Policing – Page 13

Tits and Bums For Freedom

Published on October 6, 2008

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?

Goodbye, Mr Plod. Oops Sorry, Sir Plod.

Published on October 5, 2008

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.

Yet More Taser Terror

Published on September 26, 2008

Digby:

This video is so awful, it will make you sick to watch it.

An officer appears to have violated police department guidelines when he used a Taser stun gun on a naked, distraught man teetering on a building ledge, officials said Thursday.

Inman Morales, 35, was pronounced dead at a hospital after his nearly 10-foot fall Wednesday. Police said he suffered serious head trauma when he hit the sidewalk.

[…]

Witnesses and neighbors said Morales had become distraught and threatened to kill himself earlier in the day. When police arrived in response to a 911 call, he fled naked out the window of his third-floor apartment, clambered down to a ledge and began jabbing at officers with an 8-foot-long fluorescent light.

An amateur video posted on the Web site of the New York Post shows one of the officers raising a stun gun at Morales, who freezes and topples over headfirst as the crowd screams.

“They didn’t try to brace his fall. They did nothing. I’ve seen a lot of things in my time. But what they did was wrong,” said neighbor Kirk Giddens, 39, in Thursday editions of the Daily News.

While We’re On The Subject of Backward-Facing Bodily Emissions….

Published on September 26, 2008

..I came across this little nugget, so to speak, at trainee solicitors’ website Roll On Friday:

A man has been charged with battery after deliberately farting at a police officer. Jose Antonio Cruz was stopped for drink driving and taken back to the local police station. When officers tried to get him to take a breath test, Cuz apparently lifted his leg and let out a huge fart. He then wafted the smell towards them. Police say the sheer smell “created a contact of an insulting or provoking nature” and charged him with battery.

I see. Floating arse biscuits can be a weapon, too. I wonder, could one be charged with going equipped for carrying a concealed can of beans?

Game Over

Published on September 26, 2008

Chilling news for online gamers, or for anyone who identifies themself online, really:

Gamer arrested over computer link to knife murder of Matthew Pyke
David Brown

A German computer gamer is being questioned by police over the murder of a university student after an apparent argument on an online discussion site.

Matthew Pyke, 20, who was found stabbed to death at his home in Nottingham, ran a website with his girlfriend dedicated to discussing the computer strategy game Advance Wars.

Days after his body was found, a German gamer calling himself David Heiss sent a message to Mr Pyke’s girlfriend apologising for “having caused so much trouble lately”.

Though it hardly matters now if you are pseudonymous; even the neophyte knows how to use network tools and resolve an IP address these days, witness the continual harassment of left-wingers by Michelle Malkin’s troop of flying buttmonkeys and of antifascists by website Redwatch [no link; you want it, google].

I see the amount of sheer blinding rage unleashed in some online gamers when they play and I can well imagine that to feel such extreme anger could carry someone with a lot of their ego invested in the game (forum, blog or comment thread) right over the edge.

But aren’t online communities self-regulating by consensus? Well no, of course not, no more so than RL. Other gamers may have been egging this dispute on, in which case they also bear responsibility for Matthew Pyke’s death:

Detectives are investigating if another fan of the game may have fallen out with Mr Pyke in cyberspace and then taken extreme revenge in real life.

Mr Pyke also published science fiction on the Wars Central site using the name Shade, and Mr Heiss, 21, contributed to the discussion forum under the name Eagle the Lightning.

One anonymous poster on the site forum suggested that other members may have known who was behind the killing. “We may know a lot of what was going on prior to the killing, but I, for one, am not going to say any more,” he said.