[Google translation from German to English. – WK]

Wirtschaftswoche
06.12.2008

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

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

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

[…]

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

You see?

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

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

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

That means, again, that:

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

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

What a mess!

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

That is what you have running the UK.

Like we have been saying for years:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POOP! Awake now.

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

Probable cause. It is reasonable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No one with a working brain cell ever believed that.

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

Time for a candle lit vigil then ay Shami?

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

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

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

And he knows what its like PERSONALLY.

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

And what was this persons IDENTITY?!??!

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

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

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

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

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

This is manifestly not about that. BETCH.

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

[…]

Telegraph

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

Trawling through links on a Sunday afternoon, we see that one of my favorite mathematicians

Disclose.tv – The REAL Maverick: Present Economy worse than Depr Video

confirms the ‘Monetary Monoculture Danger’ BLOGDIAL post, and introduces us to a new smart guy, Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

“My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves & the quality of their knowledge too seriously & those who don’t have the courage to sometimes say: I don’t know….” (You may not be able to change the world but can at least get some entertainment & make a living out of the epistemic arrogance of the human race).

I like it.

He wrote a book called ‘Black Swans’, and on his page there is this line:

The Black Swan: Quotes & Warnings that the Imbeciles Chose to Ignore

I REALLY like it.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (April 2007)

For the last 12 years, I have been telling anyone who would listen to me that we are taking huge risks and massive exposure to rare events. I isolated some areas in which people make bogus claims –epistemologically unsound. The Black Swan is a philosophy book (epistemology, philosophy of history & philosophy of science), but I used banks as a particularly worrisome case of epistemic arrogance –and the use of “science” to measure the risk of rare events, making society dependent on very spurious measurements. To me a banking crisis –worse than what we have ever seen — was unavoidable and NOT A BLACK SWAN, just as a drunk and incompetent pilot would eventually crash the plane. And I kept receiving insults for 12 years!

Regular readers of BLOGDIAL will know why this man and his work has such a strong appeal to us.

From what little we can glean from an hour of digging around, this man is a real scientist i.e. a scientist that is outside of the Science Cult.

His Black Swan Theory dovetails perfectly with what we and many other people have been saying about UFOs for decades. All you need is a single event to prove that everything you believe is wrong; in this case, all you need is a single instance of a UFO being of ET origin to demonstrate that there is Extraterrestrial Life and that some of it is intelligent and some of it can get here from wherever it is they come from. Such an even would also trash the mistaken idea that the distances are too far, and every other false piece of reasoning to exclude the possibility that Alien scientists and explorers coming here.

No matter what you think, no matter what you want to believe, facts are either true or they are not and the rules of evidence do not change simply because you do not like what they imply. Putting people out of work for their entire lives does not make something you find unthinkable not true.

But I digress.

We can now add Benoit Mandelbrot and Nassim Nicholas Taleb to the list of people who have been warning about an impending financial super crash, and Dr Mandelbrot brings a particularly interesting point of view to the table=, because in the discipline that he pioneered we can find a solution to the booms and busts that are created by interfereing in markets, and I wrote of it in my Monoculture post.

If it is true that economic systems are ‘far more complicated than the weather’ AND (for the sake of argument) we want to stop polluting to prevent an environmental disaster from happening, then governments should also get out of the way of how economies spontaneously and naturally order themselves.

On the surface, governments implicitly agree that market forces exist and that you can precisely alter their behavior by chanting the rates of taxes; Gordon Brown’s government is lowering VAT to 15.5% from 17.5% to encourage spending. This is an admission that indeed, human beings are rational, and that the market reacts to prices rationally. If we extrapolate this move and eliminate all government from the equation, that is, all taxes, would not the economy experience a boom big enough to correct the problem? If this is the case, then why not reduce VAT to 0% if this is the greatest crisis since the great depression? Why keep any VAT at all?

Then we read that there is a secret plan to increase VAT to 18.5% after this ‘VAT holiday’ is over. Wait a minute, if more buying and selling is a good thing, and lowering VAT makes this happen, raising VAT will cause buying and selling to slow down, which is exactly what ‘we do not want’.

Looking at this even in these most simple of terms, and then taking into account the true nature of the scale and complexity of billions of people interacting on the smallest of scales, its clear that this government and in fact no government could possibly understand and regulate any economy for any purpose, and they demonstrate the absolute pinnacle of conceit by thinking that they actually can control the economy. This is quite apart from the moral aspects of their ‘running’ the economy by having a monopoly on initiating force.

We are faced with two choices when we observe government interfering with markets.

The first, is that they do not know what they are doing; they are incompetent and are recklessly tampering with something that they do not understand, and that this crisis is a direct result of this incompetence.

The second, they DO know what they are doing, and they have in their possession a complete scientific model that explains every part of the economy, and that they have deliberately created this crash as a means to some end.

No government, not even that of Gordon Brown would claim that they have a complete, mathematical model of the economy that they work from and use to make decisions. This means that they cannot possibly know what they are doing or what the effects of their decisions will be in the future.

Both of these cases mean that no government should be involved in any aspect of any economy, since it is inevitable that they will do harm and not good either by incompetence or by malice. This is, once again, completely separate from their lack of a right to interfere in the private transactions of people who do no harm to others while transacting.

In order for any reasonable man to accept that these evil entities should have any say in the economy, just for the sake of argument, they would have to demonstrate that a government was competent, but this presents problems by itself; what metrics should be used, who is to say what a success is or is not etc etc. The fact of the matter is that there is no man alive and no group of men that has either the tools or the experience or the knowledge of what is happening right now to be able to steer the behemoth that is an economy of even a small country.

Like I said in my other post, if people are left to their own devices, we will get stability; long term stability where everyone knows, more or less, what is going to happen in the long term future in a narrow field. What is for certain is that once the government, whether it is incompetent or evil, is taken out of the equation if there are future crashes we will be able to respond to them in ways that ameliorate the situation much more rapidly. By nature also, since we would not be in a monetary monoculture, these crashes would be highly localized and not international or even continental.

The Dutch city of Eindhoven has caused a stir with a plan to set up a cannabis plantation to supply marijuana to its coffee shops. The move was announced at a “weed summit”, when dozens of Dutch mayors urged the government to back the pilot project in an effort to clamp down on the criminals who supply the drug.

The Netherlands, famed for having one of Europe’s most tolerant policies on soft drugs, allows for the possession of less than 5g of marijuana and its sale in coffee shops, but bans the cultivation and supply of the drug to these shops. The majority of Dutch mayors say this legal “back door” has spawned an illicit industry worth €2bn (£1.7bn) a year.

“It’s time that we experimented with a system of regulated plantations so we can have strict guidelines and controls on the quality and price,” Rob de Gijzel, the Mayor of Eindhoven, told the Dutch newspaper Volkskrant. “Authorities must get a grip on the supply of drugs to coffee shops.”

There are also concerns about the increasing strength of unregulated cannabis, with the content of tetrahydrocannabinol, the active chemical ingredient, doubling in recent years.

The weed summit was called to thrash out a revamp of drugs policy after the provincial cities Roosendaal and Bergen op Zoom announced plans to shut all their coffee shops in the next two years to combat drugs tourism and criminal activity. They complain that the 1.3 million French and Belgians who come every year for a puff of weed or dash of hash are often badly behaved. Worse still, they are targeted by “drugs runners” who lure them away from legal outlets to back-door suppliers that offer harder, illegal drugs.

Han Polman, the Mayor of Bergen op Zoom, said: “We are in favour of the Eindhoven experiment but we don’t see it happening quickly. That’s why we are going ahead with our shutdown.”

The Justice Minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin, of the conservative Christian Democratic Appeal party, has applauded these “courageous” efforts to wipe out coffee shops.

The capital, Amsterdam, was in shock over the weekend after news that one in five of its coffee shops would be forced to close under a new law. The city council said 43 of 228 sites must close by the end of 2011 because they are within 250m of a school. This includes the famous Bulldog coffee shop, a tourist magnet housed in a former police headquarters on the Leidseplein. Three Canadian visitors were reeling from the news. One said: “We come here twice a year, we fly thousands of miles, spend probably €4,000 while we are here. It’s the place to be!”

The headmistress of a nearby school, Margriet Bosman, was equally unimpressed by the new measure: “This is just for show. Children will get their drugs if they want to anyway, and closing the shops, which are quite regulated, is not a very good solution.”

Amsterdam’s mayor, Job Cohen, is also in favour of permitting the sale of soft drugs. “There should be a system… in which it is clear where soft drugs come from,” he said. Many Dutch also want the tolerant approach to remain in place, with a newspaper poll this week showing 80 per cent of Dutch opposing coffee shop closures.

Experts agree that a ban is not the answer. “A ban is even more dangerous than the grass itself because consumers will turn to illegal circuits and criminality will explode,” said Tim Boekhout, a criminologist.

[…]

The Independent

The only thing wrong with this plan is that the state is going to be the one setting up the plantation. They should completely legalize the growing and selling of marijuana, so that anyone can grow it anywhere and anyone can sell it….just like tomatoes.

It is completely insane and absurd that you are allowed to posses marijuana, but not allowed to grow it or sell it.

When people say, “the law is an ass”, this is what they are talking about.

There are no irrational regulations on the plantation of other crops for eating, and so there should be no irrational regulation on the growing of marijuana. If there are irrational regulations, i.e. what strains you cannot grow, someone, some ‘criminal’ is going to grow those strains simply because she should not. In any case, the crime routing around the law argument is irrelevant; no one has the right to stop you from growing whatever you want. Period. (GM being the exception, since the GM pollen can contaminate other people’s crops….small digression).

Words about the ‘increasing strength of unregulated cannabis’ come directly from the prohibitionist position, and are totally wrong. The strength or weakness of what you smoke should not be regulated by anyone, except you.

As for the Belgians and French who come to get a taste of liberty, that is a problem for the French and the Belgians to sort out. If their countries were operating correctly, there would be no reason to come to the Netherlands to smoke a plant and its extracts.

This nonsense about coffee shops being near schools is, as the teacher says, “just for show”. I’m sure no one is buying it there…what amazes me is that people are so stupid as to think that such a law would be taken seriously in the first place, or that it would in any way ‘work’ whatever they think ‘working’ is in this case.

Job Cohen is wrong to say there should be a system to show where ‘drugs’ come from.

Take a look at bread making:

when people are left to get on with their stuff in what ever way they want, they set their own standards, make what people want and everyone is catered for.

Artisan Bread Original makes a wide variety of high quality breads. No one told them how to do it, what the quality should be or anything else. It sells on its own merits and people buy it and are satisfied.

The same goes for marijuana. Growers will package it and categorize it themselves and the ones who know how best to do this will sell the most, with every other seller finding their own place in the market by virtue of people selecting them or not.

Finally, the argument about what is or is not in marijuana is simply nonsense. Cigarettes are full of toxic chemicals (599 to be exact) to aid the rate of burning and other qualities that the manufacturer is not required to list on the box:

The list of 599 additives approved by the US Government for use in the manufacture of cigarettes is something every smoker should see. Submitted by the five major American cigarette companies to the Dept. of Health and Human Services in April of 1994, this list of ingredients had long been kept a secret.

Tobacco companies reporting this information were:

• American Tobacco Company
• Brown and Williamson
• Liggett Group, Inc.
• Philip Morris Inc.
• R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company

While these ingredients are approved as additives for foods, they were not tested by burning them, and it is the burning of many of these substances which changes their properties, often for the worse.

[…]

Marijuana does not currently have any of these artificial additives…but I can assure you that if the state gets involved in the marijuana trade, those deadly chemicals and others will be added.

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

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

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

this is so good!
18.11.2008 15:14

Hi.

This link has some info :-

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

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

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

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

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

It’s not so funny now is it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UPDATE

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

That one has been taken down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thats more Wile E Coyote.

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

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

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

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

The timetable

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

[…]

The Independent

This timetable is nonsense of course.

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

This idea is going to die.

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

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

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

But we expect that.

Let’s start with a superb essay by Lew Rockwell:

The Myth of Good Government

by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

One of the great and most persistent errors of classical liberals is to believe in “good government,” a government that does “what it is supposed to do.”

There is nothing the state can do, which society needs done, that cannot be done far better by the market. Another point that is just as telling: no state empowered to do what is supposedly necessary will restrain itself to those things. It will expand as much as public opinion will tolerate.

Sometimes the point is easier to see when looking at foreign governments, such as the tragic case of China. The government is embarking on an explosive venture to dump $586 billion into “infrastructure” over two years. The reason is the classic Keynesian excuse: the spending is needed to stimulate investment. Never mind that this trick has never worked in all of human history. This is instead a grand plan to loot the private sector on behalf of the Communist Party, which will then spend the money bolstering its power.

No country knows more about the failures of this type of central planning than China. Every form of collectivism has been tried out on these poor souls, and tens of millions lost their lives in the course of Mao’s insane collectivist experiments. That this new plan is being enacted in the name of Lord Keynes rather than Karl Marx is irrelevant. The effects are the same: expand power and reduce liberty.

China’s recovery from communism is one of the most inspiring stories in the history of economic development. The country went from being a suffering and impoverished land of catastrophe to being modernized in just 15 years. The state shrunk in scope nearly by default as the private sector grew and grew. This wasn’t the plan. It was the de facto result of the new tolerance of free economic activity. The state went into protective mode to keep its power, and did nothing to stop the swell of private enterprise. The result was glorious.

Keep in mind this critical point. China’s restoration as a civilized society came about not due to some central plan, but by its absence. The fact that the state did not intervene led to prosperity. Again, it wasn’t a policy or a constitution or a law that made the difference. There was no switch from a communist-style government to a night-watchman state. Because the state abandoned its posts under public opposition and contempt, society could flourish.

But the state never went away. It’s just that its depredations have been spotty and unpredictable. Had history taken a better course, the central state would have melted away completely, and law would have devolved to the most local levels. Sadly for the Chinese, the state persisted in its old structure, even as the private sector grew and grew. The state still had its hand in the large industries such as steel and energy, and, of course, it controlled the banking sector.

The government never became good (an impossibility). It was and is bad. It was just less bad than in the past because it did less. But all states lie in wait for a crisis. The earthquake in the southwest provided one great excuse for intervention. But nothing except war compares with an economic crisis as a great excuse for state expansion. Chinese officials can count on support from Western “experts” here, and the thoroughly disgusting US response to our own economic downturn has provided an awful model for the world. Think of it: the Communist Party in China is now citing the US as the main reason for its plot to loot the private sector and bolster its own power at the expense of the country.

So much for being a beacon of liberty in a dark world! Instead, the US is helping to shut out the lights and bolster decrepit despotisms. This is surely one of the great ironies of the current political moment. Instead of teaching the world about liberty, the US’s newly empowered unitary executive is christening various forms of dictatorship.

There can be no question that China’s spending will not improve economic growth. It will instead extract $586 billion from the private sector and spend on political priorities. Never forget that no government has wealth of its own to spend. It must come from taxation, monetary inflation, or debt expansion that must be paid later. And government’s spending choices will always be uneconomic relative to how society would use that wealth. That is to say, it will be wasted.

But won’t the spending spur investment? It can create local boomlets, but they will be temporary. To the extent that the new spending causes a spending response from investors and consumers, this is more evidence of an uneconomic use of scarce resources. If the money is used to prop up failing companies, that’s particularly bad since it is an attempt to override market realities, an attempt that is about as successful as trying to repeal gravity by throwing things up in the air.

The nature of the state – and the core of its rationale for existence – is the conviction that it stands apart from and above society, to correct the failings of the market and individuals. A presumption of superiority is at the very claim of the state, whether it is minimal or totalitarian. Who is to say when and where it should intervene? Well, think about it. If the state is inherently wiser than and superior to society, standing in judgment over what is working and what is not working, the state alone is also in a position to decide when it should intervene.

No government is liberal by nature, said Ludwig von Mises. This is the great lesson that people who advocate “limited government” have never learned. If you give the government any jobs to do, it will presume the right to police its own conduct and then inevitably abuse its power. That is true in China and it is true in the US.

It was the science of economics that first discovered the radical incapacity of the state to make any improvements in the social order. It turns science on its head to invoke economics as a reason for the government to loot and pillage in the name of “stimulating investment.” Stimulation here, there, and everywhere amounts to a diminution of freedom, security of property, and prosperity.

Keynes famously praised Nazi economic policies in the introduction to the German edition of his worst book, the General Theory. After a century of horrors, free men and women, in China, the US, and the world surely deserve better.

[…]

Lew Rockwell

Fascinating and true.

If China can turn itself around in 15 years and the state shrink in scope nearly by default, and if banking is the last and most important bastion of state control, what could we expect if the resourceful Chinese adopt a private currency on a large scale?

There would be nothing that the state could do without destroying the economy if the currency was spread quickly and widely enough.

The question is how should such a currency be designed and rapidly deployed?

It would have to be some form of precious metal in denominations that made it practical for many types of transaction, from small groceries to buying a car.

In the past the wealthy of China used ingots:

and of course, the peasants used many different types of coin:

Chinese bronze coin from the Han Dynasty

and look at these coins, with their tamper evident edges:

And this is pretty…sorry, just had to throw it in:

Essentially, you need a mint, to think about the denominations and then to distribute the coins and bullion. It would be a good idea to get hundreds of millions of people to use vast amounts of low denomination gold coins; then by exchange, certain individuals, probably shop owners, would start to accumulate large numbers of coins.

Thinking about it, that is absolutely the way to seed a new economy that runs on a private currency; many small coins whose value goes up to, say the equivalent of a €500 note, spread to as many individuals as possible, so that daily exchange is made as easy as possible for everything from a bowl of noodles to a bicycle.

This brilliant piece by Lew Rockwell is well timed. Some people are organizing demonstrations outside every Federal Reserve building to ‘End The Fed’. These people haven’t got a hope in hell of ending the Federal Reserve system if all they have in their arsenal are the discredited tactics of the twentieth century.

They correctly identify the Federal Reserve as the cause of many ills and the recent crash; what they do not understand is the true nature of the force that should operate to control interest rates in absentia of central banks. The Market.

If they understood the true the power of the market, they would try and harness it directly to end the Fed, and not protest like beggars asking for oatmeal in the poor house. If they understood anything at all about problem solving they would never opt to demonstrate. Readers of BLOGDIAL know the truth about demonstrating.

If they want to solve this problem, they need to attack it directly. That means attacking the Federal Reserve Notes by issuing their own private currency, and then using it for all their transactions. There are difficulties in doing this, and one of them is Gresham’s Law:

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Gresham’s law

Observation that “bad money drives out good.” It is named for Sir Thomas Gresham (1519 – 1579), financial agent of Queen Elizabeth I, who was one of the first to elucidate it (he had been preceded by Copernicus). The meaning expressed is that, if two coins have the same face value but are made from metals of unequal value, the cheaper will tend to drive the other out of circulation; the more valuable coin will be hoarded or used for foreign exchange instead of for domestic transactions.

If that law is true, then issuing a private currency made of gold will have difficulty driving out Federal Reserve Notes. Hmmmmmm.

Small digression.

With the internet, it should be possible to distribute a private physical currency everywhere in a very short amount of time, and to spread information about it virally.

While we are at it, Obama wants to shut down internet payment systems that he does not like:

Develop a Cyber Crime Strategy to Minimize the Opportunities for Criminal Profit: Barack Obama will shut down the mechanisms used to transmit criminal profits by shutting down untraceable Internet payment schemes. Barack Obama will also initiate a grant and training program to provide federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies the tools they need to detect and prosecute cyber crime.

[…]

Barack Obama

“shutting down untraceable Internet payment schemes” means shutting down any payment system that does not allow back door automatic surveillance. Obviously. It means more laws to meddle in our internetz; laws that will inevitably have spill-over into things other than ‘payment systems’.

Another small digression.

Other private currency vendors (Mints) would no doubt spring up with their own coins, adding to the choices and flexibility.

Either way, you will not stop the bailouts, stop the war machine, or end the Federal Reserve if you do not have control of the money. A private currency is not going to appear from nowhere by magic; someone has to design it properly and release it, and according to this post on mises.org, the Liberty Dollar is not what it should look like:

Silver

As a student of Austrian Economics and supporter of commodity money, I regard the assault upon the American Liberty Dollar (ALD) with alarm and sadness, but not surprise.

While nothing the ALD firm did was clearly criminal, in that no force or overt fraud was used, their tactics could charitably be described as sleazy. They were designed to trade silver medallions to the ignorant and unwary at premiums that were many multiples of the market norm. In doing so, they created unnecessary complexity and confusion about hard money.

Consider:
1) Appropriating the face of Ron Paul without so much as asking his permission. Yes, he is a public figure so the appropriation will not be considered criminal, but it is feels sleazy.

2) Erecting a multilevel marketing scheme that provides profits that have at times exceeded 100% to insiders. The tale (face value) of the ALD was raised from $10 to $20 when the market price for an ounce of silver crossed $7.50. ALD dealers split the $12+ profit with the ALD firm. I am not against profits, I seek them. But I know where I can buy 1 ozt silver medallions, including ALDs, at less than $1 over spot silver. Only the ignorant pay such exorbitant prices for silver coins.

3) Creating confusion and needless complexity by marking their coins with a dollar-denominated tale. Unlike countless other silver coins with tales denominated in STU (silver trade unit), WTU, Sovereign, or simply weight, the ALD was denominated in dollars, a figure reserved to government-issued, primarily US and Canadian, currencies.

Mises himself taught, in The Theory of Money and Credit “…at all times and among all peoples the principal coins have been tendered and accepted, not by tale without consideration of their quantity and quality, but only as pieces of metal of specific degrees of weight and fineness. Where coins have been accepted by tale, this has always been in the definite belief that the stamp showed them to be of the usual fineness of their kind and of the correct weight. Where there were no grounds for this assumption, weighing and testing were resorted to again.
…
Nevertheless, in defiance of all official regulations and prohibitions and fixing of prices and threats of punishment, commercial practice has always insisted that what has to be considered in valuing coins is not their face value but their value as metal. The value of a coin has always been determined, not by the image and superscription it bears nor by the proclamation of the mint and market authorities, but by its metal content. Not every kind of money has been accepted at sight, but only those kinds with a good reputation for weight and fineness.”

4) Exploiting the self-made confusion of the tale by crowing about the “doubling” of the ALD when they changed the tale from 10 to 20 “dollars” per ozt. “Immediately all Liberty Dollars, in specie, paper and digital forms DOUBLED. If you had Liberty Dollars before the Move Up you profited because the underlying commodity increased in value. If you had digital, your eLD doubled the next day. If you had paper Silver Certificates, you could redeem them for the new $20 Silver Libertys. If you had Silver Liberty in specie form, you were offered a special re-minting rate to exchange them for new $20 Silver Libertys.” Liberty Dollar Doubles

Of course, nothing had changed, 1 ozt of silver remained 1 ozt of silver, and by marking their coins in “dollars” they were caught in the inflation of FRNs. Few “$10” ALDs were actually re-minted; they now circulate with all other silver medallions, currently at premiums of $0.60 to $1 over spot in small quantities (1 to 500 coins).

5) Slander of Walmart (big firm in Bentonville) and the implication that competing silver medallions are not pure in The Liberty Dollar Merchant Script.

6) Note also in that document the multiple referrals to “local business referral currency.” The appeal is to autarky rather than free commerce, with more slander to the effect that “big box retailers are in bed with the big bankers.”

The ultimate argument of the ALD firm boils down to this: A number stamped on an ounce of silver changes its value, and so determines whether it will or will not circulate. The explicit assumption is that “average” people are too stupid to know that a Liberty mint or A-mark 1 ozt silver coin with no dollar figure stamped on it and a norfed ALD with some fictional number of “dollars” stamped on it are really and truly the same thing: 1 ozt of fine silver with markings to prove that fact. Period.

The arrogant conceit that most people are too stupid to understand weight of metal without the assistance of a self-proclaimed “monetary architect” is breathtaking. History and present-day practice shows that always and everywhere precious metal coins are valued by weight and fineness (purity) with minor adjustments for being widely recognized, particularly beautiful, or other characteristics.

The aggressive tactics created by the ALD firm and taught to ALD dealers were designed to fool the unwary into believing that an ounce of silver was worth far more than the free market price. Indeed, some ALD dealers vehemently defend the large premiums attached to their products. In at least some cases, ALDs were passed to unsuspecting clerks with a casual “Oh, that’s the new twenty dollar coin.” Owners and managers discovered the deciet in the till only after the dealer was long gone. These tactics caused an increasing number in inquiries to government agencies, district attorneys, and police. It was not successful competition with FRNs that killed the ALD, it was attracting the attention of government agents with methods that had the look and feel of a scam.

The ALD firm did not deserve to be shut down, but if commodity money ever makes a return, it will do so in spite of ALD-created confusion and without multilevel marketing profit margins. In the happy future where silver and gold coins are used in daily commerce, the markups associated with minting and distributing the coins will fall to their historical norms of a few percent over melt value.

[…]

The Liberty Dollar Question – Mises Economics Blog

Clearly there are a substantial number of people with sufficient knowledge to design a optimal currency to replace Federal Reserve Notes, and there is a demand for this service that will only grow stronger as the value of everyone’s savings starts to evaporate at an ever greater pace thanks to the heat of inflation boiling away the value of the dollar.

We wrote before about the Totnes Pound; there is a demand for clean money not only in the USA but in Great Britain.

The question I have is, who is going to be the one to put their fortune into launching a private currency? What sort of person are we looking for? It seems to me that a Mark Shuttleworth type is the most likely candidate; someone who has been made aware of these problems and the solution and who will see in themselves a beneficial instrument of liberation:

This is not the end of capitalism

Some of the comments on my last post on the economic unwinding of 2008 suggested that people think we are witnessing the end of capitalism and the beginning of a new socialist era.

I certainly hope not.

I think a world without regulated capitalism would be a bleak one indeed. I had the great privilege to spend a year living in Russia in 2001/2002, and the visible evidence of the destruction wrought by central planning was still very much present. We are all ultimately human, with human failings, whether we work for a state planning agency or a private company, and those failings have consequences either way. To think that moving all private enterprise into state hands will somehow create a panacea of efficiency and sustainability is to ignore the stark lessons of the 20th century.

The leaders and decision makers in a centrally-planned economy are just as fallible as those in a capitalist one – they would probably be the same people! But state enterprises lack the forces of evolution that apply in a capitalist economy – state enterprises are rarely if ever allowed to fail. And hence bad ideas are perpetuated indefinitely, and an economy becomes dysfunctional to the point of systemic collapse. It is the fact that private enterprises fail which keeps industries vibrant. The tension between the imperative to innovate and the consequences of failure drives capitalist economies to evolve quickly. Despite all of the nasty consequences that we have seen, and those we have yet to see, of capitalism gone wrong, I am still firmly of the view that society must tap into its capitalist strengths if it wants to move forward.

[…]

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/227

In fact, Mark Shuttleworth is a PERFECT candidate, as we can see. He just doesn’t know it yet.

In case you didn’t know, Mark Shuttleworth is a South African philanthropist genius billionaire who single handedly accelerated the adoption of Linux and put it into the hands of the masses with Ubuntu. I say single handedly because he financed it by himself; where other distributions were getting better and better slowly like Fedora, Mark Shuttleworth took the Debian distribution and turned it into something that anyone anywhere could use by pouring money, philosophy and hard work onto Debian. The result has been a complete success, and now Ubuntu is being sold on Dell laptops as standard.

There are not many capitalists who understand the Open Source business model and its associated philosophies. Just look at the irrational buggy whip thinking of the music and film industry to hear what ordinary, unintelligent business people think about making money from giving away something for free.

The right man for this job would understand scale. He would understand networks, both internet and real world. He would be driven by philosophy as much as the desire to make money. He would understand the philosophy behind the Free Software movement. He would also have a grasp of banking and how currencies work. He would be able to apply and to synthesize all of this into a project to spread debt free, central banking free currency that is owned by and for the benefit of the public…just like Ubuntu is.

I could not think of a better time to launch such a project; the dollar is collapsing, the headless chickens of the G20 are all jockeying around for a ‘solution’. What better time to checkmate them all with the release of a new, private currency that trumps them all, into which everyone can convert their savings and buy their bread with.

Now that would be something worth while!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

Daily Mail

This means that:

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

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

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

by Paul Joseph Watson

The man who predicted the 1987 stock market crash and the fall of the Soviet Union is now forecasting revolution in America, food riots and tax rebellions – all within four years, while cautioning that putting food on the table will be a more pressing concern than buying Christmas gifts by 2012.

Gerald Celente, the CEO of Trends Research Institute, is renowned for his accuracy in predicting future world and economic events, which will send a chill down your spine considering what he told Fox News this week.

Celente says that by 2012 America will become an undeveloped nation, that there will be a revolution marked by food riots, squatter rebellions, tax revolts and job marches, and that holidays will be more about obtaining food, not gifts.

“We’re going to see the end of the retail Christmas….we’re going to see a fundamental shift take place….putting food on the table is going to be more important that putting gifts under the Christmas tree,” said Celente, adding that the situation would be “worse than the great depression”.

“America’s going to go through a transition the likes of which no one is prepared for,” said Celente, noting that people’s refusal to acknowledge that America was even in a recession highlights how big a problem denial is in being ready for the true scale of the crisis.

Celente says that by 2012 America will become an undeveloped nation, that there will be a revolution marked by food riots, squatter rebellions, tax revolts and job marches, and that holidays will be more about obtaining food, not gifts.

Celente, who successfully predicted the 1997 Asian Currency Crisis, the subprime mortgage collapse and the massive devaluation of the U.S. dollar, told UPI in November last year that the following year would be known as “The Panic of 2008,” adding that “giants (would) tumble to their deaths,” which is exactly what we have witnessed with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and others. He also said that the dollar would eventually be devalued by as much as 90 per cent.

The consequence of what we have seen unfold this year would lead to a lowering in living standards, Celente predicted a year ago, which is also being borne out by plummeting retail sales figures.

The prospect of revolution was a concept echoed by a British Ministry of Defence report last year, which predicted that within 30 years, the growing gap between the super rich and the middle class, along with an urban underclass threatening social order would mean, “The world’s middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest,” and that, “The middle classes could become a revolutionary class.”

In a separate recent interview, Celente went further on the subject of revolution in America.

“There will be a revolution in this country,” he said. “It’s not going to come yet, but it’s going to come down the line and we’re going to see a third party and this was the catalyst for it: the takeover of Washington, D. C., in broad daylight by Wall Street in this bloodless coup. And it will happen as conditions continue to worsen.”

“The first thing to do is organize with tax revolts. That’s going to be the big one because people can’t afford to pay more school tax, property tax, any kind of tax. You’re going to start seeing those kinds of protests start to develop.”
“It’s going to be very bleak. Very sad. And there is going to be a lot of homeless, the likes of which we have never seen before. Tent cities are already sprouting up around the country and we’re going to see many more.”

“We’re going to start seeing huge areas of vacant real estate and squatters living in them as well. It’s going to be a picture the likes of which Americans are not going to be used to. It’s going to come as a shock and with it, there’s going to be a lot of crime. And the crime is going to be a lot worse than it was before because in the last 1929 Depression, people’s minds weren’t wrecked on all these modern drugs – over-the-counter drugs, or crystal meth or whatever it might be. So, you have a huge underclass of very desperate people with their minds chemically blown beyond anybody’s comprehension.”

The George Washington blog has compiled a list of quotes attesting to Celente’s accuracy as a trend forecaster.

“When CNN wants to know about the Top Trends, we ask Gerald Celente.” — CNN Headline News

“A network of 25 experts whose range of specialties would rival many university faculties.”
— The Economist

“Gerald Celente has a knack for getting the zeitgeist right.” — USA Today

“There’s not a better trend forecaster than Gerald Celente. The man knows what he’s talking about.”
– CNBC

“Those who take their predictions seriously … consider the Trends Research Institute.”
— The Wall Street Journal

“Gerald Celente is always ahead of the curve on trends and uncannily on the mark … he’s one of the most accurate forecasters around.”— The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Mr. Celente tracks the world’s social, economic and business trends for corporate clients.”
— The New York Times

“Mr. Celente is a very intelligent guy. We are able to learn about trends from an authority.”
— 48 Hours, CBS News

“Gerald Celente has a solid track record. He has predicted everything from the 1987 stock market crash and the demise of the Soviet Union to green marketing and corporate downsizing.”
— The Detroit News

“Gerald Celente forecast the 1987 stock market crash, ‘green marketing,’ and the boom in gourmet coffees.” — Chicago Tribune

“The Trends Research Institute is the Standard and Poors of Popular Culture.”
— The Los Angeles Times

“If Nostradamus were alive today, he’d have a hard time keeping up with Gerald Celente.”
— New York Post

So there you have it – hardly a nutjob conspiracy theorist blowhard now is he? The price of not heeding his warnings will be far greater than the cost of preparing for the future now. Storable food and gold are two good places to make a start.

http://www.infowars.com/?p=5938

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

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

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

and then we have this, later in the day:

15:57 GMT, Thursday, 6 November 2008

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

The facts of the matter remain unchanged however.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let us call time on this now!

Robert Phillifent, Whitley Bay
Recommended by 266 people

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

ID cards:

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

Hokey Cokey, london, United Kingdom
Recommended by 257 people

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

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

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

How did that turn out?

[Free_Scotland], Grangemouth, Scotland
Recommended by 204 people

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

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

Chris Chris
Recommended by 201 people

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

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

Matt Gallop, Brighton
Recommended by 181 people

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

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

John Doe, United Kingdom
Recommended by 173 people

Alert a Moderator

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

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

Maximus, Boxgrove UK
Recommended by 168 people

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

Yet another money wasting scheme from our illustrious Government.

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

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

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

clive hamilton, woking
Recommended by 163 people

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

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

Neil, Brighton
Recommended by 147 people

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

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

In what was does that improve security of the public?

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

RJ, Zurich
Recommended by 147 people

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

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

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

Hard Working, Bracknell, United Kingdom
Recommended by 143 people

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

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

[anotherjames]
Recommended by 125 people

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

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

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

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

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

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

anon., UK
Recommended by 119 people

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

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

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

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

The possibilities are endless!

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

[…]

Have Your Say

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Foreign students: Identity cards

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

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

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

Won Jae from Korea, studying at UCL

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The opinions of these people are absolutely irrelevant.

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

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

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

I think not.

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

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

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

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

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

Once again, the first commenter had it precisely right:

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

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

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

And neither should you.

Gordon Brown says government cannot ensure data safety

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

ContactPoint. The database that is:

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

MUST BE ABANDONED RIGHT NOW.

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

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

Lew Rockwell Podcast

Lew Rockwell interviews Naomi Wolf:

More from Naomi Wolf:

She wrote Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries.

Her numerous appearances are documented on YouTube.

Lew Rockwell Podcast

Download

As you will remember, being an avid reader of BLOGDIAL, we are not too impressed by the reluctant Red Pill eater Naomi Wolf, who should, given her age, know better.

Nevertheless, this is an unmissable piece of audio. Naomi Wolf, despite the age of the internets, despite being exposed to Alex Jones and his fine documentaries, still doesnt kow the facts about the Federal Reserve.

I find that really hard to believe.

If she was just some mother from Jersey with one of those odd hairdoos, then it would be understandable, but someone as connected and exposed as this MUST know about the Fed; her not knowing about it is an impossibility.

If she really doesn’t know about the Fed after having been exposed to everything, after having been handed it all on a silver platter (she has had at least between now and April 2007, when we posted about her essay) she is either deliberately pretending to be ignorant, is actually ignorant (impossible, since she has been given the materials) or is stupid.

Naomi Wolf is not stupid. That is for sure.

Is she pretending to be in the dark about everything?

Who knows…who cares.

All I know is that this person has woken up too late, wether her waking up is real or not.

Further to all of this, it is interesting that the State thinks that passing laws actually means something; that they believe their wishes need to be codified in order to make them real in some way. Naomi Wolf is a facilitator of their evil by her believing that the State, by enacting laws, somehow changes reality from one thing into another.

The fact is that no matter what law they pass, their power remains just as illusory. If you choose not to obey, the law is meaninless.

People like Al Capone, Pablo Escobar, John Gotti, and all ‘Organized Crime’ figures understand reality far better than Naomi Wolf does. They understand that it doesnt matter what laws are passed; you can do whatever you like, and thrive.

The Poll Tax failed because everyone refused to obey. The Berlin Wall fell because people stopped believing that the power of the state had any hold over them. Once everyone takes for granted that the State has no right to tell them anything, from how they should measure the goods they sell to wether or not they should do anything at all whatsoever it may be, the illusion of the power of the State will simply dissapear all at once. Soldiers will take off their uniforms. The offices of the state will be abandoned. People will move freely.

And sanity will be the norm.

Before any of that can happen, the Naomi Wolfs of this world need to not only swallow the Red Pill, but digest it, and let its essence become a part of their body.

BLOGDIAL began on Friday, January 12, 2001 with a quote from The Matrix. Before BLOGDIAL, we had published articles on these important subjects. We are not the only ones who have been doing this for years, and certainly there are others who have written more and more eloquently than we did.

There really isn’t anything more that can be done for the likes of Naomi Wolf and the millions of people like her. The question now is not what is to be done to educate them, but what are we going to do to protect ourselvs from the sleeping sheeple, the half awake half wits and the legions of zombies out there who are going to drag us down.

That is the question!

Police to use handheld fingerprint scanners in the street

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fingerprint checks often showed they were carrying false documents.

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

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

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

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

Telegraph

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

We predicted this device long ago:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

Good!

We expected this to happen:

1.2.3 Section 436A requires all local authorities to make arrangements to enable them to establish (so far as it is possible to do so) the identities of children residing in their area who are not receiving a suitable education. In relation to children, by ‘suitable education’ we mean efficient full-time education suitable to her/his age, ability and aptitude and to any special educational needs the child may have. 

And here is the true purpose of this entire exercise.

This is the way they are going to get every child in England into and justify the existence of ContactPoint.

[…]

The goal of these guidelines is to create a way to sweep up all the home educating children in the UK, identify them, categorize them and put them on a database, together with the names of their parents, siblings, ethnicity and other details. See below. Once again, children who are being educated at home, privately, or in alternative provision should not be subject to being identified for this purpose, since they are being educated quite legally.

[…]

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1217

And now its even worse than we thought it would be:

By Lauren Higgs
Children & Young People Now
17 September 2008

The national database of everyone who is under 18 in England is to be used to identify children missing from education.

Monthly reports created by the ContactPoint database will be sent to local authorities listing the names of children not recorded at an education setting.

The School Census for state schools and pupil lists from independent schools and pupil referral units will be used to complete the relevant field on ContactPoint. Children not accounted for will feature in the reports, which are intended to help children missing education teams focus their work.

But Fiona Nicholson, chair of home schooling organisation Education Otherwise, said the reports will mean councils target home-educated children. She said: “ContactPoint should not be used for this.”

But Richard Stiff, chair of the information systems and technology policy committee at the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, said the reports would not change the way councils treat home-educated children: “It is unlikely this will be a tool in the armoury of the state.”

Thanks to the vigilant lurker who sent this in.

If this article is correct, someone will extract and print monthly reports from ContactPoint of groups of children. This means that the names addresses and other private details of children in the UK will be distributed all over the place; any claim that ContactPoint is secure is once again shown to be absolute nonsense.

Once these reports are printed out or emailed, they can be copied and stored in another database. Imagine the value of this database to someone who wants to get a hold of every home schooler in the UK. This list would be worth literally millions of pounds.

We have written about ContactPoint and the nature of data before.

Richard Stiff is either lying or is painfully naïve.

The new duties that Local Authorities have to make sure children are receiving suitable education dovetail with ContactPoint perfectly. Once they have a list of all people who are not in school, they will be able to claim that they do not know whether or not the children listed are being educated suitably; their duty would kick in automatically, and they would be compelled to go through the list and inspect every single name, if only to see who is home educating and who is not.

If Richard Stiff cannot see this then he is unfit to hold his chair; in any case, he sits on the information systems and technology policy committee, which has nothing to do with Local Authorities and how they do and do not operate.

This article begs the question, “what other reports are going to be generated by ContactPoint?”. It is clear that as we predicted, the ContactPoint data will have completely escaped within a matter of months. All of the Security Theatre that they have shrouded around it is now proven to be completely useless.

Think about it. If a list of all children who are not listed as being in school is sent to all 410 Local Authorities every month, wether it is by email or in printed form that is a huge number of mass points of escape. ContactPoint was originally sold as a way for the 330,000 workers who will have access to it to find information on particular children, and not children en masse or children of a particular category or class.

It is obvious that the next step in ContactPoint’s development is to use it to generate a list of all muslim children, to make sure that they are not being exposed to extremism. For example. Or to create a list of all children of a certain ‘race’, to do some analysis on them as a group. You can add whatever pretext you like to this list obviously. Anyone who does not think that this is going to happen is living on another planet.

It is now abundantly clear that massive abuses of ContactPoint are to be standard operating procedure. I recommend that if you have children, you do everything you can to get them out of and keep them away from ContactPoint. If you cannot do so, then next in your list of possible responses is to refuse to respond in any way to anything that was generated or a result of a search on ContactPoint. If everyone were to do this, ContactPoint would be a very dangerous thing to access, because if the alert parent finds out it was used to contact them, it could cause a total ‘shut out’.

All those who are depressed by this constant stream of extreme and nauseating news; take heart. All of this will go away, just like the Soviet Union, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, BCCI, Franco, PanAm and every other seemingly unassailable person and institution. Your job is to keep yourself free while the rest of the world and time itself catches up with these monsters.

From Bruce Schneier’s Cryptogram, yet another crystal clear explanation of why the TSA’s list of ‘terrorists’ is completely bogus:

The TSA is tightening its photo ID rules at airport security. Previously, people with expired IDs or who claimed to have lost their IDs were subjected to secondary screening. Then the Transportation Security Administration realized that meant someone on the government’s no-fly list — the list that is supposed to keep our planes safe from terrorists — could just fly with no ID.

Now, people without ID must also answer personal questions from their credit history to ascertain their identity. The TSA will keep records of who those ID-less people are, too, in case they’re trying to probe the system.

This may seem like an improvement, except that the photo ID requirement is a joke. Anyone on the no-fly list can easily fly whenever he wants. Even worse, the whole concept of matching passenger names against a list of bad guys has negligible security value.

How to fly, even if you are on the no-fly list: Buy a ticket in some innocent person’s name. At home, before your flight, check in online and print out your boarding pass. Then, save that web page as a PDF and use Adobe Acrobat to change the name on the boarding pass to your own. Print it again. At the airport, use the fake boarding pass and your valid ID to get through security. At the gate, use the real boarding pass in the fake name to board your flight.

The problem is that it is unverified passenger names that get checked against the no-fly list. At security checkpoints, the TSA just matches IDs to whatever is printed on the boarding passes. The airline checks boarding passes against tickets when people board the plane. But because no one checks ticketed names against IDs, the security breaks down.

This vulnerability isn’t new. It isn’t even subtle. I wrote about it in 2003, and again in 2006. I asked Kip Hawley, who runs the TSA, about it in 2007. Today, any terrorist smart enough to Google “print your own boarding pass” can bypass the no-fly list.

This gaping security hole would bother me more if the very idea of a no-fly list weren’t so ineffective. The system is based on the faulty notion that the feds have this master list of terrorists, and all we have to do is keep the people on the list off the planes.

That’s just not true. The no-fly list — a list of people so dangerous they are not allowed to fly yet so innocent we can’t arrest them — and the less dangerous “watch list” contain a combined 1 million names representing the identities and aliases of an estimated 400,000 people. There aren’t that many terrorists out there; if there were, we would be feeling their effects.

Almost all of the people stopped by the no-fly list are false positives. It catches innocents such as Ted Kennedy, whose name is similar to someone’s on the list, and Yusuf Islam (formerly Cat Stevens), who was on the list but no one knew why.

The no-fly list is a Kafkaesque nightmare for the thousands of innocent Americans who are harassed and detained every time they fly. Put on the list by unidentified government officials, they can’t get off. They can’t challenge the TSA about their status or prove their innocence. (The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decided this month that no-fly passengers can sue the FBI, but that strategy hasn’t been tried yet.)

But even if these lists were complete and accurate, they wouldn’t work. Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, the D.C. snipers, the London subway bombers and most of the 9/11 terrorists weren’t on any list before they committed their terrorist acts. And if a terrorist wants to know if he’s on a list, the TSA has approved a convenient, $100 service that allows him to figure it out: the Clear program, which issues IDs to “trusted travelers” to speed them through security lines. Just apply for a Clear card; if you get one, you’re not on the list.

In the end, the photo ID requirement is based on the myth that we can somehow correlate identity with intent. We can’t. And instead of wasting money trying, we would be far safer as a nation if we invested in intelligence, investigation and emergency response — security measures that aren’t based on a guess about a terrorist target or tactic.

That’s the TSA: Not doing the right things. Not even doing right the things it does.

My previous articles on the subject:
http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0308.html#6
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/11/forge_your_own.html
http://www.schneier.com/interview-hawley.html

This article originally appeared in the L.A. Times:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-schneier28-2008aug28,0,3099808.story or http://tinyurl.com/6dmcl4

All true, all correct.

What the article does not do however, is to explain the irrational TSA policy and how they can continue to do what they are doing unchallenged. TSA admins must know that what they are doing is incorrect and innefective in every way; they are not that stupid to believe the fairy story that they give as the pretext for their procedures.

There therefore must be another reason why they are persisting with this nonsense, instead of abandoning it completely as a big mistake.

Once explanation is that they want to put everyone in the country, and I mean every single man woman and child, on a new ‘Clean’ list, not for the purposes of anti terrorism, but for control of every aspect of life. I am talking about a national ID card that is needed for every transaction, no matter how small, as we have written about so many times.

We all know that the ‘security’ measures they are trying to roll out world-wide are not about security. It is high time that everyone start trying to figure out (for themselves) what the real agenda of all of this is. They will find that any conclusion they can come to is not pretty.

Trying to second guess the final maneuver and true agenda will also help us force the people who are trying to do this to state explicitly why they are doing it; if they cannot give a satisfactory answer they will be forced to shut it all down permanently.

Either way, we are fast approaching the point where the road forks, and they will either get away with rolling out the global police state or they are utterly destroyed.

Whilst googling around today for the uses of colloidal silver after reading an extraordinarily inflammatory post that I wont trouble you with, I wandered onto some facts about how children are being born in the USA. It is now the law, (a real, not color of law, actual statute, unlike the non existent mandatory vaccine laws) that Silver Nitrate or some other anti bacterial wash be dripped into the eyes of a newborn as soon as it emerges:

§16-3-10. It shall be unlawful for any physician, nurse-midwife or midwife, practicing midwifery, or other health care professional to neglect or otherwise fail to instill or have instilled, immediately upon its birth, in the eyes of the newborn babe, the contents of a single-use tube of an ophthalmic ointment containing one percent tetracycline or one half of one percent erythromycin or the equivalent dosage of such medications or other appropriate medication approved by the director for prevention of inflammation of the eyes of the newborn. Every physician, nurse-midwife or midwife or other health care professional shall, in making a report of a birth, state the name of the appropriate medication which was instilled into the eyes of said infant. The director shall establish a list of appropriate medications for prevention of inflammation of the eyes of the newborn. The list shall be kept current and distributed to appropriate health care facilities and such other sources as the director may determine to be necessary.

[…]

WTH??!!

‘What the heck’ indeed.

Naturally, the first reaction of any decent person is to think, “how the hell can anyone get away from this madness?”.

Home Birth is the first obvious choice; having a birth plan where Silver Nitrate or tetracycline is refused clearly is not an option, since the staff will simply say, “its the law” and secondly, they take your baby from you immediately and then do all their dastardly deeds out of sight.

But there is another way that is gaining momentum: ‘Freebirth’.

A Freebirth or Unassisted Childbirth is a birth where midwives and doctors are excluded by choice in advance.

This is what it looks like:

Of course, doctors obstetricians and the medical establishment are against this with all guns blazing. The fear-mongers are full of rubbish of course.

Read this from Laura Shanley’s Born Free website:

One of the greatest myths perpetuated by the medical system is that hospitals are the safest place to give birth. Stories abound of women dying in childbirth before the advent of modern hospitals. And yet, few people realize that women were not dying due to the fact that childbirth is inherently dangerous, but rather because of the living conditions at that time. Poor women were generally underfed and overworked during pregnancy, while wealthy women were often deprived of fresh air and sunshine because brown skin was considered socially unacceptable. Wealthy girls were corsetted from the age of eleven, so that by the time they turned fourteen, their pelvises were literally deformed. These physical factors, combined with various psychological ones (fear, shame, and guilt) led to the problems that some women encountered.

Throughout history, normal, healthy women have rarely died in childbirth. In fact, when birth moved from the home to the hospital in the 1920s, the infant and maternal mortality rates actually rose. A major study done as early as 1933 showed that hospital births were not as safe as home births. Studies done in the last twenty years, prove this is still the case. (Mayer Eisenstein, MD, The Home Court Advantage, 1988.)

When a laboring woman goes into the modern-day hospital, she is surrounded by medical personnel and machinery. Often she is told what to eat (generally nothing), what position to be in (generally flat on her back, which narrows the pelvic outlet and prevents her from utilizing the natural gravitational force), and when and when not to push (which interferes with her own instinctive knowledge of birth). Her progress is charted and measured and she is treated more like a machine than a thinking, feeling, intelligent adult.

If her labor is not progressing at the speed at which the hospital has arbitrarily decided it should be, she is often given drugs to speed things up. The drugs, however, may make her contractions more painful, which in turn, cause her to take more medication to deal with the pain. Not only does this medication prevent her from fully participating in the birthing process, it also crosses the placenta, adversely affecting her unborn baby.

Sometimes a woman’s body simply shuts down after all this intervention, and the woman is told she needs a cesarean section in order for her baby to be born safely. Unaware that the intervention she received actually caused the “complications” in the first place, she often consents “for the good of the baby.” Nearly one in four babies in this country are now born by cesarean section.

Many women who have given birth in the hospital report dissatisfaction not only with the way they were treated, but with the way their babies were treated as well. Babies are often taken away from their mothers immediately after birth to be weighed, measured, tested and cleaned. Eye drops are administered “just in case” a mother has a venereal disease, and Vitamin K is administered because babies are supposedly born “deficient.”

When a woman gives birth at home, she is free to eat what she wants, assume any position she wants, and push or not push depending on how she feels. When no one is telling her what to do, she is able to “tune in” and listen to “the still, small voice within.” The same loving consciousness that knew how to grow her baby inside her perfectly, knows how to get her baby out safely and easily, if only she will let it. With no one shouting commands at her, a woman is free to relax, and naturally birth her baby. After the birth, there is no one there to separate her from her baby. She can hold and nurse him as long as she wishes. Women all over the world are rediscovering the fact that birth works best when it is interfered with least.

In the past several years I have received hundreds of stories from women and couples who have successfully given birth without medical assistance. Their stories speak for themselves. No one, however, regardless of their “expertise,” can guarantee that a baby will be born safely. Some babies die. It’s simply nature’s way.

[…]

http://www.unassistedchildbirth.com/uc/isucsafe.html

That is all true, My friends™.

Finally, from the Washington Post article linked above:

The intensifying contractions were three minutes apart as Lynn Griesemer tried to reassure her 11-year-old daughter, who hovered anxiously beside her. Her husband, Bob, had not returned the four increasingly urgent messages she’d left on his cellphone and had neglected to give her his new office number at the Pentagon. The couple’s sixth child would be born that Friday in June 2002 and Griesemer was worried he might not make it in time.

Heh.

When someone from the Pentagon chooses unassisted childbirth, it makes you wonder, “just what has he read about vaccines and vitamin K to make him choose something so unusual?”.

But I digress.

I know someone who delivered his own son completely unassisted. He will tell anyone who asks that it is a most wonderful thing to deliver your own child.

And then there are all the other benefits of not having a drugged wife or a drugged baby, no arguments with bolshy staff about Vitamin K, bizarre vaccinations or harsh chemical eye wash, no forceful rotation of your baby’s legs to see if she has ‘clicky’ hips….a perfectly clean, natural fresh start, with everyone calm and no one destroyed or unnecessarily disturbed.

And just in case you didn’t know, if your baby DOES get conjunctivitis, all you need to do is squirt some breast milk into his or her eyes and it clears up perfectly.

Nature is best!

The usual disclaimers apply; if you have an elective Caesarian because of your workload in your job at the bank, and you want every vaccination going to be shot on day one, and you want Vitamin K, guthrie test with addition to DNA database, clicky hips rotation, eyes washed with tetracycline AND Silver Nitrate, straight onto vitamin fortified formula milk from Nestle, put directly into the crib and shipped off with the nanny….THAT IS YOUR BUSINESS AND YOUR RIGHT.