Lecturers defy government over ID cards

Anthea Lipsett
Wednesday May 28, 2008
EducationGuardian.co.uk

Lecturers voted overwhelmingly to oppose and defy the government’s plans to introduce identity cards at the University and College annual congress in Manchester today.

The government plans to pilot the controversial identity cards with international students, which lecturers warned could deter them from choosing to study in the UK.

In January, the Tories accused the government of “blackmailing” students into holding identity cards in order to get student loans.

Dave Goode from Cambridge University, who proposed the motion that was passed, talked of the “horror and contempt” of identity cards and called on members to back the NO2ID campaign.

Mike Cushman, from the LSE, had led research into identity cards and called on members to oppose their introduction as “citizens and members of society, as trade union members and education trade union members”.

He said the Home Office would like society to believe that identity cards would “end terrorism … benefit fraud … illicit health service use … identity theft … and there would be no more queues and constant sunshine in Manchester”.

To applause he said the government wanted to “delegitimise dissent” and union members should fight back.

“We know it’s going to be piloted on non-EU international students – another barrier to students coming to our universities at a time when we’re facing greater international competition,” he said.

Malcolm Povey from Leeds University said: “We live in the most disciplined and rigid society throughout the history of human evolution. Every aspect of our lives is subject to control by the state. These cards are yet another step in this direction.

“To me, these cards will form part of the scapegoating and divisive agenda of government and employers. We’re already seeing this as a challenge to academic freedom.”

For instance, he said lecturers in Palestine would be subject to very strict controls if they were to get a job in the UK.

[…]

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/news/story/0,,2282476,00.html

This is great news, but I don’t know about students from other countries being put off from coming here; no Chinese student would see being forced to be fingerprinted and enrolled in the NIR as a barrier of any kind.

Which takes us nicely to this; take a look at these extraordinary clips…uh oh, they have been removed from YouTube ‘TOS Violation’

tap tap tap…

and we find:

here’s a summary:

Foreigner: I’d like to know why you’re taking my photo and fingerprints. Also, could you explain what you’ll be doing with them? What if I refuse?

Japanese Woman: 9/11. MULTIPLE SIMULTANEOUS TERRORIST ATTACKS. MASSIVE CASUALTIES. If you refuse to be fingerprinted or photographed, you will be denied entry into Japan.

Foreigner: That sounds fantastic! Hooray!!!! I’m going to go tell all my friends how awesome it is to get my fingerprints/photo taken and stored away somewhere by Japanese authorities! Banzai!

I was worried about my rights before watching this video, but now I’m totally relieved. Getting fingerprinted sounds like loads of fun, right?!

http://www.japanprobe.com/?p=2281

and here it is for you to watch.

Sickening.

tap tap tap…tap tap tap…

WTF? Make up your minds!!!!

Japan Ends Fingerprinting of Many Non-Japanese

After years of bitter protests and debate, the Parliament passed a bill today that will eliminate routine fingerprinting of permanent foreign residents, a practice that many non-Japanese have regarded as a humiliating symbol of government-sanctioned discrimination.

While the news was welcomed by many foreigners, especially the Korean residents who will be the principal beneficiaries, many insisted the bill leaves in place an extensive system of unfair controls on non-Japanese residents.

For instance, foreign residents can still be arrested if they are found without their alien registration cards, or face criminal prosecution if they fail to report changes of address or jobs to the Government within two weeks. Permanent foreign residents, many of whose families have been in Japan for generations, also complained that they would still be denied the right to work for the Government or to vote.

“I’m pleased with this change, but if you look at other elements of the law, you will find it still includes many forms of discrimination,” said Sohn Chung In, an official of the Korean Residents Union of Japan. “This is a step forward, but not a change in the society.”

About 602,000 Korean and Taiwanese residents, many of whose families were brought here forcibly when their homelands were occupied by Japan, will no longer have to submit to routine fingerprinting in order to work, study and live in Japan. About 43,000 other foreigners who have qualified for permanent foreign resident status will also be exempted, according to the Government.

The bill passed the lower house of the Parliament last month, and was passed today by the upper house. The changes are to take effect in January.

Immigration officials have wide discretion in determining who gains permanent residence; thus, many foreigners who have been here 10 years or more, and in some instances their entire lives, will not qualify.

The Parliament originally proposed eliminating the hated fingerprinting once and for all, but a compromise was reached after the National Police Agency refused to budge in its insistence that it needed to continue some fingerprinting to insure public security. The bill has a provision that the Government should try to eliminate fingerprinting in 1998.

Thus, for the time being, 320,000 foreign residents still must be fingerprinted. In the past, the Government has sought to lessen the anger over the practice with a variety of gestures.

For instance, prints were once taken of all the fingers, but are now done of just the left index finger; the alien registration cards all foreigners must carry are now placed in a plastic sleeve with a blue seal that discreetly covers the print.

But most objectors have not been moved by these steps, or the law’s revision. Continuing the Battle

Kathleen Morikawa, an American married to a Japanese, has faced prosecution because of her refusal for 10 years to be fingerprinted. She said today that the revision still discriminated against a class that she has fought hard to help — spouses of Japanese — who rarely qualify for permanent resident status.

“The whole issue of how foreigners are treated has not gone away with this,” she said.

Koreans have long faced the most persistent discrimination. Even those who seek Japanese citizenship, which means adopting Japanese names, find they are denied jobs with major corporations and are frequently unable to marry Japanese. There is a whole industry in Japan of private detectives who, on behalf of prospective employers or spouses, try to discover if people are of Korean or Chinese descent.

Mr. Sohn of the Korean association said his group was still struggling to gain the right of Koreans here to vote, work in Government jobs and learn about their heritage in public schools, a course that is not currently taught.

[…]

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE7DE113EF932A15756C0A964958260

From 1992.

???!!!

Sticking to the point of the terror hysteria, honestly, the Japanese government and industry MUST be smarter than this. They are already waking up out of the stupor caused by the mythical ‘911’; they should destroy this inhuman, mass violation system and show the world that they are above this degrading, useless nonsense.

Every adult should be forced to use a ‘carbon ration card’ when they pay for petrol, airline tickets or household energy, MPs say.

The influential Environmental Audit Committee says a personal carbon trading scheme is the best and fairest way of cutting Britain’s CO2 emissions without penalising the poor.

Under the scheme, everyone would be given an annual carbon allowance to use when buying oil, gas, electricity and flights.

Anyone who exceeds their entitlement would have to buy top-up credits from individuals who haven’t used up their allowance. The amount paid would be driven by market forces and the deal done through a specialist company.

MPs, led by Tory Tim Yeo, say the scheme could be more effective at cutting greenhouse gas emissions than green taxes.

But critics say the idea is costly, bureaucratic, intrusive and unworkable.

The Government says it supports the scheme in principle, but warns it is ‘ahead of its time’.

The idea of personal carbon trading is increasingly being promoted by environmentalists. In theory it could be used to cover all purchases – from petrol to food.

For the scheme to work, the Government would need to give out 45million carbon cards – each one linked to a personal carbon account. Every year, the account would be credited with a notional amount of CO2 in kilograms.

Every time someone makes a purchase of petrol, energy or airline tickets, they would use up credits. A return flight from London to Rome would, for instance, use up 900kg of CO2 credits, while 10 litres of petrol would use up 23kg.

Mr Yeo, chairman of the committee said personal carbon trading rewarded those with a low carbon footprint with cash.

‘We found that personal carbon trading has real potential to engage the population in the fight against climate change and to achieve significant emissions reductions in a progressive way,’ he said.

‘The idea is a radical one. As such it inevitably faces some significant challenges in its development. It is important to meet these challenges.

‘What we are asking the Government to do is to seize the reins on this, leading the debate and coordinating research.’

The Government is committed to cutting CO2 emissions to 20 per cent below 1990 levels by 2010.

The Climate Change Bill going through Parliament aims to cut emissions by 60 per cent by 2050. The Government has said it backs the idea in principle, but it is currently too expensive and bureaucratic.

Environment Minister Hilary Benn said: ‘It’s got potential but, in essence, it’s ahead of its time. There are a lot of practical problems to overcome.’

A Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs report into the scheme found it would cost between £700million and £2billion to set up and up to another £2billion a year to run.

Tory environment spokesman Peter Ainsworth added: ‘Although it does have potential we should proceed with care. We don’t want to alienate people and we want everyone to be on board.’

But critics say the idea is deeply flawed. The scheme would penalise those living in the countryside who were dependent on their cars, as well as the elderly or housebound who need to heat their homes in the day.

Large families would suffer, as would those working at nights when little public transport is available.

It would need to take into account the size of families, and their ages. There is huge potential for fraud.

Matthew Elliott of the Taxpayers’ Alliance said the cards would be hugely unpopular. ‘The Government has shown itself incapable of managing any huge, complex IT system.’ he said.

HOW THE SCHEME WOULD WORK

Every adult in the UK would be given an annual carbon dioxide allowance in kgs and a special carbon card.

The scheme would cover road fuel, flights and energy bills.

Every time someone paid for road fuel, flights or energy, their carbon account would be docked.

A litre of petrol would use up 2.3kg in carbon, while every 1.3 miles of airline flight would use another 1kg.

When paying for petrol, the card would need to swiped at the till.

It would be a legal offence to buy petrol without using a card.

When paying online, or by direct debit, the carbon account would be debited directly.

Anyone who doesn’t use up their credits in a year can sell them to someone who wants more credits. Trading would be done through specialist companies.

[…]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1021983/Every-adult-Britain-forced-carry-carbon-ration-cards-say-MPs.html

My emphasis.

Does any of this sound familiar?

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 Nat West, 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.

[…]

Oyster, DVLA, BT and Nectar (for example) all run very detailed databases of their own. They will be allowed access to the NIR, just as every other business will be. This means that each of these entities will be able to store your unique number in their database, and place all your travel, phone records, driving activities and detailed shopping habits under your unique NIR number. These databases, which can easily fit on a storage device the size of your hand, will be sold to third parties either legally or illegally. It will then be possible for a non-governmental entity to create a detailed dossier of all your activities. Certainly, the government will have clandestine access to all of them, meaning that they will have a complete record of all your movements, from how much and when you withdraw from your bank account to what medications you are taking, down to the level of what sort of bread you eat – all accessible via a single unique number in a central database.

http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=1207&pid=8915&st=0&

That is from the famous “Anonymous email” that warned everyone about ID cards; once again the prescience of its author is vividly demonstrated.

What this Carbon Trading card will do is exactly what ‘Frances Stonor Saunders’ predicted; it will require the creation of a massive centralized database that contains a record of all your purchases, against which (at a minimum) will be your name and your carbon account balance. Of course, what will also be measured is the amount of petrol you bought, where you bought it and when you bought it, and your car registration. The database will also record where you are flying to and when as you book your ticket. You can be sure that it will also record your every journey by train.

Once they put this database together, they can adjust at will, the amount that people ‘pay’ in carbon units manipulating the market at will and without any oversight.

This is the original specification of the ID card through the back door.

What this article, inexplicably, fails to do is connect the dots. Once you have issued 45 million Carbon Trading Cards with every adult’s name, address and a unique number, you have the framework for an ID card that uses the same database. In order to save money in the running of the scheme, the Tories will claim that they are the good guys by merging the Carbon Trading System with the NIR so that they save money on the running of it. That inevitable event will make another part of the Anonymous Email come true:

There will be spaces on this database for your religion, residence status, and many other private and personal facts about you. There is unlimited space for every other detail of your life on the NIR database, which can be expanded by the Government with or without further Acts of Parliament.

Like the email says, there will be unlimited space to add, literally, “every other detail of your life” onto the NIR and this is exactly and precisely what evil, ignorant MP Tim Yeo is advocating; that the NIR be expanded to be used to run this Carbon Trading scam.

This database will record every purchase, every movement … everything, and all of it will be open to examination, all of it will be subject to the same dangers, wholesale releases deliberate and accidental as is and has been the case with these databases.

What’s next? I’ll tell you what’s next: the NIR will be used to monitor how much alcohol you drink. Everyone will be given an alcohol allowance, and this will be monitored through the NIR, as will your calorie intake, as every purchase at a supermarket will be monitored. Monitoring your groceries is a logical extension of this scheme, and in fact, an essential part of it; if you are buying apples from New Zealand, they will have a higher ‘Carbon Footprint’ than apples grown locally. This should be taken into account when you shop because demand for New Zealand products have to be shipped from half way across the world.

I wonder how the New Zealanders are going to react to all of this? Essentially it means that they will no longer be able to export food to the rest of the world, since it ‘costs’ too much to ship the goods they are making. It would mean, at the very least, a contraction of their economy. But I digress.

This scheme is built on a lie, the lie that mankind is responsible for global warming, and it is a pretext for introducing not only new taxes, but an unprecedentedly fine grained surveillance system, built around a single ID card that everyone will be compelled to carry.

The system will centrally record everything you do and which is related to your life, including but not limited to::

• A record of all your groceries.
• A record of every time you buy alcohol.
• A record of every time you buy cigarettes.
• All your medical records.
• A record of all your prescriptions.
• A record of all your journeys by train.
• A record of all your journeys by underground.
• A record of all your journeys by bus.
• A record of all your journeys by car.
• A record of every country you have visited.
• How much gasoline you buy.
• How much electricity you use.
• How much water you use.
• How much natural gas you use.
• Everywhere you visit online.
• All your emails.
• All your text messages.
• Your fingerprints.
• Your iris scan.
• Your ‘race’.
• Your religion.
• Your name and address.
• Your qualifications.
• Your criminal record.
• The names of your wife and children.

In fact, there is nothing that they will not record, except your thoughts.

As we can see, it will cost two billion pounds to set up and two billion a year to run. It is a contractors wet dream, in fact, I would not be surprised to see the contract given to Nectar, who have the skills and capacity to take on a brief like this from a running start.

In the end, they will have created the ultimate system of control, through which your every move will be monitored and taxed and steered. If you dare to complain or to refuse to comply, your card will be stopped and you will not be able to eat, or move unless someone is willing to help you.

That is what the Tories are advocating, and what Hillary Ben describes as ‘ahead of its time’.

It should be abundantly clear to everyone in the country and the entire world that the Global Warming threat is in fact this Carbon Trading scheme and the Carbon Trading tax, radical environmentalists are many millions of times worse than ‘radical jihadists’ and that the former are the greatest threat mankind has ever faced.

They want to completely transform the world so that it fits into their imagination-less frameworks and makes slaves of everyone to that lack of vision.

There are two ways out of this. Both of them can be described as a revolution.

The first is a revolution of the flesh, where the masses dismantle the system.

The second is a revolution in technology, specifically in energy production, making all of this carbon fanaticism irrelevant.

Whatever happens, if these monsters succeed, it will be the beginning of a nightmare that very few people have the capacity to comprehend.

Thanks to TH for the heads up!

Post Script

Does anyone other than me see the irony in these socialists turning to market forces to control the carbon footprint ‘problem’?

They want to create a market in carbon points that will use the forces of supply and demand to govern people’s usage of non renewables, but they will not allow those same, reliable, predictable forces to control the wider economy, where if they were unleashed, these problems would cease to exist altogether.

The example that is trotted out these days is that of cellular phones. If Hillary Benn was tasked with getting a mobile phone into every home, we would still be using suitcase phones and they would cost £1000 each and the network would not work, would not interact with any other cellular network of any other counry, calls would drop repeatedly, sound quality would….you get the picture.

The same goes for energy. If it was left to the market, it would be vastly different to how it is now; electricity would have its true value, and so would gasoline. In response, engine efficiency would be hundreds of times greater than it is now, without compromises, and we would not be talking about any of this nonsense.

These same people would say that the market cannot deliver, but then they turn to it when it suits them. This is the dictionary definition of hypocrisy.

The Telegraph seems to have a feast of articles today:

Home Office plans to create ‘Big brother’ database for phones calls, emails and web use

This appears to be either a whistleblower or a ‘feeler’ leak about yet another attempt by the Home Office to ‘store the details of every phone call made, every email sent and every web page visited by British citizens in the previous year’ – even as other countries tighten the protection of their citizens online activity.

Once again it is allegedly in the cause of fighting terrorism, so nothing to be worried about when every single piece of online activity you have made has been kept, that’s not just which website you have been to, but every unencrypted email will be available – searchable – somewhere out of your control. even if you send each of your emails encrypted you will still likely receive many unencrypted, e-receipts being the most bothersome culprit.

Out of your control? Once on a database, you can almost guarantee the data no matter how sensitive will be copied and carried across the country only to be lost who-knows-where, thusly:

NHS disc containing sensitive data lost

A computer disc containing the medical records of more than 38,000 NHS patients went missing when it was sent to a software company to be backed up – in case the records got lost.

The information, which dates back 10 years, was mislaid somewhere between London and Sandown Health Centre on the Isle of Wight.

It was given to courier company City Link in March, but the health centre only spotted it was missing in May.

A spokesman for the South Central Strategic Health Authority said the courier company – which is supposed to track every item at every stage – demonstrated a “clear failure” by losing all record of the disc once it passed into their hands.

Perhaps time to trust a ‘non-evil’ private company?

I would say not, the only people who should ‘host’ your healthcare record should be yourself or your personal doctor and it should not be networked in any way.

Finally the Conservative Party seems to be turning towards the right direction on CCTV but only partially:

Tories pledge to curb use of CCTV cameras

Unfortunately whilst looking to restrict the amount of CCTV they still echo the opinion of the Met that the solution is higher resolution CCTV rather better forms of policing i.e. more active police actually on the streets, replacing the ‘need’ for CCTV surveillance.

By Kevin Poulsen
Threat Level
Wired.com
May 13, 2008

Five workers at the Internal Revenue Service’s Fresno, California, return processing center were charged Monday with computer fraud and unauthorized access to tax return information for allegedly peeking into taxpayers’ files for their own purposes.

“The IRS has a method for looking for unauthorized access, and it keeps audit trails, and occasionally it will pump out information about who’s done what,” says assistant U.S. attorney Mark McKoen, who’s prosecuting the cases in federal court in Fresno. “In general terms, IRS employees are only authorized to access the accounts of taxpayers who write in. They’re not allowed to access friends, relatives, neighbors, celebrities.”

With tax return information just a few keystrokes away, IRS employees succumb to curiosity often enough that the agency has its own word for such browsing: UNAX, (pronounced you-nacks) , for “unauthorized access.” In congressional testimony last month, a Treasury Department investigator said employee prying was on the rise, with 430 known cases in 1998, and 521 last year.

“Whether the intent is fraud or simply curiosity, the potential exists for unauthorized accesses to tax information of high-profile individuals and other taxpayers,” testified J. Russell George, the department’s Inspector General for Tax Administration. “The competing goals of protecting this information and achieving workplace efficiencies become even more difficult as technology becomes faster and more complex.”

The five charged this week are Corina Yepez, Melissa Moisa, Brenda Jurado, Irene Fierro and David Baker. Only 13 taxpayers were compromised — each worker allegedly peeked at one to four tax returns, in incidents from 2005 through last year.

The age of some of the incidents suggests the Inspector General’s office is breaking out new algorithms to find anomalies in audit trails going back years. The office declined to comment, as did the IRS.

Workers caught in a UNAX are typically subject to disciplinary measures like unpaid leave, and less commonly charged with misdemeanor violations of the Taxpayer Browsing Protection Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. There were 185 such prosecutions from 1998 to 2007, with offenders typically receiving probation.

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/05/five-irs-employ.html

This, My Friends™, is what we call ‘a gift’.

‘UNAX’….ROTFL

Sign on IRS data manager’s desk ‘I am a UNAX sysadmin’!!!

Since it is un authorized, surely it should be ‘un-acks’, not ‘you-nack’s… but that would mean we pronounce UNIX as ‘un-ix’….

but I digress…

This is what The Google provides on UNAX from the Federal Employees Discussion Board:

Topic: UNAX
jschan77
Member posted June 17, 2002 10:52 AM
I have a UNAX problem.

They pulled my transcript on the IDRS, they found where I looked up an ex. I did this without thought and and it was found. It was so long ago that I didn’t even remember it. I have to pull calendars of my own notes to see if it was a possibility.
Well, the only thing I could find is where I was changeing my sons last name and I guess I did do it.
There is another lady in my office that looked up her son, as she had a fall out a long time ago and wanted to just find him.
She received 2 days LWOP. I am told I will be getting termination papers.
She admitted to doing it and why.
I did not remember until it was brought to my attention.

I think this is unfair.

She is a person who lives by the rule of “It’s not my job” and flexs for child care.
I live by the rule of “what can I help you with” and am getting the boot.
Is there anyway I can stop this?

I’ve been told that if I go to arbitration I can get this overturned. This is a 9 month to 1 year process. Who can afford to stay off that long. I am the main bread winner of the family.

I’ve also been told that arbitration costs money and comes out of our own pocket. I am in the union, I thought they paid for it.

Can anyone help me?

Thanks you all for your input.
I appreciated all you trying to help

Unfortunately, I ened up with –
No Douglas Factors taken into consideration.
I received a 30 LWOP suspension.

I tried to go to MSPB with a copy of another persons write up in our office whom admitted to doing the same thing and they only got a write up, and theirs were done more times than mine.
They gave me this line of I worked in SB/SE and they worked in W & I is why the difference, even tho when I had the phone interview with the judge, he seemed real suprised that he had not known about the other person.

So I lost the MSPB.

Anyway, I’m just happy to be STILL working and will bite my tounge for the next 12 years and 7 months. 17 years and 5 months done.

You can bet, I won’t be that stupid again.

Again, I thank you all for listening and you suggestions.

“””BECAUZE YOU KNOW WHAT THEY LIKE TO DO WHEN YOU ARE ON A SHEIT LIST..THEY MAKE YOUR LIFE A LIVING HELL UNTIL YOU QUIT..”””

Are you aware of the illegality of what you described?

It is referred to as Constructive Discharge. You may want to read up on it so you will recognize it when it begins to happen to you or someone around you.

It appears we must tow the line and obey the laws of the land. The govt on the otherhand….

Oh dear me.

Take a look at the site, and marvel at all the acronyms; they have a language all their own, separate from the language of non-government employees (the other 50% of the population). Could this be the beginning of an HG Wells split of the human population? The first thing that would change would be the language, the loyalty, and then the rights the food the accommodation….but I digress again.

Im sure that there are many UNIX people who could make a slew of funny UNAX/IX jokes ‘for the lulz’….

WASHINGTON — A German graduate student in oceanography at M.I.T. applied to the Transportation Security Administration for a new ID card allowing him to work around ships and docks.

What the student, Wilken-Jon von Appen, received in return was a letter that not only turned him down but added an ominous warning from John M. Busch, a security administration official: “I have determined that you pose a security threat.”

Similar letters have gone to 5,000 applicants across the country who have at least initially been turned down for a Transportation Worker Identification Credential, an ID card meant to guard against acts of terrorism, agency officials said Monday.

The officials also said they were sorry about the language, which they may change in the future, but had no intention of withdrawing letters already sent.

“It’s an unfortunate choice of words in a bureaucratic letter,” said Ellen Howe, a security agency spokeswoman.

Ms. Howe and Maurine Fanguy, who oversees the new ID card program, said that most foreign students did not qualify for the identity cards, but that the letters were not intended to label the recipients as potential terrorists. (Some applicants are also turned down because of criminal records.)

Mr. von Appen, 23, one of at least four oceanography students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who received identical letters, said he was stunned by its language.

“I was pretty much speechless and quite intimidated,” said Mr. von Appen, whose research is supported by a $65,000-a-year grant from the National Science Foundation.

A British student at M.I.T. who was rejected, Sophie Clayton, 28, said that at first she was amused at what appeared to be a bureaucratic absurdity. But as she pondered the designation, Ms. Clayton said she grew worried. “The two words ‘security threat’ are now in the files next to my name, my photograph and my fingerprints,” she said.

My emphasis.

You will get no sympathy here.

You have no business being in the USA, where they fingerprint you like a criminal just to enter. It is people like you, who blithely behave like there is nothing wrong with USVISIT that have made it so deeply entrenched.

Now that you are tasting what it REALLY Means, you are ‘worried’. You should have been worried BEFORE you submitted to the humiliation and violation of being fingerprinted. Now you are in their system, marked as a ‘security threat’ for THE REST OF YOUR LIFE, and as we can see below, there is nothing you can do about it, the government is unrepentant, and refuses to correct your records.

Institute officials were also disturbed. The agency controls airport security, and “our students travel in and out of the country a lot,” said Danielle Guichard-Ashbrook, associate dean and director of the international student office at M.I.T.

And the agency is part of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees immigration matters, including student visas.

Ms. Guichard-Ashbrook said the security agency should remove the misleading language from all files and issue new letters formally withdrawing the “threat” label.

But Ms. Howe, the agency spokeswoman, said that the letters were legal, if flawed, and that there were no plans to send replacements.

She said she did not believe the denial letters would cause students any problems with visa renewal or airport security checks. They will even be able to enter secure ports and ships for their work as long as they are accompanied by someone with the new ID, Ms. Howe said.

The Transportation Worker Identification Credential requirement is being phased in starting Oct. 15. The cards cost the applicant $132.50 and have been issued to 275,000 people so far of 1.2 million people expected to receive the credential, officials said.

My epmhasis once again.

What the last bold words mean, is that this very stupid girl could have saved herself the besmirching of her records and simply gone with someone who had the ID. Not only that, but if anyone can go into these ‘secure’ areas simply by being vouched by someone who has the right ID, the whole system is worthless as a means to secure an area.

This is a perfect example of Security Theatre.

It is beyond stupid, beyond absurd, and everyone that goes along with it, like ‘Sophie Clayton‘ helps solidify the insanity.

Workers accused of theft or damage could soon find themselves blacklisted on a register to be shared among employers. It will be good for profits but campaigners say innocent people could find it impossible to get another job.

It suffers from the same problems that all these databases suffer from.

To critics it sounds like a scenario from some Orwellian nightmare.

That is EXACTLY what it is.

An online database of workers accused of theft and dishonesty “regardless of whether they have been convicted of any crime” which bosses can access when vetting potential employees.

Guilty before proven innocent. There is no law…every man for himself!

But this is no dystopian fantasy. Later this month, the National Staff Dismissal Register (NSDR) is expected to go live.

It is dystopian fact.

Organisers say that major companies including Harrods, Selfridges, Reed Managed Services and Mothercare have already signed up to the scheme. By the end of May they will be able to check whether candidates for jobs have faced allegations of stealing, forgery, fraud, damaging company property or causing a loss to their employers and suppliers.

They are just the beginning.

And you can be sure that this database will be sold to everyone that wants it, no matter where they are in the world. I wonder; will it include your fingerprints, your photo? For sure, it will have your address and telephone number.

Workers sacked for these offences will be included on the register, regardless of whether police had enough evidence to convict them. Also on the list will be employees who resigned before they could face disciplinary proceedings at work.

What this will do is bolster the ‘black economy’ as the ‘straight world’ or ‘the system’ fences itself off with more and more measures. As ordinary people find themselvs shut out of ‘the system’ just for being themselves, or alive, they will come to the ‘black economy’. The black economy will grow so big that it becomes the real economy, or at the very least, an equilibrium is reached, where the two systems co-exist side by side.

The project has attracted little publicity. But the BBC News website can reveal that trade unions and civil liberties campaigners are warning that it leaves workers vulnerable to the threat of false accusations.

You can warn all you like. The sheeple do not care, and the ones that do are not in the system, so they do not care.

TUC policy officer Hannah Reed says that while criminal activity in the workplace can never be condoned, she fears such a system is open to abuse.

“The TUC is seriously concerned that this register can only lead to people being shut out from the job market by an employer who falsely accuses them of misconduct or sacks them because they bear them a grudge. Individuals would be treated as criminals, even though the police have never been contacted.

“The Criminal Records Bureau was set up to assist employers to make safe appointments when recruiting staff to work with vulnerable groups. The CRB already provides appropriate and properly regulated protection for employers. Under the new register, an employee may not be aware they have been blacklisted or have any right to appeal.”

You stupid fool.

The CRB is s STATE operation. The NSDR is s PRIVATE operation. Private people can do what they like, you socialist simpleton. Why don’t you set up your OWN database, instead of bellyaching like a stuck pig. You could then call a national strike if one of your workers is abused…but then, that would mean actually being effective.

James Welch, the legal director of human rights group Liberty, also says that he is concerned that the register does not offer sufficient redress to the falsely accused.

“This scheme appears to bypass existing laws which protect employees by limiting the circumstances when information about possible criminal activity can be shared with potential employers.”

It is a brilliant commercial opportunity; the only problem is, that it has been done in reverse. See below.

Set up by Surrey-based firm Hicom Business Solutions, the database will allow employers to search for potential workers by name, address, date of birth, national insurance number and previous employer.

Records on individuals “accessible online via an encrypted password system – will be kept for a five-year period and can include photos.

Here we go with the ‘encrypted password system’ snake oil again. We know all about that don’t we?!

Mike Schuck, chief executive of AABC, says that theft by members of staff costs the British economy billions of pounds each year and rejects the notion that the register is a blacklist.

It IS a blacklist you scum:

A blacklist is a list or register of entities who, for one reason or another, are being denied a particular privilege, service, mobility, access or recognition. As a verb, to blacklist can mean to deny someone work in a particular field, or to ostracize them from a certain social circle. Conversely, a whitelist is a list or compilation or list identifying entities that are accepted, recognised, or privileged.

[…]

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

And the dictionary says so!

He says that all participating companies will be obliged to abide by the Data Protection Act and that workers named on the database “maintained by AABC “will have the right to change their entries if they are inaccurate.

And if they are accurate? And what if they want to be deleted? This is a blacklist you tosser, be honest and you won’t look so stupid.

Should a dispute take place between an employee and an employer about whether an incident occurred, Mr Schuck adds, the worker will be able to appeal to the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Yeah, and we all know how well those procedures work, and how much they cost in time and money.

“We are limiting access to the database to employers who can comply with the Information Commissioner’s employment practices code,”he says. “We’re not going to allow Mr Smith’s hardware store. We’re quite open about this. People will be told when they apply for jobs that they may be checked as part of the application process.

How can people be put on this register without their consent?

“Theft in the workplace hurts staff as much as employers because it puts everyone under suspicion.”

ROTFL

This database puts everyone in the country under suspicion!

You are a suspect and untrusted until we can check you on the database, only after that do you become trusted. That is the operating principle of this database and of every other identity system like it, including the NIR and its ID Cards.

Freedom is slavery!

Nonetheless, many workers may get a nasty surprise when old allegations return to haunt them when they next apply for a job.

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7389547.stm

Nasty surprises happen to the bosses too, and when they happen to the bosses, its MUCH WORSE.

I have a better idea you villians. Yes, ‘villians’.

Do you remember that song by Sun Ra, ‘Make another mistake’?

Why not set up a database of GOOD WORKERS who are 100% reliable?

Everyone would compete to be on it, it would be another thing to put on your CV…why do these people think that the only thing a database can be used for is keeping a list of BAD people?

Probably because this venal mass murdering government has a mania for ‘registers’ of every sort of ‘criminal’.

Think about it, people try to keep their credit histories clean because they want to be on the list of people who have good credit. This is exactly the same; a voluntary database where an employee’s references are turned into a score. You do not have to be on it, but if you choose to be on it, people will trust you more.

The company makes money from registrations of workers.
The company makes money from database access by employers.

Its a better business model, and is less immoral.

Its just my idea off the top of my head, but what I have demonstrated is that the thinking of these vendors is evil, not creative, not positive and corrosive to community. It doesn’t take the desire to be and do good and use it; it instead, feeds off of evil and suspicion.

Owen Bowcott

The Guardian, Tuesday May 6 2008

Massive investment in CCTV cameras to prevent crime in the UK has failed to have a significant impact, despite billions of pounds spent on the new technology, a senior police officer piloting a new database has warned. Only 3% of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV images, despite the fact that Britain has more security cameras than any other country in Europe.

The warning comes from the head of the Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office (Viido) at New Scotland Yard as the force launches a series of initiatives to try to boost conviction rates using CCTV evidence. They include:

· A new database of images which is expected to use technology developed by the sports advertising industry to track and identify offenders.

· Putting images of suspects in muggings, rape and robbery cases out on the internet from next month.

· Building a national CCTV database, incorporating pictures of convicted offenders as well as unidentified suspects. The plans for this have been drawn up, but are on hold while the technology required to carry out automated searches is refined

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/may/06/ukcrime1

So, even though it does not work, as we have been saying for almost a decade, they are STILL drinking the Kool-Aid, and building this useless database that will compile the useless images from these useless cameras.

This behavior is at the very heart of the problem; people keep doing things and taking measures that do not work, simply because a vendor has convinced them to spend money.

What if these people did not have the money to do it? THAT is the question!

It is clear that they are irresponsible and immoral when it comes to this, so why should they be given billions of pounds to keep getting it wrong…and in this case, ‘getting it wrong’ means putting the entire United Kingdom into a giant cage.

UPDATE

The billions of pounds spent covering Britain with CCTV cameras has been an “utter fiasco” and failed to slash crime, Scotland Yard’s surveillance chief has said.

Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville said a Metropolitan Police pilot project found just three per cent of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV images.

He claimed the vast swathes of money spent on cameras had been wasted because criminals don’t fear the cameras.

But Mr Neville also castigated the police and claimed officers can’t be bothered to seek out CCTV images because it’s “hard work”.

The comments from Mr Neville, who is the head of the Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office (Viido) at Scotland Yard, will further cast doubt on the spread of surveillance in Britain.

Britain has one per cent of the world’s population but, incredibly, 20 per cent of its CCTV cameras – the equivalent of one for every 14 people.

Last year it emerged the £200m spent on 10,000 crime-fighting cameras in London had had little effect on reducing offending.

A comparison of the number of cameras in each London borough with the proportion of crimes solved there found that police were no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any.

Speaking at a security conference in London, Mr Neville claimed the use of CCTV images for court evidence had been very poor so far.

He said: “CCTV was originally seen as a preventative measure.

“Billions of pounds have been spent on kit, but no thought has gone into how the police are going to use the images and how they will be used in court.

“It’s been an utter fiasco: only three per cent of crimes were solved by CCTV.

“Why don’t people fear it? They think the cameras are not working.”

At the conference the Metropolitan Police unveiled a number of initiatives to boost conviction rates using CCTV evidence.

One, which will start from next month, involves putting images of suspects in muggings, rape and robbery cases on the internet.

In another Viido will examine whether it can use software developed to track advertising during televised football games to follow distinctive brands on suspects’ clothing.

Even with such schemes, doubts remain over whether or not the expansion of ‘Big Brother’ Britain can cut crime.

The annual report into the government’s DNA database earlier this year revealed the huge expansion of the scheme has brought fewer than a thousand criminals to justice.

For every 800 DNA samples being added by the police – including those taken from innocent people – only one crime is being solved.

Information Commissioner Richard Thomas has in the past warned the UK is in danger of “sleepwalking in a surveillance society”.

Last night he said CCTV could play in important role in preventing and detecting crime.

However he added: “We would expect adequate safeguards to be put in place to ensure the images are only used for crime detection purposes, stored securely and that access to images is restricted to authorised individuals.

“We would have concerns if CCTV images of individuals going about their daily lives were retained.”

The charity Victims Voice, which supports relatives of those who have been murdered, called for more effective use of CCTV.

Trustee Ed Usher said: “If handled properly it can be a superb preventative tool.”

[…]

Daily Mail

There has been outrage in Italy after the outgoing government published every Italian’s declared earnings and tax contributions on the internet.

The tax authority’s website was inundated by people curious to know how much their neighbours, celebrities or sports stars were making.

The Italian treasury suspended the website after a formal complaint from the country’s privacy watchdog.

The information was put on the site with no warning for nearly 24 hours.

Sour grapes?

The release of the information was one of the last acts of the outgoing centre-left government and has shocked many tax-shy Italians, says the BBC’s Mark Duff in Milan.

But it was also hugely popular, and within hours the site was overwhelmed and impossible to access.

The finance ministry described the move as a bid to improve transparency.

Critics condemned it as an outrageous breach of privacy.

The timing of the move, just days before the current administration hands over to incoming Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, was intriguing too, says our correspondent.

The outgoing government came to power promising to tackle Italians’ notoriously lax approach to paying tax.

Some sceptics have seen the move as just end of term sour grapes, our correspondent adds.

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7376608.stm

Of course, in Finland, the tax records of every ‘citizen’ are released every year, by law:

Finland Abolishes All Tax Record Privacy

Computer Hacker #1: “Hey look, this vice president makes twice as much as that vice president. I bet they don’t know that!”

Computer Hacker #2: “They do now — I just emailed the entire company!”

–An old IBM commercial

Certain noisy socialists love to remind us that the Scandinavian nations supposedly have a “higher standard of living” than the U.S.

Of course, such calculations do not include factors like this:

Care to find out what your neighbor earned last year, or how much your partner really has stashed in the bank? In Finland you can — and a lot of people did Wednesday.

Every November when the Nordic nation’s tax records of the previous year become public, Finns indulge on a massive scale in satisfying their curiosity about each other’s finances.

Newspapers were crammed with lists of the wealthiest and highest-earning men and women in 2004.

Veroporssi, a private firm which offers income details on everyone in Finland via mobile text message, said it was its busiest day of the year and had no time to comment.

Words escape me.

Of course, the next logical question, to the extent logic plays any role here, is why should tax records be public information but not library records, or medical records, or report cards, or credit card statements, or grocery lists, or Netflix queues, etc.

If this is what a nation with a “higher standard of living” considers an appropriate privacy policy, then I’d prefer poverty.

Words, on this occasion do not escape me.

It is completely wrong, immoral, indefensible and outrageous that this violation of privacy has been perpetrated on the good Italian people.

Think about it this way.

If the medical records of every Italian were posted on the internetz, would that be any different? Why do people (like the people in Finland) feel that only some things should be private and not others? It is the choice of the owner of the data what he or she decides to do with it, and it is absolutely evil for a third party to compel you to divulge private details to them, and for them to subsequently release that data for free.

Do I have to enumerate the reasons why people would want to keep facts about them private? If you read BLOGDIAL, then the answer is ‘no’ if not, then you have no sense, or you do not read BLOGDIAL, in which case, you have no sense.

It seems that we are in the middle of an epidemic of information release; deliberate and immoral disclosure of personal data by corrupt officials, who through malice, are committing acts of violation on a scale that has never been seen in the history of the world.

Nothing good can come of it, except the setting in stone of cast iron privacy laws that will make the collection of data a very dangerous act.

When such laws are passed, companies will find ways of dealing with the public that will remove the need to collect any personal data of any kind, thus removing the risk of internal database leaks, crack attacks and anything that could mean that they were prosecuted for a privacy violation.

The public would win because they would have their privacy back. Business would win because they will have clean, feature rich systems that respect their customers, and the world would be a…nicer place

A lurker writes:

You may know all this, but here are some details which may be of interest otherwise:

THE INTELLIGENT AIRPORT (TINA) PROJECT

Researchers from the universities of Leeds, Cambridge and University College London have teamed up with 10 companies on The INtelligent Airport (TINA) project, funded by The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), led by Professor Jaafar Elmirghani of Leeds University.

‘It will link a number of separate systems including wireless biometrics and RFID … We are going to put a demonstrator system into the new Heathrow terminal five to see how the system works.’ – Professor Jaafar Elmirghani
http://www.theengineer.co.uk/Articles/303000/Travel+tracker.htm

This project aims to develop a next generation advanced wired and wireless network to meet the potential requirements for future “intelligent airports”.
TINA website: http://intelligentairport.org.uk/

Travel Tracker 12 November 2007, The Engineer online:

Such a system is set to be installed and trialled at Heathrow’s terminal five, where an ‘intelligent gate’ will demonstrate, among other things, accurate passenger position estimation through active and passive RFID and radio over fibre (RoF) where the RFID is part of the boarding pass and/or passport.

Predictions suggest a terminal-wide network would have to support 10 million sources of information, from individual tracking units for passengers and staff to technology such as biometric gates. It is believed the system will have to deal with a peak data rate of 100Gbit/s as it tracks people, luggage, aircraft and all the information generated by those sources. …

Elmirghani : ‘It will link a number of separate systems including wireless biometrics and RFID, which could be put into boarding passes and will soon be put in passports. Passengers can be processed a lot faster and tags could be used to track luggage so it can be handled in a more efficient way — tracked from arrival to being put on a plane.’ …

‘The system will use a radio-over-fibre distribution network with a distributed antenna system creating a unified structure. We are looking at passive kinds of radio frequency distribution. This will allow the basic systems of the infrastructure to be easily upgraded and updated. We are going to put a demonstrator system into the new Heathrow terminal five to see how the system works.’ …

‘People will probably have issues with the technology but you have to weigh the benefits with any down sides,’ added Elmirghani. ‘This kind of information is already available if you have a mobile phone. Your position can be triangulated but that information hasn’t been available to airports. Overall there can be more benefits than some of the losses.’

full article here: http://www.theengineer.co.uk/Articles/303000/Travel+tracker.htm

Next Generation of Airports are on the Horizon , Leeds university website

A remote biometric scan that removes passport queues, airport lounge chairs that “nudge” passengers to remind them that their flight is due to board and boarding passes that locate passengers and provide automated access could be among the next generation of airport technologies that will transform airports and air travel in the future. Other new technologies developed in the project include radio frequency tags attached to baggage to help stop luggage from being lost. The same radio frequency tags will be given to passengers and coupled with wireless biometric devices, these will enable security staff to know where everyone is and who they are, helping make airport security more stringent and efficient, and also ensuring that passengers make it to the departure gate on time. Wireless technology could also allow passengers to use a portable inflight entertainment terminal which could be used in the departure lounge as well as on the plane. …

“We are hoping to achieve this within the next six years” – Professor Jaafar Elmirghani

full article : Faculty of Engineering, University of Leeds http://www.engineering.leeds.ac.uk/news/index.shtml (scroll down)

TINA Project system technology

RF-ID Tag Location Using RF-over-fibre Techniques , UCL paper

from the conclusion :

…The detection mechanism could be a small capacitively-coupled current across the sealed wrist-band which is interrupted if it is either cut or removed. […] However, public acceptance of the use of wristbands for this purpose may well be an issue, so exactly how the tags are deployed remains open at this stage. … The system may also find application in a range of other arenas, including hospitals (e.g., maternity units), theme parks, exhibition halls and concert venues.”

PAPER:

RF-ID Tag Location Using RF-over-fibre Techniques
P. V. Brennan, A. J. Seeds, and Y. Huang
University College London, UK

Abstract:
Security and efficiency at airports has, in recent years, become a critical issue in the eyes of the general public, security services and politicians alike.. This paper presents a high-resolution, indoor location technique, based on RF-over-fibre, that is ideally suited to the monitoring of a high density of people and/or objects in such a situation.

extracts

[…]

The basic concept is for airports to be fitted with a network of combined RF-ID tag readers and high-resolution panoramic cameras, spaced at around 15–20m intervals, which are used to monitor the movements of people around the terminal building or buildings. Each passenger carries or wears an RF-ID tag, which can allow location to an accuracy of around 1m, and the video and tag data merged to give a very powerful surveillance capability with a wide range of potential benefits. The tags developed at UCL are transmit-only devices that do not store any data but emit a beacon with a unique ID at frequent, randomised intervals, at least once per second, and this is cross-referenced to passenger information already stored on the system — such as name, flight number and perhaps even biometric data. This gives the effect of intelligence in the tags — passenger information can appear to be ‘read’ from them though it actually resides on the computer system. The tags and reader infrastructure allow convenient monitoring of passenger flows and identification of late-running passengers.

The system can offer a number of benefits; it can be used to control entry to secure areas, allow the precise automated-tracking of certain individuals, help to evacuate the building in the event of an emergency, provide rapid location and imaging of lost children and help to ensure that large aircraft are boarded efficiently by detecting and locating stray passengers. The Optag/ TINA consortium have calculated that cost of flight delays due to late-running passengers amounts to some 150M Euros per year in Europe alone, so considerable savings are possible with a system of this nature. A high degree of functionality can be built in to the system, dependent largely on the ingenuity of the user interface.

PROTOTYPE SYSTEM DESCRIPTION
The prototype Optag / TINA camera comprises a cluster of eight 1600 ×1200 pixel CMOS sensors, producing a 9600 ×1200 panoramic image. A portion of this image, or a lower-resolution panorama, is streamed to the central monitoring station using gigabit ethernet with the UDP protocol. The camera resolution allows recognition of a human face to 6m and detection to around 30m.

The tag system is rather challenging in that it is required to operate at relatively long range (10–20m), perform location estimates and simultaneously identify large numbers ( >1000) of tagged people or items in any given cell. To meet these challenges, the Optag/ TINA team have designed a unique tag protocol that sends short bursts of data, at randomly-varying intervals, with a mean update rate of twice per second. Each tag reader uses direction finding to establish the bearing of the tag and then two or more bearings are used to establish the location. The prototype tag board, operating at 5.8GHz, is shown in Figure 2. The peak tag output power is 10mW, but the mean output power is very much lower — around 20µW, many orders of magnitude below the threshold of emissions that would constitute any conceivable health risk. The prototype tag is a little larger than a credit card, but with miniaturization, could be very compact and easily incorporated in a small card or unobtrusive wristband.

The tag readers, shown in Figure 3, are based on four antennas and receivers mounted at 90-degree spacings, which perform amplitude-comparison direction finding [3] on each tag burst. This straightforward approach provides a reasonable accuracy of around 1m within a 10m radius. However, the effects of reflections, signal blockage in crowded environments and other propagation artifacts are likely to be significant and will most likely diminish the achievable accuracy.

[…]

The prototype system is designed with a 0.5s repetition interval equating to a mean update interval of 0.9s —indicating that the position of all tags can be determined and updated on a second-by-second basis. Thus the system can easily accommodate 1000 tags in any given cell, which is probably close to the limit of the number of people who can possibly be squeezed into a 10m radius area! …

[…]

A range of trials have been conducted in the departure lounge at Debrecen airport , Hungary. Both the camera and tag systems have been evaluated based on three cells each containing a camera and RF-ID tag reader unit. As far as the tag system is concerned, the location accuracy was assessed with the tag readers mounted both centrally and in the corners of the rooms and with a ‘passenger’ wearing the tag in a variety of locations and facing in several directions. Measurements were repeated in crowd situations in which the tag-wearing person was surrounded by other people.

The general conclusions of this trial were that the best positioning of the tag readers is in the corners of the room, location errors are indeed dependent on tag orientation and obstructions due to other individuals, and operating range exceeds expectations — 25m being easily accomplished even under the most adverse conditions.

CONCLUSION
The Optag / TINA projects have demonstrated the feasibility of a combined RF-ID tag and panoramic video monitoring approach in an airport environment, including a proof-of-concept trial in a Hungarian airport building. All indications are that the concept is sound, though any future adoption will require further development and commercialisation, in particular the network infrastructure and associated software to both operate the Optag/ TINA system and interface with existing airport computer systems and databases. The mode of deployment of the tag element of the system is controversial and somewhat critical to certain areas of operation. For instance, in a security context, it would be crucial to ensure that each person carries his/her own tag and does not lose or swap them. One way in which this can be achieved is to incorporate the tag in a wristband that sends an alert code should it be removed. The detection mechanism could be a small capacitively-coupled current across the sealed wrist-band which is interrupted if it is either cut or removed. With suitable circuit miniaturisation, the wristband could be small and unobtrusive, perhaps made of thin card. However, public acceptance of the use of wristbands for this purpose may well be an issue, so exactly how the tags are deployed remains open at this stage.

Current work is focusing on an alterative tag and reader implementation involving TDOA location exploiting RF-over-fibre transmission, which offers the prospect of significantly improved location accuracy and multipath mitigation Another area that has huge potential for future development is the user interface, where a whole host of features could be incorporated including, for instance, an additional, simple interface at departure gates to alert staff to late-running passengers; an automated monitoring and announcement system to contact such late-running passengers as and when required; extensive archiving facilities to store tag and at least a subset of video data; seamless linking of tag ID, personal data and biometric data and market research analysis of data, to aid the design of airport layouts for instance to optimise passenger flows or to feed into charging models for the various retail outlets. It is clear that, once such an infrastructure is in place, there is huge potential to make use of the capabilities in a variety of different manners, many of which have probably not yet been foreseen. The system may also find application in a range of other arenas, including hospitals (e.g., maternity units), theme parks, exhibition halls and concert venues.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank EPSRC and the European Commission, particularly Jean-Pierre Lentz, for their encouragement and support during this work

PDF : http://piers.mit.edu/piersproceedings/download.php?file=cGllcnMyMDA3cHJhZ3VlfDJQM18wMjU1LnBkZnwwNzAzMDkwODUyNTk=
HTML : MIT

TINA Project summary
from the EPSRC website (page for Cambridge University grant 2006-2009 )

Abstract:
Diverse applications are expected to appear in the future with complex and often varying service requirements, traffic profiles and user expectations. These will require extremely advanced adaptive computing and communication systems to provide users with mobile, secure and automatic means of conducting business. A prime application area is in international travel which continues to grow supported by a significant investment in infrastructure, such as Heathrow Terminal 5. An intelligent, adaptive, self-organising wired/wireless infrastructure is essential in this environment. It is anticipated that the considerable growth in the complexity of this infrastructure will not just be due to the proliferation of established fixed equipment such as wireless base stations, surveillance cameras, security detection equipment, display and terminal equipment. The requirements will also be for a much wider deployment of more compact portable equipment, for example, location and control equipment on a wide range of transportation equipment. Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags supported by a transparent optical-RF network can be used to sense, locate and track an array of objects including luggage, mobile assets and commercial goods and can provide additional features such as boarding pass auto-tags and access control tags. These active RFID tags will operate at low data rates, typically 64 kbit/s, but an airport environment can be expected to contain a few million of them. Mobile biometric sensors will be widely deployed in this environment providing advanced features. A range of fixed and mobile terminals will provide additional security measures such as chemical detection and analysis, while other terminals, fixed and mobile, will support passenger information and entertainment services on transit. The infrastructure will support an array of personal passenger and staff wireless media rich devices. The wired/wireless network envisaged will thus be huge and complex, supporting perhaps 10 million information sources, with an anticipated peak aggregate data rate of order 100 Gbit/s in a relatively local access environment. This is beyond the capability of any current network and research is needed to understand the principles upon which an effective system could be constructed. As this is such an ambitious and multidisciplinary project, a collaborative programme is proposed. The project has strong industrial involvement and support from Laing O’Rourke who will provide the application context, share design experience, user requirements and architectural constraints and Marconi who will contribute expertise in complex communication system design. At the outline proposal stage, we received feedback from EPSRC that they would welcome additional collaborations with those involved in airport operations. We are delighted that, in response, BAA and Boeing have agreed to become involved in the project, and within UCL links have been made to Dr Paul Brennan, who will contribute substantial knowledge of RfID, being involved in a major European project in the area. Finally we have additionally sought to involve the equipment company Motorola and the installation planning company Red-M to ensure that we can receive expert advice across all areas within the project.

SOURCE http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk/ViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/D076803/1

[…]

Thank you to the lurker who emailed this.

Right off the bat, this leaps from the screen:

‘People will probably have issues with the technology but you have to weigh the benefits with any down sides,’ added Elmirghani. ‘This kind of information is already available if you have a mobile phone. Your position can be triangulated but that information hasn’t been available to airports. Overall there can be more benefits than some of the losses.’

This is the same old argument, proffered by imbeciles, anti intellectuals, ostrich posturers and dumbasses. “They are already half way up your ass, so why not push it all the way in“. These people cannot distinguish between the tracking your position as a consequence of delivery of a service you subscribe to (cellular telephones) and one that is compulsory, imposed by a government or its proxy. You can always turn off your cellular telephone at any time to hide your location. Compulsory tracking is an entirely different matter. Triangulation data from cellphones is not available to airports because they do not need it, cellphones have nothing to do with the operation of airports and there is no cross over whatsoever between the two services.

There are no benefits to giving up your liberty for security, especially when the security you are getting is not really security at all but Security Theatre, which is a lie and way to rob people of their human dignity.

I find it to be disgusting that there are people out there who think that they have the right to say what rights are worth losing for the general public, and then to blithley impliment systems that take away those rights, in the belief that they are doing what is good for everyone. Imagine that Jaafar Elmirghani believes, “..that overall there can be more benefits to society than some of the losses if we compulsorily circumcise all females in Britain.” There is no difference between that belief and the belief that tracking everyone everywhere at all times is worth the losses of personal liberty because ‘society’ benefits overall.

That is the true face of the thinking of these monsters.

As for ‘probably’ have issues, why, yes indeed professor, we do have a BIG problem with your snake-oil Security Theatre, and as we have seen, Terminal 5 has had to climb down on its absurd fascist fingerprinting plan.

I am convinced that all of this snake-oil is going to go the way of the dinosaurs. When the number of people being hurt by these systems reaches a critical mass, they will be abandoned, in the manner that I have previously described.

Airline passengers are to be screened with facial recognition technology rather than checks by passport officers, in an attempt to improve security and ease congestion, the Guardian can reveal.

This means they can eventually fire all the immigration staff, who have blithely gone along with all this nonsense. They should have watched, The Man in the White Suit before they went gung ho for the biometric net….

From summer, unmanned clearance gates will be phased in to scan passengers’ faces and match the image to the record on the computer chip in their biometric passports.

Border security officials believe the machines can do a better job than humans of screening passports and preventing identity fraud. The pilot project will be open to UK and EU citizens holding new biometric passports.

What they are saying that is for the decades that humans have been comparing faces to passports, it has not been working well.

What utter nonsense.

Computer programmers have been working for years to make software that can match the human brain’s ability to recognize faces, and they still have not got it right. The best tool for recognizing a face is a human brain in a living person. What this is actually about is automating the checking of innocent people against criminal databases. This system does not simply check that the person carrying the passport is the person in front of the machine; it checks wether or not the police want you, which is nothing to do with plain immigration. Immigration controls work well without biometric passports. The first control should be getting out of Shengen and the other damaging EU treaties that allow anyone to enter your country from almost anywhere.

But there is concern that passengers will react badly to being rejected by an automated gate. To ensure no one on a police watch list is incorrectly let through, the technology will err on the side of caution and is likely to generate a small number of “false negatives” – innocent passengers rejected because the machines cannot match their appearance to the records.

And this is what we have been saying for years; the computer will say wether or not you are guilty or wanted. When a false positive comes up, what sort of extra checks will they make? Will they DNA swab you, harshly interrogate you (both of which means detaining you) all on the say of a COMPUTER.

This, my friends, is total insanity.

They may be redirected into conventional passport queues, or officers may be authorised to override automatic gates following additional checks.

Why take the risk of being embarrassed in that way? Why not just queue normally and not have your details checked against the criminal computer?

Ministers are eager to set up trials in time for the summer holiday rush, but have yet to decide how many airports will take part. If successful, the technology will be extended to all UK airports.

Ministers are retarded. Period.

The automated clearance gates introduce the new technology to the UK mass market for the first time and may transform the public’s experience of airports.

Ahhh, a Guardian fluff line!

Existing biometric, fast-track travel schemes – iris and miSense – operate at several UK airports, but are aimed at business travellers who enroll in advance.

And?!! GET TO THE POINT YOU SIMPLETON.

The rejection rate in trials of iris recognition, by means of the unique images of each traveller’s eye, is 3% to 5%, although some were passengers who were not enrolled but jumped into the queue.

SIMPLETON SIMPLETON SIMPLETON SIMPLETON SIMPLETON SIMPLETON SIMPLETON SIMPLETON SIMPLETON SIMPLETON SIMPLETON SIMPLETON SIMPLETON SIMPLETON SIMPLETON!

The trials emerged at a conference in London this week of the international biometrics industry, top civil servants in border control, and police technology experts. Gary Murphy, head of operational design and development for the UK Border Agency, told one session: “We think a machine can do a better job [than manned passport inspections]. What will the public reaction be? Will they use it? We need to test and see how people react and how they deal with rejection. We hope to get the trial up and running by the summer.

I want to see how Neu Labour deal with rejection….ha!

Some conference participants feared passengers would only be fast-tracked to the next bottleneck in overcrowded airports. Automated gates are intended to help the government’s progress to establishing a comprehensive advance passenger information (API) security system that will eventually enable flight details and identities of all passengers to be checked against a security watch list.

My emphasis.

The Guardian is one of the guilty parties for using this sort of language unchallenged. What on earth do they mean by ‘security watch list’? Who says who goes on it, who maintains it, etc etc. The americans are having a hell of a time with their own misguided ‘security watch lists’ that have nothing whatsoever to do with security, but which have everything to do with what sort of books you read.

Phil Booth of the No2Id Campaign said: “Someone is extremely optimistic. The technology is just not there. The last time I spoke to anyone in the facial recognition field they said the best systems were only operating at about a 40% success rate in a real time situation. I am flabbergasted they consider doing this at a time when there are so many measures making it difficult for passengers.”

And even if it worked 100% of the time, is it moral? This is the question we will never see asked outside of the internets.

Gus Hosein, a specialist at the London School of Economics in the interplay between technology and society, said: “It’s a laughable technology. US police at the SuperBowl had to turn it off within three days because it was throwing up so many false positives. The computer couldn’t even recognise gender. It’s not that it could wrongly match someone as a terrorist, but that it won’t match them with their image. A human can make assumptions, a computer can’t.”

And they are not using this to find ‘terrorists’ because those people are not on the system as criminals. They only get onto the system AFTER they have done a martyrdom operation. These systems are snake oil, and once again, they are not for ‘terrorists’ they are for YOU the ordinary person, so that they can control and monitor YOU, to force you to comply with the smallest of laws.

Eventually, the ‘security watch list’ that this journalist glosses over will be accessible to every council worker who will be able to put your name on the list so they can apprehend you and your children for, say, not attending school, or putting the paper garbage in the glass bin.

If you do not think this will happen, then you are insane. Just as RIPA is being used to spy on parents trying to get their children into good schools, these biometric gates, ‘the biometric net’ and ‘security watch lists’ will be used in every conceivable…and inconceivable…way.

Nothing to hide, nothing to fear, right?

Project Semaphore, the first stage in the government’s e-borders programme, monitors 30m passenger movements a year through the UK. By December 2009, API will track 60% of all passengers and crew movements. The Home Office aim is that by December 2010 the system will be monitoring 95%. Total coverage is not expected to be achieved until 2014 after similar checks have been introduced for travel on “small yachts and private flights”.

The best laid plans….here is another scenario.

After massive public rejection of the surveillance state, and country wide vandalism of the millions of CCTV cameras in the UK, it was decided to remove all traces of the monitoring apparatus that cast a debilitating fog over life in the UK. Like the fall of East Germany and the STASI, the changes came overnight as the revulsion over the mutated form of British life became universal and ‘went nuclear’.

“We are not going to live like this anymore. Britain has been turned into a prison, and we have had enough”

Parliament has drawn up a list of all ‘database state’ laws going back to the early days of the now discredited Blair government, all of which are to be struck off the books in one fell swoop.

“This has been a long time in coming, but the writing has been on the wall for years; the silent grumbling of the British public has turned into an earthquake of non-violent dissent. Just like the Berlin Wall, the database state has been dismantled one camera at a time in a single day, without any opposition from the police.”

So far around 8m to 10m UK biometric passports, containing a computer chip holding the carrier’s facial details, have been issued since they were introduced in 2006. The last non-biometric passports will cease to be valid after 2016.

Can you hear the sound?

Home Office minister Liam Byrne said: “Britain’s border security is now among the toughest in the world and tougher checks do take time, but we don’t want long waits. So the UK Border Agency will soon be testing new automatic gates for British and European Economic Area [EEA] citizens. We will test them this year and if they work put them at all key ports [and airports].”

And if they DONT work?

That is an interesting question!!!!!

U.S. to Insist That Travel Industry Get Fingerprints

By Spencer S. Hsu and Del Quentin Wilber
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, April 22, 2008; Page A08

The U.S. government today will order commercial airlines and cruise lines to prepare to collect digital fingerprints of all foreigners before they depart the country under a security initiative that the industry has condemned as costly and burdensome.

The proposal does not say where airlines must collect fingerprints — at airport check-in counters, departure gates or kiosks somewhere in between. But the government estimates the undertaking will cost airlines $2.3 billion over 10 years, a U.S. homeland security official said.

The overall economic impact on companies, passengers and the government is expected to exceed $3.5 billion, industry lobbyists said, at a time when carriers are struggling with safety concerns, high fuel costs and passenger complaints.

Formal announcement of the plan to track the departure of foreign visitors, as part of the Homeland Security Department’s US-VISIT program, comes after an extended battle between the security agency and airlines.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff linked the effort to enforcing the nation’s immigration laws recently, saying airlines were obstructing the measure for commercial reasons.

“If we don’t have US-VISIT air exit by this time next year, it will only be because the airline industry killed it,” Chertoff said recently. “We have to decide who is going to win this fight. Is it going to be the airline industry, or is it going to be the people who believe we should know who leaves the country by air?”

Doug Lavin, regional vice president for the International Air Transport Association, which represents major U.S. and international carriers, said the government, not airlines, should collect fingerprints. “This is ludicrous,” Lavin said. “We can’t afford anything in the billions to support a program that should be a government program.”

Fingerprinting an estimated 33 million departing foreign passengers a year will result in “delayed departures, missed connections here and around the world,” Lavin said.

Launched after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, US-VISIT is intended to automate the processing of visitors entering and exiting the country, using fingerprints and digital photographs to help find criminals, potential terrorists and people who overstay visas and join the nation’s illegal immigrant population.

While the program has succeeded in recording nearly 100 million people entering the country since 2004, the DHS has struggled to implement the exit portion. Frustrated at the department’s slow pace, Congress last year set a June 2009 deadline for DHS to collect fingerprints from departing air passengers in a law to implement recommendations of the 9/11 Commission.

Otherwise, Congress said, the government cannot expand the Visa Waiver Program, under which residents of 27 friendly countries can visit the United States without a visa. Inclusion is a priority for nations including South Korea and Greece, and the tourism industry has also targeted South America for expansion.

The proposal will be open for a 60-day comment period. DHS could decide after that time where fingerprinting must be conducted, or it could leave the decision up to airlines, a U.S. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the proposal has not been formally announced.

[…]

Washington Post

We all know that US-VISIT is a completely useless and bogus waste of time that violates millions of people.

We also know that the USVISIT ‘exit system’ is not in place.

USVISIT is a costly boondoggle. The penny has dropped about this, and Uncle Sham does not want to spend any more money on it.

Instead of building the infrastructure of the exit systems themselves, they are going to shift the burden on making it work to the airlines.

Like it says in this post, the exit system is currently VOLUNTARY. That is clearly insane, almost as insane as the USVISIT itself.

Pocket Satan Chertoff now says that, “If we don’t have US-VISIT air exit by this time next year, it will only be because the airline industry killed it,”. Once again, we have a government putting ‘border security’ (which this clearly is not, it is Security Theatre not real security) in the hands of private companies, and, quite absurdly, claiming that if the system is not in place, it is the fault of those companies, not the government. This is exactly what the UK government has done with fingerprinting at Heathrow Terminal 5.

If USVISIT is so very important, a key part of the US ‘security strategy’, and if the ‘terrorist threat’ was real, then to leave its complete implementation to the will of private companies is insane, and blatantly negligent.

The fact is that the living bag of bones Chertoff knows very well that USVISIT is a failure, that it has cost over $1.3 billion, apprehended only “1,200 criminals and immigration violators” and that any further money spend on this immoral, useless, wasteful, disgraceful, awful, satanic, abominable, monstrous, insane and stupid project would be indefensible, even to the expert and frictionless lie machine of ‘Homeland Security’.

Our only hope is that the airlines grow a backbone and stand up for the rights of their customers. Certainly, BA will be very reluctant to go along with this, after having been stung by their Terminal 5 fingerprinting fiasco, which is set to cost them some money, never mind the embarrassment.

The biometric fad, the most recent in a long line of snake oil solutions to non existent problems, is going to be consigned to the dustbin of technology history, along with 8 track tapes and other obsolete contraptions that seem absurd today. This fad is going to dies faster as more people wake up to what these tools really mean, and how corrosive they are to human society.

The East Germans know all about this.

And so do you.

One can only hope that the economic collapse of the USA will make it impossible for them to maintain this foolishness as their empire implodes and there is no money to run these insane programs. File under the spinoffs and benefits of Imperial collapse.

February 27, 2008
(presse@ccc.de)
Today, Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court, the country’s highest court, flatly rejected North Rhine-Westphalia’s Constitutional Protection Act, which is designed to permit the so-called online search of computers and other IT systems.

The Karlsruhe judges made it clear with their decision that the society has a legitimate interest in the confidentiality and integrity of the IT systems it increasingly depends on and that freedom of thought also exists if ideas are stored on to a computer. The Chaos Computer Club (CCC) has been demanding this right to digital privacy for over 25 years. The protection of the digital self not only affects computers but also telephones and other networked devices. “We can only hope that the politicians who only know the internet from print-outs don’t need another quarter of a century until they have taken this new fundamental right on board”, Dirk Engling, the CCC’s spokesman, commented.

The constitutional court judges point out in their oral reasons for the judgement that the systematic tapping of communication data and the creation of personality profiles are serious violations of basic rights. “We assume that this judgement will also apply to the constitutional review of the Data Retention Act”, Dirk Engling said. Several constitutional complaints have been filed against the data retention that came to effect in January.

“The judges have given the lawmakers a slap in the face for allowing all kinds of information systems to be spied on, in contravention of basic rights”, Dirk Engling continued. “Spying on hard disks will only be possible within strictly defined limits. The Federal Constitutional Court has provided humanity’s virtual self with a digital protective shield.”

Analysing the data seized will also have to be based on the criteria relating to the new basic right. The investigation authorities’ procedures when collecting evidence by digital means must now be immediately put to the test. The searching of hard disks by private companies, which has recently become commonplace, is therefore clearly unconstitutional. The judges also determined that informational self-protection through encryption is a right that may only be abrogated under very strict conditions.

The Chaos Computer Club once again came to Karlsruhe for the delivery of the judgement with the black, red and gold “Federal Trojan”, which is the symbol of resistance against online searches. The Green Party, which recently attracted negative attention by waving through former interior minister Otto Schily’s “spying laws” and endorsing the ban on hacker tools, tried to demonstrate their newly found love for digital civil rights with a vigil in front of the court. This civil rights friendly position will hopefully be maintained if the Greens get back into government.

The lawyers will turn their attention to interpreting the judgement in the next few weeks and draw the relevant conclusions. “Although the Federal Trojan was positively slaughtered, important other decisions on basic rights are imminent. However, we don’t expect Wolfgang Schäuble (the Federal Interior Minister) or Dieter Wiefelspütz (the German Social Democratic Party’s expert on domestic policy) to suddenly take our constitution seriously. The new basic right will only come to life if it is aggressively defended and exercised.”

http://www.ccc.de/updates/2008/trojaner-notschlachten?language=en

Vandals keep changing the letter ‘L’ to a ‘C’ on the village’s signs

Residents living in a graffiti-plagued village in Merseyside are being asked to consider changing its name to tackle vandals who alter signs in the village.

Lunt, which dates back to Medieval times, has been repeatedly targeted by vandals who change the “L” to a “C”.

[…]

The transmitter equipment is regularly worn by BBC radio reporters

A BBC radio reporter was held to the ground and searched by police under the Terrorism Act after his transmitter equipment was mistaken for a bomb.

Five officers forced BBC Radio Stoke’s Max Khan to his knees and held him face down in Stoke-on-Trent on Monday.

He was wearing a backpack with protruding wires and aerials. Staffordshire Police have apologised.

Earlier this year armed police tackled a man in the city after fearing his MP3 player was a gun.

Mr Khan said he was targeted after police were told an “Arabic-looking man was acting suspiciously” outside the Potteries Shopping Centre in Hanley.

[…]

Arrested, caged and DNA tested – for using MP3

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Safe and sound: Darren Nixon recovers from his ordeal

A commuter was arrested at gunpoint and had his DNA and fingerprints taken simply for listening to his MP3 player while waiting for a bus.

Darren Nixon was surrounded by armed police after his music player was mistaken for a gun.

When a passer-by saw the 28-year-old get out his black Philips machine to change tracks, she panicked and dialled 999.

Police tracked Mr Nixon using CCTV. As he got off the bus home from work he was surrounded by a firearms unit, who bundled him into a van.

He was then put in a cell and his fingerprints, DNA and mugshot were taken before he was released.

Although police realised it was a false alarm, Mr Nixon, from Stoke-on-Trent, now has to live with his DNA stored on a national database.

The force will also keep on record that he was arrested on suspicion of a firearms offence.

[…]

From the ridiculous to the Kafkaesque.

Is there still anyone out there clinging to the pathetic excuse that ‘I’ve got nothing to hide, they’ll never come for me.’

‘I’m alright Jack’ works fine until its you on your knees with a gun at your head for ‘looking Arabic’ or brandishing an MP3 player in a public place.

“Innocent until We decide otherwise.”

Schools could be raided by police to crack down on knife crime, Ken Livingstone proposed today.

The Mayor suggested that fingerprinting and DNA profiling could be used to help to identify youngsters who threw away weapons. He also called for tougher sentencing for those involved in stabbings to prevent others going down the same route.

What this actually means is that all pupils in London need to be fingerprinted, DNA swabbed and put into a database so that when they find the one or two bad guys (or girls) with knives, they can be identified.

Ken Livinston is certifiably insane; the true inheritor of Stalin’s mantle, after the living reincarnation of Stalin himself, Gordon Brown.

However, there are likely to be concerns over the civil liberties implications of his proposals for schools.

Right!

Mr Livingstone told LBC radio: “So many kids now are carrying a knife because they think someone else might try and stab them and, of course, very often they end up being stabbed with their own knife.

So many. So we have to rape them all in order to stop them. Ken, you are a scumbag, full stop.

“I think you need a really high-profile crackdown and I’d be quite prepared where we know some schools have a particular problem – as long as the teachers and parents are up for this – you suddenly flood the school with police and you arrest everyone carrying a knife.

As long as the parents are ‘up for this’ its OK to rape children. Riiiiiiiiight.

“I know a lot of them will drop them on the ground but with fingerprints, DNA profiling, we’ll identify most of the people carrying those knives.”

Ken is a police state fantacist, a hideous gargoyle control addict, and a monster. Only his will matters, as we saw with the extension of the Congestion Charge zone, despite 70% of residents saying ‘no’ he went ahead anyway.

He added: “Judges have got to recognise the need for exemplary sentencing to get the message home – carry a knife, you’ll go to prison. You can’t carry a knife then expect to get 20 hours community service.”

Judges are best suited to interpret the law. Ken should get a broom out and sweep the streets of London. He cannot even do that correctly. Many parts of London are no better than pig styes and he is responsible for it.

The Mayor was accused of insensitivity to the families of two teenagers stabbed to death last week when he declared that “if it bleeds, it leads” the news. His aides said he made the comments before he had heard about the murders.

Ken is insensitive to anything but his own perverted desire for absolute power.

Mr Livingstone admitted there would be civil liberties concerns over his proposals on knife crime. There could also be legal issues as police must arrest suspects before taking fingerprints or DNA swabs.

In other words, guilty until proven innocent, yet again.

The total aim of police state boosters like Fascist Ken.

Ken, Brown, Smith and the other mass murdering perverts like to sprinkle the magic sauce of DNA technology on every problem. Now they want to sprinkie it onto children. The fact of the matter is that the problems that create knife crime will not be stopped by taking knives out of the hands of people who need them. These measures are plasters applied to shotgun wounds. But I digress. This ‘plan’ has not been thought out, will be rejected as absurd, and shows Ken Livingston scrambling around for big headlines because he is running scared of Boris Johnson. That is what this is all about, pure and simple.

Liberal Democrat mayoral candidate Brian Paddick said the support of local communities was more important, adding: “The way to tackle gun and knife crime is not to demonise young people but to rebuild trust between police and the community.”

[…]

Evening Standard

What-ever.

All of these people are vile, repulsive beasts, and none of them have even the slightest bit of imagination.

Let us help them.

If you want to stop knives entering a school, you expel all of the trouble-making students.

And that is it.

Teachers know intimately who the bad people in their schools are. If they were allowed to run their schools AS schools and not makeshift borstals then this problem would disappear over night.

Q: But what happens when the children that are expelled are out roaming the streets like feral beasts?
A: That is the problem of the negligent parents and the police.

etc etc.

On the afternoon of 27th March I received a telephone call, at work, from a ‘journalist’ working for the London Evening Standard. He introduced himself as Joshua Neicho, apparently partly responsible for the Letters section of that newspaper. Joshua told me he had found my details from Teh Internets after reading our postings on Blogdial concerning Heathrow T5 and the implications of design on security issues.

Now, tracking me down via Blogdial isn’t so hard to do. I’m sure Joshua would have preferred to contact Irdial, the first author of those posts, but Irdial isn’t silly enough to leave a simple trail to their private telephone number pasted all over the web.

Anyway, Joshua asked me to provide 200 words on T5, security and architecture within about 4 hours. Since this is a nice Blogdialian topic, I agreed. Fitting this writing into the last few hours of my already crowded work day was a shit, but here’s what I came up with. Not thrilling by Blogdial standards, just a concise resume of the position:

Much attention has been focussed on the architecture and security measures of Heathrow T5, but unfortunately not at the same time. Design and security at T5 are not only intimately linked, but invasive security measures (fingerprinting and photographing every passenger) are necessary precisely because of the architectural design.

BAA and the architects must have agreed on a non-segregated floorplan where passengers for domestic and international flights mix. Obviously, BAA (and HMG, who work closely with BAA on airport security) must have understood the security issues arising from this design. One may conclude that the design was intended to generate exactly this situation – a wonderful opportunity for testing biometric scanning procedures and public compliance on millions of people per year. Not only this, but that BAA, the architects and the government were complicit in the entire process!

Unbelievable? The alternative is that the architects design is flawed, but this went unnoticed by the architects, BAA and HMG until one day during the build itself! ‘Hang on! If we mix up internal and external… oh no! Now we’ll have to fingerprint everyone!’ Can one imagine Lord Rogers making such a big mistake in designing T5? I can’t.

I duly mailed this to Joshua Neicho (Old Etonian; Oxford University) asking to be kept informed of any use, and haven’t heard a peep from him since – something other bloggers have also reported. And blogged. I’m not sure what they teach students at Eton and Oxford, but I’m surprised simple manners isn’t included in the curriculum.

However, this post is to show ‘Why Print Journalism Is A Rotting Corpse’.

On 28th March, when T5 was in chaos on its opening day, here (and linked here) are the two letters chosen for the T5 design/security issue:

One, an analysis of design. The other, a tirade against invasive security. What is wrong with this picture? Forgoing my usual modesty (ahem!), may I just remind you of the first sentence of our unused letter.

Much attention has been focussed on the architecture and security measures of Heathrow T5, but unfortunately not at the same time.

The published viewpoints, editorially chosen by people like Joshua Neicho, are like having your face pressed up to a cinema screen by a long-dead shuffling zombie, swathed in the stench of nepotism, laziness, corruption and self-interest. Not to mention a lack of manners! And for putting up with that disgusting experience all you get to see is the tiny bit of the picture thats right in front of your face, distorted and given a disproportionate importance.

But you’re reading Blogdial.

Best seat in the house!

Privacy International’s recent complaint to the UK Information Commissioner has threatened to bring a halt to an imminent plan to fingerprint all domestic and international passengers departing from Heathrow’s Terminal 1 and Terminal 5, due to begin business on March 27th. The British media is reporting that in response to PI’s complaint, the Information Commissioner has advised that passengers should only accept fingerprinting “under protest” until our complaint is resolved.

The prospect of a complete shutdown of two Heathrow terminals has emerged since Privacy International’s complaint about passenger fingerprinting. The complaint, lodged with the UK Information Commissioner on March 9th 2008, argues that the scheme breaches the fundamental tests of necessity and proportionality under the UK Data Protection Act.

The complaint states: “We believe the BAA solution is disproportionately intrusive. Even if it were to be established that passenger switching (if indeed such a problem exists) was a terrorist threat (rather than merely a breach of airline terms and conditions on transferability) then the photo option would be less invasive and would involve fewer intrusive procedures and less personal data.”

The complaint alleged that the design of Terminal 5 was intentionally created to ensure that passengers, both domestic and international, were exposed to retail outlets to the maximum possible extent. It noted: “We are troubled by BAA’s justification that the new procedure will ensure that “all our passengers will enjoy the same great facilities and wide choice of shops and restaurants”. To diminish privacy rights in order to achieve greater sales revenue is a disquieting development in the evolution of thinking with regard to data protection.

Privacy International alleges that there is no basis in UK law for the establishment of mandatory fingerprinting, and that the claims made by the British Airports Authority (BAA) were based in fantasy or deception. “BAA’s claim that these measures are “required by government” appears to be of dubious substance. There certainly appears to be no legislative requirement for fingerprinting in these circumstances, and so we assume that the scheme is based on an informal arrangement with government. Indeed a spokesman for BAA is quoted in the Evening Standard (March 11th) saying: “the fingerprinting scheme was introduced in cooperation with the Home Office”.

The Information Commissioner’s Office has confirmed to Privacy International (see below) that it has never been approached by the Government, British Airways, BAA or any other party about this scheme.

This PI claim received further weight when the British newspaper, the Mail on Sunday, reported that the Home Office denied that it had set any requirement for passenger fingerprinting.

If the Information Commissioner is not satisfied that the fingerprinting scheme is justified he has the authority to present a cessation order, breach of which would be a criminal offence. If BAA is found in breach of UK law its contractual terms could then be in jeopardy.

See here for the complaint and the response from the Information Commissioner’s Office. Here are some excerpts:

Privacy International believes the Heathrow fingerprinting scheme breaches the fundamental test of Necessity for compliance with Data Protection. We are not aware of any published evidence indicating that passenger switching has become a significant security issue, nor are we aware of any evidence that it could be in the future.

BAA’s claim that these measures are “required by government” appears to be of dubious substance. There certainly appears to be no legislative requirement for fingerprinting in these circumstances, and so we assume that the scheme is based on an informal arrangement with government. Indeed a spokesman for BAA is quoted in the Evening Standard (March 11th) saying: “the fingerprinting scheme was introduced in cooperation with the Home Office”.

[…]

We are troubled by BAA’s justification that the new procedure will ensure that “all our passengers will enjoy the same great facilities and wide choice of shops and restaurants”. To diminish privacy rights in order to achieve greater sales revenue is a disquieting development in the evolution of thinking with regard to data protection. We would have hoped that the planning of Terminal 5 and its associated security procedures would have taken account of compliance with law. We would be interested to learn whether a Privacy Impact Assessment was conducted or whether due diligence was instituted with regard to the DPA.

We do not believe this scheme will be in any way voluntary or opt-in. Most passengers will have little or no choice over which terminal they use, and even where such an alternative exists it may be costly. We do not believe in these circumstances that passengers should be compelled to undergo fingerprinting.

We refer you to the advice provided by your office on the subject of fingerprinting of children in schools (23rd July 2007):

In view of the sensitivity of taking children’s fingerprints, schools should respect the wishes of parents and pupils who object to their (or their children’s) fingerprints being taken in school.

We see no reason why this “sensitivity” should not extend to the adult population, particularly where some people feel vulnerable or anxious about the procedure, or where strong convictions are held about such procedures.

[…]

It is, in our view, not acceptable for BAA to institute an intrusive system merely because of a “state of heightened alert” over airport security, particularly where no evidence is offered to justify fingerprinting. Nor in our view is it acceptable to advance architectural determinism or poor planning as a justification for the necessity for intrusive practices. The decisions that are made with regard to Terminal 5 will resonate across the travel industry, and so it is crucial to ensure that the justification, the legal compliance and the procedures are positioned properly in these early days. Vague claims of government requirements are not appropriate under these circumstances.

Nor, in our view, is it acceptable to define necessity and proportionality in a minimal or casual manner when the environment in question offers so much scope for the development of privacy friendly alternatives to fingerprinting.

http://www.privacyinternational.org/

This is a properly drafted response, from an organization that is actively working to solve problems.

Well done Privacy International, your cheque is in the post.

This is the sort of organization that is worth donating to and joining. They will not fob you off with cranky emails, admonishing you to not ‘pester them’ with matters like this, whilst on the surface, pretending to be working against these outrageous and Orwellian measures.

They also get things done, and actively attack problems instead of endlessly appearing on TV and in the newspapers, decrying all that is going wrong.

Send your checque to:

Privacy International
6-8 Amwell Street
London, EC1R 1UQ
GB

Lest we forget, here are our other posts on this subject:

ID Cards, the NIR and Heathrow Terminal 5
http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=982

Richard Rogers: Architect of The New Authoritarianism
http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=771

Heathrow Terminal 5: Architectural Disaster
http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=767

More BBQ Biometric Propaganda: Terminal 5
http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=825

Terminal 5 fingerprinting; the howls begin
http://www.irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1015

Anonymous shill BBC Terrorist Journalist strikes again; this time its back to Heathrow Terminal 5 and the fingerprinting debacle:

Heathrow fingerprint plan probed

Plans to fingerprint passengers at Heathrow’s new Terminal 5 are being probed by the data protection watchdog.
The Information Commissioner’s Office warned airport operator BAA it may be in breach of the Data Protection Act.

First of all, who is the author of this piece?

Under the plans, prints will be checked at the gate to try to ensure the person who checked in is the same as the person who is boarding the aircraft.

This is clearly a lie, since it has never been a problem before.

BAA said the data was encrypted straight away and destroyed within 24 hours, in line with the act.

This is nonsense. Encryption protects data while it is in transit over a public network. Since the Terminal 5 system is a closed one (unless they do the data processing off site, which is of course possible), encryption is meaningless to the security of the data. All someone has to do is get into the server room, install rsync or some other data mirroring tool, and all the data will escape, in real time. The 24 hour deletion becomes meaningless, as does the encryption.

These sorts of lie should never be repeated without challenge. PERIOD.

The investigation would not delay the opening for business of the £4.3bn terminal on Thursday, the airport operator added.

pfft!

Prosecution possibility

The move will allow domestic and international passengers to mingle in the terminal’s departure lounge.

And why is it desirable for the passengers to mingle? Why did the architects DELIBERATELY design a building where, against all common sense, domestic and international passengers are not segregated?

It cannot be so that they can shop more easily, since shops exist in both the domestic and international sections of airports all over the world. The only possible reason for this (other than incompetence) is that this building was designed deliberately broken, so that there was a ‘problem’ to be fixed by biometrics, causing a market for the machinery and a building that can be used to soften up the public to the idea of being fingerprinted.

The people who designed this building are guilty of a serious crime against humanity.

The idea behind the fingerprinting is to make it impossible for a terrorist to arrive at Heathrow on a transit flight, then exchange boarding passes with a colleague in the departure lounge and join a domestic flight to enter the UK without being checked by immigration authorities.

This is possibly one of the most offensive sentences I have ever read on a BBC website.

Fingerprinting cannot stop terrorists. It cannot detect terrorists. It cannot stop terrorists from entering any country. But you know that. Also, if you want to stop people from exchanging boarding passes with colleagues, then you BUILD A FUCKING WALL BETWEEN THE PASSENGER AREAS. You DO NOT fingerprint millions of innocent people.

This is so absurd, so illogical, so offensive, so counterintuitive, so ass backwards, that it can only be a line regurgitated verbatim from a PR company hired to do damage limitation.

That this BBC writer copied it faithfully is sickening, but then, this is exactly what we expect from the BBC, the biggest bunch of dirty, filthy, immoral, unprincipled, journalists for sale BASTARDS ever to sit behind a keyboard.

But Deputy Information Commissioner David Smith told the Mail on Sunday: “We want to know why Heathrow needs to fingerprint passengers at all.

“Taking photographs is less intrusive. So far we have not heard BAA’s case for requesting fingerprints.

There is no case for either fingerprinting or photographing passengers. The building should have been built correctly. International passengers already have to carry passports, and these are ‘secure’ and have been used for decades without any problems.

The question that needs to be asked is how was it that BAA consulted with the Home Office and you had no part in those discussions Mr Smith?

“If we find there is a breach of data protection legislation, we would hope to persuade them to put things right.

Wow, “if we find that a bank robbery had taken place, we would hope to persuade the criminal to put things right”

I want to smoke what that S.O.B. is smoking!

“If that is not successful we can issue an enforcement notice. If they don’t comply, it is a criminal offence and they can be prosecuted.”

Wow, they KNOW that it is a criminal offence, but they get a warning FIRST and then if they keep doing it, they get prosecuted! Bank robbers take note, you have SEVERAL CHANCES TO CHANGE YOUR BANK ROBBING WAYS before they actually prosecute you!!!!

Data ‘encrypted’

BAA said the Border and Immigration Agency had been keen on a “reliable biometric element” when plans had been announced for common departure lounges for international and domestic flights.

That has nothing to do with checking into a flight. This is about a badly designed building, and nothing more. It does however, support the idea that this is a softening up exercise, and demonstrates how they want you to keep scanning in all over the place. Think about it. BAA scans you to get onto the plane TWICE, and immigration scans you to check you out of the country. That is three times in one day where before only a criminal charged with an offence would be fingerprinted and photographed.

Fingerprinting was selected as the most robust method by BAA, the BIA and other government departments, it said.

If that is true, then they are the most stupid people on this planet. A WALL is actually the most robust way of segregating passengers.

A BAA spokesman said: “The data is encrypted immediately and is destroyed within 24 hours of use, in accordance with the Data Protection Act. It does not include personal details nor is it cross-referenced with any other database.”

If it is not cross referenced with with any other database, how do they know that you are the passenger? They must record what ticket you have and place that information next to your prints and photo in their database, otherwise, your ‘terrorist colleague’ could hand you a domestic boarding pass and sneak you into Britain.

Since your fingerprint and face are written next to your ticket details, that means your flight details (stored on the SABRE system) are connected to you.

Anyone with direct access to BAAs fingerprint database will then be able to use this connection to find out everything about you, as this info is stored by SABRE, including your credit card details, which would provide another bridge to detailed knowledge about you via VISA MASTERCARD AMEX etc etc.

That is how it REALLY works you imbeciles; once you connect a plane ticket to your prints it can be used to find out everything about you. BAA, if they are talking about encryption in this way, are clearly incompetent when it comes to IT, and so they absolutely cannot be trusted with anything like this. It is probably being outsourced in any case, and if it is the case, a spokesperson from that company should have been trotted out to explain how they have managed to create dry water.

The Home Office said BAA was not required to involve fingerprinting in its security arrangements at Terminal 5.

BACKPEDALLING!

We all know that the Home Office was consulted when they were planning this!!! ROTFL!

“Our primary concern is that the UK border is secure and we won’t allow BAA to have a common departure lounge unless they ensure the border is secure,” said a spokesman.

So now you entrust the border security of the UK to BAA, and leave the responsibility to THEM to get it right, instead of mandating that passengers are segregated?

THAT my friends, is the definition of INSANITY.

Let me get this straight.

If they find that this airport is breaking the law, they are going to stop fingerprinting people and continue letting passengers mingle. The airport design is broken, they may prosecute if they do not fix it, but by cutting out the offending part, they have a huge illegal immigration hole through which people can pour, but border security is not the Home Office’s responsibility, its BAA’s responsibility.

That is the level of competence that has ruined this country.

Richard Rogers is going to be hit with a lawsuit methinks, since it was HIS IDEA to create this abomination in the first place.

“They presented us with this plan, which we are happy secures the border. The design of the plan is a matter for BAA.”

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7310158.stm

Now BAA will pass responsibility up the line to the architects.

This building will have to be retrofitted to physically separate the two types of passenger, domestic and international. All fingerprinting snake-oil will have to be removed and destroyed, and someone will have to pay for it all.

Start running NOW Richard!

And here are the other posts on this subject we have written, and thanks to the lurker who emailed this!

+++++++ UPDATE!! +++++++

The Telegraph have also drunk the Kool-Aid on this one, repeating verbatim the same damage control press release above:

The Information Commissioner’s Office warned airport operator BAA that the security measure, designed to stop terrorists getting into the country, may breach the Data Protection Act.

[…]

You see? ‘Designed to stop terrorists’. It is the same lie, verbatim.

Under the plan all four million domestic passengers using Terminal 5 annually will have their fingerprints taken when they first go through security.

They will then be checked again at the gate. BAA said the measure was required because of the way Terminal 5 is designed, with domestic and international passengers sharing lounges and public areas after checking in.

Without fingerprinting, terrorists, criminals and illegal immigrants could arrive at Heathrow on a transit flight, then exchange boarding passes with a colleague in the departure lounge and join a domestic flight to enter the UK without being checked by immigration authorities.

[…]

Note the order in which this is put, terrorsts heads the list. It is utter garbage of course, and we can substitute accordingly:

“Without physically segregated passenger lounges, terrorists, criminals and illegal immigrants could arrive at Heathrow on a transit flight, then exchange boarding passes with a colleague in the departure lounge and join a domestic flight to enter the UK without being checked by immigration authorities.”

You see? Much better!

A leading barrister has already informed BAA that he will refuse to give his fingerprints, describing the process as an “Orwellian” abuse of civil liberties.

Nigel Rumfitt QC, a specialist in serious crime including terrorism, said it was a move towards a “database state” and Britain would become a nation that “restricts the internal movement of its citizens”.

[…]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/23/nheathrow123.xml

At last, people with some balls are saying “enough is enough”.