Our new Holford Myths site is launched today – this has been developed to counteract false information about Patrick Holford.

Anyone who challenges today’s drug-based medical paradigm effectively is a likely target for attack. Notably, since the publication of Food Is Better Medicine Than Drugs by Patrick Holford and Jerome Burne, certain drug industry funded organisations and drug-oriented individuals have campaigned to discredit Patrick Holford by spreading false allegations. The main opponents have been Ben Goldacre in the Guardian, pharmacology professor David Colquhoun, the anonymous Holford Watch and certain dieticians.

The associations with the pharmaceutical industry and/or organisations funded by the pharmaceutical industry are explored in the free e-book Cultural Dwarfs and Junk Journalism: Ben Goldacre, Quackbusters and Corporate Science by Martin Walker for those who want to understand the modus operandi of the organised lobby against alternative and nutritional approaches within medicine.

Responses to false allegations about Patrick Holford plus direct links to extracts about Ben Goldacre, David Colquhoun, Holford Watch and certain dieticians from the above e-book can be found on www.holfordmyths.com

[…]

Patrick Holford is a man who owns a company that makes and sells vitamins and dietary supplements. He writes books, and sells them.

This is an affront to people like Ben Goldacre and his ilk. The only food you should be eating is the food that SCIENCE says you should be eating. The only thoughts you should be thinking are the ones that SCIENCE says you should be thinking. Anyone who eats anything else, who thinks anything else, who says anything other than what they believe, who does not swallow the dogma is ANTI-SCIENCE and is to be…

BURNED AT THE STAKE

Rational people are not frightened of Vitamin Sellers or book writers. They make their case cleanly and then STFU. If the thinking behind Bad Science is so great, then let them write a diet book, sell it, and then make people thinner…[booming voice] WITH SCIENCE [/booming voice]; what need have you to personally attack, ridicule and seek to destroy other people? What do you gain out of it? Who appointed these sub human monsters the protectors of the general public? Once again, if they have something better to offer, OFFER IT, do not pump the world full of negative vibes (man [or is that hairless monkey?]).

The fact of the matter is, none of these people have anything to offer, other than rancid bile, calls to disbelief and personal attacks. It goes like this; you have posts on your blog about UFOs, therefore, ALL your stuff is garbage. That is a stupid skeptic trick. That is junk science. I say “God does not exist” and so you are a fool to believe anything else. That is how they work; they do not have a better diet for you, or a better set of supplements, a different, greater belief to follow (except their utterly fallable, incomplete, and downright deadly dogma) the only thing they have to offer is ‘DO NOT DO THAT’ ‘DO NOT BELIEVE THAT’ ‘DO NOT EAT THAT’, and of course, there is nothing that you can DO with that negativity, and the newspaper it is printed on is fit only to light up your fire.

I can tell you something straight – anyone who writes a column like ‘Bad Science’ is on my shitlist from the first speck of ink on the paper. Anyone who runs other people down, who uses Stupid Skeptic Tricks is a TOTAL SCUMBAG.

Lets be clear:

Should they be burned at the stake? No.
Should they be stopped from writing in that RAG the Guardian or any other rag? No.
Are they the worst examples of human trash ever? Yes!

The point is, these attacks on Vitamin Sellers are direct attacks on MY LIBERTY. They are an affront to decent people everywhere, who just want to mind their own business and who do not want to be told what to do, what to think and what to eat and who to trade with.

People who are against Patrick Holford are Fascists. They want to forbid you from taking vitamins, they want the law to ban the sale of dietary supplements. They want you to not read his books; in effect, they want to censor him, and prevent the free flow of information across the world. They are as bad as the Chinese Government, or those guys who burned books in the 1930s.

All free people have the absolute right to publish what they want, and free people have the right to read what they like. Free people have the right to control what goes into their bodies; that means that they can eat whatever they like, inject whatever they like, smoke whatever they like, and it is no one’s business. It is not the business of Ben Goldacre and the corprophiliacs at The Guardian. It is not the business of Bayer, GSL, Novartis, Monsanto, Uncle Sam, HMG or anyone else.

Anyone who tries to shut down writers like Patrick Holford are on the side of Fascists and Fascism. They are against Liberty and against the freedom to read and to learn (and no, learning does not mean only learning what is ‘right’).

I am fed up to the teeth of the attacks on vitamins and food supplements. I am tired of reading about the weasel words of the corporate shills defending the indefensible, trying to take away my right to interact with whomever I want in whatever way I want.

In the end, these people must be put down like diseased dogs. Fox news is learning what it means to defy the force of Liberty unleashed. Their stock has taken a dip thanks to the boycott that is now running against all the sponsors of that evil station. This can be done to any company, and certainly, if the vitamin eaters and supplement takers decide to boycott a newspaper that is attacking them, the effects will be felt. Newspapers can publish whatever they like, and everyone has the right to buy and sell whatever they like…including stocks.

Some may say that I go in too hard on these subjects; part of the style of this blog during its nearly seven years of operation is to go in with all guns blazing if thats what you like. Nevertheless, in the past, when people tried to take away the liberty of free men the result was war and killing and that is what The Guardian, Skeptics and corporate shills are doing; literally attacking millions of free people; trying to erase their liberty, poison them and destroy their lives. That they are subjected only to some bad language and shouting is very lucky for them; in another age they would lose their lives…in any case, they have lost. More people than ever are turning away from Industrial Pharmaceutical Medicine and The Medical Industrial Complex. This is why they bring out the big guns to try and shoot down people like Patrick Holford – though in the case of Goldacre we are talking about a .22 not The Guns of Navarone… but I digress; the publishers of that garbage had better think twice about running hit pieces against people who are doing nothing but mind their own business – there could be big economic consequences for them, just like Fox is feeling right now.

For those morons out there who say that vitamin sellers are defrauding the public, that is not your business. There is plenty of legislation dealing with poisoning and poisoners to take care of people who sell things that actually harm buyers under the guise that it is medicine. We have enough law on the books to take care of almost every possible situation. It is you baying and whining morons who create the monster governments that stop at nothing to control everything that you do down to how and when you piss.

Make up your own minds, eat what you want, publish what you want, read what you want, think what you want and DOWN with the anti vitamin fascists!

UPDATE!

a lurker sends this

> this snippet should have been in your post:
>
> At this point it is perhaps worth pointing out
> that Goldacre won a British Science Writers (BSW)
> award, in 2003. At this time, the BSW was funded
> by Glaxo Wellcome and called the Glaxo Wellcome
> BSW Award, the very year that he began working
> for the Guardian. The drug AZT was made by
> Burroughs-Wellcome, now GlaxoSmithKline.
>
> and check out this book:
>
> http://www.slingshotpublications.com/dwarfs.html

What a nasty, foul and loathsome piece of work!

By STAN GOFF

For starters, I have become a single-issue voter. The two-front war in Iraq-Afghanistan continues to drag on; and I am thoroughly convinced that no viable Democratic nominee will stop these occupations.

The recent analysis by Allan Nairn shows that even the putative anti-war Edwards (who the press is smothering because of his anti-corporate declarations) has a backroom full of defense contractors. Clinton is a ruthless war-monger, period. Obama is employing on the sorriest, pro-Zioinist, neoliberal trash on the market, i.e., Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Clarke, and Dennis Ross, on his core advisory staff.

No one listens to me much, but in some fantasy world where they might, I would suggest that others follow suit with me here. In open primary states, cross over to vote in the Republican primaries for Ron Paul. In closed primary states, switch fast to Republican (like in the next few days).

Vote in the Republican primary; and vote for Ron Paul. Turnout will be dismally low for Republicans this year, because they have been demoralized by the Bush loons’ performances. Independents will vote Paul. The other Republicans are engaged in a fratricidal melee.

I already know what I am going to hear from all over the program-intoxicated, “I won’t endorse this-n-that position” liberal-left. Ron Paul is backward on abortion, passively racist, anti-immigrant, and on and on. Sorry, but I said I’d vote a dead cat that was anti-war before I’d vote a resurrected Eugene Debs if he showed up and supported the war. I meant that from my heart.

Cynthia McKinney is running Green, though she hasn’t got the nomination yet. Remember Cynthia McKinney? When she broke with the DLC diktat, her own party fronted another Black woman (Denise Majette) to run against her in an open primary, and Republicans crossed over massively to vote in the Democratic primary to unseat her in a foregone Democratic Congressional district.

Two can play that game. If Cynthia McKinney runs in 2008 for President, I’ll write her in if I have to just to burn a vote for Clinton or Obama. But meanwhile, Ron Paul is on our primary ballot (North Carolina), because he is running as a Republican (we have draconian ballot access conditions here for thrid-parties, thanks to — of course — Democrats).

Ron Paul is running for President. Just what are the capabilities of a President, and what are his likely courses of action… in the unlikely event he wins?

Well, he is the Commander-in-Chief, so he can bring the troops home immediately, as well as order the military-industrial complex to radically scale back. In case anyone on the left has missed the implications of this, this would be a profoundly anti-imperial development that would take the US boot off the necks of hundreds of millions of people around the world.

He is a libertarian who dislikes corporate subsidies, so he would veto the mega-billion dollar subisidies for Big Agra, Big Pharma, nuclear power company insurance policies, Weapons-R-Us, the ADM/Cargill Great Ethanol Scam,et al. He could veto the federal highway spending that is promoting sprawl. He has also stated that he opposed so-called free trade agreements.

Hello?

Don’t argue with libertarians when they are right. Many of them say that the leviathan-capitalists that dominate the world’s economy could not get as big as they are in an unfettered and unsubsidized market. Newsflash: that is actually true.

Ron Paul is a Gold Bug. For the uninitiated, that means he believes dollar-value should be pegged to a gold-standard. The implications of a return to the gold standard by the Fed are grim… for Wall Street and the military, both of which depend on massive foreign loans convered by runaway printing presses. Putting a stop to this is a Good Thing. What is the net effect?

Ron Paul may have the most outrageous personal account of race you might imagine; but what is the most horrific social catastrophe in the United States for Black and Brown folk? You guessed it: the criminal (in)justice system. The malignant growth of the American Gulag has been fueled — more than by any other cause — by the ever-more-punative criminalization of drug use and drug addiction, and the ability fo the criminal justice system to apply this criminalization with special force against African America and Hispano-Latinas. Here’s the thing. Paul opposes the criminalization of drugs. What is the net effect?

When we are at the point in history where we cannot change the electoral system, then we need to think tactically about what we can do right now. What will a Paul victory in the primaries do? Not whether a vote for Paul in the Republican primaries endorses his decentralizing philosophy on reproductive choice. President Paul will not be writing legislation. The Executive Branch decides how strongly to enforce legislation… like domestic spying fer-instance.

President Paul would close Guantanamo, halt CIA kidnappings, and gut the enforcement capacity for the PATRIOT Act.

Nominee Paul would give 2008 voters a choice between a real anti-war candidate and a phony Democratic equivocator. The intensity of anti-war sentiment in the country already forced ex-war-hawk Edwards to adopt an out-in-nine-months position to left flank his Democratic opponents.

Don’t ask yourself “what are the ideas?” If your toilet backs up, you can come up with a thousand ideas while shit-water cascades onto the floor. The question is not about ideas; it is, “What will be the net effect?”

Wanna throw a monkey wrench into a fixed electoral system? Here’s a chance.

Stan Goff is the author of “Hideous Dream: A Soldier’s Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti” (Soft Skull Press, 2000), “Full Spectrum Disorder” (Soft Skull Press, 2003) and “Sex & War” which will be released approximately December, 2005. He is retired from the United States Army. His blog is at www.stangoff.com.

Goff can be reached at: stan@stangoff.com

[…]

http://www.counterpunch.org/goff01042008.html

And there you have it. Snarfed from Lew Rockwell who describes the above as:

Another Left-Liberal Supports Ron Paul
And smacks down some of the left’s dumb arguments against him.

Points of order; Ron Paul’s ideas on ‘race’ are not outrageous in any way – and the fact that Stan Goff calls people ‘black’ demonstrates that he knows less about people than Ron Paul does. But I digress. The rest of this is almost BLOGDIAL in its absolutely pure common sense.

I especially like the bit about your loo overflowing with shit; of course, on BLOGDIAL we say, “if your loo is overflowing and the poop, pee water and used partially disintegrated loo roll is about to spill over the edge, you do not sit there and call for a white paper, go on a demonstration or write to your MP…you get the plunger and start MAKING IT GO DOWN!” … and you do this BEFORE the ‘shit-water’ even gets to the edge; as soon as you see it rising, you ACT QUICKLY.

Sadly, for america and the rest of the world, the loo has already overflowed and we are all walking in an inch of filthy water. Its not too late to call in the plumber though, and his name is RON PAUL.

Or:
Paedophiles must guard Children
Fire must guard Gasoline
etc etc

MPs say losing computer data should be made a crime

Tania Branigan, political correspondent
Thursday January 3, 2008
The Guardian

Recklessly or repeatedly mishandling personal information should become a criminal offence, a committee of MPs urges today in the wake of the child benefit fiasco.

no, the COLLECTION of personal information under certain circumstances, should become a criminal offence.

A report from the justice select committee says there is evidence of a widespread problem within government and expresses concern that further cases of data loss are still coming to light, adding that concerns about systemic failings were raised two years ago by the man now in charge of the government’s review of security. The committee says that companies should be obliged to report information losses.

They have been warned repeatedly about the problems inherent in centralized databases which are in fact, not needed to improve services or provide greater ‘security’ of documents. These people, these computer illiterate dimwits are the criminals; they push on ahead at the urging of vendors without any care about the consequences or the wishes of the electorate, in a deliberate and evil bid to do this ‘Transformational Government’ magic trick, which will increase their power by orders of magnitude and enrich their friends. Yes indeed, these people are the criminals, and there are no two ways about it.

“The scale of the data loss by government bodies and contractors is truly shocking, but the evidence we have had points to further hidden problems,” warned Alan Beith, chairman of the committee. “It is frankly incredible, for example, that the measures HMRC [HM Revenue & Customs] has [now] put in place were not already standard procedure.”

What is frankly incredible, is that they have been warned about this specifically and everyone in both houses has read the details written in crystal clear english. There is no way that they can claim that they did not understand the consequences of this diabolical plan hatched by the vendors to make victims of the virtuous villigers of England by the voratious vacuuming of their vital data. They are guilty of not heeding the warnings, and going along with it in an act of flagrant negligence.

The committee says the government must find ways to minimise the risks inherent in maintaining large databases to which a large number of people have access and suggests that new offences might strengthen security procedures.

All the comittees and white papers that they can sit at and print will not stop this headlong rush into disaster. All centralized databases of innocent people must be destroyed. All planned databases like ContactPoint and the NIR must be stopped. Everyone everywhere must refuse to cooperate with any document or process that has been derived from an unreasonable use of their personal data. Everyone everywhere must refuse to allow their biometric data to be harvested for collection into these databases. That means no fingerprinting for any reason, no iris scans and no DNA swabs for anyone except those convicted of a violent offence.

Criminal offences under the Data Protection Act – such as unlawfully obtaining or disclosing personal data – only apply to people who are not the “data controller”. That means that although third parties who misuse the details can be prosecuted the people holding the information, such as large businesses or government departments, cannot be held responsible for breaches. Beith said: “Clearly, criminal sanctions are not the only ones you want to use. But perhaps the issue would be taken more seriously if there was a criminal offence at the end of the line.”

These are the words of a total imbecile.

Once the data is out, no criminal sanction can make it private again.. Its like trying to put an egg back together once it has been broken, you know the story Beith, Humpty Dumpty? Does that make this easier for you to understand?

The report also argues that the information commissioner needs more resources. At present his office’s budget is just £10m a year.

[…]

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/homeaffairs/story/0,,2234448,00.html

Well, what a surprise. They want MORE MONEY from the TAXPAYER to solve a problem that THEY CREATED out of THIN AIR by using the TAXPAYERS MONEY.

These people really are the criminals, that is absolutely clear.

TOKYO (Reuters) – Yes, UFOs do exist, Japan’s top government spokesman said on Tuesday.

The comment by chief cabinet secretary Nobutaka Machimura drew laughter from reporters at his regular briefing on government policy.

Earlier the cabinet, responding to an opposition lawmaker’s question, issued a statement saying it could not confirm any cases of unidentified flying objects.

“This is an issue that the nation is interested in — it is a defence issue and a confirmation operation needs to take place,” Ryuji Yamane, a lawmaker from the main opposition Democratic Party who submitted the question to the cabinet, told Reuters.

“But the government does not even try to collect information necessary for the confirmation.”

Machimura, asked about the government’s view on UFOs at a regular press conference, told reporters that the government can only offer a stereotyped response.

“Personally, I definitely believe they exist,” he said, apparently tongue in cheek.

But the prime minister stuck to the official view.

“I have yet to confirm (that UFOs exist),” Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda told reporters later in the day.

(Reporting by Yoko Kubota and George Nishiyama, Editing by Michael Watson)

[…]

http://uk.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUKT37017220071218

In a country where ‘face’ is central to the identity of the individual, being publicly laughed at by brain dead robot journalists must have hurt.

Nobutaka Machimura however, will be vindicated. He will stand with the other great men of history and reason who made statements like, “The Earth is round”, and, “The Earth orbits around the Sun, not the Sun around the Earth”.

As for the journalists who laughed out loud at this intelligent man, well, they are on the wrong side of history.

UFOs are a matter of National Defense interest. Ex members of the French government say so, and so does everyone else with even the slightest bit of knowledge about this subject, which sadly, (or maybe not sadly) most people haven’t got even the first clue.

Bring on the ridicule in the form of Santa Claus jokes. No matter what anyone says, UFO’s are REAL and there are no two ways about it.

UPDATE!

Note how BBQ propagandists spin this story:

[…]

Earlier, in response to a question from an opposition lawmaker, the Japanese government issued a statement saying it could not confirm any cases of UFOs.

But Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura later told reporters he believed they were “definitely” real.

It is the sort of question politicians dread but, under Japanese rules, are unable to ignore.

A member of the opposition asked the government what its policy was to deal with UFOs.

He said work should begin urgently to try to confirm whether or not they exist because of what he called “incessant” reports of sightings.

[…]

Seems ok doesn’t it? it is true that the reports of UFOs are constant; incessant is a good way to describe the frequency, and we are not talking about reports of sundogs, as this lame ass pathetic moron does by inference in this absurd article.

[…]
Most alerts turned out to be birds or other objects.
[…]

This is lie speak.

If there were one million bad reports and only one genuine report of a UFO that could be explained in no other terms other than an alien space craft, then the case is proven. It is completely irrelevant that there are many misidentifications; what IS relevant are the many extraordinarily high quality cases that are on the record. Any good journalist with a working brain would know this.

One of the best documented cases was a JAL (Japan Air Lines) pilots report which is a very high quality report. That line is just a propaganda style lie.

[…]
Perhaps with his tongue a little in his cheek he insisted that he believed UFOs did “definitely” exist.
[…]

Or perhaps not? We can never be sure with any report that comes from BBQ!

and here comes the prejudicial final punch:

[…]
Questioned about the existence of alien spaceships, Japan’s Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda thought about it and then answered carefully.

He said he had “not yet confirmed” whether they existed.

The conspiracy theorists will note that the answer was not a “no”.

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7150156.stm

Whenever BBQ or any mainstream media outlet wants to demonize and discredit a person, they pull out the phrase ‘conspiracy theorist’ and when they want to discredit or trash an idea, they use the phrase ‘conspiracy theory’.

Neither of these applies to the subject of UFOs. Only a fool believes in UFOs; rational people come to the understanding that some UFOs can only be explained as the space craft of alien beings visiting Earth.

These ideas however, are far too subtle for the likes of ‘Chris Hogg’ who it appears, cannot even use the Googles.

What amazes me is that someone somewhere in BBQ thinks it necessary to derail and control information and the thinking about UFOs. But then again, it isn’t too surprising is it?

Or is that a conspiracy theory?!

I said before that any call for a White Paper or Public Inquiry is totally insane, and anyone who calls for one is delusional. As we have now seen, there has been a report that does nothing to stop the ID / centralized database juggernaut:

The Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR) believes that the Government’s response to the interim Poynter report shows that they just don’t understand what has gone wrong. Their refusal to abandon the headlong rush towards Transformational Government — the enormous centralised databases being built to regulate every walk of life — is not just pig-headed but profoundly mistaken.

Both Alasdair Darling, commenting on the HMRC fiasco, and Ruth Kelly, telling the House about the loss of 3 million people’s personal information, told us that once `lessons have been learned’ and `procedures tightened’ the march to ever-larger database systems will continue.

Before Transformational Government came along, only small amounts of data were lost — but as the new databases cover the whole population, everyone’s affected now, not just a few unlucky people.

Transformational Government means putting all of the eggs into one basket and it is creating:

• The multi-billion pound identity card scheme, to hold data on the whole population
• The National Health spine, which will make everyone’s health records available for browsing by a million NHS workers
• ContactPoint which will record details on every child in England, with details of their parents, carers and indicators of whether they have any contact with social services. Three hundred thousand people can look that information up.
• A universal pensioner’s bus pass scheme which will hold the data on 17 million people, and in principle will let any bus driver learn your age and address — when all that it should record is an entitlement to free travel.

Ross Anderson, Chair of FIPR and Professor of Security Engineering at the University of Cambridge said, “the Government believes that you can build secure databases and let hundreds of thousands of people access them. This is nonsense — we just don’t know how to build such systems and perhaps we never will. The correct way to design such systems is to localise the data, in a school, in your local GP practice. That way when there is a compromise because of a technical failure or a dishonest user then the damage is limited.

“You can have security, or functionality, or scale — you can even have any two of these. But you can’t have all three, and the Government will eventually be forced to admit this. In the meantime, billions of pounds are being wasted on gigantic systems projects that usually don’t work, and that place citizens’ privacy and safety at risk when they do.”

Richard Clayton, FIPR Treasuer said, “Personal data ought to be handled as if it were little pellets of plutonium — kept in secure containers, handled as seldom as possible, and escorted whenever it has to travel. Should it get out into the environment it will be a danger for years to come. Putting it into one huge pile is really asking for trouble. The Government needs to completely rethink its approach and abandon its Transformational Government disaster.”

[…]

http://www.fipr.org/

The reason why no White Paper or report is going to stop any of this is that BILLIONS of pounds in contracts have been handed out to the friends and family of ministers and none of them are willing to stab their friends and family in the back.

It doesn’t matter what any report or paper says, they will push this until either the people revolt or the people give in. That is why anyone calling for reason is a fool. That is why anyone depending on the processes of democracy is delusional. The only thing that is going to stop all of this is an explosion of the type we saw with the poll tax, or some other similar mass revolt that cannot be ignored.

We all know what sort of shape they can take and marching is not one of them.

But you know this!

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.

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.

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

Finally, at the 11th hour, people are waking up and realizing that the only way to kill The War Machine is to choke it of its blood:

The Nation:

I will not pay my income tax if we go to war with Iran. I realize this is a desperate and perhaps futile gesture. But an attack on Iran–which appears increasingly likely before the coming presidential election–will unleash a regional conflict of catastrophic proportions. This war, and especially Iranian retaliatory strikes on American targets, will be used to silence domestic dissent and abolish what is left of our civil liberties. It will solidify the slow-motion coup d’état that has been under way since the 9/11 attacks. It could mean the death of the Republic.

Let us hope sanity prevails. But sanity is a rare commodity in a White House that has twisted Trotsky’s concept of permanent revolution into a policy of permanent war with nefarious aims–to intimidate and destroy all those classified as foreign opponents, to create permanent instability and fear and to strip citizens of their constitutional rights.

A war with Iran is doomed. It will be no more successful than the Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon in 2006, which failed to break Hezbollah and united most Lebanese behind that militant group. The Israeli bombing did not pacify 4 million Lebanese. What will happen when we begin to pound a country of 65 million people whose land mass is three times the size of France?

Once you begin an air campaign it is only a matter of time before you have to put troops on the ground or accept defeat, as the Israelis had to do in Lebanon. And if we begin dropping bunker busters and cruise missiles on Iran, this is the choice that must be faced: either send US forces into Iran to fight a protracted and futile guerrilla war, or walk away in humiliation.

But more ominous, an attack on Iran will ignite the Middle East. The loss of Iranian oil, coupled with possible Silkworm missile attacks by Iran against oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, could send the price of oil soaring to somewhere around $200 a barrel. The effect on the domestic and world economy will be devastating, very possibly triggering a global depression. The Middle East has two-thirds of the world’s proven petroleum reserves and nearly half its natural gas. A disruption in the supply will be felt immediately.

This attack will be interpreted by many Shiites in the Middle East as a religious war. The 2 million Shiites in Saudi Arabia (heavily concentrated in the oil-rich Eastern Province), the Shiite majority in Iraq and the Shiite communities in Bahrain, Pakistan and Turkey could turn in rage on us and our dwindling allies. We could see a combination of increased terrorist attacks, including on American soil, and widespread sabotage of oil production in the Persian Gulf. Iraq, as bad as it looks now, will become a death pit for US troops. The Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, which has so far not joined the insurgency, has strong ties to Iran. It could begin full-scale guerrilla resistance, possibly uniting for the first time with Sunnis against the occupation. Iran, in retaliation, will fire its missiles, some with a range of 1,100 miles, at US installations, including Baghdad’s Green Zone. Expect substantial casualties, especially with Iranian agents and their Iraqi allies calling in precise coordinates. Iranian missiles could be launched at Israel. The Strait of Hormuz, which is the corridor for 20 percent of the world’s oil supply, will become treacherous, perhaps unnavigable. Chinese-supplied antiship missiles, mines and coastal artillery, along with speedboats packed with explosives and suicide bombers, will target US shipping, along with Saudi oil production and oil export centers.

[…]

A country that exists in a state of permanent war cannot exist as a democracy. Our long row of candles is being snuffed out. We may soon be in darkness. Any resistance, however symbolic, is essential. There are ways to resist without being jailed. If you owe money on your federal tax return, refuse to pay some or all of it, should Bush attack Iran. If you have a telephone, do not pay the 3 percent excise tax. If you do not owe federal taxes, reduce what is withheld by claiming at least one additional allowance on your W-4 form–and write to the IRS to explain the reasons for your protest. Many of the details and their legal ramifications are available on the War Resisters League’s website (www.warresisters.org/wtr.htm).

I will put the taxes I owe in an escrow account. I will go to court to challenge the legality of the war. Maybe a courageous judge will rule that the Constitution has been usurped and the government is guilty of what the postwar Nuremberg tribunal defined as a criminal war of aggression. Maybe not. I do not know. But I do know this: I have friends in Tehran, Gaza, Beirut, Baghdad, Jerusalem and Cairo. They will endure far greater suffering and deprivation. I want to be able, once the slaughter is over, to at least earn the right to ask for their forgiveness.

http://www.truthdig.com/

And there you have it.

Like I have said before if only the half of the american populatoin that are against this insanity refuse to support and finance it, everything will grind to a halt.

MoveOn, and its UK equivalent StopWar and all other groups that have tens of millions of members combined, but which do not have either singly nor collectively a plan or strategy to achieve their aims other than to write letters, march in the streets like lemmings and hold candle lit vigils outside No.10 Downing Street; all of these groups, all of these people, collectively, have always had the power to stop this insanity in its tracks.

Chris Hedges is right to be doing this, but he is dead wrong that it is, “a desperate and perhaps futile gesture”. It is in no way futile, any more than the existence of a single snowflake in a blizzard is futile. Collectively, a blizzard of snow can paralyze a country in a single night. A blizzard of individual disobedience can do the same. That is not futility, that is RAW POWER, and now, thanks to the internets, it is trivial to organize such a blizzard.

I have said this over and over, and in many different ways. Ron Paul becoming President of the United States of America will put a stop to the madness; this cannot happen for over a year, so in the interim, some form of positive, effective, logical mass action has to be taken so that hell is not unleashed in advance of the Ron Paul Presidency.

Imagine the nightmare of having just the right man in the White House and him being handed Iran in flames, Iraq in ruins (this is already the case of course) and a world in 10 times more chaos than it is today. Not a pretty picture is it? Something needs to be done RIGHT NOW, at the very minimum, pledges of real, appropriate and logically correct action of the type that Chris Hedges is making.

Take a look at this comment attached to his piece:

[…] God damn right. And why do journalists on TV, where 90% of Americans get 100% of their political and policy information, keep behaving as though there is anything at all to talk about except stopping this insane plan to destroy Iran?

Even Keith Olbermann, supposedly the greatest liberal in prime time TV political commentary, doesn’t seem to get it. He should be devoting 80 to 95% of his show every single night to this subject.

This is an absolutely out and out, hair on fire emergency. And everyone is sleepwalking right into it. It isn’t even THERE for “normal” people. […]

This commenter is correct. And I have said before, all the special comments in the world will not do anything in the end; an action is required to put out this ‘hair on fire’ emergency and FINALLY people are starting to wake up to this, and when I say ‘people’ I mean writers of the type who would normally not put themselvs ‘out on a limb’. That is how serious this is.

Note also in the comments the number of people who are saying, “sign me up I’m with you”, “where do I sign up?”. This idea is going to spread until it is out of control…right where it needs to be.

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!