Voting for a large supermarket chain instead of a political party may at first seem a ridiculous idea.

But think about it some more.

Government occupies most of its time collecting, then spending, money and an increasing amount of that money is spent through private contractors rather than public servants. From refuse collection through to health care, more and more public services are being delivered by private companies. The reasoning behind this is that the discipline of market forces delivers the best return for tax payers’ money.

[…]

The problem is that even though companies are becoming more involved in the delivery of public services there is one sector that is closed to them – the overall management of those services. Not only are they held back by being managed by politicians whose only attribute is the ability to bullshit, the companies also have every incentive to steal as much as they can from the State whilst lobbying for and executing their contracts. Neither would be the case if a company were in overall charge.

That’s why we should be able to vote for Tescos.

[…]

!!!!!!!!!!!

Actually, this is what I stumbled upon:

[…]

Looking back on the Poll Tax it’s increasingly difficult to see what all the fuss was about. At the time, the Poll Tax was seen to be a tax on the poor. The reasoning being that more poor people would live in any given house than rich people. The Poll Tax was also seen as being a pernicious tax on your very existence, as if all the other taxes aren’t.

As it happens, most of these objections to the Poll Tax were bollocks. Of course it had its flaws but so what? Most taxes do, particularly indirect taxes. People on low incomes would have received a rebate to cover the Poll Tax and the system that it replaced, and the system that replaced it, were even less connected to an individual’s ability to pay. What the Poll Tax did represent was an excuse to demonstrate against a hated government and burn down a few McDonalds at the same time.

I mention it now because the thought of 200,000 people running amok around the West End over any particularly issue seems rather unlikely these days.

This is partly down to the fact that our current, supposedly progressive, government has locked down security pretty tightly; marches and demonstrations are now policed to a ridiculous level, but mostly because most people on the Left of politics are hypocritical and full shit.

And lots of it.

Why am I picking on Left-Wingers? Well, people with more Right wing views don’t pretend to give a stuff about anyone else; Self-Interest is King. Whereas people on the Left are always prattling on about the Human Rights and twaddle like that.

They don’t really mean it though do they?

Forget for a moment the fact that the current government has presided over unprecedented levels of corporatisation and globalisation of this country or that the tax burden on the rich has been held back at the expense of the less rich. How else can you explain the conspicuous lack of any real resistance to the Government’s assault on the right to trial by jury, restriction of the right to protest, imprisonment without trial, the imposition of ID cards and that stupid, frickin’ war…

That’s the sort of stuff that should bring people out on the street to light bonfires and build barricades, not a few quid either way on the rate of property tax.

What little effective resistance there has been to the rise of fascism in this country has come from the likes of the House of Lords and the Judiciary. Both unelected and both despised by the Left.

That past generation of Left Wing protestors and the generation that should have followed them have been well and truly neutered by The Machine. Sure, some of them talk the talk but barely a handful walk the walk. Wankers.

Hmm. Well you could just as easily call ‘Right Wingers’ wankers, as the government’s authoritarianism is increasingly stamping out the ability to live an individualistic life free from the state

———————-

(monday)

I was going to write a bit more earlier than this but I’ve been feeding the rats with copious amounts of mucus.

Taking the Tesco idea at face value – The most important aspect of democracy is/should be as a protection against tyranny. In our almost democracy we actually have, in effect, a 4-5 year monopolies on governance – this is already wrong, and it takes the best efforts of private interest and parliamentary standards committees to minimise level of corruption by politicians. Any representatives of a private firm would by default be compromised as Irdial outlines below – in their obligations to shareholders, etc.
I am less picky about private companies being involved in delivering certain public services as long as those services are not either essentially monoplistic (utilities, public transport) or handle private personal information (NHS, police forces) and that the private firms are not involved in management roles – the difference between garbage contracts and PFI.

If we ever achieve a proper localised democratic structure in this country I see no problem with individual communities allowing Tesco or whoever to tender for collecting garbage or to take care of the local park.

Left wing wankers. I chose the extract because it identified the docility of the generation you would expect to be most activist. As for ‘left wingers’ I have to admit that the ones I’ve met are more likely to cling to Party allegiances even so anyone who is not upset, outraged and willing to resist ID cards etc is worthy of being called a wanker. Right wingers and liberals too.

I guess like many individuals at that time I was shocked and revolted at the conduct of the UK Government in moving against its own people with the amendments to the Terrorism Act (2000) and the attendant legislation since and using the so-called ‘Specialist Operations 19’ officers to shoot them down in the tube.

I would have hoped that by 2006 the UK Government would have begun the process of recognising that what had happened wasn’t acceptable and would have begun to atone for what has to be seen as a crime against liberty. Unfortunately there is little evidence of this and in fact, towards the end of the time that I lived in England the State started to once again tighten it’s grip on expression and information. Many muslim dissidents have been harrassed and some are in prison or have gone into exile.

All libertarians truly worthy of the name hope that the 60 million people who live in mainland UK could begin to enjoy the liberties and democracy that their compatriots on the continent still enjoy. Europe has shown that it is not impossible within a society with a strong Social-Democrat tradition to enjoy political and economic freedom whilst maintaining a federalist structure (albeit one that is similar to the United States in being split pretty much down the middle).

I argue that individuals need to engage with each other and that we should not be afraid to uphold our values, some of which are surprisingly shared by a number of professional people in Government. However what we have to realise is that the Labour Party has not only been a brake on genuine freedoms and decentralisation, it has also gradually promoted the (sometime) ideologues of Marxist-Leninism in a not disimilar way to which Mao promoted obedient officials after the Cultural Revolution. Nowadays, the Labour Party uses the veneer of accounability “with Reformist characteristics” – whatever that really means – but in reality it is advocating authoritarianism (near totalitarianism) with a capitalistic nationalist face. It is this ideology, and the means by which it hopes to permeate the UK’s social thinking, which creates the greatest problem for the continuation of a liberal democracy in the UK.

Shortly, I will post my views on the potential political scenarios facing the UK and suggesting a potential approach by the Liberal Democrats to bilateral dealings with the Conservatives.

Mangled words from a Liberal Legend! (apparently). Anyway while Toby Philpott’s ideas about China are seem intelligent enough he should really be using his Lib Dem blog to talk more about issues closer to home – after all we don’t want opposition parties to feel they have to avoid raising controversy in order to be elected (like in the Peoples Republic of America) and he obviously cares as he has all the right links in his sidebar.

Anarchist Communist Editions (ACE) Pamphlet No. 4

Anarchist Communist Federation

(now Anarchist Federation www.afed.org.uk)

First published in March 1990 under the Tories

(following ‘The Poll Tax and How to Fight It’ October 1988)

Now published online March 2006 and dedicated to New Labour and the Left

“Our past experience should teach us to expect nothing else of them.”

‘As a socialist, I have no time for tax-dodgers’
Eric Milligan, head of Lothian region Labour council’s Finance Department (April 1989)

‘Such is the scale of the non-payment movement in our region that we may have to write-off large sums of outsanding poll tax’
Eric Milligan (December 1989)

CONTENTS

• Beating the Poll Tax
• How not to fight
• What lies behind the Poll Tax
• The ‘Left’ and the Poll Tax
• Appendix: What is the Poll Tax?

Burning poll tax registration forms in London

http://www.libcom.org/hosted/af/ace/polltax.html

Monopoly money could become obsolete after the makers of the 70-year old game introduced a new version where players fund property purchases using a debit card.

The Visa-branded card inserts into an electronic machine where the banker taps in cardholders’ earnings and payments.

The Telegraph gets in on the press release recycling scam. Naturally you will pay dearly for the card version!

Unfortunately if this takes off a wave of children will grow up associating cards with financial purchases rather than cash – a salami slice off the (sometimes) untraceable economy. Another step towards the fully audited life, perhaps the Home Office should come up with an immigration control game with a biometric scanner included – they could get BBQ to give them away on Blue Peter.

Whatever happened to a nice simple game of dominoes?

Young men who father children outside marriage may be compelled to put their names on the birth certificate under Government plans unveiled yesterday to reform the chaotic system for child support.
Those who refuse to pay, or build up huge arrears, could be “named and shamed”, as well as having their passports taken away, fitted with a electronic “tag” and subjected to a night-time and weekend curfew.
[…]
Announcing the effective scrapping of the much-criticised Child Support Agency, Mr Hutton admitted that it had built up a backlog of 300,000 cases and debts of more than £3 billion, but thousands of lone parents would not receive the money because there were “limited prospects of recovery”.

An overreaction to the ‘problem’ on a Middle Eastern scale, but this sort of talk is intended to dull the public sensibility to the point at which such measures seem the only ones that will be effective, and thus the Authoritarian Left will get their desire of absolute state control.

But it will not work.

—

BP reported a record replacement cost net profit of $6.1 billion (3.3 billion pounds) for the second quarter of its financial year, as high oil prices and strong refining margins more than made up for a drop in output.

The Register reports that the cost of passports will increase considerably yet again – this october – to £66(6) making it look increasingly likely that a stand alone pasport will be near the £93 mark by the ID card system is dumped upon the nation i.e. the government will crow that the ID card is in effect gratis. So where will the money go? Either to pump-prime the NIR system or for the closing down of UK borders that Reid seems hell bent on. You need a lot of money for watch towers and barbed wire around a whole island.

Either way it makes even more sense to renew your passport before NIR information auditing/stockpiling is a matter of course at the IPS.

I’ve just noticed the price rise is covered in the guardian too and they include a statement from NO2ID etc, hats off and may it continue.

Incidentally I have good word that travelling within the EU only UK immigration officials can actually be bothered to use machine readers, it would be nice to verify this.

AussieUFOpod2.mp4

AussieUFOpod6.mov

AussieUFOpod5.mov

All snarfed from:
http://australianufowave.blogspot.com/

And while we are at it, check out the following documentary, which has some really truely astonishing footage in it:

http://www.mininova.org/tor/328395

Dan Aykroyd Unplugged on UFOs (2005)

Dan Aykroyd Unplugged on UFOs explores past and present sightings
from around the world with shocking real footage, much of it never before seen,
that will leave even the most skeptical viewers scratching their heads.

Along with the fascinating collection of stunning eyewitness videos,
Akroyd reveals his own vast knowledge of the strange and paranormal
as he explores in detail his views on conspiracy theories, military secrets,
and how UFO technology is currently part of our everyday lives!

Best Torrents on the WEB
http://conspiracycentral.net:6969
30000 Active users
Enjoy

AVI File Details
========================================
Name………: Dan Aykroyd Unplugged on UFOs 2005.avi
Filesize…..: 697 MB (or 714,524 KB or 731,672,576 bytes)
Runtime……: 01:24:07 (120,997 fr)
Video Codec..: XviD
Video Bitrate: 963 kb/s
Audio Codec..: ac3 (0x2000) Dolby Laboratories, Inc
Audio Bitrate: 192 kb/s (96/ch, stereo) CBR
Frame Size…: 560×336 (1.67:1) [=5:3]

thxmoo summary

thxmoo is a virtual world based on the story of THX-1138 by George
Lucas. As in the story, characters in thxmoo are born and raised in
a post world war III subterranean shelter. Players can control their
emotional and psychological states by use of state prescribed pills,
sensual stimuli and deity worship. Players may make it their goal to
attempt to escape to the surface where mystery and the unknown dwell.
This requires achieving a chemical balance by experimenting with
various pill prescriptions and other activities. Other players may
choose to become integral parts of the subterranean world.

character role playing

Guests are generated when a player connects as ‘thxmoo’. Regular
players may run ‘thxmoo’ at the SDF shell to generate or load a
character. The MOO then uses sperm and egg from an existing couple to
generate a new player. The player name (AAA-NNNN), sex and race are
generated by the system. Players will start the game as a child, be
trained by mentors and live in the nursery. After a period of regular
game play, a player is then coupled at which sperm and egg will be
extracted to propogate the species. If you can find the REPRODUCTION
CENTER it is possible to deduce your biological parents, if you care.

character development and space

Character features and dwellings are up to players. This is really
the only liberty you have. However, if you deviate you risk arrest.
Matured characters dwellings are in the QUARTERS dormatory and can
be arranged to your taste. Food medication and stimulation are all
provided in your dwelling. The most interesting aspect of all
dwellings is the MEDICINE CHEST. When you open your chest, the system
will ask you ‘Whats wrong?’. You then describe how you are feeling and
the chest will dispense medication. Each player has a designated
chemical balance/inbalance which can be sustained or counter acted
by drug use, misuse and/or abstinence.

Just… WOW.

There’s a lot to dislike about Chris Matthews and especially Pat Buchanan, but they have never been for the Iraq war and the neocons.

Video-QT

MATTHEWS:

We’ve killed 50,000 Iraqis in a war that was supposed to be a two-day wonder. When are we going to notice that the neocons don’t know what they’re talking about? They’re not looking at this country’s long term interest. They’re bound up in regional and global ideology and they have had no experience, I’ll say it again, in even a schoolyard fight. They don’t know what physical fighting is all about. They went to school and were intellectuals but they want our government to be their big brother. I don’t get it. I don’t know why we keep falling for it. And the President, you say, is he free of these guys or not?

BUCHANAN: Well, the President, he fell for it after 9/11 when they put that little pre-cooked meal in front of him, after they knocked down Afghanistan. And so they said, “Let’s do Iraq now.” And Wolfowitz and all the rest of them. But let me say this, Chris. I think the president realizes now that we went into Iraq to pursue weapons that did not exist, a country that did not attack us, did not threaten us, and now we have created a great base camp for terrorism in the Anbar province that did not exist. In response to Mr Shrum, you attack Iran, Hezbollah will retaliate against the 25,000 Americans in Lebanon. You will have massive hostage taking and killings. Are these people nuts? You’ve got to ask yourself. I certainly hope the president is not listening to them because I really question whether they’ve got America’s national interest at heart. They’re calling for wars against people that never attacked us. I don’t care how bad they are. There are wicked people all over this world but you don’t go after people unless they come after you. […]

http://www.crooksandliars.com/posts/2006/07/22/neocon-saturday/

If you are leaking to the press or broadcast media, they invariably want some documentary proof of what you are telling them, e.g. a document or memo or advance copy of a report, or an email. etc.

1. Do not use your @homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk email address from work to pass on whistleblower material to politicians, journalists or bloggers.The Home Office, as your employer, is perfectly within its rights to analyse the log files of its own email systems. They do not need to wait for a “serious criminal investigation” which would require a warrant signed by, wait for it, the Home Secretary, or as recently delegated under the Terrorism Act 2006, any nameless offical that the Home Secretary delegates the renewal of long running intelligence agency or electronic interception warrants, which almost certainly include the “protection” of the Home Office IT systems themselves.
2. If you are relatively IT literate, you may be able to master how to send an email through a Mixmaster Anonymous Remailer chain , but, we suspect that the number of people who are confident enough to do this currently working at the Home Office and who might become whistleblowers is very small.
3. Similarly, a whistleblower could use Pretty Good Privacy public key encryption, but again, this requires some effort to install the PGP software, on your own PC (not on your Home Office workstation !).PGP encryption will protect the content of of your correspondence with whoever you are whistleblowing to, but not the fact that your are in communication with say, David Davis, or ther Sun newspaper or even a political blog.Unfortunately it is only Spy Blog and a few other technical security and privacy related blogs which publish a PGP Public Encryption Key, something which we encourage other bloggers, journalists and members of Parliament to do as well. – Spy Blog PGP public encryption key
4. PGP also does Disk Volume Encryption, which may be of use to a whistleblower’s home PC.
5. A good compromise for the non-technical civil servant who wants to be a whistleblower could be a Hushmail account.This has the advantage of being based in Canada, Ireland and the tax haven of Anguilla, and is a web based email system which uses the SSL/TLS encryption used to protect credit card and internet banking transactions from snoopers.You may have to install the Sun version of Java if you have a recent version of Windows XP which no longer supports Java by default.You can sign up for a free , anonymous Hushmail account, (with 2Mb of storage space) which needs to be accessed at least every 3 weeks to keep it active . You can pay $30 a year for a full account.Hushmail to Hushmail traffic is strongly encrypted, but using Hushmail to say, email your Member of Parliament will be plaintext like other emails.Hushmail do have a “pre-shared secret” challenge/response email system called Hushmail Express which can be useful for non-hushmail replies, but it is a bit less secure.
6. Do not use your Home Office landline telephone or fax machine for the same reasons as above.
7. Do not use your normal mobile phone to contact a journalist or blogger from your Home Office location, or from home.The Cell ID of your mobile phone will pinpoint your location in Marsham Street and the time and date of your call.This works identically for Short Message Service text messages as well as for Voice calls.Such Communications Traffic Data does not require that a warrant be signed by the Home Secretary, a much more junior official has the power to do this, e.g. the Home Office Departmental Security Unit headed by Jacqueline Sharland.
8. Buy a cheap pre-paid mobile phone from a supermarket etc..Do not buy the phone or top up phone credit using a Credit Card or a make use of a Supermarket Loyalty Card.Do not switch on or activate the new mobile at home or at work, or when your normal mobile phone switched on (the first activation of a mobile phone has its physical location logged, and it is easy to see what other phones are active in the surrounding Cells at the same time..Do not Register it.Do not store any friends or familiy or other business phone numbers on this dispoable phone – only press or broadcast media or blogger contacts.Set a power on PIN and a Security PIN code on the phone.Physically destroy the phone and the SIM card once you have done your whistleblowing. Remeber that your DNA and fingerprints will be on this mobile phone handset.Do not be tempted to re-use the SIM in another phone or to put a fresh SIM in the old phone, unless you are confident about your ability to illegally re-program the International Mobile Equipment Electronic Identity (IMEI).Just in case you think this is excessive paranoia, it recently emerged that journalists in the USA and in Germany were having their phones monitored, by their national intelligence agencies, precisely to try to tracjk down their “anonymous sources”,Why would this not happen here in the UK ?

   See Computer Encryption and Mobile Phone evidence and the alleged justification for 90 days Detention Without Charge – Home Affairs Select Committee Oral Evidence 14th February 2006

9. Choose your photcopier carefully. Some of the newer, high end photcopiers, especially colour ones, have built in anti-counterfeit US currency routines in the software.Some combined photocopiers and printers are capable of printing tiny yellow seral numbers (e.g. Canon) on each sheet or a special series of dots (e.g. Xerox DocuColor, which makes tracing which machine was used to help to “leak” a document , if the original printout or photocopy is seized, quite a bit easier.Many typewriters, computer printers and photocopiers do leave characteristic wear and tear imperfections on the documents they produce, which a forensics laboratory may be able to match to a machine a work or your personal machine at home, if it is ever seized as evidence in a “leak inquiry”.
10. Redaction or censorship. Adobe .pdf documents have been published online, where some of the personal details e,g, email addresses have been “blacked out” using Adobe .pdf software , which has effectively simply put an extra layer on top of the supposedly censored words. Simply copying and pasting into say Windows Notepad or Wordpad or Word etc. has revealed the hidden data.Anybody publishing such stuff online needs to be aware of this, to protect their Home Office or other sources.
11. Similarly Adobe .pdf documents or Microsoft Word documents, Excel spreadsheets etc. may well have Meta information (see the Document Properties) showing the author of the leaked document (which may in turn lead back to the “leak source”).
12. Microsoft Word Documents, especially draft documents worked on by several people, often have the Version feature enabled. Sometimes examining the changes made to a document, and by whom gives extra clues about policies or coverups etc.The same feature on a whistleblowe’rs own computer, could, of course betray their identity. by adding their default name propertiesit to any document which they edit or view, before passing it on.
13. Older versions of Microsft Word (and other Office products like Excel or Powerpoint) can also betray the MAC Address of the Ethernet card of the computer on which a document was created or edited on, as part of the Global Unique ID data, embedded in the document. Most people will not have changed the MAC addresses of their computers (often possible through software), and there are likely to be inventory records or network logfiles which will pin point which MAC address belongs to which computer either at work or at home.Microsoft do now make available some tools to remove such GUID and other hidden meta data, versios, comments etc. from final published Microsoft Office products. e.g. the Microsoft Office 2003/XP Remove Hidden Data Add-in
14. Photo images. Your source or the “anonymous” publisher of a leaked document online may use a Scanner, but they may, nowadays use a Digital Camera.There is often camera make / model identifying Meta data embedded in the raw digital images taken by many types of Digital Camera. These may be used as “evidence” if your Digiital Camera is seized during a “leak inquiry” investigation.
15. You wish to blank out or censor items in .jpg or .gif or .bmp graphics image.Again, there is a temptation by the uninitiated to use, say, a Photoshop pixellation or motion blur special effect filter. Remember, that these standard filters effects can often be reversed.Since Digital Camera images and Scans of documents are usually much too large for web pages, you might want to reduce the number of colours and probably the size of the images, before publishing them as thumbnails and even as larger images on a blog or website.Remember to apply your Photoshop pixellation etc. after reducing the image size and number of colors, i.e. after you have thrown away some of the identifying data, so as to reduce the chances of the filter effects being reversed.
16. It is possible to literally cut and delete the words from an image or the identifying features of a face or address or car number plate etc. in a photo image.There have been successful guesses / recovery of “censored” words, which have been cut and and deleted from graphics image files, but, not very well, leaving tell tale spaces between words and not completely hiding the presence or absence of the tops and bottoms of individual letters.
17. File deletions.Hiding incriminating evidence (either of your “leak” or of the actual malpractice, incompetence, corruption or other criminality which you are trying to draw public attention to) is not as simple as hitting the delete key on your computer keyboard.At a simple level, some people forget that file deletions can be recovered from the “wastebasket”, and with a hexeditor or recovery utilities, many files can be “undeleted”, simply by changing the first character of the deleted file name, provided that it has not yet been overwritten.”Secure” deletion utilities repeatedly write binary patterns over the deleted filespace several times, to try to frustrate even the more sophisticated magnetic disk surface reading equipment, which can pick up the “shadows” of previous patterns of zeros and ones. However this does take quite a long time to do thoroughly.
18. Deleting corporate emails e.g. Microsoft Exchange is not a simple mayyer either. Very often deleted emails can be simply recovered from the “wastebasket” deleted folder. Anything that has remained on the system for more than a few hours, is likley to have been backed up to other backup storage media, and so may also be recoverable during a “leak inquiry” investigation.
19. Make sure that you delete the Browser History and Temporary Files (Tools / Internet Options / Delete Files / Delete all offline content and Tools / Internet Options / Clear History in the Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser) – it is not just your internet browsing which is monitored, it is yourintranet web browsing, search engine queries and document downloads which are potentially monitored.
20. USB keys and SmartMediaThese are useful to spies or to whistleblowers for smuggling out electronic copies of documents. Given the size of the memory capacity these days, which is often larger than hard disks of only a few years ago, a very large amount of data can be carried.They are small and easy to hide, and can also legitamtely be hidden in cameras or MP3 players etc.Some Government Departments e.g. the Ministry of Defence do tend to use modified operating systems software which controls access to floppy disk drives, CDROM, DVD or USB devices, either totally preventing their use, or logging all such uses to a central audit server.We suspect that not every desktop PC in the Home Office is protected in this way.However, if you are caught with a USB key or MP3 player or SmartMedia memory stick or card, which uses Flash Memory, they are nigh on impossible to securely erase, and there is a good chance that data on them , even if “deleted” can be foreniscally recovered
21. If you decide to meet with an alleged “journalist” or blogger (who may not always be who they claim to be), or if a journalist or blogger decides to meet with an “anonymous source”, then you should switch off your mobile phones, since the proximity of two mobile phones in the same approximate area, at the same time, is something which can be data mined from the Call Data Records, even if no phone conversations have taken place. Typically a mobile phone will handshake with the strongest Cell Base Station transmitter every 6 to 10 minutes, and this all gets logged, all of the time.
22. Similarly choosing a suitable location for a meeting needs some care. Nipping down to a local pub near to to the Marsham Street Home Office complex may be convenient, but your presence and that of the journalist etc. is likely to be noted by some of your work colleagues.

This is not quite a comprehensive list of hints and tips to help with sucessful whistleblowing – do any of our astute readers have any other suitable hints and tips ?

We have kept a few techniques back (email us, using if you want to know more).

None of these tips really matter for a whistleblower, unless it is Top Secret stuff which is being passed on to a politician, journalist or blogger, but they might make it less likely that a whistleblower, or the publisher of their revelations, will be harassed by the Home Office (or other Government Department).

[…]

http://www.spy.org.uk/spyblog/2006/05/home_office_whistleblowers_hin.html

Impressive. Here are some more:

1. Become computer literate. That is the one sure way to almost eliminate the risk of getting caught; know what you are doing.
2. Stop using Windows, and switch to Ubuntu. Windows is an insecure OS. If you use it, you leave yourself open to attacks both published and unpublished. It is widely held that the NSA has backdoor access to all copies of Windows. Ubuntu is free, secure, has higher performance than Windows and you can do everything (in fact far more) with it that you can do with Windows.
3. Install Mozilla Firefox as your browser.
4. Install TOR for Mozilla Firefox if you want to leave an anonymous comment on a website or access anonymous webmail. When you are using TOR, you can leave documents anonymously online for retrieval by journalists.
5. Install Thunderbird as your email client. It is the best email client out there, and there are security plugins for it that are easy to install, like Enigmail, throug which you can manage GPG.
6. Install the Enigmail plugin for Thunderbird. It is simple to do. You will then be able to send and recieve encrypted email seamlessly.
7. Use dropload to send files anonymously. Use this from a disposable email address you connect through via TOR.
8. Use GhostView to sanitize PDFs. You can use GhostView to sanitize PDFs, and even to remove the security from them so that they can be printed and converted into other formats.
9. Create a whistleblower identity for yourself in a separate user account on your computer. Many operating systems set document author fields as the name of the person who is logged in. If you cannot sanitize a document manually, this false name will be used instead of your real name. This goes against No.1 of course. There is nothing like drama to promote your message. Adopting a whistleblower name will propel your story to the front pages.
10. Create a GPG keypair that uses this whistleblower name. Then, when you need to send subsequent messages to the media, they can verify that it is indeed you sending the message, and not a Home Office damage limitation agent. This of course needs a computer literate journalist on the other end of the communication…heh good luck.

Wouldn’t it be great if a newspaper published its own GPG key so that people could communicate with it in private? Which paper do you think would be the last one to publish such a key?

And btw if any of this is wrong, please email me so that I can correct it.

updated January 7^th 2009
updated September 15th 2013

Huge Scale Model of Disputed Border Region of China Found in Google Earth

This is one of the most interesting finds in Google Earth in quite some time. A few weeks ago a first time poster, called KenGrok, at the Google Earth Community (GEC) discovered a very exact scale model of some mountainous region located in the middle of a desolate area in north central China. Seen in Google Earth the huge scale model is .9 km tall by .7 km wide. It is adjacent to what looks like a military base with many camouflaged vehicles. Last week, the same poster found the location the scale model represents – a region occupied by China but claimed by India near north central India. If you turn on the “Borders” layer in GE you will see they are colored red to indicate the dispute. Another GEC member showed how exact the scale model is by taking a screen shot of the satellite photo of the scale model and overlaying it over the real terrain (turn the image overlay on and off to see how exact it is). This scale model was most likely created for military reasons. Someone posted a description of why a military terrain visualization is critical for military purposes.

In the same thread above, several other interesting locations were found close to the scale model:

• Model of an airport? – Post
• Circle with fighter jets – a radar cross section range according to another post

http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2006/07/huge_scale_mode.html#more

The Sunday Times July 23, 2006

Leak reveals ID card ‘risks’ David Leppard

FRESH evidence that Tony Blairs flagship identity cards scheme is in crisis is disclosed in a confidential Home Office report which has been leaked to The Sunday Times. The 32-page restricted document says that the security system protecting the card and the national database could be infiltrated by criminal gangs involved in identity theft and highlights shrinking public support for the scheme. It also says British firms have no current manufacturing capacity to produce the card.

The report, entitled Market Soundings, flatly contradicts recent public reassurances to MPs by Joan Ryan, the minister responsible for ID cards, that the scheme is not facing any problems […]

It cites one manufacturer saying: “In New Zealand the lifetime of the card and chip was reduced from 10 to five years, since holding information for 10 years on a card could be dangerous as criminal activities may be able to defeat chip security within these time scales.”

Ryan’s claim to MPs that the document revealed “widespread public support for the scheme” is also contradicted. Summarising the “main risks” given by the 15 surveyed firms as to why they might not bid to develop the cards and national identity database, the report says: “Recent indications show that the British public’s appetite for the ID card is declining. Association with the resulting programme may compromise a company’s public image.”

Clegg said: “This suggests that government ministers are increasingly living in a parallel universe on ID cards. They claim there’s public support when we know it’s dwindling.

“They claim it’s insulated from fraud when its own analysis suggests it’s much more susceptible to access by criminals. Ministers are displaying King Canute-like powers of self- delusion.” […]

One of the most damning remarks in the new report is the disclosure by some manufacturers that they are in no position to make ID cards. They also said it might not be possible to produce enough iris cameras that will match the user’s “eyeprint” to their digital record on the national database.

The companies asked by the Home Office to give their confidential views on the project included BT, IBM, Motorola, Royal Mail and Siemens. They were also asked if they intended to bid for contracts to develop the system. […]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-2281600,00.html

Some people somewhere have understood what the ID card scheme really means, and together, they are working from the inside to bring it down.

Firstly they are writing these damning documents, and then they are leaking them.

Hear the lion roar!

HEAR the companies shy away as they understand that THEY will also bear the brunt of the swelling HATE that will swirl around the ID Card / NIR.

This bad business is dying…now all we have to do is twist the serrated knife so that it ‘bleeds out’ swiftly.

BBQ staffers are not feeling the love:

The thing I find strange about all this is that often people who write blogs, or contribute to them, somehow think that they are involved in a private forum.

Don’t be stupid. No one thinks this. What they fear is someone from that festering nest of lies and nepotism looking at their blog. They fear it beceause they know that it is possible that BBQ will read the words and take the ideas from their blog, link to them ro print them out of context, and then blatantly misrepresent them in one of their unauthored, unnatributed pay for insertion PR pieces. There is no avenue of redress; BBQ is the face of power, and since everyone (almost everyone) blindly trusts it, it is more dangerous than FOX news since they have ‘back door access‘ to shape opinion in the UK. This is changing however.

If you and your blog are attacked by BBQ, you are the victim. Bloggers are ‘the little guy’. You are the guys putting advertisements that threaten the public on TV. You are the guys calling Bittorrent a tool for perverts and criminals. The fact that you cannot sense this or understand it perfectly, and pretend to be ‘just another voice’ speaks volumes about you and the problem. That is why people think its ‘spooky’ that BBQ is reading their blog, and lets not forget that you are in the pocket of spooks, which in and of itself is ‘spooky’.

It wasn’t the confidentiality issue that bugged me, but that anyone would think that we as programme makers don’t have as much right as everyone else to read what you’re all writing, especially if you are writing about us. So, what do you think? Stick it on your blog and I’ll respond.

Once again, we are not journalists. We understand from the beginning that freedom of speech and freedom of the press is everyone’s right, and not just the right of journalists in the pay of the state. We feel the same level of pain no matter who is killed in a conflict; we don’t reserver our best words feelings and airtime just for people in our profession.

You go on TV every night and with foreknowledge, lie, spin and distort, knowing full well that you are doing so. ({insert Pre-Emption} this is the part where they say, “you pointed to a set of BBQ comments telling us of our error, see? we are unbiased!”. This is the logic of a villain. You deliberately lie, and then say sorry we were wrong, and think thats absolves you.) This is what ‘buggs’ us. You are unnacountable, and even when you are pulled up on your shenanigans, you are utterly unrepentant.

It has to be said that we find it astonishing that you can use Technorati to find all the blog posts about you ‘in seconds’, but you cannot use it or Google to find out the truth about any subject. Actually, we suspect that you can do this, but that when you do, you deliberately distort what you find anyway.

So spare us your ‘we have feelings too’ whining about porr wittle jewemy ‘slumped over his computer’; if you are not doing somehting right, you deserve to be roasted, and that is what you are getting, because you are habitually and deliberately perveyors of lies, distortion and spin, and to add insult to injury, everyone in the UK is forced to pay for the ‘service’.

Thankfully we have Technorati, Digg and the blogosphere in general to act as a vaccination to your lie virii. You can never again lie without being instantly caught, countered and castigated, and the only thing you can do about it is slump in front of your computers. It is going to get worse for you. As more people become computer literate (there is a person in your comments that doesn’t know what a blog is. An increasingly rare creature surely), your ability to spread lies will be curtailed to the point where you will either give up the lie game entirely or start to report only the facts, as you are meant to, but often actually fail to do.

The best part of this is that we are now seeing the end of the role of Editors. We do not need editors. We also don’t need moderators censoring out comments that go against the BBQ line. We have our own massively powerful network of free writers in a self correcting environment where the truth always comes out quickly and efficiently; all you have to do is look. Compared to the very small numbers of people who read the comments on your site this is a force you cannot possibly compete with or overcome. Speaking of the comments, this one hit the nail right on the head:

I think the amount of time you spend thinking about yourselves is totally grotesque and seriously unhealthy for you and for us. […]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/

Amen to that. The amount of stories decrying the lack or attacks on freedom of the press is amazing. Whenever ‘ordinary people’ are killed in a conflict, one tone, (similar to the one used when recounting the rainfall for the day) is taken, but when a journalist is killed, all of a sudden, the level of tragedty is 1000 times greater. It’s sickening, but now tolerable because you are on the wane, you know it, we know it, and we will all benefit from your permanent elimination.

The comments on this story say it all:

I’ve voted Labour all my life but this is really the end. Their intrusion into our liberty is frightening and they have ground away the last of my support.

– Niki, Reading, UK

So Bliar won’t even tell us if Leo has had the MMR jab, but all our kids details will be on a register for Lord know’s who to access. Where are the Civil Liberties groups when you need them?

– Sarah, France

When Germany tatooed the Jews there was a human outcry, now our govenment want to bar code it’s citizens. We’ll be known as ‘Barcode Britain’. It’s a good job this didn’t happen when I was a child, I’d have been put into care years ago!

– Alison Johnson, Lanark.UK

Yet again the state is grabbing total control of peoples lives. The outrage however is the lack of opposition by the Conservative and Lib Dem parties to stop this happening. If they truly believed in liberty and freedom they would be shouting from the rooftops, holding the government to account.

– John Galloway, Stanton Upon Hine Heath, Shropshire

Let’s hope that the opposition parties can put a stop to this Dictatorship as soon as possible.

– Fred, Northants

What is this Country coming to? The whole of Britain should take a stand and do something about this!

– Mel, Oxford, UK

No surprises, coming from the same control-freak government that seeks to force every law-abiding citizen to be fingerprinted like common criminals and inform the police when moving house, like a registered sex offender!

– Oliver Coombes, London, England

Completely ridiculous. This is undesirable, unworkable and unethical!

– Frances, Redhill, Surrey

My question to the people of Britain is are you going to let the government and its officials get away with this? Is it not time adults took back control of their families from the state?

– Mabon Dane, Haverhill, UK

What has happened to the spirit of Great Britain? From my side of the Atlantic it seems the British people are oblivious about losing their freedoms. It must be that the majority of the citizens are comfortable giving up their responsibilities to Big Brother. Little by little you are losing your individuality, effectively making the State your dad, mum, boss, etc. I am not anti government, I am for good government, and good government is limited government. I guess there is a childlike comfort to have someone or something looking out for you. But it comes with a big price to pay…your freedom. Maybe I’m totally wrong here, and if that is the case will someone please enlighten me as to what I’m missing.

– George Ruggiero, Whitney Point, New York USA

I can’t believe the over bearing restrictions of personal freedom I see coming out of England. Is there something in the water? What other excuse for the behavior of supposedly intelligent politicians? Either the birth rate will drop even further or couples will start leaving the country.
Next move? Inspectors at the borders to prevent pregnant women from emigrating.

– Joyce B. Goetz, Westlake Village, CA USA

This is outragious! British citizens should take a cue from France for once and riot in the streets.
Don’t depend on civil liberty groups to take the government to task as they are even more left than Labour. No wonder the West is slowly sinking and losing all it’s greatness it once had.
China Inc. will be smiling in the wings.

– John Main, Auckland, New Zealand

Children need one register to keep them safe – the Child Protection Register. It works very well. Tragically, the government is to abolish this by 2008. This register focuses professional attention on the few children identified as at high risk of child abuse – there is very good reason to be monitoring them and their families to keep the children safe from harm. Most children are well cared for and to electronically monitor their progress is an affront to good parents and carers and a terrible invasion of human rights. Please campaign to save the Child Protection Register. Vulnerable children depend on you to contact your MP.

– Liz, london UK

Papers please. What are we coming to? This is only the beginning of complete monitoring of all citizens. Trouble is, as long as we only complain about this in bars and take no action, we are eventually going to have to accept complete state control. Whatever happened to “never again”?

– John, Darwen, England

Britain seems about time for a revolution. They’re just doing this so that in 30 years, they can start tracking these babies as adults as they build their careers… the entire country is becoming a sick social experiment where the government is a scientist, tracking, analyzing and trying to play god with the human race.

– Matt, Carroll NH, USA

How can this even be done? To monitor whether a child is eating 5 portions of fruit and vegetables a day? How is that even possible?
I don’t see how this could be implemented in any practical way, just more bureaucracy and more paperwork and more confusion. Also more jobs created by the government. It’s scary to think the govt. will give so many people power over the lives of families. This isn’t going to help children at risk, it’s going to prepare an entire generation to obey orders and to be, essentially, helpless in the long run.

– Desha Devor, Washington, DC, USA

What happens if you refuse to give details?

– John De St Croix, London England

[…]

The Daily Mail

The hate is swelling in them now.

Look at all of these comments!

It looks like a rough ride for Bliar and the Neu Labour fascist enterprise. The best comment, the most satisfying, exiting and hope inducing one is:

“What happens if you refuse to give details?”

FINALLY someone somewhere (and this person CANNOT be the only one) is waking up, and saying, “fuck that for a scream, I’m just not going to do it”. Awesome.

I would suggest however, that the way forward is not to ‘refuse to give details’ but to simply ignore any and all requests for information. When you refuse, you actually provide feedback to the system, which is then recorded by and which engrosses the very system you are trying to strarve of information.

Imagine this; they send out 16 million letters to parents up and down the country, and not one of them replies. What are they going to do?

There is NOTHING that they can do. If no one reples, and no one responds, they are dead in the water. They might of course, try and cobble this information from schools or other sources, but that may be illegal, and fundamentally they need everyone’s cooperation. If you don’t give it, they die.

The reporting we are seeing from the BBC and the other broadcasters is racist; there is no other word to describe it. The journalists’ working assumption is that Israeli lives are more precious, more valuable than Lebanese lives. A few dead Israelis justify massive retaliation; many Lebanese dead barely merit a mention. The subtext seems to be that all the Lebanese, even the tiny bleeding children I see on Arab TV, are terrorists. It is just the way Arabs are.

That is why the capture of two Israeli soldiers is more newsworthy to our broadcasters than the dozens of Lebanese civilians dying from the Israeli bombing runs that have followed. The eight Israelis killed on Sunday are worth far more than the 130-plus Lebanese lives taken so far and the hundreds more we can expect to die in the coming days.

There is no excuse for this asymmetry of coverage. BBC reporters are in Lebanon just as they are in Israel. They can find spokespeople in Lebanon just as easily as they can find them in Israel. They can show the far vaster scale of devastation in Beirut as easily as the wreckage in Haifa. They can speak to the Lebanese casualties just as easily as they can to those in Israel.

But they don’t – and as a fellow journalist I have to ask myself why.

My previous criticisms of British reporters over their distorted coverage of Israel’s military assaults in Gaza a few weeks back appear to have struck a raw nerve. Certainly they provoked a series of e-mails – some defensive, others angry – from a few of the reporters I named. All tried to defend their own coverage, unable to accept my criticisms because they are sure that they personally do not take sides. They are not “campaigning” journalists after all, they are “professionals” doing a job.

But the problem is not with them, it is with the job they have to do – and the nature of the professionalism they so prize. I am sure the BBC’s Wyre Davies cares as much about Lebanese deaths as he does about Israeli ones. But he also knows his career at the BBC demands that he not ask his bosses questions when told to give valuable minutes of air time to an Israeli police spokesman who offers us only platitudes.

Similarly, we see James Reynolds use his broadcast from Haifa at noon to show emotive footage of him and his colleagues running for shelter as Israeli air raid sirens go off, only to tell us that in fact no rockets landed in Haifa. That nonevent was shown by the BBC every hour on the hour all afternoon and evening. Was it more significant than the images of death we never saw taking place just over the border? These images from Lebanon exist, because the Arab channels spent all day showing them.

Matthew Price knows too that in the BBC’s view it is his job as he stands in Haifa, after we have repeatedly heard Israeli spokespeople giving their version of events, to repeat their message, dropping even the quotes marks as he passionately tells us how tough Israel must now be, how it must “retaliate” to protect its citizens, how it must “punish” Hezbollah This is not journalism; it’s reporting as a propaganda arm of a foreign power.

Can we imagine Ben Brown doing the same from Beirut, standing in front of the BBC cameras telling us how Hezbollah has no choice faced with Israel’s military onslaught but to start hitting Haifa harder, blowing up its oil refineries and targeting civilian infrastructure to “pressure” Israel to negotiate?

Would the BBC bother to show prerecorded footage of Brown fleeing for his safety in Beirut in what later turned out to be a false alarm? Of course not. Doubtless Brown and his colleagues are forced to take cover on a regular basis for fear of being hurt by Israeli air strikes, but his fear – or more precisely, the fear of the Lebanese he stands alongside – is not part of the story for the BBC. Only Israeli fears are newsworthy.

These reporters are working in a framework of news priorities laid down by faceless news executives far away from the frontline who understand only too well the institutional pressures on the BBC – and the institutional biases that are the result.

They know that the Israel lobby is too powerful and well resourced to take on without suffering flak; that the charge of anti-Semitism might be terminally damaging to the BBC’s reputation; that the BBC is expected broadly to reflect the positions of the British governmment if it wants an easy ride with its regulators; that to remain credible it should not stray too far from the line of its mainly American rivals, who have their own more intense domestic pressures to side with Israel.

This distortion of news priorities has real costs that can be measured in lives – in the days and weeks to come, hundreds, possibly thousands, of lives in both Israel and Lebanon. As long as Israel is portrayed by our major broadcasters as the one under attack, its deaths alone as significant, then the slide to a regional war – a war of choice being waged by the Israeli government and army – is likely to become inevitable.

So to Jeremy Bowen, James Reynolds, Ben Brown, Wyre Davies, Matthew Price, and all the other BBC journalists reporting from the frontline of the Middle East, and the faceless news executives who sent them there, I say: you may be nice people with the best of intentions, but shame on you.

[…]

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/cook.php?articleid=9320

The fact of the matter is we don’t need BBC, FOX or anyone else to tell us that the artic is cold. As soon as you understand this, then you won’t care about wether or not the BBC is spinning ID cards on the behalf of contractors, uncritically spreading lies about ‘the middle east’ or any other despicable shenanigans that they are getting up to.

I wish Aljazeera had english subtitles….then we could actually get some perspective.

“Power is very rarely limited to the pure exercise of brute force…. The Roman state bolstered its authority and legitimacy with the trappings of ceremonial – cloaking the actualities of power beneath a display of wealth, the sanction of tradition, and the spectacle of insuperable resources….Power is a far more complex and mysterious quality than any apparently simple manifestation of it would appear. It is as much a matter of impression, of theatre, of persuading those over whom authority is wielded to collude in their subjugation. Insofar as power is a matter of presentation, its cultural currency in antiquity (and still today) was the creation, manipulation, and display of images.”

Jás Elsner in his recent book Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph