Posted: Sun Nov 26, 2006 11:07 pm Post subject: I D cards
Douglas Carswell introduced to this area of Harwich and Clacton the idea of fighting the estabishment of ID Cards using people power via the internet through website like this one, for this he deserves praise.
Strangely today David Blunkett seems to have woken up to the stealth and reach of the thought police state saying that microphones that can listen in to private conversations at great distances are "a step too far".
Of course such devices are not new and are used for surveilance right now.
Couple these devices to the plethera of DNA, fingerprints, electronic facial mapping, phone tapping, listening equipment,eye recognition software and others to ID Cards, passports, driving license, road fund license, marriage license library records, NHS records, bank account details what have you.
ID Cards will result in superior intelligence that will be handled tactfully, with utmost discretion, total transparency, complete confidence, total trust, with high efficiency, complete security.
Do the goverment actually think that after all the massive cock ups and lies that anyone trusts them. I wouldnt trust them as far as I could throw one of those lying cheating politicans (I'm a wimp so thats not far at all).
Thats bloody disgraceful. I would certainly have issues if that lady were my childrens head.
Looking on the bright side I am guessing all those that turn to a life of crime will already know what to do
Now as its preparing them why not have a bit of roll play where they simulate a bomb going off near by
Children lose their innocence earlier and earlier, but this is a step to far. Let them be children for as long as possible, before you make them take part in this.
I hate the way schools can just do things and assume that its ok. I have had dealings with one of the local schools head and deputy head due to bullying and how they dealt with it. In the end I ended up quoting the law to them and the LGA had to contact the school to clarify that I was right.
Some heads are great, some think they can do whatever they like and it doesnt matter what the parents want.
If schools want to help prepare kids for the real world rather than making them think fingerprinting is the norm and ok why not teach them skills from an early age that are useful and relevent. Proper cooking - with real ingrediants. Whole meals and not just mash. Money management. Green issues.
Please sign and pass this on. It only takes a minute...
The government's proposal to introduce road pricing will mean you having to
purchase a tracking device for your car and paying a monthly bill to use it.
The tracking device will cost about £200 and in a recent study by the BBC,
the lowest monthly bill was £28 for a rural florist and £194 for a delivery
driver.
A non working Mum who used the car to take the kids to school paid £86 in
one month.
On top of this massive increase in tax, you will be tracked. Somebody will
know where you are at all times. They will also know how fast you have been
going, so even if you accidentally creep over a speed limit you can expect a
NIP with your monthly bill.
If you care about our freedoms and stopping the constant bashing of the car
driver, please sign the petition on No 10's new website
From The Indy today,
Two months ago Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, warned that Britain was "waking up to a surveillance society that is already all around us". But ministers dismiss such fears and are pressing ahead with the world's most ambitious identity scheme, as well as a rapid expansion of the DNA database. Details of all children will be held in a single register to be launched next year, medical records are being transferred to a central NHS database and plans are being examined to track motorists' movements by satellite.
The idea of sharing personal details between departments follows a review of public services designed to make them more efficient. Ministers reached the conclusion that data protection rules limiting access to information about adults were too tight.
John Hutton, the Work and Pensions Secretary, cited an incident yesterday where a bereaved family were contacted 44 times in a six-month period by different parts of his department to confirm details of an accident. Mr Hutton said: "The Government already stores vast amounts of data about individual citizens, but actually doesn't share it terribly intelligently. There is room for improvement."
Interesting that they are worried about a family suffering 44 needless approaches to officialdom. Call me cynical but!!!!!!!!
Nevertheless he is concerned about the governments intelligence, he's not alone.
Just goes to show how things get out of hand. We must be vigilant. After all the UK has run out of prison space in an eerily manner.
Far fetched?
From TimesOnline.co.uk: No one knows how many people are executed in China each year. That number is a state secret. However, Amnesty International estimates that at least 1,770 people were executed last year and 3,900 were sentenced to death — more than in the whole of the rest of the world put together. Chinese legal experts say that the actual number may be far higher.
The decision to restore to the Supreme Court the right to review all death sentences was motivated not only by a series of reports in the increasingly courageous Chinese media of miscarriages of justice. Debate about the widespread and arbitrary use of the death penalty has also raged in recent years. China holds that the death penalty should be used sparingly. However, the number of capital crimes has more than tripled since China promulgated its criminal law in 1980, many of the additions being non-violent or economic crimes such as VAT and insurance fraud. Today nearly 70 crimes qualify as capital offences, ranging from stealing pigs or cattle to hooliganism.
In furtherence of my almost one man show, how about this? it shows the limitations of DNA techniques.
Bone Marrow Transplants Mix Up DNA
From New Scientist.com: "IT SOUNDS like an open-and-shut case: a clear DNA match is made between semen from a serious sexual assault and a blood sample from a known criminal. Yet in a recent case from Alaska, the criminal in question was in jail when the assault took place. And forensic scientists had already matched the crime sample to the DNA profile of another person who was their prime suspect. It was only after careful detective work that the mystery was solved: the jailed man had received bone marrow from the suspect many years earlier.
This week, at a meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics in Salt Lake City, Utah, Abirami Chidambaram of the Alaska State Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory in Anchorage described the case to highlight the danger of miscarriages of justice. Given the retribution that can be doled out to sex offenders by other jail inmates, the consequences could be severe. "If you implicate the wrong person, they can be killed in prison," says Chidambaram.
When Chidambaram discovered the perplexing match, she initially thought there had been a sample mix-up. But there was no mistake. What's more, the jailed man and suspect shared the same surname.Because medical records are confidential, a detective had to make further enquiries among family and friends of the two men. That revealed that not only were the convict and suspect brothers, but the inmate had received a bone marrow transplant from his brother. As a result, his blood was populated with cells bearing his brother's DNA profile.It's an instance of life imitating art: in November 2004, US TV channel NBC broadcast an smile of Law and Order: Special victims unit in which a rapist nearly got away with his crimes because of a similar bone-marrow mix-up." [Mark Godsey]
Amenity ,you may think you are running a one man show here,but I for one find all this very interesting and am pleased that you are highlighting such important issues that would otherwise have been sneaked in through the back door.
Please don't think that you are the only one as we are all reading this thread with great interest and without it we would not know a lot of important issues(being a humble daily mail reader -online so I don't get most of the higher brow stuff).
Keep up the good work and Thank You for all the items.
Old George Orwell must have been a visionary.
I just felt the subject might have become boring so made the statement by way of an excuse to post more.
Whilst the effects of the tightening of the restraining ropes by government on our freedoms will have only (I expect) a short term effect on me, it will affect our children because they will grow up with restrictions and not know how it used to be, they might even say "so long as they don't come for me what have I got to worry about".
It will come to pass I suppose that digital TV will be in every home, or so government wants. ID cards ID TV's?
Well worth a read.
Your TV is watching you
David Burke
6 - 3 - 2003
The interactive television revolution will mean more choice, more control and more freedom for the viewer, right? Wrong says the man behind White Dot – the campaign to switch off television – all it means is more ways for media corporations to keep tabs on your viewing habits and tailor their products to your tastes. Don’t believe him? Listen to what the corporations say…
Is it possible that personally identifiable information is collectable from digital TV's, from the excerpt below it seems like it.
The full discussion is on the link.
"My hope is that by showing where interactive TV is going, I can prod the companies who make it to offer up arguments based on principles. TiVo, for instance, claimed they never gathered personally identifiable information from viewers' set top boxes. That was a good start - a principle you could argue about and hold them to. (When the Privacy Foundation in Colorado found that TiVo had in fact been collecting such information I was disappointed, but not surprised.)"
The Government wants everyone to have a greater choice of digital TV options that they can afford. This can only be achieved through a universal switch to digital signals. Today 27% of UK households cannot receive the full range of digital services available free through their aerials. After digital switchover, at least 98.5% of homes in the UK (the same proportion as now) should be able to receive free TV through an aerial.
In addition, much of the UK’s broadcasting and transmission network is over 30 years old and needs replacing. It should be replaced with the best available technology – digital - so that the UK is ready for the broadcasting of the future. Digital switchover will also free up spectrum that can be used to provide new innovative services for consumers such as high definition television, broadcasting services to mobile phones and other handheld devices, and new interactive services
New Epassports only guarranteed for two years.
Micro chips in new ten year passports only good for two years a joke surely?
With government dishing out £450 million over 1998 to 2010.
For the individual passsports gone up from £51 to £66 to cover this chip system.
Posted: Mon Feb 19, 2007 10:15 pm Post subject: National ID Cards-Another Government Money Pit
On the subject of National ID cards. Well The results of the e-petition to No 10 are in. Supposedly only 28,000 people signed up in opposition to the proposed ID cards. The email proclaiming the failiure of the petition was accompanied by the following patronising garbage:
The e-petition to "scrap the proposed introduction of ID cards" has now closed. The petition stated that "The introduction of ID cards will not prevent terrorism or crime, as is claimed. It will be yet another indirect tax on all law-abiding citizens of the UK". This is a response from the Prime Minister, Tony Blair.
The petition calling for the Government to abandon plans for a National ID Scheme attracted almost 28,000 signatures - one of the largest responses since this e-petition service was set up. So I thought I would reply personally to those who signed up, to explain why the Government believes National ID cards, and the National Identity Register needed to make them effective, will help make Britain a safer place.
The petition disputes the idea that ID cards will help reduce crime or terrorism. While I certainly accept that ID cards will not prevent all terrorist outrages or crime, I believe they will make an important contribution to making our borders more secure, countering fraud, and tackling international crime and terrorism. More importantly, this is also what our security services - who have the task of protecting this country - believe.
So I would like to explain why I think it would be foolish to ignore the opportunity to use biometrics such as fingerprints to secure our identities. I would also like to discuss some of the claims about costs - particularly the way the cost of an ID card is often inflated by including in estimates the cost of a biometric passport which, it seems certain, all those who want to travel abroad will soon need.
In contrast to these exaggerated figures, the real benefits for our country and its citizens from ID cards and the National Identity Register, which will contain less information on individuals than the data collected by the average store card, should be delivered for a cost of around £3 a year over its ten-year life.
But first, it's important to set out why we need to do more to secure our identities and how I believe ID cards will help. We live in a world in which people, money and information are more mobile than ever before. Terrorists and international criminal gangs increasingly exploit this to move undetected across borders and to disappear within countries. Terrorists routinely use multiple identities - up to 50 at a time. Indeed this is an essential part of the way they operate and is specifically taught at Al-Qaeda training camps. One in four criminals also uses a false identity. ID cards which contain biometric recognition details and which are linked to a National Identity Register will make this much more difficult.
Secure identities will also help us counter the fast-growing problem of identity fraud. This already costs £1.7 billion annually. There is no doubt that building yourself a new and false identity is all too easy at the moment. Forging an ID card and matching biometric record will be much harder.
I also believe that the National Identity Register will help police bring those guilty of serious crimes to justice. They will be able, for example, to compare the fingerprints found at the scene of some 900,000 unsolved crimes against the information held on the register. Another benefit from biometric technology will be to improve the flow of information between countries on the identity of offenders.
The National Identity Register will also help improve protection for the vulnerable, enabling more effective and quicker checks on those seeking to work, for example, with children. It should make it much more difficult, as has happened tragically in the past, for people to slip through the net.
Proper identity management and ID cards also have an important role to play in preventing illegal immigration and illegal working. The effectiveness on the new biometric technology is, in fact, already being seen. In trials using this technology on visa applications at just nine overseas posts, our officials have already uncovered 1,400 people trying illegally to get back into the UK.
Nor is Britain alone in believing that biometrics offer a massive opportunity to secure our identities. Firms across the world are already using fingerprint or iris recognition for their staff. France, Italy and Spain are among other European countries already planning to add biometrics to their ID cards. Over 50 countries across the world are developing biometric passports, and all EU countries are proposing to include fingerprint biometrics on their passports. The introduction in 2006 of British e-passports incorporating facial image biometrics has meant that British passport holders can continue to visit the United States without a visa. What the National Identity Scheme does is take this opportunity to ensure we maximise the benefits to the UK.
These then are the ways I believe ID cards can help cut crime and terrorism. I recognise that these arguments will not convince those who oppose a National Identity Scheme on civil liberty grounds. They will, I hope, be reassured by the strict safeguards now in place on the data held on the register and the right for each individual to check it. But I hope it might make those who believe ID cards will be ineffective reconsider their opposition.
If national ID cards do help us counter crime and terrorism, it is, of course, the law-abiding majority who will benefit and whose own liberties will be protected. This helps explain why, according to the recent authoritative Social Attitudes survey, the majority of people favour compulsory ID cards.
I am also convinced that there will also be other positive benefits. A national ID card system, for example, will prevent the need, as now, to take a whole range of documents to establish our identity. Over time, they will also help improve access to services.
The petition also talks about cost. It is true that individuals will have to pay a fee to meet the cost of their ID card in the same way, for example, as they now do for their passports. But I simply don't recognise most claims of the cost of ID cards. In many cases, these estimates deliberately exaggerate the cost of ID cards by adding in the cost of biometric passports. This is both unfair and inaccurate.
As I have said, it is clear that if we want to travel abroad, we will soon have no choice but to have a biometric passport. We estimate that the cost of biometric passports will account for 70% of the cost of the combined passports/id cards. The additional cost of the ID cards is expected to be less than £30 or £3 a year for their 10-year lifespan. Our aim is to ensure we also make the most of the benefits these biometric advances bring within our borders and in our everyday lives.
Yours sincerely,
Tony Blair
MY RESPONSE
[1] As far as I can see the only people who will gain any financial advantage from its introduction are the Banks and Credit Card companies, by reducing their losses from identity theft. So when will they be making their contribution.
[2] If it is to be a compulsory requirement, I see no reason why individuals should have to pay a penny.
[3] To say it will contain less information than a store card is totally erroneous, I don't have a store card, but I'll probably have to have a Government ID card.
[4] If past Government IT projects are any guide the costs will almost certainly double, at best. Just look at the current fiasco with the NHS database.
[5] Why is the UK rushing headlong into this. Lets for once look around, if the rest of Europe is developing BIo metric ID cards, Lets see what happens and whose system is most succesful.
[6] I have serious doubts about both the security of Confidential information.Look at the recent incidence of illegal cleaners working at the Passport office.
Also its use or misuse by officials. I have had a US Visa for 4 years and was one of the first people photographed and fingerprinted by US immigration following the September 11th attacks. Yet despite the fact that the US government probably knows more about me than the UK Government. I have for the last two years been refused entry into the USA by Immigration officials, because there is another person with the same name and date of birth, despite the fact that they have different fingerprints and are about 9 inches shorter, and as far as I know look nothing like me or my Passport and VISA photographs.
[7] As regards removing the need to carry many documents, I'll bet the Banks will still want to see a utility bill if you want to open an account. Last time I had to prove ny ID at Barclays I took my Passport, NOT ACCEPTABLE. I had to produce my Debit Card with only a signature on it
"The government have announced children as young as six and up to sixteen years of age will be routinely fingerprinted when applying for a passport."
At six years of age it seems a travesty that a parent /guardian can concede on behalf of a child before he gains comprehension that others can have personal ID.
THE freight industry is heading for its worst security year as operators struggle to keep pace with the international nature of organised crime and the more recognisable criminal activities of deception, hijacks and terrorist attacks, writes Dominic Ellis in Dubai .
Speaking at the World Air Cargo Conference in Dubai, David Riley, director of a&b Insurance Brokers, said British losses alone were $250m last year, up 26%.
So, lie detectors are to be used by the DHS to detect fraud, it works by taking a sample of the persons voice and registers the change when pertinant questions are asked.
This technique has been used by the insurance industry and we hope has proved successful.
Would it, in the interests of equality of arms, (every persons entitlement) be nice if we could have such an instrument that works along with our TV sets. Then when a buraucrat, businessman or politician tries to sell us a duff line we will have it confirmed.
Posted: Thu Apr 05, 2007 8:01 pm Post subject: the old truth or dare game
ME TOO------ME TOO.............
Those were the days when you sat in a circle and spun a bottle with a truth, or, a dare......
If our MP`s done that now, just think of the forfiets they would have to do.
And it would be a lot more than kissing old Maggy Thatcher, i know..lol..
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