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Focus: Scared new world

The security forces are being given dramatic new powers to fight terrorism,
as predicted by 'The Independent on Sunday'. The Government is testing
biometric ID cards and building a huge database that will reveal our lives
at the touch of a button. Cole Moreton looks into the future and finds it's
already here

Independent on Sunday 11 January 2004

You want to go home, but you can't. The Army has sealed off your street
without warning and evacuated everyone in it. Your home is only a few yards
away beyond the cordon, but there is no chance of entry: the soldier in the
gas mask has orders to shoot anyone who crosses the line. He will not tell
you where your family is, or why an armoured vehicle is shunting your car
across the road, shattering its windows.

"What is your number?" Distressed, you have forgotten. They think you are
being evasive. But they already know your unique personal identity number,
one of the 58 million that give the authorities instant access to the
private details of every citizen. The police officer opposite has learnt
your age, where you were born, what your parents did for a living, where
you live, and the names of the people who live with you. He knows the job
you do and how much you are paid for doing it. He knows what you owe in
council tax, the child-support payments you make, and the number of times
your daughter has been excluded from school. He knows you haven't got a
television licence, although you've got a television. He knows you suffer
from asthma and have had a hernia operation. He even knows your former
partner left you because you had an affair. All this information is
available from public-sector records co-ordinated into one vast database..

This is not a fantasy.. The scenario you have just read is based on plans
and legislation announced by the Government last week and expected to come
into operation very soon. The Civil Contingencies Bill published last
Wednesday will give the police and Army sweeping powers to create exclusion
zones and enforce them. The proposals have been modified after protests
from civil liberties groups but still allow the security forces to make
arrests on looser grounds of suspicion than usual, to ban people from
travelling and stop gatherings, as well as requisitioning property and
taking over stations and airports. Ministers will be able to suspend Acts
of Parliament, take control of major financial institutions and declare
bank holidays in the event of an emergency, defined as "an event or
situation which threatens serious damage to human welfare, the environment
or the security of the UK or a place in the UK". This could include war,
terrorism, contamination of land with "harmful biological, chemical or
radioactive matter or oil", flooding and "disruption or destruction of
plant life or animal life".

Meanwhile, the Office for National Statistics has just been given
permission to start work on a national computerised register of the
population, for which every resident of the UK will be given a personal
identity code to replace the National Insurance number [...]

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=480010

This is just the beginning.

The problem with all of this has nothing to do with emergency situations, but has everything to do with everyday snooping by every civil servant, who will have the power to investigate you on a fine grained level.

Your local council will be able to do this. Any police man will be able to do this, without a reason. Your information will be sold on a regular basis, wether it is illegal or not.

Imagine; you get stopped by the police, for a "routine check". You put your thumb into his portable scanner, which is attached to his mobile phone. He immediately has all of your details. ALL of them. You have an Oyster card, but you are smart' you know that Oyster tracks all of your movements on public transport, so you opted to get the £3 "anonymous" version. It doesn't make a difference. Your face is photographed every time you use a bus or tube station. The police officer simply asks for your photo to be checked against the Mayor of London's database of all Oyster users that are not full users. They find you entering Embankment Station on the occasion of your first use of the card. They correlate your face with the number on your Oyster card. They now know everywhere that you travelled on both the busses and the underground since you bought the card, and can retrieve pictures of you entering and leaving each station if they want to.

The police officer asks you where you were on such and such date. You don't remember? That is suspicious; your Oyster data says you were in a place where there were some crimes. Down to the station while we "exclude you from our enquiries".

They find you to be innocent, but this encounter goes on your permanent record, forever attached to your image and number. Whenever someone looks you up, by one of the illegal services used to do background checks, they will see that you were in a police station being investigated for a nasty crime.

Lest we forget, everything you buy to read will also be recorded forever. Lets say you just happen to be leaving the underground when a bunch of dog-on-a-string anarchists are smashing up a McDonalds. You bought a copy of a book decrying fast food culture from Compendium book shop (of course, anyone who shops there is INSTANTLY put on a shit list :] ). The police stop your car for another of the increasingly frequent "routine checks". They sweep you because you were at the scene of a riot, and you need to be excluded from their enquiries. You read books from Compendium about fast food culture. You read books about culture. You are now on the "to watch" list.

This is not bullshit. This is not paranoia. This is going to happen for certain, unless the databases the governments hold are required by law to be separated, and that no unique identifier is ever used to pin down individuals. In this way, whilst it might be possible for extra-legal bodies like the high level security services to break the law and complete a private dossier on you, it will be impossible for a cop in the street do do it much less a busy body in your local council, or a journalist out to smear you, or your most despised employer.

All of these new "measures" will not stop any type of criminality. Their only use is to create a system whereby every action of every person is under the scrutiny and control of the state. This is the true goal of the numbering system. Local councils will use it against you. The police will use it against you. Your employers will use it against you. Everyone that provides a service to you will be compelled to obey the system and hand over details of your activities, or face penalties. You will not be able to speak, spend or spit without it going on your permanent record.

This system, which will collect information about you constantly, every hour of every day until you die, will feel like an electronic STASI clamping your mind and your perception of the world until you and your generation are smashed down into a paste of blood and bone and brain. Just ask any East German what it was like under the STASI eye. No one trusted anyone. All were presumed to be spying for the STASI. In our case however, our very actions will be spying on us; there will be no need for a network of informants because the act of a person living out his life will be the informer, as the active surveillance network trawls your existence and puts it all a keystroke away for anyone to read at will.

There is no reason on earth why anyone should put up with the imposition of this system. During the "cold war" when the threat of infiltration and war was actual, there was no need to implement such far reaching controls. During the IRAs bombing campaigns no one ever said that it would be necessary to number every person in the UK to protect this island from Jerry Adams.

Some planes smashed into the Twin Towers. Thats a bad thing. But its not the end of the world, and the world has not "changed since 911". There is no "new reality", only the same one that we used to live with. These new powers, the numbering system, these "measures" are simply wrong, on every level and in every way. The insane fear that is constantly pumped into the agenda is absolutely artificial. This has to be stopped.

I say No to this fear, and I say No to these new measures and the numbering of the British people. Whatever problems may exist with other countries in the world, they are not going to be solved by destroying the way of life of free people. People in other countries need to solve their own problems, and the free people need to remain free.

Only a fool will go along with this insanity in the hope that someday it will all be overturned, like the old suss laws or the dreaded pass laws of South Africa. You can realistically wait your whole life for such changes to happen, Only a fool would sacrifice his life in this way. Absolute refusal to comply is the only option open to free people who wish to remain free. A line must be drawn beyond which the state cannot go. Of course, they have already crossed that line, but this is the straw that will break the camels back.

It is astonishing to me that no one compares the numbering of people to the numbering of "undesirables" in the second world war. There is absolutely no difference between then and now, save that efficiency has increased by orders of magnitude. The number isn't worn on the flesh, but it is just as indelible, as are all of the records attached to your number. The lack of imagination on the part of journalists and people in the street is staggering. The scenario of total control has been spelled out again and again, in fiction, modern and decades old, in examples of peoples lives ruined by records that haunt them forever...how many times and in how many ways does it have to be said?

A woman who had her identity stolen found that she could not function financially, because her name was on so many shit lists. She was able to create a new, clean identity for herself, and start again. Now, in a country where your number is tied to you forever, any error by you or someone pretending to be you, wether successful or not, will be against your name. Permanently. You will not be able to change identities and start afresh, because you cannot change your fingerprints. Even if you get a new identity number and name, your fingerprints will always give you away forever. This cannot happen if your fingerprints are not used to identify you. It is also easier to repair damage if all the databases containing information on you are not linked.

Human beings are born with rights. These rights exist wether you know about them or not, or wether or not the tools to exploit and take away your rights exist or not. For example, the right to have a private conversation is born with you, but before the telephone, no one knew that this right even existed. The facts about your life, what you do, where you go, what you read, where you spend your money; all of these facts are private data that belong to you. It is your right, a right that was born with you, to keep this data to yourself if you choose, and to prevent people from collecting this data, selling this data and using it against you.

In the light of this revelation, it is obvious that these databases, the ones proposed and those that are in use all over the west are absolutely immoral and should be illegal. They violate your rights as a human being, and while the governments continue to brazenly do this, you have every right to protect yourself from this systematic abuse, and you are morally obligated to refuse to contribute to the running of the systems that abuse your human rights.

On This Day - December 8