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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
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.
If this database could be linked to myspace!!
I'll never have to write my own boring blogs ever again, this could do it for me!
11am bought donuts at krispy kreme
11:15 incurred speeding fine on South eastern freeway
11:30 purchased petrol
"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.
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. Their current behaviour just seems like the Labour equivalent of Thatcher's last years.
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
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.
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!
Watch Ordering pizza (turn on your speakers!)
Although this film was made in response the the U.S. Information Awareness Office program, it is equally relevant here.
Trusted Computing FAQ | Free Dawit Isaak!
As a Brit who lived in the USA from 1991 to 2000, I can report unfortunately, that unlike the USA, whose wonderful constitution and congress means that controversial measures are often debated, here, if the PM or PM2B decides to implement a law, he may and sometimes will bring it into being. The collapse of morals, lack of principled leadership, common sense and genuine concern for the populace shown by Blair's government is terrifying. I have had several parking tickets (citations) in London whereby my car was photographed BEFORE the alleged offence, and without my permission. I was stunned to receive pictures of my car and toughly written letters demanding payment of £100 for very very minor and totally accidental parking offences. Once such CCTV systems and linked to the same database as this retail database, we will in fact be living in a world far worse than Owell envisioned because unlike people, technology is cold and unable to make compassionate or common sense based judgements. It's not the Orwellian nightmare we should be afraid of, it's the concept of Skynet and such a system being missued by a corrupt and morally bankrupt government. Or G-d forbid, any terrorists who take over parliament and use it to 'take out' people of a specific ethnic group. It's happened before! People of Britain, open your eyes!
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
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.
think about when you sign up for health insurance, they'll be like `dear sir, we know you lied on your application, we have seen you have purchased excessive tobacoo and alcholic substances in the last year`.
Most people don't have private health insurance here, we have the NHS, and if you do choose to get private health insurance, you have to tell them how much you smoke/drink anyway.
If anything, this would be one of the few possible benefits of such a system - the amount of tax you pay could be directly linked to your lifestyle, so people who smoke would pay more because they're probably going to make more use of the NHS than those who don't. True, they already pay more due to the high level of duty on cigarettes, but smokers are an easy target and what government can resist easy tax targets. They could sell it the same way that they're selling the road usage charge idea (the one one where they stick a gps in your car and monitor where it goes) - just use a dubious moral argument to get it through (smokers|car drivers are evil and must be punished through punative taxation).
You could even go one stage further and make VAT progressive as well - instead of everyone paying the same 17.5%, your VAT rate would be directly related to income. Of course, that would mean moving to the US model where the displayed price doesn't include tax, which would mean people would actually become aware of how much money they're handing over to the government, and some resentment might result.
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
BARMAN: You're a cab.
DRUNK: The old ones are the best. Hic!
DRUNK FALLS OFF BAR STOOL.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
To be fair it's not like the UK is the most worrying place for that sort of thing. If you're talking about going abroad then a lot of countries gather far more information on you than the UK does or likely ever will. This type of thing is never going to go live as much as the media likes to sensationalise these type of things, although it's arguable of course that media sensationalism is why it wont go live - people just wont accept it. Even if somehow it did get put into practice the European human rights courts would crush it within seconds (yes Europe IS good for something ;)).
When I went to the US last year they insisted on taking my fingerprints and photograph (retina scan I think? Looked like a normal webcam though!) as well as a record of where I was going to be throughout my entire trip there, how much currency I had with me, where I worked, where in the UK I lived etc. I'd never seen a gun before except for in the army cadets, certainly never in a non-military setting for 23 years and a police officer at heathrow with an MP5 (i.e. my whole life to that point) however when I went to the US. In 4 weeks in the US travelling from Sacramento down through California and to Arizona back up to the grand canyon I saw 2 individuals with guns as well as 5 incidents (2 in Sacramento, 3 in Phoenix) of police officers with guns pulled on people in cars - that's 6 more in 4 weeks than I've ever seen in 23 years of living in the UK outside a military setting. Of course, gun crime there is a lot higher also as we well know.
I'll note also that whilst I've seen no display of firearms by anyone in the other countries I've been to I must note that arguably the worst for information gathering and general nastiness of customs officials when I went on holiday was ironically Canada, a country that is supposedly full of friendly people. When I landed in Ottawa and got to immigration I was told to step into the customs office where I was interrogated for 3hrs and asked everything from the password to my laptop which I had in my case through to the amount of money in my bank account, whether I had a criminal record, what my job was, how long I'd worked there, whether I had a girlfriend/wife, why I had two shavers in my suitcase and whether I had any beastiality images on my laptop or digital camera (no seriously, it was hard to keep a straight face on that one). After they realised I really was just there on holiday and not a multi-billionaire, unemployed, shaver murderer importing a hoarde of beastiality porn on my laptop and camera to Canada they let me go on with my holiday, again not without however recording every little detail of my planned trip. Now I'll accept I was probably unlucky, that immigration was looking for someone specific after a tip off maybe (they did pull one other person aside but only for an hour) however again, I'm pretty sure Canadian immigration now still holds far more information on me than they probably should.
The only country I've ever been to that hasn't bothered with personal details was Norway which was a weird experience, it was literally straight off the plane in Narvik and onwards with my whale watching trip.
What I'm getting at here isn't that the UK is some innocent country where the authorities treat us really nicely or that America is a land of spying gun toting maniacs but simply that the parent comment is just simple paranoia, it's worth noting that Europe as a whole has refused to let many countries retain information on European citizens unless said country adheres to European data protection laws so there's a lot more protection out there than articles like in TFA would have you beleive.
If anything, this would be one of the few possible benefits of such a system - the amount of tax you pay could be directly linked to your lifestyle, so people who smoke would pay more because they're probably going to make more use of the NHS than those who don't.
Dear Mr.Smith,
We have noticed from your grocery purchases that this month you did not buy proper amounts of vegetables from our approved Nutritional Excellence(tm) list. Instead you purchased some cakes which, you must realize, are bad for your health. Accordingly, we have no choice but to double your health insurance premiums.
Sincerely yours
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Transponders?
:
:
: ...but the link finally died in July 2004 and the new location does not have a photo of a RFID bridge underpass collector. But does discuss thhe toll booth RFID uses...
Spy transmission chips embedded in tires that can be read REMOTELY while driving.
A secret initiative exists to track all funnel-points on interstates and US borders for car tire ID transponders (RFid chips embedded in the tire).
I hope this guys RFID dumper helps people learn about their car more (if supported scanner is in the AIAG frequency standard range)
Your tires have a passive coil with 64 to 128 bit serial number emitter in them! (AIAG B-11 ADC v3.0) . A particular frequency energizes it enough so that a receiver can read its little ROM. A ROM which in essence is your GUID for your TIRE. Multiple tires do not confuse the readers. Its almost identical to all "FastPass" "SpeedPass" technologies you see on gasoline keychain dongles and commuter windshield sticker-chips. The US gov has secretly started using these chips to track people.
Its kind of like FBI "Taggants" in fertilizer and "Taggants" in Gasoline and Bullets, and Blackpowder. But these car tire transponder Ids are meant to actively track and trace movement of your car.
Taggant research papers
http://www.wws.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/byteserv.prl/ ~ota/disk3/1980/8017/801705.PDF
(remove spaces in url from slashcode if needed)
I am not making this up. Melt down a high end Firestone, or Bridgestone tire and go through the bits near the rim (sometimes at base of tread) and you will locate the transmitter (similar to 'grain of rice' pet ids and Mobile SpeedPass, but not as high tech as the tollbooth based units). Sokymat LOGI 160, and Sokymat LOGI 120 transponder buttons are just SOME of the transponders found in modern high end car tires. The AIAG B-11 Tire tracking standard is now implemented for all 3rd party transponder manufactures [covered below].
It is for QA and to prevent fraud and "car theft", but the US Customs service uses it in Canada to detect people who swap license plates on cars when doing a transport of contraband on a mule vehicle that normally has not logged enough hours across the border. The customs service and FBI do not yet talk about this, and are starting using it soon.
Photos of chips before molded deep into tires!
http://www.sokymat.com/sp/applications/tireid.html
You never heard of it either because nobody moderates on slashdot anymore and this is probably +0 still. It has also never appeared in print before and is very secret.
Californias Fastpass is being upgraded to scan ALL responding car tires in future years upcoming. I-75 may get them next in rural funnel points in Ohio.
The photo of the secret prototype WAS at
http://www.tadiran-telematics.com/products6.html
http://www.telematics-wireless.com/site/index1.php ?ln=en&main_id=33
but the fact is... YOU PROBABLY ALREADY HAVE A RADIO TRANSPONDER not counting your digital cell phone which is routinely silently pulsed in CA bay area each rush hour morning unless turned off (consult Wired Magazine Expose article). Those data point pulses are used by NSA on occasions.
The us FBI with NRO/NSA blessings, has requested us gov make this tire scanning information as secret as the information regarding all us inkjet printers sold in usa in the last 3 years using "yellow" GUID barcode under dark ink regions to serialize printouts to thwart counterfeiting of 20 dollar bills. (30 to 40 percent of ALL California counterfeiting is done using cheap Epson inkjet printers, most purchased with credit ca
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell