By James Kanter
Tuesday, June 10, 2008

BRUSSELS: The European Union’s competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, delivered an unusually blunt rebuke to Microsoft on Tuesday by recommending that businesses and governments use software based on open standards.

Kroes has fought bitterly with Microsoft over the past four years, accusing the company of defying her orders and fining it nearly ?1.7 billion, or $2.7 billion, for violating European competition rules. But her comments were the strongest recommendation yet by Kroes to jettison Microsoft products, which are based on proprietary standards, and to use rival operating systems to run computers.

“I know a smart business decision when I see one – choosing open standards is a very smart business decision indeed,” Kroes told a conference in Brussels. “No citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to choose a closed technology over an open one.”

Kroes did not name Microsoft in advance copies of her speech, but she made her meaning clear by referring to the only company in EU antitrust enforcement history that has been fined for refusing to comply with European Commission orders – a record held by Microsoft.

“The commission has never before had to issue two periodic penalty payments in a competition case,” she said.

The EU has previously ruled against Microsoft for abusing its dominance in the markets for software to play music on computers and to communicate with powerful server computers on a network. In recent months, Kroes has opened new investigations against Microsoft after complaints that it was competing unfairly in the market for Web browsers by using the Explorer software. Kroes is also investigating whether Microsoft is making it too hard for rivals to work with its Office suite applications.

In her speech, Kroes said there were serious security concerns for governments and businesses associated with using a single software supplier. She praised the City of Munich for using software based on open standards, along with the German Foreign Ministry and the Gendarmerie Nationale, a department of the French police force.

Kroes, who is Dutch, encouraged the Dutch government and Parliament to continue moving toward use of open standards. EU agencies “must not rely on one vendor” and “must refuse to become locked into a particular technology – jeopardizing maintenance of full control over the information in its possession,” she said.

A policy by the European Commission adopted last year to promote the use of software products that support open standards “needs to be implemented with vigor,” she said.

[…]

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/10/technology/msft.php

Amazing. It looks like they are finally beginning to GET IT.

Micro$oft Winblows === BAD
GNU/Linux/Gnome/Ubuntu === GOOD

M$ Office === BAD
Open Office === GOOD

.doc === BAD
.odf === GOOD

Freedom === GOOD
Slavery === BAD

Simple really!

6 June 2008

It has been learned that UK local authorities have been using RIP to spy into citizen communications and private data despite the assurances of Charles Clarke MP, in the attached letter, that this would not happen.

File names and title by Cryptome.
__________

Please feel free to publish the attached letter and/or this covering email.

This letter was sent about eight years ago as a reply to my Member of Parliament, Bill Cash, in response to the second of two letters I wrote complaining about the Regulation of Investigatory Powers bill that was then being considered by Parliament.

As you can see from the second paragraph on the second page, the Minister of State responsible for the legislation categorically denied that access to ‘communications data’ would be extended to local authorities.

As we’ve seen from recent media reports, this assurance has turned out to be entirely worthless.

—
Richard Lamont http://www.lamont.me.uk/

OpenPGP Key ID: 0xBD89BE41
Fingerprint: CE78 C285 1F97 0BDA 886D BA78 26D8 6C34 BD89 BE41

__________

Charles Clarke MP Letter: http://cryptome.org/clarke-rip-lie.pdf (4pp, 823KB)

Once more, we are taught the lesson that New Labour lies and lies and lies again. That is not a new lesson for anyone in Great Britain.

A more fresh lesson is that legislation must always be hermitically sealed; there must be no open ended provisions, no means to add to provisions in any way or change the meaning or scope in any way. If legislation that is leaky is passed, new provisions (in this case, allowing Local Authorities onto the list of organs who can use RIPA) WILL be added and there will be nothing anyone can do about it.

We must always remember; people who are willing to participate in mass murder are capable of doing any act that is less serious than murder, and turning Britain into a police state is less than murder…even though it can be likened to murdering Britain itself.

Even if you take the words of the porcine liar Charles Clarke at face value, this is another example of ‘good’ people bringing in power legislation that is later abuseable by bad people.

If there is anyone left who thinks that ID cards are not going to be used as a tool to abuse millions of people like RIPA is now being used beyond its original scope, they are completely, totally and probably mercifully, delusional.

ID card abuse will make these Local Authority RIPA abuses look like a 1950’s clip round the ear by the local bobby. They are going to unleash violations on an unimaginable scale and depth of penetration into the lives of the abused.

Remember the warnings of The Anonymous Email, that Andy Burnham said were:

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. The Bill sets strict terms on the limited number of public bodies with access to the register, while private organisations will be able to conduct verification checks only with the consent of the cardholder.

What we can take from this is that the Government will have knowledge of, and control over, your life through the National Identity Register, It is correct to suggest either that “every outpost of the state” and private enterprises who will also have access to the register. The Bill is unlimited in terms of the number of public bodies with access to the register, and private organisations will be able to conduct verification checks without the consent of the cardholder.

There. Via substitution he is being made to tell the truth.

We can see from these similar assurances of limited scope that everything anyone connected to the government has said about ID cards is a lie, and that they will break any promise they make to do with how they will be used, should they be rolled out.

Essentially they will bringing this sickening and immoral process to a national scale, affecting every single person in the UK, where a small college of twerps with overactive imaginations will determine wether or not anyone “digs with the wrong foot”.

We have been over this many times, and so have other people, at length.

You have been warned, and you know what to do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HOW THE SCHEME WOULD WORK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

My emphasis.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Every place that sells alcohol or cigarettes, every post office, every pharmacy, and every Bank will have an NIR Card Terminal, (very much like the Chip and Pin Readers that are everywhere now) into which your card can be ‘swiped’ to check your identity. Each time this happens, a record is made at the NIR of the time and place that the Card was presented. This means for example, that there will be a government record of every time you withdraw more than £99 at your branch of Nat West, who now demand ID for these transactions. Every time you have to prove that you are over 18, your card will be swiped, and a record made at the NIR. Restaurants and off licenses will demand that your card is swiped so that each receipt shows that they sold alcohol to someone over 18, and that this was proved by the access to the NIR, indemnifying them from prosecution.

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks to TH for the heads up!

Post Script

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

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

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

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

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

We’d Go Nuts

I wonder how we would react if 50,000 of us got killed in one whack, as apparently has happened in the China earthquake. Or, God forbid, 121,000, which is the high estimate for the number of dead in the Myanmar cyclone.

Judging from our reaction to the terror attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which claimed 3,000 lives, I suspect we would go nuts. Back in 2001, it became Terror Week on television, so that we got to see the damage endless numbers of times. Politicians were scrambling for flag pins and trying to remember the words of the national anthem. Hardly a family pet could be buried without the TV cameras and the mayor showing up.

The president said it was our patriotic duty to spend money and then declared world war on terrorists everywhere, even though the 9/11 attackers had nothing to do with the others.

I infuriated one of the TV talkie boys one night. I accused him of being fearmonger because he was ranting about the ever-present menace of terrorism. I pointed out that while terrorists had killed 3,000 Americans, 17,000 had killed themselves in falls, 15,000 had been murdered by homegrown criminals and 109,000 died in accidents. He shouted and hung up.

Never let the news media set your priorities for things to worry about. They will be hopelessly wrong. Any one American’s chances of being killed by a terrorist is minuscule. The only thing you have to do to protect yourself from a bomb is be somewhere else, and in a country of 3 million square miles, the odds are that most of us will be somewhere else.

There is no worldwide network of terrorists. Al-Qaida is the only group we have to worry about, and it is small and not very influential. Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad have no quarrel with us. Their quarrel is with Israel. Colombia’s terrorists are trying to overthrow the Colombian government, and that goes for most guerrilla organizations in the world.

A sensible administration would have taken out Osama bin Laden a long time ago. It’s pretty embarrassing when you can’t find a guy who is 6 feet 6 inches tall in a country where most people are short.

We need to develop some stoicism, because it is possible that we could lose a large number of people. A powerful earthquake in Los Angeles or San Francisco at rush hour could kill a good number of people. We’re 30 minutes from 150 million people dead as long as nuclear missiles sit in silos in Russia and China. The most stupidly dangerous thing this administration has done is allow our relations with Russia to deteriorate. When the Russians needed our help, we tried to exploit them instead. Now they have become an energy superpower and have little or no use for us.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin proved to be a smarter man and a better leader than George W. Bush. Russia’s economy is booming; ours is in decline. Russia is energy-independent; we are desperately dependent on energy imports. Russia’s power and influence are on the rise; ours are in decline. That’s what happens when we vote jovial dullards into office who surround themselves with ideologues. Other than throw out a couple of baseballs, what has Bush done right? I can’t think of anything.

I’m not excited about any of the possible replacements. I just pray that whichever one it is will have more brains and less arrogance than the present occupant. Forgive me for sounding cynical, but I’ve been listening to politicians promise to solve these same problems for 40 years, and the problems have all gotten worse, not better.

[…]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/reese/reese458.html

I love the smell of coffee.

Double Espresso in this case.

To the People of the United States of America,

I am writing today because no one has asked my opinion in any poll. No candidate has sought my vote, and no lobbyist taken up my cause. It seems that of all of the “special interests” in America, mine is forgotten – unworthy of notice by politicians, activists, media commentators, and the press.

It may be because I am neither a Republican nor a Democrat, nor represented by lobbyists for the disabled, senior citizens, minorities, trade unions, nor any other lobby. In fact, I am not a member of any group whatsoever.

I am the individual. Our Constitution was written to protect me from the majority. I am the victim of Democracy, which has overwhelmed the safeguards of the old Republic and replaced the Republic with mob rule. I am raising my voice now, while I am still able to raise it, if for no other reason than to let posterity know that I was still here when the ruins of our Republic are examined.

I have lived my life in a country that proclaims itself to the world to be the “land of the free,” but have watched my freedoms erode. The most basic right I had – ownership of the fruits of my labor – has been taken from me. Now, politicians argue over what portion of my labor will purchase medical care for the poor and elderly, what portion will pay social security, what portion will educate other people’s children, and what paltry sum I will be allowed to keep so that I may go out tomorrow and work another day.

I once lived in a country which recognized my right to do as I pleased, as long as I did not violate the rights of others. Now, mountains of laws and regulations have been passed in the perverse effort to prevent me from having even the opportunity to commit a crime. As a result, I am rendered paralyzed, as there is almost no action that I can take, beyond rising from my bed, that cannot be construed by someone to be a crime or violation.

More of my property is seized to support grand adventures in foreign lands, where my government spreads “freedom” through the crosshairs of its guns. My government’s invasion of countries that pose no military threat to us whatsoever has made me hated throughout the world, merely for being an American, and helped enslave my children to unserviceable debts.

Most ominously, even the legal protections of my person have been revoked in the name of protecting my fellow citizens against “terrorism. ”

While the Constitution guarantees me sound money, as only gold and silver shall be legal tender, I am nevertheless forced to use the worthless paper notes of a private banking cartel that decreases their value daily, providing me no safe store of value to save for my future. To aid financial speculators who produce nothing whatsoever, the volume of these notes is increased out of all reason whenever these gamblers and thieves stand to suffer a loss. As a result, the purchasing power of this slave currency is constantly decreased, widening the gap between rich and poor, and destroying the middle class. I am left with no practical means to participate in free trade and civil society.

I give my fellow citizens the benefit of the doubt, and believe that they have merely forgotten what the true nature and purpose of government is. I remind them that government is nothing more than the collective use of force – and that the use of force is never justified except in defense. It is, by definition, a last resort. Government has almost limitless power, but very few rights. It has no right to do anything beyond protecting my life and my freedom.

Government has no right to provide for the needy with monies extorted at gunpoint from its citizens. I will gladly work with my fellow citizens to help those in need, once I have a choice. In the meantime, I demand that my labor cease to be taken from me without my consent.

Government has no right to bring freedom to the oppressed by initiating force. I remind my fellow citizens that all of the tyrants of history justified their conquests under the false guise of “liberation. “I will gladly stand with my countrymen to fight any foreign power that truly threatens us, but I demand that my government immediately cease to invade foreign countries in my name.

Government has no right to “manage the economy. “Trade is only truly trade when it is free – the result of exchanges between people by mutual, voluntary consent. There is no role for government in this whatsoever. I demand that my right to trade freely with my fellow citizens and citizens abroad be respected and no longer subject to inspection or interference.

Government has no right to “prevent crime. “It may only punish activities that are truly criminal, and those are relatively few compared to the ocean of laws and regulations that have been passed. I demand that any law prohibiting an act that does not directly harm another person be repealed, along with any law that prohibits unpopular thoughts or speech. Neither the threat of terrorism, poverty, natural disaster, nor epidemic justifies the surrender of one ounce of liberty. I demand that habeas corpus be restored.

Finally, government has no right to rob me of my property by forcing me to use paper currency whose value is subject to its whim. I demand that gold and silver no longer be taxed as capital gain if it rises in price relative to paper currency.

While I owe my fellow citizens nothing in return for heeding these demands, I nevertheless offer a thousand-fold in return. My fellow citizens are running out of fossil fuel – I will discover a new, renewable energy source. Our planet is growing crowded – I will unlock the secrets of traveling to others. The productive members of our society will soon be outnumbered by those less able or unable to produce any longer – I will feed them all. For it was I – the free individual – that gave you everything you have. It was I that invented the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, and the computer. It was I that devised methods to produce mass amounts of goods, making them affordable and available to everyone. It was I that devised a system of government where the rule of the jungle was replaced by the rule of just laws.

In return for restoring my rights, you will again free my creative power to give you more than you can possibly imagine, and solve problems which you are unable to solve without me. I ask nothing more in return, for it is no more my right to make claims upon my fellow citizens than it is their right to make claims upon me. I hereby waive any supposed “entitlement” to public welfare, medical care, retirement benefits, or any other benefit that requires coercion of my fellow citizens to provide it. In return I demand that my liberty be restored. As I believe that I am the last individual left on earth, I do not believe that my tax money will be missed. However, if there are other individuals besides me that would claim their freedom as well, I invite them to join me, and to them I pledge my life, my fortune, and my sacred honor.

Regards,

Publius

[…]

http://www.restoretherepublic.com/content/view/1165/71/

This is beautiful, but there is something crucial missing.

• I demand that my labor cease to be taken from me without my consent.
• I demand that my government immediately cease to invade foreign countries in my name.
• I demand that my right to trade freely with my fellow citizens and citizens abroad be respected and no longer subject to inspection or interference.
• I demand that habeas corpus be restored.
• I demand that gold and silver no longer be taxed as capital gain if it rises in price relative to paper currency.

And what if these ‘demands’ are not met?

What makes you think that demanding anything will be met with nothing more than silence?

Ask the two million people who marched in London against the mass murder campaign what the result of ‘demanding’ is.

The time of demanding is OVER. Like the Founding Fathers, you must TAKE what is rightfully yours, and no longer ASK for your freedom, otherwise, the red coats will simply come to your house and kill you and your family and steal what is left of your property.

You want to keep the fruits of your labor? KEEP THEM.
You want ‘your’ government to stop the war machine? KEEP THE FRUITS OF YOUR LABOR.
You want to trade freely with your fellow citizens? CREATE A LOCAL CURRENCY, STOP USING THE DOLLAR.
You want habeas corpus to be restored? MOVE TO ARIZONA.

The last one is just completely absurd. What gold you have or do not have is no one’s business in the first instance, and so it should not be subject to any tax whatsoever. The very fact that you acknowledge that there is such a thing as ‘capital gains tax’ and that someone has the right to levy it on you, shows that you are not yet awake. This is further demonstrated by your use of the phrase ‘my government’. That government has not belonged to the people of the USA for….a very long time, certainly, you and your father and his father never lived in a time when it belonged to the people.

What is nice about this is that people are slowly coming to the inevitable, inescapable conclusion that there is only one way out of their trouble. Once all of this demanding fails to work, they are going to have to put their feet down and say ‘THAT IS IT’, and then the showdown will come.

That is what the Arizona legislation is all about; they are at the point where they will not accept any further erosion of the tiny pebble shaped remnants of their freedom that was once a granite boulder. They have drawn a line in the sand and dared the federal government to cross it.

What ‘Publius’ needed to say is:

• I withdraw my labor and will no longer allow its fruits to be taken from me without my consent.
• I withdraw the fruits of my labor from this illegitimate government henceforth until it immediately ceases to invade and occupy in any way and to any extent, foreign countries in my name.
• I assert my right to trade freely with my fellow citizens and citizens abroad and shall longer submit to inspection or interference.
• I declare habeas corpus to be restored and put on notice all law enforcement that the citizens of this country will punish violators of habeas corpus.
• I withdraw my wealth from the fiat currency system and shall only transact in debt free currencies including but not limited to gold and silver, as I see fit.

Now, this would be something that has some teeth, and which will actually cause something to be DONE, instead of begging like a leper, bowl in hand, at the feet of war criminals and organized crime!

It cannot be long before someone somewhere does this, even at the legislative level. ‘The Arizona Event’, I am sure, is about to be followed by declarations of this sort, and in fact, they naturally flow from that legislation; if Arizona declares the federal government nullified, then all federal laws are simultaneously abolished and that laundry list is automagically done.

Taking your laptop into the US? Be sure to hide all your data first

By Bruce Schneier
The Guardian
May 15 2008

Last month a US court ruled that border agents can search your laptop, or any other electronic device, when you’re entering the country. They can take your computer and download its entire contents, or keep it for several days. Customs and Border Patrol has not published any rules regarding this practice, and I and others have written a letter to Congress urging it to investigate and regulate this practice.

But the US is not alone. British customs agents search laptops for pornography. And there are reports on the internet of this sort of thing happening at other borders, too. You might not like it, but it’s a fact. So how do you protect yourself?

Encrypting your entire hard drive, something you should certainly do for security in case your computer is lost or stolen, won’t work here. The border agent is likely to start this whole process with a “please type in your password”. Of course you can refuse, but the agent can search you further, detain you longer, refuse you entry into the country and otherwise ruin your day.

You’re going to have to hide your data. Set a portion of your hard drive to be encrypted with a different key – even if you also encrypt your entire hard drive – and keep your sensitive data there. Lots of programs allow you to do this. I use PGP Disk (from pgp.com). TrueCrypt (truecrypt.org) is also good, and free.

While customs agents might poke around on your laptop, they’re unlikely to find the encrypted partition. (You can make the icon invisible, for some added protection.) And if they download the contents of your hard drive to examine later, you won’t care.

Be sure to choose a strong encryption password. Details are too complicated for a quick tip, but basically anything easy to remember is easy to guess. (My advice is at tinyurl.com/4f8z4n.) Unfortunately, this isn’t a perfect solution. Your computer might have left a copy of the password on the disk somewhere, and (as I also describe at the above link) smart forensic software will find it.

So your best defence is to clean up your laptop. A customs agent can’t read what you don’t have. You don’t need five years’ worth of email and client data. You don’t need your old love letters and those photos (you know the ones I’m talking about). Delete everything you don’t absolutely need. And use a secure file erasure program to do it. While you’re at it, delete your browser’s cookies, cache and browsing history. It’s nobody’s business what websites you’ve visited. And turn your computer off – don’t just put it to sleep – before you go through customs; that deletes other things. Think of all this as the last thing to do before you stow your electronic devices for landing. Some companies now give their employees forensically clean laptops for travel, and have them download any sensitive data over a virtual private network once they’ve entered the country. They send any work back the same way, and delete everything again before crossing the border to go home. This is a good idea if you can do it.

If you can’t, consider putting your sensitive data on a USB drive or even a camera memory card: even 16GB cards are reasonably priced these days. Encrypt it, of course, because it’s easy to lose something that small. Slip it in your pocket, and it’s likely to remain unnoticed even if the customs agent pokes through your laptop. If someone does discover it, you can try saying: “I don’t know what’s on there. My boss told me to give it to the head of the New York office.” If you’ve chosen a strong encryption password, you won’t care if he confiscates it.

Lastly, don’t forget your phone and PDA. Customs agents can search those too: emails, your phone book, your calendar. Unfortunately, there’s nothing you can do here except delete things.

I know this all sounds like work, and that it’s easier to just ignore everything here and hope you don’t get searched. Today, the odds are in your favour. But new forensic tools are making automatic searches easier and easier, and the recent US court ruling is likely to embolden other countries. It’s better to be safe than sorry.

[…]

http://schneier.com/blog/

We of course, have written about this before, September 12th 2006 to be exact, and the solution we give is more or less the same.

There is one solution however, that is not on the table in this great article; do not travel to places where these practices are in place. But that is a different blog post.

It is obvious to even the most stupid person that searching a laptop for pornography is TOTALLY STUPID. Pr0n travels over the internetz, and the really devious pr0n people use encrypted VPN to share their stuff. All these measures do is industrialize humiliation and violation. It is pointless, corrosive and the act of utterly incompetent and ignorant people.

This is a war that they will never win. Storage devices are getting bigger in capacity whilst shrinking in size, and people are getting more and more savvy about storing all their goods online; soon, many people will not use any office suites on their laptops, they will access an online office suite securely. That means they will have secure access to massive file storage, and if the files are encrypted before they are stored online, no warrant can cause them to be opened, and there will be no covert ‘sneak and peek‘ raids that obtain anything of value.

In the end, privacy will win, because the tools will make it happen. All of these insane measures simply accelerate the development of the tools and their byproduct: privacy.

Who would have thought that PGP would spread as far and wide as it has? And now, with articles like this appearing in even the shittiest of newspapers, it will spread even further, as companies demand that their laptops are locked down, and individuals start to protect themselves with these easy to use, military grade, transparent tools.

On a side note, you will see that Bruce has used a Tinyurl in this article. That is what smart people do. To my utter amazement, people who run email lists that are concerned with these issues STILL sent out alerts that have long line wrapped URLs, making them unclickable, and of course, because they are line wrapped, you cannot select them in one go, you have to select copy and paste twice. It is a minor annoyance, but it displays something about them and their attitude and level of competence. They certainly know about Tinyurl, so do they not use it because they are lazy? I think that actually, they are just plain dumb; as dumb as the people who think searching laptops at a border is a good idea, but they are batting for the other side.

VATICAN CITY – Believing that the universe may contain alien life does not contradict a faith in God, the Vatican’s chief astronomer said in an interview published Tuesday.

The Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, was quoted as saying the vastness of the universe means it is possible there could be other forms of life outside Earth, even intelligent ones.

“How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere?” Funes said. “Just as we consider earthly creatures as ‘a brother,’ and ‘sister,’ why should we not talk about an ‘extraterrestrial brother’? It would still be part of creation.”

In the interview by the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, Funes said that such a notion “doesn’t contradict our faith” because aliens would still be God’s creatures. Ruling out the existence of aliens would be like “putting limits” on God’s creative freedom, he said.

The interview, headlined “The extraterrestrial is my brother,” covered a variety of topics including the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and science, and the theological implications of the existence of alien life.

Funes said science, especially astronomy, does not contradict religion, touching on a theme of Pope Benedict XVI, who has made exploring the relationship between faith and reason a key aspect of his papacy.

The Bible “is not a science book,” Funes said, adding that he believes the Big Bang theory is the most “reasonable” explanation for the creation of the universe. The theory says the universe began billions of years ago in the explosion of a single, super-dense point that contained all matter.

But he said he continues to believe that “God is the creator of the universe and that we are not the result of chance.”

Funes urged the church and the scientific community to leave behind divisions caused by Galileo’s persecution 400 years ago, saying the incident has “caused wounds.”

In 1633 the astronomer was tried as a heretic and forced to recant his theory that the Earth revolved around the sun. Church teaching at the time placed Earth at the center of the universe.

“The church has somehow recognized its mistakes,” he said. “Maybe it could have done it better, but now it’s time to heal those wounds and this can be done through calm dialogue and collaboration.”

Pope John Paul declared in 1992 that the ruling against Galileo was an error resulting from “tragic mutual incomprehension.”

The Vatican Observatory has been at the forefront of efforts to bridge the gap between religion and science. Its scientist-clerics have generated top-notch research and its meteorite collection is considered one of the world’s best.

The observatory, founded by Pope Leo XIII in 1891, is based in Castel Gandolfo, a lakeside town in the hills outside Rome where the pope has a summer residence. It also conducts research at an observatory at the University of Arizona, in Tucson.

[…]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080513/ap_on_re_eu/vatican_aliens

Well. We can say one thing with absolute certainty; Aliens are not Catholics.

There are some amongst you that will say this is part of the softening up exercise for the forthcoming Full Disclosure of the ET reality. Maybe. For certain, one of the reasons that are trotted out routinely as a reason why the ET reality has to be supressed is ‘the potential for cultural shock and social disorientation contained…‘ in the ET reality. By pre-empting the shock-wave with information (actually, propaganda) claiming that ALL creatures EVERYWHERE in the universe belong to the Catholic faith may go a long way to softening the blow. And of course, the Muslims and every other religion will simply substitute ‘Catholic’ for the name of their own religion.

And back to the title of this post, yes indeed, we can now say with 100% certainty that the Big Bang theory is incorrect, as laid out in this post.

Think ‘Epicycles‘.

Am avid lurker writes:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/13/aids.hiv

The most interesting thing I read today. It has significant implications regarding scientific funding, not to mention funding of public healthcare which she implies is worthless. Furthermore, it strengthens the argument that US ‘aid’ to ‘the Africa’ – that great nation! ;-) – is merely propping up the profits of drug companies by maximising and subsidising the market for ARVs. In South Africa this has come through voluntary licensing, which means Glaxo et al still get their cut without any manufacturing costs. Then there is the whole ‘faith-based’ aid agencies… and yet again today (Lebanon and Gaza, Burma and the whole HIV-infected sphere is highlighted in just one day) we see how the US just cannot keep its interfering dirty great stinking hooter out of other peoples business.

And I quoth:

“HIV is mostly about people doing stupid things in the pursuit of pleasure or money,” declares the cover on a proof copy of the book. “We’re just not allowed to say so.” She suspects she will never work in the Aids industry again for saying so. “But it’s true.”

Pisani, 43, spent 10 years working in the field of HIV, first for Unaids and then for a non-governmental organisation (NGO) in Indonesia. As an epidemiologist, she quickly identified the risk of the virus spreading among drug injectors, gay men and the sex trade across Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe – underdeveloped countries with inadequate resources to prevent an epidemic. That placed 100 million at risk in Asia alone – equivalent to a third of the population of the Africa. But the data was clear: “HIV wasn’t going to rage through the billions in the ‘general population’. And we knew it.”

Like most of her colleagues, however, she also quickly realised that “governments don’t like spending money on sex workers, gay men and drug addicts”. So she put her skills as a former journalist to work, and began producing the sort of reports that persuaded politicians in Washington and the west that it is not “wicked people” but “innocent wives” at risk. “Aids couldn’t be about sex and drugs,” she explains. “So suddenly it had to be about development, and gender, and blah blah blah.”

The strategy was more successful than she could ever have imagined. “All these obsessively politically correct things started getting introduced.” HIV publications and conferences began devoting more time and attention to issues such as poverty, gender, development, vulnerability, leadership – what Pisani calls “sacred cows” – than to condoms and clean needles. “I’m just waiting for ‘climate change and Aids’,” she jokes sarcastically in her book – and sure enough, this week a headline appeared in an Australian newspaper: “Global warming set to fan HIV.”

[…]

As the veneer of political correctness starts to fade….

When people like this start to wake up and then go on to expose the nonsense, a large scale abandonment of brainwashing cannot be far behind.

Say goodbye to ‘hate speech’, political correctness, the surveillance mania, the terror fad, security theatre, cult environmentalism, [prefix] o phobia, [prefix] o fascism, the health and safety fad, the police state, and all the other garbage that has erupted like ear to ear scarlet acne on the beautiful face of Britain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My emphasis.

You will get no sympathy here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My epmhasis once again.

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

This is a perfect example of Security Theatre.

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

By Sahil Nagpal
TopNews.in
May 9th, 2008

Hong Kong – A government investigation was underway Friday after it was revealed that confidential files from the Immigration Department had been mistakenly leaked on to the internet.

The list, which contained a list of the names of people for officers to watch, plus travel document information and travel records, has been available on the internet since Monday through a file-sharing programme called “Foxy.”

The blunder occurred after a newly-recruited immigration officer working at the Lok Ma Chau border point took home some old classified files to study without authorisation.

His computer contained the “Foxy” programme and when he connected to the internet, the files were distributed without his knowledge.

The security blunder is the latest in a series in Hong Kong in the last week.

Earlier this week, banking giant HSBC was forced to apologise to customers after it admitted it had lost the data of 159,000 accounts from a Hong Kong branch.

The data was held on a internet server which is understood to have gong missing in April from the Kwun Tong branch of the bank while it was undergoing renovation last month.

The Hospital Authority also admitted this week to the loss of data of thousands of patients in several incidents.

In one case, a USB flashdrive containing the files of 10,000 patients from the Prince of Wales Hospital was lost after a hospital worker who was transferring the data left it in a taxi.

Lawmaker James To, the vice-chairman of the Legislative Council security panel said the immigration department security breach was by far the most serious of all three.

“This data is more private, it gives the detailed record of people’s travelling history,” he said.

Chairman of the security panel Lau Kong-wah said the leak was unforgivable.

“The data is sensitive information. Not only the Immigration Department, but all government organisations should review their data-privacy systems to prevent similar cases,” he said.

Security Secretary Abromse Lee has said the officer concerned would face disciplinary action after an investigation. (dpa)

[…]

http://www.topnews.in/

My emphasis.

It is not only unforgivable, but it is also undoable, and the latter is more important.

If you read BLOGDIAL, you can relate this story in ‘the Google between your ears™’ to all the other BLOGDIAL posts on this subject.

Do you remember our first taste of Barak Obama? The speech that thrilled everyone in July of 2004?

There was a BLOGDIAL back then, and of course, we wrote about that speech, and this strange man who appeared out of nowhere with smooth and empty words, who now threatens to further dismantle The United States of America:

Now let me be clear. We have real enemies in the world. These enemies must be found. They must be pursued and they must be defeated. John Kerry knows this. And just as Lieutenant Kerry did not hesitate to risk his life to protect the men who served with him in Vietnam, President Kerry will not hesitate one moment to use our military might to keep America safe and secure.

Now. This sort of totally absurd talk does not inspire one with confidence in the incoming US regime. Amercia has no enemies in the world. That is a fact. The American Government has bitter enemies, and it is that entitiy that is dragging the innocent American population into harms way, the way it did during Kerry’s youth.

There is no one out there that needs to be “pursued and defeated”; everyone in the entire world (including you, as in “But you know this”) except American politicians knows this. Perhaps this man should spend some time outside of America to re-acquaint himself with the real world. Spain will do; they are now off of the shit list because they, the Spanish population, have the common sense to elect people who will mind Spain’s business.

You know the song by Bread, the one with the lyric “Dreams are for those who sleep”; well, the American dream sounds like a dream of sleepers when it is spoken about in this way. They had better wake up to the real danger caused by the reckless, racist and insane foreign and internal policy that their government has put into high gear, and elect a government that will put the breaks on and do a u-turn before there is nothing left to save.

It would be much more comforting to have a candidate who had refused to go to Viet Nam rather than one that reveled in that pointless and illegal “war” … beggars cant be choosers.

Whatever happens, the entire world will still be faced with an unexposed and untraveled loose cannon congress, a society gripped by xenophobia and extreme paranoia rubber stamping their every misguided vote for aggression, and no real way out in sight.

Warm and fuzzy feel good speeches simply will not cut it. The world wants to know the answer to a very simple question; are you going to knock it off?!
posted by Irdial , 5:24 PM Þ

um, hey akin: the ‘world’ isn’t electing the new american president.

Perhaps if the whole world elected the american president, you might be given one that is reasonable. Certainly if a country is to be the policeman of the world, the very same world should have direct control over that country and its election process.

and this bullshit about ‘national security’ is what the american populous is currently most interested in.

Hence my point about the hysterical false concerns over security. The answer to this “problem” is clear, and has been demonstrated by Spain. Let me put it in terms anyone can understand; if you poke around in a hornets nest, you are going to get stung. There. Leave the hornets to do what the hornets do, and live life that you deserve, free, peacful, without fear and hopefully long.

i agree with what you have to say — honestly — but trust me, electability is just as important as being truthful right now.

So, the whole world should sit by and say nothing while one bunch of idiots replaces the last bunch? I think not. No one in the world would care if the americans voted Luke Skywalker of 2 Live Crew as their president (at least he has a passport uunlike half of the congressmen) if their government minded their own business, but it seems that they refuse to, and even intelligent people appear to be saying that we all have to put up with this hysteria and the interference that stems from it (and which caused it) “until we are done with it”. Not good enough.

after your whole tirade against nader, one would think ‘you would know this.’

I was responding to that template-made feelgood claptrap speech which did not impress or move me in the slightest bit. Bush has to go, at the very least, to cut off his freinds businesses from world access; we all know he will never face a war crimes tribunal, in the end, that wont matter, because its far more important that he will no longer be there pushing the world towards the precipice . We all want Bush to be replaced. Nader is insane for threatening this; thats just logic. Now, imagining that Kerry is going to win, we casually take a close look at him and find him utterly wanting, even on the surface. Still we would prefer him, just to see Bush and the Neocon armageddonite puppeteers thrown into the garbage where they belong.

kerry won’t get elected if he says our new foreign policy won’t include kicking ass. (and yes, i think thats despicable)

So, Kerry, to be elected, must promise to break international law, ignore treaties and pledge to continue america’s suicidal pre-emptive foreign policy just to be elected, and we must all put up with it in silence, because “its just like that”.

This is not reasonable.

And you know this.

At the very least, apologise for this dreadful state that the world has been deliberately thrown into, and beg forgiveness and forbearance from the civilized world while you clean your house out. It would be only words, but if that is all you have, we will gladly take them. Telling the world to “MYOB” about this election is just too outrageous for words!
posted by Irdial , 9:00 PM Þ

[…]
And I can tell you this; everyone everywhere is more tired of your warmongering government than you are of hearing how much we hate it.
[…]
posted by Irdial , 11:27 AM Þ

That was the way we did it.

Americans are now in the position of having a real choice in the presidential election; Ron Paul or anyone else (since all the other candidates represent the same faction).

They have the benefit of hindsight, a population that is more awake than it was in 2004 and an identical crisis on the horizon, in the form of an insanely murderous attack on Iran.

John McCain is promising more war “My Friends”; Hillary Clinton is using phrases like ‘obliterate Iran’ on television. Obama has an invasion of Pakistan on the cards. These people are INSANE.

Hillary is particularly offensive, because even in her own upside down reality of misremembered and misspoken events, she is a total idiot; this is the same monster who only a short time ago said that Obomba was “naïve” on foreign policy for his declaration on a hypothetical scenario involving Pakistan, yet this harpie uses phrases like ‘obliterate Iran’, when the whole world is watching.

All three of these people are so manifestly inappropriate for the job, how could anyone possibly get it wrong this time?

The answers are, in case you are too thick to understand:

• If you are going to vote, vote for Ron Paul and NOT Hillary Clinton or Barak Obama or John McCain.
• Do not under any circumstances permit Iran to be attacked.
• Do not march in the streets to try and prevent an attack on Iran.

Obomba has americans so deeply hypnotized that it might be hard to derail him.

As for preventing an attack on Iran, we now know definitively that marching in the streets and vigils and every other 20th century tactic is useless; that is how the illegal, immoral, insane Iraq invasion and mass murder was given license to happen. You now know this to be true. If you march again, or hold a candle lit vigil, or do ANYTHING that was done before and shown to be useless, you are a COMPLETE IDIOT.

Ron Paul received more donations from active military than all the other candidates combined. All of these military personnel swear an oath:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to the regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God“

How is it that they can sit around watching America being dismantled and do absolutely nothing at all? Surely they must understand, up to the highest levels that ‘enemies domestic’ are in full operation, and that it is their sworn duty to excise them? Why has not a single shot been fired, why has there not been a breaking of ranks?

It is BIZARRE.

They are on the edge of engaging in another war crime, in historical terms, a page turn after Iraq, and not one of them is acting? No one is that stupid.

I would love to read an explanation for this inexplicable silence, this immoral inaction, this nauseating inertia; there must be an explanation – even the act of a lone maverick would exonerate them, but there is not one soldier amongst them (it seems) that actually understands what America really was.

Even the Nazis had high ranking soldiers willing to kill their despot. In their failure, they achieved the greatest honor for being on the right side of history.

In fact, we see that the army is doing exactly the opposite of what their oaths demand; they are preparing to take over the country and put decent people into concentration camps.

If only it were all a bad dream…

This is a comment attached to this post, that I had to ‘promote’ to an entire post:

——-

The new wave of anti-organic propaganda: organic food is bad for the environment!

First, biased tripe masquerading as a magazine piece on BBQ. Previously they had this slightly more balanced piece.

And last week, the “7 Myths Of Organic Food” debunked by Robert Johnston, who claims to be an ‘environmental expert’ but I can’t find his credentials anywhere. “these foods are an indugence the world can’t afford, argues environmental expert Rob Johnston”.

“Robert Johnston is a doctor and freelance journalist. He was an executive producer for Lifetime Television in New York and medical adviser for the Millennium Dome Body Zone.”

His ‘article first appeared online before the Indescribablybad picked it up.

If these studies and articles have not been funded and placed by BigAgro then I’m a monkey’s uncle. The thrust of these articles is that only by intensive, chemical-driven farming can we save the world. And we’ll be healthier too.

Smacks of desperation, with a whiff of fear.

——-

It in fact, stinks.

When someone who has the brain of a researcher and who is honest turns the fire-hose of their logic onto these subjects, the shiny surface gets washed away to reveal the pure dirty evil underneath.

Note how it is the usual suspects who eagerly regurgitate the PR lies.

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

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

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

That is EXACTLY what it is.

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

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

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

It is dystopian fact.

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

They are just the beginning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You stupid fool.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It IS a blacklist you scum:

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

[…]

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

And the dictionary says so!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ROTFL

This database puts everyone in the country under suspicion!

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

Freedom is slavery!

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Its a better business model, and is less immoral.

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

Swiss banks cannot be expected to police foreign clients’ tax affairs, one of the country’s top banking officials said Monday, rejecting German demands for greater cooperation to catch tax evaders.

The president of the Swiss Bankers Association laid the blame for tax evasion squarely at the feet of governments that demand too much of their citizens’ income.

“Countries which worry about tax evasion of their citizens should have a good think about the way they tax their people,” Pierre Mirabaud told journalists in Geneva.

The European Union, in particular Germany, has been pressuring Switzerland to crack down on EU citizens who hide money in Swiss banks in order to avoid paying higher taxes at home.

Switzerland, which is not a member of the 27-nation bloc, fiercely protects the privacy of banking customers, including foreigners who have deposited more than 1 trillion Swiss francs (US$950 billion; €640 billion) in its vaults.

“It’s necessary to clearly show Germany and the European Union where their sphere of influence ends and where our sovereignty begins,” Mirabaud said, adding that his members don’t regard themselves as responsible for their clients’ actions.

“We are not a tax authority and we are not a police authority,” he said.

Leading Swiss politicians and bankers reacted with outrage earlier this year when it was revealed that German intelligence had purchased confidential information on bank customers in neighboring Liechtenstein. Mirabaud said at the time that Berlin had used “Gestapo” methods to acquire the data, but later retracted his comparison to Nazi Germany’s secret police.

The information led to a series of high-profile raids against individuals and businesses in Germany, as well as further investigations by authorities in Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand.

Switzerland, like Liechtenstein, provides no judicial assistance to foreign authorities in cases of tax evasion because it is considered an administrative offense subject only to fines rather than a crime punishable by a jail sentence.

A visit last week by German chancellor Angela Merkel to discuss the tax issue failed to change Switzerland’s stance on the matter.

Mirabaud said criticism of Switzerland was misplaced, and largely driven by competitors jealous of the Alpine nation’s success as a leading center for international finance.

“For any Anglo-Saxon newspaper, it’s much easier to attack Switzerland than the United Kingdom or the U.S.,” he said.

Mirabaud insisted that Switzerland has some of the world’s strictest rules against money laundering and has done much in recent years to shake off its reputation as a safe haven for dictators to stash their funds.

Millions of dollars (euros) hidden in Swiss accounts by the late Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha and Philippines strong man Ferdinand Marcos have been returned to their governments, and Swiss authorities are seeking to do the same for money deposited here by former Haitian dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier.

But on the matter of tax evasion, Mirabaud said the solution is for countries to demand less from their citizens.

“Humans being what they are, if the tax burden becomes too high there will always be tax evasion,” he said.

[…]

IHT

My emphasis.

At last, some bankers with bottle!

Common sense from one of the best countries on Earth. Instead of copying the Swiss model, and reaping the benefits, the western police states insist on the slave model of insane taxation, war and waste, and expect everyone to simply put up with it.

Owen Bowcott

The Guardian, Tuesday May 6 2008

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

UPDATE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

Daily Mail

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

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

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

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

Sour grapes?

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

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

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

Critics condemned it as an outrageous breach of privacy.

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

Finland Abolishes All Tax Record Privacy

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

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

–An old IBM commercial

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

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

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

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

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

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

Words escape me.

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

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

Words, on this occasion do not escape me.

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

Think about it this way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What utter nonsense.

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

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

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

This, my friends, is total insanity.

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

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

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

Ministers are retarded. Period.

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

Ahhh, a Guardian fluff line!

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

And?!! GET TO THE POINT YOU SIMPLETON.

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

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

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

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

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

My emphasis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing to hide, nothing to fear, right?

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

The best laid plans….here is another scenario.

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

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

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

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

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

Can you hear the sound?

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

And if they DONT work?

That is an interesting question!!!!!