You KNOW what it says, in every way, since you read BLOGDIAL.
The original.
The post I snarfed it from.
Linked from Lew Rockwell.
One Real American’s take.

Schools could be raided by police to crack down on knife crime, Ken Livingstone proposed today.

The Mayor suggested that fingerprinting and DNA profiling could be used to help to identify youngsters who threw away weapons. He also called for tougher sentencing for those involved in stabbings to prevent others going down the same route.

What this actually means is that all pupils in London need to be fingerprinted, DNA swabbed and put into a database so that when they find the one or two bad guys (or girls) with knives, they can be identified.

Ken Livinston is certifiably insane; the true inheritor of Stalin’s mantle, after the living reincarnation of Stalin himself, Gordon Brown.

However, there are likely to be concerns over the civil liberties implications of his proposals for schools.

Right!

Mr Livingstone told LBC radio: “So many kids now are carrying a knife because they think someone else might try and stab them and, of course, very often they end up being stabbed with their own knife.

So many. So we have to rape them all in order to stop them. Ken, you are a scumbag, full stop.

“I think you need a really high-profile crackdown and I’d be quite prepared where we know some schools have a particular problem – as long as the teachers and parents are up for this – you suddenly flood the school with police and you arrest everyone carrying a knife.

As long as the parents are ‘up for this’ its OK to rape children. Riiiiiiiiight.

“I know a lot of them will drop them on the ground but with fingerprints, DNA profiling, we’ll identify most of the people carrying those knives.”

Ken is a police state fantacist, a hideous gargoyle control addict, and a monster. Only his will matters, as we saw with the extension of the Congestion Charge zone, despite 70% of residents saying ‘no’ he went ahead anyway.

He added: “Judges have got to recognise the need for exemplary sentencing to get the message home – carry a knife, you’ll go to prison. You can’t carry a knife then expect to get 20 hours community service.”

Judges are best suited to interpret the law. Ken should get a broom out and sweep the streets of London. He cannot even do that correctly. Many parts of London are no better than pig styes and he is responsible for it.

The Mayor was accused of insensitivity to the families of two teenagers stabbed to death last week when he declared that “if it bleeds, it leads” the news. His aides said he made the comments before he had heard about the murders.

Ken is insensitive to anything but his own perverted desire for absolute power.

Mr Livingstone admitted there would be civil liberties concerns over his proposals on knife crime. There could also be legal issues as police must arrest suspects before taking fingerprints or DNA swabs.

In other words, guilty until proven innocent, yet again.

The total aim of police state boosters like Fascist Ken.

Ken, Brown, Smith and the other mass murdering perverts like to sprinkle the magic sauce of DNA technology on every problem. Now they want to sprinkie it onto children. The fact of the matter is that the problems that create knife crime will not be stopped by taking knives out of the hands of people who need them. These measures are plasters applied to shotgun wounds. But I digress. This ‘plan’ has not been thought out, will be rejected as absurd, and shows Ken Livingston scrambling around for big headlines because he is running scared of Boris Johnson. That is what this is all about, pure and simple.

Liberal Democrat mayoral candidate Brian Paddick said the support of local communities was more important, adding: “The way to tackle gun and knife crime is not to demonise young people but to rebuild trust between police and the community.”

[…]

Evening Standard

What-ever.

All of these people are vile, repulsive beasts, and none of them have even the slightest bit of imagination.

Let us help them.

If you want to stop knives entering a school, you expel all of the trouble-making students.

And that is it.

Teachers know intimately who the bad people in their schools are. If they were allowed to run their schools AS schools and not makeshift borstals then this problem would disappear over night.

Q: But what happens when the children that are expelled are out roaming the streets like feral beasts?
A: That is the problem of the negligent parents and the police.

etc etc.

Barak Obama’s first act as president will be to lie under oath.

When he is sworn in at his inauguration ceremony, he will swear, on the Holy Bible, the following oath:

“I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

He will swear that he will, “to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”.

When Obama says this, he will be lying.

Thanks to Kurt Nimmo and Raw Story we have a clip that demonstrates Obama’s unctuous frictionless, expert facility to lie. In this video, which is is a segment of a ‘Town Hall’ meeting where audience members get to ask questions, someone comes to the microphone and asks:

AUDIENCE MEMBER
Its been reported that you and your wife are in the globalist ‘CFR’ which is the Council on Foreign Relations. I would like to know if that is true, and I would also like to know where you stand on the North American Union, which has been confirmed recently in the press (Ron Paul actually spoke about it and the Congress has spent some money on it) This North American union involves a union much like the European Union, only with Canada Mexico and the United States, and the possible merging of the money system into a piece called the Amero which would actually strip the United States of some of its sovereignty and perhaps our rights. Where do you stand on that?

OBAMA
Well first of all uh, im not uh, the Council on Foreign Relations, uh I don’t know if I am a official member, I have spoken there before. Uh it basically is just a forum where a bunch of people talk about foreign policy. Uh and, so there’s nothing, uh there’s no official membership…i don’t have a card or a special handshake or anything like that. (LAUGHTER) um, the, in terms of this North America…uh, what did you?…Union! This has been, uh, something i know Ron Paul has been talking about and people have been talking about. I have to say with all due respect that I see no evidence of this actually taking place. I think that this has been something that has been ginned up in certain blogs on the internet……there’s no evidence that that’s taking place (a Union like the European Union).

I don’t think there’s some conspiracy to create uh, this one, you know, continental government between Canada and Mexico, all right?

Next!

What the subsequent questioner should have asked is wether or not Obama would nullify any treaty or agreement signed by Bush under the SPP agreements that are the precursor to the NAU, should he find out that such a plan exists, i.e. he finds that there is evidence of such a plan.

But I digress. Just because he does not know of the evidence, doesn’t mean it does not exist. The point is, do you, Barack Hussein Obama, intend to obey your oath of office and to the best of your ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States?

Are you going to PRESERVE the constitution, i.e. absolutely reject anything that dilutes the authority and force of the constitution?

Are you going to PROTECT the constitution from attacks no matter where they emanate from?

Are you going to DEFEND the constitution by striking down all unconstitutional measures, legislation and bodies?

Your position on the theoretical idea, the hypothetical concept, of a North American Union and a converged currency, should be immediate and unambiguous. Your response should have been:

“Such an idea is repugnant to me as it should be to all Americans. When I take my oath of office, I will do what I swear I will do; to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. That rules out the possibility of a North American Union or an Amero, and I guarantee that neither of those scenarios will come to pass under my administration, and I further promise to dismantle any groundwork that could potentially produce such a union or currency in the future, should I become aware of it during the course of my Presidency.”

So much for the ‘words from our fantasy presidential candidate’.

Lets now show that Barak Obama actually knows about the CFR, and what it really is all about. The clues to this are in his dismissive description of it and his use of ridicule to attack and discredit the questioner and deflect attention from this subject.

He says that the CFR is, “basically is just a forum where a bunch of people talk about foreign policy” this is a gross understatement of what the CFR is and who its membership is composed of. There is no way that anyone other than a deceiver would describe the CFR membership as, “a bunch of people”. The membership reads like a who’s who of every powerful person on this planet spanning continents and decades. Go read the membership list for yourself
. And what sort of man describes his wife as part of a collective ‘a bunch of people’?. They do not just ‘talk about foreign policy’ they exert influence on foreign policy world wide.

Only the most simple minded of people would assert that they are talking foreign policy ‘just for the fun of it’. These people are steering world events, and that is a fact. We should expect people to gather together and trade ideas and steer events; that is what human beings do, no matter what sphere they are in.

What is wrong with these groups is that government officials swear oaths of loyalty to their countries and their constituents and they should take orders only from the latter and never from anywhere else.

Barak Obama understands what the CFR is, and the influence it has over world affairs. That is why he mentioned specifically that there is no ‘special handshake’. Special handshakes are associated with secret societies like the Masons; shadowy, conspiratorial, unaccountable, operating at the highest levels of society – not at all like the CFR, which is just ‘a bunch of people’. This code language is well understood, and that is why everyone laughed when he used it; he used it to ridicule and smear the questioner, deflect and discredit the serious nature of the question and to reassure his audience that, in fact, he is not one of these mysterious ‘globalists’.

Next Obama does exactly what septuagenerian adulterer Gary Hart does when he is asked about the North American Union at a book signing. He deftly feigns ignorance of it.

Before we address this, we need to say that it is an absolute impossibility that Gary Hart does not know about The North American Union.

Gary Hart (CFR member) is promoting his new book, ‘Under the Eagle’s wing‘ which is described as:

Description: Aimed at the new administration of 2009, this work provides a sound national security strategy for the new century. “Under the Eagle’s Wing” makes a compelling plea for America’s leaders to embrace a new world order, in which the U.S. and other nations draw strength from a united approach.

By all means, look at the video and watch how he pretends not to know about the NAU. Any author writing about, ‘drawing strength from a united approach’ would certainly know about all competing attempts to bring about a global government. No one is THAT STUPID. Not only does he pretend not to know about it, but he pretends to not have ever heard the phrase ‘North American Union’, asking the audience member to repeat the name to try and reaffirm that he really has not heard of it. He then asks the audience if they have heard of it, trying to isolate the questioner, and then something wonderful happens, they ALL KNOW ABOUT IT, and Hart is made to look like he is out of the loop!

I have to say that this confrontation is one of the best ever by We are Change. No shouting, no aggression, no baseball caps, signs, just a room full of very polite, well dressed people who very gently humiliate and rattle and ultimately destroy a transparent liar.

Obama knows about the NAU, the SPP and everything else that is going on in that area. His behavior demonstrates this. His reluctance to frame the CFR in the correct terms demonstrates his loyalty to it and the agenda of its members. This loyalty is incompatible with the oath that he is going to take. Their agenda is diametrically opposed to the sovereignty of the United States, and his oath binds him over to protect that country from the likes of the CFR and all its partner organizations.

You cannot serve two masters. Obama claims that he is a Christian, and so he should know this.

This man is a slippery liar and actor; another complete nightmare.

The Guardian, once again, has a pro-corporate, pro-pharmaceutical propaganda piece in its toilet paper.

It goes like this:

Organic food ‘no benefit to health’
Eating fruit and veg is more important than whether produce is ‘green’, says expert

Jo Revill, Whitehall editor
Sunday March 30, 2008
The Observer

Parents who want their children to eat healthily should focus more on serving them extra fruit and vegetables and less on giving them expensive organic produce, according to one of the country’s leading nutrition experts.

Lord Krebs, former head of the Food Standards Agency, said families were becoming ‘deeply confused’ by conflicting messages about healthy eating.

The market for organic food reached more than £2bn last year, with most consumers from households with children under the age of 15. An average of £37m is spent each week on organic produce, mostly in south-east England.

[…]

http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/food/story/0,,2269340,00.html

Without going into wether or not Lord Krebs is corrupt or not, or is a paid liar or not, or wether or not Monsanto, GSK or any other corporation is really behind this proclamation or not, we can say one thing for sure.

Organic food is better for you than non organic food.

And I can prove it.

Lets say you are someone with an infant child.

You have two glass ten litre beakers, marked ‘A’ and ‘B’, of distilled water in front of you and your baby.

I take a container of commercially available liquid pesticide, open the lid, and dip the tip of a thin sewing needle into the surface of the pesticide. I then dip that needle into the beaker marked ‘B’ and then stir the water vigorously.

I pour some water from beaker ‘A’ into a baby’s bottle marked ‘A’, and some water from beaker ‘B’ into a baby’s bottle marked ‘B’. I pour out 90% of the water in bottle ‘B’ and then replace the missing volume with water from beaker ‘A’.

Now.

Which bottle do you give your baby to drink?

Any sane person will give their baby bottle ‘A’. No parent with a single working brain cell will knowingly give their child the water in bottle ‘B’ which has been tainted by a miniscule amount of pesticide.

This is what Organic food is about, at the most basic level. Deliberately feeding people pesticide, at any concentration IS INSANE. It is better to eat food that has not come into contact with pesticides than it is to eat food that has come into contact with pesticides.

Organic food has not been sprayed with pesticides, and so therefore, it is better for you.

And that is THAT.

Then of course, there are all of the other ramifications of spraying crops, the pesticide entering into and remaining in the soil and rivers, the animals poisoned by it, etc etc. But I digress. Anyone who tells you that pesticide in small concentrations is safe to eat either works for one of the manufacturers of these poisons, is a paid liar for them, or they are stupid or ignorant.

Exactly the same demonstration can be made about organic meat.

Organic meat has not been injected with growth hormones, steroids and all manner of unnecessary and monstrous interventions. Would you feed your child a piece of meat that has trace amounts of animal growth hormone in it, or one that has no trace of such a thing?

The choice is obvious, and anyone who says that these trace amounts of drugs is harmless is is one of the above, a liar, a paid liar, ignorant or just plain stupid.

I would love to know how much money these journalists and newspaper editors are paid to regurgitate this nonsense unchallenged. Obviously they have no morals or human decency.

Thankfully, the majority of people are now waking up to why they should be eating organic food, and no, they are not so stupid as to conflate having a balanced diet with what organic food is all about. These imbeciles can publish all the papers they like, make all the proclamations they like in whatever newspaper or media they choose; we are ignoring them. Every time they publish a new paper or make another absurd proclamation, they become further discredited, and every time a trashpaper like the Guardian uncritically reprints their lies, they too become more discredited an look more foolish.

The same, tired religious dogma is trundled out:

However, according to Krebs, an eminent scientist and principal of Jesus College, Oxford, there is still no reliable, peer-reviewed evidence to show that there is any clear health benefit to eating this ‘green’ produce.

And we do not care. We do not care about the eminence of Krebs, Jesus College, Oxford, reliable peer reviewed evidence, his proclamations or anything else these suspicious characters, charlatans and religious fanatics come up with. Their credentials are meaningless. We are not eating poison because you say it is safe to do so. We are not going to give our children pesticide to drink because there is ‘reliable, peer-reviewed evidence’ saying it is safe. We are not going to sit around and wait to be told what is or is not beneficial or what is or is not safe to eat. You have lost all credibility, all authority, and no matter how you are announced in the newspapers the slavering ‘journalists’ intoning from your sacred scroll of hierarchical science power, we do not, and will not believe what you say.

Note how when the writer of this nonsense tries to balance out her article by quoting The Soil Association, she only quotes ‘A Sopkewoman’. No list of credentials, letters, academic associations…just ‘A Spokeswoman’ not even ‘an eminent Spokeswoman’. These sorts of cheap tricks no longer work; in fact, they can never work when the initial premise is so absurd, counterintuitive and blatantly false. What is in fact happening is that the more you are associated with these discredited bodies, the LESS you are believed, thanks to the decades of lying for money, bullshit and PR.

But you know this!

Organic food is better for you, better for the environment and better for the animals that are used as food.
Organic food is bad for evil scientists, bad for pharmaceutical companies and bad for fear-mongering journalists.

And that, my friends, is a proclamation you can trust!

Anonymous shill BBC Terrorist Journalist strikes again; this time its back to Heathrow Terminal 5 and the fingerprinting debacle:

Heathrow fingerprint plan probed

Plans to fingerprint passengers at Heathrow’s new Terminal 5 are being probed by the data protection watchdog.
The Information Commissioner’s Office warned airport operator BAA it may be in breach of the Data Protection Act.

First of all, who is the author of this piece?

Under the plans, prints will be checked at the gate to try to ensure the person who checked in is the same as the person who is boarding the aircraft.

This is clearly a lie, since it has never been a problem before.

BAA said the data was encrypted straight away and destroyed within 24 hours, in line with the act.

This is nonsense. Encryption protects data while it is in transit over a public network. Since the Terminal 5 system is a closed one (unless they do the data processing off site, which is of course possible), encryption is meaningless to the security of the data. All someone has to do is get into the server room, install rsync or some other data mirroring tool, and all the data will escape, in real time. The 24 hour deletion becomes meaningless, as does the encryption.

These sorts of lie should never be repeated without challenge. PERIOD.

The investigation would not delay the opening for business of the £4.3bn terminal on Thursday, the airport operator added.

pfft!

Prosecution possibility

The move will allow domestic and international passengers to mingle in the terminal’s departure lounge.

And why is it desirable for the passengers to mingle? Why did the architects DELIBERATELY design a building where, against all common sense, domestic and international passengers are not segregated?

It cannot be so that they can shop more easily, since shops exist in both the domestic and international sections of airports all over the world. The only possible reason for this (other than incompetence) is that this building was designed deliberately broken, so that there was a ‘problem’ to be fixed by biometrics, causing a market for the machinery and a building that can be used to soften up the public to the idea of being fingerprinted.

The people who designed this building are guilty of a serious crime against humanity.

The idea behind the fingerprinting is to make it impossible for a terrorist to arrive at Heathrow on a transit flight, then exchange boarding passes with a colleague in the departure lounge and join a domestic flight to enter the UK without being checked by immigration authorities.

This is possibly one of the most offensive sentences I have ever read on a BBC website.

Fingerprinting cannot stop terrorists. It cannot detect terrorists. It cannot stop terrorists from entering any country. But you know that. Also, if you want to stop people from exchanging boarding passes with colleagues, then you BUILD A FUCKING WALL BETWEEN THE PASSENGER AREAS. You DO NOT fingerprint millions of innocent people.

This is so absurd, so illogical, so offensive, so counterintuitive, so ass backwards, that it can only be a line regurgitated verbatim from a PR company hired to do damage limitation.

That this BBC writer copied it faithfully is sickening, but then, this is exactly what we expect from the BBC, the biggest bunch of dirty, filthy, immoral, unprincipled, journalists for sale BASTARDS ever to sit behind a keyboard.

But Deputy Information Commissioner David Smith told the Mail on Sunday: “We want to know why Heathrow needs to fingerprint passengers at all.

“Taking photographs is less intrusive. So far we have not heard BAA’s case for requesting fingerprints.

There is no case for either fingerprinting or photographing passengers. The building should have been built correctly. International passengers already have to carry passports, and these are ‘secure’ and have been used for decades without any problems.

The question that needs to be asked is how was it that BAA consulted with the Home Office and you had no part in those discussions Mr Smith?

“If we find there is a breach of data protection legislation, we would hope to persuade them to put things right.

Wow, “if we find that a bank robbery had taken place, we would hope to persuade the criminal to put things right”

I want to smoke what that S.O.B. is smoking!

“If that is not successful we can issue an enforcement notice. If they don’t comply, it is a criminal offence and they can be prosecuted.”

Wow, they KNOW that it is a criminal offence, but they get a warning FIRST and then if they keep doing it, they get prosecuted! Bank robbers take note, you have SEVERAL CHANCES TO CHANGE YOUR BANK ROBBING WAYS before they actually prosecute you!!!!

Data ‘encrypted’

BAA said the Border and Immigration Agency had been keen on a “reliable biometric element” when plans had been announced for common departure lounges for international and domestic flights.

That has nothing to do with checking into a flight. This is about a badly designed building, and nothing more. It does however, support the idea that this is a softening up exercise, and demonstrates how they want you to keep scanning in all over the place. Think about it. BAA scans you to get onto the plane TWICE, and immigration scans you to check you out of the country. That is three times in one day where before only a criminal charged with an offence would be fingerprinted and photographed.

Fingerprinting was selected as the most robust method by BAA, the BIA and other government departments, it said.

If that is true, then they are the most stupid people on this planet. A WALL is actually the most robust way of segregating passengers.

A BAA spokesman said: “The data is encrypted immediately and is destroyed within 24 hours of use, in accordance with the Data Protection Act. It does not include personal details nor is it cross-referenced with any other database.”

If it is not cross referenced with with any other database, how do they know that you are the passenger? They must record what ticket you have and place that information next to your prints and photo in their database, otherwise, your ‘terrorist colleague’ could hand you a domestic boarding pass and sneak you into Britain.

Since your fingerprint and face are written next to your ticket details, that means your flight details (stored on the SABRE system) are connected to you.

Anyone with direct access to BAAs fingerprint database will then be able to use this connection to find out everything about you, as this info is stored by SABRE, including your credit card details, which would provide another bridge to detailed knowledge about you via VISA MASTERCARD AMEX etc etc.

That is how it REALLY works you imbeciles; once you connect a plane ticket to your prints it can be used to find out everything about you. BAA, if they are talking about encryption in this way, are clearly incompetent when it comes to IT, and so they absolutely cannot be trusted with anything like this. It is probably being outsourced in any case, and if it is the case, a spokesperson from that company should have been trotted out to explain how they have managed to create dry water.

The Home Office said BAA was not required to involve fingerprinting in its security arrangements at Terminal 5.

BACKPEDALLING!

We all know that the Home Office was consulted when they were planning this!!! ROTFL!

“Our primary concern is that the UK border is secure and we won’t allow BAA to have a common departure lounge unless they ensure the border is secure,” said a spokesman.

So now you entrust the border security of the UK to BAA, and leave the responsibility to THEM to get it right, instead of mandating that passengers are segregated?

THAT my friends, is the definition of INSANITY.

Let me get this straight.

If they find that this airport is breaking the law, they are going to stop fingerprinting people and continue letting passengers mingle. The airport design is broken, they may prosecute if they do not fix it, but by cutting out the offending part, they have a huge illegal immigration hole through which people can pour, but border security is not the Home Office’s responsibility, its BAA’s responsibility.

That is the level of competence that has ruined this country.

Richard Rogers is going to be hit with a lawsuit methinks, since it was HIS IDEA to create this abomination in the first place.

“They presented us with this plan, which we are happy secures the border. The design of the plan is a matter for BAA.”

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7310158.stm

Now BAA will pass responsibility up the line to the architects.

This building will have to be retrofitted to physically separate the two types of passenger, domestic and international. All fingerprinting snake-oil will have to be removed and destroyed, and someone will have to pay for it all.

Start running NOW Richard!

And here are the other posts on this subject we have written, and thanks to the lurker who emailed this!

+++++++ UPDATE!! +++++++

The Telegraph have also drunk the Kool-Aid on this one, repeating verbatim the same damage control press release above:

The Information Commissioner’s Office warned airport operator BAA that the security measure, designed to stop terrorists getting into the country, may breach the Data Protection Act.

[…]

You see? ‘Designed to stop terrorists’. It is the same lie, verbatim.

Under the plan all four million domestic passengers using Terminal 5 annually will have their fingerprints taken when they first go through security.

They will then be checked again at the gate. BAA said the measure was required because of the way Terminal 5 is designed, with domestic and international passengers sharing lounges and public areas after checking in.

Without fingerprinting, terrorists, criminals and illegal immigrants could arrive at Heathrow on a transit flight, then exchange boarding passes with a colleague in the departure lounge and join a domestic flight to enter the UK without being checked by immigration authorities.

[…]

Note the order in which this is put, terrorsts heads the list. It is utter garbage of course, and we can substitute accordingly:

“Without physically segregated passenger lounges, terrorists, criminals and illegal immigrants could arrive at Heathrow on a transit flight, then exchange boarding passes with a colleague in the departure lounge and join a domestic flight to enter the UK without being checked by immigration authorities.”

You see? Much better!

A leading barrister has already informed BAA that he will refuse to give his fingerprints, describing the process as an “Orwellian” abuse of civil liberties.

Nigel Rumfitt QC, a specialist in serious crime including terrorism, said it was a move towards a “database state” and Britain would become a nation that “restricts the internal movement of its citizens”.

[…]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/23/nheathrow123.xml

At last, people with some balls are saying “enough is enough”.

Jan Bledsoe was shocked Thursday to learn she can no longer just swipe her finger across a screen at the local Jewel store to buy her groceries because the bankrupt company behind the technology no longer will process such transactions.

“I’m concerned because I didn’t know it wasn’t Jewel that I’d given my information and fingerprints to,” said Bledsoe of Lake Villa. “The girls at the Jewel were as surprised as anyone” that the system was shut down.

Bledsoe was among thousands of disappointed customers to learn that Solidus Networks Inc., a provider of payment processing, is no longer operating its biometrics unit. The firm’s failure prompted some financial analysts to question whether technology that relies on biological information to identify a customer is ready for the market’s mainstream.

[…]

Although biometrics is far from perfect, it offers consumers an option for making purchases with minimum hassle and no need to remember passwords.

“Commercial biometrics is inevitable,” said Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley-based trend forecaster. “There are huge risks, but it’s just so cheap and convenient, people won’t be able to resist it. Whenever Americans face a choice between privacy and convenience, they always choose convenience.”

[…]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/

There are so many examples of Idiocracy out there, we need a category just 4 it.

Home Schooling parents, alerted to the vile smear carried out by the anonymous liar at BBQ have all received the same response from lie central:

Dear Mrs XXXXXXXXXX,

Thank you for contacting the BBC News website.

We agree that our first attempt at an explainer piece on parental responsibility and Scarlett Keeling confused the issue of her case and that of home education.

We are sorry for that confusion and have now updated the piece in order to make it clearer.

Thank you again for your views which we value.

Yours,

BBC News Website

Notice how this is from yet another filthy cowering slimebag who will not put their name to this communication.

Here are before and after screengrabs of the original article and their ‘second attempt’. Perhaps if they make a THIRD ATTEMPT they will actually get it right. ‘Third time lucky’ as they say:

The fact of the matter is, in Goa the law and courts of India have jurisdiction, not the law and courts of the uk, so any reference to this girl in that aspect is just stupid, unless the anonymous swine who wrote this is suggesting that parents should not be allowed to leave the UK with their children unless they have been issued with exit visas. But I digress.

This is a sad story about a crime. That crime has nothing to do with Home Schooling, or the laws in the UK concerning children. FULL STOP.

Let us now re-write this article for the numbskulls at BBC News:

Title: Parental Responsibility.

Fifteen-year-old Scarlett Keeling was killed while on an extended visit to India with her mother and siblings.

The title now makes sense. What is an ‘extended’ visit? Extended in terms of what exactly? No vague language should be allowed.

Her mother, Fiona MacKeown, has been criticised for taking her children out of school and leaving the teenager while she travelled without her for part of the trip. But what are the rules surrounding parental responsibility?

First of all, WHO CRITICIZED HER? This is like Fox News saying, “some people say” as a clever way of injecting editorial spin into a subject or discussion. No reasonable journalist uses these shabby techniques; if someone said something, SAY WHO IT WAS, or DO NOT CITE THE WORDS.

This “some people say” technique is the shoehorn for this entire article. Once you eliminate it, almost the whole piece is erased.

Here are some of the laws and guidelines that govern schooling and child supervision in the UK.

Irrelevant, since this crime happened in India, not Britain.

When is it appropriate to leave a child alone?

There is no legal age limit for leaving a child on his own.

However, it is an offence to leave a child alone if it places him at risk.

Under the Children and Young Persons Act, parents can be prosecuted for neglect if they leave a child unsupervised “in a manner likely to cause unnecessary suffering or injury to health”.

The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) believes it is unacceptable for a child under 16 to be left alone overnight.

It says most parents would be happy to leave a 16-year-old alone for an evening, but would not leave them for a weekend.

That is not a law making body, and their opinion is irrelevant. Each parent has the right to bring their children up as they see fit. Full stop. BBC uses quotes from these irrelevant organizations because they can’t get legitimization from any other quarter for bogus pieces of ‘journalism’ like this. Clearly the author (whoever it is) is not qualified to write on this subject, otherwise, they would have put their name to the piece as, “education correspondent” or whatever.

Is it compulsory for children to attend school?

Education is compulsory in the UK, but attending school is not.

Home education is an option and parents are not required to register or seek approval from the local authority to educate their children at home.

Neither does home education have to take place solely in the family home.

This is completely irrelevant to the case of a murder in another country. It is astonishing that after being flooded with letters from Home Schoolers, these beasts are persisting in making a link between a murder in India and Home Schooling in Britain.

How long can youngsters be taken out of school?

The Independent Schools Council, which represents about 1,200 of the 2,500 independent schools, said each school would have its own policy on allowing pupils to be taken out for extended periods.

If you are paying the fees to a school, they are rendering a service to you. If you decide to remove your child for any reason at any time, this is your absolute right. In any case what on earth does The Independent Schools Council have to do with a murder case in India? NOTHING.

For state schools, parents can take children out of school for up to 10 days per year. However, this has to be approved by the school and may meet with opposition by officials.

Actually, your children are not the property of any school, and you can remove your child from a school at any time for any reason. Since the state is rendering you a service, there is an argument that they have the right to exclude your child should you break their rules, but other than that, they have not right to control you, or what you choose to do with your children, no matter what the law says.

Once again, none of this has anything to do with a murder case in India.

Some schools may refuse to release a pupil and the decision partly depends when in the year it happens.

For example, removal of children during an exam period would – in all likelihood – result in a refusal.

Irrelevant; and I would like to see a school try and stop parents taking their children away from school. The whole idea is completely absurd, apart from being nothing to do with the sad story of this girl.

Amazingly, that is where the propaganda piece ends.

All we are left with is a fraction of the first sentence, ‘the slug’ and the title and thats it!

Clearly this article should just be deleted in its entirety, since none of it can be salvaged.

We are sorry for that confusion and have now updated the piece in order to make it clearer.

They have totally failed to ‘make it clearer’. The only thing that is clarified is that these animals, take license payer’s money and then lie and spin and smear and disparage whilst hiding behind anonymity.

Nauseating and totally unacceptable behavior.

and here is a very concise ‘tear-apart’ of this piece and its feeble re-write, by a Home Schooler:

It is clear that one or two – often anonymous, as in this case – members of your staff have it in for home education, and “Q & A: Home education and responsibility” is a case in point.

The article strongly implies that home education had something to do with the death of Scarlett Keeling. Apart from the fact that British law is irrelevant to the case, the law relating to leaving children unattended is separate from home education.

While it is true to say that had Scarlett Keeling attended school then she wouldn’t have been in Goa at the time, this is as ridiculous as saying that home education would save the lives of all children killed in traffic accidents on their way to school.

By using the tragic circumstances of Scarlett Keeling’s death as an excuse to “discuss” the law relating to home education, the writer deliberately places home education in a negative light.

The discussion – albeit biased – is a legitimate one, but not in this context. The fact that Scarlett Keeling was home educated had nothing to do with the circumstances surrounding her death.

No British laws were broken by her mother, and in any case, British laws no longer apply to India. The implication of the article and the context of the discussion was that Scarlett Keeling’s death resulted from Fiona MacKeown’s lifestyle choices and that the law relating to these choices should therefore be tightened up. Apart from being thoroughly vindictive in tone against Ms MacKeown, it is completely unacceptable that the BBC allows its writers to use such a case to question the option of home education and the laws relating to it.

If a child dies or is attacked on a school trip, the BBC doesn’t decide to attack the lifestyle choices of his parents. Perhaps the BBC can bring itself to apply the same standards to families that choose to educate their children outside of school. It is too much to ask the BBC to stop discriminating against home education, but please do not use a completely irrelevant case to do so.

BANG!

A lurker writes:

Hi. I visit Blogdial when I can to get a different take on what’s going on.

I know that home schooling is a topic that comes up from time to time and wanted to share something that noticed on the BBC website earlier today. I am not sure about whether I am confused (and therefore missing the obvious connections) or whether this is a blatant attempt at linking a tragedy to home schooling without even the pretence that the two have a common link.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/devon/7291792.stm

The death of Scarlett Keeling, 15, in Goa has highlighted the issue of parental responsibility and the law relating to education.

I have been reading about this girl’s death, or murder as now seems more likely. It is a tradgedy that this girl died and even more so if it turns out that she was indeed drugged, raped and then murdered.

However, I am still trying to find a link between her death on a beach in Goa and the law relating to education and more specifically to home schooling which takes up about half of the BBC’s piece.

The only thing that I can think of is that she might have been out of school during term time, but since she was with her mother and siblings (ie not a truant), and presumably the school knew where she was, this should really not have been an issue.

From what I have read, Scarlett was prone to experimenting with drugs but does not seem to have been arrested or have priors on this or any other count, so this does not appear to be an issue either and a link between this and laws on education or home schooling seem tenuous.

The only question seems to be that her mother left her with friends while she went with her other children to a neighbouring area. In my mind this is a separate issue and can be related even less to laws on education or home schooling.

I freely admit that my research into this non-existant, but even if she did have a record and she had been taken from school during term time without the school’s knowledge, the fact remains she was enrolled in a school even though it may be regarded as quite alternative (I am providing the link as it looks like a very cool project http://www.smallschoolhartland..org/).

In fact a previous BBC news article quoted:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/devon/7275977.stm

“Staff and pupils at Scarlett’s school – The Small School in Hartland, which has only 23 students – said they had been deeply affected by her death. “

Starting from this basis I do not see any link between her death and home schooling or why it should even enter into the equation, yet the BBC piece devotes about half of the text to home schooling. Not only that, but the paragraph immediately preceding the start of the home scholing section is titled “When is it appropriate to leave a child alone?”.

Am I missing something here?

Is this really just using the headlines surrounding this girl’s death possibly at the hands of someone in Goa to try and suggest that home schooling is somehow at fault?

Or to equate home schooling to leaving a child alone?

Or even that small community based schools are bad because they are similar to home schooling and nowhere near as protective of the children as a large state run school would be?

Maybe I am just confused and if Scarlett had been enrolled at the local comprehensive then none of this would have happened and she would have gone on to become a happy and productive member of society or maybe an MP or MEP even.

What do you think?

Bye for now.

Xxxxx

Well, first of all this is a typical BBC propaganda piece, without an author so there is no one who is accountable. These people are the worst human garbage behind keyboards, and they are rabid statists and control freaks.

This death has nothing whatsoever to do with Home Schooling, and neither do any of the other bogus stories that the BBC posts where they weave Home Schooling into a horror story with their poisonous lie spinning loom.

Home Schooling is under attack by these scum-bags, for several reasons.

Those jackasses that managed to produce children and who also work at the BBC are green with envy of the families that Home School; lets face it, Home Schoolers are a very fortunate lot, living lives that BBC types would love to lead, whereas they have to work their bollocks (and tits) off to pay their mortgages while their children are being brainwashed in inferior schools.

They know full well that the many Home Schooled children that are now entering the system are going to beat their inferior children for places at University. As you read BLOGDIAL, you will know that Universities in the USA are bending over backwards to attract Home Schooled students because they are simply superior in every way. By extension, these BBC animals know that what will inevitably follow is the exclusion of their children from jobs at the BBC, which of course, they feel belong to their children by virtue of the fact that they work there now.

This is a class war issue, pure and simple. The BBC editorial control and the anonymous writer in this case, have lumped Home Schoolers in with Etonians as a class of people who have unfair ‘privilege’ and advantage by being Home Schooled while everyone else has to suffer a substandard education at the mercy of the state. Like Etonians and Harovians, Home Schoolians get fast track access to the best in higher education, and all the downstream advantages of that. This deep and bitter resentment is doubly compounded by the fact that Home Schooling families have better family lives than they do. They eat together, spend quality time together and actually know each other, unlike the BBC drones who only get to see their children for a short time every day after work, when they are completely exhausted and unable to be fulfilled.

Finally, Home Schoolers do not watch television.

That is their greatest sin.

Once again, this is a pure propaganda piece. It suddenly switches, without any reason, to ‘How many children are taught at home?’ out of nowhere. It is a vile, nasty baseless piece of garbage writing, delivered on command, as part of a long term strategy to dismantle Home Schooling in the UK. The people ordering this sort of bogus report know full well that they are building a dossier of cases that will eventually be trotted out as sufficient proof that there, “is a need to change the law”. We must remember that ContactPoint was justified on the death of a single girl – this is how they operate. In the case of Home Schooling, because such a tragedy is not likely to happen, Home Schooling parents being the least likely to fall into the class of people that abuse their children, they would have to wait literally until the end of time for a ‘Climbie’ to materialize to help them outlaw Home Schooling. This is why they have to build up a dossier over years, and this case, though it has nothing whatsoever to do with Home Schooling, fits the bill, because they can lie on the record via the BBC.

The fact of the matter is, Home Schooling is growing, and will continue to grow. American home schoolers are very organized, and there are millions of them; they have already reached the tipping point, and legislation over there is mostly retreating from the tidal wave of change.

Britain, sadly, is always 20 years behind america, so we will have to wait until the evidence is so ‘in your face’ that the paid liars at the BBC cannot ignore the facts any longer. Then the headlines will transform overnight to, “Should more children home School?”, instead of the biased, baseless, brainwashing attacks they peddle now.

That is what I think.

Lib Dems plan tax for super rich

That gaggle of nimrods the Lib-Dems, are lashing out with the cut vines that provide them with year round sour grapes.

Lib Dem treasury spokesman Vince Cable says he wants to end the “ridiculous anomaly” which sees the owners of homes worth millions paying only council tax.

The only ‘ridiculous anomaly’ here is that these morons still make noises like they matter to anyone. They have no ideas of their own, do not even have a original twists on old ideas, and time after time demonstrate that they have even less understanding about what is really going on in the world.

These are the same idiots who are totally against the ID card because it will probe into people’s private lives and give snooping powers to every Tom Dick and Harry, but who with the same tongue, push for a local income tax to replace the rates. Duh; the same council workers who would run that ‘service’ would be into your most personal business on an unprecedented scale under such a wicked and stupid idea much worse than in the ID card scenario.

These cretins couldn’t think their way out of a wet paper bag.

Mr Cable told BBC News he had scrapped plans for a levy on properties worth £1m – but he was still considering a tax on the homes of the “super rich”.

Sour Grapes, jealousy, ignorance, disregard for consequences. That is what these fools and this fool in particular are all about. This announcement and its language are the most base sort of call to gutter emotions and SHAME on anyone who sinks to this level, or who thinks that people are so stupid that they will go along with the ‘politics of jealousy’. This is not the 1970′ you stupid fool.

He said he would be announcing detailed proposals later this year.

And in a speech to the party’s spring conference, Mr Cable told wealthy non-domiciles to “pay up or pack up”.

These catch-phrases betray his simple mindedness, and his disregard for the British people. Everyone has had enough of this sort of garbage, this trash talk, this empty rhetoric, these recycled ideas stapled together on pieces of scrap paper in steering meetings.

Thank heavens these jackasses do not have a hope of being elected.

Labour and the Conservatives have both outlined plans for a levy on non-domiciled foreign nationals who pay no tax on their overseas earnings, but Mr Cable said they had not gone anywhere near far enough.

The Tories will drop these insane plans. Labor…well, we know all about them don’t we?

He said: “After 10 years of dithering Gordon Brown has decided to act.

As a veteran of the struggle against Mrs Thatcher’s poll tax, he has decided – you’ve guessed already – to introduce a poll tax.

“Billionaire Lakshmi Mittal is to pay the same tax as a non-dom shopkeeper.

“Not surprisingly, the Tories agree that this is fair, indeed, they claim to have thought of it first.

The non-dom fiasco has already blown up in the face of Neu Labour, and London is going to suffer as a result of it. This is nothing to be happy about or to trumpet, unless you are a delusional half-wit like Cable.

“Yet there has been an almost hysterical reaction from the City. How dare British politicians query the tax privileges of the rich?

“If we are not careful, they say, Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs living in 80m houses will no longer feel welcome and go somewhere else.

This is the sort of nonsense that has caused the flight from London. This is what happens when you let pinheads get onto a microphone or even worse, into the legislature. These petty minded, unexposed, foolish, and unthinking monkeys are hell bend on dismantling what is left of Britain, all for a few symbolic pennies. The whining speech, the stereotyping and the base thought of this bad man are actually THE PROBLEM.

‘Pay up or pack up’

“That’s tough. Let them go. We say that foreign expatriates are welcome to live and work in Britain.

“But when they have been here seven years, they pay British tax like the rest of us. Pay up or pack up.”

And, you total idiot, that is exactly what they are doing. They are taking themselves, their businesses, their clients, their art, their patronage, EVERYTHING with them, and they are NOT COMING BACK. They are firing their British employees, closing their offices, moving their bank accounts. They are leaving nothing behind; they are moving all their company registered offices…they are not leaving a single pencil behind.

You have what you wanted. They are packing up and leaving.

Mr Cable also said he wanted to be more “radical” in his approach to taxation.

“I would like to see a much tougher approach to the windfalls on property and land values enjoyed by the super rich,” he told delegates.

At last year’s Lib Dem spring conference Mr Cable floated the idea of an annual 1% levy on homes worth more than £1m.

Not only is this insane, it is immoral and very probably illegal under EU law.

‘Anomaly’

He told BBC News he had dropped that idea as unworkable – but he still wanted to devise a way of extracting more tax revenue from the owners of very high value homes.

Why?

He said the fact that some houses in London were worth £80m or more but the owners only paid council tax on them was a “ridiculous anomaly that has to be addressed”.

Why?

He said the cash generated should be used to cut tax on low- and middle- income families, with the aim of taking some of them out of the tax system altogether.

This is a LIE because the amount of money raised will not be enough to cover what he is planning, which is, in essence, “I will steal from the rich to give you money so vote for us”.

An appalling and disgraceful sentiment.

Mr Cable also used his conference speech to set out proposals for an increase in tax on “high alcohol” drinks to be offset by a cut in the VAT on fruit juices from 17.5% to 5%.http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7284895.stm

More tweaking and coercion. Sad and pathetic.

I hear the sound of toilets flushing.

It is the sound of the Liberal Democrats being disposed of with their intellectual bedfellows; SHIT.

Do you know what I hate the most?

People who cannot see the world through the eyes of other people:

EU visitors to have fingerprints taken

This title is backwards. It should read, ‘Visitors to EU to have fingerprints taken’. But I digress.

Rory Watson and David Charter

BRUSSELS Every visitor to the European Union would have to provide fingerprints before being allowed to enter, under plans unveiled yesterday to clamp down on illegal immigration.

The move to record the arrival and departure of non-EU citizens and to store the data in a single European database is part of a wider overhaul of border security. It is aimed at the largest single category of illegal migrants: people who remain once their visa or permit has expired.

Franco Frattini, the EU Justice Commissioner, argued that the existence of the electronic register containing a visitor’s personal details and final destination would make it possible to identify overstayers.

The scheme, which must be approved by all 27 EU governments before it can come into force in 2013 as proposed, has been criticised by civil rights groups. They fear that it could lead to a “fortress Europe” mentality against foreigners and to identity theft if the data were lost or stolen.

[…]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/

We have already talked about this, for years. It is bad, no matter who is doing it, and that is wether or not it is in retaliation for the mass humiliation of people from the countries in the EU, or because it is part of a wider plot.

What is galling to me are the reactions of the filthy, stupid americans to this article:

Oh well, just another reason for me to not travel outside of my own country.
RDM, Rockville, MD USA

My wife and I try to visit a different place in Europe every year or so. I guess we will start exploring more of the US for vacation if this goes through. Doesn’t the EU realize that they may be able to identify illegals but they still have to find them once they are in country?
JB, Sierra Vista, AZ USA

Well, I guess I won’t be visiting the EU anymore. I’ll travel my own country…there’s plenty to see here. This entire fingerprint / Big Brother idea is a waste! Both sides of the Atlantic just need to stop it. I’m not afraid of people. For every nut that comes over, there’s thousands of good, honest people. I can stand a nut or two every so often to be and live free.
DB, Atlanta,

Criminals are fingerprinted. This doesn’t send the right message to tourists. And as an American citizen I have no desire to illegally immigrate to Europe, Thanks.
chrysd, Lexington,

It is my finger, and my fingerprints. I will not be going to Europe if this passes. EVER.
Dave, Seattle, USA

These are the same subhumans who can stand by while people are lining up to be incinerated and not even ask a question. The huge lines at airports, international outrage, the previous reciprocal fingerprinting backlash when Brazil fingerprinted only americans….all of this means nothing, until it is actually your turn.

The scum of the earth is what these people are.

It is this same lack of empathy that allows them to sit back and do nothing while their military murders millions of people around the world. Then when it is THEIR TURN, the whole world is made to suffer for it, like it is some sort of unique tragedy.

And there are the usual ‘nothing to fear nothing to hide glove’ puppets, the ignorant who think its ‘no big deal’, the stupid who think it will ‘stop islamic terrorism’ etc etc; the same broken record Then there are the Brits who say, ‘dumb americans’. You get the picture.

Finally, there was one curios post:

I spent almost 2 hours queuing at Newark airport to be fingerprinted before I could enter the US. A week later I was pulled over in Vermont for driving 10 mph above the speed limit. Upon seeing my British driving licence, the policeman called up homeland security and was told there was no record of me entering the country! So much for the fingerprint system.
Calista, cambridge,

??!!!

Wouldn’t it be hilarious if all of this was an elaborate scam to sell equipment that didn’t even work!!!

We know that USVISIT does not count people out of the country as they exit, it just might be true.

More likely is that USVISIT is just a processing machine to capture the prints, names and addresses and photos of hundreds of millions of people. That is why the exit system doesn’t matter.

Internet users could face disconnection for illegal downloads

Sarah Knapton
The Guardian, Tuesday February 12 2008

Internet users who illegally download music and films could lose their access to the web under legislation aimed at cracking down on those who flout piracy laws. Powers being drafted by the government will compel internet service providers to take action against customers who access pirated material.

The Department of Media, Culture and Sport will recommend the plan in a green paper on the creative industries to be published this month, a source with knowledge of the paper said. Under the new sanctions users will face a “three strikes” regime. A warning email will be sent for the first offence, followed by suspension from the service and finally termination of the internet contract.

Shouldnt that be, “download and you are run out”, or “share music and its LBW” as in cricket? Three Strikes laws like this insane RIAA driven drivel come from the USA and have no place in civilized societies.

These laws, as we all know, are actually drafted by the MPAA and the RIAA, not by British legislators, who are as computer literate as an apple. Collectively.

A draft copy of the green paper said the government “will move to legislate to require internet service providers to take action on illegal file-sharing,” although it has yet to decide if information on offenders should be shared between the ISPs, the Times reported.

The government has come under increasing pressure from the music and film industries to penalise users who download pirated files. Although piracy is illegal, prosecutions are rare.

Like we keep saying about the Guardian; they always take the side of The Man in these issues. Any newspaper that seeks to be taken seriously would never repeat this twaddle unchallenged, but this is exactly what we expect from these idiots, and this ‘report’ is 100% in character; i.e. not journalism, but simple, unthinking regurgitation.

For the record, there is no such thing as a ‘pirated file’. This is the irrational language of the RIAA. ‘Piracy’ is the act of making a copy of someone else’s work and then SELLING IT FOR MONEY. That is what piracy is; it is nothing more than that. File sharing is not piracy. Copying files between computers is not piracy. The Guardian claims that everyone who does not believe this is wrong. This is no surprise. They are an old media dinosaur struggling to make sense of and to fit in with the modern world…the real world. If I were them, I would start by never regurgitating a government PR piece unchallenged in the way that they have opened their mouths, accepted the vomit from HMGs stomach, swished it around and then spat it onto the page, brown chunks and all.

The UK’s four largest internet providers – BT, Tiscali, Orange and Virgin Media – are already in talks with studios on a joint voluntary agreement to share information on web violators.

There is no such thing as a ‘web violator’, any more than there are ‘newspaper violators’. Substitution. TRY IT! And as for ISPs sharing information’ that phrase is a euphemism for violating the privacy of customers…’customer violators’ if you will.

But under the legislation they could be forced to cut off customers. ISPs which fail to enforce the rules could face prosecution, and suspected customers handed over to the courts. It remains unclear who would be responsible for arbitration in disputed allegations, for example when customers claim that other users have “piggy-backed” on their wireless internet access.

This is bullshit, and the ISPs know it.

In order to bring a prosecution against an ISP, the person or party bringing the claim has to prove that the user is doing something illegal. Lets consider a Bittorrent user torrenting a file. The entity bringing the prosecution has to prove that the person who ‘owns’ the IP address was downloading a so called ‘pirated file’. Then they have to prove that the owner of the IP was the one who torrented it. With Bittorrent it is easy to see the IPs of seeds and peers, so the entity bringing the claim does not need help from the ISP to identify who is copying a file, and this legislation is not needed.

In the case of FTP, DCC on IRC and other types of sharing there is no way to identify who is sharing without getting logs from ISPs. That means either ISPs policing their traffic in real time or keeping extensive traffic logs. Traffic logs do not contain any part of the actual files that were transferred, so anyone naming a file ‘Pirates_of_the_Carrabean_at_Worlds_End.rar’ could claim that what was ftp’d was something actually totally unrelated to the title; photos of a party themed on that movie for example. The principle is that you have to have PROOF that someone has committed a ‘crime’ before you prosecute them or start snooping into their private communications. This is where the legislators completely fail.

A spokesman for the Department of Media, Culture and Sport said: “There are still meetings going on and consultation to take place, so nothing is finalised. The strategy document is to be released within the next couple of weeks.”

Yet another consultation, where no one has seen the proposals in advance, and the initial document is being written by industry. Its called ‘a sham’.

The green paper is also expected to call for a £200m national film centre, as well as 19 other schemes intended to turn Britain into the “world’s creative hub”. Other pledges include the launching of a global arts conference, dubbed the “World Creative Economy Forum” modelled on Davos, the creation of a new college of digital media and the protection of live music venues such as the Astoria and the Hammersmith Apollo in London.

Now here is where we get into the Neu Labor Soviet Diktat fantasy world. They want to make Britain the “world’s creative hub”, but do everything to stifle people freely interacting on the web, by encumbering ISPs (driving up the cost of getting and staying connected, diverting energies and monies that should be spent in improving the networks to pointless surveillance systems) enacting legislation that makes people look over their shoulders etc etc, the very OPPOSITE of what you need to be doing to attract the most creative and talented people.

What a total bunch of pathetic puppets and nincompoops.

If you want to support the new economy of the 21st century this is how you do it. You support those people who are changing the world for the better, not the buggy whip salesmen. The guardian should, of course, know that the Swedish Parliament supports file sharing, and has refused to be a puppet of the USA. That context is crucial in this story, and of course, there is none of it in this shabby article.

The government is also expected to reveal plans for a new creative festivals season, a new film centre on London’s South Bank and a permanent home for London fashion week.

And of course, all the ‘non dom’ designers will not come here to create their haut couture, preferring countries that actually support entrepreneurial people by getting out of their way and not trying to steal every penny they create.

They think creativity and economies can be created by pronouncement, that all they need to do is swill back beer and curry and greasey chicken shawarma, puke it into the mouths of the gyroscopists at rags like the guardian and then, by magic, their bile soaked pronouncements…make it so. The film industry needs, more than anything, tax breaks. That is one of the main considerations when people shoot film…or at least, it used to be, because now with synthetic scenemaking, you can be anywhere and appear to be shooting somewhere else. But I digress. Sort of. Opening a film centre does not mean you will get a revived film industry where people shoot, edit, score and most importantly, finance films from England. That is what film making is about, not opening ‘centres’.

Under plans to be announced by Gordon Brown and the culture secretary, Andy Burnham, children will be given the right to “five hours of culture a week” encouraging them to visit galleries and museums, attend the theatre, or study a musical instrument.

And some 1,000 creative apprenticeships for young people are also being proposed, which will be managed by a new Skills Academy.

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/12/piracy.politics

And there you have it.

No only do these people have no idea of what a right is, they do not know how to preserve and support culture. That is why they are stupidly driving away the very people who create the culture they falsely claim that they support. In fact, these people loathe culture with the same hate that communists hate religion. Did you know that ballet is not considered valuable by these monsters because they say it is ‘not a sport’? This is a verbatim quote from a teacher at one of London’s most prestigious schools, repeated to me personally during a conversation about how ballet schools and their staff are struggling to survive.

Finally, look at who is in charge of this; the scumbag Andy “Nazi” Burnham, ex-excuse maker for the ID car debacle. This man, who thinks that its OK to enslave people, is now charged with giving children, “The right to culture”.

If it wasn’t so sick it would be hilarious.

EU plans to require biometrics of all non-European visitors

By Stephen Castle
Sunday, February 10, 2008

BRUSSELS: All non-Europeans would need to submit biometric data before crossing Europe’s frontiers under sweeping European Union proposals to combat illegal migration, terrorism and organized crime that are to be outlined this week.

The only reason why this is being opened as a possibility is USVISIT.

And yet, the EU appears to be furious that the Great Satan wants more passenger data.

The plans – arguably the biggest shake-up of border management in Europe since the creation of an internal travel zone – would apply to citizens of the United States and all other countries that now enjoy visa-free status.

They would, however, allow EU citizens and “low risk” frequent travelers from outside the bloc to pass through automated, fast-track frontier checkpoints without coming into contact with border guards. Voluntary programs for prescreening such visitors, who would register fingerprints and other data, would be stepped up.

‘Voluntary’. A page right out of Tony Bliar and his venal musical chairs Home Secretaries and their ID Card farce.

The proposals, contained in draft documents examined by the International Herald Tribune and scheduled to go to the European Commission on Wednesday, were designed to bring the EU visa regime into line with a new era in which passports include biometric data.

No debate, no consultation, no warning, no rationale, just ‘this is the way it is going to be’. Pure dictatorship, pure fascism. Who has designed this system, why is it being put in place after centuries of people moving without problems and decades of free travel without Fascist measures?

The commission, the EU executive, argues that migratory pressure, organized crime and terrorism are obvious challenges to the Union and that the bloc’s border and visa policy needs to be brought up to date.

This is not a rationale, this is a complete lie.

for decades, ‘terrorism’ has been going on in europe, and in the case of Italy, the home of Fascism and Franco Frattini, the terrorism was callously engineered by the Italian government to…terrorize the good people of Italy. Terror is no pretext to abuse the people of europe in this way. Migratory pressure can be controlled by the ID cards that all EU citizens are already compelled to carry. These measures will not stop people coming to Italy in boats or walking into europe. It will only impact the law abiding and good people; in fact, this plan is a clever scheme by equipment vendors to create a market for themselves where millions of people will be forced to consume their services through contract with governments. Organized crime? Italy is the world capitol for organized crime, and yet, you could not have a more beautiful and well ordered country, where the people have a high standard of living, a high ‘index of happiness’ as do many counties of europe. This simply is not needed, and when they say that, “visa policy needs to be brought up to date” this code for, “we have to keep up with the americans”.

It also wants a new European Border Surveillance System to be created, to use satellites and unmanned aircraft to help track the movements of suspected illegal migrants.

All of this will cost money, contractors will make a fortune on it, it will not stop illegal working, or ‘terrorism’

If approved by the commission this week, the measures would need the approval of all EU states.

The United States routinely requires European citizens to submit fingerprints when crossing its borders and the commission’s document notes that America plans to introduce an electronic travel-authorization system for people from countries like Britain, France and Germany that are in its Visa Waiver Program.

And it is all pure evil, and we and many smart people have been saying so for years.

The commission’s proposals cover the Schengen zone, Europe’s internal free-travel area named after the village in Luxembourg near where the original agreement between five countries was signed on June 14, 1985. Twenty-four countries are now members.

It is unclear whether Britain and Ireland, which along with Cyprus are not members of Schengen, would opt into the program.

Each year more than 300 million travelers cross EU borders, but there is no obligation for countries inside the Schengen free-travel zone to keep a record of entries and exits of non-European third-country nationals in a dedicated database. Moreover, if the visitor leaves from another Schengen country, it is often impossible to determine whether or not the visitor overstayed his or her visa.

And that is the way it should be. Everything has been working without these measures, and these measures will not be effective, because, A) Terrorism is a false pretext, B) only law abiding people use passports, C) organized crime will not be impacted in any way.

The proposals, drafted by the European commissioner for justice and home affairs, Franco Frattini, suggest that non-Europeans on a short-stay visa would be checked against a Visa Information System that is already under construction and should be operational in 2012.

Fratinni the Fascist, strikes again. This evil bastard is, “…responsible for Freedom, Security and Justice.” What a joke. This evil man has consistently been for the erasure of freedom, measures that do not improve security, and that are unjust. He wants to censor the internet. Lets leave it right there. This is a very bad man.

Frattini also is calling for a new database to be set up to store information on the time and place of entry and exit of non-European nationals, using biometric identifiers. Once a person’s visa expired, an alert would go out to all national authorities that the visitor had overstayed his or her allotted time.

Fratinni is an imbecile. This database he is proposing will not catch a single illegal worker that does not use a passport, and these people number in the millions. Perhaps next he will advocate the re-opening of the concentration camps to store all the undesirables; by making this database, he will be putting in place the infrastructure to make it easy to do, just like his predecessors and inspiration the Nazis did. How can such a beautiful country produce such an ugly man?

Travelers from countries with a visa requirement would need to provide biometric data at European consulates before leaving their home country. Those arriving from nations not requiring visas, like the United States, would also need to submit fingerprints and a digitalized facial image.

Border control that is proportionate is what is required. There is nothing wrong with border controls as long as they are reasonable and do not interfere with the flow and freedom of people. For decades air travel has been a great boon to everyone. If there is a problem of too many travelers, this cannot be solved by fingerprinting everyone over the top Security Theatre and launching spy planes and surveillance drones.

But the European Union would try to make the system more user-friendly for Europeans and some categories of bona fide visitors by granting them the status of “registered traveler.” They would be able to have their biometric travel documents scanned and checked by machines.

Once again, none of this will stop illegal migration, illegal working, ‘people trafficking’, terrorism, organized crime or any of the things Fratelli claims he wants to stop. These are measures that will only work on the harassed law abiding public.

All Europeans should be able to use such a system when EU countries complete the task of issuing passports with two biometric identifiers, by 2019 at the latest. The 27 EU countries started issuing passports with a digitalized facial image in August 2006 and, in June 2009, will add the holder’s fingerprints. European residence permits will also contain the same identifiers.

All nonsense, and all measures designed to increase the cost of issuing and maintaining passports; this is the real reason why these measures are being proposed; vendors will have the opportunity to roll out several layers on top of the existing passports, each one being worth billions of euros.

Think about it, RFID chips mean the chips themselves manufactured in the tens of millions, the readers on a scale of tens of thousands, then there are the maintenance contracts. The same goes for fingerprinting; readers will need to be rolled out in the tens of thousands. Digital photograpy, whole new generations of equipment. Then the databases and associate software and hardware it will be run on. It is a contractors wet dream. Fratelli and the unelected, unaccountable EU commission are the people who are going to dish out this candy.

Non-Europeans could gain the same, fast-track status providing they have not overstayed previous visas, have proof of sufficient funds to pay for their stay in Europe and hold a biometric passport.

And of course, the illegals, who have no money, always overstay the visas they never apply for, will go around this system.

All non-European nationals would be asked to make an electronic application, supplying key data, before their arrival, allowing them to be checked against anti-terror databases in advance.

Migrants on foot? How many times do we have to repeat it?

The draft documents also highlight weaknesses in Europe’s efforts to guard its borders. One paper points out that, in the eight EU countries with external borders in the Mediterranean Sea and southern Atlantic, frontier surveillance is carried out by about 50 authorities from 30 institutions, sometimes with competing competencies and systems.

and nothing that Fratelli is offering will make it better. And he knows it.

The plans foresee increased use of satellites and unmanned surveillance aircraft to monitor unauthorized movements, and a computerized communication network to share information.

‘computerized’

Just like Buck Rogers!

Frattini also wants to see a bigger role for the agency that coordinates cooperation over external borders, known as Frontex. Although the agency has been criticized in some southern European nations for failing to match the scale of the challenge over illegal migration, the commission argues that it has achieved impressive results.

In 2006 and 2007 more than 53,000 people were apprehended or denied entry at a frontier and at least 2,900 false travel documents were seized. In addition, 58 people suspected of links to illegal trafficking have been arrested.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/10/europe/union.php?page=2

In other words, it has been just about as effective as USVISIT; billions spent to capture a handful of passports, and under one hundred criminals.

Pathetic.

Sadly we cannot expect anyone in Europe to take a common sense stance, put their foot down and say, “this is impossibly stupid”.

An ugly future, built by ugly people.

Crime fears as cheap PCs head for Africa

Initiatives such as the OLPC and Classmate could mean an explosion in botnets in the developing world, warn security experts

Pete Warren
The Guardian,

One Laptop Per Child project, Nigeria

The OLPC could have the unwanted side effect of fuelling cybercrime in Africa

What if the plans to spread low-cost One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and Intel Classmate computers to the developing world work? What if in a few years there are hundreds of millions of them out there? Many might applaud. But among computer security experts, there’s growing concern that those scheme could inadvertently lead to a huge increase in computer crime.

Because of course, only europeans can maintain and update software, wheras the ‘darkies’ cannot.

Initiatives such as the OLPC and the Classmate are intended to help bridge the digital divide. But security experts warn that there could be an unforeseen negative effect.

“There is the possibility of creating the largest botnet in the world,” says Yuval Ben-Ithak of Finjan, a computer security company. This view is borne out by a recent report by F-Secure identifying Africa as one of the emerging cybercrime threats.

When they say, “this view is borne out”, what it really means is that someone else repeated the same lines. There is no proof, no proof of concept, no study, nothing. Just a bunch of fear mongering twaddle of the type the Guardian loves to peddle.

Phenomenal takeup

“Within the past few years, internet take-up in emerging markets has been phenomenal,” says Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure. “The trend is expected to continue and spread into areas such as Africa, India and central America. People are developing sophisticated computer skills. But,” he adds, “they have limited opportunities to profit from them legally. There will be a delay before legal systems catch up with developments in the IT sector. Computer criminals may also be able to escape the law more easily in countries which are undergoing serious political and security problems.”

The case of Onel de Guzman, the student who wrote the 2000 Love Bug virus and who escaped prosecution because the Philippines, his home, had no offence with which to prosecute him, is a case in point.

No, it is not, because this story WAS about ‘Africans’ fueling ‘cybercrime’. Phillipinos, ‘Africans’ what’s the difference? “They are all foreigners innit!”

But Ivan Krstic, OLPC’s director of security hardware, points to the choice of Linux as the operating system for the computers. “You cannot have one program loading from the internet that can then go to your [email] address book and then send out a spam message to everyone,” Krstic explains. “The program can only work in its own area and has no functionality beyond that.

“For anything to be able to achieve that overall control, the attack would have to be written to the system kernel, and those are the hardest attacks to launch. Those vulnerabilities do exist, but they are patched very quickly. It would be difficult to get them to run bots.” However, there is an option to run Windows XP on the machine – which means, concedes Krstic, “they can be attacked. All of the connotations of Windows security apply.”

And FINALLY we have some common sense in writing.

OLPC will not be used to create huge botnets because it is running Linux. Botnets normally run on winblows, the OS so beloved by and the meat and potatoes of the computer illiterate fear-monger journalist.

Don’t install winblows, and there is no problem from botnets.

Next?

The Windows-based Intel Classmate also includes a nod at security. Countries buying it can opt for antivirus software, included for a higher price, but must negotiate that with AV companies themselves; and a hardware setting disables the laptop if it is not connected to an antivirus monitoring network for a certain period of time. This is to safeguard the machine from becoming part of a botnet, which can disable antivirus checking.

And there you have the whole security and journalist fear-mongering industry in a nutshell. It is all about selling software, and inducing people to buy it through fear.

In case you did not know, this is the Intel Classmate:

The Classmate PC powered by Intel for emerging markets worldwide

The World Ahead Program from Intel Corporation aims to enhance lives by accelerating access to uncompromised technology for everyone, anywhere in the world. Focused on people in the world’s developing communities, it integrates and extends Intel’s efforts to advance progress in four areas: accessibility, connectivity, education, and content.

It runs Winblows (requiring 2gig flash), or Mandriva (requiring 1gig flash [no surprise there ay?]).

The bigger problem in the long term may be the developing world’s choice of operating system. “Most of the machines we are shipping have Windows on them. That’s the operating system most countries want,” says Intel.

And do you wonder why? All these people, these government ministers are more computer illiterate than Guardian journalists, and they read the Guardian and take their lead from them and the other newspapers. They are also under massive bribery pressure to accept winblows:

Dear Steve,

Hi, this is François, from Mandriva.

I’m sure we are way too small for you to have heard of us. You know, we are one of these Linux company who is working hard to make its place in the market. We publish a Linux Distro, called Mandriva Linux. Mandriva Linux 2008, our last edition, has a pretty good review and we’re proud of it. You should try it, I’m sure you’d like it. We also happen to be one of the Linux companies that did not sign an agreement with your company (nobody’s perfect).

We recently closed a deal with the Nigerian Government. Maybe you heard about it, Steve. They were looking for an affordable hardware+software solution for their schools. The initial batch was 17,000 machines. We had a good deal to respond to their need: the Classmate PC from Intel, with a customized Mandriva Linux solution. We presented the solution to the local government, they liked the machine, they liked our system, they liked what we offered them, especially the fact that it was open, and that we could customize it for their country and so on.

Then, your people get in the game and the deal got more competitive. I would not say it got dirty, but someone could have said that. Your team fought and fought again the deal, but still the customer was happy with the CMPC and Mandriva.

We actually closed the deal, we took the order, we qualified the software, we got the machine shipped. To conclude, we did our job. And, the machine are being delivered right now.

Now, we hear a different story from the customer : “we shall pay for the Mandriva Software as agreed, but we shall replace it by Windows afterward.”

Wow! I’m impressed, Steve! What have you done to these guys to make them change their mind like this? It’s quite clear to me, and it will be to everyone. How do you call what you just did Steve? There is various names for it, I’m sure you know them. […]

http://blog.mandriva.com/2007/10/31/an-open-letter-to-steve-ballmer/

So to claim that, “That’s the operating system most countries want” is just disingenuous. These government people do not know anything about operating systems; they just want the best possible deal, whatever it is, and if you offer them a PC running Linux, and explain why it is so good, they will accept it, just like the Nigerian government did.

These excuses are echoes of the ones we used to hear not so long ago, “Linux is not ready for the desktop” is the one that you have to strain to hear the most, as it has faded to almost nothing.

It adds that teachers will receive training from Intel to monitor the network and will be able to see if changes have been made to the machines: “Some schools using the computers will have a teacher who is responsible for security on their networks, others will have an IT person.” As a last resort the Classmate, like the OLPC XO, can be wiped clean and restored to its factory settings.

So in fact, there is no problem at all.

But while Windows has its problems, Linux may not offer much better protection, says Guillaume Lovet, a botnet expert for Fortinet. “The first botnets were Stacheldraht, Trinoo and TFN, and were built in Linux,” says Lovet. He also dismisses claims that the low bandwidth and internet use in parts of the developing world – the World Economic Forum’s 2007 Africa Competitiveness Report estimated that African internet use was just 3.4% of the world total – would act as a brake on the development of botnets.

Whoa!

What these journalists never do is challenge assertions made in their pieces. Lets find out EXACTLY what that last blockquothed text really means:

============================

The “stacheldraht” distributed denial of service attack tool

============================

David Dittrich
University of Washington
Copyright 1999. All rights reserved.
December 31, 1999

Introduction
————

The following is an analysis of “stacheldraht”, a distributed denial of service attack tool, based on source code from the “Tribe Flood Network” distributed denial of service attack tool. [Note that throughout this analysis, actual nicks, site names, and IP addresses have been sanitized.]

Stacheldraht (German for “barbed wire”) combines features of the “trinoo” distributed denial of service tool, with those of the original TFN, and adds encryption of communication between the attacker and stacheldraht masters and automated update of the agents.

For more information on trinoo and TFN, see:

http://staff.washington.edu/dittrich/misc/trinoo.analysis
http://staff.washington.edu/dittrich/misc/tfn.analysis

In late June and early July of 1999, one or more groups were installing and testing trinoo networks and waging medium to large scale denial of service attacks employing networks of over 2000 compromised systems. These attacks involved, and were aimed at, systems around the globe.

In late August/early September of 1999, focus began to shift from trinoo to TFN, presumed to be the original code by Mixter. Then in late September/early October, a program that looked a lot like the TFN agent, known as “stacheldraht”, began to show up on systems in Europe and the United States.

These attacks prompted CERT to release Incident Note 99-04:

http://www.cert.org/incident_notes/IN-99-04.html

Like trinoo, stacheldraht is made up of master (handler) and daemon, or “bcast” (agent) programs. The handler/agent terminology was developed at the CERT Distributed System Intruder Tools workshop held in November 1999, and will be used in this analysis instead of the stacheldraht specific terms. It is highly recommended that the CERT workshop report be read as well. See:

http://www.cert.org/reports/dsit_workshop.pdf

There is some competition to stacheldraht in the form of Mixter’s new version of TFN — Tribe Flood Network 2000, or TFN2K — released on December 21, 1999. For more on TFN2K, See:

http://packetstorm.securify.com/distributed/
http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-99-17-denial-of-service-tools.html

Along with trinoo’s handler/agent features, stacheldraht also shares TFN’s features of distributed network denial of service by way of ICMP flood, SYN flood, UDP flood, and “Smurf” style attacks. Unlike the original TFN and TFN2K, the analyzed stacheldraht code does not contain the “on demand” root shell bound to a TCP port (it may be based on earlier TFN code than was made public by Mixter in mid-1999).

One of the weaknesses of TFN was that the attacker’s connection to the master(s) that control the network was in clear-text form, and was subject to standard TCP attacks (session hijacking, RST sniping, etc.) Stacheldraht deals with this by adding an encrypting “telnet alike” (stacheldraht term) client.

Stacheldraht agents were originally found in binary form on a number of Solaris 2.x systems, which were identified as having been compromised by exploitation of buffer overrun bugs in the RPC services “statd”, “cmsd” and “ttdbserverd”. They have been witnessed “in the wild” as late as the writing of this analysis.

After publishing analyses of trinoo and Tribe Flood Network on Bugtraq in December 1999, an incident investigator at another institution provided stacheldraht source code that was obtained from a file cache in a stolen account. (I would like to thank this investigator, and also thank the folks at SecurityFocus for providing the open forum that allowed this to occur.) This analysis was done using this captured source code (labelled version 1.1, with source file modification dates ranging from 8/15/1999 to 10/17/1999).

The Makefiles contain rules for Linux and Solaris, with the default being Linux (even though it appears that the code does not work very reliably on Linux). For the purposes of this analysis, all programs were compiled and run on Red Hat Linux 6.0 systems. As far as I am aware, the agent has been witnessed “in the wild” only on Solaris 2.x systems.

[…]

http://staff.washington.edu/dittrich/misc/stacheldraht.analysis

Stacheldraht was only seen in the wild on Solaris 2.x systems so saying, “The first botnets were Stacheldraht, Trinoo and TFN, and were built in Linux,” doesnt really apply to OLPC, and futthermore, all of the above happened in 1999. The question to ask here is, “have there been any botnets running on Linux since 1999?”. Journalists would no doubt add that seven years in internet time is an eternity, but we wont sink that low here.

“It doesn’t take any bandwidth to control or make a botnet,” Lovet says. “Aggregated bandwidth is what is important, and that would still be massive. You could still build a huge cyber-weapon with only a thousand of these machines.”

‘Huge cyber-weapon’….this is the language of fear-mongering. Its good in science fiction, but inappropriate in a newspaper, in an article about OLPC, an entirely noble and beneficial effort, which will transform the lives and brains of millions of people.

Of course, there are those in the west whose worst nightmare is a third world population weaned on logic, able to programme and organize, immune to stupidity and because of all that, free. No more Kwashiorkor bellied pickininnies to plaster in their papers and opine about. A REAL tragedy.

That leads us to the subtext of this article. OLPC will breed the next generation of 419 scammers, all fluent in Python and UNIX, which is the very backbone of the internets. It would sound like this coming out of their mouths:

“We are breeding a whole new generation of internet cybercriminals by providing OLPC to so many people” an expert from G-Secure said, “this army of highly skilled black hats will dominate any future internet if we do not take preventative measures now.”

Heh…’Black Hats’!!!!

For the botnet herders – the people who create and control botnets – there would also be kudos in staking a claim in a new area. “We have seen botnets involved in landgrab exercises in the past,” says Greg Day, a security analyst for McAfee.

McAfee, another anti-virus vendor. You have heard the rumor that Anti-Virus companies fund the creation of viruses so that they can keep the fear level up and artificially sustain their vampiric subscription business model right? Nah, its just a ‘conspiracy theory’.

Just as alarming for Mark Sunner, chief technology officer of Messagelabs, which monitors email traffic on behalf of the government, is that the machines could be used as a recruiting ground for criminals.

Its alarming is it? Just what EXACTLY is the scenario that is ‘alarming’ in this case? Perhaps when this man says ‘recruiting’ he is referring to recruiting the newly trained up Python programmers who are willing and able to be turned to… the Dark Side. ROTFL!

Herd goats, or bots?

“You can imagine a whole swathe of internet boiler-rooms being created among people who can make more money from internet crime than herding goats,” says Sunner, who points to the fact that Africa already has the highly technologically literate Nigerian 419 group, one of the oldest cyber-crime organisations.

and BANG there it is, said out loud. These people are more inclined to be criminals than the millions of children with laptops in the west. Of course, this came from the mouth of a Government contractor, the types that know all about criminality from the inside.

As for the subheading, what do YOU make of it?

The latter are very dangerous, says a former head of the UK’s now disbanded West African Organised Crime Unit. “They are organised like a business. They are already building most of the bogus bank sites on the web. If you ship computers to Nigeria then a lot of them will inevitably make their way to 419. I mentioned this to someone who is still monitoring 419 and they said ‘you might as well shut down the internet and go back to pen and ink’.”

Which is exactly what they want for these people, to shut down THEIR internets and cut them off from the rest of the world. Note that this ‘alarming’ situation is so bad that the ‘West African Organised Crime Unit’ is now closed down, and that they talk about bogus bank sites, not sophisticated botnets. This article is a hodge podge of nonsense, a fear bouillabaisse for the computer illiterate cuisine eaters that dirty their hands on that shitty paper. And let us not forget that 419 only works because there are gullible, greedy westerners who fall for it day after day. 419 is social engineering, not software engineering Unsurprisingly, these nincompoops cannot make the distinction; its all ‘cybercrime’ to them.

Sunner, meanwhile, notes the dangers that the machines represent to Africa’s own emerging internet infrastructure. “There are a lot of viruses are already heading for Africa and China and the consequences of spam can be terrible if you do not have much bandwidth,” he says.

As this very article says, in the only part of it that is sensible, OLPC cannot be used to send out spam because:

“You cannot have one program loading from the internet that can then go to your [email] address book and then send out a spam message to everyone,”

so OLPC cannot be used as a zombie machine to send out spam. Insert joke here about how Zombies come from the west indies in any case, not west africa.

Both Intel and OLPC point out that the laptops will often only have intermittent connectivity. That might lower the risk of getting infected – or the chances of getting security upgrades.

Bullshit. OLPC and Intel Classmate are not gong to get ‘infected’ by anything as long as they are running Linux. If they do, it can be fixed quickly. The risk mentioned here is extremely low, and the fixes easy to roll out. This is a non issue, full stop. The long term effect of OLPC will be to educate millions of people around the world, and any problems along the way will be temporary.

But the bleak picture may be avoidable, says Rolf Roessing, a security expert for KPMG. “If we are to bring IT to Africa then it will not work unless we bring security with it. Computer security in the west grew because of a loss of innocence and there are still weaknesses in the developed world because of a lack of awareness. If you bring IT to developing countries then you have to develop awareness, too.”

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/07/olpc.security

The picture is not at all ‘bleak’; bad journalism as in this article is the most bleak part of this story.

OLPC is going to change the world, in a good way, and there is nothing that negative spinning, fear-mongering journalists and ‘no darkie computer programmers’ racists can do about it. Both of the latter groups, and the ‘security’ companies are on the wrong side of history. The internet is going to reach everywhere, it will be beneficial. Deal with it.

IT is already in Africa, and the last thing that the people who live in the sovereign countries on that continent need is to copy the ‘security’ model of broken monopoly OS, fear-mongering, security company subscription. Thankfully, the Pandora’s box is already open. Linux has a strong foothold, and it will completely dominate the desktop in all of the target countries. This will happen not only because it makes sense, but because the absurd anti copying policies of Micro$oft will drive people to install other operating systems that can be freely and easily copied without any pain or risk of the customer coming back to say, “my computer is broken”. Additionally, the users of OLPC 15 years from now, having grown up with open systems will reflexively reject any OS that tries to lock them down with DRM, false security models and bullshit.

Computer security grew in the west not because of a ‘loss of innocence’ but because of a lack of computer literacy and the winblows monopoly. Now that those things are breaking, despite the efforts of scumbags on every side, as people dump windows and move to linux we will see fewer problems and a more healthy working environment.

The question you want to ask yourself is this; do you want to be a part of what made the magic happen, or do you want to be aligned with the enemy?

This article smells very bad. Lets take a sniff…

Al-Qaeda group’s encryption software stronger, security firm confirms

By Ellen Messmer
Network World
02/01/08

Shame on you for propagating this nonsense.

Al-Qaeda support group Al-Ekhlaas has improved the encryption software it now provides to its online members, according to one security researcher who examined the software, known as “Mujahideen Secrets 2.”

Al-Qaeda support group, also known as ‘NSA’.

Anyone who is smart enough to know how to write an encryption algorithm and a package to deliver its functionality, and who is responsible for keeping people secure, knows that it is far better to use an off the shelf set of tools rather than build your own application and algorithm from scratch.

If ‘Al-Qaeda’ was real, and someone in their group knew about encryption, all they would need to do is settle on standard tools to keep their communications secure; they would never risk, or waste time trying to create from scratch, using their own proprietary system.

Mujahideen Secrets 2 has added the ability to encrypt chat communications, which the first version lacked, says Paul Henry, vice president of technology evangelism at Secure Computing. Henry says he got the software through a contact in the intelligence community.

OH REALLY??!?!? a contact in the ‘intelligence community’???!!!!

It is OBVIOUS to even the most casual observer that the way to infiltrate a group like this, that is paranoid about security, would be to infiltrate them and then provide them with a ‘secure’ way of chatting that logs all of their communications. You could do this even if the clients were secure; all you would need to do is control the chat server.

I assure you that all of the people, even those that are casually interested in cryptography understand this. They would immediately recommend open source publicly available tools to do this job. For example, if you want to have one to one encrypted chat, you use Adium. If you want encrypted email, you use GNU Privacy Guard. If you want to shred files, manage keys, recipient keys, encrypt attachments and files there is no better tool than Enigmail. Any tool that is not peer reviewed cannot be trusted. This tool, by its very nature, is untrustworthy; this whole story doesn’t sound right.

The home-grown Mujahideen Secrets 2 encryption software, based on open source RSA code, can encrypt binary files so they can be posted on ASCII-text-based bulletin boards and Web sites.

‘Pics or it didn’t happen’. Without looking at the source of this programme, it is impossible to say how good this software is, and once again, there are other, better more secure tools to do this.

Lets think about the sentence above. If you are going to post an encrypted binary on an ascii bulletin board, you need to encrypt it to the members of that board, using the private key of each member. If you cannot control who is on your board, i.e. you have a single infiltrator, your enemy will have access to the file and the list of recipients. The whole point of posting files on a board is to distribute them widely, and so you do not want to encrypt them in this way; if you want to send encrypted binaries to multiple people, you send the file by email, encrypting the file for each recipient individually. Once they get on your board in the scenario provided by this ‘journalist’, your enemy can get a hold of the file, at any time after it was posted, and then list the keys needed to decrypt the file, giving a list of all the nicknames of the recipients of the file. Sending

“They have improved the operation of the graphical user interface and it will now encrypt chat communications,” says Henry, who adds that the Arabic translation suggests the software is encouraged for use by Al-Ekhlaas members to evade U.S. government efforts at surveillance.

This sentence is the exact OPPOSITE of what the truth is; it is software encouraged by U.S. government to aid its efforts at surveillance of Al-Ekhlaas.

Tampa-based ISP NOC4Hosts and Rochester, Minn.,-based SiteGenesis in January found out their operations were being used to host the Al-Ekhlaas Web sites where Mujahideen Secrets 2 can be found. Both hosting firms pulled the plug on the Web sites after receiving specific technical information about the content.

From whom?

This week another Web hosting company, CrystalTech Web Hosting in Phoenix, shut down sites linked to the Al Qaeda-link support group.

Once again, these people could, if they were real, host their websites anywhere in the world. They would not host thier sites in Minnesota or Pheonix. This is just utter nonsense of the first order, and those sites were most probably ‘honey pots’ set up to get this Back Orifice ‘Jihad Edition’ into the hands of dweebs that want to help the CIA operaton ‘Al-Qaeda’ who they will then use as patsies to carry out false flag attacks, all under the guise of ‘Radical Islamo Facscism’.

“As soon as we found out, we brought the IP sites down,” says Bob Cichon, president of CrystalTech Web hosting, who blamed a reseller for it happening. “We’re a very large host and it’s hard to track everything.”

Its not your fault Bob.

In its analysis of Mujahideen Secrets 2, Secure Computing has noticed that the software appears to violate copyright law.

“Typically with open source, they still require a copyright notification,” Henry says. “There’s no copyright notification whatsoever here.”

So, the latest supercrime of Radical Islamo Facscists is not blowing up buildings and making them fall in defiance of the laws of physics, NO, we can prosecute them for violating the GPL.

Another notable thing is that the public-key signature in Mujahideen Secrets 2 leaves a tell-tale sign that the Al-Ekhlaas home-rolled software produced it. The encryption itself is strong at up to a 2,048-bit key length, and like the previous version, provides e-mail and file encryption using public-key certificates.

All contents copyright 1995-2008 Network World, Inc

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/020108-al-qaeda-encryption.html

Once again, if any of this is even true, there are only a handful of people who are capable of understanding how to best fulfill the requirements of encrypting chat and instant messaging, and then the subset of people who can actually pull this off in a software client is even smaller. No one in their right mind would do this in a ‘home-rolled’ package…unless your home is the NSA.

Everything that this journalist claims could be done with off the shelf packages, and in fact, it would be safer to do it with off the shelf packages.

Lets say that the above report is true, and these packages are out there. The only way you can know that the package has not been tampered with is if you can check the signature against it. GPG does this so that you know that you are getting an un-tampered with binary or source. Publicly available tools give you a high level of confidence that your communications will not be susceptible to a ‘man in the middle attack‘. By settling on those tools, rather than rolling your own, you get a higher level of trust. And everyone who understands how this works knows that.

Rolling out your own tools, from whatever angle you look at it, is insane. It is clear that this whole story is a glimpse into some secret operation to recruit patsie jihadies. In that respect, it is fascinating.

What will be even more interesting is to read a report from a trusted peer, who would, amongst other things, run a packet sniffer to see if and where this sneaky piece of infiltration-ware phones home.

Is this a warm up article for another attempt to crack down on freely available encryption tools?

They are producing THE PROBLEM:

Happy Mutant Profile
brianwood1

Website: www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~bmwood/

Bio: PhD student in biological anthropology, Harvard University

Recent Comments:
LEAKED UK GOV’T DOC REVEALS PLAN TO “COERCE” BRITS INTO NATIONAL ID REGISTER — MIRROR THIS FILE!
JANUARY 29, 2008 3:01AM

I grew up in the United States, and have immigrated to Denmark, which as mentioned by user FELSBY in the first posting to this discussion, is a state in which each resident has a “CPR Number” which uniquely identifies them in a state database. This unique ID is used in a variety of ways, and is employed by both private and public institutions for linking information to an individual. Contrary to Cory’s posting above, it is used in different government agencies, for example, one’s doctor uses the number, as does the civil registry of marriages, as does the university. Guess what? All is well here in Denmark. As for the US, I recently had a nightmare situation that could have been avoided if the federal government had a central database that contained either my physical or email address. My taxes were audited, and the notices were sent to the last address they “had on file” and these never reached me. Misery ensues. Keeping a database of individuals who reside in your country is a basic requirement for organizational efficiency. Employers, universities, charitable organizations, gyms, even BoingBoing all keep track of their users with unique IDs. Since we pay taxes and reside in a state, why shouldn’t the state keep track of its citizens using standard methods? Conspiracy theories aside, a national database and ID card has great merits. In my opinion, the Danish example shows that equating national ID system to RFID implants, fascism, or some type of New World Order misses the point entirely.

My emphasis.

Harvard, apparently, is producing people who cannot distinguish between a blog, a university, charitable organizations, employers and the state.

This is what we are up against; the supposedly brightest and best americans are amongst the most brainwashed and clueless people alive.

And this guy is VERY bright. He has a Computer Science: M.S. with distinction, and speaks four languages, including Swahili. From his CV:

Languages

Native English, advanced Swahili, basic Spanish, basic Danish
Programming Languages

C/C++, C#, Java, PHP, HTML, Javascript, Visual Basic, Perl

How is it that someone so educated, well travelled, deeply exposed to different cultures clearly capable of logical thinking be so utterly wrong about ID cards, when he is so clearly well informed about the nature of humanity, his place on this planet, his recent history, and how computers and databases work?

From all three of those angles (power corrupting, man being born free on the earth not as property, the recent history of the Soviet Union and Fascism throughout Europe), the nature of human beings has shown us that ID cards and their related systems are just not acceptable in the hands of any government. How can people like this get it so very wrong?

I am FLABBERGASTED and UTTERLY PERPLEXED.

For the millionth time…

Keeping a database of individuals is NOT a ‘basic requirement for organizational efficiency’. And even if it were, just because something makes a process more efficient that doesn’t immediately mean that it should be implemented. Culling all the starving in the world would be an efficient way of eliminating the problem of hunger…blah blah blah bad example blah.

Just because ID cards are ‘standard methods’ in many parts of the world, that does not mean that they are morally correct, or right, or that anyone should adopt them.

The citizens of a state are not the property of the state. To say that the state should keep track of THEIR citizens is to fundamentally misunderstand the relationship between a state and the people who live in it.

“We are a nation that has a government, not the other way around.”
Ronald Regan

Indeed. Do I really have to spell all of this out? Honestly!

The danish example shows that reasonable people can be overwhelmed and subsumed into a community that is totally inured to this form of slavery.

This person decides to immigrate to Denmark. He decides to live there by their rules; being a polite young man he is hardly going to come there with all his pesky Live Free or Die twaddle-baggage. He leaves all that behind, learns Danish and acts like a Dane. That means repeating like a robot that ID cards are good, he doesn’t see what all the fuss is about, and everyone who doesn’t think like him has ‘missed the point’. Yes indeed. Very polite. When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

The actual point is his philosophy and personal standards are his alone, and they do not apply to anyone else. Our ideas about ID cards do not apply to this gentleman. Or the Danes for that matter. He can go there, live there, take their ID card, obey their rules until he dies. We accept this, and him, and ‘his’ philosophy.

The difference between this man and us is that his philosophy, his ‘opinion’, requires that we submit to his ideas of what is good and bad. His philosophy requires that we give up our liberties to satisfy his broken ideas of how the world works and the nature of human beings. If we are wrong, it affects only us, since we do not want to exercise power over anyone. If he is wrong, other people suffer as a consequence of the law rolling out his control measures. That is the basic difference between all the pro ID people and people who live free. They think they are right and everyone else is wrong and are prepared to force us to accept their view of the world.

Hey wait a minute…when I said this is what harvard is producing these days I was wrong; this is what harvard has always produced!

Every time we read comments to do with the issue of ID cards, there are always these imbeciles, who are not trolls, but honest simple folk who do not think too hard, who prop up the insane ideas behind ID cards. They are almost always people who are either brain dead, or people who have moved to Denmark, or Belgians, or Germans, or people from some Spanish or Portuguese speaking country who live in a country without a national ID card, and they always display a shocking and repulsive disregard for human dignity. Shockiing to me at least, and judging by how everyone rightly jupms (yes ‘jupms’) down the throats of these morons, many other people also take offense at these non thinkers who impurify our neural impulses with their statist electron powered drivel:

Patrick said, “British society wasn’t run by a fascist dictatorship for forty-one years in the middle of the 20th century. Unlike, say, Portugal.”

Patrick, how we define “dictatorship” can be argued subjectively. While GB hasn’t had an official dictator, it has a history filled with Kings that, for lack of a better word, were Dictorial in their actions. And my family lived under an oppresive government which was guilty of genocide (I’m Irish). It doesn’t take long to find a Top Dog who has abused his/her power (I live in Detroit!). And humans have very short memories. The Spanish and the Portuguesse seem to avoid their past, not review it in detail in an attempt to learn from it (sweep it under the carpet).

and…

BRUNO FIGUEIREDO, “I don’t mind surveillance on the street since I’m not doing anything wrong.”

Only until someone decides you ARE doing something wrong. (I mean, honestly, have you read 1984?) What about toll booths with RFID readers being used to hand out speeding tickets because you’re going a couple miles over the limit? What if you pop over to the neighbor’s to borrow a cup of sugar carrying the baby monitor while the baby naps? In my state, that’s child neglect. How convenient it must be for the department of children to have it all on Big Brother’s surveillance video. Criminalizing cake-baking.

Citizens shouldn’t be monitored in a free society for the convenience of the government or police. Citizens shouldn’t be treated like prospective criminals. And nothing, NOTHING in the world is scarier than a government saying, “Papers, please.”

These things creep. They always creep. Right now I’m in a battle with a local government body who won’t pay me for work I did until I give them personal documents that I am not required by law to give them. They keep demanding it for their record-keeping. I keep refusing.

I know it’s an idea that’s stronger in Anglo-American thought, but I truly don’t understand why other countries (particularly those that suffered under the Nazis) don’t shudder when a government suggests “identity papers” as a good idea.

(And for those of you not visiting the US because of our utterly moronic and invasive treatment of foreign tourists, I’m so sorry we’ve decided to suck and I hope one day we can have a tourist industry again, when we stop abusing them.)

go and follow it for yourself http://www.boingboing.net/2008/01/29/leaked-uk-govt-doc-r.html

These people are the problem, and this ‘BRUNO FIGUEIREDO’ is the worst kind:

Heck, a few weeks ago an UK convicted paedo was arrested, gave a false name and they let it go. That could never happen in Portugal.

Yeah, right, Mr. ‘Boa Tarde’ Portugal is soooooo gooooood at catching criminals, especially of the ‘paedo’ type.

Another common trait of the pro ID people, they are to a man, totally delusional. Its easy to hate them, because they are actually attacking us by helping the people who are trying to enslave us. And being up against smart people like this makes the problem much worse, because they are more dangerous and potent than dumb people. They are the architects of the systems of fascism, and if they are not busy building the tools, they are eloquently explaining why they are so great and innocuous, backing it up with their in depth studies into the nature of man.

His flippant comments about the New World Order are telling; there is no ‘some type of New World Order’ the plan for a New World Order is utterly real, and the push to create it is an established fact. Its members discuss its implementation, aims and objectives openly now.

Finally, I use the language of hate because this man and his demented colleagues want to enslave me and all the members of my family, and my countrymen.

I will not have it.

the next installment of a very irregular ceries:

The latist:

and the previus

And moron the elecshun, a lurker forwards this gem:

The bad news is that my Dumkopf wife is voting for the Clintocracy……”I’ve got to support her because she is a woman”

so I said, “what about supporting the brotherman as opposed to the otherman” and she said I haven’t followed Obama I don’t know where he stands on the issues and I said the only thing Hillary Clinton stands for is supporting her man while he blows his load on the face of an intern….

!!!

‘Your’re fucked up, you talk like a fag, and your shit’s retarded.”

Chavez: Pull Reserves From US

Chavez Urges Latin American Allies to Move Reserves Out of US

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez urged his Latin American allies on Saturday to begin withdrawing billions of dollars in international reserves from U.S. banks, warning of a looming U.S. economic crisis.

Chavez made the suggestion as he hosted a summit aimed at boosting Latin American integration and rolling back U.S. influence.

“We should start to bring our reserves here,” Chavez said. “Why does that money have to be in the north? … You can’t put all your eggs in one basket.”

To help pool resources within the region, Chavez and other leaders launched a new development bank at the summit of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Nations of Our America, or ALBA.

The left-leaning regional trade alliance first proposed by Chavez is intended to offer an alternative, socialist path to integration while snubbing U.S.-backed free-trade deals.

Chavez noted that U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Colombia in recent days, saying “that has to do with this summit.”

“The empire doesn’t accept alternatives,” Chavez told the gathering, attended by the presidents of Bolivia and Nicaragua and Cuban Vice President Carlos Lage.

Chavez warned that U.S. “imperialism is entering into a crisis that can affect all of us” and said Latin America “will save itself alone.”

Rice left Colombia on Friday after a trip aimed at reviving a free trade deal that has stalled in the U.S. Congress. She sidestepped an opportunity to confront Chavez, who accused Colombia and the United States of plotting “military aggression” against Venezuela.

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega joined Chavez in his criticism of U.S.-style capitalism, saying “the dictatorship of global capitalism … has lost control.” Three days earlier, Ortega had shouted “Long live the U.S. government” as he inaugurated an American-financed section of highway in his country.

The ALBA Bank is “being born with the aim of boosting development in our countries,” Venezuelan Finance Minister Rafael Isea said Saturday as he and other officials gathered at the bank’s Caracas office for an inaugural ceremony.

Isea has said the bank will be started with $1 billion to $1.5 billion.

Chavez welcomed the Caribbean island of Dominica into the ALBA — an acronym that means “dawn” in Spanish — joining Nicaragua, Bolivia and Cuba. Attending as observers were the prime ministers of Antigua and Barbuda and St. Vincent and the Grenadines, along with officials from Ecuador, Honduras, Haiti and St. Kitts and Nevis.

Chavez said a new fund created by Venezuela and Iran to support projects in third countries would have links to the ALBA Bank.

[…]

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080126/venezuela_alba_summit.html

These people are not very smart.

They should have done this years ago before the Iraq invacion (yes ‘invascion’), when it would have made a huge impact. Now that we have a man who could actually become their greatest ally, they want to accelerate the destruction of the USA and trigger the neocon Final Push at the very point at which the whole world could be saved by Ron Paul. Yes, I typed that.

Peanut brained imbeciles!