ID cards | ukwatch.net

Spin Doctor Behind Davis' Campaign Promotes ID Cards

Tim Holmes — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 18:16:49 +0000

A spin doctor behind David Davis and his much-vaunted "freedom" campaign against creeping state surveillance is an influential figure in the worldwide promotion of identity cards.

Kevin Bell is vice-president of Fleishman-Hillard, a global public relations firm representing security companies that have introduced ID cards in the United States and Spain. Opposition to the Government's move to introduce a British ID card is a major plank of the David Davis for Freedom campaign website, which Fleishman-Hillard also set up.

Mr Bell has been close friends with Mr Davis for more than 20 years. But they appear to be on opposite sides of the national debate that the politician is hoping to spark about Britain's surveillance society.

Mr Bell has spoken at a Home Office-supported conference promoting the controversial ID card, a scheme that Mr Davis cites as one of the main reasons for his shock resignation as shadow Home Secretary earlier this month. The title of Mr Bell's speech was "Achieving public acceptance".

The embarrassing disclosure comes as Mr Davis launches his all-or-nothing attempt to return to Parliament on a civil liberties agenda. During Mr Davis's dramatic resignation speech, which has forced a by-election next month in his East Yorkshire constituency of Haltemprice and Howden, he has railed against "the database state". He attacked the British ID card plan as "the most intrusive system in the world" at the low-key launch of his election campaign last Friday.

Mr Davis's hopes of fighting a by-election to highlight Labour's "authoritarian" policies have been undermined by the fact that Labour, the Liberal Democrats, UKIP and even the BNP declined to field candidates to stand against him. Instead, his best-known opponent is David Icke, a former sports presenter who has claimed he is the son of God.

Other candidates include the Church of the Militant Elvis Party, the Official Monster Raving Loony Party (whose candidate is called Mad Cow-Girl), the New Party, the Christian Party, the Freedom 4 Choice Party, the Socialist Equality Party, the National Front, a market trader, a variety of independent candidates, an anti-rape campaigner and a performer who twice represented the UK in the Eurovision Song Contest during the 1960s.

Mr Davis's stand against "the ceaseless encroachment of the state into daily lives" already sits awkwardly for some voters with his support for the death penalty.

Britain's proposed ID card scheme, to be rolled out by 2010, could eventually cost taxpayers £6bn. One of the security firms interested in a government contract is Texas-based Entrust. It already provides software for the national identity card used by 40 million Spanish citizens.

Mr Davis criticised David Blunkett, who introduced the ID Card Bill, when the former home secretary announced he was taking up a paid consultancy with Entrust. However, Entrust is represented by Fleish-man-Hillard, whose digital media team designed Mr Davis's campaign website.

Tom Ridge, the former US minister for homeland security in the Bush administration and a prominent supporter of ID cards, sits on the PR firm's international board. Among its other American clients is Blackboard Inc, a security company responsible for the introduction of ID cards on US campuses.

Mr Davis said "Mr Bell is an old friend. He did initially help set up my website for the present campaign, for which payment will be made and declared in due course." Mr Bell did not respond.

The Surveillance Society Does Not Work

Ellie Keen — Tue, 06 May 2008 23:29:38 +0000

Costing in excess of billions of pounds each year, every single area of the British surveillance society has been proven ill effective when dealing with crime, fraud and terrorism – the very reasons government officials implement such measures.

Which begs the question: How can the Government justify such spending when it also imposes an increasing risk to our personal freedom and privacy? What is more, as current technology has failed to live up to the expectations of the British Government they still have widespread plans to advance citizen surveillance like we have never seen before.

Passport Interrogations

The latest statistics are cause for concern. A procedure introduced in 2007 made it compulsory for all passport applicants to attend face-to-face interviews.

We were told this was a necessary measure in fraud prevention but out of 90,000 interviewees not a single criminal had been caught. The cost of the network has run into the hundreds of millions.

DNA Database

More statistics show the DNA database, which contains the details of over one million innocent people, has almost zero effect in solving crimes. On average just 1 in every 800 crimes will be solved and the cost runs into the millions, turning the innocent into suspects. Each DNA sample added to the database cost £3,575 - last year the database held 660,000 samples.

Phil Booth of NO2ID said: “This utterly blows away the myth that the DNA database is the perfect detection tool. It is, in fact, creating-a nation of suspects.”

The British DNA database contains 4.5 million samples and is the largest in the world yet it does not hold the information of terrorist suspects or serious offenders currently in jail.

Police across the EU can access the database creating what civil liberty advocates call a ‘Big Brother Europe’.

CCTV

Just this week it was revealed that only 3% of London street robberies were solved using CCTV. Britain is the most monitored country in the world with an average of one CCTV per ever 14 people.

“Billions of pounds has been spent on kit, but no thought has gone into how the police are going to use the images and how they will be used in court. It’s been an utter fiasco: only 3% of crimes were solved by CCTV. There’s no fear of CCTV. Why don’t people fear it? [They think] the cameras are not working,” said Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville.

Still the development of a national facial recognition CCTV database continues at the taxpayer’s expense.

RIPA

What is more worrying still is the use of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), a spy law that was introduced in 2000 which gives the police and security services the power to monitor people and their communications. In 2002 the act was extended to include local councils allowing them to commit extensive surveillance of its citizens.

The law was introduced to catch terrorists but is currently being used to stop benefit cheats, anti-social behaviour, graffiti and even poor parking.

The abuse of Government authority is abundantly clear as our privacy and freedoms are needlessly stripped way while the taxpayer is forced to pay for technology which fails to protect us from criminals or terrorists.

A surveillance society simply does not work.

London Olympics terror threat used to vastly increase surveillance powers

tim — Sat, 03 May 2008 08:53:47 +0000

The threat of terrorism at the 2012 London Olympics is being hyped up in order to justify a vast increase in the surveillance powers of the British state.

According to a memo leaked to the Daily Telegraph, Home Office officials are planning to expand the police DNA database to identify suspects and use greater powers to track individuals through advanced closed circuit television (CCTV) technology and the Oyster card used by millions of people on London’s bus and rail network.

The memo discusses different means the government could use to persuade the British public to accept these measures. It asks, “To what extent should the expectation of liberty be eroded by legitimate intrusions in the interests of security of the wider public?” and concludes, “Increasing [public] support could be possible through the piloting of certain approaches in high-profile ways such as the London Olympics.”

To that end, ministers, police chiefs and officials have stepped up their demands for more security measures, utilising the Games. Last month, Lord Dear, the former Scotland Yard head of operations, made a public announcement expressing his doubts over present police capabilities to deal with the event. He said that the police force is too short of manpower to deal with the extra security needed and likened it to a “Sixties car in the 21st century,” adding, “If the model is flawed now, it will certainly be flawed in four years’ time.”

“It’s fairly obvious to anyone that major terrorist groups will not be particularly interested in attacking the Beijing Olympics,” Dear said. “But in four years’ time they will have the London Olympics as a target and we need to be best positioned to counter that well in time.”

Dear’s announcement was made despite the fact that there are a record 140,000 police officers in service and the Olympics security budget has risen sharply by £238 million in the last few months. At the end of last year, Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell released figures that showed that the initial security budget of £200 million in 2005 had spiralled to more than £1 billion.

Dear’s comments reflect those of the most senior officers in the police. The head of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Ian Blair, has also expressed concern over existing security arrangements and outlined a plan for them to be beefed up in readiness for the games. He has also said that special security and training will be required for athletes and the 200 heads of state expected for the opening ceremony. These proposals will inevitably involve extending the budget still further.

As well as increasing the number of police, the proposed scheme involves an elaborate and sophisticated security system spanning the whole of London. According to a BBC report last month, the Metropolitan Police Service wants to pool its 10,000 existing cameras with the thousands of traffic and congestion cameras already in operation across the city.

This would give the police control over a vast network of up to half a million CCTV cameras, making it the largest of its kind in the world. The network would then be controlled by a central £100 million bomb-proof command bunker operated jointly by the military, police and intelligence services brought together under the umbrella of the Olympic Security Directorate.

The Olympic security coordinator, Assistant Police Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur, has made several statements over the last few weeks that indicate just how huge the increase in surveillance will be. Speaking at an international security conference in Abu Dhabi, Ghaffur outlined new ticketing technology to be used on the London transport system to track the movements of every individual, as well as “second-generation” computer technology that can track individuals through face recognition. The computers can use identity-recognition techniques to compare video against a database of digital faces.

A pilot scheme involving 750,000 mugshots has already been completed. Using the facial-mapping software connected to the CCTV cameras, an alert will flash up as soon as a known person appears on the screen. He added, “We will have the most secure and transparent ticketing system. Tracking technology is being developed—a spectator will be tracked from the venue to his or her home with these tickets.”

Other measures outlined by Ghaffur include dividing London into three security zones, three extra helicopters to carry out close surveillance, an increase in the automatic vehicle number plate recognition system, and checks using biometric fingerprints on the 50,000 workforce being used to build the venues.

Currently, the police can only check fingerprints and photographs from suspects after they have been arrested. Under these new powers, the police will be able to carry out these checks instantly with hand-held devices that are connected to the security database. Peter Neyroud, the chief executive of the National Policing Improvement Agency, said, “We are trying to get a really disciplined understanding of how to use these tools before the Olympics. That is a really important time scale for us.”

As well as increasing the size of the British police force to 9,000 for the major Olympic events, there are also proposals to draft in extra manpower from private security firms and foreign armed police. Scotland Yard has called for these measures on the basis that too few British police have firearms training to cope with the events, and the costs of training them are prohibitive. The contracted armed police will be used to guard dignitaries, athletes, the main Olympic Park and other sports venues.

Ian Blair told a meeting of the Metropolitan Police Authority, “The principle must be that we don’t want armed foreign police, but there’s a ‘but’—and the ‘but’ is twofold. One, you may not be able to get any foreign police unless they are armed, because they won’t feel easy being unarmed in public scenarios like that. Two, do we actually have, in this case, sufficient capacity to have enough armed officers to do the job?”

All of these extra resources will mean that the security budget for the games will mushroom in the next four years. Denis Oswald, the chairman of the International Olympic Committee’s London 2012 coordination commission, has admitted that it is “impossible to predict” how much money will need to be spent when the games are still four years away. He said, “It’s a very difficult area but if we want to have occasions like the Olympic Games, where hundreds of thousands of people meet, then you have to make sure they are safe, otherwise you just give up and the terrorists will win.”

This refusal to draw up a fixed budget on the basis of a terrorist threat that is “impossible to measure” amounts to a blank cheque that Londoners and the British people will ultimately have to pay. More importantly, the machinery is being created that is necessary to impose a highly integrated police/military apparatus in Britain’s capital city, under the pretext of keeping the country safe from terrorism.