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Biometrics system for foreign students

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

A parliamentary committee has echoed universities’ concerns over the robustness of the biometrics system that will be used for visa applications by students.

The Home Affairs Committee looked at the role of the National Biometric Identity Service (NBIS) in student visa applications as part of a report into migration processes.

UK universities can guarantee that foreign students applying for visas will attend under the sponsorship management system, which is part of the NBIS. Under the scheme, students must submit their fingerprints and other identifying characteristics at biometric collection points overseas for holding in the NBIS database.

However, as approximately eight per cent of university funding comes from those foreign students, and because many government IT projects have failed, universities are concerned that the enrolment of students will depend on the untested NBIS, the committee said.

“Given the unfortunate propensity of previous large-scale Home Office IT systems to fail, we fully sympathise with the nervousness felt by universities about a sponsorship management system which relies entirely on a Home Office IT project,” said the report, released on Saturday. “The consequences for the reputation, functioning and finances of UK businesses and educational establishments of any failure of the system at peak times of the year, are potentially dramatic.”

A spokesperson for the UK Border Agency (UKBA) told silicon.com sister site ZDNet UK on Wednesday that while the part of the NBIS that deals with the sponsorship management system will be launched in the autumn, the majority of the system is already running.

“Much of our IT system is already in place and is working well,” said the spokesperson. “The final part of the system, which will be used by colleges and universities, will go live in autumn of this year. We have been working with colleges for nearly a year to develop the system and we have a robust and independently verified testing plan.”

In addition, the UKBA does not have enough collection points overseas, the Home Affairs Committee said in its report, citing incidences of people having to travel to different countries to give their fingerprints. This has slowed the visa application process, said the committee.

“The requirement for applicants to provide biometrics in person for visas and the inevitable delays associated with this process seems to be causing disproportionate delays and expense to applicants,” said the report. “The challenge with providing biometrics is especially acute for migrants in certain parts of the world where biometric collection centres are few and far between, such as certain African countries.”

The committee added there were insufficient numbers of biometric collection centres in most countries aside from the US, and recommended the government should establish more biometric capture points, including the provision of mobile biometric-collection centres, “as a matter of urgency”.

The UKBA spokesperson added that while the agency had no plans to increase the number of biometric collection points, it was working to improve the application process.

“Visa applications can be lodged at 250 places worldwide,” said the spokesperson. “We are continually seeking ways to make biometric collection more accessible to our customers and have agreements in place with many foreign governments to use already established collection points. Where people need to travel urgently we can and have made special arrangements to facilitate their journeys.”

The seven-year NBIS contract was awarded to IBM in April.

Original article: MPs show lack of faith in biometrics IT system from ZDNet UK

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Orson Welles, the blacklist and Hollywood filmmaking

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

This is the first part of an interview with Joseph McBride, author of What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? A Portrait of an Independent Career(2006). The second part was posted June 17.

While in the Bay Area for the recent San Francisco Film Festival, David Walsh and Joanne Laurier had a lengthy conversation with Joseph McBride, author of What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? A Portrait of an Independent Career (University Press of Kentucky, 2006), an unusual and valuable book.

McBride, an associate professor at San Francisco State University, is a former screenwriter, a former critic and reporter for Daily Variety in Hollywood, and one of the foremost experts on American filmmaker Orson Welles. He has also written or edited works on John Ford, Howard Hawks, Frank Capra, Steven Spielberg and Kirk Douglas.

What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? is significant for a number of reasons. The title refers sardonically to the attitude of numerous critics toward Welles’s last years, the two decades, more or less, before his death in 1985 at the age of 70. In their complacency and indifference, such commentators choose to view Welles as a victim of his own unfortunate career choices or a supposed inability to finish projects, or, worse still, they paint him as a lazy, overweight “has-been” who had tragically squandered his undeniable talent.

According to this theory. Welles’s career following the making of Citizen Kane when he was 25, in 1941, consisted of a series of self-inflicted disasters that resulted in his becoming, more or less deservedly, something of a pariah.

McBride works diligently to dispel such myths. He knew Welles during the last 15 years of the latter’s life and participated in one of the filmmaker’s major unfinished projects, The Other Side of the Wind, about an aging Hollywood director, with John Huston in the lead role.

The author makes clear that Welles was willing and eager to work, virtually to the last day of his life. The fundamental sources of his difficulties remained what they had been throughout his career: the financial and artistic constraints bound up with working in the American film industry

McBride writes: “The story of the last fifteen years of his life is a saga of untiring work, dedication, creativity, and indomitable courage in the face of overwhelming obstacles placed before him by a society that tragically undervalues its great artists.” (p. 26)

In addition to The Other Side of the Wind, McBride discusses a number of the projects that Welles worked on and was unable to complete in the last several decades of his life, including his nearly 30-year, legendary effort to adapt Cervantes’ Don Quixote for the screen; various planned series for US television, including a documentary “essay” show called “Orson Welles and People”; a thriller, The Deep, with Jeanne Moreau; a version of The Merchant of Venice, whose negative was stolen from Welles’s Rome office; The Dreamers, an adaptation of two stories by Isak Dinesen; scripts adapted from works by Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene: “a cheerily autobiographical account of his early days in the theater”; and many others.

What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? sets the record straight in another important regard. It emphasizes Welles’s artistic and political radicalism, which has been downplayed by numerous biographers, in some cases with Welles’s own help. As McBride notes, “Despite Welles’s later defensiveness about his political evolution and his general aversion to polemics on stage or screen, his artistic career…was always profoundly radical.” (pp. 46-47)

The book argues convincingly that Welles was blacklisted by the Hollywood studios in the late 1940s. McBride points to “unmistakable evidence, hidden in plain sight, that Welles’s political and cultural activities had caused him to be blacklisted during the postwar era. His decision to leave the country in 1947, just as the Hollywood blacklist was being imposed, and his reinvention of himself as a wandering European filmmaker, largely out of necessity, hastened his already strong bent toward independence from the commercial system.” (p. xvii)

Welles was a man of the left, who associated with socialist-minded intellectuals in the New York theater world before his move to Hollywood in 1939. His direction of a version of Macbeth set in Haiti in 1936 for the Federal Theatre Project’s Negro Theater Unit, and Marc Blitzstein’s left-wing musical work, The Cradle Will Rock, and an adaptation of Julius Caesar laid in fascist Italy, both in 1937, consolidated his reputation as a remarkable dramatic innovator and a fierce critic of contemporary society.

Welles had already incurred the wrath of right-wing publisher William Randolph Hearst for his theater and radio work, but his audacity in choosing to direct a film for RKO that drew its inspiration at least in part from the media mogul’s life and career, Citizen Kane, made him, in the words of an artistic associate, “a marked man.”

Attacking Hearst and all that he represented within the American ruling elite, in McBride’s words, brought down “the wrath of a whole powerful network of right-wing red-baiters, including the FBI, the Dies committee, and the American Legion, all of which were allied with and supported by the vociferously anti-Communist publisher.” (p. 45)

The FBI opened a file on Welles in April 1941, shortly before Citizen Kane’s release, and kept it active until 1956, when the filmmaker was safely semi-exiled in Europe. Hearst had been an ally and collaborator of J. Edgar Hoover since the early 1930s, supplying him with information on suspected Communists and fellow travelers in Hollywood.

McBride cites an FBI report’s conclusion about Welles’s extraordinary first film: “The evidence before us leads inevitably to the conclusion that the film Citizen Kane is nothing more than an extension of the Communist Party’s campaign to smear one of its most effective and consistent opponents in the United States [i.e., Hearst].” (p. 45)

The hostility of Hoover and the FBI toward Welles was so great, that although the bureau’s agents could find no proof of his membership in the Communist Party (and it appears he never was a member), “Los Angeles special agent in charge R. B. Wood took the drastic step of recommending to Hoover in November 1944 that Welles be listed as a Communist on the FBI’s Security Index. That little-known roster gathered the names of people who supposedly represented threats to national security. Originally the Custodial Detention Index, it was designed by Hoover to facilitate the rounding up and detention of alleged subversives during a national emergency. Welles’s name was on the Security Index from 1945 to 1949.” (p. 50)

As we note in our interview with McBride, it has some significance that an individual often credited with directing the greatest film made in the US was placed on a list of those to be rounded up and interned when the powers that be felt threatened!

McBride’s book has many fascinating aspects to it. We spoke to him at his home where we discovered him surrounded by piles of books, videos and DVDs.

* * * * *

WSWS: We found your book while searching for material on Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane [1941]. We thought it was especially significant that you emphasized Welles’s political radicalism, and also challenged the conventional wisdom that his career was a downward spiral from Citizen Kane. It’s a valuable book with some remarkable insights. There are big questions bound up with his career, which are not just film questions, but bound up with the character of American society in the middle and late 20^th century. They continue to vibrate.

Joseph McBride: Welles may be a beneficiary of the changing times. In the 1970s, when the blacklisted people started getting a lot of attention, they were now seen as heroes. The whole thing reversed itself. With Welles, people have mistakenly rejected the idea that he was blacklisted.

Have you seen his FBI file? The main file is 222 pages long. You can get it online.

One of the problems with the history of the blacklist is that there’s sort of an official list that everybody knows. These are people who were unfriendly witnesses before HUAC [House Committee on Un-American Activities], basically. People are familiar with them. Dalton Trumbo, John Howard Lawson and the others.

But there were so many people who were “greylisted” and blacklisted who you don’t really know about. And that’s part of the Kafkaesque nature of the blacklist. Sometimes people could not even tell what happened to their careers because suddenly they just couldn’t get work.

James F. Byrnes, the former secretary of state [1945-47] under Harry Truman and chief legal counsel for the studios, advised the film industry to deny there was a blacklist because blacklisting was illegal.

There’s a documentary called Hollywood on Trial, made in 1976, and Ronald Reagan is in it, sitting in front of an American flag and a California flag and wearing makeup. On camera Reagan says there was no blacklist. It’s sort of like Holocaust denial. It’s terrible to go through it, and then another blow is to be told it didn’t exist.

There are a lot of people like African-American actress Hattie McDaniel [who won the award for Best Supporting Actress for Gone With the Wind in 1939], for example, somebody who I admire a lot, who were greylisted. But she suffered after the war because she was progressive. And she was also suffering because people in the NAACP and other liberals were criticizing her for the kind of roles she played. She was kind of unemployable for a while because she was getting it from both sides. But very few people know that she was blacklisted or greylisted. So when you do the research, you start finding out that people had these degrees of problems. Some were totally blacklisted and some simply didn’t find much work.

So with Welles, I realized that this was the elephant in the room that nobody ever really talked about. The clearest evidence that he was blacklisted is that he was named in Red Channels, that terrible book put out in 1950. I’ve read the book, and it lists a lot of people in the business, and if your name was in Red Channels, you had to write a letter clearing yourself or do some other form of clearing yourself to work again. That’s the way it worked.

I’ve seen the types of letters that people wrote, for example, screenwriter Philip Dunne. He was a liberal and an anti-communist, and one of the founders of the ADA [Americans for Democratic Action], and he was also a founder of the Committee for the First Amendment. They fought the blacklist and then they sort of caved in—it was short-lived. He showed me a letter he had to write, even though he was not a Communist. He had to state that and disown some of his associations. He felt bad about it, but he showed it to me. Dunne was working for Twentieth Century-Fox, but for most of the studios you had to do something like that.

And John Houseman mentions in his memoirs that he had to write a letter like that. He was Welles’s partner in the Mercury Theatre. So the things they held against Houseman were some of the same things they held against Welles. Associating with left-wingers, putting on certain plays—The Cradle Will Rock [1937]—and things like that.

So I would assume that Welles, in order to do even the limited work he did for American television and for Hollywood studios during the 1950s, would have had to write a letter of that sort, short of informing on people. If you were not a Communist you might not have to inform on people to go back to work, if you were abject enough in your letter and you had people in the studios supporting you. I could not imagine that Welles would ever have informed on people.

When I was researching my recent book on Welles, I began thinking about when he left Hollywood. Most of the books say that he left in 1948 and did not come back until the mid-1950s, and that’s pretty much the heyday of the blacklist.

In his FBI file, they reported he left Hollywood in late November 1947.

WSWS: A significant month. The “Hollywood Ten” were cited for contempt, and the studios launched the blacklist in November 1947.

JM: Yes. The original Hollywood Nineteen were subpoenaed in October 1947 for the November HUAC hearings involving those who became known as the Hollywood Ten.

WSWS: The significance of Welles’s departure in November had never occurred to us till we read your book.

JM: It’s a revelation, thanks to the FBI files. Whatever he had to say publicly about the blacklist I have in my book. He gives a limited mea culpa to blacklist ringleader Hedda Hopper that is fascinating and painful to read. There is an interview with British talk show host Michael Parkinson, from the 1970s, in which he was asked directly whether he went to Europe because he was being investigated. Welles denies it and sort of dances around the subject. But I don’t believe that. He says the reason he went to Europe was not political, it was because he was not getting work in America.

Now it was true that he had just made Macbeth [1948], which was considered a monumental flop. It’s a fine film, but people were dumping on it. The Lady from Shanghai, which actually did not come out until 1948, was also a commercial failure. So he was getting to the point where it was hard to find a job as a director. But, theoretically, he could have worked as an actor.

There’s a book on Carol Reed’s The Third Man—which came out in 1949—that mentions David O. Selznick, one of the producers, and his resistance to hiring Orson Welles as Harry Lime. Selznick made a comment to the effect that Welles’s politics were a problem in America. To have him in a film would turn people off, etc. The British producer and director went ahead and put him in the film anyway. And it didn’t seem to hamper the film’s release.

The argument against his being on a blacklist was that he did appear in films that were shown in American theaters. So he may not have been totally blacklisted. The American Legion in those days used to threaten to picket theaters. It scared the studios. It’s one of the reasons that they instituted the blacklist. The fact that the Legion didn’t picket Welles’s films does not necessarily indicate that he was not blacklisted.

The other thing you could say is that he did work for some American studios in Europe. Twentieth Century-Fox made some films in Europe in which Welles acted. And Darryl F. Zanuck was his friend and actually put some money into Othello [1952]. So, again, the blacklist may not have been total in that sense.

Welles stayed away until 1953, and what happened then was interesting. He went to work for CBS doing the television version of King Lear, with Peter Brook directing. There was a pattern: Welles appeared on a number of American television shows over the next three years—all for CBS. Sometimes you would have one network that would hire you, and you somehow worked it out with that network and they would support you. You did whatever you have to do to work for them.

WSWS: You suggest he might have had to write a letter to do that?

JM: I think it is almost certain that he would have had to do that, but I haven’t found such a letter. When you take account of other people’s histories, it would have been difficult for him to work under that cloud without it. Now, in his FBI file there is a document that specifically says, “No record of Communist Party membership but Subject has consistently followed Communist Party line.” There’s a lot of innuendo in there and people say, “we think he’s a Communist,” but we, the FBI, really looked for the proof and didn’t find it. And they admit that in the file. So there’s no doubt. Even they knew he was not a Communist. He was very anti-Stalinist.

Welles claims over the years and in various interviews that the Hollywood Communists didn’t like him. I guess because he wasn’t controllable. They felt he was too much of a maverick for them. At least that’s his version.

This next story is a bit off the track, but it’s strange. I interviewed the actor Eddie Albert, whose actress wife, Margo, was blacklisted. So they were leftists. He told me an amazing thing that I don’t think has ever been printed. Albert said that in the latter part of World War II, Ronald Reagan approached the Hollywood Communist party and tried to join.

WSWS: In Paul Buhle’s and Dave Wagner’s Radical Hollywood, they mention that the FBI considered Reagan to be in or around the CP periphery.

JM: Reagan was considered a liberal, and in his testimony before HUAC he says being a Communist was not illegal, and publicly at that time he opposed the blacklist. However, privately, he was informing to the FBI. So he was playing a double game by that time. Eddie Albert said that Reagan tried to sign up with the CP, but they wouldn’t have him, because they thought he was an infiltrator. How history would have been different had Reagan been a Communist!

Welles had never been a Communist, and as one of the blacklisted people told me about Frank Capra, he could not have informed with much specificity on people because he wasn’t a Communist. So Welles probably wasn’t the kind of guy that they would haul before HUAC. Welles was never a Communist, and that was frustrating for J. Edgar Hoover, because he couldn’t pin that on him.

I did a book on Frank Capra [Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, 1992/2000] that deals extensively with the blacklist. The major revelation of that book was that Capra was an informer during the blacklist era, which was quite stunning. He named names in private.

The Army-Navy-Air Force Personnel Security Board was investigating Capra because he was a member of a think tank for the Defense Department, planning strategy for war in Europe if there were a Third World War. Capra was involved in that, so his security clearance was denied, and a number of things were held against him. He had worked with a lot of left-wing writers, for example. So he panicked and turned in several of his writers, including Sidney Buchman, who wrote Mr. Smith Goes to Washington [1939], and who was a Communist when he wrote that film.

Capra, I also found out, was an FBI informer and a State Department informer. They called him to clear or not clear people in Hollywood. The book took a lot of research, and I came up with the whole story. So I did a lot of investigation of the blacklist and interviewed people who were affected. Ian McLellan Hunter was a blacklisted writer informed on by Capra. I told him that Capra had informed on him, and he was stunned to find that out.

WSWS: Is a 222-page file, as the FBI had on Welles, particularly thick or thin?

JM: It is substantial, but not as huge as some. Charlie Chaplin’s is more than two thousand pages long. Welles’s file indicated serious interest in him. The FBI pursued him and spied on him from 1941 to 1956, when they closed the file.

The file was opened in 1941 around the time of the release of Citizen Kane, and it’s clear that [William Randolph] Hearst, who was a close ally of Hoover’s, had sicced the FBI on him.

Welles was involved in a group for radio called the Free Company, made up of progressives who were doing programs about civil liberties and similar issues. And Welles did a radio show that he wrote and directed called His Honor the Mayor, which is quite sophisticated because it’s about a town in which there is a fascist organization, kind of like the Ku Klux Klan, and the mayor defends their right to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.

Welles is saying in America we can’t deny anyone the freedom of speech whether we like their politics or not. It was a clever of way of defending basic rights even for our enemies. But Hearst saw through this and didn’t like it—also in the play, they criticize a powerful publisher, it’s implied that he’s a fascist. And it’s clearly Hearst they’re talking about, even though the character has a different name. So Hearst went bananas and attacked Welles over that and, of course, Citizen Kane, so this led to the FBI starting their investigation of Welles.

WSWS: What does it say about American society that the man who directed what is often called the greatest American film [Citizen Kane] was put on the Custodial Detention Index, an FBI list of people to be interned in case of a national emergency?

JM: Having read these files I knew he was on the list. And a story came out after my book was published that Hoover wanted to round up the people on the Security Index, as it was then called, at the time of the Korean War.

WSWS: Yes, we wrote about that in 2007 [FBI’s Hoover proposed internment of 12,000 “disloyal” Americans in 1950].

JM: [President Harry] Truman said no. Because Welles had left the country, the FBI removed him from the Security Index in 1949. But if he had been in the country when the Korean War began in 1950, he probably would have been vulnerable to being rounded up. And winding up in a camp.

WSWS: In the recent review of Hollywood’s Blacklists [The anti-communist purge of the American film industry], we argued that Welles, through no fault of his own, was not prepared for the counter-offensive against him and the left in general.

JM: By 1941 he was prepared, because he was getting the full heat. I think he was a little naïve when he made Kane. It was not a mistake to do it. Some people said he should not have made Kane because it ruined his career

WSWS: Of course, that’s a coward’s argument. That’s the theme of that documentary, The Battle over Citizen Kane [1999] [PBS documentary: “The Battle Over Citizen Kane”—A revealing look at an old controversy]

JM: That was ridiculous, because it equated Welles and Hearst—a progressive and a quasi-fascist—as if they were similar creatures. I think Welles did not realize how much trouble he’d get into by attacking Hearst. That’s one of the reasons Citizen Kane is a wonderful film, it’s very brazen and audacious. But it certainly caused him immense trouble. By the time the film was under attack in 1941, he certainly was aware of the magnitude of the problem, because they were threatening to burn the film.

WSWS: It was a remarkable moment, when Welles persuaded the film studio executives and their lawyers, in a projection room at Radio City Music Hall in New York, not to destroy the film.

JM: [Welles’s editor at the time and future director] Robert Wise, who was there, gave me a first-hand account. He said it was the greatest performance Welles ever gave, when he gave this wonderful speech about defending freedom of speech against fascism and how we have to defend it here at home. It is under attack around the world, he said…. It’s very moving—and the people he addressed his speech to were the heads of the New York corporations that ran the studios and their top lawyers. RKO was threatened by Louis B. Mayer, who ran MGM. He was heading an informal group from the studios and saying we’ll go to RKO and buy Citizen Kane for $800,000 and burn it.

All the studios, who got their lawyers involved, were all feeling vulnerable because Hearst was threatening to go to town against them. He was threatening to bring up the fact that many Hollywood executives were Jews. In Hearst Over Hollywood, Louis Pizzitola [An interview with Louis Pizzitola, author of Hearst Over Hollywood] goes into detail about the anti-Semitic crusade Hearst was going to mount, and he was also going to reveal a lot of scandals about studio bosses and stars. Screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz was quoted about that—Hearst had all the goods on people throughout the years that he had suppressed, various “dirty secrets,” and he was going to publish that material. So the fact that Welles could persuade them is pretty extraordinary.

The fictional version of the struggle over Citizen Kane, RKO 281 [1999] [How today’s film industry views Orson Welles] has that scene, but they ruined it for me. In their version Welles gives that speech and it’s pretty stirring, then he walks out with George Schaefer, the head of RKO. It leaves some ambiguity as to whether Welles meant what he said, or he was just putting on an act, which I thought was a gratuitous pulling the rug out from under this wonderful moment. It’s absurd, because, first of all, Welles was trying to save his film, and, second, he cared deeply about fascism and freedom of speech.

WSWS: Your book points out, without covering over his weaknesses and failings, the ongoing effort to portray Welles as crazy, maniacally egotistical, reckless, wasteful, opportunist, etc. There’s the Tim Robbins version of this in Cradle Will Rock [1999], and, more recently, Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles [2008]. It’s unfortunate. He represents something people still find threatening in some way.

JM: In Discovering Orson Welles, Jonathan Rosenbaum argues that Welles represents the artist, and artists threaten the status quo. Welles is the archetypal troublesome artist. Rosenbaum thinks this is the root of all this. In a puritanical culture the artists are considered amoral and reckless. They waste money, chase women and they do all these terrible things, and Welles seems to fit all those characteristics.

In my book, I point out that Welles went over budget a few times, not a great deal and not as much as others have done. The Lady from Shanghai went way over budget.

Let’s put it in perspective: In regard to his Brazilian film, It’s All True [shot in 1942], which was never completed, there were rumors that Welles went down there and went way over budget. They fired him. They lied about it.

In my book I reproduce the transcript of the phone conversation between two RKO executives, Reg Armour and Phil Reisman. This is a smoking gun. It shows the character assassination that was going on. Armour said, “We don’t want him to know” what the real budget is, because Welles was well under budget. They also said things like, well, he didn’t have a story. They sent him down there without a script because that was the project—he had to discover what the film was about when he was down there. He did do some carousing, there is no doubt, but that’s been kind of exaggerated.

He dated Brazilian women, and you still find the suggestion in some of the books on him that there’s something wrong with that. There’s a kind of racist tinge to this, that he’s reveling with “native women”—they use phrases of that type.

Rosenbaum and Robert Stam argue that Welles’s problems were partly racial or political, because he was taking the side of the poor blacks in Brazil living in the favelas. They were persecuted and economically deprived, and he was centering a lot of the film on their problems and how the government was oppressing them. So he was threatening to the Brazilian and American governments who didn’t want a film of that kind but an innocuous travelogue.

The studio also worried that if the film had a lot of black people in it they couldn’t show it in the South. When MGM used to make movies with Lena Horne they used to design her scenes so they could be cut out when the films were shown in the South. But Welles had whites and blacks freely mixing in the cast. He was under attack for the political content and also because he was associating with black people. He had black members of his creative team whom he would meet with. Granted, they often met in nightclubs. The fact that they were working was ignored. So it’s a lot of picking and distorting of facts, and when you analyze these myths most of them collapse. Or all of them collapse, actually.

WSWS: There’s that aspect of it. But it was not simply the artist as artist in Welles who was threatening. He thought about and deeply criticized American life.

JM: The Magnificent Ambersons [1942] was quite radical when you consider that it’s a film directed against the automobile. Against capitalism to a certain extent. The industrial age that ruined America. Although you could find something quite conservative in that film because it is also a lament for a vanished time in American history.

WSWS: It was directed against Henry Fordism perhaps.

JM: Ambersons was made at the worst possible time because the whole country was gearing up for the war effort. Everybody was supposed to be working 24-hour shifts at the factories and everything else. He comes along and says the automobile, or the automobile industry, is the enemy.

To be continued

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New Phone Directory Invades Privacy

Friday, June 12th, 2009

Pay a pound for faceless corporation to have your phone number

Technology but used for evil? In a potential step towards a bleak Big Brother future, this week sees the launch of the UK’s first mobile phone directory.

Starting on Tuesday June 16, any Briton willing to pay a pound will be given the number of, and connected to, one of the 16 million phone users in the database. But while that figure represents just 40 percent of the handsets currently being used in the UK, the directory’s launch has created concerns on how the numbers were collected and more importantly, the invasion of mobile users’ privacy.

When the plan was first publicized, Connectivity, the company that created the directory, proudly announced that each and every potential subscriber would be contacted for their approval-that didn’t happen, and many critics are now claiming the entire directory was collected from market research data.

To add insult to injury, those who are currently in the directory must pay an opt-out fee and will have to wait around a month to be removed. As a mobile phone magazine, we respect the confidentiality of a user’s phone number and feel that trading it for profit is an obvious invasion of privacy. If you are part of the directory and want to opt out, head to 118800.uk or text the letter “E” to 118800.

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A New Spy in the Sky

Friday, June 12th, 2009

At first glance, there was nothing special about the blimp floating high above the cars and crowd at this year’s Indy 500 on Memorial Day weekend. Like most airships, it acted as an advertising vehicle; this time for the Fisher House, a charity focused on helping injured veterans and their families. But the real promo should have been for the blimp’s creator, Raytheon, the security company best known for its weapons systems. Hidden inside the 55-foot-long white balloon was a powerful surveillance camera adapted from the technology Raytheon provides the U.S. military. Essentially an unmanned drone, the blimp transmitted detailed images to the race’s security officers and to Indiana police. “The airship is great because it doesn’t have that Big Brother feel, or create feelings of invasiveness,” says Lee Silvestre, vice president of mission innovation in Raytheon’s Integrated Defense division. “But it’s still a really powerful security tool.”

Until recently, Raytheon’s eye-in-the-sky technology was used in Afghanistan and Iraq to guard American military bases, working as airborne guards against any oncoming desert threat. Using infrared sensors and a map overlay not unlike Google Earth, the technology scans a large area, setting important landmarks (say, the perimeter of a military base), and constantly relays video clips back to a command center. If a gun fires or a bomb is detonated, the airships can detect the noise and focus the camera—all from a mighty-high 500 feet.

After the success of the Indy 500 trial, the company is targeting police departments and sporting facilities that want to keep an eye on crowds that might easily morph into an unruly mob. “Large municipalities could find many uses for this [technology] once we figure out how to get it in their hands,” says Nathan Kennedy, the blimp’s project manager.

For now, cost might be the only thing preventing a blimp from appearing over your head. Raytheon won’t disclose how much the system may eventually cost, but chances are it won’t be cheap. For municipalities without a Pentagon-size police budget, the blimps’ potential to display ads may assist with financing. Raytheon says local authorities could install a built-in LED screen to attract sponsors, generate revenue and defer operating costs.

But what about privacy and civil-rights concerns? Raytheon argues that its technology is no different than what’s already watching us on a daily basis: street cameras, cop cars, helicopters and foot patrols. “No new information is being picked up by the airships, necessarily,” Silvestre says. “We’re just incorporating lots of different feeds to provide a quick, complete picture; integration is the key here.”

Not everyone is buying that argument. “Our legal system, not to mention our culture, has not had time to digest this new technology, or preserve the privacy we’re used to having,” says Jay Stanley, of ACLU’s Technology and Liberty program. Though a 1986 Supreme Court case (California v. Ciraolo) set a precedent for the police using aerial surveillance, Stanley and his ACLU colleagues are waiting for the court to address modern technology. “In America, we have this principle that the government doesn’t look over your shoulder unless you’re suspected of wrongdoing.” In other words, start eyeing the skies.

Newsweek

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£400m biometric-passport contract awarded

Friday, June 12th, 2009

The UK government has awarded the contract for creating the next generation of British passports to secure-document specialist De La Rue.

The Identity and Passport Service on Thursday announced the £400m contract for the passports, which will be available to UK citizens from October 2010. The passports will feature new designs and improved security, including the ability to carry fingerprint biometrics.

“The British passport is recognised as one of the best in the world, and we want to keep it that way. Today we are affirming our commitment to making this travel document more secure than ever by using fingerprint biometrics,” James Hall, chief executive of the Identity and Passport Service (IPS), said in a statement.

The contract will last for 10 years. According to the IPS, the procurement process for the contract started with 20 prospective bidders in June 2008, before De La Rue was eventually awarded the project.

British company De La Rue has developed passports and identity documents for over 50 governments, according to the company’s chief executive, James Hussey.

IPS issued two contracts in April worth around £650m. The Application and Enrolment (A&E) contract to replace the UK’s current passport-application processing system, which is about to come to the end of its life, was awarded to CSC. The other deal, a contract to provide the National Biometric Identity Service (NBIS) with a database to support the introduction of biometric passports and ID cards, was awarded to IBM.

The biometric passports are part of a wider government strategy which also encompasses an ID card scheme. The government’s scheme to introduce ID cards has faced criticism from oppostion parties, claiming it is a waste of money at a time when government spending is under increasing scrutiny.

The Liberal Democrats recently said the present government is not capable of managing a project such as the ID card scheme. “Recent catastrophes involving personal data clearly demonstrate the inability of the government to handle sensitive information,” Liberal Democrat shadow home secretary, Chris Huhne, said recently.

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UK Government Drops Big Brother ‘Database’ But Remains Big Brother

Monday, April 27th, 2009

The UK government wants communications companies to keep records of our phone, text messages, e-mail and Internet traffic, but has dropped plans to keep this information stored in a centralized database.

Currently UK Internet service providers are required to keep records of Web and e-mail traffic for one year, the Government wants to change this to include all communications that come from other countries that cross British networks.

The dates, duration and location/IP address will be kept by communications companies.

Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith said “Advances in communications mean that there are ever more sophisticated ways to communicate and we need to ensure that we keep up with the technology being used by those who would seek to do us harm.”

“My key priority is to protect the citizens of the UK, and communications data is an essential tool for law enforcement agencies to track murderers and pedophiles, save lives and tackle crime,” she added.

 

“It is essential that the police and other crime-fighting agencies have the tools they need to do their job. However, to be clear, there are absolutely no plans for a single central store.”

The Government claims there will be “strict safeguards on who could access the information” but this has not stopped local authorities from abusing their new found powers in the past.  

A spokesman for the  Conservative party, Chris Grayling, said the government had “built a culture of surveillance”.

“Too many parts of government have too many powers to snoop on innocent people and that’s really got to change,” he said.

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Paying billions for our database state

Friday, April 24th, 2009

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Security services eye personal data

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

Privacy campaigners are already protesting the idea to use personal data to for ‘pre-emptive surveillance’.

By William Maclean |

CCTV cameras will play a big part in security during next week’s G20 summit, but a former security chief has said it could soon go further than that, with all personal data being uesd for “pre-emptive surveillance”.

That is the vision outlined by former security chief David Omand in a study of intelligence methods seen by privacy campaigners as a plan for a vast breach of human rights.

“Finding out other people’s secrets is going to involve breaking everyday moral rules,” he said in the paper for the Institute of Public Policy Research, an influential think tank.

“Application of modern data mining and processing techniques does involve examination of the innocent as well as the suspect to identify patterns of interest for further investigation.”

In an interview, Omand said: “If you have the advantage of pre-emptive intelligence, then you are able to use the rapier, not the bludgeon, of state power.”

Law enforcement agencies can already access personal data in a criminal investigation. What is new is the proposal to examine the data purely to identify leads for further investigation.

Analysts say the study by Omand, the cabinet’s Security and Intelligence Coordinator in 2002-05, may be an indicator of the kind of reforms the security agencies may seek in coming years.

It may also point to changes elsewhere, as British surveillance practice is often emulated by countries who see Britain as a leader in using technology to snoop on its own people.

Omand says a growing target for spies is not the street, where an estimated 4.2 million closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras already operate throughout Britain, but personal data held on computers that forms the stuff of personal life.

This means databases of airline bookings, advance passenger information, financial, telephone, tax, health, passport and biometric records and phone and internet communications.

“Where I disagree with many who warn of the dangers of the ’surveillance society’ is that I think these methods are necessary for counter-terrorism, provided they are properly regulated,” he said.

What about privacy?

“I think the British public would be on my side given the still significant threat from terrorism,” said Omand, a former director of the Government Communications Headquarters, an intelligence agency that intercepts electronic communications.

Omand says the state needs this power because Britain is more vulnerable to disruption as it becomes more networked and IT-dependent. Also, he says, sacrificing some privacy is preferable to other ways of boosting security such as altering the criminal law to make it easier to convict.

“This is a hard choice,” he said. “But…it is greatly preferable to tinkering with the rule of law, or derogating from fundamental human rights,” he wrote.

Omand said surveillance should be subject to an authorizing process with clear accountability to safeguard “public trust in the essential reasonableness” of British security action.

It will be for parliament eventually to decide the limits of such surveillance, and some analysts fear MPs will permit wide powers. Britons, with no experience of invasion or occupation in their modern history, are traditionally tolerant of state power provided it is seen to be wielded benignly.

Omand’s critics have been quick to speak up.

Ken MacDonald, a former Director of Public Prosecutions, said if spies trawled the data of people suspected of no crime they “would become, in peoples’ eyes, essentially objectionable and oppressive. They would be viewed with hostility.”

“This is because to abolish the distinction between suspects and those suspected of nothing, to place them in entirely the same category in the eyes of the State, is an unmistakable hallmark of authoritarianism.”

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NSA’s meta-data email surveillance program exposed

Wednesday, February 11th, 2009

WMR has learned details of one of the most important components of the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program code named “STELLAR WIND.” The highly-classified STELLAR WIND program was initiated by the George W. Bush administration with the cooperation of major U.S. telecommunications carriers, including AT&T and Verizon.

The interception of text communications by STELLAR WIND was a major priority of the NSA program.

The major NSA system for intercepting text communications is called PINWALE. On September 15, 2008, WMR first reported on how PINWALE was used to target Russian e-mails: “Code-named PINWALE, the NSA e-mail surveillance system targets Russian government, military, diplomatic, and commercial email traffic and burrows into the text portions of the email to search for particular words and phrases of interest to NSA eavesdroppers.”

WMR has learned additional details of PINWALE. The system is linked to a number of meta-databases that contain e-mail, faxes, and text messages of hundreds of millions of people around the world and in the United States.

Informed sources have revealed to WMR that PINWALE can search these meta-databases using various parameters like date-time, group, natural language, IP address, sender and receipients, operating system, and other information embedded in the header. When an NSA analyst is looking for Persian or Arabic e-mails, the sender and recipients are normally foreign nationals, who are not covered by restrictions on eavesdropping on U.S. “persons” once imposed on NSA by United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18 (USSID 18). However, STELLAR WIND and PINWALE negated both USSID 18 and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 by permitting NSA analysts to read the e-mails, faxes, and text messages of U.S. persons when PINWALE search parameters included searches of e-mails in English. When English language text communications are retrieved, analysts read the text message content to determine whether it contains anything to do with terrorism. However, rather than being deleted, the messages are returned to the meta-databases.

Text message records in PINWALE, a system developed by NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, are contained in three major meta-databases code-named LION HEART, LION ROAR, and LION FUSION.

Not only are text communications between U.S. persons in the United States and recipients abroad contained in the PINWALE meta-databases but text messages between U.S. persons within the United States are also held in the databases.

WMR reported on May 10, 2005, that Booz Allen is also the major contractor for an NSA database code named “FIRSTFRUITS” that tracked not only the articles of journalists but contained intercepts of their communications, “ . . . part of the upkeep of the [FIRSTFRUITS] system has been outsourced to outside contractors such as Booz Allen.”

The involvement of the telecommunications companies in STELLAR WIND and PINWALE was revealed when former AT&T technician Mark Klein leaked AT&T documents on the program in 2006. AT&T’s interception entailed NSA snooping equipment being placed within AT&T centers in San Francisco; Bridgeton, Missouri; San Diego; San Jose; Atlanta; Seattle; and Los Angeles. 

The Obama administration recently appealed a decision by U.S. Judge Vaughn Walker of the U.S. Court for the Northern District of California who ruled that a lawsuit brought by the Al Haramain Islamic charity (Al Haramain v. Bush), in which the charity charges that it was the subject of illegal warrantless wiretapping under STELLAR WIND, could proceed. 

WMR has previously reported that STELLAR WIND may have been used to prosecute Democratic governors and other Democratic officials around the country. WMR has received confirmation that when NSA analysts monitoring e-mails and other text messages, encountered information from PINWALE meta-databases that did not involve terrorism or foreign counterintelligence issues but did involve other possible criminal matters, NSA lawyers would determine whether such information should be turned over to Department of Justice criminal prosecutors. However, with information passed to WMR that NSA directors Michael Hayden and Keith Alexander were in total lockstep with the Bush-Cheney political agenda, with Alexander once boasting to a group of NSA employees that “I am a Rumsfeld man,” there is the real possibility that PINWALE data ended up in the hands of U.S. attorneys like Patrick Fitzgerald in his vendetta against deposed Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, and Alice Martin and Leura Canary in their Bush White House-directed political prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman.

If Fitzgerald’s legal brief against Blagojevich contains PINWALE-derived wiretap information it would explain why he has been unsuccessful in finding a grand jury in Chicago to indict Blagojevich. WMR was specifically told that e-mails between Washington and Chicago would be contained in PINWALE and that is something that could pose a problem for Fitzgerald in explaining where all his intercepts of Blagojevich originated. It may also explain why the Obama administration does not want details of STELLAR WIND to be exposed in Al Haramain v. Bush.

Copyright © 2008 WayneMadenReport.com

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Don’t sleepwalk into Big Brother surveillance, schools warned

Wednesday, January 14th, 2009

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Fury at Labour MPs ‘Orwellian’ tactics over DNA database vote

Friday, November 21st, 2008

Liverpool Daily Post | LABOUR MPs were accused of “Orwellian” tactics last night after voting to make it all-but impossible for innocent people to remove their DNA from the national database.

Opposition parties reacted with fury after the Government overturned a Lords amendment that would have forced the Home Office to issue specific guidelines to help the innocent strip out their profiles.

The vote came just days after the Daily Post revealed a seven-year-old Merseyside child had its DNA added to the database – a move condemned by civil liberties campaign groups.

Merseyside police chiefs said it had been held because of “extraordinary circumstances”, but later ordered the details to be removed.

Almost one in ten people in Merseyside have their genetic profile stored, around one quarter of whom have not been convicted, or cautioned, with any offence.

The law allows the police to take DNA samples from anyone who has been arrested – and store their samples permanently, even if they are acquitted.

Most concern centres on the profiles of nearly 40,000 children in Britain, including 3,555 under-16s from Merseyside and a further 2,452 from Cheshire.

Two weeks ago, the House of Lords backed a Conservative amendment calling for the Counter-Terrorism Bill to be redrafted to include specific guidelines on DNA removal.

Damien Green, a Tory home affairs spokesman, said the draconian rules gave police only a single example where a person’s DNA would be considered for destruction. This would be where a person died in a multi-occupancy house and everyone else was arrested on suspicion of murder. If it later transpired the person died of natural causes, only then would other residents have a case for removal.

Mr Green said: “I think MPs will recognise that this is an absurdity and clearly these guidelines in themselves are not an acceptable way to proceed.”

But, yesterday, the amendment was easily overturned with a government majority of 68.

Chris Huhne, for the Liberal Democrats, said: “This Orwellian government has turned down the opportunity to give innocent people the rights they fully deserve.”

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Passengers test new face scanners

Tuesday, August 19th, 2008

Facial recognition scanners are being trialled at an airport as part of government efforts to improve security and reduce passenger congestion.

The system has been introduced at Manchester Airport. It can be used by adult biometric passport holders from the UK and European Economic Area.

It works by scanning passengers’ faces and comparing it to the photograph digitally stored on their passports.

The Lib Dems said the government must ensure the technology is “foolproof”.

Facial recognition technology is part of the Home Office’s e-Borders programme, which is aimed at transforming the UK’s border control to ensure greater security and efficiency.

Ministers believe the facial recognition technology will help identify criminals and terrorists trying to enter the UK illegally.

About 13 million people in the UK have been issued with a biometric passport, which contains a microchip holding biographical information and images.

And a further 30 million people living in the European Economic Area, which incorporates the EU countries plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland, have biometric passports.

Adults only

At Manchester Airport, passengers with biometric passports will avoid queues and pass through unmanned gates.

A scanner checks their passport has not been tampered with and that they are not on any security lists.

They are then allowed through to the next gate, where a facial recognition scanner reads their face.

Rejected passengers are redirected to immigration officers for further checks.

Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Tom Brake voiced concerns over the reliability of the technology.

“Ministers must ensure that this technology is foolproof. If this goes wrong, thousands of passengers could be left stranded at Manchester Airport,” he said.

“Following the Heathrow Terminal 5 embarrassment, the last thing this country needs is another major transport hub grinding to a halt.”

The system will be introduced at Stansted in September, and if the trials are successful it will be extended to all major UK airports.

All new UK passports have been biometric for the past two years and the Home Office estimates about seven million people will receive one every year.

BBC

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DNA database least of our concerns

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

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Spy-in-sky patrols over British cities

Monday, August 4th, 2008

By Jason Lewis | MI5  is using a fleet of sophisticated surveillance aircraft to search for unidentified Britons who fought alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The manhunt has been ordered because it is feared the committed and highly trained fighters may have returned home to plot terror attacks in the UK.

Planes with eavesdropping equipment are now flying over British cities searching for returning Afghan fighters.

They are attempting to identify suspects using ‘voice prints’ of fighters with British accents picked up by RAF Nimrod spy planes monitoring Taliban battlefield radio signals.

The revelation comes after the former SAS commander in Afghanistan yesterday confirmed that British Muslim extremists were actively supporting Taliban and Al Qaeda attacks on British troops.

He said there was also evidence that these people were then returning home to plot further attacks in the UK.

Brigadier Ed Butler warned: ‘There is a link between Kandahar and urban conurbations in the UK. This is something the military understands but the British public does not.’

Whitehall sources have never officially confirmed that the three Britten-Norman Islander aircraft based at RAF Northolt in West London are being used for covert surveillance by MI5.

Last year it was revealed that West Midlands Police had used the aircraft, which can monitor computer and mobile-phone communication and long-wave radios, to track suspects connected to the plot to kidnap and behead a British Muslim soldier.

And their long-term role with the Security Service was apparently confirmed by a photograph, obtained by The Mail on Sunday, of an MI5 surveillance officer, Steven Lanham, who died on duty in 1999, dressed in a flying suit alongside one of the aircraft.

The Islander aircraft regularly patrol the skies over Birmingham and Coventry, Leicester, West Yorkshire and the bordering Greater Manchester areas, flying at between 12,000ft and 15,000ft.

Their equipment and capabilities have never been officially disclosed but they are believed to be able to monitor mobile-phone calls. More recently they have been fitted with equipment capable of picking up signals from wi-fi computer networks.

‘Traffic’ intercepted by the equipment on board is analysed and processed, probably at the GCHQ spy centre in Cheltenham, searching for voice matches with those overheard in the Afghan war zone.

Voices heard in Afghanistan and the suspect voices in the UK are computer-analysed looking for a match. It is understood that, in some cases, it has been possible to determine the true identities of the Taliban fighters from the UK.

Last night Whitehall sources refused to discuss MI5 surveillance methods.

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Call for system to ensure proper use of CCTV

Monday, July 14th, 2008

By MICHAEL SETTLE | A new system should be introduced to ensure that the growing number of CCTV cameras are used properly, Ann McKechin, the Labour MP for Glasgow North, will propose in the House of Commons this week.

She said: “Seventy percent of CCTV is operated by private companies. There are 16 different types of system operated by public authorities in the Strathclyde Police area. We need a system that makes sure that cameras are used properly.”

The back bencher is proposing a statutory duty for public bodies such as local authorities, transport groups and housing associations to work together with their local police forces to achieve streamlining of public systems.

Ms McKechin wants shops, shopping centres and licensed premises to agree a code of conduct on the use and storage of CCTV images.

Her proposals would require private organisations which control large areas open to the public such as cinemas, hotels and shopping centres or large bars and clubs to provide the local police force with up-to-date information on the type of CCTV systems that they use and how they use them.

The 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain has led to accusations that the nation has become a “surveillance society”, which was one of the issues at the centre of the campaign by David Davis, the former Shadow Home Secretary, who last week regained the seat of Haltemprice and Howden in a by-election.

Last week, the latest row over CCTV cameras emerged in the idyllic fishing village of Elgol on Skye, where locals have complained over the siting of a £1200 camera by the local council, claiming it was an intrusion into the area’s tranquility.

However, Highland Council has made clear that the only reason it has installed the camera is to monitor a dispute between two rival boat-trip companies.

Ms McKechin will use the parliamentary device of the 10-minute rule bill on Wednesday to raise the issue of CCTV cameras. Without the backing of the UK Government, it will not become law.

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