Posts by Guy Herbert

@ Allan George Dyer

"Or is this good news: your biometrics will be removed from the database once your dead..."

There's actually no provision for that. It is not completely clear that there can be, the way the law is written. So when we at NO2ID say applying for an ID card will put you on the database "for life", we are, strictly speaking, understating the horror.

There *is* clear provision for the database to record your date of death, and as Wittgenstein pointed out, "death is not an event in life".

@ AC 09:31

Happy to be corrected on any inaccuracies in my letter, if you would care to identify them. Broad-brush sneering does not encourage anyone to take your points seriously.

The process and reality could be discussed in public did the Home Office not refuse to do so. One therefore has to proceed by proper inference from public documents and announcements that are couched in carefully drafted, minimally revealing (and quite often misleading) terms, That analytical and interpretative task is largely what NO2ID at a national level does. However: 1. It is really quite hard to get people, whether supporters, or opponents, or basically neutral like ABTA, to know the grounds for what they are saying before they open their mouths; and 2. We are necessarily a political campaign deploying more emotive arguments than rational ones. Nevertheless we have a long-term strategic interest in honest debate that is shared neither by politicians nor by those whose job it is to implement the policies by hook or by crook.

BTW "Commercial confidentiality" in this context is just official secretiveness by another name, an extremely handy excuse for the civil service to draw a veil over everything and anything when an external contractor is involved. Commercial firms would still line up to be paid large sums of public money were the contracts and other details public, just as they will do whatever stupid, wasteful or dangerous things they are asked to do for large sums of public money, despite the personal preferences of staff and the well-established principles of project management. They are businesses, and the customer with pockets as deep as his capriciousness is right.

Chutzpa

You have to have some sneaking admiration for the Home Office's complete lack of shame and conscience in suggesting not doing anything at all for another 6 months at least, after postponing any action for 10 months already through its ludicrous consultation on some proposals designed to stave off doing anything till a court case on the new 6 years limit, as "expeditiously complying with the ruling".

Note, too, that by removing the relevant order-making power from the bill, they have ensured that no incoming Home Secretary can change the situation without further primary legislation. If it is not going to get the changes in the way ot wants them, then there won't be any changes. The equivalent of taking the ball home after being sent off for a foul.

Numbers

@ AC: 10:49 GMT

"Worrying. How does one find 2,000 folk volunteering to have their fingerprints taken and filed; like a criminal ? Or maybe they were 2,000 who knew the police already had them anyway?"

- MIsunderstands the process, as the IPS wants you to do. These are NOT volunteers to be fingerprinted, let alone to be recorded on the National Identity Register for life, which would be the consequence if they were actually to apply.

They are people who for one reason or another have filled their contact details in here:

http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Governmentcitizensandrights/Identitycards/DG_174257

There's no reason to suppose that at the time of doing so they knew anything much about the scheme. Nor is there any reason to suppose many of them will apply when they receive the forms. They are sales-leads, no more. And fairly weak ones at that. They have not even signed up to a statement that says: "I want an ID card, please tell me when I can apply."

At a minimum £232 pounds each for sales leads in Manchester (more in fact, since the other 8,000 show some would have registered anyway) perhaps we taxpayers should be grateful the IPS marketing campaign has yet to take off.

Not about the money

If the cost of PR and advertising is totted up they have spent many times what NO2ID has. SO I'd suggest the move in public opinion is not down to marketing spend. Though it is generally the case that the more people know about the scheme the more likely they are to hate it, I don't think Home Office promotion has increased public knowledge, being more calculated to mislead and misdirect.

@ A Bee

Staples's solution is probably the most cost effective on offer. Other than stopping the information being demanded and collected in the first place.

Trouble is you can't rely on banks and retailers, let alone big public-sector organisations, to exercise basic care with all the identity information they are busy (usually unecessarily, or only to satisfy another bureaucracy) twisting our arms to part with.

Re: Time to pull the plug

Quite. And notice you have to apply, under a system where DCSF guidelines presuppose refusal in most cases - you have to prove to the local authorities satisfaction that not being sheilded will produce serious danger in your particular case.

Arguments about that issue alone are going to absorb more than 5 million man hours, would be my guess.

Needs to make his mind up

If he wants to exterminate humanity why does he care about farmers? To be consistent he needs to encourage DEFRA in its making life difficult for farmers, and have the whole of the Asian mountain paddy country set aside as a Panda reserve. That way we can all starve together.

And badgers will inherit the earth.

@ seanj

"I'd say "cross it at your peril, Labour Party", but it doesn't really matter any more, anything they attempt now will not wipe out the memory of 12 years of mismanagement, incompetence and outright criminality."

I'd be prepared to bet that the civil service (and especially the Home Office and the Cabinet Office) is preparing to do precisely that - to wipe the official memory of the worthlessness of its previous policies in order to get the new administration following the same *departmental* thinking. The way they'd do it is using the rules that are supposed to protect ministers from embarassment:

"An incoming Minister should not have access to any minutes or documents written by a predecessor of a different Party other than those which were published or put in the public domain by that predecessor; nor should he be told whether directly or by access to departmental papers which would tell him exactly what his predecessor had said. *Moreover, it may be equally important to withhold papers which show the advice given by officials to the previous Minister even though there may be no indication on them of his views.*"

[My *emphasis*]

(Directory of Civil Service Guidance, Volume 2, quoting, with approval, a parliamentary answer written for Margaret Thatcher by the Cabinet Office in 1980.)

There have already been very carefully balanced attacks by distinguished former civil servants on the use of special advisers by the current administration, which I'm glad to say the Tories have not fallen into the trap of endorsing.

Re: Nice Advert

Thanks. Kindly created by a volunteer. You'll only have seen it before, in all likelihood, if you read the political weeklies, where we have been chipping away at support for the scheme among the great and the good as we can afford it. Give me £100,000 for space and I could probably get it in front of every national newspaper reader three times - though they still might not actually register it.

Anyone worried about the chap in the picture should be reassured that he is a Brazilian model, safely resident in Brazil , and is unlikely to be troubled by all the angry mobs aroused by seeing his pic in the New Statesman or Spectator.

All a bit of a muddle

Regardless that you consider HMG to have continuous existence, Brown can't apologise for the judicial treatment of Turing. He might legitimately have been apologising for the exclusion from secret intelligence work, but he talked about "the law", beyond and outside of which intelligence existed at the time.

He could (again assuming the continuity of government in some sense) have apologised for the campaign of persecution waged by the Home Office against homosexuals in the 50s, when investigations and prosecutions under the pre-existing but previously little-used law were deliberately encouraged. But I don't think that was what he was doing, either.

The apology is couched in the peculiar terms of identity politics and status crime. While Sir David Maxwell Fyffe was making war on 'vice', seen as a sort of moral infection, Brown can only interpret this as Turing being persecuted "for being gay". He's specifically not saying that persecution by the state is wrong, still less that the Home Office should get out of private relationships. If anything he is rehearsing the current received wisdom, that *being* gay is OK as a matter of fact; and therefore that the circumstances that drove one famous man to suicide were an unfortunate product of a factually mistaken judicial and administrative process, failing correctly to attribute OK-ness to certain inherent characteristics.

Hard to know whether to take seriously...

a man who says some apparently sensible things and then:

"Gamble said organised criminals had virtually abandoned the business because of the risks."

Which is clearly utter rubbish. Organised criminals (though calling *them* organised is usually generous, and mostly police and journalistic projection) aren't frightened by risks, and are pretty good at laying them off on patsies anyway. The only reason for them not to be in 'the business' is because there isn't a business proposition - there's no money to be made. Which tends to undermine the major premise of paedohunters that children being raped for group entertainment is widespread and could become popular.

clothed children

It is worse than the posters above suppose.

There are no criteria whatsoever for indecency in the law, which means possession of indecent images is effectively limited only by the degree to which the fact of accusation and the plausibility of prosecution experts - argument from authority in other words - can persuade a jury. Legally it is a test of fact; factually it is a test of social psychology.

Yet this is an offence that is regarded by the public as among the most serious in the book, canvassed by child-protectors as in itself 'abuse' (with a connotation of rape), and labelled as a sex-crime bearing a severe risk of brutal treatment in prison.

The Register has covered the jurisprudential problems of such sexthoughtcrime statutes extensively in the past. I blogged a couple of practical examples, here:

http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/2006/03/thoughtcrime_and_maythinkcrime.html

and here:

http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/2006/08/sexthoughtcrime_again.html

Clarification required

I think you should make it clear for m'learned friends that "racist undertone" is in no way a reference to Mr Feargal Sharkey, and that you in fact meant to refer to the Police's long-playing record "Racist under Tone" available throughout Mr Blair's premiership. No, not that The Police!

Is that an inuendo in your pocket? It's not mine.

NO2ID ID card

I think we'll pass on that one. We might get round to issuing a nice chunky membership card for people to wave in the face of officials demanding ID.

However, if we do the absolute maximum information about the member it will have on it is name and membership number (not a number used anywhere outside our office or checking AGM attendance). However, I'm fairly sure that (since members probably know their names or can remember whatever name it was they gave us) we will just put numbers on them.

A more apposite question to ask of Hillingdon is why they want to check entitlements so much. Leave aside the economic illiteracy of creating non-tarriff barriers to "keep business within the borough". What's so valuable about their services that it is worth the Council Tax payer collectively stalking the Council Tax Payer individually, by centralising credentials and making them widely readable (if not always read), in order to lock out the occasional free-rider?

If it is a publicity stunt,,,

Then it is an insanely misguided one. By engaging in worthy misery as a summer holiday, Brown just confirms to the public he is nothing like an ordinary human being. If he must do social work, he ought to have kept quiet about it.

Cameron and Clegg OTOH get non-Brownie points for coming across as standard upper middle-class Euro-trippers, having lined up doing vaguely-described nothing much in France and Spain respectively. (Cameron's "trashy novel" might be gilding the lily, but is at least a lily being gilded and not a rosy brier amid life's thorny path o' care.)

@ Andrew Yeomans

"But the reported Home Office statement is still factually correct, just not what it appears at first reading."

That is so often true (and almost invariably so with the IPS) that anyone reading any Home Office statement ought to consider it first: Assume it is designed to mislead, and ask yourself what is the most perverse, countercontextual, meaning that can be placed on the words. Practice this for a few months and you will be able to read Home Office fluentl. (But it is quite another matter to learn to write it. You'll have to be able to see dialogue as an instrument of policy, rather than an exchange of information.)

The report is censored anyway

The various commissioners report to the PM's office, which then publishes the bits it doesn't think in any way embarrassing to HM Govt or prejudicial to the national interest very broadly defined. I think it is highly likely the only reason we are hearing about this is because the person concerned is pursuing a complaint against the police (though I don't know if they are).

The mission is clear then...

Relationships in which children acquire trust in adults are the ones in which no one is permitted to trust each other except under official supervision. The function of the system is the eradication of informal trust - which is to say ALL trust.

Has anyone yet claimed...?

That it will solve the problems of the Indian legion of the dead, those people who under the existing permit raj have been reported dead by unscrupulous relatives looking to 'inherit' their property:

http://movies.indiainfo.com/2007/10/01/0710011313_abhishek.html

?

Indian bureaucracy already demostrates quite well the consequence, if everyone has to have an officially approved identity, of having your identity officially deleted.

The argument from government there is much more explicit, but essentially the same as that offered in the UK: "You know all the unnecessary and unreasonable demands for 'identification' we are now making? Here's something that will help you comply with them, and incidentally make it easier for us to collate the information."

Switch it off?

Or just leave it on the bus for maximum diversionary effect at minimum cost, if they really are spotting "unauthorised phones". The depth of authoritarianism required to think to have a system of approval for the movements of individual phones in order to enable this fatuous 'security' system, doesn't bear thinking about.

Great marketing opportunities in Burma, China and Iran tho'.

I hope that Catholics..

Will be voting against the original clause as well as the amendment. Otherwise there'll be a lot of devotional works depicting Saint Agatha destroyed, and religious folk in jail for possessing them.

(I'm sorry to say I don't know who the patron saint of anuses is.)

@ Lester Caine`

"We *NEED* some form of photo identification just to live nowadays, so how about eliminating all the unnecessary crap and producing a single card that we can use even if we just want to fly from Newcastle to Bristol"

No you don't NEED it, nor does the person asking for it NEED it. The reason it is so widely demanded is Government forcing sellers of large ticket items to demand it under the fatuous excuse of 'money laundering' controls, security and so forth. They NEED you to get used to providing it as circular justification for mass surveilance. That plan seems to be working just fine.

It's now a Waitrose

Though surely the planning committee must be worried that it will affect the character of the area.

Visotirs or residents?

Quite easy for a departmental or agency website to clock up a lot of hits by the organisation itself checking on things. Or are the numbers given unique visitors *not from gov.uk*?

Still presumed consent, not real

"In response to this, CfH changed its process, so every patient above the age of 15 and three quarters receives a letter telling them about the transfer, is pointed to sources of further information and is given 12 weeks to refuse."

Is sent a letter. No guarantee that they receive it, or read it - or that it doesn't mislead.

If your doctor is going to do something to you that might have significant consequences, medical ethics usually require informed consent, which is actual consent, not failure to answer, in circumstances where he is satisfied you know what you are able to understand about what is about to happen. The Department of Health couldn't care less about ethics.

All ten fingers?

I'm still waiting for the IPS to discover that there are many people fewer than ten fingers, unscannable scar tissue or corn on some of them - and a few people *with* more than ten fingers. The problem with universal compulsory systems is you have to be prepared to cope with ALL anomalies.

And the rest...

That's £400,000,000 annually passing through the IPS. They are not counting the cost to anyone else for anything.

@ Chris Thorpe -- one-way voluntary

"I'm too apathetic to read up on it, but does anyone know if, while this is still in the 'voluntary' phase, you can opt back out again if unsatisfied?"

Yes; you can't. Whatever the reason you become registered on what they are now calling "the Service" rather than "the Register" (and probably not to avoid confusion with an esteemed web organ), you are stuck with all the notification requirements, charges, future changes of conditions, and threats to your personal data security for life (and indeed after you are dead) or until the Identity Cards Act 2006 is repealed.

@ Eponymous Coward

"So if I get arrested because someone makes a false rape allegation, my DNA stays on the database for 12 years. If I get arrested because someone make a false allegation of shoplifting it stays on for 6 years, and if I don't get arrested at all I stay off the database."

Better than that, even. Much more likely than either of those: You are randomly assaulted by some low-life. He, on arrest, as is now standard behaviour, makes a counterallegation that you in fact assaulted him. Police arrest you. They take your DNA. It is a violent crime, so you are on the database for 12 years. Whether or not he is convicted.

Still, better than for life as currently. (Not that the Home Office is likely to move rapidly from this consultation to do anything at all; though I strongly suspect there might be new powers used to collect DNA from old lags before they do any of the other things suggested.

@ various:

The EHCR isn't part of the machinery of the EU. The Home Office has been evading its judgments since 20 years before we even joined the EU.

@ Martin

"...instead maybe use the existing one which does exactly the same thing, just needs a warrant issuing ..."

Except it doesn't. The hundreds of official bodies that can ask to see your comms data currently are self-authorising when they do so. IMP is to let them get more, to get it more easily as a matter of practical arrangement, and to get it in a more readily used and cross-matched form.

Were warrants and a reasonable suspicion based on evidence presented to an independent judge required, then most of the objections of civil libertarians would go away.

Says who?

Says the Home Office, which is responsible for the relentless extension of legal sanction into the formerly private lives of British citizens, and keen to label as many as possible as 'sex offenders', thus making all its vetting and censorship campaigns seem worthwhile.

Amazing isn't it

That it takes 3 months to remove 49 profiles - the under-10s (a classic piece of misdirection) being J Smith's only promise to do anything immediately following the Marper judgment. I suppose they don't have much practice removing people so it is terribly hard and difficult work compared with the swabbing and lab work and coding and referencing invoved in putting someone on.

I'd quite like to know whether the fingerprints of the same under-10s have been removed from that database. Or is the Home Office happy pretending Marper was only about DNA and hoping that its defiance on that point will divert attention?

Agreed

What AC, 13:02 said. I really don't understand why the massive fuss over StreetView, when the police (i.e. ACPO) can announce an ambition to "record every car journey in Britain" to seeming complete indifference.

Is it just that you can look up Google at home or office and get a nice picture, while ANPR archiving is an abstract govt-only closed system, so people can't visualise what it is doing in their lives? I fear it might be.

No chance, though...

That they'll stop gangs of imbeciles intent on dominating the space using mobiles as mobile sound-systems on the tube.

The English law too...

... has problems with the idea of freely-given consent meaning you are not the victim of a crime. Recall the R v Brown, Operation Spanner case?

No doubt our Calvinist establishment think we should be grateful that we don't live in Saudi Arabia where consent is *never* an issue, since all sexual activity is either a serious crime or at the discretion of an identifiable male authority figure.

Daily Mail?

Actually the Daily Mail is a voice of reason restraint and civil liberty these days, so far have we come. The real problem is the calling of the mob in the red-top tabs, and the snake-oil response form government propaganda engines relayed by incurious journalists in all media, and relayed verbatim without demur by the broadcast media, which are both dominant and effectively state-controlled. The regulatory requirement for balance means lies are the equal of truth, and it's not what you say but how much you can say it that matters.

The first step away from a police state would be to sack all the police and Home Office press officers and disolve the bogus representative organisations envoys and commissioners they set up with public money. The second would be to introduce the novel concept that when police break the law they are punished, and they cannot gain an advantage by doing so. Let's have a "fruit of the poisoned tree" rule here, so that an unlawful search cannot lead to a conviction.

To be fair...

"Stuffing draconian provisions with massive implications for data security into an unrelated bill is another."

The entire bill is a gallimaufry of unrelated draconian provisions with massive implications, only one part of which is half relevant to its title. The half-relevance being to "coroners" - none of it has any relationship to "justice", except perhaps the ochlocratic torches-and-pitchforks variety.

A sting in the tail

"So how can you force people to have a passport if they have no intention of leaving the country?"

Actually, you don't have to have a passport to leave the country at the moment - the Home Office has plans to change that. (See the draft 'codification' of immigration law, that just happens to remove some immemorial rights of citizens as well as established fair procedures for foreigners and suspected foreigners.) Then you'll need their permission, in effect, because the Home Secretary can revoke your passport or place you under a travel restriction order for multifarious reasons.

Even worse than it seems

"Nor does it help that government is amending laws passed as recently as 18 months ago."

Worse than that. It was pointed out in the CJB debate that the government there seeks to repeal and replace sentencing rules that were enacted in 2008, less than 10 months ago, and have yet to be brought into force.

A great deal of law is in suspended animation waiting to be arbitrarily brought into force by those self-same statutory instruments.

Parliament in its wisdom - doing whatever the whips told it, which was to do whatever the Home Office wanted - completely transformed the law of incitement in the Serious Crime Act 2007, overturning centuries of common-law understanding. Nobody has a clue what it means, except for the general intention to make the prosecution's job a lot easier. But we'll only have to find out when a Home Secretary decides to issue a commencement order, so there is always the hope it might be repealed first.

All sorts of implications...

"There's an implicit admission that Section 44 stops and searches do not detect terrorists." And in the same passage that they do not find terrorist items, either.

Meanwhile you missed...

The introduction of legislation thay would make possession of some drawn porn illegal (among many other undesirable things, such as allowing departments to amend the law by regulation to share personal information). Coroners and Justice Bill, first read.

Cunning experiment by rats

... appears to have unearthed the conceptual structures and preferences of Israeli scientists. The scientists presumed grid is good, and interpreted the rats' movements accordingly.

People who have compared their own behaviour in messy humane cities with "efficient" gridded ones, and noticed the "destination" areas of the latter are the places where the grid breaks down might think something different. How about the hypothesis that the cobbled-together structure of the Big Easy encouraged a more laid-back lifestyle in rats that in long straight tunnels rushed around desperately looking for some quiet, comfortable, rat-sized spaces to hang out?