In today’s Grauniad, a very pleasant letter has been published:

Boycott these checks on students

The Guardian,
Tuesday 14 April 2009

As academics involved in research on the uses and abuses of state power, it is becoming increasingly apparent that members of staff in universities and colleges are being drawn into a role of policing immigration (Universities weigh up new fraud unit to thwart bogus applications, 11 April). For example, academic and administrative staff are being asked to monitor the attendance of students at lectures and classes (whether compulsory or not), and we are being asked to check the ID of students and colleagues, while external examiners and visiting lecturers are also now being asked to provide passport details.

We strongly oppose the imposition of such changes in the way that academic institutions are run. We believe these practices are discriminatory and distort academic freedoms. The implementation of UK immigration policies is not part of our contractual duties and we will play no part in practices which discriminate against students and staff in this way. We support our administrative colleagues in their refusal to engage in such practices. Thus we pledge to refuse to co-operate with university requests for us to provide details on our students or participate in investigations of those students.

As a first, and highly practical, step, we pledge not to supply any personal details – such as passport or driving licence details – in our role as external examiners, and urge all of our colleagues across higher and further education to join this boycott. We will also forward motions to our respective union branches in support of this position. A boycott would undermine immediately the system of external examining at all levels, which operates almost exclusively on the basis of goodwill, and thus strike a significant blow against both the pernicious drift of government policy, and university managements’ acquiescence to this.

Dr Elizabeth Capewell
Professor Ben Bowling
Professor Penny Green
Professor Gerry Johnstone
Professor Scott Poynting
Dr Anandi Ramamurthy
Professor Phil Scraton
Professor Joe Sim
Professor Steve Tombs
and 28 others

In The Devil’s Home on Leave by Derek Raymond (aka Robin Cook), published in 1986, the main character, a detective sergeant, refers at one point to a proposed police special powers bill. Noting it would allow police to detain a person for seven days without access to a lawyer, he says: “If it ever passed on to the statute book we [the police] would effectively be released from any serious accountability to the public.” He adds: “I could stop and arrest a man on the street simply because I didn’t like the look on his face, or the way his pockets bulged.” He notes that the bill had been rejected (did it exist?), but he predicts that it would be back, “perhaps in a different form, perhaps looking more innocuous – not tomorrow, possibly not even the day after, but doubtless the day after that” … and he was right.

Peter Hames
Bideford, Devon

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/14/immigration-higher-education

At last, the people with some backbone and brains are saying, “No”.

Like we keep saying, all it takes is for everyone to stop obeying; in this case, the ‘Academics’ are going to stop obeying and get on with minding their own business, which is the business of being an Academic.

If what the government is doing is really evil, and it is, then ALL professionals should take the same stance, and make the following pledge:

There is a broad consensus that the potential for abuse of human rights is massive with ID cards.

Whilst governments may be able to issue them, it is businesses and the professionals that run them who will be the main interface administering their use and pushing their widespread adoption.

We all have a moral responsibility to protect the welfare of others by refraining from doing evil ourselves.

We therefore call upon all members of Facebook, LinkedIn and all other professional networks to sign this pledge that they will not integrate ID Card requirements into their interactions with their clients, colleagues or customers.

For generations man has succeeded brilliantly without ID Cards in every sphere of life. We actively reject the mistaken ideas, claims and outright falsehoods made by the governments that want to introduce ID Cards, and we commit ourselves to reinforcing normal, moral interactions with our clients, customers and colleagues.

We actively reject the ‘Zero Trust Society’ that governments are trying to create through ID Cards.

We pledge that:

We will not require ID to provide our services.

We will choose professionals and service providers that have taken this pledge over those that have not.

We will not cooperate with any mandate that requires us to identify our clients, colleagues or customers.

When you take payment for a service, you pledge that you will not ask for ID. Your client or customer should not have to produce a document in order to buy products or receive services from you.

Example Scenario
The guiding principle here is not that our clients, colleagues or customers need to prove that, “they are who they say they are”, but that, “I am who I say I am” is good enough as long as they pay you.

If you are offering a hotel room, and the person hiring the room pays with a credit card or cash, there is no need for any other information; you are in the business of renting hotel rooms, not collecting information about your clients on behalf of governments.

Policy Example
Any form that you print that you require your clients, colleagues or customers to fill out should not contain fields for ID card numbers, passport numbers or any other number from an ID document.

If we all refuse to interface with the ID Cards they will be of little use to anyone, and will eventually be abandoned. If however we integrate them into our systems and processes, they will become indispensable and the Zero Trust Society will come into being.

Think of this pledge as a Hippocratic Oath for the 21st Century.

Spread it far and wide!

And now we have a new policy example; Academics refusing to demand ID before they teach, enroll or interact with students. Each professional body can come up with its own scenario and policy example; the most important thing is that everyone has a policy, and that that policy is to reject the Zero Trust Society and all the apparatus that enables it. Everyone everywhere must avoid doing the administrative work of the police state, and they must shun anyone that does do that nasty work.

Do you know someone who needs to read this pledge?

And now the line is drawn in the sand:

Airline pilot leaders today accused the government of using airport workers as ‘guinea pigs’ for identity cards and warned they would not co-operate with the scheme.

The British Airline Pilots Association (Balpa) said ID cards had ‘absolutely no value’ for security and claimed pilots were being ‘coerced’ into using them.

‘Promises that ID cards would be voluntary have been broken,’ said general secretary Jim McAuslan.

‘Forcing pilots to have ID cards is an affront to the people who for years have been, and continue to be, at the forefront in the battle against terrorist outrages.’

Balpa has written to the Identity and Passport Service, as well as to management at Manchester airport and London City airport – the first two locations for the introduction of ID cards.

Mr McAuslan said workers who refused to accept the cards face being sacked. ‘This could be an individual who has served his or her country as a service pilot being told they are not now trusted,’ he added.

‘This is both unacceptable and demeaning and we will resist.’

Balpa said in its submissions: ‘It is clear that the government’s staged introduction of biometric identity cards first to overseas students, then to migrant workers and then for aviation workers represents a way of picking off what is seen as easy or compliant targets.’

But, an IPS spokesperson said it remained committed to working closely with the aviation industry and trade unions to introduce cards for airside workers. Discussions with individual airports would continue to establish which employees would ‘initially’ be required to have them.

Metro

If these guinea pigs all say no, then the experiment is a failure.

BLOGDIAL pledges, right now, to contribute £100 to any legal fund supporting pilots prosecuted for refusing ID cards.

If you use Apple, you will know that the new version of iLife will include updates to iPhoto that are simply astonishing.

iPhoto 09 will scan your photo library for faces, and allow you to name the people in your photos. It will then put the right name to each face in every photograph in your library automagically.

The first thing that came to my mind was the phrase, “Police state dividend!”.

What is even more fascinating is that iPhoto 09 allows you to upload your named faces to Facebook. I’m sure there are many people who know what this means; why should the state spend billions rolling out centralized databases of everyone’s faces when they can get back door access to Facebook, which not only will have everyone’s name and face, but also all of their social connections and their named faces also!

In any case, David Rowan writes in the times about how face recognition is being touted as the next big thing:

[…]

Rob Milliron, a construction worker, had a close escape back in June 2001, when, while eating lunch in Tampa, Florida, he was photographed without his knowledge by a hidden government facial-recognition surveillance camera scouring for felons and sex-offenders. Police passed images to the press and, although Mr Milliron wasn’t a match to a bad guy, his picture was printed in a magazine alongside the words: “You can’t hide those lying eyes in Tampa.” A woman in Tulsa called police to identify him falsely as her ex-husband wanted on felony child-neglect charges. When police surrounded Mr Milliron days later at his construction site, he had to point out that, yes, that was him in the photograph, but no, he had never married, never had children, and never been to Oklahoma. As he told the local newspaper: “They made me feel like a criminal.”

Tampa scrapped its facial-recognition system two years later, citing its ineffectiveness, but not before Milliron had become something of a poster-boy for the technology’s unreliability and its likelihood to trap the innocent amid its many “false positives”. Since then, the War on Terror has amplified official interest in and financing for face-recognition trials as a means of identifying the supposedly high-risk – but, in projects from Newham in East London to Logan Airport in Boston, results have been flawed to say the least. In one high-profile trial, at Palm Beach International Airport, a facial-recognition system at a security checkpoint matched faces to those in its database just 47 per cent of the time. Ordinary passengers and other airport staff not meant to be recognised, meanwhile, triggered 1,081 false alarms in a month, risking interrogation or detention.

Yet just because, for the moment, such surveillance systems are flawed – their recognition befuddled by human ageing, outdoor light, poor image resolution, even facial hair – the extraordinary pace of development means that far more accurate screening systems are imminent. Researchers are developing sharply accurate scanners that monitor faces in 3D and software that analyses skin texture to turn tiny wrinkles, blemishes and spots into a numerical formula.

The strongest face-recognition algorithms are now considered more accurate than most humans – and already the Home Office and the Association of Chief Police Officers have held discussions about the possibility of linking such systems with automatic car-numberplate recognition and public-transport databases. Join everything together via the internet, and voilà – the nation’s population, down to the individual Times reader, can be conveniently and automatically monitored in real time.

Just listen to senior law-enforcement executives to understand their brave new intentions. Three months ago, Mark Branchflower, Interpol’s database chief, declared facial recognition a desirable means of alerting local forces about the movements of internationally wanted suspects, “a step we could go to quite quickly”. And in evidence to MPs last March, Peter Neyroud, head of the National Policing Improvement Agency, raised the prospect of “automated face recognition” to identify suspects, as well as “behaviourial matching” software that uses CCTV images to predict potential troublemakers.

So let’s understand this: governments and police are planning to implement increasingly accurate surveillance technologies that are unnoticeable, cheap, pervasive, ubiquitous, and searchable in real time. And private businesses, from bars to workplaces, will also operate such systems, whose data trail may well be sold on or leaked to third parties – let’s say, insurance companies that have an interest in knowing about your unhealthy lifestyle, or your ex-spouse who wants evidence that you can afford higher maintenance payments.

Rather than jump up and down with rage – you never know who is watching through the window – you have a duty now, as a citizen, to question this stealthy rush towards permanent individual surveillance. A Government already obsessed with pursuing an unworkable and unnecessary identity-card database must be held to account.

As for me, I’ve been re-watching for inspiration the 1997 film Face/Off, in which John Travolta wears Nicolas Cage’s face as a way of infiltrating Cage’s criminal gang. And if that fails to inspire a means of fighting back, face-transplant surgery is always an option.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article5504534.ece

Before I dive in:

Mark Branchflower, Interpol’s database chief, declared facial recognition a desirable means of alerting local forces about the movements of internationally wanted suspects

What if every time they came to find someone, the people who were despatched were simply despatched themselves:

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

No matter what face recognition software is out there, if the above is the counter rule, the machine will grind to a halt. Today, it will not be half a dozen people with axes, but a flash mob of 500 who will not only despatch the thugs, but who will destroy whatever is put in front of them, like a swarm of hungry nanites. It will look something like this only violent.

The answer to all of this is very simple. There are things that the state simply should not do. It is not the function of the state to issue ID Cards, run central databases that store everyone’s communications, etc etc. It does not matter what technology scientists invent; the mere existence of something does not mean that the state should use it. Quite the opposite.

Small government, with its functions clearly defined is the answer to all of our problems. The government has no business regulating money. The government has no business regulating $whatever_they_do_now. Their job is to clean the shit off the streets with brooms and to arbitrate in disputes between people, should they choose the state as the arbitrator. As soon as they start doing other things, the trouble is set off. We see the result of it every day.

The CCTV cameras in the UK are now like a sleeping giant. Once they become intelligent they will suddenly awake and KNOW WHO YOU ARE.

Just think about that.

Every empire that ever existed on the earth eventually fell to dust; these systems and the people who own them are as fragile as a chicken’s egg stretched a mile wide. In a single night the entire machine could be destroyed by an unaccepting population. Whatever happens, this will not last forever. Something will break; either the mass will reject it or the empire that uses it will collapse under the weight of its own debt, like all the others have.

In the mean time, we live in a time where the tools of oppression are available to you to play with. You can download iLife and use its face recognition to organize your photos. This is unprecedented, and very useful. It will instruct millions of people on the true capabilities of the state, causing them to be outraged…but I digress.

This is an age where everyone everywhere can use military grade encryption to keep their communications private. All you need to do is just use it. If Apple rolled it out as a part of their ‘Mail’ application, in a single day many millions of people’s communications would ‘go dark’ to the authorities.

Imagine this scenario. Someone somewhere sets up a Web 2.0 site that features photos of bad police and other officials, or those mysterious agent provocateurs that have been plaguing the useless demonstrations around the world. Imagine that the software behind this site (which could be connected to iPhoto 09) identifies all the bad people and exposes them to the public, nullifying all acts of political infiltration over night. Anyone setting up any sort of anti-state gathering or demonstration or action could, with a gauntlet of workers armed with iphones, vet every demonstrator as they turned up to weed out all the infiltrators, collaborators and provocateurs.

I guarantee you that this will happen, and not only that, but that someone is going to put into a copy of iPhoto 09, a huge archive of photos from demonstrations and political meetings going back decades to pick out the bad guys.

This explosion and convergence of technologies is a double edged sword, and since there are more of us than there are of them, it will be the case that all this technology and the networks that join them together will result in something totally unexpected; the tools may turn around and bite the state in the ass in an unexpected way. The very nature of networks says that this will happen; the population by virtue of its vast networked numbers can overpower any government in a scenario where the network is the power.

We are not powerless like the slaves in the Soviet Union were. We have fantastic tools, all of them free, right in our hands. Those tools, by the act of using them, change the game entirely, and the more the state pushes against the mass, the more dense and impenetrable it becomes.

This is a war that they cannot ever win.

In 2006, the infamous ‘anonymous email‘ of Frances Stonor Saunders that was widely circulated and published in newspapers, predicted that:

[…]

Every place that sells alcohol or cigarettes, every post office, every pharmacy, and every Bank will have an NIR Card Terminal, (very much like the Chip and Pin Readers that are everywhere now) into which your card can be ‘swiped’ to check your identity. Each time this happens, a record is made at the NIR of the time and place that the Card was presented. This means for example, that there will be a government record of every time you withdraw more than £99 at your branch of NatWest, who now demand ID for these transactions. Every time you have to prove that you are over 18, your card will be swiped, and a record made at the NIR. Restaurants and off licenses will demand that your card is swiped so that each receipt shows that they sold alcohol to someone over 18, and that this was proved by the access to the NIR, indemnifying them from prosecution.

[…]

http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=1207

Now we see that once again, its assertions have proven to be completely correct.

This is from a column in today’s Daily Mail

[…]

at the Lichfield branch of Marks & Sparks, 30-year-old Oliver Butler was told that unless he could produce his passport, he couldn’t buy two bottles of mulled wine.

They wouldn’t accept his paper driving licence either.

Rightly, he points out that you don’t see many under-age bingedrinkers swigging M&S mulled wine by the neck down your local shopping precinct.

Alcopops and extra-strength cider are more their preferred beverage.

Oliver tells me that it was the first time in 12 years he’d been asked for ID. You’d better get used to it, old son. It probably won’t be the last.

The crackdown on alcohol sales now extends even to people who can prove they are over 18, if they happen to be accompanied by a minor.

Christine Middleton, from Edinburgh, was out shopping for Hogmanay with her daughter at her local Co-op; usual stuff – chicken, turkey, sprouts, two bottles of wine (one red, one pink champagne).

When the champagne went through the barcode scanner, an alarm went off.

The checkout girl asked Christine’s daughter how old she was. After discovering she was 17, she confiscated the two bottles.

Christine (’48, but I look good for my age’) pointed out that the wine was for her, not her daughter, and sent for the manager. Still no joy.

The manager said that her daughter could, in fact, be a local hoodie who had persuaded Christine to buy booze on her behalf.

Like Oliver Butler and his mulled wine, Christine remarked that ‘pink champagne and a cheeky wee Rioja’ weren’t exactly your average hoodie’s gargle of choice.

But the manager still wouldn’t serve her and, with an impatient queue getting restless behind her, she was forced to withdraw, empty-handed.

At first glance, this all seems laughable, to be filed under You Couldn’t Make It Up – especially after reports that grown men and women are being refused whisky-infused cheddar cheese and knitting needles without proof of identity.

The idea that supermarkets are accusing law-abiding adults of being glue-sniffers and purveyors of illicit hooch to under-age hooligans is not only risible but deeply offensive.

It would be easy to put all this down to the good old British jobsworth mentality and the ridiculous modern ‘if it saves one life’ excuse for lowest-common-denominator law enforcement.

But scratch the surface and there’s something far more sinister going on – on a couple of levels.

First, proof of identity is not just the new elf’n’safety. It has been seized upon gleefully by the ‘consumer protection’ nazis.

[…]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1110069/RICHARD-LITTLEJOHN-How-Mr-Sheens-enemy-State.html

And there you have it.

The contents of this article prove something else; that it is the store managers and businesses that will be enforcing this scheme, not the government. Every supermarket, every seller of alcohol and cigarettes will be a de-facto arm of government, a fine grained interface between the ID Card the NIR and the public.

It immediately follows therefore that if we want to stop the ID card from being a useful tool, we have to ask that all professionals who will come in contact with it refuse to be that interface and facilitator.

If we can secure a pledge from millions of people who are going to be dealing with this, it would strike a real blow to the proposed ID Card and NIR.

With all the shops, supermarkets, cellphone outlets, banks and every other service you can imagine all refusing to interface with this card, it will become useless and even more pointless to everyone.

The Oxford Libertarian Society mailing list mentions a conference called ‘Modern Liberty’.

Let’s smell it…

Why?

From Anthony Barnett, Phil Booth, Shami Chakrabarti, Henry Porter, Stuart Weir

We are entering a dangerous period in our country.

Economic turmoil threatens profound hardship and disharmony.

Good. Now is the chance to put things on a better footing. Starting by admitting the true cause of this ‘crisis’; fiat currency. This is an unprecedented opportunity to stop the war machine permanently by choking off its fuel; the printing presses that manufacture money by the command of government.

Disenchantment with politics is growing and even legitimate protest is threatened by an unprecedented programme of challenges to our rights, freedoms and democracy.

Good. Politics is corrupt by its nature. Legitimate protest is worthless and has been for decades. We have been over that before.

Sixty years ago Britain was a proud co-author of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Now it is increasingly centralized, abandoning its historic principles some of which date back to the Magna Carta.

And it is getting worse because gatekeepers an safety valvists deliberately prevent the necessary change from taking place by diverting the anger and momentum of the population into useless ‘feel good’ activities that have no real effect in attacking the problems. We have told you about them before.

The Government’s continued stated determination to extend detention without charge in terrorism cases to 42 days is one symbol of the damage done to our hard-won rights and freedoms. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA), which gives hundreds of agencies access to people’s records without their knowing, is another. The collection of all available records on a huge central database for the use of the authorities is a third.

None of these things could happen absent the cooperation of all the people who think they are wrong. Listing all the bad stuff over and over and publishing condemnations of them does not destroy them. If you want to destroy something, you have to make a plan and then execute it.

The fundamentals behind all of this evil are not being addressed at all. One of the people out there who does address this is Jan Helfeld. When all these people address this fundamental issue, then the whole true nature of the problem will start to unravel. Then, when they eventually get around to the nature of money, ‘their’ money, the circle will be complete. The answer to all these problems will present itself by virtue of the facts being laid out in front of everyone.

But if you look at who is lined up to speak at this gathering, you will see that for the most part it is precisely the sort of people who have absolutely no interest in changing the way things work. See below.

We believe that such threats can be overcome but only if the public is woken to the dangers. While we may be impatient for action, the issues must be addressed in an open-minded way with as thorough and accessible public debate as possible.

First of all you have to define, precisely, the problem. There are some things which are non-negotiable, like ID-Cards. No amount of open mindedness and public debate has anything to do with the wrongness of this and other subjects when it comes to people’s rights; murdering is wrong, ID-Cards are wrong, stealing is wrong, and employing others to steal or murder or put numbers on people on your behalf is wrong. There are many uninformed, purely ignorant people who think that ID-Cards are OK; you know the type, “nothing to hide, nothing to fear”. Are we to consider the unthinking opinions of these people like they have merit? I think not. And this goes right to the heart of the problem; Democracy is fundamentally flawed, because the illiterate, the unintelligent and the evil can use the vote to force other people to do something through violence financed by the collective.

Therefore we invite you to join a Convention on Modern Liberty. It will ask three broad questions:

Are our freedoms and rights threatened by an over-powerful state and if so how do we defend ourselves from this?

If the majority who show up say ‘no’, then what? It’s all over? This is why you people FAIL.

Are dangers to our security from terrorism and other threats, from climate change to pandemics being used to attack our rights, and how can we best defend ourselves?

This is like asking wether or not the sun is hot. As to how we can best defend ourselvs, history has all the answers to that one. The real question is what can we plan right now to DO IT.

How can we arouse sustained public interest?

The public…what is to be done with them?

It only takes a small minority of people to set things right. We do not need to get everyone on board (that pesky idea of ‘Democracy’ again, EVERYBODY, the MAJORITY must be behind something for it to be ‘right’. It’s a lie.)

We are making Modern Liberty a convention not a conference. We want to bring as many people together to see what common ground can be reached in defence of our freedoms.

No. When there is ‘common ground’ there is the risk of compromise. If the majority of people there agree that its OK for the state to steal from some to give to others or impose ID-Cards then its no better than any other grouping of people who agree to do evil ‘for the greater good’.

The Guardian is the main media partner.

The Guardian is the worst criminal in this affair. It has some good articles once in a while, but these are dead batteries buried deep in a landfill. They routinely call for Britain to interfere in other people’s countries, scream for government to solve ‘problems’ and are generally on the wrong side of history.

Fundamental rights and freedoms are common to us all.

No, they are not. People in other countries are not the business of The Guardian, or of you or I. What I believe applies only to me, and I do not have the right to force my beliefs on anyone else, or to join with others to make them obey my beliefs or service my views.

If you really want to live in a free country, this is the first principle. You cannot initiate force against anyone and you cannot ask someone to do it on your behalf.

Still don’t get it?

The Universal Declaration recognises ‘the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family as the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world’. In Britain such values have an even longer history.

No. The foundation of peace is the acceptance that no one has the right to initiate force. There is no such thing as ‘the human family’ there are only people with their own beliefs, who organize themselves in the way that they like. The shape that those forms take is not our business, and no one has the right to say that anyone or everyone is part of this fictitious collective ‘human family’ that has to live by the rules written down by some wine soaked career diplomats in New York. This declaration is the same paper that is used as a pretext for murdering people and toppling governments.

We are indeed the inheritors of an inspiring tradition of liberty.

This is not true. If Britain had a tradition of liberty we would not be suffering the abuses that we are today. The British have been living under a gentlemen’s agreement that totalitarianism was not good for business. Free range livestock is what Britain has been all about. Steph says it very well, in that link. I will leave it to others to thoroughly debunk that particular passage.

At the same time technical advances from information technology to explosives and the threats of catastrophic climatic change have altered the framework of power and fear.

Wow, its recursive; abusing the generation fear to talk about the problem of the abuse of the generation fear.

This calls for a renewal of our democratic self-confidence.

WRONG. What we need is a change to principles of liberty AWAY from democracy and false, delusional ‘self-confidence’. We need to address the problems directly with a set of simple principles that are applicable to any situation so that even the thickest of people can point to them as a basis for absolute refusal to obey anything that is offensive to the free man.

This is the purpose of the Convention on Modern Liberty. Whether you agree or not we hope you will join us to debate these issues.

Amazing. Wether you agree or not, we hope you will come and spend time talking to us Question Time style.

Good luck with that.

As everything gets worse and worse, the heat under the pot increases and they need a bigger release valve to control the overheating pressure cooker containing the incandescent rage of the population. The biggest gatekeepers and cattle herders gather to vent off the steam, and that is what this gathering is. It is not in any way dangerous to the problem. It presents no threat, no threat of a solution, and not even the promise of a solution. It is chaired by people who are the problem, the panel members are almost without exception people who are the problem and so it is a complete waste of time.

All these people, since they cannot come up with a program of strategies that revolve around destroying what is wrong (a strategy to commit suicide) will be aiding the problem by making people feel that they are still ‘free’ since they can organize and gather without permission.

Remember; these are the same people who offer a candle lit vigil should Iran be bombed with weapons they have paid for. These people are part of the problem, and I would not trust any of them with overseeing an empty milk bottle; never mind guarding my liberty, (least of all The Guardian). The only one with any real credentials is Phill Booth who, via No2ID is actually asking people to disobey the law en masse and building an organization to make it happen – the only thing that will stop the problems dead – and they are having a real measurable effect.

Lets see who else is in there:

Anthony Barnett (openDemocracy)

“openDemocracy offers in-depth news analysis and commentary from a pro-Democracy, pro-Human Rights perspective”

I am AGAINST Democracy. Democracy is BAD, people who want to spread it everywhere world-wide are EVIL or in league with it. See what I mean?

Phil Booth (NO2ID)

Really worthwhile. I put my money where my mouth is with them. Real people offering real information and real solutions. No calls for pointless gatherings. Highly efficient. Highly focussed. And its working. They are actually dangerous. Maybe this is why they are part of this…I’m sure that there are plenty of people who would want No2ID de fanged….hmmmmmmmm!

Shami Chakrabarti (Liberty)

No, no, and no.

Henry Porter (the Observer)

Henry Porter has written many excellent articles and is mostly on the right side. There really isn’t anything more to say about him. Everyone does what they are capable of doing, and he does what he does. He calls a spade a spade. Sadly, the evil people don’t care at all what anyone writes in a newspaper, and so if you are not going to use it to organize disobedience, there comes a point where writing articles that describe a problem accurately serve no further purpose. Its like reporting calmly that your neighbors are being taken away in railway cars to be incinerated. They will end up as ashes while the newspaper rolls off the presses.

Then again, lets look at this from his last column of 2008:

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve always believed that the democratic state must be given power to act on behalf of us all but that is not the same as the state granting itself powers to know everything about us and to bully those who resist its invasive instincts. In 2004, the Courts and Tribunals Enforcement Act made it legal for the first time in 400 years for bailiffs to force entry into homes on a civil order and remove goods. Now we hear from the Justice Ministry that bailiffs may offer reasonable violence to force inside their own homes. That gives us an idea of how the government plans to enforce the £1,000 fines handed out to ID card refuseniks – ultimately by violence meted out by men who may be no better than nightclub bouncers. It is astonishing that we are going to allow this to happen.

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/25/civilliberties

“I’ve always believed that the democratic state must be given power to act on behalf of us all”. Well, this is what we call ‘epic fail’. Once you give power to the state, legitimized by a vote, you inevitably end up with the very situation that we are in now. This belief is fundamentally wrong and immoral, as you can see explained here, and as we see explained here.

The only astonishing thing here is that Mr. Porter asserts that it is astonishing that ‘we are going to allow this to happen’. If ‘we’ give our consent to it via democracy, and he believes that “that the democratic state must be given power to act on behalf of us all” then surely it is completely legitimate for bailiffs to enter houses on civil orders. If they are behaving on ‘behalf of us all’ then it is legitimate. Period. Mr. Porter cannot pick and choose what parts of Democracy he does and does not like; majority rules and once the majority has been given power to do something, it is by definition right.

That is the true face of what Henry Porter believes in.

I suspect that he doesn’t know what he believes in at all, and that he would crumble under the questioning of Jan Helfeld if he were to be forced to strip his beliefs down to their core elements and explain what he actually thinks from first principles.

The fact of the matter is that the state granting powers to itself is exactly how it works and now it always has worked. The public, the electorate, has never been allowed fine grained control over the legislation that goes through Parliament; which has always voted on whatever they like without any reference to or meaningful consultation with the public. That is part of the reason why the statute book is full of garbage.

You cannot have it both ways. You cannot on the one hand, believe that it is OK for violence to be done on behalf of the collective but then say its NOT OK in certain circumstances just because you say so. It is either right or wrong. What Mr. Porter is referring to when he says, “but that is not the same as” is the breaking of the gentlemen’s agreement, “its not cricket to give bailiffs the power to break into your home and use violence old chap”. Well, these people are not playing cricket…certainly not with YOU.

I’m afraid that many of the people interested in this gathering are of the same confused type. Look at this comment and the others on this post about The Countryside Alliance joining this farce:

Anna Stanley says:
December 31st, 2008at 9:17 pm(#)

In February 2008, an independent survey of over 2,000 British people was carried out. Of these, 73% said that fox hunting should remain illegal. The House of Commons voted in favour of the Hunting Bill by 339 votes to 155. There is no doubt that the minority are unable to hunt as they please, but it is clear that an overwhelming majority of people are in favour of the ban on hunting with dogs.

Whether the Countryside Alliance like it or not, we live in a democracy. There is no violation of civil liberties here, merely proper application of the democratic process.

Their prescence at this conference is insulting to those attending who are genuinely in need of support.

And there you have it, “we live in a democracy. There is no violation of civil liberties here, merely proper application of the democratic process.” meaning that if the majority rule that all penises must be cut off, thats it, off they go ‘we live in a democracy’. This is the sort of moron that we share air with, and with whom Henry Porter partially shares his philosophy. Bankrupt.

But I must move on.

Stuart Weir (Democratic Audit)

“Democratic Audit is an active research organisation which audits democracy and human rights in the UK and internationally. We are a consortium of scholars, lawyers and others. We often work with partners in mature and developing democracies to assess the quality of their democratic arrangements.”

Democracy. We have said enough about that. As for ‘developing democracies’ you mean like Iraq? I think we have all had enough of THAT also. Spreading democracy is evil. Period.

http://www.modernliberty.net/what/why

and look at the first Plenary

Chair: Georgina Henry (executive comment editor, The Guardian)
Speakers:
Nick Clegg MP (leader, Liberal Democrats)
Dominic Grieve QC MP (Shadow Attorney General)
Helena Kennedy QC (Doughty Street Chambers)
David Lammy MP (Minister for Higher Education and Intellectual Property)
Ken Macdonald QC (former Director of Public Prosecutions)

Second Plenary16.00 – 17.00

Freedom and Democracy after the Market meltdown

Chair: Anthony Barnett (founder, openDemocracy)

Speakers:
Chris Huhne MP (Liberal Democrat spokesman on Home Affairs)
Will Hutton (Chief Executive, The Work Foundation)
Caroline Lucas MEP (leader, Green Party)
Chuka Umunna (Labour Party candidate, Streatham)

Lammy? Lucas? Umunna? Clegg? These are the very people who are on the way OUT!

This is a plenary of foxes gathered to discuss how many chickens they will consume in their ideal Democracy. David Lammy? You have got to be freaking kidding me. Why not get Clarke, Blunkett or Smith in while we are on the case? It’s a good thing that guilt by association is hogwash, otherwise we wold have to throw out the baby with the bath-water on this one.

Its £35.00 to get in.

Finally, the thing that irks me about many of these people is their misuse of the Possessive Pronoun ‘Our’. They misuse it everywhere – its ‘our’ democracy, ‘our’ money, ‘our’ troops, ‘our’ police, ‘our’ taxes, ‘our’ country, ‘our’ $something_that_is_not_actually_owned_collectively.

Happy New Year BLOGDIAL Man Dem!!!!

[Google translation from German to English. – WK]

Wirtschaftswoche
06.12.2008

On the black market for personal data after searching the business week, the bank accounts of 21 million German citizens in circulation. Then, in extreme cases, three out of four households in Germany fear that money deducted from her checking account, without ever that they have given a direct debit.

Dusseldorf magazine was the gigantic amount of data for almost twelve million euros offered. A CD with 1.2 million customers received the Business Week as a model. In addition to the Personal details such as dates of birth include the records with the bank account number and bank code, in some cases even more detailed information on assets.

The Duesseldorf prosecutor in the week, the explosive economic data on Thursday passed, must now clarify how so many account numbers illegally in circulation could. According to Business Week first traces lead almost completely on small call center operators. To serve mainly to highly competitive mass markets such as telecommunications, power or cable television many suppliers almost exclusively external service providers and call centers. These receive the relevant customer data in part by the client. Turn the service providers for their subcontractors, lost control over the data sometime in nothingness.

[…]

http://www.wiwo.de/unternehmer-maerkte…

You see?

Just like we, and other people have been saying, the data that is collected in any database, once it gets out, either wholesale or piecemeal will be collected by criminals, compiled and then sold to whoever wants it.

You are guaranteed that before this newspaper, ‘received the Business Week as a model the CD’ that this information was used for many months to slowly leech money from the accounts of hundreds of thousands of people; think about it; you take a random amount from 20 to 90 euros from each account, spread over a large number of accounts in different banks, going to many different bank accounts and there will be no pattern to discern. Once you have done this, the data is useless because any further harvesting will set off alarms. That is when the data is valuable only as something to sell to the criminals on the lower rungs, who have a different risk threshold.

This will be repeated with every sort of data imaginable, because all data is valuable to someone.

That means, again, that:

• ContactPoint will be released on DVDR.
• The NIR will be released on DVDR.
• <insert name of government database> will be released on DVDR.

And remember; just because you have not read about a particular database being leaked, that does not mean that it has not happened. Criminals can keep secrets and so can governments; many times the latter does not know that the former has access.

What a mess!

And what is so galling, infuriating and exhasperating is the fact that Gordon Mass Murdering agromegly Monster Brown admits that government can never keep databases safe and yet they are going ahead anyway with ContactPoint. A most disturbing, sickening and irresponsible action…but then again, what is putting 11 million children in a shopping cart for paedophiles compared to mass murdering one million people? It’s nothing at all, and that is the problem; once you have graduated to the level of a murderer, anything else bad that is less severe than murder is trivial.

That is what you have running the UK.

Like we have been saying for years:

• an ID card scheme that covers only some of the population doesnt make any sense.
• Running ID Card sweeps on only some types of people doesnt make any sense.
• If you have an NIR, EVERYONE has to be in it for it to make any sense.

If Nu Labor had put all of the details of the ID Card scheme into one bill, it would never have passed. They understood perfectly that once the legislation creating the card is passed, an infinite number of subsequent pieces of legislation can be introduced that all make use of the card, thus, they can build a total police state infrastructure by adding on whatever they like down the road. The key to it all is the NIR and the ID Card. The legislation creating it had to be as simple as possible so as not to raise suspicion.

Of course, the computer illiterate MPs passed it, and now we see the legislation that adds the ‘icing on the cake’:

Police and immigration given powers to demand to see identification
Police and immigration officers will be able to stop Britons and demand they prove their identity under proposed sweeping new powers.

Clauses in the draft Immigration and Citizenship Bill give state officials the power to make anyone who has ever entered the country, at any time, prove who they are without needing any suspicion of a potential crime.

This is the logical conclusion of having an ID card of any sort. Once some people have one, everyone has to have one.

Civil liberty groups warned that the catch-all clauses would effectively cover any British citizen who has ever left the UK, even for a holiday, because they will have “entered” the UK on their return.

This is the insane part that will be covered in some subsequent legislation. You cannot prove that you have never been outside of the country ‘on the spot’ obviously. For the sake of argument, there will be people who have never left the UK; how are you going to prove that on the street when some nosey Fascist asks for your ID?

Refusing to hand over the necessary documents would be a criminal offence with a maximum penalty of almost a year in prison and/or a hefty fine.

And of course, the ID card is still not compulsory. Riiiiiiight.

Officers will also be able to hold someone until they meet the requirements and can even demand a medical examination, although that will be more targeted at foreign nationals arriving from countries with high health risks of contagious diseases.

This means forced vaccination and forced medication of course. One assumes that these clauses are meant for immigration staff; if that is the case, people entering will already ‘meet the requirements’. If they have a false passport, how does that relate in any way to their health status?

If a policeman on the street finds an illegal immigrant, does that mean that they will be subject to forced medical exams and everything else? These people have totally lost the plot.

Critics said the move would see a return to war-time Britain where citizens had to carry their “papers” with them and accused the Government of bringing in compulsory ID cards by the back door.

This is through the front door, clearly. So was the Poll Tax.

Phil Booth, national coordinator of the NO2ID campaign, said: “We have not had any sort of law like this outside of war time.

“In practice it will be impossible to determine who has or has not entered the UK and therefore this applies to anyone in the UK.”

Bingo, and that is the whole point. They want everyone in the NIR.

Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne added: “This is potentially a catch-all power which would allow the police or the officials to arrest and hold anyone who was unable to prove their own identity.

“The Government has always promised that it would never introduce such a draconian intrusion into our daily lives.”

ROTFL…”The Government promised” ….. ‘Liberal Democrats’ BWAHAHHHAHAHAHAAHAAA!!!!

The clauses in the Bill, contained in the Queen’s Speech, were unearthed by civil rights group Liberty and centre on a power to examine those who “arrive in, enter or seek to enter the UK”.

A sub-clause refers to anyone who “has entered the UK” and can therefore mean anyone who has entered either recently or in the past.

It means police or immigration officers would have the power to stop anyone, either at a port of entry or inside the country, and demand their identity purely on the basis they may have entered the UK at some point.

Clause 28 gives the power to require the production of a passport or other valid identity document.

A Liberty spokeswoman said: “This extends powers of examination to several new categories including anyone in the UK (whether a British citizen or not) who has ever left the UK at any time.”

She went on to say, “we strongly recommend that all Britons refuse to enter the NIR, and to comply with any request to show ID, point blank, as an act of civil disobedience. We have a legal fund to defend all those who disobey this immoral legislation”.

POOP! Awake now.

Currently, police or immigration officers can ask for identity if there is reasonable suspicion of a crime or immigration offence.

Probable cause. It is reasonable.

The Liberty spokeswoman added: “Clause 28(3) dramatically changes this premise allowing identity documents to be demanded of anyone that has at any time entered the UK by anyone authorised by the Secretary of State. No suspicion of criminality or immigration offending is required.”

She said it went “far beyond” what is reasonable for immigration control, adding: “We believe that the catch-all remit of this power is disproportionate and that its enactment would not only damage community relations but would represent a fundamental shift in the relationship between the State and those present in the UK.”

Around eight in ten UK citizens have a passport and the majority of those will have left the country at some point and therefore have “entered” again.

The clauses are in the draft bill to be put forward in the Queen’s Speech.

It doesn’t matter what legislation they pass. If no one obeys it, it is meaningless. Just like the insane drug laws; no one obeys them, everyone is doing it and the law is made to look ridiculous.

They say refusal to submit to demands for identification would be a criminal offence that carries a maximum penalty of no more than 51 weeks in prison and or a £5,000.

They don’t have enough space for the people they already have in gaol. Imbeciles!

The Government is currently rolling out the controversial ID cards programme for both foreign nationals and Britons but has insisted it will not be compulsory for Britons to carry the cards.

No one with a working brain cell ever believed that.

But Liberty Director Shami Chakrabarti said: “Sneaking in compulsory identity cards via the back door of immigration law is a cynical escalation of this expensive and intrusive scheme.

Time for a candle lit vigil then ay Shami?

Shadow Immigration Minister, Damian Green, added “This scheme will do nothing to improve our security, may make it worse, and will certainly land the tax-payer with a multi-million pound bill.

“Labour should be concentrating their efforts on things that will actually improve our security, like a dedicated UK Border police force, instead of trying to introduce ID cards through the back door.

“Now more than ever the issue of our basic freedoms is very important.”

And he knows what its like PERSONALLY.

A Home Office spokeswoman insisted there were no plans to make it compulsory for British citizens to carry or produce forms of identity.

And what was this persons IDENTITY?!??!

She said: “It is simply wrong to claim there are any plans whatsoever to make identity cards compulsory for British citizens or to require British citizens to have their ID card – or any other form of ID – on them at all times and to present it when asked to do so.

What is your name, in what office do you work?

“From next year British citizens will have the convenience of being able to use identity cards to travel in Europe, but they will not become the only way to prove your identity at borders and the UK passport will still be valid.

As we know, you do not need to have a passport to enter the UK if you are British.

“In order to maintain an effective immigration control it is only right that we ask everyone attempting to enter to the UK to produce a valid identity document.”

This is manifestly not about that. BETCH.

But Mr Booth said it was “appallingly-drafted legislation”, adding: “They have got to the point that we must take the worst possible implication of the legislation.”

[…]

Telegraph

No one is going to obey any of the ID Card legislation. Pilots are ready to strike over it, students are waking up to it, Scotland has rejected them outright. They are going to run up against a brick wall with this, and rightly so. It is a terrible, monstrous system of police state control of an unprecedented invasiveness that will turn this once great country into an unrecognizable nightmare land.

Before you read this post, press play on this:

The Scottish Parliament has voted against the UK Government’s plans to introduce ID cards.

MSPs backed a Scottish Government motion stating the scheme would not increase security or deter crime, while raising concerns about civil liberties.

Scots Community Safety Minister Fergus Ewing said the estimated £5bn needed for ID cards should be spent elsewhere.

But Labour declined to back the motion, saying parliament should focus on issues which were devolved to Scotland.

The first identity cards will be issued to foreign nationals from next week, while young people will be asked to sign up from 2010 before their expected general introduction from 2012.

Mr Ewing told parliament ID cards were a “colossal waste of money”, and that the UK Government could not be trusted to keep the data safe.

“This scheme won’t achieve its primary stated objective of making people safer nor reducing the terrorist threat,” he said.

“We do believe that it poses an unacceptable threat to citizens’ privacy and civil liberties.”

Liberal Democrat MSP Robert Brown said he was uneasy at the decision to issue cards to foreign nationals.

He said: “It goes under the rather unpleasant title of identity cards for foreign nationals, with all the nasty implied innuendo of the recipients being aliens, other people from far-off countries that we know nothing about and probably terrorists anyway.”

Tory Bill Aitken said governments had every justification to take action on improving security, but added: “Where there have been terrible terrorist outrages in the past, in countries where identity cards are compulsory, they have made not one whit of difference.”

Pointing out Holyrood had no jurisdiction on ID cards, Labour’s Richard Baker said there would be no obligation on people to carry ID cards.

He said the UK Government was bringing forward a series of measures to enhance national security and public safety.

He added: “ID cards are a part of that.

“There’s nothing extreme or unusual in the introduction of ID cards and the kind of data which will be on them.”

The government motion was passed by 69 votes to zero, with 38 abstentions.

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/7736588.stm

Amen.

The entire membership list of the BNP has been released by a disgruntled BNP member.

People all over the internets are laughing their heads off as they read about the teachers, lawyers and others who will now face the sack and lots of trouble for being a member of the BNP.

This is an example of the brainless bile being shot out:

this is so good!
18.11.2008 15:14

Hi.

This link has some info :-

https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=32095749&postID=300681785381908982

Hopefully gangs of illegal immigrants will rape their families………..
interzoneman

BLOGDIAL and its readers are not easily distracted by propaganda however. We think, and think ahead.

This BNP database release is a perfect example of why you should NEVER collect and keep sensitive lists of personal details on a database. Let’s do a little substitution shall we?

Replace the phrase ‘BNP Database’ with the word ‘ContactPoint’.

It’s not so funny now is it?

This database leak of 12,802 names, addresses, email addresses and occupations is NOTHING compared to the size and scale of ContactPoint; and bear in mind that the ease with which ContactPoint could be released onto the internet is exactly the same for both the BNP list and ContactPoint.

The BNP database was accessible to only a hand full of people and it contained a small number of people. ContactPoint contains the names, addresses, telephone numbers and parental details of ELEVEN MILLION CHILDREN and it is accessible to ONE MILLION people via the internet.

When you bear those facts in mind, and then connect them with this BNP membership database leak and the real harm it is going to cause to each and every one of the people on that list, you begin to get a sense of the scale of the disaster that ContactPoint is. The same is true of course of the National Identity Register (NIR) which powers the proposed ID Card. ALL databases are subject to this risk; the size of the list is irrelevant and leaks are not something that can ever be prevented, and in any case, ContactPoint and the NIR are designed to be accessed (which means copied) easily.

The shock that everyone feels at this list being released, the strong nosey desire to see who is on it; this will be replicated on an unprecedented scale if the NIR and ContactPoint are rolled out. It would certainly create a huge demand and market for illicit access to both these databases.

There could not be a better example of why these government databases are a bad idea. Everyone should now understand that the people on the BNP list are in danger, forever, because they were on a list that was released once by a single disgruntled person.

If such a release were to happen to ContactPoint, all 11 million children in the UK would be put at similar risk.

Here is a scenario that you might not like to think about.

Imagine a disgruntled employee makes a copy of the ContactPoint database and then does not make it public but sells it secretly to a criminal gang. No one would ever know that the copy had been made. Out of the 11 million children, hundreds would be cherry picked for kidnapping, and no one would be able to connect these kidnappings to the covert release of ContactPoint. That criminal gang could operate for years off of the ContactPoint data without anyone knowing.

That is a far more horrible scenario is it not? Do you feel queasy?

And of course, piecemeal copying of ContactPoint is just as bad; with one million people granted access to it, printing off pages, saving screen grabs and just writing down details with a pencil and a piece of paper, these sorts of criminal activities could happen without a wholesale data breach.

ContactPoint and the NIR / ID Card must be scrapped and never proposed again. They are perfect recipes for irrevocable disaster.

UPDATE

Some people who can code have put together mashups of the postcode / address lines and Google maps:

That one has been taken down.

This one is anonymized:
http://www.bnpnearme.co.uk/

Pilots threaten to strike over ID cards
The first wave of ID cards to be issued to British citizens has prompted airline pilots to threaten a strike rather than accept the documents.

The second Brass Balls™ award goes to the airline pilots who vote to strike.

Aviation workers have warned that proposals to make airport staff register for the cards from next year would do little to improve security. The British Airline Pilots Association (Balpa), which represents 10,000 of the 12,000 commercial pilots and flight engineers in Britain, said its members were being treated as “guinea pigs”. Jim McAuslan, Balpa’s general secretary, said the Government’s “early warning system should be flashing” over opposition to the plans.

The government doesnt have an early warning system. They are blind dumb and deaf when it comes to what actually works and what people’s concerns are. That is how they could ignore two million marchers demonstrating against an illegal immoral and unjustified attack against Iraq.

Pilots going on strike however is a different thing. These highly trained and completely indispensable people going on strike will cost the airlines millions of pounds. These pilots cannot be replaced with scabs. This action is going to hurt where the pain is felt most strongly; in the realm of money.

The Home Office insists the scheme will help airport workers improve security and streamline pass applications when staff move jobs.

They cannot demonstrate how these cards will improve security. All the people who work at airports currently are already carrying ID cards and have already been vetted. Another, state issued card cannot add any further security. If this is not the case, then they need to demonstrate how having TWO ID cards is better than having one.

Ministers will publish draft regulations on Friday to set up a trial requiring airside staff at Manchester airport and London City airport to sign up for an ID card before they can get security passes allowing them to work there. If the regulations are approved, the first ID cards will be issued at the two airports from autumn next year as part of an 18-month trial.

They should ALL go on strike and shut down the entire airport and air transport system of the UK. That would cause real economic damage and would force the government to back down.

Under the proposals, airport workers will be the first British citizens to be given ID cards, which are due to be introduced for young people from 2010.

But Mr McAuslan, whose union holds its annual conference at Heathrow later this week, said he would be consulting members on the possibility of industrial action if the Government presses ahead with the plans. “It may come to an industrial dispute,” he said. “We would want to avoid that. We would want the Government to think again about the compulsory nature of it and think again about the whole scheme. The Government has said previously that ID cards will be voluntary but the indications are that if you choose not to have a card you will not get an airside pass.”

That is a very diplomatic way of drawing a line in the sand. Bugs Bunny would have said, “Of course you know, this means war”.

The British Air Transport Association, which represents airlines including British Airways and Virgin Atlantic, branded the scheme a “dubious PR initiative by the Government and one that fails to offer any real benefits”.

Thats more Wile E Coyote.

The shadow Home Secretary, Dominic Grieve, said: “Labour should take their heads out of the sand and abandon this £19bn white elephant which will do nothing to improve our security but may well make it worse.” The Tories have pledged to scrap the scheme if elected. Chris Huhne, the Lib Dem home affairs spokesman, added: “It is no surprise that pilots are up in arms since they are one of the few groups selected as guinea pigs for this benighted experiment.”

And they will be the first to be lined up and violated; fingerprinted and scanned and given a number like concentration camp cattle. It is sickening, and finally everyone is starting to feel queasy.

But a spokesman for the Identity and Passport Service said: “Identity cards will directly benefit airside workers – not just by improving personnel security, but also by speeding up pre-employment checks and increasing the efficiency of pass-issuing arrangements.”

This is twice that they have said it would increase efficiency. This is a lie. Without an ID card no time is made making a meaningless check against the NIR when you apply for a job or go and buy a bottle of wine. And as for the lie of it “improving personnel security” they have to demonstrate how people who are already vetted and who already carry ID cards are going to be ‘more secure’ if they also carry a government ID card.

The timetable

*21 November 2008: Home Office issues draft rules on ID card trial at Manchester and London City airports.
*25 November: Home Office starts issuing ID cards for foreign nationals.
*March-May 2009: Regulations on trial scheme debated by Parliament.
*Autumn 2009: First airport staff to be given ID cards.
*2010: ID cards made available to young people for the first time.
*2011-12: Public invited to register for ID cards.
*2017: Vast majority of the population enrolled on ID card database.

[…]

The Independent

This timetable is nonsense of course.

They no doubt had a similar timetable for the adoption of the Poll Tax…and we all know what happened with that idea.

This idea is going to die.

Every group that they try and use as guinea pigs to stress test the enrollment system are going to violently refuse to be numbered and fingerprinted like criminal cattle.

If everyone says ‘NO!’ then the scheme dies. We have said this over and over and over again.

Of course, the Independent fails to ask any of the questions that a normal person would ask, like “how will this increase security”. They simply parrot the line from the Passport service and the Home Office like trained dogs.

But we expect that.

Now in the relations between man and man, the worst that can hapen is for one to find himself at the mercy of another, and it would have been inconsistent with common sense to begin by bestowing on a chief the only things they wanted his help to preserve. What equivalent could he offer them for so great a right? And if he had presumed to exact it under pretext of defending them, would he not have received the answer recorded in the fable: ‘What more can the enemy do to us?’ It is therefore beyond dispute , and indeed the fundamental maxim of all political right, that people have set up cheifs to protect their liberty, and not to enslve them. ‘If we have a prince,’ said Pliny to Trajan, ‘it is to save ourselves from having a master.’
Politicians indulge in the same sophistry about the love of liberty as philosophers about the state of nature. They judge, by what they see, of very different things, which they have not seen; they attribute to man a natural propensity to servitude, because the slaves within their observation are seen to bear the yoke with patience; they fail to reflect that it is with liberty as with innocenceand virtue; the value is only known to those who possess them, and the taste for them is forfeited when they are forfeited themselves. ‘I know the charms of your country,’ said Brasidas to a Satrap, who was compaing the life at Sparta with that at Persepolis, ‘but you cannot know the pleasures of mine.’

[…]

We cannot therefore , from the serility of nations already enslaved, judge of the natural disposition of mankind for or against slavery; we should go by the prodigious efforts of every free people to save itself from oppression. I know that the former are forever holding forth in praise of the tranquility they enjoy in their chains, and that they call a state of wretched servitude a state of peace: miserrimam servitutem pacem appellant. But when I observe the latter sacrificing pleasure, peace, wealth, power, and life itself to the preservation of that one treasure, which is so disdained by those who have lost it; when I see free-born animals dash their brains out against the bars of their cage, from an innate impatience of captivity; when I behold numbers of naked savages, that despise European pleasures, braving hunger, fire, the sword, and death, to preserve nothing but their independence, I feel that it is not for slaves to argue about liberty.

Jean-Jaques Rousseau, A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

Up to a million public sector workers could be allowed to access a Government database containing sensitive information on every child in England and Wales, it has emerged.

Critics say the figure is three times higher than ministers told Parliament, and raises further privacy concerns about the controversial ContactPoint system.

The database will contain the name, home address and school of all 11million children. It will also include information about their legal guardians.

It is designed to make it easier for public bodies to share information. Those permitted by law to access it include bureaucrats such as school ‘administrators’ and ‘any employee’ of a police force.

But campaigners fear that the greater the number of users, the more chance the database will be trawled by the likes of abusive former partners seeking a reunion.

Phil Booth, of the NO2ID privacy campaign, said: ‘Rather than the 330,000 they have previously suggested – which was bad enough – it appears that a million or more people will be able to get access under the terms of the Children Act.

‘This, in the light of the Government’s own auditors saying that ContactPoint could never be made secure, paints a deeply disturbing picture.’

Maria Miller, Conservative spokesman for children, schools and families said: ‘They have grossly underestimated the number of people who will have access to children’s data and now more children will be put at risk. ContactPoint should be scrapped.’

And Baroness Sue Miller, a Liberal Democrat peer with a special interest in data protection issues, said: ‘The ContactPoint system was dubious to start with. It would have been irrelevant to key cases such as that of Victoria Climbie. This latest revelation merely makes it at least three times worse.’

Lord Adonis and Kevin Brennan, ministers for the Department for Children, Schools and Families, have told both houses of Parliament that ‘the number of users (of ContactPoint) is estimated to be around 330,000’.

But the legislation governing the database lists a huge number who could potentially be granted access.

These range from senior police officers and headmasters to officers of local probation area boards and administrators working in schools or further education colleges.

Publicly available staffing figures from education authorities, the NHS, social services and other organisations show that the number of those falling into the categories listed by the Government is one million, according to the respected technology news website Register .

The system, which is the centrepiece of the Government’s Every Child Matters strategy, has been shrouded in controversy since it was first announced, and has been delayed twice.

Both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats have pledged to scrap ContactPoint.

The Tories want to replace it with a smaller system that will only hold data on children deemed at risk.

Whitehall officials wrote to councils in October arguing against the alternative scheme.

The DCSF later apologised for the breach of civil service political impartiality rules.

A spokesman for the department said: ‘Access to ContactPoint will be strictly limited to those who need it as part of their work and subject to stringent security controls. Not everyone who works in one of the roles listed in the regulations will be permitted access.

‘We have consistently maintained that the estimated number of users for ContactPoint is around 330,000, and this takes into account those needing access across all relevant sectors. This number was informed by the experience of trailblazers, who developed their own systems locally.’

[…]

Daily Mail

This means that:

The ContactPoint data will escape in one third of the time we predicted.
There will be three times as many opportunities for paedophiles to gain access to the data.
There will be three times as many people who will be approached for illicit access.

Gordon Brown has already admitted that they can never keep ContactPoint data safe because it is being run by human beings.

That means that he understands that he is a paedophile facilitator by knowingly setting up this database with foreknowledge that the data will escape and end in the abuse of children.

Yesterday there was a deluge of PR paid propaganda – bullshit if you will – trying to sell the ID Card with the hideous prostitute Jacqui Smith making outrageous claims.

The lying lickspittle bastard repeater journalists at the BBC tweaked this first article during the day for maximum impact and under orders. We grabbed both pages.

First we have this:
12:20 GMT, Thursday, 6 November 2008

and then we have this, later in the day:

15:57 GMT, Thursday, 6 November 2008

The title of the page changed from ‘Shops may take ID card biometrics’ to ‘People ‘can’t wait for ID cards’. The first title is obviously more pertinent, more astonishing and alarming because of the implications of shops taking Biometrics. Later, it was changed to a pure and very cheesy propaganda headline after pressure no doubt from the office of that kebab eating monster. There have been seven versions so far.

The facts of the matter remain unchanged however.

HMG actually plans to allow people to enroll in the ID Card scheme / NIR from inside Tescos.

Do you know what this means? It means that the NIR is going to be full of bad entries. People will be able to go to Tescos and get themselves onto the NIR claiming to be someone who they are not, maybe even you, which is the absolute opposite of what the government has been saying all along was the purpose of this vile and pointless database and its associated card. Perhaps that is exactly what they want – you to be frightened of someone getting there first and stealing your identity. “Claim your identity now before someone else does!” will be the call.

This ugly, chinless, subhuman, totalitarian garbage actually claims that people ‘can’t wait for ID Cards’; this is the sound of sheer desperation my friends. Look at the comments on BBQ’s ‘Have Your Say’. I think Jacqui Smith is a delusional liar and the only people she has been speaking to are figments of her insane and deeply troubled mind:

Added: Thursday, 6 November, 2008, 07:38 GMT 07:38 UK

Not one bit! And I won’t be buying or carrying one!

This is another snooping measure from the NuLabour Gestapo state. I make this appeal to everybody to refuse to buy or carry this insidious document. If you receive a communication from any department of the Fascist NuLabour apparatus about it cut it up and send it back, unstamped, to some government department!

Let us call time on this now!

Robert Phillifent, Whitley Bay
Recommended by 266 people

Added: Thursday, 6 November, 2008, 09:12 GMT 09:12 UK

ID cards:

– nobody wants them
– they won’t make us any safer
– the government will lose all the sensitive information anyway

Hokey Cokey, london, United Kingdom
Recommended by 257 people

Added: Thursday, 6 November, 2008, 09:13 GMT 09:13 UK

Why dont they just tatoo or brand us all? We could all be marked with a number at birth to make sure we were all identifiable.

Hold on, something in the back of my mind tells me that a similar method to this may have been used before?

How did that turn out?

[Free_Scotland], Grangemouth, Scotland
Recommended by 204 people

Added: Thursday, 6 November, 2008, 09:11 GMT 09:11 UK

Remember everyone – it’s not just a piece of plastic, it’s the vast database behind it too… all your data, addresses, accounts, policies, pensions, all of it nicely formatted and ready to be left on trains, in car parks, in brief cases, lost laptops etc etc

Chris Chris
Recommended by 201 people

Added: Thursday, 6 November, 2008, 07:49 GMT 07:49 UK

I do not think these cards will do much to improve security. Instead, we will have one card which proves who you are, and when this is cracked and cloned by organised crime (and believe me it will be) it will make avoiding detection and stealing identity much easier for them.

Matt Gallop, Brighton
Recommended by 181 people

Added: Thursday, 6 November, 2008, 07:49 GMT 07:49 UK

ID cards for the whole population once again punishes the general population for the lack of control of immigrants. When will the government target risk groups & stop wasting everybodys time by monitoring the activities of everyone.

John Doe, United Kingdom
Recommended by 173 people

Alert a Moderator

Added: Thursday, 6 November, 2008, 09:12 GMT 09:12 UK

What is it in the words ‘this ID card system would be unworkable’ does Jacqui Spliff not understand? Security specialists have stated that it would not work and cards can be cloned.copied or falsified with todays technology. Aftter the many fiascos of data going missing, how many times is it now? Would you trust this lot with digitalised information about you? No chance. With the billions wasted on useless IT systems by this government I wouldn’t trust them to run a raffle. Forget it Spliff.

Maximus, Boxgrove UK
Recommended by 168 people

Added: Thursday, 6 November, 2008, 07:36 GMT 07:36 UK

Yet another money wasting scheme from our illustrious Government.

They are not listening to the electorate, nobody wants ID cards, and as far as I know, nobody has been able to make them “secure”.

Plus can we trust them with our data? Based on countless examples over recent years its obvious the answer is no.

At a time when the UK needs all the money it can get, to pay its billions on previous commitments, you would have thought that schemes like this would have been postponed.

clive hamilton, woking
Recommended by 163 people

Added: Thursday, 6 November, 2008, 09:08 GMT 09:08 UK

This is not about terrorism! It’s about controlling the population and keeping tabs on them and their movements. Liabor are control freaks and they want to micro-manage every aspect of our live’s and that includes us. We should say no to this and do all we can to stop ID cards from becoming a reality. Is there not already enough information about each and every one of us in their databases? Do I not already have ID we carry? Why should I pay for something I don’t want or need?

Neil, Brighton
Recommended by 147 people

Added: Thursday, 6 November, 2008, 07:39 GMT 07:39 UK

How many times do we need this same debate? According to the government itself, the checks that should be performed for airport workers are much more stringent that those for the ID card.

In what was does that improve security of the public?

Once again, the government presses ahead with projects to catalogue every citizen and no-one appears willing to stop them in their tracks.

RJ, Zurich
Recommended by 147 people

Added: Thursday, 6 November, 2008, 09:11 GMT 09:11 UK

So, I have a birth certificate, photo driving license, passport credit cards and more and yet I need ANOTHER piece of ID. Can someone tell me why?

Unless this would replace the driving license and passport, it is, in my opinion, a ridiculous waste of time and money. As for fighting terrorism…..is having an ID card going to stop someone making a bomb? The logic escapes me.

Hard Working, Bracknell, United Kingdom
Recommended by 143 people

Added: Thursday, 6 November, 2008, 07:46 GMT 07:46 UK

To try to kid us that this is not a Gestapo act, Clown says, we must have an ID card but will not have to carry it at all times. So when a terrorist is asked to present his/her card at the police station within a week……!!
Yes I think that will definitely deter terrorists from blowing up Britain.

[anotherjames]
Recommended by 125 people

Added: Thursday, 6 November, 2008, 07:48 GMT 07:48 UK

Don’t they already have ID cards or security checks for “people working in specific sensitive roles or locations” in airports? I’m pretty sure that there is already an ID systetm in place for airport workers.

This is just a sneaky way to try and tenderise public acceptance towards nationwide cataloguing. You give an inch…

Blue-eyed cyclops, Norwich, United Kingdom
Recommended by 125 people

Added: Thursday, 6 November, 2008, 07:40 GMT 07:40 UK

ID cards are just a scam to take an ID card fee from every adult in the UK. They’re a stealth tax, nothing more.

anon., UK
Recommended by 119 people

Added: Thursday, 6 November, 2008, 09:07 GMT 09:07 UK

The only way I can see ID Cards helping in the fight against terrorism is if they have sharp corners, and you can jab them in to someone’s eyes to stop them blowing something up.

Or maybe – if they were really big and made of metal and teflon – you could hold it up in front of you to protect yourself from a bomb blast.

Or you could jam them in a door to stop it opening and letting in a person with a bomb…..

The possibilities are endless!

[angelholme], Blackpool, United Kingdom
Recommended by 117 people

[…]

Have Your Say

Total comments: 2134
Published comments: 1643
Rejected comments: 39
Moderation queue: 452

Methinks that the argument is lost Jacqui, you piece of trash. Almost all of the comments are violently against the idea of ID cards and this database.

The first comment is one of the best, and it is what we have been recommending for years; simply do not respond or react to anything that is sent to you. If everyone does it, the whole system dies, and that is that.

As we pointed out before, the unions are finally waking up to this problem and are going to cause trouble:

[…]

The Unite union, which represents airport workers, has said staff are already extensively vetted before being given airside passes.

Airport unions have been resisting the scheme, saying workers would have to pay £30 for a card to do their jobs.

However, it is understood that the cards would be issued free during the evaluation period.

Airlines including British Airways, Virgin Atlantic and EasyJet, also spoke out against the plan, saying it was “unjustified” and would not improve security.

On plans to involve retailers and the Post Office in the ID cards scheme, a spokesman said it would be “more convenient” for people than the government’s original plan to set up enrolment centres in large population centres.

The Identity and Passport Service (IPS) would continue to carry out enrolment at its offices but a spokesman said it also wanted to “drive down costs using market forces and competition” and was talking to a “range of high street retailers and other organisations”.

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7712275.stm

I see. They will issue them free for the testers. Last time I checked, when you test something for someone, you get PAID for doing so, and ‘free’ is not paying. It does however mean that they have to eat the cost of rolling out this test because the reaction against the ID card has been so hostile. Finally.

Don’t you think its interesting that IPS wants to “drive down costs using market forces and competition”? If the market can be used in this way to drive down costs, why not let the market take care of the entire ‘problem’?

What we would have is a market response to the problem of ID, and we would get the most efficient solution, in the same way that the market has provided the most efficient solution to the provision of universal and dirt cheap cellular telephone coverage and access.

The problem with letting the market solve the ‘problem’ of ID is that there is no ID problem to be solved in the first place. Business can carry on totally successfully without ID cards; in fact, ID cards are a form of friction, slowing down commerce, not facilitating it in any way.

Only the government wants ID cards. Business doesn’t need them (like the absurd fascist nonsense of having to produce a Passport or ID to get a SIM card), the public does not need them or want them; only the chinless, foul toothed fascists like Jacqui Smith and her equally repulsive predecessors want them, because they are bereft of imagination, fascist in nature and on the payroll of the venal vendors who are in line for billions of pounds for generations.

Now on to the next, most revolting, astonishing and inexplicable article from propaganda central, AKA BBC News:

Foreign students: Identity cards

The UK Border Agency is to issue the first identity cards to foreign nationals who officials say are most at risk of abusing immigration rules – non-EU students and those on a marriage or civil partnership visa.

But how do foreign students feel about carrying identity cards and being targeted as “risk” categories?

WON JAE, 20, FROM KOREA, STUDYING PSYCHOLOGY AT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON (UCL)

Won Jae from Korea, studying at UCL

I think it would be OK to carry an identity card, so long as it wasn’t discriminatory.

At the moment if I go anywhere off campus I have to carry my passport as my identity, for example if I am buying alcoholic drinks, so it would be better to have a card. So long as it’s not discriminating me against UK people, it’s fine.

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7635114.stm

First of all, every student except two (one from the US and one from Nigeria) on that page comes from a country where they have state issued ID cards, and have had them for decades. These people are the most sheepish, inured sad slaves imaginable. Won Jae is very well trained in double think:

I think it would be OK to carry an identity card, so long as it wasn’t discriminatory.

Well done Dear Leader in training! 2+2=5!

And you absolutely do not have to carry your passport to buy alcoholic drinks you moron. Learn something about the country you are studying in, it might help transform you from a slave into a human being.

What can you say to a parade of people like this?

Britain is a country where you used to be able to show, just by living here, that you do not need to have a totalitarian system of constant checks to create a thriving and tolerant society. All the Europeans who cannot imagine living without an ID card could be shown the 4th largest economy in the world doing very well, in fact, better than them, without ID cards and a police state.

Since when is the policy affecting the British public the business of foreign students? For sure, these students (wether they know it or not, and clearly this Korean does not) have rights and should never be compelled to carry an ID card; but since their acceptance of an ID card would inevitably lead to pressure on every British person to have one, why on earth are they being consulted at all, as if their opinion actually matters?

This page from the BBC is one of the most revolting, ill conceived and traitorous that I have ever read. To use foreigners from totalitarian states in this way to apply the force of opinion and change the outcome of a critical battle in the UK is treason, full stop. These people have no intention of living in Britain, and their approval of ID cards, once used to shoe-horn them in would still be here after they have left.

This is a sickening article. It made me so angry that I had to get up and go away for many hours.

The opinions of these people are absolutely irrelevant.

Should we have brought in ID cards in the ’70s because some ignorant Spaniards living under Francisco Franco ‘had no problem with it’ or as this young lady says

MI-YOUNG PARK, 24, KOREA, ENGLISH AT OXFORD HOUSE COLLEGE, LONDON
I think we need identity cards to buy things like alcohol or cigarettes. I have tried to show my Korean card, but they won’t accept it, so I have to carry my passport around with me which is really dangerous.

But I’m not staying in London for much longer, I’m applying to Emirates to be a flight attendant.

I think not.

ID cards are morally wrong. It doesn’t matter what anyone’s opinion is, in the same way that murder is wrong no matter who says otherwise. People like Gordon Brown and Jacqui Smith do not have any morals, and so they can mass murder and tag everyone like cattle without breaking a sweat, sleeping soundly every night. Those ignorant, annoying students might not have any understanding about ID cards, and may even want them; that does not mean that they are right, or that these foul instruments of totalitarian control should be introduced to Britain. What the Koreans do in their own country is their business, and I do not care about how they choose to live, and their way of life should have no influence or sway over what happens in a free country or in Britain.

To digress for a moment, none of these students seem to understand that if they take this card, it will mean that the police will be stopping and checking them just because they ‘look Korean’. They will be stopped and checked, and everyone else will be stopped and checked for these cards. These students are the trojan horse for this racist nightmare, where everyone will be profiled by what they look like on the spot. We have already been through this many times in the twentieth century…and this is the problem; all of these pathetic students are very young and have no memory or knowledge of the racist Suss Law (UK) and Pass Laws (South Africa) that caused so much friction and problems. They should all know better. They should all have better self correcting self preservation skills that ring alarm bells when someone wants to harm you or your fellow man. But then again, when you are born into a police state, you know nothing but the police state – its the same for the Spanish as it is for the Koreans and the Belgians.

The BBC, by putting on this parade of idiots has sunk to its lowest level ever, and as usual, there is no named person or editor to point the finger at for this scandalous, treasonous, infuriating article.

I have to say that despite all of this evil being thrown in our faces, that I am greatly pleased by the outpouring of hate against the ID card and Jacqui Smith / Neu Labour. It seems that we are actually very close to or on the tipping point now. There is no one left who is saying ‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear’ except the evil glove puppets in the pay of the vendors and HMG.

This is going to be abandoned completely, and shortly after that, ContactPoint will be scrapped. Gordon Brown has admitted that they can never keep data safe. That means that the children of Britain can never be kept safe once they are on ContactPoint. It means that they can never keep the personal details of these stupid students safe once they are on the NIR. It means that no one will be safe, and this is quite separate from the social ills that will arise from this evil mania for registers.

Once again, the first commenter had it precisely right:

If you receive a communication from any department of the Fascist NuLabour apparatus about it cut it up and send it back, unstamped, to some government department!

This is the only response needed. Make sure that you tell everyone exactly what you are doing and why, and encourage them to do the same, for the sake of themselves and this great country.

Many people died so that we would not have to carry ID cards. I will not dishonor them by giving in like a subhuman.

And neither should you.

Gordon Brown says government cannot ensure data safety

Gordon Brown has made a frank admission that government cannot promise the safety of personal data entrusted by the public.

Hopefully this ‘frank admission’ is the precursor to the complete rollback of all the doomed IT / ID projects this insane government has embarked and wasted money on.

The Prime Minister was speaking hours after it emerged that a memory stick containing the passwords to a government website used submit online tax returns had been lost.

Speaking on the second day of his trip to the Gulf, the Prime Minister said it was caused by "mistakes" which were “human”.

It is a human error when the wrong medicine or too much of the right medicine is injected in a hospital. When this happens, people are compensated via lawsuits. There is an avenue of redress.

When data leaks happen, there is nothing the government offers, other than ‘sorry it was not our fault’.

He also sought to clear government officials of blame, stressing that a private company – Atos Origin, a computer management firm – had accepted responsibility for the loss.

The Department for Work and Pensions was forced to shut down the Gateway service, which is used by consumers to pay parking tickets and fill in tax returns after the data, on a memory stick found outside a pub.

The loss by Atos Origin, which won a five-year £46.7million contract to manage the Government Gateway in 2006, was reported to the Government last week. The memory stick was found outside the Orbital Pub in Cannock and handed in to a Sunday newspaper.

We have heard all this before. What happened to the memory stick BEFORE it was turned over to the newspaper. Who has a copy of it? Was it encrypted so that whoever picked it up could not read it?

Mr Brown said this was completely unacceptable, and warned that the company would be punished.

They could terminate the contract for all the good it will do; once the genie is out of the bottle, it is OUT. We have written about this time and time again. No sanction, no punishment, no words can undo the harm that is done by a leak like this. In the case of credit card details and passwords, those can be changed, even if there are millions of numbers to be cancelled and re-issued. If the data however is the fingerprints and DNA of living people, those CANNOT be replaced; that private data escaped represents a violation on unprecedented scales, and as we keep saying, it WILL HAPPEN no matter what precautions you take to protect the systems that hold the information.

Which comes to another point; why on earth do these sensitive computers have USB slots and DVD burners? SURELY after all the leaks and missing discs, all USB ports should be pulled and DVD burners removed. In a networked environment there is no need for those means of moving data….but I digress, and of course, if any of these computers is on the internetz, remote access by bad guys is guaranteed.

“I think that the company responsible has accepted responsibility and it is a private company. I think action will be taken by the Department of Work and Pensions. It’s not acceptable behaviour,” he told ITV News. He said that the company could expect “changes to the contract.”

I think you are a squint eyed, pig faced liar and mass murderer.
I think any action taken by the Department of Work and Pensions will not matter a single bit, you clod.
I think changes to the ATOS contract are a total irrelevance, and insulting as a sanction, even to the most thick person.
I think the jig is up you scum. People are finally waking up to this total insanity, and you are not going to be able to roll out your ID schemes.

The Government has faced repeated embarrassments over lost data, with 277 data breaches reported since 25 million child benefit records went missing nearly a year ago. Only last week James Purnell, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, was forced to apologise for leaving papers on a train. Mr Brown appeared to accept data loss in future was inevitable.

Data loss in the future is only inevitable if you allow yourself to be put onto these systems. If you allow your fingerprints to be taken, your fingerprints will be released to the public. If you allow your DNA to be taken, your DNA will be released to the public. If you allow your doctor to upload your information to the Spine, your medical records will be released to the public.

Once again, for all those thick morons who trot out the, “we already have credit cards and loyalty cards, so what’s the difference” line, the difference is that if your data is released by a credit card, you can be compensated. The same goes for all of your interactions with private companies, and if any company does not guarantee your privacy, you should shun them, full stop.

Also, the State is not the same as a private corporation with whom you deal willingly. You should already know all of this.

“It is important to recognise we cannot promise that every single item of information will always be safe because mistakes are made by human beings. Mistakes are made in the transportation, if you like in the communication, of information.”

[…]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article5065795.ece

Therefore, it is important to recognise that sensitive information should never be hoarded in centralized databases by compulsion of the State. The State should abandon all IT projects that collect personal data, all data sharing should be stopped, and each citizen should have the right to demand that data on him is deleted should he so wish.

The ContactPoint database listing all 11 million children in Britain should be scrapped immediately in the light of these comments by Gordon Brown.

He has admitted that he cannot keep children safe from paedophiles who would inevitably (by his own admission) gain access to ContactPoint data, making that database nothing more than a catalogue for paedophiles. We have described how this would happen before.

ContactPoint. The database that is:

• ‘too risky’ for the children of the famous
• a catalogue for paedophiles
• impossible to secure, putting all children at risk
• will be leaked in its entirety within months of it going online

MUST BE ABANDONED RIGHT NOW.

Anyone who is for ContactPoint, or any of these insane IT / ID projects simply does not know what they are talking about. All of them should be scrapped. If they are not scrapped, you should do everything you can to stay out of them, starting by refusing to take the ID card.

Government can run perfectly well without any of it, and none of it is of any benefit to the public.

Police to use handheld fingerprint scanners in the street

The scheme, called Project Midas, will transform the speed of criminal investigations, according to the police.
It is thought the new technology could be in widespread use within 18 months.

Details of the scheme were revealed by the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) at the Biometrics 2008 conference.

The Mobile Identification At Scene (Midas) project, will cost between £30 to £40 million. Fingerprints taken using the device will be compared against the national police database, which holds information on 7.5 million individuals.

Geoff Whitaker, a senior technology officer from NPIA, said Project Midas would save enormous amounts of police time and reduce the amount of wrongful arrests.

To take fingerprints currently, officers have to take a suspect into custody suites. Research shows this takes 67 minutes on average.
Mr Whitaker said: “If we scaled this [saving] up to the national level that would equate to 366 additional police officers on the beat.”
He suggested policing of sporting events and festivals could benefit, as well as immigration and border control.

He said Project Midas would give the police “a full, mobile national capability” to check identities.

The system may potentially beam images of suspects back to officers – some US police forces are already using such technology.

Project Lantern, a trial of mobile devices, started in 2006. The devices were used in police cars using automatic number plate recognition technology and stopped vehicles logged as stolen or having no insurance.

Fingerprint checks often showed they were carrying false documents.

Response time for Lantern took between two to five minutes generally, and responses were graded as “high” or “medium” depending on how confident they were of a match.

A NPIA spokeswoman said: “It will be up to each police authority to assess the benefits and see how many they want. Early indications are that the benefits will be huge.”

Liberty, the civil rights group, has warned however that fingerprints taken in such a way would require them to be deleted straight afterwards – police have already insisted fingerprints would not be stored.

Gareth Crossman, Liberty’s policy director, said: “Saving time with new technology could help police performance but officers must make absolutely certain that they take fingerprints only when they suspect an individual of an offence and can’t establish his identity.”

Telegraph

The only Midas Touch here is the gold each fingerprint reader is going to make for the vendor of this vile police state equipment.

We predicted this device long ago:

here and here (from 2004) and here (from 2004).

This is a very bad idea. It is the modern equivalent of the Apartheid ‘Pass Laws’, that were:

[…] designed to segregate the population and limit severely the movements of the non-white populace. This legislation was one of the dominant features of the country’s apartheid system. Introduced in South Africa in 1923, they were designed to regulate movement of black Africans in urban areas. Outside designated “homelands”, black South Africans had to carry passbooks (“dom pas”, meaning dumb pass) at all times, documentation proving they were authorised to live or move in “White” South Africa.

The laws also affected other non-white races. Indian people, for example, were barred from the Orange Free State.
These discriminatory regulations sparked outrage from the black population and the ANC began the Defiance Campaign to oppose the pass laws.
This conflict climaxed at the Sharpeville Massacre where the black opposition was violently put down, with 69 people killed and over 180 injured.
The system of pass laws was repealed in South Africa in 1986.

What this article fails to mention are the effects that this device will have. Everyone will be required to be fingerprinted wether they are a criminal or not. That means the Police will have discretion to fingerprint who they like at will. As I say in the BLOGDIAL posts linked above, if you are scanned on the street and the machine comes up with nothing, what does that actually mean? Are they going to let you go because they have nothing on you? Or maybe because you are not in the database you MUST be illegal.

This device will not prevent crime; in fact, it will increase the amount of crime, and exponentially increase the amount of hatred for the beleaguered police.

Liberty, that organization that is made of pure fail, once again says nothing to address the true nature of this device and the inevitable consequences of its being rolled out.

This device is useless without an NIR that contains everyone in it. Of course, criminals will not line up to enter the NIR, so anyone who turns up as un-scannable will be immediately hauled off to gaol not so that they can find out who you are, but because you are not in the database. All tourists will be put on the NIR with a ‘tourists’ flag on their entry, so if someone coming here to see Big Ben gets scanned, his details will show up on the device like everyone else’s, only with a ‘tourist’ flag.

This device will not reduce the amount of wrongful arrests. It will greatly increase the number of arrests as people who do not turn up on the database will have to be taken into custody to be identified. That is also the case for the 10% of times when the database or equipment is down.

Also, this article is mixing up ‘checking identities’ with checking people against the criminal database. Checking against the criminal database doesn’t say anything about the current intentions of a person who is stopped. Think about it; a police officer might stop a reformed burglar on the street during one of their random sweeps. They find that this guy is in the database of criminals. Does this mean he should be subjected to extra scrutiny because he was a bad guy? What about the bad guys who are not in the database because they have not yet been caught and convicted once?

This device will not and can not catch criminals. It cannot detect crime or the intention of crime. It is as useless as ID cards in crime fighting. Finding out someone’s real name and some biographical details about them does nothing to prevent crime, and in fact, fingerprinting people on the street is the only crime that is being committed here.

Then of course, there is the next step in development, where the reach of these devices is spread to the NIR, as I describe above. That is inevitable, since the majority of people are not in the criminal database, and the police will argue that they need to know exactly who everyone is at a crime scene to help them investigate crime.

Its all baloney of course, and this is just another angle from which pressure is going to be applied for the full roll out of the NIR and ID cards. This is the ultimate goal, the vendors wet dream and everyone’s nightmare.

Passports will be needed to buy mobile phones

Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance.

Phone buyers would have to present a passport or other official form of identification at the point of purchase. Privacy campaigners fear it marks the latest government move to create a surveillance society.

A compulsory national register for the owners of all 72m mobile phones in Britain would be part of a much bigger database to combat terrorism and crime. Whitehall officials have raised the idea of a register containing the names and addresses of everyone who buys a phone in recent talks with Vodafone and other telephone companies, insiders say.

The move is targeted at monitoring the owners of Britain’s estimated 40m prepaid mobile phones. They can be purchased with cash by customers who do not wish to give their names, addresses or credit card details.

The pay-as-you-go phones are popular with criminals and terrorists because their anonymity shields their activities from the authorities. But they are also used by thousands of law-abiding citizens who wish to communicate in private.

The move aims to close a loophole in plans being drawn up by GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre in Cheltenham, to create a huge database to monitor and store the internet browsing habits, e-mail and telephone records of everyone in Britain.

The “Big Brother” database would have limited value to police and MI5 if it did not store details of the ownership of more than half the mobile phones in the country.

[…]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article4969312.ece

Whilst in France, I needed a SIM card. I went into a shop to buy one and the man behind the counter asked for my ID. I told him that I was not French and did not have one. He refused to sell me the SIM. I got my driver to present his ID and then I had my SIM card.

This and thousands of variations of it will ensure that anyone can get a SIM card without showing ID. All of you with a working brain cell know this.

This measure is nonsense, promoted by imbeciles and supported by imbeciles. Criminals can make phone calls today that are 100% untraceable where no one even knows that a phone call is taking place. By using Asterisk and some cheap equipment, you can have your own absolutely secure private phone network. See how it works here:

http://tinyurl.com/57588k

Anyone who tells you these pathetic measures are for security, or who trotts out the tired, “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” line is, like I say above, an imbecile. These measures cannot work for the stated purpose, are actually not designed for the stated purpose, (they are there to surveil the ordinary citizen and NOT criminals) and it is high time that we point blank refuse to obey anything that this totalitarian government orders, starting with the absurd and evil ID card.

Any business that requires state ID does not get my money or money from my business, full stop. This is our anti Police-State policy, and we strictly adhere to it. If everyone who is against all of this adopts this policy in their private and business lives then the police state they are trying to build will come to a crashing halt.

Furthermore, everyone knows that they can follow the physical location of any cellular telephone on the network. They can also create relationship diagrams of every phone and then infer whatever they like from that. Criminals will always be able to get a mobile phone to use for crime. This is a fact.

Can we now expect all public phones to be dismantled and taken away? After all, they are anonymous phones that any one, any TERRORIST can use to make TERRORIST phone calls.

What about land lines in hotels, bars pubs etc etc.

This makes so little sense….until you read that GCHQ has been given one BILLION pounds to put it all together. GCHC is not keeping this money; they are spending it with vendors who will sell them the servers, and every other bit of kit they need to make this bad magic happen.

This is about money, pure and simple. This is corruption writ large. That is the only explanation that makes sense, since the case for what they are proposing is bogus on its face.

Plans to build support for identity cards by introducing them among ‘guinea pig’ groups, such as airport staff and students, are in crisis after 10,000 airline pilots vowed to take legal action to block them and opposition swept through Britain’s universities and councils.

In a move that could wreck the government’s strategy for a phased introduction beginning next year, the British Airline Pilots Association (Balpa) said it would seek a judicial review rather than see its members forced to adopt ID cards at a time when pilots are already exhaustively vetted.

Balpa’s vehement opposition is a hammer blow for the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, who had hoped to win the wider public over to ID cards by demonstrating that they were crucial to anti-terrorism policies. She intends to introduce them among groups ‘who operate in positions of trust in our society’.

In a speech in March, Smith said: ‘The first cards will be issued, from 2009, to groups where there is a compelling need for reassurance that someone is who they say they are.’

But Balpa, which represents more than 10,000 pilots working on 28 airlines, backed by the Trades Union Congress, insists that ID cards will ‘do nothing’ to enhance airport or flight security, and it fears that information about its members stored on a National Identity Register could be abused.

Jim McAuslan, general secretary of Balpa, told The Observer: ‘Our members are incensed by the way they have been targeted as guinea pigs in a project which will not improve security. We will leave no stone unturned in our attempts to prevent this, including legal action to force a judicial review if necessary.’

From late 2010 ministers intend to start issuing ID cards to ‘young people’, particularly students, on a voluntary basis in a further attempt to win the population round. Then around 2012 everyone applying for a passport will have to be on the National Identity Register.

However, the anti-ID card campaign group, NO2ID, is mobilising what it says is ‘a wave of student opposition’ to ID cards on campuses across the country.

More than 40 local authorities, as well as the Scottish parliament and the Welsh and London assemblies, have passed motions opposing ID cards. Without the co-operation of councils, which would use ID cards to verify benefit claimants and those wanting to use public services, the entire project would fail to get off the ground.

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/oct/12/idcards

Finally, the masses are putting their foot down in unison. Students, Trades Unions and everyone else has now woken up to the facts about the NIR and the ID Card.

Only a completely insane person would bet on the successful introduction of ID cards. This insane project is FINISHED, and it is going to crash and burn just like the Poll Tax did.

Good!