Nearly a quarter (22 per cent) of UK employees admit to having illegally accessed sensitive data such as salary details from their firms employer’s IT systems. More than half (54 per cent) of 2,200 adults polled during a YouGov survey said they’d forgo any scruples to do the same, given half a chance, according to a Microsoft sponsored survey that points to a culture of internal snooping and casual identity theft in offices across Britain […]

Reg

Presumably it is safe assumption that 22% of people accessing NIR data will use their privileges to have a quick check on people they know (and seemingly 33% if they are unknown) – even without the incentive of payment by criminals to pass on such information.

Of course if you aren’t registered then there’s no record to snaffle.

Died on Monday.

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Problems with the distribution of federal disaster assistance after hurricanes Katrina and Rita caused potential fraud and waste topping $1 billion, an audit by the Government Accountability Office found.

Debit cards given to people displaced by the storms were improperly used to buy diamond jewelry, a vacation in the Dominican Republic, fireworks, a $200 bottle of champagne at a Hooters in San Antonio and $300 worth of “Girls Gone Wild” videos, the audit found.

According to the GAO, $1,000 from a FEMA debit card went to a Houston divorce lawyer, $600 was spent in a strip club and $400 was spent on “adult erotica products,” all of which auditors concluded were “not necessary to satisfy legitimate disaster needs.”

The GAO concluded that at least $1 billion in disaster relief payments by the Federal Emergency Management Agency were improper and potentially fraudulent because the recipients provided incomplete or incorrect information when they registered for assistance.

[…]
The GAO also found that FEMA lost track of 750 debit cards, worth a total of $1.5 million.

After inquiries from the GAO, FEMA recovered about half of that money, which had not been distributed by JPMorgan Chase, the bank hired to run the program. But the agency still cannot account for 381 cards, worth about $760,000 total, which JPMorgan Chase says it distributed, according to the GAO.

[…]

GAO investigators estimated that 16 percent of FEMA’s disaster relief payments were made to people who submitted invalid registrations, to the tune of about $1 billion. However, because the figures were calculated using a statistical sample, the agency said the amount could range from $600 million to as much as $1.4 billion.

[…]

Among the problems found with the registrations, according to the GAO study:

• People signed up for assistance using Social Security numbers that didn’t exist or belonged to other people.
• Aid applications contained bogus addresses for damaged property, or gave addresses for damaged property where the applicants did not live when the hurricanes struck. In one case, FEMA paid nearly $2,360 to a man whose allegedly damaged property was in a cemetery.
• Payments were made to people who listed post office boxes as their damaged residences.
• People submitted duplicate registrations, which FEMA did not detect.
• More than 1,000 registrations used the names and Social Security numbers of prison inmates. According to the GAO, in one instance, FEMA paid $20,000 to a Louisiana prisoner who listed a post office box as his damaged property.
• As part of its audit, the GAO used an undercover registrant who submitted a vacant lot as a damaged address.

FEMA paid the registrant $6,000 and even made payments after being notified by one its own inspectors, as well as an inspector for the Small Business Administration, that the damaged property could not be found, the GAO investigators found.

The GAO concluded that the potentially fraudulent payments occurred because FEMA did not validate the identity of registrants and the locations and ownership of purportedly damaged property before it began making payments.

While conceding that FEMA acted out of the need to provide assistance quickly, GAO investigators concluded the agency’s own policies required additional verification before continuing payments.

The GAO study also found FEMA improperly provided rental assistance to people who were staying in hotels paid for by FEMA because the agency did not require hotels to collect Social Security numbers and FEMA registration information.

Without that information, FEMA could not verify if people were staying in hotels when they applied for rental assistance.

And because that information doesn’t exist, GAO auditors said they could not determine how many people might have double-dipped — or how much it cost the government. […]

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/06/14/fema.audit/index.html

My emphasis.

Stepping back, you can se how this can be used as an argument for REALID. With it, people will be inextricably tied to their street addresses, social security numbers and ‘identities’ by their thumbprint. If you want to collect your money, you have to be in the system. If you want to buy something, you have to be in the system. And the system is the ultimate arbiter.

Now in a potential cashless society, where the government mandates that you must be in the system in order to be ‘economically active’ it is abundantly clear how REALID / UKNIRID will be able to track everything that you do. They will use the same methods that used to know about the specific purchases made in this relief programme; just ask. There will be no need for statisical samples in order to see how many people are doing what; it will be a simple (comparatively) SQL query.

Anyone trying to roll out these systems will be smacking their lips at this story, which acts as both a test case for rolling out electronic money to millions of people, but also as a demonstration of why the biometric net must be put in place, “to prevent fraud”.

‘Mother nature’ has kindly provided the pretext for the rolling out of this FEMA programme, and note how it is being tested on the poorest of the poor, who are 1000 times more likely to be able to get a hold of the SSN’s of prisoners and be well versed in the subtle arts of ‘gettin one over the man’.

This article does not mention how much JP Morgan charged the government to run this system. No doubt they made sure that they would not be penalized for any fraud committed by ‘their’ users, otherwise you can guarantee that the system would have been air tight.

51°29’54.86″N, 0°20’33.15″W

Hmmmm what is under here?

John Podesta is the president and CEO of the Center for American Progress in Washington and former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton

William S. Sessions is the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation

As technological advances turn the unimaginable into the everyday, ensuring the continued protection of civil liberties, privacy and security becomes ever more complicated.

A growing number of communities have installed – or are considering – public video surveillance systems. These efforts gained momentum after 9/11, both as anticrime and antiterrorism measures. Philadelphia is no exception. In a May 16 referendum, residents overwhelmingly approved the installation of a video surveillance system.

Many public surveillance systems employ the latest in high-technology features, creating powerful and intelligent networks of cameras. Residents generally welcome the perceived increase in their security, and often seem largely untroubled by any potential intrusion on their privacy rights or civil liberties. Most of us seem to accept the notion that individuals have no legitimate “expectation of privacy” once they leave their homes and step into the public streets. But even in public places, isn’t there a point where we would draw the line?

What if local governments used these systems to create “digital dossiers” on residents, tracking the time, date, and location of each individual’s movements? What if an individual were filmed each time he or she entered a psychiatrist’s office or an infertility clinic? Or an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting? Or the meeting of a controversial religious or political group?

Even if we were not breaking any laws, wouldn’t we be concerned if our every movement were recorded and stored in a digital database, readily searchable by the government? What if that information could be shared with anyone who asked for it?

We believe it is possible to establish useful surveillance systems that also protect residents’ privacy rights and civil liberties – but communities should incorporate such protections into their systems from the outset, and remain vigilant to ensure they are both effective and operating within legal limits. […]

http://www.centredaily.com/mld/centredaily/news/opinion/14803735.htm

You are mistaken.

Either the streets belong to the public or they belong to the state. If you allow state owned cameras to watch your every move when you are in public, then that space belongs to the state, and you are a prisoner.

We all would like to restore a pre-9/11 sense of security to our communities. But in our attempts to do so, we must be as smart as the new technology we seek to install. Like any law-enforcement tool or tactic, video surveillance systems should have clearly defined uses, employ specific procedures, and be subject to oversight. They should be adopted thoughtfully, evaluated continuously, and constrained by appropriate checks and balances.

We can be both safe and free.

My emphasis.

Aaahhhh. The Old America. The America of The Eagles and Bruce Springsteen. You all long for it now that you have rushed headlong into the fascist nightmare. You are beginning to understand at a gut level how wrong it has all gone.

Good.

Allow me to qoute:

DR. BRODSKY
Very soon now the drug will cause the subject to experience a death-like paralysis together with deep feelings of terror and helplessness. One of our earlier test subjects described it as being like death, a sense of stiflingand drowning, and it is during this period we have found the subject will make his most rewarding associations between his catastrophic experience and environment and the violence he sees.

Alex retching violently and strugglingagainst his strait jacket.

INT. ALEX’S ROOM – LUDOVICO – DAY

DR. BRANOM
Well, that was a very promising start. By my calculations, you should be starting to feel alright again. Yes? Dr. Brodsky’s pleased with you. Now tomorrow there’ll be two sessions, of course, morning and afternoon.

ALEX
You mean, I have to viddy two sessions in one day?

DR. BRANOM
I imagine you’ll be feeling a little bit limp by the end of the day. But we have to be hard on you. You have to be cured.

ALEX
But it was horrible.

DR. BRANOM
Well, of course, it was horrible. Violence is a very horrible thing. That’s what you’re learning now. Your body is learning it.

DR. BRANOM
You felt ill this afternoon because you’re getting better. You see, when we’re healthy we respond to the presence of the hateful with fear and nausea. You’re becoming healthy that’s all. By this time tomorrow you’ll be healthier still.

What america needs is a healthy dose of The Ludivico Treatment. Each and every one of them. Then they will NEVER have the stomach to allow their government to murder other people en masse. Their problems will have been permanently ended. No need for surveillance cameras to stop terrorists, because there will be no one who wants to kill americans in retaliation. American towns and cities will be like they were in ‘The Rockford Files’, ‘The Honeymooners’…you can fly anywhere with the same ease as jumping on a routemaster bus. You can go anywhere without being watched. A free country full of free people. And proud of it.
Thats what the real america was like. That’s the america they want to bring back.

If you ever get the chance, I strongly reccomend that you watch the episode of ‘The Outer Limits’ called ‘O.B.I.T.’; it dates from the ‘real america’ era. You won’t be sorry that you took the time to track it down watch it.

(CNN) — A man using a fake identification card was able to enter the Homeland Security Department headquarters in Washington, he said, even though the United States government considers the type of Mexican-issued card he used invalid.

Retired New York City policeman Bruce DeCell, who had arranged to meet with DHS officials last week to lobby for document security, told CNN he purposely used a forged version of identification that Mexican consulates in the United States issue to their nationals living here illegally.

Undocumented Mexicans can use the cards at banks and other institutions that accept them. The cards are not valid for entry into federal government buildings.

DeCell is a board member of a group called “9/11 Families for a Secure America,” which he formed with others after losing his son-in-law in the 2001 terrorist attacks.

I wrote about these morons previously, but can’t find the link.

They are the imbeciles that believe biometric ID for all in the use will help ‘prevent another 911’. Why are they morons? Firstly, they are proposing something that will not prevent further attacks. Secondly, they are driven by pure pain, and not reason, and this does not give them the right to further ruin america and make everyone in it suffer just because they are suffering. It is very sad that they have lost loved ones, and the world would be a better place had it not happened, but their grief does not give them carte blanche to flush americans and their liberties down the toilet.

If anything what they should be calling for is an immediate cessation of all us imperialist running dog activities in the middle east. That is the ONLY way you can GUARANTEE that america will never be attacked again.

His group advocates stricter controls against illegal immigrants and wants to ban use of the “matricula consular” cards.

This is just total nonsense. Mexcans have nothing to do with americas flying carpet troubles…or maybe these people belive that Mexico ‘had something to do with 911’. You never know, these Fox watchers are amongst the most stupid creatures in the known universe.

“The card is an unsecure document that could facilitate terrorist money and travel,” he said.

I call bullshit. No card can predict your intent. No card can be ‘secure’. But you know this.

DeCell said a friend in California bought him the fake Mexican card for $20.

Cheaper than UKNIRID ay?!

“I sent him a passport-size photo and the spelling of my name, and he had the card made for me on the street,” he said.

Days before his meeting with DHS officials, DeCell was asked to furnish his name, Social Security number and birth date, so they could be compared by security personnel to a valid form of picture identification. The building security accepted his matricula card, even though it listed a false date of birth, he said.

Trained people are better at judging who is a threat and who is not than any computer. What these fools want is for machines to make all the judgements for us. This move is totally against human culture and history, and is actually dangerous. As we all know, bombers use legit ID to move around. When I say ‘all’ obviously I dont mean ‘all’.

He was allowed entry into the building after walking through a metal detector, according to a statement posted on his group’s Web site.

He was not a threat. Even if he was a terrrst with a fake ID (of the kind that did NOT do Madrid or ‘911’), on this occasion the system would have worked because they could see that he was ‘clean’. This proves that ID cards are ‘security theatre’ and are not needed to make government buildings or planes or anywhere safe. Had he carried REALID and been a REALTERRORIST then there would have been an asplosion.

“It’s obscene in a post-9/11 world that they did not match my name against the fake [date of birth],” DeCell fumed. “They’re spending a lot of money [on security] for nothing.”

The only obcenity here is that this group of grieving murderers of the american dream continue to spew their illogic and lies to a brainless press that doesn’t have the wit or nerve (out of misplaced sympathy) to challenge them and thier nonsense. The obcenity is that they are pushing for the ruin of america for no good reason instead of calling for the measures that will solve the real problem once and for all. They are actually doing the work of those who want to eliminate america and american style freedom from the face of the world.

That is the very definition of ‘obscene’.

Jarrod Agen, a Homeland Security spokesman, told CNN, “In response to this incident, we are following up on the allegations, and we seek to ensure that an incident like this does not occur again.

“At no time was there a threat to the DHS building or its personnel,” he said.

DeCell said he has used the card for years in airports and other sensitive locations, but was still astonished that he was able to use it to enter the headquarters of Homeland Security, the federal agency charged with determining secure IDs.

“It’s very frustrating,” he told CNN. “I’m an unpaid citizen who had a loss on 9/11, and they’re not doing what they need to do to prevent another 9/11. It’s very discouraging for me. […]

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/06/12/dhs.fakeid/index.html

You are a sad fool.

Kingsland Road panorama. Though only a short sample.

Led to this site, a compilation of images of every listed building in England.

11 listed buildings on Fossgate, York. And it’s only about 100m long.

Police seek new powers to prevent paedophiles hiding data

By Richard Ford, Home Correspondent

THE Government is proposing new penalties to stop terrorists and other criminals using technology that prevents police accessing information on a suspect’s computer.

Terrorists do not use encryption to hide their data. This is a lie. This is why the laptop that was aledgedly found by security forces was able to be read. Remember the ‘terrorists using steganography’ hysteria from a few years ago? Read it:

The rumors about terrorists using steganography started first in the daily newspaper USA Today on February 5, 2001.

The articles are still available online, and were titled “Terrorist instructions hidden online”, and the same day, “Terror groups hide behind Web encryption”. In July of the same year, the information looked even more precise: “Militants wire Web with links to jihad”.

A citation from the USA Today article: “Lately, al-Qaeda operatives have been sending hundreds of encrypted messages that have been hidden in files on digital photographs on the auction site eBay.com“. These rumors were cited many times – without ever showing any actual proof – by other media worldwide, especially after the terrorist attack of 9/11.

For example, the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported that an Al Qaeda cell which had been captured at the Via Quaranta mosque in Milan had had pornographic images on their computers, and that these images had been used to hide secret messages (but no other Italian paper ever covered the story).

The USA Today articles were written by veteran foreign correspondent Jack Kelley, who in 2004 was fired after allegations emerged that he had fabricated stories and invented sources.

In October 2001, the New York Times published an article claiming that al-Qaeda had used steganographic techniques to encode messages into images, and then transported these via email and possibly via USENET to prepare and execute the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack.

Despite being dismissed by security experts [3][4], the story has been widely repeated and resurfaces frequently. It was noted that the story apparently originated with a press release from “iomart” [5], a vendor of steganalysis software. No corroborating evidence has been produced by any other source.

Moreover, a captured al-Qaeda training manual makes no mention of this method of steganography. The chapter on communications in the al-Qaeda manual acknowledges the technical superiority of US security services, and generally advocates low-technology forms of covert communication.

The chapter on “codes and ciphers” places considerable emphasis on using invisible inks in traditional paper letters, plus simple ciphers such as simple substitution with nulls; computerized image steganography is not mentioned.

Nevertheless public efforts were mounted to detect the presence of steganographic information in images on the web (especially on eBay, which had been mentioned in the New York Times article).

To date these scans have examined millions of images without detecting any steganographic content (see “Detecting Steganographic Content on the Internet” under external links), other than test images used to test the system, and instructional images on web sites about steganography. […]

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

And there you have it. This story is yet another lie trolled out by brainless journalists with nothing to write on a slow day. There is no counter argument, no real information, just rabid whipping up.

Senior police officers have warned ministers that their investigations into serious crime are being thwarted by safety technology, which conceals data held on computers. Terrorists and paedophiles are using devices available on the internet for as little as £20 to keep data on their computers hidden from the authorities.

This is proof that the journalist who wrote this doesn’t know what he is talking about, and did not take the time to consult someone who does know what they are talking about.

No one with a single brain cell uses ‘devices available on the internet for as little as £20’ this is a lie. Everyone who encrypts their data does so with free software tools like PGP. None of these people are terrorists.

The encryption technology is being used by “terrorists and criminals to facilitate and conceal evidence of their unlawful conduct so as to evade detection or prosecution”, according to a Home Office consultation paper.

This is another lie. If the police have reason to think that a crime has been committed, they will not need new powers to demand the keys to decrypt someones photos in order to catch them. All they need to do is to clandestinely break into the users house and install keystroke capture dongles or software on the criminals machine. They will then be able to capture any password that they need to decrypt the criminals files.

This would mean that law abiding citizens will not be penalized for putting their email into an envelope, or encrypting their laptop drives to prevent data theft should the laptop go missing.

The people who wite these consultaiton papers and the unqualified journalists who unquestioningly report the stories are computer illiterate to a man. It is absolutely sickening.

Encryption enables plain text to be turned into a non- readable form. The person who receives the encrypted text uses a “key”, or password, to return it to its original form. By refusing to disclose that to police, suspects can conceal any criminal behaviour.

No, by encrypting your information you can keep anyone from getting to it. This has nothing to do with ‘concealing criminal behaviour’. Once again, if the police have enough evidence to go to a man’s house and confiscate his computer, they should have enough evidnce to arrest and charge him. Chicken and egg anyone?

The consultation paper said: “Over the last two to three years, investigators have begun encountering encrypted and protected data with increasing frequency.”

What were the methods of encryption? Without this information, it is hearsay and computer illiterate nonsense. For all we know they may have come across password protected word files, and interpreted this as ‘encryption’. Reports without details are totally useless, except if your aim is to whip up hysteria.

The Home Office is planning to introduce powers that will require a person to turn encrypted information into a readable form, and is proposing harsher penalties for those suspected of child sex abuse.

If I am correct, we already have the dreadful RIPA could it be that this journalist is talking about the introduction of clause three?

Under the current law a person suspected of possessing indecent photographs of children faces only two years in prison for failing to disclose to police the key to encrypted material. But they could spend up to ten years in prison for possessing the indecent image.

Police say that the low maximum jail term for failing to hand over the key provides an incentive to plead guilty to that offence as, with early release, the suspect could be free after a year.

If the police already have a reason to suspect someone is guilty of this heinous crime, they should put in place an operation to intercept the perpetrators computer in a state that will allow them to read everything, ie, by logging his keystrokes in advance of any raid. The stupidity of these people is staggering, but not at all surprising; look at what just happened to those two poor saps who had their house turned over and one of them shot for no reason at all? How can we expect these keystone kops to be able to use keystroke loggers and surveillance equipment to catch bad guys? We cant. But what we can expect is more miscarriages of justice as they bumble their way into the 21st Century, and the last thing we need to do is give them more power than they can handle.

David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, said that he welcomed the consultation paper on increasing the sentence. He said: “What the criminal is trying to do by using this encryption is to avoid the full sentence. In essence, the failure to provide the encryption key is an admission of guilt.”

Computer illiteracy – its not just for labour anymore!

Honestly, the tories are still as thick as shit, and its a great pity and a big PITA that we have to support them thanks to the NIR.

Ray Wyre, a child protection expert, said: “If people really intend to get away with it then the move to encryption was always going to be the next issue for the police and government”.

This is nonsense. This moronic journalist should have consulted a COMPUTER AND ENCRYPTION EXPERT not a child abuse expert, since this paper is about encryption and not child abuse. How totally pathetic!

He said that police used software known as Encase, which allowed them to look at images on the computer, but with encryption they are unable to access the data. “In technology the offender has always been ahead of the police.

Take a look at the first google result for ‘Encase‘ (clearly a distortion of ‘In Case’). It costs $425. What the HELL are they doing using crappy software like this? Its is astonishing; you mean to say that they do not have a single person on their staff that can mount a windoze drive under linux and then run a simple perl script to sort all the files into directories for inspection? Is it really that hard? And just imagine, these are the guys who will be bringing evidence against totally innocent people!

“Encryption is a problem for the police because, if you cannot access the data, you cannot find out the extent of a person’s criminality or the danger they pose to society.”

So, the secure wipe features of the many free tools out there should be immediately outlawed, since a perpetrator could use this to completely erase evidence from their drives. Oh, I’m sorry, you’ve never heard of secure erase!

Margaret Moran, the Labour MP for Luton South, cautioned that the development of encryption would provide further opportunities for criminals. She told MPs when the Sexual Offences Act was being debated: “The concern is that the advent of strong encryption technologies gives criminals the opportunity to hide their criminal activities or to conceal other evidence.

Here comes new labour, same as the old labour.

“If a paedophile has on his computer files, e-mail messages, pictures or other material that discloses a serious sexual offence against a child — an offence for which he knows he could face a prison term of ten years or more — he could encrypt the lot and, if investigated by police, simply refuse to hand over the key to decrypt the files, thus making unavailable evidence of a serious offence.”

If one of these monsters has been sending email, the police should have been collecting the evidence while it was in transit, or by posing as monsters (of that type) so that they can have the evidence delivered to them directly. How stupid people like Margaret Moron are, how deep is the well from which they draw their stupidity?

Until the internet was invented, encryption was rarely used by the public. Encryption garbles data using irreversible mathematical functions. It is the encoding of data so that it cannot be read by anyone who does not know the password that decodes it. […]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,29389-2221574,00.html

Didnt he just say this? Clearly this is a cut and paste article done whilst rushing off to lunch. Bad journalism. Bad journalist.

http://www.speedcam.co.uk/gatso2.htm

This is what the future of ‘the Surveillance Society’ will look like; broken cameras in the streets, overgrown by weeds because the contracting companies no longer exist to clean them up.

When people have had enough, there will be a ‘day to close the eyes’ where tens of thousands of people destroy surveillance cameras, when the London congestion charging system is physically destroyed by people who have simply ‘had enough’.

I can see this day as clearly as I see the keyboard in front of me.

You might think your personal data is safe, secured under computerised lock and key, and fenced by the Data Protection Act with its sanctions against release of private data. Especially, surely, that which the government holds.The reality is that everything has its price. Last month, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the state-funded watchdog for personal data, published a report, What Price Privacy?. The title’s question was answered with a price list of public-sector data: £17.50 for the address of someone who is on the electoral register but has opted out of the freely available edited version; £150 to £200 for a vehicle record held by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency; £500 for access to a criminal record. The private sector also leaks: £75 buys the address associated with a mobile phone number, and £750 will get the account details.

These were the prices charged by private investigators caught by the ICO and police. Their clients included insurers, creditors and criminals trying to influence jurors, witnesses or legal personnel. Newspapers were a big source of business: the ICO says it knows the names of 305 journalists who have used such investigators.

The investigators obtained the data from corrupt insiders or via “blaggers” who impersonated officials and others to obtain personal information, often gathering an apparently unimportant fact, such as a mother’s maiden name, in one phone call in order to get a much more important one in the next.

In the report, the ICO called for prison sentences of up to two years for the illegal buying and selling of personal information. The maximum fine is £5,000, and courts often impose much less. “The fine is no deterrent to them,” says Jonathan Bamford, assistant information commissioner. One investigator used by local authorities as well as finance firms to find debtors was invoicing £120,000 a month. “People make so much money, they can get a fine and drive away from court in their Porsche,” says Bamford. The Department for Constitutional Affairs says it is reviewing the sentencing tariff. […]

Patient records

In the absence of tougher laws, the ICO sees the potential for much worse. “The government’s plans for increasingly joined-up and e-enabled public-sector working make the change even more urgent,” the report says. Medical professionals are already concerned about the risks of electronic patient records, which they think will be unpopular with patients who are uneasy about other sectors of government getting at them (see ‘Doctors voice concern over patient records’, below).

Indeed, the government has been playing fast and loose with some people’s data, according to a European court of justice ruling at the end of last month. The court said the 2004 deal between the EU and the US, under which airlines had to provide data about passengers travelling to the US, was unlawful because it breaches privacy rules. As a Guardian investigation last month (http://tinyurl.com/gxx5l) showed, the data sent as a result of that law means a discarded airline ticket stub can be enough to carry out identity theft.

But sometimes the problem lies inside government departments. In January, it emerged that the identity details of 8,800 Network Rail staff – who are civil servants – were stolen in 2003-04 and used to make fraudulent online claims for tax credits, costing the government millions of pounds. Alarmed at the rising levels of fraud through the online service, the government shut it last December.

Such examples are not encouraging about the government’s ability to protect or police the valuable data about us. Yet more is to come in the government’s largest project, which will join all the data about us and put it in a single place – creating a unique description of each of us for every government department. Enrolment on the National Identity Register, to be established by the Home Office under the recently passed Identity Cards Act, will, from 2008, be compulsory when renewing a passport – and compulsory for everyone some time after the next election (due by 2010), if the next government backs it.

The register can include a wide range of personal data, an audit trail of where and when the entry has been accessed, and reference numbers for other systems, including national insurance, driving licence and passport numbers, allowing for substantial joining-up.

The act imposes prison sentences of up to two years for those who illegally disclose information from the register. The ICO – which has reservations about other aspects of the scheme – takes this as its model for all illegal use of personal data.

But Phil Booth, national coordinator for the campaign group No2ID (www.no2id.net), says a two-year sentence will not deter criminals wanting to reach and influence jurors. “The problem is having all that data in one place, so it becomes trivially easy to compromise the system,” he says. He compares personal identity to the Titanic: “They are talking about linking all the watertight compartments, so if one is holed, you go to the bottom of the sea.” […]

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1792102,00.html 

My emphasis.

Hmmmmm. This is an interesting article. We already know about how the NIR could be abused, so I wont go into that aspect.

The structure of this piece is rather familiar. Do you know what I am talking about?

It is also interesting that the Guardian is using Tinyurl in the body of its articles; no, I didnt put it there, its actually on the site!

This article shows that someone is starting to understand the true nature of the NIR, and why it is being created. Your personal data is literally valuable in the money sense.

I have said before that your data belongs to you and is your real property. Furthermore it should not be sold collected or transferred without your permission and a royalty being payed to you.

Imagine getting a %60 royalty every time someone sells your name, address or other details? Every time you get junk mail, you would be paid! But I digress.

What this article fails to do is to turn the subject around and say, ‘you should not do this on any account’. This is as important as a subject can get, and in a circumstance like this, a firm stance needs to be taken to avoid disaster.

Data Theft Affected Most in Military

National Security Concerns Raised

By Ann Scott Tyson and Christopher Lee

Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, June 7, 2006; Page A01

Social Security numbers and other personal information for as many as 2.2 million U.S. military personnel — including nearly 80 percent of the active-duty force — were among the data stolen from the home of a Department of Veterans Affairs analyst last month, federal officials said yesterday, raising concerns about national security as well as identity theft.

The department announced that personal data for as many as 1.1 million active-duty military personnel, 430,000 National Guard members and 645,000 reserve members may have been included on an electronic file stolen May 3 from a department employee’s house in Aspen Hill. The data include names, birth dates and Social Security numbers, VA spokesman Matt Burns said.

Defense officials said the loss is unprecedented and raises concerns about the safety of U.S. military forces. But they cautioned that law enforcement agencies investigating the incident have not found evidence that the stolen information has been used to commit identity theft.

“Anytime there is a theft of personal information, it is concerning and requires us and our members to be vigilant,” Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said. He said the loss is “the largest that I am aware of.”

Army spokesman Paul Boyce said: “Obviously there are issues associated with identity theft and force protection.”

For example, security experts said, the information could be used to find out where military personnel live. “This essentially can create a Zip code for where each of the service members and [their] families live, and if it fell into the wrong hands could potentially put them at jeopardy of being targeted,” said David Heyman, director of the homeland security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

Another worry is that the information could reach foreign governments and their intelligence services or other hostile forces, allowing them to target service members and their families, the experts said.

“There is a global black market in this sort of information . . . and you suddenly have a treasure trove of information on the U.S. military that is available,” […]

WaPo

My emphasis. An SQL file containing one million records could easily fit on a USB Flash Drive the size of your thumbnail. When they say ‘an electronic file’ this is what they are talking about.

The article says that the information could be used to find out where military personnel live. The same holds tru obviously, for the data of plebians ordinary citizens. Our safety is just as compromised by this sort of theft as the safety of military types. We can be ‘targeted’ just like anyone else. Why is there increased concern for the personal information of grunts over and above that which is displayed for the man in the street.

We are made to feel concerned that ‘the information could reach foreign governments’.

What the Fuck?

The criminal, mass murdering, regime changing, perverted, CIA/NSA terrorist controlled, government of the USA (Under Satan’s Authority), mandated that the citizens of the EU have their data harvested on a totally bogus pretext, and then keeps this data and uses it for just these criminal ends, and we are meant to think that it is a ‘worry’ when their data is to be spread around the world?

Forgive me if i wish nothing but ill to these people, these HYPOCRITES, these DOGS who now have to suffer what their own government has done to MILLIONS of innocent travellers. And lets not forget, that the animals in the us government collected not just people’s names and addresses, but:

4. Is sensitive data included in the PNR data transfer?

5. Will my PNR data be shared with other authorities?

PNR data received in connection with flights between the EU and the U.S. may be shared with other domestic and foreign government authorities that have counter-terrorism or law enforcement functions, on a case-by-case basis and under specific data protection guarantees, for purposes of preventing and combating terrorism and other serious criminal offences: other serious crimes, including organized crime, that are transnational in nature: and flight from warrants or custody for the crimes described above.

PNR data may also be provided to other relevant government authorities, when necessary to protect the vital interests of that passenger or of other persons, in particular as regards to significant health risks, or as otherwise required by law. [..]

LUT

and lets not forget; name, address, flightnumber, credit card number, and choice of meal.
Once again, I cannot understand how ANYONE who knows this is happening can WILLINGLY fly to the USA…but I digress.

Clearly if the NIR is rolled, out, a disaster like this WILL happen again and again, and the entire contents of the NIR will fall into the hands of criminals. Unlike having your credit card fall into the criminal hands of uncle sham, your fingerprints cannot be changed. You will be exposed forever, and in that eventuality, nothing less than the removal of relying on fingerprints for the purposes of ID will save the millions of compromised persons from impersonation.
If you dont enter the NIR of course, you will not be exposed to this threat. You should not, under any circunstances, register with the NIR should it come into being.

and, just in time for this post:

Information from the UK’s controversial DNA database is being given to foreign law agencies, it has emerged.

The Home Office has revealed that other nations have made 519 requests for details from the database since 2004.

All of the requests were granted and the Liberal Democrats fear there are not enough checks on the system.

It emerged in January that 24,000 under-18s never cautioned, charged or convicted are on the database, which was established in 1995. […]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/5056450.stm

and if the NIR comes on line, you can expect this sort of data sharing to proliferate dramatically.

Apalllung. YES APPALLUNG!

It is now time to think about the unthinkable. Americans who have been raised to love their country and trust in their leaders’ commitment to democracy need to be considering–even planning for–emigrating to escape before full-blown tyranny arrives in the United States.

You and Your Family Can Be Trapped in a Matter of Hours

Don’t be lulled into complacency because neither you nor your friends have been hauled out of bed by the Gestapo in the middle of the night. The heavy hand of an unrestrained government is already being felt among some targeted groups, and the mechanisms necessary to institute a totatlitarian state that will impact the daily lives of all Americans are already in place. Within a matter of hours, the power of the imperial federal executive can be invoked to freeze your assets and prevent you from traveling within or out of the United States.

Do you still believe that your money is your own, and that you can do with it what you want? Then you have a lot to learn about how federal control of your money has grown in the last 15 years. Many ordinary Americans, people who are far from being terrorists or even political activists, have already encountered the Bank Secrecy Act and the features of the Patriot Act that have made it even more restrictive. Benedictine sisters at the Holy Name Monastery in Florida couldn’t understand why their checks were bouncing back in 2005. A call to the bank revealed that their account had been frozen–by the bank–because one 80 year-old signatory on the account had not provided her Social Security number as required by the Bank Secrecy Act and the Patriot Act.

Federal law now requires banks to provide strict oversight of customers’ accounts, ostensibly to counter money laundering and terrorist funding. Banks must first collect extensive information about depositors so that they have clear evidence of customers’ identities, and then share this information with federal agencies. They must file Suspicious Activity Reports with FinCEN whenever there is “unusual” activity out of the customer’s normal pattern of behavior in addition to the more widely known Cash Transaction Reports filed whenever there are cash deposits or withdrawals in excess of $10,000. Finally, they must respond quickly with information and other “appropriate action” whenever a customer’s name is on the “Control List” formed from information collected from federal and local law enforcement agencies.

Banks are anxious to avoid the wrath of the federal officials who regulate them closely, and are quick to share information and even freeze accounts if there is any question about a customer. John Byrne, an official of the American Bankers’ Association, testifying before the House Financial Services Committee in February, 2002, was proud of bankers’ efforts to satisfy federal requests:

We have also been diligently responding to the various lists that the government has been distributing to either block or freeze accounts or to notify law enforcement that a particular individual has an account with a specific institution.

If a federal or local law enforcement agency decides to put you on the “Control List,” you will lose access to your bank assets within hours.

You probably already know something about the lists that can prevent you from traveling by air. The F. B. I. created the original “no-fly” list in 1990, but the Patriot Act created a new agency, the Transportation Security Administration, to implement the list after 9/11. At the beginning of September, 2001, there were 16 people on the list. Now, European airlines, who must check the list before boarding passengers bound for the U. S., report it contains over 80,000 names.

There are actually two lists. One is a strict “no-fly” list of individuals who are not allowed to board planes at all. The larger list is the “selectee” list. People who turn up on the selectee list have their boarding passes marked with an “S” which signals security personnel to pull them out of line and subject them to stricter searches and often extensive questioning. Those who have missed flights because of begin detained or prevented from flying altogether include political active individuals on the left and right and critics of the Bush administration, intelligence services and the Iraq war.

The TSA and the agency that actually compiles the list, the Transportation Security Intelligence Service, refuse to divulge the sources for the names added to the list. They do admit that the number of names increases “almost daily” as various federal and possibly local agencies submit information.

Again, if an agency decided to submit your name, this computerized system would be able to block you from being able to travel within minutes.

If you think you can evade the TSA by getting to Canada and flying from there, think again. Transport Canada expects to have a no-fly list in place by the end of the year despite the objections of Canadian civil liberties groups and the Canadian Islamic Congress.

Nations that move toward totalitarianism follow a common series of steps as they eliminate freedom. While rhetoric aimed at target groups may begin with “love it or leave it,” before long authoritarian states enact restrictions on emigrees taking assets out of the country and even on emigration itself. In the United States, those restrictions are already in place, but are currently enforced selectively against a fairly small number of people to avoid arousing too much controversy. Modern computer technology enables authorities to use the laws and systems now in place to expand the application of these restrictions far more widely to groups and individuals identified through the government’s vast, illegal data gathering effort of the past few years. Those who hear themselves targeted as “traitors,” “fifth columnists,” “degenerates,” etc.–in other words, Muslims, gays, atheists, leftists, antiwar activists, dissenters and others–should realize that they could find themselves blocked from leaving the country even before other elements of a fascist state are put in place. […]

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/emigration.php

Real Americans don’t run. They fight!

http://www.smartalecmusic.com

Hi.

I was browsing through through some of my regular blogs and saw this. It made me think of you.

From the comments section in response to a post in the Policeman’s blog.

http://coppersblog.blogspot.com/2006/05/mainline.html

“The point of having things like ASBOs is to have as many things as possible against the law. This moves all the discretion into the hands of the government.

In a reasonable system, one could simply avoid sanctions by not stealing/murdering/raping and all would be well. Under the “nearly everything is illegal” system, most crimes are not punished. However, since one cannot avoid illegality, the state can come after you whenever you displease it. It becomes a system for enforcing loyalty to the powers that be rather than a neutral system of justice that protects life, liberty and property. The resulting epidemic of crime is seen as inconsequential- it does not threaten the established government – it even makes people more dependent upon it for protection.

In earlier times, this would have been called “tyranny.””

In the mighty France, all of the workforce, Civil Service and even the police have refused to obey the abolition of the bank holiday that would have not occured today.

When the police of this country finally grow some grapefruits and decide that ‘enough is enough’, and that they will only enforce the laws that directly affect the population that they serve, ie, crimes against the person and crimes against physical property, THEN we can take posts like this seriously.

Like we saw in the CCTV footage from the TPB raid, it only takes a handful of swine to disrupt the activities of millions of innocent people. The real policemen, the ones that are not swine, filth, ‘le flick’ etc, the ones that are there actually doing the true work of policing are all damaged by the actions of these dirty pigs, who don’t even bother to wear a uniform while they stomp on you with their boots.

That they recieved a direct order to raid that ISP is not an excuse to do it. Niether is it an excuse to violate the TPB lawyer by DNA swabbing him. They, all police, must have an intact moral compass that allows them to say, “no, I will not obey this order, because it is illegal”, or at the very least, compells them to call a neutral lawyer before carrying out orders that are clearly dubious if not totally bogus. Should they be ordered to carry out a raid on an emergency basis, they should have recourse to the law, where they can sue their superiors for leading them into an illegal action. Where there was ample time to check the legality of a raid, like the TPB one, all the officers should be liable for punitive damages. The police MUST BE GOT UNDER CONTROL, and if they dont have a moral compass, then they must either be sacked or put in fear of their livelyhoods so that there is a real disincentive to carrying out illegal orders, like the animals who raided TPB, and simultaneously took out the websites of 300 people UNRELATED TO TBP.

Local planning authorities are giving identity criminals “all they need” by posting applicants’ personal details online, according to the UK’s fraud prevention service Cifas

The organisation said planning authorities were publishing applicants’ personal details, including names addresses, telephone and signatures, on the web as part of their planning consultations.

Reg

What more can be said?

The NIR setup will have the same flaw – a fraudster (or their agent) will be able to access personal details across a network, just replace signatures for ‘unchangeable biometric information’ and it there you have it, a recipe for disaster.

The ONLY insurance is not to register on the NIR, neither intentionally nor through renewal of linked documents (i.e. your passport) after the next couple of months.

The data breaches noted below have been reported because the personal information compromised includes data elements useful to identity thieves, such as Social Security numbers, account numbers, and driver’s license numbers. A few breaches that do NOT expose such sensitive information have been included in order to underscore the variety and frequency of data breaches. However, we have not included the number of individuals affected in such breaches in the total because we want this compilation to reflect breaches that expose individuals to identity theft as well as breaches that qualify for disclosure under state laws.

For tips on what to do if your personal information has been exposed due to a security breach, read our guide.

The catalyst for reporting data breaches to the affected individuals has been the California law that requires notice of security breaches, the first of its kind in the nation, implemented July 2003.
www.privacyrights.org/ar/SecurityBreach.htm
www.privacy.ca.gov/recommendations/secbreach.pdf

This chronology below begins with ChoicePoint’s 2/15/05 announcement of its data breaches because it was a watershed event in terms of disclosure to the affected individuals. Since then, the “best practice” has been to disclose breaches to individuals nationwide — in a sense, adopting California’s notice requirement nationally.

In the meantime, at least 23 states have passed laws requiring that individuals be notified of security breaches. For a list of states enacting security breach and freeze laws, visit the Consumers Union web site here:

Security breach notice laws: www.consumersunion.org/campaigns/Breach_laws_May05.pdf
Security freeze laws: www.consumersunion.org/campaigns/learn_more/002355indiv.html
State security freeze bills pending in 2006: www.consumersunion.org/campaigns//learn_more/002906indiv.html
And visit the PIRG site here: www.pirg.org/consumer/credit/statelaws.htm.

Congress is considering several bills this year in which security breach notices would be mandated nationwide. See http://thomas.loc.gov. See also EPIC’s bill-track list, www.epic.org/privacy/bill_track.html.

Here are other sources for security breach information:

• Adam Shostack’s blog, www.emergentchaos.com/archives/cat_breaches.html
• Attrition, www.attrition.org/errata/dataloss.html (includes links to news articles and offers free list-serve on the latest breaches, http://attrition.org/security/dataloss.html)
• World Privacy Forum, Security Breaches in the Digital Medical Environment (scroll to section D of testimony), www.worldprivacyforum.org/testimony/NCVHStestimony_092005.html
• Security Breach Resources (Chris Walsh)
  www.cwalsh.org/BreachInfo

[…]

A HUGE list of breaches follows. Go to the site to read it!

[…]

TOTAL 83,114,945

[…]

http://www.privacyrights.org/ar/ChronDataBreaches.htm

And there, once again, you have it.

Britain does not have a unique personal identifier like the american ‘Social Security Number’ (SSN). The British are therefore safe from this type of security breach.

If the UK rolls out the ‘National Identiy Register’ (NIR) then every single person living in the UK will have their Identity compromised in the way described by that website. It is not a question of ‘if’ but of when.

Britian should not introduce the NIR. The British are safer from the threat of identity theft if they do not have a single all encompassing number issued to them.

You must under no circumstances enter the NIR should it be introduced. That is the only way you can be sure that your identity will remain safe.