Slashdot Mirror
The UK's Total Surveillance
Budenny writes "The Register has a story in its ongoing coverage of the UK ID Card story. This one suggests, with links to a weekend news story, that the Prime Minister in waiting has bought the idea that all electronic transactions in the UK should be linked to a central government/police database. Every cash withdrawal, every credit card purchase, ever loyalty card use ... And that data should flow back from the police database to (eg) a loyalty card use. So, for example, not only would the government know what books you were buying, but the bookstore would also know if you had an outstanding speeding ticket!"
And we ALL have many things to hide.
Abuse of the info will happen, so let it never be allowed, anywhere!
"I have a right to buy those, but please officer don't tell my boss or my wife or my kids!"
Help end the use of Sigs. Tomorrow
"Nothing for you to see here." *gasp* They got to /.!!!
In all seriousness, this scares the bejesus out of me... and I don't even live in the UK. This would make Big Brother a whole lot bigger... do people really need the government "watching out for them" every step of their lives? And what's with the reverse-feedback? I could see some useful situations (i.e. a bar could see that a patron had a DUI and call him a cab), but overall it seems rather Orwellian.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
And who's guilty of this all?
Terrorists!
And I do mean it. They're bad, bad folks who use scare tactics and incite the fear of getting blown up to control the population into obeying their demands.
Yeah, that's right. Your beloved government fills all the requirements for the word "terrorists". Just like the other side of the pond.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Question: With all these people's lives transparant to business and government, do you think that business/government will become MORE or LESS transparant to people in exchange?
My take is that this is a game of government and business ganging up on the rest of society in the name of security. Government is the daddy, business is the favorite trusted son, and everything else is their hunting ground. The conservative dream.
Ryan Fenton
"The bookstore would know you had an outstanding parking ticket" - how and why? The current bank card we use in a bookshop links to all our bank details but a bookshop cannot access them - no system would let retail outlets interrogate a database for that information or any other info that didn't directly refer to them - that would be a serious design flaw and would never be accepted.
So an article in the Observer makes claims from 'sources', and all of a sudden everyone should get their tin foil hats out. We've all seen what a spectacular failure most of the recent UK Gov IT projects have been, if I believed they were even capable of doing this I might be slightly concerned. When they officially announce this is what they're rolling out, I'll make a fuss.
Kinda makes me feel like I'm on the Truman show - all famous and special and such.
Oh wait - its a bad thing, not having a life of my own...
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Anyone remember the scare about the NSA commissioning programs that could pull together information on individuals from all over t'interweb and produce coherent, intelligent reports on behaviour patterns etc? The idea being that all of this data is available, but it's so massive and disparate that it would be almost futile to draw anything useful from it.
Seems kind of obsolete now, doesn't it.
Meta will eat itself
But who would want ot visit the UK then?
I for one will stay clear of this country... I just prefer to keep my privacy and not get shot.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" - Carl Sagan
that started in 1215 with magna carta. Apparently your present prime minister, whom you have elected to power 2 times, is very enthusiastic about following in the footsteps of his sidekicks in u.s. government to kill democracy.
Read radical news here
>I just prefer to keep my privacy and not get shot.
Don't be silly, we only shoot people if they live in the same house as a terrorism suspect. Stay away from them and you'll be fine. Unless you carry a table leg in a brown bag of course.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
I myself am living through the hell of a family member's minor criminal infraction being repeatedly mishandled and miscoded by the 2 courts and 3 police departments that have some jurisdiction. Now on a daily basis there are cops at my house with one kind of arrest warrant or another for a charge that was dropped months ago.
So yeah let's give the cops more power and more data to peer into and let's give them more of an excuse to wave a piece of paper in my face and tell me "I don't care what you say, this piece of paper says I'm right and you're going to jail.." Yeah let's do that.
This system is far too complicated to ever work.
A much easier system would be to just let the government decide what you can eat, where you can go (and when), and what you can read (if anything). In fact, let the government set your schedule, issue you a uniform with a number on it, and install a chip in your head so you can be tracked 24/7.
Only then will we be safe from terrorists.
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
When I first heard about the 9/11 attacks, I thought "Was this a CIA plan to get a law passed to elimnate all are civil right?" Of couse not, but then they passed the Patriot act. Only terrorists and criminals would have anything to hide, only a terrorist would say, "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Fight Spammers!
I was thinking more of V for Vendetta.
One of the underlying goals of the whole ID card fiasco isn't the card but the database it is intending to use that is designed to integrate all the other government owned databases in a way that allows a single view of a person. As things stand, if you want to search the driving licence data, address, voting info, criminal records etc you haven't to search different databases.
Nowhere have I seen anything that suggested this data will be available to 3rd parties such as shops but for sure, they want the data from shops.
Anyway, the UK government have a terrible record for producing big systems either to time, budget or function so we'll have nothing to worry about for ten years by which time it will have bankrupted us and will use kit no longer available and crash out with errors and timeouts all over the place. It will probably be a doddle to hack too so at least the crims will get something useful out of it.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
I know you're being sarcastic, but it's not information being free - it's information being collected to control the masses - thus being a complete solution for the removal of freedoms.
A total surveillance society is a mere 10-20 years away. Every traffic light I approach I am taped. My face is scanned every time I go to a baseball game. The SCOTUS already upheld that I do indeed have to provide ID to a police officer even if I am not suspected of any wrong doing, at their whim.
Biometrics are the rage. Biometrics and RFID will be on my passport, in my license. The REAL ID act officially creates a national ID in the US. And so on...
While the US is behind the UK in terms of true overall survellance, it's not that far. 20 years from now, when facial recognition is perfected - or some new technology that can ready our DNA from a small distance exists - you won't need customer loyalty cards anymore.
And people will accept it all - because it will all happen slowly, over time, and add seeming convenience to everything. Why carry an ID or a credit card? The police car will instantly recognize you, know exactly where you've been in public in the past few days, weeks, months... Everywhere your car travels, RFID tags or your cell phone will give away your location and be recorded.
See, aside from the DNA sniffer... all of this is reality now. 1984 was a little ambitious - we needed a few more years to totally accept living in a police state, but that's because there was no MySpace back then to distract us from the realities of government total awareness.
Yeah, lable me a tin foil hat person, but I'm going to hold out as long as I can - no EZPass, no customer loyalty cards, a new non-RFID passport, etc., etc. I may go down, but not without some degree of a fight.
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
The oft used trick in the UK for getting the population to swallow whatever crap the government wants to hurl their way, i.e.
1) Announce insanely over the top version of whatever it is you want to do
2) Sit back while the population freaks out for a while and make a token defence of it
3) Back off to the point you originally intended and watch the population sigh in relief your "capitulation" in the face of their protests.
Generally, if there's one thing to realise about New Labour it's that things don't leak from a source close to anyone in the government unless there's an agenda behind it.
Hmmmmmm..... Deep fried and look like Squirrel.
Brown has also said (i think in TFA) that he will sell our info to offset the costs of the scheme. Well, the details of those left in the UK. Im off to Germany when this happens.
Statistically, that's not true. Smokers cost the NHS less over the course of their lifetimes on average, because they tend not to live as long.
This may be counter-intuitive, but it does illustrate very nicely how dangerous a little information can be. Not that this is at all relevant to the current discussion, of course. ;-)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Contrary to prevailing beliefs on Slashdot, governments can become very efficient indeed when they have a mind to be. Case in point, the Holocaust. It was probably the most efficient government operation ever conducted. Executions continued even while under soviet bombardment and practically right up until the red army marched into the camp gates. Source.
Godwin's Law, blah, blah. For a more mudane example of government efficiency, remember that only two things are certain. Death, and Taxes.
May the Maths Be with you!
Let people know your country's moving into fascism.
And then be shocked to discover that most of your countrymen think moving into fascism is a good idea. At best, they will say that they do not support fascism - unfortuantly what they do support will look and act like fascism - just without the historical baggage associated with the term.
Instead of jumping right in organizing a rebellion (which, let's face it, is a lot of hard work and unlikely to succeed, at least in the the short to medium term), it's a lot easier to see if leaving the country is an option (assuming you can find somwhere on the planet to go) and if it is an option, take it.
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
Assuming those speed cameras photograph and register all vehicles that pass, people should destroy them. If they only take pictures when a passing vehicle is actually speeding and the photographs are analyzed by hand/human eye (thereby minimizing the possibility of misuse), I'm thinking destroying them is not quite called for.
Indeed, why spend the effort to destroy when you can much much more easily disable? I'm thinking a tube or three of some cyanoacrylate adhesive and a sheet of quarter-inch particle board (cut into lense-shaped pieces, duh) can render ineffective quite a few of those pesky cameras!
You can be an atheist and still not want to succumb to some weird cross-over sheep disease -- AC
Remember, Remember, the 5th of November,
of gunpowder treason and plot.
For I see no reason that gunpowder, treason,
should ever be forgot.
Indeed, why spend the effort to destroy when you can much much more easily disable?
For the same reason that V didn't simply disable the House of Parliament: the act of destroying - particularly by means of a well-aimed bullet - is intended to send a precise message to the authorities about the relative balance of power between the government and the people.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
I'm sure you aren't trying to imply that guns and books are equally dangerous. The day that books are banned because they are considered to be as deadly as assault rifles will be a sad day indeed.
I don't see a lot of benefit from plugging supermarkets or bookstores into a crime database; their products are uncontrolled and their employees are not trained for apprehending or detaining suspects. The danger in proposals such as this is the so-called "cooling effect" that it has citizens. It begins a drift away from "presumed innocent." Instead, a book-purchaser is considered possibly criminal by default. In the same way that racial profiling causes minorities to mistrust police, so policies like this will (along with the inevitable screw-ups and abuses of information that will occur) will cause a mistrust of bookstore employees and the government.
The job of the government is to serve the people, not to make its own job easier.
The IT infrastructure supporting the system will be down more often than up and the costs will spiral in the tens of billions.
Whilest it would provide a fair amount of amusement to me to watch the government screw up an IT system yet again (or rather, EDS or other complete idiots they decide to contract who have shown on numerous previous occasions to be incapable of running an abacus, let alone a national computer database+network), I can think of better things for my taxes to go on.
And you can guarantee that before there is *any* chance of the system being scrapped, it'll have to have been kludged and band-aided (expensively) a few hundred times over the course of several decades.
I might be slightly more inclined to spend that kind of tax money if the result is the people responsible for building a flawed security hole ridden system ending up in jail, but that's never going to happen - they'll just take a big payoff and wait until the next month when the govenment contracts them to screw up another project for an extortionate sum of money.
Forgive my cynicisim, but I've seen the same companies being contracted and screwing up in fairly major ways time and time again - when will the government learn to blacklist companies who cause major screwups or cost overruns?
http://blog.nexusuk.org
'Give me six lines penned by the hand of an innocent man, and I will find in them somethign to have him hanged.'
We all do, say, buy, or otherwise involve ourselves in things that might not put us on everyone's best person of the year list. If you have access to enough information about somebody, simply through selective presentation one can create a danmning image of an otherwise innocent and decent indivual.
"And I see you bought drain cleaner, fertilizer, and firecrackers sir, clearly you are trying to build a bomb"
This is definately a serious potential for massive abuse.
Why do you do that? Do you think the grocery store is planning to kill you? "Sir, he went to our competitor yesterday, prepare the death ray"
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
It's easy to get confused if you're used to a two-party system. You can tell just by the phrase "that side of the divide", as if there were a canyon and there are only two sides of the canyon that you can stand on. The two party system here taints all discussion and even thinking about politics, even my own though I try to be aware of it. Everything becomes an "either-or" issue with two choices, and the worst part is that both of them are usually bad. Thus the phrase "lesser of two evils", which denies the existence of possible third choices.
The enemies of Democracy are
What a whole load of fuss over pretty much nothing. Apart from "speculation" that ID cards are evil and will contain your soul the actual facts are that ID cards will only contain the same amount of information found in driver's license, passport, etc - it is just consolidated in one place. Every single time there is an ID cards discussion on /. everybody starts saying "the UK is a police state", "the UK is fascist", "Britain is undemocratic". Nobody seems to realise that ID cards aren't the state trying to reach into every aspect of your life, they are just trying to consolidate your personal information into one place, rather than having it scattered all over the place, making ID theft all the easier.
And to whoever it was who said about discussing policy in the UK rarely happens and policy discussion goes on all the time in the US: a seperation of powers only works if they are pulling in different directions.
The government ought to fear the people - correct - but if they did, they'd just make even more draconian laws and privacy invasions so that they don't fear the people once more.
About five years ago I was generally in favour of limited invasion of privacy like ID cards, CCTV etc. The level of craziness coming from Labour in the area has pushed me into the privacy nut camp.
See, this is one of the problems. Not to pick on you, but let me use your anecdote as an example. People who think 'ok, I trust my government, let's go along with them and give up a tiny bit of privacy to get all this security they're advertising.' And they ignore us 'nutters' who are screaming things like "slippery slope! 1984!" thinking that we're just overreacting. But now fast forward 5 years and oho, look who was right! The government especially always lives up to the old saying "give em an inch and they'll take a mile." People need to understand that whatever the government is asking for, it has more than just the advertised motive. Whether for good or ill (usually ill with respect to the populace) there are more issues at stake than what they tell us because that's what politics is, it's a game of chess, a subtle pawn move today sets up the checkmate tomorrow. Every government in the history of man has sought to expand its own power, that's a rather strong precedent to go against. (And I don't care about the pedantic historian who posts with a few counterexamples, over 1000s of years, such examples are anomolies.) It always amazes me when ignorant people just assume new powers will be used for good because the government so far has been good. This is especially risky in governments where we change leaders every so often. Sure, you may trust the people in charge today, but 10 years from now will you have the same faith in the leaders elected then? You'd better because those laws won't be going off the books, not w/o a revolution.
I hope you personally have learned from your mistake of supporting any loss of freedom, no matter how trivial, and are preaching the word of caution to others. It's a bum deal, never willingly give up what you would otherwise fight to protect, even if you trust the current government.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
What's that - the Supreme Court Rolling Over The United States?
It probably fits.
Maybe 'Reaming Out'?