Civil liberties – Page 14

Routing Round Obstacles

Published on February 22, 2008

American and looking for the censored wikileaks.org?

Let me know if it works for you.

UPDATE: That reminds me – Freenet is not yet censored in any way.

Freenet is a global peer-to-peer network designed to allow users to publish and consume information without fear of censorship. To use it, you must download the Freenet software, available for Windows, Mac, Linux and other operating systems. Your computer will then form part of a global, decentralized P2P network, and you will be able to publish and consume information anonymously, either through your web browser, or through a variety of third party applications, such as Frost (see http://jtcfrost.sf.net/).

You can download it here.

The Washington Post reports that the US military is ready to start its 9/11 show trials. Well, what else do you call a trial in which much of the evidence has been extracted by torture, the suspects have been kept imprisoned for years without being charged and it’s only through a Supreme Court ruling that the defendants even have a semblance of a proper trial, rather than a military tribunal?

It’s quite obvious that these trials are intended primarily for propaganda, another feature it has in common with the show trials of Stalin. This was so obvious even the hapless BBC reporter I heard on the subject this afternoon acknowledged it, though he missed the point by assuming it was meant for international consumption. Which of course it isn’t.

Instead its meant for internal use, a little booster for the coming elections to help the Republicans regain some of their mojo as the big daddy security party. The last eight years under Bush II have been a bit of a disaster in this regard, what with 9/11, the failure in Afghanistan and the Iraqi clusterfuck, so much so that even the biggest Bush cheerleaders have long ago hung up their pompoms (with some exceptions). They need closure, to make Bush look a little bit less like a miserable failure and to make his successors look slightly more appetising. Good thing they have all those dangerous terrorists on ice at Guantanamo….

Mother of Three, Enemy Of The State

Published on February 7, 2008

That’d make a great title for a tv drama, wouldn’t it? Unfortunately it’s not a story, it’s true.You’ll understand why I harki back to the tv drama of yesteryear when you read it.

Britons of a similar vintage to me will remember fondly the crop of tv conspiracy thrillers of the late seventies and eighties. when it was a given that the police and security services had their own hidden aganda.

Edge of Darkness is the classic example, but most dramas had common elements: bent coppers and/or corrupt government, an average joe or jane or journo caught up in bewildering events beyond their control (generally terroristic or nuclear but ocasionally environmental), a massive internal military-industrial conspiracy, a state within the state, is gradually exposed by the hero or heroine who then endis up dead, assassinated by the state within the state within the state.

This was before focus-group mandated happy endings, obviously.

The quality of British thriller series has much reduced since. Now they give us Paul Smith mannequins striding about the Heals catalogue in clever lighting, torturing each other for no apparent reason other than for the fun of it, or 70s retro shows which portray the time’s clothes and casual violence accurately but ignore the justified paranoia of the times. All Sweeney and no Smiley, a circus not The Circus.

Odd that. Paranoia about state shenanigans was as prevalent then as it is now.

When it’s a running joke on a mainstream comedy like The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin that shady rightwing ex-army cabals plot cosily away in the shires (albeit with constant cockups on the catering front). then conspiracy and spying is an accepted part of life. Even such a weaselly milquetoast as Justice Minister Jack Straw was considered a subversive and spied on the ’70s. Spying on ‘subversives’ is all the rage again – but do we see it on tv?

Imagine what a screenplay the ThePress Gazette story.would make…

Milton Keynes Citizen journalist Sally Murrer today described the revelations about the bugging of MP Sadiq Khan as the missing piece in the jigsaw about her case.

Murrer has been at the centre of a huge police inquiry since May last year when she was accused of “aiding and abetting misconduct in a public office”. Her co-defendant – the policeman accused of illegally giving her stories – is Mark Kearney, the Thames Valley Police officer who this week revealed he had twice been ordered to bug the phone of MP Sadiq Khan in Woodhill Prison in 2005 and 2006.

Murrer, a part time journalist and mother of three, has herself been bugged and tracked by police and been locked up twice during questioning – once for 30 hours.

She now feels that fear on the part of the police that her friend Kearney was going to blow the whistle on the bugging of Khan may explain the huge investigation into them both under the “misconduct in a public office” charge.

She said today: “I think this is the missing part of the jigsaw that I’ve been searching for eight months now. During the whole investigation I have wondered what it is I was supposed to have done.”

Average Jane journo, check. Bewildering, unwarranted events, check…

The police allege that Kearney illegally gave Murrer details of various stories. She says the stories they have referred to have all involved relatively ordinary crimes, the details of which she says she knew about from other sources anyway.

Now she believes the current charges she faces – and for which she is due to stand trial next year – may stem from the revelations that Kearney was involved in the bugging of Khan.

She said: “I clearly remember him saying in May 2005 and June 2006 – ‘they’d made me do something illegal’ and I kept asking him what it was.

“He said it was something to do with the bugging of an MP. When it came up again he said he was losing sleep about this, and said something about the Wilson Law.

“He now says that towards the end of 2006 everything was getting too much and the one thing that was stressing him out was this.”

Bent coppers, check. Shady doings, check…

She believes that it would have been obvious to colleagues at Thames Valley Police that Kearney was becoming increasingly agitated about the bugging episode – and that there was a risk he would blow the whistle.

Murrer said it was around this time that the investigation into her and Kearney – code-named Operation Plaid – began.

She said: “It dawned on me yesterday that this may be the missing piece of the jigsaw. They tried to discredit the whistleblower and the journalist they thought he was going to blow the whistle to and destroy the story that way.

“It seems like a huge hammer to smash a very small nut and I think this could be one of the biggest cover-ups this country has ever seen. They were trying to ruin him, destroying me in the process.

“The way I was treated it felt like they wanted to crack me and stop me writing anything ever again – they nearly did, I was a gibbering wreck for a while.”

Murrer is due to appear at court again next week for a plea and directions hearing and believes her full trial may still be a year away.

More…

Diverting as it is to allow myself the conceit of lreading this story as though it were tv drama, these are real lives and real people.

Murrer’s life has been made hell. and she’s a relatively minor character in the overall conspiracy. The ful scale of routine spying, intimidation and harassment by the police and security services, is yet to be revealed. Are there other Murrers languishing in British jails or held under control orders? We just don’t know.

Mind you, in the seventies or eighties we may have never heard Murrer’s story at all, because those concerned would’ve met with an unfortunate accident before they could’ve typed out heir story and got it to a newspaper. Thank goodness for modern communications.

The internet notwithstanding, have we moved on from the seventies at all? Like then, the same fundamentals of liberty and governance are still at stake and the apparatus of state security runs rampant and unchecked. Unlike then, the shady doings of the deep state don’t get much serious coverage on TV, dramatic or otherwise. Technology is such that it is now virtually impossible to check rampant spying. and the laws so written that any attempt to do so is in itself an offence.

On the whole I’d say we trust government about as much now as we did thirty or so years ago.. The difference then is we thought we could do something about it. Now we know we can’t.

Set Incoherent Outrage Meter To Stun

Published on December 12, 2007

Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, courtesy Moby in Sadly No’s comments.

This really is a forthcoming movie. I can’t begin to articulate my what, rage? Sickness? No, neither are quite it. That someone in Hollywood apparently thinks routine torture and injustice are are just a normal hazard of life to make comedy (and a buck) out of speaks volumes to me about just how far down the rabbithole we’ve gone.

What kind of bizarro world are we in when scriptwriters see torture as normal?

From that limited clip that movie doesn’t look much like satire to me; it looks like a moviie whose makers, far from recoiling from torture, are revelling in their government’s criminality, treating crimes against humanity as just another saleable commodity to yuk it up over and market. No doubt they’d say if challenged that they are telling necessary truths through the medium of comedy.and that even mentioning Guantanamo Bay and US torture in a mainstream movie is transgressional and satirical in itself.

I’d say bollocks to that.

The creators of this movie – who surely know their intended audience down to the tiniest demographic – have shown their deep and abiding cynicism by adding gratuitously large amounts of and tits and ass. Oh and pussy too, just to make assurance doubly sure that it sells.

They’ll make milions, how can they fail? Harold and Kumar Gitmo has everything to appeal to the nihilistic, materialistic and disaffected young – torture, cheap anal rape jokes, tits and ass, torture, cheap dick jokes, more torture and plenty of drug references so mviegoers can turn and look at each other with a complicit smile and go heh, yeah, cool.

The whole movie’s an aknowledgement that OK, our government are torturing murdering bastards, but so effing what? Eat cockmeat suckers! Who could ask for more? It’s the perfect movie. Pass the popcorn, whoop, whoop! Go Hollywood, Go, go USA!

Do You Know Who Your Children Are? Gordon Brown Does.

Published on November 23, 20071 Comment

One of the ironies that popped up on the Today Programme this morning was a press release from the UK data protection commissioner, warning teenagers about the dangers of exposing personal data online and announcing a probe of Facebook (which also has other issues elsewhere., more on that later).

Wahaha. You have to laugh. In a week when the government lost the personal details of millions of Britain’s children, that’s a bit rich.

There might be worse to come though,. HM Reveniue and Customs’ (former proprietor Gordon Brown) current problems with IT could pale into insignificance when it comes to some of the cockups over children’s private data that’re waiting in the wings.

Take the government’s long planned child information policy for instance. Called ContactPoint, it’s touted as an integrated information sytem that will enable schools and other oganisations to work together to protect at-risk children. No more Victoria Climbies – who could be against that?

ContactPoint was previously known by the working title of the ‘information sharing index’. It is a key element of the Every Child Matters programme to transform children’s services by supporting more effective prevention and early intervention.

ContactPoint is one of a range of tools that will help services work together more effectively on the frontline to meet the needs of children, young people and their families.

It sounds innocuous enough, if well-meaningly vague. So what is it and what does it do? It’s it a massive database of every single child in Britain, containing:

Basic identifying information for all children in England (aged up to 18): name, address, gender, date of birth and a unique identifying number.

Basic identifying information about the child’s parent or carer.

Contact details for services involved with the child: as a minimum, educational setting and GP practice, but also other services where appropriate.

A means to indicate whether a practitioner is a lead professional and if they have undertaken an assessment under the Common Assessment Framework.

[My emphasis.]

This database includes fingerprints, already being taken from children nationwide,encouraged and subisdised by the central government, and is to be accessible only to ‘practitioners’:

Access will be restricted to authorised users who need it as part of their work. This will include those working in education, health, social care, youth offending and some voluntary organisations

Some voluntary organisations? Who? Where? Why? And who the hell is an authorised user? A doctor? a nurse? Someone who helps at the local playgroup? Some anonymous, low-paid clerk in your local council’s social services department? The one who lives down the road fron you and gossips with the bloke in the newsagents on the way to work?

From the text it seems a ‘practitioner’ is an ‘authorised user’ – but I note the government is careful not to specify what an ‘authorised user’ actually is.

Who are they? Who authorises them? The document promises criminal records checks – but remember what a dog’s breakfast they made of the crimnal records database? It does not inspire confidence.

When you start to think through just how many people could potentially access this information you realise just how many potential points of leakage there are (and although it does not contain casefiles files still will be flagged) the heart sinks. It’s an accident just waiting, no, itching to happen:

Authorised users will be able to access ContactPoint in three ways – through:

A secure web link

Some existing case management systems

Another authorised user (where appropriate IT is unavailable)

Wherever possible ContactPoint will be automatically updated from existing systems, avoiding the need for practitioners to enter information on a separate system. It will not be possible for an authorised user to access case management systems or to see case data held by another agency on ContactPoint.

[My emphasis again]

That hardly matters when the minor functionaries of local authorities and a range of unaccountable quasi-autonomous agancies have been given the power to snoop into our bank acoounts, email traffic, car and electoral registrations, credit cards, medical records, library use and all manner of other personal data virtually at will.

ADDITIONAL RELEVANT PUBLIC AUTHORITIES FOR THE PURPOSES OF SECTION
25(1) OF THE REGULATION OF INVESTIGATORY POWERS ACT 2000

Government departments
1. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
2. The Department of Health.
3. The Home Office.
4. The Department of Trade and Industry.
5. The Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions.
6. The Department for Work and Pensions.
7. The Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment for Northern Ireland.

Local authorities

8. Any local authority within the meaning of section 1 of the Local Government Act 1999.
9. Any fire authority as defined in the Local Government (Best Value) Performance Indicators Order 2000.
10. A council constituted under section 2 of the Local Government etc. (Scotland) Act 1994.
11. A district council within the meaning of the Local Government Act (Northern Ireland) 1972.

NHS bodies in Scotland and Northern Ireland

12. The Common Services Agency of the Scottish Health Service.
13. The Northern Ireland Central Services Agency for the Health and Social Services.

Other bodies

14. The Environment Agency.
15. The Financial Services Authority.
16. The Food Standards Agency.
17. The Health and Safety Executive.
18. The Information Commissioner.
19. The Office of Fair Trading.
20. The Postal Services Commission.
21. The Scottish Drug Enforcement Agency.
22. The Scottish Environment Protection Agency.
23. The United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority Constabulary.
24. A Universal Service Provider within the meaning of the Postal Services Act 2000.

RIPA 2000 allows for authorisations (as distinct from warrants for telephone-tapping) and the serving of notices by “a person designated” include the following grounds:

a) “in the interests of national security”
b) “for the purpose of preventing or detecting crime or of preventing disorder”
c) “in the interests of public safety”

It wouldnt take much to marry up the data. Think of what an abusive ex-husband or stalker would give to get their hands on that.

But apparently Gordo doesn’t think that the safety of the natiion’s children is worth its own secure stand-alone system, built from the ground up and inaccessible to all but those most closely involved directly with the child.

No, that would cost money more usefully spent pursuing pointless wars, so what we’re getting is another cobbled-together mongrel of a thing, full of bugs and holes.

The blithe assertion that they can successfully integrate and update a patchwork of different systens in national and local government, independent trusts and charities would be have been laughable even without this week’s events, given the government’s abysmal record with IT projects and data security. The thing that really worries me about ContactPoint is off in the future, though: this system is supposed to track and protect children, defined as those under 18. But what happens to their data when they’re 19? Does it get destroyed? Somehow I doubt it…

It’s too easy to get sucked into looking at just the nuts and bolts of the project, though those are interesting and shocking enough. The real question is what is ContactPoint actually for, and why?

All this past week, despite having had the evidence of their own incompetence staring them in the face, the government has still insisted that it’s not the end for the ID card scheme. Why are they so sanguine?

There’s a reason: they know damned well that it doesn’t matter a jot if Brown has to shelve current plans, because our children are having an ID card sytem imposed upon them by stealth, under the guise of their own protection.

When viewed in that light, it’s difficult not see the loss of the CDs containing the personal details of 25 million parents and children as less of a bureaucratic bungle and more of a policy decision, a deliberate and cynical softening up exercise. Those with little trust in New Labour might even see it as an act of information terrorism against its own electorate.

The HMRC debacle could actually work in Gordon Brown’s favour. If their childrens’ current identity details are compromised, how much more likely are parents, perfectly understandably wanting to protect their children from fuure fraud or personal harm, to turn to a verified fingerprinted government ID as the defintive proof of their children’s identity? There, conveniently, is ContactPoint, ready to fill the void.

No, surely not. Surely a British government wouldn’t be so cynical as to make all curent forms of identification worthless so it could bring in ID cards by the back door, would it? Would it?