Source: Original Article
The Royal Constabulary has conducted a trial at Schiphol airport that involves searching through digital media in possession of travelers. Customs hopes to fight the smuggling of child pornography.

Traders in child pornography, out of fear of being caught, are said to not be making frequent and heavy use of the internet. Laptops, USB sticks, digital cameras, and mobile phones are said to have become more popular as a means to transport and spread illegal images and videos. Because media like flash memory cards have gotten smaller, and thus are easy to hide, it is said that the chances of being caught are lower than with online transfers. In order to combat this phenomenon, the justice department in collaboration with the Royal Marshals (Royal Constabulary), customs officials and the national police services, have conducted a pilot project where digital equipment and media of incoming travelers to Schiphol Airport were searched. In particular travelers returning from ’suspect’ countries such as Thailand, Brazil, Shri Lank, and Vietnam were targeted for these additional searches.

It is entirely unclear which selection criteria the border guards use for these searches. The Royal Marshalls are keeping it a secret but an insider told the Telegraaf newspaper that the criteria includes males traveling by themselves and who are regular travelers to countries that are known for or have a reputation of catering to the sex-tourism industry and the production of child pornography. These individual single male travelers had to surrender their mobile phones or laptops so these searches could be conducted. Whether any child pornography has been discovered during this ‘trial project’ is unclear because customs refuses to answer that question.

The justice department wanted to keep a lid on these activities, fearing the legal complications. According to a spokesperson for the Royal Constabulary, searching through digital media has a valid legal basis, that being; customs officials are allowed to search through the possessions of travelers if they have a reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed.

Currently the pilot project is said to be under evaluation by the public prosecution and justice department in Haarlem. The results of this evaluation would be used to determine and decide whether these targeted searches should become a part of the basic law-enforcement methods. Liesbeth Groeneveld, director of an organization where child pornography can be reported said these searches are a “good thing” even though the reality and chances of catching actual criminals is completely unclear. She added that “sending this signal is more important than the results”.

Source: American Chronicle
So, according to this plan, EVERY man, woman and child in the United States is to be screened, analyzed and monitored by the US government, and legal enforceable personalized “care” regimes WILL BE applied to those exhibiting signs of “mental illness.”

Why? Profiling. There is soon to be a new world order that is taking shape rapidly in our nation by Executive Orders, such as this one. In the new world, we are to be divided up and ranked according to screenings such as the ones initiated by the New Freedom Initiative For People With Disabilities and No Child Left Behind. The ramifications are terrifying. For instance, let’s say that your child is determined by a teacher or school counselor to be “difficult” or “under-achieving” by virtue of a C or D grade.

Even now you see how children are separated and removed from their primary classrooms and attend “reading groups” with other teachers. And what if your nine-year-old son decks a kid on the playground and is sent to the principal’s office. Does the principal determine the psychology of the incident? Do the 25 Federal agencies become involved and establish coordinated services and without your permission as parents?

As entire school districts are now being corporately funded, I suggest to you that this coordinated profiling of our children speaks volumes of their future potential for higher education and rank in society. Think of the sheer size of mental health screening and the data collection apparatus that will contain actual screening data for each and every American child, no less adults. Another terrifying implication is that conservation and the U.N. Agenda 21 has called for mind-bending population reduction globally. Some conservation organizations have called for a 40-50% reduction in human life to achieve “sustainability.”

I wonder how Terri Schiavo was ranked?

And most of the legislation that has passed through Congress regarding compulsory mental health screening for children AND for pregnant women, has been passed in hidden legislation and/or by Executive Order. We either weren’t aware of the legislation at all or our opinions were not wanted. Think about that.

There are reasons for profiling, RFID, and massive databases that collect everything we do and our medical and psychological records. Simply nothing makes sense unless you look at the trends in legislation and their constant attempts to hide data collection bureaucracies with names like “New Freedom.”

Have you noticed that school children are now called into the “counselors’’ offices to talk, rather than having the option to do so? Each quarter, go into your children’s schools and request to see their school records. You are going to see new forms and assessments performed each and every year. Proficiency tests are a part of the annual assessments, which also profile children with hidden, psychographics questions on the tests that analyze personality traits.

It is, indeed, a new world, and it is terrifying and unconstitutional. In closing, be very, very careful who you elect and keep very close tabs on your children and their school records – that is if you still actually have your children attending profiling schools.

Source: Australian IT
A MISSING computer backup tape containing personal information on Ohio state employees also held the names and Social Security numbers of 225,000 taxpayers. The tape, stolen last week from a state intern’s car, was previously revealed to hold the names and Social Security numbers of all 64,000 state employees, as well as personal data for tens of thousands of others, including Ohio’s 84,000 welfare recipients.

The taxpayers’ information was on the backup tape because they hadn’t cashed state income tax refund checks. Ohio Governor Ted Strickland said an expert’s review could reveal the tape contained more sensitive data. The administration has maintained it does not believe the information had been accessed because it would require specific hardware, software and expertise. But data security experts said the unencrypted tape, described by police as roughly 10cm square and 2.5cm thick, could be breached by someone with computer expertise, time and money.

Mr Strickland said 20,000 state employees had signed up for identity-theft protection as of Tuesday night, and there had been no indications that someone had attempted to use their personal information. The state is paying more than $US700,000 to provide all state employees with identity-theft protection services and to hire an independent computer expert to review what data the tape contained. Officials said they would extend identity-theft protection services to the people in the categories announced on Wednesday.

The tape was stolen June 10 out of the unlocked car of a 22-year-old intern who had been designated to take the backup device home as part of a standard security procedure. The governor has since issued an executive order ending the practice of employees taking backup devices home for safekeeping. He also mandated a review of how state data is handled.

Source: EDP 24
Fingerprint recognition systems and mathematical algorithms may sound like something from a hi-tech spy film. But for pupils at a Lowestoft school, they are to become simply part of the daily routine of ordering their school dinners.

The new technology is part of a “cashless catering” drive, giving students the opportunity to pay on account and avoid the daily scramble for dinner money. From next Tuesday, Kirkley High School will use biometric fingerprinting to identify each of the school’s 1300 pupils when they make their food orders. Once pupils’ digits have been scanned, canteen staff will have instant access to their account which will be pre-paid by their parents, or topped up at “reval” machines in the school. Parents will be able to control the amount of money available and even place conditions on what kind of food their children should be eating.

Yesterday, pupils from years nine, 10 and 12 had their right index fingers scanned, and saw their fingerprints converted into a mathematical algorithm to be stored on the system. The school’s IT manager, Toby Hacker, said: “The scan plots up to 45 points on the fingerprint, then turns them into a long, unique number, like a barcode. Only this number will be stored, not the image itself, so there can be no worry of anyone passing fingerprint information on. We believe we’re one of the first schools in this area to use this technology.”

The system will also allow parents to monitor the food choices of their children through a database stored in the computer’s memory. Headteacher, John Clinton, said: “We are a sports college, so developing healthy lifestyles for our students is a particular issue for us. The cashless catering system gives us the ability to influence where they eat and what they eat. We would introduce the controls very gently, but ultimately it will be the parents who control what their children’s diet is.”

Starting from next autumn’s year nine intake, pupils will also be banned from leaving the site at lunchtime to restrict their access to fast food. Students had mixed opinions on the new regime. Fifteen-year-old Tom Tillett, of Old Farm Road, Lowestoft, said: “It is a good idea that people don’t have to carry money around. If you had £20 at the start of the week you might just waste it all.” Laura French, 15, of Salisbury Road, Lowestoft, said: “I think it is a bad idea. People should be able to eat what they want.” The pioneering new meals system, developed in partnership with Suffolk County Catering, marks the first step towards a potential £5m redevelopment of the school’s canteen.

Deputy headteacher, John Shanahan, said: “We are working closely with Suffolk County Council to create a brand new, state-of-the-art, eco-friendly dining space. The school strongly believes that the dining experience is central to the life of the school, and that the experience could and does affect the ethos and culture of the school.” As well as the security benefit of removing the need for cash in school, it is also hoped that the system will create equality among pupils at meal times, as students claiming free meal entitlements could have their accounts credited anonymously. The cashless revolution in the region’s schools was first reported by the EDP in March, when Taverham Middle School in Norwich became one of the first in the county to launch a pay-on-account service.

Comment: “Only this number will be stored, not the image itself, so there can be no worry of anyone passing fingerprint information on” is such a load of deceptive bullshit it would be surprising if anyone buys it. Storage of digital fingerprints is always done by converting a physical image scan of a fingerprint into a set of numbers. Remember how computers store everything in ones and zeros? Well, this is the exact same thing. So yes, full fingerprint details are stored because the number can be used by a system compatible with its algorithm can be used to check the fingerprints.

Source: CTV Canada
A Nova Scotia family has inadvertently been on Internet “candid camera” for months without their knowledge. Dale Gass became their peeping tom by accident. “It is kind of disturbing these videos are being sent to me. It’s an invasion of privacy,” he said.

Gass used to own a wireless security camera. Unfortunately, it is now installed in the family’s house, and no one seemed to have a clue where they lived. “Thankfully they are a nice wholesome family, not doing anything too shocking,” he said. Gass’s former camera sends an e-mail image every time it senses motion. He was unsatisfied by the product and returned it to the retailer, but forgot to remove his e-mail address from its software. Someone else bought the camera, but apparently didn’t put in their own e-mail address, so now the camera is sending him images from their house.

“I received them at the rate of two to 10 a day,” Gass said. Staples Canada said it warns stores to make sure this particular model of camera is fully erased before resale. However, retailer Tim Walker pointed the finger at Gass. “The onus is on him to make sure that camera had been reset,” Walker said. No matter who’s to blame, one privacy expert said the case is yet another cautionary tale for consumers. “It also raises the question of how many other cases are happening without other people know about it,” said Philippa Lawson of the University of Ottawa’s Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic. Gass eventually put out a public appeal and located the family.

Terence Drake has posted a very interesting piece on FaceBook and highlights some of their so-called privacy policy that most people are probably unaware of: The so-called “Privacy Policy” of Facebook includes a statement saying that they “may share your information with third parties, including responsible companies with which we have a relationship.” It goes on to say that, “We may be required to disclose customer information pursuant to lawful requests, such as subpoenas or court orders, or in compliance with applicable laws. Additionally, we may share account or other information when we believe it is necessary to comply with law or to protect our interests or property. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, agents or government agencies.”

Source: WYFF4
PENDLETON, S.C. — A Pendleton woman is suing her landlord, accusing the management company of violating her privacy by using sound-and-video surveillance equipment at her apartment compex.

Judy Johnson said that she and other residents of the Pendleton Garden Apartments no longer feel comfortable living there. Johnson declined an on-camera interview with WYFF News 4, but her attorney said that she is “very upset about it. Very concerned.”

Charles Griffin said that Ambling Management is using a camera with a microphone to monitor activity at the apartment complex. Griffin said that the main issue in the lawsuit is sound monitoring, as privacy laws generally prohibit using electronic devices to listen in on conversations unless at least one of the parties involved in a conversation agrees. “Audio is the main thrust of the … cause of action,” Griffin said, accusing Ambling of “endeavoring to intercept the oral communication of Ms. Johnson and other residents living at the apartment complex.”

Griffin said that Johnson learned about the audio monitoring when she was at the management office one day. “She was in the office one day and heard a car crank up,” Griffin said. “She inquired about how she could hear that.” Griffin said that the office employees explained that cameras at the complex were monitoring the area. Griffin said that an investigator he hired found a camera in an outside area. The camera was “smaller than a man’s palm and very difficult to spot.” There is no indication of cameras monitoring any activity inside any apartments, Griffin said.

Griffin said that the management posted a sign at the entrance to the complex warning about video surveillance at the complex several weeks after Johnson said she learned about the video and audio monitoring. WYFF News 4 contacted Ambling Management, but a spokesperson declined an opportunity to comment on the case. Griffin said he is hoping to turn Johnson’s case into a class-action lawsuit, asking for $100 per day for the privacy violation or $10,000, whichever is greater.

Source: Press Esc
G8 Justice and Interior Ministers on Friday endorsed the setting up of a global biometric database proposed by the Interpol. Interpol Secretary General Ronald K. Noble views this database as a vital policing tool required to tackle the global problem of prison escapes of terrorists and other dangerous criminals not being promptly and adequately reported to police worldwide. Noble noted that during the past two years alone, Interpol has become aware that more than 500 prisoners have escaped from at least 72 prisons across 43 countries worldwide.

“With no system in place to automatically alert the international police community, these dangerous criminals are given an unacceptable opportunity to escape apprehension and to cause further harm,” Noble said. “Moreover, the absence of a global protocol on sharing vital information such as fingerprints and photographs of escaped prisoners, including terrorists, constitutes a serious threat to the safety and security of citizens worldwide.”

Noble also sought G8 support for the creation of an international missing persons and unidentified bodies database. Following the Asian tsunami in 2004, the need to develop a permanent structure to deal with any such future natural or manmade disasters was first raised by Germany at Interpol’s 2005 General Assembly. Hosted by Interpol, this centralised database would enable police around the world to maintain and access information on unidentified persons and bodies on a day-to-day and long-term basis.

The Secretary General also provided an update on the International Child Sexual Exploitation (ICSE) image database being developed by Interpol at the G8’s request. Endorsed by the G8 in 2005, the creation of the ICSE image database at the General Secretariat in Lyon will assist national investigators across the globe to identify and potentially rescue victims of child sexual abuse whose images have been posted on the Internet or retrieved from seized computers.

Interpol has progressed with the initiative and a pilot project with three G8 countries, Canada, Germany and the United Kingdom, will be launched by the end of 2007.

Source: BBC
Council staff, charity workers and doctors could be required by law to tip off police about anyone they believe could commit a violent crime. The Home Office proposals, leaked to the Times newspaper, insist public bodies have “valuable information” that could identify potential offenders. Possible warning signs could include heavy drinking, mental health problems or a violent family background. The Tories say the plans would require staff to “snoop on their customers”. Civil liberties campaigners are concerned that people could be put under police surveillance despite having committed no crime. [more]

Source: NY Times
Because of the inroads the Internet and other digital network technologies have made into everyday life over the last decade, it is increasingly possible to amass Big Brother-like surveillance powers through Little Brother means. The basic components include everyday digital technologies like e-mail, online shopping and travel booking, A.T.M. systems, cellphone networks, electronic toll-collection systems and credit-card payment terminals. In essence, the Pentagon’s main job would be to spin strands of software technology that would weave these sources of data into a vast electronic dragnet.

Technologists say the types of computerized data sifting and pattern matching that might flag suspicious activities to government agencies and coordinate their surveillance are not much different from programs already in use by private companies. Such programs spot unusual credit card activity, for example, or let people at multiple locations collaborate on a project. [more]

This is something you absolutely need to see. This video shows how the Big Brother at Myspace is censoring all posts and articles that mention presidential candidate Ron Paul. Don’t believe it? Watch this recording and see it happen live!

Source: Thrifty Scot
The government has decided to take away our rights in an effort to put a stop to debt. This can make the most pragmatic economist shake their head. Less than five months ago the Bank of England was publishing reports that claimed there was no debt mountain. They claimed that half the population could clear their debts, except their mortgage, before the end of 2007. Then, reports were being published that made claims that the average UK consumers was using their debt to build wealth.

Now we are expected to swallow the new Big Brother position the government is taking on debt. Several changes have taken place that will make it more difficult to borrow, and reduce the chances of running from your debt. The government’s Big Brother program is simple, ‘none of your financial information is private any more.’ The banks will be allowed to share your bill paying information, current loans, bank balances, and a host of other information with the Credit Reference companies. It wouldn’t be so bad, if this is where the information stopped. [more]

Source: Reuters
LONDON (Reuters) - Spies in the sky may track motorists in Britain within a decade if the government goes ahead with controversial plans to introduce road user charging schemes, scientists said on Tuesday. The plans were unveiled in a report on future transport policy in November as a way of cutting congestion and prompted 1.8 million people to sign an electronic protest petition.

Monitoring would be via a combination of static cameras to capture license plate details, electronic tags in vehicles that would be read by roadside monitoring stations and global positioning system satellites to read on-board transponders. “You will need 10 years at a minimum for a national rollout,” Phil Blyth, professor of Intelligent Transport Systems at Newcastle University, told reporters. “I do not see many other options available to us to manage our transport system.” Blythe, head of a panel of transport experts from the Institution of Engineering and Technology, said the technology was already available and had been tried and tested in various countries including Australia and Brazil. [more]

Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
What shall you do with a drunken sailor? Well, if you’re Millersville University of Pennsylvania, you deny her a degree, and you get sued for doing so.

Stacy Snyder, an aspiring teacher who is now 27 years old, was set to graduate last year from Millersville’s School of Education. But just days before commencement, campus officials discovered Ms. Snyder’s MySpace page — which featured a photograph of the student wearing a pirate hat and sipping from a plastic cup. The picture’s caption read “Drunken Pirate.”

Although Ms. Snyder was of legal drinking age when the photo was taken, Millersville administrators deemed the image “unprofessional,” and they refused to award her an education degree and the teaching certificate that came along with it. (Instead they issued her a degree in English.)

Now Ms. Snyder has filed a federal lawsuit asking Millersville to issue her education degree and teaching certificate. The former student also seeks $75,000 in compensatory damages from the university, according to the Intelligencer Journal of Lancaster, Pa. Millersville officials declined to comment, the newspaper said.

Source: The Columbian
GIG HARBOR, Wash. (AP) — Restrictions on the use of security videotape have been tightened at a suburban Tacoma high school after images of two girls kissing were shown to the parents of one of the girls, officials say.

Keith Nelson, dean of students at Gig Harbor High School, said he saw the students kissing and holding hands in the school’s busy commons, checked a surveillance camera and showed the parents the tape because they had asked him a few weeks earlier to alert them to any conduct by their daughter that was out of the ordinary. They then transferred their daughter to a school outside the Peninsula School District, which lies northwest of Tacoma.

Both girls said their privacy was invaded and denied doing anything wrong. Neither was identified by name in an article published Thursday by The News Tribune of Tacoma. The kiss amounted to a quick “peck,” said the girl who remains at the school, a 17-year-old senior described as the daughter of a News Tribune employee. “We weren’t doing anything inappropriate, nothing anyone else wouldn’t do,” she said. Nelson said students could not have any expectation of privacy in a crowded place and maintained that he would have taken the same action had the students kissing been a boy and a girl. An internal investigation into a complaint from a student - it was unclear whether the complaint came from one of the girls - established that Nelson had not violated district policy, Assistant School Superintendent Shannon Wiggs said.

Even so, Principal Greg Schellenberg said, school surveillance videotape may now be used only for security monitoring and discipline for actions such as trespassing, vandalism and fighting. Kissing and other public displays of affection were at the time and remain violations of school rules, but violators will first be given warnings and will be disciplined only for a second offense, Schellenberg said. In addition, school employees are barred from sharing surveillance video in response to an open-ended parental request. “It’s not our normal practice,” Schellenberg said. “It’s not going to happen again.”

In the case of the kiss, he added, “the same information could have been portrayed to the family without the video.” Nelson said he respected the change in policy but added that he believes his first obligation is to parents. “They’re paying good money for us to make their kids good citizens,” he said. “Whatever that means to the parents, I’ll do it.”

Source: Globe and Mail
Air travellers everywhere may soon be able to choose between the traditional pat-down and a new X-ray machine that leaves little to the imagination.

Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport is the first airport in the United States to conduct a pilot program with the SmartCheck security scanner, which uses backscatter X-ray technology, a form of low-level radiation that penetrates clothing. An early generation of images, however, proved too revealing, with bodies clearly defined. That triggered an outcry from such privacy protection groups as the American Civil Liberties Union. The Transportation Security Administration, which oversees security in 425 U.S. airports, agreed that the pictures were invasive and asked for changes.

The company complied. The machines now blur some details and render an image similar to a chalk outline that still shows some body creases while promising to disclose “all types of threat objects,” Reiss said. Implants larger than small pins, such as Johnson’s shoulder and knee replacements, would also show up, TSA officials said. But security authorities will not divulge exactly what does and does not show up on a SmartCheck image and will not say whether the machine has nabbed any passengers carrying suspicious objects.

Source: The Register
Science minister Malcolm Wicks suggested that such tagging technology, which is already used to track convicted criminals on early release from prison, could also help a family caring for an elderly relative. He told the BBC: “This is about dignity and independence in old age,” and said that far from making someone a prisoner in their own home, such a device could give a dementia sufferer the “freedom to roam around their communities”. Wicks said that permission from the individual concerned should be sought before using such a device.

Kate Jopling of Help the Aged told the BBC: “Although when we first hear this it smacks of ‘Big Brother’, we shouldn’t dismiss the possibility of some new technologies to help us in providing better care for people with dementia”. Tagging was introduced by the UK Home Office in 1999 as part of its home detention curfew scheme, which came about in an attempt to help reduce prison overcrowding. Such a surveillance device, which is attached to a person’s ankle, uses radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. The tag communicates with a base station that is hooked up to a telephone line. If the person wanders out of range it sets off an alert.

But other technology options could also be considered, including GPS tracking. “Let’s use satellites and satellite technology to tackle some real important social issues that worry many families,” said Wicks. Symptoms of dementia, for which there is no cure, can often include memory loss and confusion, making thre sufferer more vulnerable to wandering off. According to the Alzheimer’s Society, there are currently 700,000 sufferers of dementia in the UK of which the majority are elderly people.

Source: Telegraph
The European Union’s privacy watchdog has given warning that new access for Europol to personal data could lead to individuals being labelled as terror suspects based on hearsay or records of their shopping habits.

The warning, from the head of the European Data Protection supervisor, comes amid moves to allow the EU police agency to process so-called “soft data” in search of relevant information for its criminal investigations. Peter Hustinx said that moves to give Europol the power to gather intelligence on “people who have not (yet) committed a crime” are without privacy safeguards.

He told The Daily Telegraph: “The proposal does not specify what data could be used in criminal investigations. It could be everything. It could be a vital detail such as an insurance company about a stolen car. But it could also be soft data, behavioural data.” The information could include statements of hearsay given to a local police force or data on personal shopping habits from a supermarket loyalty card, he said. Under the new Europol rules, expected to be agreed by governments later this year, people will be unable to find out what information is held on them unless all 27 EU police forces unanimously grant permission.

Sayed Kamall, the Conservative Euro-MP, shares the watchdog’s fears and is concerned that “behavioural data” will lead to ethnic profiling. “For example, someone who purchases kosher meat and never shops on the sabbath, or who buys halal meat but not alcohol, can easily be categorised and every purchase scrutinised, no matter how innocent it may be,” he said. Mr Hustinx, a Dutchman with decades of experience as a national privacy watchdog and data protection at the European level, is worried at the absence of proper safeguards to ensure the reliability of “soft data”.

He said that individuals could easily be identified as suspects, giving the example of someone seen standing next to a terror suspect at a bus stop and becoming labelled “a facilitator for terrorism”. Max-Peter Ratzel, Europol’s director, said that European law enforcers needed to update and extend the scope of intelligence gathering - which is unchanged since the EU police agency was set up in the early 1990s. “Our databases are on organised or serious international crime so I would assume that ordinary citizens would not have any possibility of being there,” he said.

Comment: Haven’t we seen what happens when governments ASSUME?

Source: WREX TV
We’re used to giving personal information about ourselves when there’s a security issue, maybe using a credit card in a store or getting on an airplane. But new technology tracks us in places we may not even know about.

You can now put “going to a bar” on the list. Now when some places check your ID, they’ve got a permanent record of your information. The next time you request a table or order a round, the bartender might know your age, height, and eye color before you even make eye contact. That’s thanks to new scanning equipment that’s becoming mainstream. Rockford’s Silver Lounge uses scanners to uncover the underage. General Manager Addison Jun says, “It’s just pretty much this little scanner that’s meant to scan drivers licenses, business cards and it just kind of helps keep track of everybody.”

Bar-goers have mixed feelings about being cyber-carded and having their personal information saved in a database. One told 13 News, “It makes me pretty uncomfortable. You don’t know who’s working behind the door.” Billy Cook from Roscoe says, “I feel like it’s an invasion of privacy if they find out where you live. You never know where that info is going to go.”

But Jun says they do it for a good reason. “If it’s a fake, it lets us know that it’s not a valid ID. Security is a huge, huge issue in the nightlife business.”

But local security experts say don’t underestimate the old-fashioned role of the bouncer. Merchants Police Director Larry Hodges says, “It says here she’s 5′11″. The girl that produced the ID was only 5′5″. It says she’s 160 pounds, the girl that produced the ID was 125. So the machine doesn’t catch that. But the person does.” Cook says, “The established places that have good security will hopefully use it in the right manner and not abuse it.”

But bar owners also use it as a marketing tool. Because the scanner saves your address, they can then send out information about special events or upcoming promotions. They can only see and save what’s on the front of your license, including your address and picture. But they do not have access to a person’s criminal record, health information or credit background.

Source: Telegraph
Checks will be made on all children to identify potential criminals under a further extension of the “surveillance state” announced by Tony Blair today. A Downing Street review of law and order policy also called for greater use of sophisticated CCTV, an expanded DNA database and “instant justice” powers for police. The review is intended to chart a course ahead for the next 10 years by focusing more “on the offender, not the offence.”

Most crime is committed by a small number of prolific offenders who could be identified almost from birth, ministers believe. After 10 years concentrating on tougher sentences, the review paper said it wanted to tackle the “underlying causes..through better targetting.” Vulnerable children and those at risk will be identified by “trigger” factors such as parents in jail or on drugs. They will be subject to personalised measures, including home visits from specialist practitioners. But the Government says the net should be cast as widely as possible “to prevent criminality developing.”

It proposes to “establish universal checks throughout a child’s development to help service providers to identify those most at risk of offending.” The document added: “These checks should piggyback on existing contact points such as the transition to secondary schools.”

The plan will be backed up by a new database for all children due to be up and running by 2008. It will contain basic information identifying the child and its parents and will have a “facility for practitioners to indicate to others that they have information to share, are taking action, or have undertaken an assessment, in relation to a child.” The database was ostensibly proposed to prevent another tragic death such as that of Victoria Climbie but now appears to be the basis for cradle-to-adult monitoring. It is not clear when data will be erased from the database.

The Government believes children can be prevented from becoming offenders if early intervention is targeted at those who displayed certain behaviours. These include having a short attention span or behaving aggressively or living in a difficult or deprived environment.

Some children who show signs of becoming criminals are logged and monitored by dozens of early interventions schemes. Those aged 8-13 may be referred to a Youth Inclusion and Support Panel if they are thought to be potential offenders and data about them is held on an information system. Other agencies target 50 children and young people thought most ‘at risk’ of offending, truancy or social exclusion.

Mr Blair said the main aim of policy was to tackle the “hard core” of 100,000 criminals who, he said, commit about half of all crimes in England and Wales. Career criminals would be subject to prolific offender licences, punishable by three years’ jail if broken, which would impose a range of restrictions on their activities.

“They are not an alternative to prison. They are in addition to prison,” Mr Blair said when he launched the review at a conference in Westminster. “But we have to ensure that, when people leave prison, they do not rebound straight back in.” He added: “These people have serious problems and targeting the offender means taking those problems seriously. If we want a criminal justice system that works, we have to target the offender and not simply the offence.”

Other measures include tougher community sentences and special units for mentally ill prisoners, where drug treatment would be available. The Home Office also announced a review of policing to be carried out by Sir Ronnie Fanagan. the chief inspector of constabulary. He will try to find ways to cut red tape, make the police more accessible to the public and give forces greater say over their budgets.

Comment: In other words, if you are different from what the government considered the norm, and thus deemed a “social outcast”, you may find yourself detained and drugged in order to force you into submission to the desired standard. If you also happen to have a short attention span, which a lot of kids naturally have at the ages they propose to monitor, you are likely going to find your child forced to take drugs and will have to endure home visits and invasion of all privacy. I bet the big pharmaceutical companies are already rubbing their greedy little claws together on the mere idea of being able to “help” bring all the above together in a perfect government-and-pharma symbiosis!

Source: This is London
British citizens will be quizzed on up to 200 different pieces of personal information in a 30-minute grilling if they want a passport, it has been revealed. From May, thousands of applicants will be forced to travel 20 miles or more - at their own expense - to attend one of the interviews.

The application process, which will cause huge inconvenience to holidaymakers, will take up to six weeks and involve at least 700 civil servants in a huge logistical exercise which threatens to descend into chaos. Those who fail to convince the bureaucrats they are who they say will be denied a travel document - or face a full investigation by antifraud experts. There is no formal appeal process.

Critics have likened the new system to an ‘interrogation’ and warned that it will prove intimidating to many law-abiding members of the public. It will also fuel alarm over the emergence of a ‘Big Brother Britain’, in which the Government holds detailed information about everybody living here. The details an applicant will be questioned on include sensitive financial information, such as bank account details and mortgage applications purchased by the Government from a credit-checking company.

Officials at the Identity and Passport Service defended the requirement for applicants to undergo the 30-minute interview process, comprising 20 minutes of questioning and ten minutes of form-filling. They say it will reduce the number of passports handed over to fraudsters and terrorists each year - a figure which currently stands at 10,000. The process will begin as soon as a person applies in writing for a passport. Initially, the new regime will apply to around 600,000 first-time applicants each year - but is likely to be extended to everybody wanting a document by 2009. To deal with the 600,000 applicants involves the appointment of 700 extra civil servants - 600 to carry out the interviews and 100 managers.

With 6.6million applications processed every year, extending the face-to-face interview to all applicants would require up to 7,000 staff. Once the application arrives, officials will begin compiling a ‘biographical footprint’, containing 200 different pieces of personal information. It will be drawn from Government records, birth and marriage certificates and - most controversially - material purchased by the IPS from one of the UK’s. The bill for buying the personal data from Equifax is one of the main reasons why the passport fee has rocketed to £66. As recently as December 2005, it cost only £42.

Bernard Herdan, executive director of the IPS, said the information would include previous and current addresses, how long they have lived there, who with, whether they have a mortgage, and any bank accounts which may be held.

Details of a person’s ancestors, family background and any credit cards applied for are also likely to be included. Once the ‘footprint’ is complete, the applicant will be invited to attend one of 69 interview offices due to open across the UK. They will not be open in the evening, forcing most people with jobs to attend on a Saturday. The smallest offices will open only two and a half days a week. Initially, Ministers claimed that over half of the population would be within 15 minutes of an office. Yesterday, officials conceded this was a crude estimate. Instead, they said most people would be within 20 miles - with travel costs to be paid by the applicant.

Once there, the interview will take place, with civil servants bombarding the would-be holidaymaker with questions from their ‘footprint’. Mr Herdan said there would be no pass or fail mark. Instead, the official will be attempting to get an overall picture of whether the person is who they say. Those rejected must write to the IPS to ask for the case to be reconsidered, or ask an MP or ombudsman to take up the matter. Even those who are successful are told to expect the process to take as long as six weeks, compared with three or four at present. The fast-track service, for people who desperately need a document within a week, has been scrapped altogether for first-time applicants.

Mr Herdan insisted the interview process was not meant to be ‘daunting’, but to weed out fraudulent applications. Critics, however, said the checks would impose a huge burden on the public in order to catch a tiny percentage of people to obtain fraudulent documents. The 10,000 figure constitutes only 0.15 per cent of the 6.6 million passports issued each year. They suggested the Government’s real motive was to gather as much personal data as possible, ahead of the introduction of controversial ID cards in 2009.

Tory immigration spokesman Damian Green said: “These interviews will do plenty to inconvenience the ordinary law-abiding British traveller. They will do very little to stop terrorists obtaining even more fraudulent passports.” Phil Booth, of the NO2ID campaign, said of the 10,000 fraudulent applications: “Assuming it is even vaguely right, then the Identity and Passport Service plans to add hundreds to the price of a family holiday, inconvenience and intimidate millions of lawabiding people, and spend billions of pounds - all to tackle a problem that affects just 0.15 per cent of all passports issued.” He added: “No-one should be fooled - the interrogation system is for the ID card scheme.”

Ministers have already ruled anybody who refuses to let their details go on the ID cards database will be banned from having a passport from 2009.

Source: Workplace Law
The GMB union has welcomed moves by the European Commission to study the use of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, because of concerns over the fact that they have been introduced in some workplaces in order to monitor employees. The Commission has agreed to set up an RFID Stakeholders Group and to publish recommendations on how to handle data security and privacy.

However, employers be warned, there are currently a number of pieces of legislation that make it illegal for employers to monitor staff’s email or calls without informing them. Under the Human Rights Act 1998, the Data Protection Act 1998, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, and the Telecommunications Regulations 2000 employers must inform employees why their email is being checked.

Source: Telegraph
The Government is to remove all barriers to banks sharing data on us in a bid to curb irresponsible lending. But the potential for error is huge, writes Teresa Hunter

The Government is poised to remove all privacy to our financial arrangements by allowing banks and other institutions to reveal full details of our accounts to each other and credit reference agencies, even though we may not have given permission for this data to be shared.

The move is likely to prove controversial as credit reference agencies can be prone to errors. Citizens Advice confirmed that the bureaux regularly deal with clients who have been refused credit because of problems with their files. Moira Haynes of Citizens Advice says: “There can be things on files which customers do not agree with, or imply financial associations with other people which do not exist. We do what we can to help them get the mistakes corrected.” [more]

Source: UK Daily Mail
Banks and other businesses are to be sold access to personal information stored on the Government’s ID cards database.

Ministers want to raise hundreds of millions towards the £540million a year cost of running the controversial scheme. The Government is already facing a backlash over charging people £93 each for an ID card - which will contain 49 different pieces of personal data. Now ministers are planning to charge companies around 60p a time to check details held on the giant “big brother” database. They hope for up to 770million “verifications” each year. The data which banks, financial institutions and others will be allowed to access includes names, addresses, any second homes and National Insurance numbers.

Critics warned it may be the “tip of the iceberg” as the Home Office becomes increasingly desperate to balance the books. The Daily Mail has learned that a top firm of headhunters is already working for the Government, seeking a consultancy expert to market the benefits of the database to the private sector. Firms will be told that using the scheme will cut millions from their annual fraud bills and save them hefty fines for employing illegal immigrants. Officials believe it will be cheaper for companies to confirm identity through the database than by using current methods such as bills and driving licences. The Home Office said businesses would need a person’s consent to check information about them. But there was fury that the Government will be selling information which the public has had to pay to hand over - like it or not. Anybody who buys a passport from 2009 will have no option but to sign up.

Phil Booth, of the NO2ID campaign, said: “The government is trying to pay for its compulsory ID scheme by turning a buck on the very same personal information it forces you to hand over. Charging others to check your personal details is the thin end of a very dangerous wedge. When employees of tens of thousands of officially-accredited companies are allowed to make checks, how much easier will it be for dodgy investigators and identity thieves to find out your information? Under pressure from the Treasury, the Home Office is trying to screw every penny possible out of a scheme that it still hasn’t proved will work.”

Chancellor Gordon Brown supports the ID card scheme but is putting the Home Office under enormous pressure to recoup the extraordinary costs of setting up the huge database. According to the Government’s own estimates, the bill will be £5.4billion over the next ten years. Charging the public £93 for an ID card and biometric passport will go only part of the way to meeting the cost. The remainder will come from charging businesses to access information. Official documents reveal that some 44,000 organisations could be “accredited” to carry out verification checks, either online or over the phone.

They range from Whitehall departments, banks and financial institutions to mobile phone and video rental shops. They will inform database officials of details given by a customer, such as name and address. In return for the fee they will be given a Yes or No answer. Many firms may increase the costs of the goods or services they provide to recoup the outlay. Employers will be expected to pay to check the status of people applying for a job, to establish their identity and whether they are in the UK legally.

Shadow Home Secretary David Davis said last night: “This is yet more evidence of a Home Office IT-based project that is spiralling out of control. The Government should ditch this costly plastic poll tax and invest the savings in practical measures to improve our safety, like establishing a dedicated UK border police force.”

Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg said: “Public resistance to the imposition of this utterly unnecessary ID cards scheme will continue to increase as the costs to each and every one of us become clearer.”

Source: London Independent
Paying for goods with notes and coins could be consigned to history within five years, according to the chief executive of Visa Europe.

Peter Ayliffe said that, by 2012, using credit and debit cards should be cheaper and more convenient than cash. Some retailers could soon start surcharging customers if they choose to buy products with cash, because of the greater cost of processing these payments, he warned. Visa Europe briefed the British Retail Consortium last month on new “contactless” cards that can be waved in front of a scanner to make small payments. However, the consortium dismissed this vision and claimed that card processing fees, which regulators are investigating, are still too high. One member of the consurtium said that the estimated “interchange” fee charged to retailers amounts to some 4p for each transaction. Nick Mourant, treasurer at Tesco, said: “There is a duopoly between Mastercard and Visa in the UK. Their setting of fees is anti-competitive.”

Comment: When is the last time you TRUSTED a BANK to tell you that their new services and offerings were going to SAVE money and BE cheaper? They only do this so you no longer have a choice and THEN they raise the cost in gradual steps, just like they have done every time with new services you’re supposed to be excited about. Of course, it is also easier for banks to track your activities, whereabouts, and payments.

Source: The Register
Analysis Germany’s police and secret services are pushing for a legal basis for “online house searches” – carried out without the knowledge of suspects, using spyware similar to a Trojan.

The German public learned of the practice in November last year, when a magistrate of the Bundesgerichtshof (Federal High Court) ruled that there is no legal basis for such measures as part of police inquiries. Magistrate Ulrich Hebenstreit argued that house searches could only be carried out openly, with the knowledge of the suspect. In his view, and legal parlance, secretly searching a hard drive, whether in private or for commercial use, constituted “a major interference with the right to informational self-determination”. Moreover, because all data can be viewed and analysed by the authorities – from private photos to email correspondence – the suspect’s right to refuse to give evidence was violated by the measure. Hebenstreit’s decision received mixed response.

While the Home Office stressed that it immediately stopped online searches, spokesman Christian Sachs says: “One organisational unit at the Bundeskriminalamt (Federal Criminal Office) is currently working on the technological basis for such online house searches. For obvious reasons, we cannot comment on the technicalities.”

Minister of the Interior Wolfgang Schäuble intends to introduce a law to legalise the practice. In fact, the measure, and online security in general, plays a major role in his imminent “programme for the strengthening of public security”.

“The internet of today is a training camp, and an open university for terrorists,” Schäuble says. Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) president Jörg Ziercke believes the “Federal Trojan” (as the project has been dubbed by the public) is necessary because confiscating physical hard drives is almost useless. “They store their data on the internet and encrypt the hard drive. That is why we have to have access at the point of dissemination.” He said 99.9 per cent of German internet users will “have nothing to with this”.

How often German law enforcers have tried to infect the PCs of suspects with Trojans is unclear. While the BKA talks about “only a few cases”, Minister of Justice Brigitte Zypries, of the Social Democrats, knows of “four requests for online house searches so far”. However, the government, in an answer (PDF in German) to a written parliamentary question, says so far there have been no online house searches at all, because one request was rejected by the responsible judge, while another attempt failed because of “technical difficulties”.

Influential German hacker organisation The Chaos Computer Club published a statement pointing to the possible consequences of successful infection with a Federal Trojan. “The whole PC could be telecommanded, the webcam turned on, and the room surveilled acoustically, email and chat conversion could be followed.” However, the hackers are skeptical about the real danger posed by the spyware, and dryly recommend that “a well managed firewall and anti-virus software should take care of governmental or private spyware”.

Mr Padeluun, a spokesperson of the data protection association FOEBUD, says the whole debate is nothing but a “smoke screen”. “As long as we are talking about Trojans, the danger is quite small. Another question, however, is if security agencies might soon be allowed to bug a computer with small hardware, which is far more difficult to detect.”

Source: Associated Press
The next time you walk by a shop window, glance at your reflection. How much do you swing your arms? Is the weight of your bag causing you to hunch over? Do you still have a bit of that 1970s disco strut? Look around — you might not be the only one watching. Never-blinking surveillance cameras, rapidly becoming a part of daily life in public and even private places, may be sizing you up, as well. And they may soon get a lot smarter.

Researchers and security companies are developing cameras that not only watch, but interpret what they see. Soon, some cameras may be able to find unattended bags at airports, guess your height, or analyze the way you walk to see if you are hiding something.

Most of the cameras used today are used to identify crooks after-the-fact. (Think grainy video on local TV news of convenience store robberies gone wrong.) But so-called intelligent video could transform cameras from passive observers to eyes with brains, able to detect suspicious behavior and potentially prevent crime. The innovations could mean fewer people would be needed to watch what cameras record, and make it easier to install more in public places and private homes.

“Law enforcement people in this country are realizing they can use video surveillance to be in a lot of places at one time,” said Roy Bordes, who runs an Orlando, Fla., security consulting company. Some advancements have already been put to work. Baltimore, for instance, installed cameras that can play a recorded message and snap pictures of graffiti sprayers or illegal dumpers. The gaming industry uses systems that can detect facial features, Bordes said. Casinos use their vast banks of security cameras to hunt cheating gamblers who have been flagged before. In London, one of the largest users of surveillance, cameras provided key photos of the men who bombed the underground system in July 2005 and four more who failed in a second attempt just days later. But the cameras were only able to help with the investigation, not prevent the attacks.

Companies that make the latest cameras say the systems, if used broadly, could make video surveillance much more powerful. Cameras could monitor airports and ports, help secure homes, and watch over vast borders. Intelligent surveillance uses computer algorithms to interpret what a camera records. The system can be programmed to look for particular things. “If you think of the camera as your eye, we are using computer programs as your brain,” said Patty Gillespie, branch chief for image processing at the Army Research Laboratory in Adelphi, Md. At the University of Maryland, engineering professor Rama Chellappa and graduate students have worked on systems that can analyze the way someone walks to determine if he is a threat.

With two cameras and a laptop computer, Chellappa recently demonstrated how intelligent surveillance works. A student walked into the room, dropped a laptop case, then walked away. On the laptop screen, a green box popped up around him as he moved into view, then a second focused on the case when it was dropped. After a few seconds, the box around the case went red, signaling an alert. In another video, a car pulled into a parking lot and the driver got out, a box springing up around him. It moved with the driver as he went from car to car, looking in the windows instead of heading into the building. In both cases, the camera knew what was normal: the layout of the room, and the location of the office door and parking spots in the parking lot. Alerts were triggered when the unknown bag was added and when the driver didn’t go directly into the building.

Still, industry officials say the technology needs to improve before it can be widely used. There are liability issues, such as if someone is wrongly tagged as a threat. And the cameras only see so much. They can’t see what you are wearing under your jacket — yet.

Source: The Independent
The Royal Mail, which earlier this month revealed an 86 per cent plunge in profits, is spending hundreds of thousands of pounds installing television screens in every delivery and sorting office in the country.

Management will use the screens to convey information and updates on the company’s performance to staff, including speeches by chief executive Adam Crozier and chairman Allan Leighton - prompting wags inside the state-controlled postal group to dub it “Allan Leighton Direct” and to compare it to George Orwell’s Big Brother.

A Royal Mail spokesman declined to comment on the cost of the new communication system, but insiders believe it will set the business back considerably. The TVs are understood to be 42-inch Fujitsu screens, which retail for around £2,000 each.

The Royal Mail will be able to negotiate a discount but it is still buying a considerable amount: at least one will be installed in every site, including 1,400 delivery offices, the 470 post offices the group manages directly, administration centres and other depots. The spokesman defended the communication system, commenting: “It’s absolutely normal good practice for any large company to have effective and swift communications with its people, especially when we’re operating out of many different sites nationwide.”

But the move comes at a time when the Royal Mail is being forced to tighten its belt as it confronts a gaping pension black hole and struggles to adapt to increased competition. Earlier this month, the group confirmed that interim operating profits had come in at £22m, against £159m a year earlier. Much of the decline was blamed on costs associated with the pension deficit, which rose by £1bn to £6.6bn. But the Royal Mail has also lost a number of corporate clients, including Carphone Warehouse, BT and Centrica.

Employees, meanwhile, are being told to keep spending to a minimum, at least until the end of the financial year next month. The First Line Fixed scheme, for example, where a pool of money is made available for morale-boosting items such as kettles and TVs for staff rooms, has been temporarily suspended. The Government has provided fresh funds for the business, but last week the European Commission launched a probe following complaints from competitors that the money amounted to illegal subsidies.

Source: Reuters
PHOENIX (Reuters) - U.S. authorities began testing a controversial new X-ray machine to screen air passengers for weapons in Phoenix on Friday, which critics likened to a “virtual strip search.”

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration rolled out an X-ray machine that uses so-called “backscatter” technology at one checkpoint at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. The machine peers beneath passengers’ clothes to search for hidden explosives and weapons.

The TSA will test the machine in Phoenix for 60-90 days before deploying machines in Los Angeles and New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport for additional testing by the end of the year. “Everyday the bad guys are working and improving their tools. We need to continue working to improve ours and introducing this technology is part of that work,” TSA regional spokesman Nico Melendez told Reuters.

Privacy groups and the American Civil Liberties Union have labeled the new screening a “virtual strip search” that could be abused. But TSA officials said Friday they had worked with industry specialists to blur any images of body parts generated by the scan, and likened the resulting picture to a “chalk outline” of a person. The machine is made by Boston-based American Science and Engineering Inc., and is on loan for the trial.

Passengers selected for secondary testing at the airport, which is the nation’s eighth busiest, can choose an X-ray scan or a pat-down search. It is strictly voluntary. Airline passengers who choose to use the new machines stand in front of it with their arms in the air. A tiny laser beam scans the passenger from head to toe. The images come up on a computer screen in a room about 50 feet away. A green or red light — for pass or fail — is pressed and shows up at the screening location. Officials said the computer does not have the ability to save or store images, a concern expressed by privacy-rights groups. “It gives our officers the absolute best opportunity to find prohibited items,” said Michael Golden, the TSA’s chief technology officer.

Airport travelers had mixed opinions about the new device, saying they hope it doesn’t slow down the process of getting through security. Few had any privacy concerns.

“If it’s something that’s going to improve safety, then I don’t have any problem with it,” said Ashley Houston, 32, as she waited for a plane to Albuquerque. “I have nothing to hide.”

To all people who always say they have nothing to hide when their privacy is invaded: Please report to your nearest scrutiny center so we can examine you head to toe, follow you with cameras all day long in your home, walk one step behind you everywhere you go, and listen in on every conversation you have. Hey, you have nothing to hide, right? So what’s the problem?

Source: Star Telegram
The British tolerate millions of surveillance cameras watching their every public move. They agreed to let roadside cameras record their vehicular movements and store the information for two years. But when they discovered that their garbage is being bugged, they howled that Big Brother had gone too far.

Local governments have attached microchips to about 500,000 “wheelie bins,” the trash cans residents wheel to the curb for collection. The aim, they say, is to help monitor collections and boost the national recycling rate, which is among the lowest in Europe. The public has reacted with suspicion and fury.

“Germans Plant Bugs in Our Wheelie Bins,” a Daily Mail headline announced in August. Two of the bin manufacturers are German. Newspaper letter writers have taken to calling it “Bin Brother.” Small-scale revolts have erupted across Britain for months as localities adopt the technology. Some towns failed to mention the new feature, which is concealed under coin-sized plugs under the rims of their garbage cans. In the coastal city of Bournemouth, 72-year-old Cyril Baker ripped the chip off his new bin the day he discovered it, then went on national television to show how he did it. Thousands of his neighbors followed his example. “It was a very emotional issue. The whole town was in an uproar,” he said.

“I think people really see this as an intrusion into their personal space,” said Bournemouth councilman Nick King, a champion of the anti-chip cause.

Residents also fear that the little bug will nip them in the wallet. The microchips — radio frequency identification transmitters known as RFID tags — can’t actually spy on the contents of a bin. They’re more like tiny digital nametags, but they hold lots of information and can be scanned from yards away. In parts of Germany and Belgium, garbage trucks equipped with scales and scanners lift the tagged bins. The bins are weighed as they’re emptied, and residents are charged for each pound they send to the landfill. Bournemouth administrators swear that they intend only to monitor trash trends and return lost bins to their assigned homes. Other cities said they wanted to identify heavy heapers to advise them on better rubbish management. But residents suspect a plan to levy charges for garbage hauling, and some local officials have acknowledged that’s their long-term aim.

Source: AJC
Let’s say your teenager is a habitual truant and there is nothing you can do about it. A Washington area politician thinks he might have the solution: Fit the child with a Global Positioning System chip, then have police track him down.

“It allows them to get caught easier,” said Maryland Delegate Doyle Niemann (D-Prince George’s), who recently co-sponsored legislation in the House that would use electronic surveillance as part of a broader truancy reduction plan. “It’s going to be done unobtrusively. The chips are tiny and can be put into a hospital ID band or a necklace.”

Excuse me. But that is obscene. Electronic monitoring is used by criminal court judges to keep track of felons. Researchers use them to track the movements of wild animals. Let parents use such devices if they must. But that’s no way for government to treat a child.

Niemann’s legislation mirrors a bill sponsored by state Sen. Gwendolyn Britt (D-Prince George’s). Both would provide truants and their parents with better access to social services, such as mental health evaluations and help with schoolwork. Electronic monitoring would be a last resort. Still, the prospect of tagging children and using them in some “catch and release” hunt by police casts a pall over everything that’s good about the plan.

All of this is because about 6,800 students in suburban Prince George’s County (out of a total 134,000) missed 20 to 35 days of school in 2005, and an additional 5,800 missed 36 days or more. A problem? Yes. Bad enough to use an Orwellian quick fix? No way. Besides, is there no end to this fiddling with mere symptoms?

Stephanie Joseph, a member of the board of ACLU of Maryland who testified against the bill at a recent Senate committee hearing, correctly observed that “it really doesn’t address truancy and its root causes.” Even as Niemann and other lawmakers seek to rustle up students and herd them back to school, school officials are kicking them out by the score. More than 4,300 county students were suspended at least twice during the 2005-06 school year; 480 of them, five or more times. You can imagine what all of that confusion might look like on a GPS monitor: satellite images of dots streaming in one school door and back out through another.

Perhaps most distressing is the number of students who stay in school only until age 16, when they can legally drop out. Enrollment figures show that, during any given year, roughly 14,000 students are in ninth grade. By 12th grade, the number drops to 8,000. “We need to take a look at the whole system,” Niemann said. “We want to know why students drop out and if we are preparing them for the world they live in. But there is a limit to what you can do.”

Odd how billions and billions of dollars keep going to a war that almost nobody wants but there’s never enough to fund the educational programs that nearly everybody says are needed. Aimed solely at students in Prince George’s — the only predominantly black county in the Washington area — the truancy effort is called a “pilot program,” a first-of-its-kind experiment. It would cost $400,000 to keep track of about 660 students a year.

Surely that money could be better spent. Take one example: In nearby Montgomery County, kindergarten teacher Kathleen Cohan noticed that 5-year-old children of affluent parents were entering her school knowing about 13,000 English words, while children from poor and immigrant families knew as few as 500. So she and other teachers came up with a plan to close the gap. And it worked. Between 2002 and 2005, the percentage of low-income kindergartners reaching first grade soared from 44 percent in 2002 to 70 percent in 2005. Now that’s a pilot program. Invest in something like that and you might find more students becoming eager to attend school.

Niemann notes that the law requires students to attend school — period. “Where do you lodge responsibility for school attendance: with the parent and child, or society?” he asked. “If you say that the school system has to do blank this and blank that before holding parents and students accountable, that’s a dead end. That’s just making excuses for unacceptable behavior.”

But maintaining a school system that is among the worst in the state ought to be unacceptable, too. Maybe county officials should be monitored to see why they aren’t showing up for work.

Source: The Register
Blair adds whole UK to police suspect list. The National Identity Register will allow police to add the entire adult population of the UK to their suspect list, giving them the opportunity to check fingerprints left at scenes of crime against those collected from ID card and passport applicants, says Tony Blair. Nor are fingerprints in other EU countries necessarily safe - the introduction of biometric technology, he adds, will “improve the flow of information between countries on the identity of offenders”.

Blair made the pledge to collar the lot of us, and some, as part of a rag-bag of warmed-over, half-baked, misleading, and just plain untrue claims issued in an email to the near-28,000 signatories of the Downing Street petition calling for the scrapping of the ID card scheme. The notion of the police having access to the NIR fingerprint data in order to tackle unsolved crime is not entirely new (the Home Office document Identity Cards Scheme - Benefits Overview tentatively suggested this could happen a couple of years back), but it’s not something that has previously been pushed by senior ministers.*

Characteristically, Blair and his delusional wonks find themselves unable to put forward this unfeasible scheme without falsifying the data. Blair talks of “fingerprints found at the scene of some 900,000 unsolved crimes”, when actually the 900,000 is the total of crime-scene marks found at scenes of unsolved crimes. That means the total number of crimes covered will be lower, and indistinct prints together with the headache of matching scene-of-crime prints to NIR prints reduce the number further.

And how would they do it, anyway? Fingerprints taken for biometric ID systems aren’t particularly compatible with the fingerprint systems historically used in criminal justice systems. The point of an ID fingerprint system is primarily to confirm the identity of a known individual, comparing a standard format fingerprint previously gathered with a real fingerprint presented in a standard way.

Criminal justice, on the other hand, needs to be able to deal with partial fingerprints and indistinct marks, and to have systems in place to support one to many searches. This explains the historical use of ‘rolled’ prints, which record a greater area of print. The kind of print recorded by criminal justice systems has been changing, but it clearly isn’t possible to get burglars to leave prints under controlled conditions.

Automated one to many searches of the NIR for the purposes of identifying individuals are possible (necessary, in that checking your ID against the NIR is one of things it says on the tin), but they’re far less feasible when it comes to scene of crime marks. Parts of this process can be automated to some extent, but the machines will miss some and throw up many false matches, so human expertise of the sort already used by police will be necessary, on a far larger scale. You’ll possibly also have noted that even the inflated figure of 900,000 for unsolved crimes seems rather low - yes that’s right, it’s by no means standard practice for police to send round the fingerprint squad to scenes of crime.

Logically, in Blair’s Wonderworld of Criminal Justice, police showing up at scenes of crime will as a matter of course scan it (um, with what?) for prints, and then compare the images with the NIR in real time (er, how?) in order to discover… Yes, that this particular set of fuzzy images unearthed at Anwar’s Doughnut Bar might have been left by any one of several thousand of the 60 million people on the NIR. The Boys in Blue are going to love this gear, which doesn’t even exist yet (mobile fingerprint readers do, but these are for taking prints off real people).

We shouldn’t leave this demented scheme without noting that the production of matches that will pass muster in a court of law will still require the presence of the traditional fingerprint squad at the scene of the crime. And if police do start to make routine automated checks at scenes of crime then we’re going to need a lot more traditional squads to chase down the leads, so more specialists would be needed at this end of the process as well.

Petition signatories are unlikely to be convinced by this or any of the other claims made in the Blair email. No2ID debunks these here, and National Coordinator Phil Booth comments: “The PM’s claims on this subject are not exactly lies, so much as fact-free. Endlessly repeating a fabrication doesn’t make it real, Mr Blair.”

The repetition of the claim that identity fraud costs £1.7bn annually is however particularly worth noting. The £1.7bn figure has, as No2ID points out, been discredited by Andrew Gilligan and Andy McCue of Silicon, and is itself based on the Cabinet Office’s 2002 study which we analysed here.

Bear in mind that the £1.7bn simply tags a few numbers onto the 2002 ones, and that the claim that it was “a one-off exercise using the same methodology as the 2002 Cabinet Office Study” is wildly misleading. The 2002 study itself did little more than take a guess at the order of magnitude of ID fraud, and at how ID fraud might be defined (ID theft? ID fraud? ID-related crime? Credit card theft? Who knows?).

One thing that was clear from the 2002 study was that further work would be needed to provide a clear definition of what we mean by ID fraud, and consequently take us closer to making a realistic estimate of what it might cost. The Government was so interested in this in 2002 that it conducted no further studies, and didn’t even bother to update and expand the data contained in the 2002 report. It did say “£1.3bn” a lot until 2006, when it chucked some more numbers into the pile of aging stats and started saying “£1.7bn” instead. And there they go again. “Yours sincerely, Tony Blair”, sic.

* Claiming surprise in response to journalists’ questions earlier today, the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesperson said the fingerprint trawl (which is not a trawl, honest) had previously been referred to in several places. These included the Identity Cards Act 2006 itself, and an article ‘written by’ Tony Blair in the Telegraph in November 2006.

The reference in the Act appears, we think, under Registration in section 4, where registrable facts about individuals may be verified in the public interest, with “the interests of national security”, and “prevention or detection of crime” being the defined areas of public interest that would appear to be relevant in this instance. We’ve no idea how we could have missed it.

The Telegraph piece, according to the PMOS, “explicitly discussed precisely what he said in response to the e-petition on ID cards”. Which indeed it did. Which we suppose just goes to show that nobody at all, not even Telegraph journalists, read articles ‘by’ Tony Blair in the Telegraph. Reading it now, however, it does look rather like Tony’s minions just grabbed the old text, chopped out the wackier stuff about DNA, CCTV and fingerprint verified payments, and bunged it out to all the ID card protestors. Nice to see they put such thought into interacting with the electorate on the Electronic Highway…