Palau

Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt, washed the t-shirt 23 times, threw the t-shirt in the ragbag, now I'm polishing furniture with it.

Tits and Bums For Freedom

Activism, Civil liberties, IT is not magic pixie dust, Life under Capitalism, Media, New Labour, Policing, UK politics, War on Terror
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Strange days indeed, when it takes a porn baron to keep an eye on Britons’ online liberty. Could Richard Desmond become the UK’s Larry Flynt, I wonder? He’s had a hand in politics before…

Back along I posted about the Interception Modernisation Programme and the paucity of the available information about it:

Speaking of IT clusterfscks…

Somebody tipped me off to the innocent sounding “Interception Modernisation Programme”, but what is this exactly? It’s mentioned in this “Security and Counter-Terrorism Science and Innovation Strategy” document (PDF) from the Home Office, which seems to be some sort of happy face p.r.-minded strategy overview to show how on the ball the government is in combatting terrorism through innovation and science . In this context, the “Interception Modernisation Programme” is only mentioned in an aside and it sounds like it could be anything:

Intercepting terrorist communications

Knowing the content of terrorist communications is vital to the UK’s ability to respond to terrorism. The cutting-edge interception technology required is therefore critical to building up our intelligence and to understanding the nature of the threat.

The Interception Modernisation Programme is a cross-Government programme which aims to maintain the UK’s world-class capability in obtaining and exploiting terrorist communications data. It is a key example of how Government is using innovative and ground-breaking technology to stay well ahead of the terrorists

Well, now I know, courtesy of the Daily Express, proprietor New Labour’s favourite pornographer, Mr Richard Desmond:

After the top-secret plans were leaked yesterday critics accused the Government of stalking the public. Michael Parker of anti-identity card group No2ID said: “It is a shocking intrusion into privacy. This is stalking. If an individual carried out this sort of snooping, it would be a crime.”

Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve said the proposal marked “a substantial shift in the powers of the state to obtain information on individuals”. And after a series of embarrassing security blunders including the loss of child benefit records for every family in the country, he questioned Whitehall’s competence to keep such data. He said: “Given the Government’s poor record on protecting data and seeing how significant an increase in power this would be, we need to have a national debate and the Government would have to justify its need.”

ALL telephone calls, emails and text messages in Britain will be monitored under new Government snooping plans. A £12billion identity database at the GCHQ spy centre could even log every website visited by computer users nationwide.

Hundreds of bugging probes will be installed in the telephone system and computer networks to monitor communications traffic.

GCHQ has already been handed £1billion of taxpayers’ cash to begin developing the database.

After the top-secret plans were leaked yesterday critics accused the Government of stalking the public. Michael Parker of anti-identity card group No2ID said: “It is a shocking intrusion into privacy. This is stalking. If an individual carried out this sort of snooping, it would be a crime.”

Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve said the proposal marked “a substantial shift in the powers of the state to obtain information on individuals”. And after a series of embarrassing security blunders including the loss of child benefit records for every family in the country, he questioned Whitehall’s competence to keep such data. He said: “Given the Government’s poor record on protecting data and seeing how significant an increase in power this would be, we need to have a national debate and the Government would have to justify its need.”

The plan for the biggest surveillance system in British history is being spearheaded by GCHQ director Sir David Pepper.

It is currently classified as top secret and is being developed under the title: Interception Modernisation Programme.

The aim is to set up a “live tap” on every electronic communication in the country. At present, security service MI5 carries out limited monitoring of email exchanges and internet use.

Ministers have been told that the latest computer technology lays the grounds of a massive expansion of monitoring.

The database is likely to be centred at GCHQ’s famous “doughnut”-shaped spy centre in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.

Further details will be released when the Government’s legislative programme is announced in the Queen’s Speech in December.

The plan is even more ambitious than the Identity Cards scheme being gradually introduced by the Government at a cost of £5billion. While a final decision has yet to be taken, ministers are understood to have agreed to the move “in principle”.

No wonder the Express is worried, considering how much money Desmond’s business empire makes from soft porn and technology – and considering some of the very dodgy people he’s done business with too.

Sometimes private (very private) interests and public interest collide – so shouldn’t Desmond put some of his porn-derived cash behind the privacy campaigns, if he’s so concerned?

I Know You’re Sick Of Her But…

'08/12 Election, Palin, US politics, Wingnuts, Women
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… even if you don’t read anything about her ever again, do read Matt Taibbi’s acid Rolling Stone essay to really understand exactly why it is Sarah Palin’s so dangerous.

[…]

…watching Palin’s speech, I had no doubt that I was witnessing a historic, iconic performance. The candidate sauntered to the lectern with the assurance of a sleepwalker — and immediately launched into a symphony of snorting and sneering remarks, taking time out in between the superior invective to present herself as just a humble gal with a beefcake husband and a brood of healthy, combat-ready spawn who just happened to be the innocent targets of a communist and probably also homosexual media conspiracy. She appeared to be completely without shame and utterly full of shit, awing a room full of hardened reporters with her sickly-sweet line about the high-school-flame-turned-hubby who, “five children later,” is “still my guy.” It was like watching Gidget address the Reichstag.

Within minutes, Palin had given TV audiences a character infinitely recognizable to virtually every American: the small-town girl with just enough looks and a defiantly incurious mind who thinks the PTA minutes are Holy Writ, and to whom injustice means the woman next door owning a slightly nicer set of drapes or flatware. Or the governorship, as it were.

Right-wingers of the Bush-Rove ilk have had a tough time finding a human face to put on their failed, inhuman, mean-as-hell policies. But it was hard not to recognize the genius of wedding that faltering brand of institutionalized greed to the image of the suburban-American supermom. It’s the perfect cover, for there is almost nothing in the world meaner than this species of provincial tyrant.

More…

UPDATE: If you want just the Palin lols go to Under The Lobsterscope’s excerpts from this weekend’s David Letterman show. Wahaha. Hilarious, if only it weren’t so scary.

Goodbye, Mr Plod. Oops Sorry, Sir Plod.

Policing, UK politics
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Regular readers will know already exactly what I think about former Met boss Sir Ian Blair. As you can imagine, I’m happy as Larry he’s finally gone and this morning I was going to look at the cross-party politics that laid behind his figleaf of a ‘resignation’.

But I see that Rory Baxter of civil service blog Public Servant Daily has saved me the trouble:

We didn’t want Blair to go, Smith said. Oh please …

[…]

What was the government going to do, this guy had accusation after accusation being thrown at him and he was refusing to go, holding press conferences to say “I deny everything, I just want to get on with my job”? Sacking him was out of the question, how would that look? So the problem would not go away and, with Blair insisting he wanted to stay in post for the 2012 Olympics, Blair’s sores could well be running right across a general election, putting the Home Secretary – and therefore the government – in a very difficult position. You don’t want this kind of scandal hanging around at election time. No, Blair had to go beforehand, that was certain. But how?

Along comes Boris Johnson and hands the answer to Smith – and Blair, it has to be said – on a plate. Johnson had already made noises about wiping the slate clean at the Met when he gained power and Home Office officials had talked at the time of how Smith would almost certainly not oppose such a move. According to one report, when asked some time ago if Smith still had full confidence in Blair, a senior Whitehall official said: “No one is indispensable.” Funny how she now feigns disappointment and surprise.

Read whole thing

Exactly. He had to go before the Jean-Charles De Menezes inquest lays bare any more of his and New Labour’s policing and policy fuckups. Blair was New Labour’s creature; they made him, they ran him, and now they need to get rid of him. Boris is happy to go along because it makes him and his party look good. ‘Who will rid us of this troublesome plod?’ said No. 10: ‘Me!’ said Boris “More tv face time! Huzzah!’

This is a rare outbreak of bipartisanship dressed up as an interparty spat. Ian Blair walks away without the opprobrium of a sacking, with his retirement benefits intact, a nifty knighthood, and a future pension-enhancing career in daytime tv; Boris looks like a decisive leader, Labour gets rid of a liability, the public gets revenge of a sort. Everybody wins.

Actually, thinking about it, Labour gets rid of two liabilities; Blair and Jacqui Smith, who has been an embarassing failure as Home Secretary and who’s alternately alienated rank and file coppers and sucked up to the grandest, most expensive paramilitary anti-‘terror’ fantasies of a few wannabe J. Edgars in the senior ranks.

Her worst moment came when in January she admitted in a newspaper interview that she felt unsafe walking alone in London at night, at the same time as bragging about the success of her neighborhood policing team strategy and her 5 million pound anti-knife crime initiative. This was not helped when one of her few female colleagues in the cabinet, Harriet Harman visited her constituency wearing a stab vest and cowering between a praetorian guard of those very neighbourhood police officers. Very reassuring.

It would be too embarassing to sack her outright, there’s few enough women in the cabinet as it is, and Harriet Harman might kick up a stink. No what Brown (or should I say Mandy, now they’re ‘joined at the hip’?) has done is to install Margaret Beckett so the sexism jibe is neutralised.

So let her take a public humiliation in the Blair affair, then a couple of months later give her her reward – a peerage, a pension and a kick upstairs, and hey presto, the way’s open to bring back yet another Blairite to push ID cards and Titan prisons through against public resistance. My money’s on Blunkett.

UPDATE

Gordon Brown has stepped in personally to block Sir Ian Blair from receiving a peerage when he steps down as Metropolitan Police Commissioner, The Independent on Sunday has learned.

Sources said yesterday that allowing Sir Ian a seat in the House of Lords would fuel controversy over his resignation, and the Prime Minister would prefer to distance the Government from the row surrounding it.

If the outgoing police chief is denied a peerage, he will be the first retiring head of Scotland Yard not to get one in almost two decades. It had been expected that Sir Ian would be given a peerage within months of stepping down. But a Downing Street source said yesterday that had been ruled out.

I think that proves Public Servant Daily’s point.

Crisis Casualties, No.2

Capitalism, Life under Capitalism, Poverty
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So zillionaires are losing billions. How very sad. Oh, how my heart bleeds.

London, Oct 5 (PTI) NRI steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal has lost 16.6 billion pounds in the global credit crunch owing to plummeting stock markets in the last four months, media reports said here today.
The 58-year-old Mittal heads a list of ten super-rich losers who together have seen their share portfolios shrink by about 23 billion pounds from their peaks, The Sunday Times claimed.

Another NRI entrepreneur Anil Agarwal, who built up his metals empire, has seen his stock plummet by 2.7 billion pounds.

The height of Mittal’s losses dwarfs those of others in the list of top 10 losers, which include Mike Ashley, the beleaguered owner of Newcastle United football club and the retailer Sports Direct.

Mittal has seen his family’s stake in ArcelorMittal, the steel conglomerate, fall from 33.24 billion pounds on June 4 this year to 16.63 billion pounds at the close of Friday’s markets. The loss is equivalent to 137 million pounds a day or nearly 6 million pounds an hour.

The credit crunch losses were established by comparing the value of shareholdings around the world held by them at their peak with the value at the close of markets last Friday. PTI

All very sad for them, the poor penurious preciouses – but I doubt very much any one of them will do without food to put money on his electric or gas meter key this winter.