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but I fail to see how a national ID card can invade or strip my privacy any more than a drivers license or any of the other things Ive mentioned above.

Possibly because you are used to carrying an ID card with you at all times and possibly because what you consider to be an ID card (name, address, maybe a couple of other sensible pieces of information) is nothing like what the government are proposing. Their ID card would include: fingerprints, iris scanning, possibly facial scanning amongst other things. Along with the requirement that all agencies are required to inform other agencies of any changes to these details it means that a large amount of information on me is available to people for no real reason, this is what I object to, especially given their current record of data security.

I wouldn't mind the one off cost of these things in the same way that I don't object to paying for my passport, but I do object to ANYBODY demanding my information on spurious grounds of "security" and that "the public support for ID cards has remained consistently high across all sectors of society [quote from ID cards briefing - http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/docs4/Id_Cards_Briefi ng.pdf%5D" which is arrant bollocks and typical of the current slippery incumbents of the UK government

The UK Passport service will look after the database.

All our normal Data Protection Act laws will apply.

You will not be forced to carry it around with you 24/7.

More from the Home Office's FAQ here: http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/comrace/identitycards /faq.html

The only thing that bothers me is the amount of money the government wants me to pay for my new card and the amount of money they want for making changes to the card. Anything more than 0p is too much in my eyes.

This coming from the land of the Anti Social Behaviour Orders and the Official Secrets Act.

How amusing.

Actually, only half wrong. But I thought I'd take the opportunity to use my favourite "subject" heading.

Lets talk British crime rates. Yeah, baby!

Violent crime has fallen by over a third since 1995. So, since they tightened gun laws violent crime in the UK has *fallen*. (Not risen, fallen.)

Source: http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs04/hosb1004.p df

Now, I know there are people who don't like the British Crime Survey. But their methodology is simple. Every year they ask 30,000 people "have you or a close friend/relation been the victim of a crime, if so what was it and how many times did it happen?" Essentially, the survey strips out the absurdities of police crime reporting changes. (See http://thelawwestofealingbroadway.blogspot.com/200 5/04/crime-figures.html for details.)

Now, I'm not claiming that guns cause crime. But the evidence is certainly more mixed people (on either side of the debate) believe. And the main argument, I believe, against letting the populace bear arms is the risk of accidents. (See http://www.kidsandguns.org/study/states_deaths.asp ?National)

Anyway, just my thoughts,

Cheers,

Robert

The whole scheme is very secretive, but from what we know, all citizens will have to take about 50 pieces of personal data, their eyeballs and £80 to a registration centre for the dubious pleasure of being entered into a national database. Their fingerprints and iris patterns will be digitised and a hash generated from each. The hash is then written to the chip on the card. the idea of the government is that soon Britain will have tens of thousands of biometric readers at paces like airports, police stations, hospitals and doctors. Whenever you need a service, enter or leave the country or get arrested you'd have to produce the card.

It won't be compulsory (at first) to carry a card, but it will be compulsory to register and keep your personal data up-to-date. The card is not yours, instead it remains the property of the government and can be withdrawn at any time on the say-so of the Home Secretary.

Last year the government conducted a trial of 10,000 people and promised to tell us the results before the ID card bill was brought before Parliament. Well they've had one go at getting the bill through but ran out of time before Parliament's dissolution - and we still haven't seen the results of the trials. Which is kind of suspicious - surely if everything is hunky dory then they would have been shouting it from the rooftops?

As for reliability, the Home Office (think Ministry of the Interior) doesn't seem to know the difference between false positive matches between two biometrics (where one person is mistaken for another) and false negatives (where a person isn't recognised at all). In written answers they only ever cite a failure rate based on the very low false positives - NEVER the much higher failure rate for false negatives. BUT positive confirmation of identity is the entire reason for their introduction.

The general feeling of IT experts is that the scheme will rocket in price and never work properly - but that millions of people will be inconvenienced and perhaps thousands have their lives ruined by the cards.

So for those UK people reading (hello!) - Labour is the only party promising to introduce ID cards. The Tories made no mention of it in their manifesto and have gradually gone off of the scheme. The LibDems, Greens and nationalist parties are all opposed. If you don't want ID cards, then the nice people at No2ID will be able to help.

Perhaps you would be as good as to provide a link to back up this ridiculous claim of yours?

in countries like the UK, where guns are mostly illegal, lots of criminals have guns.

Gun crime accounts for less than 0.5% of UK crime.

You can also search Google for other sources.

Report 1; warninig pdf

Schwartz (1988). He set out to compare customary teacher-based tutoring of reading and comprehension with practice on a set of computer games derived from analysis of the reading process. 24 primary school children were selected, who were of average intelligence and who were 18 months or more behind their peers in reading comprehension. The children were split into two groups and assigned to teacher-based tutoring or to a computer game training group where they received practice on four computer games. Training in both conditions focused on word decoding and phonics. The study found that almost all students improved their reading comprehension test scores after training, although the poorest readers made significantly greater gains in the computer game condition than in the teacher training condition

study 2 - warning pdf:

"Marble Madness" and effects on spatial skills: A study of 61 children, ages 10 to 11, compared the effects of two computer games on the development of spatial skills--the cluster of skills required for children to visualize and manipulate objects or images in their minds.1 Practice on Marble Madness was found to reliably improve the children's spatial performance, while practice on Conjecture, a computerized word game similar to the TV show Wheel of Fortune, did not. The children playing Marble Madness used a joystick to guide a marble along a three-dimensional grid, trying to keep the marble on the path and prevent it from falling off or being attacked by intruders. After playing the game, children were found to have improved their ability to anticipate targets and visualize spatial paths. ?"Concentration" and effects on iconic skill: A cross-cultural study carried out in Rome and Los Angeles examined the effects of playing a computer game on the development of iconic skills--the skills that enable people to read images such as pictures and diagrams.2Researchers found that after playing the game Concentration on a computer, undergraduate students offered more diagrams in their analysis of an animated simulation of electronic circuits, whereas those who played the game on a board offered more verbal descriptions. ?"Robot Battle," "Robotron," and effects on visual attention skills: A study compared the effects of computer game expertise on college students' visual attention skills, the skills required to keeping track of several different things at the same time--not unlike a pilot keeping track of a row of several engine dials simultaneously.3 Researchers measured participants' response time to two events at two locations on a computer screen, where one target icon appeared more often than another. Predictably, participants who were expert players of Robot Battle (scoring above 200,000) had faster response times than participants who were novice players (scoring below 20,000). But after five hours of playing the game Robotron, all participants responded significantly faster to the target at the low probability position on the screen, demonstrating a causal relationship between playing a computer game and improving strategies for keeping track of events at multiple locations.

So there's more than just getting a job - there's actually advancing mental development.

"Later in the week the home secretary is to host a summit on tackling gun crime, which figures due out on Thursday are expected to show has risen sharply......It is expected the figures will show a 20% increase in firearm offences in England and Wales." That happened over a year ago and it showed a small rise which has been wiped out this year, just because the journalist perceived there to be a big increase in crime and excepts people to announce it doesn't mean it's true, you may not have been talking out of your ass but hindsight has shown the journalist was.

Bobbies are now being issued guns. If you want crime to go away, get guns in the hands of the citizens.

Ok where did you get Bobbies are now being issued with guns from? Because they don't carry guns and the biggest police union don't want to carry guns, there are highly trained armed police but they are support units not Bobbies on the beat. Also there are guns in the hands of Citizens (except ironically handguns) I have a full bore license, I have a Lee-Enfield .303 that I use for target shooting and culling deer and Browning 525 Shotgun for Clay pigeon shooting. If someone where to break into my house I would rather attach my Granddads bayonet to the lee-Enfield very intimidating, and if it came to a fight I would rather use the gun as a club anyway.

Note that burgulary has dropped by about half in the UK since 1995 **, mainly due to more alarms and window locks etc. but partly due to police targetting persistant burgulars personally rather than trying to solve individual crimes.

** Figure obtained from the British Crime Survey available at http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/crimeew0304.html
The BCS is generally regarded as reasonably accurate since it relies on a large survey (e.g. asking 'have you been burgled in the last year?') rather than relying on police figures which fluctuate depending on recording methods and willingness of victims to report the crime.

More than 8.75 million people are held in penal institutions throughout the world, mostly as
pre-trial detainees (remand prisoners) or having been convicted and sentenced. About half of
these are in the United States (1.96m), Russia (0.92m) or China (1.43m plus pre-trial
detainees and prisoners in 'administrative detention').

The United States has the highest prison population rate in the world, some 686 per 100,000
of the national population, followed by the Cayman Islands (664), Russia (638), Belarus (554),
Kazakhstan (522), Turkmenistan (489), Belize (459), Bahamas (447), Suriname (437) and
Dominica (420).

To what extent will the citizens feel safer, and how much safer will they actually be?

Here in the UK where there is a great deal of surveillance, the jury is still out. (Links will follow). The general impression I have as someone who is interested in this subject, is that, yes, they are reducing crime at present. Some research shows that the effect wears off though, so a large part of this may just be shock of the new.

Note that one of the main uses of CCTV is not crime prevention, but aiding in conviction rates.

Particular concerns about CCTV are that it doesn't so much prevent crime as it does displace it elsewhere. As the CCTV cameras are being placed firstly in more affluent areas, this has an even more negative effect on nearby deprived areas.

Sadly, rather fewer people are objecting on the grounds of how much power this gives authorities over people. This might be a grave error in the longer term (my opinion).

My own feeling is that although it seems (to me) to reduce crime a little and increase convictions, it's doing nothing to solve the problems that lead to crime. In my experience, most criminals, whatever their bravado, are driven to be criminals. Tightening the lid on the boiler may hide the problem for a while but it is not the solution.

A few links are:
An 'official' report.
A government response and
a more cautious opinion.

Here is a report of international crime statistics which shows that there is, in fact, far more violent crime in the US than in Western Europe.

The following are average numbers of homicides per 100,000 inhabitants per year from 1997 to 1999

US : 6.26
England : 1.45
Germany : 1.28
France : 1.63
Norway : 0.85
Russia : 20.52
S.Africa: 56.49

Interestingly, the land of the free also has the extremely high prison population (from the same source, again per 100.000 inhabitants)

US : 682
England : 125
Germany : 97
France : 91
Norway : 56
Russia : 729
S.Africa: 327

I have - it's one of the things I've noted in the margins of my printout of the consultation document (120 pages of PDF). Comments are invited, closing date is the 20th of July. I suspect the government's answer will be that it allows banks and other non-government parties to check your biometrics without having access to the National Identity Register.

In Britain I believe he would have to nominate (or implicitly choose) one as his legal wife. For instance, see paragraph 278 of the immigration rules.

OK - so maybe dog pound supervisor is perhaps hyperbole, but the list of people able to access your information does extend as far as, for example, any local authority, any health service trust, even the Royal Pharmaceutical Society.

So yes, we have a law, and even an authority set up to protect citizens from the misuse of data, but at the same time we have RIPA, which drives a coach and horses through any privacy we may have felt entitled to under the Data Protection Act.

Be assured, under RIPA the Home Secretary can add whoever he wishes to the list of people authorised to access information about citizens, and if the current atmosphere is anything to go by, business will be allowed to check the database for any of their employees.

He's decided (not mentioned in election manifesto, no vote in Parliament, no primary legislation, public consultation gave a big thumbs down) that everyone in the UK is going to have to pay to have biometric ID cards and that they will be completely secure because they use computers and the Internet and stuff...

Somehow I think the government got the salespitch from one of the manufacturers, certainly they ignored the fact that the UK's bank and credit card issuers recently refused to implement biometrics because they considered them too unreliable.

Doubtless Slashdot will carry the story about the biggest IT fiasco in history just as soon as Blunkettcards become a reality.

Best wishes,
Mike.

From the PDF file referenced in the parent post, the World Prison Population List:

"The United States has the highest prison population rate in the world, some 686 per 100,000 of the national population, ..."

In the U.S., the anger level is such that there is strong support for keeping people in small cages, at great taxpayer expense, but little support for fixing social problems.

From the parent post: "Getting rid of your idiot president would be a good start."

As others have said, at least there is what appears to be a good alternative: Howard Dean for President

Including other soverign states.
A new bill being legislated in Britain "will classify sexual touching of any kind among under 16s as an offence, including kissing and touching with full consent."

Bill here.

One concerned group here.

Why are so many Americans in prison, under third world medical conditions? The war on drugs, primarily, but also idiotic minimum sentencing laws. Where China executes people as a "deterrence", the US lock them up for decades for the same reason, while still retaining a provably flawed capital punishment system. And, by the way, according to Amnesty International:

Seven countries since 1990 are known to have executed prisoners who were under 18 years old at the time of the crime - Congo (Democratic Republic), Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, USA and Yemen. The country which carried out the greatest number of known executions of child offenders was the USA (17 since 1990).

There are many other very serious social issues in the US (insufficient health care, police brutality, religious fundamentalism, sexual hysteria ..), and just waving the finger at China and shouting "Woo, we're so great" is not going to cut it. The US needs to get serious about cleaning up at home before trying to impose itself as the world police elsewhere. Getting rid of your idiot president would be a good start.

Nope, we're ahead again. The government has just decided that all Britons are going to have to have biometric ID cards linked to a centralised government database. All in a country that has no written constitution, essentially no freedom of information, detention without trial, the acceptance of evidence gained under torture in criminal trials, where the police have repeatedly been found to be institutionally racist and with a government who thinks that George Bush is the best thing to come out of Texas since crude oil.

Apparently we need Big Brother surveillance because: (and I quote) 'In this country we have a proud tradition of being a free and open society. Freedoms are not only embedded in our democracy, but in the very way we live our lives.'

So do we have the freedom to vote against this proposal? - errr no.

But to be fair to Blunkett and friends, the government did hold a consultation exercise. Okay they tried not to tell anyone about it, but they did have one. 66% of the people who responded voted against ID cards - which was a bit of a problem for a government hell-bent on introducing them (despite not having made up its mind) So the Home Office excluded all those people who had sent in responses via groups such as Liberty. Et voila! 66% against becomes 60% in favour!

Honestly, I don't know why the US is bothering with electronic voting, a few British statisticians will get you the results you want.

You can read the whole Orwellian document here (PDF document).

Best wishes,
Mike.

Nope, we're ahead again. The government has just decided that all Britons are going to have to have biometric ID cards linked to a centralised government database. All in a country that has no written constitution, essentially no freedom of information, detention without trial, the acceptance of evidence gained under torture in criminal trials, where the police have repeatedly been found to be institutionally racist and with a government who thinks that George Bush is the best thing to come out of Texas since crude oil.

Apparently we need Big Brother surveillance because: (and I quote) 'In this country we have a proud tradition of being a free and open society. Freedoms are not only embedded in our democracy, but in the very way we live our lives.'

So do we have the freedom to vote against this proposal? - errr no.

But to be fair to Blunkett and friends, the government did hold a consultation exercise. Okay they tried not to tell anyone about it, but they did have one. 66% of the people who responded voted against ID cards - which was a bit of a problem for a government hell-bent on introducing them (despite not having made up its mind) So the Home Office excluded all those people who had sent in responses via groups such as Liberty. Et voila! 66% against becomes 60% in favour!

Honestly, I don't know why the US is bothering with electronic voting, a few British statisticians will get you the results you want.

You can read the whole Orwellian document here (PDF document).

Best wishes,
Mike.

UK residents are 5 times less likely to be victims of violent crime than US ones

Firearms are more often involved in violent crimes in the United States than in England. According to 1996 police statistics, firearms were used in 68% of U.S. murders but 7% of English murders, and 41% of U.S. robberies but 5% of English robberies.

Whether measured by surveys of crime victims or by police statistics, serious crime rates are not generally higher in the United States than England. (All references to England include Wales.) According to 1995 victim surveys -- which measure robbery, assault, burglary, and motor vehicle theft -- crime rates are all higher in England than the United States (figures 1-4 of the report beginning on page 1). According to latest (1996) police statistics -- which measure incidents reported to police of murder, rape, robbery, assault, burglary, and motor vehicle theft -- crime rates are higher in England for three crimes: assault, burglary, and motor vehicle theft (figures 5-10). The 1996 crime rate for a fourth crime (robbery) would have been higher in England than the United States had English police recorded the same fraction of robberies that came to their attention as American police (figure 15).

These are *old* stats, I know, but your DOJ doesn't have any newer ones :(

"I've been thinking about using my right of return privileges (my grandfather was a UK citizen) to go to the UK and work for a few years."

Do you have British citizenship yourself? Your eligibility depends upon your father or mother's status. If they were born in the UK, then you probably qualify. If they weren't then they can't pass the right on to you. Check out the Home Office's web site - I think there are two classes of citizenship: otherwise than by descent (their citizenship can inherited by their children); by descent (they inherited citizenship, and they cannot pass it on to their children.) If you get the opportunity, I would take it, especially if you're still young as it gets harder with age and you will regret it later if you don't. Even if you don't like the UK, being a citizen will allow you to live and work anywhere in the EU. That's very appealing to me as my travels and living overseas are one of the best things I've been able to do in my life. Somebody who posted a reply to something I wrote on /. recently has done this move from the US to London, and you might find his blog interesting.

As you might guess, I've looked in to this a little. I've been interested in this for my future children and for my Canadian wife. I emmigrated from the UK at 21 and have thought of moving back to find out what it's really like to live there as an adult. Three years of residence will also get my wife a European passport. At that point, I think we'll know enough to decide which side of the Atlantic we're happier on. There are trade-offs and advantages for us in either Canada or the UK, but which suits us the most, I don't know yet.

Unbelievable.

The USA has taken the lead in the incarceration rate.
It's prison population rate was between 686 (in 2001) and 702 (in 2000) prisoners per 100,000 of the national population, according to various sources.

Also see here and some additional info here.
I wonder what were the rates for 2002 and what they are today.

Your understanding is wrong.

Well, mostly wrong. We used to have a culture of "innocent until proven guilty", but that is slowly being undermined

Well, lets see, I got this from the Gun Control Network

There were 4,019 crimes involving handguns. While this number has increased in the last two years, the figure is still lower than those recorded in 1992 and 1993.

So while it is true that crime did not disappear, it certainly was not as bad as it used to be when guns were legal.

Now for the most important thing for us to know is Murders in 1996, 679. Murders in 2001/02 was 886. So yes there was an increase, but if you look at the total number of crimes committed, in 1996, it was 239,340, in 2001/2002 it was 650,154. So for a drastic increase in the amount of crimes committed there were not a drastic increase in the number of murders! This statistics provided by Research Development Statistics of the UK.

It seems to me that gun control was done those people a world of good. Of course I am not suprised by your answer. People tend to form an opinion and will attempt to find the facts to fit there preference.

It is reminiesent of when we had all these doom-sayers preaching that if the US raised the speed limit to 65 that people would be dying left and right, it would be holocaust of people flying all over the road... Funny, how the world somehow did not end.

Interestingly enough while we are talking about UK specifics, I do think this sort of "geek groupthink" the article complains about is becoming more detectable, and one of the symptoms of it I have run into locally a couple of times are UK "geeks" who spout off about the DMCA and illegality of decss and other US specific tech legalities, seemingly ignorant of the fact that they don't actually apply to their own national jurisdiction. Generally they then move on to tell me that OpenBSD is more secure by design, RMS is a lunatic , emacs/vi/KDE/GNOME sucks , X11 is bloated, windows crashes a lot , all the other 2nd hand opinions you see on sites like this every day, blah blah. I have a name for these people, and it isn't "geeks". But I'm not sure that its anything sinister. You could probably chalk it up to the fact that the sort of people who use their computers a lot are nowadays exposed to a wider pool of consensus due to the increasing penetration of the internet. This always happens as something moves from the fringes,to a trend and then into the mainstream.

Lets face it, in 2002 there isn't anything terribly "geek"-ish, or whatever you want to call it, about having linux on a home( or even work ) computer, using the web,and being aware of DRM issues ( at least napster and DVD region coding ) and buying T-shirts online that reference these things. In fact there hasn't been for a good few years now. Sturgeons Law, people. As always, look to the fringes for the voices of dissent, of course those fringes are always being redefined. Thats how social evolution works, I've always thought. Celebrate diversity for sure, but don't forget elitism sucks.

If you look at the actual figures, you get a different picture. In 1997, the US murder rate was 18,209. In the same year, in England and Wales, there were 739 murders. Population of England and Wales, about 52 million. Population of US, about 270 million.. Therefore E&W murder rate of 1.4 per 100,000 is much smaller than the rate of 6.8 per 100,000 for the USA.

Indeed... it's so naive when people think terrorism is "new" threat, it just reared its ugly head again in the most awful fashion.

Anyway, every road into the Square Mile has automatically been monitoring numberplates and drivers for years, the idea is to alert the police when a vehicle is logged going in but hasn't been logged going out for a number of hours (i.e. sign of a car bomb), it also helps track stolen, untaxed and uninsured vehicles.

ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) is mentioned in this Home Office report.

Under the RIP act, if intercepted communications are encrypted, it will force the individual to surrender the keys, on penalty of jail sentences of up to two years. The government "says" keys will only be required in "special circumstances" and promises that the security services will destroy the keys as soon as they are finished with them.

Unless I'm reading this incorrectly, this reverses the burden of proof in UK law. In addition, there are stiff prison sentences if an individual who has been required to hand over keys tells a third party. Even worse is the defense for individuals who have "lost or forgotten" a key: innocent people could be jailed for innocently forgetting keys, while drug smugglers and bearded linux hippie pedophiles would happily settle for a two-year prison sentence rather than face far harsher penalties for being found guilty of the crime of which they are suspected.

For the government's take on this, check out the Home Office RIP site. Prove me wrong. I hope to holy strangled Christ that I am.

That's what I did when this unholy bill was first announced asking why any of the listed groups could have access to emails, mobile phone and ISP logs without so much as a warrant. Read that list - it's beyond belief what they're trying to get away with. The only one I can see a justification for is the Home Office as they deal with crime and internal security.

Within two days I received a reply signed by the man himself which suggested that he agreed that there were privacy concerns here and he has forwarded my concerns to the home secretary. So I await Blunkett's justification for all this with baited breath.

It's nice to see that they have delayed the debate but the House of Commons is so stuffed with New Labour drones that they will be able to whip whatever fascist legislation they want through there. Still if this proposed legislation does concern you write to your MP and let your views be known. Who knows maybe even New Labour will deign to listen to the electorate if enough people kick up a fuss.

You're right, the U.S. and China aren't comparable. The U.S. has 1.7 million people in prison, while China (with over 4 times the population) has only 1.4 million people in prison.

people didn't get put into labor camps and tortured for doing spiritual aerobics, falun gong, nor did they get tortured and imprisoned for 33 years because they were vocal about their believe that their country should be free

No one said China was paradise on earth. I think the Chinese government is horrific. But instead of trying to do an honest, intelligent evaluation of the two countries, you simply choose a few anecdotes to attack China while carefully avoiding evidence that would tend to implicate the United States as well -- evidence a jingoist patriot like you can't tolerate.

Soon, all the people will stop coming because they are afraid.

Not to worry. The British have had limited detention without trial to fight terrorism since 1974 and it has had no known effect upon foreigners seeking admission to Britian. The laws are disproportionately applied to Irish visitors without reducing the number Irish citizens coming to Britian to work or visit.

Terrorism is a threat to resident aliens as much as anyone else. A resident alien, like an American citizen, has to decide whether the possibilities of a terrorist attack outweigh the new restrictions and hassles.

If a resident alien is willing to stay in America despite the risk to life and limb posed by terrorism, he may find the additional risk from anti-terrorist measures a reasonable price to pay.

check out the art in these articles, its an expression of what's to come.

Never mind the art. Check out the anti-terrorism laws in other countries where terrorism has been endemic for decades. Hundreds of resident aliens were killed in the attack on September 11. They have as much reason as anyone else to be clamouring for clampdown.

One day I found in it a message informing me that I had been automatically issued a passport. Without my consent. They had just taken the info in my hotmail registration and created a passport for me, without asking my permission. I got very angry, and asked that the "passport" be removed, because I didn't want it. The reply was "it cannot be removed, once you got one, you're stuck with it forever". It seems that, by logging into my hotmail account after they had sent me the info, I had "automatically given them permission to activate the passport". But nowhere on the login page was there any information about this!

IANAL, but looking at some information about UK data protection law, it would seem that Microsoft's behaviour here might be illegal on several counts. Oops. :-)

You can get the crime figures from the UK Home Office online. In the year in question, the method for measuring violent crime was switched, and the new method clearly shows a larger number than the old method. The graph jumps substantially. It doesn't prove a thing, except for how unreliable "proof by statistics" is.

Actually 'The City' or the Square Mile is covered by number plate recognition systems. It logs cars going in and out of the financial district, it checks if the car is reported stolen, and properly taxed and insured. It logs cars that 'go missing', if a car was logged into the system and wasn't seen leaving the area it alerts the police to the possibility of a car bomb. You can read more about it on the Home Office site.

The rest of London and many other parts of the country do have extensive CCTV coverage, however it's just bog standard cameras and monitors.

The only face recognition system in use in London (and possibly the whole country) is the Mandrake system in Newham, which had a particularly bad crime problem. I know it's also being tested in Australia, but it's not used widely in the UK (yet).

This development is particularly frustrating, since up to now UK .gov sites have generally been very standards compliant. In fact the open.gov.uk initiative even has a W3C standards statement. I quote:

"The most important aspect of publishing information on the internet is to ensure that it is available to all, not just a select few who happen to have the newest browser, all the latest plugins and a top of the range, superfast PC.

UK public sector information must be accessible, legible and fast to download."

This is a common mistake made by people, but it's simply not true. We are in fact British citizens, and seeing as no legislation at all relating to nationality existed before the British Nationality & Status of Aliens Act of 1914, the term "subject" is simply a holdover from when the monarchy wielded real power.

I do live in the UK (in the London area) and I have noticed an accute reduction of police interest in the public over the last ten years.

Granted we have some ridiculous bills in parliament (the RIP bill for one) that do appear to infringe on human rights, but considering the amount of times I have been a victim of crime over the last six months (5) I would feel a whole lot safer if there were more Orwellian messures imposed.

----------------------------

The Home Office people would also be responsible for drafting this sort of legislation.

Yes. Now that RIP has been passed we have the Human Rights Act, which incorporates the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law.

It's not the people, but the Prime Minister who can dissolve Parliament and thus cause a general election (in fact, it's theoretically the Queen).

I'm not sure what you mean by "proper credibility" for political parties-- AFAIK whether Members belong to a given party is not taken into account in the original design (any more than it is under the US electoral college system), though there are organisations that keep tabs on what parties are doing.

You might have meant that the people respect political parties in the UK more than they do in the US, and since I haven't lived in the US, it's difficult to say. Anyone know? Do bear in mind that we're still not under a multi-party system, though; even though the centre party have grown in the last few decades, we're still in a first-past the post system, mainly a race between the other two.

From http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/ripa/ripa ct.htm:

"The Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Bill was introduced in the House of Commons on 9th February 2000 and completed its Parliamentary passage on 26 July. The Bill received Royal Assent on 28 July. "

For what it's worth, Here is a link to the full text of the legislation passed by the house of commons.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill hasn't passed yet.

What happened is that the House of Commons discussed and accepted the amendments to the bill made by the House of Lords. No vote to accept or reject overall passage of the bill was made.

You can read the discussions for yourself.

For up-to-date tracking of the bill's progress, see the Home Office's RIP page.

Ummm...the Home Secretary? Find out more about the exciting Home Office ministerial structure by going here (and no, it's not really exciting).

Quick Home Office summary, with Part 3 relating to the crypto stuff.

Full text of Bill as introduced to parliament (Part 3).

Of course it's all written in that sort of legalese which ought to win the International Obfurscated English Contest...

Quick Home Office summary, with Part 3 relating to the crypto stuff.

Full text of Bill as introduced to parliament (Part 3).

Of course it's all written in that sort of legalese which ought to win the International Obfurscated English Contest...