This is amazing - especially when the idea is being promoted by a 'Professor of Security Engineering' at a reputable university. How can adding a backdoor to security systems be anything other than a massive weakness just waiting to be exploited?
Imagine if this went ahead - the British government would want access to versions of Windows sold in this country, the American government to US copies of Windows, the German government... and so on and so on... Would Microsoft allow the Chinese government access to their citizens' disks? The Chinese government are signed-up members of The War Against Terror - so they could claim they need access, and besides recent experience says that big businesses will always accommodate governments no matter how repressive.
And it gets worse. Microsoft would either have to make a single key that would open every machine in the World; or they would have to issue copies of all the keys to every government - the British government won't accept not being allowed into a suspected terrorist's (and we have a splendidly wide definition of 'terrorist' in this country) computer purely because the suspect happens to be foreign.
But it will all supposedly remain secure and not fall into the hands of wrong-doers.
The Home Office, IT and Microsoft - what an unholy trinity we have there. With this level of stupidity the legislation can't be far off.
Good point, however I think only 10 of them have compulsory cards and none have the amount of data the British are proposing to include. I can foresee a possibility for a case based on the intrusiveness of the data collection procedure and the level of fines for not being able to provide all of the data - for instance I could be HEAVILY fined just because I can't remember every address that I've ever lived at.
A more likely case would involve someone being discriminated against on the grounds that the information held about them on the database is incorrect (say they were told they had a criminal record and were unable to get a job) or that they were unable to validate their information using the database (because biometrics are publicly shown to be the vat of snake oil that security experts have warned about). If the latter case was proved in court, then the entire ID card system would collapse like a pack of cards. The government has sold biometrics (or isometrics as the Chancellor called them yesterday) as foolproof and absolute, then they have built their case on foundations that might well be made of sand. If the biometrics fail (or more likely 'when'), the government will be open to all sorts of challenges.
I'm also beginning to wonder if scheme described in the ID Card Act will violate the Data Protection Act - namely the requirements that data collection must be proportionate and data processing must be restricted to the tasks data was originally collected for.
The European Court of Justice only handles breaches of European Community law - which the ID Card Act will almost certainly not affect. You're thinking of the European Court of Human Rights which is a pan-European court and not part of the EU.
Sadly, the ECHR does not have the power to strike down legislation in the UK. The long list of rulings against the British government over human rights abuses in Northern Ireland did not change domestic legislation - although they did embarrass the UK government and cost it a fortune in damages.
Courts in the UK do however usually look to ECHR rulings when coming to their own verdicts. But none of that will change the (il)legality of the ID Cards Act.
But I have to ask. Is there any legal recourse if this is passed into law? Any equivilent of the US Supreme Court?
Britain lacks a written constitution, so it is much harder to prove that a law falls foul of any fundamental rights (see below for Human Rights legislation in the UK). The House of Lords acts as the Supreme Court in the UK and can rule on whether a law is unjust or has been unjustly applied in a particular case. However, and this is crucial, British law holds that Parliament is supreme and that the judiciary cannot overturn a piece of legislation.
Having said which... There has been at least one case, Factortame, involving European (Community) law where the House of Lords, after guidance from the European Court of Justice, ruled that an Act of Parliament fell foul of European law. EC law is considered supreme over domestic law because of the wording of the Treaty of Rome to which Britain is a signatory. The Lords placed an injunction on the government forbidding them from using the Act. The government had to repeal the offending Act and bring British law into line with European law.
That is unlikely to be the case here as there is no universal EC law covering identity cards; the closest is the Schengen Agreement for border controls to which Britain is not a signatory.
The only reason the Lords overturned the Act was because of the implied supremacy of EC law in the Treaty of Rome - and even then they were loathe to do so. I strongly doubt that they would dare overturn purely domestic legislation.
The best hope (apart from hoping that EDS screw things up as well as usual) is that there could be a challenge under the Human Rights Act 1999 which embodies most of the European Convention on Human Rights into British law. If the ID cards system were found to fall foul of the HRA (and I'm not going to say if it could - INAL) then the courts could make a 'declaration of incompatibility' between the ID Cards Act and the HRA.
In such a case the government is not obliged to change the law, but it must at least review the offending legislation. The law would continue to apply, but people would still be able to take their cases before the courts and claim damage. If the British government refused to repeal or amend the law then plaintiffs could take their claims to the European Court of Human Rights which has the power to lay down massive fines against the government in the hope of shaming it into compliance.
That there will be active volcanos on Venus, if only for the simple fact that it's apparently close enough to the Sun to be "as hot as hell", but not quite close enough to be baked to a cinder like Mercury, plus there was some interesting things observed when we last sent a probe - even with lens-cap problem.
Active vulcanism has still not certainly been observed on Venus. Variations in sulphur dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere were observed by Soviet spacecraft, but these have never been definitively linked to volcanic activity.
Venus may not have ongoing volcanic activity because of the apparent lack of water in its crust and Mantle. On Earth, water helps promote melting in the Earth by acting as a flux that reduces the melting point of minerals. On Venus, if water is as rare as we suspect then melting may only take place at much higher temperatures - deeper in the crust and might never make its way to the surface.
Clearly Venus has had volcanic activity in the past, the radar observations by Venera and Magellan showed that much, but Venus seems to lack plate tectonics like the Earth. The lack of cratering suggests that the majority of the planet was cataclysmically resurfaced within the last billion years. It's entirely possible that Venus has long periods of relative quiescence followed by apocalyptic periods when much of the crust is reworked.
Although Venus is very similar to Earth, it does have significant differences. The lack of a planetary magnetic field suggests that the core isn't working the same way as the Earth's, then there is that extraordinary backwards sluggish rotation that still lacks a convincing explanation.
One thing I am fascinated by this mission is that the Venusian atmosphere is so dense that earthquake waves might propagate into the atmosphere and be detected by the orbiter.
Still it's great to be going back to Venus after all of these years.
IIRC the Marian Rejewski's team at the Polish Cipher Bureau had mathematically deduced the wirings of rotors I through V from 1932 onwards. These were passed to the British in 1939, the British obtained Naval rotors VI, VII and VIII from captured U-boats during the course of the war.
The wiring of the rotors is a comparatively small part of the complexity of Enigma which is much more governed by the wiring of the plugboard on a daily analysis. The vast majority of plugboard settings were determined mathematically, but I agree - the codebooks were invaluable at speeding the effort - although almost as rare and hen's teeth.
RIPA only requires them to suspect that you have the key. And it once again uses the all-to-common word 'reasonable', which can be as broadly drawn as required. (I've read this horrible piece of legislation so you don't have to):
46. (2) If any person with the appropriate permission under Schedule 1 believes, on reasonable grounds-
(a) that a key to the protected information is in the possession of any person,
(b) that the imposition of a requirement to disclose the key is-
(i) necessary on grounds falling within subsection (3), or
(ii) likely to be of value for purposes connected with the exercise or performance by any public authority of any statutory power or statutory duty,
(c) that the imposition of such a requirement is proportionate to what is sought to be achieved by its imposition, and
(d) that the key cannot reasonably be obtained by the person with the appropriate permission without the giving of a notice under this section, the person with that permission may, by notice to the person whom he believes to have possession of the key, require the disclosure of the key.
So I guess if you could obfuscate the encryption enough you might not be asked for the keys.
It's a bit like the code devices of WWII. It was always easier to capture a code machine than try to brute force the code itself.
Capturing the machine, despite what 'U571' may have said, would have been almost irrelevant to the success of the codebreakers.
The workings of the Enigma machine were known to the British before World War II (it was patented in the UK amongst other countries), but they still couldn't break the codes until they had either captured the code books that detailed the various rotor and plugboard settings, or reverse engineered the set-up of the machines.
For the Lorenz codes, the British never even saw the machines themselves until after the war, the whole workings of the machines were derived from the traffic. Had the British gained access to the codebooks (which they didn't in this case), that would have greatly speeded up the code-breaking effort.
It's well worth remembering when discussing any aspect of British IT law that the present administration is headed by a man who was incapable of buying flowers for his wife over the Internet, what hope have they of understanding cryptography?
I sometimes wonder if the evidence is along the lines of 'looking foreign with possession of, or intent to grow, a beard'. From The Daily Telegraph (27/01/05):
That police activity has been considerable. Since September 11, 2001 to the end of last year, 701 people have been arrested under the Terrorism Act 2000, which requires only "reasonable suspicion" to arrest. Most have come from various branches of the Muslim community - either North Africans, who were the subject of most arrests in the immediate post-September 11 period, and Middle Eastern Muslims, or British-born suspects of Pakistani origin.
However, only 119 of those arrested were charged under the Act. Of those, 45 were also charged with offences under other legislation. A total of 135 others were charged under other legislation, including charges for "terrorist offences that are already covered in general criminal law such as grievous bodily harm and use of firearms or explosives". There have also been a number of fraud cases.
Of the rest, about 60 were transferred to immigration authorities and 351 were released without charge. Only 17 individuals have been convicted of offences under the Terrorism Act and there have been "lesser" convictions, either Irish-related or as a result of membership of proscribed terror groups.
There have been no convictions of alleged Islamic fundamentalist terrorists for the kind of readily understandable "direct" terrorist offences, such as bombings, shootings or possession of explosives and guns, which characterised the years when the Provisional IRA attacked the mainland.
Not in direct British law, but the current government incorporated most of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) into British law as the Human Rights Act 1999 (HRA).
Although the ECHR does not explicitly mention self-incrimination; precedent in the European Court of Human Rights (Funke v. France, 25 February 1993) suggests that Article 6.1 of the ECHR may be read as prohibiting self-incrimination.
However it is worth pointing out that the court, unlike most British courts, is not bound by judicial precedence and is not obliged to follow previous decisions.
A citizen could fight the government using the HRA all the way to the House of Lords, but because of the notion of Parliamentary supremacy, British courts cannot strictly speaking declare a law illegal.
If a court finds a British law (such as this one) is in conflict with the HRA the government should then enter a process of bringing the offending law into compliance with the HRA - but there is no compulsion to change it or strike it out entirely, the law remains on the statute book and can still be used.
If the British legal route fails, citizens could then take their case to the European Court of Human Rights. However (again), even if they win the case, the British government is not obliged to change the offending law.
This is not like EC (Community) law which has been ruled to be capable of overriding British law.
This is such blatant 'the sky is falling!' government propaganda.
Under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act it is already an offence not to hand over encryption keys to the police when requested to do so.
If a person is detained, the police could investigate the hard disk and ask for the appropriate keys, if the suspect refuses they could then be charged under RIPA.
They would then be brought in front of a magistrate who would determine if there was a case for refusing bail (if they are truly a threat then bail would be refused) before the case is taken up by the higher courts.
The police could then have all the time they want to crack the disk, my rights would be less infringed than they already are and the police would actually have to work to prove the case for a serious crime.
Anti-fouling paint used to contain the biocide tributyl tin (TBT) which is in the process of being banned. TBT is extremely stable and tends to accumulate in harbour sediments where even low levels affect the reproductive health of marine organisms.
TBT has largely been replaced by copper-based compounds which are now suspected of being almost as toxic, so future hull coatings are likely to be silicone based and contain no biocide - the hull will be too slippery for the little critters to get a grip.
I find her comments very worrying and showing a profound lack of understanding of the concept of risk.
Eliza Manningham Buller is saying that it might be necessary for EVERYONE to lose well-established rights in order that SOME people MIGHT be protected from a possible threat. There is a possibility of tens of thousands of people having their rights abused if human rights legislation is weakened. Is this a fair price to pay for The War Against Terror (tm)?
f we're going to keep salami slicing our rights to protect ourselves from terror, when will someone in power start asking who is the bigger threat - Osama bin Laden and his cronies, or the government of the day?
There is also a question to be asked about her politics. Traditionally, Britain's spooks have been generally independent of government. They've also kept their mouths shut when their work is a matter of political debate. All of a sudden a speech she made some months ago is published, talking the same language as Blair, Clarke and Blunkett. Published just before Parliament is reconvened to discuss ripping up our human rights. Published just after Charles Clarke stood up in Brussels to tell the EU that the European Convention on Human Rights was helping weaken Western civilisation because it prohibited such useful judicial tools as torture.
Just watch the politicians now say that they have to do these things because the spies need these new powers to keep us all safe.
"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
Hermann Goering in comments to Gustave Gilbert, 18 April 1946.
I couldn't help but think of a short essay written by Carl Sagan after he saw an image of the Earth taken by Voyager. It's spine-tingling stuff:
'Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
'The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
'Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
'The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
'It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.'
What hurts is that we import so much and don't export that much. With a stronger dollar less will be imported and more exported. Instead of being a consuming society we'd be a producing society on balance. It's simple, selling more than buying is economically positive. As exports increase employment increases as well.
And with a strong dollar your exports become relatively more expensive in the rest of the World.
America already has problems selling manufactured goods to the rest of the World. Many American brands are almost unknown in Europe and Japan because they are seen as energy inefficient, lacking features, poorly made and not tailored to that market - cars with steering circles the size of Rhode Island, suspension that Isambard Kingdom Brunel would have rejected and fuel economy that makes you wonder if there is a hole in the tank, top loading washing machines, *BIG* CRT televisions - that sort of thing.
The only way America would keep export markets in a strong dollar is by doing the same as the Japanese and Germans did when they were faced with appreciating currencies - invest heavily in quality control and considering local markets rather than thinking what played well in Peoria would also go down a treat in Portsmouth, Potsdam and Pappanaickenpalayam.
This new plane is supposed to be able to carry 300 people at Mach 2. Concorde's top speed was Mach 2 as well. It was designed over 40 years ago.
The designers of Concorde looked at Mach 3 flight but were constrained by the materials available at the time. The only material up to Mach 3 were various titanium alloys of which neither Britain nor France had much experience, so they chose aluminium alloys. Aluminium has a much lower tolerance to high temperatures, so they had to reduce the maximum speed to keep frictional heating low.
I wonder if the same applies today? Titanium was used on the SR71, but that was a plane notorious for leaking fuel when sitting on the ground - not the most inspiring sight for wannabe passengers!
It isn't vacuum insulated, the foam does all of the hard work.
I don't think any dewar flasks on that scale have ever been launched into space - the engineering challenges of making one so big and capable of surviving a rocket launch would be - ahem - astronomical.
Previous rockets had an outside steel skin then a thick layer of insulation between that and the cryogenic tanks. However, that did not prevent the skin becoming extremely cold which led to ice forming in the moist Florida atmosphere. When the engines were ignited, the ice comes crashing down off the rocket - you can see tonnes of it falling off the Apollo rockets.
This isn't a problem in a traditional rocket where the important bits are sitting safely at the top, but on the Shuttle all of that ice would smash into the belly tiles or the leading edges of the wings - shredding the thermal protection and destroying the aerodynamics.
And the reason we have the Shuttle we do today is because NASA said in the late 1950s that it could design and build a reusable vessel for $5 billion rather than the $12 billion they had previously estimated. Putting the Orbiter on the side of a foam-clad external tank was just one of the many terrible compromises they had to make to even come close to that original budget.
One of the bigger savings was by turning the external tank into just that rather than a proper booster (along the lines of the Soviet Energia), the engines were put on the Orbiter and could be reused, the external tank would be discarded each time. But in doing that they turned the Space Shuttle Main Engines into engineering nightmares that took many years to debug and reduced the amount of cargo the Shuttle could take into space.
Although the government hasn't explicitly said what is on the proposed UK cards it is reasonable to assume the three biometrics will be stored as hashed values signed with a government private key.
Go to US immigration and after the usual abuse for wanting to enter such a wonderful country they will take your biometric measurements and [insert miracle here] your biometrics are retrieve, hashed and compared with the values held on the card (which are authenticated by the digital signature). Everything okay - welcome to America and wipe your feet on the mat, everything not so good, please check in for the Guantanamo Express.
So far, so annoying, but not really much more of an infringement of privacy than having your passport photo scanned by some scary lady at JFK.
HOWEVER, and here is the scary bit - the UK ID card would be the link back to the National Identity Register which will contain many dozens of pieces of personal information and a complete trail of previous accesses. Is the UK government going to refuse to allow the US authorities to access that database.
If it does then we are in a world of hurt, by doing so it would blow the Data Protection Act out of the water and probably be in multiple violations of EU law.
Part of me says it couldn't happen - the UK would refuse to allow personal data to go to a country with such poor data control regimes as the US - but then I think of the way we rolled over to send airline passenger data into the maw of Homeland Security.
So I hope all Brits who are worried have signed up to No2ID?
then the satellites you have up there to control global networks/weather/communication/internet/imaging/ec t? launch an interceptor sat, or a nuke in orbit and detonate.
Hmmm I wonder which country has the largest number of such satellites up there?
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, cheap jibe.
This is amazing - especially when the idea is being promoted by a 'Professor of Security Engineering' at a reputable university. How can adding a backdoor to security systems be anything other than a massive weakness just waiting to be exploited?
Imagine if this went ahead - the British government would want access to versions of Windows sold in this country, the American government to US copies of Windows, the German government ... and so on and so on... Would Microsoft allow the Chinese government access to their citizens' disks? The Chinese government are signed-up members of The War Against Terror - so they could claim they need access, and besides recent experience says that big businesses will always accommodate governments no matter how repressive.
And it gets worse. Microsoft would either have to make a single key that would open every machine in the World; or they would have to issue copies of all the keys to every government - the British government won't accept not being allowed into a suspected terrorist's (and we have a splendidly wide definition of 'terrorist' in this country) computer purely because the suspect happens to be foreign.
But it will all supposedly remain secure and not fall into the hands of wrong-doers.
The Home Office, IT and Microsoft - what an unholy trinity we have there. With this level of stupidity the legislation can't be far off.
A more likely case would involve someone being discriminated against on the grounds that the information held about them on the database is incorrect (say they were told they had a criminal record and were unable to get a job) or that they were unable to validate their information using the database (because biometrics are publicly shown to be the vat of snake oil that security experts have warned about). If the latter case was proved in court, then the entire ID card system would collapse like a pack of cards. The government has sold biometrics (or isometrics as the Chancellor called them yesterday) as foolproof and absolute, then they have built their case on foundations that might well be made of sand. If the biometrics fail (or more likely 'when'), the government will be open to all sorts of challenges.
I'm also beginning to wonder if scheme described in the ID Card Act will violate the Data Protection Act - namely the requirements that data collection must be proportionate and data processing must be restricted to the tasks data was originally collected for.
Sadly, the ECHR does not have the power to strike down legislation in the UK. The long list of rulings against the British government over human rights abuses in Northern Ireland did not change domestic legislation - although they did embarrass the UK government and cost it a fortune in damages.
Courts in the UK do however usually look to ECHR rulings when coming to their own verdicts. But none of that will change the (il)legality of the ID Cards Act.
Britain lacks a written constitution, so it is much harder to prove that a law falls foul of any fundamental rights (see below for Human Rights legislation in the UK). The House of Lords acts as the Supreme Court in the UK and can rule on whether a law is unjust or has been unjustly applied in a particular case. However, and this is crucial, British law holds that Parliament is supreme and that the judiciary cannot overturn a piece of legislation.
Having said which... There has been at least one case, Factortame, involving European (Community) law where the House of Lords, after guidance from the European Court of Justice, ruled that an Act of Parliament fell foul of European law. EC law is considered supreme over domestic law because of the wording of the Treaty of Rome to which Britain is a signatory. The Lords placed an injunction on the government forbidding them from using the Act. The government had to repeal the offending Act and bring British law into line with European law.
That is unlikely to be the case here as there is no universal EC law covering identity cards; the closest is the Schengen Agreement for border controls to which Britain is not a signatory.
The only reason the Lords overturned the Act was because of the implied supremacy of EC law in the Treaty of Rome - and even then they were loathe to do so. I strongly doubt that they would dare overturn purely domestic legislation.
The best hope (apart from hoping that EDS screw things up as well as usual) is that there could be a challenge under the Human Rights Act 1999 which embodies most of the European Convention on Human Rights into British law. If the ID cards system were found to fall foul of the HRA (and I'm not going to say if it could - INAL) then the courts could make a 'declaration of incompatibility' between the ID Cards Act and the HRA.
In such a case the government is not obliged to change the law, but it must at least review the offending legislation. The law would continue to apply, but people would still be able to take their cases before the courts and claim damage. If the British government refused to repeal or amend the law then plaintiffs could take their claims to the European Court of Human Rights which has the power to lay down massive fines against the government in the hope of shaming it into compliance.
HTH.
Some of us oldies would say that Rare haven't been the same since they released 'Atic Atac'.
That there will be active volcanos on Venus, if only for the simple fact that it's apparently close enough to the Sun to be "as hot as hell", but not quite close enough to be baked to a cinder like Mercury, plus there was some interesting things observed when we last sent a probe - even with lens-cap problem.
Active vulcanism has still not certainly been observed on Venus. Variations in sulphur dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere were observed by Soviet spacecraft, but these have never been definitively linked to volcanic activity.
Venus may not have ongoing volcanic activity because of the apparent lack of water in its crust and Mantle. On Earth, water helps promote melting in the Earth by acting as a flux that reduces the melting point of minerals. On Venus, if water is as rare as we suspect then melting may only take place at much higher temperatures - deeper in the crust and might never make its way to the surface.
Clearly Venus has had volcanic activity in the past, the radar observations by Venera and Magellan showed that much, but Venus seems to lack plate tectonics like the Earth. The lack of cratering suggests that the majority of the planet was cataclysmically resurfaced within the last billion years. It's entirely possible that Venus has long periods of relative quiescence followed by apocalyptic periods when much of the crust is reworked.
Although Venus is very similar to Earth, it does have significant differences. The lack of a planetary magnetic field suggests that the core isn't working the same way as the Earth's, then there is that extraordinary backwards sluggish rotation that still lacks a convincing explanation.
One thing I am fascinated by this mission is that the Venusian atmosphere is so dense that earthquake waves might propagate into the atmosphere and be detected by the orbiter.
Still it's great to be going back to Venus after all of these years.
The wiring of the rotors is a comparatively small part of the complexity of Enigma which is much more governed by the wiring of the plugboard on a daily analysis. The vast majority of plugboard settings were determined mathematically, but I agree - the codebooks were invaluable at speeding the effort - although almost as rare and hen's teeth.
So I guess if you could obfuscate the encryption enough you might not be asked for the keys.
Capturing the machine, despite what 'U571' may have said, would have been almost irrelevant to the success of the codebreakers.
The workings of the Enigma machine were known to the British before World War II (it was patented in the UK amongst other countries), but they still couldn't break the codes until they had either captured the code books that detailed the various rotor and plugboard settings, or reverse engineered the set-up of the machines.
For the Lorenz codes, the British never even saw the machines themselves until after the war, the whole workings of the machines were derived from the traffic. Had the British gained access to the codebooks (which they didn't in this case), that would have greatly speeded up the code-breaking effort.
It's well worth remembering when discussing any aspect of British IT law that the present administration is headed by a man who was incapable of buying flowers for his wife over the Internet, what hope have they of understanding cryptography?
Although the ECHR does not explicitly mention self-incrimination; precedent in the European Court of Human Rights (Funke v. France, 25 February 1993) suggests that Article 6.1 of the ECHR may be read as prohibiting self-incrimination.
However it is worth pointing out that the court, unlike most British courts, is not bound by judicial precedence and is not obliged to follow previous decisions.
A citizen could fight the government using the HRA all the way to the House of Lords, but because of the notion of Parliamentary supremacy, British courts cannot strictly speaking declare a law illegal.
If a court finds a British law (such as this one) is in conflict with the HRA the government should then enter a process of bringing the offending law into compliance with the HRA - but there is no compulsion to change it or strike it out entirely, the law remains on the statute book and can still be used.
If the British legal route fails, citizens could then take their case to the European Court of Human Rights. However (again), even if they win the case, the British government is not obliged to change the offending law.
This is not like EC (Community) law which has been ruled to be capable of overriding British law.
HTH.
Under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act it is already an offence not to hand over encryption keys to the police when requested to do so.
If a person is detained, the police could investigate the hard disk and ask for the appropriate keys, if the suspect refuses they could then be charged under RIPA.
They would then be brought in front of a magistrate who would determine if there was a case for refusing bail (if they are truly a threat then bail would be refused) before the case is taken up by the higher courts.
The police could then have all the time they want to crack the disk, my rights would be less infringed than they already are and the police would actually have to work to prove the case for a serious crime.
TBT has largely been replaced by copper-based compounds which are now suspected of being almost as toxic, so future hull coatings are likely to be silicone based and contain no biocide - the hull will be too slippery for the little critters to get a grip.
Eliza Manningham Buller is saying that it might be necessary for EVERYONE to lose well-established rights in order that SOME people MIGHT be protected from a possible threat. There is a possibility of tens of thousands of people having their rights abused if human rights legislation is weakened. Is this a fair price to pay for The War Against Terror (tm)?
f we're going to keep salami slicing our rights to protect ourselves from terror, when will someone in power start asking who is the bigger threat - Osama bin Laden and his cronies, or the government of the day?
There is also a question to be asked about her politics. Traditionally, Britain's spooks have been generally independent of government. They've also kept their mouths shut when their work is a matter of political debate. All of a sudden a speech she made some months ago is published, talking the same language as Blair, Clarke and Blunkett. Published just before Parliament is reconvened to discuss ripping up our human rights. Published just after Charles Clarke stood up in Brussels to tell the EU that the European Convention on Human Rights was helping weaken Western civilisation because it prohibited such useful judicial tools as torture.
Just watch the politicians now say that they have to do these things because the spies need these new powers to keep us all safe.
"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
Hermann Goering in comments to Gustave Gilbert, 18 April 1946.
Mike.
I couldn't help but think of a short essay written by Carl Sagan after he saw an image of the Earth taken by Voyager. It's spine-tingling stuff:
'Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
'The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
'Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
'The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
'It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.'
Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
And with a strong dollar your exports become relatively more expensive in the rest of the World.
America already has problems selling manufactured goods to the rest of the World. Many American brands are almost unknown in Europe and Japan because they are seen as energy inefficient, lacking features, poorly made and not tailored to that market - cars with steering circles the size of Rhode Island, suspension that Isambard Kingdom Brunel would have rejected and fuel economy that makes you wonder if there is a hole in the tank, top loading washing machines, *BIG* CRT televisions - that sort of thing.
The only way America would keep export markets in a strong dollar is by doing the same as the Japanese and Germans did when they were faced with appreciating currencies - invest heavily in quality control and considering local markets rather than thinking what played well in Peoria would also go down a treat in Portsmouth, Potsdam and Pappanaickenpalayam.
The designers of Concorde looked at Mach 3 flight but were constrained by the materials available at the time. The only material up to Mach 3 were various titanium alloys of which neither Britain nor France had much experience, so they chose aluminium alloys. Aluminium has a much lower tolerance to high temperatures, so they had to reduce the maximum speed to keep frictional heating low.
I wonder if the same applies today? Titanium was used on the SR71, but that was a plane notorious for leaking fuel when sitting on the ground - not the most inspiring sight for wannabe passengers!
I don't think any dewar flasks on that scale have ever been launched into space - the engineering challenges of making one so big and capable of surviving a rocket launch would be - ahem - astronomical.
Previous rockets had an outside steel skin then a thick layer of insulation between that and the cryogenic tanks. However, that did not prevent the skin becoming extremely cold which led to ice forming in the moist Florida atmosphere. When the engines were ignited, the ice comes crashing down off the rocket - you can see tonnes of it falling off the Apollo rockets.
This isn't a problem in a traditional rocket where the important bits are sitting safely at the top, but on the Shuttle all of that ice would smash into the belly tiles or the leading edges of the wings - shredding the thermal protection and destroying the aerodynamics.
And the reason we have the Shuttle we do today is because NASA said in the late 1950s that it could design and build a reusable vessel for $5 billion rather than the $12 billion they had previously estimated. Putting the Orbiter on the side of a foam-clad external tank was just one of the many terrible compromises they had to make to even come close to that original budget.
One of the bigger savings was by turning the external tank into just that rather than a proper booster (along the lines of the Soviet Energia), the engines were put on the Orbiter and could be reused, the external tank would be discarded each time. But in doing that they turned the Space Shuttle Main Engines into engineering nightmares that took many years to debug and reduced the amount of cargo the Shuttle could take into space.
You're thinking of the focus.
...and running the new AmigaOS.
HTH.
Mike.
Go to US immigration and after the usual abuse for wanting to enter such a wonderful country they will take your biometric measurements and [insert miracle here] your biometrics are retrieve, hashed and compared with the values held on the card (which are authenticated by the digital signature). Everything okay - welcome to America and wipe your feet on the mat, everything not so good, please check in for the Guantanamo Express.
So far, so annoying, but not really much more of an infringement of privacy than having your passport photo scanned by some scary lady at JFK.
HOWEVER, and here is the scary bit - the UK ID card would be the link back to the National Identity Register which will contain many dozens of pieces of personal information and a complete trail of previous accesses. Is the UK government going to refuse to allow the US authorities to access that database.
If it does then we are in a world of hurt, by doing so it would blow the Data Protection Act out of the water and probably be in multiple violations of EU law.
Part of me says it couldn't happen - the UK would refuse to allow personal data to go to a country with such poor data control regimes as the US - but then I think of the way we rolled over to send airline passenger data into the maw of Homeland Security.
So I hope all Brits who are worried have signed up to No2ID?
Mike.
Nonsense - Hemel is already famous for its 'oh my god! oh my god! we're all going to die!' 'magic roundabout'.
But then I live in Milton Keynes - spiritual home of the roundabout - and we're secretly jealous.
Mike.
Hmmm I wonder which country has the largest number of such satellites up there?
Mike.