Cameras Protecting Other Cameras

There is a proposal in Scotland to protect automatic speed-trap cameras from vandals by monitoring them with other cameras.

Then, I suppose we need still other cameras to protect the camera-watching cameras.

I am reminded of a certain building corner in York. Centuries ago it was getting banged up by carts and whatnot, so the owners stuck a post in the ground a couple of feet away from the corner to protect it. Time passed, and the post itself became historically significant. So now there is another post a couple of feet away from the first one to protect it.

When will it end?

[…]

Snarfed from Bruce Schneier’s Blog

It will end Bruce, when everyone reflexively smashes any ‘security’ camera that is operated by the state.

What people do in their own property is their own business, i.e. in Marks & Spencer they can have cameras wherever they like because it is a PRIVATE space. It is your choice not to shop there if they make you feel uncomfortable. Believe me, they will remove them in an instant if their profit margin is hurt by cameras.

Cameras that are in the public, operated by the state are a different thing entirely. The streets and the public spaces are precisely that, PUBLIC, belonging to EVERYONE and no authority has the right to surveil you while you are in public. You have the right to go about your business without being filmed, especially by the police.

All of these cameras should be smashed as a matter of civic duty. I have said this before, and so has Jultra, and so have many others. The fact that they have to put cameras on the cameras means that…its starting.

What would be excellent is if some geek put together a portable microwave gun that destroyed the circuits / CCD in a CCTV / Congestion Charge camera, so that you could kill any camera from a distance discreetly and effectively.

BBQ has an (shock) article by a named author on The Great Satan’s lust to be able to destroy everything:

The declassified document is called “Information Operations Roadmap”. It was obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University using the Freedom of Information Act.

Officials in the Pentagon wrote it in 2003. The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, signed it.

[…]

The operations described in the document include a surprising range of military activities: public affairs officers who brief journalists, psychological operations troops who try to manipulate the thoughts and beliefs of an enemy, computer network attack specialists who seek to destroy enemy networks.

All these are engaged in information operations. […]

Perhaps the most startling aspect of the roadmap is its acknowledgement that information put out as part of the military’s psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans.

“Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience,” it reads.

“Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public,” it goes on. […]

“In this day and age it is impossible to prevent stories that are fed abroad as part of psychological operations propaganda from blowing back into the United States – even though they were directed abroad,” says Kristin Adair of the National Security Archive. […]

Late last year, it emerged that the Pentagon had paid a private company, the Lincoln Group, to plant hundreds of stories in Iraqi newspapers. The stories – all supportive of US policy – were written by military personnel and then placed in Iraqi publications.

And websites that appeared to be information sites on the politics of Africa and the Balkans were found to be run by the Pentagon. […]

When it describes plans for electronic warfare, or EW, the document takes on an extraordinary tone.

It seems to see the internet as being equivalent to an enemy weapons system.

“Strategy should be based on the premise that the Department [of Defense] will ‘fight the net’ as it would an enemy weapons system,” it reads.

The slogan “fight the net” appears several times throughout the roadmap. […]

And, in a grand finale, the document recommends that the United States should seek the ability to “provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum”.

US forces should be able to “disrupt or destroy the full spectrum of globally emerging communications systems, sensors, and weapons systems dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum”.

Consider that for a moment.

The US military seeks the capability to knock out every telephone, every networked computer, every radar system on the planet.

Are these plans the pipe dreams of self-aggrandising bureaucrats? Or are they real?

The fact that the “Information Operations Roadmap” is approved by the Secretary of Defense suggests that these plans are taken very seriously indeed in the Pentagon.

And that the scale and grandeur of the digital revolution is matched only by the US military’s ambitions for it.

[…]

The article. The paper.

Now you know for sure that the worldwide ID / Biometric Net project is being cast in these terms by the Pentagon. Mark My Mords™ the documents exist.

This document states clearly that everyone other than those at the Pentagon is the enemy. ‘The Mass’, in the Baudrillard sense, is the enemy. YOU are the enemy.

But you know this!

A programmer colleague writes:

Civil Disobediance is the only answer. On a rather predictable note the eye scanning has been dropped as all the machines run Windows and keep crashing ! Laughably the Uk has based it’s whole IT policy on MS Software so none of it is likely to ever work properly, however I am ready to resist.

This is very insightful. If the Linux advocates had been more successful in convincing HMG to adopt GNU / Linux / Open Source, these absurd, immoral and draconian projects would be more likely to succeed, since the infrastructure would be robust.

A rare instance where its a good thing that Linux is not being adopted.

Looking for a Walter Nurnberg book on ebay… came across this… do these THINGS get everywhere, everytime?

Now you’re going to tell me that’s religious imagery, aren’t you?

Interestingly morbid news…

(Oh, and people who store information would be able to decide in advance when and to whom it would be disclosed, using DNA or biometrics to confirm identity.)

For full story see:
seattlepi.nwsource.com/business

To read the patent application go to:
uspto.gov

[…] Now the question that immediately comes to mind is which ‘officials’ (aka installed Bolshevik coup faction) within the Home Office ? Is it that radical foaming menagerie of creatures that good people tried for decades to keep away from power, often to the response of ‘conspiracy theorist’ etc.

Hell, well whatever. Sadly that effort just wasn’t enough and when you’re dealing with evil in its purest frorm, dealing with a total hatred of humanity, of society, of the most basic foundations of freedom, accompanied by a desire to topple that society, to destroy it, to create a dire hopeless world of technological, legal and constitutional permanent revolution where everyone is sufficiently plebified into a grey terrified goo, then we can afford to be, and need to be, a lot more aggressive.

You see this kind of story will be treated by its critics as something along the lines of a ‘concerning misunderstanding about relationship between individual and state’, an overreaction to crime and terrorism, but what makes me strongly believe it is not a misunderstanding and overreaction, but truly indicative of a deep-rooted palsied disorder, that manifests as a hatred of freedom and quite serious plot a to otherthrow society altogether is that this latest and most horrific of attacks is hardly in isolation.

Is this a state mistakenly doing all the wrong things, in a well intentioned way to try to keep the public ‘safe’ as some would have you think, or is it a state truly gone wrong ?

We’ve seen recently the bad breathed ever-angry (former-) communist John Reid, trying to inflict the worthless ID cards onto visitors working in the UK, and that unfortunately proves the point. There isn’t a UK anymore, there is no nation, it’s a just container, a cage to practice this crippling socialism protecting the world globalisation/banking hub.

The truth is this. All members of Parliament, all members of the civil service, all donors to political parties, all figureheads in the police, and people in the media who as far as Murdoch and the Sun go…well we’ll come onto that in another time, but anyway all those who are trying to do this are the enemy of the country and are an enemy of all people. There is no other way to say it and they going to have to be dealt with one way or another.

Additionally, I’m sorry to say the bumbling police officer carrying out politically-distorted duties, or the stupid contractror just installing X-ray cameras in lamp posts and elsewhere is inevitably making themselves a legitimate subject of reprisals, just as that pedophile who has been moved into the estate over the road from you is. It’s not enough to be just doing your job anymore, as good people like Craig Murray have said.

[…]

Jultra!

Thats the way we like it. The absolute truth said plainly and with some balls.

I just saw this:
http://speak.ytmnd.com/

Which brought me to here:
http://www.custommusicrecords.com/

Via the google…

I like it!

Do you have a spare moment?
Or two?

Visa Denied: How Anti-Arab Visa Policies Destroy US Exports, Jobs and Higher Education In the aftermath of 9/11 US visa processing in the Arab world has ground to a halt.

US consulates formerly striving to outsource key visa processes to travel agencies before the terror attacks are now paralyzed and fearful. Under funded and insufficient security review processes leave Arab executives, prospective students, and vacation travelers in limbo for years or looking for alternative destinations. Shabby treatment of those who successfully run the visa gauntlet leaves many vowing never to return to the US. How much has it cost? The damage assessment is now in:

• Total US manufacturing jobs sustained by Arab market demand reached 215,000 in the year 2005, but could have been 420,000 with more effective and non-discriminatory US visa policies.
• Arab business and tourist travelers remained at half their 2001 levels, creating five year travel related service losses of $1.775 billion and 4,126 potential service jobs.
• In 2005
  Arab student enrollment in the US higher education system reached only 66% of the 2001 level. The US higher education system lost $1.989 billion in revenue and 9,000 education and support service jobs.

The 200 page Visa Denied report quantifies the damage done to US exporters, travel related service industries and the higher education system. Visa Denied recommends steps to correct and realign a severely degraded system to the true opportunity cost of flawed and sometimes discriminatory policies. Visa Denied traces a path from freewheeling days of outsourced national security of the State Department “Visa Express” system exploited by 9/11 hijackers toward the secure, efficient, and color blind visa policy American stakeholders expect and deserve.

Table of Contents and Free Chapters
(All 11.3 MB PDF)

1.0 Executive Summary (.1 MB PDF)

2.0 Free Travel and Free Trade: The US National Interest (1.4 MB PDF)

3.0 The Trade Consequences of US Visa Barriers (6.4 MB PDF)

Affected Industries
Key US State Stakeholders
4.0 Turning Away the World’s Highest-Spending Tourists (.4 MB PDF)

5.0 Cutting America’s Link to Tomorrow’s Leaders (1.3 MB PDF)

Fixing the Fulbright

6.0 Country-Level Damage Assessment
United Arab Emirates
The Dubai Ports World Debacle
Politics vs. National Security Concerns
DPW Analysis and Lessons Learned
Saudi Arabia
2005: A Year of Missed Opportunities
Egypt
Kuwait
Algeria
Qatar
Iraq 7.0 Conclusions: Restoring Visitors and Trade
Appendix – Opportunity Cost Methodology
Travel and Tourism
Arab Students
Arab Market Imports from the US

[…]

http://www.irmep.org/visa.htm

And there you have it.

What this report had better say, is that this 100,000,000,000 dollars is just the beginning and that all of that money was spent in other countries. This money is not sitting in the pockets of people waiting to spend it on america and its products and services, it is GONE, and will continue to evaporate, and the effects of this will last generations; more than the number of generations that The Lord Of Darkness predicts the bogus war on turrr is set to last.

What this article also doesn’t go into is the effect of the loss of influence on the world caused by people never getting to see the inside of the USA, and of course, the rise in influence of other countries as students come back thinking like Germans, Russians, Chinese etc etc.

Told you so.

It’s a new category don’t cha know!

…and that link should point to one of the articles predicting people abandoning the good ‘ol usa as a place to visit, and of course, my google fu is fucked up today and i cant find one….bleh!

I notice two notices relating to banking this morning which threw up contrasting sentiments.

The first was a bus shelter advert for a high street bank written entirely in Polish. Quite novel I thought especially as they don’t have them in any other foreign languages around here. Obviously a case of a company seeing a market and responding accordingly.

The other notice was to inform customers of another high street bank informing their ‘customers’ that all withdrawals at the bank would have to be accompanied by two forms of identification (unspecified). Now as a feature of a specific account additional security could be a ‘good thing’, people could chose the level of security they wanted for their money and the bank could charge/adjust interset rates to cover the additional inconvenience .
They could even issue a card with a security code when the account was opened!!! Seriously, they could issue a bank card with an encrypted photo image that shows up when read (and PIN verified) in the bank for a nominal fee – if it were requested by the investor opening the account, I am sure Irdial has been through this before.
Anyhow I had negative feelings not so much for the level of security being ‘offered’ but that I feel that that particular bank is likely not to question the pros and cons of requiring ID cards information to operate a bank account in the future.

(an old article)

–

Did I mention ID cards?

It seems bizarre that a system that will supposedly reduce ‘illegal immigrant working’ will be ‘policed’ by the very employers that exploit non-official residents for labour.

MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota (CNN) — It’s always interesting to me, that in my own country, I often get assignments where I walk into a room, and everyone looks and sounds different from me. Different language. Different culture. And sometimes, different beliefs.

On this story, I crossed such a threshold.

I stepped into the taxi depot that serves the Minneapolis – St. Paul International Airport, where drivers sit and wait for their next fare. In this crowded, noisy room, most of the cabbies are Muslims originally from Somalia.

“We’re doing a story about the conflict between the cabbies and the airport. The Muslim drivers have been refusing to take passengers carrying alcohol, such as wine or liquor purchased at a duty free shop,” I explained.

A group of men gathered around us.

“This is America, we have freedom of religion,” says one cabbie. We could see their feelings are intense — that the issue seems to cut to the core of their identity.

“The Metropolitan Airport Commission is discriminating against us Muslim drivers,” says Abdulkaddir Adan, a Somalian-American who’s been driving a cab in the Twin Cities for two years.

We asked Adan if he’d give us a ride, and let us interview him while he was driving. He agreed. CNN Photojournalist Derek Davis set up a “lipstick” cam, a small camera, positioned on the dashboard.

From the back seat, I asked why Adan would object if I were carrying alcohol.

“The one who drinks, the one who transports, and the one who makes a business of it, they have the same category,” he said.

“So, by my transporting my alcohol in your cab, you are sinning?” I asked.

“Sinning to God, yes,” he replied.

Adan is not alone. About three quarters of the 900 cabbies serving the airport are Muslim, and many have been regularly refusing passengers carrying beer, wine or liquor.

In the past five years, 5,400 would-be taxi passengers at the airport were refused service for this very reason, said the Metropolitan Airport Commission, or MAC. Last May, passenger Bob Dildine says he waited for 20 minutes, and five cab drivers would not give him and his daughter a ride. He was carrying wine he bought on vacation.

“They’re here to provide service to people,” said Dildine. “We were a lawful customer, and we were denied service. That’s not our way of doing things.”

MAC officials said they don’t know of any airport other than the Twin Cities where this has become an issue. MAC officials explain that the area has a growing population of immigrant Somalians, many who’ve sought jobs as taxi drivers. Last year, MAC consulted local Muslim leaders, who issued a fatwa, or religious opinion.

“It is expressly stated,” said Kahlid Elmasry of the Muslim American Society. “Transportation of alcohol for Muslims is against the Islamic faith, and therefore forbidden.”

Last September, airport officials sought a compromise, and suggested that distinctive lights could be put on the roofs of cabs operated by drivers who will not transport alcohol. That way, taxi starters — airport staff who direct people into cabs — could send passengers with alcohol to those drivers who have no objection.

“But the feedback we got, not only locally but really from around the country and around the world, was almost entirely negative,” said airport spokesman Pat Hogan. “People saw that as condoning discrimination against people who had alcohol.”

Right now, MAC says any cabbie who refuses a passenger carrying alcohol must go to the back of the line. No small thing, given cabbies often have to wait at the depot up to three hours for the next fare.

But because MAC officials have received thousands of complaints, they’re considering stiffer penalties: a 30-day suspension for a first refusal, a two-year suspension for a second.

“We’re now at a point where the drivers may have to make a choice,” said Hogan.

For Adan, the choice is clear.

“I would leave my job, instead of doing something that’s not allowed in my religion,” he said. […]

CNN

This sort of story is designed to drive people insane. Its very clever; it is a story about how america is changing (for the worse) but also how its principles are still intact (letting new people in to get on with their lives as they wish). This is a story that you cannot take at face value. It is a provocation, a red rag to a bull.

It is a story that is made to provoke bloggers to make links like this as a suggestion to these Taxi drivers, and to make other bloggers write that these people are going to end up in a paralell society, where they cater for their own needs while everyone else lives in ‘REAL-AMERICA’, where you can call a taxi and not have to think about the sensibilities of the hack, save that he wants to be paid.

But we won’t fall for it.

What would be interesting is this; imagine these (male) cab drivers deciding that they won’t carry females. There is nothing to stop them from coming to this decision….go for it dudes!

Maine overwhelmingly rejected federal requirements for national identification cards on Thursday, marking the first formal state opposition to controversial legislation scheduled to go in effect for Americans next year.

Both chambers of the Maine legislature approved a resolution saying the state flatly “refuses” to force its citizens to use driver’s licenses that comply with digital ID standards, which were established under the 2005 Real ID Act. It asks the U.S. Congress to repeal the law.

The vote represents a political setback for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Republicans in Washington, D.C., which have argued that nationalized ID cards for all Americans would help in the fight against terrorists.

“I have faith that the Democrats in Congress will hear this from many states and will find a way to repeal or amend this in the coming months,” House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree, a Democrat, said in a telephone interview after the vote. “It’s not only a huge federal mandate, but it’s a huge mandate from the federal government asking us to do something we don’t have any interest in doing.”

The Real ID Act says that, starting around May 2008, Americans will need a federally approved ID card–a U.S. passport will also qualify–to travel on an airplane, open a bank account, collect Social Security payments or take advantage of nearly any government service. States will have to conduct checks of their citizens’ identification papers, and driver’s licenses likely will be reissued to comply with Homeland Security requirements.

In addition, the national ID cards must be “machine-readable,” with details left up to Homeland Security, which hasn’t yet released final regulations. That could end up being a magnetic strip, an enhanced bar code or radio frequency identification (RFID) chips.

The votes in Maine on the resolution were nonpartisan. It was approved by a 34-to-0 vote in the state Senate and by a 137-to-4 vote in the House of Representatives.

Other states are debating similar measures. Bills pending in Georgia, Massachusetts, Montana and Washington state express varying degrees of opposition to the Real ID Act.

Montana’s is one of the strongest. The legislature held a hearing on Wednesday on a bill that says “The state of Montana will not participate in the implementation of the Real ID Act of 2005” and directs the state motor vehicle department “not to implement the provisions.”

Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU’s Technology and Liberty Project, said he thinks Maine’s vote will “break the logjam, and other states are going to follow.” (The American Civil Liberties Union has set up an anti-Real ID Web site called Real Nightmare).

Pingree, Maine’s House majority leader, said the Real ID Act would have cost the state $185 million over five years and required every state resident to visit the motor vehicle agency so that several forms of identification–including an original copy of the birth certificate and a Social Security card–would be uploaded into a federal database.

[…]

News Dot Com

Well well well.

Does this mean that the drivers licenses from that Maine will not be good for travel inside the other areas of Soviet America? If that is the case, the free citizens of Maine will go berserk with rage when they are routinely denied travel ‘rights’ or are perpetually strip searched because they have deviant drivers licenses. This is commonly known as ‘discrimination’.

It is also what we call ‘soft compulsion’; make them need REALID by causing their lives to become impossible without it. Are all the banks in Maine who are going to be forced to require REALID for all transactions going to be under different rules than the rest of Soviet America? Will they then be prevented from making transfers to other banks from customers who have not presented REALID? These are the questions that come to mind. Hell, forget all of that, will they be able to drive cars in other states?

Maine is going to have to become like another country entirely if they are going to separate themselves from the biometric net. Its called secession, and it will be the best thing for them. They will have their international airport, where USVISIT will not exist, and then once again, at least in one place, america will start looking like America. With a capital ‘A’. Most importantly they will have their own foreign relations, ensuring that they have real, long term security at zero cost.

In a properly federated country, stuff like this can happen. After everything, this total nightmare, like I said before, if any country can come back from the brink of total destruction, it is the United States of America. These are the people who went to the moon, who built the internets…there was no place like it on earth.

And I’m not just saying that.

The question is, is this the beginning of the end for the biometric net? Will Maine and the other ‘REAL-AMERICA’ states get away with this?

I sure hope so.

Here come some big lies:

Huge majority say civil liberty curbs a ‘price worth paying’ to fight
terror

Research finds most support compulsory ID cards, with phone tapping, curfews and tagging for suspects

John Carvel and Lucy Ward Wednesday January 24, 2007 The Guardian

An overwhelming majority of people in Britain are willing to surrender civil liberties to help tackle the threat of terrorism, the nation’s leading social research institute will disclose today. The survey found seven in every 10 people think compulsory identity cards for all adults would be “a price worth paying” to reduce the threat of terrorism. Eight in 10 say the authorities should be able to tap the phones of people suspected of involvement in terrorism, open their mail and impose electronic tagging or home curfews.

The findings come from the annual British Social Attitudes survey, based on interviews with a sample of 3,000 adults by the National Centre for Social Research

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1997179,00.html

And a clever person on the FIPR saved me some typing:

would the replies have been different if the questions had been:

are you prepared to identify yourself every time you:

(a) take money out of the bank;
(b) want to enter a shopping mall/department store;
(c) [etc]; with those data being stored so the police, social security and your boss can check where you were and what you did at any time?

would you object to being detained for a week because an anonymous informer told the police that s/he thought you were up to no good – without the police giving you any further evidence and without you being able to challenge your detention?

people are always willing to give up freedoms if they think it’ll only affect “the other”, i.e. sinister people from “other cultures” (black, muslim, hoodie). as whatshername said, it’ll be too late if you wait until the [secret] police knocks on your door …

la lotta per la liberta (e gli liberti) continua!

John Carvel and Lucy Ward Wednesday are total scumbags.

They know perfectly well that biased and malformed questions are almost always used to generate this data; the fact that they did not publish the questions proves that they are culpable, or amongst the stupidest people in the country.

Everyone knows now that we are in the middle of a historic fight for the very soul of Britain. To let this sort of thing pass unchecked is simply CRIMINAL, especially since its appearing in the same paper that Henry Porter has been doing such good work in. They will know ABSOLUTELY that this report is totally bogus, because they work IN THE SAME TEAM AS HENRY PORTER. They will have read, without a doubt, the ‘Frances Stonor Saunders’ email. THEY KNOW WHAT THEY ARE DOING when they publish this without question and put their names to it.

Dirty filthy animals, against Britain, against freedom; LIARS LIARS LIARS, COWARDS COWARDS COWARDS lower than any dog, suicidal, imbecilic…

FUCKING DUMBASSES.

… and they don’t even have the brains to point out that none of the measures proposed will actually do what HMG says they are for. Even HMG admits that ID cards will do nothing to stop ‘terrorism’.

The question is, why on earth do the editors of The Guardian allow this evil drivel in their paper?

The proposed separation of the Home Office into two departments is being seen in most reports as an overdue necessity, I have my doubts, especially as the Prime Minister seemingly approves of the idea.

Firstly the creation of a separate department for ‘Security’ implies that the current problems have a set of solutions independent (or abstractable) from other Departments. This is entirely untrue, most of the bad feeling towards the UK is a direct result of bad foreign policy backed up by bad ‘defence’ policies (then to spice the mixture up a load of nonsensical national legislation). If anything a security minister should be a junior official at the Foreign Office.

Secondly this move doesn’t do anything to REDUCE Governmental tinkering, paranoia-mongering and legislative fluff. More than likely this will create a situation where two programmes of legislation relating to ‘law and order’ will be fed through the parliamentary sausage machine with even less scrutiny and more chance of being voted through according to party whipping. Yes MORE of the same ‘need to do something’ posturing but with even less ‘joined-up’ thinking!

Thirdly this change is going to be rushed through which means instead of one ‘not fit for purpose’ government department there will be two slapdash mini-me versions. Presumably in the confusion it will be more likely that serial killers, rapists, embarrassing paperwork will go missing.

Fourthly the proliferation of biometric & database security peddlers will have an extra outlet to lobby government, and government an extra mouthpiece to voice its desires for these.

What the government desparately needs to do is to re-evaluate its ‘need’ to legislate in the face of reason, to massively scale back its meddling control freakery etc. of course this is not going to happen until the day someone walks into Whitehall whose heart is sick to the core of government insidiousness and arrogance. Certainly not a politician.

Gun shots ring out in the Bagdad night
Enter GI Joe in the Palace hall.
He sees the Iraqis in a pool of blood,
Cries out, praise god, we killed them all!
Here comes the story of Saddam Hussein,
The man the The Great Satan came to blame
For somethin that he never done.
Hanged in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been
The champion of the world.

Three bodies lyin there does GI see
And another man named Musta, movin around mysteriously.
Thats the way we do it, he says, and he throws a grenade
We are robbin your country, I hope you understand.
And we aint leavin, he says, and he stops
Its a hard job being here like we’re your cops.
And forever wer’re gonna be your cops
And they arrive on the scene with IEDs flashin
In the hot bagdad night.

Meanwhile, far away in another part of town
Achmed and a couple of friends are drivin around.
Owner of ‘best taxi driver of Bagdad’ crown
Had no idea what kinda shit was about to go down
When GIs pulled him over to the side of the road
Just like the time before and the time before that.
In Bagdad thats just the way things go.
If youre Iraqi you might as well not show up on the street
less you wanna draw the heat.

Achmed had a partner and he had a rap for the cops.
Him and Jamal were just out drivin around
He said, I saw two men runnin out, they looked like terrorists
They jumped into a white car clenching their fists.
And miss GI just shook her head.
She said, wait a minute, boys, these ones aint dead
So they shot them there for all to see
And though these two could hardly more innocent be
They told all that they may have been guilty men.

Four in the mornin and they haul Rashid in,
Take him to Abu Ghraib and they bring him downstairs.
Lyndie looks out through one open eye
Points, glad you brought him in boys! he ready to die?
Yes, heres the story of Saddam Hussein,
The man the The Great Satan came to blame
For somethin that he never done.
Hanged in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been
The champion of the world.

Four months later, Bhagdad is in flame,
Chavez in south america, fightin for his name
While Haliburton still in the robbery game
Jihadi are puttin the screws to GI, lookin for somebody to blame.
Remember that murder called ‘911’?
Remember the man who they said got it done?
You think he’d like to play ball with the law?
Think it might-a been that phantom that you saw in Pakistan?
Just you forget the name of that man.

Dumb Joe Sixpack said, Im really not sure.
Uncle Sam said, a poor boy like you could use a break
You just dont get it, you dont know what’s at stake
Now you dont wanta have to pay five bucks a gallon.
Youll be doin society a favor.
That sonofabitch is brave and gettin braver.
We want to put his ass in stir
We want to pin this nukular gig on him
He aint no gentleman jim.

Saddam could take a man out with just one punch
But he never did like to talk about it all that much.
Its my work, hed say, and I do it for play
And when its over Id just as soon go on my way
Up to some paradise
Where the trout streams flow and the air is nice
And ride a virgin along a trail.
But then they took him to the jailhouse
Where they try to turn a man into a mouse.

All of Saddam’s cards were marked in advance
The trial was a pig-circus, he never had a chance.
The judge made Saddam’s witnesses drunkards from the slums
To the white folks who watched he was a revolutionary bum
And to the Arab folks he was just a crazy nigger.
Not one doubted that he coulda pulled the trigger.
And though they could not produce the gun,
The judge said he was the one who did the deed
And the all-white military jury agreed.

Saddam Hussein was falsely tried.
The crime was mass murder, guess who testified?
Only his enemies and they both baldly lied
And the newspapers, they all went along for the ride.
How can the life of such a man
Be in the palm of Uncle Sam’s hand?
To see him obviously framed
Couldn’t help but make me feel ashamed to be from a land
Where justice is a game.

Now USUK criminals in their coats and their ties
Are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise
While Saddam got hung in a ten-foot cell
An innocent man in a living hell.
Thats the story of Saddam Hussein,
But it wont be over till they clear his name
And leave the land he was from.
Hanged in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been
The champion of the world.

Thanks Bob… And thanks to the dude who mailed it to me.

Spire on Saturday was extremely good. First some great beer in KoKo bar (Goodramgate), which used to be a fabulous shop selling a myriad of bottled beers and now a lovely, cosy bar run by the same man. From the window we watched images of the East Window of the Minster projected onto the scaffolding that will continue to cover it for years to come.

The concert itself was a mix of classical, religious organ pieces, some accompanied by piano and tape, some vocal pieces, some individual chants, and solo offerings from Fennesz, Jeck and BJ Nilsen. Fennesz played in the Chapterhouse, with transmission into the Nave. It was interesting to wander from one place to the other, feeling the changing acoustics and feel of the rather subdued (for Fennesz) sounds.

For me, Jeck was the surprising highlight. From listening close to his set-up at the front of the Nave,  I wandered to the far end. Here, instead of the intense, personal feel of close quarters, his samples and loops of various organ and church sounds filled the huge space wondrously. It felt like the memories of centuries of ceremonies breathed themselves from the stones to fill the void. Something vaguely familiar, borderline comforting, yet still ethereal and untouchable swirled around, the huge and reverberating space preventing the sounds from coming into anything but the softest of focus.

Nilsen tried his best to send everyone into a coma, and it failed to move me at all. However, a final set of organ and vocal pieces including some Pärt sent me home with a warm glow inside.

Jason Singh, an officer with Northumbria Police, was the ringleader of a team attacking ATMs with power tools in professional, well planned raids across Tyne and Wear.

The 23-year-old police constable even used confidential information obtained from a Northumbria Police computer to target a vulnerable woman’s £30,000 savings.

[…]

Telegraph

Yet again this a demonstration of how ‘insiders’ can misuse database information, and how the importance being able to control access to personal information should be paramount.
Now if you consider that the government is doing as much as possible to convince businesses to use NIR/ID card information as proof of identity this will allow someone somewhere to correlate bank account numbers with NIR entries. Now if your bank starts deploying fingerprint activated atm machines it will take the minimum of effort for such an insider to link NIR stored fingerprint data to a certain bank account.
In addition this shows how detailed NIR information can become ‘valuable’ in it’s own right – in order to allow secondary crimes to occur.
The ‘proposal’ (assuming it already isn’t happening) to allow departments access to each other’s data will both make it easier to accumulate disparate data and for ‘insiders’ to hide their tracks more effectively.