Government databases The MPs express concerns about the proliferation of official databases - the overlap between the registrar general's proposed population register, called the Citizen Information Project, and the ID cards database. MPs say there is no coordination here, but also warn against a government database of all information. But the ID card database should be comprehensive enough to mean that no more than one government-issued card is needed. http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianpolitics/story/0,3605,1272206,00.htmlProves that the all-party group of MPs who wrote this have no clear understanding of what they were asked to look into. They dont understand that the single number attached to a person is the key danger in an ID card scheme, and that many of the concerns flow from this one "feature". Of course, even an ID card without this feature is still unnaceptable, simply because it will be continually demanded innapropriately. Look at this:
They have your number As a privacy watchdog bestows its latest awards for super-snoopers, Mark Oliver looks at a powerful new surveillance system being rolled out at service stations Thursday July 29, 2004 For the stream of shoppers driving into the supermarket petrol station just outside Bradford, the CCTV camera has been such a familiar sight it may as well have been invisible.<> My emphasis on the last paragraph. Clearly there are some people for whom the light is turning on. Its clear that this is precisely what will happen. You will drive into a petrol station forecourt, and then by the time you are ready to pay, the man at the till will have all three of your credit cards already set to pay your bill for you, because he subscribes to ten different companies that together contain every bit of information about you.But from this month, it is not just fuel-dodgers who the camera is there to monitor; up to 3,000 number plates an hour from the forecourt will now be fed into a police database.
In theory, the camera in the Sainsbury's forecourt, in the Greengates area of Bradford, is meant to recognise people who have previously not paid for fuel and vehicles with warrants on them. But, for the first time, it will provide police with a round-the-clock "intelligence" feed, a spin-off from the project that has raised concerns among civil liberties campaigners.
The pilot scheme, which uses the latest automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) technology, was launched in Bradford, West Yorkshire, three weeks ago and will be rolled out to a further six petrol stations. Two garages are already using the cameras and all 53 stations in the Bradford area have been invited to take part. One stumbling block to a 100% take-up is that the garages have to pay �5,000 for the cameras while the only outlay from the police is a small support team to channel them information.
The scheme is the latest example of how, in the post-September-11 world, ANPR is being used increasingly nationwide as Britain's reliance on surveillance grows. On average, Londoners can each expect to be monitored on as many as 300 CCTV cameras a day as they go about their business. [...]
Undeniably, ANPR can be effective. In an earlier pilot scheme involving 23 police forces, including West Yorkshire, between summer last year and April this year, APNR accounted for more than 10,000 arrests.
The technology emerged to combat Irish republican terrorism, when the city of London demanded its deployment after the 1993 Bishopsgate bombing. An early incarnation of ANPR was used in the capital as part of the "ring of steel" thrown around the City of London in 1997.
West Yorkshire police say the petrol station project is intended to stop what is known as "bilking", using a fuel pump and then driving off without paying. But they also say it is a "valuable source of intelligence". [...]
He says: "The Police Information Technology Organisation [which liases with forces about the use of technology] has policy documents saying how in the future they want ANPR to be everywhere. They will use it to police uninsured drivers, or those who have not paid road tax."
Of the Bradford scheme, he says: "It's total overkill to monitor everyone's registration to catch a tiny proportion of people not paying. Is it necessary? They already have CCTV cameras where they can record vehicles' number plates, or staff can take them down. This is the kind of scheme the Big Brother awards are for."
Mr Brown says that, in the past 15 years, the Home Office has spent huge sums on CCTV, but a study by the crime reduction charity Nacro found the technology only reduced crime by 3% to 4%, while better street lighting led to a decrease of 20%. [...]
A spokesman for the information commissioner's office, which enforces the data protection legislation, says: "We don't want to get in the way of the police doing their jobs. We only have concerns if CCTV cameras are being used illegitimately."
"For example you could not have the boss of a shop take CCTV footage of you and then cross reference that with a loyalty card to build up a profile of you," he says. [...]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/humanrights/story/0,7369,1271120,00.html
A unique number attached to you is the key to joined up government, joined up commerce and complete surveillance.
The fact that a very few people steal drops of petrol in Bradford is not a reason to create a surveillance system that connect to the Police. All they need to do to stop people stealing gas is to put up an automatic barrier, similar to the ones that M&S and Tesco use to protect their car parks. Its simple. You have to collect a ticket to leave the station with your petrol. You get this ticket when you pay for your petrol. If you do not have a ticket, your car cannot exit.
The simple solutions are the best. Of course, the simple solutions are not what the ANPR system sellers want to sell. They have to pile in secondary uses (often connected to the irrational fear of terrorism) so that they look more attractive than they really are.
What is going to happen is this; one day, in what will seem like a spontaneous event, all the systems that are being rolled out, both privately and publicly will be connected by the convergence of top level services and government meaning that anything you do, from walking out of your house to buying a newspaper, will be knowable. Of course, the people who will benefit from this will be anyone that can afford the subscription fees to these services (the word subscription also means "bribe") and everyone else will be in the dark. Before you go anywhere, everything about you will be known; they will onlly ask you questions to see if you lie, not to find out any fact about you. When people know everything about you, you live in an enviornment in which you are owned. Everything you do, and by that I mean the knowledge of it and record of it, belongs to you. When people capture data from you and sell it, they are literally stealing from you, and it is a sort of theft that is more than someone stealing �5 from your pocket. When people steal your personal data, they steal something that gives power to other people; power to control and manipulate you and your interactions with the world. This power over you acts like a prison, where you are not free to interact in a non compromised way with anyone. Without these systems, you are free to travel without consequence, you are free to read without consequence, you are free to choose what you want to eat, see and listen to, all without consequence. As soon as these systems are put in place, and they reach the point of critical mass where everything is knowable, you cannot do anything without there being a consequence. You might buy The Guardian. This will be known. Someone with whom you are going to interact will be able to know this, and that will contaminate your interaction, especiall if this person has a low regard for Guardian readers, or pr0n surfers, or Greenpeace contributors, or people who have worked for $you name the company. Before you say "Greenpeace would never reveal who is in their database" thiink about this; anyone who sends Greenpeace money electronically, say by Direct Debit, is compromised; the database that controls your Direct Debits will have your number on it, which will be tied to your name, and of course, HMG will have access to this, so they will know that you contribute to Oxfam AND Greenpeace. All it takes is one person with access to HMG systems for this information to leak out into "Grey Databases", which will be everywhere, run by private detective firms and the like. Anyone will be able to "subscribe" to them. Nothing will be able to escape this network of systems, not a single fact, and the scenario that I gave above is the hard way that grey databases will be filled up with your private information; compromised or incorectly configured systems (anything running an M$ OS) will be routinely raided; this information will be worth its weight in gold. People all over the world will be attacking these machines night and day. It is better that these systems, which do not solve the problems they are being rolled out for, are not created in the first place. This jail that they are making, this invisible bubble from which you will not be able to escape, unless you completely remove your physical body from the country covered by this system, will be an unprecedented nightmare. The British will be living like the East Germans did under the STASI, only much worse. Everyone will be second guessing their every move, as they realise that everything they do has an immediate and eternally fixed consequence and impact on their lives. People who publish will be constantly self censoring, people who buy publications will be wondering if its is an appropriate purchase. And so on. Only the most stupid of people thinks that this is a good idea, and we certainly should not wait and see if it all comes together like this or not. We should not take the risk. We should not trust the motives of the people who are advocating these plans. They must be rejected absolutely, nothing less will do, and anything less would not be British!
which is a sphereish thing surrounded by undistorted rings and background stars, or would not the gravitational lensing twist up space so that it looks more along the lines of this?:
would gravitational lensing not let you look past a black hole in a straight line? The light passing through its influence would be bent, so how can the top picture show rings in an oval shape "orbiting" the hole undistorted right to the event horizon?
Of course, they are both artists interpretations (the top one from NASA), and so they are made with a licence to show anything at all. I would love to see a computer modeled image of a black hole taking gravitational lensing into consideration, with different backgrounds and from different perspectives, from on the edge of the event horizon to millions of miles away...
