Frightening People Into A Police State

Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5, has said that "we risk a police state" with the climate of fear sown by the government.

Rimington, speaking to La Vanguardia, said: "It would be better that the Government recognised that there are risks, rather than frightening people in order to be able to pass laws which restrict civil liberties, precisely one of the objects of terrorism: that we live in fear and under a police state,” she said.

Her intervention comes just as the Home Office is about to public plans for the police and security services to monitor all of our emails, as well as telephone and internet activity. Since leaving MI5, Rimington has also spoken out about ID cards and on 42-day detention.

Airline Pilots And ID Cards

Airline pilots are on the front line of the ID card battle: "Our members are incensed by the way they have been targeted as guinea pigs in a project which will not improve security. We will leave no stone unturned in our attempts to prevent this, including legal action to force a judicial review if necessary."

- A profile of Tasmin Omond, one of the protesters who scaled the Houses of Parliament to protest against a third runway at Heathrow.

- The £303 trillion time bomb. Go back to sleep, Britain, Gordon Brown stood back and let all of this develop, but your government is in control. Go back to sleep, Britain, here's another season of X-Factor! Here's 56 channels of it!

- A victory for asylum-seeker health-care.

- 42 writers attack the idea of 42 day detention without charge: "We don't know how lucky we are to live in a nation where police officers have all of six weeks to discover why they've locked us up."

And finally, how do they come up with these top 100 lists anyway? Andy Atkins and Barbara Stocking not in the top 50?

The All-Seeing State

Jenni Russell:

"Would a rebel politician stand up against the prime minister if he knew security services had access to the 100 text messages a week he exchanged with a woman who wasn't his wife? ... Mobile network records can already place us, at any time, within 100 yards of our phone's location. The ID database will record every time we go to a hospital or a benefit centre, fill in a prescription or a draw a large sum from a bank ... Most alarming of all, for its breadth of knowledge about us, the NHS database will give hundreds of thousands of staff the ability to discover when we lost our virginity, the drugs we're on, our mental health history."

"None of this information will be safe, because we know three things about the mass collection of data. The first is that the authorities will mine it where it suits them. The second is that the data will be lost. And the third is that it will leak."

Ed Miliband's Shadow Minister

David Cameron has named Greg Clark as the shadow minister for "Energy and Climate Change" ... Clark was the MP behind the Private Members Bill to stop gardens being defined as brownfield land. He is also a former director of policy (2001-2005) for the Conservatives. I don't remember any ideas about feed-in tariffs and microgeneration emerging at that time. His assistants are Greg Barker (shadow minister for climate change) and Charles Hendry (shadow minister for energy).

Other items:

- If you're a roofer, you may want to check out Solarcentury's booth at Interbuild (the NEC, 26th to 30th October).

- UK consumers use food at a rate that represents six times more land and sea than is available to us.

- Sure, ID cars are going to be totally secure.

- Give coal the boot!

Finally, Help the Aged and FoE are taking the government to court over their fuel poverty policies.

Ruling Against Lib Dems On Direct Calling

The Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, has issued an enforcement notice. I wonder if an apology will be forthcoming on their national website. The enforcement notice gives them 30 days to stop using the calls, and any breach of the notice would be a criminal offence.

See also: Radio 4 calls the Lib Dem office with an automated call

Full Steam Ahead For ID Cards

Labour is pushing ahead with its plans for national ID cards. Suppliers for the design and production of ID cards could be shortlisted in the next few months.

You can read about some of the problems behind the entire idea of ID cards here.

And Meg Hillier, a Home Office minister, said today that children as young as 14 could be required to carry one. Referring to the entire scheme, Hillier said: "It is full steam ahead ... In fact, the prime minister wanted me to do it quicker than it was possible."

See also: Youth revolt against ID card propaganda website

Statewatch -- "The State Of Things To Come"

"Every object the individual uses, every transaction they make and almost everywhere they go will create a detailed digital record. This will generate a wealth of information for public security organisations, and create huge opportunities for more effective and productive public security efforts." (EU Council Presidency paper)

Monsanto's Record Profits In A Food Crisis

- Monsanto, which has a virtual monopoly of US GM cotton, corn seed, and soya, has just made record profits in the middle of a world food crisis. So, naturally, they are increasing their herbicide prices by more than 50%, and the price of its soya and corn seeds by 35%.

- Water policy, with McCain being from down-stream in Arizona, could play a key role in the swing state of Colorado.

- Someone's trying to steal our clothes.

- I've lost count of the data losses in the last year of the Brown government. This time, they've lost:

- the names, addresses and dates of birth of around 33,000 offenders in England and Wales with six or more recordable convictions in the past 12 months on the Police National Computer
- the names and dates of birth, but not addresses, of 10,000 prolific and other priority offenders
- the names, dates of birth and, in some cases, the expected prison release dates of all 84,000 prisoners held in England and Wales

The Guardian points out that: "if it falls into the wrong hands it could leave some criminals with spent convictions open to retribution at the hands of victims, raising the possibility of the government being sued."

Our Identities Are Not Secure

When the national DNA database went live in 1995, only the DNA of convicted offenders could be held on it. Thirteen years on, in area after area, we see "mission creep" -- the holding of phone calls, web page requests and text messages for 12 months, or the retaining of 39,000 DNA profiles of 10-18 year olds who were never cautioned or charged.

The idea that a DNA database is secure, that 12 months worth of ISP information or phone calls is secure, isn't credible.

In July 2006, the government introduced higher fees for biometric passports, 29% higher in fact, promising that it would be the most "secure ever produced by the UK." Instead, the encryption on biometric passports was cracked by January 2007. Passports are supposed to last 10 years, but the security protection only lasted 6 months. And it's not unaffordable. All you need is some software, a £40 card reader, two £10 radio frequency chips, and a publicly available programming code, and you can fake a passport in an hour.

Here's another example of how ID checks are not being used for security purposes. They are being used for control. Even four years ago, groups were speaking out about the construction of a global culture of surveillance.

£5.5 billion will be spent on the identity card scheme. Why spend £5.5 billion on a scheme which may facilitate criminal fraud, terrorism and potential state abuses of human rights?

David Davis And 42 Day By-Election

The short-term effect of David Davis running in a by-election, on the issue of 42-day detention, is a stunt. Labour only received 13% of the vote in his constituency in the last election, and the Lib Dems aren't running a candidate against him.

The long-term effect could be a solidification of Lib Dem-Tory relations. Nick Clegg was happy, in a constituency which was in the top 10 of Lib Dem targets, to stand aside nearly immediately.

Do we need a national re-examination of how we are sliding into a society with CCTV cameras, detention without trial, Belmarsh, and complicity in rendition? Do we need to look again at more than 2,000 Asbos being issued to children between 1999 and 2006, with some young children given Asbos lasting up to 10 years? Do we need to halt our expansion of prisons, and re-examine the per capita prison population that leads the industrialised world?

Sure.

But the Tories have been in favour of prison expansion and Asbos.

So, in terms of David Davis leading a debate on the direction of law and order/civil liberties policies in British society, he's not a perfect white knight.

Labour's Lesson From Crewe By-Election

Harriet Harman was on the Today programme this morning to talk about the by-election defeat.

She was asked about the "crass language of authoritarianism", but she reiterated Labour's support for "tough immigration rules" and "biometric ID cards for foreign nationals."

Labour seems intent on moving the country towards harsher and harsher positions on immigration. This seems inane in an era where we will face tens of millions of climate change refugees over the next few years.

More broadly, Labour has set out positions (on ID cards, on 42-day detention, on trial by jury, on the criminalisation of youth) that move the mood of the country towards an anti-civil liberties point of view.

Labour has had 10 years to develop a new way of addressing youth involvement in crime (investing in communities, empowering youth), to develop a foreign policy so we don't need to worry about terrorism so much (42-day detention, ID cards).

Instead, they have retreated, arguably since Tony Blair was Shadow Home Secretary, and two boys in the Bootle Strand shopping centre in Liverpool took a toddler by the hand and led him away to his death. Labour thought that right-wing rhetoric was appropriate for moving the country towards social democracy.

They are finding out the hard way that, whilst the Tories are opposed to ID cards and the trial by jury changes, right-wing Labour rhetoric is paving the way for a right-wing Tory majority government.

You might be a Green .... Crime

You might be a Green if you agree with the following statements:

- The Green Party wants to encourage responsible use, not binge use, of alcohol by both adults and young people. We need more police in drinking areas on Fri and Sat night. We want to encourage the serving of alcohol in smaller measures -- all these specials on triple sambucas. We'd increase penalties on drink driving. Better late-night public transport means less alcohol-related crime. We'd review late licenses that are going awry (a lot of the complaints coming out of the "nighttime economy" in Earlsdon)

- We need projects that engage high-risk youth

- We need to crack down on gun crime by introducing a tough licensing system, and work to cut off the supply of guns to the UK

- We should ban the sale of replica guns

- Where appropriate, offenders should be brought together with their victims, so that they can be made aware of their impact on people’s lives, and, where possible, can make reparation for their crimes

- We can tackle drug-related crime by increasing the provision of treatment for addiction and breaking the link between drugs and criminal activity

- Homophobic and transphobic crimes should be dealt with on a par with racist crimes. Police forces should adopt and implement action plans on homophobic and transphobic hate crimes.

- We need more community police, holding community surgeries, and who are mobile (on teams of bicycles)

- 70% of crime is solved by "community-led intelligence" -- local people telling police information. Instead, the recent emphasis has been on investment in "listening" and "talking" CCTV. Cameras can't apprehend people if you're getting beat up. Cameras can only record what's going on

- Cameras already record us 300 times a day. With CCTV, ID cards and databases, we’re sleepwalking into a surveillance society.

Listening CCTV In Coventry

CVOne will be installing listening CCTV cameras, to be used on the High Street.

The cameras will be able to detect conversations 100 yards away. The technology comes from Holland, but Holland has stricter privacy laws than the UK – there, they can only record voices in short bursts. Last year, the UK’s Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, spoke out against the use of listening CCTV in public spaces.

The rhetoric is that we're in a slow slide into a surveillance society.

It's not that slow.

We already have video monitoring of classrooms, fingerprinting in schools, and plans for a national ID card database. GPs doubt the security of the new "spine" of the NHS IT network, fearing it will be vulnerable to hackers and unauthorised access by public officials from outside the NHS and social care. We have the monitoring of our buying habits (supermarket cards), and the monitoring of our travel habits (Oyster, in London).

Privacy is being given away, bit by bit, and there has been a lack of public consultation over the introduction of listening CCTV in Coventry.

News Roundup - 22nd February 2008

- Hamburg has its city elections on Sunday, and "The Left" party is expected to take 9% of the vote. Across Germany, their support is at 12%. With a platform of a minimum wage, renationalisation of the energy sector, a super tax for the rich, and troops out of Afghanistan, Die Linke is taking advantage of people disillusioned with the Social Democrats (in coalition with the right nationally) and the German Greens (who are split down the middle on German deployment to Afghanistan).

- The government has refused to publish the full report, by Deloitte and Touche, on the risk to security breaches of the £224m ContactPoint child protection system. ContactPoint would list the name, address and date of birth of every child in England and contact details for their parents, doctors and schools. In a five page summary, the Deloitte report said that: "risk can only be managed, not eliminated, and therefore there will always be a risk of data security incidents occurring."

- Johann Hari makes the case for strong government regulation:

Dispersed consumer choices are not going to keep the climate this side of a disastrous temperature rise. The only way that can ever happen is by governments legislating to force us all – green and anti-green – to shift towards cleaner behaviour. Just as the government in the Second World War did not ask people to eat less voluntarily, governments today cannot ask us to burn fewer greenhouse gases voluntarily . It is not enough for you to change your bulbs. Everyone has to change their bulbs. It is not enough for you to eat less meat. Everyone has to eat less meat. It is not enough for you to fly less. Everyone has to fly less. (And yes, I hate these facts as much as you do. But I will hate the reality of runaway global warming even more.)

Gordon Brown And 2008

Gordon Brown looks set to continue the Blair tradition of endlessly confronting his own backbenchers.

- He's going ahead with a "new generation" of nuclear power stations. Britain does not have a repository for high-level nuclear waste, and there is a limited amount of high-grade uranium in the world, which will be drained by nuclear expansion elsewhere.

- Brown plans to greenlight the expansion of Heathrow. This despite a poll, released by HACAN on 30th December, that 19% of Britons want airport capacity reduced, and 52% favour a standstill on new capacity.

- Brown feels that "nobody should fear ID cards," despite his government's lack of caution in handling our personal data.

- Brown wants to find a "compromise" on extending detention to 42 days without charge.

Brown repeatedly frames his policy choices as "the difficult long-term decisions, even if at times it may be easier to do simpler or less difficult things."

The hard thing to do would be to oppose the nuclear power lobby, as well as the oil, gas and coal lobbies, and do what Germany has done and stand behind a policy to support renewable power on a nationwide level.

The hard thing to do would be to tell Britons taking short-haul trips that they can't go from flying twice a year to flying eight times a year and think it has no impact on carbon emissions. The hard thing to do would be for Gordon Brown to take the train when it's feasible to take a train to Paris/Brussels and then a night train to a morning meeting.

The hard thing to do would be to avoid the creeping installation of a surveillance society and reject ID cards, or to stand up for civil liberties and stick with 28-day detention.

In short, Brown is taking a series of centralising decisions, that remove control over our energy production, over our information, our civil liberties. He's taking the easy options, not the hard ones of his propaganda.

Alistair Darling And Datagate: Day 3

From two missing CDs, we have a long-term problem, especially for young people affected:

Helen Lord, from Experian: "The children whose names, addresses and dates of birth have been lost are also at risk, especially those who are between 15 and 17 years old now. The fraudsters will wait until they turn 18 and start applying for loans, credit cards, mobile phone contracts and other credit products in their names. That could have a catastrophic effect on their ability to get on the housing ladder, rent a flat, obtain their first credit card, obtain a loan for their first car, even open a bank account."

Anatole Kaletsky, in the Times, points out that it's not really about "junior officals" but what ministers required from computer boffins at the Revenue and Customs.

A junior official at HMRC may have been directly culpable in the case of the missing discs, but true responsibility is clearly located farther up the hierarchy. The obvious problem lay in the way that HMRC computers were designed and managed, which would seem to pin the blame primarily on the computer boffins, many of them working for private consultants, rather than civil servants themselves.

Just as the FSA and the Bank of England were regulating Northern Rock within a system designed by Gordon Brown in 1998 to satisfy the criteria that he considered most important, computer consultants design systems to achieve objectives ultimately specified by ministers. The question therefore is how much importance ministers attached to security and how this was defined.

Gordon Brown has given the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, new authority to carry out “spot checks” on government departments. This is less than a month after the government told a House of Lords committee that "the current enforcement regime for data protection is fit for purpose." However, Thomas is demanding far wider powers:

A spokesman said: "We want powers to carry out full audit and inspection powers, not just in Government departments but in local government and private companies."

Mr Thomas also wants the power to mount criminal prosecutions when serious breaches of data protection laws occur. At present he can issue only an enforcement notice, which results in a prosecution if an organisation fails to comply. Most prosecutions take place in magistrates’ courts, where the maximum fine is £5,000, rather than in the Crown Court, where an unlimited fine can be imposed.

Mr Thomas said: "It is important that the law is changed to make security breaches of this magnitude a criminal offence. Making this a criminal offence would serve as a strong deterrent and would send a very strong signal that it is completely unacceptable to be cavalier with people’s personal information."

It's a significant demand.

Internet service providers, search engines, supermarkets and their clubcard points databases, and e-commerce companies are retaining an expanding mountain of data on all of us.

Tesco is selling access to [its] database to other big consumer groups, such as Sky, Orange and Gillette. "It contains details of every consumer in the UK at their home address across a range of demographic, socio-economic and lifestyle characteristics," says the marketing blurb of dunnhumby, the Tesco subsidiary in question. It has "added intelligent profiling and targeting" to its data through a software system called Zodiac. This profiling can rank your enthusiasm for promotions, your brand loyalty, whether you are a "creature of habit" and when you prefer to shop. As the blurb puts it: "The list is endless if you know what you are looking for."

Alistair Darling And "Junior Officials"

So, the entire child benefit database was sent by a junior official from HMRC in Newcastle to the audit office in London through a courier, TNT, on 18 October.

If a junior official has access to 7.25 million bank accounts, how many junior officials are there? 100? 1000? How "junior" was the junior official? No one seems to want to say if the junior official in question has been fired.

If an ID card scheme goes ahead, how many "junior officials" will have access to all the information about everyone in the country?

The UK has the world's largest DNA database, with 4 million profiles. Anyone arrested for an imprisonable offence can have a sample taken without consent. It also holds samples taken from crime scenes by police. How many "junior officials" have access to that?

The NHS wants to create an "Electronic Patients Record System" with all records online in a database. How many "junior officials" will have access to that?

ZDnet.co.uk:

Who thought transporting such information physically was the best way to do it? We're told that a junior official was responsible — but why do junior officials have, or indeed need, access to the entire, downloaded database? And why did the junior official think that a courier was the best way to transport such a vast database of such valuable, personal information? Is data security at HMRC really so bad that sending physical CDs was considered more secure than electronic transmission? What risk assessment did they use to come to that conclusion? Is there even a risk-assessment procedure in place?

Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, was on Radio 4 this morning:

It's almost certain that they’ve broke the [data protection] legislation … Any aggregated system of collecting information must be proof against criminals, it must be proof against idiots, it must be proof against those who do not follow ordinary rules or procedure … You don’t assume security is ok, you take active steps to monitor what’s going on … We have to have the powers and resources to do our job properly. I haven’t got the power as the Information Commissioner to inspect the processing of any organisation without the consent of that organisation. I’ve told the government, and I’ve told Parliament, we need to have the power -- as our European counterparts have -- to inspect what’s actually going on inside organisations without their consent.

Alistair Darling And Bank Details

My wife and I were watching "Watchdog" last night on BBC One. One of their stories was about the Inland Revenue losing a CD with confidential details for 15 500 people on it. We looked at each other and rolled our eyes.

Today, I'm in a local pub, and I'm having a pint, and I look up at Sky News on the telly.

It's one thing for Alistair Darling to lose millions of records.

It's another for Darling:

- to be in the midst of the Northern Rock crisis
- to lose millions of records, including bank details
- to lose millions of records, including bank details, when they were unencrypted files on discs sent by normal mail.

The HMRC has set up a Child Benefit Helpline on 0845 302 1444 for customers.

The chief advice, from listening to an interview on Radio 5 Live, seems to be to change your banking password immediately, especially if it's your child's name, your maiden name, i.e. something that could be in the lost records. The more drastic option would be to request a new bank account number.

BBC News:

A rather scarier scenario has been put forward by the technology analysts Gartner. They warn that if the information is in the hands of criminals, they could try to take over peoples' bank accounts to remove the money in them. "The data lost - bank account numbers, names and addresses - represents a gold mine for the thieves and is much more valuable to them than credit card numbers or taxpayer id numbers," said Gartner analyst Avivah Litan. "In fact, in the black market, bank account numbers sell for the highest price, or between $30 and $400 (£15 to £200), which is significantly more than the fifty cents to five dollars that criminals pay for credit cards," she said.

Biometrics In Schools

I didn't realise that schools already had fingerprinting programmes in place, for things like school catering, automated attendance, and library borrowing.

It's the thin edge of the wedge, since in the future, it will move on to retina and iris patterns, voice, facial shape, hand measurements and behavioural characteristics such as handwriting and typing patterns.

It's a scandal that, under this guidance from BECTA, schools are not required to seek parental consent.

The guidance states that schools should not store biometric data after pupils have left - and that any information can only be used for the specific purpose for which it was given. When children leave school, or the original purpose no longer applies, schools will be expected to destroy this personal information. Schools are also barred from handing over such information to any other organisation. There is also a requirement for schools to have sufficient security to protect this data.

That last point is interesting, since there must be student hackers hard at work to break into school computer networks to get this sort of info, the 2007 equivalent of Matthew Broderick changing his grades.

EU-US Agreement on Data Sharing

Under an interim agreement after the 11th September 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, European airlines have been required to pass on up to 34 items of passenger data (your address, your credit card details, etc) before airlines could land at U.S. airports.

The data was only to be held for 3 1/2 to 11 1/2 years.

Now, after talks between the EU Justice and Security Commissioner, the German Interior Minister, and the U.S. Homeland Security Secretary, the EU has agreed that the US will have access to passenger data from flights into the US for 15 years, but "the number of pieces of information would be reduced."

Whew, that's a relief, only, say, 15 items retained for 15 years if I fly into the US.

Oh, and under a deal backed by EU ambassadors on Wednesday, the US can use SWIFT data for counter-terrorism purposes for 5 years.