Wednesday, 28, Oct 2009 By Sarah Garrod

The British public are increasingly concerned about the Big Brother measures taken by government, a poll released today suggests.

Big Brother Watch says their survey of the public showed four in five people believe their freedoms are being eroded in Britain, and are particularly concerned about the sharing of their personal information.

Key results from the poll of 1,353 adults included 45 per cent of respondents 'strongly agreeing' with the statement "our freedoms are being eroded by a Big Brother state", while just 16 per cent supported the use of CCTV cameras which can record conversations.

Alex Deane, director of Big Brother Watch, said: "We are the victims of ever more intrusive policies, pushing more and more into the details of our lives.

"The government doesn't seem to care that Big Brother Britain has been rejected by the vast majority of people who live here.

"They continue to pursue expensive and invasive surveillance methods that serve only to create criminals out of otherwise law-abiding citizens."

Big Brother Watch is a campaign from the founders of the Tax Payer's Alliance. Their poll found 82 per cent of people disagreed that "placing microchips in refuse bins to monitor the waste thrown away by households was an acceptable measure to encourage recycling" – despite 42 local authorities currently monitoring the habits of over two million households. www.inthenews.co.uk

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Britain passes Big Brother landmark: More than one in 10 people now on DNA database
By James Slack 28th October 2009

A Big Brother landmark has been passed with ten per cent of the population now stored on the Government's DNA database.

In total, there are now an astonishing 5,532,847 individual profiles logged on the giant computer system - out of a population of 54million in England and Wales.

Around one million of those included on the system have never been convicted of any crime.

It will fuel the public backlash against the march towards a surveillance state, with polling released today showing eight out of ten voters are now fed-up with the increased use of surveillance powers.

Shadow Home Office Minister James Brokenshire said: 'The Government has been obsessed with growing the DNA database for the sake of it regardless of guilt or innocence. 

'Despite being told that their approach is unlawful they have been dragging their feet about doing anything about it.

The polling, carried out for the civil liberties pressure group Big Brother Watch by PoliticsHome, found 45 per cent of respondents answered ‘strongly agree’ and 34 per cent ‘somewhat agree’ with the statement: 'Our freedoms are being eroded by a Big Brother state'. [...]

 Alex Deane, director of Big Brother Watch, said: 'Britain is a country rightly known around the world as a cradle of liberty and freedom.  But as these results show, most people now feel that our freedoms are being eroded.

'We are the victims of ever more intrusive policies, pushing more and more into the details of our lives.

'The Government doesn’t seem to care that Big Brother Britain has been rejected by the vast majority of people who live here. They continue to pursue expensive and invasive surveillance methods that serve only to create criminals out of otherwise law-abiding citizens.'

Meanwhile, separate figures obtained by the Liberal Democrats showed that more than 90,000 innocent people have been added to the database since European judges ruled the practice was illegal last December. [...]

'Despite the European ruling that the practice is a breach of human rights, for every innocent DNA profile removed from the database, around 150 new ones are added.'
http://bit.ly/1E5Eul

17.10.2009
Politicians, corporations 'rewarded' for infringing privacy

An annual award for the greatest abusers of data protection and privacy infringement is highlighting those, considered by some, to be German privacy's public enemies. This is one award that no one wants to receive.

The Big Brother Awards 2009 wrapped up in Germany on Friday, handing out recognition to politicians and corporations with records of data and privacy infingement.

The big "winners" of Friday's  Big Brother Awards were Germany's Family Minister Ursula von der Leyen and Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble along with a slew of companies.

These so-called "Oscars for data leeches" have been awarded each year since 2000 by the FoeBuD association which was formed in 1987 for the Promotion of Mobile and Immobile Public Data Traffic.

Watching the watchmen

Called "Zensursula," or Censorsula, by the awards' organizers, Ursula von der Leyen won for her initiatives to block access to child pornography websites. This, according to the award's justification, created "a system for advanced content control on the internet, which could evolve into Orwellian proportions."

Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift:  The organizers warn of "Orwellian proportions" as in the famous novel "1984"

However, the issue seemed moot as, the day before the awards ceremony, new measures were announced by the Christian Democrats and Free Liberal parties, that child pornography sites would be deleted at the source, rather than try to limit internet access.

Interior Minister Schaeuble's prize was one of recognition of lifetime achievement for his "obsessive ambition for turning the constitutional democracy into a preventatively authoritarian police-state," according to FoeBuD.

Rewarding the many, as well as the few

Also honored with an award was the International Association of Athletics Federations, which organized the World Championships in Berlin in August, for its invasively in-depth background checks on journalists in order to be permitted to cover the event.

Other awards went to German firms Lidl, KiK Textiles, HDI Gerling, Deutsche Bahn, Deutsche Post and Deutsche Telekom, as well as the farming company Claas GmbH, which was highlighted for placing a GPS tracking device in its combine harvesters to ensure no deviations were made by the vehicle during harvesting.

Upcoming Big Brother awards are in Zurich, Switzerland on 24 October and Vienna, Austria on 25 October.

sjt/dpa/EPD
Editor: Andreas Illmer

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,4800854,00.html

European Union Using ‘Big Brother’ Technology to Scour Web for ‘Abnormal Behaviour’ September 21, 2009

(ChattahBox)—Human rights groups are alarmed over a new program operated by the European Union to develop computer programs to monitor information from the Internet throughout Europe, to detect signs of threats or potential violence. The program is called, Project Indect and is intended as an expansion and coordination of EU law enforcement agencies, to fight crime and terrorism across boundaries on a larger scale.

Project Indect is a five-year research program, which received about £10 million from the EU to make use of computer technology to detect threats, at a time when budgets and human resources are shrinking. The project, includes the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), computer scientists at York University and law enforcement officials from nine other European countries.

Future plans call for a possible expansion to local police usage of the technology across the EU, as the trend in law enforcement in Europe is one of “common culture” and sharing intelligence.

According to Project Indect’s Web site, the program’s goal is to:

“to develop a platform for the registration and exchange of operational data, acquisition of multimedia content, intelligent processing of all information and automatic detection of threats and recognition of abnormal behaviour or violence”.

The project describes computer agents, which would continuously monitor, web sites, discussion forums, usenet groups, file servers, peer-to-peer networks, and even individual computer systems.

There is the additional fear, among human rights groups, that the new global outlook on crime detection could empower a EU secret service agency, such as the EU Joint Situation Center (SitCen), which would expose greater numbers of people to continuous computer surveillance, raising privacy issues.

Shami Chakrabarti, the director of the human rights group Liberty, called the mass surveillance activities of Project Indect, a “sinister step” and “positively chilling” on a European scale.
http://bit.ly/NFCcx

Incident of the Week: UAE Carrier Updates Blackberry Software With Spyware, Captures Outgoing User Emails

The UK government is about to spend $700 million dollars installing surveillance cameras inside the private homes of citizens to ensure that children go to bed on time, attend school and eat proper meals. No you aren’t reading a passage from George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, this is Britain in 2009, a country which already has more surveillance cameras watching its population than the whole of Europe put together.

Now the government is embarking on a scheme called “Family Intervention Projects” which will literally create a nanny state on steroids, with social services goons and private security guards given the authority to make regular “home checks” to ensure parents are raising their children correctly. Telescreens will also be installed so government spies can keep an eye on whether parents are mistreating kids and whether the kids are fulfilling their obligations under a pre-signed contract.

Around 2,000 families have been targeted by this program so far and the government wants to snare 20,000 more within the next two years. The tab will be picked up by the taxpayer, with the “interventions” being funded through local council authorities. Another key aspect of the program will see parents deemed “responsible” by the government handed the power to denounce and report bad parents who allow their children to engage in bad behavior. Such families will then be targeted for “interventions”.

Both parents and children will also be forced to sign a “behavior contract” with the government known as Home School Agreements before the start of every year, in which the state will dictate obligations that it expects to be met. The opposition Conservative Party, who are clear favorites to win the next British election, commented that the program does not go far enough and is “too little, too late.” [...]

The move to install surveillance cameras inside private homes is also on the agenda across the pond. In February 2006, Houston Chief of Police Harold Hurtt said cameras should be placed inside apartments and homes in order to “fight crime” due to there being a shortage of police officers. "I know a lot of people are concerned about Big Brother, but my response to that is, if you are not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?” Chief Hurtt told reporters.

[...] If such programs come to fruition and are implemented on a mass scale then the full scope of George Orwell’s depiction of a totalitarian society is his classic novel 1984 will have been realized.

The following passage is from Orwell’s 1984:
The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized. http://bit.ly/10XCCC

Britain To Put CCTV Cameras Inside Private Homes - By Charlie Sorrel  August 3, 2009
I’m well aware of the authorities’ love of surveillance and snooping, but [I] am amazed by the governments latest plan: to install Orwell’s telescreens in 20,000 homes.  http://bit.ly/3wZxXS

SIN BINS FOR WORST FAMILIES - July 23,2009 - By Alison Little
THOUSANDS of the worst families in England are to be put in “sin bins” in a bid to change their bad behaviour, Ed Balls announced yesterday. http://bit.ly/22bgE

Profile: Asif Ali Zardari: Tuesday, 16 June 2009
Asif Ali Zardari has always been one of Pakistan's most controversial political figures and yet he has risen to its most powerful office - the presidency.

He found himself in major trouble in 1990 when he was accused, among other things, of tying a remote-controlled bomb to the leg of a businessman and sending him into a bank to withdraw money from his account as a pay-off.

In 1996, when another president sacked the PPP government, he was arrested and charged with a number of offences including the murder of Mir Murtaza Bhutto, his wife's brother.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4032997.stm

With all this corruption under his wing. It is no wonder he cannot take any jokes about him.  As any Joke against Zardari can lead to a 14 years of jail time.

Indecent SMS Sender Could Face Jail Time in Pakistan
Media Line News Agency July 22, 2009By Adam Gonn

Pakistan has issued a new cyber-crime law which lists sending indecent, provocative or ill-motivated messages on a cell phone as an offence.

Under the Cyber Crimes Act, sending an SMS message or email containing defamation of the country´s civilian leadership or of the security forces is punishable with 14 years in jail, according to a statement by the Interior Ministry, which did not specifically define the crime.

In addition to jail time, offenders could have their property confiscated, and any Pakistani national living abroad and violating provisions of the act may be charged and liable for extradition to Pakistan.
http://www.worldsentinel.com/articles/view/111212

India is preparing to issue biometric identification cards to every one of its 1.2 billion citizens in what is being called "the biggest Big Brother project yet conceived," according to a published report.

This fresh piece of reporting just in from the Times Online:

"It is surely the biggest Big Brother project yet conceived. India is to issue each of its 1.2 billion citizens, millions of whom live in remote villages and possess no documentary proof of existence, with cyber-age biometric identity cards.

The Government in Delhi recently created the Unique Identification Authority, a new state department charged with the task of assigning every living Indian an exclusive number. It will also be responsible for gathering and electronically storing their personal details, at a predicted cost of at least £3 billion.

The task will be led by Nandan Nilekani, the outsourcing sage who coined the phrase “the world is flat”, which became a mantra for supporters of globalisation. “It is a humongous, mind-boggling challenge,” he told The Times. “But we have the opportunity to give every Indian citizen, for the first time, a unique identity. We can transform the country.”

If the cards were piled on top of each other they would be 150 times as high as Mount Everest — 1,200 kilometres."

The card will include a computer chip with either a fingerprint or an iris scan, the report says. The card may even be tied to criminal and credit histories. And last, but certainly not least, with just about 7 percent of Indian society registered to pay income tax, this new database of citizens -- potentially the largest ever attempted -- will certainly aid in the government's collection of funds.

-- Stephen C. Webster
http://rawstory.com/blog/2009/07/india-biometric-id-cards

Phone lines are tapped legally but without the owner's consent, e-mails and credit card numbers are read and stolen. Personal information is not personal anymore. Governments are quietly leeching our freedom away. Ranging from requirement to produce documents on demand, through to the extent to which states force ISP’s and phone companies to retain data, the blurring of boundaries between police and intelligence work and ultimately the breakdown of the principles of habeas corpus.

Dame Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5, has warned that the fear of terrorism is being exploited by the Government to erode civil liberties and risks creating a police state. “Since I have retired I feel more at liberty to be against certain decisions of the Government, especially the attempt to pass laws which interfere with people’s privacy,” Dame Stella said in an interview with a Spanish newspaper. http://bit.ly/yhIYP

Ottawa to seek biometric data on all visitors
The incoming head of Canada's spy agency says new rules requiring digital fingerprints and photos at foreign visa offices will be extended to every visitor from any country in the world – including close European allies such as France and Britain. Speaking in his current position as deputy minister of Citizenship and Immigration, Richard Fadden said the use of such biometric data will be phased in over time, starting with countries considered to pose higher security risks. http://bit.ly/Upufc

Indian state to implement biometrics in schools
The system they intend to implement soon would see the monitoring of daily attendance of both teachers and students via a biometrics check-in system. Though all schools enrolled in the program would be setup to be monitored via the web by a central location, it would require that each school upload their daily data to the municipal school authority Web site. http://bit.ly/Uwvm3

US Begins Collection of Biometric Information on Non-Citizens Departing Country
The Obama administration is launching a pilot program to collect biometric information from non-U.S. citizens when they leave the country. The federal government began testing the system at two big city airports this week. The initiative is the latest effort, following the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, to keep track of those who come to and depart from the United States. http://bit.ly/pPfDG

Middle East and Asia to take lion's share in biometrics market
In the Middle East, companies and governments are increasingly using biometric security systems to verify the identity of individuals at corporate and government sites, as well as at border points and airports. The regional biometrics market was estimated to be worth almost $500 million (Dh1.84 billion) in 2007, according to published reports. Only recently, the UAE government spent about $55 million on cutting-edge biometrics technology to implement the National ID system, which in turn will generate some revenues. http://bit.ly/BciBd

Phone Tapping in Turkey Raises Privacy Concerns
In Turkey the revelation last month by the ministry of justice that 70,000 telephones have been monitored by the state in the last three years, has provoked a major controversy.  Many of the telephone taps are related to an ongoing investigation and trial into an alleged conspiracy by a secular nationalist group known as Ergenekon to overthrow the Islamic rooted government now controlled by the AK Party. But there is an increasing feeling that the investigation could turn Turkey into a big brother state. http://bit.ly/140VcM

From fans at the Superbowl having their faces scanned to kids thumscanning to purchase lunches in the school cafeteria, Americans are being conditioned to give up their privacy and independence in exchange for the "safety" of biometrics technologies. Police departments across the country are debating the implimentation of invasive and unconstitutional Big Brother biometrics "for our safety and convenience," or, in the case of Ybor, Florida they have already instated and misused faces scanning cameras to victimize an innocent man.

Across the US and the world, from Odessa, Texas to Beijing, China populations are being forced to accept the incredibly invasive technology of biometrics. Right out of the gates biometrics is being used only in Big Brother type surveillence monitoring and tracking efforts. Just imagine elementary school children in Pennsylvania who attend the Lakeside school district classes being forced to digitally fingerprint to obtain their lunches. We're talking about everybody "all the children" no cash allowed!

Two things are happening here: The children are being trained to accept a cashless society where all of their transactions are recorded and, more importantly, they are being put into Federal and State databases. In the past, only criminals were fingerprinted.

You see, we're all being treated as if we're guilty until proven innocent. In fact, Detective Todd [...] stated to the press, "I don't see the big problem with it if you don't have anything to hide." Yes, this was the mantra of Nazi Germany: "You are free to go, once we see your papers." Imagine what Hitler would have done with this Orwellian tool which is already being used in England to deny people to stores and sports arenas.

[...]Wells Fargo has implemented the face-scanning cameras at its banking centers in Dallas. But where are they getting the databases to match the faces and fingerprints with names and Social Security numbers? That's right: they got them from States' drivers' license facilities. In the past eight years, State DMV's in 38 States have been collecting digital photos, thumbprints and signatures. And now, Washington DC's Mayor has announced that all the school children will be face scanned, thumbprinted and then loaded into the drivers' license database.In one fell swoop they have put the cashless society surveillance grid in place, and they're training the children that cash will no longer get them a hamburger.

Americans Against Biometrics President Alex Jones saw the threat four years ago with the drivers' license databases. He staged a 100+ person protest at the State Police offices in Austin, Texas against the biometric requirement for a driver's license. Jones was arrested after demanding that his driver's license be renewed without submitting to a digital photo and thumbprint. He had brought eight forms of ID with him, but that was not enough. [...]

Jones became very concerned four years ago when he began to see defense contractors like Lockheed-Martin running television ads equating thumscanning to buy and sell with America's pride in the space shuttle. Biometric propaganda is everywhere in commercials and on TV: IBM and American Express show people being scanned by lasers to get their groceries; the Sci-FI channel goes out to break and comes back into the show with someone biometrically thumscanning.We are all being conditioned to accept a highly centralized and dictatorial system. Is it any wonder that Red China is hastily buying up biometric technology?

Remember: right out of the gates, from the very start of this it has been mandatory to biometrically scan your body parts to get your driver's license, in turn to get a job and to have a bank account. Now every form of retail business and service company is deploying these systems and in hundreds of schools children are thumbscanning to get their food. We're not headed towards "1984," we're already in it.