Bliar's not as bad as Hitler!

The NO2ID campaign placed the following advert in the Guardian, which resulted in a total of 8 complaints (it's not known how many were from Labour people):




























Due to the number of complaints, the Advertising Standards Authority were called to make a decision on whether the ad should be removed due to it causing public offence. They said the following:

The ASA noted the ad had been intended to encourage discussion on a sensitive political issue. We considered that, although the ad may have been distasteful to some, it was unlikely to be seen as making a serious comparison between Tony Blair and Hitler but instead as highlighting a lobbying group's opinion that ID cards should not be introduced because of the threat to civil liberty they posed. We concluded that, as such, the ad was unlikely to cause serious or widespread offence.

You should read the full article including their judgement, it's quite interesting, especially the evidence the NO2ID people use.

Thinkpol

From the Guardian:

Police are to demand new powers to arrest protesters for causing offence through the words they chant and the slogans on their placards and even headbands.

The country's biggest force, the Metropolitan police, is to lobby the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, because officers believe that large sections of the population have become increasingly politicised, and there is a growing sense that the current restrictions on demonstrations are too light.

After all, we all know that SCOPA doesn't go far enough...

The civil rights group Liberty said the powers would make the police "censors in chief".

I guess SCOPA isn't enough!

Trouble at recent protests involving Islamic extremists has galvanised the Met's assistant commissioner, Tarique Ghaffur, into planning a crackdown... Mr Ghaffur has previously advocated banning flag burning. But this document would take the police a lot further. Mr Ghaffur says there is a "growing national and international perception" that the police have been too soft on extremist protesters, which has led to rising anger across the country. "The result has been to create an imbalance in public perception that is manifesting itself in passionate responses from elements of the community not traditionally given to publicly protesting. What we are seeing in effect is a rise in the politicisation of middle England and the emergence of a significant challenge for capital city policing."

Aside form the fact that people having opinions is obviously a bad thing in this country, this sort of thing causes "the politicisation of Middle England". As Issac Newton said "For every action, there is an equal but opposite reaction".

As well as the absence of a law banning the burning of a flag, there is no law banning the burning of a religious text.

... and? Is just a book - no-one's harmed by it.

"There must be a clear message that we will not allow any extremist group to display banners or make public statements that clearly cause offence within the existing law," the document says.

Someone will always be offended, no matter what you do. What's worse is that some people will claim to be offended. How will you be able to distinguish actual "offence" from feigned "offence"?

A solicitor who has defended protesters, Mike Schwarz, said: "Causing offence, if there is no other ingredient, is not against the law." He said such proposed powers would clash with article 10 of the European convention on human rights which protects freedom of expression.

Damn right it would, although, unfortunately, the Human Rights Act is a bit of a waste (if a law if found to conflict with it, the law is still valid and enforceable, it's up to the politicians to decide whether to change it. Do you really think they'd amend or scrap a law which made it easier for people to protest? Of course they would...)

RFID passports cracked!

From the Guardian:

"The information contained in the chip is not encrypted, but to access it you have to start up an encrypted conversation between the reader and the RFID chip in the passport.

"The reader - I bought one for £250 - has to say hello to the chip and tell it that it is authorised to make contact. The key to that is in the date of birth, etc. Once they communicate, the conversation is encrypted, but I wrote some software in about 48 hours that made sense of it.

"The Home Office has adopted a very high encryption technology called 3DES - that is, to a military-level data-encryption standard times three. So they are using strong cryptography to prevent conversations between the passport and the reader being eavesdropped, but they are then breaking one of the fundamental principles of encryption by using non-secret information actually published in the passport to create a 'secret key'. That is the equivalent of installing a solid steel front door to your house and then putting the key under the mat."

Within minutes of applying the three passports to the reader, the information from all of them has been copied and the holders' images appear on the screen of Laurie's laptop. The passports belong to Booth, and to Laurie's son, Max, and my partner, who have all given their permission.

Booth is staggered. He has undercut Laurie by finding an RFID reader for £174, which also works. "This is simply not supposed to happen," Booth says. "This could provide a bonanza for counterfeiters because drawing the information from the chip, complete with the digital signature it contains, could result in a passport being passed off as the real article. You could make a perfect clone of the passport."

"The problems could get worse when they put fingerprint biometrics on to the passports. There are established ways of making forged fingerprints. In the future, the authorities would like to have automated border controls, and such forged fingerprints [stuck on to fingers] would probably fool them.

"But what about facial recognition systems (your biometric passport contains precise measurements of key points on your face and head)? "Yes," says Grunwald, "but they are not yet in operation at airports and the technology throws up between 20 and 25% false negatives or false positives. It isn't reliable.

It takes around four seconds to suck out the information with a reader; then it can be relayed and unscrambled by an accomplice with a laptop up to 1km away. With a Heath Robinson device we built on Tuesday using a Bluetooth antenna connected to an RFID reader, Laurie relayed details of his son's passport over a distance of 10 metres and through two walls to a laptop.

There's more on Wired:

In other words, electronic passport theft is about as handy as regular, commercial identity theft. The real hell would come if the authorities didn't bother to stare at the passport but simply trusted the signal from the chip. Which was supposed to be the idea in the first place: these arphids are supposed to be making transit SAFER AND FASTER AND MORE CONVENIENT, not just introducing a new level of Rube Goldberg snafu.

If we simply returned to the security situation status quo ante on 9/10 instead of 9/11, it would be like the civilized world suddenly got over a massive, self-inflicted stupidity virus. Furthermore, we'd be a lot safer.

There's always hope...

The People vs ID Cards

From the Mirror:

[R]eaders of the Yorkshire Post were asked in a phone-in poll if Identity Cards should be made compulsory. Seventy-six [%] said "No", and 24 per cent said "Yes".

Tony's wrong about saying people support the things then...

Delays and extra costs

From Computer Weekly:

Computer Weekly has learned that the Identity and Passport Service is running more than a year behind schedule on an online passport system that is far simpler than the ID cards scheme and costs less than one hundredth of its price.

If they can't do it with something a lot simpler, what makes them think they'll succeed with ID cards?

No wonder the government's going to Court to overturn a ruling under the FOIA that it has to release it's costing of the ID cards project. It would also explain why the roll-out for ID cards to those of us who aren't Johnny Foreigner has been put back to 2009.

How things change...

From Peter Black (Lib Dem Member of the Welsh Assembly for SW Wales) on Bliar's comments on ID cards:

In a speech to the Labour Party Conference on 3 October 1995, Tony Blair outlined how he was going to be tough on crime. This included a passage on ID cards:

"We all suffer crime, the poorest and vulnerable most of all, it is the duty of government to protect them. But we can make choices in spending too. And instead of wasting hundreds of millions of pounds on compulsory ID cards as the Tory Right demand, let that money provide thousands of extra police officers on the beat in our local communities. But the truth is that the best two crime prevention policies are a job and a stable family."

What made him change his tune?

More technological problems with ID cards

From the Register:

The EU-funded FIDIS (Future of Identity in the Information Society) project has warned that implementation of the current generation of biometric travel ID will dramatically decrease security and privacy, and increase the risk of identity theft. In the Budapest Declaration, which derives from FIDIS' September meeting in Budapest, FIDIS calls for short-term damage control measures to be taken (because biometric ID is already being rolled out), and for "a new convincing and integrated security concept" to be developed within the next three years.

FIDIS points out that the new generation of biometric Machine Readable Travel Document (MRTD) is remotely readable at a distance of 2-10 metres, and that current security simply isn't good enough to protect it.

The most significant problems with these MRTDs are:

• Biometrics in MRTDs currently cannot be revoked and since biometric features of the users such as fingerprints and facial features cannot easily be changed, "stolen" biometrics can be abused for a long period of time
• The key to access data on the RFID tag is stored on the passport itself and can be read by humans and machine scanners.
• Eavesdropping of communication between RFID tag and reader
• Cloning of RFID tags in MRTDs
• Abuse of the remote readability of RFID tags in passports

Even more evidence against ID cards, not that Blair’ll listen of course…

The Citizen Registration Programme II

I've previously mentioned where the ID cards centres will be based.

Well, NO2ID have a list of the locations where the ID card processing centres will be based. There appears to only one for the whole of London, in Victoria. Some of them, e.g. Blackburn, require planning permission. To any one in the area: lodge lots of complains and then there'll be a public enquiry over the location.

CCTV is a waste of time

In my fisking of our Dear Leader yesterday, I questioned the evidence about the effectiveness of CCTV, which our Dear Leader says the public support.

Thanks to Not Sassure, I've come across a report by the Information Commissioner which says:

During the 1990s the Home Office spent 78% of it crime prevention budget on installing CCTV46 and an estimated £500M of public money has been invested in the CCTV infrastructure over the last decade. However a Home Office study concluded that ‘the CCTV schemes that have been assessed had little overall effect on crime levels’.

The Home Office study itself also has the following (on p. vi)

Out of the 13 systems evaluated six showed a relatively substantial reduction in crime in the target area compared with the control area, but only two showed a statistically significant reduction relative to the control, and in one of these cases the change could be explained by the presence of confounding variables. Crime increased in seven areas but this could not be attributed to CCTV. The findings in these seven areas were inconclusive as a range of variables could account for the changes in crime levels, including fluctuations in crime rates caused by seasonal, divisional and national trends and additional initiatives.

and this (p. 48):

[T]he presence of CCTV in an area actually increases worry about crime, possibly because the assumed need for CCTV to be installed makes the area seem more problematic than the respondents had previously thought.

A government report contradicts Blair's own arguments... any other reasons you wanna try, Tone?

Bliar's reasons for ID cards

Our Dear Leader's written an article in the Telegraph: about why we need ID cards. Let's fisk it shall we?

The case for ID cards is a case not about liberty but about the modern world. Biometrics give us the chance to have secure identity and the bulk of the ID cards' cost will have to be spent on the new biometric passports in any event.

Yet..

I am not claiming ID cards, and the national identity database that will make them effective, are a complete solution to these complex problems.

So he admits they're a failure!

Nor is the Government alone in believing that biometrics offer us a massive opportunity to secure our identities.

How about some evidence?

I am convinced, as are our security services, that a secure identity system will help us counter terrorism and international crime.

Speak to people in Madrid about this...

It will also help us tackle the problem of identity fraud, which already costs £1.7 billion annually

By having a big, centralised database of everyone's details?!

The National Identity Register will 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 between the cracks.

Praying on the public's fear of Paedophiles & Ian Huntley. Not a reason, barely an excuse... Anyway, what if the data's wrong? Who pays for screwing up people livelihoods?

Crime detection rates, which fell steadily for decades, should also be boosted. Police... will be able to compare 900,000 outstanding crime-scene marks with fingerprints held centrally.

No such thing as a presumption of innocence then... not bad for a Barrister.

Biometric technology will enable us, in a relatively short period of time, to cut delays, improve access and make secure a whole array of services.

See the LSE's ID cards report on the problems involving biometrics...

It should prevent us having to tell every agency individually when we move house. In future, we could be automatically alerted when our passports are running out.

A fantastic use of £X billion! I'm sure people are capable of looking at the inside of their passport for the expiration date...

I know this will outrage some people but, in a world in which we daily provide information to a whole host of companies and organisations and willingly carry a variety of cards to identify us, I don't think the civil liberties argument carries much weight.

A lot of completely separate databases - which are completely voluntary and free - are a hell of a lot better than one costing billions and is compulsory. Also the worst thing about the current ones is junk mail, not thousand pound fines and a criminal record!

Individuals will have the right to see what information is held on them; the register will not contain medical records or tax and benefits information

... at the moment... anyway, Tony, your own government has said medical records WILL be on there!

It was also very clear from last week's arguments about surveillance and the DNA database that the public, when anyone bothers to ask them, are overwhelmingly behind CCTV being used to catch or deter hooligans, or DNA being used to track down those who have committed horrific crimes. And that's what surveys suggest, too, about their position on ID cards.

Any chance of evidence of the effectiveness of CCTV? As far as I can tell it just moves crime into another area - this is used an excuse to have more cameras, not scrap 'em on the grounds of being completely ineffective... Surveys, apart from Home Office ones, show that the more the public know more about ID cards, the less they want them!

On present estimates, biometric passports make up 70 per cent – or around £66 – of the cost of the combined passports/ID cards we want. The additional cost of the ID cards will be less than £30 — or £3 a year for their 10-year lifespan.

Any chance of letting us see the evidence for this Tony? after all the innocent have nothing to fear, do they?

He also did a press conference today, which gave another "reason":

But he believed that it was more an issue of "modernity" and of "modern life" - and he backed the use of these new technologies to tackle the new types of crime.

In that case, I want to be Old Skool, mutha'fucka!

But he also confirmed the timetable for Britons' cards has slipped to 2009.

A potential election year - that'll be fun!

The Tories have it right:

"He claims they will deal with benefit fraud, whilst his own minister pointed out that 95% of benefit fraud is caused by people lying about their circumstances, not their identity.

"He claims they will tackle terrorism, whilst his home secretary on the 7th July last year said 'I doubt it would make a difference'.

"...Microsoft tells us it is more likely to trigger identity fraud on a massive scale.... it will almost certainly cost £20bn, will solve very few problems... it will be Labour's final act of ineffective and expensive authoritarianism."

So have the Lib Dems:

"All the evidence from Britain and abroad shows that big government databases just become the favoured target for ever more sophisticated organised criminals."

UPDATE: Reading Bliar's comment about them preventing terrorism reminds me of a quote from the sorely-missed World Weary Detective:

The scene: An anonymous provincial town in middle England somewhere. Four plotters gather together in a darkened room. The year is 2008.

Plotter 1: Right everyone. Today is the day. Is everyone ready?

All: YES!

Plotter 1: Is everyone a 'clean skin' that has avoided the attention of the greatest security agencies in the world?

All: YES!

Plotter 1: Does everyone have a rucksack packed with explosive?

All: YES!

Plotter 1: Is everyone fully aware of our warped religious justification for committing mass murder?

All: YES!

Plotter 1: Is everyone suitably brainwashed that they will follow my commands without question?

All: YES!

Plotter 1: Is everyone willing to die in the name of their cause?

All: YES!

Plotter 1: Is everyone in possession of their ID cards?

All: Errr...

Plotter 1: What? What if you require access to key services on the way to cause carnage on the transport infrastructure of Britain?

All: Err...

Plotter 1: Right that's it. Take off those bloody suicide belts. No ID card no mass murder. If it wasn't for that blasted Blair we would have got away with it....