April 11) — A handheld device that can tell in a second whether a person is on one of 140 wanted or watch lists is being hailed by police as a crime-fighting breakthrough and flayed by civil libertarians as an intrusion on the innocent.

The sheriff’s office in Clermont County, Ohio, is the first civilian law enforcement agency in the nation to test the portable fugitive finder.

Police say Mobilisa Inc.’s m2500 Defense ID system shows promise of saving them time and helping them fight crime. Critics say it intensifies questions about privacy.

The Port Townsend, Wash., wireless technology company says its handheld electronic scanner can identify within a second whether someone is a fugitive from justice, has a violent criminal past or is a convicted sex offender.

The scanner reads the magnetic strip or barcode on state-issued ID cards, passports and driver’s licenses. It uses the information to determine whether a person shows up on wanted or watch lists, including ones from the Drug Enforcement Agency and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The databases are downloaded when the scanner is placed on a Mobilisa charger. In the field, the scanner operates wirelessly.

“It’s a technology whose time has come,” says Nelson Ludlow, Mobilisa’s CEO. He says he came up with the idea for the scanner after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks for use at military bases. He quickly realized it would benefit all law enforcement agencies.

Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, says the scanner raises concerns about privacy. The Cato Institute is a non-profit, public-policy research foundation in Washington, D.C., that promotes limited government.

Harper says use of the scanner emphasizes the need for society to decide whether average, law-abiding Americans should be stopped and checked for warrants as they go about their business. “The Framers of the Constitution suggested that they shouldn’t be when they wrote the Fourth Amendment,” he says.

Personnel at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland started using the Defense ID in mid-January. Air Force One, the president’s plane, is housed at the base.

“The Defense ID is a powerful security enhancement,” says Sgt. Gregory Striejewske of the Visitor Control Center at Andrews.

So far, 108,432 identification credentials have been scanned, finding 286 hits of people who were wanted or had expired or terminated identifications, he says.

Clermont County Sheriff A.J. “Tim” Rodenberg says, “This is the future of crime fighting.”

John Paxton, chairman of Mobilisa’s board of directors, lives in Clermont County and is a friend of the sheriff. Paxton arranged for the department to begin testing the scanners late last year at no cost. The scanners cost $6,700 each, plus a $148 monthly service fee.

Between Jan. 1 and March 14, 1,277 identifications were scanned, and 33 resulted in arrests on warrants or came up as a sex offender. Another 18 people had expired driver’s licenses.

Cincinnati attorney Martin Pinales, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, calls the Defense ID “another closing in of Big Brother.”

He says showing identification to police during a traffic stop is one thing, but the scanner puts a private company in the encounter.

“Government has the right to contract with private companies, but this brings into question who controls the information,” Pinales says. “What happens to the data collected?”

Ludlow says activity on a scanner can be recorded and searched by investigators for law enforcement purposes. The data remain the property of the law enforcement agency using the scanner, he says.

AOL News

[…]

Coolidge reports daily for The Cincinnati Enquirer.

I told you that this would be developed four years ago.

The pure evil that it represents is unambiguous. Look at the manufacturer’s website.

Interesting….Mobilisa VS Doe.

And the army is in on it: Mobilisa, Inc. is pleased to announce the addition of Major General Jack A. Davis USMCR to their Board of Directors.

On the surface, the Air Force and Navy contracts they scored were cheap to buy.

It is of course the Mobilisation of pure evil.

The Scouts are prepared to help the Identity and Passport Service design a model procedure for checking people’s identities against the ID database.

Register

CCTV cameras will bark orders at people who misbehave in the streets of eight major British cities as part of a government scheme to cajole people into respecting authority.
[…]
Using recordings of children’s voices will make it harder for those in opposition to the surveillance society to be defiant of the talking cameras. Moonies and rude gestures will most definitely be a no-no.

Register

Two more examples of the State brainwashing children into supporting their repressive schemes. Frankly the Scouts should know better, how they got from empowering children and teaching survival skills to herding sheep is anyone’s guess.

We also know of Irdial’s foolproof system for the IPS using extant technology (of course this doesn’t require an ID database in the first place).

To say using children’s voices neuters opposition to the talking cameras is untrue, there are the issues of child exploitation and to think that anyone believes a young child is actually going to be berating them at midnight is nonsense.

Checks will be made on all children to identify potential criminals under a further extension of the “surveillance state” announced by Tony Blair today.

‘potential criminals’ actually means people who haven’t committed a crime, in a law court this would mean presumption of innocence, so why not on the street?

A Downing Street review of law and order policy also called for greater use of sophisticated CCTV, an expanded DNA database and “instant justice” powers for police.

‘Instant justice’ is an invitation to lowest common denominator policing and is easily abused and a hassle for those charged to resolve. We know about the inefficiencies of CCTV and the evils of (the police) DNA databases.

The review is intended to chart a course ahead for the next 10 years by focusing more “on the offender, not the offence.”

Most crime is committed by a small number of prolific offenders who could be identified almost from birth, ministers believe. After 10 years concentrating on tougher sentences, the review paper said it wanted to tackle the “underlying causes..through better targetting.”

Ministers can believe what they want but to impose their spurious beliefs on innocent people and their families is unjust and should not be tolerated. Surprisingly for a ‘social-democratic’ government this notion implies that education of these ‘future offenders’ is in effect worthless in terms of sociability and ‘morality’. 10 years of failure is also implied, why should anyone consider these fools to come up with the right answer now?

Vulnerable children and those at risk will be identified by “trigger” factors such as parents in jail or on drugs. They will be subject to personalised measures, including home visits from specialist practitioners. But the Government says the net should be cast as widely as possible “to prevent criminality developing.”

This means if any of your relatives are in jail or live in certain areas your children will probably be ‘loosely monitored’ in case they pick up any nasty habits which they may have missed picking up through their genes [HA!]

It proposes to “establish universal checks throughout a child’s development to help service providers to identify those most at risk of offending.” The document added: “These checks should piggyback on existing contact points such as the transition to secondary schools.”

This means constant monitoring at school, probably without informing or asking consent of parents. FWIW Home-schooled children probably will have a big fat black mark on their file anyway.

The plan will be beacked up by a new database for all children due to be up and running by 2008. It will contain basic information identifying the child and its parents and will have a “facility for practitioners to indicate to others that they have information to share, are taking action, or have undertaken an assessment, in relation to a child.”

Hmm 2008 sounds sounds suspiciously close to the NIR implementation.
‘child AND parents’ so everyone with a child will be databased too, I imagine this will be via the school asking children to fill in forms about their parents.
‘facility to share’ means minimal Data Protection regulations

New child checks to identify future criminals

By Philip Johnston, Home Affairs Editor
Last Updated: 1:38am BST 28/03/2007

# The main proposals

Checks will be made on all children to identify potential criminals under a further extension of the “surveillance state” announced by Tony Blair today.

A Prison Officer, Tony Blair will today stage a dramatic U-turn on Labour’s crime policy by conceding that too many offenders have been sent to jail since he took office 10 years ago
Mr Blair began his premiership promising to be tough on crime

A Downing Street review of law and order policy also called for greater use of sophisticated CCTV, an expanded DNA database and “instant justice” powers for police.

The review is intended to chart a course ahead for the next 10 years by focusing more “on the offender, not the offence.”

Most crime is committed by a small number of prolific offenders who could be identified almost from birth, ministers believe. After 10 years concentrating on tougher sentences, the review paper said it wanted to tackle the “underlying causes..through better targetting.”

Vulnerable children and those at risk will be identified by “trigger” factors such as parents in jail or on drugs. They will be subject to personalised measures, including home visits from specialist practitioners. But the Government says the net should be cast as widely as possible “to prevent criminality developing.”
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It proposes to “establish universal checks throughout a child’s development to help service providers to identify those most at risk of offending.” The document added: “These checks should piggyback on existing contact points such as the transition to secondary schools.”

The plan will be beacked up by a new database for all children due to be up and running by 2008. It will contain basic information identifying the child and its parents and will have a “facility for practitioners to indicate to others that they have information to share, are taking action, or have undertaken an assessment, in relation to a child.”

The database was ostensibly proposed to prevent another tragic death such as that of Victoria Climbie but now appears to be the basis for cradle-to-adult monitoring. It is not clear when data will be erased from the database.

Good old function creep/salamitactik, unless there is a serious effort by the peple who topple Neu Labour to dismantle these databases the data is unlikely to be erased for the simple reason it takes more effort to do so than to leave the audit trail ‘intact’.

The Government believes children can be prevented from becoming offenders if early intervention is targeted at those who displayed certain behaviours. These include having a short attention span or behaving aggressively or living in a difficult or deprived environment.

It does not believe this or educational or other measures which assist rather than stigmatise would have been put in place to rescue these children from their ‘original sin’.

Some children who show signs of becoming criminals are logged and monitored by dozens of early interventions schemes. Those aged 8-13 may be referred to a Youth Inclusion and Support Panel if they are thought to be potential offenders and data about them is held on an information system.

This will simply devalue the role of parental responsibility in the eyes of the children. It will foster a mentality that in the end the State rather than ‘people’ will intervene. It will devalue respect for other people and short circuit community responsibilities.

[…]

Telegraph

Yet another catch all scheme that will be ineffective, expensive and impose on everybody innocent or not at the same time as destroying liberty, respect and imposing conformity.

The day before Christmas, the German newspaper, Erlanger Nachrichten published a picture of the eight-member Busekros family standing happily together around an advent wreath. The title of the accompanying article was “Only families open the way for new perspectives“. On the first of February this year, the Busekros’ oldest daughter was torn from her family by force, thanks to a judge’s ruling : Compulsory admittance to the Klinikum Nuremberg-Nord, a psychiatric clinic for children and young people and loss of parental custody.In summer 2005, 15 year old Melissa was told that she would have to repeat the 7th grade at the Christian Ernst Hig Gymnasium (a high school where one can obtain the Abitur, the highest German high school diploma) due to her bad grades in math and latin. The situation in the class played no small part in creating this state of affairs – the high noise levels and cancelled classes prevented her from receiving the educational assistance she needed during school hours. As Melissa had good grades in all the other subjects, repeating the whole year would be mostly a waste of her time, as well as the fact that she would now be in a class even more problematic than the previous year’s. Thus, it was decided by Melissa and her parents that she would be tutored individually at home to meet her specific needs. At her own wish, Melissa only took part in Music and sang in her school choir. The school and the local school authorities were not satisfied with this solution, and consequently expelled Melissa from the school, allocating her to the local Hauptschule (the lowest in the German three-tier high school system.The Busekros continued educating their daughter at home, with their other school-age children still attending school. At the end of the school year 2005/2006, Melissa was no longer subject to full-time compulsory schooling. In spite of this the Youth Welfare Office (Jugendamt) in Erlangen appealed to the local Family Court, which ordered Melissa and her parents to appear at a hearing, which was consequently attended solely by her father. Melissa was overseas at that point. However, the authorities didn’t relent and wanted to know in detail where Melissa was, resulting in an unannounced visit to the family by the Judge of the Family Court.

The Busekros family is known and much loved by all their neighbours. Their willingness to be photographed for an article in the local newspaper demonstrates that they have nothing to hide. That was not good enough for the officials. On Tuesday 30th January just after 7am, Mrs Busekros and her children – Mr Busekros had already left for work – were startled by the appearance of social workers and police officials who demanded that Melissa be handed over to them immediately. They had as authorisation a decision by the Erlangen Court (case no. 006 F 01004/06) of the 29th of January. It stated “The relevant Youth Welfare Office is hereby instructed and authorised to bring the child, if necessary by force, to a hearing and may obtain police support for this purpose.”

Melissa was brought into the Child Psychiatry Unit of the Nuremberg clinic and was subjected to an interrogation in the presence of the specialist Dr. Schanda. After this interrogation, about three and a half hours after she was coerced into the clinic, Melissa was returned home. Her relieved parents and her five younger siblings, who didn’t know when they would ever see Melissa again, as well as Melissa herself didn’t know that the worst was still to come.

On the afternoon of the 1st of February, the judge of the Family Court, representatives of the Youth Welfare Office, along with fifteen police officers, marched up to the Busekros home, to haul Melissa off to the Child Psychiatry Unit of the Nuremberg clinic. The judicial decision authorising this also removed Melissa from her parents’ custody, according to her father, Hubert Busekros.This treatment was justified by the psychiatrist’s finding, two days previously, that she was supposedly developmentally delayed by one year and that she suffered from school phobia. […]

http://www.netzwerk-bildungsfreiheit.de

Home schoolers get a really hard time in Germany. It is ILLEGAL to school your children at home, because, as the European Human Rights Court confirmed:

…that society has a significant interest in preventing the development of dissent through “separate philosophical convictions.” WND

The law against home schooling was introduced by the Nazis it is incredible that this law has not been removed from the statutes, and its even more amazing that the EU says its all ‘OK’.

Do I really have to spell out your right to educate your children in whatever way you want?

Hmmmm I wonder if these laws apply to Koran schools, or Catholic schools, or any other religious schools? Surely these institutions foster “separate philosophical convictions”.

And separate philosophical convictions to what exactly? Where are these convictions written down for you to follow?! Its all nonsense on sticks obviously.

Blair launches new drive to let officials share data on citizens

Tony Blair will today spearhead a fresh government initiative to persuade voters they have nothing to fear from consenting to a relaxation of “over-zealous” rules which stop Whitehall departments sharing information about individual citizens.

How are people going to give ‘informed consent’? Is it not more likely that officials will be told to assume consent has been given unless specifically denied (and how effective is this likely to be)? And how will all this be regulated?

But the exercise was denounced by opposition MPs as a further lurch towards a Big Brother state even before the prime minister announces the formation of five citizen panels, each with 100 members, to examine the merits of such a change.

Just examine the merits? will these ‘citizen panels’ be fed with the sort of half truths and incomplete information that Civil Servants/Select Committees would rightly reject?

Officials were keen to emphasise that talk of a “single massive database” is misconceived. What is at issue is allowing individual departmental systems to talk to each other.

What is at issue is the ability for an individual to limit/prevent the damage caused by disclosure of personal information to all and sundry.

One official derided the condemnation likely to come from civil liberty lobbies, insisting: “At present we have some ridiculously artificial demarcations in government when Tesco and the credit agencies know more about us all than government agencies which are there to help you.”

Tesco is not a monopoly service provider and the information it gathers can be controlled to an extent by Data Protection laws which help prevent it gaining third party information. In principle and to a large degree Tesco only gathers the information you supply it with or allow to be made public. YOU CAN OPT OUT OF SUPPLYING TESCO WITH INFORMATION especially by not shopping there. In addition a lot of information held by State controlled agencies is potentially more damaging than that held by Tesco et al. (and I don’t even include covertly gathered ‘intelligence’).
There is no comeback from not supplying Tesco with information – it can’t fine you for not having a clubcard, or for not having a TV License, it doesn’t have powers to curtail freedom of movement or protest. It’s a shop – it just sells things.

The first target of the reforms is bereavement, when families under stress are required to notify a range of agencies that they have lost a loved one.

Work is still under way to establish the technical changes that would be necessary to make reporting a death a one-stop call. It is claimed such changes would help “early identification” and thus give warning that a family is struggling.

Surely it is better to question why so many officials need to be informed of a death.

But the Tories and Liberal Democrats have brushed aside promised safeguards and denounce the change as “an excuse for bureaucrats to snoop”. The NO2ID campaign to resist government plans for universal ID cards calls the proposals “the abolition of privacy”.

Manifesto commitments to overturn this please, all else is hot air.

It reverses the historic presumption of confidentiality, the campaign argues, something ministers deny. But the office of the information commissioner, whose task is to promote public access to official data – and to protect personal data – is taking a more benign view. The government’s intentions have been debated within Whitehall and were signalled as part of the reform of public service delivery in the documents published as part of Gordon Brown’s pre-budget report in November. “Citizens should be able to access public services in relation to changes in their personal or family life events through a single point,” said a document which promised a delivery plan in 2007.

If public services were handled at a local level more then the burdens would be easier to bear on both sides

Inside Whitehall the lead department on the proposed change is work and pensions, whose secretary of state, John Hutton, yesterday used an interview on BBC1’s Politics Show to deny that the change were too intrusive. The potential benefits were considerable, he said. “The government already stores vast amounts of data about individual citizens [why??? – mm] but actually doesn’t share it terribly intelligently across various government agencies. I had a case in my department about a family where someone had unfortunately died in a road traffic accident, and over the space of six months, on 44 separate occasions, they were asked by elements of my department to confirm details of this terrible tragedy.”

This burdensome red tape is entirely because the government is already too involved in people’s lives.

[…]

Guardian

This all follows on from the relaxation of Data Protection controls last July and is most likely a prelude for the most questioning Census ever in 2011. It’s like a real version of the boogeyman stories about drugs, the soft stuff leads onto the hard stuff and BAM! you’re hooked.

Government intrusion? Just Say No!

—

Hmm, I was trying to ‘Detox’

Britons to be scanned for FBI database
Anger over airport fingerprint plan; Terror tests to start this summer
Paul Harris in New York, Jamie Doward and Paul Gallagher

Sunday January 7, 2007

Millions of Britons who visit the United States are to have their fingerprints stored on the FBI database alongside those of criminals, in a move that has outraged civil rights groups. The Observer has established that under new plans to combat terrorism, the US government will demand that visitors have all 10 fingers scanned when they enter the country. The information will be shared with intelligence agencies, including the FBI, with no restrictions on their international use.

[…]

The Observer

You really don’t need that holiday in Florida that much, do you?

Middle Finger Print?

Guantanamo Bay of Pigs!

Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi
The government of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi announced a three-day official mourning period following Saddam Hussein’s execution and canceled all celebrations of the Islamic Eid al-Adha feast. In an official statement, the government ordered all its branches to lower the national flag to half mast. “All celebrations all around the country should also be canceled,” the statement said.

Guardian reports:

A new contract between the state and the citizen setting out what individuals must do in return for quality services from hospitals, schools and the police is one of the key proposals emerging from a Downing Street initiated policy review…

Even from the beginning this is yet more topsy-turvy posturing from the Government. Once an individual has paid for State services they should be provided to anyone entitled without qualification.

[…]

The aim is to build on the government’s rights and responsibilities agenda, and papers released yesterday by the Cabinet Office speak of seeking “a new more explicit contract between the state and the citizen on agreed public outcomes”.

Explicit Contract? Well literalism is always the touchstone of the stupid, inept and authoritarian. But again it would not be individuals driving legislation/writing the contract it would be government definitions of rights and responsibilities, and we know how fucked up Neu Labour‘s ideas of ‘social responsibility’ are.

[…]

The review is likely to examine fundamentally the future relationship between citizen and state. The public service commission has been asked to consider “whether it is possible to move from an implicit one-way contract based on outputs, to one based on explicit mutually agreed outcomes”. It asks “should we be aiming for a more explicit statement of the contract that covers both the service offered by the public sector (what is in and what is not) and what is expected from citizens (beyond paying taxes and obeying the law)”. It also asks “whether these explicit and binding contracts could work not just for individuals and communities”.

The big question this raises is what happens when you refuse to sign such a ‘binding contract’ will the State ‘allow’ you to get O-U-T or will they attempt to fine/jail people into their ‘slave grid’ contract?

I think you know the answer.

Hacking through the jungle of “haven’t we heard all this before?” , wading through the river of “Is there anything more to say?” and adjusting our hat to avoid the bright rays of “PRopaganda dressed as news” seems to having an effect on one’s system. The daily news once more seems to me a set of evolving illusions – popular tropes that need regular spinning lest they fall off needle thin spires of truth – just as it did in the mid-90s.

Anyway I caught the end of the Toady programme this morning which had some news about the introduction of portable fingerprint detectors. In the first instance I was dumbfounded by the sheer futility of the excercise as it will stand:

Experts hope the device will save massive amounts of police time and money by allowing officers to identify suspects on the roadside without having to take them to the station.

A pilot scheme – called Project Lantern – will be used in Luton, Bedfordshire, by officers targeting motoring offences.

The gadget allows officers to search 6.5 million fingerprints archived on the National Automated Fingerprint System, with the trial aiming to give them a result within five minutes.

The Home Office’s Police Information Technology Organisation (Pito) calculates it could save more than £2.2m a year.

Fingerprints can only be taken from the public voluntarily using the Lantern system because the law will have to be changed before officers can force people to give prints on the street.

Guardian

So for the system to ‘work’:
1) a person needs to alreday be on a police database.
2) said person needs to give their consent (incredibly likely, no?)

Additionally the spokesman on the Toady programme informed us that new fingerprints would not be added to the database and records would be deleted at the end of the day or on request (actually a good thing – not as good as prints not being taken though).

But then what does the system ‘working’ mean? Presumably it will allow truth-telling people with a criminal record to be identified more quickly. Hooray.

NO.

That is not what this device ‘working’ means.

This is part of the softening up procedure to make ‘procedural’ fingerprint taking and police access to a population database acceptable. Remember:

Fingerprints can only be taken from the public voluntarily using the Lantern system because the law will have to be changed before officers can force people to give prints on the street.

And believe me this Government will be all too ready to change the law to follow the technological ‘solution’.
This Government wants acceptance of a fully populated ‘criminal’ database (that is everyone has a criminal record, empty or otherwise)
This Government wants it’s NIR-centred biometric databases to be complete and pervasive.

But I’m sure we’ve said this before.

Normally, discussion pieces leave us with that empty feeling of, ‘yes, but what are you going to DO about it?’.

Well, here’s a piece – the leader piece in today’s online Grauniad – which fills that gap.

Warning over privacy of 50m patient files

Call for boycott of medical database accessible by up to 250,000 NHS staff

What you can do

!!! Immediate, and so unexpected as to be almost missable, is the link to The Proposed Solution.

David Leigh and Rob Evans
Wednesday November 1, 2006
The Guardian

Millions of personal medical records are to be uploaded regardless of patients’ wishes to a central national database from where information can be made available to police and security services, the Guardian has learned.Details of mental illnesses, abortions, pregnancy, HIV status, drug-taking, or alcoholism may also be included, and there are no laws to prevent DNA profiles being added.

The uploading is planned under Whitehall’s bedevilled £12bn scheme to computerise the health service.

After two years of confusion and delays, the system will start coming into effect in stages early next year.

Though the government says the database will revolutionise management of the NHS, civil liberties critics are calling it “data rape” and are urging Britons to boycott it. The British Medical Association also has reservations. “We believe that the government should get the explicit permission of patients before transferring their information on to the central database,” a spokeswoman said yesterday.

And a Guardian inquiry has found a lack of safeguards against access to the records once they are on the Spine, the computer designed to collect details automatically from doctors and hospitals. The NHS initiative is the world’s biggest civilian IT project. In the scheme, each person’s cradle-to-grave medical records no longer remain in the confidential custody of their GP practice. Instead, up to 50m medical summaries will be loaded on the Spine.The health department’s IT agency has made it clear that the public will not be able to object to information being loaded on to the database: “Patients will have data uploaded … Patients do not have the right to say the information cannot be held.”Once the data is uploaded, the onus is on patients to speak out if they do not want their records seen by other people. If they do object, an on-screen “flag” will be added to their records. But any objection can be overridden “in the public interest”.

Harry Cayton, a key ministerial adviser, warned last month of “considerable pressure to obtain access to [the] data from … police and immigration services”, but he is confident that these demands can be resisted by his department.

Another concern is the number of people who can view the data. The health department has issued 250,000 pin-coded smart cards to NHS staff. These will grant varied access from more than 30,000 terminals – greater access for medical staff, and less for receptionists. Health managers, council social workers, private medical firms, ambulance staff, and commercial researchers will also be able to see varying levels of information. Officials say the data will be shared only on a need-to-know basis. But Guardian inquiries show a lack of safeguards.

Although data protection laws supposedly ban unnecessary build-ups of computer information, patients will get no right to choose whether their history is put on the Spine. Once uploading has taken place, a government PR blitz will follow. This will be said to bring about “implied consent” to allow others view the data. Those objecting will be told that their medical care could suffer.

The government claims that computerised “sealed envelopes” will allow patients selectively to protect sensitive parts of their uploaded history from being widely accessed. But no such software is yet in existence.

It is being promised for an unspecified date. Some doctors say “sealed envelopes” may be too complex to be workable. The design also allows NHS staff to “break the seal” under some circumstances. Police will be able to seek data, including on grounds of national security. Government agencies can get at records, according to the health department, if “the interests of the general public are thought to be of greater importance than your confidentiality”. Examples given of such cases include “serious crime and national security”.The department’s guidelines say: “The definition of serious crime is not entirely clear … Serious harm to the security of the state or to public order, and crimes that involve substantial financial gain or loss will … generally fall within this category.” The health department says confidentiality can already be breached in such cases.At present, police have to persuade a GP, who knows the patient, to divulge limited facts, or insist on a court order.

Under the new system, data may be disclosed centrally and anonymously, at the touch of a button. Health department privacy advisers say they do not wish to allow police to have clinical information. But they are prepared to disclose patients’ addresses.Another safeguard initially promised was that all patients would be able to check their records on the internet for mistakes. But a system involving the issue of smart cards to patients has not yet been tried out.

Current criminal penalties are so weak they have failed to stop tabloid journalists and private detectives raiding such data on an industrial scale, according to a recent special report by Richard Thomas, the information commissioner.

Sir John Bourn’s National Audit Office also wrote a recent report warning of significant concerns among NHS staff “that the confidentiality of patient information may be at risk”. But officials persuaded the NAO to delete the warnings in the published version.The original draft said: “Patient confidentiality remains a controversial issue among critics … both as regards the adequacy of the planned safeguards to protect information, and whether patients should have a right to opt out of having their information recorded”.

Stunning! That those charged with serving your best interests treat you with such open contempt. You are meat. You are data. You are a commodity belonging to the nation, and anything you have or hold can be stolen and sold for ‘the public interest’. Are you ready to sold?

So, coming back to the good and bad of this article… it is a good stand-alone piece. However, no database now stands alone. It is clear from the above how police, immigration et al want access to every detail of peoples lives. This cannot be pointed out strongly enough. And it must be resisted with every fibre.

No apathy, apathy is complicity. No compliance, compliance is treachery. No NIR registration, registration is slavery.

What can you do? Today, against this NHS database, you can go back to the top and follow the link.

Beer fingerprints to go UK-wide

The Register | October 23 2006

The government is is funding the roll out of fingerprint security at the doors of pubs and clubs in major English cities.

Funding is being offered to councils that want to have their pubs keep a regional black list of known trouble makers. The fingerprint network installed in February by South Somerset District Council in Yeovil drinking holesy is being used as the show case.

“The Home Office have looked at our system and are looking at trials in other towns including Coventry, Hull & Sheffield,” said Julia Bradburn, principal licensing manager at South Somerset District Council.

Gwent and Nottingham police have also shown an interest, while Taunton, a town neighbouring Yeovil, is discussing the installation of fingerprint systems in 10 pubs and clubs with the systems supplier CreativeCode.

Bradburn could not say if fingerprint security in Yeovil had displaced crime to neighbouring towns, but she noted that domestic violence had risen in Yeovil. She could not give more details until the publication of national crime statistics to coincide with the anniversary of lax pub licensing laws on 24 November.

She was, however, able to say that alcohol-related crime had reduced by 48 per cent Yeovil between February and September 2006.

The council had assumed it was its duty under the Crime and Disorder Act (1998) to reduce drunken disorder by fingerprinting drinkers in the town centre.

Some licensees were not happy to have their punters fingerprinted, but are all now apparently behind the idea. Not only does the council let them open later if they join the scheme, but the system costs them only £1.50 a day to run.

Oh, and they are also coerced into taking the fingerprint system. New licences stipulate that a landlord who doesn’t install fingerprint security and fails to show a “considerable” reduction in alcohol-related violence, will be put on report by the police and have their licences revoked.

Offenders can be banned from one pub or all of them for a specified time – usually a period of months – by a committee of landlords and police called Pub Watch. Their offences are recorded against their names in the fingerprint system. Bradburn noted the system had a “psychological effect” on offenders.

She said there had been only been two “major” instances of alcohol-related crime reported in Yeovil pubs and clubs since February. One was a sexual assault in a club toilet.

The other occurred last Friday when an under-18 Disco at Dukes nightclub got out of hand after the youngsters had obtained some alcohol from elsewhere. A fight between two youngsters escalated into a brawl involving 435 12-16 year olds

A major incident is when 15 police attend the scene, said Bradburn. She was unable to say how many minor incidents there had been but acknowledged that fights were still occurring in the streets of Yeovil.

The Home Office paid for Yeovil’s system in full, with £6,000 of Safer, Stronger Communities funding.

Bradburn said the Home Office had paid her scheme a visit and subsequently decided to fund similar systems in Coventry, Hull and Sheffield.

The Home Office distanced itself from the plans. It said it provided funding to Safer, Stronger Communities through the Department for Communities and Local Government’s Local Area Agreements. How they spent the money was a local decision, said a HO spokeswoman.

[…]

Propaganda Matrix Quotes The Register

I swear to you right now, that I will NEVER give my fingerprint in order to have a drink. My local can fuck off to hell if they think that I am going to do it. DEATH to all publicans to go along with it…and if it does get rolled out, then farewell O England…I fought for thee….

Henry Rollins has a typical vein popping performance on YouTube. Sadly it typifies the sort of thinking that has allowed Murder Inc. to go hog wild with their plans to the point of suspending the constitution.

Rollins makes several mistakes in his piece. The first one, is that he is swearing like a sailor. The people in middle america who need to be shown the truth instantly switch off when you use ‘bad language’; indeed on Propaganda Matrix (where I found this clip) there is a warning, “Extreme Profanity” many people will not get past that to press play.

Lets go through this garbage line by line:

Freedom is under attack.

There is no such thing as ‘Freedom’. This is a childish simplification. More accurately, the american constitution has been suspended by a small cabal of murderous animals, who will do literally anything to achieve their goals. It has been done with language that even the most terrible of tyrants have never dared to put on paper.

Under attack by hysterical and well funded Christian psychotics,

Wrong. These people are NOT Christians by any measure. They are in fact worshipers of Satan.

intellectually undernourished leaders

Actually, these people are amongst the smartest people on the planet. They are evil for sure, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that they are not smart. Lord Bush might not be smart, but he doesn’t matter.

who lie and manipulate information,

true.

overfed Baby Huey coward bitch motherfuckers like Karl Rove and their suck up weakling apologists like Sean Hannity. To question authority is to be somehow unpatriotic, unAmerican and in league with terrorists worldwide?
Fuck you.

Indeed. Darth Cheney is a fat pig. As for Fox News, they are able to reach into the minds of middle america for a reason, and you would do well to find out what that reason is and then use it to put your own message there, instead of alienating them with your foul mouth. Of course, there will be people who say, “but hey, BLOGDIAL is CHOCK FULL of swearing!!”, yes, indeed it is, but the audience of BLOGDIAL is very particular, and not intended to be a mass one. We tailor the language we use to the particular audience we are addressing, and we have been VERY VERY successful at doing it.

Henry Rollins needs to put on some neat clothes and get on his knees to reach middle america. He needs to be temperate, rational and humble. Alex Jones has the balance between anger, respect and the pure facts perfect, which is why he has had a real impact on the entire world. You cannot pour gasoline on a fire and expect it to go out. This is what Rollins is doing in this piece. He is doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to face the problem head on, and is providing no solution of any kind, and is alienating the very people he needs to protect his ‘freedom’.

With even election results becoming more and more questionable, The Constitution a thing to be manipulated, ignored and frivolously amended, even Democracy itself seems to be on the run.

Election results are being fixed with deliberately insecure Diebold voting machines. If this is the problem, then you need to calmly point out that only a paper count with an audit trail is the solution. Saying that, “election results becoming more and more questionable” is meaningless. How it is being done is a matter of public record. Face the problem head on and provide a solution, or shut up.

The constitution is not being manipulated, it is being nullified by pieces of legislation, (PATRIOT, Military Commissions Act etc etc) you need to name these pieces of legislation and then call for them to be repealed. If they are not repealed, then your state should secede from the union. After that, the right of every person to form a militia to overthrow the government comes into force. This is called getting your facts straight, attacking the problem head on and providing a solution. Anything less is just pointless.

Where’s one place you can go and tell your version of the truth, rail against liars, fakes and propagandists with your own unique propaganda, sign your name to it and let the world know how you feel? That’s right, the internet. Perhaps responsible for the most substantial shifts in culture in the last several decades. There is so much freedom and potential on the World Wide Web that one is barely able to get one’s head around it.

Telling the truth is not enough. This was done before the illegal Iraq invasion, and the mass murder happened anyway. Railing against liars is also pointless. Signing your name to anything is just suicidal. The potential of “the internets” as lord Bush calls it, is in its use as a tool to organize real world mass-less and un-manifested civil disobedience. By mass-less and un-manifested I mean the organizing of people in a flash mob sense, where there is no gathering; in fact, where there is an absence of gathering. Demonstrating in the streets (as we have said so many times before on BLOGDIAL) is totally pointless and counter productive. We need to destroy the monster by not engaging with it on any level. That means getting O.U.T., it means 20AC, it means a complete shutdown of obedience. If all the people in the USA who were against Murder Inc did this, the whole criminal organization would collapse. Olberman is a blood brother to Rollins in this error; you must provide a solution and not just a presentation of the facts. The ineloquent and the greatly learned are both slaves to this monster, and neither of them can do a single thing about it because they are not thinking of this as a fire that needs to be put out. They are both like deers in the headlights, stunned spectators at the pyre when all it takes to put it out is to reach for the extinguisher.

The question we have to ask is…why won’t they do it?

Who in their right mind would to dare to regulate or charge websites to be on the internet? Who would dare to rain on a parade so fantastic that many of us wouldn’t know what to do without our high-speed connection and our lives on the internet?

Actually some very powerful forces. Telco companies want to make you pay for your site to be carried on the internet. If you can’t afford to pay, guess what? That’s right–you’re cyber history pal.

Before the internet there were other, smaller nets of computers. This isn’t a problem; your problem is the fire that is raging at your ankles and your inability to even pee on it to quench it. The internet can fix itself. The people in control of it will make sure that happens. If not, it will fissure into a free internet and the commercial internet. You will still be able to run your blog (probably text only) and do your email and it will probably be more secure than the commercial internet. As I said, this is not the issue; it is in fact, a distraction. While the internet is here and unbroken, you would be well advised to use it to its full potential to organize the second american revolution.

The Bush Administration wants major internet and phone companies to keep track of where their customers surf, all in the name of the War On Terror don’t ya know. How much do you want to bet they want the internet regulated, contained and thrown into a cell in Guantanamo Bay?

Indeed Mr Rollins. Do you encrypt your email? Do you use Windows? Do you do ANYTHING to protect yourself and your digital communications? You would do better to calm down, and spread information about GPG and all the other myriad free tools that are out there to use, and of course, use them yourself, contribute to their development and integration into everyone’s life.

For a country that talks so much about freedom being on the march, seems to me that some people want anything but. If they come for your freedom you must not only resist, you must strike back with a vengeance that will stun them. On this front, if your anger and outrage are not at the forefront then you’re already dead. Dead to me, anyway. Fuck these cowards, these traitors, these enemies of Democracy.

These people take what they want. Just like the founding fathers did; they wanted ‘freedom’ and they engineered a revolution to get it. These people want Nazi style total control, and they are doing what they need to do to get it. They have perfectly gauged the public mood (total apathy) and are forging ahead with their plans. You have to admire their balls.

You say, “if they come for your freedom”. They have already come for and stolen your ‘freedom’ you imbecile, and your suggestion that people ‘resist’ is absolutely meaningless. Striking back with a vengeance that will stun them is is also nothing but a hollow phrase.

Without specific instructions or plans and a concrete goal, you will be wiped off the face of the earth, and no Mr. Rollins, and Olbermann, you will not be taken off to ‘Gitmo’ (Guantanamo Bay you habitually abbreviating simpletons), you will in fact be bussed off to one of the six hundred american concentration camps that are currently staffed and waiting for you and your ranting swearing gunless tattooed bespectacled cohorts.

Never relent.

And do WHAT?

Big Brother is not only watching you – now he’s barking orders too. Britain’s first ‘talking’ CCTV cameras have arrived, publicly berating bad behaviour and shaming offenders into acting more responsibly.

The system allows control room operators who spot any anti-social acts – from dropping litter to late-night brawls – to send out a verbal warning: ‘We are watching you’.

Middlesbrough has fitted loudspeakers on seven of its 158 cameras in an experiment already being hailed as a success. Jack Bonner, who manages the system, said: ‘It is one hell of a deterrent. It’s one thing to know that there are CCTV cameras about, but it’s quite another when they loudly point out what you have just done wrong.

‘Most people are so ashamed and embarrassed at being caught they quickly slink off without further trouble.

‘There was one incident when two men started fighting outside a nightclub. One of the control room operators warned them over the loudspeakers and they looked up, startled, stopped fighting and scarpered in opposite directions.

‘This isn’t about keeping tabs on people, it’s about making the streets safer for the law-abiding majority and helping to change the attitudes of those who cause trouble. It challenges unacceptable behaviour and makes people think twice.’

The Mail on Sunday watched as a cyclist riding through a pedestrian area was ordered to stop.

‘Would the young man on the bike please get off and walk as he is riding in a pedestrian area,’ came the command.

The surprised youth stopped, and looked about. A look of horror spread across his face as he realised the voice was referring to him.

He dismounted and wheeled his bike through the crowded streets, as instructed.

Law-abiding shopper Karen Margery, 40, was shocked to hear the speakers spring into action as she walked past them.

Afterwards she said: ‘It’s quite scary to realise that your every move could be monitored – it really is like Big Brother.

‘But Middlesbrough does have a big problem with anti-social behaviour, so it is very reassuring.’

The scheme has been introduced by Middlesbrough mayor Ray Mallon, a former police superintendent who was dubbed Robocop for pioneering the zero-tolerance approach to crime.

He believes the talking cameras will dramatically cut not just anti-social behaviour, but violent crime, too.

And if the city centre scheme proves a success, it will be extended into residential areas.

The control room operators have been given strict guidelines about what commands they can give. Yelling ‘Oi you, stop that’, is not permitted.

Instead, their instructions make the following suggestions: ‘Warning – you are being monitored by CCTV – Warning – you are in an alcohol-free zone, please refrain from drinking’; and Warning – your behaviour is being monitored by CCTV. It is being recorded and the police are attending.’

Mr Bonner said: ‘We always make the requests polite, and if the offender obeys, the operator adds ‘thank you’. We think that’s a nice finishing touch.

‘It would appear that the offenders are the only ones who find the audio cameras intrusive. The vast majority of people welcome these cameras.

‘Put it this way, we never have requests to remove them.’

But civil rights campaigners have argued that the talking cameras are no ‘magic bullet’, in the fight against crime.

Liberty spokesman Doug Jewell said: ‘None of us likes litterbugs or yobs playing up on a Saturday night, but talking CCTV cameras are no substitute for police officers on the beat.’ […]

Daily Mail

How long will it take for people to start SMASHING these cameras and their associated equipment?

The Register reports:

The headmaster of Porth County Comprehensive School in South Wales has defended fingerprinting all 1,400 of his pupils days after their parents were told about the scheme last Wednesday.

[…]

Porth County Comprehensive headmaster Stephen Bowden told El Reg: “As far as we were concerned, it wasn’t necessary for us to seek parental consent in this. It’s a system that has been approved by the DfES and it’s supported by Capita SIMS.”

[…]

The system, called Vericool, was developed by Anteon, a subsidiary of General Dynamics, a firm that specialises in developing systems for the military and intelligence services.

It will register children for lessons by scanning their fingers when they enter a classroom at the start of a lesson.

Bowden said it would give the school a means of “effective administration” and help in “reducing the bureaucratic burden” of staff taking registrations themselves. It had cost the school £25,000.

“By the time I’ve put this together, I can assure any parent that their child is safely in school and on the premises…or we can purely or simply track students to see if attendance affects their progress,” he said.

But Bowden said he would not know how much more efficient the system would be than a manual register until after its installation was complete in January.

[…]

What a despicable creature this Stephen Bowden is. How utterly repugnant that someone in charge of educating a rolling total of 1400 children believes they should learn to be treated like unthinking livestock. What sort of example does it show to overrule or blatently disregard viewpoints of these children’s parents.

What a dangerous man he is to institutionally abuse so many children?

Now, of course the parents who have complained about this should remove their children from this school until this system is withdrawn, with a bit of luck they will have the sense to link this nonsense with the daily impositions that the National Identity Register will cause and they will be motivated to resist that also.

• Stop JonBenet Overload; Remember the REAL News
• Irdial/ What your Senator said about Rumsfeld
• What did we accomplish, anyway?
• Irdial/ Here’s what your Rep. had to say on Iraq
• Follow the money
• VICTORY … If we can keep it. Act Now.
• Stop Fake News
• IRAQ FOR SALE/ The War Profiteers Screening
• TODAY/ Stand Up to Rumsfeld
• Federal Budget PRIORITIES Campaign is Rocking
• Enough JonBenet!
• Success on Fake News – Now on to the Budget
• On Hiroshima day, send an e-card that will stop the madness
• Keep the Internet Free
• Israel, Lebanon and America/ Tell Rep. Nadler to get involved
• LAST DAY/ Keep this Show on the Road
• Last Chance — IRAQ FOR SALE/ The War Profiteers Screening
• It’s not too early for a good idea

That is a list of the recent subjects sent out to all ‘TrueMajority’ subscribers. Lets go through some of them.

Stop Fake News
Information is the life blood of democracy. If we lose trust in the news, how can citizens possibly make informed decisions at the polls?

Some TV stations air “news segments” that look like everyday journalism but that are actually produced by the federal government or large corporations and are designed to promote a political position or product.

The Federal Communications Commission must enforce rules stating that TV stations “must clearly disclose” when they air news segments produced by the government or other entities.

To send a message (text below) to FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin urging him to ban fake news, click here.

Instead of whining, why don’t you START YOUR OWN NEWS CHANNEL like Alex Jones has? He has reached millions of people with his films and websites with a small team, and had a global influence.

What did we accomplish, anyway?
[…]Tax Breaks for Millionaires. The polls are clear, and the citizens let Congress have it: diverting billions to those who don’t need it by raising the deficit and further reducing spending on human needs is bad policy. The House did pass a giveaway to millionaires, but the Senate won’t touch it because now they don’t have the votes to pass it. So far so good.[…]

[…]America’s Occupation of Iraq. American troops are still dying in Iraq. But thanks to ongoing pressure from citizens like you, Congress is finally starting to discuss our course in that country, and many who originally supported the invasion have come out in opposition to the war. TrueMajority launched an online innovation to let you know what your congressmember said during a heated daylong debate about Iraq. Thousands of you contacted your lawmakers to thank them for standing up or to tell them to get it right. We even heard back from some congressmembers themselves who weren’t happy that we exposed their usually hidden pronouncements to public scrutiny. We got a lot of feedback from you on this. Here’s one example:[…]

[…]Save Public Broadcasting. PBS and NPR are again under attack by those who would silence public broadcasting’s alternative to commercial media. The House Appropriations Committee voted to slash funding for NPR and PBS by $115 million, but TrueMajority members joined tens of thousands of others who objected. The Senate subcommittee in charge of that money just voted to restore funding…we citizens may have turned this one around.[…]

Firstly, Sour grapes bullshit doesnt stop wars or reform society. YOU, you fucking morons, ARE THE BILLIONAIRES, with your MASSED DOLLARS. As a group, you are more powerful and wealthy than any single man. This jealously driven garbage is so twentieth century, so childish, irrelevant and pathetic I can scarcely believe people still talk like this.

Secondly, Nothing you say will change what is going on in Iraq. The embassy they YOU are building in Iraq, the biggest one on earth, indicates that you are going to be there for a very very long time. Wake up you idiots.

Thirdly, and once again, Start your own TV station if you want free TV. Don’t rely on Uncle Sham to finance it and support it, and if you want your money to be spent on that, well, spend it on that and not war you imbeciles which neatly leads us to…

the final inslut (yes, ‘inslut’):

Follow the money
Already presidential hopefuls for the 2008 elections are trooping thru Iowa and New Hampshire. And TrueMajority organizers are on the ground working to make sure that this time they are forced to take a stand on how the federal budget pie gets sliced up. We want more money for education, healthcare and energy independence, without raising taxes or increasing the deficit. And we can get it with your help. We’re off to a great start – the plan, with the backing of congressmembers, big-time business executives and even retired generals and admirals, is beginning to make headlines.

The idea is simple: America fritters away billions of taxpayer dollars every year on maintaining 10,000 nuclear bombs and other obsolete Cold-War weapons. According to President Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of Defense1, we could save $60 billion (out of the $460 billion Pentagon budget) by getting rid of those dinosaurs. Polls show a big majority of our fellow citizens already agree with the idea – all we have to do is start the discussion.

And we’re doing it in a way which is fun, entertaining, and engages regular people.

What these people need to do is something we have been saying for ages, others have been saying for longer and some have just said. They need to ‘follow the money’ right back into their own pockets, where these insane wars, Orwellian police state, barbarism, international adventurism, Hegemonic contamination and bullshit starts.

I have said it before; begging will get you nowhere. Petition writing, mass telephoning, letter writing…all of these are meaningless gestures at best, and at worse, tools to deflate and disempower the masses; redirecting and even sapping their energy as the war machine trundles on, gaining momentum every day that it is fed. These people are as bad as the enemy; they, through their actions, do nothing to stop the war machine, do nothing to educate their members and as they do this, in no way hider the monsters plotting our total enslavement to war.

StopWar are of the exact same type of course.

There can be no Iraq ‘war profiteering’ if there are no dollars to buy weapons. There is actually nothing wrong with selling arms; what is criminal is that all these nincompoops blithely pay for these arms instead of paying for infrastructure, like their beloved PBS.

If they had a single brain cell between them, and followed the course of total permanent success, then there would be no begging, no pleading…there would be a quiet, and startling sunrise on a new democracy, a fine grained democracy where warmongering is impossible, there is an abundance of funding for everything imaginable that is purely beneficial, and multi generational peace and prosperity that will be the envy of the world. It would mean the end of the fear that is soaking into the bones of all americans. It would mean a return to the real America. Those missing buildings in NYC would symbolize the birth of this new era of peace, and not the point at which everything turned bad.

Nothing less than this will do. Nothing less than the cutting off of the blood supply to the vampires will solve this problem. It needs to be done now. No more pointless elections. No more faith in politicians. No more begging and whining. A return to true democracy, where choices are local and the effects are global, where the constitution is not ‘just a piece of paper’ but the foundation of a true and beneficial way of life.

Or…

You can continue whining, writing to congress, emailing your many members, making flash animations explaining that ‘we are paying WAY too much to the military’.

And nothing will change, and your sons will be drafted for war, and your rights will melt away and evaporate like ice dropped on an Arizona street in the middle of summer. You will be treated like cattle to be milked and sheep to be fleeced, and you will deserve it, because you are behaving like domesticated animals instead of human beings.

An Iraqi asylum seeker who was cleared yesterday of making a video identifying potential terrorist targets in London faces being issued with a government control order, the Guardian has learned.

Rauf Abdullah Mohammad, 26, sunk his head into his hands as he was found not guilty at Woolwich crown court of four terrorism charges related to making the tape. The crown had alleged the video was a film of “high-profile targets” made to help Islamist terrorists plot and commit an attack on the capital.

But the jury, with their not guilty verdicts, appeared to accept Mr Mohammad’s case that the hour-long film was a souvenir of his time in London […]

So let’s get this straight. The Home Office isn’t even bothering with an appeal but the opinion is that the Home Secretary will be able to dish out ‘punishment’ simply because of government suspicions.

If anyone from the “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” camp can argue their case after this I’d be amazed. Because they are essentially arguing that the whole basis of UK law is worthless and can be bypassed by a politician. Traitors that they are.

If you want a preview of how ‘helpful’ the trails of information gained by NIR trawling will be take a look at this article at nth position. It goes into detail about an active project in Bedfordshire which agregates information about crime levels, ambulance reports et al. in house-to-house detail. As you will see these records are rather simple to access and there are plans to allow public access via the internet to a range of data gathered:

Surely, I thought, in the name of all that is most sensible, those cannot really be emergency service logs? Later that day, Bedfordshire County Council’s press office kindly supplied me with a CD-ROM of the presentation. Yes, the spreadsheets glimpsed in the presentation really were pages from emergency service logs.

The level of detail included:
* X and Y co-ordinates allowing pinpointing of crimes and accidents on Ordnance Survey maps
* Details of crime victims including address, age and sex
* Ambulance data including patient problems
CDRP: Ambulance data, redacted for patient data privacyIn this last category, the medically confidential information had been shaded over for presentation to the council. However on examination it was easily readable, allowing me to zero in on the locations of the following incidents, all from October 1, 2005
* 12 cases of ‘assault/rape’
* One case each of ‘overdose/poisoning’ and ‘stab/gunshot wound’
* 16 cases of ‘specific traumatic injuries’ [nthposition has redacted the personally identifiable data.]
Information from the fire and rescue service also give OS grid references, street addresses and notes on whether fires are considered accidental or deliberate.
Information from the council’s environmental services includes unprocessed reports pinpointing complainants’ addresses.
From information on council trading standards ‘enforcement visits’, it could be seen that four specific shops in nearby towns had provided drink and/or tobacco to underage children. In the council’s words: “Data on crime and anti-social behaviour incidents is extracted from the partner systems and replicated into a central data store and a common application has been created to provide user access.”

Such is the CDRP’s belief in data protection that they lifted pages of this data store for a slide show, and then simply handed it out to the public on request. And this is the sort of information that is going to be pinged back and forth between the CDR partners. Bedfordshire’s CDRP also plans to show reported incidents of anti-social behaviour on a website map giving house-to-house detail. These maps will be available online to the public.

You will notice that enthusiasm for the project already means ‘institutional ignorance’ of data protection concerns is in place.
The ‘Geographical Information System’ in Bedfordshire is by no means alone. see this Home Office report (pdf) for introduction to the scope of another few (via crimereduction.gov). Interestingly at least one of the Systems (COSMOS – covering the Birmingham area) has a vanilla http login page the insecurity of which should be obvious. This doesn’t exactly make one feel comfortable.

So that is where we are now. The fundamental question to pose with these systems is are they necessary? That question is not actually about whether they will aid the authorities which they almost certainly will but whether the information they gather is any more useful than limited research projects. It is the question of what amounts to ongoing mass surveillance is actually more beneficial than spending money on a research programme and then acting in advance of crime and antisocial behaviour – because whatever these systems do they are absolutely useless if no one actually learns from the data gathered. It should be pretty clear to most people that sink estates and higher crime areas share certain characteristics and the findings of research in one location can be applied with a bit of critical thinking to another area. The idea that ongoing mass surveillance is in any way more responsive or accurate than limited research is fallacious, moreover ‘unguided’ systems such as these may obscure potential solutions to problems that ‘guided’ research may uncover – indeed it is like finding a cure for ‘the common cold’ by counting how many people buy cough medicine.

Secondly we have the issues of security and privacy, as the writer from the nth position found, the regard towards data protection aspects is minimal, and has been sidelined in the interests of interoperability, with this approach the underlying assumptions are that everyone has a legitimate use for information gathered and that it is being requseted ‘innocently’.
Additionally in these systems it is unclear how accurate these databases will become once opened up to the public, as the nth position discusses:

Using a special page on the CDRP sites, members of the public will be able report instances of alleged anti-social behaviour. At present, Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (Asbos) can be made by local courts. They are yet another of Labour’s quick fixes: where prosecution might otherwise fail, or even where no specific crime has been committed, Asbos can be slapped on instead. The bald truth about Asbos is unpalatable enough: they can be (and in fact, are designed specifically to be) applied to anyone magistrates consider to have behaved legally, but badly enough to warrant legal restraint. Now, in a sort of post-modern nightmare, Orwell’s Big Brother has been ousted by Bazalgette’s Big Brother.

The public will be the ones doing the state’s spying, and ‘voting off’ fellow citizens.

You shouldn’t worry unduly about this, because (as one CDRP officer put it): “These reports will be sanity-checked.” What might ‘sanity-checking’ entail? On the face of it, emailed reports of pink elephants leaping over office blocks might not make it on to the map. Then again, you may remember the case of Caroline Shepherd, a woman from East Kilbride served with an Asbo in 2005 for answering her own front door while wearing a nightdress. Or perhaps the luckless would-be suicide who repeatedly jumped in to the River Avon and was hit with an Asbo preventing her from going near any body of water in the vicinity – her name is public knowledge, but I can’t see any benefit in repeating it. (Then there are the cases of Michael Donockley, David Gaylor and David Boag… but I fear that no-one will believe those actually happened: stick their names plus ‘asbo’ into a search engine and find out for yourself).

So on to the future.
If the NIR is implemented ‘successfully’ it will be possible for people/companies with access to GIS technology, and who have bought government database access to overlay ‘public’ and commercial information to create a ‘live profile’ of anyone registered on the NIR database. A criminal will be able to identify high crime areas, perhaps with poor police response times and correlate the data with people recently buying a new car/financial services with PNR flight data they could check if occupants are on holiday etc, etc. Obviously the converse data matching could be employed by the government for their own reasons (we shan’t be handing out any more ideas here I’m afraid). Even if access to this sort of information is more secure (https? phut!) it won’t prevent the internal compromises such as those reported this week at the Identity and Passport Service (the future gateway to NIR informtaion no less).

Naturally an ‘I told you so’ when the NIR fails will be a response that won’t address the problem of its creation. Much like using mass surveillance technology to respond to crime.