Too many inexperienced police were on the front line of London's G20 protests, according to a report by MPs.

The Commons home affairs committee said confidence in police had been damaged because of some officers' actions, despite the operation's successes ...

The committee also criticised the police's widespread use of crowd containment - a controversial strategy known as kettling.

... MPs said the success (of the operation) was partly down to luck on the day, particularly because too many untrained officers had been on the front line of protests.

Most police officers receive two days of public order training every year, although specialist officers train almost once a month.

"Never again must untrained officers be placed in the front line of public protests," said the report ...

BBC NEWS 29 June 2009

Don't blame the G20 police officers

Police told: stop 'kettling' activists

Two female protesters who challenged police officers for not displaying their badge numbers were bundled to the ground, arrested and held in prison for four days, according to an official complaint lodged today.

The incident was caught on camera, and footage shows officers standing on the women's feet and applying pressure to their necks immediately after the women attempted to photograph a fellow officer who had refused to give his badge number ...

Val Swain, 43, and Emily Apple, 33, both mothers with young children, believe they were deliberately targeted for arrest at last year's climate camp demonstration in Kent because they campaign for Fit Watch, a protest group that opposes police surveillance at demonstrations.

The pair were remanded to a women's prison for four days and released only after the demonstration against the Kingsnorth power station had finished ...

A third Fit Watch campaigner, Geoff Cornock, 52, was also arrested and bailed the following day.

Charges were later dropped against all three, whose joint complaint to the IPCC alleges that they were unlawfully arrested and detained ...

Guardian 21 June 2009

Fit Watch

Shadow home secretary Chris Grayling has written to the companies contracted to produce identity cards to warn them the scheme would be cancelled if the Tories won power.

Mr Grayling told the firms the ID cards programme would not be completed under a future Tory government, and warned ministers against putting "poison pill" provisions into the contracts that would increase the cost of cancellation.

He said: "We intend to scrap the ID card project as one of our first acts if we are successful at the election.

"I am increasingly concerned that the Government is putting in place contractual arrangements that are designed to tie the hands of a future government, and I want to make the contractors absolutely aware that we do not intend to complete this work."

The scheme for ID cards, biometric passports and the national identity register is expected to cost more than £5 billion ...

Telegraph 17 Jun 2009

NO2ID

Thousands of people are being stopped and searched by the police under counter-terrorism powers simply to provide a racial balance in official statistics, the government's official anti-terror law watchdog has revealed.

Lord Carlile said in his annual report that he has got "ample anecdotal evidence", adding that it was "totally wrong" and an invasion of civil liberties to stop and search people simply to racially balance the statistics.

The official reviewer of counter-terrorist legislation said there was little or no evidence that the use of section 44 stop-and-search powers by the police can prevent an act of terrorism ... such searches were stopping between 8,000-10,000 people a month ...

None of the many thousands of searches had ever led to a conviction for a terrorist offence ...

"I have evidence of cases where the person stopped is so obviously far from any known terrorism profile that, realistically, there is not the slightest possibility of him/her being a terrorist, and no other feature to justify the stop."

Carlile uses his annual report to endorse complaints from professional and amateur photographers that counter-terror powers are being used to threaten prosecution if pictures are taken of officers on duty ...

He mentioned an incident in which two Austrian tourists were rebuked by officers for photographing Walthamstow bus station ...

Guardian 17 June 2009

All internet and phone traffic should be recorded to help the fight against terrorism, according to one of the UK's former spy chiefs.

Civil rights campaigners have criticised ministers' plans to log details of such contact as "Orwellian".

But Sir David Pepper, who ran the GCHQ listening centre for five years, told the BBC lives would be at risk if the state could not track communication ...

Details of the times, dates, duration and locations of mobile phone calls, numbers called, website visited and addresses e-mailed are already stored by telecoms companies for 12 months under a voluntary agreement.

However, the Liberal Democrats said the government's plans were "incompatible with a free country and a free people".

In February, the Lords constitution committee said electronic surveillance and collection of personal data had become "pervasive" in British society.

Its members said the situation threatened to undermine democracy.

However, Sir David said he was speaking out to help people understand that agencies were there to protect them.

BBC NEWS 07 June 2009

As the political consensus collapses, now all dissenters face suppression

... A few weeks ago, like everyone in mid-Wales, I received a local policing summary from the Dyfed-Powys force.

It contained a section headed Terrorism and Domestic Extremism.

"Work undertaken is not solely focused on the threat from international terrorists. Attention has also been paid to the potential threat that domestic extremists and campaigners can pose."

I lodged a freedom of information request to try to discover what this meant. What threat do campaigners pose? ...

Paul Mobbs of the Free Range Network has found what appears to be an explanation.

Under the heading "Protect[ing] the country from both terrorism and domestic extremism", the Dyfed-Powys Police website repeats the line about domestic extremists and campaigners ...

Mobbs has also found a bulletin circulated among Welsh forces at the end of last year, identifying the "new challenges and changes" the police now face.

Eco-terrorism is a charge repeatedly levelled against the environment movement, mostly by fossil fuel lobbyists. But, as far as I can discover, there has not been a single recorded instance of a planned attempt to harm people in the cause of environmental protection in the UK over the past 30 years or more.

So what do the police mean by eco-terrorism? It appears to refer to any environmental action more radical than writing letters to your MP.

The Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) now runs three units whose purpose is to tackle another phenomenon it has never defined: domestic extremism.

These are the National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit (Netcu), the Welsh Extremism and Counter-Terrorism Unit and the National Public Order Intelligence Unit.

Because Acpo is not a public body but a private limited company, the three bodies are exempt from freedom of information laws and other kinds of public accountability, even though they are funded by the Home Office and deploy police officers from regional forces.

So it's hard to work out exactly what they do ...

Guardian 19 May 2009

Britain's Secretive Police Force

A-Z of legislation

The government is dropping plans to hold secret inquests without juries, Justice Secretary Jack Straw has said.

In a Commons written statement, Mr Straw said the move did not command the necessary cross-party support, despite earlier government concessions.

It was included in the Coroners and Justice Bill earlier this year to cover cases involving sensitive information.

Civil liberties groups who feared cases like that of Jean Charles de Menezes would be affected, welcomed the move ...

BBC NEWS  15 May 2009

Secret inquest plans brought back

Secret inquests plans 'dropped'

Do you believe in the infallibility of governments, police forces and databases? If so, your letter welcoming the latest Home Office "consultation" on the national DNA database will no doubt be gratefully received. But if you are of a more cautious disposition, a closer examination of yesterday's proposals might be advisable.

No one disputes the considerable benefits of well-managed DNA evidence in the justice system. It is capable of clearing the innocent and contributing to the conviction of the guilty. Nor is there any objection to those arrested on suspicion of a crime having their DNA taken and applied to evidence gleaned from past or present crime scenes: this is a common, and completely uncontroversial, scenario. There is not even any argument about the wisdom of retaining a suspect's DNA until the conclusion of the investigation, and of any subsequent trial.

The crucial question – and the one on which the Government was defeated in the European Court of Human Rights last year – relates to the retention of intimate material, or the unique personal information extracted from it, in case you should offend in future.

Predictably, the Government's instinct has been in favour of a universal database. Undeterred by the spectre of every small child or senior citizen being marched to the census point for saliva swabbing, Tony Blair openly mooted this terrifying and impractical idea in 2006. But, just as predictably, the Government lacked the courage of its convictions, and instead moved towards universal retention by stealth ...

Telegraph 07 May 2009

The DNA profiles of innocent people will remain on the national database for up to 12 years despite a landmark European Court ruling that they should be deleted ...

Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said: "This well-spun proposal proves that the Home Secretary has yet to learn about the presumption of innocence and value of personal privacy in Britain.

"Wholly innocent people - including children - will have their most intimate details stockpiled for years on a database that will remain massively out of step with the rest of the world. With regret we shall be forced to see her in court once more."

There are an estimated 5.3 million profiles on the DNA database - around one in 10 people making it the largest of its kind in the world - but around 850,000 are people who were never convicted of any crime ...

Telegraph 07 May 2009

DNA database powers condemned as 'blanket and indiscriminate'

DNA pioneer condemns plans to retain data on innocent people

Cleaners vote to boycott fingerprint machines

DNA database

Timeline of the national DNA database

Government plans to keep DNA samples of innocent

Islamist preachers, white supremacists, a radio shock-jock, an Arab terrorist and two anti-gay evangelicals are just some of the people to have been banned from entering Britain recently, it emerged yesterday.

In a bid to regain the initiative after weeks of negative publicity and fears that anti-immigration parties will sweep the board at the forthcoming European elections, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith took the unprecedented step of "naming and shaming" 16 individuals who were barred from coming to the UK between November and March ...

Under a new law introduced in 2005, Britain is able to pre-emptively ban anyone who promotes hatred, terrorism or serious criminal activity. Since the measure was introduced, 101 people have been refused entry.

In the five months to March, 22 were excluded; the Home Office refused to name six of the people, citing national security reasons.

Critics argue that the orders are a form of pre-emptive policing that stifles free speech and, in the age of the internet, have little effect on halting hateful remarks.

The Independent 06 May 2009

Savage response: barred shock jock vows to sue

UK 'least wanted' list published

Who is on UK 'least wanted' list?

The Home Office list

The unwanted

Government officials have been monitoring environmental campaign groups and then passing intelligence on to the police, according to documents seen by the Guardian.

An internal risk report from the Department for Transport reveals that a unit referred to as the comms directorate ­"continuously monitor[ed]" peaceful protest groups opposed to the expansion of Heathrow airport and then briefed detectives about their findings.

The disclosure is the latest evidence of a wide-ranging crackdown on environmental campaign groups and has been condemned by MPs and civil liberty groups ...

The Liberal Democrat justice spokesman, David Howarth, said it was "extraordinary" that civil servants were monitoring peaceful environmental campaigners and then passing information to police.

"The document confirms the suspicion that the main concern of the government is to undermine the protest movement rather than to engage in a genuine debate with campaigners and local residents.

"The fact that the monitoring was being undertaken by a communications and public relations team, rather than by the police or security service officials, strongly suggests that the government's real concerns about protests are political and nothing to do with national security or public order."

Greenpeace said the documents revealed a systematic attempt by government to stop protesters highlighting the impact Heathrow expansion would have on climate change.

"A pattern appears to be emerging of government departments concerned as much with protesters as with policy," said spokesman Ben Stewart. "The case for Heathrow expansion was riddled with exaggeration and misrepresentation and now we know it was pushed through by the Department for Transport over-reaching its authority to spy on peaceful and legitimate protest groups." ...

Sabina Frediani, campaigns co-ordinator for Liberty, said it was inappropriate for civil servants to be carrying out any investigation into protest groups .

"We always thought a communications directorate was a press office – now that simple phrase takes on positively Orwellian overtones. First we had police investigating Home Office leaks and now we've got DfT officials investigating protest groups. Haven't we had enough of constitutional cross-dressing?"

Guardian 02 May 2009

Civil Liberties

Seeking to Save the Planet, With a Thesaurus

Ministers want to farm out a Big Brother database of everyone's emails, phone calls and internet use to private companies who will be given the job of storing the data on behalf of the state.

The £2bn cost of the plans could add millions of pounds to phone and internet bills to help pay for new systems to collect and sort private information.

Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, said the Government had rejected the idea of a centralised database because it would impinge on privacy. She favoured a "middle way" in which primary communication companies, such as BT or Virgin, and leading internet service providers would have the job of collating phone, email and web use.

The Home Office wants communications companies to extend the range of information they currently hold on subscribers and organise it so that it can be better used by the police, MI5 and other public bodies investigating serious crime and terrorism.

Ministers estimate that the project will cost £2bn to set up, which includes some compensation to the communications industry for the work it may be asked to do.

"Communications data is an essential tool for law enforcement agencies to track murderers, paedophiles, save lives and tackle crime," Ms Smith said.

"It is essential that the police and other crime-fighting agencies have the tools they need to do their job. However, to be clear, there are absolutely no plans for a single central store." ...

The Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, welcomed the decision not to go ahead with a giant centralised database, but called on the Government to publish details about how ministers intended to protect privacy. He said: "You can tell an awful lot about some people's personal circumstances from the people they are talking to and the websites they visit. It is important that the proposals are tightly defined and minimise the level of intrusion with appropriate safeguards in place."

Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, described the decision as a "Home Office climb-down" on a super Big Brother database. "It is a clear signal that the public interest in personal privacy can no longer be ignored, she said. "However, if companies are to be required to hold even more information than they do at present, concerns about access and use become even more important."

Communications service providers already hold large amounts of communications data and an EU directive that came into force this month requires data to be retained for a year.

The Internet Services Providers' Association (ISPA) welcomed the government consultation. Nicholas Lansman, ISPA secretary general, said: "To ensure that any updated law enforcement requirements do not place extra financial burdens on internet service providers, ISPA stresses the importance of cost recovery." ...

The Independent 28 April 2009

Scrap ID cards now, say Cabinet rebels

Respect our right to privacy

Paying billions for our database state

Undercover police are running a network of hundreds of informants inside protest organisations who secretly feed them intelligence in return for cash, according to evidence handed to the Guardian.

They claim to have infiltrated a number of environmental groups and said they are receiving information about leaders, tactics and plans of future demonstrations.

The dramatic disclosures are revealed in almost three hours of secretly recorded discussions between covert officers claiming to be from Strathclyde police, and an activist from the protest group Plane Stupid, whom the officers attempted to recruit as a paid spy after she had been released on bail following a demonstration at Aberdeen airport last month.

Matilda Gifford, 24, said she recorded the meetings in an attempt to expose how police seek to disrupt the legitimate activities of climate change activists. She met the officers twice; they said they were a detective constable and his assistant. During the taped discussions, the officers:

• Indicate that she could receive tens of thousands of pounds to pay off her student loans in return for information about individuals within Plane Stupid.

• Say they will not pay money direct into her bank account because that would leave an audit trail that would leave her compromised. They said the money would be tax-free, and added: "UK plc can afford more than 20 quid."

• Accept that she is a legitimate protester, but warn her that her activity could mean she will struggle to find employment in the future and result in a criminal record.

• Claim they have hundreds of informants feeding them information from protest organisations and "big groupings" from across the political spectrum.

• Explain that spying could assist her if she was arrested. "People would sell their soul to the devil," an officer said.

• Warn her that she could be jailed alongside "hard, evil" people if she received a custodial sentence ...

In a statement last night, assistant chief constable George Hamilton said the force had "a responsibility to gather intelligence", and such operations were conducted according to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) ...

Guardian 25 April 2009

'UK plc can afford more than 20 quid,' the officer said

The case against 12 Muslim men involved in what Gordon Brown described as a "major terrorist plot" amounted to one email and a handful of ambiguous telephone conversations, it emerged last night after all the men were released without charge.

Eleven Pakistani students and one British man were freed after extensive searches of 14 addresses in North-west England failed to locate evidence of terrorist activity, according to security sources.

Police did not find any explosives, firearms, target lists, documents or any material which could have been used to carry out an attack ...

The Independent 23 April 2009

'The officers got bad information and are using it to scare everyone'

Nine held after terror raids face deportation

Guilty as not charged

Police who arrested the Conservative frontbencher Damian Green trawled his private e-mails looking for information on Britain’s leading civil liberties campaigner.

Officers from Scotland Yard’s antiterror squad searched the computer seized from his parliamentary office using the key words “Shami Chakrabarti” – even though the Liberty director had nothing to do with the leaking of Home Office documents that prompted the investigation.

In an interview with The Times, Mr Green warned that his arrest and the raids on his Commons office and homes smacked of a “police state”. The Tory immigration spokesman said that Ms Chakrabarti’s name had been one of the keywords used to go through e-mails and computer documents going back several years.

“This feels to me like a fishing expedition on somebody who embarrasses the government of the day,” he said. “That’s very disturbing.” ...

The Times 18 April 2009

Our freedoms are not frothy skinny lattes

Civil servants exaggerated the seriousness of Home Office leaks which led to the arrest of Tory MP Damian Green, a committee of MPs has said.

The Crown Prosecution Service is to say later if it will prosecute Mr Green and the official who fed him information.

The inquiry ran into controversy when the Tory immigration spokesman was arrested and had his office searched.

The home affairs committee questions whether police would have got involved if they had not been misled.

It has also called for changes in the way sensitive cases such as this are handled.

Mr Green and Christopher Galley, a junior civil servant working at the Home Office, both deny wrongdoing. Mr Green says he was releasing information in the public interest ...

Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne said officials "seemed to have complained about national security when all they wanted to hide was their embarrassment".

"The police should never have been involved in this case, which should have been handled as an internal civil service disciplinary matter," he said ...

BBC NEWS 16 April 2009

Tory MP Green 'warned of life sentence'

Damian Green cleared - what DPP Keir Starmer said

Tory MP Green will not be charged

• EU wants Britain to tighten laws on internet privacy
• Use of new advertising technology questioned

... The commission's legal action, which could result in the government being dragged before the European court of justice, centres on the handling of controversial online advertising technology developed by UK-based Phorm which has been tested by BT in the UK and cleared by the authorities.

That technology enables internet service providers (ISPs) to track what a user does on the internet to create a list of their interests which can be used to show them more relevant adverts on websites they subsequently visit. While heralded by ISPs and media companies as a way of making more money from internet advertising, a market dominated in the UK by Google, it has been widely criticised by privacy campaigners and the web's creator, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, as unjustifiable online snooping ...

Guardian 15 April 2009

It was clear from early on, in the City of London on Wednesday, that two very different protests were being staged. One, centred on the Bank of England, sheltered masked agents provocateurs, who were intent on clashing with the police. They succeeded in their aims.

But the other, the Climate Camp on Bishopsgate, harboured no such elements, and continued peacefully all day. Yet the 800 people at this street party were still attacked by riot police very suddenly in the evening. Footage has been posted on the internet showing officers repeatedly hitting unarmed civilians

The attack on the camp by the police is being described as "unprovoked" by protesters. This is not, strictly speaking, the case. It is provocative, of course, to block a road without permission, and the aim of the protest was to block that section of Bishopsgate for 24 hours.

What is downright sinister, however, is that all those who were visiting the Climate Camp at that time were violently attacked and then trapped for many hours by the police. They were not allowed to leave between 7pm and midnight, even if they had been injured. Even a woman in a wheelchair was held.

If the concern of the police was to clear the road for traffic, then their action was certainly counterproductive. They succeeded, after all, in blocking the road to pedestrians as well as vehicles for five hours. The tactics of the police smack of collective punishment for everyone.

It is possible that had a warning of an impending shutdown been given to the campers, the news may have attracted more aggressive visitors. It's true also that had the police put in place a policy whereby people were allowed to leave but not to enter, there was no guarantee that those leaving would quietly disperse.

Yet these factors only make it difficult to understand why the police became so confrontational so early. Why could the police not just keep the protest under observation, while they concentrated on quelling the violent skirmishes in other parts of town?

Their claim is that they corral groups of protesters so that they can isolate the anti-social elements. But by the time they mounted their attacks, the police had had nearly seven hours to assess whether any such element had ever been present. The fact that the Climate Camp protesters mounted no violence in response to that meted out to them suggests that their intentions of mounting a peaceful protest had been successful.

Most worrying of all, when legal observers advised people who had been hit by the police, or who had been witnesses to it, to take down the numbers of their assailants, the line of police all covered their badges. It is much more terrifying that the police are hiding their identities as they take part in violence, than that the self-styled "anarchists" we have heard so much about are doing so.

The Independent 04 April 2009

One hundred and eighty schoolchildren across Britain have been identified as potential Islamic extremists by a police-run early intervention programme which aims to coax youngsters away from radical influences.

The Channel project, a pilot scheme established in April 2007 and run by six police forces, provides parents, teachers and youth workers with training to recognise the warning signs of "grooming" by radicals and a mechanism to report concerns over a child, or group of children, to the police. A panel of community leaders then decides the best course of action, in the most serious cases referring them to social services.

Keen to assuage fears the scheme targets Muslim children unfairly, the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) last night said the aim was to steer vulnerable children away from radicalism before it was too late.

An Acpo spokeswoman said: "It provides support to parents and safeguards to identify young people who are at risk of violent extremism. It also creates a way for the police, local authorities and community to work together to identify those at risk and then refer them to the relevant agency for help."

The Channel project was piloted in Lancashire and the London borough of Lambeth, then rolled out to nine other areas in Britain, including West Yorkshire, home to the four July 7 2005 bombers. It will be trialled in a further nine areas this year.

Guardian 28 March 2009

Councils in England and Wales have used controversial spying laws 10,000 times in the past five years, figures obtained by the Liberal Democrats show.

The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) was designed to fight serious crime.

But officials have been using it to spy on suspected dog fouling, littering and other minor offences.

The government has promised curbs on its use but the Lib Dems warn it could still become a "snoopers' charter".

The figures, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal for the first time how widespread the use of Ripa is among council officials in England and Wales.

A survey of more than 180 local authorities found:

• 1,615 council staff have the power to authorise the use of Ripa.

• 21% (or 340) of these staff are below senior management grade.

• Ripa powers have been used 10,333 times in the last five years.

• Just 9% of these authorisations have led to a successful prosecution, caution or fixed-penalty notice ...

BBC NEWS 26 March 2009

Council uses criminal law to spy on school place applicants

Spy law 'used in dog fouling war'

Council admits spying on family

RIPA

Minister wants government database to monitor social networking sites

Millions of Britons who use social networking sites such as Facebook could soon have their every move monitored by the Government and saved on a "Big Brother" database.

Ministers faced a civil liberties outcry last night over the plans, with accusations of excessive snooping on the private lives of law-abiding citizens.

The idea to police MySpace, Bebo and Facebook comes on top of plans to store information about every phone call, email and internet visit made by everyone in the United Kingdom. Almost half the British population – some 25 million people – are thought to use social networking sites. There are already proposals under a European Union directive – dating back to after the 7 July 2005 bombs – for emails and internet usage to be monitored and added to a planned database to track terror plots ...

The Independent 25 March 2009

Social network sites 'monitored'

There is an increased risk terrorists could get hold of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons to attack the UK, the Home Office has said.

The assessment comes as Home Secretary Jacqui Smith unveiled a new UK strategy to tackle an evolved terrorist threat.

It warns failed states such as Iraq have made it easier to obtain materials for weapons such as dirty bombs.

Ms Smith said the threat is "severe" - meaning an attack is "highly likely" and "could happen without warning" ...

BBC NEWS 24 March 2009

Warm words, dud deeds

'The government's new anti-terror strategy plays into the hands of the extremists'

Hazel Blears' standoff with Muslim Council overshadows new anti-terror launch

Counter-terror training 'flawed'

One in four of the major government databases is almost certainly illegal and should be scrapped ...

Researchers called for 11 systems assessed as "almost certainly illegal" under human rights or data protection law to be scrapped or substantially redesigned.

The study, by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, also pointed to significant legal and practical problems with a further 29 databases, including the national childhood obesity one and the planned NHS summary care record system, and said they should be reviewed independently ...

The report's co-author, Professor Ross Anderson of Cambridge University, said:

"Britain's database state has become a financial, ethical and administrative disaster which is penalising some of the most vulnerable members of our society. Often, computerisation has been used as a substitute for public service reform rather than a means of enabling reform. Little thought is given to safety, privacy and value for money." ...

The Independent 23 March 2009

Call to scrap 'illegal databases'

Ten ways to track the citizen

Baby's DNA was held on database

Warning over 'surveillance state'

390,000 to access child database

DNA database 'breach of rights'

Police are too heavy-handed in dealing with protests, harassing and intimidating people, a leading parliamentary committee has said.

The Joint Select Committee on Human Rights also criticised the misuse of legislation used against demonstrators.

It says peaceful protesters have had personal property seized and have been intimidated by police.

It wants tighter restrictions to prevent the use of anti-terrorism laws. Police say they are acting lawfully.

The committee also said police were too heavy-handed with journalists reporting on demonstrations. It comes as police forces prepare to deal with large-scale protests in London ahead of the G20 summit ...

BBC NEWS 23 March 2009

Camp complaints referred to IPCC

Thousands of UK workers are being trained to help respond to a future terror attack as part of an updated counter-terror strategy, ministers say.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said shop and hotel workers would be among 60,000 people able to deal with an incident.

The updated approach, aimed at tackling immediate terrorist threats and the causes of extremism, would be the most comprehensive in the world, she added ...

The paper - called Contest Two - will update the Contest strategy developed by the Home Office in 2003, which was later detailed in the Countering International Terrorism document released in 2006.

Over the last six years the strategy has concentrated on preventing radicalisation of potential terror recruits to disrupting terrorist operations, reducing the UK's vulnerability and ensuring Britain is ready for the consequences of any terror attack.

The updated strategy will increase the focus on challenging individuals and groups who undermine the UK's "shared values" - even if they are not breaking the law ...

One terrorism expert said equipping people to react quickly to an attack in the workplace and in public areas was a "bold and imaginative" step.

"There are thousands of people not only in the public sector but in the private sector also who have the necessary knowledge and skills to help in the constant vigilance that is needed against the terrorist threat," said Professor Paul Wilkinson, from St Andrew's University.

By 2011, Britain will be spending £3.5bn a year on counter-terrorism, the Home Office has said.

The number of police working on counter-terrorism has risen to 3,000 from 1,700 in 2003 ...

BBC NEWS 22 March 2009

We are about to take the war against terror to a new level

A new opportunity for arbitrary restrictions

Police have been accused of setting a "dangerous precedent" when they confiscated hundreds of items of property - including children's crayons, a clown's outfit and a pensioner's walking stick - from people attending an environmental protest camp at Kingsnorth power station.

A list of more than 2,000 possessions taken from protesters, who were repeatedly searched going to and from the camp last August, has been obtained through a freedom of information request by Liberal Democrat justice spokesman David Howarth.

It shows that officers took packets of balloon, tents, a clown's outfit, camping equipment, cycle helmets and bike locks, plastic buckets, bin bags, blankets, soap, banners and leaflets, books, party poppers and nail clippers. A toy plastic gun, life-jackets, inflatable dinghies, paddles and foot pumps were also confiscated, police say, to stop protesters taking to the river around the Hoo peninsula in Kent. Much of the property has yet to be returned. ...

Kent police were embarrassed over the event last year when, after ministers had justified what they called the "proportionate" £5.9m cost of the security operation by pointing out that 70 officers had been injured at the event, they then had to admit that the injuries reported by officers included heat exhaustion, toothache, insect bites and headaches.

Howarth said: "It is not the police's job to confiscate protesters' banners, pensioners' walking sticks and children's crayons.

"The police admit that almost all the items seized had a legitimate purpose. The idea that it is appropriate to seize ordinary people's property on the off-chance that it might be used to commit a crime is a dangerous precedent.

"Almost anything can be invested with sinister intent with enough imagination. I even heard of one case where police confiscated a camper's soap on the basis that it could be used to make them slippery and evade capture by police. This is simply farcical.

"This kind of pre-emptive policing is out of all proportion to the threat posed by environmental direct action and should not be acceptable in a democratic society." ...

Sarah Perkins, a member of the Climate Camp's legal team, said their main concern was that they believed police misused "stop and search" legislation. "It certainly was disproportionate policing and a real sea change in the way police are using their powers. Absolutely everyone was searched, many people several times over, and then police raided the camp and searched yet again."

Green party MEP Caroline Lucas, who attended the week-long event, said at the time that she had witnessed police confiscating disabled access ramps, board games and fire safety equipment ...

Observer 01 March 2009

Protesters fought the law, but the law fought back

Controversial surveillance powers employed to fight terrorism and combat crime have been misused by civil servants in undercover "spying" operations that breach official guidelines, the Guardian has learned.

Documents obtained under Freedom of Information show some government departments and agencies have used these powers incorrectly or without proper controls. They also show the official government watchdog set up to monitor the use of such clandestine techniques criticised the departments for their behaviour ...

The watchdog highlighted how:

• Officials at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) did not have proper authorisation when they went undercover posing as anglers to glean information about imported fish;

• A manager responsible for authorising surveillance at the NHS anti-fraud agency routinely gave officials "carte blanche" in surveillance operations;

• Tracking devices were attached to vehicles in a bid to monitor the disposal of waste, after the Environment Agency received apparently incorrect advice from the Home Office

• Potential prosecutions were jeopardised because those conducting the surveillance operations were not properly trained and had not followed procedures

• A large array of public bodies are also using surveillance powers, including the Charity Commission, Royal Pharmaceutical Society and the BBC ...

Guardian 28 February 2009

Cameron pledges bill to restore British freedoms

Spying on 60 million people doesn't add up

The government is planning to get around a European court ruling that condemned Britain's retention of the DNA profiles of more than 800,000 innocent people by keeping the original samples used to create the database, the Guardian has learned.

A damning ruling last December criticised the "blanket and indiscriminate nature" of the UK's current DNA database - which includes DNA from those never charged with an offence - and said the government had overstepped acceptable limits of storing data for crime detection.

Last month the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, said she would publish a white paper setting out "a more proportionate, fair and commonsense approach", but she has not given any indication whether DNA samples already obtained would be destroyed. However, Home Office sources said the government, which was given three months to respond to the ruling, has "no plans" to destroy samples of DNA ...

Guardian 27 February 2009

DNA details of 1.1m children on database

DNA database

Perhaps because of the media interest in the Convention on Modern Liberty, both The Guardian and the Press Association via the The Independent newspapers, have quoted from a discussion paper published over 2 weeks ago by the NuLabour "think tank" lobbyists at the Institute for Public Policy Research, through which several Labour party surveillance nanny police state policies have been "market tested", to see if they can be slipped through past the public and Parliament, without too much vocal opposition.

IPPR seem to have funded and have now published, "A discussion paper for the ippr Commission on National Security for the 21st Century" by Sir David Omand, an eminent retired Whitehall security and intelligence insider, on whose watch under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, many of the most repressive Labour laws and policies were trotted out ...

A significant challenge supporting the National Security Strategy will be how the intelligence community can access the full range of data relating to individuals, their movements, activities and associations in a timely, accurate, proportionate and legal way, and one acceptable in a democratic and free society, including appropriate oversight and means of independent investigation and redress in cases of alleged abuse of power.

A significant challenge supporting the National Security Strategy will be how the intelligence community can access the full range of data relating to individuals, their movements, activities and associations in a timely, accurate, proportionate and legal way, and one acceptable in a democratic and free society, including appropriate oversight and means of independent investigation and redress in cases of alleged abuse of power.

Spy Blog 25 February 2009

It is time to resist

Secret inquests, held without a jury. Is this an idea whose time has come? The Public Bill Committee is going through the text of the Coroners and Justice Bill.

The proposal is this. The state is involved in the death of someone – in police cells, in prison, in a shooting incident, on the battlefield in Afghanistan – and the minister decides to hold the inquest beyond the public gaze.

Is that odd, at all? There are usually juries in these sorts of matters. Ordinary people have been sitting in judgment for centuries. Too long, some think. Yes, true: it's against the spirit of the times. Ordinary people have no expert knowledge of the sensitivities involved. And our intelligence relationships with foreign countries demand great sensitivity. Also, the safety of our police is paramount – it's the first duty of officers these days to protect the safety of themselves.

And, of course, national security. That shuts everyone up.

David Howarth, the Cambridge MP, thinks this is drivel. As does Edward Garnier for the Tories. As does Liberty, as does Inquest, the coroners organisation, as does... almost everyone. Possibly not the police, who may be behind this nasty piece of work.

The way the Bill is worded, the Minister of Justice can use five grounds to bang up the inquest. Mr Garnier pointed out how a police officer can – and has – used a clause in the Counter-Terrorism Act to confiscate a camera from a member of the public who'd photographed the officer committing a traffic violation. That's the trouble: if they can, they will.

Would the Menezes inquest have been held in public under this law? Like fun. Under all five provisions of the Bill they could have held it in secret. To protect "national security" (terrorists shouldn't know how incompetent our police were). To protect "the relationship between the UK and another country" (ditto foreign governments). To "protect the safety of a witness or other person" (the head of the Met, for instance).

James Gray mentioned the Hercules that went down in Iraq killing 10 servicemen – the coroner criticised the US intelligence sharing (very relationship-damaging), and the British Government for not having flame suppressant foam in the plane, and made £30m of safety recommendations.

If they could pull it off, all military inquests would be held in secret. The several oppositions agree there are occasions when secrecy is required, and agree with Mr Howarth that coroners should operate according to the same rules of secrecy as High Court judges in espionage or terror trials. That's the answer. But the Government is asking a different question.

Simon Carr 25 February 2009

Straw plan for private inquests back on agenda

Secret inquests plans 'dropped'

We are letting the well run dry, allowing little bits of our civil freedoms to be chipped away by paranoiac governments who assure us we can trust them – and consistently betray that trust.

We are gradually sacrificing what has taken hundreds of years of civilisation to achieve, which is a condition of some kind of liberty. It may not be evident to everyone yet, but we have lost so much freedom in the past 10 years. When the Government passed its "anti-terror" laws, it reassured those who campaigned against them that they would only ever be used in the most extreme circumstances.

But these are completely vague laws which enable a government to arrest almost anybody for almost everything.

Within a couple of years they had been used to eject an 80-year-old heckler from a Labour Party conference, to arrest a woman for reading out the names of British soldiers killed in Iraq, and to freeze the assets of Icelandic banks in England. This is the problem with vague legislation of this type: it invariably gets called into use whenever anybody does anything that the Government finds embarrassing or the police find inconvenient.

It criminalises the behaviour of concerned citizens and thereby encourages disengagement and apathy. By preventing people from taking part in critiques of governance it increases the gap between rulers and ruled: it is fundamentally anti-democratic.

I worry about initiatives like identity cards and computer databases because they could be a step towards a police state, with completely innocent people being held in custody because of software malfunctions.

It is incredibly sad that these moves towards a police state should have happened under a Labour government. Gordon Brown should think about the serious problems that need to be solved – such as climate change – and direct his government's efforts towards that.

The Independent20 February 2009

Revealed: the full extent of Labour's curbs on civil liberties

If, historically, the record of British judges as defenders of personal liberty has been patchy, the tools at their disposal were rather limited. They could, in case of doubt, interpret parliamentary enactments on the assumption that parliament did not intend to infringe rights and freedoms; yet if the enactment was clear and unambiguous, they had no choice but to give it effect. But the rules of the game have changed - if not in the sense or direction that Tony Blair had in mind when using that expression - for parliament has, in the Human Rights Act 1998, instructed the judges to protect the main rights and freedoms enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights, providing a much more comprehensive framework of principles than judges have been able to invoke before.

It is in this context that we must review a development that is a cause of profound unease to many. It has recently been described, in unrhetorical but chilling terms, by the House of Lords select committee on the constitution in its recent report on Surveillance, Citizens and the State: "Successive UK governments have gradually constructed one of the most extensive and technologically advanced surveillance systems in the world ... The expansion in the use of surveillance represents one of the most significant changes in the life of the nation since the end of the second world war." Tony McNulty, then minister for security, counter-terrorism, crime and policing, told the committee that this was "today's normality. CCTV, DNA database and a whole range of these other elements are not there as a response to exceptional threats and exceptional circumstances." A national identity card and a database with the name and address of every child lie in the future.

Perhaps the British are content to be the most spied upon people in the democratic world. But this would be surprising given their traditional resistance to official intrusion and their traditional belief that the state should mind its own business, not theirs. The qualified right to respect for private and family life, home and correspondence, embodied in Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, is not an ideal weapon to counter the growth of a surveillance society; but failing parliamentary restraint and adequate regulatory oversight, it may be the best weapon there is.

In reversing a House of Lords decision that permitted the police to retain DNA samples given by people who had been acquitted or never charged, the European Court of Human Rights has given a nudge in the right direction. There has been a surprising paucity of legal challenges in this area, but the number of challenges may grow in the years to come, as the public appreciate the extent of the surveillance to which they are subject. But the judges are not, in any ordinary sense, legislators: they cannot rule on claims that litigants do not choose to bring before them.

• Lord Bingham retired as senior law lord last year

Guardian 17 February 2009

On the day that it becomes illegal to take pictures of police engaged in counter-terrorist operations – in practice a ban on taking pictures of the police – it is worth noting events in Brighton recently where police set up outside a cafe and photographed people attending a meeting about the environment.

According to the Brighton Argus, members of the Cowley Club, which was hosting a meeting of Earth First, "were confronted with four uniformed officers outside the Somerfield store, opposite the venue, snapping visitors using a paparazzi-style lens". One of the club members, David Biset, said the police were behaving in a deliberately "intimidating manner". He said:

Avenues of dissent are being closed down and police feel able to treat politics as a police matter. There was no suggestion of anything going on outside the building. The police have no reason to be there beyond intimidating people. You shouldn't be put on a database simply for attending a meeting.

The local MP, David Lepper, agrees that the police operation was designed to scare activists rather than prevent crime, and has written to the divisional commander for Brighton and Hove demanding to know why officers were photographing people engaged in a political activity. The police have refused to comment other than to produce the usual assertion that this was a normal police operation ...

Guardian 16 February 2009

ACPO

The secret police are watching you

Police chiefs body faces calls for review

CIA warns Barack Obama that British terrorists are the biggest threat to the US

Secret police unit set up to spy on British 'domestic extremists'

Taser Abuse in the United States

Launch of Automatic Number Plate Recognition

ACPO

Taxpayers face a £46m bill for the cost of communications companies storing details of all personal email and internet use, the Home Office has revealed.

The introduction from April of a requirement on internet service providers to keep details of personal internet use follows a 2006 EU directive on data retention agreed after the 2005 London bombings.

Many British communications companies have kept customers' data on a voluntary basis but said they would only comply with a mandatory requirement if the government was prepared to pick up the bill. The move towards compulsory data retention represents a major step towards the creation of "super-database" to track all phone, email, text and internet use.

Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, is expected to publish a paper this month on the new database as part of the government's "interception modernisation programme".

The Home Office says the data being stored is not the content of emails, texts and phone calls but the traffic and location data and other details needed to identify a subscriber or user.

Ministers say the data is needed to enable police and national security investigators to identify suspects, examine their contacts, establish relationships between conspirators and place them in a specific location at a certain time. The data is used to build up a profile of the suspect, and can be used to disrupt a criminal enterprise or terrorist operation, or in a prosecution.

The Home Office admitted in an assessment published this week that the use of data in this way involves interference with personal privacy but said it was balanced by the benefit to investigations by the police or security services. ...

Guardian 13 February 2009

Keeping tabs on texts and Twitter

The government is compiling a database to track and store the international travel records of millions of Britons.

Computerised records of all 250 million journeys made by individuals in and out of the UK each year will be kept for up to 10 years.

The government says the database is essential in the fight against crime, illegal immigration and terrorism ...

The intelligence centre will store names, addresses, telephone numbers, seat reservations, travel itineraries and credit card details of travellers ...

Minister of State for borders and immigration Phil Woolas said the government was determined to ensure the UK's border remained one of the toughest in the world.

"Our hi-tech electronic borders system will allow us to count all passengers in and out of the UK and [it] targets those who aren't willing to play by our rules," he said.

"Already e-Borders has screened over 75 million passengers against immigration, customs and police watch-lists, leading to over 2,700 arrests for crimes such as murder, rape and assault."

BBC NEWS 08 February 2009

390,000 to access child database

Top

Data Bill 'will wipe out privacy at a stroke'

Sweeping new laws to allow ministers to release the private details of millions of people to a string of public bodies or private firms have been condemned as being "open sesame to a vast increase in government power".

Opposition MPs joined human rights campaigners in attacking the new powers, warning that they could lead to the widespread release of medical records and other sensitive data.

As MPs opened debate on the Coroners and Justice Bill, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats branded the plans an unacceptable extension of the state, while the all-party Commons Justice Committee called for greater safeguards to protect the public against the sharing of information.

Genewatch, a genetic technology pressure group, warned that proposed data-sharing powers could ultimately open the door to the creation of a national DNA database linked to medical records. It said the Bill could allow DNA samples taken for medical reasons to be released alongside people's medical records. Dr Helen Wallace, the group's director, said it would "wipe out the personal privacy of everyone in Britain at a single stroke".

Under the proposals, ministers will be able to draw up new information-sharing orders that would allow them to release private data – such as tax returns, personal details or medical records – to any public or private body.

Orders would have to be vetted by the Information Commissioner, the official freedom of information watchdog, and approved by Parliament.

Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, insisted yesterday that sharing data between government departments would reduce the burdens on taxpayers and businesses.

But Dominic Grieve, the shadow Justice Secretary, said the plans would "drive a coach and horses through the traditional relationship between the state and individuals" to serve a "nebulous case of public good". He warned that the Bill would allow ministers to share medical records with organisations that had no link to people's health.

Mr Grieve said that clauses "tucked away" at the back of the Bill would give ministers "carte blanche to expand data sharing between officials across Whitehall, with local authorities and even with companies in the private sector". He added: "This should be done with great caution and should not be open sesame to a vast increase in government power."

David Howarth, the Liberal Democrat justice spokesman, said the data-sharing proposals were "outrageous". He said: "These provisions will allow all the restriction on data sharing in the ID Cards Act to be overridden and drive a coach and horses through all other restrictions on medical and DNA records. These plans are not confined to government departments and other public authorities. They would allow unlimited data sharing between private sector organisations and government and the private sector, whether in this country or abroad."

Ministers insist that tough safeguards would prevent the misuse of data. The Information Commissioner would have to investigate any proposed data sharing, which must then be approved by MPs and peers. But members of the Justice Committee called on ministers to increase the safeguards in the Bill.

Mr Straw said that data sharing powers could help relieve the burden on bereaved families who were forced to notify a string of public bodies when a relative died. He said: "Responsible data sharing between the relevant agencies would reduce the number of people who need to be notified of a death, thereby helping to relieve distress."

The Independent 27 January 2009

Hackers steal details of 4.5 million job-seekers

Them and us child register

Top

Riding roughshod over our privacy

The economic downturn has altered the political landscape in numerous ways, but one constant remains: the Government's determination to ride roughshod over the privacy of the individual.

The Coroners and Justice Bill, published yesterday, proposes to give ministers the right to allow public bodies to exchange sensitive data about each of us between themselves.

The effect would be to free organisations such as the Inland Revenue and the National Health Service from the present data protection laws which state that such information can only be used for the purpose for which we originally handed it over.

Ministers would even be able, in theory, to transfer public records to private companies ...

The Justice Secretary, Jack Straw, argues that there will be strong safeguards against these new powers being abused.

We heard the same thing when the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill on terrorist surveillance was making its way through Parliament in 2000. Yet that upshot of that odious act was to allow councils to mount covert surveillance on householders suspected of such offences as dog fouling or fly tipping ...

The Independent 15 January 2009

Top

Compensation clause in ID card contracts angers Tories

Taxpayers face paying tens of millions of pounds in compensation to private companies involved in the national identity card scheme if their contracts are torn up by an incoming Conservative government.

The disclosure of the repayment clause in the contracts, which the Government is negotiating, provoked fury among Tories, who are committed to scrapping the cards. The secrecy surrounding the agreements has raised the threat of an investigation by the information watchdog.

The Home Office is offering contracts worth more than £1bn to run the world’s largest identity scheme. Just one small deal has so far been signed, but most are expected to be awarded this year in preparation for a planned roll-out of the cards in 2011.

The Government has confirmed compensation for costs will be paid to companies whose contracts are scrapped and they will also be entitled to claim for lost profits if they receive less than a year’s notice, but the Government will not reveal the exact amounts that would have to be paid.

NO2ID 09 January 2009

The true cost of this folly

Top

Police set to step up hacking of home PCs

THE Home Office has quietly adopted a new plan to allow police across Britain routinely to hack into people’s personal computers without a warrant ...

The hacking is known as “remote searching”. It allows police or MI5 officers who may be hundreds of miles away to examine covertly the hard drive of someone’s PC at his home, office or hotel room.

Material gathered in this way includes the content of all e-mails, web-browsing habits and instant messaging.

Under the Brussels edict, police across the EU have been given the green light to expand the implementation of a rarely used power involving warrantless intrusive surveillance of private property.

The strategy will allow French, German and other EU forces to ask British officers to hack into someone’s UK computer and pass over any material gleaned.

A remote search can be granted if a senior officer says he “believes” that it is “proportionate” and necessary to prevent or detect serious crime — defined as any offence attracting a jail sentence of more than three years ...

Sunday Times 04 January 2009

Top

Private firm 'may run' phone log

A private company could be asked to run a huge database containing details of all telephone calls, emails and internet use, it has been reported. ...

Former director of public prosecutions Sir Ken Macdonald reiterated his opposition to the plan in light of the Guardian's report, dismissing official claims that additional legal assurances would ensure the information is not misused.

He told the paper: "All history tells us that reassurances like these are worthless in the long run. In the first security crisis the locks would loosen."

The database, which critics claim would cost up to £12bn, is not intended to record the content of communications, but only the details of internet sites visited and what emails and telephone calls have been made, to whom and at what times ...

BBC NEWS 31 December 2008

Private firm may track all email and calls

Top

The Paranoia Squad

When you hear the term “domestic extremist”, whom do you picture? How about someone like Dr Peter Harbour? He’s a retired physicist and university lecturer, who worked on the nuclear fusion reactor run by European governments at Culham in Oxfordshire. He’s 70 next year. He has never been tried or convicted of an offence, except the odd speeding ticket. He has never failed a security check. Not the sort of person you had in mind?

Then you don’t work for the police.

Dr Harbour was one of the people who campaigned to save a local beauty spot – Thrupp Lake - between the Oxfordshire villages of Radley and Abingdon. They used to walk and swim and picnic there, and watch otters and kingfishers.

RWE npower, which owns Didcot power station, wanted to empty the lake and fill it with pulverised fly ash.

The villagers marched, demonstrated and sent in letters and petitions. Some people tried to stop the company from cutting down trees by standing in the way. Their campaign was entirely peaceful. But RWE npower discovered that it was legally empowered to shut the protests down.

Using the Protection from Harrassment Act 1997, it obtained an injunction against the villagers and anyone else who might protest ...

The act, parliament was told, was meant to protect women from stalkers. But as soon as it came onto the statute books, it was used to stop peaceful protest.

To obtain an injunction, a company needs to show only that someone feels “alarmed or distressed” by the protesters, a requirement so vague that it can mean almost anything. Was this an accident of sloppy drafting? No. Timothy Lawson-Cruttenden, the solicitor who specialises in using this law against protesters, boasts that his company “assisted in the drafting of the … Protection from Harassment Act 1997?(3). In 2005 parliament was duped again, when a new clause, undebated in either chamber, was slipped into the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act(4). It peps up the 1997 act, which can now be used to ban protest of any kind.

Mr Lawson-Cruttenden, who represented RWE npower, brags that the purpose of obtaining injunctions under the act is “the criminalisation of civil disobedience” .... Monbiot.com 23 December 2008

Top

Legal move to crack down on climate protesters

The attorney general is considering asking the courts to clamp down on high-profile, direct-action protests on issues such as climate change, the Guardian can exclusively reveal.

Six Greenpeace protesters, who were acquitted in September of criminal damage for their demonstration at the Kingsnorth coal-fired power station in Kent, now face having their case referred to the court of appeal in what is believed to be an attempt to increase convictions for direct-action protests.

The six were acquitted after they successfully persuaded a jury that the demonstration, in which they scaled a 200 metre chimney in an attempt to paint Gordon Bin It , was intended to prevent greater damage to property from the imminent threat of global warming.

The defence centred particularly on plans for the new-generation station - Kingsnorth II - planned for the site.

The jury accepted the defence of lawful excuse after an eight-day trial which included evidence from the ecologist Zac Goldsmith and Professor Jim Hansen, the Nasa scientist regarded as one of the world's leading climate change experts.

Jurors were shown maps of the Kent region depicting coastal areas where property and land would be at risk of being submerged by rising sea levels and heard from a representative of Greenland's Inuit community who described watching their villages "eroding into the sea" ...

... a lawyer familiar with the case told the Guardian: "Juries are a reflection of the public. In this case the jury spent two days carefully thinking about more than a week's evidence and they came to a conclusion. This is a ... sinister effort to undermine their decision" ...

Guardian 18 December 2008

Ed Miliband: 'We need a mass movement ... '

Top

The police crossed a line at Kingsnorth

The £5.9m bill to police the climate camp at Kingsnorth is not only a colossal waste of money, but yet another example of the increasingly aggressive and authoritarian attitude the police are taking to peaceful green protests.

... why, rather than being straight with the public, did the truth about police "injuries" have to be dragged out of the government by a freedom of information request? At the time of the police operation at the power station in the summer, ministers justified the police's action by claiming that 70 officers had been injured in the course of their duties. Now we know there were in fact only 12 reportable injuries – ranging from wasp stings to backache from sitting too long in a police car ...

Guardian 15 December 2008

Minister apologises

Those Kingsnorth police injuries in full:
six insect bites and a toothache

Top

DNA database innocents win landmark European court ruling

Two men from Sheffield, south Yorkshire, who were previously cleared of criminal charges, have won a major victory after the European Court of Human Rights ruled keeping their DNA on the British police database breached their human rights.

The decision now has far reaching consequences for the police, the Home Office and the British Government, although officials initially refused to say whether all the samples of innocent people on the system will now have to wiped.

The UK database is the biggest of its kind in the world per head of population, with around 4.5 million profiles held, and is seen by the police as a vital crime fighting tool, helping to solve hundreds of high profile murders and rapes. ...

The profiles of the two men are now expected to be taken off the database but the Home Office said the current policies of taking and retaining the DNA of innocent people will remain until it delivers it's formal response to the European court in March.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said: "DNA and fingerprinting is vital to the fight against crime, providing the police with more than 3,500 matches a month, and I am disappointed by the European Court of Human Rights' decision.

"The Government mounted a robust defence before the Court and I strongly believe DNA and fingerprints play an invaluable role in fighting crime and bringing people to justice.

"The existing law will remain in place while we carefully consider the judgement."

Telegraph 04 December 2008

Top

The Big Brother state – by stealth

Personal information detailing intimate aspects of the lives of every British citizen is to be handed over to government agencies under sweeping new powers. The measure, which will give ministers the right to allow all public bodies to exchange sensitive data with each other, is expected to be rushed through Parliament in a Bill to be published tomorrow.

The new legislation would deny MPs a full vote on such data-sharing. Instead, ministers could authorise the swapping of information between councils, the police, NHS trusts, the Inland Revenue, education authorities, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority, the Department for Work and Pensions and other ministries ...

Thomas Hammarberg, the Council of Europe's commissioner for human rights, said he believed Britain had gone too far in helping to bring about a "surveillance society". In a report drawing on personal data infringements across Europe but "inspired" by Britain's plan for a new internet, email and telephone database, he added:

"General surveillance raises serious democratic problems which are not answered by the repeated assertion that those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear. This puts the onus in the wrong place: it should be for states to justify the interferences they seek to make on privacy rights." ...

The Independent 04 December 2008

Top

£1,000 penalties for out-of-date ID details

People who fail to tell the authorities of a change of address or amend other key personal details within three months will face civil penalty fines of up to £1,000 a time when the national identity card scheme is up and running, according to draft Home Office regulations published yesterday.

The Home Office made clear that repeated failures to keep an entry on the national identity register up to date could ultimately be enforced by bailiffs being sent round to seize property.

But yesterday's detailed regulations to implement the national identity card scheme make clear that they intend to avoid the creation of ID card "martyrs", by levying no penalty on those who refuse to register for the national identity card database in the first place. ...

Guardian 22 November 2008

Top

MPs seek to censor the media

Britain's security agencies and police would be given unprecedented and legally binding powers to ban the media from reporting matters of national security, under proposals being discussed in Whitehall.

The Intelligence and Security Committee, the parliamentary watchdog of the intelligence and security agencies which has a cross-party membership from both Houses, wants to press ministers to introduce legislation that would prevent news outlets from reporting stories deemed by the Government to be against the interests of national security ...

The committee has focused on one particular case to highlight its concern: an Islamist plot to kidnap and murder a British serviceman in 2007, during which reporters were tipped off about the imminent arrest of suspects in Birmingham, a security operation known as "Gamble" ...

The Independent 10 October 2008

Censorship is not the answer

A law unto themselves

Politics, propaganda, and persecution

Birmingham: the questions remain

Top

Shops may take ID card biometrics

Supermarkets could be asked to take people's fingerprints as part of the government's identity card scheme.

The Home Office is talking to retailers and the Post Office about setting up booths to gather biometric data.

It comes as Home Secretary Jacqui Smith announced ID cards would be issued to airside workers at Manchester and London City airport from late 2009 ...

On plans to involve retailers and the Post Office in the ID cards scheme, a spokesman said it would be "more convenient" for people than the government's original plan to set up enrolment centres in large population centres.

The Identity and Passport Service (IPS) would continue to carry out enrolment at its offices but a spokesman said it also wanted to "drive down costs using market forces and competition" and was talking to a "range of high street retailers and other organisations".

He stressed that security of data would remain the "utmost priority".

"Any third party involved in enrolment would be accredited and audited to ensure they meet and continue to meet robust and strictly administered security standards.

"System design standards will ensure that no data is stored locally and that all data is transmitted directly to IPS using a secure communications link. In addition all locations and personnel will be subject to strict security standards set by IPS."

...

BBC NEWS 06 November 2008

Foreign students fingerprint fear

Top

Government black boxes will 'collect every email'

Internet "black boxes" will be used to collect every email and web visit in the UK under the Government's plans for a giant "big brother" database, The Independent has learnt.

Home Office officials have told senior figures from the internet and telecommunications industries that the "black box" technology could automatically retain and store raw data from the web before transferring it to a giant central database controlled by the Government.

Plans to create a database holding information about every phone call, email and internet visit made in the UK have provoked a huge public outcry. Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, described it as "step too far" and the Government's own terrorism watchdog said that as a "raw idea" it was "awful".

Nevertheless, ministers have said they are committed to consulting on the new Communications Data Bill early in the new year. News that the Government is already preparing the ground by trying to allay the concerns of the internet industry is bound to raise suspicions about ministers' true intentions. Further details of the database emerged on Monday at a meeting of internet service providers (ISPs) in London where representatives from BT, AOL Europe, O2 and BSkyB were given a PowerPoint presentation of the issues and the technology surrounding the Government's Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP), the name given by the Home Office to the database proposal.

Whitehall experts working on the IMP unit told the meeting the security and intelligence agencies wanted to use the stored data to help fight serious crime and terrorism, and said the technology would allow them to create greater "capacity" to monitor all communication traffic on the internet. The "black boxes" are an attractive option for the internet industry because they would be secure and not require any direct input from the ISPs. ...

The Independent 05 November 2008

Parents to be fingerprinted by nursery schools

Up to 50 nurseries and playgroups have already signed up for the new security measures, thought to be the first time parents have been targetted in this way. ...

The Government has issued guidance telling head teachers they have the right to collect pupils' biometric data for security reasons ...

Any information gathered will be subject to data protection laws and should not be shared with outside bodies, says the guidance.

However, the Government insists that using biometric data is an efficient way of tracking children during the school day. It is estimated that at least 200 schools used fingerprint scans, before any official guidance was published. But this is thought to be the first time that parents have been targeted. ...

Telegraph 29 October 2008

Top

Police will use new device to take fingerprints in street

Every police force in the UK is to be equipped with mobile fingerprint scanners - handheld devices that allow police to carry out identity checks on people in the street.

The new technology, which ultimately may be able to receive pictures of suspects, is likely to be in widespread use within 18 months. Tens of thousands of sets - as compact as BlackBerry smartphones - are expected to be distributed.

The police claim the scheme, called Project Midas, will transform the speed of criminal investigations ...

To address fears about mass surveillance and random searches, the police insist fingerprints taken by the scanners will not be stored or added to databases. ...

Guardian 27 October 2008

Panopticon highway

Top

Centuries of British freedoms being 'broken'
by security state, says Sir Ken Macdonald

Outgoing Director of Public Prosecutions Sir Ken Macdonald warned that the expansion of technology by the state into everyday life could create a world future generations “can’t bear”.

In his wide-ranging speech, Sir Ken appeared to condemn a series of key Government policies, attacking terrorism proposals - including 42 day detention - identity card plans and the “paraphernalia of paranoia”.

Instead, he said, the Government should insist that “our rights are priceless” and that: “The best way to face down those threats is to strengthen our institutions rather than to degrade them.” ...

But Sir Ken warned that increasing the powers of the state in law meant that any new powers would be “with us forever”.

He said: “It is in the nature of State power that decisions taken in the next few months and years about how the State may use these powers, and to what extent, are likely to be irreversible.

“They will be with us forever. And they in turn will be built upon. So we should take very great care to imagine the world we are creating before we build it. We might end up living with something we can’t bear.”

Sir Ken warned Parliament to resist “special courts, vetted judges and all the other paraphernalia of paranoia” in the fight against terrorism.

That risked copying “the Guantanamo model.... which says that we cannot afford to give people their rights, that rights are too expensive because of the nature of the threats we are facing”.

He added: “It is difficult to see who will maintain a cool head if governments do not. Or who will protect our Constitution if governments unwittingly disarm it.” ...

Telegraph 21 October 2008

Ken Macdonald's speech

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Storm over Big Brother database

Early plans to create a giant "Big Brother" database holding information about every phone call, email and internet visit made in the UK were last night condemned by the Government's own terrorism watchdog.

Lord Carlile of Berriew QC, the independent reviewer of anti-terrorist laws, said the "raw idea" of the database was "awful" and called for controls to stop government agencies using it to conduct fishing expeditions into the private lives of the public.

Today the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, is expected to signal the Government's intention to press ahead with proposals to collect more details about people's phone, email and web-browsing habits as she warns that the terrorist threat to Britain is growing. ...

The Independent 15 October 2008

The threats to our liberty just keep on coming

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Police train for riot scenarios

Police officers from forces across the South West are to receive training to prepare them for riots. Police horses, dogs and a helicopter will be used to add realism during the two-day courses at Moreton-in-Marsh Fire College, Gloucestershire.

Some officers will take on the role of hostile crowds in real-life scenarios such as raves, demonstrations and disorder at football matches. Missiles and petrol bombs will be thrown as part of the training.

Officers attending the training will come from Gloucestershire; Dorset; Wiltshire; Avon & Somerset; and Devon & Cornwall Constabularies.

Inspector Mac McGarry, of Gloucestershire Constabulary Operational Services, said: "These are very important and impactive sessions because it is essential all officers allocated to the Public Disorder Unit experience the sort of difficulties they will encounter in real-life situations.

"It also gives us the chance to test the command structure we have in place and the inter-operability with other forces."

BBC NEWS 05 October 2008

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There’s no hiding place as spy HQ plans to see all

Every call you make, every e-mail you send, every website you visit - I’ll be watching you.

That is the hope of Sir David Pepper who, as the director of GCHQ, the government’s secret eavesdropping agency in Cheltenham, is plotting the biggest surveillance system ever created in Britain.

From his office in the agency’s famous “doughnut” building, Pepper is masterminding an innocent-sounding project called the Interception Modernisation Programme.

The scope of the project - classified top secret - is said by officials to be so vast that it will dwarf the estimated £5 billion ministers have set aside for the identity cards programme. It is intended to fight terrorism and crime. Civil liberties groups, however, say it poses an unprecedented intrusion into ordinary citizens’ lives.

Aimed at placing a “live tap” on every electronic communication in Britain, it will dwarf other “big brother” surveillance projects such as the number plate recognition system and the spread of CCTV ...

Sunday Times 05 October 2008

Government will spy on every call and e-mail

First ID cards are to be issued within weeks

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Bully-Boy State Picks on Soft Targets

Desperate to shore up support for the ID scheme, the Home Secretary this week brandished a new plastic card to be issued to some foreign residents from November, calling it an "ID card" for foreign nationals. This cynical branding exercise with its sly appeal to xenophobia should fool no-one.

Having failed to convince industry and employers, the unions and the public at large that ID cards are necessary or desirable, the government has resorted to picking on soft targets - anonymous individuals seeking marriage visas or education - those who have no choice but to keep quiet and comply. And if the statements of junior minister Meg Hiller at Labour Party conference are to be believed, they also intend to target children as young as 14.

Ministers try to give the impression that their National Identity Scheme is inevitable It is not. All the opposition parties are committed to scrapping it and, without the National Identity Register (the database at the heart of the scheme) and with the repeal of the Identity Cards Act we can - and shall - go back to being a free country.

no2idcards.net 25 September 2008

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Coal protesters cleared of criminal damage

Six Greenpeace climate change activists have been cleared of causing criminal damage at a coal-fired power station in a verdict that is expected to embarrass the government and strengthen the anti-coal movement. ...

The jury was told that Kingsnorth emits the same amount of CO2 as the 30 least polluting countries in the world combined – and that there are advanced plans to build a new coal-fired power station next to the existing site on the Hoo Peninsula in Kent. ...

Guardian 10 September 2008

Goldsmith defends climate change activists

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Children aged eight enlisted as council snoopers

The youngsters are among almost 5,000 residents who in some cases are being offered £500 rewards if they provide evidence of minor infractions.

One in six councils contacted by the Telegraph said they had signed up teams of "environment volunteers" who are being encouraged to photograph or video neighbours guilty of dog fouling, littering or "bin crimes".

The "covert human intelligence sources", as some local authorities describe them, are also being asked to pass on the names of neighbours they believe to be responsible, or take down their number-plates.

Ealing Council in West London said: "There are hundreds of Junior Streetwatchers, aged 8-10 years old, who are trained to identify and report enviro-crime issues such as graffiti and fly-tipping."

Harlow Council in Essex said: "We currently have 25 Street Scene Champions who work with the council. They are all aged between 11 to 14. They are encouraged to report the aftermath of enviro-crimes such as vandalism to bus shelters, graffiti, abandoned vehicles, fly-tipping etc. They do this via telephone or email direct to the council."

Other local authorities recruit adult volunteers through advertisements in local newspapers, with at least 4,841 people already patrolling the streets in their spare time. ...

Telegraph 06 September 2008

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While the cat's away ...

Parliament is on holiday. No doubt to the relief of the officials driving forward the database state.

With the politicians out of the way, a cadre of Home Office and Cabinet Office cronies is free to extend the tentacles of Whitehall.

This August, long term plans to monitor your movements and communications have moved on significantly.

Your travel information, your phone and text records, your e-mail and internet usage are set to be monitored. Your personal details trafficked ever more widely among officials and to foreign powers.

The Home Secretary has been hyping "biometrics" at Manchester airport - a trial of 'facial recognition'. But in reality it is just an excuse to get your passport electronically scanned.

"e-Borders" is about collecting massive amounts of detailed information on every traveller's journey for official use.

The spin is all about 'foreigners' but the system applies with even greater force to UK citizens.

The spectre of road-pricing through a 'spy in the sky' technology has also reappeared.

Following everyone everywhere is the government's way of dealing with road problems.

And if you stay at home, you are to be watched there, too.

Many people have been shocked to discover that Local Authorities have spy powers.

But for years now hundreds of bodies have been able to authorise themselves to examine any of your phone, e-mail, text and web-browsing histories that have been held by phone and internet companies.

Now there are determined efforts to make that easier. The Home Office is seeking to build a massive database of all communications data. Massive funding is already secretly committed.

What could be done with such powers? Who would you trust with them?

Whatever the purpose, it is certain that the very private information involved will be lost or fall into untrustworthy hands.

NO2ID August 2008

Machines to scan faces of travellers at UK airports

System to count visitors by 2014

'Spy-in-the-sky' paves way for road pricing

UK.gov to spend hundreds of millions on snooping silo

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Police may be given powers to question child suspects alone

The police will be able to question children without their parents or other relatives being present under a shakeup proposed by the Home Office yesterday.

Ministers also announced their intention to push ahead with plans for "shopping centre jails" - short-term holding centres in busy shopping malls and town centres - to detain low-level offenders for up to four hours so they can be fingerprinted and processed without being taken to a police station. ...

... a proposal for an extension of the national DNA database by allowing samples to be taken from people arrested for minor offences such as littering, which featured in an earlier consultation paper, has been "parked" pending the outcome of an important human rights case in the autumn.

The changes to the rules on interviews of child suspects would mean that the police would no longer have to wait for a parent, guardian or other relative to turn up at the police station. In future the presence of an "appropriate adult", a role often fulfilled by a trained lay visitor at the police station, would be sufficient. ...

Changes are also proposed in the rules surrounding extensions of detention in custody from 24 to 36 hours. Currently, they have to be approved by an officer of the rank of superintendent or above. In future the signature of a police inspector would be sufficient and reviews could be carried out by telephone or video link. ...

Tony McNulty, minister for the police, said that changes to Pace codes were designed to reduce police bureaucracy while ensuring they had the powers needed to carry out frontline duties.

Guardian 29 August 2008

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New powers proposed for security staff

Powers for council wardens and private security staff to issue fixed-penalty notices and on-the-spot fines for disorderly behaviour are being considered by the police and Home Office ministers. Chief constables are also looking at using security staff to tackle community problems in places where police involvement might be seen as excessive.

A Home Office "audit" published yesterday of the use of council and private sector staff said they had been employed widely by police forces across England and Wales since their powers were established in 2002. "They are an extra pair of eyes and ears and if tasked properly they will get results, because unlike police officers who can get diverted, they are usually on the street for seven hours engaging with the community," said the report.

At present the powers used most by these "accredited" security staff are those to request a name and address if someone is acting in an antisocial manner; to confiscate alcohol from under-16s and from anyone drinking in a public place; and to issue on-the-spot fines for littering.

Those involved include park wardens, hospital and shopping mall security staff, council wardens and car park attendants.

A review of their powers is under way and senior police officers are looking at giving them the power to issue fixed penalty notices for a far wider range of offences, including disorder.

Guardian 27 August 2008

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Safe in our cages

In the Queen's speech this autumn Gordon Brown's government will announce a scheme to institute a database of every telephone call, email, and act of online usage by every resident of the UK. It will propose that this information will be gathered, stored, and "made accessible" to the security and law enforcement agencies, local councils, and "other public bodies". ...

Two things have made this ghastly development possible: the technology, and politicians.

The technology is way ahead of the game: Siemens of Germany are already supplying 60 countries with a device that monitors and integrates data from phone, email and internet activity; its software establishes patterns of uses and alerts monitoring staff to deviations from the patterns.

As New Scientist reports, the system is already known to throw up huge numbers of false positives; that could have been predicted by a rudimentary acquaintance with human nature and human life. But it is a fact that has to be added to the brilliance and reliability of government and law enforcement agencies in keeping data secure, unhackable and unlosable.

The second point concerns the quality of our politicians. They say they are putting us all under suspicion for our own good. They wish to protect us against terrorists and criminals, and to make bureaucracy more efficient.

The efficiency of bureaucracy has one of its finest moments in the neat and sorted piles of false teeth, hair and spectacles at the gas chamber doors. Oh no: better the milling crowd than the police-disciplined queues of bureaucratic efficiency; better the irritation of dealing with human fallibility than the fear of dealing with jack-booted gendarmes whose grip on one's arms follows stepping out of the queue. ...

Guardian 26 August 2008

Snoop software makes surveillance a cinch

UK may store all phone calls and emails

Communications Data Bill

Civil Liberties

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Labour warned over limits to free expression

The government has been accused of creating laws that have a chilling effect on freedom of expression in the UK in a sharply critical report from the United Nations' committee on human rights. ...

Among the problems identified, the UN says:

· Terrorism Act 2006 provisions covering encouragement of terrorism are too broad and vague, and should be amended so that their application does not lead to "a disproportionate interference with freedom of expression".

· Libel laws should be reformed to end so-called "libel tourism", whereby wealthy foreigners have gone to the high court to sue over articles that would not warrant action in their own country.

· Powers under the Official Secrets Act have been "exercised to frustrate former employees of the crown from bringing into the public domain issues of genuine public interest, and can be exercised to prevent the media from publishing such matters".

The committee also warns that, in the age of the internet, Britain's unduly restrictive libel laws create the danger of affecting freedom of expression worldwide, contrary to a UN covenant on civil and political rights which guarantees the right to freedom of speech and to exchange ideas and information "regardless of borders". ...

Guardian 15 August 2008

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'Snooper's charter' to check texts and emails

Local councils, health authorities and hundreds of other public bodies are to be given the power to access details of everyone's personal text, emails and internet use under Home Office proposals published yesterday.

Ministers want to make it mandatory for telephone and internet companies to keep details of all personal internet traffic for at least 12 months so it can be accessed for investigations into crime or other threats to public safety.

The Home Office last night admitted that the measure will mean companies have to store "a billion incidents of data exchange a day". As the measure is the result of an EU directive, the data will be made available to public investigators across Europe.

The consultation paper published yesterday estimates that it will cost the internet industry over £50m to store the mountain of data ...

Guardian  13 August 2008

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Dirty tactics to defend a dirty industry

The police – primarily from the local Medway force but Metropolitan officers are also in evidence – have raided the camp twice now, confiscating items that included crayons, disabled access ramps, marker pens, banners, radios for relaying fire and medical emergency information, the nuts and bolts holding toilet cubicles together and blackboard paint.

They have found it necessary to use pepper spray without provocation, and several campers have been arrested and bailed off the site for "obstructing" increasingly aggressive police officers.

Everyone who enters the site is being searched. Police officers are taking anything away that "could be used for illegal activity", with efforts being made to strip protesters of such hardcore weapons of choice as bits of carpet, biodegradable soap and toilet paper.

In the absence of any serious threat, the police clearly found it necessary to justify their presence with an unprovoked attack on personal hygiene.

When I met with Medway police ahead of climate camp, I asked if officers could be given specific information about the ethos behind climate camp and guidelines on proportional responses. I had hoped that the guidelines would be based on sensible use of discretion and grounds of precedent.

I am therefore horrified that police here have used pepper spray, riot gear, physical intimidation, and indulged in bizarre confiscations. It almost feels like an attempt to inflame tensions and provoke protesters into less peaceful behaviour ... ...

Guardian 04 August 2008

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Curse of the DNA register

One million innocent Britons 'criminalised', says damning report

A generation of young Britons is being criminalised for life by the relentless expansion of the national DNA database, ministers are warned today.

Alarm and hostility over the massive scale of the collection of DNA has been uncovered by groundbreaking research funded by the Home Office among panels of members of the public.

The Human Genetics Commission found there was widespread mistrust among people presented with evidence of the size of the database, which now contains the genetic records of more than four million people. It called for the database to be taken out of the control of the Home Office and police altogether, with one panel member warning that the database was a "first step towards a totalitarian state".

Britain now has by far the largest DNA database in the world. It includes an estimated one million people who have never been found guilty of any offence, some 100,000 of whom are children.

About 40 per cent of young black men have been forced to provide samples, compared with 13 per cent of Asian men and 9 per cent of white men.

Genetic material is now taken from all people arrested by police, regardless of whether they are subsequently charged or convicted, and remains on file for life.

Offences covered include begging, being drunk and disorderly, taking part in an illegal demonstration and minor acts of criminal damage caused by children kicking footballs or, in one instance, throwing a snowball.

Detailed consultation on the database by the commission, the Government's genetic watchdog, found the public believed samples provided by the innocent should be destroyed and those of people convicted of lesser offences removed after a few years.

The damning verdict was delivered by panels in Birmingham and Glasgow. After studying evidence about the database they called for an array of reforms designed to reassure the public that it would not be abused. They concluded that the records of children convicted of minor offences should be removed after a short period. Warning that adults are "criminalised" by having their DNA permanently on record, the panels said the length of time it stays on the database should be proportionate to their offence. "Currently no distinction is made between someone who has been arrested for breach of the peace and someone who has murdered somebody," the commission's report noted.

It registered alarm over the "very lax security" protecting the database and concerns over "who had access to samples and profiles and for what purpose". The panel members unanimously supported a nationwide publicity campaign to raise awareness of the database, using the internet, posters, leaflets and school visits.

The public backed control over the database being transferred to an independent body comprising ministers, police and civilians. Juries should be given better information about DNA in trials, they said, with independent scientists explaining the evidence, in addition to those hired by the prosecution and defence.

The proposed destruction of many DNA samples would be strongly opposed by ministers, who argue that they have proved vital to solving a succession of "cold cases". A Home Office spokesman said: "The national DNA database is a key information tool which has revolutionised the way the police can protect the public through identifying offenders and securing more convictions. It provides the police on average with almost 3,500 matches each month." He said there had been 41,717 crimes in 2006-07 which yielded DNA matches, including 452 homicides, 644 rapes, 222 other sex offences and more than 8,500 domestic burglaries. ...

The Independent 30 July 2008

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Bluetooth is watching

Tens of thousands of Britons are being covertly tracked without their consent in a technology experiment which has installed scanners at secret locations in offices, campuses, streets and pubs to pinpoint people's whereabouts.

The scanners, the first 10 of which were installed in Bath three years ago, are capturing Bluetooth radio signals transmitted from devices such as mobile phones, laptops and digital cameras, and using the data to follow unwitting targets without their permission.

The data is being used in a project called Cityware to study how people move around cities. But pedestrians are not being told that the devices they carry around in their pockets and handbags could be providing a permanent record of their journeys, which is then stored on a central database.

The Bath University researchers behind the project claim their scanners do not have access to the identity of the people tracked.

Eamonn O'Neill, Cityware's director, said: "The objective is not to track individuals, whether by Bluetooth or any other means. We are interested in the aggregate behaviour of city dwellers as a whole. The notion that any agency would seriously consider Bluetooth scanning as a surveillance technique is ludicrous." ...

Guardian  21 July 2008    Keeping an eye on city lives

Bluetooth monitoring can bring many benefits

Cityware - Urban Design and Pervasive Systems

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Warning over phone calls database

A central database holding details of everyone's phone calls and emails could be a "step too far for the British way of life", ministers have been warned.

Plans for such a database are rumoured to be in the Communications Data Bill.

But Information Commissioner Richard Thomas said "lines must be drawn" to defend "fundamental liberties".

The government says the growth of the internet means changes must be made to the way communications are intercepted in order to combat terrorism and crime.

In his annual report, Mr Thomas addressed speculation about plans for a government-run database holding details of telephone and internet communications of the entire British population ...

BBC NEWS 15 July 2008   

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Put young children on DNA list, urge police

Primary school children should be eligible for the DNA database if they exhibit behaviour indicating they may become criminals in later life, according to Britain's most senior police forensics expert.

Gary Pugh, director of forensic sciences at Scotland Yard and the new DNA spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), said a debate was needed on how far Britain should go in identifying potential offenders, given that some experts believe it is possible to identify future offending traits in children as young as five.

'If we have a primary means of identifying people before they offend, then in the long-term the benefits of targeting younger people are extremely large,' said Pugh. 'You could argue the younger the better. Criminologists say some people will grow out of crime; others won't. We have to find who are possibly going to be the biggest threat to society.' ...

The Observer 16 March 2008

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Why I told Parliament: you've failed us on liberty

Two things are striking as you read through the oral evidence presented to the Joint Committee on Human Rights. The first is the measured calm of the majority of your witnesses and, indeed, of the majority of the committee, in the face of the most serious attack on personal freedom and privacy ever mounted during peacetime in this country. British democracy is on the brink of being changed beyond recognition, yet nothing seems to disturb the equanimity of your proceedings. Even allowing for the well-mannered traditions of parliamentary committees, the lack of urgency and of a sense of crisis seems remarkable. ...

The shocking loss of rights in Britain is now being noticed with bafflement abroad by people who do not understand this turn of events in one of the oldest democracies in the world. On a book tour last month in France, I was repeatedly asked by journalists: 'Why in Britain? Why are there no demonstrations?'

There are complex answers to these questions, but an obvious one is that the government has consistently advanced the argument that new laws meet singular threats from crime, terror and antisocial behaviour. We accepted these appeals with a rare faith in the wisdom and benevolence of our leaders, a faith, incidentally, that I increasingly do not share. After a decade, the account shows a devastating loss of the freedoms that we once regarded as our birthright, the self-evident and self-perpetuating virtue of the British people and their constitution.

The shocking part of it all is that it has occurred with almost no coherent analysis, scrutiny or opposition in Parliament, no debate about the direction of our society and only a little understanding and exposition in the media. ...

The Observer 09 March 2008

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DNA register 'labels children as criminals'

What's the real purpose of this register?

Nearly 1.5 million 10 to 18-year-olds will have been entered on the national DNA database by this time next year, sparking claims that Britain's youths are being criminalised and disproportionately 'targeted'.

Changes to the law have meant police can arrest anyone over the age of 10 on suspicion of committing a 'recordable' offence - which includes even minor crimes - and place their details on the register. But the government has been reluctant to discuss the issue of minors, confirming last year only that the profiles of some 358,012 children are currently on the register.

But campaign groups claim that this figure masks the bigger picture. A close analysis of the register by Arch and the pressure group Genewatch reveals the profiles of more than 1.1 million young people aged 10 to 18 have been added between 1995, when the database started, and April last year. Of these, they calculate 521,901 were aged 10 to 16 and 604,590 were between 16 and 18. ...

Genewatch calculates some 100,000 children on the database are 'innocent' in that they have not even received a caution after being arrested. It also claims that between 1995 and 2007 only 189 minors have successfully applied to have their details taken off the register. ...

A spokeswoman for the National Policing Improvement Agency, which oversees the register ... added: 'The retention of a person's DNA profile... is not a criminal record. If a young person has DNA stored on the database but does not have a conviction, this database record will not show on criminal record checks for education or employment matters.'

The Observer 09 March 2008

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How this government has undermined society

Communications

· Under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2002), government agencies make 500,000 secret interceptions of email, internet connections and standard mail.

· Since summer 2007, the government and some 700 agencies have had access to all landline and mobile phone records.

Databases

· Police build network of ANPR cameras on motorways and in town centres. Data stored for two years.

· The National Identity Register will store details of every verification made by ID card holder. Data used without knowledge of citizens.

· ID card enrolment will require biometric details and large amount of personal data.

· The Home Office plans to take 19 pieces of information from anyone travelling abroad. No statutory basis.

Free expressions

· Public-order laws have been used to curtail free expression.

· The Race and Religious Hatred Act (2006) bans incitement of hatred on religious grounds.

· Terror laws are used to ban freedom of expression in some areas.

The courts

· Asbo legislation introduces hearsay evidence which can result in jail sentence.

· The Criminal Justice Act (2003) attacks jury trial.

· Admissibility of bad character, previous convictions and acquittals.

· The Proceeds of Crime Act (2002) allows confiscation of assets without prosecution.

· Special Immigration Appeals Court hearings held in secret.

Terror laws

· Terror laws used to stop and search. Current rate is 50,000 per annum.

· A maximum of 28 days detention without charge.

The Observer 09 March 2008

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Anti SOCPA Campaigners To Assert Right To Protest

The Government consultation on ‘Managing Protest around Parliament’, which closed on 17 January, began as a review of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (SOCPA) 2005, s.132-138, which controversially restricts demonstrations in a 1km zone around Parliament [2,3]. While it had previously been reported that Prime Minister Brown intended to repeal the unpopular provisions of the legislation [4], the consultation paper’s questions on the possible ‘harmonisation’ of the existing legislation suggest that the Government plans to extend current restrictions on protest around Parliament to the whole country. This means giving the police the power to censor the number, size and content of banners and placards; and existing laws requiring prior notification of and the power to impose restrictions on, and even ban, protest marches - covered by the Public Order Act 1986 – could be extended to all demonstrations ...

RINF.COM 28 February 2008

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How commonplace is it for people to be bugged?

In his annual report for 2006, Sir Paul found that the majority of requests related to the supply of communications data - telephone calls, emails and post - rather than actual bugging of phone conversations.

This means that information held about a person by phone companies and internet providers can be accessed to reveal their network of friends and colleagues, how often and when they are communicated with and where the person has been when the communication has taken place.

Of 253,557 applications to intercept private communications under surveillance laws in the last nine months of 2006, it is understood most were approved.

BBC NEWS 04 February 2008

Simon Jenkins

Police 'took MP bugging decision'

Police bugged Muslim MP Sadiq Khan

Bugged Muslim MP:
Tories claim they warned Gordon Brown

Letter from Tories to PM over bugged MP

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US and UK rival China for government surveillance

The US, the UK, China and Russia are "endemic surveillance societies", according to a recent study examining privacy protection around the world that gave the four nations the lowest possible rating.

The 10th annual report showed a global increase in surveillance and a decline in privacy safeguards during 2007, as concerns over immigration and border control continued to dominate national policy agendas.

The 2007 International Privacy Ranking, published by advocacy groups Privacy International of the UK and the Electronic Privacy Information Center in the US gave Britain the "black" or "endemic" ranking for the second year in a row.

Gus Hosein, of Privacy International, justified the UK's low ranking, noting that the country has the world's largest network of surveillance cameras, plans for national identity cards rich with personal and biometric information, and little government accountability when personal information is lost.

"This government has access to its people and technology that China doesn't," says Hosein. "It really is that bad here." ...

New Scientist 07 January 2008

Privacy International

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Civil rights fears over DNA 'census'

More than 100,000 people, including children as young as 10, will be asked to provide saliva tests and DNA samples in a new annual survey of the lives, behaviour and beliefs of people in the United Kingdom.

The UK Household Longitudinal Study will replace the long-running British Household Panel Survey. It will be the most expensive and ambitious survey of its kind in the world, costing an initial £15m and covering 40,000 households. ...

The study will incorporate the existing survey, which has been running since 1991, but will ask those taking part to allow interviewers working for the National Centre for Social Research to take a saliva sample and allow a range of physical examinations. 'The sample could be sent to a medical laboratory to look at indicators of health, such as sugar and cholesterol levels, and for genetic tests that use the DNA contained in saliva,' said Buck.

The sample will not be tested for diseases such as HIV but interviewers may ask those taking part for permission to store a small amount that can be used as medical tests become more advanced. 'If a certain gene is found in the future to be associated with a certain illness, then being able to go back to previously gathered samples and testing to see how common that gene is will help to plan healthcare,' said Buck.

The Observer 30 December 2007

UKHLS

FBI Prepares Vast Database Of Biometrics

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You’re better safe than free -
the mantra of the Whitehall Taliban

How much did you drink last week? In Harrogate 26.4% of you had between 12 and 17 “large” glasses of wine (depending on your sex), in Mole Valley 25.5% of you did, and in Leeds 25.3%. Don’t ask me how the government knows this. It apparently wants to “target middle-class drinkers”. Public money must be squandered, so why not measure the nation’s drinking habits?

Meanwhile the makers of the film, The Bourne Ultimatum, needed a location where a character could be watched by police as he moved step by step about the city. Did they use Moscow or Berlin or New York? No, they used London. They did so because Britain is the world capital of surveillance, deploying a fifth of the global stock of closed-circuit television cameras, even though the Home Office admitted last week that they were next to useless. ...

Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, wants to give the police and others access to all mobile phone records - and one day possibly the satellite tracking of car movements. Smith wants to supplement this material with electronic identity cards, including personal and criminal details, and computerised medical records. If the lord chief justice and others get their way the DNA of every native of, and visitor to, Britain will be added to this mighty store.

Given the number of access points - police, National Health Service, Whitehall, local councils and insurance companies - and given the ease of modern computer hacking, every Briton’s life story will be open to all and vulnerable to all. One result is that millions may find it impossible to get credit or insurance cover. ...

Sunday Times 21 October 2007

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Moving towards post-democracy?

This summer one of our biggest debates cycled down the road from Westminster and set up camp outside Heathrow, where environmental protestors (ranging from seasoned eco-warriors to suburban housewives) became a magnet for concern about the impact of the vast expansion in air travel on climate change.

However, the aim of the protest was not just to challenge public opinion and get people to change their minds about flying. It was also aimed at getting governments to do something.

The role of our domestic legislature was an essential part of the story in another way, too. For what few noticed is that the parliamentary Act used to challenge the climate camp makes any protest virtually illegal, interpreted to the boundaries of its meaning.

The 1997 Protection from Harassment Act, as amended by the 2005 Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (SOCPA), creates an offence of trying "to persuade any person ... not to do something that he is entitled or required to do" or "to do something that he [or she, presumably] is not under any obligation to do" in a way that harasses them.

Harassment is defined as "alarming the person or causing the person distress". Alarm and distress are left undefined. As such, they become catch all categories – rather like “terror” in legislation directed at combating what the experts rather forensically call “asymmetric, non-state sanctioned violence, designed to intimidate people and public institutions.”

Public demonstrations are, by definition, trying to get someone or somebody alarmed or distressed about something – the treatment of workers, environmental damage, human rights, global poverty, or whatever. And increasingly, the legislature is forcing the executive and the judiciary to ban them ...

Ekklesia 07 September 2007

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Climate of Fear

If nothing else, police attitudes at the climate camp indicated that the road to sustainability is likely to be a rocky one. If the camp's media collective seemed to be pumping out the message that a peaceful negotiated solution to climate change is just on the horizon, and airhead mass-media celebs confuse low-carbon living with the Atkins diet, the Metropolitan Police at least seem to realise that any genuine attempts to push our society towards a carbon-neutral and eco-friendly future will mean a total smashing of the status quo. And needless to say that's something the boys in blue and their bosses are none too keen on. ...

Throughout the week campers were subjected to assaults, constant stops and searches, sexist comments, aggression and sarcasm from the Met. One element of police repression which attracted some mainstream media attention were the searches under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act. In fact by Wednesday most stops were being conducted under Section 1 of PACE (this meant that the police claimed to suspect everyone of 'going equipped to cause criminal damage'). One man was stopped on the basis that he was thus 'equipped', even though two minutes before he was being kicked out of West Drayton police station with no possessions and wearing a paper suit! Stops and searches were carefully coordinated with a team of police photographers making sure that everyone stopped had their mugshot taken. People were forcibly and illegally detained until the happy snaps could be shot. Of course 99% of these searches produced no evidence of anything ...

schnews.org 24 August 2007

Anti-terror powers used at climate camp

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SOCPA - The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005

What does the phrase "Serious Organised Crime" conjure up in your mind? Violent murder, drug gangs, and protection rackets perhaps?

High-level fraud and corruption, corporate tax evasion and dodgy arms deals maybe?

Think anti-social behaviour, and peaceful protest, and you'll be on the right lines.

SOCPA is a long document, setting up the ‘Serious Organised Crime Agency’ but also introducing clauses that target protesters in this country in various ways.

Section 125 covers harassment (used on animal rights protestors), Sections 128-131 deal with military bases (with serious penalties on trespassers) and Sections 132-138 outlaw "unauthorised" demonstrations roughly 1 kilometre around Parliament ...

occupiedlondon.org 20 March 2007

SOCPA Border Control

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2012 London Olympics: Police State Opening Ceremony

A combination of leaked documents and public policy debate has recently revealed that the British government is preparing to use the 2012 Olympic games in London as a showcase for multiple big brother police state operations and technologies.

The London Telegraph reported on Sunday that a memo, entitled No 10 Policy Working Group on Security, Crime and Justice, Technological Advances, asks: "To what extent should the expectation of liberty be eroded by legitimate intrusions in the interests of security of the wider public?"

The document, drawn up by officials at the Home Office and sent to 10 Downing Street, explores ways of winning over public opinion to intrusive and liberty crushing methods of policing and surveillance and concludes: "Increasing [public] support could be possible through the piloting of certain approaches in high-profile ways such as the London Olympics."

This is key as it shows that the overall agenda is to make people accept big brother per se, not to make them accept it in the short term to ensure security at the Olympic games. Once again it is clear that security is not the issue, the real agenda is control.

Some of the methods advanced by the memo include empowering police to scan postal packages, advancing CCTV systems to monitor individuals, tracking people's movements via the electronic Oyster travel card system already in use in London and a massive extension of the national DNA database. ...

... it is again clear that such moves have nothing to do with increasing security for the Olympic games.

How is it that a British national DNA database is going to keep us secure from any foreign visitors who wish to carry out acts of crime or terror during the global spectacle of the Olympics?

Last November the London Times reported that authorities were also considering the 2012 Olympics as a cover for the introduction of high-powered microphones attached to CCTV cameras.

The microphones, which are already in use in the Netherlands, can pick up "aggressive tones" on the basis of 12 factors, including decibel level, pitch and the speed at which words are spoken. They are so advanced that background noise is filtered out, enabling the camera to focus on specific conversations in public places. ...

Indy Media 08 February 2007

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No terror supremo will overcome public fears of enemies within

Britain's biggest national security problem isn't so much law enforcement as a cycle of mutual hostility and alienation.

Blog in reply to Max Hastings:

buddha9

November 14, 2006 02:14 AM

Max - your interesting, but ultimately unsatisfying article, raises some points which need rebutting -

1 - Why are Muslims the only underclass disaffected by economic deprivation, while white w/class are simply driven by race hatred? Neo-liberalism has created a situation where dissatisfaction is being increasingly felt by everyone (middle class included) and in fact, you could argue this widespread dissatisfaction is precisely what is being averted and headed off by being transformed into race hatred.

2- none of the chattering/political classes of whom you are member, have yet proved why the so called Muslim threat is any different than the much more potent IRA threat - after all that lasted generations, they were citizens of Britain. No one asked why Catholics weren't integrated/ couldn't integrate. Indeed the IRA threat lasted many years and let off more bombs and didn’t require, despite their open threat to UK sovereignty, the sort of exaggerated anti-terrorism legislation which is routinely considered now.

3- Why is it that when Muslims question the official narratives concerning the 9/11 and 7/7 bombings, they are automatically labelled terrorists sympathisers? 40% of Americans according to various polls think the US govt. knew off or sponsored in some form the attacks on the twin Towers. Are they all terrorists? Well perhaps they will be in a few years.

4 it is not Pakistan’s radicals who pose a threat to the population of Britain, but the Pakistan intelligence service as various articles tacitly admit. They are the ones rearming the resurgent Taliban, they are the ones who seem constantly to have some sort of connection to every claimed crazy radical caught in Britain. What do you propose to do about them? Well nothing of course.

5 your ref to the New East End is warranted, its a very good book. The liberals (and we're all liberals now) do dump people in areas of already existing poverty, without consulting the residents and when unrest happens the very same liberals from their sanctuaries in west and north London, utter pious homilies against the racism of the working class. Considering they are confronting the problems and they're under resourced already, I'm amazed (and I've worked in the east end) how little racism there is in these areas. Dump a lot of any sort of foreigners in Hampstead and see what you get.

6 i notice you claim al qaida (al-CIA-da) are indiscriminate, where the IRA weren't. Well Max some of us have long memories, and I don't recall the daily tele discriminating in this manner when the IRA bombs were going off.

Still, after all of that, I’ve seen much worse and more stupid articles about this topic than yours. The standard of the debate is getting better. The problem with your pious ending which of course everyone would wish were true, is that it fails to take into account the officially endorsed and ongoing violence that this system perpetuates on everyone, every day. Until that is resolved violence will occur. It’s just a matter of how you label it.

The first step away from this sort of violence is for the rich to admit that their 20 year endeavour to stuff as much of the GNP cake into their mouths as they possibly can without paying any social cost what so ever, has in fact endangered everyone including them. That's the root course of the problem: neo-liberalism and the rich’s greedy, anti-social behaviour that goes with it. No amount of finger pointing and scapegoating of Muslims will alleviate that. The Guardian 14 November 2006

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Serious Organised Crime & Police Act 2005

The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 has received most publicity for it's ban on unauthorised protests within 1 km of Parliament - widely accepted to have been devised to end the peace protest of Brian Haw.

Brian Haw has maintained a five year protest against the war on Iraq opposite the Houses of Parliament but, in May this year, the police began dismantling his site.

Maya Evans and Milan Rai were arrested at the Cenotaph on Whitehall for reading out the names of UK soldiers and civilians killed in the war in Iraq.

It is unacceptable that security laws should be used to protect Parliamentarians from legitimate protest. This is a significant attack on our traditional rights to free expression and assembly.

SOCPA also makes all offences arrestable, meaning that protesters who might previously have received a warning, could now be arrested.

It widens ASBOs, by allowing unaccountable bodies to seek them against individuals, and creates a new criminal offence of trespass on a 'designated site' on grounds of national security. 'National security' is not defined, which risks the new offence being used against protesters.

Specific provisions were also brought in against animal rights protesters. The crime of 'economic sabotage' not only extended the criminalisation of violent and unlawful protesters, but was so broadly drafted as to make criminals of many peaceful protestors who were simply calling for boycotts.

Liberty

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We don't live in a police state yet, but we're heading there

The argument for social control goes like this: if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear from a national data bank of identity/the terrorism act/the tapping of MPs' phones/the use of the public-order act to control protest and limit free expression/the new powers of arrest/the retention of DNA samples taken from innocent juveniles. ...

If you put to one side Blair's addiction to summary justice and focus on the measures carried out in the name of security, you find two streams: those devoted to reduction of free speech and the right to protest, and those that concentrate on the surveillance and monitoring of innocent citizens.

The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (Socpa) falls in the first category. Apart from increasing the police's powers of arrest, it removed the right to demonstrate within one kilometre of parliament, a right people still possess in Serbia and Ukraine.

Section 44 of the 2000 Terrorism Act, meanwhile, allows police to stop and search anyone in a designated area. This has been used to obstruct demonstrations against the Iraq war, global capitalism and arms fairs and even those who heckled speakers at last year's Labour party conference. Linked with issuing Asbos, it has proved highly effective in controlling demonstrations which offend the government.

To limit what can be said in public, the government also inserted a provision in Socpa that criminalises opinions that are held to stir up religious hatred. You may not make a joke about Islam, Judaism or Christianity without risking a criminal record. And section 5 of the Public Order Act allows police to prosecute if they believe a hate crime has been committed. ...

If anything, the strand of Blair's campaign devoted to surveillance and bugging is much more worrying. He has already granted MI5 and the police powers to pry on people's email and text messages. According to the Independent on Sunday, he now plans to allow MPs' communications to be intercepted by MI5. It is astonishing that parliament did not erupt.

If US senators and members of Congress were being bugged, there would be an outcry.

The constitution would be flourished, as it is now by Greenpeace, the Council for American-Islamic Relations and a number of well-known writers such as Christopher Hitchens and James Bamford in a case claiming the Bush administration's use of wiretaps is a violation of privacy and free speech. ...

Does anyone care about the proposals to extend the automatic numberplate recognition system throughout Britain's motorway network so that the details of every journey by every innocent member of the public are retained? I spent an entire day last week being batted from the Home Office to the Department of Transport and the Highways Agency trying to determine what legislation enables this scheme.

The answer is none.

I spoke to the pleasant chief constable of Hertfordshire, Frank Whiteley, who advocates this system on behalf of the Association of Chief Police Officers. He made points about the detection of criminals and terrorists, but conceded there was indeed a cost to civil liberties.

Piece by piece, that system is being built because the CCTV cameras already in place can also read numberplates. Yet there has been no debate in parliament, no special powers enacted, no one questioning the cost or the privacy issues. Make no mistake - we are wiring up for the police state.

Henry Porter, The Observer, Sunday January 22, 2006

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All UK 'must be on DNA database'

The whole population and every UK visitor should be added to the national DNA database, a senior judge has said.

The present database in England and Wales holds details of 4m people who are guilty or cleared of a crime.

Lord Justice Sedley said this was indefensible and biased against ethnic minorities, and it would be fairer to include everyone, guilty or innocent. ...

Nick Clegg, Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said there was "no earthly reason" why someone who has committed no crime should be on the database - "yet the government is shoving thousands of innocent people's DNA details on to the database every month".

The DNA database - which is 12 years old - grows by 30,000 samples a month taken from suspects or recovered from crime scenes.

There has already been criticism of the database - the largest in the world - because people who are found innocent usually cannot get their details removed. ...

BBC NEWS 05 September 2007

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'Sleepwalking into Stasi state'

Richard Thomas, the information commissioner, has warned that Britain could be sleepwalking into an East German-style surveillance society, holding extensive but secret files on all citizens.

Mr Thomas said the government was planning three population databases that would make more personal information quickly available to more officials, yet citizens would not be able to find out what the government knew about them.

The projects, he said, were the home secretary's identity card scheme, the citizens' information project (a population register proposed by the Office for National Statistics), and a planned database of every child in the country from birth to the age of 18.

"My anxiety is that we don't sleepwalk into a surveillance society where much more information is collected about people, accessible to far more people shared across many more boundaries, than British society would feel comfortable with," he told The Times. ...

The Guardian 16 August 2004

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Police State Britain: More Links

DNA evidence is far from foolproof

The Rules of the Game: Terrorism, Community and Human Rights

SOCPA

The Children's Index

The NHS Spine

Building Big Brother

We are already at the gates of the surveillance society

Britain's surveillance future

Britain: the most spied on nation in the world

The Surveillance Society - pdf

You ARE being Watched

Your Life in Their Lens

Surveillance Society - 2016

The most spied on society in Europe

Implant Tagging

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