Digital Britain: A tax, a quango and ISP snooping

All in a day's work for the modern bureaucrat

By Andrew Orlowski • Get more from this author

Posted in Government, 29th January 2009 13:36 GMT

Digital Britain Did anyone expect more from Stephen Carter CBE? The former Ofcom boss and No.10 strategy chief (sic) has spent his career moving between the world of advertising and public relations, quangos and party. So it's no surprise that the "vision thing" involves a tax, a quango and a burden by private parties to snoop on the public. It's an administrator's answer.

There's a lot more in Carter's sprawling Digital Britain review, which was published in "preview" form today, but those are the three primary recommendations that affect media and creative businesses, and how we pay for and use stuff we like on the internet - copyright material.

First things first. The purpose of the new ISP tax, according to the review, is "to fund... a new approach to civil enforcement of copyright". Note the emphasis on enforcement. The purpose of this, Carter suggests, is to "cover the need for innovative legitimate services to meet consumer demand, and education and information".

There's no explanation as to why the private sector can't come up with innovative legitimate services by itself. We know it can - and one such game-changing service which legalised P2P file sharing was weeks away from launch before being scuppered by two major record labels last week. But perhaps we now have an an explanation for why Virgin Music Unlimited didn't make it to market - it would jeopardise the education and information programs some in the music business see as of paramount importance.

But without a sanction to back them up - Three Strikes has gone - the nastygrams will pile up on our doormats like so much junk mail. Eventually these will need their own recycling container - and perhaps that necessitates another quango to tell us how to dispose of junk mail created by quangos. But we're getting a little ahead of ourselves, here.

Secondly, there's the inevitable NuLab quango that's required to administer and dole out the tax. The purpose of this new "Rights Agency" is even more vague. The primary role of the tax is to fund the Rights Agency - and the primary role of the Agency is to spend the tax. This is a policy tautology if there ever was one.

This isn't a broadband tax that compensates artists and garage entrepreneurs, but a broadband tax that compensates the quango that administers the broadband tax.

Finally there's the new obligation on ISPs to snoop on their customers.

"We also intend to require ISPs to collect anonymised information on serious repeat infringers (derived from their notification activities), to be made available to rights-holders together with personal details on receipt of a court order," the review states.

Again, as with most NuLab "solutions", this imposes a burden on one party (here, the ISPs) to spy on the public with no benefit to the public. There isn't even the fig-leaf of "national security", "public safety" or health. This increases the costs enormously to ISPs, and yet doesn't change the balance of enforcement at all - industry groups must still fund their own litigation.

READ MORE at:-
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/29/digital_britain_tax_quango_and_enforcement/

NOTHING TO HIDE NOTHING TO FEAR - RIGHT?

It's really reassuring to know that our government is introducing all these shiny new databases to protect us from all these dangerous terrorists roaming our streets (can't say I've met any lately though....), of course we are reassured that the data is always accurate, safe and if we have not done anything wrong then we don't have anything to fear - do we?

1m French out of work thanks to dodgy data - UK next?

Get vetted and go... on the dole

By John Ozimek • Get more from this author

Posted in Government, 30th January 2009 12:39 GMT

As the UK prepares to put in place its shiny new vetting database later this year, analysis of a similar project in France reveals a devastating degree of inaccuracy, leading to real hardship for a very large number of people.

A report (pdf) issued last week by CNIL, the French Data Protection Agency, reveals that as many as a million people have lost jobs – or didn’t get them in the first place – because of inaccuracies in the police STIC database (Systeme de Traitement des Infractions constatés, or "criminal record check system").

Police databases have been very much in the news in the course of 2008, following the creation, by decrees published on 1 July 2008, of two new intelligence databases, EDVIGE and CRISTINA.

The purpose of CRISTINA (Centralisation du renseignement intérieur pour la sécurité du territoire et les intérêts nationaux) is the "Centralisation of domestic intelligence for homeland security and national interests". Because CRISTINA is classified as being for defence purposes, its contents are deemed to be an official secret and details of what is held on it remain a mystery.

But that's not the case with EDVIGE, which provoked such outcry that the government backed down in November 2008, agreeing instead to bring forward proposals for a modified system, known as EDVIRSP.

Objectors to EDVIGE were horrified to learn that it would have gathered information on any person having applied for or exercised a "political, union or economical mandate or playing a significant institutional, economical, social or religious part as well as information on any person, starting from the age of 13, considered by the police as a "suspect" potentially capable of disrupting the public order".

Opposition was swift and brutal, with thousands of people demonstrating in over 60 cities. Faced with petitions and up to a dozen separate legal challenges, the French government decided to cut its losses and back down. While detail of what will be held in EDVIRSP is still not known, it is believed that it will specifically exclude information relating to people’s health or sexual orientation.

But what then of STIC? The CNIL report reveals that STIC, created in 1995, but only officially acknowledged since 2001, is accessed by the police approximately 20m times a year. That alone represents a massive degree of surveillance and checking.

However, CNIL's President described STIC as "more dangerous than EDVIGE", because of the huge number of errors that CNIL has discovered recorded in it.

READ MORE at:-
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/30/stic/

LUCKY MANCHESTER

Hearty congratulations to the people of Manchester; these lucky folk are having the 'opportunity' to be the first in the country to 'benefit' from the National ID card:-

Jacqui Smith yesterday told the people of Manchester that they might be lucky enough to get their hands on ID cards earlier than the rest of the country.

The Home Office is looking for "beacon areas" to further trial the cards from autumn this year. The tech is already on trial at two airports - despite the protests from Balpa - and foreign residents have been guinea-pigging the cards since late last year.

Wacky Jacqui, with the help of the BBC, claimed in November that "people can't wait for ID cards". Talking about general availability of cards in 2012 she said: "I regularly have people coming up to me and saying they don't want to wait that long."

Our Jacqui visited pupils at a school in Wythenshawe, and: "Together they discussed how identity cards will help young people strike out on their own by opening their first bank account, renting their first flat, or perhaps travelling to Europe for the first time." The lovely Home Secretary and the shell-suited scrotes of southern Manchester - a heartwarming image for a Friday morning.

She said the scales were falling from people's eyes as they saw the "real benefits for citizens... That is why we have brought forward our plans and this year will begin offering identity cards on a voluntary basis, giving British nationals the chance to access the benefits of identity cards as soon as possible."

READ MORE at:-
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/30/idcard_cobblers/

Gordon Brown demands global financial regulator

An article from The Telegraph 15th October 2008 Yet more indications of the drive towards Global Gov't:-

Gordon Brown said that he has already discussed with other leaders his idea that the top finance houses be overseen by international colleges of supervisors instead of separate national regulators.

The European Union is already working on plans for such colleges, but the prime minister's idea stretches further afield to include the United States and Japan. Mr Brown said that the post-war financial system shaped by the Bretton Woods conference 64 years ago - which included setting up the International Monetary Fund (IMF) - was no longer fit for purpose.

He tabled a series of proposals at an EU summit yesterday for what he called "stage two" of a project to reshape the financial world order. The document calls for tougher supervision of banks, a global "early warning system" to identify future financial troubles and agreement on a world trade deal to banish international protectionism.

Mr Brown said he expected the Group of Eight industrialised nations - America, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Canada and Russia - plus emerging nations such as China, India, Brazil and South Africa to hold a summit on financial reform in November or December.

As a first step, the world's largest 30 multinational finance houses should be brought under the scrutiny of new bodies capable of monitoring their activities globally, Mr Brown said. It would "end concealment" of financial transactions and shine a light on the "shadow banking market", he added.

Experts on regulation said Mr Brown's idea was a good one - but they questioned if it could work in practice. Simon Gleeson, a partner at law firm Clifford Chance, believes the tendency for countries to revert back to "national solutions" when things go wrong would be strong.

Containing global supervision to just the top 30 institutions made the idea less complicated, but would still require a "huge amount of political will," he said.

Look to the future (toungue in cheek)

This article has been shamelessly nicked from here and here, I think it is excellent :-)

Having Children "Could be a cover for child abuse", say DCSF 17-01-2050

"I'm sure some parents are adequate", said a minister yesterday, " but we are concerned that the majority simply aren't helping our children achieve their full potential, and in many cases, parenting may even be a cover for child abuse. Untrained, unvetted 'biological' parents are quite clearly no substitute for properly qualified childcare experts"

The Department proposes that all children should be removed from the 'mother', or incubator as is now the preferred term, at birth and placed in special child rearing units until they are ready to enter the workforce. " This will be good for parents too; they will be freed from the onerous duty of childcare ( known to cause stress, sleeplessness, palpitations and obesity ) and will be able to use their Time ((c)Tesco 2020) more efficiently for the benefit of the Global Economy."

Children's supercharity BarnardoSPCC concurred with the governments findings. "When you think of all the dangerous thing we used to allow ; summer holidays, Easter break, and God ((c) Tesco 2034) forbid, home education – it's a wonder any of us survived. It's terrifying to think what fate could befall a child whilst not under state surveillance" said a spokeswoman "Just think what those poor innocent children had to endure – disgusting sexual abuses such as 'tickling' and 'cuddling' at the hands of callous parents! We welcome these proposals; in fact we would suggest they do not go far enough. The incubation period is still a very risky time for the developing child; we would like to see more research into how we can get around this process."

A Civil Rights ((c) Tesco 2018) campaigner claimed " This is absolutely outra..." before being arrested under section 985 of the Terrorism (2022) act and summarily shot.

NEW WORLD ORDER

Yet another reference by Gordon Brown about the new world order, is this recession part of a move towards globalising government?

Take a look at:-

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7850649.stm
Where Gordon Brown says "The economic crisis should be treated as the difficult birth-pangs of a new global order"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/davos/7855445.stm
Where Klaus Schwab talks about the current financial crisis being compared with a highway with each community making its own rules "so now we have a mass crash" we need now to help those injured people in the crash and then figure out what rules we need for the future to avoid
this happening again .... we need to resync to reboot the system.


This move towards increasing globalisation and greater dependance on big business and financial systems run by a small group of very rich and powerful people has increasingly robbed us of our rights and freedoms, it is not a new idea - Gerald Ford made his “Declaration of Interdependence” on October 24, 1975; according to the ex-general counsel of the Export-Import Bank of the United States, Peter Beter, the Declaration of Interdependence states that:

We must join with others to bring forth a new world order… Narrow notions of national sovereignty must not be permitted to curtail that obligation.

Worrying stuff indeed.

Get your own house in order

The government is busy attacking home educating families, wanting to make them more like schools, subject to targets and inspections yet for all the changes to the school system and all the money thrown into education, all the targets, inspections and so called ever increasing exam grades we seem to be getting more and more articles like the one below:-

Too many' cannot read and write

An "unacceptably" high number of people in England cannot read, write and count properly, MPs have warned.

The Public Accounts Committee said in 2007 51,000 pupils left school without a GCSE of at least D-G in maths and 39,000 left without this in English.

The report into adult literacy and numeracy also warned that only one in five offenders with poor basic skills had enrolled on a course to help them.

Ministers said no other government had invested so much in basic skills.

The committee of MPs said a lack of up-to-date information about skills meant the government could not be sure its schemes to improve basic skills were working.

Chairman of the PAC Edward Leigh said anyone who believed the government could meet its target of 95% adult literacy and numeracy by 2020 was "living in cloud cuckooland".

"Whilst they have made some progress, I don't think there's the remotest chance they will reach that," he told the BBC.

READ MORE at:-
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7856001.stm

The coming war against Home Schoolers

Yet another article found tonight, the government really is pulling out all the stops in its bid to know and control every aspect of your life, from the cradle to the grave........

I knew this was coming. The inflamed, all-seeing red eye of political correctness, glaring this way and that from its dark tower, has finally discovered that home schooling is a threat to the Marxoid project, and has launched its first open attack on it.

Before long, those who wish to declare independence from the state system (and cannot afford monstrous private school fees) will face endless interference, monitoring and regulation.
How do we know this? On the 19th January, an obscure person called Delyth Morgan levelled what I regard as an astonishing smear against people who educate their children at home. She suggested that such parents might be abusers, saying (I have taken these words directly from the Education department's own website): 'Making sure children are safe, well and receive a good education is our most serious responsibility.
'Parents are able, quite rightly, to choose whether they want to educate children at home, and a very small number do. I’m sure the vast majority do a good job. However, there are concerns that some children are not receiving the education they need.
'And in some extreme cases, home education could be used as a cover for abuse. We cannot allow this to happen and are committed to doing all we can to help ensure children are safe, wherever they are educated.
'This review will look at whether the right systems are in place that allow local authorities and other agencies to ensure that any concerns about the safety, welfare or education of home educated children are addressed quickly and effectively. The review will of course talk to home educating families to ensure their views and experiences are heard.'




READ MORE at:-
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2009/01/the-coming-war-against-home-schoolers.html#comments

Paying to protest

So much coming out of the woodwork today, just found the following article:-

Paying to protest
Did you know … that you can be charged by councils for demonstrating against them?

As the House of Lords nears a decision on whether the Metropolitan police were right to cordon off and hold peaceful May Day protesters for over seven hours in 2001, a number of recent protesters against the Israeli action in Gaza questioned whether riot police in balaclavas and attempts to contain crowds were really the best way for "working together for a safer London".

As local protest movements are discovering, myriad laws are being subverted and misunderstood by local authorities and the police. A new generation, as Henry Porter writes, are "increasingly coming up against authoritarian laws that were put in place while so few were paying attention".

Last summer, pupils from St George's Roman Catholic school in Salford received a bill for nearly £2,000, which the local council claimed was for managing the cost of a protest against the closure of their school, including closing a road for five minutes and keeping a set of traffic lights on red while the schoolchildren crossed.

The power stemmed from the Road Traffic Regulation Act 2004, but as Alex Gask, a lawyer for Liberty pointed out at the time, councils are only allowed to charge for gatherings classified as sporting or social events and entertainment. He said Salford appeared to be "bending over backwards" to find a reason for the charge.

READ MORE at:-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/26/protest-civil-liberties

Children deemed predeliquent are being identified on databases accessible to thousands of civil servants

When families become enemies of state

Did you know ... children deemed predeliquent are being identified on databases accessible to thousands of civil servants?

Under Labour policy, the family's relationship with the state is being subjected to a transformation that erodes their privacy and autonomy. It is being done in the name of child protection and "safeguarding" children. The aims appear honourable and desirable; it may seem obvious that losing a few civil liberties is a small price to pay for the security and welfare of children, but when you look closer, it is very steep: the benefits are questionable while probability of dangerous outcomes seems high.

The transformation of family life is founded on the assumption that sharing information among practitioners is the route to improving children's safety and welfare. This has led to a proliferation of databases in social care, health, education and youth justice. They include ContactPoint, the eCAF, the National Pupil Database, the Management of Information across Partnerships, and the Universal Management of Information System.

It has long been accepted that family privacy has to be breached when there are concerns of parental abuse or neglect. But current policy extends this to cover any concern about a child's development or, as the government puts it, where a practitioner thinks that a child is not making appropriate progress towards the government's desired outcomes for children.

All very scary stuff.....

READ MORE at:-

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/28/children-socialpolicyandadministration

National child database will increase risk

The government makes much of the need to 'protect' children by setting up lots of databases to enable data sharing between professionals (although this label includes some 390,000 people)

Eileen Munro wrote in the Guardian newspaper that 'Children's welfare is best protected by by having competent and well resourced professionals not with computer wizardry'

The tragic death of Victoria Climbié is being used as a Trojan horse by the government to rush through an unpopular policy in the children bill. It is strange for the government to present the proposed electronic database on all 11 million children in England and Wales as a way of preventing the kind of mistakes made in Victoria's care.

Her case was mishandled because staff misunderstood the information they had, not because they could not share information. When there are concerns about abuse, confidentiality can be broken, and needs to be broken because we cannot trust abusive parents to tell the truth about what they are doing to the child.

It has now emerged that the idea of the database predates the Climbié report by at least a year and was not initially linked to child abuse. It was suggested in a report by the Performance and Innovation Unit at the Cabinet Office - Privacy and data-sharing: The Way Forward for the Public Services.

READ MORE at:-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2004/apr/06/childrensservices.comment

It couldn't happen here ........ Could it???

In the western world we pride ourselves on the democracy we live in, the free market that brings prosperity to all (except when it all falls apart and we have yet another recession), we have the 'mother of parliaments' here in the UK ........ or is just the matrix?

Naomi Wolf wrote an article for the Guardian newspaper, it is based on her take on events in America though most of what she says can equally be applied to the UK, scary to think how easily we can sleepwalk towards state control of the people ............

Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.

They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.

As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.

READ MORE at :-

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/apr/24/usa.comment

UK 2017: under surveillance

A scary description of what sort of world we could all be living in within the next few years.

A world of electronic tagging, automatic numberplate recognition, automatic face recognition, privatised security services...........

Not based on sci-fi but but on existing technology, statements made about the intentions of government and private companies and studies by other think tanks, regulators, professional bodies and academics.

Come to think about it, most of what they discuss is already here, NOW.

Read more at:-
http://www.sundayherald.com/news/heraldnews/display.var.1741454.0.uk_2017_under_surveillance.php

Police want to search rail passengers

Senior British Transport police officials have told MPs that they want to change the railways' "conditions of carriage" to close a loophole that means officers using mobile knife-detecting arches at stations have no legal power to search someone who sets them off unless they have a reasonable suspicion that they are breaking the law. This would mean that passengers who buy a London train or tube ticket would automatically be giving their consent to be searched.

The transport police chief told MPs they could currently use the arches only to scan people who volunteered to go through them, unless they had a reasonable suspicion the travellers were breaking the law.

As I see it, if they don't have "reasonable suspicion" that you are breaking the law then they should simply leave you alone to continue your journey, Oh of course, I forgot - we are all under permanent suspicion because they are the authorities and we are not, therefore we must all be planning to blow up the country!!!!!

"In effect, a suspect may not be searched, even where consent is provided, in an absence of 'reasonable suspicion'; a procedural stumbling block to the unfettered use of knife arches," said transport police evidence to the MPs' inquiry into knife crime.

So, "an absence of reasonable suspicion" is a procedural stumbling block now, I always thought it meant that they had no reason to suspect you of anything and left you alone but I guess I'm old fashioned about these things.

In relation to policing the railways, one [possibility] may be to have as a condition of carriage, when people purchase a ticket, that they agree to being searched."

Well, that's me off public transport then! Pity about the carbon footprint.

Read more on the guardian website

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/jan/13/knife-crime-police-gang-violence

Powers to make "Information Sharing Orders"

Yet more of the government barrage on our freedom and privacy!
The Coroners and Justice Bill is due a 2nd reading tomorrow (26th January), on clause will allow Information Sharing Orders to be made which will allow the authorities to use any information they have gathered for any purpose to be collected and used for any other purpose they see fit.

Write to your MP using http://www.writetothem.com asking them to oppose this outragous piece of legislation

"Take more children into care" says Barnardos chief

Just read an article in the Telegraph online http://tinyurl.com/bay4q4

I know that there are occasions that families are so broken down that it may be necessary to take the children into care but I really think that this should be a measure of last resort, Going hand in hand with that statement though - I also believe that when there are serious concerns that children are at risk of harm then the authorities should act swiftly.

The big issue that always seems to crop up is that people involved in child welfare are always trying to meet some gov't target rather than really considering the children involved, they lose sight of what is best for the children and look for solutions that please their bosses or gain positive press stories or score political points.

Then when I read stories like http://tinyurl.com/bj8k8m where councils are awarded financial rewards for meeting adoption targets makes me wonder how often the drive to take children into care is linked with the need to find more children available for adoption!!! It is a disgusting
thing to consider but I wonder how often it happens considering how the authorities seem to regard us as commodities rather than the people they are supposed to serve, they are the experts and THEY know what is best for us, we are just resources to be used and abused for their purposes.