The government is backing a project to install a “communication box” in new cars to track the whereabouts of drivers anywhere in Europe, the Guardian can reveal.
Under the proposals, vehicles will emit a constant “heartbeat” revealing their location, speed and direction of travel. The EU officials behind the plan believe it will significantly reduce road accidents, congestion and carbon emissions. A consortium of manufacturers has indicated that the router device could be installed in all new cars as early as 2013.
Details of the Cooperative Vehicle-Infrastructure Systems (CVIS) project, a £36m EU initiative backed by car manufacturers and the telecoms industry, will be unveiled this year.
But the Guardian has been given unpublished documents detailing the proposed uses for the system. They confirm that it could have profound implications for privacy, enabling cars to be tracked to within a metre - more accurate than current satellite navigation technologies.
The European commission has asked governments to reserve radio frequency on the 5.9 Gigahertz band, essentially setting aside a universal frequency on which CVIS technology will work.
The Department for Transport said there were no current plans to make installation of the technology mandatory. However, those involved in the project describe the UK as one of the main “state backers”. Transport for London has also hosted trials of the technology.
The European Data Protection Supervisor will make a formal announcement on the privacy implications of CVIS technology soon. But in a recent speech he said the technology would have “great impact on rights to privacy and data”.
Paul Kompfner, who manages CVIS, said governments would have to decide on privacy safeguards. “It is time to start a debate … so the right legal and privacy framework can be put in place before the technology reaches the market,” he said.
The system allows cars to “talk” to one another and the road. A “communication box” behind the dashboard ensures that cars send out “heartbeat” messages every 500 milliseconds through mobile cellular and wireless local area networks, short-range microwave or infrared.
The messages will be picked up by other cars in the vicinity, allowing vehicles to warn each other if they are forced to break hard or swerve to avoid a hazard.
The data is also picked up by detectors at the roadside and mobile phone towers. That enables the road to communicate with cars, allowing for “intelligent” traffic lights to turn green when cars are approaching or gantries on the motorway to announce changes to speed limits.
Data will also be sent to “control centres” that manage traffic, enabling a vastly improved system to monitor and even direct vehicles.
“A traffic controller will know where all vehicles are and even where they are headed,” said Kompfner. “That would result in a significant reduction in congestion and replace the need for cameras.”
Advice to ministers obtained by the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act advocates upgrading to a more effective car tracking-based system, similar to CVIS technology, but warns such a system could be seen as a “spy in the cab” and “may be regarded as draconian”.
Simon Davies, director of the watchdog Privacy International, said: “The problem is not what the data tells the state, but what happens with interlocking information it already has. If you correlate car tracking data with mobile phone data, which can also track people, there is the potential for an almost infallible surveillance system.”
.
.
The report from the York-based Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust claims to show how, in too many cases, the public are neither served nor protected by the increasingly complex and intrusive holdings of personal information invading every aspect of our lives.
Of the 46 databases considered, the authors conclude only six are broadly acceptable in privacy terms, and more than 10 should be scrapped entirely, including the ID card scheme and the centralisation and sharing of all health records by the National Health Service.
Madeleine Parkyn, co-ordinator for Scarborough NO2ID group, which campaigns against ID cards and the “database state”, said: “This survey reveals just how vast the database state has stealthily grown.
“This obsessive collection and hoarding of our personal data threatens the privacy, personal security and freedom of everyone in this country.”
Scarborough Evening
News
Monday, March 30th, 2009
By Tom Young |
Some 1.4 million new profiles have been added to the DNA database in the past two years – a rise of 38 per cent – according to figures released by the Home Office.
In February 2007 the database contained some 3.7 million profiles. Figures from the Home Office on Friday (27 March 2009) show that number had risen to 5.1 million by January of this year.
The Home Office estimates that both these figures are about 13 per cent above the actual number of people on the database because of duplicate profiles – a result of people giving different names, or different versions of their name, on separate arrests.
Home Office minister Alan Campbell said: “The presence of replicate profiles does not have an impact on the effectiveness and integrity of the database.”
There are profiles of about four million men and more than one million women on the database; four million of the people on the database are white European, 400,000 are black and 280,000 are Asian.
In terms of age, 1.5 million people listed are between 25 and 34, 1.1 million are between 35 and 44, and 730,000 are between 21 and 24.
Have Your Say:
DNA database grows by 38 per cent in two years
Please read our
posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively
you can discuss this report in our forum .
Monday, March 30th, 2009
Increasingly, companies, governments, police and even criminals are seeking the greatest possible access to our private data. The internet provides a previously unimaginable level of access to information about our private lives, which unfortunately, can be abused by companies, intelligence services or even identity thieves. The report highlights action against cybercriminals whilst also guaranteeing fundamental rights to privacy for internet users.
The report adopted with 481 votes in favour, 25 against and 21 abstentions is the first recommendation from MEPs concerning the fight against cybercrime and preserving the rights of internet users. Clearly the internet can be used as an excellent tool for accessing information and allowing connections between individuals and communities all over the world. However, it also has its dangers as it can expose users to surveillance, or even serve as a tool for criminals or terrorists. The main advantage and disadvantage of the internet is that it transcends almost all borders.
Criminalising grooming
Parliament urges Member States to update legislation to protect children using the Internet, in particular in order to criminalise grooming (online solicitation of children for sexual purposes), as defined in the Council of Europe Convention of 25 October 2007 on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse.
MEPs are also concerned with the idea that “e-illiteracy will be the new illiteracy of the 21st Century.” The report argues that in this age, having access to the internet is “equivalent to ensuring that all citizens have access to schooling”, and that this access should not be denied by governments or private companies.
Fundamental freedoms of internet users
There are a number of fundamental rights which are affected by the internet, including “respect for private life…data protection…freedom of speech and association, freedom of press, political expression and participation, non-discrimination and education.” The report calls on Member States to protect these rights by making use of existing national, regional, and international law, and to exchange best practices amongst themselves.
The report recognises that given “the global and open nature of the Internet”, international standards for data protection, security and freedom of speech are required. MEPs call on Member States and the Commission to draw up a series of regulations to protect the privacy of internet users.
Crime, identity theft and terrorism
The nature of the internet also means that it is open to abuse. It has “been used as a platform for violent messages…as well as for websites which can specifically incite hate-based criminal acts.” Cybercrime, in general has also increased, and internet users are at risk of identity theft, if they transmit their personal details across the internet without a minimum level of protection. Therefore, the House calls on the Council and Commission to develop a “comprehensive strategy to combat cybercrime…identity theft and fraud.”
Finally, the report raises the question of consent of internet users, when giving personal information to governments or private companies, and the imbalance of negotiating power between users and institutions. In relation to this, MEPs stress the importance of internet users being able to retain the right to permanently delete any of their personal details saved on “internet websites or on any third party data storage medium.”
Have Your Say:
Security and fundamental freedoms on the Internet
Please read our
posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively
you can discuss this report in our forum .
Monday, March 30th, 2009
By Phil Leggiere |
Police from various jurisdictions swarm on a Connecticut High School with police dogs, ransack over a hundred cars in the parking lot, rifle through lockers and find- rolling papers. An embarrassing misapplication of force? Nah. Not according to the school superintendent who quite proudly said terrorizing students was worth it to prove the school was drug free.
WTHN Reports
Officers from numerous police departments charged into Wethersfield High School Thursday to hunt for drugs.
Armed with police dogs, officers from Wethersfield, Rocky Hill, Manchester and New Britain raided the high school at 411 Wolcott Hill Road.
Locker by locker and room by room, police and their dogs sniffed around to send the school district’s message that drugs will not be taken lightly.
Police also searched more than 100 cars in the school’s parking lot, which led to the arrest of one student for drug paraphernalia.
Police ended up not finding any drugs, and that lone arrest is something School Superintendent Michael Kohlhagen is proud of.
“This is just one step in the right direction, to ensure our students continue to learn and thrive in a drug free environment.” Kohlhagen said and later added, “This issue has been and remains a priority; our entire administration and faculty remain committed to the health, safety and welfare of our students.”
Kohlhagen said Thursday’s raid proves that Wethersfield High School is safe and drug free.
Thanks to the Agitator
Have Your Say:
Police Invade High School in Mass Drug Raid- Find One piece of “Paraphernalia”
Please read our
posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively
you can discuss this report in our forum .
Monday, March 30th, 2009
Unless we take hold of the reigns we will be cursed with a more ruthless form of corporate power wielded through naked repression.
In decaying societies, politics become theater. The elite, who have hollowed out the democratic system to serve the corporate state, rule through image and presentation. They express indignation at AIG bonuses and empathy with a working class they have spent the last few decades disenfranchising, and make promises to desperate families that they know will never be fulfilled. Once the spotlights go on they read their lines with appropriate emotion. Once the lights go off, they make sure Goldman Sachs and a host of other large corporations have the hundreds of billions of dollars in losses they incurred playing casino capitalism repaid with taxpayer money.
We live in an age of moral nihilism. We have trashed our universities, turning them into vocational factories that produce corporate drones and chase after defense-related grants and funding. The humanities, the discipline that forces us to stand back and ask the broad moral questions of meaning and purpose, that challenges the validity of structures, that trains us to be self-reflective and critical of all cultural assumptions, have withered. Our press, which should promote such intellectual and moral questioning, confuses bread and circus with news and refuses to give a voice to critics who challenge not this bonus payment or that bailout but the pernicious superstructure of the corporate state itself. We kneel before a cult of the self, elaborately constructed by the architects of our consumer society, which dismisses compassion, sacrifice for the less fortunate, and honesty. The methods used to attain what we want, we are told by reality television programs, business schools and self-help gurus, are irrelevant. Success, always defined in terms of money and power, is its own justification. The capacity for manipulation is what is most highly prized. And our moral collapse is as terrifying, and as dangerous, as our economic collapse.
Theodor Adorno in 1967 wrote an essay called “Education After Auschwitz.” He argued that the moral corruption that made the Holocaust possible remained “largely unchanged.” He wrote that “the mechanisms that render people capable of such deeds” must be made visible. Schools had to teach more than skills. They had to teach values. If they did not, another Auschwitz was always possible.
“All political instruction finally should be centered upon the idea that Auschwitz should never happen again,” he wrote. “This would be possible only when it devotes itself openly, without fear of offending any authorities, to this most important of problems. To do this, education must transform itself into sociology, that is, it must teach about the societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of political forms.”
Our elites are imploding. Their fraud and corruption are slowly being exposed as the disparity between their words and our reality becomes wider and more apparent. The rage that is bubbling up across the country will have to be countered by the elite with less subtle forms of control. But unless we grasp the “societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of political forms” we will be cursed with a more ruthless form of corporate power, one that does away with artifice and the seduction of a consumer society and instead wields power through naked repression.
I had lunch a few days ago in Toronto with Henry Giroux, professor of English and cultural studies at McMaster University in Canada and who for many years was the Waterbury Chair Professor at Penn State. Giroux, who has been one of the most prescient and vocal critics of the corporate state and the systematic destruction of American education, was driven to the margins of academia because he kept asking the uncomfortable questions Adorno knew should be asked by university professors. He left the United States in 2004 for Canada.
“The emergence of what Eisenhower had called the military-industrial-academic complex had secured a grip on higher education that may have exceeded even what he had anticipated and most feared,” Giroux, who wrote “The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex,” told me. “Universities, in general, especially following the events of 9/11, were under assault by Christian nationalists, reactionary neoconservatives and market fundamentalists for allegedly representing the weak link in the war on terrorism. Right-wing students were encouraged to spy on the classes of progressive professors, the corporate grip on the university was tightening as made clear not only in the emergence of business models of governance, but also in the money being pumped into research and programs that blatantly favored corporate interests. And at Penn State, where I was located at the time, the university had joined itself at the hip with corporate and military power. Put differently, corporate and Pentagon money was now funding research projects and increasingly knowledge was being militarized in the service of developing weapons of destruction, surveillance and death. Couple this assault with the fact that faculty were becoming irrelevant as an oppositional force. Many disappeared into discourses that threatened no one, some simply were too scared to raise critical issues in their classrooms for fear of being fired, and many simply no longer had the conviction to uphold the university as a democratic public sphere.”
Frank Donoghue, the author of “The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities,” details how liberal arts education has been dismantled. Any form of learning that is not strictly vocational has at best been marginalized and in many schools has been abolished. Students are steered away from asking the broad, disturbing questions that challenge the assumptions of the power elite or an economic system that serves the corporate state. This has led many bright graduates into the arms of corporate entities they do not examine morally or ethically. They accept the assumptions of corporate culture because they have never been taught to think.
Only 8 percent of U.S. college graduates now receive degrees in the humanities, about 110,000 students. Between 1970 and 2001, bachelor’s degrees in English declined from 7.6 percent to 4 percent, as did degrees in foreign languages (2.4 percent to 1 percent), mathematics (3 percent to 1 percent), social science and history (18.4 percent to 10 percent). Bachelor’s degrees in business, which promise the accumulation of wealth, have skyrocketed. Business majors since 1970-1971 have risen from 13.6 percent of the graduation population to 21.7 percent. Business has now replaced education, which has fallen from 21 percent to 8.2 percent, as the most popular major.
The values that sustain an open society have been crushed. A university, as John Ralston Saul writes, now “actively seeks students who suffer from the appropriate imbalance and then sets out to exaggerate it. Imagination, creativity, moral balance, knowledge, common sense, a social view — all these things wither. Competitiveness, having an ever-ready answer, a talent for manipulating situations — all these things are encouraged to grow. As a result amorality also grows; as does extreme aggressivity when they are questioned by outsiders; as does a confusion between the nature of good versus having a ready answer to all questions. Above all, what is encouraged is the growth of an undisciplined form of self-interest, in which winning is what counts.”
This moral nihilism would have terrified Adorno. He knew that radical evil was possible only with the collaboration of a timid, cowed and confused population, a system of propaganda and a press that offered little more than spectacle and entertainment and an educational system that did not transmit transcendent values or nurture the capacity for individual conscience. He feared a culture that banished the anxieties and complexities of moral choice and embraced a childish hyper-masculinity, one championed by ruthless capitalists (think of the brutal backstabbing and deception cheered by TV shows like “Survivor”) and Hollywood action heroes like the governor of California.
“This educational ideal of hardness, in which many may believe without reflecting about it, is utterly wrong,” Adorno wrote. “The idea that virility consists in the maximum degree of endurance long ago became a screen-image for masochism that, as psychology has demonstrated, aligns itself all too easily with sadism.”
Sadism is as much a part of popular culture as it is of corporate culture. It dominates pornography, runs like an electric current through reality television and trash-talk programs and is at the core of the compliant, corporate collective. Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice. And it has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and our lack of compassion for the homeless, our poor, the mentally ill, the unemployed and the sick.
“The political and economic forces fuelling such crimes against humanity — whether they are unlawful wars, systemic torture, practiced indifference to chronic starvation and disease or genocidal acts — are always mediated by educational forces,” Giroux said. “Resistance to such acts cannot take place without a degree of knowledge and self-reflection. We have to name these acts and transform moral outrage into concrete attempts to prevent such human violations from taking place in the first place.”
The single most important quality needed to resist evil is moral autonomy. Moral autonomy, as Immanuel Kant wrote, is possible only through reflection, self-determination and the courage not to cooperate.
Moral autonomy is what the corporate state, with all its attacks on liberal institutions and “leftist” professors, has really set out to destroy. The corporate state holds up as our ideal what Adorno called “the manipulative character.” The manipulative character has superb organizational skills and the inability to have authentic human experiences. He or she is an emotional cripple and driven by an overvalued realism. The manipulative character is a systems manager. He or she exclusively trained to sustain the corporate structure, which is why our elites are wasting mind-blowing amounts of our money on corporations like Goldman Sachs and AIG. “He makes a cult of action, activity, of so-called efficiency as such which reappears in the advertising image of the active person,” Adorno wrote of this personality type. These manipulative characters, people like Lawrence Summers, Henry Paulson, Robert Rubin, Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, AIG’s Edward Liddy and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, along with most of our ruling class, have used corporate money and power to determine the narrow parameters of the debate in our classrooms, on the airwaves and in the halls of Congress while they looted the country.
“It is especially difficult to fight against it,” warned Adorno, “because those manipulative people, who actually are incapable of true experience, for that very reason manifest an unresponsiveness that associates them with certain mentally ill or psychotic characters, namely schizoids.”
Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, is a Senior Fellow at the Nation Institute. His latest book is Collateral Damage: America’s War Against Iraqi Civilians.
Have Your Say:
Are Universities Turning into Corporate Drone Factories?
Please read our
posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively
you can discuss this report in our forum .
Monday, March 30th, 2009
By Hank Kalet |
The federal government should help homeowners go green.
Several states are already seeking ways to encourage homeowners to switch from dirty fuels to cleaner energy sources, kick-starting a green revolution house by house.
In New Jersey, the state Legislature recently passed a bill that would require homebuilders to offer buyers solar energy systems as an option. And the state government provides grants and loans for solar installation on existing housing.
Communities, neighborhood groups and educational facilities in New Mexico are experimenting with solar and biomass systems, and dozens of cities and counties around the country are doing the same.
Take a look at California, where several cities are offering homeowners the opportunity to finance the installation of solar power the same way most public water, sewer or gas-line projects are financed — over a 20-year period to be paid back as a special assessment on a homeowner’s property taxes.
Cities and towns, however, have to get the money to finance these programs. Berkeley, the first city in California to create a public-financing program, turned to the banks for financing. Palm Desert, another California community that offers financing, used its own reserves to get its pilot project off the ground.
But interest in such programs could outstrip the ability of local governments to procure financing, which is why the federal government must step in.
Most states and towns face tight budgets because revenue has become scarce and their budgets, by law, have to be balanced.
Federal money ought to be made available — as it has for energy-efficiency projects and large-scale conversions of the energy grid.
By engaging individual homeowners in going green, we will not only reduce our carbon footprint one household at a time. We will simultaneously be building the larger constituency we’ll need to arrive at our clean energy future.
Hank Kalet is online editor and columnist for The Princeton Packet newspaper group in New Jersey. He can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org.
Have Your Say:
Government should offer incentives for homes to go green
Please read our
posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively
you can discuss this report in our forum .
Monday, March 30th, 2009
In yet another instance of lowering the expectations on the campaign promised US pullout from Iraq, President Barack Obama touted the military progress in the nation but ruled out increasing the speed of his current pullout strategy.
The current “pullout” plan, announced a month ago and consisting of the removal of somewhat less than two-thirds of US forces from the nation by August 31, 2010 and the continuation of the war indefinitely beyond that date, falls far short of campaign promises to remove all troops within 16 months of taking office.
But beyond that, is Obama’s defense of what he called “a very gradual withdrawal through the national elections in Iraq” something to be taken at face value, or is his insistance that “we still have a lot of work to do” in spite of claims of military goals being met another step on the road toward backing out of the already limited pullout being promised. Either way it seems safe to say that the war in Iraq will remain an issue for years to come.
© Antiwar.com 2009
Have Your Say:
Obama Won’t Speed Up Iraq Pullout
Please read our
posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively
you can discuss this report in our forum .
Monday, March 30th, 2009
By Adrian Roberts |
THOUSANDS of campaigners marched through London on Saturday in the run-up to the G20 summit to demand action on poverty, climate change and jobs.
Over 40,000 marchers accompanied by brass bands and drummers walked the four miles from Embankment to Hyde Park.
Union banners from GMB, UNISON, Unite and RMT were on show as protesters moved past the capital’s landmarks in a carnival-like atmosphere before gathering for a series of speeches.
Many protesters carried banners bearing slogans including: “Put the children first” and “Climate emergency” and there were loud boos and whistles as the crowd passed 10 Downing Street.
The Put People First march, backed by an alliance of 150 groups including unions, charities, greens and faith organisations, was held amid anger at the £19 million cost of staging the G20.
People came from all over the country and families with children in pushchairs were among those marching.
Jyoti Fernandes, an organic farmer who travelled from Somerset with her four children, said: “We are here to remind people that we have to look after our land and look after our food.”
Protester Kevin Stevens ignored police warnings for City workers to keep a low profile and came dressed in a pinstripe suit as a banker.
“I thought I might prove all the talk about attacking City workers is nonsense,” he said.
Bryan Simpson, who had travelled from Glasgow, said it was going to be a summer of rage for the working class, who “are expected to pay the price for the debts of the banks.”
As marchers arrived at Hyde Park, Unite union leader Derek Simpson said: “I think it’s an important message, but whether it will get through to the people meeting in London I don’t know. Anyone who sees the numbers on this march should realise how important it is.”
Global Call To Action Against Poverty co-chairman Kumi Naidoo told the rally that the G20 had a duty to act.
“Today we have to say the choices the poor people face and middle-class people face are intolerable and therefore we will not accept timidity from the G20 when they gather next week,” he said.
Comedian Mark Thomas believed the protest marked “the start of a grass-roots movement.”
He said: “This is a moment. This is the first time people have had a chance to come out on to the streets in a big way.”
ActionAid’s Claire Melamed said her organisation was delighted with the turnout.
“We’re really pleased. We are hearing every day about people losing jobs and not being able to feed their children as this economic crisis deepens.
“We want the G20 to listen to us. This began as a financial crisis and it’s turning into a humanitarian one.”
TUC general secretary Brendan Barber told the crowd that never before had such a wide coalition come together with such a clear message for world leaders.
“The old ideas of unregulated free markets do not work and have brought the world’s economy to near-collapse, failed to fight poverty and have done far too little to move to a low-carbon economy,” said the TUC leader.
After the demo, Prime Minister Gordon Brown insisted that he would answer protesters’ concerns.
Speaking in Chile at the end of a pre-G20 tour, Mr Brown said: “We will respond at the G20 with measures that will help create jobs, stimulate business and get the economy moving.”
See reference:
Unity from diversity
Have Your Say:
40,000 reasons the G20 must act
Please read our
posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively
you can discuss this report in our forum .
Monday, March 30th, 2009
Claims that secret agents working for MI5 and MI6 watched and encouraged the torture of a second British resident held by the Americans must be investigated by the police, politicians, lawyers and human rights groups said last night.
Fresh allegations in the High Court this week will increase pressure on the Government to open a judicial inquiry into collusion between the CIA and British security services in torture during the “war on terror”.
Shaker Aamer, 42, the final British resident in Guantanamo Bay, claims that like Binyam Mohamed, he was tortured in American custody in 2002.
On Thursday the Attorney General took the unprecedented step of calling in Scotland Yard to investigate allegations that MI5 collaborated in the alleged torture of Mr Mohamed. Mr Aamer’s case is believed to be one of 15 similar new cases. In a legal claim against the Government to be lodged at the High Court this week, Mr Aamer’s lawyers allege that MI5 and MI6 were complicit in the torture of Mr Aamer.
A claim letter sent to Government lawyers alleges: “UK intelligence services officers were present whilst Mr Aamer was beaten. They provided information and encouragement to his US torturers. They made no attempt to stop his ill-treatment or any enquiries into his well-being.”
The British Government has requested the release of Mr Aamer from Guantanamo Bay, where he is on hunger strike. There are no terrorism charges against him.
Dominic Grieve, the shadow Home Secretary, last night called on the Government to investigate Mr Aamer’s allegations. “These disturbing claims only strengthen the case for a judicial inquiry into allegations of British collusion in torture,” he said. “Britain’s reputation will be dragged through the mud if they go unanswered.”
According to an MI5 senior manager, known as “Witness A”, the Security Service was aware of transfers of prisoners from Pakistan to Afghanistan during this period. Witness A’s evidence in the case of Binyam Mohamed, given last year but only released on Friday, suggests at least some of these transfers were believed to be unlawful.
Mr Aamer’s lawyer Irène Nembhard, of Birnberg Peirce, is asking the British Government to disclose the identity of the US and UK agents involved in her client’s interrogation, detention and torture.
Mr Aamer is married to a British citizen with whom he has four children, including a son he has never seen. He says he went to Afghanistan in 2001 to work with charities. He was sharing a house with Moazzam Begg, the British man released from Guantanamo Bay in 2005, when he was forced to flee the US-led invasion. He says he was held by an Afghan militant group, who passed him to the Northern Alliance who sold him to the Americans. The CIA arranged his detention in Afghanistan and transfer to Guantanamo Bay. Mr Aamer says an MI5 officer, who gave his name as “John”, was present while he was tortured in Afghanistan in January 2002. “John” was the name given by Witness B, the MI5 agent who interrogated Binyam Mohamed.
©belfasttelegraph.co.uk
Have Your Say:
New claim of MI5 collusion in torture
Please read our
posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively
you can discuss this report in our forum .
Monday, March 30th, 2009
A British man was sentenced to serve six months in a Hong Kong jail after being found guilty of causing a public nuisance.
Matt Pearce, a teacher originally from Bristol but who now lives on the territory’s island, staged a protest against China’s human rights record on a Hong Kong bridge on August 8 last year - the opening day of the Summer Olympics in Beijing.
The 33-year-old hung banners that read ‘We want human rights and democracy’ and ‘The people of China want freedom from oppression’ on road signs on the Tsing Ma Bridge in a protest that lasted for two hours and caused major traffic congestion as police tried to remove him.
After a three-day trial Mr Pearce was found guilty of causing a public nuisance earlier this month but was cleared of a separate charge of common assault.
In 2005 the veteran activist, who is the founding member of an organisation called International Action, was sentenced to 21 days in prison after dressing as Spiderman and scaling a giant television screen in the Central district of Hong Kong on the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square killings. The sentence was later suspended for 18 months on appeal.
He was also convicted of causing a public nuisance after staging a protest in a horse costume at the Hong Kong races, in 2004, again receiving a suspended jail sentence.
Prior to the verdict, Mr Pearce had insisted he was keen to continue to stage protests in Hong Kong regardless of the outcome of this trial.
“I believe in what I am doing and the style and approach and the strategy I am adopting is what I think is exactly what Hong Kong needs,” he said.
“I am hoping that I will influence some of the other activists here and if more people started doing what I am doing then it would be quite a big problem for the Government.”
©2009 Associated Newspapers Limited
Have Your Say:
British activist jailed in China for Olympics protest
Please read our
posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively
you can discuss this report in our forum .
Monday, March 30th, 2009
COULD
Big Brother soon be keeping tabs on Isle of Man residents’ travel arrangements?
That’s the fear of
political lobby organisation the Positive Action Group, which is concerned about the extension of the
UK’s e-Borders programme and its effect on travellers between the Isle of Man and the
UK.
E-borders is an integrated electronic travel monitoring system that aims to combat terrorism, drug trafficking, illegal immigration and other serious crime.
The Manx Government has agreed in principle to be involved in the programme.
It means that when someone books a flight or ferry their details would be checked on the UK e-Borders database.
The plan is to collect, in advance of travel, extensive personal information on people using airline and ferry reservation data and passengers’ biometric passport data.
But PAG fears Island travellers could be stopped and searched randomly – and their travel plan blocked for even minor offences, such as unpaid parking fines.
There are also concerns about the storage of people’s personal travel history for up to 10 years.
A pilot is already running on ‘high-risk’ routes; by next year all rail, air and ferry travellers will be tracked; by 2014, even pleasure boats, fishing vessels and private planes will be included.
PAG chairman Roger Tomlinson said: ‘A number of our members are concerned about the restrictions the system could impose on passengers as we have just learned that the new Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill proposes a new power for the UK authorities to randomly subject to ’stop, search and delay’, passengers entering the UK from the Isle of Man.
‘We face having to carry a passport to get into the UK, booking at least 24 hours in advance to travel off Island and possibly having travel plans disrupted due to no fault of our own. The restrictions will apply to pleasure craft and the fishing fleet as well as private air travel.’
He said taxpayers may have to fund new building works at the Sea Terminal to allow for identity checks.
‘In addition there will be a need for expensive new passport reading electronic equipment at the Sea Terminal and Ronaldsway in order to pass all the data to the UK Home Office. It will indeed be Orwellian,’ he said.
Please read our
posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively
you can discuss this report in our forum .
Sunday, March 29th, 2009
IT is said to be the most impregnable vault on Earth: built out of granite, sealed behind a 22-tonne door, located on a US military base and watched over day and night by army units with tanks, heavy artillery and Apache helicopter gunships at their disposal.
Since its construction in 1937, the treasures locked inside Fort Knox have included the US Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, three volumes of the Gutenberg Bible and the Magna Carta.
For several prominent investors and at least one senior US congressman, it is not the security of the facility in Kentucky that is a cause of concern: it is the matter of how much gold remains stored there — and who owns it.
They are worried that no independent auditors appear to have had access to the reported $137bn (€104bn) stockpile of brick-shaped gold bars in Fort Knox since the era of President Eisenhower.
After the risky trading activities at supposedly safe institutions such as AIG they want to be reassured that the gold reserves are still the exclusive property of the US and have not been used to fund risky transactions.
In other words, they want to be certain that the bullion has not been rendered as valueless as if a real-life Goldfinger had stolen it.
“It has been several decades since the gold in Fort Knox was independently audited or properly accounted for,” said Ron Paul, the Texas Congressman and former Republican presidential candidate. “The American people deserve to know the truth.”
Mr Paul has so far attracted 21 co-sponsors for a Bill to conduct an independent audit of the Federal Reserve System — including its claims to Fort Knox gold — but an organisation named the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee (GATA) is taking a different approach.
It has hired the Virginia law firm William J Olson to test US president Barack Obama’s promise to bring “an unprecedented level of openness” to the US government.
Next month it will file several Freedom of Information requests for a full disclosure of US gold ownership and trading activities.
Nuclear
“We’re taking the president at his word,” said Chris Powell, of GATA.
“If you go online you can find out how to build a nuclear weapon but you won’t find any detailed records on central gold reserves.”
A month after former US president Richard Nixon resigned over the Watergate affair, Congress demanded to inspect the contents of Fort Knox but the trip to Kentucky was dismissed by critics as a photo opportunity.
Three years earlier, Mr Nixon brought an end to the gold standard when France and Switzerland demanded to redeem their dollar holdings for gold amid the soaring cost of the Vietnam War.
Many gold investors suspect that the US has periodically attempted to flood the market with Fort Knox gold to keep prices low and the dollar high — perhaps through international swap agreements with other central banks — but facts remain scarce and the US Treasury denies that any such meddling has gone on for at least the past decade.
Pressure for more openness is mounting after the collapse of the global banking system and renewed interest in a return to the simpler era of the gold standard — a subject that is likely to be raised at the G20 summit next week.
China and Russia are calling for the creation of a new world reserve currency amid fears that the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing policy — essentially printing money — might cause hyperinflation, then collapse.
A spokesman for the US Treasury said that US gold holdings were audited every year by the Department of Treasury’s Office of Inspector General.
He confirmed that although independent auditors oversaw the process they were not given access to the Fort Knox vault.
The website of the US Mint says that the 147.3million troy ounces of gold in Fort Knox “is held as an asset of the US”. It does not elaborate. (© The Times, London).
- Chris Ayres in Los Angeles
Have Your Say:
A golden opportunity to test Obama pledge on open government
Please read our
posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively
you can discuss this report in our forum .
Sunday, March 29th, 2009
Freedom House condemns the UN Human Rights Council for undermining the universal right to freedom of expression by once again passing a resolution that urges members to adopt laws outlawing criticism of religions.
The “defamation of religions” resolution, introduced by Pakistan on behalf of the Organization for the Islamic Conference (OIC), passed today by a vote of 23-11, with 13 abstentions. Muslim nations have been introducing similar resolutions since 1999, arguing that Islam-the only religion specifically cited in the text-must be shielded from unfair associations with terrorism and human rights abuses.
“These countries are using the UN to expand and bring legitimacy to their frontal assault on freedom of expression,” said Paula Schriefer, Freedom House advocacy director. “This assault starts at the level of domestic blasphemy laws present in many OIC countries, which are routinely employed to harass and imprison religious minorities, political dissenters and human rights advocates, and is elevated to the international level through resolutions at the UN.”
Freedom House is especially disappointed that South Africa, a liberal democracy whose citizens’ have a deep understanding of how such laws are used to punish dissenters, continues to back these resolutions. Similarly, strong democracies such as South Korea, Japan, India, Mexico and Brazil should have actively worked to defeat the resolution, instead of casting abstention votes.
In contrast, Freedom House applauds the leadership shown by Chile in rejecting the resolution and hopes that Chile will work to persuade other Latin American countries to vote in a manner that accurately reflects the democratic nature of their region. Such an effort would send a message that freedom of expression is a universal right and not just a right to be enjoyed by the citizens of Western democracies.
Text condemning “defamation of religions” was originally part of a draft declaration to be issued at the Durban II anti-racism conference in Geneva next month. But it was withdrawn after Western nations said they would pull out of the UN conference unless it was removed.
In addition, supporters of “defamation of religions” are increasingly attempting to incorporate the concept into existing human rights law, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). They claim that “defamation of religions” leads to “incitement of hatred or violence,” which is a legitimate restriction under the ICCPR’s Article 20.
“It’s preposterous to suggest that criticizing or satirizing a religion automatically leads to hatred or violence or in any way prevents its adherents from practicing their faith,” said Schriefer. “In fact, the ability to question religious beliefs or tenets is not only a right of free expression, but a critical aspect to freedom of religion itself.”
Of the 14 OIC members on the council, only Indonesia is ranked Free in Freedom in the World, Freedom House’s annual assessment of political rights and civil liberties. Four of these countries-Cameroon, Egypt, Qatar and Saudi Arabia-are ranked Not Free, demonstrating an absence of political rights and a systematic denial of basic civil liberties. A further analysis of Freedom in the World comparing levels of freedom of expression and belief within OIC countries to regional groupings finds that only the Middle East and North Africa would receive a lower score in these categories.
Have Your Say:
Free Expression Assault Continues at UN Human Rights Council
Please read our
posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively
you can discuss this report in our forum .
Sunday, March 29th, 2009
The Networker
There’s a delicious moment in Alastair Beaton’s satirical film, The Trial of Tony Blair, in which the former prime minister is finally arrested for war crimes on a warrant from the international criminal court. One scene shows the standard police procedure as Blair is inducted by the desk sergeant in a London station. Towards the end of the rigmarole, the policeman moves to take a saliva swab from him.
Blair is aghast, asks him what he is doing and - after the policeman has explained that’s he’s taking a DNA sample - asks who brought in such a stupid law. “You did, sir,” is the response.
The irony, of course, is that Blair led New Labour down the path towards an authoritarian, target-driven, intrusive state. His administration dreamed up the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 handing draconian powers of surveillance to every goon and jobsworth in the land. He was the guy who undermined parliament and took the country to war on false pretences. Oh, and he was also the PM whose administration insisted on keeping forever on file the DNA records not just of criminals but anyone who’s ever been arrested.
All of this was brought to mind this week with the publication of Database State, an amazing report by IT security experts commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust in the aftermath of the loss, by HM Revenue & Customs, of the entire child benefit database in October 2007. Spurred by the HMRC fiasco, and all the subsequent data losses that came to light in the months that followed, the trust sponsored a meeting of academics and activists with an interest in privacy. These experts attempted to map Britain’s database state, identifying the many public sector databases that collect personal information about us.
Not surprisingly, the task proved to be too big for one seminar, so the trust commissioned the Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR) to conduct the most comprehensive survey ever of Britain’s government databases. The report was published last week (it’s available online at www.fipr.org) and makes sobering reading for anyone who cares what’s happened to this country since Blair & Co swept to power in 1997.
Of the 46 databases assessed, only six are found to have “a proper legal basis for any privacy intrusions and are proportionate and necessary in a democratic society”. Eleven are “almost certainly illegal under human rights or data protection law” and “should be scrapped or substantially redesigned”, while the remaining 29 were found to “have significant problems and should be subject to an independent review”.
The creation and updating of these databases is central to the Blair/Brown “transformational government” programme, for which the government is currently unable to attach an estimated cost. But the UK public sector currently spends £16bn a year on IT projects and had - at least until the credit crunch - planned to spend £100bn on databases and related stuff over the next five years.
Even these days, these are huge sums, which reflect the New Labour belief that IT systems will one day give the government the information it needs to control every aspect of our lives, defeat terrorism and eliminate crime. Much of the proposed expenditure is devoted to enabling colossal official databases to talk to one another.
The goal is that one day the government will have a seamless cradle-to-grave electronic record of every aspect of a citizen’s life. It will track school and medical records, every phone number dialled, every email and text message sent and received, every website visited, every speeding fine and passport issued, every vehicle registered, every mortgage or loan taken out, every foreign trip undertaken, every tax return filed and benefit claimed. And, of course, every encounter with officialdom. It’s an Orwellian nightmare rationalised by the need for efficiency in the spending of public money but designed to change forever the relationship between the individual and the state.
The FIPR/Rowntree survey has uncovered the extent to which the UK government is already operating outside the law. That would once have been enough to call a halt to New Labour’s Orwellian project. But those days have gone. The only thing that will stop Britain’s descent into the National Surveillance State is a change of government. Fortunately, looking at the opinion polls, we might not have too long to wait.
Have Your Say:
New Labour’s dream is a surveillance state nightmare
Please read our
posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively
you can discuss this report in our forum .
Related News
This entry was posted
on
Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 at
9:01 am 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.
Loading ...
