2012 Olympics Win Gold Medal for Liberticide

I always hated the Olympics as a vulgar, corrupt and expensive display of corrosive, narrow-minded nationalism. Later, I came to realise that it is also a splendid example of all that is wrong with intellectual monopolies, as the IOC tries to claims "rights" over everyday word combinations. Now I realise that it links up neatly with all kinds of issues relating to corporate greed and the police state:

Police will have powers to enter private homes and seize posters, and will be able to stop people carrying non-sponsor items to sporting events.

"I think there will be lots of people doing things completely innocently who are going to be caught by this, and some people will be prosecuted, while others will be so angry about it that they will start complaining about civil liberties issues," Chadwick said.

"I think what it will potentially do is to prompt a debate about the commercial nature of the Games. Do big sponsors have too much influence over the Games?"

Surely not.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

The UK Police State's Perfect Storm

I missed this story when it first came out, which is a shame, because it's an important revelation of what the current mad mix of surveillance, authoritarianism and target-driven management is doing to civil liberties in the UK:

Police are using controversial car-surveillance technology aimed at catching criminals and terrorists to target members of the public in order to meet government performance targets and raise revenue, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.

Police whistleblowers also claim that intelligence stored on the national Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) database is "at least 30 per cent inaccurate", which has led to the wrongful arrest of innocent motorists and the seizure of their cars.

The revelations highlight growing concerns about a burgeoning target culture among enforcement agencies and local authorities seeking to bolster figures and income with so-called soft arrests and fines on otherwise law-abiding members of the public.

Now, it seems, the target cart is driving the horse of policing:

This target culture has allegedly led to unethical practices during roadside stops, according to concerned police sources. Some officers, they say, trawl through drivers' personal data on police databases to find any reason to arrest. Alternatively, they "wind up" motorists who, in their frustration, become abusive and are then arrested for a public-order offence.

...

Whistleblowers also expressed concern that managers are "engineering" arrests to meet targets. Officers have been sent to re-arrest drivers fined for driving without insurance. Before cars can be released from the pound the driver has to apply for insurance. "[Officers were] checking with insurers if Mr Smith had declared his recent penalty," said one officer. "If the answer was 'no' they arrested him for obtaining insurance fraudulently."

If this carries on, or is extended, it will destroy the public's faith in the UK police: is that what the government really wants? (Via Techdirt.)

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Stop the "Stop and Search" Shame

How can a government minister be so shameless as this?

Policing and Security Minister David Hanson MP said: ”Stop and search under section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 is an important tool in a package of measures in the ongoing fight against terrorism."

How has it done one single thing to "fight against terrorism"? How many "terrorists" have they caught as a result of using "stop and search"? Zero, I'll be bound. All it seems to be used for is to oppress opponents of the government. Words fail me.

The Utter Moral Bankruptcy of the DNA Database

This is staggering:

Detections using the national DNA database have fallen over the past two years despite the number of profiles increasing by 1m and its running costs doubling to £4.2m a year.

A report on the database covering the years 2007-09, published today, shows that crimes cleared up as a result of a match on the DNA database fell from 41,148 to 31,915 over the period. At the same time the number of DNA profiles on the database – already the largest in the world – rose from 4.6m to 5.6m. Duplicates mean that the police database now holds details of 4.89 million individuals.

That is, despite increasing the size to getting on for 10% of the UK population, the number of crimes cleared *fell* by over 25%. How pathetic is that? Not as pathetic as this statement from the truly Orwellian "National Policing Improvement Agency":

Nevertheless, Peter Neyroud, the head of the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA), which hosts the DNA database, says in the report that it continues to provide the police with the most effective tool for the prevention and detection of crime since the development of fingerprint analysis more than a century ago.

Against the background that this "most effective tool for the prevention and detection of crime since the development of fingerprint analysis more than a century ago" is getting ever-less effective and more costly, and infringing on the rights of ever more people, this statement proves just one thing: that the British police are getting more and more incompetent, and have to rely on more and more Draconian laws and tools just to stop their already footling success rate dropping even more precipitously.

This is an utter scandal on so many levels, but above all because the UK government is continuing to foist this intrusive, disproportionate, racist and morally repugnant approach upon us when it's *own figures* demonstrate that it is failing more and more each year.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Thanks for Keeping us in the Picture

Although e-petitions don't often accomplish much (the apology for Alan Turing being a notable exception), they do have the virtue of forcing the UK government to say something. In response to this:

“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to remove new restrictions on photography in public places.”

we got this:

It is a statutory defence for a person to prove that they had a reasonable excuse for eliciting, publishing or communicating the relevant information. Legitimate journalistic activity (such as covering a demonstration for a newspaper) is likely to constitute such an excuse. Similarly, an innocent tourist or other sight-seer taking a photograph of a police officer is likely to have a reasonable excuse.

Since most people can't *prove* they had reasonable excuse for taking a photo - is "because it was a nice shot" *reasonable*? And how do you *prove* it was reasonable at the time? - this very high legal bar obviously implies that non-journalistic Brits had better not take any snaps of Plod because, otherwise, you're nicked.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Checks Are Indeed Needed - on Reality

Here's an unbelievably shameless attempt by Sir Roger Singleton to shout down the justified concern in the face of the insane UK government vetting scheme, which he heads. Let's consider some of his comments.

It is not about interfering with the sensible arrangements which parents make with each other to take their children to schools and clubs.

Well, except for the fact that if I regularly take other people's children to a club, I have to register. So Sir Roger seems to be re-defining "sensible" to exclude this hitherto mundane activity.

It is not about subjecting a quarter of the population to intensive scrutiny of their personal lives

No, it's worse: it's allowing a quarter of the population to be at the mercy of *unsubstantiated* rumours, without any controls on calumnies, however misinformed, that may be circulating about them.

it is not about creating mistrust between adults and children

Er, apart from the fact that the line now being pushed by proponents of the scheme is that if you don't register you clearly have something to hide, and cannot therefore be trusted with children. Which means that children are now expected to distrust everyone who has not been vetted - a mere three-quarters of the population.

it is not about ... discouraging volunteering

Well, Sir Roger, I agree it's not *about* discouraging volunteering - this is about instilling yet more fear to make people more sheep-like and compliant - but it will certainly be the inevitable knock-on consequence. I, for one, will not be volunteering for anything in future, because I refuse to allow a faceless and largely unaccountable bureaucracy - one that has time and again proven itself to be utterly incompetent with sensitive, personal information - to make judgments about my trustworthiness.

So, all-in-all, your statements are a total disgrace, because you simply dismiss all the deeply-felt concerns of parents up and down the country without addressing them in the slightest. You have simply re-stated your own indifference to what the public thinks - a public you are supposed to serve.

If you had any decency, you would resign; but then, if you had any decency you wouldn't be running this divisive, authoritarian scheme that will continue to blight families, education and British society in general until such time as it is consigned to the political dustbin, which can't be soon enough.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Don't Do as I Do, Do as I Say

Wasn't Damian Green threatened with life imprisonment for allegedly doing precisely this:

Government officials handed confidential police intelligence about environmental activists to the energy giant E.ON before a planned peaceful demonstration, according to private emails seen by the Guardian.

Correspondence between civil servants and security officials at the company reveals how intelligence was shared about the peaceful direct action group Climate Camp in the run-up to the demonstration at Kingsnorth, the proposed site of a new coal-fired power station in north Kent.

Intelligence passed to the energy firm by officials from the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) included detailed information about the movements of protesters and their meetings. E.ON was also given a secret strategy document written by environmental campaigners and information from the Police National Information and Coordination Centre (PNICC), which gathers national and international intelligence for emergency planning.

So it's official now, I take it: *they* can break any law they like, while we are afforded no protection from them - even by innocence.

Not that We Live in a Police State...

...but there is this:

Police are targeting thousands of political campaigners in surveillance operations and storing their details on a database for at least seven years, an investigation by the Guardian can reveal.

...


Police surveillance teams are also ­targeting journalists who cover demonstrations, and are believed to have ­monitored members of the press during at least eight protests over the last year.

Because we know that all journalists are scum, anyway....

Wot Police State?

Papers acquired by the Liberal Democrats via Freedom of Information requests show that the 1,500 officers policing the Kingsnorth climate camp near the Medway estuary in Kent, suffered only 12 reportable injuries during the protest during August.

The Home Office has now admitted that the protesters had not been responsible for any injuries. In a three-line written answer to a parliamentary question, the Home Office minister Vernon Coaker wrote to the Lib Dem justice spokesman, David Howarth, saying: "Kent police have informed the Home Office that there were no recorded injuries sustained as a result of direct contact with the protesters."

Only four of the 12 reportable injuries involved any contact with protesters at all and all were at the lowest level of seriousness with no further action taken.

The other injuries reported included "stung on finger by possible wasp"; "officer injured sitting in car"; and "officer succumbed to sun and heat". One officer cut his arm on a fence when climbing over it, another cut his finger while mending a car, and one "used leg to open door and next day had pain in lower back".

Keep up the good work, Jacqui.

Publish and Be Damned?

If you were wondering why I have been rabbiting on about police raids on alleged leakers, here's the reason:

The new Counter Terrorism Bill, currently in The Lords, contains an amendment to Section 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000. This amendment will make it an offence, punishable by up to ten years imprisonment, to publish or elicit information about any police constable "of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism".

Furthermore, Schedule 7 of the Bill applies this amendment to internet service providers and web hosting services. This means they will have a legal duty to remove all sites perceived to fall under this offence, and has provisions for use at home and abroad.

It is unclear what information will be classed as “useful” to terrorists, but due to this ambiguous wording, the Bill has implications for bloggers, journalists, photographers, activists and anyone who values freedom of speech.

It is hard to see what exactly this Bill is trying to do that isn't already coverd by the reams of similar legislation that has been passed recently. What kind of information about the police is so sacred? Why not pass a law about firemen, doctors or sewage workers - all people working on critical parts of society's infrastructure? Actually, I'm sure that's the next stage in this creeping lockdown of democracy.

This is yet another case of bad law predicated on a bad premise: that you can "fight" terrorism by passing increasingly Draconian measures. In fact, this is actually counterproductive: it takes away the liberties of people without giving them any security. It simply does the terrorists' work for them.

Moreover, the scope for abuse is huge: what exactly does "of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism" mean? Presumably, it would be useful for a "terrorist" to have pictures of police officers, so presumably *any* photography will be illegal. Which means - conveniently - that it will be impossible to photograph officers abusing their power.

Indeed, it could be argued - and probably will - that publishing any information desdribing police bullying or general stupidity is "useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism" in some vague, general sense, because it is bound to give away some details of police activities, which are therefore potentially useful.

Clearly, this law will have a chilling effect not just on people wanting to leak information that is embarrassing to the government - since it becomes even harder to resist exaggerated responses of the kind we have seen recently - but on any kind of journalism or blogging about civil liberties. The sickening slide towards the police state continues apace.

Microsoft: The Police State's Best Friend

You can't make this stuff up:

Microsoft has developed a small plug-in device that investigators can use to quickly extract forensic data from computers that may have been used in crimes.

The COFEE, which stands for Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, is a USB "thumb drive" that was quietly distributed to a handful of law-enforcement agencies last June. Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith described its use to the 350 law-enforcement experts attending a company conference Monday.

The device contains 150 commands that can dramatically cut the time it takes to gather digital evidence, which is becoming more important in real-world crime, as well as cybercrime. It can decrypt passwords and analyze a computer's Internet activity, as well as data stored in the computer.

Now, tell me again why you want to run Windows instead of GNU/Linux?

No ID, No Comment

This is what will happen if you're not carrying the ID card that nice Mr Blair wants us all to have....