Orwellian
Database craziness - it’s not just the government
Shop staff who have been sacked or resigned while under suspicion of dodgy behaviour could soon struggle to find work, as some of the UK’s top retailers are set to share information online about their employment history.
As The Register notes, you can be listed on the database if you have “left a job while under mere suspicion” of dodgy deeds. As the TUC says:
this register could lead to people being excluded from the job market by an employer who falsely accuses them of misconduct or sacks them because they bear them a grudge. An individual may not be aware they have been listed and have no right of appeal.
Flying to the US on business? Leave your laptop at home
Business travellers visiting America are being warned not to travel with sensitive information - because US security staff can copy it and hang on to it indefinitely.
“Right now, the U.S. customs department has the right to look at the data on your computer and download that data if they want to,” Gurley said. “The Ninth Circuit held that it is within the purview of the U.S. government to look at or download anything” on laptops and other electronic devices at the border, she said.
A recent court ruling says that laptops are just like any other luggage, which means security have the right to search their contents.
The Association of Corporate Travel Executives (ACTE) has issued a warning to its members worldwide – and to all business travellers – to limit proprietary information on laptop computers when crossing U.S. borders, and to eliminate any personal data, including photographs, finances and email that you do not want examined by Border Protection authorities. The warning follows a decision by a federal appeals court on 21 April 2008 giving customs officials the unfettered authority to examine, copy, and seize travellers’ laptops – without reasonable suspicion.
The ACTE isn’t telling its members to hide data; it’s suggesting that they should take steps to avoid sensitive corporate information from getting into the wrong hands, or from being deleted by some fat-fingered fool. The group also recommends:
3) If your laptop also serves as your major home computer, get another one for travel purposes.
I reckon journalists travelling to the US might want to pay attention to that one.
The war on terror… and dogshit
When the Regulation of Investigatory Powers legislation was introduced, tinfoil hat wearers like me wrote a lot of words about how the rules would be abused. And lo! It turns out that councils are using the anti-terror legislation to find the owners of crapping dogs.
Earlier this month, it emerged that a family in Poole in Dorset had been covertly tracked for nearly three weeks to check if they lived in a school catchment area.
The investigation has also revealed that the law was used in at least seven cases to find out about people who let their dogs foul; a breach of planning law; an animal-welfare case; and an instance of littering
Return of the son of ID cards
An excellent post by Mr Eugenides:
If you want to know what’s really happening… you watch the hands.
So never mind the cards; it’s all about the database. It’s always been all about the database. Don’t watch the cards. Watch the hands.
Government listens to turkeys, bans Christmas
Rather than go over the insane anti-file sharing plan the government apparently intends to implement, here’s an extract from this month’s The Word magazine talking about EMI.
The average salary across EMI is estimated at £57,328, heavily weighted towards the top. A FTSE 100 company on average has fewer than 20 execs on £500K-plus; EMI is reported to have over 50. These top execs are the ones sitting on top of massive severance packages too…
While all labels rely on that 10 per cent of signings who are multi-platinum successes in every key territory, EMI has (Norah Jones excepted) not signed and nurtured one this side of the millennium…
EMI ignored the warnings of the last ten years to its detriment. The same accusation can be levelled at all the majors. For the first time, a format (MP3) and a delivery channel (online) were developed outside of the labels’ control; their inability to understand the opportunities and possibilities were pre-Luddite.
So obviously, the solution is to cripple the internet industry. Sheesh.
What a bunch of discs
When the Guardian urged the government to “free our data”, I’m pretty sure they didn’t mean that the government should compromise the personal data of half the population. The “discgate” (gah, why does everything need to be called “-gate”?) scandal is all the more horrifying because of the sheer stupidity involved: it seems that 25 million people’s data was entrusted to a junior clerk and stored without encryption before burnt to CD and lost in the post. [The data was encrypted after all. Thanks Charles.]
It’s a spectacular display of utter incompetence, but of course there’s a bigger point here. There are all kinds of rules, procedures and laws to prevent such stupidity from happening, and none of them made any difference.
These are the people who will protect us from ID thieves? Jesus wept.
And that’s why the ID card scheme gives sensible people the heebie-jeebies. It’s not fear of Big Brother watching us; it’s the perfectly reasonable fear that Big Brother is D-U-M dumb. What’s the point of biometric scanning and other high-tech protection if the entire system can be compromised by a clerk with a CD burner?
As this sorry saga proves, relying on the government to safeguard our personal data is like asking Fred West to babysit.
Stars of CCTV
London has 10,000 crime-fighting CCTV cameras which cost £200 million, figures show today.
But an analysis of the publicly funded spy network, which is owned and controlled by local authorities and Transport for London, has cast doubt on its ability to help solve crime.
A comparison of the number of cameras in each London borough with the proportion of crimes solved there found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any.
Embarrassed by your passport photo? This’d be a good time to change it
If your passport is due for renewal in the next wee while, it’s worth doing it sooner rather than later: prices are going up again, and they’ll go up even more over the next few years if the ID card system isn’t thrown into the skip where it belongs.
Looking on the bright side, the Passport Office - sorry, I mean the not-Orwellian-at-all Identity & Passport Service - seems to be on top of its game just now, because the whole process from online submission to receiving my shiny new passport took just over a week. And for now at least, you don’t need to give the government your DNA or get yourself microchipped.
A good day to bury bad news
Government: Look! Over there! It’s Blair! He’s finally resigning!
*everybody runs over to listen to Blair’s speech*
*government waits until everyone’s out of earshot*
Government (whispering): The ID card system’s going to cost another half billion.
Ah, ID cards. Remember them? They were going to cost £3.1 billion and save us all from everything. The official cost’s gone up to £5.5 billion now, and it would have been higher still if the Home Office hadn’t palmed off a half-billion in costs to the Foreign Office so they’re no longer included in the total.
It’s worth noting that the £5.5 billion is the official cost, which no sane person believes is anywhere close to the real cost of this shambles.
It’s also worth noting that by delaying the announcement, the government broke the law: Section 37 of the Identity Cards Act 2006, to be precise, which says the announcements should be “before the end of every six months” - so these figures should have been out in early April.
Let’s recap, shall we?
- Every justification for an ID card system - terrorism, identity fraud, immigration etc - has been comprehensively debunked.
- In IT terms, the government couldn’t hit a cow’s arse with a banjo. This will be the most ambitious IT project the government has ever attempted.
- When the government embarked on its initial public consultation about ID cards, 5,000-odd concerned anti-ID petitions were lumped together as a single complaint from (I assume) a Mr Internet, enabling the Home Office to claim widespread public support.
- The official figures - which no sane person believes - are already spiralling out of control to the tune of a billion quid per year.
- A few years back the government angrily denied claims that the ID card system would cost £6 billion. If trends continue, the official cost of the ID card system will hit £6 billion in October.
- If it thinks doing so could help avoid anti-ID card publicity, the government will cheerfully break the law.
And yet despite all this, the anti-ID crowd think it’s going to be an expensive disaster! The fools!
ID cards - it’s about curtains
This is not my idea - I saw it on a site, possibly Fark, today - and the original was worded much better than this half-remembered paraphrase, but hopefully it’ll survive my mangling: Not wanting ID cards or over-the-top state surveillance isn’t because you’re up to no good; it’s about privacy, the same way you put curtains on your windows. You don’t have curtains because you’re up to no good; you have them because having people staring into your house is annoying and occasionally creepy.