Are you scared yet?

I watched this exchange on Question Time last night completely aghast:

Transport Secretary Geoff Hoon has said the government is prepared to go “quite a long way” with civil liberties to “stop terrorists killing people”.

He was responding to criticism of plans for a database of mobile and web records, saying it was needed because terrorists used such communications.

By not monitoring this traffic, it would be “giving a licence to terrorists to kill people”, he said.

It’s almost refreshing to see a New Labour Minister finally admit that as far as they are concerned our civil liberties are completely meaningless. At least now we know exactly where we stand with this lot.

Way to go Mr. Davis!

Hats off to a man who has suddenly made the British political landscape very interesting:

But in truth 42 days is just one, perhaps the most salient example, of the insidious, surreptitious and relentless erosion of fundamental British freedoms.

We will have, shortly, the most intrusive identity card system in the world, a CCTV camera for every 14 citizens, a DNA database bigger than any dictator should have with thousands of innocent children and millions of innocent citizens on it.

We witness an assault on jury trial – that bulwark against bad law and its arbitrary abuse by the state, short cuts to our justice system will make our system neither firm nor fair and the creation of a database state opening up our private lives to the prying eyes of official snoopers and exposing our personal data to careless civil servants and criminal hackers.

The state has security powers to clamp down on peaceful protest and so-called hate laws to stifle legitimate debate whilst those inside Parliament get off Scot free.

Well said sir.

Music to my ears

Half the population don’t support ID cards. Oh, the joy:

Support for the UK’s national ID card programme continues to plummet, with one quarter of people saying they are strongly opposed to the scheme.

According to an ICM poll, 25 percent of those surveyed thought it was a “very bad” idea — up from 17 percent in September last year.

Opponents of the ID card scheme said the survey of just over 1,000 people, commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, showed the government would be “unable to impose” the cards on the population.

25% think it is a very bad idea and other 25% think it is just a bad idea. Not that New Labour will give a shit either way about what we think.

Police can “no longer”? bug clients?!!

I had no idea that they were even allowed to do it in the first place:

Police can no longer authorise bugging conversations between solicitors and clients in police stations.

A ruling by the Lord Chief Justice said the monitoring of such conversations will be unlawful, unless it is authorised by an independent person.

…

Until now, such surveillance could be authorised by a deputy chief constable.

So much for Attorney Client Privilege. How did we get into a situation like this?

Oh dear…

Think you’re not living in a police state?

Think again:

Proposals to fingerprint children aged 11 to 15 as part of new passport and ID card plans are being considered.

Immigration minister Liam Byrne told ITV1’s The Sunday Edition the proposals were being “looked at”.

Under existing plans every passport applicant over 16 will have details – including fingerprints – added to a National Identity register from 2008.

But there was concern youngsters could use passports without biometric details up to the age of 20, said Mr Byrne.

This could happen if they are issued a child passport between the ages of 11 and 15, which would be valid for five years.

Of course, you have a choice: You can choose to never leave the country again or be treated like a common criminal.

Anyone comes near my kids with a biometric sensor, I’ll have their head on a stick.

Shades of Stalinism

Say farewell to the right to peaceful protest:

Labour officials have banned the grieving families of the Iraq war dead from staging a peaceful protest outside the party’s forthcoming annual conference in Manchester.

Furious members of Military Families Against The War accused the party of ‘censorship’ after they applied to hold a small peace camp near the conference later this month.

But officials on Labour-run Manchester council told them they could not do so for ‘health and safety’ reasons.

It is bad enough that we are not allowed to protest outside the seat of our democracy. My advice to the members of Military Families Against The War is to go ahead and hold your protest anyway. There will be plenty of TV cameras outside the conference.

Did our forefathers really fight in two world wars so that we would have to put up with this shit?

UPDATE: Military Families Against The War are going ahead with their protest. They are asking people to email Manchester City Council and have kindly provided an easy to use web page for this very purpose. Please go and help them out.

UPDATE 2: For the record, I sent them the following:

I would like to urge you to reconsider your ban against Military Families Against the War from holding a Peace Camp in Albert Square.

We still have the right to peaceful protest in this country and using a ‘health and safety argument to prevent such a protest is lame in the extreme.

I am not affiliated with the group, but I am no longer willing to sit back and watch our democratic rights be dismissed in such an underhanded manner.

This is not a Stalinist State. Yet.

Brilliant

From B3ta. I nicked it from DK who in turn nicked it from somebody else.

Picking on the geeks

Section 41 of The Computer Misuse Act, currently winging its way through the Lords, has the following clause:

A person is guilty of an offence if he makes, adapts, supplies or offers to supply any article —
(a) intending it to be used to commit, or to assist in the commission of, an offence under section 1 or 3 [of the Computer Misuse Act]; or
(b) believing that it is likely to be so used.

So if I were to write a packet snooping program to scan my network for Trojans or other suspicious traffic, I would unwittingly fall foul of this clause. I would have invented something that a criminal could use to scan network traffic and steal valuable information.

Everybody accepts that knives and guns are lethal weapons but we would never expect to see the authorities prosecute the companies who manufacture them. Why then, are computer programmers different?

If you think that is bad then how would you feel about being sent to jail for forgetting you password? The government is now in the process of activating Part 3 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIP) giving law enforcement officers the authority to order the disclosure of decryption keys, or force suspects to decrypt encrypted data. Failure to hand over a key could land you in jail for 2 years. If your enrypted data turned out to be incriminating evidence that could put you away for much longer… let’s just say that even John Prescott could figure out that little conundrum.

If Part 3 is passed, financial institutions could be compelled to give up the encryption keys they use for banking transactions, experts have warned.

Our last hope is to cling to the notion that in the end, this law will be completely un-enforcable:

“It is, as ever, almost impossible to prove ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ that some random-looking data is in fact ciphertext, and then prove that the accused actually has the key for it, and that he has refused a proper order to divulge it,” pointed out encryption expert Peter Fairbrother on ukcrypto, a public email discussion list.

Clayton backed up this point. “The police can say ‘We think he’s a terrorist’ or ‘We think he’s trading in kiddie porn’, and the suspect can say, ‘No, they’re love letters, sorry, I’ve lost the key’. How much evidence do you need [to convict]? If you can’t decrypt [the data], then by definition you don’t know what it is,” said Clayton.

I guess I could offer to write a program that could employ complex pattern matching algorithms in an attempt to identify the data and figure out the type of encryption being used, but if I do that I might fall foul of the Section 41 of the Computer Misuse Act. Bummer.

If you have nothing to hide…

… you have nothing to fear? Well, bollocks! Life has conspired to keep me out of the bogosphere for the past few days, so I missed this hideously frightening story from DK:

An internal investigation at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has found that civil servants are colluding with organised criminals to steal personal identities on “an industrial scale”.

Ministers have been privately warned that the investigation will show that hundreds of thousands of stolen personal details have been ripped off from official databases, often with inside help. Key personal details such as national insurance numbers can be used to commit benefit fraud, set up false bank accounts and obtain official documents such as passports.

If that is not a good enough reason to stop ID cards in their tracks then I don’t know what is.

As a parting thought to those that think this is a non story and I am simply indulging in a typical anti-New Labour rant: How can you be sure that your identity isn’t one of the ones that corrupt civil servants have sold?