? Today, against this NHS database, you can go back to the top and follow the link.

Just as individual identity is fundamental to our face-to-face interactions, digital identity is fundamental to our interactions in the online world. Unfortunately, many of the challenges associated with the Internet stem from the lack of widely deployed, easily understood, and secure identity solutions. This should come as no surprise. After all, the Internet was designed for sharing information, not for securely identifying users and protecting personal data. However, the rapid proliferation of online theft and deception and the widespread misuse of personal information are threatening to erode public trust in the Internet and thus limit its growth and potential.

Microsoft believes that no single identity management system will emerge and that efforts should instead be directed toward developing an overarching framework that connects different identity systems and sets out standards and protocols for ensuring the privacy and security of online interactions. Microsoft calls this concept the Identity Metasystem. The Identity Metasystem is not a specific product or solution, but rather an interoperable architecture that allows Internet users to use context-specific identities in their various online interactions.

PDF

M$ has released a new paper ‘The Identity Metasystem: Towards a Privacy-Compliant Solution to the Challenges of Digital Identity’. The above is from the summary. This paper is flawed from the outset; the ‘problem’ of identity on the web is a vendor looking for a solution.

individual identity is fundamental to our face-to-face interactions, digital identity is fundamental to our interactions in the online world

This is not true. When I buy a newspaper from a street vendor, he doesn’t need to know anything about me to sell me an Evening Standard. When I buy a bouquet of flowers from a shop in the high street, the shop keeper doesn’t need to know who I am and where I live, or anything else about me. All they have to know is that my money is good. They can then deliver the flowers to wherever I say it should go. The second part of that quoted sentence, “digital identity is fundamental to our interactions in the online world” is simply wrong, for reasons I give below.

many of the challenges associated with the Internet stem from the lack of widely deployed, easily understood, and secure identity solutions.

This is not true; the problem is, as I say below, one of buggy whip manufacturers trying to sell their wares to bicycle makers. Poor analogy!

the rapid proliferation of online theft

Is caused by this misapplication of existing systems and a misunderstanding of what is actually required for an online purchase.

Microsoft believes that no single identity management system will emerge and that efforts should instead be directed toward developing an overarching framework that connects different identity systems and sets out standards and protocols for ensuring the privacy and security of online interactions. Microsoft calls this concept the Identity Metasystem.

Identity management systems are not needed. The onus needs to be swung back onto the user. Identity management systems will eventually be replaced by light systems where the users ‘identity’ is owned by the user. These bad, antiquated systems will eventually collapse like MS Passport collapsed, when the solution that solves the problem correctly is launched.

Identity, like cash, needs to be owned by the user, and it needs to be cash like, and not card like. The problems of CC fraud are caused by old style services trying to shoehorn ’70s style payment systems into a twentieth century shoe. The way forward is to literally let people own their identities, i.e., in systems that do not rely on you revealing who you ‘really are’ to get things done, but which rely on you managing your identity in a cash like manner. I have said this before on BLOGDIAL; your data has an actual monetary value and should be treated as a valuable thing, like precious metals etc.

Skype payments (and all payment systems like it) are a good example of a cash like identity system; they are light, limited in their exposure of user info, and the onus is on the user to protect a single piece of information; her login.

Skype doesn’t care who you ‘really are’ in order for you to spend Skype money (when they roll this out); its up to you to protect your user name and password, just like it is your responsibility to look after your wallet in your pocket when you are in the street. Oyster, for all its flaws (following people around) is the same. When you buy an anonymous Oyster card, no one will care who you are when you go and buy a Mars bar with it in a shop. Who you ‘really are’ is irrelevant to all transactions both online and offline; this is the paradigm (re) shift that identity system vendors resist but which has been in place for generations. It is only now that it is possible to know everything about someone when they grocery shop that companies are clamoring for ways to actually do this and harvest this data. It has never been needed and will be rejected wholesale when people cotton on (again) to how bad these systems really are for people and society.

You can buy with Skype money, have goods delivered to any address that you like, and be completely anonymous while taking full advantage of e-commerce. This is the way that identity should be managed; in light, not heavy systems, that are cash-like, where the onus on security is pushed (or released) back to the consumer. Chaumian e-cash did this beautifully; you should look it up as an example of how identity can and should be managed.

Biometrics, ID cards, iris scans and every other vendor created snake oil product to ‘secure’ identity and e-commerce is just that, Snake Oil. Twenty first century thinking and systems are what is needed and are what will eventually take over. Over zealous, pointless, vendor driven ‘solutions’ are detected as damage by ‘the internets’ and economics, and both of these will be automatically routed around, circumvented, defeated and replaced by systems that are both better and beneficial.

One thing is for sure, Microsoft will not be the vendor to come up with it. It will be someone like Skype, or its decedents that does it; some outfit that is light, decentralized, focussed and unfettered, unlike M$, which is encumbered, lethargic, immobile and who has been playing catch up since Netscape. It will not be Google either, as we have seen from the YouTube buy out. Whoever does it, this solution will change everything overnight. It will destroy the old (and wrong) ideas about identity, and then we will enter ‘The Third Bubble’.

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

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

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

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

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

Recruit volunteers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Call centres have become an increasingly important source of jobs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You get the picture.

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

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

Or maybe I have it all wrong.

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

But why go there?

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

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

Maybe its because they are in the southern hemisphere, and the Coriolis Effect has addled their sunburned brains…whatever the reason, ZDNet Australia appears to be smoking crack:

Fingerprinting technology is the most reliable and cost effective biometric authentication technology but it’s not being deployed on a wide scale because people still imagine that criminals are the only ones that have to surrender their fingerprints, according to Sagem.

Users are resisting the switch to fingerprint authentication technologies because they still see the process of giving a fingerprint as somehow related to being caught by the police, according to Gilles Novel, manager for secure terminals and transactions at Sagem Australasia.

“We have to shift mentality away from where people are scared [of giving their fingerprints],” Novel told ZDNet Australia. “The problem we have faced is that people think ‘if I enrol my fingerprint there has to be, one way or the other, a link to the police’. They think criminal activity instead of their own privacy.”

Novel argues that attitudes are slowly changing — especially as people slowly realise that fingerprints are more reliable than passwords and can help increase, not erode, privacy.

“If you are an employer and someone does the wrong thing on your network, that person can say ‘it wasn’t me — someone has used my password’. But in the case of biometrics, how can you say ‘it wasn’t my finger?’.” Novel told ZDNet Australia.

???!!!

This uncritical article can only be the result of paid for PR insertion. Everyone knows that fingerprinting is for criminals, and that it should remain ONLY for criminals; free and innocent people should be at liberty to be anonymous and unaccounted for; the exact opposite of what happens when you give your fingerprints to anyone. ZDNet has just published an article that claims that Black is White.

Unbelievable.

Fingerprinting violates your privacy in many ways, which we have outlined on BLOGDIAL for years, and which the writers of a technology rag like ZDNet should for certain understand, ummm don’t they read The Register for crying out loud?

The piece ends with this:

In Australia, fingerprinting technology was being adopted by Centrelink, the government’s nationwide human services agency. Last year, the organisation decided to ditch passwords in favour of a fingerprint authentication system that would require it to purchase and deploy 31,000 finger scanners. However, the plan was scrapped earlier this year.

ZDNet Australia

[…]

Well I do declare, there ARE some sensible people in Australia!

WHY was it scrapped ZDNet Australia? Could it have something to do with the incredible and totally sucessful resistance to ID cards that smashed the Australian governments plans so many years ago?

Maybe we need some of that Coriolis Effect and hot sun here in the UK!

The rest of the world slowly catches up with BLOGDIAL:

By Mark Ballard
18th October 2006

The public fears losing their fingers to ruthless biometric ID thieves in the fingerprint-controlled future, apparently. Or at least, so says Frost & Sullivan analyst Sapna Capoor, who argued unconvincingly that “A dead finger is no good to a thief.”

If you have a fingerprint scanner protecting your family jewels, your data might be safe, but what about your fingers?

So, it’s all getting out of hand? Then on the other… there are recorded instances of people having their fingers chopped off, and the biometric industry takes the issue seriously.

For example, there were the Malaysian crooks who nabbed a man’s fingers in order to operate the biometric security on the S-class Mercedes they stole from him.

Nevertheless, biometric firms are doing what they can to detect whether a fingerprint being scanned is alive or not, said Jean Francois Mainguet, chief scientist of fingerchip biometrics at Atmel-France, and inventor of the sweeping technique for direct silicon fingerprint scanning (he was awarded his patent on 9/11, as it happens).

Speaking at Biometrics 2006 in London, Mainguet said it wasn’t yet possible to detect “liveliness”, and even when it was, this would guarantee security no more than a regular biometric.

“Absolute security doesn’t exist,” he said. If you could detect liveliness, you wouldn’t be able to tell if someone was accessing some system or authorising some payment under duress or not.

Security causes an escalation of causes and reactions just like the arms race. Want to cheat the banking system? Forge an ID. Fingerprint scanner making it tricky? Chop someone’s finger off. Live fingerprint scanner? Hold someone’s family at gun point.

The techniques being explored for live scanners include inducing involuntary responses via an electric charge to cause a spasm in skin pressed against the glass. Or there’s the use of light fluctuations to induce involuntary responses from the user of an iris scanner.

They can all be faked, said Mainguet. The electrical response, for example is as easy as making a frog’s leg twitch if you have chopped carefully.

There is a solution, he said, which is to use a variety of biometrics to identify someone. Biometrics? You just can’t get enough of them. At some shows, anyway.

[…]

The Register

We made this exact point before. Like we have been saying if you do not register in the biometric net (ID Card, NIR), or in this case, buy a car, or a lock, or a safe that uses your thumbprint as the key, you will not have to worry about the bolt cutters removing your thumb(s) or the cheese slicer removing the top four millimeters of your thumb skin.

Now, if they get out the cheese slicer, and slice off your prints, when they stick them onto their own fingers, they will seem to be alive, because the criminals finger is providing the 37^° warmth that these ‘is she alive’ scanners will be looking for. For example. Either way, having a biometric door-lock on your house tells the criminal that he has to come properly equipped, just as he does when he sees a particular type of lock that he knows how to pick. It also tells him that he can target your wife, your children and your housekeeper.

Its pretty obvious really.

I had the opportunity to look at Virgin’s ‘self service’ checkin at Heathrow. To use this ‘service’ you put your machine readable passport into a machine, and your checkin pass is printed out for you.

What’s wrong with this picture? That instead of using your credit card or some other card to issue with your ticket, they use a state issued document whose purpose is to get you past immigration, and nothing else. There is no reason whatsoever for them to use your passport for this, and since you and your passport and your ticket will be examined by several people on your way to the cattle truck aircraft, this check is redundant. A machine should never be used to check your ‘identity’ or validity. Of course, people were lining up to take advantage of the ‘convenience’ of this ‘service’, blithely sticking their passports into this machine without any indication of what this machine was doing with their data. Of course, if the RFID passports gain wide acceptance, you wont even have to touch the machine….and thats the machine that you know about.

Yesterday, the Daily Mail reported that:

“A vast database containing a file on every man, woman and child is being planned by the Government in a ‘sinister’ expansion of the ‘Big Brother’ state.

Personal information containing details of every aspect of an individual’s life will be available to 400,000 Whitehall civil servants and council workers.

Lord Falconer has ordered privacy laws to be watered down to allow the plans to be forced through.

The plans would allow anyone working for a public body to monitor everything from an individual’s driving licence record to whether they had paid their council tax on time. ”

Who is this installed noxious toad Falconer to be ‘ordering privacy laws to be watered down ?’ You would tend to think, as useless as they have proved themselves in other ways, what feeble laws are there, are there for good reason.

“Critics warned that allowing sensitive financial information to be viewed by all public bodies would leave it wide open to identity fraud. And pensioners who take stands against soaring council tax bills by refusing to pay could have their rights to pension credit withdrawn”

One reason the UK is so vulnerable to this sort of crap, is that opponents of tyranny are not capable of arguing against it thanks to the crippling poisonous socialism that New Labour and its instruments of torture like the BBC have so corrupted political thought with.

People have been so bludgeoned into being terrified plebs by the regime, they can no longer argue in a principled way as human beings, but feebly; only against the trivial practicalities of tyranny as stupified slaves which is of course worse than pathetic and useless. […]

What’s more, appalled citizens who the state serve, have a responsibility to put their foot down when the state becomes this malignant.

The question civil servants, various council workers, the police, security services and military have to ask themselves is should we really be listening to a faction that Clare Short recently described as a coup ? That former Foreign Office officials are openly saying is putting the country in danger, and that the Telegraph describe as ‘Nazis’ ? (although it’s a tough one to choose, I think the better analogy is communists).

Are these people going to take orders like pitiful shamed automatons to hurt the population on behest of a truly wretched criminal government that instead of confronting it’s own abnormalities becomes sicker and more perverted by the day, and is permitted to do so by a largely worthless collection of coward backbenchers who are more concerned with masturbating over a pre-soiled gargoyle like Gordon Brown than doing their job ?[…]

Jultra

Another classic post from Jultra, and I agree with everything in it.

Now all we have to do is do nothing about it. Yes, thats right, do nothing, i.e.,

DO NOT apply for a new passport.
DO NOT renew your driving license.
DO NOT enter the NIR for any designated document or any other reason.
DO NOT answer any correspondence to do with this or registration in any database.

That is where we start.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ministers are to announce next month that they have overturned a key data protection principle which prevents information on individual citizens held by one government department from being passed to another public agency, the Guardian has learned.

It is believed that a cabinet committee, MISC 31, set up by Tony Blair to examine data sharing and chaired by Hilary Armstrong, the chief whip, decided last month to overturn the principle that personal information provided to a government department for one purpose should in general not be used for another.

Last month? WTF on whose authority (I’m sure that this question doesn’t ‘matter’ anyway). In any case this is a key decision in allowing the NIR to be used as a hub for government busybodying, snooping and before you can say ‘Salamitaktik’ Aleikum – Control over day to day activity. This is exactly the way the government can say $PRIVATE_DATA will not be stored on the National Identity Register even though anyone with NIR information will be able to access a government database with that information on it.

The current policy means that public bodies and departments must provide a legal justification each time they want to share data about individuals and specify the purpose. The new policy will reverse this and allow officials to assume that personal data can be shared unless there are pressing reasons not to disclose it.

This basically means no one is going to bother checking why a DEFRA official is so interested in your Driving License or why someone from the MOD is checking your tax returns. This is also the the attitude towards data sharing in the US and what makes their Social security Numbers so valued for fraud using information gathered by the state.

Mr Suffolk has denied there will be free trade across Whitehall in personal information: “Not all information will be shared,” he said. “This is not about sharing your health record or criminal record. It is about basic data sharing to ensure that services to citizens are seamless.”

Not YET. You wouldn’t have imagined a backroom committee would be able to overturn data protection policy would you? And, again, at whose bequest/with what safeguards? Who is this Mr Suffolk, without legislative responsibilities, that we are supposed to trust with this statement?

(John Suffolk, the former Director General of Criminal Justice, is the new government CIO…An IT veteran with a CV stretching back over 25 years including a stint as IT director at the Britannia Building Society, Suffolk will report in to Ian Watmore, the previous holder of the post and now Head of the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit…In his spare time, Suffolk helps run a farm for rare breeds.)

It is expected that the change of policy on data sharing will be presented as a consumer-friendly move.

To call the public consumers in relation to government services is still a distortion of the relationship.

Officials say that when a family move home, they could register their new address online with their local authority, which would then update the records of the new local authority and pass the information to the driving licence authorities, the tax authorities and the electoral registrar.

At least half of this does not concern central government in its current role (and in the utopian future none of this would need to be handled by central government).

…Critics claim that an unpaid parking ticket for someone on benefits could lead to that information being passed to the Benefits Agency and the fine deducted directly.

Or perhaps you will be denied medical care unless you top up your NI contribution, more likely, overpaid tax credits will be automagically deducted from your pay packet. Give with one hand, take with the other and pay ‘commission’ on both that’s the reality of Brown’s top down economic view – I digress.

So the need to shed the state from your life becomes even greater. The gap between rich and poor expands, between those who can afford privacy and those who are bullied into justifying their lives to all and sundry. Unless unless…

Via the Guardian who are also doing some good exposing of the massively over budget NHS IT coordination project (you can feel the wasted billions in NIR implementation in your veins – furring them up like cholesterol)

A system for the “positive profiling” of European airline passengers is to be urgently explored in response to last week’s alleged airline terror plot, European interior ministers meeting in London agreed yesterday.

The home secretary, John Reid, insisted that the new system, which would affect all domestic and international flights in and out of Europe, would not involve screening by religion or ethnic background but would be carried out well in advance of flights based on biometric checks – electronic eye or facial scans.

[…]

NO

This would not address anything – you can no more identify a potential terrorist through ‘biometric information’ than you can by what brand of breakfast cereal they eat. This sort of data rape serves only one purpose and that is for the (EU) State(s) to aggregate information on individuals in any/every manner possible. It would be a sickening and wicked deception that would have nothing to do with amending the UK’s foreign policy (nor the interim measure of improving targeted investigations against suspected terrorists) and would simply be an outrageous use of tax payers money that subsidises the Government favourite lobbying companies.

We have been through the arguments so many times that they practically never leave the front page.

For this sort of thing to stop the people of the UK must STOP.

(So where is the rebuttal of Reid’s tripe in the Guardian story? And I’m not talking about the easy option of reporting ‘potential’ racial discrimination)