What would you think if I told you the police had accused 5,000 British citizens of a really unpleasant, despicable crime, the sort of thing where just being questioned is the kind of news that could destroy your family, career, and psyche, that some 39 of them had committed suicide as a result, but quite…
Read More The Next Big Miscarriage of Justice“How would a Galileo-based road pricing scheme fit into the code of practice requirement of a direct relationship with the user?” Good fucking question. We’ve got David Smith, the deputy information commissioner, and among others Richard Clayton of the Cambridge Computer Lab’s security engineering group – that’s right, the guy from Light Blue Touchpaper –…
Read More Confoblogging: Trust, consent, and standardsGareth Crossman of Liberty: “The only way the National Identity Register can fight terrorism is if the amount of information on it is increased to make profiling possible.” Next up: Simon Watkin. Former head of David Blunkett’s private office at the Home Office, he now runs the HO’s Covert Investigations Policy team and the ACPO…
Read More Confoblogging: The NIR and the surveillance that goes with itReid wants to change the law so you can be tortured if he says you’re evil enough. Not only that, he wants one of the people who the courts found innocent of preparing ricin in the great no-ricin no-plot tortured, presumably to get out of him why he didn’t prepare any ricin. This is an…
Read More Recidivist with alert populationsEveryone is talking about this New Statesman story in which so-and-so visits Westminster Council’s CCTV surveillance control centre, which rather wonderfully turns out to be situated in the bowels of the dire Trocadero on Wardour Street. Apparently we have 20 per cent of world CCTV capability in Britain. But it was this response at Spyblog…
Read More User 64Now here’s a party proposal I can get behind. Lib Dems want to introduce a Great Repeal Act, which would consist of a single sweeping revocation of a whole catalogue of liberticidal, stupid and expensive Blairite nonsense. Details are here. 1. Restrictions on protests in Parliament SquareSections 132 to 138; Serious Organised Crime and Police…
Read More Repeal!Of course they will! Major Chip’n’Pin securifart. It’s essentially the exploit described by Prof. Ross Anderson of the Cambridge Computer Lab, as described on his cracking blog (in both senses of cracking) – thieves have converted some point-of-sale terminals to collect the data from the cards’ magnetic strips, then made new cards. They can only…
Read More ID Cards Will Make Us SaferWhat a reshuffle it was, too. Despite all the pre-election expectations management (it’ll only be serious if it’s a loss of 400), it looks like the local elections really perturbed Blair’s systems. Take a look. So, after all the stand-by-your-man stuff, it’s the Angolan option after all, as Alan Clark would have put it. The…
Read More Chainsaw ReshuffleWell, wasn’t Charles Clarke’s appearance on television fun? The boiling hatred and revenge just spumed off his hoggish cardiac-case chops. There’s enough lard in there to fuel a whole West Greenlandic tribe for a decade, even though elephant would be a novelty to them. Apparently the only reason anyone disagrees with house arrest without trial,…
Read More Like a Fiery (Safety) ElephantTom of Blairwatch has been doing some sums on how badly the ID card registration process is going to fuck up. You may recall we did something similar for the biometrics. Using the Home Office’s own figures, in which the best identifier (iris scanning) had a success rate of 96%, and assuming that each one…
Read More Scaling and Scoping an ID Card Protest