How to Secure Your Computer, Disks, and Portable Drives

Computer security is hard. Software, computer and network security are all ongoing battles between attacker and defender. And in many cases the attacker has an inherent advantage: He only has to find one network flaw, while the defender has to find and fix every flaw.

Cryptography is an exception. As long as you don’t write your own algorithm, secure encryption is easy. And the defender has an inherent mathematical advantage: Longer keys increase the amount of work the defender has to do linearly, while geometrically increasing the amount of work the attacker has to do.

Unfortunately, cryptography can’t solve most computer-security problems. The one problem cryptography *can* solve is the security of data when it’s not in use. Encrypting files, archives — even entire disks — is easy.

All of this makes it even more amazing that Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs in the United Kingdom lost two disks with personal data on 25 million British citizens, including dates of birth, addresses, bank-account information and national insurance numbers. On the one hand, this is no bigger a deal than any of the thousands of other exposures of personal data we’ve read about in recent years — the U.S. Veteran’s Administration loss of personal data of 26 million American veterans is an obvious similar event. But this has turned into Britain’s privacy Chernobyl.

Perhaps encryption isn’t so easy after all, and some people could use a little primer. This is how I protect my laptop.

There are several whole-disk encryption products on the market. I use PGP Disk’s Whole Disk Encryption tool for two reasons. It’s easy, and I trust both the company and the developers to write it securely. (Disclosure: I’m also on PGP Corp.’s Technical Advisory Board.)

Setup only takes a few minutes. After that, the program runs in the background. Everything works like before, and the performance degradation is negligible. Just make sure you choose a secure password — PGP’s encouragement of passphrases makes this much easier — and you’re secure against leaving your laptop in the airport or having it stolen out of your hotel room.

The reason you encrypt your entire disk, and not just key files, is so you don’t have to worry about swap files, temp files, hibernation files, erased files, browser cookies or whatever. You don’t need to enforce a complex policy about which files are important enough to be encrypted. And you have an easy answer to your boss or to the press if the computer is stolen: no problem; the laptop is encrypted.

PGP Disk can also encrypt external disks, which means you can also secure that USB memory device you’ve been using to transfer data from computer to computer. When I travel, I use a portable USB drive for backup. Those devices are getting physically smaller — but larger in capacity — every year, and by encrypting I don’t have to worry about losing them.

I recommend one more complication. Whole-disk encryption means that anyone at your computer has access to everything: someone at your unattended computer, a Trojan that infected your computer and so on. To deal with these and similar threats I recommend a two-tier encryption strategy. Encrypt anything you don’t need access to regularly — archived documents, old e-mail, whatever — separately, with a different password. I like to use PGP Disk’s encrypted zip files, because it also makes secure backup easier (and lets you secure those files before you burn them on a DVD and mail them across the country), but you can also use the program’s virtual-encrypted-disk feature to create a separately encrypted volume. Both options are easy to set up and use.

There are still two scenarios you aren’t secure against, though. You’re not secure against someone snatching your laptop out of your hands as you’re typing away at the local coffee shop. And you’re not secure against the authorities telling you to decrypt your data for them.

The latter threat is becoming more real. I have long been worried that someday, at a border crossing, a customs official will open my laptop and ask me to type in my password. Of course I could refuse, but the consequences might be severe — and permanent. And some countries — the United Kingdom, Singapore, Malaysia — have passed laws giving police the authority to demand that you divulge your passwords and encryption keys.

To defend against both of these threats, minimize the amount of data on your laptop. Do you really need 10 years of old e-mails? Does everyone in the company really need to carry around the entire customer database? One of the most incredible things about the Revenue & Customs story is that a low-level government employee mailed a copy of the entire national child database to the National Audit Office in London. Did he have to? Doubtful. The best defense against data loss is to not have the data in the first place.

Failing that, you can try to convince the authorities that you don’t have the encryption key. This works better if it’s a zipped archive than the whole disk. You can argue that you’re transporting the files for your boss, or that you forgot the key long ago. Make sure the time stamp on the files matches your claim, though.

There are other encryption programs out there. If you’re a Windows Vista user, you might consider BitLocker. This program, embedded in the operating system, also encrypts the computer’s entire drive. But it only works on the C: drive, so it won’t help with external disks or USB tokens. And it can’t be used to make encrypted zip files. But it’s easy to use, and it’s free. And many people like the open-source and free program, TrueCrypt. I know nothing about it.

This essay previously appeared on Wired.com.

Why was the UK event such a big deal? Certainly the scope: 40% of the British population. Also the data: bank account details; plus information about children. There’s already a larger debate on the issue of a database on kids that this feeds into. And it’s a demonstration of government incompetence (think Hurricane Katrina). In any case, this issue isn’t going away anytime soon. Prime Minister Gordon Brown has apologized. The head of the Revenue and Customs office has resigned. More fallout is probably coming.

[…]

http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0712.html

UK’s privacy Chernobyl:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article2910705.ece
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7104945.stm
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/economics/story/0,,2214566,00.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article2910635.ece
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/21/response_data_breach/

U.S. VA privacy breach:
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2006/05/70961

PGP Disk:
http://www.pgp.com/products/wholediskencryption/

Choosing a secure password:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/01/choosing_secure.html
http://www.iusmentis.com/security/passphrasefaq/

Risks of losing small memory devices:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/07/risks_of_losing.html

Laptop snatching:
http://tinyurl.com/fszeh

TrueCrypt:
http://www.truecrypt.org/

Of course, we now know that authorities cannot tell you to decrypt your data for them in the USA. If you insist on working for and in fascist countries or countries with fascist legislation like the United Kingdom, Singapore and Malaysia, then you must expect that your rights disappear the moment the tires of the airplane touch the landing strip in these places, and that you may be subject to a decryption order. Much better to carry a blank laptop with you and then log into your system over an encrypted link rather than carry fully loaded email clients with you.

You can fully expect all of these bad laws to be dropped once businessmen from the United Kingdom, Singapore, Malaysia and other countries get their laptops copied wholesale, or when people stop doing business with them out of principle…ummmm probably not going to happen, right?

Avid readers of BLOGDIAL will remember the utter nonsense of the Sudanese government stealing laptops:

The government of Sudan started seizing and quarantining laptop computers for inspection last week, ostensibly to stem the import of pornography and seditious material.

remember now?

Apparently it occurred to government officials that they didn’t understand what was in the devices and that the devices might be the conveyance for objectionable material.

A beautifully understated assessment :)

The immediate effect of the quarantines and data inspections is sure to be a dampening of business interest in an already risk-fraught environment. Over the long term, however, silly rules regarding technology tend to be corrected by individuals’ use of even more advanced technology. Governments rarely win this sort of oneupsmanship.

And so on:

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=453

I have been encouraging the adoption of PGP/GPG for ages. The tools to use it are now as easy as switching a light on and off, even if the underlying concepts remain impenetrable to all but people with A-Level maths. If you have the time and the need for it, you can use it with ease. It is possible to do everything you need to do without it, but do not complain that people are reading your email; those complaints are what is unacceptable today.

There has never been a time in man’s history where you could communicate in complete, guaranteed privacy over any distance. No surveillance system can break into properly deployed PGP/GPG communications. All those who complain about the government monitoring their email but who do not use PGP/GPG do not get and cannot expect any sympathy.

You have an umbrella, yet you prefer to get soaked to the skin when it rains.

You have fire, but you choose not to light it and to stay damp and wet.

That is called STUPIDITY and there are no two ways about it.

This week we launched The NO2ID Pledge – a way for people to personally and publicly declare that they will refuse to comply with the government’s ID scheme. It says:

I solemnly and publicly promise that:

• I shall not register for a national identity card
• I shall not supply personal details or fingerprints to a National Identity Register
• I shall not apply for any document or service if joining the National Identity Register is a condition of obtaining it
• I shall not co-operate with any Identity and Passport Service interview concerning my identity.

I also promise by my example to encourage others to do the same.

The pledge is an act of *pre-emptive* resistance and is, as such, entirely legal. It’s something positive that you can do NOW. In fact, there’s not much ID law to break at present – most of the powers in the Identity Cards Act 2006 have yet to be brought into force. The government certainly hasn’t made it illegal to declare you’ll refuse to go along with its scheme.

The ID scheme is like a vampire. It has no life of its own, and thrives only if it feeds.

There is its weakness. We, collectively, can choose to starve the Identity and Passport Service. It only works smoothly if few are prepared to face some inconvenience to resist. It only works at all if a large majority of the population can be hypnotised into thinking that it is just routine, no big deal. If enough of us refuse to be bled willingly, the beast will either starve or show its fangs.

The NO2ID Pledge will lead to civil disobedience only if the government fails to see sense and scrap its monstrous ID scheme. The polls have long said millions will not submit to being numbered like cattle. Is the government really going to risk trying to make them beg to be branded?

To make pledging straightforward we have created The NO2ID Pledge certificate, for you to fill out and sign in front of a witness. You can find out more and download certificates from http://www.no2id.net/pledge/

Please don’t just print one copy… print five… or fifty and pass them on to people who you think might also pledge. The idea is to spread The NO2ID Pledge as far and as wide as possible.

Anyone can do it. Anyone can help others do it. And the more who do, the easier it is.

Note: This is a new pledge, if you signed our previous PledgeBank “refuse” pledge then you can still make this pledge.

Referring back to this post.

December 4, 2007
If you’re a fugitive from the law — or even if you’re just super paranoid about your privacy — you might want to steer clear of a new biometric payment system which has been implemented at about ten Shell gas stations in the Chicago area. The biometric payment system, developed by San Francisco-based Pay By Touch, works by linking a user’s fingerprint to his or her credit card or checking account. For now, customers must scan their fingertips at a kiosk inside the gas station – however, Shell is reportedly considering the idea of having the scanners installed on the pumps to facilitate even faster payment.

But what if the scan taken could be linked to other databases – even be cross-checked against the NCIS database? We’ve heard about how this technology can be used to create “theft proof” smart cars which can only be used by the driver registered to that vehicle. And now it appears the technology can be used to verify a credit card user’s identity as well. But where is the fingerprint information stored and who has access it? Is it possible that, one day in the future, even people wanted for minor offenses, such as failure to appear in court or failure to pay child support, could be “nabbed” by police at the local gas station or some other store, should they attempt to pay using this new system?

Of course, I’m intentionally being absurd … obviously, Shell is using the technology to see if it will provide a new level of convenience for its customers … it probably has no intention of using it proactively as a crime fighting tool. Furthermore, if you’re on the run, you’ll probably be smart enough not to use such a system.

Still, as adoption of this technology grows — and if one day it becomes ubiquitous — one can’t help but wonder what role it might play in identifying and tracking people as they move about and make purchases. By the same token, one can also speculate whether it might be possible for the bad guys to use this technology against consumers: For example, maybe someone will come up with a way of “faking” people’s fingerprints, as part of an impressive effort to steal their identities.

Shell is reportedly the first gas station company in the U.S. to install biometric payment devices. The company is also reportedly testing hand-held wireless devices that allow full-service customers to pay electronically without getting out of their cars. For more information, check out this article.

[…]

TCMNet

‘What if’. That is the question. TODAY they are not linked to any other databases, but it would be trivial to do so, and government would have no problem in compelling gas stations or anywhere else from providing real time access.

Like we and other people have been saying for ages, they will use this to cut off your life, making you a ‘non person’ at the press of a button, so that you cannot eat, travel or, as in this case, buy gasoline. They could even use it to ration gasoline and food in an ’emergency’.

IF you think that they will not try to do this, you are delusional; and we don’t have to take breath to talk about the ‘accidents’ that can happen where your identity is stolen or corrupted. We have had some very good examples of how that works.

This article is cautious, but the writer has the main points nailed; this is something to be VERY cautious about; do you REALLY need to save three minutes at the pump? Are those three minutes worth your irreplaceable fingerprints? You can already pay at the pump by swiping your card without even entering the station proper – there is no advantage in using your fingerprint to facilitate transactions; this is a completely faddish and pointless exercise. Period.

Child database system postponed

Ministers are postponing a new database on every child in England, pending a security review and changes to the system including its access controls.

Children’s minister Kevin Brennan told MPs there would be a five-month delay to the £224m system, ContactPoint.

The security review was ordered after the loss of child benefit discs.

ContactPoint holds name, address, date of birth, gender, parental contact information, details of school and any professionals working with the child.

It does not include actual case records.

The database came out of the inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbie and is designed to make it easier to co-ordinate the work of different child protection agencies.

‘Questions raised’

Mr Brennan said in a statement: “Over the last few months we have been considering the substantial stakeholder feedback we have received and looked at the implications that the resulting proposed changes could have on the system.

“It is clear from the considerable work we have done so far that we will need more time than we originally planned to address the changes to ContactPoint which potential system users suggested.”

The change to the timetable will mean deployment to the “early adopters” local authorities and national agencies in September or October 2008, and to all others by May 2009.

Mr Brennan said the loss of the Revenue and Customs child benefit data “has raised questions about the safety of large scale personal data in other government systems, including ContactPoint”.

An independent assessment of security procedures would be undertaken by Deloitte.

“Delaying the implementation of ContactPoint will enable the independent assessment of security procedures to take place as well as address the changes to ContactPoint that potential system users have told us they need,” Mr Brennan said.

He added: “The fundamental design of ContactPoint will not change; the alterations will make sure the system works even more effectively for users and improves the ability of local authority ContactPoint teams to manage user access.”

Shadow Children’s Minister Maria Miller said: “The government should also use this opportunity to see whether it really is necessary to have a database for every single child in the country, accessible to 330,000 people, given the significant amount of concern that this could overload the system and lead to a dumbing down of information.

“We have always supported, as an alternative, a slimmed-down tightly controlled database which focuses on those genuinely vulnerable children.”

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7115546.stm

My emphasis.

This is one of the most absurd statements ever. Just when you thought that they couldn’t get more stupid, we have the imbecile ‘Kevin Brennan’ saying they need more time to CHANGE THE VERY NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE and RE-DEFINE THE RULES OF MATHEMATICS before they roll out ContactPoint.

The fact is, you computer illiterate JACKASS, no matter how long you delay it, not matter what you do to re-design it, data will always be copyable, and if you put together ContactPoint in the way it has been planned, it will still be copyable. Read how this is going to be done, in evidence already submitted to you. Even if you make it difficult for insiders with root level DB access, wholesale copying WILL take place on a page by page basis. Remember, there are going to be 300,000 people with authorized access; it will be impossible to monitor them all, like that PHD’s submission says.

No amount of security reviews will be able to stop people from printing off ContactPoint pages. Deloitte knows this. The alterations you are talking about will do nothing to reduce the risk you are putting all the children of the UK in.

These are the FACTS.

ContactPoint MUST BE ABANDONED COMPLETELY, and it is absolutely sickening that you and your inhuman child harming monster colleagues are pushing on with this abomination.

The telegraph has a good news poll; most people are now against the ID card. Of course, these polls are bogus because the questions they ask are misleading, but that is irrelevant now.

The most important part of this story is a comment attached to it written by an acting police man, who says:

I’ve been a police officer for many years and the police aren’t exactly known for being strong proponents of civil liberties. However, most of my colleagues seem to be coming to the conclusion that this identity database is a step too far. We are moving towards a Big Brother state in which everyone is treated like a criminal by compulsory interrogation, fingerprinting, photograph, numbering and then being subjected to state monitoring of your movements and activities. Personally speaking, I’d rather leave the force – and the country – than submit to this and I have made plans accordingly.
Posted by Bison on December 3, 2007 9:30 AM

Without the cooperation of the police, how can you run a police state?

I guarantee you that many civil servants are equally opposed to this insanity, and it is them who run the backroom operations of a police state. Doctors are already committed to rejecting the database state as it applies to them:

Family doctors to shun national database of patients’ records

· More than half would seek specific consent
· Security fears dominate concerns, poll shows

John Carvel, social affairs editor
The Guardian Tuesday November 20 2007

Nearly two-thirds of family doctors are poised to boycott the government’s scheme to put the medical records of 50 million NHS patients on a national electronic database, a Guardian poll reveals today.

With suspicion rife across the profession that sensitive personal data could be stolen by hackers and blackmailers, the poll found 59% of GPs in England are unwilling to upload any record without the patient’s specific consent…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2007/nov/20/nhs.health

The whole thing is falling apart.

The only part they managed to roll out is the completely evil biometric passport; this will be rolled back as soon as people start to see their personal details stolen from their passports turning up where they should not.

We may yet get Great Britain back!

Human garbage like Jacqui (who has the must utterly appalling dress sense) Smith are however, determined to go down with the ship:

[…]
However, at the weekend Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, continued to defend the scheme and said the inclusion of fingerprints would ensure the data’s security.

“I will be able to be confident that my identity… will be linked to my fingerprint so just knowing who I am, where I live and what my bank details are will not be enough to be able to take my identity,” she said in a television interview.

“It is an increased protection even against times when people’s biographical details are stolen or lost.” […]

Biometrics cannot “ensure the data’s security” this is fairy dust talk from a computer illiterate incompetent.

Your identity is not “linked to your fingerprint”. Your fingerprint is linked to a record in a database that has information about you. That is NOT your identity, that is a database record. If someone changes your database entry either deliberately or accidently, say, changing your address, then your ‘identity’ is damaged and since nincompoops like you believe that the computer cannot be wrong, all your financial transactions will be stopped because your paper documents and your database records are out of sync. Of course there is the more serious matter of having a crime you did not commit attributed to you, but we have discussed this ad nauseam.

It is not the government’s responsibility to guarantee the identity of citizens, and it is totally immoral for them to try and compel everyone to submit to this violation.

Jacqui Smith, the adulterer Blunkett, vile porcine lie-machine Charles Clarke and Jack ‘Straw Man’ Straw are all guilty of trying to foist this abomination on the free British people, and now that the public are waking up to this, their shame will be eternal.

Six leading academics have written to a Parliamentary committee to express their dismay at the way biometrics has been used as a magic wand which would have supposedly stopped Darling’s great data giveaway.

The six said of claims by the Prime Minister and his Chancellor: “These assertions are based on a fairy-tale view of the capabilities of the technology and in addition, only deal with one aspect of the problems that this type of data breach causes.”

Both Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling claimed, after the loss of CDs containing 25m recipients of child benefit, that the data would somehow be protected by biometric information if we had national ID cards.

The letter points out that this is based on three suppositions – that the entire UK population can be enrolled on the database; that no one can forge biometric information; and finally that every ID check would include checks against biometric information on the national database.

The letter said:

Even if, in this fairy-tale land, it came to pass that (a) (b) and (c) were true after all (which we consider most unlikely), the proposed roll-out of the National Identity Scheme would mean that this level of ‘protection’ would not – on the Home Office’s own highly optimistic projections – be extended to the entire population before the end of the next decade (i.e. 2020) at the earliest.

The academics also note that including biometric information on a national ID register would make such records even more valuable to fraudsters, and once compromised make “fixing” the problem even more difficult.

The inclusion of biometric data in one’s NIR record would make such a record even more valuable to fraudsters and thieves as it would – if leaked or stolen – provide the ‘key’ to all uses of that individual’s biometrics (e.g. accessing personal or business information on a laptop, biometric access to bank accounts, etc.) for the rest of his or her life. Once lost, it would be impossible to issue a person with new fingerprints. One cannot change one’s fingers as one can a bank account.

The six academics also point out that leaking such personal data is not just a question of hassle for people but could be potentially fatal for “the directors of Huntingdon Life Sciences, victims of domestic violence or former Northern Ireland ministers”.

The open letter, available here, was sent to Andrew Dismore MP, chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights.

The academics behind the letter include Professor Ross Anderson and Dr Richard Clayton of the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, and Dr Ian Brown of the Oxford Internet Institute. Other signers include Dr Brian Gladman, formerly of the Ministry of Defence and NATO, Professor Angela Sasse of UCL’s Department of Computer Science and Martyn Thomas CBE FREng. ®

The Register

Anyone with any doubts about just how ‘over’ the NIR and ID cards are should have those doubts washed away by this, from the Times:

[…]

Ms Smith had many inquisitors. The first was the senior Labour MP Keith Vaz, who is deeply oily but that makes it all the more slippery when he asks a good question. After the events of last week, he demanded, was she planning to look again at how to protect ID scheme data. As his words oozed over us, like treacle over sponge, Ms Smith just sat there. She did not jump up, eager to inform. Instead she looked over at her Immigration Minister, Liam Byrne. He popped up and trumpeted: “The House will know that, where there are lessons to be learnt from last week’s events at HMRC, then it is right that we learn them.”

This was clearly nonsense. Ms Smith nodded away earnestly. Why? Could this really be the Home Secretary? Was she in charge? Perhaps we should check her biometric data just to make sure. David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, knows exactly who he is. He is her tormentor. He can smell weakness but he asked a simple enough question. “If the Government gives away your bank account details, that is a disaster but you can change your bank account,” he noted. “What precisely do you do if the Government gives away your biometric details?”

Here was another chance for Ms Smith to tell us of her strategy or, at least, to pretend to have one. Instead she said: “Biometrics will link a person securely and reliably to his or her unique identity.”

No one looked reassured. I cannot think why: surely the news that our biometrics can link us to ourselves can only be good, but Ms Smith, or her impostor, struggled on, to loud barks of laughter. “The current plan for the national identity register is that biometric information would be held separately from biographical information, thereby safeguarding against the sort of eventuality that you are talking about.”

Mr Davis, looking like a shark who had just had a tasty snack, asked her about a European information-sharing scheme called Project Stork. “How are we going to prevent a repetition of the disaster of the last few weeks when sensitive personal data is held not by one government but by 27?” Ms Smith looked flummoxed. I don’t think she knew about Project Stork. Again, this was worrying. Wouldn’t a real Home Secretary have a clue about this?

[…]

Yes indeed; it looks like the computer illiterates in the House of Commons have all suddenly woken up to what biometrics really mean, and it has happened because either they or someone they know has been violated; so large was the recent violation that there is no way that a single member of the house was not affected.

Absolutely Brilliant. You could not have designed a better demonstration of how the NIR and ID cards are dangerous.

Members of the house are now speaking like we and the many others against this madness have been speaking for years. It is now well and truly OVER.

Now we hear about ‘Project Stork‘; so many words and images come to mind. But I will defer.

Fears over pan-EU electronic identity network
By Philip Johnston, Home Affairs Editor

New concerns have been raised over the Government’s multi-billion-pound ID project as it emerged that Britain’s identity database could be shared with 26 other European Union countries.

The Home Office is taking part in a scheme, codenamed Stork, which aims to make all EU electronic identity networks ”inter-operable” within three years..

Michael Wills, the data protection minister, yesterday conceded that the ”deplorable” loss of 25 million records had implications for the ID card scheme.

“We are going to obviously have to look at the national identity register in the light of all this,” he told Parliament’s joint human rights committee.

”We are going to have to learn the lessons. Everything will have to be scrutinised and then we will assess it again.”

However, Mr Wills said this did not mean the ID scheme – due to start next year for foreign nationals – would be scrapped

[…]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/11/27/nidcards127.xml

There cannot be anyone now, thanks to the DVDR fiasco that does not instantly understand the full implications of this. Everyone in the UK now has first hand, intimate knowledge of what this means; it means that your personal information will no longer be personal, it will be sown to the wind and spread to every corner of the globe. It will be a violation without precedent, even WORSE than the violation of the DVDR release, since, as Rt HON Vaz points out, you can change your address and bank account but you cannot change your face or fingerprints and once they are out there, they are out there forever.

The question everyone is now asking; do I want my face, fingerprints, address, date of birth and all of the other pieces of information the NIR will collect on me in the hands of, say, the Germans?

The answer, from Land’s End to John o’Groats is a resounding ‘NO’.

Anyone who signs up for ID cards now is totally insane, or has been living under a rock for the last two weeks. There is nothing you can do about your data being in the DVDR release, but there is everything you can do about staying off of the NIR / ID card database.

All you have to do is refuse to comply, and your data will never enter that system. If enough people refuse, the whole scheme will become unworkable and collapse.

There is a problem however, with passports. Something needs to be done about the new generation passports and accompanying database and the poor sheeple that have applied and been issued with them. They are all going to need to be recalled as too dangerous to be used. They then need to be replaced with ISLAND (Intrinsically Secure Legally Acquired Named Document) Passports.

As you know, the ISLAND Passport system allows you to be issued with a secure document that does not depend on a centralized database for verification and does not violate your rights by assigning a unique number to you.

It is entirely possible to reduce the amount of passport fraud without rolling out an Orwellian surveillance system.

But you know this!

The police understand intimately how reports are forged, corrupted, accusation falsely made, evidence planted and the ‘criminals’ stitched up. That is why they are shrieking like Abu Grahib inmates at the idea that their DNA should be put in the database:

PLANS to force police to give DNA samples have sparked a rebellion among rank-and-file officers.

It is understood all eight of Scotland’s police forces are about to demand that in future new recruits hand over samples to be included in a national genetic database.

This would allow any body matter, such as hair or saliva, found at a crime scene, to be compared with the DNA records of officers, so investigations are not thrown off course through accidental contamination by officers working there.

This is the same reason that they want everyone in the UK to be put on this database. What is interesting is that these police men obviously thought that as police, they would be excluded from the national DNA database. Are they in any way different from other members of the population? If everyone else is being made to go into this database, what on earth would make them think that they have an ‘opt out’?

But rank-and-file police fear that calculating criminals with a grudge against members of the force could manipulate the system to damage the careers of innocent officers.

Actually, what they think is that calculating police men with a grudge against members of the force could manipulate the system to destroy the careers of officers. There. Some substitution for you.

Members of the Scottish Police Federation believe criminals could deliberately contaminate the scene with officers’ DNA, either to implicate them in serious crimes or to give the impression that they had planted evidence. A federation spokesman said: “A point made by many of our members is that it is relatively easy for anyone so minded to obtain DNA traces of a police officer – for example from a discarded cigarette butt – and to deliberately contaminate a locus with it.

If that is the case, and police are to be exempted, then everyone in the UK who has not been convicted of a crime should also be exempted, because the same threat to the reputations and careers of ‘ordinary’ citizens exists for the man in the street and the police man.

“Apart from the suspicion which may or may not fall on the officer, it has the potential to diminish the evidential value of any DNA traces of the real perpetrator of the crime.”

If this is true of the police being on the register, then it is true for the members of the public, and even moreso, because the vectors for fraud increase exponentially when everyone in in the database; ANY cigarette butt or used condom instantly becomes a means of diverting attention away from the perpetrators of crime; every bin in the street becomes a gold mine of DNA to be sourced. If no one is in the database except criminals then this threat disappears, and in fact, when you get a match to a known criminal, the database does what it is meant to do; catch repeat offenders.

Last night the officers’ fears were dismissed as “far fetched” by a source close to the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland, which is driving the new plan forward.

But the possibility of framing police officers is an extremely sensitive issue for the force. A policewoman lost her job after being wrongly accused of leaving her fingerprint at a murder scene. All officers already have to provide fingerprints as a condition of appointment.

Former Strathclyde WPC Shirley McKie was accused of contaminating the scene of the murder of Ayrshire woman Marion Ross, who was found stabbed at her Kilmarnock home in January 1997.

McKie maintained that although she was one of the first officers to arrive at the scene, she had never been in Ross’s house.

Despite the defence argument that the murder scene had been contaminated by police incompetence, David Asbury was convicted on other fingerprint evidence and sentenced to life imprisonment. But 10 months after the conviction, McKie was charged with perjury and suspended by Strathclyde Police for allegedly lying on oath, although she was later fully acquitted.

And there you have it. A perfect example of how someone can have their lives trashed by false evidence.

Civil liberties campaigners last night voiced concerns about the DNA testing plan. John Scott, the chairman of the Scottish Human Rights Centre, said the move was “an intrusion into personal privacy”.

He said it would be easier to justify checking samples against police DNA when the need arose, rather than impose blanket DNA testing.

and the same is true for everyone in the population, not just the police.

Scott also agreed a determined criminal could attempt to frame a police officer with a stolen DNA sample. “There have been cases where it has been suspected that fingerprint evidence has been planted,” he said. “If you have access to someone’s DNA it allows greater scope for the possibility that evidence can be planted.”

The police federation also doubts whether the planned DNA database represents good value for money. It has suggested it may be cheaper simply to obtain samples as required from an individual officer if it is suspected he may have contaminated a crime scene.

Note how they are using all the attacks that the ordinary people use to get themselves off of the slippery slope towards the biometric net. This is a perfect example of ‘first they came for the communists….there was no one left to defend me’. All those police who called for universal DNA collection now have the light shined on them, and they do not like it when the horror of it is applied to them.

Typical.

But the Scottish Executive, which is prepared to change the law to allow the testing regime to begin shortly, rejected such concerns. An Executive spokeswoman said: “The creation of such a database has clear benefits in terms of providing operational, time and financial savings.”

The requirement for new recruits to provide a DNA sample as a condition of appointment has been in place south of the Border since last summer.

Under the Scottish plan, samples would be stored on a database to be searched only if a senior investigating officer had reasonable grounds to believe that innocent contamination of a scene of crime might have taken place.

Once again, special treatment for the police. Outrageous.

Supporters say because technological developments had produced highly sensitive analytical techniques, there is a risk that a DNA profile could be inadvertently contaminated – for example as a result of an officer sneezing, coughing or shedding a stray hair.

OR, deliberately, through planting of evidence.

While this may not lead to a wrongful conviction, it could delay an investigation or at worst prevent the real offender being identified.

Backers of the policy say that if investigators could quickly identify such innocent contamination using the DNA database and discard it, inquiries could proceed quicker.

A spokeswoman for Acpos confirmed that following a meeting last week, all forces had agreed to require new recruits to take a DNA test and follow the English model, although Scotland’s biggest force, Strathclyde Police, is considering requiring all its officers to provide a sample.

A source close to the association said: “The fact that you’ve got someone’s DNA at a crime scene does not mean people will believe that person is responsible.

Well, we know that is a lie don’t we?!

“It is simply an indication that the person may have been at the locus. It would merely start an investigation which would require to look for corroboration.”

[…]

http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/scotland.cfm?id=902562003

The key here is MAY and thanks to the way thick people (‘cumpuuta sez nooooooooooo’) treat anything coming off of an LCD as the gospel truth, there is a real problem with the perception of DNA evidence mixed with computer delivery.

One thing is for sure, there are people out there who understand how insane this is, and as the injustices mount up and the people wake up the inevitable conclusion is that the plans will be completely scrapped.

Lets hope it is BEFORE they collect the DNA and not AFTER.

But it is clear that no one in or out of government knows what the word ‘encryption’ means:

Child database plan under attack following missing discs debacle By Colin Brown, Deputy Political Editor Independent Published: 26 November 2007

A review of security has been ordered over Government plans to put the personal details of 11 million schoolchildren on to a database. The move comes in the wake of the HM Revenue and Customs missing discs debacle.

Information about every child’s name, address, their parents or guardians as well as contact details for each government service they use, including which GP they go to, are to be held on a £224m database called ContactPoint planned for the new year. The information is to be made available to 330,000 government workers on the internet and only a two-part security authentication will be needed to access the data.

Parents’ groups have protested against putting their children on the database, fearing it could be dangerous. But the loss of the personal details of 25 million people receiving child benefit prompted fresh demands from parents for a rethink of the entire scheme..

Ed Balls, the Children’s Secretary, has ordered an urgent independent review of security surrounding the planned database but he is under pressure to order that it should be entirely encrypted if it goes ahead

[…]

The Liberal Democrat spokesman for children, Annette Brooke, said all children’s data should be encrypted. She said ContactPoint information “could be extremely dangerous in the wrong hands”.

[…]

But the Tories are calling for the scheme to be ditched. Tim Loughton, the Conservative spokesman for children, said it should be replaced by a smaller, more tightly controlled database. A spokesman for Mr Balls said he had asked David Bell, the permanent secretary at the Department for Children, Schools and Families, to carry out the review of his department’s data security. He reported back last Friday that it was “very robust”.

Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, is facing calls for a fresh Commons statement today on the “data disaster” after the shadow Home Secretary, David Davis, claimed he has “not told the whole truth” to Parliament. It emerged over the weekend that six more discs had gone missing from the HMRC. They were sent by post on 10 October from a Preston tax credit office to Whitehall.

The Government will review too whether NHS patient information should be sent abroad for processing.

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article3196251.ece

Encryption is not a magic fairy dust that stops data from being escapable, in the same way that you cannot make liquid water not wet.

Annette Brooke obviously hasn’t got a clue about data and its nature. There is nothing wrong with that; what is wrong, is that she is throwing around words without knowing what they really man, in an attempt to look like she knows what she is doing. Clueless people then rely on her poor understanding and use it as re-assurance that nothing can go wrong when the exact opposite is true.

As for data being ‘sent abroad’ for processing, this is, once again, complete insanity. We now know that when they say ‘sent abroad’ they LITERALLY and incomprehensibly mean physically sent abroad on discs!

Clearly this is insane, and for the thousandth time, once a disaster happens, the data cannot be returned, its over, period, done.

Henry Porter is almost 100% awake. Read his latest piece, where he gets is all right except for right at the end, where he say, in his sleepy headed manner:

[…] It is clear we have a short time to act. A high-profile, independent public inquiry is needed to examine the accumulation of personal data by the government, how it is stored, what it is used for and where the risks to security occur. An important aspect is the technology. Is it desirable for multinationals with no stake in this country’s traditions of privacy and freedom to be installing the systems that will control us? I very much doubt we will get such an inquiry because it would strike at the heart of Labour’s grasping and incompetent megalomania. But it is worth the opposition pushing for it.

I receive hundreds of emails each week from people asking what they can do. The first is to join a local group set up by No2ID, one of the best run campaigns I have seen. Terri Dowty’s Action for Rights on Children (Arch) and Helen Wilkinson’s the Big Opt Out both do very good work, as does the Our Kingdom website. We should write to our MPs – especially Labour MPs – and to local newspapers; contribute to blogs and phone-ins. We should talk to our friends and colleagues about what has been done by Labour’s centralisers and mainframe men, who Anderson properly identifies as Marxist controllers in another guise.

Each of us should understand that personal information is exactly that – personal – and that the government has only limited rights to demand and retain it. The scale of its operations and the innate weakness of the systems is a very grave concern to us all.

What is needed – and here I hope someone is listening – is a mass movement on the lines of the Countryside Alliance, which goes across all parties and absorbs the skills and expertise of countless activists. Now is the moment to create a movement in defence of our privacy, security and freedom.

henryporter@henry-porter.com

Guardian

Poor poor Henry!

A Public Enquiry? ANOTHER Public Enquiry? Are you totally INSANE? Just what on earth will another ‘Foxes guarding the henhouse’ opertaion do to stop this insanity?

You see, this is the writing of someone who is not yet completely awake, despite the loudest ever alarm bell ringing right next to his sleepy head. He still believes in the process of ‘democracy’ and the once great institutions of the British, which are now totally at the mercy and control of Murder Inc. We must give credit where credit is due however, and really, Henry Porter has done more than most to help get this problem the exposure that it needs out to those living under rocks without internets.

Proof of the last part of his awakening will be his public commitment to disobedience, like Dame Shirley has done (that line is bullshit. he has already done this, and said he will not submit. a.). No self respecting person will sign up for this nonsense. No self respecting person will willingly submit to it. I will not submit to it. My family will not. My friends have all said categorically that they will not.

What say you Henry? (Said, done and dusted. a.)

You can join all the groups that you want, but as we have said on BLOGDIAL so many times if there is mass non participation the whole scheme will collapse. You are under no obligation to obey laws that are harmful to you or others, and ID cards are a perfect example of this.

In conjunction with joining anti-ID groups like NO2ID, it is very important that people pledge not to cooperate with the system, on an individual and business level.

The business level is more important than the individual, because business is used as a proxy control mechanism by government. All businesses must be forced to give a commitment that they will not cooperate with the ID card / Database state controls. All those who will not give that written commitment must be boycotted. In the end, the power in any country boils down to the money in your pocket as an individual.

Airlines that do not clearly state they will not participate in the data collection crimes should be lightning boycotted. All it will take is a single week of no passengers to bring them to their knees. Once this happens the measures will be dropped. I guarantee it. And by the way, airlines are a perfect example of control by proxy. They are handed edicts from government and then obey them without any regard to the human rights and dignity of passengers. They do it seamlessly and in a fine grained way through their use of databases as a normal part of their business, handing over the cost free spoils to governments under threat of prosecution. Well, the threat of non existence is more frightening to them than any fine for non compliance and this is what it is going to take to make them do what is correct.

Finally, here is a comment attached to the Henry Porter piece. It is brilliant and very enlightening, and was previously touched upon in a post by Meau²:

There already is direct action, by criminals, corrupting the DNA database by deliberately seeding their crime-scenes with other people’s DNA – eventually making this 800 million pound database a next to useless white elephant.

http://www.scotlandonsunday.com/scotland.cfm?id=902562003
“But rank-and-file police fear that calculating criminals with a grudge against members of the force could manipulate the system to damage the careers of innocent officers.
Members of the Scottish Police Federation believe criminals could deliberately contaminate the scene with officers’ DNA, either to implicate them in serious crimes or to give the impression that they had planted evidence.
A federation spokesman said: “A point made by many of our members is that it is relatively easy for anyone so minded to obtain DNA traces of a police officer – for example from a discarded cigarette butt – and to deliberately contaminate a locus with it.”

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg18725163.800
“Police in Manchester in the UK say that car thieves there have started to dump cigarette butts from bins in stolen cars before they abandon them. ”

http://www.out-law.com/default.aspx?page=3436
“Databases on this scale change the nature of society.
For instance, if a criminal were to deposit someone else’s DNA sample at the scene of a crime, then that someone else might have to prove themselves innocent.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/crime/article/0,,1835971,00.html
“The court heard how in order to substantiate her claims, which she made in a letter to the board of Dr Falkowski’s hospital trust, Maria Marchese had obtained one of his used condoms from a rubbish bin and had transferred a specimen of his semen on to a pair of her own knickers.
She handed the underwear to police and Falkowski was arrested, although the case against him was eventually dropped. “The professional consequences were
devastating,” Dr Falkowski told the jury: “I lost my private practice, my reputation was irreparably damaged.”

Paul Nutteing

Awesome.

Once again, those who protect themselves by not submitting to any of this will never be fished out by ‘DNA / fingerprint seeding’ of crime scenes. If however, they manage to put every sheep in the UK in the DNA and or fingerprint database…. the consequences do not bear thinking about.

What the above refers to is obvious, mainly the presumption of innocence lost (OMW a triplet!), and like it says in Meau’s post, the police will simply say, “the computer says you did it, therefore you did it”….until it comes to THEM of course, and the logical conclusion to this is that all police will be put on a special DNA white list along with legislation saying that whenever their DNA is found at a crime scene they are to be presumed innocent!!

Mark my words.

This story shows the extent to which these people are a bunch of mentally retarded incompetent liars. According to BBQ:

Private data ‘also given to firm’

Unencrypted discs with 25 million Child Benefit records on them were handed to an accountancy firm by government auditors, it has emerged.

Obviously the drone that wrote this report has taken the phrase ‘unencrypted discs’ and inserted them here because she thinks that any disc that leaves the government must be encrypted to protect it. The fact is in this case, the disc was handed over personally, and so wether or not it was encrypted is not an issue. What IS an issue is that the data was not anonymised, and that someone had root aceess to the database to be able to export all the tables.

The National Audit Office (NAO) gave the CDs – similar to the ones lost by HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) officials – to accountants KPMG for auditing.

It said the discs – with bank account details on them – were delivered “by hand” to KPMG and returned safely.

The Information Commissioner is probing whether data laws were broken.

A spokesman said the commissioner would be looking at “all aspects” of data protection surrounding the missing Child Benefit records as part of its investigation.

‘All aspects’ will not include wether or not ContactPoint is to be abandoned no doubt.

Meanwhile, police looking for the missing discs say they expect to finish their search at the HM Revenue and Customs office in Tyne and Wear on Friday night. The focus will then turn to premises run by the couriers, TNT.

Something of this value that has been missing for this long will have been copied, so even if they find the discs, the data is out there now. Period. The fact that everyone is scrambling around to find these discs (especially in the light of this story) and not shouting for the closure of ‘the database state’ shows just how STUPID they all are.

‘Treated securely’

An NAO spokesman said it had not asked for sensitive information to be included in the material sent to it by HMRC – but it was confident it had taken steps to ensure its security.

This is absurd. Once the data is out there, all the measures in the world will not put it back. The motherlode has already been shot. There is now no real incentive for criminals to get a hold of any other database because this one will satisfy any criminal for years to come.

This is what we have been saying for years. Once the data is out there, it can never be put back. This cannot be undone. No penalty, no sanction, no censure, no sentence can un-violate the violated.

“We feel we treated this data securely but at the same time we will look at any lessons that may have to be learned,” he added.

If you feel that then you are an unmitigated imbecile.

The data given to KPMG was for the 2006/07 audit and was sent to the NAO offices in March this year. The missing data was produced for the 2007/08 audit.

The details were revealed in a letter sent by the NAO, which was released on Thursday.

The letter from an NAO director, whose name is blanked out, says: “I also confirm that I have asked KPMG to provide me with assurances that they have deleted or erased the data that they analysed as part of our 2006-07 Resource Accounts audit.”

All it takes is one employee to make a pair of copy discs, or ISO images, store them on his iPhone or iPod or laptop, and then BOOM the data is out there forever. There is no way of knowing that it was done or who might have copied the discs. Any assurances, even if given honestly, are worthless. And I GUARANTEE you that this data is lurking in one of KPMG’s backup devices!

Returned safely

The letter was dated 9 November – the day after senior management at HMRC was told about the missing discs.

The NAO told the BBC the data was delivered to KPMG’s offices by hand and had now been returned safely.

This is so TARDED it is beyond belief. These people clearly think that discs are analogous to paper. Even PAPER can be copied after it is handed over, so these assurances are not only wrong, but they are extremely insulting to anyone with half a working brain cell.

A KPMG spokesman agreed with this statement and said any trace of the data contained on the discs had been erased from the company’s computer system.

The Child Benefit details had originally been put on to disc and forwarded to the NAO by HMRC officials at its Tyne and Wear offices in March.

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7108532.stm

Even if this is true, they cannot GUARANTEE that no one copied the data while the discs were in their offices. If they did give such a guarantee, they would be certifiably insane, because there is no way to distinguish a released copy of the discs that escaped from another source and the data set that they were handed. It would be easy to say that ‘it was not us’ and there would be no way to prove or disprove it.

Needless to say, this BBQ report does not counter each of the bogus and TARDED points that have been put out there to re-assure the sheeple public. This is another …YET ANOTHER… example of poor journalism from BBQ. But I digress.

It is abundantly clear that no one can trust these people to handle any sort of data, and it is abundantly clear taht they are the most incompetent people in this country.

It is ASTONISIHING that audits are not ‘done in house’ and that private firms are hired to do the work. Is there NOTHING that the government does for itself? is there nothing that is not outsourced?

And now we hear that they did it DELIBERATELY with forethought:

A secret meeting of senior Whitehall officials made the decision to release personal information on millions of people, it emerged last night, as the “cover-up” row in the lost data scandal deepened.

The Daily Telegraph has established that officials from at least three units within HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) authorised the decision not to strip out sensitive, confidential data before sending the child benefit records of 25 million people through the post.

Nigel Jordan, an assistant director at HMRC, who received copies of key correspondence on the release of the information, is to be hauled before the Commons public accounts committee to explain how the records were lost.

[…]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/11/24/ncustoms124.xml

Once again, they can haul whomever they like before a committee; that will not put the genie back in the bottle!

These mentally retarded subhuman monsters JUST DONT GET IT; they have let escape, on more than one occasion, a perfect, formatted, searchable, exportable, plaintext list of ALL THE CHILDREN IN THE UK along with their parents names, addresses and bank account details of same.

They should all be hung drawn and quartered.

OR

They should take immediate steps to make sure that such a thing can never happen again. That means abandoning all databases involving children and citizens of the UK, and doing everything in the list on this post.

It will be literally a generation before the effects of this disaster start to wind down and the data becomes so out of date that it is rendered useless and worthless. If the government stops collecting and centralizing data on British Citizens now, and return to tightly compartmentalized systems that cannot easily compromise privacy, by the time we reach 2075 they will have a system in place that actually works for the population without violating them, and a population that is no longer in danger from these two DVDs.

Everyone now seems to be waking up to what we and other people have been saying for four years.

What they are NOT doing, is going far enough.

Once again the following must be totally SCRAPPED in order to protect the privacy of the British Public:

• The NIR – the National Identity Register that backs the ID Card.




• Mass Fingerprinting – Compulsory fingerprinting for access to anything must be outlawed.




• The NHS ‘Spine’ – The NHS SPine must be scrapped, as it suffers from the same vulnerabilities as all centralized databases do.




• ContactPoint – The database of all children in the UK must be scrapped, as it is no different to any of the other databases listed above.




• Project Semaphore – The plan to collect 53 pieces of data on all travellers flying to the UK (a mirror project of USVISIT) must be stopped. USVISIT has cost the american people BILLIONS of dollars and only 1500 people have been caught, millions have been subjected to humiliation and violation and none of the people caught have been identified as ‘terrorists’. No one in the UK has done a cost benefit analasis of Project Semaphore and USVISIT; had they done so, they would have found that it is a total waste of money.

All of these projects MUST BE ABANDONED and the contracts terminated, even if there are penalties to be paid.

It’s good news to hear that people are FINALLY waking up, and I know that we have done our own small part in getting the word out about what a disaster this is in the making. Now lets FINISH THE JOB. No signing up for ID cards, demand that your doctor remove your records from his system, and NEVER give your fingerprint to anyone for ANY reason.

This rabid mania for ‘registers’ should now be put out of the minds of the brain dead subhumans who run the government, PERMANENTLY.

Who would have thought that four .25p DVDRs could bring down billion pound contracts and a fascist police state control system?!

The fact of the matter is that these corrupt regimes and their infernal tools are as weak as spiders webs. All it takes is one touch and the whole thing can be brought down. In this case, the biometric net is the weak premise being destroyed.

On the cover of every newspaper in the UK is this news, which should come as no surprise to anyone:

Revenue & Customs loses personal details of 25m people
Deborah Summers and agencies
Tuesday November 20, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

The chancellor, Alistair Darling, today admitted the personal details of 25 million individuals had been lost by HM Revenue and Customs.

The information includes the names, dates-of-birth, national insurance numbers and in some cases the bank details of those claiming child benefits.

Paul Gray, the chairman of HM Revenue and Customs, today resigned over the “extremely serious failure” of security.

In a Commons statement greeted by gasps of astonishment from MPs, Darling told the Commons that two discs containing details of the 7.25 million families claiming child benefit, sent to the National Audit Office, failed to reach the addressee.

[…]

The Guardian

I hate to say it, but I TOLD YOU SO.

The personal details of TWENTY FIVE MILLION PEOPLE contained on TWO DVDRs is now missing.

Here are some obvious questions you would ask of a person who is not incompetent:

What the hell are you doing sending data by post? THAT IS WHAT TEH INTERNETS ARE FOR.
What the hell are you doing burning data onto DVDs?

Data sets the size of DVDs are downloaded MILLIONS OF TIMES A DAY. Are these people really THAT INSANE?

Now.

Is there anyone left ON THIS PLANET that thinks the government should take your fingerprints and photos and use them to administer a national ID card? Is there anyone left IN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE that thinks ContactPoint is a good thing?

I should think not.

Even if they get those discs back, this is a vivid demonstration of how two very small objects can hold the details of the lives of MILLIONS of people. If this information was not held on computers, it would not be possible for the government to create and then misplace such discs, and that is the way it should be, since they are amongst the most incompetent organizations in this or any other universe.

A database of convicted criminals is another story, but these databases of ordinary people must be COMPLETELY OUTLAWED so that it is impossible for data breaches of this kind to take place. Just read the absolute STUPIDITY of these people:

The chancellor told MPs the information went missing after a junior official in the department failed to follow standard procedures and sent a “full copy of the data” to the NAO by courier – not by recorded or registered mail.

When it became clear the discs had not arrived, the same official sent the information again – this time by registered post.

What this article does not mention is wether or not the data on these two, sorry, FOUR DVDRs was encrypted or not.

Had the data been encrypted with GPG, it would not matter if the discs went missing, because it would be impossible to get anything off of them.

But then, using GPG is something COMPETENT people do, not the likes of Citizen Brown and his bumbling buffoons.

Amazingly, this incompetent government has just invoked RIPA against an animal rights activist, threatening her with gaol if she refuses to provide the password to the encrypted data on her hard drive.

You cant make shit like this up.

These people REALLY ARE BUFFOONS.

Think about it. Those discs are worth literally MILLIONS of pounds to a large number of people, criminals being far down on the list.

Finally, this is the insult above all insults:

Campaign group Action on Rights for Children (Arch) warned that children could have been put in danger. “It’s a simple and vital precaution which any self-respecting government agency should be practicing,” its director, Terri Dowty, said.

“This appalling security lapse has placed children in the UK in immediate danger especially those who are already vulnerable.

“Child benefit records contain every child’s address and date of birth. We are not surprised that the chair of HMRC’s board has resigned immediately.”

Arch accused the government of ignoring warnings over the dangers of creating “large centralised databases” of sensitive information about children.

ARCH are a group that is rightly skeptical about ContactPoint.

Now that everyone can see what a TOTAL NIGHTMARE these systems are hopefully this will add tremendous momentum to their absolute abolition.

If you go along willingly with any of this, ID Cards, NIR, ContactPoint, then you can count yourself amongst the stupidest people in the history of mankind.

Once again, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

UPDATE:

The Telegraph echoes BLOGDIAL:

The disks are now either languishing in the bottom of a postbag in the bowels of a London sorting office or are in the hands of organised criminals somewhere in Africa or Asia.

It is an astonishing, almost grotesque, failure that will come to symbolise the gradual collapse of Whitehall’s Rolls Royce reputation into the equivalent of an old heap ready for the scrap-yard.

The only benefit that might possibly come out of it is that surely, now, the Government cannot proceed with the ID card project.

Can it?

[…]

Telegraph

Momentum indeed!

In modern Britain, you are better off being a car than a human being.

These two stories from The Times tell us why. Firstly, there is the story of who is to carve up the human cattle pie, and who is going to be the loser:

BT loses deal for high-tech borders
Dominic O’Connell

AN American defence company has pipped BT to a sensitive IT contract that will bring high-tech methods to policing Britain’s borders.

Raytheon is expected to be named as the winner of the £500m Eborders contract in the next few weeks.

The aim of the project is for IT systems to be installed that will prevent illegal migrants or any other undesirables from entering the UK by stopping them at their port of departure.

Raytheon leads a consortium called Trusted Borders, which includes Accenture, Detica and Serco. It beat competition from Emblem Group, a consortium led by BT that included Lockheed Martin, Logica CMG and Hewlett-Packard.

The Eborders system will link the databases of government departments to those of transport providers to allow the speedy identification of passengers the government would want to exclude.

It is part of the wider strategy that includes biometric passports and visas and the controversial identity-card scheme.

Meanwhile, two defence contractors, BAE Systems and Thales, are understood to have made the Home Office’s long list for a “roster” of companies that will provide the ID-card system.

The list is also said to include Fujitsu, Accenture, EDS, North-rop Grumman, IBM, CSC and Steria. The Home Office is expected to choose just five contractors to make up the roster by the new year.

The ID-cards programme, which has been opposed by the Conservative party and civil liberty campaigners, is expected to be worth between £5 billion and £7 billion.

The first cards, which will use biometric data to provide identification, will be issued in 2009.

The Times

First of all, the e-borders plan and how it is being rolled out is bogus, and built on the wrong principles and technology.
Secondly, Raytheon should not be in charge of Fortress UK®; it is an american military contractor. This sort of thing should always be done ‘in house’ if it is to be done at all, but then again, we know that the British, despite being full to overflowing with the greatest geniuses on the planet cannot organize any large scale government IT project. We wrote about how an american company has the contract to run the UK police fingerprint database (I cant find the URL). Is there going to be any part of HMG left that is run by the British? And the worst part of it is, the money for all of this comes out of your pockets and is then siphoned abroad.

And here is the reason why it is better to be a car in the UK than a human being:

Attack of the clones
A surge in car cloning where criminals copy numberplates is cheating secondhand buyers and landing law-abiding drivers with fines for offences they did not commit

When Mike McLellan, a businessman from Manchester, pulled up in a residential cul-de-sac in the city, he couldn’t help noticing the silver Vauxhall Astra alongside his looked similar. Nothing unusual in that, it’s one of the bestselling vehicles in Britain and silver is one of the most popular colours.

But his interest turned to astonishment when he saw the numberplate was identical. For a second, McLellan, 58, thought he was seeing double. After several confused double takes, he realised he had become a victim of car cloning, the vehicle equivalent of identity theft. He called the police, expecting them to be shocked at his discovery. Their response? “It happens all the time.”

There are up to 100,000 cloned cars on British roads – 10 times previous estimates – according to police officers on a national working group set up to tackle the problem. Cloners use plates stolen from an identical model or copy them. The cloned car will then pass a superficial police check that matches the numberplate with vehicle type and colour.

Armed with their duplicate plates criminals can dodge speeding fines, drive away from petrol forecourts knowing they can’t be traced using CCTV images, escape congestion charges and parking fines, and hide their true identity from police numberplate-recognition cameras. And the offences aren’t all traffic-related.

[…]

The Times

Awesome.

If you are a car in the UK, you CAN change your identity and be anonymous on the street.

If you are a human being in the UK, you CANNOT change your identity and be anonymous.

Why?

Because you cannot replace your face and your fingerprints in the way that a car can have its plates swapped in five minutes. Cars on the streets of the UK with swapped plates can go as they please and no one knows who the driver is or who the car belongs to. Those cars have the true freedom of the road. They cannot be tracked, traced, ticketed, speed trapped, Congeston charged or abused in any way.

That is what it used to be like in the UK for human beings.

You used to be able to walk about freely without being watched. You could not be tracked, traced, surveilled or monitored in any way. You were a private person, going about your own business, and enjoying the liberty of one of the greatest, if not THE greatest countries on earth.

And now….It’s gone.

Whilst looking through the Blarchive for the post about who has the contract for the police fingerprint database, I came across this:

POLICE DATA SNOOPED

Two girlfrinds of Yardie criminals yesterday admitted snopping on the police database.

Civilian workers Davina Kirwan and Sunshes Pike-Williams, both 21, made hundreds of unauthorized checks on their boyfriends and other criminals while employed at Stoke Newington police Station in North London, Southwarrk Crown Court heard.

They also admitted entering false information on to the system.

Kirwan, of Leytonstone, East London, and Pike-Williams, of Ealing, West London, risk being jailed next month.

[…]

Metro Magazinesee also:
BBC News
The Times
Evening Standard

I TOLD YOU!!!!

Two people working inside the police, corrupting and passing information from the police database for their criminal boyfriends.

Now.

If its YOU on the database, and someone who doesnt like you is paying a dudette with access to put convictions on your record, you are literally FUCKED, because its impossible for anyone but criminals to remove information from these records!

Add this to the ultimate poison of a unique number tied to you for life, and you start to see what a nightmare we will be living in if ID cards become a reality.

Someone, some gangsters moll will be able to attribute false crimes to you and there will be nothing you can do about it.

Now, the police have rigorus checks in place to keep criminals and their associates of criminals out of the reach of terminals, but these systems simply do not work.

I have personally seen the forms that the police require to be filled out even for the most trivial of jobs earning 15,000pa. You have to list:

• Name, Address
• Husbands / partners name / address
• Fathers name / address
• Siblings name / address
• Name and address of dependents
• Name and address of “other significant persons”
• “Have you ever been involved in espionage, terrorism, sabotage, actions intended to overthrow or undermine parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means”
• “Have you ever been a member of or supported a group or groups involved in any of the above activities”
• “Have you ever had a close association with anyone who, to your knowledge, has ben a member of or given support to any such group or activities”

And THEN there is the medical disclosure form, which asks if you are suffering from just about any illness imaginable, who your doctors are and all sorts of other very private and personal information.

This form runs to 14 pages.

These two persons clearly had to fill out these expansive and invasive forms, and yet, they were the ‘girlfriends of Yardie criminals’! The only way to protect against these sorts of abuses leaking into every area of your life, is to not allow a unique number to be attached to you. In this way, all of the people who want to foul your record will have to work very hard indeed to do a hatchet job on your records, which will be separated by closed systems on different databases, as they should be.

The Blarchive

There are only two links on google for ‘Davina Kirwan Sunshes Pike-Williams’ one is to BLOGDIAL, the other is to BBQ, and I quoth:

Violence and firearms

The court heard how the pair accessed police computer databases and carried out hundreds of checks on different people, vehicles and crime reports.

They pleaded guilty to committing misconduct in a public office.

Det Supt Trevor Smith from the City of London Police specialist crime unit said there was “no direct evidence that they (their boyfriends) have benefited from this”.

“Because of their actions, we had to conduct a long, lengthy and expensive investigation, and we had to review methods and techniques that we were using,” he said.

[…]

I ROTFL.

“No direct benefit”?! So they did these checks just for fun?

Of course, the officer conveniently left out that these two girls admitted entering false information on to the system.

You can expect to see an explosion of snooping abuse if the NIR / ID Card gets rolled out; and it will not be insiders doing it, it will be ordinary people running perfectly legal background checks on you willy nilly.

You were warned. You are being warned. Take heed!

And finally, another blast from the BLOGDIAL past that warmed my heart:

http://www.life.com/Life/lifebooks/mobsters/gallery1/4.html

If you cant beat em…Join me!

Post updated March 26 2009

More true now than it ever was!

The wife of Lord Birt, the former Downing Street policy guru, looks set to land a massive contract to develop Labour’s controversial ID-card scheme.

As No 10’s “blue skies thinker”, Lord Birt – who was criticised as a “croak-voiced Dalek” when he ran the BBC – advised on Government IT programmes and drew up a major report on criminal justice which analysed the effect ofidentity cards.

Now The Mail on Sunday can reveal that his second wife Eithne Wallis, a senior executive at a Japanese computer giant, is poised to cash in on the policy he helped to develop.

Ms Wallis, who married Lord Birt last year, is the director of government contracts at Fujitsu Services, which was last month shortlisted for the £2billion contracts to operate the ID-card scheme.

Last night the Conservatives expressed “concern” at the way the company could be benefiting from insider knowledge.

Ms Wallis, 54, met 62-year-old Lord Birt, a former BBC Director General, three years ago on a Whitehall committee when she was head of the National Probation Service.

Lord Birt went on to leave Jane, his first wife of 41 years, and to marry his mistress, prompting a major family rift. None of the children from their first marriages attended the low-key civil wedding ceremony.

Ms Wallis, who was born in Northern Ireland, quit the civil service to join Fujitsu in February 2005 on a six-figure salary as a “senior member of the business transformation group”.

She was promoted in July that year to her present post of managing director of government business and began positioning the company as a leading supporter of Labour’s unpopular ID-card programme.

Fujitsu funded a Government report which showed how to overcome concerns from ethnic minorities that the scheme could lead to racial and religious discrimination.

Then, last year, Fujitsu paid for a debate on ID cards at the Institute for Public Policy Research, New Labour’s favourite think-tank.

Until December 2005, Lord Birt was occupying a Whitehall office drawing up secret reports for Tony Blair on issues ranging from criminal justice to Government information technology.

According to reports, he regularly used to “chew the cud” with the Prime Minister on ID cards.

[…]

As head of the BBC, Lord Birt was dismissed by writer Dennis Potter as a “croak-voiced Dalek” for stifling creativity and was lampooned by Private Eye in the column “Birtspeak”.

[…]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/

No actually, it is not Lord Birt who is chewing the cud, but the British people, the human cattle, who are going to be chewing the cud, and being herded like the bovine / human sub species they have become.

This is the corruption that we know about. There are, 1000% guaranteed more cases like this where ‘a friend of a friend of someone in the department’ has landed one of these criminal contracts.

It is nauseating, infuriating and BAD.

A lurker sent me this:

Its almost like she’s quoting from Blogdial.

Heh…

Peer ‘ready to defy ID card law’
The Liberal Democrat peer Baroness Williams has said she would rather go to prison than carry an identity card.

Baroness Williams said the cards would seriously undermine individual liberty so people were entitled to refuse their co-operation, using non-violent means.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions, she described the plans as “a Big Brother scheme of the most terrifying kind”.

From 2010, all UK passport applicants will be issued with biometric ID cards.

The £5.6bn scheme will also mean all foreign nationals will have to carry them from next year.

The government says cards will help protect people from identity fraud, will tackle illegal working and illegal immigration, and disrupt criminals and terrorists’ use of false identities and ensure free public services are only used by those entitled to them.

But Baroness Williams said: “Because it is so expensive the government has proposed that it will sell our data to commercial interests who will then be able to track down every damn thing you do from dawn until dusk.

“And you won’t be able to escape from it because the ID card which will be checked against your credit card will be a record of exactly where you’ve been, what you’ve done, who you’ve talked to.

“My view quite simply is that the ID card will undermine individual liberty so seriously that one’s entitled to say one won’t co-operate with it.

“I have not suggested I would use violence. I am suggesting I wouldn’t co-operate with it, nor will I.”

Asked whether that meant she would go to prison for breaking the law, she replied: “So be it – and I’m not suggesting any act of violence but we’ve got to not co-operate with something as bad as this.”

Nick Clegg, one of the party’s leadership candidates, has also stated he would take part in a civil disobedience campaign against ID cards.

Last month, he said if legislation were passed, he would lead a grassroots campaign of civil disobedience to thwart the programme and thousands of people would simply refuse to register.

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7088315.stm

She is right of course.

But what she has failed to understand (or at least failed to say) is that exactly the same dangers exist if you simply apply for a passport and hand over your fingerprints.

Once they have your fingerprints, they can use both stationary and mobile fingerprint readers to interface with the NIR in lieu of a physical card.

It is the NIR which is the danger, not the physical card alone.

If Dame Shirley is really serious, she should encourage everyone to refuse to be fingerprinted by the authorities for any reason. That means not applying for a new passport until the requirement of fingerprinting is eliminated.

Violence is absolutely not required. All you need to do is get everyone to agree to refuse to co-operate. That is the only thing that is required.

As for her reading BLOGDIAL, that may or may not be the case. What we do know with absolute certainty is that she has read the ‘Frances Stonor Saunders‘, which spells out beautifully and perfectly what ID cards are all about. We know this because everyone in the Lords read it.

This scheme is going to fail. The next part they are trying to bring in is the fingerprinting and registration of all foreigners. This is not only discriminatory, but it is insanely stupid, as we have said over and over again.

Firstly:

[…]

It’s certainly possible that people might find ways to mount legal challenges to compulsory ID cards, but the most obvious potential challenge would be over the introduction of an ID card for EU citizens resident in the UK. This is specified in the ID Cards Act, and can only go ahead without being challenged by Brussels if compulsory ID cards for all UK citizens also go ahead. The moment Gordon Brown’s Government admits that compulsory ID cards aren’t going to happen for UK citizens is the moment that he also has to abandon them for non-UK EU citizens, because he’s not permitted to discriminate against them.

[…]

The Register

And secondly, you cannot discriminate against foreigners who are not EU citizens because that is….DISCRIMINATION.

Thirdly, this doesn’t make any sense on a practical level. If you stop someone (you being a police man) and then use your mobile NIR fingerprint reader to scan the person, and they are NOT in the NIR, what does this mean? IT can mean one of several things:

This person is not in the database because he is an:

1. Illegal immigrant
2. ID card Refusnik
3. British Citizen without a passport

So, what do you do?

You have to haul in the person wether they are entitled not to be in the NIR or not, just like they do in Belgium if you are caught in the street without your ID. You are taken to the police station until they can find out exactly who you are. Them not knowing who you are at all times is a crime in Belgium, and it is the logical conclusion of having a compulsory ID card. But I digress.

The only way to be sure that only criminals are not in the database is to put all the law abiding citizens in the database. Fingerprinting only foreigners is insanely stupid because it is impossible to distinguish between a foreigner and a True Brit^®. An identity database that only targets foreigners or that is voluntary is useless for the purposes of identifying people on a routine basis. The above leaves out all the moral objections any of which is enough to destroy a scheme like this.

Fingerprinting is for criminals and the detection of crime. It should be done only when a person is convicted of a crime, and if someone is convicted and later acquitted, those records should be erased. That is the only fit purpose for this technology, and it should be used to speed up the identification of known criminals and nothing more.

Fingerprinting everyone in a country is very much the ‘Nuclear Option’ in the identity arena, and this option should be and will be shunned by all decent and properly informed people.

Just you watch.

By Mariko Sanchanta in TokyoPublished: October 25 2007 01:32 | Last updated: October 25 2007 01:32Millions of visitors to Japan will be required to have their photographs and fingerprints taken from next month as part of new immigration procedures meant to help prevent terrorist attacks.

The move, which includes fingerprinting longtime permanent foreign residents, marks the first time a country other than the US has introduced such procedures. The US adopted similar measures following the September 11 attacks and the UK and European Union are considering introducing comparable requirements.

The new measures have been attacked by human rights groups, which have said the collection of biometric data could play into the hands of Japanese xenophobes and raises privacy issues.

“This will further the perception in Japan that foreigners are terrorists and at the same time rejects the idea that the Japanese could be terrorists as well,” said Makoto Teranaka, secretary-general of Amnesty International Japan. “In fact, all recent terrorist attacks have been conducted by the Japanese,” he said, pointing to the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway by the Aum Shinrikyo cult.

The new procedures are part of an amendment of Japan’s Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act, which contains measures to prevent terrorism. The measures come into force on November 20. In certain instances, Japan will be able to share its biometric data with other governments.

The move has been criticised by many foreigners living in Japan, particularly as the government has said it wants to make Tokyo an international financial centre. It also coincides with the government’s long-running Visit Japan campaign, which aims to increase the number of foreign visitors. Last year, more than 8m people visited the country, up from 5.2m in 2001.

Though Japan invited public comments on the new measure, one could only do so in Japanese.

If a foreigner refuses to be fingerprinted and photographed, he or she will not be permitted to enter the country.

Certain individuals, including “special permanent residents” (which include longtime ethnic Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese and Brazilian-Japanese residents), people under 16 and diplomats will be exempted from the new procedures.

Financial Times

Fingerprinting tourists and anyone for that matter will not prevent ‘terrorist attacks’.

Like the article says, the people who do ‘terrorist attacks’ (more accurately, mass murder by poison) are JAPANESE not TOURISTS, and even if they fingerprinted all Japanese citizens alive that would not prevent another gas attack.

Some Japanese citizens have a long standing problem with foreigners so maybe this insane measure is a consequence of that; in any case, thats Japan off of my list of places to visit!

Another Post Tipping Point^™ post.

UPDATE!

Amnesty International calls bullshit:

[…]

Amnesty International is calling for the immigration plan to be abandoned.

“Making only foreigners provide this data is discriminatory,” said Sonoko Kawakami of Amnesty’s Japan office.

“They are saying ‘terrorist equals foreigner’. It’s an exclusionary policy that could encourage xenophobia.”

The new system is being introduced as Japan campaigns to attract more tourists.

More than 6.7m foreign visitors came to Japan in 2006, government statistics show. Immigration officials say they are unsure how long tourists can expect to wait in line for the checks to be made.

Britain is set to require non-European foreign nationals to register biometric details when applying for visas from next year.http://www.news.com.au/
[…]

And amazingly, they think that this will HELP bring new visitors to Japan!