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Total Phone and Email Database Proposed In UK
mishmash writes "The Times of London is reporting a proposal for a massive government database holding details of all phone calls, emails, and time spent on the Internet. This is to be justified as being 'part of the fight against crime and terrorism.' Quoting: 'Internet service providers and telecoms companies would hand over the records to the Home Office under plans put forward by officials.' If you want to write to representatives to let them know your views, contact details are available at Write to Them." UK telecoms are already required to keep records of phone calls and text messages for 12 months, accessible by subpoena; the requirement is already slated to expand to records of Internet usage, emails, and VoIP. This new proposal aims to centralize all that information in a single database in the Home Office.
The subject line says it all.
Mr.Orwell! A telephone call for Mr.Orwell ....
What on earth is this going to be good for?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
But how about a much cheaper and effective method of keeping the UK safe from Teh Terrorists:
1. Stop supporting Israeli terrorism
2. Stop acting the lapdog to the United States rampaging through the Middle East in an effort to secure oil resources and pipelines and wacky Christian end of world judegement day type crazyness.
When doing something that is both unpopular and demonstrably ineffective, the obvious solution is to do more of it. Those clever Brits! A perfect model for the future of U.S. legislation!
enjoy reading my encrypted traffic and voip phone calls.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
If the British Government had any balls, they'd build their own version of the Great Firewall and log everything that goes through a node on their national infrastructure.
That way you can call it what it is.
Instead, the ISPs are being pulled into doing the dirty work, which means the gov't gets shielded from some of the heat.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
... or storage consultants, IT consultants, IT services.... Does anyone have an idea how much data this database would have to hold? From the data I'm guessing at (1 MB per 1 minute call, 1 million calls a day for the UK), that's 1 TB a day being generated. They'll need an ungodly amount of storage, processing power and bandwidth to house this just for phone data. Email can easily double that data. Did anybody think this through properly? Is this actually gonna fly? Or is this just gonna make IBM and HP filthy rich, while some sysadmins get to poke around real data for "testing purposes"?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
In soviet UK, database injects you?
While I think Write To Them is a fine service and encourage people to use it more, I can't help but feel this is a little premature. This is just another hare-brained idea by the Home Office that MPs haven't even seen yet. Why don't we wait until they actually have a copy of the bill before bombarding them with complaints about it? Otherwise we run the risk of looking like paranoid kooks for protesting a bill that nobody has read because it doesn't even exist yet.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Many people assume that this is illegal, but it really isn't. The only privacy issue would be over listening to the actual calls. All such statistical data is public knowledge. This database would only take it a small step further.
My preferred name is frazz, but someone keeps taking it. If you see him, tell him I said hi.
Slashdotters spend more than 24hrs per week on Slashdot. Slashdotters have the lowest amount of social connections of any other group Slashdotters often times obfuscate their traffic and messages after hearing the first two.
Why not? After all their current, obtrusive, all-seeing camera system works so good at stopping major crimes, errr, I mean, illegal dog poop.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
"Western civilization isn't possible without relational databases." -- Bruce Lindsay, IBM fellow. I always loved that quote.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
...an inconvenient truth
...I wonder if the Empress Elizabeth II gives a crap about her government running all over her subjects.
People are surprised by this? Awwwww.... that's so cute...
Newsflash. This is what governments do. Something bad happens, and they use it as an excuse to take away rights.
English speaking countries may mock the French as much as they want, at least THOSE guys know how to have a Revolution.
I do not think they are talking about statistical data in here. They mean the content of everything and that is A BAD THING(TM).
After the very public demonstration of the UK Government's (more specifically, Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs) laughable security policy when it comes to personal data, I'm suddenly very paranoid.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Marx was from London.
If you don't understand what it's good for, well, you're just a prole.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
...will that include spam? If so it becomes quite useless: >90% of the e-mails are spam these days. Good luck doing anything with such a noise to signal level.
When did the Brits pass the Patriot Act? I know America's running the country, but the Poms at least like to think they run it themselves.
Cogito, ergo sig.
Being a U.S.-centric site, a lot of vitriol gets directed towards the US government around here (and so it should in relation to many laws and policies relating to "terrorism" and "security").
But what on earth is going on in the UK? Security cameras literally everywhere, compulsory DNA databases, laws permitting detention without charge or trial for long periods of time, that insane proposal for a law to allow laws to be made and abolished by regulation (i.e. without a vote in parliament), and this obsession with centralising government control over information, particularly insofar as it relates to the movements and communications of private citizens. The list goes on and on.
Britain stood virtually alone against fascism in World War Two, and was a bastion against the totalitarian Soviet bloc during the Cold War. Before then the UK resisted the power of the Catholic church, eliminated any real power for its despotic monarchs, and even briefly pioneered the field of total republican independence from hereditory rule, later embraced by some more celebrated republics. Before any of that you managed to write the Magna Carta, perhaps the greatest document on the rights of the individual in human history.
Why did you even bother, only to willingly turn yourselves into a bureaucractic authoritarian state? Sure, you're not murdering millions of your citizens in gas chambers, but you're only a hop, skip and a jump away from East Germany under the Stasi - total state surveillance and the tyranny of a huge, opaque executive government where faceless "officials" control the lives of citizens.
Wake up, before it's too late.
Read Pynchon.
yes, Al Gore is a socialist, but that doesn't have much to do with this.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Because soon you won't be able to.
If you're interested in facts I'll tell you what they are and I'll give you sources - Chomsky on The Big Idea
I'm sure they are already doing it there and in the U.S. as well.
Here it is:
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Brilliant stuff. Really sad. But brilliant.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
You know, stories like this make clear its a good thing the Nazis didn't win WWII. Just imagine if the Nazis had won, they might have tapped everyone's.....
er..... Nevermind....
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
This is the first comment I read. I do not need to go any further before saying that you are not only right, but have put forth the truth in such an eloquent manner.
History does repeat itself, or so they say.
1700-1900 is NOT that long of a time span at all in the grand scheme of things. Now consider all of the world changing events we saw in just two hundred years. The change saw are almost unimaginable by even the most creative of minds. What will another 200 years and scarce resources bring?
I do not think even the most intellectual of us can fathom what the world will look like in a hundred years. If it comes down to it, the police state WILL be enforced if deemed necessary, and it will all be already in place ready to go...
We think we are so different from those before us, but are you so naive to think that they did not feel the same way about their previous generations?
It really is time to get up and do something if you live in the UK. This kind of stuff makes me feel good to be in the US... for once.
Vendetta
How can we be safe from criminals and terrorists while we still retain the ability to communicate face to face without full disclosure to our loyal public servants?
I regard it as not only highly desirable but a moral duty to provide the contents of all non-electronically-mediated conversations - ideally a full video or audio recording would be made available, but at the very least a transcript or precis.
I just don't know how one could claim to be an upstanding citizen without providing such.
.sigs: Just Say No!
It sounds like that we are moving to the state of "Pre-crime" where we will be charged with suspicious activity even when no crime has yet been committed.
All they need now is some curfews and laws against private gatherings.
Nobody seems to hate the concept of terrorism as much as the Brits -
I would like to see us have an Osama Bin ladin day where we burn his effigy to fireworks and general celebration
- and Guy fawkes never actually carried out the gunpowder plot
AND nobody seems to forget the bloody goverment reprisals that have taken place under the guidance of the old Kings and Queens, mostly due to religious differences. here I name but a few:
The rampage of Bloody Bonner during the reign of Queen Mary I
The Bloody Assizes of Judge Jeffreys in the reign of King James II
The repression in Scotland against the highlanders after the first Jacobite rebellions which some historians have called genocide
The Peterloo Massacre in 1819
Have the English forgot all of these thousands of government killings and yet still remember Guy Fawkes who did not manage to kill a single person?
If I were British I would be considerably more afraid of my government than any terrorist.
Better stick to encryption for everything these days. That way it wouldn't matter if it was logged in a central database or not.... They can't read it. Eventually they'll make encryption a 'terrorist tool', which in turn makes you a 'terrorist' for using it. I love their psychology mind tricks... By the way, keeping everything centralized makes for a better plan. Once the hacker community finds out where it is, it will be the race for the first team to hack the box and steal every person's confidential data that the government has been taking (stealing... double theft :) )
So once again, we have a very bright government from all angles. No my people, they want to know everything about you, and will use YOUR money to obtain it. They don't care about terrorists, they care about YOU.
Wake up society; History repeats itself!
Oday ouyay antway otay ayplay away amegay?
When you don't surf, fire-up your trusty "robrowser" which will surf randomly, thus overflowing the guvmint's computers.
Cue the 1812 Overture...
"We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Publicly condemn the EU for its decision to compulsorily introduce the electronic identification of sheep after 2010"
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/sheepEID
Is all of this all down to the British Government or is it coming from the EU?
How long before the British Government is just a puppet and everything is run from Brussels?
>Wake up, before it's too late
dude - it's too late.
It's too late. We can't win. They've gotten too powerful. - Abbie Hoffman's 1989 Suicide Note
despair can kill you, or they'll kill you if you get in the way...
But that is not new: it's always been true, throughout history. So, smile pretty for the cameras and encrypt your data.
... spam.
Considering that over 90% of all email is spam.....
If I were British I would be considerably more afraid of my government than any terrorist.
I'm American and I fear our government more than any other terrorists. This is backwards, government is supposed to fear citizens, not citizens fear government.
FalconShould there be a Law?
No he's not, Al Gore's family is a big holder of stocks in Oxidental Petroleum Company, Oxy.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Have you guys seen what's been happening to the republican assholes who've been running our government?
I won't blame the Republicans, the powers that the PATRIOT Act gave Bush Clinton tried to grab as president too.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Guantanamo Bay was created when Chuck roundhouse-kicked Cuba in the face during the Cuban Missile Crisis and so terrified Castro he begged Khrushchev to remove the missiles.
So *now* you know.
this is not just something the UK citizens should be protesting / revolting over... if this goes through it will set a precedence for other governments to follow. but that's not to say that it isn't already happening, black ops do happen
Having lived in a former Communist country all I can say that this sucks and it's extremely sad and disappointing. The UK government should know it better.
Great comment, bet that argument could be used to win some opposition in England! "Your Granddad fought Nazis..for this?"
You're absolutely right and it scares the crap out of me. There are so many in the US who want to emulate the UK and the EU - yet those countries seem to be on a bullet train to complete slavery to the government. I can't fathom WHY people in the UK don't speak out (or if some do, why more don't speak out) against this garbage. Are there any people here from the UK who can enlighten me?
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
"A break-in to end all break-ins
In 1971, stolen FBI files exposed the government's domestic spying program.
By Allan M. Jalon, ALLAN M. JALON is a longtime contributor to The Times and other publications on issues of culture and media.
March 8, 2006
THIRTY-FIVE YEARS ago today, a group of anonymous activists broke into the small, two-man office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Media, Pa., and stole more than 1,000 FBI documents that revealed years of systematic wiretapping, infiltration and media manipulation designed to suppress dissent.
The Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI, as the group called itself, forced its way in at night with a crowbar while much of the country was watching the Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight. When agents arrived for work the next morning, they found the file cabinets virtually emptied.
Within a few weeks, the documents began to show up mailed anonymously in manila envelopes with no return address in the newsrooms of major American newspapers. When the Washington Post received copies, Atty. Gen. John N. Mitchell asked Executive Editor Ben Bradlee not to publish them because disclosure, he said, could "endanger the lives" of people involved in investigations on behalf of the United States.
Nevertheless, the Post broke the first story on March 24, 1971, after receiving an envelope with 14 FBI documents detailing how the bureau had enlisted a local police chief, letter carriers and a switchboard operator at Swarthmore College to spy on campus and black activist groups in the Philadelphia area.
More documents went to other reporters Tom Wicker received copies at his New York Times office; so did reporters at the Los Angeles Times and to politicians including Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota and Rep. Parren J. Mitchell of Maryland.
To this day, no individual has claimed responsibility for the break-in. The FBI, after building up a six-year, 33,000-page file on the case, couldn't solve it. But it remains one of the most lastingly consequential (although underemphasized) watersheds of political awareness in recent American history, one that poses tough questions even today for our national leaders who argue that fighting foreign enemies requires the government to spy on its citizens. The break-in is far less well known than Daniel Ellsberg's leak of the Pentagon Papers three months later, but in my opinion it deserves equal stature.
Found among the Media documents was a new word, "COINTELPRO," short for the FBI's "secret counterintelligence program," created to investigate and disrupt dissident political groups in the U.S. Under these programs, beginning in 1956, the bureau worked to "enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles," as one COINTELPRO memo put it, "to get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox."
The Media documents along with further revelations about COINTELPRO in the months and years that followed made it clear that the bureau had gone beyond mere intelligence-gathering to discredit, destabilize and demoralize groups many of them peaceful, legal civil rights organizations and antiwar groups that the FBI and Director J. Edgar Hoover found offensive or threatening.
For instance, agents sought to persuade Martin Luther King Jr. to kill himself just before he received the Nobel Prize. They sent him a composite tape made from bugs planted illegally in his hotel rooms when he was entertaining women other than his wife and threatened to make it public. "King, there is one thing left for you to do. You know what it is," FBI operatives wrote in their anonymous letter.
Under COINTELPRO, the bureau also targeted actress Jean Seberg for having made a donation to the Black Panther Party. The fragile actress ultimately committed suicide after a gossip nugget based on a FBI wiretap was leaked to the L.A. Times and published. The item, suggesting that the father of the baby she was carrying was a Black Panther rather than her French writer-husband, turned out to be wr
And now the official move to let civilian authorities log all your telephonics just like the intelligenace srvvices do at Menwith hill http://cndyorks.gn.apc.org/mhs/ http://www.fas.org/irp/facility/menwith.htm
New labourt have introduced more than 4000 pieces of legislation since 1997 and thus in many ways have introduced the "patriot act" by increments instead of one big piece. this is an outrage and indeed people should be making a big noise about it.
They already went there, believe me. Go to The Pirate Bay and get the movie "Taking Liberties" - it's a documentary about what the current government has done to the UK.
They have a clip of Tony Blair saying that he knows a whole class of people who will grow up to be be criminals and ought to be registered as such *pre-birth*.
No sig today...
I did...I emigrated.
a.
I was about to come over here and post pretty much the same thing. Britain has become a place that I would never, ever want to live. I only hope it's an aberration in the history of government rather than a glimpse into the future.
-Vendal Thornheart
What's wrong?
The British Empire, that's what.
By allowing entry into Britian to anyone with a British passport (which is to say anyone from any of current and former the British colonies) the British have lost control of their own land and country. They have lost control of their borders.
These measures are a desperate attempt by native British to retain rule of the British Islands, to keep from becoming Britanistan, or ruled by people of African, Indian, or South East Asian descent.
The average British citizen does not object because, they believe, its not aimed at them, its designed to monitor and control those "others".
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
.... given them a clue on how to break you keys, they will start by guessing that the first words are Chuck Norris!
As long as the CIA keeps Osama safe in a bunker at the Pentagon, he can and will continue to be used to scare all Westerners into giving up our rights. We really have no privacy any more anyway, we just need to install the two-way televisions and we're right there in 1984.
There are hundreds of institutions that would appreciate knowing how the hell to properly archive and store the e-mail of just 10,000 people.
Can't wait to see the solution they come up with. And the invoice...
Mind you, six months after they get it set up, we'll probably see a story about a server theft.
This is unequivocally one of the most profound posts ever made on Slashdot about the state of the government in the UK and other wester states around the world.
..papers please. :-)
Now that I've said that... ehm...
To...?
Seriously. I don't understand why people bother caring about politics enough to desire discussing it, let alone even paying attention. Unless you're willing to bomb your government, there is no point in giving a shit about what they do. They are in control, and the term "democracy" means nothing.
Now get back to working long hours for minimal pay so your family doesn't wind up living on the streets next month. And don't forget to take advantage of your fellow human beings in any manner necessary to make your employer a nickel. Now that's a good civilian.
East Germany. (Time machine, go!)
Given their current track record, when it comes to keeping information to themselves, you would think they would have given up trying to collect more of it by now.
Actually no I wouldn't.
The character of Sir Humphrey Appleby, in Yes Minister, once quipped, "The ship of state is the only ship that leaks from the top". I think our ship of state is currently a colander.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
Is there really anyone left who believes that these privacy invasions are designed or expected to stop "terrorism", and not just give the government (and its corporate vendors) unlimited power through unlimited knowledge of its people?
If so, then what the hell is wrong with those people?
--
make install -not war
After I posted (too quickly) I immediately saw my error. You are completely correct.
/. I knew that somebody would eventually catch it, so congratulations for being the first!
this being
Why should not they start with this problem first? Solve it, gain experience and then move forward.
But what on earth is going on in the UK? Security cameras literally everywhere, compulsory DNA databases, laws permitting detention without charge or trial for long periods of time ...
I understand where you are coming from, and I hate being surveilled myself, but let's try to understand the context in which this is happening. Necessity is the mother of invention. For the better part of a half a century, the UK has been under constant terrorist threat and subject to numerous (often hightly deadly) attacks. They have a lot of experience dealing with this and these measures have developed over time (accompanied by some very poor curial decisions). This is not unqualifiedly good, but neither is it surprising.
Now that sections of Islam have declared war on Western civilisation, the UK faces a particularly nasty threat, namely a HUGE number of poorly socialised (into British culture) and radicalised Islamic youth living within their very borders. As we sit here from a safe distance, several hundred potential Islamic suicide bombers are devising way to kill the maximum number of Britons possible.
Perhaps the problem was that the British state (which after all is not separated from the Anglican church), has been too tolerant of religious diversity in the past.</irony>
Sorry I'm not up to speed here. Delegated legislation is long established and is in use in virtually every common law country in the world. That's what a 'Regulation' (as opposed to an 'Act') is. Which particular insane proposal are you referring to that puts a new twist on this?
Britain stood virtually alone against fascism in World War Two, and was a bastion against the totalitarian Soviet bloc during the Cold War ... Why did you even bother, only to willingly turn yourselves into a bureaucractic authoritarian state?
Here you are simply committing an error of logic. While it is true that a "bureaucractic authoritarian state" would benefit from a highly surveilled society, a highly surveilled society by no means implies a "bureaucractic authoritarian state!" (Neither is the absence of effective surveillance a guarantee against authoritarian rule). This really depends on how robust British democracy is, how safe the legal framework is regarding the proper use surveillance, presumptions of innocence vs. protection of the public, data protection, privacy etc. etc. I don't think you should write off British democracy just yet (I mean it's not like they use electronic voting machines! ;)
Wake up, before it's too late.
I believe that's what they are doing! And one hopes that their basic liberal-democratic* values survive the challenge.
*I mean 'liberal-democratic' in the traditional sense of the term (ie. representative democracy through free elections balanced by respect for the rights of individuals, as embodied in the rule of law), not in the recent abusive misuse of the term to signify left-of-centre US Democrats, as employed by people who got their politcal education off the back of a Corn Flakes pack.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd%5B347%5D=x-347-559597
According to Privacy International, Australia's slight worse off than Scotland but a lot better than England and Wales, luckily we keep our own law system when we invited England into the union.
The UK government seems to implementing anything they think they can get away with, CCTV with speakers attached, lamp posts with hidden CCTV and flying CCTV (like the things from HL2).
With all that in mind it has become absolutely imperative that Scotland gains its independence in the 2010 referendum, without that, I worry that we will be heading down the tubes with the rest of the 'UK'.
For those that debate how bad things actually are then the 'Taking Liberties' documentary (as mentioned above) shows how every basic human right has been violated by the Labour government in the last 10 years.
It's time....
Britain stood alone against fascism? A bastion against the Soviets? I am not surprised your government wants to keep a close eye on you. An island nation with an ego like that definitely requires close supervision.
What's wrong with them? I think I've got a good idea...
Don't forget they have actually had a number of terror related incidents... more than one the US has had.
How many incidents do you think it would take to get the US on this track? (Keep in mind we've already got surveillance in NY where 9/11 hit hardest)
We love to think we're so brave and treasure our liberty above our security, but human nature is human nature. I'd say we'd cave similarly quickly in the same position...
* 2000 1 June: Bomb explodes on Hammersmith Bridge
* 2000 20 September: RPG attack SIS Building
* 2001 4 March: A car bomb explodes outside the BBC's main news centre in London.
* 2001 16 April: Hendon post office bombed
* 2001 6 May: The Real IRA detonate a bomb in a London postal sorting office.
* 2001, 3 August: The last Real IRA bomb in Britain explodes in Ealing, West London, injuring seven people.
* 2001, 4 November: Car bomb explodes in Birmingham
* 2005 7 July: The 7 July 2005 London bombings conducted by four separate suicide bombers, killing 56 people and injuring 700.
* 2007 January - February: The 2007 United Kingdom letter bombs
* 2007 30 June: 2007 Glasgow International Airport attack
source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in_the_United_Kingdom (modified slightly for brevity's sake)
(This is just 2000-present. IRA bombs kill just as well as Al-Qaeda)
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
But what on earth is going on in the UK? Security cameras literally everywhere,
... which will be talked about for a while, then thrown out.
Except there isn't
compulsory DNA databases,
If you're charged with a crime, you get a DNA sample taken. If it doesn't go to court for whatever reason, or you are not found guilty, the sample is destroyed (unless you've got a prior criminal record)
laws permitting detention without charge or trial for long periods of time
Yeah, the US has *nothing* like that that
insane proposal for a law to allow laws to be made and abolished by regulation (i.e. without a vote in parliament),
Laughed out of the house as soon as it was proposed
and this obsession with centralising government control over information, particularly insofar as it relates to the movements and communications of private citizens
The UK may have its faults, but I'd rather live here than in the US, where you've got a policeman training his gun on you wherever you go, ready to shoot and kill you at a moment's notice.
I agree entirely. The problem is that of distraction; when finances are tight people are a lot more worried about how they're going to pay their mortgage and fuel bills, and their conversations around the water-cooler revolve around TV, sports and house prices.
You and I can see the building of the panopticon society being built, in the UK, and all the tools being put in place for totalitarian control if a government decides to use them that way. But all they have to say is 'we respect civil liberties of course, but what about the rights of people to walk down the street safely without being harrassed by hoodies, or their car broken into, or attacked by terrorist extremists' and most people will nod, accept it, and carry on.
You try to explain the risks and implications of it, and they honestly don't care - the government would never use these things against *them*, they'll only be used against those 'nasty youngsters hanging around the corner shop' (black or otherwise), or those 'horrid muslim suicide bombers'.
To put it bluntly, most people just don't care about privacy rights, because they're certain as 'good people' they have nothing to fear. They care about their wallets and their families and their comfort, and indstinct privacy rights are well down on that list.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
This is really, really taking it too far.
Even the UK's whole univeral ID card system, I don't approve of.
If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
But don't you understand? All this -- the surveillance, the monitoring, the foolproof IDs -- is going to ultimately eliminate crime in the UK and enable everyone to live in blissful peace and safety and harmony, correct? I mean, hasn't crime already slowed to a trickle because of all the CCTV and stuff?
What? It hasn't? But...but...how could this not work? I thought for sure...
Unless.....maybe this has nothing to do with battling crime and terrorism, but instead to establish total control over the lives of citizens? NO!!! NO!!! Perish the thought...not in a Western Democracy...we have freedom and all that other good stuff, not like those nasty totalitarian regimes, right? Must...eliminate...negative...thinking....all is well...all is well....all is well.....
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
While I agree that this whole venture is a horrific invasion of privacy and butchering of civil liberties, I'm not too worried.
This will follow the same route as every other major UK government IT project of the last 10 years: The contract will be awarded to the lowest bidder, probably EDS (Now owned by HP but still as incompetant as ever). Billions of pounds will be spent trying to get the system working, but as it will have been designed without any reference to those who will be using it they'll never get there. After 4 or 5 years of delays and overspending, EDS will bail out of the contract, the government will let them go without penalty and the whole project will be left abandoned in an unusable state.
Completely incorrect. If you are even arrested for a "recordable offence" (which most are) your DNA can be taken, and kept even if you aren't charged, (or even if the arrest was completely baseless). The only place where it is automatically destroyed is in Scotland, which is may be what you are thinking of.
Exigo spamos et dona ferentes
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
I agree entirely. The problem is that of distraction; when finances are tight people are a lot more worried about how they're going to pay their mortgage and fuel bills, and their conversations around the water-cooler revolve around TV, sports and house prices.
In Europe people drink water from the tap, the only gathering spot might be the automatic espresso machine.
Thats all you got for 7 years? So fricking what? How many more people were Murdered by common criminals or died in car accidents over the same period?
9-11 was a terrible event yet *each and every day* many times the number of people killed during that event die from smoking related causes. Where is the media attention, hundreds of billions of dollars and public outcry?
If only a fraction of the money to fight "terrorism" went into anti-drug education, medical research or foreign aid.. pound for pound it could easily save orders of magnitudes more lives than the current trend of acting like a bunch of tired protectionist sissys.
If you really want to make progress in the middle east get everyone out of Iraq as soon as possible and resolve all outstanding border disputes with Isreal.
By allowing entry into Britian to anyone with a British passport (which is to say anyone from any of current and former the British colonies) the British have lost control of their own land and country.
Huh! I wish! I was born in what was, at the time, a self-governing colony of Great Britain. A couple of years later, it became independent of Great Britain (the only significant change was that the government was appointed directly by the Queen on the advice of the the Victorian Premier, instead of on the advice of the British Foreign Office). However, neither before "independence" (Victoria of course remains a state of Australia, so it's not independent, merely independent of Great Britain), nor after it, was I entitled to a British passport.
And even of the former British colonies which have become practically independent of the United Kingdom more recently than my country, most people don't have access to a British passport.
And even of the present British colonies, or people who did whatever was necessary to retain a British passport in former British colonies, the mere possession of a British passport does not grant you right of abode in Britain. You need to have British Citizenship for that i.e. an association with Great Britain proper --- not just an association with a British colony.
France, on the other hand, is much more like you describe. You should check it out if you want scary weirdness.
Look out!
Mods really are on crack today, or else don't know *anything* about the UK. (Or possibly the original poster is Melanie Phillips.)
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
It's very simple.
Five years ago, two million Brits marched through London protesting against the very idea of our government launching an illegal war against Iraq.
We were ignored - they took us to war anyway.
What's more, the people of the UK then voted this government back into power for a third term.
That's when I decided to leave.
You won't get two million protesting against a database, no matter how heinous, because most people don't care about databases, or even understand what they are.
And even if you did, two million people is too small a minority to change anything.
I don't live in the UK any more.
2000 - a couple of incidents, neither serious nor fatal.
2001 - a cluster of 'Real IRA' incidents - again, none fatal.
Then a gap of 4 years, until a small group of misguided Islamists actually manage to get it together to cause mayhem - bad, but only about a weeks worth of road deaths in the UK.
Then another gap of two years, and two unrelated incidents - the Glasgow attack was particularly inept and risible, the letter bombs were the work of a nutter rather than organised terrorism.
I live here, and my parents were a couple of hundred yards away from the Arndale Centre truck bomb when it went off, and I'm not worried about terrorism at all.
I am, however, worried about the authoritarian tendencies of Neues Arbeit and the complicity of their friends in the media.
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
Don't forget they have actually had a number of terror related incidents... more than one the US has had.
Ok, so what you're saying is that terrorist activity excuses the kind of draconian measures being taken?
Let's take a good look at that word "terrorist" again. Terror...had something to do with being very afraid, doesn't it? So if one goes completely apeshit and implements all sorts of ridiculous measures...who's winning again?
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
I will admit I was thinking in terms of the anglosphere. Russia obviously took an absolute beating in WWII, although for a long time they were also neutral.
As for the Cold War, well, I didn't say they stood alone in that. But post WWII Britain and the US were the dominant allied powers, with Britain on the wane and the US on the rise.
Read Pynchon.
No, that's what they know will rile people up in England, so that's what they tell voters. Probably while slipping other laws through unnoticed.
"Security cameras literally everywhere, compulsory DNA databases, laws permitting detention without charge or trial for long periods of time, that insane proposal for a law to allow laws to be made and abolished by regulation (i.e. without a vote in parliament), and this obsession with centralising government control over information, particularly insofar as it relates to the movements and communications of private citizens. The list goes on and on."
This is the problem with getting all your information about a country from the paranoid. There aren't secruity cameras "everywhere" in the UK. Detention without trial for terrorism is 30 days max. There's no realistic "laws to be made and abolished by regulation" unless you really twist the facts.
Btw, the U.K. has amongst the strictest data privacy laws in the world.
Anyone can twist the facts to invent a 1984 style scenario, but that doesn't really mean one exists.
Feel safe now?
For the simple reason that the UK is a democracy. These things are planned or exist because the citizens elected representatives who support this and not those who oppose. This is because so many voters have no clue. Stop blaming the bloody government and blame yourselves and your fellow citizens. Might not be so easy, but nearer to the truth.
What's going wrong is people don't care about politics in the UK any more. Our two main parties became too similar (the LibDems are very different, esp concerning privacy and human rights), so people stopped listening to what they said. Since then, insane policies and huge corruption has gone bananas.
If people in the UK stopped giving a fuck about who won Big brother or a part in a west end musical, and started giving a fuck who was Home Secretary, things would be different.
Hopefully the current govt is about to fall apart entirely, maybe then there will be change?
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Text of the communist manifesto can be found here: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/61/61.txt
...
...the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie (owners of private property) ...
... and their elimination.
So what is communism on paper?
According to Marx and Engels, it is the abolition of law and morality
"The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family-relations; modern industrial labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests."
"In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat."
"Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society."
So, if we include the extermination of all property owners in our definition of a "working political system", then communism works, on paper.
McCarthy was right.
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I stopped reading at "Now that sections of Islam have declared war on Western civilisation.." Let me fix that for you: "Now that Western imperialist wars on Islamic countries have triggered terrorist responses.." Please, please get it right. Contrary to what you hear from adults around the playground "Who started it" is very important.
https://dalgamotor.wordpress.com/ - Elektronik beyinlere ozgurluk asisi (Turkish)
"black ops do happen"
Yea, theres so many movies with "black ops" in them. They must be true.
This whiffs very strongly of the usual government tactic here in the UK. They will 'leak' an extreme proposal that nobody in the right mind would support and get a lot of people protesting. Then when the bill is presented the proposal will be watered down to what the government actually wanted in the first place. Protesters are happy because they were 'successful'. Government are happy because they get what they wanted. We lose but think we win.
Oh please. Cameras literally everywhere ? Maybe in town centres & business parks, but I bet the one or two outside a local shop round my way are not hooked up to a VCR, let alone some big bad gov't network. Compulsory DNA databases ? For trialled & convicted criminals maybe, but not for the general populace. Laws permitting detention without charge or trial ? What about Guantanamo Bay then.
No one seems to have picked up on the total infeasibility of writing the huge amounts of data that this idea would require either. My first thought was that it is totally unworkable.
Your comment indicates your utter ignorance of UK immigration and passport laws. Every detail of your comment is incorrect and easily confirmed incorrect with a trivial amount of research.
I was going to say exactly the same. Please mod the parent post up.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
... that insane proposal for a law to allow laws to be made and abolished by regulation (i.e. without a vote in parliament) He's referring to the "Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill".Published text
Opposition website
And I'll quote them as to why it was scary enough to raise so much protest. The boringly-named Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill started life as an extremely dangerous piece of legislation. It had the power to grant any minister the ability to amend, replace, or repeal existing legislation. The frightening thing is this: they would have been able to make major changes to the law without Parliament being able to examine it properly, taking away the ability of Parliament to meaningfully represent the citizens of this country.
More worryingly, the minister involved could have amended almost any existing legislation; nothing was protected. So, as was pointed out in The Times by 6 law professors from Cambridge, a minister would have been able to abolish trial by jury, suspend habeas corpus (your right not to be arbitrarily arrested), or change any of the legislation governing the legal system, with the only exceptions being the Bill itself and the Human Rights Act.
"Britain stood alone against fascism? A bastion against the Soviets? I am not surprised your government wants to keep a close eye on you. An island nation with an ego like that definitely requires close supervision."
:-)
I believe the original poster was from the USA, not the UK. I suppose the USA is sort of an island nation, all be it a very big island...
I think the only people in the UK who might make those claims are the nasty people in the ultra right wing nationalist-racist parties and the more out of touch Conservatives who are still living in the late 1940s... The rest of us would rather have a nice cup of tea and carry on.
One line of argument I found interesting is that 'the increased use of surveillance by the British government, and its singular determination to collect and share data on everyone who lives in the UK, are desperate attempts by the government to make a connection with its citizens. Feeling themselves increasingly estranged from the public, government officials have become obsessed with finding out who we are and what we do, and with monitoring and measuring every aspect of our lives.' http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5112/
If Chuck had roundhouse kicked Cuba, there would be just a big crater. HE was the one that caused the death of the dinosaurs...
You mean you might start placing people in prison without charging them with any crime on the basis that they're "linked to terrorism", then place them under house-arrest when the courts point out that the government has no right at all to incarcerate people that have not committed any crime?
Ah but they were darky Muslims, so no one was too worried about that were they?
Actually, if you are arrested you have a DNA sample taken regardless. To get your sample removed from te database involves you going to court to ask. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/04/26/dna_database_removal/
I don't know if I'm just particularly uninformed, but I seem to be in the same state as the rest of the population in that, the first time I hear about these laws is people complaining about them having already been passed.
-- All your booze are belong to us.
No, the mods are just Americans. The story was published and commented upon while everyone in Britain was asleep.
The reverse happens when America hasn't woken up when a story is published.
By allowing entry into Britian to anyone with a British passport (which is to say anyone from any of current and former the British colonies) the British have lost control of their own land and country.
This is the story pushed by the government and the press.
"We need these laws to keep you safe from all those nasty Moslem terrorists and Eastern European Maffia types. Things are so bad now that we need to track anybody or this will soon be an Islamic state. If you complain about this you are supporting terrorists. If it we don't get this information half of London could be blown up"
Unfortunately a lot of people believe the FUD and think they have to accept it.
We managed in WW2 and against the IRA without this. We could easily manage against the few Islamic terrorists too.
Your post does one thing, it illustrates the mind-set that allows this to happen.
If you're charged with a crime, you get a DNA sample taken. If it doesn't go to court for whatever reason, or you are not found guilty, the sample is destroyed (unless you've got a prior criminal record)
True in Scotland (thank you Scottish parliament), but not England and Wales, if you are lifted for any reason they can take DNA by force and keep it.
laws permitting detention without charge or trial for long periods of timehttp://www.genewatch.org/uploads/f03c6d66a9b354535738483c1c3d49e4/Councillorsbrief07_2.pdf
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/6979451.stm
Yeah, the US has *nothing* like that that
And that makes it OK? Letting the police lift people for a month(ish) then just letting them go with out having to give a reason is fine by you?
and this obsession with centralising government control over information, particularly insofar as it relates to the movements and communications of private citizensHello ID cards, the RIPA act, etc. Thankfully the government is so incompetent that they'll probably balls this up too.
2 million marching in a country with a population of 60 million is a significant percentage. Hardly a "small minority"!
And how is it that there was no call for extra surveylance, suspension of rights etc. until after the 2005 events?
He's referring to the "Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill".
Thanks for that, I knew I must have missed something while I was away, because from OPs description "allow[ing] laws to be made and abolished by regulation (i.e. without a vote in parliament)" it sounded for all the world like he was talking about subordinate legislation ... nothing special about that. But this isn't rule "by regulation" but rather rule by decree. I've only given it a cursory glance, but please tell me this is going to go down!
I can't see how this can fly (ie. a ministerial decree effectively overriding the decision of parliament see s3(a)), this goes to the very heart of the principle of parliamentary sovereignty and raises all those classic jurisprudential quandries as to whether parliament can fetter itself or bind a future parliament ... I guess this is what you get from having an unwritten "constitution."
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
In places that the Government wants to keep an eye on they are everywhere. Bradford already has a ring of cameras tracking every car going in and out
One of the reasons was the state-of-the-art CCTV system in Bradford. The so-called 'Big Fish' automatic number-plate recognition system allowed detectives to trace the movements of the convoy of cars involved in the robbery.
London's congestion charge cameras have the same secondary use. If you live in a small white conservative village there might just be a dummy camera in a store, but eventually everywhere will be reached.
If you're charged with a crime, you get a DNA sample taken. If it doesn't go to court for whatever reason, or you are not found guilty, the sample is destroyed (unless you've got a prior criminal record)
Not quite accurate - the DNA sample is retained just in case, unless you go through the court process of requiring the police to destroy the sample due to "exceptional circumstances". Even then, I wouldn't trust them to destroy it - I mean, you *might* commit a crime later on in life...
Except there isn't
Most per person in the world
compulsory DNA databases,
If you're charged with a crime, you get a DNA sample taken. If it doesn't go to court for whatever reason, or you are not found guilty, the sample is destroyed (unless you've got a prior criminal record)
WRONG - its taken if you are ARRESTED for a crime. And there is only 1 case (which took many months of wrangling) where someone has got their dna removed after arrest without charge. I still think the uk is a free(ish) place but what you are saying is factually incorrect.
I stopped reading at ...
Ah now that's where you went wrong, you see, being closed minded and being well informed are mutually exclusive. And because you were not informed about the rest of my comment, your make a critique is somewhat lacking in relevance.
Let me fix that for you: "Now that Western imperialist wars on Islamic countries have triggered terrorist responses.."
Had you continued to read, you would have noticed that this was not about "Islamic countries" (which should in any case not exist)*, but about British Muslims, born, bred and living in the UK (which remains for now not an "Islamic country"). Yes they are living there as a result of past imperialism, but about the only imperialist transgression these individuals can complain of that the UK permitted their ancestors to escape the "Islamic countries" they lived in and settle in Britain.
Contrary to what you hear from adults around the playground "Who started it" is very important.
When some religionist fruitcake decides to kill him- or herself and to take out as many innocent bystanders because of his or her delusional adherence to some psychopathic intepretation of any particular "holy" book, (and without so much as the excuse that they are fighting off the invader), it really and truly doesn't matter "who started it." But I guess you would have to be an adult to appreciate that.
*instead there should be countries which, like Turkey, are simply countries which happen to have Islamic people living in them.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
If you're charged with a crime, you get a DNA sample taken. If it doesn't go to court for whatever reason, or you are not found guilty, the sample is destroyed (unless you've got a prior criminal record) If you knew anything about the U.K., you would know this is simply not true. Any DNA sample taken, for whatever reason, is retained indefinitely. It is not destroyed, even if no charges are pressed. (Admittedly, the rules are different in Scotland).
If you were really from the UK, you would remember the fuss about children who had never been charged with anything being on the DNA database.
I think you are wrong there:
DNA is taken from anyone who is arrested, including many people who are underaged (the lastest being a 16 year old who was causing trouble on a school bus). The sample is never destroyed and is not linked to having been charged.
The ID Cards system is only centralisation, nothing more. Have a look at the leaked documents that barely mention the card itself.
Its bad in the UK and it is getting worse. Did you even hear about the spying by the local council in Poole?
Oh, he's definitely from the UK. The comment about guns confirms it - in the minds of us Britons, America is a country where children carry handguns and policemen (with their heavy machineguns) summarily execute you for blaspheming. Britons are also completely apathetic and misinformed - the Daily Mail readers to whom the DNA retention was news have forgotten about it already.
I'll tell you why most people are not up in arms about these things, it's because during the recent economic boom years, the vast majority of people have been wealthy enough to put a roof over their heads and food on the plates of their family. Once those basic needs have been met, most of the 'proles' cease to have concerns outside their immediate social sphere, meaning they have less interest in what the government is up to.
The Government has cunningly used this time to introduce measures such as DNA Databases, extended periods of detention and anti 'terrorism' laws, all this following the media inspired frenzy after 9/11 & 7/7. The media is also far more widely reporting the rare occurrences of violence that are perpetrated on the streets as keeping us all in a state of fear obviously persuades us that, although we'd rather not be CCTV'd 24x7, we will put up with it 'for the greater good'.
The thing is, all this stuff is not making people feel safer, in fact they all feel far more afraid on the streets now than at any time in history, when the statistics show that crime and violent crimes in particular have been falling steadily for the last 20 years. The system is then abused by the relevant agencies and is used for trivial means, such as that pensioner being chucked out of some political party conference for heckling whoever was speaking at the time. The kicker was that the Police used their newly prescribed Anti-Terror laws to detain him. There was also a story recently about a mother whose young daughter dropped half a sausage roll in the street so she was fined £75 ($150 US) That's a sausage roll! Not even real litter like a chip packet, but a piece of food that would have been cleared away overnight by some animal or other! http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-561762/I-dropped-morsel-girls-sausage-roll-litter-police-fined-75.html
There's example after example of this lunacy in the country and yet no-one says anything. It's outrageous, and every significant political party is in on the act, the situation will not change until there's a serious public backlash. I think we could be in for some interesting times if this so-called credit crunch bites as hard as some are predicting. People will let a litter fine slide when times are good, but when it is the difference between paying money to the government via their stealth taxes, and putting food on your kids plate, the public may not be so understanding.
If medicine were ever perfected, we'd all be the same.
I didn't say it was a small minority.
I said it was too small a minority to change anything.
As evidenced by the fact that the war went ahead, and the people voted to keep the government afterwards.
"If you're charged with a crime, you get a DNA sample taken. If it doesn't go to court for whatever reason, or you are not found guilty, the sample is destroyed (unless you've got a prior criminal record)"
Wrong....
As well as criminals, samples are retained from those arrested but not convicted, and from victims and witnesses who give their consent.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6104876.stm
It's long been practice to keep the DNA of those not charged with a crime so, for instance, if you get a parking ticket and swear, you can be arrested under section 5 of the public order act for causing offence by swearing, your DNA swabbed and you held on the database. Should you not be charged or tried, the DNA sample stays on record for what is an extremely trivial offence.
And here we have the problem. While keeping the fingerprints and DNA of serious or serial offenders is desirable, the trivial nature of the offence required to get on to the database particularly under a government that has created in excess of 3000 new and, more often than not pointless laws in itself makes it a worrying development. In effect, all you have to do is make it so easy to be in breach of an ill-defined law that anyone can, at the whim of an official be added to the database so you then catch the whole population.
Basically, if the population will only accept criminals on the database make everyone a criminal.
No, in my post above I did not advocate for one position or the other. I was merely pointing out, that this is probably what has been going "wrong" with the UK and has likely been ingrained in their culture, likely starting with the IRA attacks decades ago. For the record, I lean towards more danger, less security (you're gonna die anyway) -- let's see how the mods interpret it...
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
"If it comes down to it, the police state WILL be enforced if deemed necessary"
Those at the top of the political heap always deem police states to be necessary because they wouldn't stay at the top of said heap unless they had an innate desire for controlling everyone else. The problem they have in democracies is convincing the public to let them have the powers they've always wanted.
"It really is time to get up and do something if you live in the UK"
They won't though, because Britain is now largely occupied by spiteful, ignorant people who are so driven by their resentment of anyone who does something they don't like or approve of that the vast majority of them would welcome a system where denouncing annoying people would immediately result in them being forcibly hauled off to a place where they can't annoy decent citizens for the rest of their lives.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
They have a lot of experience dealing with this and these measures have developed over time
;)
Which Tony Blair chose to ignore and favoured Bush tactic of retaliation.
Perhaps the problem was that the British state (which after all is not separated from the Anglican church), has been too tolerant of religious diversity in the past.
It is precisely this tolerance that made the British Empire so successful in the past. Pax Americana, which again Tony Blair led the British government to buy into, is what has caused the sorry state of affairs we have today. The British Empire no longer exists due to the loss of reliance on Naval power and giving up of our own territories.
Delegated legislation is long established and is in use in virtually every common law country in the world. That's what a 'Regulation' (as opposed to an 'Act') is. Which particular insane proposal are you referring to that puts a new twist on this?
Actually regulation, as opposed to law, is what is killing freedom in the UK. For example the British Bill of Rights 1689 is being ignored and abused by various traffic and protest laws- namely fines before judgement in a court of law. The creation of impotent Community Support Officers, who don't support the community but simply look for trouble. The turning of Traffic Wardens into "civil enforcers" and given a whole raft of new powers to impose on the people.
I don't think you should write off British democracy just yet (I mean it's not like they use electronic voting machines!
Google for "postal voting", particularly in Birmingham and you will get an idea of how sound British democracy is.
I believe that's what they are doing!
No. Sorry, they aren't. The most important things for the British right now is evaporating house prices (thanks to 10 years of Chancellor Gordon Brown) and what is happening on Eastenders.
"If it comes down to it, the police state WILL be enforced if deemed necessary, and it will all be already in place ready to go..."
And if it wasn't already in place it will take them, what at most a few months to put in place. Surely the point is not to let the bad guys into power in the first place, rather than worrying about which particular tools they will use to torture the populous.
After all, the Nazi's and the Soviet's didn't need a DNA Database and Spy cameras to oppress their people. Oppression is a political issue, not a technological one.
Just returned from Mumbai in India which proves you can fit a lot more than 7 million into a city. I think what you're saying is "more than 7 million in a lifestyle that I wish to lead" which is a completely different thing. Globalisation means a lot of changes are coming...
Keep an eye on "S and Marper v United Kingdom", where two British citizens who've had their DNA taken argue that this retention is in breach of their human rights. More here: http://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/news-and-events/1-press-releases/2008/european-court-of-human-rights-dna-case-will-promote-national-database-deb.shtml
Dear My MP, I read with horror this week (http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/telecoms/article3965033.ece) about the plans for the home office to keep a massive government database holding details of every phone call, e-mail and time spent on the internet by the public is being planned as part of the fight against crime and terrorism. How is this actually going to help? As a technical professional I know that the moment these plans are announced the people that want to keep secrets are going to turn to encryption, dark nets and tor (anonymous emails) so in effect all you will end up with is a large database of law abiding citizens data. How is this good use of taxpayers money or going to help in the fight against terrorism or crime? I suspect this is just another element of the incumbent administrations need to control us and knee jerk thinking. I am not happy. Yours sincerely,
"Don't forget they have actually had a number of terror related incidents... more than one the US has had. "
They've obviously only had one, because the Ku Klux Klan bombing churches with people in them during the 1960s, the first attempt to bring down the World Trade Center, the Oaklahoma City bombing, the Unabomber, people sending anthrax through the post, and various other incidents that most people would say were acts of terrorism were really just a few good ol' boys letting off some steam.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
As we sit here from a safe distance, several hundred potential Islamic suicide bombers are devising way to kill the maximum number of Britons possible.
Several hundred? Any evidence of this? No? I didn't think so.
For the better part of a half a century, the UK has been under constant terrorist threat and subject to numerous (often hightly deadly) attacks.
Haha! What _are_ you smoking!? If we exclude 'the troubles' which have _nothing_ to do with the way the UK has gone security crazy since 9/11, what 'constant terrorist threat' has there been? There has been a single 'real' attack, '7/7'. Sure there were a couple of other laughable attempts (one a few days after 7/7, and the morons who crashed a car into Glasgow airport), but these were clearly not organised and posed very little threat.
From your comments it seems that you are living in the state of perpertual fear that the UK government wants you to live in, and you really believe we are under a 'constant terrorist threat'.
God, with people believing this nonsense we really are in the sh*t.
"that insane proposal for a law to allow laws to be made and abolished by regulation (i.e. without a vote in parliament)"
It's called the Civil Contingencies Act. And we've already got it, despite the efforts of the House of Lords.
Although you'd not expect the landowning classes to care much about civil liberty, the Earl of Onslow put it all fairly well in an open letter two years ago: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/apr/23/comment.conservatives
If this actually becomes reality, we are doomed! This kind of thing does NOT belong to our society. The concept of freedom would be gone. I personally value freedom very highly. Freedom should never be overridden this way to accomplish "greater good". THE LINE GOES HERE.
Absolutely. And if you provide you DNA as part of a general hunt (for exclusion purposes) it STILL goes on the database and cannot[1] be deleted.
Tim.
[1] OK I think there has been about 3 instances in 3 million where someone managed to get it deleted.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
Every office I've ever working in in the UK - including my current one - has a water cooler next to the coffee machine. We have 4 that I can think of, in various kitchens. Admittedly, quite a few of them get their water from the mains rather than a top-bottle, but it's still a water cooler!
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
You need to have British Citizenship for that i.e. an association with Great Britain proper --- not just an association with a British colony.
Not strictly true. Any national of an EU country has the right to settle and work in the UK, with almost all of the rights of a naturalized british citizen including social security and NHS care (a few things like student loans are restricted). No UK passport required.
As you say though, ex and current british colonies are more restricted on access than EU nationals these days, which seems pretty rediculous. Then again, why would you want to come to police-state britain these days anyway?
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
You could spam government records.
Send a lot fake mails and make a lot of phonecalls using the keywords that would mess with their filters/scanners.
End every sentence with dangerous keyword Bin Laden
Or even create a legend of yourself Al qaeda
So when sometime in future aliens scan these records from your e-mail and phone calls they realize you were the earths first and only superhero. assassinate bush.
I don't really care let them have my data, I have nothing to hide,necrophilia is nothing to be ashamed of.
Largely so I could live in other parts of Europe ;) Also, the fact that their former enemies in France and Germany get treated like locals but their cousins in Australia get treated like foreigners strikes me as ... offensive.
Look out!
What's wrong with them? I think I've got a good idea...
Don't forget they have actually had a number of terror related incidents... more than one the US has had.
Yup, and we had a whole load more terror related incidents in the decades prior to 2000 from the IRA. We didn't need to treat the whole population as potential terrorists to deal with the threat then so why do we need to now?
When I was younger, and we had a constant threat of IRA terrorism, everyone always downplayed the dangers in an effort to keep people calm. Ever since 9/11, the US have been making a big deal about terrorism and (rather stupidly) the UK government have aligned themselves with the US. These days, the UK government seems to be following the US's lead and actively *hyping up* the terrorist threat - trying to make the public as scared as possible so they can push through new legislation like this.
This is not helped by the modern media who try to sensationalise stories as much as possible, to the detriment of the society as a whole. You don't even need to look at terrorism to see the effects the media have - last year, sensationalist reporting caused a run on the Northern Rock bank which was only saved from collapse by being hurriedly nationalised.
Back in the IRA days, it was often said that if we change the way we live because of terrorist threats then the terrorists have won. Well I guess we know who's won now don't we?
Who are the terrorists these days? Extremists - yes, they are going around blowing people up as they always have. The government - definitely, they are now terrorising the public by overstating the extremist threat in an effort to further their own political agenda.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
As I understand it, they are collecting all of our (60 million people) data while on the hunt for less than 800 known but mobile subversives; Al-Queda, lingerers from the IRA, Euro-nutters and a few home-baked loonies plus perhaps a few thousand wannabes. Surely the money would be better spent on a focussed research, tracking and capture project rather than a total net that will result in less than 0.00000001% of 'bingo' data that MAY prove useful in the capture of dangerous people.
If he's the Walrus then can I be a penguin please?
It's a warrant or court order. You're in England now.
Damn good point.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Yet China is "communistic", right?
fuck karma, I like saying the truth better
Well, there are downsides for EU nationals. My fiancee, being french, and a qualified teacher in france, and a teacher of english and french as a foreign language isn't qualified to teach bugger all in the UK.
she's currently jumping through the same hoops as any other graduate to teach basic french, despite being a french teacher and a teacher of french. In france.
Getting funding to go through the beaurocratic hoops was a huge struggle too, despite being resident here for years. We've pretty much decided to emigrate, but don't know where yet. France is going to down the same route as the UK now, as is germany. Canada looks attractive, but it's so damn cold. I've some family in oz, but it's a long way from the rest of our friends and family.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
Oh they'll care allright - give'em a generation or two. The tree of liberty must indeed be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants - unfortunately, Jefferson even got the sequence right - it's the patriots who must bleed first and only then the tyrants.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
You do realise that Tony Blair retired almost a year ago.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
We managed ... against the IRA without this.
But we didn't! That was precisely his point, most of the surveillance which now exists was rolled out because of the IRA. This is just more of the same with better technology.
The government expreses confidence that this will cause no problems.
In unrelated news, ISPs have been asked by the government to throttle all customer connections to 300bps....
If we exclude 'the troubles' ... what 'constant terrorist threat' has there been?
If we exclude the constant terrorist threat, what constant terrorist threat has there been, None! Hey, now you can't argue with that kind of logic!
NO2ID is the main campaign opposing mass surveillance. We are the fastest growing campaign in the country, are very well organised and have driven most of the bad press these Big Brother plans have received.
But we are short on people (and money). So register your support. There is no obligation and how many opportunities do you get to save your country?
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
Cause whoever lands that deal is going to sell thousands of HDDs. Keep an eye out, and be ready to invest...
But clearly you have something better to say...
Bullish Machine Tzar
Given that java is fairly standard on mobiles is it not possible to encrypt phone calls or at least sms through it.
Im not talking PGP or anything fancy but just have a 5-10mb (im sure phones can store that) random character map. at 10mb they need to get ~3500 encrypted text messages (with that key) before you repeat the same mapping. So if you change keys every 3000 messages its like a one time pad and even if you dont it would be hard to tell when you start repeating and im sure more than 2 messages encrypted with the same random key are needed to crack it so youd be safe well upto 10-15,000 messages.
OFC it would only work with people who also have the software, but does this stuff exist yet
Voice encryption would be nice too but i have no idea how that would be implemented, but as overhead per message isnt an issue im sure youd probably be able to use your standard pgp key over whatever cyper you choose.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
If you are going to make a statement, at least try to fake being a little more informed.
The U.S. repeatedly proposes such overreaching police state security measures and fails due to citizens taking a stand. Yes we have Gulags, but they are dealt repeated blows in the courts. Americans make mistakes, but we do not sit idly by while it happens.
When someone tries to take more control there are always others who step in to fight back. That is our history. We are rebels. We started a country as rebels. And we continue to rebel. That's why you can sit on this site and bitch all day. Try posting an article saying how much you hate your leaders in India or China or Russia and watch yourself disappear into rotting, rat infested jails, never to be seen again. Try saying that China is a totalitarian state, in China, on the internet, and see what happens, douchebag. Or try to look at some porn on the internet in China and spend 3-10 years in jail.
America is not perfect. But I am fucking sick of people saying that the alternatives are better. We make a lot of mistakes. We are people. People make mistakes. But at least we try to correct them. The abuses of the Bush administration are being swept out with vigor right now. There is a cycle here. The cycle elsewhere is a never ending one of oppression.
Um, Russia is becoming more free? Are you insane? Seriously learn a little something about the world before you say something stupid. Have you bothered to listen to former chess champion Gary Kasperov? The "elections" they just had where Putin's hand picked successor got 98% of the vote in Muslim parts of the country, where the Russian government is hated. Or how about forcing entire companies to vote while your boss watches you? Or about about placing your vote in the open with AK-47 armed guards standing over you. Guess who you vote for?
And didn't we just have a story about China the other day where they are looking to build an all seeing eye of linked facial recognition systems and hidden cameras?
A friend of mine went to China an few years back and the police burst into his room looking for unmarried couples sleeping together. They were going room to room in the hotel. Or how about taking a look at these pictures of dead Tiben monks, a group of peaceful non violent people by nature who were "rioting". http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Wikileaks_releases_over_150_censored_videos_and_photos_of_the_Tibet_uprising
Look at them if you have the stomach.
You are an idiot who deserves to spend a few years in Russia or China. Start by visiting the jails there, if they'll let you.
Of course I can - the point being made is that 'the troubles' have nothing to do with the current fear-mongering and over-hyping of security 'threats'.
Utter rubbish. The idea that radical Islam is more of a threat than the IRA were at the height of their power is easily refuted by comparing the effectiveness of their attacks. Al Qeada are a far lesser threat, and would be even less threatening with some minor changes to foreign policy.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
The countermeasure to your ISP being required to record your email, is to use the ISP to tunnel out to your non-UK-hosted email server.
Since your email-related traffic isn't easily recognizable from any other type of traffic, now they have to record every single packet, in order to watch your email. That's (maybe) expensive.
And if your tunnel is doing an on-the-spot D-H key exchange (after and inside of a MitM-proof public key authenticated session; that's where I think you went wrong with Zfone, Phil) then even a total log of the conversation isn't enough, and there's no known key for you to be forced to disclose under RIPA.
Forcing ISPs to spy, simply can't work (if people don't want it to). To spy on people who don't want to be spied on, requires compromising an endpoint. Bullying third party "providers" isn't enough.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I think he was talking about the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, it was largely gutted before it was passed. The original version gave very broad powers to ministers effectively allowing rule by decree. I've not read the text of the one that passed, but by all accounts it's much better.
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
I do remember the Axis making it to the coast of France and the British retreating across the channel. Not to detract from RAF's valiant performance or from the importance of America's belated aid, but what really saved you guys was Hitler's decision to invade Russia while still fighting Britain. If instead he chose to concentrate exclusively on your island - as his generals urged him - you might have been writing in German now.
What cracks me up is your Cold War stance. Aside from starting it Britain played a secondary role in the thing. That is unless you take James Bond into account, of course. So you were protecting democratic freedoms and all those great things from the big bad rooskies, but somehow in the end you ended up with the biggest police state of any developed Western nation and Russians are doing better than ever. Ironic, isn't it?
Troll? The parent post is a bit snippy, but not out of line. Regardless, it's well reasoned. "Troll" is undeserved. I hope someone corrects this in meta-moderation.
- T
Try "speech-to-text" as your form of compression.
Speech-to-text is already pretty advanced -- just call 1-800-GOOG-411 to hear Google's latest attempt -- it's pretty good at understanding what you are saying.
As a matter of fact, the whole point of GOOG 411 is to create large phoneme database to use in speech-to-text translation system to index audio content for searching.
So you could easily have a system where you just store the text of most phone calls, and store the audio of any "persons of interest" if storage space actually became a problem, which is doubtful considering the speed at which storage density has been increasing. Google has plenty of expertise in both storage systems, indexing and retrieving the data, and translating speech to text -- do you think they will really turn down a multibillion dollar contract and an opportunity to "help in the fight against 'terrorism'"?
First of all, there are armed police in the UK. Granted, most police don't carry guns, but there are specific armed units, as well as regular officers who are authorized to carry firearms. And, it's not like they have never used them improperly. There's an interesting list of police shootings on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_use_of_firearms_in_the_United_Kingdom#Controversial_shootings.
Secondly, where do you get your information on police having guns drawn and trained on people at all times? I live in Detroit. Arguably the most dangerous city in the US. I was a student at Michigan State University during the riots in the late 90s. I often pass 4+ cop cars on the way to work, an 11 mile drive (almost 18 km). I have *never* seen a police officer with their gun drawn. Never.
Your post should not be modded Insightful. You, sir, are a troll. I would mod you myself, but I felt it necessary to respond to the post, rather than modding you as you should be.
I live in Detroit. Arguably the most dangerous city in the US. I was a student at Michigan State University during the riots in the late 90s. I often pass 4+ cop cars on the way to work, an 11 mile drive (almost 18 km). I have *never* seen a police officer with their gun drawn. Never.
That's simply not true. Because you live in the US, you *will* be involved in gun-related violence at some point in your life. All Americans are victims of gun crime at some point.
Losing your qualifications is a risk you take whenever you move from one country to another. Even with moving from one state to another in Australia or America there can be difficulties with some qualifications, although big fields like medicine and teaching are fine. I wouldn't expect your fiancée to be able walk into a teaching job over here, either. (I was talking the other day to a German dentist; she's settled for teaching at a university for the time being until she can get her qualifications recognised. Fortunate that she's educated enough a university would employ her...)
Look out!
Britain is an un-nation. The landmass you refer to, is (and has always been) called Airstrip One.
Not all qualifications lose their value - an MCSE is worth about the same anywhere in the world.
[ ]Half Empty [ ]Half Full [x]Twice as big as it needs to be
and there are so many movies with car crashes, guns, tits and explosions too, they must be true remember, you are not told what you are not supposed to know
Utter rubbish. The idea that radical Islam is more of a threat than the IRA were at the height of their power ...
... is not actually one I put in the post you are responding to.
I must confess, I cannot recall when it was that the IRA managed to kill in excess of 50 people in a single day in England. When did this happen?
Al Qeada are a far lesser threat, and would be even less threatening with some minor changes to foreign policy.
Don't go there! I can assure you that the international community would not approve of the nuclear carpet bombing of Afghanistan! :P
Seriously though, I think we will need to wait several decades to assess the relative threats posed by Irish vs Islamic terrorism in Britain. In any case this comparision is quite irrelevant to the point I was making.
What I was pointing out was that the IRA posed a terrorist threat to the UK going back several decades. (I think we can agree on that.) And that this provides the historical context for the way the current threat (whether or not it is more or less serious than perceived) is being handled. British law enforcement organisations have a great deal of experience in dealing with terrorists and a great deal of expertise at conducting extensive surveillance. That they should choose to respond to the current 'threat' in a similar fashion is understandible, that they should choose to apply the best available technology to the problem is utterly unsurprising.
Please note that I did not express my approval for this strategy (if anything the opposite). I did, however, want to point out that surveillance and authoritarianism are not simple equivalents -- the tacit, and dare I say naive, assumption upon which the GP post is founded. Implied in my argument is the notion that since British democracy survived the struggle with the IRA, it is at least conceivable that it will survive the threat posed by indigenous Islamic terrorists. And I expressed my hope that it does so.
As much as I detest having surveillance cameras trained on me (and I do!), I should be far more concerned about the passage of a Bill such as Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, which the GP referred to, albeit in an incomprehensible manner (thanks to a subsequent poster, I am much the wiser). For in the final analysis, it is the robustness of one's system of laws (most particularly in how effectively they limit authority), not the presence of absence of technology on telegraph poles, which guarantees political liberty.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
My thoughts exactly. Unfortunately, many other countries seem to be heading in that same direction.
I was almost shot in the foot by my father once when we were deer hunting. Does that count?
Nah, that could happen to anybody. This is why we only issue gun licences to people who are responsible enough to use them correctly in the UK.
My memory is very different 28 day detention, use of number-plate tracking, etc. was all justified by Islamic terrorism in recent years.
Her power is much like that of King Verence: In the same way that his people will do anything he tells them, as long as he only tells them to do what they already wanted to, Her Majesty has the power to remove the government, as long as she doesn't actually use it.
Yeh I think that most people accept everything. None stands for what they think anymore. Itâ(TM)s a deliberate intrusion in our lives we cannot allow. In the end he loved the big brother and thatâ(TM)s how we all will end up.
Now I always use 0800 numbers service.
Right.
People like Thomas Hamilton, and Michael Ryan.
Given that there are 1.2 billion Indians and only 60 million British people (a 200:1 ratio), you'd think it would be damn obvious that not everyone from an ex-colony gets a British passport.
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
Two, as compared to how many shooting rampages in the US? Hell, they even give them to the untrained lowbrow thugs they employ as police over there!
Some of us here in the UK have been trying hard for some time to resist the relentless encroaching and chipping away at our privacy and freedom, but there is so much apathy, that the government just pushes through whatever mad laws it dreams up with little or no opposition. I even saw some dimwit on a news report, when asked about this say "Well if you're not doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about", with not even a scintilla of irony. Many of us here feel that we are banging our heads against a brick wall, the simple truth is people don't care and won't until it is too late. Take the "dangerous pictures act", a law banning so-called extreme pornography, because few even looked twice at this law, we now have a situation where a citizen of this country can be locked up, for up to three years (the police wanted 10 years), for looking, in private, at images of consenting adults taking part in perfectly legal activities. Time and again we told people about this law, but they just shrugged and said "It won't affect us" or "This is so mad it will never get passed", but now it has been passed and it is too late, the very same people are panicking and crying about it. It is much the same with each new attack on our rights. Ten years ago Labour signed up to the European Human rights charter, the closest thing we have to a bill of rights and ever since they have been undermining it at every opportunity. Most people just shrug and say "it wont affect me" I really fear for the future here, no one not even the opposition parties are seriously opposing the infringements of our rights. It seems there is nowhere left to turn.
Well, they're different societies. If I lived in the US, I'd want a gun, and want to be able to hit want I intended to aim it at - the original "well regulated militia" that George and co were talking about.
The problem in the UK is that our government make more laws, instead of using the ones that we've got properly. If the gun licensing agency (probably the police or the Home Office, but I'm not sure which) had done their job properly, neither of them would have had licenses in the first place.
probably the appropriate comparison would be between similarly sized cities in the US, one with a gun ownership ban (DC or NY perhaps?) and one without (not sure - somewhere in California, perhaps?).
The problem in the UK is that our government make more laws, instead of using the ones that we've got properly.
Exactly. Now they're whining on about wanting people to have licences for air guns, because some neds use air guns to shoot at people. There's already laws against shooting at people, and the vast majority of people who own air guns don't use them to shoot at people, so how about using the already very obvious law?
I'm sorry I didn't honour your original reply with a counter, but I thought the AC did so much more succinctly than I could ever hope to. Since, however, you are apparently labouring under some historical misconceptions, allow me to dispel your ignorance.
My memory is very different 28 day detention, use of number-plate tracking, etc. was all justified by Islamic terrorism in recent years.
Your memory is very short.
As much as I regard the 28 day period as unconsciounable, the travesty of allowing detention without charge in relation to terrorist offences was already present in the 1989 Act.
Number plate tracking was extensively employed at least as early as the 1980s (that's when it became public knowledge). Photographs would be taken of the streets sometimes of entire towns (particularly in Nth Ireland, of course) and English intelligence would draw up social maps of who visted whom and when.
In choosing your examples you have argued my case with great effectiveness, thank you. I wasn't even saying that exactly the same methods were being employed against Islamic terror as was against Irish terror (your choice of examples was merely fortuitous). I was telling the astonished young American kiddie, that there are historical reasons and precedents, as well as real current threats (such as don't actually exist in the US IMO, because US culture is far more assimilationist) for the current reaction in the UK. This is how you beat the IRA and this is how your government thinks it can beat Islamic terrorists. As I told the poster below I'm not here to condone the actions, merely to help people understand the context in which they arise. There was also the implied "don't presume to lecture the British if you haven't been through what they've been trough."
I lived in London 10 years ago, which if my memory serves me correctly was prior to 9/11, and was astonished at the security measures in place (and yes the cameras). I was looking for a rubbish bin in some tube station only to be told by my English companion that they were all taken away because of the troubles. When I saw 'the City,' I simply aghast, what sort of town has its central business district walled off by security and requires permits to enter?! I can't think of another city anywhere either then or now ... well actually I can, Baghdad. Oh yeah, and did I hear they done this to Wall Street in NY too, and that after a single, albeit spectacular, attack.
A friend who was living in Edinburgh (an academic at the university like me from Australia) had special branch police visit and interview him at his appartment for no other reason than that he had an Irish surname! I kid you not.
What has changed is that technology is both better and cheaper and emboldened by their 'successes' in the previous battle against terrorism, the legislature is even more excessive. And what has also changed apparently, is that whereas before, when England's moral position was perhaps more ambigious (though why the fuck you went into Iraq ...), it was considered expedient to hush things up, whereas now it is seen as politically necessary to be seen to be doing something.
And believe me, if you are seeing more and more surveillance cameras, it's because They(tm) want them to be seen (especially if you consider the miniturisation technology of surveillance cameras). Look I hate to stoke your paranoia, but you sould be more afraid of the cameras you can't see, and trust me, they're there.
Perhaps there has been an acceleration of security measures in the UK, since 9/11, but the machinery was already put in place and the direction these measures would taken was laredy plotted out, but the struggle in the second half of C20th with the IRA.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
What's wrong with that? If you have your fingerprints taken, for whatever reason, the police keep that on record. It's so if they pick you up on later occasions they can look up your record. Unlike fingerprints however, DNA is hard to forge, therefore it is the next step in identity technology. I want the police to have my DNA so that if they bring me in they will be able to quickly ascertain i have committed no previous offences.
If people in the UK stopped giving a fuck about who won Big brother or a part in a west end musical, and started giving a fuck who was Home Secretary, things would be different.
Hopefully the current govt is about to fall apart entirely, maybe then there will be change? My name is Harry Gasper, I am from London I am not annonymous, just don't want an account.
I just wanted to say that the use of this word "people" is such a typical generalisation that is used a lot these days. Which people in particular are you talking about? The number of political parties in the UK is now at it's highest ever. It seems that the "people" of the UK do care about politics. The Home Secretary is Jacqui Smith by the way.