security | ukwatch.net

Nigerians in the UK urge boycott of British Airways

Ellie Keen — Sun, 11 May 2008 01:00:54 +0000

British Airways has been criticised over its handling of a forced deportation and its treatment of Nigerian passengers on a flight from Heathrow airport.

Passengers on board the 27 March BA flight to Lagos began to protest about the manhandling of Augustine Eme, a Biafran independence activist, who was allegedly being restrained by up to five police officers while pleading not to be sent back to Nigeria where he feared he would be killed. (Eme’s brother has already been killed and his wife and children are missing.)

The police promptly removed Eme from the flight, but returned to arrest another passenger, Ayodeji Omotade. This prompted other passengers to complain about his detention, which resulted in the pilot ordering all 136 economy class passengers off the flight.

Omotade, who is from Kent, was on the flight to attend his brother’s wedding in Nigeria but was detained by police for ten hours following his arrest. In that time police confiscated £1,603 that Omotade had on him, stating that they had strong reason to believe the money came from criminal activities. Omotade was then returned to Heathrow without any money and having missed his brother’s wedding. He has also been banned for life from travelling with British Airways.

The flight did eventually go to Lagos, but with only Eme and first class passengers on board. British Airways defended its removal of the economy passengers, on the basis that their behaviour constituted a security threat to staff.

The incident has prompted calls for a boycott of BA from within the Nigerian community in the UK. Over one thousand people signed a petition sent to the Nigerian government demanding a written apology to all the passengers. The petition also called on BA to compensate Omotade and lift the lifetime ban against him, as well as lifting any criminal charges against him. The Nigerian president, Umaru Yar’Adua, has ordered an investigation into the incident at Heathrow.

British Airways recently came under fire from one of its own pilots for ignoring racism amongst its staff. Captain Doug Maughan, who has worked for BA for fifteen years, recently accused management of failing to deal with his complaints about frequent racist remarks made by senior BA employees.

Misguided weapon

Ellie Keen — Thu, 08 May 2008 22:47:53 +0000

Thank you Dr Nick Ritchie and Bradford department of peace studies. This new report on Trident is a model of analysis and dissection. Every justification ever produced for spending astronomical sums on yet another generation of British nuclear weapons goes under the magnifying glass and gets dealt with briskly and effectively. The report should find its way onto the desk of every person who is in any way responsible for this policy and also onto the desks of those so far silent about it.

It’s high time that the major development agencies too had something to say about this vast expenditure. Making poverty history means making Trident history too. The millennium goals would be a doddle if Trident money were redirected. Not just poverty abroad but here as well. For instance, dozens of post offices are to close because, we are told, we cannot afford the subsidies. Trident money could keep the entire post office network going for 125 years.

The “we need Trident because the future is uncertain” argument gets fair but robust treatment. By definition, the future, for good or ill, is always uncertain. Tidal waves, asteroids and mad dictators are all possible, but Trident is no answer to any of them. In terms of nuclear threats “our” Trident will increase not reduce dangers. The longer nuclear weapons are around the more likely accident, miscalculation and proliferation into the wrong hands: in fact, there are no “right” hands.

At one or two points I came up with a grunt of disagreement. “In sum nuclear weapons contribute little to British security.” Do they add anything to British security? It seems to me that Sweden, New Zealand, and South Africa (which gave its own up without fanfare) are all safer in terms of international threats than we are here.

There was also the assumption that Britain would go on trying to be the world’s junior policeman. “It is highly likely that the UK will continue to intervene in regional crises over the coming years with conventional military forces.” If we are to do so it must only be with the authority of the UN security council which is itself bound by the terms of the charter.

There is now another study for Ritchie to undertake on an equally important issue. Someone has got to examine the cultural prejudices which lie behind all this. For over 50 years the great British public have been told by all shades of politician that nuclear weapons were the road to security. They were the only way of bringing the second world war to an end. They kept the peace for 40 years. Unless they get into the hands of mad or suicidal people they are quite safe. These are the cultural myths that are just as important as the technical issues.

The UNESCO Courier got it right in 1993. “The problem is that belief systems have been built up to support the idea that they [nuclear weapons] are usable and indeed almost indispensable to international security.” Yet there is now a detailed draft treaty, lodged with but not discussed at the UN, aimed at the elimination of all nuclear weapons everywhere. It covers all the key issues of inspection, verification, criminality and whistleblowing. Maybe there is more interest in it today. Gordon Brown and Des Browne have both recently said that a world free of all nuclear weapons is their ultimate destination. They won’t get there while a massive roadblock labelled Trident sits stubbornly in the way.

A Global Threat Multiplier

Tim Holmes — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 02:20:31 +0000

A European Union study on the problems of global climate change, leaked to the press four days before its official launch on 14 March 2008, contained the sobering assessment that a failure to take radical action now to address global warming would create the likelihood of severe conflict over resources in the decades ahead. Two days later, on 16 March, data from the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) reveals that the rate of shrinking of glaciers across the world – a key marker of climate change – has accelerated; this more than doubled between 2006 and 2007, and the 2007 figure was five times the average for the 1980-99 period. These two documents, taken together, present governments and citizens in the leading emissions-producing countries in particular with an unavoidable test.

UNEP’s data – included in its report Meltdown in the Mountains, based on research conducted by the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) – is significant for two quite different reasons. The first is that in a number of key parts of the world, glaciers are essential parts of the crop-support system. Winter snow and ice locked up in massive glaciers in mountain ranges (the Andes, the Karakorams and especially the Himalayas, for example) store water which is slowly released during the spring and early summer, providing water for irrigation as much as a 1,600 kilometres away from the glaciers themselves. If the glaciers melt more quickly, or if what would normally be late winter snow falls as rain, then the rivers flowing off the mountain ranges will no longer provide water for crops during the growing season.

The second reason why the Unep study is important is that it provides one more indication that climate change is speeding up and therefore more evidence for the argument that decisive policy-shifts are urgently needed to address the crisis. Yet the spread of such is not yet having the impact on government policy that it should; too many influential people and interest groups (including the governments of many oil-producing states and some transnational oil-and-gas companies) still reject the evidence and block progress.

Moreover, as the problems intensify the scale of measures needed to address them also expand. The evidence that existing carbon emissions will have their severest impact over at least the next three decades mean that plans for a 50% cut in global carbon output by 2050 – which, it is true, go beyond what was proposed barely five years ago – have already become woefully inadequate. Analysts may differ on the details of what is really required, but a consensus is beginning to emerge that 80% cuts are needed a long time before 2050 – including deep cuts by 2012-15, i.e. in the next five to seven years.

A global focus

It is in this context – of an unfolding emergency – that the European Union document – Climate Change and International Security – is so interesting. It must also be read in relation to three specific aspects of climate change (see “Climate change: a window to act”, 22 November 2007):

positive-feedback processes, including summer melting of polar sea-ice, and methane release from melting permafrost, mean climate change is likely to intensify

climate change will (against projections common in the early 1990s) affect many of the poorest parts of the world, mainly through severe droughts

global climate-change estimates are necessarily consensus documents, intended to keep climate specialists from scores of countries on board; they are inevitably and naturally conservative in their assessments.

The EU report – prepared for the European commission by Javier Solana (the union’s lead foreign-policy coordinator) and Benita Ferrero-Waldner (its commissioner for external relations), and presented to the European council’s climate-change summit on 13-14 March 2008 – reflects these features, yet it also has a sense of urgency that is largely lacking from the equivalent documents or reports produced by its own member-states or other national governments. Indeed, one of its most compelling arguments concerns the impact of climate change on weaker states beyond the global north: “Climate change is best viewed as a threat multiplier which exacerbates existing trends, tensions and instability. The core challenge is that climate change threatens to overburden states and regions which are already fragile and conflict prone.”

The document anticipates a number of severe outcomes if this challenge is not properly met: conflict over food and water resources as rainfall diminishes; risks to the infrastructure of coastal cities and fertile river deltas; strains from environmentally-induced migration and to radicalisation as marginalised peoples react to their exclusion. It also cites the potential for conflict over energy resources inside some of the world’s most energy-rich regions, as they too experience physical and social stresses due to climate change.

The tone of the entire report is downbeat, with an unusual (in such official products) awareness of the inescapable immediacy of what lies ahead. Its main emphasis is on the consequences of climate change and how Europe might best address them – especially by cutting carbon emissions. It also recommends putting far more research effort into understanding the regional effects of climate change, and more development resources into countering these (see “Climate change: threat and promise”, 2 November 2006).

An elite lens

For all its value and importance, however, there is a problem with the report: it is unable to transcend what is essentially a Eurocentric view. In this sense, it has much in common with the report published in January 2008 by five former defence chiefs from the United States, France, Britain, Germany and the Netherlands (see “The New Atlantic Century?“, 24 January 2008). This document – Towards a Grand Strategy for an Uncertain World: Renewing Transatlantic Partnership – is straightforward and unashamed in seeing global threats in terms of a north Atlantic dimension. The authors’ concern is with the lands from Finland to Alaska; they insist on the need for a revitalised and strengthened Nato in parallel with far closer collaboration between north America and the European Union than at present. The report’s imaginary “other” is the new adversary of an unstable and uncertain world whose millions of inhabitants are metaphorically gathering outside the walls of civilised Europe, Canada and the United States.

This view of the world is essentially about protecting the status quo, making climate change a security problem for the elite states rather than an issue for the whole global community. As such, it fails and is bound to fail: since it embodies no recognition that climate change is part of the much wider issue of a deeply and increasingly divided world. This division is both socio-economic and (again) imaginary: for improvements in education, literacy and technology produce the consequence that what remains essentially the marginalised majority of the world’s people are – from the “other” side – far more knowledgeable of that very condition than ever before.

The logic of the “climate-change-as-threat” paradigm is, at heart, to create the need for more forms of physical security: that since Europe’s biggest problem is likely to come from “militant migration” (especially from north Africa and the middle east), the land borders in southeast Europe must be controlled and the Mediterranean seen as a barrier, with the necessary military forces constructed and deployed to help keep Europe safe.

The reality of an interconnected, globalised, technologically distributed world in which small groups of determined people can (for example) use civil aircraft to attack New York skyscrapers and the world’s largest military headquarters armed only with parcel knives makes this outlook – to say the least – self-defeating. Europeans will be as little able to align the Mediterranean as the moat for their 21st-century castle as will the Israelis to build a wall high enough to exclude those determined to breach it.

True, the European Union report at least does see things in more than purely security terms; it addresses the need to support affected countries outside Europe in surviving the impacts of climate change, and it recognises that there is a link between socio-economic divisions and environmental constraints. What it is unable to do is to follow comprehensively the implications of that link.

European action to avoid a dysfunctional global condition requires an unprecedented commitment to prevent climate change and ameliorate those effects that cannot now be avoided, especially in poorer countries. It will also require a greatly heightened commitment to development, not least in terms of trade reform, debt cancellation and direct international assistance targeted at sustainable and gendered development (see “Wanted: a new global paradigm”, 8 November 2007).

Dystopia and optimism

Thirty-five years ago, the economic geographer Edwin Brooks evoked the risk of “(a) crowded glowering planet of massive inequalities of wealth buttressed by stark force yet endlessly threatened by desperate people in the global ghettoes” (see Edwin Brooks, “The Implications of Ecological Limits to Growth in Terms of Expectations and Aspirations in Developed and Less Developed Countries”, in Anthony Vann & Paul Rogers (eds), Human Ecology and World Development [Plenum Press, 1974]).

An integrated response to climate change and the wealth-poverty divide is both essential and urgent. The Europeans have the capacity to provide leadership and the resources to take action, and their new – as yet officially unreleased – report begins to open up the issue in the systematic manner needed (see Mats Engström, “Europe’s green power”, 25 March 2007). If the analysis could be extended to a global understanding, and if the sheer urgency of the issue could be recognised, then there will be cause – even at this late stage – for optimism. All this, however, demands the biggest step-change of all: imagination. If it is not forthcoming, Brooks’s dystopic prediction – already reality in too many places – is the most likely outcome.

Paul Rogers is professor of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England.

Faceless: Chasing the Data Shadow

Ellie Keen — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 09:55:08 +0000

Remote-controlled UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) scan the city for anti-social behaviour. Talking cameras scold people for littering the streets (in children’s voices). Biometric data is extracted from CCTV images to identify pedestrians by their face or gait. A housing project’s surveillance cameras stream images onto the local cable channel, enabling the community to monitor itself.

These are not projections of the science fiction film that this text discusses, but techniques that are used today in Merseyside¹, Middlesborough², Newham and Shoreditch³ in the UK. In terms of both density and sophistication, the UK leads the world in the deployment of surveillance technologies. With an estimated 4.2 million CCTV cameras in place, its inhabitants are the most watched in the world.⁴ Many London buses have five or more cameras inside, plus several outside, including one recording cars that drive in bus lanes.

But CCTV images of our bodies are only one of many traces of data that we leave in our wake, voluntarily and involuntarily. Vehicles are tracked using Automated Number Plate Recognition systems, our movements revealed via location-aware devices (such as cell phones), the trails of our online activities recorded by Interent Service Providers, our conversations overheard by the international communications surveillance system Echelon, shopping habits monitored through store loyalty cards, individual purchases located using RFID (Radio-frequency identification) tags, and our meal preferences collected as part of PNR (flight passenger) data.⁵ Our digital selves are many dimensional, alert, unforgetting.

Increasingly, these data traces are arrayed and administered in networked structures of global reach. It is not necessary to posit a totalitarian conspiracy behind this accumulation – data mining is an exigency of both market efficiency and bureaucratic rationality. Much has been written on the surveillance society and the society of control, and it is not the object here to construct a general critique of data collection, retention and analysis. However it should be recognised that, in the name of efficiency and rationality – and, of course, “security” – an ever-increasing amount of data is being shared (also sold, lost and leaked⁶) between the keepers of such seemingly unconnected records as medical histories, shopping habits, and border crossings. Legal frameworks intended to safeguard a conception of privacy by limiting data transfers to appropriate parties exist. Such laws, and in particular the UK Data Protection Act (DPA, 1998)⁷, are the
subject of investigation of the film Faceless.

From Act to Manifesto
“I wish to apply, under the Data Protection Act, for any and all CCTV images
of my person held within your system. I was present at [place] from approximately
[time] onwards on [date].” (From the template for subject access requests used for Faceless)

For several years, ambientTV.NET⁸ conducted a series of exercises to visualise the data traces that we leave behind, to render them into experience and to dramatise them, to watch those who watch us. These experiments, scrutinising the boundary between public and private in post-9/11 daily life, were run under the title The Spy School. In 2002, the Spy School carried out an exercise to test the reach of the UK Data Protection Act as it applies to CCTV image data.

“The Data Protection Act 1998 seeks to strike a balance between the rights of individuals and the sometimes competing interests of those with legitimate reasons for using personal information. The DPA gives individuals certain rights regarding information held about them. It places obligations on those who process information (data controllers) while giving rights to those who are the subject of that data (data subjects). Personal information covers both facts and opinions about the individual.” ( Data Protection Act Factsheet available from the UK Information Commissioners Office, www.ico.gov.uk)

The original DPA (1984) was devised to ‘permit and regulate’ access to computerised personal data such as health and financial records. A later EU directive broadened the scope of data protection and the remit of the DPA (1998) extended to cover, amongst other data, CCTV recordings. In addition to the DPA, CCTV operators ‘must’ comply with other laws related to human rights, privacy, and procedures for criminal investigations, as specified in the CCTV Code of Practice (www.ico.gov.uk).

As the first subject access request letters were successful in delivering CCTV recordings for the Spy School, it then became pertinent to investigate how robust the legal framework was. The Manifesto for CCTV Filmmakers was drawn up, permitting the use only of recordings obtained under the DPA. Art would be used to probe the law.

A legal readymade

“Vague spectres of menace caught on time-coded surveillance cameras justify an entire network of peeping vulture lenses. A web of indifferent watching devices, sweeping every street, every building, to eliminate the possibility of a past tense, the freedom to forget. There can be no highlights, no special moments:
a discreet tyranny of now has been established. Real time in its most pedantic form.” (Ian Sinclair: Lights out for the territory, Granta, London, 1998, p. 91)
Faceless is a CCTV science fiction fairy tale set in London, the city with the greatest density of surveillance cameras on earth. The film is made
under the constraints of the Manifesto – images are obtained from existing CCTV systems by the director/protagonist exercising her/his rights as a surveilled person under the DPA. Obviously the protagonist has to be present in every frame. To comply with privacy legislation, CCTV operators are obliged to render other people in the recordings unidentifiable – typically by erasing their faces, hence the faceless world depicted in the film. The scenario
of Faceless thus derives from the legal properties of CCTV images.

“RealTime orients the life of every citizen. Eating, resting, going to work, getting married – every act is tied to RealTime. And every act leaves a
trace of data – a footprint in the snow of noise… (Faceless, 2007)

The film plays in an eerily familiar city, where the reformed RealTime calendar has dispensed with the past and the future, freeing citizens from guilt and regret, anxiety and fear. Without memory or anticipation, faces have become vestigial – the population is literally faceless. Unimaginable happiness abounds – until a woman recovers her face…

There was no traditional shooting script: the plot evolved during the four-year long process of obtaining images. Scenes were planned in particular locations, but the CCTV recordings were not always obtainable, so the story had to be continually rewritten.

Faceless treats the CCTV image as an example of a legal readymade (objet trouvé). The medium, in the sense of raw materials that are transformed into artwork, is not adequately described as simply video or even captured light. More accurately, the medium comprises images that exist contingent on particular social and legal circumstances – essentially, images with a legal superstructure. Faceless interrogates the laws that govern the video surveillance of society and the codes of communication that articulate their operation, and in both its mode of coming into being and its plot, develops a specific critique.

Reclaiming the data body

Through putting the DPA into practice and observing the consequences over a long exposure, close-up, subtle developments of the law were made visible and its strengths and lacunae revealed.

“I can confirm there are no such recordings of yourself from that date, our recording system was not working at that time.” (11/2003)

Many data requests had negative outcomes because either the surveillance camera, or the recorder, or the entire CCTV system in question was not operational. Such a situation constitutes an illegal use of CCTV: the law demands that operators, “comply with the DPA by making sure [...] equipment works properly.” (CCTV Systems and the Data Protection Act 1998, available from www.ico.gov.uk)

In some instances, the non-functionality of the system was only revealed to its operators when a subject access request was made. In the case below, the CCTV system had been installed two years prior to the request.

“Upon receipt of your letter [...] enclosing the required £10 fee, I have been sourcing a company who would edit these tapes to preserve the privacy of other individuals who had not consented to disclosure. [...] I was informed [...] that all tapes on site were blank. [.. W]hen the engineer was called he confirmed that the machine had not been working since its installation.Unfortunately there is nothing further that can be done regarding the tapes, and I can only apologise for all the inconvenience you have been caused.” (11/2003)

Technical failures on this scale were common. Gross human errors were also readily admitted to:

“As I had advised you in my previous letter, a request was made to remove the tape and for it not to be destroyed. Unhappily this request was not carried out and the tape was wiped according with the standard tape retention policy employed by [deleted]. Please accept my apologies for this and assurance that steps have been taken to ensure a similar mistake does not happen again.” (10/2003)

Some responses, such as the following,were just mysterious (data request made after spending an hour below several cameras installed in a train carriage). “We have carried out a careful review of all relevant tapes and we confirm that we have no images of you in our control.” (06/2005) Could such a denial simply be an excuse not to comply with the costly demands of the DPA? “Many older cameras deliver image quality so poor that faces are unrecognisable. In such cases the operator fails in the obligation to run CCTV for the declared purposes.You will note that yourself and a colleague s faces look quite indistinct in the tape, but the picture you sent to us shows you wearing a similar fur coat, and our main identification had been made through this and your description of the location.” (07/2002)

To release data on the basis of such weak identification compounds the failure.

Much confusion is caused by the obligation to protect the privacy of third parties in the images. Several data controllers claimed that this relieved them of their duty to release images:

“[... W]e are not able to supply you with the images you requested because to do so would involve disclosure of information and images relating to other persons who can be identified from the tape and we are not in a position to obtain their consent to disclosure of the images. Further, it is simply not possible for us to eradicate the other images. I would refer you to section 7 of the Data Protection Act 1998 and in particular Section 7 (4).” (11/2003)
Even though the section referred to states that it is:
“not to be construed as excusing a data controller from communicating so much of the information sought by the request as can be communicated without disclosing the identity of the other individual concerned, whether by the omission of names or other identifying particulars or otherwise.”

Where video is concerned, anonymisation of third parties is an expensive, labour-intensive procedure – one common technique is to occlude each head with a black oval. Data controllers may only charge the statutory maximum of £10 per request, though not all seemed to be aware of this:

“It was our understanding that a charge for production of the tape should be borne by the person making the enquiry, of course we will now be checking into that for clarification. Meanwhile please accept the enclosed video tape with compliments of [deleted], with no charge to yourself.” (07/2002)

Visually provocative and symbolically charged as the occluded heads are, they do not necessarily guarantee anonymity. The erasure of a face may be insufficient if the third party is known to the person requesting images. Only one data controller undeniably (and elegantly) met the demands of third party privacy, by masking everything but the data subject, who was framed in a keyhole. (This was an uncommented second offering; the first tape sent was unprocessed.) One CCTV operator discovered a useful loophole in the DPA:

“I should point out that we reserve the right, in accordance with Section 8(2) of the Data Protection Act, not to provide you with copies of the information requested if to do so would take disproportionate effort.” (12/2004)

What counts as disproportionate effort ? The gold standard was set by an institution whose approach was almost baroque – they delivered hard copies of each of the several hundred relevant frames from the timelapse camera, with third parties heads cut out, apparently with nail scissors.

Two documents had (accidentally?) slipped in between the printouts – one a letter from a junior employee tendering her resignation (was it connected with the beheading job?), and the other an ironic memo:

“And the good news – I enclose the £10 fee to be passed to the branch sundry income account.” (Head of Security, internal communication 09/2003)

From 2004, the process of obtaining images became much more difficult.

“It is clear from your letter that you are aware of the provisions of the Data Protection Act and that being the case I am sure you are aware of the principles in the recent Court of Appeal decision in the case of Durant vs. Financial Services Authority. It is my view that the footage you have requested is not personal data and therefore [deleted] will not be releasing to you the footage which you have requested.” (12/2004)

Under Common Law, judgements set precedents. The decision in the case Durant vs. Financial Service Authority (2003) redefined personal data ; since then, simply featuring in raw video data does not give a data subject the right to obtain copies of the recording. Only if something of a biographical nature is revealed does the subject retain the right.

“Having considered the matter carefully,we do not believe that the information we hold has the necessary relevance or proximity to you. Accordingly we do not believe that we are obligated to provide you with a copy pursuant to the Data Protection Act 1988. In particular, we would remark that the video is not biographical of you in any significant way.” (11/2004)

Further, with the introduction of cameras that pan and zoom, being filmed as part of a crowd by a static camera is no longer grounds for a data request.

“[T]he Information Commissioners office have indicated that this would not constitute your personal data as the system has been set up to monitor the area and not one individual.” (09/2005)

As awareness of the importance of data rights grows, so the actual provision of those rights diminishes:

“I draw your attention to CCTV systems and the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA) Guidance Note on when the Act applies. Under the guidance notes our CCTV system is no longer covered by the DPA [because] we:

• only have a couple of cameras
• cannot move them remotely
• just record on video whatever the cameras pick up
• only give the recorded images to the police to investigate an incident on our premises” (05/2004)

Data retention periods (which data controllers define themselves) also constitute a hazard to the CCTV filmmaker:

“Thank you for your letter dated 9 November addressed to our Newcastle store, who have passed it to me for reply. Unfortunately, your letter was delayed in the post to me and only received this week. [...] There was nothing on the tapes that you requested that caused the store to retain the tape beyond the normal retention period and therefore CCTV footage from 28 October and 2 November is no longer available.” (12/2004)

Amidst this sorry litany of malfunctioning equipment, erased tapes, lost letters and sheer evasiveness, one CCTV operator did produce reasonable justification for not being able to deliver images:

“We are not in a position to advise whether or not we collected any images of you at [deleted]. The tapes for the requested period at [deleted] had been passed to the police before your request was received in order to assist their investigations into various activities at [deleted] during the carnival.” (10/2003)

In the shadow of the shadow

There is debate about the efficacy, value for money, quality of implementation, political legitimacy, and cultural impact of CCTV systems in the UK. While CCTV has been presented as being vital in solving some high profile cases (e.g. the 1999 London nail bomber, or the 1993 murder of James Bulger), at other times it has been strangely, publicly, impotent (e.g. the 2005 police killing of Jean Charles de Menezes). The prime promulgators of CCTV may have lost some faith: during the 1990s the Home Office spent 78% of it crime prevention budget on installing CCTV, but in 2005, an evaluation report by the same office concluded that, “the CCTV schemes that have been assessed had little overall effect on crime levels.”⁹

An earlier, 1992, evaluation reported CCTV’s broadly positive public reception due to its assumed effectiveness in crime control, acknowledging “public acceptance is based on limited, and partly inaccurate knowledge of the functions and capabilities of CCTV systems in public places.”¹⁰

By the 2005 assesment, support for CCTV still “remained high in the majority of cases” but public support was seen to decrease after implementation by as much as 20%. This “was found not to be the reflection of increased concern about privacy and civil liberties, as this remained at a low rate following the installation of the cameras,” but “that support for CCTV was reduced because the public became more realistic about its capabilities” to lower crime.

Concerns, however, have begun to be voiced about function creep and the rising costs of such systems, prompted, for example, by the disclosure that the cameras policing London’s Congestion Charge remain switched on outside charging hours and that the Metropolitan Police are to have live access to them, having been exempted from parts of the Data Protection Act to do so.¹¹ As such realities of CCTV’s daily operation become more widely known, existing acceptance may be somewhat tempered.

Physical bodies leave data traces: shadows of presence, conversation, movement. Networked databases incorporate these traces into data bodies, whose behaviour and risk are priorities for analysis and commodification, by business and by government. The securing of a data body is supposedly necessary to secure the human body, either preventatively or as a forensic tool. But if the former cannot be assured, as is the case, what grounds are there for trust in the hollow promise of the latter? The all-seeing eye of the panopticon is not complete, yet. Regardless, could its one-way gaze ever assure an enabling conception of security?

There will be a screening of Faceless on Tuesday 6th May at Peacock Visual Art, Aberdeen. For details, see: www.peacockvisualarts.com

Notes
1. Police spy in the sky fuels ‘Big Brother’ fears, Philip Johnston, Telegraph, 23/05/2007, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/05/22/ndrone22.xml

The Guardian has reported the MoD rents out an RAF-staffed spy plane for public surveillance, carrying reconnaissance equipment able to monitor telephone conversations on the ground. It can also be used for automatic number plate recognition: “Cheshire police recently revealed they were using the Islander [aircraft] to identify people speeding, driving when using mobile phones, overtaking on double white lines, or driving erratically.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2181393,00.html

2. ‘Talking’ CCTV scolds offenders, BBC News, 4 April 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/6524495.stm

3. If the face fits, you’re nicked, Independent, Nick Huber, Monday, 1 April 2002, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/if-the-face-fits-youre-nicked-656092.html

Also see: “In 2001 the Newham system was linked to a central control room operated by the London Metropolitan Police Force. In April 2001 the existing CCTV system in Birmingham city centre was upgraded to smart CCTV. People are routinely scanned by both systems and have their faces checked against the police databases.” Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility: http://www.ccsr.cse.dmu.ac.uk/resources/general/ethicol/Ecv12no1.html

4. A Report on the Surveillance Society. For the Information Commissioner by the Surveillance Studies Network, September 2006, p.19. Available from www.ico.gov.uk

5. ‘e-Borders’ is a £1.2bn passenger-screening programme to be introduced in 2009 and complete by 2014. The single border agency, combining immigration, customs and visa checks, includes a £650m contract with consortia Trusted Borders for a passenger-screening IT system: anyone entering or leaving Britain are to give 53 pieces of information in advance of travel. This information, taken when a travel ticket is bought, will be shared among police, customs, immigration and the security services for at least 24 hours before a journey is due to take place. Ministers are also said to be considering the creation of a list of “disruptive” passengers. Trusted Borders consists of US military contractor Raytheon Systems who will work with Accenture, Detica, Serco, QinetiQ, Steria, Capgemini, and Daon. It is expected to cost travel companies £20million a year compiling the information. These costs will be passed on to customers via ticket prices, and the Government is considering introducing its own charge on travellers to recoup costs. A pilot of the e-borders technology, Project Semaphore, has already screened 29 million passengers. Similarly, Lockheed Martin, the biggest
defense contractor in the U.S, that undertakes intelligence work as well as contributing to the Trident programme in the UK, is bidding to run the UK 2011 census. New questions in the 2011 Census will include information about income and place of birth, as well as existing questions about languages spoken in the household and many other personal details. The Canadian Federal Government granted Lockheed Martin a $43.3 million deal to conduct its 2006 census. Public outcry resulted in only civil servants handling the actual data, and a new government task force being set up to monitor privacy during the Census. See: http://censusalert.org.uk/, http://www.vivelecanada.ca/staticpages/index.php/20060423184107361

6. Sales:“Personal details of all 44 million adults living in Britain could be sold to private companies as part of government attempts to arrest spiralling costs for the new national identity card scheme, set to get the go-ahead this week. [...] ministers have opened talks with private firms to pass on personal details of UK citizens for an initial cost of £750 each.”‘Ministers plan to sell your ID card details to raise cash’, Francis Elliott, Andy McSmith and Sophie Goodchild, Independent, Sunday 26 June 2005, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/ministers-plan-to-sell-your-id-card-details-to-raise-cash-496602.htm

lLosses:In January 2008, hundreds of documents with passport photocopies, bank statements and benefit claims details from the Department of Work and Pensions were found on a road near Exeter airport, following their loss from a TNT courier vehicle. There were also documents relating to home loans and mortgage interest, and details of national insurance numbers, addresses and dates of birth.In November 2007, HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) posted, unrecorded and unregistered via private courier TNT, computer discs containing personal information on 25 million people from families claiming child benefit, including the bank details of parents and the dates of birth and national insurance numbers of children. The discs were then lost. Also in November, HMRC admitted a CD containing the personal details of thousands of Standard Life pension holders has gone missing, leaving them at heightened risk of identity theft. The CD, which contained data relating to 15,000 Standard Life pensions customers including their names, National Insurance numbers and pension plan reference numbers was lost in transit from the Revenue office in Newcastle to the company’s headquarters in Edinburgh by ‘an external courier’.

Thefts:In November 2007, MoD acknowledged the theft of a laptop computer containing the personal details of 600,000 Royal Navy, Royal Marines, and RAF recruits and of people who had expressed interest in joining, which contained, among other information, passport, and national insurance numbers and bank details.In October 2007, a laptop holding sensitive information was stolen from the boot of an HMRC car. A staff member had been using the PC for a routine audit of tax information from several investment firms. HMRC refused to comment on how many individuals may be at risk, or how many financial institutions have had their data stolen as well. BBC suggest the computer held data on around 400 customers with high value individual savings accounts (ISAs), at each of five different companies — including Standard Life and Liontrust. (In May, Standard Life sent around 300 policy documents to the wrong people.)

7. The full text of the DPA (1998) is at www.opsi.gov.uk/ACTS/acts1998/19980029.htm

8. ambientTV.NET : “a crucible led by Manu Luksch and Mukul Patel, conceives and produces interdisciplinary art projects, develops social and technical infrastructure, and promotes network architectures that allow explorations of alternatives to current socio-political and economic practice.”

9. Gill, M. and Spriggs, A.: Assessing the impact of CCTV. London: Home Office Research, Development and Statistics Directorate 2005, pp.60-61www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs05/hors292.pdf

10. www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/prgpdfs/fcpu35.pdf

11. Surveillance State Function Creep – London Congestion Charge “real-time bulk data” to be automatically handed over to the Metropolitan Police etc.http://p10.hostingprod.com/@spyblog.org.uk/blog/2007/07/surveillance_state_function_creep_london_congestion_charge_realtime_bulk_data.html

Plane Stupid Protest

The Staff — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 23:02:51 +0000

Richard George, co-founder of Plane Stupid, dictated the following statement from the roof of the Houses of Parliament

“We’ve come to this symbolic home of democracy to make clear that the consultation process of the third runway at Heathrow has, from the beginning, been a sham. We’re making paper airplanes out of documents that Greenpeace obtained under the Freedom of Information Act from the Department for Transport, which proved that the British Airports Authority wrote sections of the consultation and that there has been a BAA official within the consultation committee pushing their forward their agenda – at the expense of the 70% of Londoners who don’t want the runway.

We’re taking direct action as a last resort because we don’t believe that the consultation has been a democratic process. This is the beginning of a campaign of direct action that will not cease until we feel we’re being listened to and until we’re satisfied that it’s Londoners’ views, rather than BAA’s, that the government paying attention to.”

Real Victim of Bugging Scandal is Babar Ahmad

Ellie Keen — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 01:47:07 +0000

Arrested on the wishes of the US. Thrown in jail for the past three and a half years. Threatened with extradition on trumped up “terrorism” charges. And now it has been revealed that the police bugged his meetings with his MP.

That’s the story of Babar Ahmad, a south London IT worker, who is the real victim of the bugging scandal that has emerged over the last week.

The media and politicians have whipped themselves into a frenzy after it was revealed that meetings at Woodhill Prison between Sadiq Khan, MP for Tooting and a government whip, and Babar Ahmad had been bugged.

Senior police offices authorised the operation, apparently without the knowledge of then home secretary Jack Straw, who has now launched an inquiry into the case.

The inquiry ought to look at the outrageous way in which Babar Ahmad has been treated, and assess the impact of police surveillance upon those whose only crime is to oppose British foreign policy.

It will not. The MPs are merely concerned that their own private conversations are being listened to. But it is Babar who is suffering in this case.

He was arrested on 5 August 2004 after an extradition request from the US. It accused him of running a website supporting “terrorists” in Chechnya and Afghanistan.

Babar has not been charged with any crime in Britain and the attorney general has given written confirmation that there is insufficient evidence to charge him in this country.

But the British government is still aiding the US in its attempts to extradite Babar to face a trial there – a trial in the country that gave us Guantanamo Bay and secret rendition to torture centres around the world, and punishes people with the death penalty.

A high-profile campaign by Babar’s friends and family has so far frustrated this plan. But his case is now at the European Court of Human Rights, which will make a decision soon.

Sara Ahmad, Babar’s sister, told Socialist Worker, “We are very concerned that private meetings with his MP, at which the strategy to fight his extradition has been discussed, have been bugged.

“We are also concerned that his legal teams’ visits may also have been bugged, and are demanding to know whether the monitoring was at the request of the US. We also want to know whether the recorded discussions were passed on to the other side in preparation for its legal case?

“Our confidence in the Metropolitan Police and the authorities has plummeted.

“We have tried everything – petitions, letters, protests, attempting to get the Independent Police Complaints Commission to investigate. But Babar is still faced with extradition.

“The case shows Britain’s subservience to the US.”

The bugging scandal has revealed the continuing crackdown on civil liberties under the “war on terror” and New Labour’s increasingly authoritarian regime.

Security sources told the Times newspaper this week that many prisoners in British jails are routinely under covert electronic surveillance.

Matt Foot, a solicitor in north London, told Socialist Worker, “I was pleased to see the principled reaction of my old boss, Sadiq Khan, to the bugging of his prison visits with Babar Ahmed.

“Sadiq was a fine lawyer. He has also however been a pretty much establishment Blairite MP – with the exception of his stand over the war on Lebanon – and has been rewarded with a post as a government whip.

“But surely the real point here is, if the security services are bugging his prison visits what hope does that give to the rest of us?

“Jack Straw’s inquiry needs to take a look into the bugging of lawyers’ visits with their clients, and see who is accountable.”

For more information go to www.freebabarahmad.com

From Evil Empire to Axis of Evil

JamieSW — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 18:03:18 +0000

Cold War Origins

Oxford Research Group (ORG) was founded twenty-five years ago at the height of one of the most dangerous phases of the Cold War. Ronald Reagan had been elected two years earlier and had dubbed the Warsaw Pact the “evil empire”, yet the Soviet Union was in the midst of a prolonged leadership crisis. An ailing Leonid Brezhnev died in November 1982 and was followed by Yuri Andropov who survived only fifteen months in office, to be replaced in turn by Konstantin Chernenko who lasted barely a year. Only in March 1985, with Mikhail Gorbachev taking power, was some semblance of order restored.

Meanwhile, both NATO and the Warsaw Pact were engaged in a bitter arms race, with the nuclear dimension the focus of attention. The Soviet Union was deploying the new SS-20 mobile intermediate-range ballistic missile in Eastern Europe and the United States was bringing in the ground-launched cruise missile and the highly accurate Pershing 2 ballistic missile into Western Europe. The Thatcher government in Britain had decided to build a new generation of Trident missile submarines and the anti-nuclear movement was also boosted by the US decision to base cruise missiles at Greenham Common and Molesworth.

Oxford Research Group was established originally to research the processes of nuclear decision-making and to enable ordinary people to engage with those taking the decisions. It also saw a need, from the start, to facilitate dialogue between groups with radically different approaches to international relations. Throughout the mid-1980s it worked to develop knowledge and contacts, extending its work to encompass wider issues of nuclear proliferation as the Cold War began to wind down.

A common view in the 1980s was that the Cold War may have been a dangerous confrontation but nuclear weapons were so destructive that their very possession on both sides of the Cold War divide ensured stability. In other words, nuclear weapons could not be used so they deterred both sides and kept the peace. It is not an argument that goes down well in those many parts of the world in which proxy wars were fought between East and West. In Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, Central America and many other places, those wars cost at least ten million lives and many tens of millions of people injured, frequently leaving behind wrecked societies.

Even in the NATO/Warsaw Pact alliances themselves, the extent of the resources devoted to the military were extraordinary. By 1985, the two groups had deployed over 62,000 nuclear weapons, and nearly 85% of all the world’s military expenditure was going into this one confrontation. Over the whole period of the Cold War, there were numerous nuclear accidents, some involving releases of radiation and others with nuclear weapons lost and never recovered.

Many of the details of the crises remain largely hidden, with the notable exception of Cuba in 1962, although it is now known that in the autumn of 1983 NATO and the Warsaw Pact came close to nuclear war. At that time, just as cruise and Pershing 2 missiles were being deployed, a Soviet interceptor shot down a Korean Airlines 747 over Sakhalin Island east of Siberia, after it had entered Soviet air space, killing all those onboard and leading to a crisis in East-West relations. Shortly afterwards, NATO began a major test of its new mobile missile forces in West Germany, the Able Archer exercise, a test that Soviet intelligence operators believed was a preparation for a surprise attack. Soviet forces were put on immediate alert and an escalation was only avoided when NATO staff realised what was happening and scaled down the exercise.

Able Archer and other incidents were evidence of the need for dialogue and groups such as Pugwash and ORG worked hard to keep channels open. By 1987, an East-West thaw had at last begun, leading to the ground-breaking Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty that resulted in the withdrawal of the cruise, Pershing 2 and SS-20 missiles. By the end of the decade, the Cold War had eased, there was a mix of multilateral and unilateral processes under way that scaled down nuclear forces substantially, and there was even a modest peace dividend.

Arguments persist that the nuclear arms race was a necessary evil and that the West “won” the Cold War. Other views see Gorbachev as the key individual in recognising the need to break out of the “race to the death”, however much he may be maligned now. What is clear, though, is that the very emphasis on the East-West confrontation had a dangerous legacy and also overshadowed two other issues that now look likely to dominate the security agenda in the coming years.

The Arms Legacy

While the nuclear forces were scaled back substantially through to the mid-1990s, and a Chemical Weapons Convention was also agreed, the sheer momentum of the Cold War arms race resulted in many further developments. Among them was the greater use of area-impact munitions – weapons such as cluster bombs, multiple rocket launchers and fuel-air explosives – that were designed specifically to cause destruction over the widest area possible. While these have been overshadowed by the parallel development of precision guided weapons (“war against property not people”), their impact in Iraq and Afghanistan has been potent and they are now proliferating across the world’s armed forces.

A second Cold Wear legacy was that with cuts in defence budgets, the major arms companies were even more active in seeking to sell weapons to states outside of the old East-West axis. The Middle East, in particular, was a focus for arms sales throughout the 1990s, a trend which has continued to the present.

As for nuclear weapons, after an apparent lull, we have now moved into an era of renewed proliferation. In the 1985-95 period there appeared to be good news on this front. Argentina and Brazil ended their competitive nuclear programmes and three countries – Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Belarus – all returned nuclear stockpiles to Russia when the Warsaw Pact broke up. South Africa went as far as dismantling its small nuclear arsenal and nuclear-free zones were also agreed across much of the world.

Since 1995, progress has reversed, and there is a real risk that the seventh decade of the nuclear age will mark a new phase of proliferation. India is now a fully-fledged nuclear weapon state, as is Pakistan. North Korea has acquired a small nuclear arsenal and Iran appears to have nuclear ambitions. If Iran does join Israel as another Middle Eastern state with nuclear weapons, then other states in the region, including Egypt and Turkey, may revise their current non-nuclear policies. The changed dynamic is having a substantial impact on western strategic thinking. The Bush administration may take a very hard line, especially with a country such as Iran, but other strategists are beginning to think about the need to move towards a nuclear-free world – a remarkable change of attitude that brings them close to the views of anti-nuclear activists.

The Majority World

Most of the security focus of the early 1980s when Oxford Research Group was first established was on the East/West divide, but this did mean that two much larger global issues were sidelined. One was the wealth-poverty divide, where little progress had been made during the 1960s and 1970s, despite the best efforts of organisations such as the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). Just after ORG was established, the Sixth UNCTAD session took place in Belgrade in June 1983, but this had little more success than the earlier sessions in trying to bring in a fair international trading system.

Also sidelined was the issue of global environmental constraints. After the UN Human Environment Conference in Stockholm in May 1972, there had been a hope that the risk of global “limits to growth” would prompt moves towards effective environmental management, and the oil price shocks of the mid-1970s seemed to suggest that energy resource issues involved problems that would become desperately urgent. Instead, these receded into the background as free market economics came to the fore, and there was a fifteen-year gap before the development and environment issues emerged once again as part of the criticisms of globalisation of the late 1990s. This was partly due to the conspicuous failure of the globalised free market to deliver socio-economic justice. Coupled with the recognition that climate change could have disastrous impacts across the world, this meant that an integrated approach to sustainable security was going to be necessary.

Axis of Evil

The 9/11 attacks pushed that aside, as the United States and its coalition partners embarked on a world-wide war on terror not just against the al-Qaida movement but on an “axis of evil” of rogue states that replaced the “evil empire” of the Cold War era. Six years later, and after the termination of regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, over 100,000 civilians have been killed, many tens of thousands of people are detained without trial, and torture, prisoner abuse and rendition are all consequences of the coalition polices.

President Bush’s war on terror was confidently expected to result in a dispersed and diminished al-Qaida and a stable pro-western Afghanistan with much greater US influence in Central Asia. It was also expected to create a pro-western Iraq with a long-term US military and political presence leading to greater security for western interests in the oil-rich region of the Persian Gulf, and an Iran which would be hugely limited in its influence and capabilities.

Instead, Afghanistan and much of western Pakistan are deeply insecure, Iraq is mired in violence, the al-Qaida movement remains active and threatening, and there is even a risk of war with Iran, given the recent extraordinary rhetoric of the Bush administration. With all of these consequences, there is just beginning to be a willingness to examine other security paradigms, even if there is little evidence of this affecting the Bush administration.

Sustainable Security

The bare outline of that approach is beginning to emerge (see, for example, Beyond Terror explores the origins of Oxford Research Group twenty-five years ago). It acknowledges from the start that one of the biggest single issues in the coming decades will be the impact of climate change. Not only is that happening faster than predicted but it is now evident that there will be massive impacts on the tropical and sub-tropical regions of the world where most people live and are dependent on locally produced food. As these regions dry out and harvests fail, the consequences in terms of social unrest and of mass migration born of desperation could be appalling.

Yet climate change is only one part of the problem, since the other major driver of insecurity is the widening wealth-poverty divide as wealth concentrates more and more in the hands of around a fifth of the world’s population. With the massive and welcome improvements in education in recent decades, people on the margins are much more likely to be aware of their own marginalisation and to react strongly. Whether this is in the form of social unrest in rural China, Naxalite rebellions in India or radical social movements erupting in shanty towns across the South, these are all markers of a trend made all the more disturbing by the activities of elite communities determined to maintain the status quo.

This is an unsustainable posture yet it is much like the mindset of the Cold War. In participating in an arms race that was hugely dangerous as well as being insatiable in its demand for resources, Britain was just one country that appeared unable to escape from its own narrow outlook and seek alternative security policies. Similarly, there is now a tendency for “old thinking” to dominate. Military think tanks may well point to the potential problems of climate change and marginalisation, but their job is to protect their state. It is not their remit to see it in terms of the prevention of future conflict, especially when that is primarily a matter for other branches of government.

The end result is a demand for an increase in military spending instead of an integrated security posture rooted in sustainability. That has to have as its foundation a focus on people and communities rather than rigid security for states. It has to accept that most of the world’s security problems can only be overcome by states working together, especially on the core issues of environment and development. Most of all, it has to be sustainable, in the sense that what is done in the short term does not make for much greater problems in decades to come.

In one sense, the dangers of the Cold War were obvious, and organisations such as Oxford Research Group were able to point to those dangers as they sought engagement and dialogue. There was always the risk of going over the precipice – a global nuclear war that would set the human community back centuries. Now we are in a more difficult circumstance in that it is more like a slippery slope than a precipice. Moreover, on issues such as climate change there have to be huge changes in policy in the next five to ten years to avoid problems twenty or thirty years hence. That is something that cannot easily be embraced by most political systems and is going to require an immense increase in the engagement of civil society. It will also require intensive dialogue with political, business and military leaders. In respect of the need for such dialogue, at least, little has changed since the Cold War years.

No Central Control Over UK Nuclear Arsenal

Tim Holmes — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 19:16:42 +0000

In September, the world was stunned by news of what was described as an isolated mistake. A US Air Force B-52 bomber flew over the length of the United States armed with six cruise missiles. Each missile carried nuclear warheads that individually contained a yield of up to 150 kilotons—more than 10 times greater than the US bomb that levelled Hiroshima at the end of the Second World War.

The incident evoked Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove—the black comedy starring Peter Sellers about a delusional air force commander giving the unilateral order for an unprovoked nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union.

A recent report by the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Newsnight programme on the UK’s nuclear weapons evoked Kubrick’s Cold War satire once again.

In 1998, the last Royal Air Force nuclear bomb was withdrawn. Until then, the programme revealed, the RAF’s nuclear bombs were armed simply by turning a bicycle lock key with no other security on the bomb itself.

Furthermore, Newsnight explained, up to this day, there is a deliberate policy to allow British submarines the capability to launch nuclear missiles without any central control or oversight by the government.

The US, Russia and France have systems in place to prevent a Dr. Strangelove scenario of a rogue individual launching a nuclear strike. According to the BBC, this makes Britain the only nuclear power without a fail-safe.

In 1960, the American government under President Kennedy introduced a system called Permissive Action Links (PAL), which was fitted to every American nuclear bomb. To detonate a bomb. it was now necessary for the correct code to be transmitted by the US Chief of Staff and dialed into the nuclear device. Until 1991, the US submarine fleet was exempted from this arrangement. It was then that a fail-safe commission, under President Bush senior, decided to introduce PAL to the Navy as well, and by 1997 this was installed on all nuclear submarine missiles.

When there was an attempt to introduce a similar system in Britain in 1966, it led to ferocious resistance by the Royal Navy, and it was subsequently deemed unnecessary.

Newsnight showed papers from the National Archive, marked top secret and atomic. In these, the Chief Scientific Adviser Solly Zuckerman, who advised the then-Labour government’s Defence Secretary, Denis Healey, suggested that Britain needed to install PAL on its nuclear weapons to keep them safe. “The Government will need to be certain that any weapons deployed are under some form of ‘ironclad’ control,” he wrote.

But the Royal Navy was apparently deeply insulted by the implication that its officers were not be trusted absolutely: “It would be invidious to suggest…that Senior Service officers may, in difficult circumstances, act in defiance of their clear orders,” it replied.

The plans were duly mothballed and the RAF bombs, as long as they existed, were not fitted with PAL. Even today, the Royal Navy’s nuclear devices remain free from such safeguards.

Newsnight reported that there is a deliberate policy to allow submarines the capability to launch nuclear missiles without an order from Whitehall. This is apparently so as to maintain a nuclear deterrent under conditions in which Whitehall is no more.

Britain is confident, it says, that the Dr. Strangelove scenario could never happen because the company of a British trident submarine is trained to spot a “rogue commander” and deal with him or her.

The Defence Ministry (MOD) responded to the Newsnight programme by stating that it was “satisfied that robust arrangements are in place for political control of the use of the UK’s strategic deterrent and these controls are tested and audited.”

The MOD stated that “A rigorous system of processes ensures the safety and thoroughness of the operating system for the UK nuclear deterrent.”

“Launching a Trident missile from a submarine is a complex activity,” it continued. “Prior to launch, the command and control structure on board the submarine would need to be satisfied that the Prime Minister has issued instructions to launch nuclear weapons. A coordinated effort involving key individuals from the boat’s company of 150 is required to launch the missile. The number of participants required to act in concert means that the ‘Permissive Action Link’ type safeguards found in other systems are not relevant in the SSBN domain” [emphasis added].

“We don’t discuss the detailed arrangements,” an MOD spokesman added, declining to respond to questions about the BBC report.

In short, the prime minister alone needs to be seen as having given the go-ahead for a nuclear strike. And launching a missile is apparently more complicated in Britain than it is in the US, France or elsewhere. So the wise-heads of the crew’s members will make sure no one gets the wrong idea. Even the talents of Kubrick and Sellers would find it difficult to ridicule further something that already reads like a satire.