Loss of Privacy

Not happy with catching just terrorists (which they don’t) with CCTV, the UK government has now turned against pooping dogs and their owners. This was bound to happen since only 3% of all crimes are solved using CCTV. This is the perfect way to boost those figures.

Recent reports in the U.K. media indicate that the laws are being used for everything but terrorism investigations:

Derby City Council, Bolton, Gateshead, and Hartlepool used surveillance to investigate dog fouling.

Bolton Council also used the act to investigate littering.

The London borough of Kensington and Chelsea conducted surveillance on the misuse of a disabled parking pass.

Liverpool City Council used Ripa to identify a false claim for damages.

Conwy Council used the law to spy on a person who was working while off sick.

Is this surprising? Not really. Just as we’ve seen in the U.S., once law enforcement and intelligence agencies are given new unchecked powers, abuse tends to happen. The more secretive and unchecked the powers, the more widespread the abuse.

Beginning March 27th, all domestic passengers passing through Heathrow’s terminal 5 will have their photograph and four fingerprints taken when they check in.  Photographs will be checked against faces before boarding the aircraft and fingerprints will be taken again at this time.

Although the BAA says that the biometric data will be destroyed within 24 hours, the record of where a person is traveling will not be, leaving photographs and travel information to be mined by law enforcement agencies.  The BAA says that the information will never be passed on to the police.  That may be true now, but because the BAA insists that this information is necessary to catch terrorists and illegal immigrants, it is only a matter of time before this information will be required to be turned over to law enforcement agencies.

If you are going to destroy the fingerprints, what is the point of taking them in the first place?  Surely, a photograph will suffice in checking to see if the person who checked in is, indeed, the same person getting on the plane.

International passengers will not be fingerprinted, as they must show a passport when they check in and before they board their flight.

So, international passengers do not need to be fingerprinted in the UK because their passport photo is good enough, but its own citizens have to give up more personally identifiable biometrics?  Who thought that made sense?

The BAA had to see this coming, with their decision to allow domestic and international passengers to wander through the same terminal.

The controversial security measure is also set to be introduced at Gatwick, Manchester and Heathrow’s Terminal 1, and many airline industry insiders believe fingerprinting could become universal at all UK airports within a few years.

Within the next few weeks BAA will announce plans for voluntary fingerprinting under a so-called “trusted traveller” scheme. Those willing to have their fingerprints and passport information stored would be able to bypass immigration queues by placing their finger on a scanner instead of waiting to have their passport checked.

Oh, I see.  This is a scheme to get all citizens to give up their information and allow their biometrics to be stored as well.  This is a brilliant scam to fool the people into bypassing privacy laws and give away their information gleefully.

One option could be to routinely check fingerprints against the criminal record database – a step which is currently only taken when immigration officers have a reason to be suspicious.

And there’s the rub.  Become a “trusted traveler” or else you’ll be suspected of doing something criminal.  It’s funny how none of this was necessary when the IRA was active.

With this new attitude, the terrorists have already won.  Far too many people are allowing their governments to give them the allusion of security, while joyfully handing over their long standing freedoms.

Just imagine the carnage that is going to happen when all these people have to wait in even longer lines due to these new security measures and one or two suicide bombers waltz into the airport and blow themselves up.

These draconian measures are quickly turning me off to flying overseas.  These new measures will see a drop in tourism to the UK.  I will certainly rethink going to the UK again.  Maybe I’ll take the train from Paris, until that’s included as well.  The more countries that force biometrics mean the more countries I mentally tick off my list of places to visit.

Motorists will be targeted by a new generation of road cameras which work out how many people are in a car by measuring the amount of bodily fluid it contains.

Uh, ok.

The cameras work by sending an infrared beam through the windscreen of vehicles which detects the unique make-up of blood and water content in human skin.

Uh, yeah, ok. What if you’re covered up with long sleeves or a jacket? Will turning the heat or the A/C on affect the results? Can it detect a small child as a person? Will fat people be counted as two or three people? How exactly does this system work?

Add this new camera to the ever growing Orwellian society that Great Britain is turning in to. I seriously don’t know whether to laugh or cry at this stuff anymore.

The FBI and senior British officials are discussing the possibility of sharing information contained within the British ID database in yet another attempt to track down terrorists and major criminals.

The US-initiated programme, “Server in the Sky”, would take cooperation between the police forces way beyond the current faxing of fingerprints across the Atlantic. Allies in the “war against terror” – the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand – have formed a working group, the International Information Consortium, to plan their strategy.

Biometric measurements, irises or palm prints as well as fingerprints, and other personal information are likely to be exchanged across the network. One section will feature the world’s most wanted suspects. The database could hold details of millions of criminals and suspects.

Details on criminals and suspects.  It should be understood that anyone can be considered a suspect and, once in this database, the information contained on individuals will not be removed. Considering the debacle of lost databases the British suffered last year, is it really a wise idea to be instantly handing over such sensitive information to foreign governments?

Britain’s National Policing Improvement Agency has been the lead body for the FBI project because it is responsible for IDENT1, the UK database holding 7m sets of fingerprints and other biometric details used by police forces to search for matches from scenes of crimes. Many of the prints are either from a person with no criminal record, or have yet to be matched to a named individual.

Your fingerprints could already be in their database, especially since it is common to collect all fingerprints at the scene of a crime.  It does not matter whether or not the fingerprints are from the innocent or the guilty.  All prints go into the database forever.

The FBI is proposing to establish three categories of suspects in the shared system: “internationally recognised terrorists and felons”, those who are “major felons and suspected terrorists”, and finally those who the subjects of terrorist investigations or criminals with international links. Tom Bush, assistant director at the FBI’s criminal justice information service, has said he hopes to see a pilot project for the programme up and running by the middle of the year.

If you believe this statement, then your personal information will never be accidentally mixed in with terrorists and your life will continue to run as smoothly as it has ever been.  If not, this is just another warning in a long line of ever increasingly scary tactics from governments who were supposed to be looking after our best interests.

It’s no secret that there is a huge gap between organ donators and those who need organs.  Many people want to donate their organs, they simple never get around to actually filling out the paperwork do to it, thus the reason the UK is now contemplating a scheme that would assume organ donation unless an individual specifically states they do not wish to do so.

Naturally, in other countries where organ donation is presumed, their donations are higher.

While I normally hate opt-out programs, the fact that most people want to donate but are too lazy to get around to filling out the paperwork, this seems to be a good idea.