BREAKING: Discover How A Slacker Makes $100,000 A Year!

WEBMASTERS! Get Your Website To The Top Of Google

World Renowned Security Expert Slams ID Cards

Saturday, July 7th, 2007

Indymedia

Security Expert Bruce Schneier says the problem with ID Cards is that they will make Identity theft easier, resulting in a nastier crime with a lot more Dame to individuals.

In an interview conducted by Personal Computer Magazine `PC Answers`, world renowned security expert Bruce Schneier hit out at the idea of having a Identity Card as being the worst possible solution to personal and national security.

Highly respected Bruce Schneier started his career in understanding the mathematics of encryption to protect computer systems and data. Understanding this is just one element in the field of security as he went on to explore the relationship between humans and computers and what influences would affect even the security expert.

Having written several famous books e.g. Secrets & Lies and Beyond Fear, Bruce today as founder and CTO of BT Counterpane is clearly an interested party in making sure the business world does not suffer in relationship to Banking or even to Terrorism.

These credential in the field of security stand out as he lays bare the problem of having an Identity Card, as he makes clear “ these cards will make identity theft easier “ resulting in a much “nastier crime” with a “ lot more damage being done to you” than just using the conventional methods of protection of data through encryption.

In explaining at what is at the bottom of the problem Bruce explains that the two deciding factors that make ID Cards useless, lies first in the fact that identity information is easily obtained and secondly that it becomes valuable once obtained.

As a solution to Identity Theft, Bruce explains that the answer lies within making personal information harder to get and to use. For instance in the US it is easy to get a credit card on the most basic of personal information about a person, whereas in Europe this information is not the deciding factor.

Truncating his argument is very much the suggestion that many Myths have to be dispelled especially in regard to the provision of Security through the ID Card and the debate around the idea that this will also protect Privacy, which he puts down as a complete load of nonsense.

Here Bruce asks you to think of security measures that work and as an example he puts forward a Door Lock and a Wall. Of these two methods that have now been implemented in the protection of planes from high-jacking it is the cockpit door that has been reinforced and passengers that have been convinced to fight back that provide security. Each security solution here has nothing to do with privacy or identity.

The ID Card thus as a means of Security is flawed to such an extent that its use of identity as the Wall/Door is compromised instantly, whereas identity should be seen to be behind the Wall/Door hidden and protected from being faked. If there is any conclusion to be made, the certainty of any implementation of ID Cards and failure in any part will devastate hundreds of thousands of lives, just as a Door left wide open that will allow an artic to roll through it destroying every bit of your Life & Personal Finances.

Have Your Say: World Renowned Security Expert Slams ID Cards
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

The Sustainable Soldier Takes to the Streets! In Your Car?

Saturday, July 7th, 2007

By Brent Jessop
RINF Alternative News
Knowledge Driven Revolution.com

Let me share a little story before I get into a new government plan that will save you money (can you spot the oxymoron?). About a year ago I went to a presentation at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada given by someone directly trained by Al Gore. According to the presenter (a grown man with family), he applied (written essay and all) and was accepted to travel to the southern US with a bunch of other like minded folk to learn how to give the famous presentation from ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. These well trained Sustainable Soldiers (my term not theirs) then give presentations back home in their respective communities to anyone who will listen.

The presentation was nothing special, your typical global warming fear mongering and kindergarten simple science (especially the Al Gore version). But one thing that he did mention was that he made the decision to drive slower on major freeways to further reduce his ‘carbon footprint’. And he didn’t care how many cars or trucks passed him.

Other then the inside joke when we passed a slow moving vehicle, that was the end of my Sustainable Soldier experience.

Drive Slow Children

The Globe and Mail reports:

“Ontario Transportation Minister Donna Cansfield has proposed new rules that would force large commercial vehicles - weighing at least 12,000 kilograms - to use electronic limiters to cap speeds at 105 kilometres an hour.”

…

“Many of the larger trucking companies operating in Ontario use speed limiters - microchips which regulate a vehicle’s top speed - in part for the economic and environmental benefits, as well as the increased safety factor. Vehicles use less fuel when they slow down”

So there it is. What the Sustainable Soldier does voluntarily the truckers with be forced to do. Of course, it is for their own good, all that money they will save. Unless they get paid by the kilometer, then it will take them that much longer for the same pay. Or worse still, imagine a refrigerated truck in the middle of July. Think how much more energy will get used in the slower haul, especially after global warming really gets going. Never mind, 105 km/hr is optimal for everyone. Big brother knows best. Besides, how could you leave such a decision to the individual?

So how long will it be until your car is governed at an environmentally acceptable speed?

Have Your Say: The Sustainable Soldier Takes to the Streets! In Your Car?
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

‘More than 150′ dead in Iraq blast

Saturday, July 7th, 2007

More than 150 people have been killed by a lorry bomb in a crowded market in the northern Iraqi village of Amirli, an Iraqi military commander told Al Jazeera.

Many homes in the small community were destroyed when a suicide bomber detonated a powerful bomb on a lorry loaded with bricks, security and administration officials said on Saturday.

Hamad Rasheed, a local civilian administrator, said: “Some 40 homes, 20 shops and 10 vehicles were destroyed.

“The corpses were under the debris of the collapsed buildings. Some were burnt and others were torn apart.

“This is a big disaster for the town, all of the casualties were civilians,” he added.

Corpses

Ambulances and private cars ferried dozens of corpses and wounded civilians to nearby clinics and hospitals in where relatives waited for news of the missing.

Dr Wissam Abdullah, the director of a local hospital said the dead and wounded had been taken to an emergency room at his hospital in Tuz Khurmatu, to two hospitals in Kirkuk and two more as far away as the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah.

Lieutenant colonel Saman Hamid, security forces commander in nearby Tuz Khurmatu, told the AFP news agency, “there are more than 250 wounded.”

“I heard the cries of my child, then I heard nothing else until I woke in hospital,” Sukaina Abdul Razak, whose clay brick home collapsed when the bomb went off, said.
  
“I don’t know the fate of my husband and my family. They were all in the kitchen, but I was in my room.”

‘Smoke and dust’

Shrapnel from the explosion killed shoppers hundreds of metres from ther bomb, Hussein Abu Al-Hussein Akbar Aziz said.
  
“We have never seen an attack like that in Amirli. The whole village was shrouded in smoke and dust,” he said. “I was serving a woman and her child in my shop. They were both killed.”

Earlier reports had put the death toll at about 20 people.

It was the second attack on a village in the north of the country in the last 24 hours. 

Late on Friday a suicide car bomber killed 22 people and wounded 17 others when he drove his vehicle into a group of Shia Kurds near Iraq’s border with Iran.

The victims were returning from a funeral, a local official said.

In another attack, six people were killed, including five Iraqi soldiers, when a car bomb was driven into a military checkpoint in east Baghdad, an army spokesman said. The attack also wounded 24 people, including 18 soldiers.
  
US soldiers killed

Meanwhile, the US military announced the deaths of six troops in the past three days, mostly victims of roadside bombs in Baghdad.

Three soldiers were killed by the devices in Baghdad on Friday and another on Saturday. Two Marines were killed in combat in Anbar province, the US military said.

So far this month 20 soldiers have been killed, half of them in Baghdad.

Overnight, a mortar killed seven members of a family in Baghdad as they slept on their roof, police said.

Constant power outages often force Iraqis to sleep on the roof of their homes to try and escape sweltering summer temperatures inside.

Police said the mortar bomb that killed seven family members in the mostly Sunni neighbourhood of Fadhil in central Baghdad also wounded two neighbours.

Agencies

Have Your Say: ‘More than 150′ dead in Iraq blast
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

7/7 Bombing victims still waiting for compensation

Saturday, July 7th, 2007

By Nicola Boden

More than 120 victims injured in the July 7 bombings are still waiting for full compensation two years on from the attacks, it was revealed yesterday.

The Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority (CICA) has not yet resolved a fifth of claims made in relation to the attacks in London in 2005 which killed 52 and injured thousands.

A spokesman conceded 126 of 614 cases are still outstanding, amid claims survivors had been forgotten and were struggling to deal with such an impenetrable, unwieldy compensation system.

On the eve of the bombings’ second anniversary lawyer Thelma Stober, who lost her leg in the explosion on the Circle line train at Aldgate, said: “We are the forgotten people.”

The 35-year-old has received £33,000 - the maximum value for the loss of a limb below the knee - but is still trying to get compensation for the rest of her injuries.

She told the Evening Standard: “I have got to the stage where even though I am a lawyer and I am used to dealing with large documentation and complicated forms I am so fed up with it.”

She added: “I would have been better off if I had been knocked down by a bus or a car.”

CICA dismissed the idea it had been waiting on cases for two years as “very misleading” and said applications were even now still coming in.

A spokesman said: “There are 126 out of 614 outstanding according to the latest figures we have but we are still receiving applications.

“We have had 47 so far this year and seven in the past week. To give the impression that the CICA has been waiting on cases for two years is very misleading.”

He added that the outstanding cases were the most serious ones which involved complicated loss of earnings calculations and working out how much future care will be necessary.

“They are really not delays from our perspective. We have been in touch with every single outstanding applicant in June to say this is what we still need from you… We could not be doing any more,” the spokesman added.

He conceded there was a “certain inevitability” about some of the delays but said the authority was always looking how to make the process as easy as possible.

It has given out £4.2 million in total since July 7 and £1.2 million in the past year alone which has seen it resolve 91 cases, he added.

July 7 campaigner Rachel North, who survived the Russell Square Piccadilly Line bombing which killed 26 people, wants the system improved for all victims seeking compensation.

She said: “It is not just the July 7 victims who struggle with bureaucracy in the face of disaster. The CICA is an unwieldy, bureaucratic system.

“I hope that by raising this issue, people who have the power to make things easier for victims of crime might look at how they can make it more supportive and smooth-running.”

People struck by disaster were being asked to fill out complex application forms at a hugely challenging time for them and needed more support, she argued.

She said: “It is a very complicated system - and it is the system and process itself, not the people working it. It is a very weighty and difficult way of working because people have to prove that they are a victim repeatedly and endlessly.

“It is very upsetting for them because people want to get closure. The criminal injuries money is not supposed to make everything right again because it cannot possibly do that but it is supposed to be an expression of support.

“You do not tend to feel very supported if you are still waiting to get something that you would have thought at the time would be administered in months rather than years.”

Have Your Say: 7/7 Bombing victims still waiting for compensation
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Caught on CCTV: the police sergeant who said Somalian needed ‘a good beating’

Saturday, July 7th, 2007

· Scotland Yard caught up in new race row
· Community worker derided as ‘low life’

Diane Taylor and Hugh Muir
Saturday July 7, 2007
The Guardian

By the time Fahmi Hassan was settled into his police cell, having been accused of assaulting a police officer, the atmosphere was highly charged.His request for a cigarette was rejected out of hand as was his attempt to plead his case with a senior officer. The exchanges were sharp if predictable.

But this week the case of Fahmi Hassan plunged Scotland Yard into a race row as previously confidential surveillance tapes emerged revealing what officers were saying privately about the Somalian youth worker as he languished in his cell.

On the tape, which the Guardian has seen, one clearly agitated supervisory officer says Mr Hassan has “lots of wants, lots of needs, lots of arrogance; nothing a good beating wouldn’t put right. Knows his rights, knows the law.”

The 23-year-old British born community worker is derided as an “arrogant shit” and an “obnoxious Somalian”.

An officer tells colleagues in the custody suite that the prisoner is “an absolute knobhead”. The sergeant adds: “There is a great film. Have you seen the film Black Hawk Down about an American helicopter that gets shot down in Somalia? Mogadishu. It is based on the truth. It is when the Americans very foolishly went into Somalia to suppress the warlords. There is no one in charge in Somalia. It’s just tribal factions. There’s no bugger in charge in Somalia.

“He’s a Somalian. They are very violent people I think. If you think about it, the ones who got out of Somalia are either the middle classes with money or the kids with guns. It’s that type of environment.”

Later, discussing the time when Mr Hassan should be permitted to see a police doctor, the officer says: “he’s a piece of low life”. He goes on to say: “Because he is a complainer I want him seen by a doctor. He’s an obnoxious Somalian. I’m sure there must be nice Somalians but he’s an obnoxious … didn’t want to see the doctor, now he wants to see the doctor. Fuck him.”

Mr Hassan, a volunteer with a group which aims to keep youngsters away from drugs and crime, is suing the Met alleging that he was wrongfully arrested, assaulted and maliciously prosecuted following his arrest in north London in 2005.

No drugs were found on him and he was cleared at a magistrates court last year of assaulting a police officer. The youth worker claims the supervisory officer set the tone for how he was treated by others at the police station where he says he was manhandled, humiliated and suffered racial abuse. The Met was legally obliged to hand over hours of tape from the custody suite as part of the civil action process.

Mr Hassan, who first viewed the tape on Monday, said he was shocked to hear the comments. “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I was frustrated because I was trying to say that I had been wrongfully arrested. I had done nothing wrong. You just can’t make up lies about people and arrest them. Imagine being holed up in a cell when you haven’t done anything wrong.”

Dan Rubinstein, his solicitor, said the tape showed clear stereotyping and that his client’s treatment was influenced by the allegation officers had made against him.

“What is clear is that back at the police station, the custody officer didn’t bother to look at the issue dispassionately,” he said. “They automatically took the arresting officer’s version of events as the truth whereas their job is to query the evidence. The custody sergeant’s duty is to ensure the welfare and safety of the person detained. This case gives me very little confidence in their ability to do that.”

The tapes reveal conversations in the custody suite that are alternately comic and disturbing. As Mr Hassan, who has previous drug possession convictions, sits in his cell, officers discuss subjects ranging from “black on black shootings” to the quality of Babybel processed cheese.

After fingerprinting him, officers discuss Mr Hassan’s request for a cigarette. “Assaulted police? And then he wants a fag?” the supervisory officer says. “A cigarette after he’s been very horrible,” adds a PC. “I don’t think so. Put him back in his cell,” says the supervisory officer. “Ooh I love you sometimes,” a WPC chips in.

There are strict rules governing the conduct of officers and their behaviour towards prisoners in custody suites. The role of the custody sergeant was created as part of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, which dictates how detainees should be treated and how long they can be held. The custody sergeant is a powerful figure because they carry the legal responsibility for prisoners in their care.

A spokeswoman for the Met confirmed that legal proceedings had been initiated and said the force would defend itself against Mr Hassan’s claim.

Have Your Say: Caught on CCTV: the police sergeant who said Somalian needed ‘a good beating’
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Much of US favors Bush impeachment: poll

Saturday, July 7th, 2007

Nearly half of the US public wants President George W. Bush to face impeachment, and even more favor that fate for Vice President Dick Cheney, according to a poll out Friday.

The survey by the American Research Group found that 45 percent support the US House of Representatives beginning impeachment proceedings against Bush, with 46 percent opposed, and a 54-40 split in favor when it comes to Cheney.

The study by the private New Hampshire-based ARG canvassed 1,100 Americans by telephone July 3-5 and had an error margin of plus or minus three percentage points. The findings are available on ARG’s Internet site.

The White House declined to comment on the poll, the latest bad news for a president who has seen his public opinion standings dragged to record lows by the unpopular war in Iraq.

The US Constitution says presidents and vice presidents can be impeached — that is, formally charged by the House — for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” by a simple majority vote.

Conviction by the Senate, which requires a two-thirds majority, means removal from office.

Just two US presidents have been impeached: Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998 and acquitted in 1999; Andrew Johnson was impeached and acquitted in 1868. Disgraced president Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 when a House impeachment vote appeared likely.

In late April, left-wing Representative Dennis Kucinich, a long-shot Democratic presidential hopeful, introduced a resolution calling for Cheney’s impeachment. To date, the measure has nine listed co-sponsors and a 10th set to sign on when the House returns to work next week.

But Democratic leaders appear unlikely to pursue such a course.

AFP

Have Your Say: Much of US favors Bush impeachment: poll
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

In France, a senior pol dares to question the 9/11 tale

Saturday, July 7th, 2007

Today, nearly six years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, does anyone doubt the Bush administration and the mass media’s grand narrative about just who was responsible for those shocking, sudden, well-coordinated and super-destructive events?

AP

France’s Minister of Housing and Urban Affairs, Christine Boutin (left), with her boss, President Nicolas Sarkozy

Well, yes.

For starters, on the strength of irrefutable evidence, the whole world has rejected George W. Bush, Jr. and Dick Cheney’s repeated insinuations - which they used as a excuse to start the U.S.-led Iraq war - that the government of former dictator Saddam Hussein was somehow behind the attacks. That claim didn’t square with the evidence that Al-Qaeda was responsible, since the terrorist organization led by Osama bin Laden was not operating in Iraq at the time. In any case, today, still, there are some observers who doubt the established, now-familiar media story about the historic attacks that Team Bush seized upon to launch an aimless “war on terror.” Apparently, one of them has landed a high-ranking government job in the cabinet of France’s new president, Nicolas Sarkozy.

That Doubting Thomas is Christine Boutin, France’s new minister of housing and urban affairs.

ReOpen911, a France-based Web site devoted to investigating what took place in New York, Washington, D.C., and a field in Pennsylvania on that fateful day in 2001, and whatever events might have led up to it, is now featuring a video clip shot in November of last year in which Boutin - at that time still not a cabinet minister - is asked: “Do you think that Bush could [have been] behind these attacks?”

Boutin responds: “I think that it’s possible.”

Two 9/11-questioning bloggers and Karl Zéro, a French TV presenter/personality, take part in the interview/conversation recorded in the video clip. In it, however, Boutin goes on to clearly explain why she might hold this view. It’s because, she says, of the numerous Web sites on which “masses” of ordinary citizens, in a serious manner, have been asking and continue to ask questions and to present evidence related to 9/11 that may lead one to doubt the established, media account of the events. Boutin says: “I know that the sites that speak of this problem are the sites that have the greatest numbers of visits….And so, I tell myself, I who am extremely sensitive…to the new techniques of information and communication, that this expression of the mass of the people cannot be without any truth.” (From ReOpen911, quoted by Le Monde)

Le Monde reports that the complete version of this same video, from which the brief extract that appears on the ReOpen911 Web site was taken, can be found on Karl Zéro’s Web site. In the longer version of the interview, the newspaper reports, one hears Boutin go on to say: “I’m not telling you that I adhere to that position” - to the idea, that is, that the Bush administration could have or did have anything to do with the planning or execution of the 9/11 attacks - “but let’s say that, nevertheless, I’m questioning myself a bit on this question.”

Stephen Chernin/AP

Workers searched for victims in the rubble of the World Trade Center, New York, two months after the September 11, 2001 attacks

A spokesman for Boutin has criticized ReOpen911’s presentation on its Web site of a “truncated” version of Karl Zéro and the two bloggers’ now months-old interview/conversation with her, which, the spokesman said, only serves to stir up “a polemic.” Boutin’s statement in the complete interview - when she says, “I’m not telling you that I adhere to that position” - makes it clear that she is not buying into any sort of conspiracy theory about the September 11, 2001 events, the spokesman pointed out. His boss’s months-old remarks aren’t worth whipping up into a scandal, he added. After all, as a cabinet-level member of Sarkozy’s government, Boutin deals with housing and domestic concerns in France’s cities. Her spokesman noted: “She isn’t the minister of foreign affairs!”

© 2007 Hearst Communications Inc.

Have Your Say: In France, a senior pol dares to question the 9/11 tale
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Talking CCTV arrives in Railway Village

Saturday, July 7th, 2007

By Sarah Hilley

THE Railway Village is likely to join Penhill as one of the first areas to get talking CCTV.

Residents came face to face with the town’s own Big Brother today at the Central Community Centre.

But there were mixed reactions to its possible deployment.

The black swivelling sphere-shaped camera allows council staff at the Waterside CCTV station to see all with a 360-degree view.

The camera will be attached to a lamppost with microphones placed around it.

It barked out warnings yesterday to bemused spectators and reprimanded Coun David Renard, who dropped a piece of litter to test out the technology.

It scolded: “Will the gentleman with the red jacket please refrain from throwing chewing gum.”

Council policy and regeneration manager Mark Walker said the cameras are likely to be deployed in the Railway Village and Fleet Street area.

If the council is contacted about a problem in a certain area, the camera will be set up there.

“Our CCTV camera operators can use the system more proactively if people are acting in a suspicious manner. It will issue a warning that will stop them in the first place,” he said.

The council has ordered three cameras, which are expected to arrive in two weeks and they will be deployed straight away.

One of the advantages is they can be moved rapidly from place to place because they communicate via a wireless network.

The council is also considering placing them on cars allowing the streets to be patrolled.

Resident Noreen Wise, 75, feared the talking camera would create noise pollution.

“If the cameras shout in the middle of the night, it will wake us up,” she said.

“Would you like a thing booming in the middle of the night?”

Rosemany Chatfield, 55, of Faringdon Road, believes the extra CCTV will help elderly people feel safer.

She said: “It will be safer for the older generation as people over 70 need to feel more secure.”

Company 802 Global is supplying the camera.

“The use of wireless means the cameras can be moved around quickly so they can follow the crime rather than offenders moving away from it,” said sales and marketing director Tim Close.

Coun David Renard said: “We have a significant interest in the area as it is a heritage site and there is an anti-social problem. The CCTV camera is part of our efforts to help. It is a mobile camera, so if there is a problem, we’ll bring it down.”

The talking CCTV showcase was part of a week-long initiative designed to show council tenants what services are available to them.

A repairs amnesty has been running throughout the week, which has seen council maintenance workers carrying out minor repairs to tenants’ homes such as broken windows. The council has also run a rubbish amnesty and safe and clean day to spruce up the area.

Have Your Say: Talking CCTV arrives in Railway Village
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Disappeared: Five Years in Guantanamo

Saturday, July 7th, 2007

In 2001, 19-year-old Murat Kurnaz was an innocent man caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Accused of being a terrorist, he spent five years in Guantanamo before being released — now he’s telling his story.

By Lou Dubose

FIFTEEN AMERICAN SOLDIERS WATCHED over a man, shackled to a seat in the cargo bay of a C-17 Globemaster — the Air Force workhorse that usually moves Abrams tanks, Chinook helicopters or infantry vehicles. Wearing goggles that shut out all light, a soundproof headset and a mask that covered his mouth so he could not speak, spit or bite, the prisoner arrived at Ramstein Air Force Base in Kaiserslautern, Germany, under the tightest security. The plane had burned through 36,000 gallons of jet fuel and had refueled in flight. During the seventeen-hour ride, the prisoner was provided with neither food nor water. Nor was he allowed to stretch his legs or relieve himself.

This was how what had been the world’s greatest democracy when George W. Bush took the presidential oath in 2001 repatriated an innocent man who’d never represented a security threat to the United States. Murat Kurnaz was nineteen when he was taken off a bus in Peshawar, Pakistan. He had, as many first- or second-generation Muslims in Europe do, turned to a religion his family had abandoned when they emigrated from their native land. His religious awakening put him in proximity to Islamic fundamentalists: sufficient justification for detention by American forces, after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, as a supposed member of Al Qaeda.

Kurnaz was twenty-four and had been the last European held at the American prison camp in Cuba when the Globemaster touched down in Kaiserslautern in August 2006. He didn’t know he’d been returned home to Germany until an American enlisted man removed his goggles and he saw three German policemen standing outside the airplane.

“He was dumped on German soil like some sort of alien,” said Bernhard Docke, one of Kurnaz’s attorneys, from the north German city of Bremen.

Murat’s Story

Murat Kurnaz, German born of Turkish parents, could be an expert witness and fact witness for any legislative or judicial procedure that would cast a cold eye on the transgressions of law, the Constitution or the fundamental precepts of human rights perpetrated by George Bush’s terror warriors. Pick your amendment. Fifth: one is not compelled to be a witness against oneself, or deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law. Eighth: protection against cruel and unusual punishment. Fourteenth: the state cannot deprive someone of life, liberty or property without due process.

The habeas corpus statute? For innocent detainees caught up in the sweeps that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, there is no legitimate legal process that can be resorted to. No legal cause of action against the U.S. government. Not even an apology, if you’re released.

“They threw my clothes over the fence,” Kurnaz said in an interview in his lawyer’s office in Bremen. “They told me, get ready to move. I thought to another prison; then I was back in Germany.” That the U.S. soldiers continued to curse and humiliate him during the flight from Guantánamo gave him reason to believe he wasn’t flying home to freedom. “They treated me the same as always,” he said. “Like I was the number one terrorist.”

Kurnaz represents a secondary problem related to the human rights violations occurring in the prison system Donald Rumsfeld situated ninety miles from Key West, beyond the reach of American law. After a prisoner has been subjected to “enhanced interrogation” (a phrase in U.S. military manuals and memos that is a direct translation of verschärfte Vernehmung, a euphemism for torture the Gestapo coined in 1937), you don’t want him returning home to tell his story.

But that’s precisely what Murat Kurnaz has done. His Fünf Jahre meines Lebens: Ein Bericht aus Guantánamo (Five Years of My Life: A Report from Guantánamo), is a straightforward account of his rendition, torture, detention and interrogation by American forces–torture that continued in Guantánamo. It even identifies a few of his tormentors, whose name tags were visible until Major General Geoffrey Miller took command and ordered all American personnel to remove anything that might identify them.

Kurnaz is beginning to appear in public to promote his book, described in the June 7 issue of The Economist as “a Swiftian tale” of a man who “survived by brawn and brains.” On June 19 he was a guest on the TV show Beckamm, Germany’s equivalent of PBS’s Charlie Rose. On the same day in Washington, George Bush’s nomination for the CIA’s general counsel, John Rizzo, spent an hour equivocating before the Senate Intelligence Committee regarding one subject with which Kurnaz has experience: torture.

For one man torture was abstract and theoretical. For the other, it was concrete and immediate.

CIA counsel nominee Rizzo said in response to a question asked by Senator Carl Levin (D-MI): “I’m trying to be responsive . . . without getting into a detailed explanation. We believed then and we have believed throughout this process that the CIA program, as it was conceived, when taken in toto, justifies the conclusion that the program was, from the outset, and remains conducted in a humane fashion.”

Murat Kurnaz was more direct. “In Kandahar,” he said, “they hanged me by my hands.”

A massive, muscular man with a long reddish beard down to his chest and hair pulled back in a ponytail, Kurnaz speaks good, if basic English. He’s a bit of a contradiction: a fundamentalist Muslim who drives a sports car and dresses as though he selects his clothes from GQ ads. His English improved considerably at Guantánamo. Kurnaz reluctantly agrees to interviews with reporters, though he earned a substantial amount of money for two exclusives with Der Stern magazine and a German television network. He tends to end interviews abruptly with the same line.

“I have to stop now.”

From Jail to Justice

There are two Murat Kurnaz narratives. One is found in the paper trail and legal pleadings assembled by his two lawyers, Bernhard Docke in Bremen, Germany, and Baher Azmy from Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey. The other is his personal account of his five years in American custody.

The legal process by which Kurnaz was freed from Guantánamo was, in a sense, irrelevant. It’s not precedent-setting, because there is no effective process that provides detainees access to justice. He is one of very few whose situation was eventually considered by an American court. His case is the best example of why the military tribunals conducting trials at Guantánamo are fundamentally flawed.

In January 2005, Washington, D.C., federal district Judge Joyce Hens Green ruled on Kurnaz’s case, along with the cases of ten other detainees. During his Combat Review Status Hearing in Guantánamo, Kurnaz had appeared before a panel of three military officers. He had no legal representation and was not allowed to see the classified evidence used to declare him a member of Al Qaeda. Before his hearing in Washington, some of the classified evidence used against him was inadvertently declassified and obtained by the Washington Post> It included reports that established that two years earlier, the Command Intelligence Task Force that oversees Guantánamo had concluded there was “no definite link/evidence of detainee having an association with Al Qaeda or making specific threats against the U.S.”

Judge Green reviewed the evidence and found nothing that justified holding Murat Kurnaz in prison. Among the hundreds of pages used to declare him a member of Al Qaeda, the smoking gun was a single document with vague allegations made by an unidentified officer. The judge was disturbed by the fact that Kurnaz, like other detainees, was never permitted to see or rebut the allegations that kept him in a cage in Guantánamo.

During the trial it was also revealed that a friend of Kurnaz’s who was reported to have carried out a suicide bombing in Turkey–another bit of incriminating evidence–was alive and well in Bremen. And that German intelligence officers traveled to Guantánamo to interview Kurnaz and concluded he had not been involved in any terrorist activity in Germany. They even tried, at one point, to recruit him to return to Bremen and work undercover for them in the mosque he attended before going to Pakistan to study Islam. They later concluded he was so unconnected–and unsophisticated–he would be of no use to them as a snitch.

Yet nothing the judge did would result in his release. Judge Green ruled in his favor, devoting a number of pages in her 75-page opinion (some redacted) to the government’s sloppy prosecution and lack of evidence against this man. But the heart of her ruling was that the process was basically illegal. The ruling was stayed, pending a decision at the appellate level. And after the trial, the then-Republican Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, which included a controversial provision by Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) that denyed all detainees the right to file habeas corpus petitions. The habeas corpus right that Judge Green had provided as an avenue out of Guantánamo was stripped away by Congress.

Kurnaz was released only because Azmy and his colleague in Germany, Bernhard Docke, took his case to the court of public opinion in Germany. Their skillful use of the media persuaded German chancellor Angela Merkel to prevail on George Bush to release Kurnaz. Merkel raised the issue on her first visit to the White House in January 2006. The irony was evident: the Conservative chancellor who defeated Social Democrat Gerhard Schroeder, who had led a “red-green” coalition and was Europe’s most strident critic of Bush’s Iraq War, had delivered a German resident from Guantánamo, after Schroeder had allowed him to languish there for years.

“No one gets out of Guantánamo by any legal process,” Azmy said. “Because there is none.”

Counter-attack

It’s now clear that the administration’s attempt to maintain a detention center beyond the reach of U.S. law has failed. Eleven district judges have ruled against Guantánamo. There have been adverse rulings by the Supreme Court. And on June 4, two military judges in Guantánamo ruled that two detainees on trial were not properly designated “unlawful enemy combatants.” A week later, a three-judge panel on the federal appeals court in Richmond, VA, ruled that the President cannot designate civilians who are in this country “enemy combatants” and order the military to hold them indefinitely. The ruling pertained to a citizen of Qatar arrested in 2001in Illinois, where he was a computer science student. A mid-June campaign by high-level White House staffers to begin planning to close Guantánamo was stopped by Dick Cheney. But there are enough stand-up judges to put Bush’s squalid extra-judicial prison out of business. Or It will be done by the Congress in 2009, if no President Giuliani or Thompson is in office to veto it.

Kurnaz’s five-year detention brings up another grave issue, one that the courts and the Congress have largely avoided. It was briefly addressed on June 19 at the Senate Intelligence Committee meeting, when committee chair John Rockefeller (D-WV) questioned John Rizzo. Rockefeller asked Rizzo about the memo Jay Bybee wrote at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in August 2002. (Bybee is now a Federal Appeals Court judge.) The memo, written in collaboration with John Yoo and widely known as the “Torture Memo,” redefined torture as an act that inflicts pain equivalent in intensity “to the pain accompanying serious physical injury such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.”

Rizzo told Rockefeller he initially thought the expanded definition of torture was acceptable. The memo was later repudiated by the Office of Legal Counsel, but it was written both to expand the legal definition of torture and to provide cover for CIA agents pushing the envelope to the extreme limits described in the memo. Rockefeller pursued a second line of questioning, one that human-rights and personal-injury lawyers should be considering regarding cases like that of Murat Kurnaz. The senator asked Rizzo if he was aware of CIA agents’ concerns that they could be exposed to criminal prosecution for their involvement in the interrogation program. Rizzo said yes.

Murat Kurnaz was picked up in Pakistan in December 2001, before then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales signed off on the torture memo. Kurnaz and hundreds of others were subjected to “illegal torture” (what a concept) before Bybee and Yoo drafted a memo that would protect the torturers from prosecution. The expanded legal definition of torture in their memo doesn’t provide cover for those agents who tortured Kurnaz immediately after he was detained.

“The beatings began as soon as I was turned over to the Americans,” Kurnaz said. Once in the Americans’ hands, he was transferred to a camp at Kandahar, in Afghanistan, where suspected terrorists were held in tents. His account of his torture at the hands of the Americans–in his book and in interviews–is clear-eyed and consistent. He has repeated it in testimony before a committee of the German parliament, where he was described as a “very credible witness.”

In the prison camp in Kandahar, Kurnaz said, he was hoisted on chains and was forced to hang by his hands while he was being interrogated. He was left hanging for “hours and days” after the interrogators left. An American physician in camouflage would come and check his vital signs to determine if he could withstand more enhanced interrogation.

The doctor’s house call must have failed Kurnaz’s neighbor in the next room. “They were hanging me and pulled me up higher than the other times. I could see the man in the other room. He was hanging, too. Maybe they lifted him higher that time, too, I don’t know. I had heard him moaning and breathing; this is the first time I saw him. He was dead. The color of his body was changed and I could see he was dead.”

Kurnaz said he was also subjected to waterboarding and electric shock. And that beatings were routine and constant. He theorizes that much of the torture was a result of the failure of the American soldiers and agents to capture any real terrorists in the initial sweeps. (He was told that he was sold to the Americans for $3,000 by Pakistani police, who identified him as a terrorist.) “They didn’t have any big fish. And they thought that by torture they could get one of us to say something. ‘I know Osama’ or something like that. Then they could say they had a big fish.”

The German government is still conducting a parliamentary inquiry into its complicity in the Kurnaz case. Ultimately Kurnaz may have a legal cause of action to seek some reparations from his government. As for the U.S. regime, the Bush administration’s attempt to create a unitary presidency that uses war to justify executive powers never imagined by the men who negotiated our Constitution has been unmasked, and the Bush-Cheney presidency is in its last throes. When it is gone, or even before it packs up and moves on, some plaintiff will likely find legal counsel and a forum in which to litigate these issues.

In such a case, Kurnaz’s book and testimony will be useful. He’s written a primer on rendition, incarceration and torture. It’s being translated by a U.S. publisher for a January release. It’s not Solzhenitsyn, but it’s a gripping account of life in an American gulag.

Movie rights have been sold in the U.S.

Have Your Say: Disappeared: Five Years in Guantanamo
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

FSB launches criminal case on officer’s claim to spy for MI6-1

Saturday, July 7th, 2007

The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) has completed an inquiry into an ex-security officer’s claim on spying for the British intelligence and launched a criminal case on espionage charges, the FSB press service said Saturday.Last week FSB said the alleged spy Vyacheslav Zharko had disclosed the names of four British intelligence officers, and given locations in Europe where meetings had taken place, including information regarding the assignments he had been given.

“We have inquired into the matter and received enough information, which indicates that between 2003 and 2007 British SIS officers recruited him and later used as an agent for spying to the detriment of Russian Federation’s security,” the FSB said in a statement.

Zharko turned to the FSB following May 31 news conference given by another former security officer Andrei Lugovoi, who accused Russia’s fugitive tycoon Boris Berezovsky of working for British intelligence.

Berezovsky, now living in Britain, has denied contact with British intelligence. “The British intelligence services know only too well that I am not listed on any organization, including MI6,” Berezovsky said in response to Lugovoi’s accusations.

Lugovoi was accused by the Crown Prosecution Service on May 22 of murdering former Russian security officer Alexander Litvinenko, who had fled to the U.K. in 2000, claiming his life was in danger after refusing an order to assassinate his patron Berezovsky.

Though Litvinenko is thought to have been poisoned with radioactive Polonium-210, no official autopsy report has so far been made available. Lugovoi has vehemently denied the accusations against him claiming they are politically motivated.

http://en.rian.ru/world/20070707/68533362.html

Have Your Say: FSB launches criminal case on officer’s claim to spy for MI6-1
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

South African Police ‘rotten to the core’

Saturday, July 7th, 2007

By Melanie Peters

A former police inspector with 17 years’ experience was jailed for firearm fraud. Now he has admitted that was just one of a myriad crimes he committed while a police officer.

They included pimping prostitutes, car hijacking and raiding drug dens only to sell off the merchandise to rival dealers.

In a week in which shocking police crime statistics showed the Western Cape was still the South African crime capital, Liza Grobler, an expert who interviewed a number of police officers in the province jailed for a variety of crimes, asked: “How can you expect crime to come down when the police service is rotten to the core?”

In another case she researched, an ex-member of the flying squad who was jailed for murder described how he “moonlighted” as a nightclub bouncer and was a member of the triads - the Chinese mafia. He extorted money from Chinese immigrants, smuggled cocaine, diamonds and shark fins. He turned killer when his gang boss ordered him to “eliminate” a rival gang member.

Grobler, a criminologist, obtain-ed her PhD for her thesis titled “A Criminological Examination of Police Criminality”.

The eight former police offenders she interviewed in jail were from 31 to 42 years old. They had served in the force for up to 21 years. Their ranks ranged from constable to inspector and captain. Their sentences varied from four to 25 years and their crimes from fraud to murder.

Her work has been handed to provincial Police Commissioner Mzwandile Petros and Community Safety MEC Leonard Ramatlakane, in the hope it can be used to help stamp out corruption. But she said she has not “heard a peep” from them.

Grobler has also backed a recent report on the state of policing in the province penned by 15 people including forensic expert David Klatzow and Paul Hoffman, director of the Centre for Constitutional Rights, senior advocates and politicians.

It calls for a commission of inquiry and notes the urgent need to devise joint strategies to improve and protect the police service.

Grobler said: “The extent to which police are involved in criminal activity made my hair stand on end. There are criminals masquerading as police.”

Crimes police were involved in included tipping off dealers or syndicates about pending raids, drugs, assault, murder, vehicle theft and perlemoen syndicates, gangs, bribery, fraud, extortion, theft, rape, tampering with evidence and sabotaging cases by “losing” dockets.

She said most of the police crime was drug- or gang-related. Not only were they using drugs, but also robbed drug dealers. Police would receive a tip from one dealer about another’s shipment, conduct a raid, steal the drugs and then sell them to the first dealer. There were also cases where members would hijack a perlemoen consignment and sell it to rival syndicates.

Police would tip dealers off about a raid for a fee, or take a cash or drug bribe “to turn a blind eye”. Some members would even help transport illegal goods or facilitate a safe passage out of the airport.

She said police who were drug couriers for gangs often got involved with perlemoen smuggling as well.

“The relationship between cops and gangs is a system, but not the kind involving handing over an envelope in the dark,” she said. Gangs recruited police the way they recruited members, identifying officers with leadership potential. They create schemes to hook them.

She said in one case a police officer was renovating his house. The gang leader put R25 000 into his bank account as an anonymous gift, and he used the money. He then got roped into doing “favours” for the gang. But she said the gangsterism link could start with small things, like providing police with meat and alcohol for a party at the station.

She was told police braais of this kind were common at one station in a gang-ridden area. It was also common practice to pilfer goods from the station’s exhibits store, where all confiscated goods such as drugs and firearms were held.

She said there were police involved with most syndicates - vehicle theft, cash-in-transit heists, hijackings and the minibus taxi industry. “They said heists are orchestrated by ex-MK soldiers.”

Police involvement in registering stolen vehicles and issuing clearance certificates without seeing the car was rife. A former police officer told her how “he wore a balaclava and helped hijack a car from a woman motorist”.

Have Your Say: South African Police ‘rotten to the core’
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

RFID in Student Phones

Saturday, July 7th, 2007

The Pennsylvania university is giving out passive 13.56 MHz RFID tags to attach to mobile phones, allowing attendees to pay for a range of goods and services, both on campus and off.

By Claire Swedberg

Starting in August, Slippery Rock University’s 8,500 students and faculty members will each receive a passive 13.56 MHz RFID tag they can attach to their cell phones. This tag will allow them to pay for everything from laundry and copier services to movies and groceries in the surrounding town of Slippery Rock, located about 50 minutes north of Pittsburgh.

Payment card solutions company Heartland Payment Systems is providing the RFID system, which uses near-field communication (NFC) technology and complies with the ISO 14443 standard.

Robert Smith

Slippery Rock students can currently make purchases by means of photo ID cards, which contain a magnetic stripe encoded with each user’s ID number. The students already use their ID cards to pay for goods and services at the school. Upon enrolling at the university, students open a Rock Dollar FDIC-insured bank account, in which they (or their parents) can deposit spending money. The ID card’s mag-stripe can be swiped at point-of-sale terminals or vending machines, with the money automatically deducted from the Rock Dollar account.

Students can go online at any time to track their spending and, if they so desire, allow their parents the same access. Their parents can then see where the money is being spent, and add money to the account.

The school is adopting the RFID system to enable students to spend money even if they leave their wallet and ID card at home. “We wanted to provide additional services to our students,” says Robert Smith, president of Slippery Rock University, “and we’ve always taken a certain pride in the fact that we are technologically sophisticated on our campus.” Prior to the deployment of the system, Smith spoke with Heartland’ manager of IT, Barry Welsch, regarding a contactless payment solution. Welsch suggested one based on near-field communication.

NFC readers require a tag to be very close to an interrogator—within a few centimeters—to capture its ID number. As such, NFC can be a preferable solution with regard to payment methods, because it offers greater security. The university set up a focus group, polling select students as to their spending behavior. It found the students were more likely to have a cell phone in their pocket than to carry even one dollar in cash.

The resulting solution will be available to students and faculty at the start of the fall semester, in conjunction with the ID cards. Supplied by RFID systems provider On Track Innovations (OTI), the tag is affixed to a cell phone, preferably on the inside cover of the battery compartment. When presented to an RFID interrogator at a merchant’s sales terminal, it transmits an ID number linked to the tag holder’s Rock Dollar account. Heartland is providing RFID-enabled point-of-sale terminals for deployment on the college campus. In addition, Welsch says, the company is signing up merchants in town, and also in neighboring communities.

At the first meeting with merchants, expected to take place next week, Welsch hopes to sign up 50 to 100 merchants initially. Whether on campus or off, he explains, the merchants must purchase the point-of-sale device, manufactured by VeriFone and cabled to an RFID interrogator and PIN keypad made by Heartland. The device will be able to read regular payment media, such as mag-stripe credit cards and student ID cards, as well as RFID tags in cell phones. Welsch estimates the cost of the device will be similar to that of a POS device without the reader: about $500. Merchants must use the specific VeriFone credit-card terminals, with an RFID reader and PIN pad attached. The devices can also accept Visa and MasterCard contactless cards.

Welsch reports that unattended food and beverage vending machines, clothes washers and driers, and photocopiers on campus will each have a Heartland RFID reader installed, which will communicate directly with Heartland’s host system via an Internet connection. Dining halls, the bookstore and other on-campus merchants will use VeriFone POS terminals, in combination with the Heartland interrogators and PIN keypads.

When a student uses the cell-phone NFC option, merchants enter the amount of the transaction and the student “taps” the phone within an inch of the reader, entering a PIN to verify identity. The readers have an Internet connection to a server hosted by Heartland, which verifies the account number of the tag holder, as well as the payment amount, before authorizing the transaction. Once the purchase is complete, the cost is deducted from the owner’s account. Welsch doubts the system will save time on each transaction, but predicts its convenience will be an incentive for students to obtain the tag. “Certainly it is easy technology,” he notes, “and the tag always stays in the consumer’s hand—in this case, it’s a phone.”

According to Welsch, initial interest from Slippery Rock-area merchants has been enthusiastic. Heartland has built the technology and has also provided RFID tags for some university summer-school students. During the fall semester, it is prepared to distribute the tags to all students. The company is also installing 122 readers in vending, laundry and photocopy machines, as well as at on-campus retail facilities.

Although the vendor declines to disclose the price Slippery Rock pays for the RFID tags, Welsch points out that RFID cards and tags typically cost about $1 apiece. The university will make the cards and tags available for free to all its students.

“In the focus-group research, we found that students considered their cell phone a device they would always have with them, and which they expected greater use from,” Smith says. “Originally, we thought of embedding the tags in the phone, but decided to give the plastic card [the existing ID card with mag-strip and photo] and a separate chip with the intent to attach to the phone.” (Technology is not yet available or affordable that would allow the tag to replace the card.) Students use the picture on the card, for example, to verify their identity.

Smith says he already has the chip attached to his own phone, and fully expects most of the faculty and students to do the same. “We already know students are incredibly excited about this,” he states. “We found students want to be able to make a statement about Slippery Rock [and its technology].” By using their phones to make payments in public places, Smith adds, they are making that statement to students of other public universities, who must dig cash or credit cards out of their wallets.

Have Your Say: RFID in Student Phones
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Blair ‘held secret talks with Diana’

Saturday, July 7th, 2007

By Gary Cleland

Diana, Princess of Wales, secretly met Tony Blair to discuss her becoming a global ambassador for Britain, it was claimed last night.

Details of the meetings, which are said to have begun before Mr Blair became prime minister in 1997 and continued when he took office, are due to be revealed in a new book by Alastair Campbell.

The former Labour spin doctor, whose book The Blair Years is to be published on Monday, is said to give details of how the encounters were kept secret to avoid accusations that the princess was interfering in party politics.

Very few people knew of the meetings, but the Queen was apparently informed by Mr Blair to ensure future relations with the monarch were not damaged.

Mr Blair is said to have seen Diana as a worldwide ambassador for Britain and she was said to be taken with the idea and also apparently enjoyed the secrecy of the meetings. The princess was said to have been interested in performing a role for Britain overseas, just before her death in 1997.

She met Robin Cook, the foreign secretary, and Clare Short, the international development secretary, over the plan to outlaw anti-personnel mines.

Mr Cook paid tribute to her in the House of Commons when a ban on the weapons was passed in 1998.

A source, who claims to have seen Mr Campbell’s diaries, told the Daily Mirror: “Campbell’s diaries tell how Blair and Diana always held their private meetings away from Westminster.

“It’s pretty clear they were discussing some kind of new role for her.

“He thought that she could do a brilliant job as a kind of ambassador abroad for his vision of a modern Britain.

“The princess was intrigued by the idea.

“She liked the image of the country Blair wanted to project and thought that she could make a contribution.

“Diana was very excited about it.”

Have Your Say: Blair ‘held secret talks with Diana’
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Censors order bloggers to use real names on internet

Saturday, July 7th, 2007

Chatroom users will be required to register with their real names after an internet campaign mobilised 10,000 people to join a protest march

By Jane Macartney

Anonymous online postings are to be banned by a city in China, after residents mounted a successful internet campaign against proposals for a huge chemicals factory.

Internet users will have to provide their real names, backed up by data from their identity cards, when posting messages on more than 100,000 websites registered in Xiamen. Authorities are taking action after thousands of residents of the prosperous southern port city marched through the streets, mobilised by mobile phone text messages and an internet-based campaign.

Protesters used their mobile phones to send text reports, as well as photos and videos, to bloggers and websites in other cities, which posted live reports of the march. The local government has suspended construction of the £700 million chemicals plant, pending an investigation into the potential environmental risk.

Tian Feng, vice-director of the Xiamen Bureau of Industry and Commerce, said that a new law, the Measures for Management and Disposition of Harmful and Unhealthy Information on the Internet, would be announced soon by the city government. “All postings must implement a real-name system. We are the first in the country to do this,” Mr Tian said.

The law obliges anyone who wants to chat online to register using their identity card. Moderators of political noticeboards will be required to use their real names, and anonymous comments will be banned. Messages will be vetted before they are posted.

One government official said that the protest had shown the necessity to control content on the internet. He said: “Those who illegally spread harmful or bad information will be detained or fined.”

Internet censorship is common in China, where the Government employs an elaborate system of filters and tens of thousands of human monitors to survey the surfing habits of its 140 million internet users.

Dozens of outspoken journalists and internet commentators are serving lengthy prison terms after being jailed on charges such as subversion or leaking state secrets. Internet cafés are required to inspect and register the identity cards of all users, but this is not widely enforced, particularly outside the larger cities.

Lian Yue — real name Zhong Xiaoyong — a writer and blogger who posted real-time footage of the march on his website, was swift to comment on the planned crackdown on anonymous postings. He wrote: “The awakening of public power can perform a key influential function in environmental protection. That small step for Xiamen’s citizens should have become a giant leap for the progress of environmental protection in China. Unfortunately, some local Xiamen officials perhaps did not see this as an honour, and subconsciously felt that they had lost face.”

The clampdown seems unlikely to deter those people who dare to criticise the Government online or to voice dissenting opinions, since most are already well known to the police, and their actions are carefully monitored. Those involved in Xiamen were not political dissidents, but ordinary citizens anxious to protect the environment of their pretty seaside town, which has become a winter escape for Beijing’s wealthy, and also the value of their homes.

Have Your Say: Censors order bloggers to use real names on internet
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Related News

• ID cards ‘could be a Big Brother tax trap’
• ID Cards Under Fire
• ID cards and the snooper state
• NO2ID: ID Cards are not ‘voluntary’
• Government can’t be trusted with our personal information

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 7th, 2007 at 9:58 pm and is filed under Surveillance, Civil Liberties & Human Rights News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.