Loss of Privacy

Despite ever growing concerns over security details, the UK has gone ahead and entered the details on 11 million children into ContactPoint’s database. The database has been delayed several times over security and privacy concerns, however, after claiming the pilot project a success, every local council authority will soon have the project.

They say the long-delayed £224 project will make England’s 11million young people safer by providing a single register that can be used by all child protection professionals.

But there are concerns that the sensitive data could fall into the wrong hands, after an official review concluded that it could never be completely secure.

The program was delayed after officials admitted that the database could never be fully secured. Then, ContactPoint had some glitches over the summer and new loopholes were found, making the system vulnerable to attacks.

Children were being listed in the database under their real and adopted names, making it easier to track them down and eliminating the “shielding” that was supposed to take place to protect them. The database itself proved to be helpful to anyone who would hack the system to find out where the children lived, leaving many children at risk again.

It is also feared that police or council workers will use it to search for evidence of crime or pry into family arrangements, rather than safeguarding children.

Tim Loughton, the shadow children’s minister, said: “We are determined to protect vulnerable children from abuse, but ContactPoint would put them risk.

“Every IT system the Government touches turns into a disaster – we cannot afford to let them mismanage the personal details of 11 million children. It would be irresponsible to implement something that is such a danger to our children.”

David Laws, the Lib Dems’ children’s spokesman, added: “When it comes to child protection, professionals need to be talking to one another and not relying on simply putting data into a massive database.

“The Government has shown it can’t be trusted with sensitive data. Parents have every right to demand that their children’s personal details are not put at risk.”

The computerised database contains a record for each of the 11m under-18s living in England, containing their name, address, gender, date of birth and a unique identifying number.

It also holds information on their parents, their nursery or school, their GP and whether they have a social worker, health visitor or probation officer assigned to them. If the young person consents, it will also give details of sexual health or drug abuse counsellors.

After politicians claimed the pilot program a success, at least 390,000 people will have access to the database. These include, social workers, teachers, police officers and health care workers. They will use the database to track children in a variety of different ways.

A nurse said: “A child came into A&E [who] lied about his address as he had run away from home. I went onto ContactPoint and was able to find his correct contact details.”

Noting is noted about why the child ran away from home or why he was in the emergency room. Instead, the nurse “helped” by contacting his parents and letting him know where he was. This isn’t helpful. This is detrimental. A nurse should not be determining this information. If she knew the child had run away from home, she should have contacted the police and the right child advocate authority. Common sense should have told her this. Instead, the nurse has already relied on a database to solve the problem.

In a massive act of deception, the public was mislead by an overly zealous prosecutor in his attempt to capture pedophiles.  While pedophiles were caught, most of the men in question were instead victims of identity theft.

Thirty-five of the accused committed suicide. It’s not easy to think of many things that are worse than being convicted of a paedophile offence when you are innocent of that ghastly crime. Once you are stamped as a paedophile and placed on the Sex Offenders Register, you will probably lose your family, for your wife will divorce you, if only to ensure she can keep custody of the children whom you will now be forbidden to care for. You will lose your friends and you will lose your job.

That’s exactly what happened to dozens of men who either pled guilty or were convicted as a result of Operation Ore. The sole evidence against them was that their credit card details and computer passwords were found on the list of subscribers to websites with such repulsive names as “child rape”.

The most disgusting, and inexcusable, part of this entire mess is that their computers were checked and found free of child porn.  Their alibis checked out.  Yet, judges and juries convicted these men solely on the basis of the electronic credit card details.

But the electronic data wasn’t irrefutable. One simple possibility appears not to have occurred to the police or any of the lawyers assigned to the accused: that they had been the victims of identity theft. Someone had got hold of their credit card details and identified the perfect way to rack up charges: create a subscription service child-porn web site (it need not actually have any child porn on it, just a suitably disgusting name), then charge a subscription to the stolen card.

It took a computer expert named Jim Bates to notice that on the full electronic log, the same credit card frequently subscribes to the same child porn site several times on the same day – and yet the “subscriber” never actually visits the site. Moreover, Mr Bates noticed that the same credit card number was being used to subscribe to child porn sites at the same time on three different continents.

Great.  So a computer expert finds that there are many discrepancies and many men aren’t guilty of what they are accused of.  Does this information come to light so these men might try to repair their lives after being accused of being pedophiles?  Nope.

Mr Bates’s discovery that the electronic data was riddled with fraud did not find favour with the police. His reward was to be smeared as a paedophile himself: the cops searched his house and accused him of – you’ve guessed it – “conspiracy to obtain indecent images of children”. Employed as an expert witness, he had, in the course of his work, examined computers with paedophile material. The police search was ruled illegal and last week he received back the material that they had confiscated.

Remember when you were a child and told that if you do the right thing you will be rewarded?  Well, here’s your reward.

Chris Saltrese, a Merseyside solicitor, believes he can demonstrate that scores of the men caught by Operation Ore are not paedophiles, but victims of identity theft. If his arguments convince the Appeal Court – with whom he has just lodged a specimen case – the police may be forced to apologise for their role in causing this country’s most colossal example of injustice. It will be too late for most of the innocent men they convicted. Their lives are in pieces. And they will never be able to put them back together.

Unfortunately, these men will never be able to recover their lives.  As the article stated, 35 men have committed suicide.  35 men.  Let that sink in for a moment.  How many of those 35 men had wives and children?  At a minimum that’s 35 families torn apart and ruined, with the actual number of people likely in the hundreds.  This is all a result of the prosecution wanting convictions instead of actually conducting a proper investigation.

Defrauding the court is a serious offense and anyone involved in this should face prosecution themselves.

How many of you still think Pete Townshend is a pedophile?

The United Kingdom’s Ministry of Justice is now piloting a program that will, eventually, make a lie detector test a mandatory part of probation for sex offenders.

A three-year pilot project in East and West Midlands will aim to establish whether polygraph testing should be introduced across England and Wales.

Between 350 and 450 offenders are expected to be tested over the three-year period of the latest pilot scheme. Those who refuse risk being sent back to prison.

Claude Knights, director of the children’s charity Kidscape, said she believed the tests could help to assess risk.

“I’m hoping that this will be an incentive for paedophiles to disclose more information, which would help us to manage their release more effectively.”

What she really meant to say is, “We must think of the children.  Oh, and we must keep these dirty bastards off the street.  This sort of testing is just what we need as an excuse to throw people back into jail.”

The long-expected move had been a commitment of the government, he said, and he was “proud to say that this can now legally happen from Wednesday”.

Is anyone else bothered by the fact that the government is now happy and proud that this can legally happen now?  Have they been doing this all along and just now legalized it?

Up next, all criminals on probation will be required to submit to a polygraph.  Once the criminals are finished and in a database, we’ll move on to people arrested for anything.  Next we’ll move on to speedsters, boy racers, and loiterers.  Don’t worry, citizen, we’ll get to you soon enough.