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

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

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

That is EXACTLY what it is.

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

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

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

It is dystopian fact.

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

They are just the beginning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You stupid fool.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It IS a blacklist you scum:

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

[…]

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

And the dictionary says so!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ROTFL

This database puts everyone in the country under suspicion!

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

Freedom is slavery!

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Its a better business model, and is less immoral.

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

Owen Bowcott

The Guardian, Tuesday May 6 2008

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

UPDATE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

Daily Mail

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

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

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

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

Sour grapes?

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

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

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

Critics condemned it as an outrageous breach of privacy.

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

Finland Abolishes All Tax Record Privacy

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

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

–An old IBM commercial

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

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

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

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

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

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

Words escape me.

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

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

Words, on this occasion do not escape me.

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

Think about it this way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

… the greed of a few bankers costs you your house

… people scuffle over bags of rice in Walmart stores

… and it gets mapped on GoogleEarth

… BP announce 48% increases in profits, as petrol hits £1.10 a litre

… anyone is surprised that the rich get richer

… billions are found for destruction, at the sufferance of creation and discovery

I could go on. I’m sure you could too.

My cynicism today is dragging me down. It is a good excuse to return to Ivor Cutler, to whom I referred recently. Here are his words, a small poem perhaps, with which I empathise closely at the moment, entitled ‘A Real Man’.

When I was 12 I wanted to be a real man — an old man with a beard, sitting at a table with a huge book full of wisdom. And what did society hold up to me for my admiration? A golfer, a boxer, a man who ran quickly; a soldier, a lawyer, a tycoon; a motorist, a pop star; a footballer. Into what kind of madhouse had I been born?

And what have I become? A child, witlessly pouring out whatever enters my head. I am a madman and people gather to listen to me make a fool of myself. I am not a role model. This is my protection and security. I still long for the table and the book, the smell of an old man and an old book; the afternoon light fading.

A lurker writes:

You may know all this, but here are some details which may be of interest otherwise:

THE INTELLIGENT AIRPORT (TINA) PROJECT

Researchers from the universities of Leeds, Cambridge and University College London have teamed up with 10 companies on The INtelligent Airport (TINA) project, funded by The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), led by Professor Jaafar Elmirghani of Leeds University.

‘It will link a number of separate systems including wireless biometrics and RFID … We are going to put a demonstrator system into the new Heathrow terminal five to see how the system works.’ – Professor Jaafar Elmirghani
http://www.theengineer.co.uk/Articles/303000/Travel+tracker.htm

This project aims to develop a next generation advanced wired and wireless network to meet the potential requirements for future “intelligent airports”.
TINA website: http://intelligentairport.org.uk/

Travel Tracker 12 November 2007, The Engineer online:

Such a system is set to be installed and trialled at Heathrow’s terminal five, where an ‘intelligent gate’ will demonstrate, among other things, accurate passenger position estimation through active and passive RFID and radio over fibre (RoF) where the RFID is part of the boarding pass and/or passport.

Predictions suggest a terminal-wide network would have to support 10 million sources of information, from individual tracking units for passengers and staff to technology such as biometric gates. It is believed the system will have to deal with a peak data rate of 100Gbit/s as it tracks people, luggage, aircraft and all the information generated by those sources. …

Elmirghani : ‘It will link a number of separate systems including wireless biometrics and RFID, which could be put into boarding passes and will soon be put in passports. Passengers can be processed a lot faster and tags could be used to track luggage so it can be handled in a more efficient way — tracked from arrival to being put on a plane.’ …

‘The system will use a radio-over-fibre distribution network with a distributed antenna system creating a unified structure. We are looking at passive kinds of radio frequency distribution. This will allow the basic systems of the infrastructure to be easily upgraded and updated. We are going to put a demonstrator system into the new Heathrow terminal five to see how the system works.’ …

‘People will probably have issues with the technology but you have to weigh the benefits with any down sides,’ added Elmirghani. ‘This kind of information is already available if you have a mobile phone. Your position can be triangulated but that information hasn’t been available to airports. Overall there can be more benefits than some of the losses.’

full article here: http://www.theengineer.co.uk/Articles/303000/Travel+tracker.htm

Next Generation of Airports are on the Horizon , Leeds university website

A remote biometric scan that removes passport queues, airport lounge chairs that “nudge” passengers to remind them that their flight is due to board and boarding passes that locate passengers and provide automated access could be among the next generation of airport technologies that will transform airports and air travel in the future. Other new technologies developed in the project include radio frequency tags attached to baggage to help stop luggage from being lost. The same radio frequency tags will be given to passengers and coupled with wireless biometric devices, these will enable security staff to know where everyone is and who they are, helping make airport security more stringent and efficient, and also ensuring that passengers make it to the departure gate on time. Wireless technology could also allow passengers to use a portable inflight entertainment terminal which could be used in the departure lounge as well as on the plane. …

“We are hoping to achieve this within the next six years” – Professor Jaafar Elmirghani

full article : Faculty of Engineering, University of Leeds http://www.engineering.leeds.ac.uk/news/index.shtml (scroll down)

TINA Project system technology

RF-ID Tag Location Using RF-over-fibre Techniques , UCL paper

from the conclusion :

…The detection mechanism could be a small capacitively-coupled current across the sealed wrist-band which is interrupted if it is either cut or removed. […] However, public acceptance of the use of wristbands for this purpose may well be an issue, so exactly how the tags are deployed remains open at this stage. … The system may also find application in a range of other arenas, including hospitals (e.g., maternity units), theme parks, exhibition halls and concert venues.”

PAPER:

RF-ID Tag Location Using RF-over-fibre Techniques
P. V. Brennan, A. J. Seeds, and Y. Huang
University College London, UK

Abstract:
Security and efficiency at airports has, in recent years, become a critical issue in the eyes of the general public, security services and politicians alike.. This paper presents a high-resolution, indoor location technique, based on RF-over-fibre, that is ideally suited to the monitoring of a high density of people and/or objects in such a situation.

extracts

[…]

The basic concept is for airports to be fitted with a network of combined RF-ID tag readers and high-resolution panoramic cameras, spaced at around 15–20m intervals, which are used to monitor the movements of people around the terminal building or buildings. Each passenger carries or wears an RF-ID tag, which can allow location to an accuracy of around 1m, and the video and tag data merged to give a very powerful surveillance capability with a wide range of potential benefits. The tags developed at UCL are transmit-only devices that do not store any data but emit a beacon with a unique ID at frequent, randomised intervals, at least once per second, and this is cross-referenced to passenger information already stored on the system — such as name, flight number and perhaps even biometric data. This gives the effect of intelligence in the tags — passenger information can appear to be ‘read’ from them though it actually resides on the computer system. The tags and reader infrastructure allow convenient monitoring of passenger flows and identification of late-running passengers.

The system can offer a number of benefits; it can be used to control entry to secure areas, allow the precise automated-tracking of certain individuals, help to evacuate the building in the event of an emergency, provide rapid location and imaging of lost children and help to ensure that large aircraft are boarded efficiently by detecting and locating stray passengers. The Optag/ TINA consortium have calculated that cost of flight delays due to late-running passengers amounts to some 150M Euros per year in Europe alone, so considerable savings are possible with a system of this nature. A high degree of functionality can be built in to the system, dependent largely on the ingenuity of the user interface.

PROTOTYPE SYSTEM DESCRIPTION
The prototype Optag / TINA camera comprises a cluster of eight 1600 ×1200 pixel CMOS sensors, producing a 9600 ×1200 panoramic image. A portion of this image, or a lower-resolution panorama, is streamed to the central monitoring station using gigabit ethernet with the UDP protocol. The camera resolution allows recognition of a human face to 6m and detection to around 30m.

The tag system is rather challenging in that it is required to operate at relatively long range (10–20m), perform location estimates and simultaneously identify large numbers ( >1000) of tagged people or items in any given cell. To meet these challenges, the Optag/ TINA team have designed a unique tag protocol that sends short bursts of data, at randomly-varying intervals, with a mean update rate of twice per second. Each tag reader uses direction finding to establish the bearing of the tag and then two or more bearings are used to establish the location. The prototype tag board, operating at 5.8GHz, is shown in Figure 2. The peak tag output power is 10mW, but the mean output power is very much lower — around 20µW, many orders of magnitude below the threshold of emissions that would constitute any conceivable health risk. The prototype tag is a little larger than a credit card, but with miniaturization, could be very compact and easily incorporated in a small card or unobtrusive wristband.

The tag readers, shown in Figure 3, are based on four antennas and receivers mounted at 90-degree spacings, which perform amplitude-comparison direction finding [3] on each tag burst. This straightforward approach provides a reasonable accuracy of around 1m within a 10m radius. However, the effects of reflections, signal blockage in crowded environments and other propagation artifacts are likely to be significant and will most likely diminish the achievable accuracy.

[…]

The prototype system is designed with a 0.5s repetition interval equating to a mean update interval of 0.9s —indicating that the position of all tags can be determined and updated on a second-by-second basis. Thus the system can easily accommodate 1000 tags in any given cell, which is probably close to the limit of the number of people who can possibly be squeezed into a 10m radius area! …

[…]

A range of trials have been conducted in the departure lounge at Debrecen airport , Hungary. Both the camera and tag systems have been evaluated based on three cells each containing a camera and RF-ID tag reader unit. As far as the tag system is concerned, the location accuracy was assessed with the tag readers mounted both centrally and in the corners of the rooms and with a ‘passenger’ wearing the tag in a variety of locations and facing in several directions. Measurements were repeated in crowd situations in which the tag-wearing person was surrounded by other people.

The general conclusions of this trial were that the best positioning of the tag readers is in the corners of the room, location errors are indeed dependent on tag orientation and obstructions due to other individuals, and operating range exceeds expectations — 25m being easily accomplished even under the most adverse conditions.

CONCLUSION
The Optag / TINA projects have demonstrated the feasibility of a combined RF-ID tag and panoramic video monitoring approach in an airport environment, including a proof-of-concept trial in a Hungarian airport building. All indications are that the concept is sound, though any future adoption will require further development and commercialisation, in particular the network infrastructure and associated software to both operate the Optag/ TINA system and interface with existing airport computer systems and databases. The mode of deployment of the tag element of the system is controversial and somewhat critical to certain areas of operation. For instance, in a security context, it would be crucial to ensure that each person carries his/her own tag and does not lose or swap them. One way in which this can be achieved is to incorporate the tag in a wristband that sends an alert code should it be removed. The detection mechanism could be a small capacitively-coupled current across the sealed wrist-band which is interrupted if it is either cut or removed. With suitable circuit miniaturisation, the wristband could be small and unobtrusive, perhaps made of thin card. However, public acceptance of the use of wristbands for this purpose may well be an issue, so exactly how the tags are deployed remains open at this stage.

Current work is focusing on an alterative tag and reader implementation involving TDOA location exploiting RF-over-fibre transmission, which offers the prospect of significantly improved location accuracy and multipath mitigation Another area that has huge potential for future development is the user interface, where a whole host of features could be incorporated including, for instance, an additional, simple interface at departure gates to alert staff to late-running passengers; an automated monitoring and announcement system to contact such late-running passengers as and when required; extensive archiving facilities to store tag and at least a subset of video data; seamless linking of tag ID, personal data and biometric data and market research analysis of data, to aid the design of airport layouts for instance to optimise passenger flows or to feed into charging models for the various retail outlets. It is clear that, once such an infrastructure is in place, there is huge potential to make use of the capabilities in a variety of different manners, many of which have probably not yet been foreseen. The system may also find application in a range of other arenas, including hospitals (e.g., maternity units), theme parks, exhibition halls and concert venues.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank EPSRC and the European Commission, particularly Jean-Pierre Lentz, for their encouragement and support during this work

PDF : http://piers.mit.edu/piersproceedings/download.php?file=cGllcnMyMDA3cHJhZ3VlfDJQM18wMjU1LnBkZnwwNzAzMDkwODUyNTk=
HTML : MIT

TINA Project summary
from the EPSRC website (page for Cambridge University grant 2006-2009 )

Abstract:
Diverse applications are expected to appear in the future with complex and often varying service requirements, traffic profiles and user expectations. These will require extremely advanced adaptive computing and communication systems to provide users with mobile, secure and automatic means of conducting business. A prime application area is in international travel which continues to grow supported by a significant investment in infrastructure, such as Heathrow Terminal 5. An intelligent, adaptive, self-organising wired/wireless infrastructure is essential in this environment. It is anticipated that the considerable growth in the complexity of this infrastructure will not just be due to the proliferation of established fixed equipment such as wireless base stations, surveillance cameras, security detection equipment, display and terminal equipment. The requirements will also be for a much wider deployment of more compact portable equipment, for example, location and control equipment on a wide range of transportation equipment. Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags supported by a transparent optical-RF network can be used to sense, locate and track an array of objects including luggage, mobile assets and commercial goods and can provide additional features such as boarding pass auto-tags and access control tags. These active RFID tags will operate at low data rates, typically 64 kbit/s, but an airport environment can be expected to contain a few million of them. Mobile biometric sensors will be widely deployed in this environment providing advanced features. A range of fixed and mobile terminals will provide additional security measures such as chemical detection and analysis, while other terminals, fixed and mobile, will support passenger information and entertainment services on transit. The infrastructure will support an array of personal passenger and staff wireless media rich devices. The wired/wireless network envisaged will thus be huge and complex, supporting perhaps 10 million information sources, with an anticipated peak aggregate data rate of order 100 Gbit/s in a relatively local access environment. This is beyond the capability of any current network and research is needed to understand the principles upon which an effective system could be constructed. As this is such an ambitious and multidisciplinary project, a collaborative programme is proposed. The project has strong industrial involvement and support from Laing O’Rourke who will provide the application context, share design experience, user requirements and architectural constraints and Marconi who will contribute expertise in complex communication system design. At the outline proposal stage, we received feedback from EPSRC that they would welcome additional collaborations with those involved in airport operations. We are delighted that, in response, BAA and Boeing have agreed to become involved in the project, and within UCL links have been made to Dr Paul Brennan, who will contribute substantial knowledge of RfID, being involved in a major European project in the area. Finally we have additionally sought to involve the equipment company Motorola and the installation planning company Red-M to ensure that we can receive expert advice across all areas within the project.

SOURCE http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk/ViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/D076803/1

[…]

Thank you to the lurker who emailed this.

Right off the bat, this leaps from the screen:

‘People will probably have issues with the technology but you have to weigh the benefits with any down sides,’ added Elmirghani. ‘This kind of information is already available if you have a mobile phone. Your position can be triangulated but that information hasn’t been available to airports. Overall there can be more benefits than some of the losses.’

This is the same old argument, proffered by imbeciles, anti intellectuals, ostrich posturers and dumbasses. “They are already half way up your ass, so why not push it all the way in“. These people cannot distinguish between the tracking your position as a consequence of delivery of a service you subscribe to (cellular telephones) and one that is compulsory, imposed by a government or its proxy. You can always turn off your cellular telephone at any time to hide your location. Compulsory tracking is an entirely different matter. Triangulation data from cellphones is not available to airports because they do not need it, cellphones have nothing to do with the operation of airports and there is no cross over whatsoever between the two services.

There are no benefits to giving up your liberty for security, especially when the security you are getting is not really security at all but Security Theatre, which is a lie and way to rob people of their human dignity.

I find it to be disgusting that there are people out there who think that they have the right to say what rights are worth losing for the general public, and then to blithley impliment systems that take away those rights, in the belief that they are doing what is good for everyone. Imagine that Jaafar Elmirghani believes, “..that overall there can be more benefits to society than some of the losses if we compulsorily circumcise all females in Britain.” There is no difference between that belief and the belief that tracking everyone everywhere at all times is worth the losses of personal liberty because ‘society’ benefits overall.

That is the true face of the thinking of these monsters.

As for ‘probably’ have issues, why, yes indeed professor, we do have a BIG problem with your snake-oil Security Theatre, and as we have seen, Terminal 5 has had to climb down on its absurd fascist fingerprinting plan.

I am convinced that all of this snake-oil is going to go the way of the dinosaurs. When the number of people being hurt by these systems reaches a critical mass, they will be abandoned, in the manner that I have previously described.

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

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

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

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

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

What utter nonsense.

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

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

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

This, my friends, is total insanity.

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

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

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

Ministers are retarded. Period.

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

Ahhh, a Guardian fluff line!

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

And?!! GET TO THE POINT YOU SIMPLETON.

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

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

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

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

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

My emphasis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing to hide, nothing to fear, right?

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

The best laid plans….here is another scenario.

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

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

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

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

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

Can you hear the sound?

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

And if they DONT work?

That is an interesting question!!!!!

U.S. to Insist That Travel Industry Get Fingerprints

By Spencer S. Hsu and Del Quentin Wilber
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, April 22, 2008; Page A08

The U.S. government today will order commercial airlines and cruise lines to prepare to collect digital fingerprints of all foreigners before they depart the country under a security initiative that the industry has condemned as costly and burdensome.

The proposal does not say where airlines must collect fingerprints — at airport check-in counters, departure gates or kiosks somewhere in between. But the government estimates the undertaking will cost airlines $2.3 billion over 10 years, a U.S. homeland security official said.

The overall economic impact on companies, passengers and the government is expected to exceed $3.5 billion, industry lobbyists said, at a time when carriers are struggling with safety concerns, high fuel costs and passenger complaints.

Formal announcement of the plan to track the departure of foreign visitors, as part of the Homeland Security Department’s US-VISIT program, comes after an extended battle between the security agency and airlines.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff linked the effort to enforcing the nation’s immigration laws recently, saying airlines were obstructing the measure for commercial reasons.

“If we don’t have US-VISIT air exit by this time next year, it will only be because the airline industry killed it,” Chertoff said recently. “We have to decide who is going to win this fight. Is it going to be the airline industry, or is it going to be the people who believe we should know who leaves the country by air?”

Doug Lavin, regional vice president for the International Air Transport Association, which represents major U.S. and international carriers, said the government, not airlines, should collect fingerprints. “This is ludicrous,” Lavin said. “We can’t afford anything in the billions to support a program that should be a government program.”

Fingerprinting an estimated 33 million departing foreign passengers a year will result in “delayed departures, missed connections here and around the world,” Lavin said.

Launched after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, US-VISIT is intended to automate the processing of visitors entering and exiting the country, using fingerprints and digital photographs to help find criminals, potential terrorists and people who overstay visas and join the nation’s illegal immigrant population.

While the program has succeeded in recording nearly 100 million people entering the country since 2004, the DHS has struggled to implement the exit portion. Frustrated at the department’s slow pace, Congress last year set a June 2009 deadline for DHS to collect fingerprints from departing air passengers in a law to implement recommendations of the 9/11 Commission.

Otherwise, Congress said, the government cannot expand the Visa Waiver Program, under which residents of 27 friendly countries can visit the United States without a visa. Inclusion is a priority for nations including South Korea and Greece, and the tourism industry has also targeted South America for expansion.

The proposal will be open for a 60-day comment period. DHS could decide after that time where fingerprinting must be conducted, or it could leave the decision up to airlines, a U.S. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the proposal has not been formally announced.

[…]

Washington Post

We all know that US-VISIT is a completely useless and bogus waste of time that violates millions of people.

We also know that the USVISIT ‘exit system’ is not in place.

USVISIT is a costly boondoggle. The penny has dropped about this, and Uncle Sham does not want to spend any more money on it.

Instead of building the infrastructure of the exit systems themselves, they are going to shift the burden on making it work to the airlines.

Like it says in this post, the exit system is currently VOLUNTARY. That is clearly insane, almost as insane as the USVISIT itself.

Pocket Satan Chertoff now says that, “If we don’t have US-VISIT air exit by this time next year, it will only be because the airline industry killed it,”. Once again, we have a government putting ‘border security’ (which this clearly is not, it is Security Theatre not real security) in the hands of private companies, and, quite absurdly, claiming that if the system is not in place, it is the fault of those companies, not the government. This is exactly what the UK government has done with fingerprinting at Heathrow Terminal 5.

If USVISIT is so very important, a key part of the US ‘security strategy’, and if the ‘terrorist threat’ was real, then to leave its complete implementation to the will of private companies is insane, and blatantly negligent.

The fact is that the living bag of bones Chertoff knows very well that USVISIT is a failure, that it has cost over $1.3 billion, apprehended only “1,200 criminals and immigration violators” and that any further money spend on this immoral, useless, wasteful, disgraceful, awful, satanic, abominable, monstrous, insane and stupid project would be indefensible, even to the expert and frictionless lie machine of ‘Homeland Security’.

Our only hope is that the airlines grow a backbone and stand up for the rights of their customers. Certainly, BA will be very reluctant to go along with this, after having been stung by their Terminal 5 fingerprinting fiasco, which is set to cost them some money, never mind the embarrassment.

The biometric fad, the most recent in a long line of snake oil solutions to non existent problems, is going to be consigned to the dustbin of technology history, along with 8 track tapes and other obsolete contraptions that seem absurd today. This fad is going to dies faster as more people wake up to what these tools really mean, and how corrosive they are to human society.

The East Germans know all about this.

And so do you.

One can only hope that the economic collapse of the USA will make it impossible for them to maintain this foolishness as their empire implodes and there is no money to run these insane programs. File under the spinoffs and benefits of Imperial collapse.

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.

Thanks to a tip from Alun, I watched the film ‘The lives of Others‘ last night.

This is a brilliant and very important film. People often cite the STASI and its tactics and corrosive effects on East German society as a way of warning people of the sort of place Britain will become should it continue down the road of the insane mass surveillance that it has embarked upon. The lives of Others portrays in a most compelling and gut wrenching way what the STASI really means.

In the light of Poole Council’s nauseating surveillance of a British family, this is a film that everyone, every decent person in Britain, should see, as an example and warning of what is here and what is coming.

The parallels to East Germany and today’s Britain are clear. Britain is turning into a place where the horizon of surveillance is now under our feet, and the next stage, acting on it German style, is beginning to approach.

For my part, the idea of these people carrying out these operations in the past made me sick, as it always does. Watching fat pig government employees violate and wield unlimited power over people should make all good people feel queasy.

The main lesson of this film however is that the decent people did nothing. They carried on as best they could, trying to live as normal a life as possible, putting up with every outrage like prisoners suffering from one of those psychological disorders that affect mammals habituated to incarceration. They were frightened to the point that it was impossible for them to even speak. And then….

It all just ended.

Its rather like the three prisoners in THX-1138 walking out of the white space, being astonished that nothing stopped them. The power of the state is an illusion in this way. All of those East Germans could have simply stood up and walked away at any time. The only thing that was stopping them was their belief that the system was real, when in fact, it was not.

I note with dismay, that the names of the councilors and actors who carried out the surveillance were not names and photographed by the newspapers who feigned outrage. It is almost as if they were frightened of some unspoken consequences of doing the obvious; shaming these people so that they are made to suffer humiliation when they violate the rights of others. As it stands now, we do not know who these people are, what they look like or anything about them; they cannot therefore be shunned and vilified by decent people. This is part of the problem. It is this self protecting system of keeping quiet that emboldens these monsters.

Here are some links:
http://www.enjoy-surveillance.org/

I’m Not Being Mean, You’re Just Retarded, Sir

Our state collects more data than the Stasi ever did. We need to fight back

To trust in the good intentions of our rulers is to put liberty at risk. I’d go to jail rather than accept this kind of ID card

Timothy Garton Ash
Thursday January 31, 2008
The Guardian

This has got to stop. Britain’s snooper state is getting completely out of hand. We are sleepwalking into a surveillance society, and we must wake up. When the Stasi started spying on me, as I moved around East Germany 30 years ago, I travelled on the assumption that I was coming from one of the freest countries in the world to one of the least free. I don’t think I was wrong then, but I would certainly be wrong now. Today, the people of East Germany are much less spied upon than the people of Britain. The human rights group Privacy International rates Britain as an “endemic surveillance society”, along with China and Russia, whereas Germany scores much better.

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2249473,00.html

It isn’t too late to turn everything around. This is how it starts:

Do you get me?

This is a comment on an article that appeared in The Telegraph about the highly offensive spying of Poole council on an innocent family, who were judged to be guilty before proven innocent:

Just ponder for a moment. Ten short years ago, nobody in the world would have thought that the once proud British people could, by self infliction, descend to a debt ridden proletariat, with possession and use of the instruments and trappings of a quasi Stalinist dictatorship, in the incompetent, arrogant hands of what are supposed to be servants of the public.

You have corrupt politicians, with their fingers consistently in the till, above the law, and ears ever deaf to the electorate which put them where they are. A current chancellor who lacks the fiscal competence to add up his wage slip, because he never had one before he got this job as a convenient stooge for the previous carrier of the budget box. A plethora of ‘employment’ Ministers, who have proved to be anything but employment ministers for the intrinsic population, crying ‘skills shortage, skills shortage,’ like demented parrots, justifying the cry for the bird seed of the ever cheaper labour of mass unskilled immigration, to sustain their bankrupt policies. An ‘elf Minister, presiding over the third largest ‘employment’ factory in the world, with a large proportion of the ‘employees’ putting their wages above patient care. An anti English Egyptian born ‘Kulture Minister’ performing like a latter day Beria, systematically eradicating the history and soul of everything a country, once in the vanguard of what freedom stood for. A Home Secretary divided by two, because the job is now too big for a single NULabour politician to cope with, with an avalanche of foreign laws imposed on the British, without referendum promised in two elections. A part time defence secretary, and a military with no kit, because the armed forces never did figure in Labour, other than as an accountants cost saving exercise. This trough fed entourage crowned with an unelected Prime Minister, who fiddles his TV License, and whose revealed former capabilities, with ten years of ‘growth,’ but nothing in the bank, are now staring everybody over there, squarely in the wallet. But by far and away the biggest crime of all, was the calculated erosion of educational standards for the masses, to the point where a sixteen year old state sink school ‘graduate,’ could not compete against the abilities of a nine year old from the former colony of Singapore. Education, Education, Education? More like Educashun, Educashun, Educashun, with a ‘so what’ ‘Minister’ most aptly demonstrating the zenith of NULabour teachings. If Britain continues down this path, it is guaranteed accelerated descent into a third world satellite banana republic of the EUSSR.

With this ‘leadership’ at the helm, it is little wonder that the sub Stalins of local government have got the green light to misuse anti terrorism legislation, to intrude on every aspect of your lives. You already have Zampolits of the rubbish police, chipping your dustbins. Now you have the state machine commissars tailing three year olds, presumably in a flasher mack driving a Russian Fiat copy. I assure you, that to the rest of the free world you have become a very sick joke. It would be comical if it were not tragic. You are now a United Kingdom in name alone. It is hoped that if you ever get the chance of another election, and your Ministers have not worked sufficient overtime to convert it to the Zimbabwe variety, you will remember when NULabour again makes promises in a manifesto, that, to avoid their obligations to the people, they went to the time and trouble of a court case to have it legally declared to be not worth the paper it was printed on. Be careful which library books you read, the fact that you are still reading books, instead of dosing your brain with state Television soap, may attract the unwelcome attention of a Kulture Zampolit.

Posted by Michael Barningham on April 11, 2008 12:25 PM

Judging by the comments to this article, we are quickly approaching the tipping point in the UK, where everyone will, seemingly, spontaneously cry, “enough is enough” and the whole system will be explosively reconfigured so that it looks more like the Real Britian^™ that we all knew and loved.

Vandals keep changing the letter ‘L’ to a ‘C’ on the village’s signs

Residents living in a graffiti-plagued village in Merseyside are being asked to consider changing its name to tackle vandals who alter signs in the village.

Lunt, which dates back to Medieval times, has been repeatedly targeted by vandals who change the “L” to a “C”.

[…]

The transmitter equipment is regularly worn by BBC radio reporters

A BBC radio reporter was held to the ground and searched by police under the Terrorism Act after his transmitter equipment was mistaken for a bomb.

Five officers forced BBC Radio Stoke’s Max Khan to his knees and held him face down in Stoke-on-Trent on Monday.

He was wearing a backpack with protruding wires and aerials. Staffordshire Police have apologised.

Earlier this year armed police tackled a man in the city after fearing his MP3 player was a gun.

Mr Khan said he was targeted after police were told an “Arabic-looking man was acting suspiciously” outside the Potteries Shopping Centre in Hanley.

[…]

Arrested, caged and DNA tested – for using MP3

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Safe and sound: Darren Nixon recovers from his ordeal

A commuter was arrested at gunpoint and had his DNA and fingerprints taken simply for listening to his MP3 player while waiting for a bus.

Darren Nixon was surrounded by armed police after his music player was mistaken for a gun.

When a passer-by saw the 28-year-old get out his black Philips machine to change tracks, she panicked and dialled 999.

Police tracked Mr Nixon using CCTV. As he got off the bus home from work he was surrounded by a firearms unit, who bundled him into a van.

He was then put in a cell and his fingerprints, DNA and mugshot were taken before he was released.

Although police realised it was a false alarm, Mr Nixon, from Stoke-on-Trent, now has to live with his DNA stored on a national database.

The force will also keep on record that he was arrested on suspicion of a firearms offence.

[…]

From the ridiculous to the Kafkaesque.

Is there still anyone out there clinging to the pathetic excuse that ‘I’ve got nothing to hide, they’ll never come for me.’

‘I’m alright Jack’ works fine until its you on your knees with a gun at your head for ‘looking Arabic’ or brandishing an MP3 player in a public place.

“Innocent until We decide otherwise.”

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.

I always see nutters as those who feel that their moral ideas should be inflicted on others. They usually mean well, but unfortunately their morality is based on nonsense, and this is reflected in the validity of their ideas.

Most of the time their ranting isn’t taken too seriously and it is ignored by everyone but themselves.

Just occasionally they strike a chord with the blame society and we end up with nutter inspired legislation

Note that this section constrains itself to censorship and the media.

[…]

http://www.melonfarmers.co.uk/nwi.htm

found whilst trawling the internets randomly, testing the new search engine Searchme.

How many of the ‘Video Nasties‘ have YOU seen?

They are even showing them on TV UNCUT these days…

‘Extreme’ blog councillor resigns

The blog claimed there should be compulsory sterilisation

A Medway councillor has resigned after claiming on his website that there should be compulsory sterilisation for parents on benefits. John Ward prompted comparisons with the Nazis after attacking what he called “professional spongers” whom he claimed “breed for greed”.

The Tory councillor, who lives in Chatham, told BBC South East Today the views were not his own.

He lifted them from other sites, and has since deleted the page, he added.

When asked if he supported the concept of sterilisation, Mr Ward said: “No.

“I’d hope that before it became such a big problem that the nanny state does impose something like that the way they tend to do, with compulsory ID cards, compulsory whatever.”

‘Extreme and unpleasant’

The sentences from Mr Ward’s blog said: “I think there is an increasingly strong case for compulsory sterilisation of all those who have a second, (or third, or whatever) child while living off state handouts.”

Now, then. What are you thinking right now? What is that seedling thought sprouting under that pile of old Guardian newspapers in the recycling bin of your mind?

Am I being harsh on you? Or are you actively censoring your own thoughts? These are interesting questions, should you choose to address them. In the privacy of your own head, should you wish.

On Tuesday, he said he had lifted the words from other websites to promote debate, and had been interrupted before he had had a chance to make that clear on the web page he then published.

Adding that he had resigned, he said he felt “delighted”, with a “weight lifted from his shoulders”.

But councillor Bill Esterson, from Medway’s Labour group, said: “It had nothing to with the benefits culture issue.

“It had everything to do with some extreme and very unpleasant views about forced sterilisation of people – the sort of thing that happens in totalitarian regimes, that happened in Nazi Germany.”

Of course, Nazi Eugenics. But discussions about eugenics have not stopped since world war II, but have been swept from the table of politically correct society. There are people who make the case for eugenics today. They argue:

1. Human intelligence is largely hereditary.

2. Civilization depends totally upon innate intelligence. Without innate intelligence, civilization would never have been created. When intelligence declines, so does civilization.

3. The higher the level of civilization, the better off the population. Civilization is not an either-or proposition. Rather, it’s a matter of degree, and each degree, up or down, affects the well-being of every citizen.

4. At the present time, we are evolving to become less intelligent with each new generation. Why is this happening? Simple: the least-intelligent people are having the most children.

5. Unless we halt or reverse this trend, our civilization will invariably decline. Any decline in civilization produces a commensurate increase in the collective “misery quotient.”

It’s hard to argue against those statements, isn’t it? So what should society do? That’s the important question. The eugenics supporters would say society at present not only stands idly by and watches the less intelligent members of society breed, but actively encourages and supports this behaviour by supplying them with free medical care, housing and food!

Of course, normal people (you are normal, right?) would find the eugenics argument abhorrent, arguing perhaps that by providing care and education society can propel these people upwards on the scale to the benefit of all mankind. But didn’t the eugenics people say intelligence is mostly genetic? Hmm. And is there evidence that providing handouts is helping society? Hmm.

Political blogger Iain Dale said: “The problem is if you’re writing a blog and you get angry about something, you’re anger transmits itself from your brain through your fingertips on to the keyboard and on to the internet.

“Ten minutes later, you might think ‘maybe I’ve gone a bit over the top there’, but it’s too late.

“You can amend what you’ve written, but it’s already out there and someone, somewhere, will have found it.”

I wonder how many kids this man has.

Googles cache of the ‘offending’ blog:

Saturday, 15 March 2008

What You Probably Won’t Read in the Press

One side of the Shannon Matthews story you are unlikely to read in the mainstream Press is what the police themselves know about this sorry tale. Inspector Gadget has it HERE. Note the “seven children” part in particular, and the implicit reasons for that…

At least there was a good outcome on this occasion, which makes a pleasant change from so many of the “missing child” news stories of recent years.

This one, though, is yet another example of “Breakdown Britain”, about which so much has been reported over the last several years, much (if not most or even all) of which stems from the Government-encouraged change away from the hard-working and decent family structure to an increasingly self-indulgent immoral and State-funded lazy lifestyle, with huge handouts to provide for just about all one’s needs and desires, at next to no personal expense or effort. Children become just a means toward that end, and are of themselves of little if any further significance in this new society. What was once a small issue has now become mainstream.

I think there is an increasingly strong case for compulsory sterilisation of all those who have had a second (or third, or whatever) child while living off State hand-outs. It would (if one thinks about it) clearly take a lot of social pressures off all concerned, thus protecting the youngsters themselves to some degree, and remove the incentive to “breed for greed” — i.e. for more public subsidy of their lifestyle (a now well-known dodge, worth ever greater amounts to countless thousands of professional spongers).

With over-population being the root cause of so much that negatively impacts Planet Earth, and thus needs to concern human society, the very last thing the world needs is to encourage excessive breeding.

There are some subjects in society that are taboo, and openly discussing eugenics is clearly one of them. But it should not be. Some very important people are discussing eugenics, and if you are censoring yourself then you are no longer able to argue either way. If you are guilty of being your own Thought Policeman, give yourself a nightstick upside your head.

…

Lightening the mood a little, here’s a little something for the idiocrats out there.

Enlarge

The TwoDaLoo is billed as the world’s first toilet two people can use … at the exact same time. It brings couples closer together and conserves our water supply all with one flush. The TwoDaLoo features two side-by-side toilet seats with a modest privacy wall in between. An upgraded version includes a seven inch LCD television and iPod docking station.

It’s just a small evolutionary step from this to spending 18 hours a day on a Lay-Z-Boy armchair with built-in toilet, watching trash TV and ‘bating.

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.