Archive for the 'Told You So' Category

Going on an Imperial Bender

Thursday, September 11th, 2008

How the U.S. Garrisons the Planet and Doesn’t Even Notice
By Tom Engelhardt

Here it is, as simply as I can put it: In the course of any year, there must be relatively few countries on this planet on which U.S. soldiers do not set foot, whether with guns blazing, humanitarian aid in hand, or just for a friendly visit. In startling numbers of countries, our soldiers not only arrive, but stay interminably, if not indefinitely. Sometimes they live on military bases built to the tune of billions of dollars that amount to sizeable American towns (with accompanying amenities), sometimes on stripped down forward operating bases that may not even have showers. When those troops don’t stay, often American equipment does — carefully stored for further use at tiny “cooperative security locations,” known informally as “lily pads” (from which U.S. troops, like so many frogs, could assumedly leap quickly into a region in crisis).

At the height of the Roman Empire, the Romans had an estimated 37 major military bases scattered around their dominions. At the height of the British Empire, the British had 36 of them planetwide. Depending on just who you listen to and how you count, we have hundreds of bases. According to Pentagon records, in fact, there are 761 active military “sites” abroad.

The fact is: We garrison the planet north to south, east to west, and even on the seven seas, thanks to our various fleets and our massive aircraft carriers which, with 5,000-6,000 personnel aboard — that is, the population of an American town — are functionally floating bases.

And here’s the other half of that simple truth: We don’t care to know about it. We, the American people, aided and abetted by our politicians, the Pentagon, and the mainstream media, are knee-deep in base denial.

Now, that’s the gist of it. If, like most Americans, that’s more than you care to know, stop here.

[…]

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174972/being_in_base_denial

The scale of the fall of the American Empire will be in proportion to its reach.

It will be a spectacular contraction more than the Roman Empire or any other empire in history.

The worst part about it, is that if this collapse is ugly, the idea that man can live in a free, sovereign country may be taken down with the USA.

And that would be a bad thing.

Total surveillance of everything and everyone

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

Andy Burnham, fascist, liar and traitor said that:

Suggesting the Government will have knowledge of, and control over, your life through the National Identity Register is untrue. It is also nonsense to suggest either that “every outpost of the state” or private enterprises will have access to the register.

[…]

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=156

and

His (Henry Porter’s) article swallows the contents of a ridiculous, anonymous email and unquestioningly regurgitates it. The scheme will not track your life’s activities. ID cards will be used when it is important to verify identity.

[…]

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=142

Now it emerges that not only is everything that Andy Burnham said about the NIR and ID cards a total lie, but that the EU knew it, and had been planning to capture everything about everyone. We were right and he has been proven to be a liar:

New Statewatch Report: Embargoed until 00:01, Thursday 11 September 2008

The Shape of Things to Come by Tony Bunyan

The EU is currently developing a new five year strategy for justice and home affairs and security policy for 2009-2014. The proposals set out by the shadowy “Future Group” set up by the Council of the European Union include a range of highly controversial measures including new technologies of surveillance, enhanced cooperation with the United States and harnessing the “digital tsunami”. In the words of the EU Council presidency:

“Every object the individual uses, every transaction they make and almost everywhere they go will create a detailed digital record. This will generate a wealth of information for public security organisations, and create huge opportunities for more effective and productive public security efforts.”

Seven years on from 11 September 2001 and the launch of the “war on terorism” this major new report The Shape of Things to come (60 pages) examines the proposals of the Future Group and their effect on civil liberties. It shows how European governments and EU policy-makers are pursuing unfettered powers to access and gather masses of personal data on the everyday life of everyone – on the grounds that we can all be safe and secure from perceived “threats”.

The Statewatch report calls for a “meaningful and wide-ranging debate” before it is “too late” for privacy and civil liberties.

Press release (pdf)
Eight page Conclusions (pdf)
Copy of full report (pdf)

For further information:
00 44 208 802 1882
e-mail: office@statewatch.org

And there you have it.

Every object that the individual uses, every transaction they make and almost everywhere they go will create a detailed digital record.”

We have detailed how all of this will be done before on BLOGDIAL, and of course, much of this was accurately predicted in the ‘Frances Stonor Saunders’ email from 2006.

  • They will know what objects you have because each store receipt will have your ID attached to it, and the state will have access to the store’s database of all purchases.
  • They will know each and every transaction you make, no matter how small, because cash transactions will be outlawed and replaced by Oyster like systems..
  • They will know everywhere you go because you will use an Oyster or its decedents to go on public transport or trains, your car will be tracked every mile by GPS and or ANPR and CCTV will watch you while you walk.
  • They will know everywhere you fly because the airlines will capture information about you and pass it to them.
  • They will know every border you cross because your passport data will be captured.

And of course, they will know everything about your medical history, in intimate detail.

There is no technical reason why they cannot do all of this. The only reason why they will not be able to do it is if there is public opposition. Of course, the elite security services will put together a covert system that will do all of this and more outside the scope of the law, but that is not our worry; these measures have nothing to do with ‘security’, which is now the word they are slowly using in place of ‘terrorism’ since it is becoming widely understood that none of these measures can stop ‘terrorists’. These measures are designed to exert total surveillance and control over the ordinary individual, with a special focus on financial transactions.

I say control because the state will be able to turn ‘your’ identity off with a few clicks of a mouse, making it impossible for you to exist.

Imagine a world where there is no cash. You will not be able to even beg on the streets for money should the state freeze your bank account. You will not be able to travel anywhere, go on the internet (which will require you to ‘swipe in’ to log on). You will become a non person, cut off from society, made desperate…and easy to persuade.

Once this happens to a few people, and news about it spreads, a wave of deeply seated fear will spread over the civilized world like a black fog. No one will dare say or do anything out of line for fear of being handed the death sentence of ‘ID Death’.

As we have seen in Great Britain, there is nothing and no place that they will not consider their domain, from how you plant your garden, to what and how much you eat, to how you dispose of your garbage, they will be there, watching you, controlling you and fining you for the smallest infraction. That is what they will add to the mix. The Germans will bring their obsessive need to control thought to the table. The worst aspects of every nation will be brought to bear on everyone; this will be the greatest nightmare ever faced by any generation of human beings in their short history.

I say their because if no one stands up to this, if everyone accepts this without even a stone being thrown then I cannot consider myself to be one of those ‘human beings’ that would willingly put their heads into a noose without so much as a word.

But I digress.

We have an anti Police State policy whereby we do not cooperate with any police state measure, and do anything we can to stop it. Just recently when someone asked me to produce my passport to complete a transaction, I refused. A few weeks later when another person asked for that same document, I refused again. I will not show my passport at any place other than a border. I will not show my driver’s license anywhere except when I am getting a ticket for speeding or some other car related event. I will refuse every time, without exception. I will not pay any fine that is generated by the Police State system. I will not respond to anything generated by it.

Now.

If four fifths of all adults in the UK did this, the system would utterly collapse. I imagine that something like this will happen eventually, and hopefully sooner rather than later. It is the only way that it can be destroyed utterly; by denying it the food it needs to survive; compliance. BLOGDIAL readers know that demonstrations, petitions and Chakrabarti posturing will not do anything to stop this. Only massive refusal to obey will stop it in its tracks. This refusal must be carried out with business, because it is they who actually operate the majority of the system on a day to day basis. They swipe everyone’s cards, they provide back door access to their databases. The state alone has no apparatus to do the majority of the work. Their single greatest point of direct access and contact is at the borders – other than that, they are nothing but desk bound creatures shuffling between meetings and lunches while they delegate the dirty work to the public.

This can and will be stopped. The Soviet Union no longer exists, and neither does PanAM. Nelson Mandela got out of gaol and became president of South Africa Both of those institutions and that man and his countrymen’s situations seemed unassailable, unchangeable and the pillars of reality. Now all of it is gone, and we lived to see it.

We will live to see the total destruction of the Police State. It will either happen before it starts or after it is entrenched. Either way, it will end and the subhuman monsters that are bringing it about will be consigned to the ranks of the forgotten. No one will remember Andy Burnham in the future. His worthless, meaningless life and the lives of his co conspirators will be washed away as we move to a future where people like that, pure evil, are rendered powerless to hatch their vile schemes on the good people of civilization.

ContactPoint ‘delayed’ till 2009

Thursday, August 28th, 2008

The white heat of public outrage is crisping this sham:

The launch of the Government’s flagship database of every child living in England has been delayed just days after The Daily Telegraph exposed serious concerns about its purpose.

ContactPoint will include the names, ages and addresses of all 11 million under-18s in the country, as well as detailed information on their parents, GPs and schools.

It was announced in the wake of the murder of Victoria Climbié as a way to protect children by connecting the different services dealing with them, but this newspaper discovered that it will actually be used by police to hunt for evidence of crime.

The £224million computer system was meant to come into operation in April 2008 but was delayed following the loss of data discs containing 25 million child benefit records by HM Revenue & Customs last year, which triggered fears that ContactPoint records could easily find their way into the hands of paedophiles.

A review of its security – which the Government refused to publish in full – found the risk of a data breach could never be eliminated and the launch of ContactPoint was pushed back to October.

Now, just weeks before its planned launch and days after the Telegraph disclosed concerns that it will be used to increase the criminalisation and surveillance of England’s youth, ministers have announced that ContactPoint will not become operational until the New Year at the earliest.

The Department for Children, Schools and Families claimed that the new delay was not down to security or privacy fears, however, but simply because of “glitches” that had emerged during testing of the system, which is being built by the IT firm CapGemini.

The children’s minister, Kevin Brennan, told fellow MPs: “We have identified some issues as a result of recent system tests which we are working urgently to address.

“I have therefore taken a decision today to postpone deployment until January 2009 to allow sufficient time to continue to test the system.”

However opposition MPs said the Government should now take the opportunity to scrap the whole project.

The Shadow Families Minister, Maria Miller, said: “We repeatedly warned the Government of the problems with ContactPoint but they pressed ahead regardless, ignoring our calls to allow time to sort them out.

“There were clear indications in February of significant security concerns with this database. Only now, with just weeks to go until the project is supposed to go live, have they finally agreed to pull back to try to iron out some of the problems. Ministers now need to come clean and confirm whether this delay is because children’s personal information is at risk.”

The Liberal Democrats’ Shadow Children, Schools and Families Secretary, David Laws, added: “Instead of delaying the launch of the database, this intrusive project must be scrapped altogether.

“A recent independent review has already undermined all of the Government’s assurances that the database will be secure. The discovery of further technical issues does not bode well for the future.

“The Government has proven itself untrustworthy with large databases containing sensitive data. Parents have every right to demand that their children’s personal details are not put at risk.”

Of course, ContactPoint should be scrapped entirely, and readers of BLOGDIAL know the reasons why.

If it is scrapped, (and it should be because ContactPoint can never be made secure) then the same reasons why it is being scrapped will apply to the rationale behind scrapping of the NIR and the ID Card.

No database can ever be secured. Once the data gets out, it is out forever. Internal leaks are a great hazard, and most of the biggest data escapes have been from this source, like the DVDR posted in the post and LOST, containing the personal details of 25 million children and parents.

This submission has a good summary of these risks, and why databases can never be secured.

The fact of the matter is if children need to be protected from paedophiles by not implementing ContactPoint, then the rest of the population should also be protected from identity thieves, stalkers, rapists, and every other sort of criminal that will be willing to pay millions for access to the NIR data. Of course, all of these correct objections are completely separate from the moral objections that are to do with children not being the property of the state, privacy, liberty and all the rest.

ContactPoint is part of the irrational mania for registers that computer illiterate ministers are suffering from which threatens to plunge Britain into an abyss of unprecedented blackness and horror.

I am getting a sense that this is a step too far for the mild mannered, infinitely patient Great British Public™; that the reaction of the public has been violently antagonistic to ContactPoint, and ministers have been feeling the incandescent rage of anyone they encounter who knows about this abominable system. Even a rabid dog knows when to turn tail and flee when it is confronted by its own destruction, and it may be the case that Neu Labor is that rabid dog when it comes to ContactPoint.

It should not be long before the same reasoning is applied to the NIR and ID Cards and then the whole identity sham will come down on them.

AC Grayling and Smith and Wesson

Tuesday, August 26th, 2008

“This is your freedom. This is the freedom of the British. And to you, it’s gold. And you don’t get it. Because to give freedom to you is just throwing it away. Freedom is for closers.”

In the Queen’s speech this autumn Gordon Brown’s government will announce a scheme to institute a database of every telephone call, email, and act of online usage by every resident of the UK. It will propose that this information will be gathered, stored, and “made accessible” to the security and law enforcement agencies, local councils, and “other public bodies”.

This fact should be in equal parts incredible and nauseating. It is certainly enraging and despicable. Not even George Orwell in his most febrile moments could have envisaged a world in which every citizen could be so thoroughly monitored every moment of the day, spied upon, eavesdropped, watched, tracked, followed by CCTV cameras, recorded and scrutinised. Our words and web searches, our messages and intimacies, are to be stored and made available to the police, the spooks, the local council – the local council! – and “other public bodies”.

This Orwellian nightmare, additionally, is proposed for a world in which leading soi-disant liberal democracies run, and/or permit rendition flights to, Guantanamo Bay. How many steps separate an innocent British citizen from some misinterpretation or interference or error in the collected and ‘made accessible’ data of text messages and emails, and a forthcoming home-grown version of Guantanamo Bay for people whose pattern of phone calls does not fit the police definition of acceptable?

Two things have made this ghastly development possible: the technology, and politicians. The technology is way ahead of the game: Siemens of Germany are already supplying 60 countries with a device that monitors and integrates data from phone, email and internet activity; its software establishes patterns of uses and alerts monitoring staff to deviations from the patterns. As New Scientist reports, the system is already known to throw up huge numbers of false positives; that could have been predicted by a rudimentary acquaintance with human nature and human life. But it is a fact that has to be added to the brilliance and reliability of government and law enforcement agencies in keeping data secure, unhackable and unlosable.

The second point concerns the quality of our politicians. They say they are putting us all under suspicion for our own good. They wish to protect us against terrorists and criminals, and to make bureaucracy more efficient. The efficiency of bureaucracy has one of its finest moments in the neat and sorted piles of false teeth, hair and spectacles at the gas chamber doors. Oh no: better the milling crowd than the police-disciplined queues of bureaucratic efficiency; better the irritation of dealing with human fallibility than the fear of dealing with jack-booted gendarmes whose grip on one’s arms follows stepping out of the queue.

But as to the first matter: protecting us – by making us all suspects, all potential criminals and terrorists – from terrorism and criminality. Well: the first duty of our politicians should be to protect our liberties, and to encourage us to see that liberty carries risks, which we should be trusted to understand and accept so that we can make our own lives our own way. But no: these politicians – Brown and Labour, once the party of the people – are going to keep us safe by not keeping our liberties safe; they are going to keep us safe by making us unfree. Yet the putative benefit of protecting us from terrorism and crime is unattainable. They themselves say ‘there is no 100% guarantee of safety’: but they are going to spy on us all anyway! In fact they are going to create crime: a huge new criminal industry awaits for stealing, copying, falsely creating and manipulating that newly-created precious commodity, “identity”. A huge new impetus awaits for techno-crime to disrupt the monitoring and data storage systems on which the government intends to spend billions of our tax money, creating its unblinking eye in our bedrooms. As surely as night follows day, the new surveillance society will do more harm than good.

[…]

Grauniad

We have been saying this for almost a decade, and with all the technical facts included.

We are far ahead of AC Grayling and all the others who write in these newspapers, and have been for many years.

What none of these people want to face is the fact that government will NEVER bestow (or in this case, return) freedom on its citizens. If AC Grayling wants his civil liberties back, he is going to have to become uncivil to a very distasteful degree.

The potential for profoundly negative uses of technology has escaped us. It is with despair that I conclude that we have to start all over again with the demos and resistance, the campaigns and arguments, to roll back this huge and ultimately destructive assault on our civil liberties.

That is not going to cut it. The police are armed like Japanese manga characters, and have powers to lock you up indefinitely should you dare to riot. Once again, BLOGDIAL is way ahead of you. Rioting and demonstrating do not work. They did not work to save the Iraquis (who were murdered to the tune of one million people), and they will not work to restore your liberties. Do you really think that people who are capable of mass murder (Gordon Brown) will be in any way moved by a demonstration or a riot?

Are you really that Naïve?

In any case, how are you going to organize a resistance when they can know your every move in advance? This is assuming that you will not seek permission for your demonstration or gathering of more than 99 people in advance. You will not be able to surprise the police state with a demonstration or a riot, which in any case, even if you managed to organize it flash mob style, would not produce the result you require; the restoration of your liberties.

We need to stop this assault on civil liberties going further, we need to roll back the attritions they have already suffered, and we need a rock solid written constitution to protect us from those who aim to make us all suspects in the gaze of the unblinking universal eye.

Wow, you really ARE that Naïve!

The United States of America has a written constitution, and it has been summarily torn to shreds by the legislature in the last seven years.

A written Constitution is useless against this sort of onslaught. That should be plainly obvious to everyone by now.

If you have even a shred of common sense, you should be coming to the conclusion that all bets are off, that something VERY UNCIVIL has to happen if you are going to ever be free again.

Thankfully freedom returning to this beautiful island is not impossible. It will take some clear thinking, some twenty first century thinking (combined with some eighteenth) to make this happen.

Your freedom is out there, just waiting for you to take it. Are you man enough to take it?

If you are not prepared to face these facts, if you are not prepared to stare this problem in the face as you would a leaking roof, then all is lost, and all you and Henry Porter will have are your columns.

Oh…have I got your attention now?

Child protection database ‘will be used to prosecute young people’

Tuesday, August 26th, 2008

A flagship database intended to protect every child in the country will be used by police to hunt for evidence of crime in a “shocking” extension of its original purpose, The Daily Telegraph has learned.

ContactPoint will include the names, ages and addresses of all 11 million under-18s in England as well as information on their parents, GPs, schools and support services such as social workers.

The £224 million computer system was announced in the wake of the death of Victoria Climbié, who was abused and then murdered after a string of missed opportunities to intervene by the authorities, as a way to connect the different services dealing with children.

It has always been portrayed as a way for professionals to find out which other agencies are working with a particular child, to make their work easier and provide a better service for young people.

However, it has now emerged that police officers, council staff, head teachers, doctors and care workers will use the records to search for evidence of criminality and wrongdoing to help them launch prosecutions against those on the database – even long after they have reached adulthood.

It comes amid growing concern about the increasing criminalisation of Britain’s youth and the extent of the country’s surveillance society.

Only this week a report warned that teenagers were being dragged into the criminal justice system rather than being given an old-fashioned “ticking-off”, while it has also been disclosed that the DNA profiles of almost 40,000 innocent children are now being kept on the national database.

An estimated 330,000 people will have access to the data stored on ContactPoint, which is due to launch this autumn despite fears the Government’s poor record on data security will mean it puts children at risk from paedophiles.

The records will be updated until children turn 18 then kept in an archive for six years before being destroyed, meaning they can be accessed until a young person reaches 24. Those who have learning difficulties or who are in care will remain on the live system until they turn 25, so their archived records will be available into their 30s.

Little-noticed guidance published by the Government discloses that ContactPoint users can request administrators to give them archived data for a number of reasons, including “for the prevention or detection of crime” and “for the prosecution of offenders”.

The disclosure has led civil liberties campaigners to warn the entire database will be open for investigators to trawl for evidence that links young people to crime or anti-social behaviour.

ContactPoint will not include detailed case information on children, but will record if they have contact with a Youth Offending Team or “sensitive services” such as drug abuse workers, which critics say will mean it is obvious which young people have criminal records.

Investigators opening a ContactPoint file would be able to see at a glance where they had lived throughout their childhood, where they had gone to school, what contact they had with social services and who their parents or carers were, and use the information to link them to known gangs or areas of criminal or anti-social activity.

Baroness Miller, the Liberal Democrats’ home affairs spokesman in the House of Lords, said: “This is truly shocking. It’s exactly the definition of a police state. The police will have the details of a whole generation for so-called crime prevention.

“It raises a lot of issues and we haven’t had a debate in Parliament about it.”

The proposed use of ContactPoint to collect evidence will raise further fears about the extent to which citizens are being spied on by the state.

Britain has more CCTV cameras than any other country, and its local authorities are increasingly using powers designed to prevent terrorism to spy on people suspected of petty crimes such as littering and failing to pick up dog mess. Ministers are also pressing ahead with a £20 billion scheme to issue all UK residents over the age of 16 with ID cards.

The launch of ContactPoint was delayed following the loss of data discs containing 25 million child benefit records by HM Revenue & Customs last year. A review of its security – which the Government refused to publish in full – found the risk of a data breach could never be eliminated.

Because of fears that certain children, including those of MPs and celebrities as well as abuse victims, will be at particular risk, a “shield function” has been created within ContactPoint to hide their addresses.

However, the new guidance states that this can be overridden if police or social workers deem it an emergency. One of the stated reasons why this may be carried out is “an investigation of a crime toward or by the child”, in a further confirmation of the intended uses of the database.

Prof Ross Anderson, an expert in security at Cambridge University, said: “This is yet another revelation about the database state that is shocking but not surprising.

“The police have always been able to look into whatever they want, but the information age changes the scale of that completely.”

Phil Booth, national co-ordinator for the civil liberties campaign group No2ID, added: “Parents should know that this is not for the protection of their children, it could be used to prosecute them. This is a serious step on from what little has been told to the public.”

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families insisted: “The purpose of ContactPoint is not crime detection, it is to help improve services to children, including safeguarding vulnerable children.

“To access ContactPoint for the purposes of prevention or detection of crime or for the prosecution of offenders, police would have to make a special request directly to the Secretary of State or Local Authority and make a case for disclosure.”

ContactPoint will be put into use by 17 councils in the North West in October and then rolled out across the country.

[…]

Telegraph

You were warned.

Catholic weekly slams fingerprints

Monday, August 18th, 2008

Catholic weekly Famiglia Cristiana hit out at the religious values of the Italian government on Monday as the furore over a plan by Interior Minister Roberto Maroni to fingerprint all children in the country’s gypsy camps rumbled on.

“The ‘Catholic’ ministers of Silvio Berlusconi’s government have fallen at the first hurdle, without appeal,” said the weekly, which slammed the newly formed government in April for failing to include staunch Catholics in its line-up.

The dignity of man is worth nothing to them. No-one has raised his hand to counter Maroni and his indecent racist proposal“.

The weekly went on to attack the granddaughter of Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, Alessandra Mussolini, who had previously failed to comment on Maroni’s plan despite her recent appointment as president of the Parliamentary Children’s Committee.

Mussolini’s silence is not surprising, since ethnic and religious registers are part of her family DNA and finally return as government heritage“, it said.

The Catholic paper went on to suggest that the fingerprints of parliamentarians and their children should be taken first.

The registering of a Roma child, who has committed no crime, violates human dignity,” it said,

“We would have given more credit to the minister if, together with the register, he had explained how he would get all the Roma children into schools and take them away from the camps they share with rats. What help has he planned? Nothing”.

Mussolini described the editorial as “a mixture of confusion and intolerance”, adding that she “could not fail” to support a plan that would “save and defend” the Roma children.

But the president of the Italian branch of the United Nations’ Children’s Fund (UNICEF) echoed Famiglia Cristiana’s fears.

Not only do we fail to understand how this register can bring positive results, but there is a risk of criminalising the victims – the children themselves,” said Vincenzo Spadafora, appealing for a meeting with Maroni.

“I think the minister would do well to open dialogue on this issue rather than repeating his position,” he added.

A former Italian president, Francesco Cossiga, added to the chorus of nay-sayers, asking what Maroni had planned next.

I think the minister’s next step will be to cut the first phalange from the little finger of the right or left hand of gypsy children, or even better a piece of the lobe from the right or left ear so that they can be immediately recognised,” he said.

MARONI DEFENDS PLAN.

But Maroni’s proposal received support from Foreign Affairs Minister Franco Frattini, despite unofficial comments from the EC last week that the plan would be unacceptable.

“I think that Maroni has done well to continue along this path. This measure is above all in the interests of the children who have no identity. We can help them (by removing them) from the ignoble state of abandonment in which they find themselves,” said Frattini, a former European Commissioner for Justice and Security.

“It’s not about registers or anything like that but about identifying those who live in our country. These things are done in many other European countries without any scandal and they will also be done here,” he added. Maroni hit back at critics, describing his plan as a “logical measure” that conformed to European directives.

“All the polemics are unfounded, the fruit of ignorance or ideological prejudice,” he said.

Maroni also pointed to an EU law passed in April that requires member states to take the fingerprints from migrant minors coming from outside the EU from the age of six and up.

Under Maroni’s proposal, fingerprints will be taken during a census of all gypsy camps in a bid to establish who is in the country legally and who is not.

Gypsies found without the correct paperwork will be expelled after three months.

The government eventually plans to dismantle all illegal camps as well as authorised camps that do not have adequate facilities.

The proposal has come under heavy fire from opposition politicians, children’s rights organisations, Catholic immigration foundation Migrantes and international bodies including the European Union and the Council of Europe for discriminating against an ethnic minority.

[…]

http://www.italymag.co.uk/italy/politics/catholic-weekly-slams-fingerprints

My emphasis.

Well well well; it seems like the Catholics are finally smelling the stench of fascism and are beginning to say something about it.

Note how Franco Frattini, Fascist, justifies dehumanizing people because it is a logical measure.

Note also how these vermin lie through their teeth; they say:

It’s not about registers or anything like that but about identifying those who live in our country

how can you identify who should or should not be in the country without keeping a register of who is legal? The whole ‘logic’ of fingerprinting and biometrics is that you keep a permanent register and then constantly check people against it. If this man does not understand this, he is incompetent. If he does understand it and said those words, he is a liar. Either way, he has no place being in charge of any of this.

All the usual excuses are rolled out:

These things are done in many other European countries without any scandal and they will also be done here

Translation: “other states violate peoples rights, and so we will also”.

Italy would be far better off simply rounding up all Roma and expelling them en-masse, as they bulldoze their camps.

That way, the people of Italy will be spared the creation of their own police state biometric apparatus; which is the REAL reason why this is being done. Once the apparatus is in place, ‘logic’ will be used to justify putting all Italians in the database, and using it for any and all purposes.

This is how they build these systems. This is how the Germans built their early computer driven police state apparatus; on the back of the threat of the Baader Meinhof gang.

Wake up Italians; you may not like the Roma, but your problem is not them, it is what is being planned for YOU!

Pincer Movement: Home Education in Britain on the way to banishment

Tuesday, August 12th, 2008

“Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends… …when millions are slaughtered, when torture is practiced, starvation enforced, oppression made a policy, as at present over a large part of the world, and as it has often been in the past, it must be at the behest of very many good people, and even by their direct action, for what they consider a worthy object.” Isabel Paterson ‘The God of the Machine’

There is a new consultation, hot on the heels of the last one outlining the proposed guidelines for Local Authorities who have a ‘…a new duty to establish the identities of children missing education.’

Everything that could be wrong, is wrong with this. Lets pull it apart section by section:

1.1.1 There is wide agreement about the outcomes we all want for every child – they should be healthy, stay safe, enjoy and achieve, make a positive contribution and achieve economic wellbeing.

That is completely wrong. There is no ‘wide agreement about the outcomes that we want for every child’. That is why millions of families are home educating. There is no ‘we’ in all of this. Each family is separate, and there is no collective ownership of children. Any normal parent wants their child to, “be healthy, stay safe, enjoy and achieve”. The shape that that takes is up to each family, and has nothing to do with and cannot be defined by the state.

None of this is negotiable.

The same goes for ‘economic well-being’ this is not something that can be defined by the state, especially when it concerns future economic well-being. And for an idea of what a country looks like where everyone has a degree, just look at third world countries where there are so many people with them that many of them are bus conductors. No parent wants their child to be a bus conductor, and yet, if everyone in the country achieved a university degree, would not this eventually be the case? But I digress.

1.1.3 The guidance in this document aims to help Local Authorities (LAs) to effectively implement the duty to identify children not receiving a suitable education. […]

Everything in this document (except the database references) would be acceptable if all mention of home education was removed. Home education is not relevant to this in any way, and if this document was designed to guide Local Authorities for all cases of bad children or children at risk (which home educated children are not a subset of) then it would be fairly innocuous. Sadly, the imbeciles who authored this are clearly against home education and have, from the outset, wanted to create a system of organized harassment to suppress home education in the UK.

As I have said before, no one in a Local Authority has the right to tell a parent what is or is not ‘suitable education’ anyone with even a single brain cell can see that this is the case. A parent may want their children educated and nurtured in their culture and religion; no Local Authority Apparatchik has the right to come into your house and tell you that your child must receive facts deemed by the state to be necessary to life. The very idea should be anathema to all decent people.

1.1.4 Children not receiving a suitable education are clearly at risk of a range of negative outcomes that could have long term damaging consequences for their life chances. For example they are at risk of not attaining the skills and qualifications they need to succeed in life, and are at significant risk of becoming NEET (not in education, employment or training) once they have reached the compulsory school leaving age. They are also are more likely to be vulnerable in one way or another. They may be from disadvantaged families, (experiencing multiple risks such as poverty, substance misuse, mental ill-health and poor housing), travelling communities, immigrant families, be unaccompanied asylum seeking or trafficked children, or be at risk of neglect or abuse or disengaged from education.

The schools that the state runs produce negative outcomes that have long term damaging consequences for the life chances of British children. That is why so many people choose to home educate. Many state educated children do not attain the skills and qualifications they need to succeed in life. The system is so bad that they have to reduce the difficulty of exams so that these educationally impoverished children have a chance of getting a ‘passing’ grade. This is why universities and commercial enterprises have to set their own exams to see who can do what after 100 candidates all with 5 grade ‘A’ A-Levels come to interview but none of them can spell.

Disadvantaged families, families in poverty, substance abusers, mental health cases, travelers, immigrant families, asylum seekers, trafficked children – none of these categories have anything whatsoever to do with home educated children, and it is illogical and offensive to mention them in the same breath as the unfortunates in that list. The Local Authorities already have many duties related to these groups. They cannot run the schools they are already tasked with organizing. New Labour ministers avoid them like the plague; what is it that they fear so much about home educators that they must lump them in with these trouble cases?

This is a direct attack on a philosophical difference that home educators have with the collectivists in New Labour. New Labour does not want any child left behind…from the indoctrination and brainwashing that creates mindless drones who will believe anything that they are told, who cannot think at all, never mind think for themselves. ‘By their fruits ye shall know them’; look at the results of the schools they have been running. They produced a generation of people capable of enjoying ‘Lad Mags’, an epidemic of binge alcoholism, feral street children and decent people fleeing their ‘education’ system.

1.1.5 Local authorities, through their Children’s Trust, must have robust measures in place both to identify quickly when a child is not receiving a suitable education, and to follow through with effective tracking and enquiry systems. These measures should be at the heart of the local strategies for preventing negative outcomes for children and young people, and ensuring their safety and well-being.

The best way to ensure that children do not have ‘negative outcomes’ is to make the schools that they attend good enough to achieve these results. When they are able to make the schools perform properly, the incentive to home educate will be eliminated, and the only people left doing it will be those with children who have special needs. Until they have done this, they do not have a leg to stand on on this front, quite apart from the moral aspect of a parent’s right to educate and nurture their children in whatever way they see fit.

1.2.1 This document is issued under the section 436A (inserted before section 437 in Chapter 2, Part 6 of the Education Act 1996 (school attendance) by the Education and Inspections Act 2006), which provides that local authorities must have regard to statutory guidance issued by the Secretary of State. This document provides that statutory guidance and applies to England only. Local authorities in England must take this guidance into account and, if they decide to depart from it, have clear reasons for doing so.

My emphasis.

What this means is what I asserted before. These guidelines are not new law, they are guidelines, and as such, you are free to ignore them, just as the Local Authorities are free to ignore them.

1.2.2 This document is a revised version of original statutory guidance issued in February 2007, updated to place implementation of the duty in the revised strategic context following on from publication of the Children’s Plan (December 2007); to reflect priorities that emerged since the original version was published; and to reflect local authorities’ initial experience of implementing the duty.

Translation: “We could not have possibly put all of this in the original guidelines, otherwise there might have been a rebellion.”

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.

Quite apart from that, this section is absurd on its face. It is not the place of the state to determine what is or is not a suitable education. It is not the place of the state to say what is or is not an efficient education, and neither is it their place to mandate full-time education.

1.2.4 The duty applies in relation to children of compulsory school age who are not on a school roll, and who are not receiving a suitable education otherwise than being at school, for example, at home, privately, or in alternative provision.

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 eductated quite legally. Are they going to go to all the private schools in the UK and ask for their student registers? If the Local Authority has a duty to identify every child who is not on a school roll, how are they to know which ones are being home educated and which are in private schools? The only way to know would be to collect in a database, a list of all children who are in any type of school and then the numbers that are left are ‘at risk’, and lo and behold, further in the report, we have:

Access to rolls for all providers
6.19 When the named person(s) receive notification about a child believed to be in their area it may be necessary to check the child’s name and other details, if available, against all alternative provision rolls in the local area held by the local authority and schools to see if they are already registered. One way to achieve this is to have all names of school-aged children kept on a central database which is frequently updated and can be checked by the staff members who require access. (This is not a requirement to set up new IT systems for children not receiving education. See paragraph 6.37 for suggestions for utilising existing databases).

6.20 Another way to check a child’s name and other details would be via communication links with all educational providers: this includes all schools; Pupil Referral Units; custodial institutions and other providers of alternative provision (local authorities and schools should establish a contractual agreement that providers of alternative provision will keep a register to check if the child is registered with them.

God help you if your child has the same name as another child who is a bad egg deep in the system. All it will take is for one of these Apparatchiks to misidentify you and your life will be turned into a living hell. If you let them.

They are actually saying that PRIVATE schools must turn over the rolls of their students to the Local Authority. It simply beggars belief, but it is totally logical; they want EVERY CHILD IN THE DATABASE, and being able to afford private education is not going to be an exception.

1.2.5 In order to help local authorities achieve consistency in how they share information in order to meet this duty, this version of the guidance includes, at Appendix 1, a workbook that provides standard data definitions. The data definitions were produced taking into account the views of local authorities based on their experience of implementing the duty since its introduction in February 2007.

This is unacceptable. Period.

1.2.7 Local authorities have a duty to make arrangements to enable them to establish whether a child who is being educated at home (under section 7 of the Education Act 1997) is not receiving suitable education.

This is perhaps the worst part of all, and it is something we have covered at length. No public servant has the right or the ability to say what is or is not a suitable education, and by including this in the guidelines, they are opening the door for widespread harassment and abuse. Once again, for many parents the lack of provision of a suitable education by the Local Authority is the very reason why parents are opting to home educate. It is completely absurd that they should now be given guidelines that say they should pass judgement on families when they are manifestly incapable of providing themselves what they are looking for in a home educator.

What this boils down to is mandatory inspection. And if you do not measure up, you can be compelled to send your child to receive an inferior education.

1.2.8 ContactPoint, to be implemented across England by mid 2009, will help local authorities discharge the duty by recording the place where a child is being educated, where that is known. Where it is known that a child is being educated at home, that would also be recorded. This will enable local authorities to focus their efforts on identifying children who are not receiving education, and putting in place the necessary support. ContactPoint will also show whether a Common Assessment Framework has been undertaken with a child, and whether the child has a ‘lead professional’ co-ordinating any support required.

And there you have it. They are going to use ContactPoint to list all home educators and then pick them off one by one for inspection and shut-down. This section is completely absurd. It says that where a child is being EDUCATED at home, ContactPoint will enable Local Authorities to find children who are NOT BEING EDUCATED!

1.3.2 The duty to identify children not receiving a suitable education can make a cross-cutting contribution to a number of local priorities and should strengthen and complement existing duties. It should be incorporated into the local authority’s Children’s Trust governance and strategic planning arrangements, which are made under section 17 of the Children Act 2004, and the cross-cutting arrangements of safeguarding and inter-agency co-operation to improve the well-being of children. (Children Act 2004 Guidance http://www.everychildmatters.gov.uk/strategy/guidance/).

1.3.3 The relevant partner agencies are: (these are the partners referred to in The Children Act 2004 in relation to a number of duties)

  • Education (maintained schools, independent schools, Academies, Pupil Referral Units, special schools and City Technology Colleges)
  • Children’s Social Care
  • Health (Strategic Health Authorities, Primary Care Trusts)
  • Police and police authorities
  • Youth Offending Teams
  • Community safety teams, anti-social behaviour teams
  • Young Offender Institutions
  • Secure Training Centres
  • local authority Secure Children’s Homes
  • Housing providers.

Other key partners are

  • HM Revenue and Customs
  • Connexions
  • statutory and voluntary youth services
  • UK Border Agency
  • the Fire and Rescue Service
  • Other Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership agencies
  • voluntary and community organisations.

There may also be others, depending on local circumstances.

1.3.4 Information Sharing Guidance was published April 2006 and can be found on the Every Child Matters website.

??!!

No doubt sensitive data from ContactPoint will be shared with all of these agencies.

Simply ASTONISHING.

6.24 Local authorities should not make “blanket” enquires (by email or hard copy). Contacting all local authorities with a list of children asking them to search their databases is seen as poor practice and the majority of local authorities will ignore this request, as it is time consuming with little reward (very rare that they find the child in their area). It is also not secure. Best practice is for local authorities to carry out thorough local checks in their own authority area before contacting specific local authorities that they believe to be linked to the child/young person that they are looking for.

Amazing. Fishing expeditions are ‘seen’ as poor practice, they are not ACTUALLY poor practice, and, “don’t bother doing it anyway, since your request will probably be ignored”. Well, I feel so much better that these goons are concerned about security!

Of course, we know that ContactPoint itself is not secure, and here, we can see an example of why that is the case. They are going to share information on every child they can get their hands on, between all agencies with a computer, and Local Authorities will be able to search private and public databases at will for any child that they cannot find in their own databases. This is going to be one of the leakiest databases ever…and it will be a database of CHILDREN!

It gets worse:

Useful information to share with another local authority in England
To enable local authorities to make their best efforts to search for a child/young person on behalf of the enquiring local authority the following basic information could be shared (as appropriate) with the named officer:

  • Name (plus any know aliases)
  • Date of Birth
  • Gender
  • Ethnicity
  • Parents/carers names including who has parental responsibility
  • Siblings names
  • Previous Address
  • Previous school and date of last attendance
  • Possible new address and school if known or suspected
  • Previous home education
  • Date child/young person left area
  • If recent entry to UK – their country of origin.

Absolutely unbelievable and unacceptable.

6.26 Care must be taken to ensure information is factual and evidence based. (Also consideration should be given to guidance on “custodians of child protection register”

This is absurd. First, they want to check every home educator to make sure that the provision is ‘suitable’, and then, they want to make sure that information is ‘evidence based’. You cannot have it both ways; you cannot on the one hand lump all home educators in one basket and say that they are all putting their children at risk based on no evidence at all and then say that information should be factual and evidence based. In the law, you are guilty until proven innocent. You cannot enter someone’s house or data or communications without probable cause. These guidelines violate some of the most important principles of the law and of free countries, this is quite apart from violating the sanctity and centrality of the family.

6.27 The following may give an indication of the level of vulnerability of child:

  • reason for leaving if known
  • home educated child where the local authority considers that the parent is not providing a suitable education
  • the child is or has been the subject of a child protection plan

[…]

You see? Suspicion is generated by the mere fact that parents are home educators. Unacceptable!

6.34 Local authorities should keep a record of children who are known to be educated at home by parents. Parents are not, however, required to inform the local authority if they decide to home educate a child who has not previously attended school.

This is insane. Local Authorities need to keep a record of all home schoolers (why?) but parents are not required to inform the local authority. How are the Local Authority going to keep records of all home educators, as the guidelines say they must? Any self respecting parent will not offer up their children to this system, and so when the Local Authority come calling and the parent says nothing (as is their absolute right), a conflict will occur.

This is bad guidance, and like the last set of guidance that ignored all the consultation entries, it is full of contradictions, prejudice, ignorance and offensive, immoral twaddle.

One thing is for sure; these guidelines will only affect the most vulnerable home educating families – the ones without money or influence, the ones who are debilitated by having children with problems. Any parent with a powerful solicitor can simply have a single letter written and these Apparatchiks will be frightened off.

These new guidelines are offensive. They are offensive because they illogical, and do not take the reality of home and state education into account. They do not take the needs of children into account. They do not take the rights of parents into account. They recklessly and violently violate the privacy of parents and children, and then share their sensitive and private data with anyone they care to, without the consent of anyone.

These guidelines are what we expected; another step in the incrementalist approach to total control and outlawing of home education in the uk.

Another interesting aspect of this is related to the German home educators experience of their Hitler written home education law (its completely banned). Germans wishing to home educate have moved to the UK and even to Iran to live freely. When the state finally decides to outlaw home education here, will they deny parents the right to move out of the country? Will it be the case in the future that everyone needs an exit visa to leave the UK? Just as it is in Germany and as I said before, if all of this is genuinely being done for the good of the children, how cold you possibly let them leave the fatherland to be educated outside of the German system in Iran, or Britain or the USA? Logically, you would have to bar all movements of all children out of the country so that you can ensure that they are receiving a suitable education in the state system.

Under ideal circumstances, we would never be confronted by Local Authority guidelines like this, or the sinister databases or anything else in this wretched document. In a a slightly less than ideal world, we would expect to see a union of all home educators in the UK to combine as a single voice to say that these guidelines are moot and will not under any circumstances be obeyed. There would be a fighting fund, the most powerful lawyers hired, a hell of a stink raised and the state humiliated and sent packing.

Sadly, we live in the worst of all possible worlds; there are many home educators who will feel that all of this is perfectly OK, who will go along with it and who will deride anyone who thinks otherwise.

We have Local Authorities and government bodies that are completely and willfully ignorant about and hostile to home schooling, who will do anything to stamp it out and will hurt any number of children that they can in order to achieve their nefarious goals.

This document is literally sickening. Every aspect of it is nauseating and what is most insulting is the fact that no matter who complains and no matter what logic is applied to it, it will be published as written, without change, because the evil people behind it (and some of the dimwitted on the receiving end of it) simply do not care about anyone’s rights.

Another nail in the coffin of Great Britain.

Read all our other posts on this subject.

The Times on Biometric Passports: Do they FINALLY understand?

Wednesday, August 6th, 2008

The front page of The Times has as its story, with a HUGE headline:

The Times
August 6, 2008

Fakeproof e-passport is cloned in minutes
Steve Boggan

New microchipped passports designed to be foolproof against identity theft can be cloned and manipulated in minutes and accepted as genuine by the computer software recommended for use at international airports.

Tests for The Times exposed security flaws in the microchips introduced to protect against terrorism and organised crime. The flaws also undermine claims that 3,000 blank passports stolen last week were worthless because they could not be forged

[…]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article4467106.ece

And Martyn Thomas chimes in, echoing some strange Tory logic:

Martyn Thomas CBE FREng
http://www.thomas-associates.co.uk

The tests also raise serious questions about the Government’s £4 billion identity card scheme, which relies on the same biometric technology. ID cards are expected to contain similar microchips that will store up to 50 pieces of personal and biometric information about their holders. Last night Dominic Grieve, the Shadow Home Secretary, called on ministers to take urgent action to remedy the security flaws discovered by The Times. “It is of deep concern that the technology underpinning a key part of the UK’s security can be compromised so easily,” he said.

The ability to clone chips leaves travellers vulnerable to identity theft when they surrender their passports at hotels or car rental companies. Criminals in the back office could read the chips and clone them. The original passport holder’s name and date of birth could be left on the fake chip, with the picture, fingerprints and other biometric data of a criminal client added. The criminal could then travel the world using the stolen identity and the original passport holder would be none the wiser.

Furthermore, the thief could selectively replace the fingerprints and photo to make the most convincing fake ever. This is something that no one seems to understand; you can replace entries either in the database or the ‘cloned’ documents so that someone can most convincingly ‘become you’.

We have been saying all of this for years, and we have gone further, with more accuracy and prescience.

The fact of the matter is, no matter what anyone says, a database can never be ‘secured’ and no ‘urgent action to remedy the security flaws’ can ever protect these systems.

The only way to fix this problem is to actually make the passports secure. That means:

  • Remove the RFID chips from all passports
  • Dismantle the NIR
  • Take the central passport administration computer offline, so that it is only accessible from inside a single site.
  • Issue passports in line with our system, ISLAND.

Securing the passport by removing bad technology does not mean that you cannot use cryptography and modern technology to verify the authenticity of passports; on the contrary, you can have the best of both worlds (the privacy of a paper document and digital authentication) in a single system. We wrote about how to do this previously:

If any document is issued correctly, and is not tampered with, it must be assumed that the holder is the person named on the document, whether it has biometric information in it or not.

If the document has been tampered with, then the holder might not be the person named in the passport. This is the only type of check that needs to be made in passports.

Biometrics are not needed to ensure that the holder of a passport is the named person in the passport. Certainly, there is no need for a central database of all biometrics (photograph, fingerprint, iris scan) to check the identity of each person every time a passport is used. A simple test to see if the passport has been tampered with is all that is required.

This is how you do it.

  1. Each passport or ID document contains a cryptographically signed digital portrait of the holder, signed by the passport issuing authority.
  2. When your passport is swiped, your picture comes up on the screen, loaded from the passport, and NOT a central database
  3. The digital signature of the passport photo is also downloaded.
  4. A PGP-like signature check is done against the public key of the national passport issuing authority, which is stored on the keyring of the swiping device.

If the signature is good, the document is genuine. If the signature is bad, the document is a forgery.

This system does several things.

  • It decentralizes the management of photo authentication.
  • It stops the inevitable abuses of centralized databases.
  • Each passport photo is digitally unique. This means that every time that you get your photo taken for your passport, it is a different cryptographically signed number that ends up in your passport. You will never have a unique identifier tied to your identity, even though its your face in every photograph.
  • Big brother gets a kick in the balls.
  • Passport/ID fraud is basically eliminated, except for the fake ones made to order at the request of MI6 and the like.

There is no need for the centralized passport biometrics database that they are planning; the means exist right now, with military grade crypto and digitally signed photographs that will create a rock solid, absolutely authenticatable, user friendly, non big brother solution to passport fraud, that protects documents and does not further erase our rights as free people.

The crypto to do this is in the public domain, and so zero-cost license wise. My solution is cheaper than the centrally held database solution.

Now of course, there is nothing to stop people from collecting these signature numbers, but if that is the only part of the passport that is readable, and this readable part does not contain your name or any other personally identifiable information, it will be harder for people to create a database connected to your biometric ID. If you are the nervous type you could change your id every month; in any case, I devised this ID scheme to demonstrate that there is no reason to create a centralized database from the outset. There are other, better ways to manage document authenticity. All someone has to do is simply THINK about the problem. Unfortunately, the people who are behind the deployment of this disaster are the companies that sell the systems that will be used to fleece the population for decades to come. Money is the true root cause for centralization, that and the lust for absolute control that slobbering pigs like David Blindkid and John Asscroft dreamed about.

It is only a matter of time now, before both RFID passports and ID Cards are scrapped.

They are not only perfect examples of the misapplication of technology, but they are immoral, illiberal, ineffective, not cost effective and socially corrosive.

Welcome to fascist Britain: All UK travelers to be fingerprinted!

Sunday, July 27th, 2008

First, lets start with a word from a QC:

‘I refuse to be fingerprinted’

Nigel Rumfitt QC, terrorism specialist, explains why he is opposed to compulsory fingerprinting at Heathrow.

Everyone using the new Terminal 5 at Heathrow for domestic flights will have to be fingerprinted. Who says so? Not Parliament. The British Airports Authority, a Spanish-owned private company, and British Airways say so. Why? It’s a government requirement, they tell us. But in free societies, government requirements come in the form of laws. Who made the requirement, when and in what terms?

Fingerprinting has been around for more than 100 years. In this country it has been used only to catch and identify criminals. No doubt that is why it carries a stigma. Compulsory mass fingerprinting is regarded as “unBritish”, but the present Government seems determined to change our attitude.

A few years ago, with little publicity, the law was altered to allow the indefinite retention of fingerprints and DNA taken from suspects later acquitted or even released without charge. Police powers of arrest have been extended recently, allowing the more widespread obtaining of this data. Nonetheless, the Government has not yet dared to make mass fingerprinting compulsory. What this Government fears to do openly it tries to do by stealth.

Because you cannot be compelled to provide your fingerprints, both BAA and British Airways are saying that by choosing to fly through Terminal 5 you are “consenting” to the taking of your prints. That is disingenuous, to put it mildly. True, some people will not mind; others will object, but will not be prepared to abandon an important journey in order to register that objection. In practice, and without legislation, we will have become a nation that restricts the internal movement of its citizens by government decree.

Imagine how people would have reacted in the 1950s to the proposition that before boarding the Flying Scotsman at King’s Cross you had to provide your fingerprints because the Home Secretary thought it a good idea.

These measures, it is said, will protect us against terrorism. That is nonsense. Modern Islamist terrorists want the world to know who they are. That’s why they make video wills to show everyone exactly who has been martyred for the cause. Would any recent terrorist outrage have been prevented by ID cards or fingerprint records? If it would, why bring in vital security measures by the back door and confine them to domestic flights?

Another danger is that, at Terminal 5, illegal immigrants can swap boarding passes with domestic passengers and get into the country unchecked. This is because greedy BAA wants all passengers – domestic and international – to mingle in the same shopping mall before flying.

If this is only about verifying identity at the gate, why take four prints and not just one? Why keep these prints on file for “only” 24 hours instead of destroying them at the gate? To what use will the prints be put in that time? The Data Protection Act, quoted by BAA, in fact allows police access to this material.

This is not about security. It is about paving the way towards the database state, making it easier to force us to “consent” to giving our fingerprints when we apply for a passport. That’s the final step before the compulsory ID card.

I already refuse to visit the United States because of oppressive security and I have indicated to BAA that I shall refuse to provide fingerprints unless I can be satisfied that it has a legal right to demand them. If the law has been changed to allow BAA to behave in this way, I shall find another airline.

Nigel Rumfitt QC is a specialist in serious crime, including terrorism.

[…]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/839199/Comment-%27I-refuse-to-be-fingerprinted%27.html

And this is the offending news:

Millions of passengers flying from British airports will be fingerprinted from next year under the latest controversial Government anti-terror plans.

The measures, which will apply to both domestic and international passengers, are being introduced despite opposition from the Information Commissioner, Britain’s privacy watchdog.

The Commissioner forced Heathrow to abandon a similar plan earlier this year after warning that it was potentially illegal under data protection laws.

Critics say the main reason for the scheme is that airport operators want to maximise profits by ensuring all passengers are able to spend money in ‘duty-free’ shops.

[…]

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

Courtesy of Richard Rogers, BAA, BBC, Fascist new Labour and millions of sheeple.

Thinking about Yellow Ribbon Thinking

Sunday, July 27th, 2008

Another great post from George Washington:

Fearmongering As a Form of Warfare

We often think of psychological warfare as meaning disinformation. See, for example, this.

But psychological operations also include efforts to induce and spread fear, because fear immobilizes people more than any other emotion. Make people afraid, and they won’t take any action to challenge those in power.

We all know that false flag terror is a form of psyops to intimidate people. Likewise, the real reason that our government tortures innocent people is to spread fear. And we already know that the Pentagon employs bloggers to spread its propaganda (indeed, even private companies appear to do it).

I’ve increasingly recently run across a form of fearmongering psyops on the web. Specifically, whenever anyone posts a hopeful idea or a promising strategy for fighting tyranny, someone will post a fear-inducing comment like:

“If you sign the impeachment petition, the government will put you in its terrorist database”

Or

“If you show up to the anti-war rally, you’ll be tasered”

You’ve seen this, right?

These kind of statements can do no possible good. They are not intended to convey any useful information. They are merely meant to discourage people from taking any action.

Given that the Bush administration tortures innocent people, tramples on the Constitution, and spies on everyone, many people are already cowed and intimidated. What we need more of is courage and hope. Those are the qualities which will enable us to save our country.

Anyone sewing unreasonable seeds of fear is either a psyops agent or a coward who is trying to justify their own cowardice by infecting others with the virus of fear. Either way, their fearmongering should be countered with comments about the importance of courage in saving our country and with reasons to have hope that we can change things if we are committed to creating a saner world. Fear may be contagious, but so is courage and hope.

Because those trying to save our country outweigh the psyops agents by millions-to-one, we will win the battle if we take a stand for courage and against fear.

There are several posts on BLOGDIAL about what and what not to do about ‘our problems’.

Before the illegal, immoral, unjustified war crime of the invasion of Iraq, I said categorically that a demonstration against the invasion would have no effect, and that the invasion would happen anyway.

Sadly, I was proved right.

Now we have people calling for more demonstrations, public rallies and such like, and whilst I defend everyone’s right to assemble, I disagree that these actions will be of any lasting value.

I call the sentiment behind these actions ‘Yellow Ribbon Thinking’. It is something that americans are particularly fond of, and which keeps everyone in line, preventing them from making the final leap to real solutions that will actually solve the problems.

This is the only sphere of human activity where the solution is not tailored to the problem. At any other time and in every other instance, a normal, rational human being addresses a problem or crisis in a way that is designed to produce a discrete result; if there is a fire, you bring water or a fire extinguisher. If you want to fly to the moon, you design a space craft. If there is a leak in your roof, you patch it. If it is raining, you get out your umbrella. If you are hungry, you get yourself a sandwich.

In not one of those examples would any rational person put forward as a plan that a demonstration against the rain should be held, or that a candle lit vigil should be organized, should we become hungry, or that we should play music if there is a fire, or that we should dance around with plastic wings to reach the moon.

People should not attend anti-war rallies not because they might be tasered; they should not attend them because they do not work to stop war. If they did, they would not be in Iraq and planning an attack on Iran right now.

People should not sign petitions, not because you might get on the government’s ‘terrorist’ database, but because they do not work to effect permanent change. If petitions worked, we would not have 99% of the bad legislation on the books that we have now.

I have said it before, and I will say it again. Only a fool keeps doing something that doesn’t work. All of these tactics that are very old, tried and tested, have been shown to be ineffective against the sort of tyranny we are facing today. If you keep doing them, you are a fool. If you are calling for them, you are either a fool, or are working for the enemy.

The contention that psy-ops are working to stop people from protesting and signing petitions is probably 100% true; but those psy-operatives are also inside the delusion that protesting and petition writing have power. The fact that they are out there trying to stop it adds to the ‘meta psy-op’ that is being promoted; the one geared to making you think that demonstrations, petitions and all other ‘Yellow Ribbon Thinking’ is useful and effective, when in fact they are not. That is the Matroska trick that is being played on the public; it keeps them two levels down inside the doll from discovering the real truth, which is that even if everyone in the entire USA were to sign a petition it wouldn’t be worth the ink used to scratch out the signatures; the bad stuff would still happen. By keeping people from signing and demonstrating, they are keeping everyone from waking up and realizing that these tactics are worthless; going through a failure on the path to achieve your goal is an essential step before creating the next generation of tools that are actually effective in getting to your goal, which in our case is (partial list):

  • A permanent end to the war machine
  • Sound money
  • An obedient congress
  • Obedient law enforcement staff
  • A properly restrained executive
  • Full, unassailable and enforced individual rights
  • Full, unassailable and enforced property rights

It seems that today, in response to tyranny, fascism and the police state, the only ‘solutions’ that anyone can come up with are ones that simply will not work. Only a small minority is actually fully awake and doing something concrete and focussed, like the war tax resistors, the people who have turned their backs on ‘the system’ and the many others who have found their own way to escape.

we will win the battle if we take a stand for courage and against fear.

I agree that fear is being exploited to an unprecedented level today. The first step on the road to defeating this is for everyone to understand the true nature of life, risk and the probability of anything bad happening to you.

The fascist ‘Health and Safety’ culture that has engulfed the UK (for example) needs to be explained, confronted and disobeyed at every point that it is touched. ‘Health and Safety’ culture is one example of fear running wild, and how it is used to engineer control. The same goes for Anthropgenic Global Warming.

The fear of ‘terrorism’ is the other bogeyman being trotted out on a minute by minute basis to scare everyone into line. All Security Theatre and its related nonsense must be countered, defied and disobeyed at every point that it is encountered. That means refusing to comply with anything that has been introduced ‘because of terrorism’.

Finally, people have to stop acting like simpletons, and stop using the language of simple minded people. There is alot of this language about; it is unfocussed, nebulous and actually, very dangerous; when your house is on fire, you do not talk about ‘taking a stand’ or ‘standing up for what is right’ against fire. You get a fire extinguisher and PUT OUT THE FLAMES. That is why, whenever I talk and have talked about this I try and make sure that I do not use this in nubibus thinking and offer another way of thinking and acting as a solution. Even if what you offer is wrong, by iterating out the failures we come closer to the solution. The most important part is that you are iterating, and not doing the same thing over and over again.

False Flag terror is the number one tool of the fear-mongers. They have been using it for decades. That means we must put false flag terror in its proper context and ignore it whenever it happens. No matter how big the outrage, we must all refuse to change our opinions, change our behavior, accept new regulations of any kind, get all ‘patriotic’, ‘get behind the president’ or do anything that is expected of us. Once we accept that and behave correctly, false flag terror and the fear they try to create with it loses all power, and it loses the power to change the way we live.

There are probably an infinite number of solutions to our problems. All we need to do is find one and then ruthlessly execute it.

Whatever one we choose to use, it must be done with a clear goal and deliverables and it must be unstoppable. We certainly have many models of how it can be done; as I said above, in every other sphere of life, complex problems are addressed successfully. If this were not the case, we would not have put man on the moon or done anything that requires engineering.

In fact, this is an engineering problem, and it must be attacked in precisely that way.

Spreading information and educating people about what is really going on is essential. You can do this without wasting your time marching in the streets. Context is everything; that is why I support and personally distribute DVDs of the crucial documentaries. Once the critical mass of informed people is reached, it will be much easier to deploy the final maneuver, which should not be something that has been seen before, like a demonstration or a rock concert. For the record, I do not believe that asking foxes to investigate a raid on a chicken coop is sensible, logical, rational or smart. Impeaching Bush will achieve nothing, except the justice that he is gaoled for his war crimes…what about the next war criminal?

That is the question that needs to be asked and addressed.

We need a solution that takes care of the next war criminal, and all other possible followers, on a permanent basis.

Thankfully, it is not an intractable problem.

Whenever I hear the name Andy Burnham, I reach for my revolver

Thursday, July 24th, 2008

Illegal downloaders to get warning letter in government clampdown

Internet service providers have struck a deal with government and the music industry to help clamp down on illegal downloading.

The deal, to be announced later today, is thought to include an agreement for ISPs to send out hundreds of thousands of letters to account holders responsible for illegal downloading.

The memorandum of understanding, struck with the BPI, the body that represents record labels, and the government, will be announced today ahead of the launch of a consultation on the introduction of legislation to clampdown on offending.

The memorandum of understanding has been struck with the UK’s six biggest ISPs – BT, Virgin, Carphone Warehouse, Orange, Tiscali and BSkyB – and includes a deal for all parties to work together to develop ways to deal with repeat offenders.

The agreement has been reached ahead of an announcement expected later today by the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform of a consultation on regulatory options to punish ISPs if they fail to take action against the illegal downloading of music, films and TV programmes.

“We have looked to ISPs to acknowledge their responsibility to help deal with illegal filesharing, engage in communicating the issue to their customers, and put in place procedures necessary to effectively tackle repeated unlawful filesharing,” said a spokesman for the BPI.

“Achieving this would represent a significant step forward and demonstrate clearly the collective will that exists to tackle this serious issue.”

It is thought that BSkyB’s announcement of a digital music joint venture with Universal Music earlier this week – the venture has no name, no pricing and no launch date – could have been a move to prove that ISPs are supporting new, innovative, legal digital models ahead of the announcements today.

In February, the culture secretary, Andy Burnham, raised the possibility of introducing legislation to crack down of illegal filesharing as part of a wide-ranging strategy paper designed to look at ways of supporting the UK creative industries and digital intellectual property.

At the time Burnham said that the government preferred to find “voluntary, preferably commercial, solutions” but that it would look to introduce legislation next April if necessary.

The strong stance by the government has alarmed ISPs, which believe that regulation is a step too far.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jul/24/digitalmedia.piracy

The Grauniad is up to their usual slack jawed shenanigans again, this time, acting as the mouthpiece for arch criminal Andy Burnham and the buggy whip entertainment industry.

What’s that you say? You recognise that name?!

You should.

Andy Burnham is the musical chairs minister who used to be in charge of the most illiberal, invasive, dehumanizing and wrong ID card in history. The card that prompted Danny Kruger to write in the Telegraph, in a headline, that New Labour are acting like Nazis.

Andy Burnham is the imbecile that tried to lie about the true capabilities of the ID card, as outlined in ‘Frances Stonor Saunders” email.

Andy Burnham is a bad guy, no doubt about it, and now this monster is in charge of Culture. Given his past, the title of this post is entirely appropriate.

First of all, file sharing is not stealing. The BBC had to do a big climbdown about this after transmitting a completely absurd ‘hit piece’ on file-sharing which equated it with theft, terrorism and … pedophilia. This is how the apology read:

First though, an apology. File sharing is not theft. It has never been theft. Anyone who says it is theft is wrong and has unthinkingly absorbed too many Recording Industry Association of America press releases. We know that script line was wrong. It was a mistake. We’re very, very sorry.

If copyright infringement was theft then I’d be in jail every time I accidentally used football pix on Newsnight without putting “Pictures from Sky Sport” in the top left corner of the screen. And I’m not. So it isn’t.

This groveling apology was needed because the first lines of this bogus ‘report’ started like this:

Now how could downloading a film affect the fight against terrorism or indeed paedophiles?

Well, it goes something like this; getting hold of movies, ‘Bittorrent File Sharing’ in the jargon…

So, child raping, mass murder, the name of a protocol and ‘File Sharing’ all in the first two sentences of one of the most scandalous reports ever on Newsnight. A report so absurd that even the ‘deny everything’ BBC had to climb down.

But I digress.

File sharing is not stealing. It never has been stealing. Anyone who says so (or who repeats it unchallenged like the Guardian just has) is either in the direct employ of the entertainment industry or computer illiterate.

In the case of Andy Burnham, we can safely say that he is in the direct employ of the music and film industry, just as he was in the direct employ of the ID card contract holders when he worked at the Home Office.

I do not need to go any further in this post about how filesharing is not stealing. We have been over this before on BLOGDIAL.

What is new is that Andy Burnham, a corporate enforcer and dongle without shame, is in the right place to introduce legislation that will be penned by the music and film industry – the buggy whip salesmen – to tax everyone with an internet account, and to prosecute those who are file sharing.

To bottom line it:

  • It is completely wrong that ISPs have been blackmailed into sending these letters at their own expense.
  • ISPs are not responsible for the actions of their users. The users are responsible for what they do. This is well understood by most people.
  • It is not for ISPs to, “…support(ing) new, innovative, legal digital models”. The internet is a level playing field; it is up to the music industry to adapt or die, and it is completely wrong for them to use prostitutes like Andy Burnham to apply pressure or introduce legislation that harms the majority that are doing nothing illegal or wrong and industries that are changing the world for the better.

There is nothing that any of these people can do about file sharing, any more than they can stop sunlight from reaching the earth; the users of the internet will always have the upper hand if the entertainment industry takes this approach.

These morons should take a page out of Apple’s book; look at what just happened with native applications on the iPhone.

Apple wanted everyone to write web apps for the iPhone, keeping native apps exclusively for Apple itself in order to maintain complete control over the platform. Within a short amount of time, developers cracked the iPhone and created a set of tools making it possible for any developer to write native apps. They also created a way to explore, distribute, install and manage these apps that was simplicity itself.

Many developers wrote apps for this ‘black market’ of iPhone applications, and Apple didn’t like it.

Instead of running to the legislators to fix their problem, they did something smart, which the likes of the entertainment industry and Andy Burnham are incapable of doing.

They gave the people what they wanted.

Give the people what they want, and what you don’t want will go away.

Apple opened up the iPhone and created its own way to distribute apps. You can even make money from distributing an app with Apple’s App Store. Every developer that used to write apps for the old ecosystem now writes apps for the ‘legit’ Apple ecosystem. Apple gets what it wants (control over what apps go onto the iPhone) and the developers get what they want (the freedom to write apps for the iPhone and distribute them), and the users get what they want; the functionality of their iPhones exponentially multiplied.

This solution has something for everybody, and it even pays Apple and the developers.

Now that is smart.

Andy Burnham is not smart. He is the opposite of smart.

If he were smart, he would tell the entertainment industry to go back to the drawing board before it’s too late (which it already is).

Instead, he is trying to put the genie back into the bottle with his puppet hands flailing about in the wind of change.

Yes, I wrote that.

Sell it by the Pound, Sell it by the Acre

Monday, July 21st, 2008

The face of a traitor:

Selling land by the acre to be banned under new EU ruling

People in Britain will lose the right to sell land in acres under a new Brussels ruling nodded through by the Government.

In a low-key meeting, a junior minister agreed last week to abolish the ancient imperial measurement and replace it with the metric equivalent ‘hectare’ from 2010.

The UK previously had an opt-out, technically known as a ‘derogation’, from the EU’s use of some metric measurements, which allowed the continued use of acres for the pruposes of land registration.

But from January 1, 2010, the unit, which dates back to the 13th century, will be banned.

The decision was buried deep within the small print of EU directive 80/181/EEC on agriculture and fisheries and revealed by the Tories.

‘This is this kind of pointless interference into the nooks and crannies of our national life that frustrates people about the EU,’ said shadow Europe minister Mark Francois.

‘Whether we use hectares or acres should be a matter for Britain to decide, not the EU.

‘Once again this weak Labour Government has meekly given up yet another of Britain’s rights to Brussels.

‘They need to think again and insist that we must keep our right to use our ancient traditional measure of land if we wish.’

Successive British governments have been under pressure from Brussels to announce a date for phasing out imperial measures altogether, with the latest deadline set for 2009.

Last year, however, the European Commission and Parliament announced that it would no longer be seeking their extinction.

It followed campaigns by Britons dubbed ‘Metric Martyrs’ who have fought for years to stop the march of new measurements from Europe.

In 2001, Sunderland market trader Steve Thoburn was convicted of selling bananas by the pound.

He died in March 2004, aged 39, just days after learning his appeal to the European Court of Human Rights had been rejected.

But the move consigning the acre to history – rubber stamped by Jonathan Shaw, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Marine, Landscape and Rural Affairs – will alarm those who believe many eurocrats are still intent on forcing Britain to swap the pint for the litre, ounce for the gram and mile for kilometre.

Neil Herron, campaign director of the Metric Martyrs Defence Fund, told the Mail: ‘This is what happens when you allow yourself to be ruled from Brussels. We are being governed by people we cannot remove from power and have a weakened Parliament in Westminster.

‘The acre is an instantly recognisable unit to Britons. How is the farming industry going to cope? They will all still talk in acres so this is just meaningless.’

An acre is equal to 4,840 square yards or 43,560 square feet. A hectare is more than twice the size at about 107,639 square feet.

The first law setting out an exact statutory size for the acre was passed under Edward I’s reign between 1272 and 1307. The word is derived from the Latin ‘ager’, from which we also have words like agriculture.

Public consultations launched by the commission, which confirmed that allowing imperial measures to be used alongside metric measures would not disrupt trade and commerce – and would help to counter anti-EU sentiments.

But loose goods still have to be sold in metric quantities, with imperial measures only allowed to be displayed alongside, rather than instead of, them.

No one from the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs was available for comment.

http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/news/article-1036895/Selling-land-acre-banned-new-EU-ruling.html

Remember the woman who was in trouble for selling by the pound?

We can take comfort in one thing; all of this is going to come to an end, and sooner than you think, because we are winning:

History shows that people usually don’t know when we are about to win. We are lousy at knowing whether we have a chance at victory.

When people struggling for liberty and justice face seemingly overwhelming power and impossible odds, they can suddenly breakthrough and win when things seem most hopeless and they least expect victory.

Why We Underestimate Our Chances

Why?

Well, for one thing, it is impossible to know what’s going on in the other camp. The oppressors might seem invincible, but there are often schisms and rifts which are tearing the enemy apart from within. The bad guys might be extremely vulnerable because they are busy fighting with each other. They might be merely putting a false public image of unity . . . one which is dropped the minute the cameras stop rolling.

In addition – as I learned as a kid in karate class – even the toughest opponent has vulnerabilities. No matter how big the lug you’re fighting is, hit him in one of his vulnerable spots, and he’s going down. In struggles for freedom and justice as well, if you identify and focus on the bad guy’s vulnerabilities, you can win no matter how poorly the fight seems to have been going.

Moreover, the opponent might be affected by what we do a lot more than we realize. You’ve seen it in horror and martial arts movies. The good guy has given his best shot at the monster. But the monster doesn’t seem to be fazed in the least . . . he glowers and starts walking threateningly towards the good guy, who is flat on his back. It seems like the good guy is finished.

But at the last minute, the monster falls over and dies, and we see for the first time that the good guy had earlier mortally wounded the monster in some way.

There is often a lag time between what we do and our ability to see the effect on our opponents. It may be that our activism is having a tremendous effect and is pummeling the forces of tyranny, but that the weakened and wounded tyrants are simply bluffing and putting on a strong front to keep us intimidated. Don’t stop fighting just because the effects of our actions haven’t yet become visible.

In addition, it is often difficult at any given time to see which historical trend will end up being the most important one. In other words, there are always competing trends and forces, and something which doesn’t seem very important at the time can end up winning the battle in the long-run.

As just one example, the Soviet Union collapsed partly because Russians watched images of prosperity on American tv, and decided they weren’t going to put up with what they had. The communist leaders didn’t think that letting in American tv programs would have such a huge influence on their population’s willingness to put up with communist repression. But it did.

There are historical trends which we are not even currently aware of which might end up ensuring our victory.

(Finally, while the enemy might appear to have overwhelming force, they may be “paper tigers”, with much weaker resources than it seems. More on this in a later essay.)

Don’t Quit Now

Bottom line . . . don’t quit now.

It is possible that we are mere days away from starting to hold the tyrants responsible for their war crimes, false flag terror, illegal spying, and other unlawful acts. The Red Cross finding Bush guilty of war crimes is significant (while it is not a U.S. institution, it is an important one).

[…]

George Washington

The people who have systematically sold Britain to the EU are traitors, and the banning of selling by the pound and now the acre are the latest outward symptom of this deeply offensive trend that is wrecking this country.

It WILL come to an end, and ALL the bad legislation and the insane treaties that have been introduced to destroy Britain will be repealed and nullified respectively, leaving us once again in a place worth living in.

For now, it is your duty to sell by the pound and by the acre and by the foot or by the pea weight if that is your desire. Private transactions are exactly that, PRIVATE and the state, any state, has no business interjecting itself into your exchanges of goods and services.

How long will you stand aside?

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

Sent to me by a lurker, this image:

seen today on a church noticeboard behind the national gallery

and if you Google “have stood aside watched

You get:

I have stood aside and watched while the once greatest, most civilized, and most humane nation in history was being converted into a jungle.

I have stood aside and watched white the greatest good will the world has ever seen between multiple white nationalities within one nation, was being deliberately changed into suspicion, dissension and hatred.

I have stood aside and watched while this “land of the free and the home of the brave” was being conditioned by traitors to seek peace at any price-even at the price of independence and freedom.

I have stood aside and watched while our courts encouraged and our press glorified the perpetrators of crime who have spread riots, vandalism, robbery, and murder across our land.

I have stood aside and watched while our colleges have been taken over by misguided children without the slightest understanding of the civilization they have inherited, or of the evil forces by which they have been duped by.

I have stood aside and watched while our great system of public education has been turned into a propaganda agency for revolution and spawning ground for homosexuality, race mixing, sex abuse and crime.

I have stood aside and watched while meretricious scoundrels, using our television media, our motion picture screens, our newsstands, and other available means, have contrived to bring about a breakdown of morality that is reducing millions of Americans to the level of animals.

I have stood aside and watched while the basic human loyalties- loyalty to God, loyalty to country, and loyalty to family- were being destroyed by evil forces, which now permeate every segment of American life.

And I have had enough. I am only one person, but I shall no longer refuse “to get involved” what about you? How much longer will you stand aside????

Smells so good

Sunday, June 29th, 2008


David Davis feeling a littl’ bit country

One of the key reasons why our current government has been able to get away with the shocking things that it has over the last eleven years has been the equally shocking lack of opposition to its behaviour

Traditional, nominally Left Wing, Labour Party fanboy activists have given the government a free ride on the basis that ‘it’s better than having the Tories in power’

And any voices of dissent given mainstream media access have been be carefully hand picked for their qualities of establishment-friendly ineffectiveness

The Labour government has NOT been better than having the Tories in power – we’ve seen more wars, more inequality, more corporate corruption, more authoritarianism than even Thatchler could have dreamed of getting away with. The only reason why people have taken so long noticing is that they’ve been bought off by unprecedented levels of debt. Debt that is now going to have be paid off in one way or another – which will lead to a lot of people finally realising that their lives have been sold off to the banking system in exchange for not very much at all

And as for the hand-picked shills who represent the voice of establishment-sanctioned dissent, I find it very difficult to put into words just how thoroughly depressed I was by the demonstration against the 42 Day Detention Bill organised by ‘Liberty’ in Parliament Square earlier this week

“The Lib Dem and Tory home affairs spokesmen, and the outspoken left-wing Labour MP, were outshone as James Bond actress Honor Blackman and fashion designer Vivienne Westwood came to Westminster. They were all there for a photoshoot, organised by the pressure group Liberty, to protest against government plans to extend pre-charge terror detentions to a maximum of 42 days.”


Fight Fascism!! Buy a T-Shirt!!
Kapow!! Take that Shadowy Overlords!!

The director of Liberty is, of course, Shami Chakrabarti

Shami’s CV in a nutshell…

  • Worked as a Barrister for the Home Office 1996-2001
  • Leaves(?) Home Office and Joins Liberty 10th September 2001
  • Appointed director of Liberty September 2003

Shami is the first person to be called whenever someone is required to speak out against the latest legislative monstrosity and you can rest assured that she could organise photoshoots featuring scary undead celebrity crones for the next 5,000 years and not change a single fucking thing

In short, opposition to the creeping fascism we’ve experienced for the last eleven years has been carefully managed and all sewn up

And then David Davis pulled his little stunt yesterday


Davis may be an egotistical, self-serving, right wing moonbat but the mass confusion of the establishment press and other politicians caused by his resignation seems to be genuine

And after eleven years of ineffective opposition to creeping fascism I’m personally not fussy any more


(LWTC247)This appears to be a genuinely off-script event and something which could, though the chances are admittedly tiny, upset the carefully managed false Left vs. Right dichotomy which is used to blind us all

There are some principles which should transcend people’s party political beliefs – it is wrong to kill, it is wrong to steal and it is also wrong to subjugate the many to suit the interests of the tiny few

This should be obvious enough stuff but a lot of people have been conned into overlooking basic moral principles through a media-led focus on irrelevancy and bullshit

[…]

http://stefzucconi.blogspot.com/2008/06/i-want-to-have-david-davis-babies-well.html

This guy is spot on.

US OUT!

Tuesday, June 24th, 2008

She’s thirty-six US military bases in a country a third of the way around the globe. She’s over half a century old but the warhawks and the chickenhawks love her – she’s that sweet Korean Model. You know, the one they use as a model for Iraq.

President Bush (what a source!) has referred to the “Korean Model” for Iraq. Also, in discussing plans to keep US troops in Iraq, John McCain stated: “We’ve been in South Korea… for 60 years.” and Defense Secretary Robert Gates: “So I think that the reason that Korea’s been mentioned is – and it’s been mentioned in contrast to Vietnam, where we just left lock, stock and barrel.” and White House Press Secretary Tony Snow last year mentioned it too:” … in South Korea, where for many years there have been American forces stationed there as a way of maintaining stability and assurance on the part of the South Korean people against a North Korean neighbor that is a menace.”

Maintaining stability? Oh, yes, like against democratization movements. From the CIA Factbook: In 1993, Kim Young-sam became South Korea’s first civilian president following 32 years of military rule. To many South Koreans, the long American presence in their country is a reminder of tacit U.S. support for a series of ruthless despots. “South Korea between ’61 and ’89 was ruled by some of the worst military dictators created during the Cold War,” [Chalmers] Johnson says. “Finally the Koreans got rid of them and have quite a healthy democracy now. But all the credit goes to the Koreans – there is a terrible tendency for Americans to mislead themselves about the good things they have done in East Asia.” During that period, Korean history was marked by the The Gwangju Democratization Movement, a popular uprising in the city of Gwangju, South Korea from May 18 to May 27, 1980. During this period, citizens rose up against Chun Doo-hwan’s military dictatorship and took control of the city. During the later phase of the uprising, citizens took on arms to defend themselves, but were crushed by the South Korean army. Senior officials in the Carter administration approved South Korean plans to use military troops against pro-democracy demonstrations ten days before former General Chun Doo-hwan seized control of the country in a May 17, 1980, military coup, according to newly released U.S. government documents.

So our guys helped in domestic repression, but the South Koreans need help defending against the menace of North Korea, right?

Not exactly. South Korea currently ranks 12th in the world militarily, whereas North Korea is 18th. South Korea has twice as many men available to the military (24 million to 11 million) and roughly twice as many under arms (657,000 to 382,000). Economically the South ranks 13th in the world with a GDP of $982b (just above Australia), the North ranks 156th with $2b (just above Greenland). North Korea‘s gross national income was valued at $26.7 billion last year, with its per capita gross national income at $1,152, according to the Bank of Korea. By contrast, South Korea‘s $971 billion economy grew 5 percent last year, giving it a per capita income at $20,045.

Nevertheless, about 27,000 U.S. troops are stationed in South Korea, a legacy of the 1950–53 Korean War. The two Koreas (and the US) are still technically in a state of war since the 1950–53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty.

But while the US is technically still at war with North Korea, it no longer considers Korea to be a combat zone. In fact, the US Defense Secretary considers the country to be safe.

News report: Seoul, South Korea – Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Tuesday [June 3, 2008] that he supported extending the tours of thousands of troops stationed here to three years and allowing their spouses and children to live with them during their assignments. His endorsement adds momentum to a policy shift favored by commanders to improve the quality of life for most of the 28,500 troops assigned to South Korea on unaccompanied 12-month tours because South Korea was considered a combat zone, but that has changed. “I don’t think anybody considers the Republic of Korea today a combat zone,” Mr. Gates told reporters earlier this month.

Despite South Korea’s emergence as one of the most modern, progressive and democratic nations in the world over the past 55 years, the United States still rotates its troops here as through it’s still an active combat zone, Army Gen. Walter Sharp, who has recently taken command of U.S. Forces Korea, pointed out to the Senate Armed Services Committee during his confirmation hearing in April. At the time Defense Secretary Gates said that extending tours and allowing troops to bring their families to Korea would send the message that South Korea is safe, and would bring assignment policies in South Korea in line with those in Japan and Europe.

So South Korea is like Japan and Europe, not threatened and now just a nice safe place for US troops to bring their families. Nobody knows this better than the leaders of North and South Korea. The South and the North are reconciling.

Relations improved following the 1997 election of Kim Dae-jung. His “Sunshine Policy” of engagement with North Korea set the stage for the historic June 2000 inter-Korean summit between President Kim and North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. President Kim was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000 for the policy, but the prize was somewhat tarnished by revelations of a $500 million dollar “payoff” to North Korea that immediately preceded the summit. The United States, according to the US State Department, believes that the question of peace and security on the Korean Peninsula is, first and foremost, a matter for the Korean people to decide.

And they’ve done it. The leaders of North and South Korea last year signed a joint declaration calling for a permanent peace deal on the Korean Peninsula. South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun and the North’s Kim Jong-il issued the declaration after a three-day historic summit in Pyongyang.

The Korean people also want reunification. Christine Ahn testified to the US Congress on January 25, 2005, including the following. The Korea Institute for National Unification, or KINU, a national research policy institute, recently conducted a public opinion poll of 1000 South Koreans citizens and 300 leaders from political, media and civil organizations. It found that 84 percent of the public and 96 percent of opinion leaders believed that unification was an urgent task for the nation, and 85 percent of the general public and 95 percent of opinion leaders approved of North-South economic cooperation. Tourism has also been booming in North Korea. In 2005, over 275,000 South Korean tourists visited Mt. Kumgang resort in North Korea, bringing the total to over 1.1 million. That year, over 10,000 Koreans, not counting tourists, had social and cultural exchanges in the north, a doubling from 2002 to 2004, when an average of 5,000 Koreans met per year. Together, they reconstructed Buddhist temples and Christian churches, and held meetings to discuss intellectual property rights of literature and a common dictionary. Last year, North Koreans watched a South Korean opera, and this year, South Koreans will watch “Sa-yuk-shin,” a North Korean drama on TV.

Ahn’s testimony continued: Perhaps the most emotional aspect of this historic process is the meeting of families, many who have not seen their relatives in over 50 years. Last year, 660 separated family members were reunited in person, and 800 family members were able to see and speak to each other through webcast, a new technology that has helped the elderly who can no longer travel far distances. Koreans, seeing the significant gains in peace and reunification, are no longer willing to accept America’s Cold War mentality. On January 18th, the Journalist Association of Korea, the largest journalist group with 6,000 members, asked U.S. ambassador Alexander Vershbow to “stop making anti-North Korean remarks that do more harm than good,” and to apologize for his remarks, which they viewed as “an intrusion in domestic affairs.” South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun also recently made clear that he did not endorse U.S. sanctions against North Korea. If the Bush administration continues hostile regime change policies, Roh said, “there will be friction and disagreements between Seoul and Washington.”

And how do the Korean people feel about the continuing US presence?

One group of young Koreans claims that since 1945, U.S. soldiers committed over 100,000 crimes against South Korean civilians. Between 1993 and April 2000, these crimes averaged 820 incidents per year or 2 to 3 incidents per day. Yet, the South Korean government has only been able to bring to trial 20 or 3.56% of the 562 crimes committed in 1999 alone.

Obviously it doesn’t serve US interests for Korea to re-unite. Permanent war is better. But, despite what the White House says, if there is no threat and the South can handle a threat that arises, and the people and governments want to re-unite, then why does the US maintain troops in Korea fifty years after the war? Could it be financial? Could be, but the current expensive changes in US basing have caused a stir.

South Korea’s financial burden sharing for a multi-billion dollar project to relocate U.S. military facilities is expected to reach some 9 trillion won ($8.8 billion), a figure far higher than the originally estimated 5.6 trillion won. Last year, Seoul and Washington agreed on a master plan for the estimated $11-billion project under which South Korea was to pay about 5.6 trillion won. Under a 2004 land-swap pact, the United States is required to return 170 square kilometers of land housing 42 military bases and firing ranges across the country by 2011. In return, Seoul is required to offer 12 square kilometers of land to help triple the size of Camp Humphreys to some 15 square kilometers housing 500 buildings. The expanded Camp Humphreys, located 70 kilometers south of Seoul, will accommodate more than 44,000 U.S. servicemen, their families, base workers and South Korean reinforcements, according to the master plan.

The United States has called on South Korea to pay more to reach the 50-50 level in tune with the country’s growing economy and increased responsibility for national defense. “Defense burden sharing is advantageous to both partners. For the United States, the Republic of Korea’s willingness to equitably share appropriate defense costs is a clear indicator that the United States Forces in Korea are welcome and wanted,” USFK (US Forces Korea) Commander Gen. B. B. Bell said in a statement presented to the House Armed Service Committee on March 12. Under the Land Partnership Plan (LPP) reached in 2002, the United States promised to pay for moving the bases of the 2nd Infantry Division, north of Seoul, to Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province, where a consolidated U.S. military base will be built. On the other hand, Seoul agreed to bear the cost for relocating the Yongsan Garrison in Seoul under the Yongsan Relocation Plan (YRP) finalized in 2004. Under a master plan drawn up by the two governments last year, Seoul agreed to spend about $5.2 billion on the program to move U.S. bases to Camp Humphreys, which will be tripled in size to accommodate more than 44,000 U.S. service members, their families, base workers and KATUSAs (Koreans serving with the US Army).

General Bell told Congress on March 12 that South Korea had paid “about $2 billion” in a relocation effort “that’s going to cost them around $10 billion.” His comments caused an uproar in South Korea, which had pledged to pay only about $4.5 billion toward the move. Bell blamed his comments on a “misstatement or mischaracterization” in a transcript of his speech, but the news service that provided the transcript said it reported his comments accurately.

And the landowners subject to land confiscation for base expansion weren’t happy either. From a 2006 news report: Daechuri, South Korea – Here in the marshy heartland of the Korean Peninsula, the rabble-rousing rice farmers of this tiny village are engaged in their own little war against the U.S. military. With American forces in the midst of their largest regional realignment in decades, the farmlands of Daechuri have been condemned to make room for the expansion of a nearby U.S. base. While about half the residents have quietly accepted a lucrative cash-for-land deal being offered by the South Korean government, a core group of about 70 holdouts have rebuffed all efforts to buy them out. Their refusals to make way for the base – or give in to what many of the farmers are calling “American bullying” – have won them instant hero status among some South Korean labor unions and student groups. Over the past several weeks, protesters have held the largest anti-American demonstrations in South Korea in four years, turning Daechuri into a symbol of their struggle to drive U.S. troops out of the country. “We are sick of being treated like America’s servants!” said Cho Sun Yeh, a fiery 90-year-old rice farmer. Her first home in the area was bulldozed to make room for a U.S. base during the 1950–53 Korean War.

So much for Tony Snow’s “assurance on the part of the South Korean people.”

The US is currently expanding its military forces and needs its overseas bases because there is no room for these troops in the United States, and it’s financially advantageous to dun our allies for half the cost of maintaining these troops and their families. The US needs these bases so badly, in fact, that it has put a terribly increased burden on the troops in Iraq (stop-loss, extensions, recalls etc.) just to keep these overseas bases in operation and the Empire in business. Not only that, but when it comes to newly invaded and occupied countries the US can use these anachronistic examples to justify more new and permanent bases in more countries. The US is in a self-perpetuating military empire mode with no end in sight, with the Korean Model as a prime example. And the new bases in Korea will accommodate fifty percent more troops than are currently stationed there! For three-year tours, with their families! Think of it – new schools, child development centers, gymnasiums, swimming pools – and two towns up from me the kids go to school in temporary trailers, just big boxes. Go figure. Edward Abbey: “As war and government prove, insanity is the most contagious of diseases.”

Incidentally, the sweet Korean model being used for a policy in Iraq may not be accepted by the Iraqis. Trudy Rubin, Philadelphia Inquirer, on the proposed Status of Forces Agreement: “A surge of Iraqi nationalism . . . spurred questions about whether the Iraqi parliament would deliver the required two-thirds vote to endorse an accord.”

Of course Miss Korea isn’t the only model that’s struttin’ her stuff – besides her there are enough other models to fill the runway: Germany, 75,603 US troops; Japan, 40,045 troops; Afghanistan, 17,900 troops; Italy, 13,354 troops; UK, 11,801 troops; Qatar, 3,432; Bosnia-Hercegovina, 2,931; and Iceland, 1,754 troops. Is that all? No. According to the US Postal Service there are about 3,000 overseas military ZIP codes.

So the warhawks and chickenhawks should lay off the Korean Model. She’s still sweet, but she’s no longer useful and she’s no longer wanted. Like Japan and Germany, and a hundred other places, she’s high maintenance and not worth the trouble. Bottom line – she sets a bad example, if you know what I mean. Give her the hook.

June 24, 2008

Don Bacon [send him mail] is a retired army officer who founded the Smedley Butler Society several years ago because, as General Butler said, “war is a racket.”

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig9/bacon7.html

Global Warming scam booster James Hansen debunked

Tuesday, June 24th, 2008

NASA warming scientist: ‘This is the last chance’

WASHINGTON (AP) — Exactly 20 years after warning America about global warming, a top NASA scientist said the situation has gotten so bad that the world’s only hope is drastic action.

James Hansen told Congress on Monday that the world has long passed the “dangerous level” for greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and needs to get back to 1988 levels. He said Earth’s atmosphere can only stay this loaded with man-made carbon dioxide for a couple more decades without changes such as mass extinction, ecosystem collapse and dramatic sea level rises.

“We’re toast if we don’t get on a very different path,” Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute of Space Sciences who is sometimes called the godfather of global warming science, told The Associated Press. “This is the last chance.”

Hansen brought global warming home to the public in June 1988 during a Washington heat wave, telling a Senate hearing that global warming was already here. To mark the anniversary, he testified before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming where he was called a prophet, and addressed a luncheon at the National Press Club where he was called a hero by former Sen. Tim Wirth, D-Colo., who headed the 1988 hearing.

To cut emissions, Hansen said coal-fired power plants that don’t capture carbon dioxide emissions shouldn’t be used in the United States after 2025, and should be eliminated in the rest of the world by 2030. That carbon capture technology is still being developed and not yet cost efficient for power plants.

[…]

USA Today

In 1971, James Hansen helped create the model that told us of the coming ice age. When that didn’t happen, he turned to global warming. He’s a very intelligent nut job.

http://www.investors.com/

The guy’s a putz. He’s been going back and changing the data so it fits his story better. Let’s keep it scientific then: Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is a theory (hypothesis). It is an unproven theory. What you do with theories is put them to the test with scientific observations. Let’s see what data points we now have:

  1. Average annual temperatures have not surpassed 1998 (NOAA)
  2. Average annual temperatures are now trending downward since 1998 (NOAA)
  3. Ocean temperatures have not risen since 2000 when the 3000 Argo buoys were launched. The buoys even show a slight decrease in ocean temperatures
  4. The Arctic ice froze to February levels by December, there are 1mm more sq km than before (previous was 13mm sq km)
  5. The Arctic ice is 20cm thicker than “normal” (whatever that is)
  6. All polar bear pods are stable or growing (NOAA/PBS)
  7. Mount Kilimanjaro is not melting because of global warming, rather “sublimation”
  8. The Antarctic is not “melting”, it is growing in most places, the sloughing off at the edges is normal as the ice mass grows
  9. The majority of the Antarctic is 8 degrees below “normal” (again, whatever that is)
  10. The coveted .7 degree rise in temperatures over the last 100 years has been wiped out with last years below “normal” temperatures
  11. Al Gores film was just deemed “propaganda” in a court of law in the UK as many points could not be substantiated by scientists
  12. It was also just reveled that some of the footage in Al’s film was CGI. The ice shelf collapse was from the movie “The Day After Tomorrow” (ABC)
  13. One of the scientists that originally thought that CO2 preceded the warming has now found with new data that the CO2 rise follows the warming (Dr David Evans)
  14. Storms have become less frequent and less severe (many GW alarmists are now backtracking these earlier “theories”)
  15. Droughts have always happened and always will
  16. The greenhouse effect is real, our small contribution to it cannot even be measured
  17. Several publications, including those that are “warmist” have recently written that the “natural” cycles of the earth may “mask” AGW. Give me a break.
  18. 31,000 scientist have signed a petition against AGW!

With China (1 new coal fired plant coming on line each week) and India spewing millions of tons of CO2 in to the atmosphere, along with the rest of the world increasing their CO2 “production” over the last ten years, these results should be impossible.

Now, please be so kind to give me one piece of observable evidence that man is causing “global warming”.

Well, Chicken Little has struck again. I don’t know why people listen to this man, who keeps predicting that the sky is falling.

I guess the sun, the ocean, volcanoes and other things have very little bearing on global warming. Of course, what do they blame the “global warming” on other planets besides earth?

If one takes a look, there are over 31,000 scientists who have signed up stating they do not believe in this “religion.” This entire process is nothing more than a way to gain more power and to provide another way to raise taxes. They are watermelons. Green on the outside and red in the middle. When communism fell, the ones who believed in communism looked for another organization that had similar views, and they found one.

Me, I would rather live in this century than go back to the dark ages that Hensen and his group are advocating. However, even Al Gore doesn’t believe in this. After all, all the Green improvements he put in his house saw his energy bill go up by around 10%.

Just because they print the letters ‘NASA’ before his name this does not make him right.

Obviously.

And as for ‘carbon capture technology’ there is already a highly efficient form in existence, with near zero deployment costs, astonishing efficiency and many useful byproducts. The name of this technology is ‘Pale Flint’.

This amazing ‘Pale Flint’ technology is actually a form of biotech that works on the nano scale. Pale Flint can absorb CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) and return O2 (Oxygen) with an exceptional level efficiency, whilst providing byproducts of the process that can be used in the fuel, chemical, clothing and food industry. Pale Flint is a ‘fire and forget technology when used in its most simple form; you simply deploy it by dropping it, and in a very short time scale, it begins to absorb CO2 and produce O2 without any supervision or interference from anyone. It also does not need to be connected to a man made energy source to run….astonishing!

Pale Flint is here, right now, and if it is deployed aggressively, can soak up all the CO2 man is producing in a very short amount of time.

If you think that is something you need to do.

Mission Accomplished

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

-International Herald Tribune

BAGHDAD — Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.

Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields, according to ministry officials, oil company officials and an American diplomat.

The deals, expected to be announced on June 30, will lay the foundation for the first commercial work for the major companies in Iraq since the American invasion, and open a new and potentially lucrative country for their operations.

The no-bid contracts are unusual for the industry, and the offers prevailed over others by more than 40 companies, including companies in Russia, China and India. The contracts, which would run for one to two years and are relatively small by industry standards, would nonetheless give the companies an advantage in bidding on future contracts in a country that many experts consider to be the best hope for a large-scale increase in oil production.

There was suspicion among many in the Arab world and among parts of the American public that the United States had gone to war in Iraq precisely to secure the oil wealth these contracts seek to extract. The Bush administration has said that the war was necessary to combat terrorism. It is not clear what role the United States played in awarding the contracts; there are still American advisers to Iraq’s Oil Ministry.

Sensitive to the appearance that they were profiting from the war and already under pressure because of record high oil prices, senior officials of two of the companies, speaking only on the condition that they not be identified, said they were helping Iraq rebuild its decrepit oil industry.

For an industry being frozen out of new ventures in the world’s dominant oil-producing countries, from Russia to Venezuela, Iraq offers a rare and prized opportunity.

While enriched by $140 per barrel oil, the oil majors are also struggling to replace their reserves as ever more of the world’s oil patch becomes off limits. Governments in countries like Bolivia and Venezuela are nationalizing their oil industries or seeking a larger share of the record profits for their national budgets. Russia and Kazakhstan have forced the major companies to renegotiate contracts.

The Iraqi government’s stated goal in inviting back the major companies is to increase oil production by half a million barrels per day by attracting modern technology and expertise to oil fields now desperately short of both. The revenue would be used for reconstruction, although the Iraqi government has had trouble spending the oil revenues it now has, in part because of bureaucratic inefficiency.

[…]

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/19/africa/19iraq.php

Via Ron Paul News

The pattern is clear.

It has been done in ‘Banana Republics (Operation PBFORTUNE)‘.
It has been done in Nicaragua.
It has been done in The Congo.
It has been done in Iran (Operation Ajax).
It has now been done in Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom).
It is now being planned for Venezuela (Operation Pliers).

The most important part of this repeated pattern is not that corporations are hiring out the CIA to ensure they can monopolize markets, but that the great american public allows it to happen time and time and time again.