Another study pours cold water on CCTV

Daily Mail: "The millions of CCTV cameras on Britain's streets have done virtually nothing to cut crime, Home Office-funded research found today. It said that cameras placed in town centres, housing estates and public transport 'did not have a significant effect on crime'.

The only crime that was heavily reduced by the presence of spy cameras was stealing from cars in car parks, the study said"

Which seems to be a repeat of an earlier conclusion to a Home Office study circulated back in 2005, (difficult to get hold the original source of this article by the way which was an Associated Press report in securityinfowatch.com).

But I think everyone knows this anyway. And we don't need studies to justify the notion that blanket CCTV is an absolutely vile, dehumanizing and stupid practice that's now gone totally out of control.

And why these studies should be a surprise to anyone I have no idea. The point is the cameras are not a failure as they are not about crime to begin with. They are about surveillance of the general population, and to make the idea of being watched and logged seem normal so that can be further escalated, and as well so people modify their own behavior in line with knowing they are being watched.

If anything I believe crime, the threat of violent crime is actually a highly favourable state of a social-centrist government to help keep the middle class in check.

CCTV's role in that sense is to remind people there is a threat of violent crime not to prevent it.

Google's spy in the streets triggers a wave of protests

Sorry for the lull here.

Guardian: "For 24 hours, Google's new Street View brought a vision of British cities to the web that included such memorable sights as a man throwing up between his knees outside a London bar and youths with traffic cones on their heads in Edinburgh.

But while the chance to take a 360-degree tour of every street in 25 UK cities continued to bring most offices to a standstill yesterday, some of the more invasive moments caught on camera saw Google hit with a wave of privacy complaints"

If you read the article there's very little real protest. I'm not going to say I've never used this. And it's quite cool and all. I just don't like Google's culture of 'filling in the gaps' aka ostensibly 'If it can be done let's just do it', it creates this care-free atmosphere of zero-consequences that contributes massively to this surveillance culture.

It's as if Google see it as their sole responsibility to push back the boundaries of privacy more and more to the point that it really doesn't exist anymore. And it's developed a firm track record of this, which is very difficult to deny, with Gmail and Google Health, its search records and various other greedy guzzling initiatives which I think are demeaning, trivialising and sinister.

Melanie Phillips on the police state and its causes.

Quite an interesting article by Melanie Philips in yesterday's Mail and well worth a read.

To cut a long story short and I certainly recommend people read Melanie's article, but according to her- a wider culture of so called human rights legislation, anti-discrimination laws, political correctness etc. have helped play a role in laying the groundwork for a police state in the UK (although she herself doesn't yet like that term). She says:

"It may be thought a curious irony that the Human Rights Act was introduced in 1998 to tackle precisely the concerns expressed last weekend of a slide into tyranny - and yet liberty has been seriously eroded in the past decade.

In fact, this isn't curious at all. Although the campaigners would sooner cut off their hands than admit it, the one has followed directly from the other. The idea that human rights law expands freedom was always a serious mistake. It has the opposite effect."

It's a pretty interesting article, of course a lot of people know Melanie Phillips and either love her or hate her but I don't believe any serious conservative grass roots campaigners against the police state in the UK represents anything like the culture she describes, although others may do.

Sometimes I've referred to something like the European Court of Human Rights, not because I think it's necessarily ideal and that it would in an perfect world supersede national laws but because the system has been so skewed, become so entrenched and the whole thing such a mess now, and the UK such a damaged blot that's what's there currently in this big mess.

And even if the culture Melanie describes is historically on the right lines, things like the European Court of Human Rights also happen to be rebuking the national Labour regime over things like their vile DNA stock-piling.

Certainly though Melanie could well be correct about a lot of it as far as it goes. I think these things probably have helped create the framework for a lot of this, and loosely you might throw these things under the heading of internationalism, post World War II.

Organizations like Liberty advocate a culture of human rights and egalitarianism rather than freedom per se, and the media tend to do a good job of obscuring this and presenting a case about 'civil liberties and human rights'. And this has the implication that the notion of freedom must be bound to other concepts as a kind of intellectual taxation and must now be 'handed down' rather than something you just have with inalienable implications.

And actually in fact I would quite expect the media to advocate, or some organizations to play up to the very notions Melanie is complaining about. I.e to promote people who are anti-police state but somehow enveloped in a culture of political correctness or maybe pro-hate laws or have some flavor of that about them; having the effect to slightly dilute and distract from the the real message and the main issue people are fighting against. It certainly wouldn't surprise me.

And certainly Melanie is absolutely correct to suggest that human rights, or in particular the culture that has now become associated with human rights should not be seen as any kind of a replacement for liberty and freedom.

I did see a leaflet for an event I think it was called 'Taking Liberties' off the top of my head (And I believe our friends at Irdial may have attended) and it listed Germaine Greer and Peter Tatchell as main speakers on a panel. And I agree that they may not like the police state but they are also not necessarily representative shall we say but represent something else.

This isn't an issue to do with feminism or gay activism.

Of course sometimes we all have to find common ground on those issues that are serious and important with widespread implications and that's a good thing, and I don't believe that is incongruous to anything else, but certainly that must be without loosing sight of what those big issues are.

What Melanie didn't mention of course is this police state/surveillance culture is being cultivated in the United States and Europe too. I don't know if you can pick Britain out in that way other than it's way ahead of the others.

Information Commissioner warns of surveillance culture

The Times from 27/2/08:

"Laws that allow officials to monitor the behaviour of millions of Britons risk “hardwiring surveillance” into the British way of life, the country's privacy watchdog has warned.

Richard Thomas told The Times that “creeping surveillance” in the public and private sectors had gone “too far, too fast” and risked undermining democracy.

The Information Commissioner warned that proposals to allow widespread data sharing between Whitehall and the private sector were too far-reaching and that plans to create a giant database of every telephone call, e-mail and text message risked turning everyone into a suspect. “In the last 10 or 15 years a great deal of surveillance in public and private places has been extended without sufficient thought to the risks and consequences,” said Mr Thomas, 59. “Our society is based on liberty and democracy. I do not want to see excessive surveillance hardwired into British society.”

He criticised proposals going through Parliament to allow mass data sharing between government departments and the private sector. Campaigners have claimed that Section 152 of the Coroners and Justice Bill would enable the transfer of health and tax records to private companies such as insurance firms and medical researchers.

Last year Mr Thomas — who became head of the independent body charged with safeguarding privacy and freedom of information in 2002 — recommended to ministers that data sharing be allowed only in carefully defined circumstances such as law enforcement, improving public services and for research. They ignored his advice. The Bill “needs to be narrowed”, Mr Thomas said. He called on Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, to write into it that “anything to justify a data-sharing order has to come explicitly under one of those headings”.

Whitehall sources told The Times yesterday that Mr Straw would amend the Bill in the next few weeks to meet Mr Thomas's criticisms. Previously Mr Straw's department had maintained that there were sufficient safeguards, including a requirement for parliamentary approval for each data transfer.

The Bill also gives the Information Commissioner the power to investigate public bodies without their consent where there has been a suspected breach of data protection law. Mr Thomas complained that the powers did not extend to private companies.

Other government plans also risked undermining people's right to privacy, Mr Thomas said. Of the Home Secretary's proposal to build a database to store information currently held by internet service providers and telephone companies, Mr Thomas said: “A government-run database of the communications of all citizens, every phone call, every e-mail, every text, every internet use; a database of all those activities held by the Government would be a step too far for the British way of life.”

He dismissed Jacqui Smith's assurances that officials would have access only to data on who had contacted whom, rather than the content of the communication. “That A has telephoned B on a particular date from a particular location is actually quite intrusive,” he said. “If an MP logged on to a site selling Viagra, that tells you quite a lot. If a 16-year-old girl goes on to a website about abortion that tells you an awful lot about her too. I don't think there's a black-and-white distinction between traffic data and content.”

Mr Thomas made clear that he did not object to the monitoring of those suspected of involvement in terrorism and serious crime. “But I think that's a very different situation from monitoring the communications of the entire population,” he said. “We've got to have a much clearer distinction between those who are suspects and everybody else and I think we're at risk of making everybody a suspect if we go too far down this road.”

Security services have insisted that modernising the capacity to store and search telephone and internet information is crucial if Britain's ability to combat terrorists and serious organised crime is to be maintained.

Mr Thomas said that forcing government officials to make specific requests every time they needed information — as they currently have to do - provided a crucial safeguard. “If you have a security service or a policeman making an application [to an internet service provider for records], at least each of those applications has to go through a process and is scrutinised by the ISP. That's very different from it all being done behind the closed doors of a governmental agency.”

His concern about the erosion of the right to privacy extends to social networking sites. People did not realise that information put on sites such as Facebook and MySpace could come “back to haunt them”, he said.

Another area of concern for Mr Thomas is the use of surveillance cameras: he criticised the police for pressing to have closed-circuit television cameras installed in pubs. “We've come out against the requirement for pub licensees to fit CCTV as a condition of their licence,” he said. “This is hardwiring surveillance into British pubs. It is unacceptable.”

He also expressed concern that even some schools were now installing cameras in the classroom. He said that it might be acceptable in the case of a particularly unruly class, “but to roll out cameras in all classrooms is unacceptable”.

The Information Commissioner added his voice to criticism of ContactPoint, a computer database containing details on every child in the country.

“I can see the benefits of a national database of children at risk ... I'm less convinced that you need to have a database of every child in the country. Is it not better to have fuller details of children known to be at risk and make sure that information is used properly?”

Other key government surveillance measures had been “pushed through” without proper scrutiny or parliamentary debate. Of a database of DNA gathered from crime suspects, he said: “Clearly, the DNA database was set up with insufficient public debate. Part of the problem was that such debate took place on the assumption that it would be expensive to run DNA tests. The costs have absolutely fallen and it has become a matter of routine. We have to re-examine the issue in the light of current technology.”

He also lamented the lack of debate over the creation of a North London database that records details of car numberplates for up to five years. Mr Thomas questioned whether the Government had the legal authority for this and asked whether the public recognised that millions of their daily journeys were now being monitored. “We have to scrutinise every proposal very closely indeed to ensure that none involves a step too far.”

Fight against terror 'spells end of privacy'

I guess that's that then.

"Privacy rights of innocent people will have to be sacrificed to give the security services access to a sweeping range of personal data, one of the architects of the government's national security strategy has warned.

Sir David Omand, the former Whitehall security and intelligence co-ordinator, sets out a blueprint for the way the state will mine data - including travel information, phone records and emails - held by public and private bodies and admits: "Finding out other people's secrets is going to involve breaking everyday moral rules.

His paper provides the most candid assessment yet of the scale of Whitehall's ambitions for a state database to track terrrorist groups. It argues that while the measures are essential, public trust will be maintained only if such intrusive surveillance is carried out within a strong framework of morality and human rights" (Guardian)

As we said before, it's like a child. In this case a child that wants to do something but is embarrassed or shy to do it, it keeps getting closer to what it wants to do, then runs away again and if asked by an adult the child would say 'no I don't want to do that thing' when it's transparently obvious to any adults in the room that is what the child is trying to do.

And this has been the way of the Labour regime in trying to create a new social order, a new police state and to send the world backwards in time.

Now, like the small child as it's closer to its goal of a truly a truly radical pleb grid it's getting so emboldened it can just declare what it wants to do off the back of its previous efforts and the mess itself it has pooped out all over the place even though it said at every stage it wasn't trying to do it.

And we've seen this across the board with all of this menu of state terror that Labour have sought to deploy from ID cards, to the traffic spying grid, to this mass communications database it now desires and on and on and on.

I should say this is not strictly the Guardian's take on this. The Guardian's view is that David Omand, who they describe as a 'key architect of the national security strategy as it is now" is demonstrating 'great honesty' in telling us what Whitehall want to do.

The only problem with that is the police and security services have always had provisions to snoop and gather information where necessary in cases of serious crimes.

In the end of course it's not a question of the endlessly-repeated mantra about "maintaining security". If a civil servant like Omand were actually interested in that then he would have done well to take the advice of his colleagues in their own now infamous and rather obvious (yet feebly obvious warnings) about the invasion of Iraq.

Furthermore there is progressively becoming very little at all to 'secure' in the UK, it now represents such a damaged waste land. I think the real question is what is Britain, what are you protecting ?

Omand says, "This is a hard choice, and goes against current calls to curb the so-called surveillance society - but it is greatly preferable to tinkering with the rule of law, or derogating from fundamental human rights."

But that's not quite correct is it. Firstly it's not a 'choice' between liberty and security that's a false choice, secondly these spying and surveillance grids are the total undermining of the rule of the law by their very nature and presence, that's the whole point.

But what's even worse and actually breathtaking in its egregiousness is this notion, shared by the likes of Omand and elected politicians in the Labour government itself, of 'inevitable progression' and that this is something people will eventually 'understand as necessary' and just 'need to get used to', and then 'everything will be alright'. All of which accompanies the notion that it's simply a matter of the technology existing that decides if it should be deployed.

I don't think you could construct a more ridiculous, insane and dangerous error if you wanted to.

And if that's the case terrorism remains firmly a necessary tool of deception and staggering self-deception.

Sir David Omand, who according to the Evening Standard, was "among those to decide that [Dr Kelly] should be pursued for talking to the media about the Government's dossier on Iraq's alleged WMD" should be truly ashamed.

He has no business writing reports like this. He should instead be grovelling on his knees, begging for forgiveness for being the supine ridiculous wretch he is and that he has been a factor in taking things as far as they have already.

Omand needs to explain his macabre interest in creating a police state under a radical regime, and stop wasting everybody's time in trying to rationalise it. Instead the fact that Omand and those supporting him have produced this document shows how dangerously out of step with reality they are.

Perhaps the best way of summing this up though is in the editorial that goes along with this in today's Guardian, which is jokingly self-conscious about this itself and starts with the now all too familiar sentence we've all seen many many times:

"Britain is not a police state, but.."

Surely that says it all.