Wiring up for a police state?

A useful, if depressing, snapshot of the current situation in our surveillance State was posted to Indymedia UK today, originally published in the wonderfully-named Porkbolter, a local activist mag for Worthing, of all places. In case the link 'goes off' I've copied the article in its entirety below, followed by some comments I made. Formatting in original, underlines are not links.

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TONY Blair has put the entire population of the UK on trial, without telling us, has found us all extremely guilty and has placed us in permanent incarceration on a hi-tech prison island.

Although this doesn't seem to have been reported on the news, we reckon this must be what has happened. How else can you explain the great tide of freedom-stealing measures currently being imposed on us?

Let's begin with the chilling news that "Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded" (Independent, December 22). Said the report: "Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years. "The network will incorporate thousands of existing CCTV cameras which are being converted to read number plates automatically night and day to provide 24/7 coverage of all motorways and main roads, as well as towns, cities, ports and petrol-station forecourts."

Frank Whiteley of the Association of Chief Police Officers confirmed that it would not just be the Boys in Blue that would be using the technology, but also the likes of MI5: "The security services will use it for purposes that I frankly don't have access to," he admitted.

And it's not just cars. The Guardian reported on January 24: "The police are being given access to advanced travel details on more than 40 million passengers a year who travel on domestic flights and ferries within Britain."

So far it seems that the only way to avoid the prying eyes of the police state is to stay at home. But you're not even safe there. The Independent on Sunday revealed on January 1 (Happy New Year, folks!) that "John Prescott has told tax inspectors to use satellites to snoop on householders' attempts to improve their homes." It added: "Even minor improvements, invisible from the road, will be caught by 'spy in the sky' technology that uses a mix of aerial and satellite images taken over time to spot changes. The Government is planning to compile a database of every home in Britain, which will include details of how many bedrooms each house has and what kind of roof it has. Inspectors will look at whether garden sheds have been converted into offices or studios and whether kitchens or porches have been extended."

Now let's turn to communications where, reported The Guardian on January 12, a new EU directive "requires every telephone company and internet service provider (ISP) to save call records and internet logs up to two years", supposedly in order to "aid law enforcement". The information that will be stored includes details of numbers dialled, call duration and location, websites visited and header information on emails.

Then the Independent on Sunday reported on January 15 that Tony Blair was set to allow MI5 to bug MPs' phones. Hang on, aren't MI5 supposed to be "civil servants" working for MPs and Parliament? And if the politicians aren't safe from the police state, where does that leave the rest of us?

We haven't even mentioned ID cards yet. The Daily Telegraph revealed on January 8 that all those government promises about the cards being "voluntary" are a load of hogwash. The revelation, no surprise to cynics like us lot, came from a trawl through "an obscure Whitehall consultation paper", the report explained. The small print revealed that town hall officials will be asked to police the scheme by using the Electoral Register to identify homes and individuals without cards. "The register will be cross-checked against the proposed Identity Card Database. Those who fail to register for a card or to keep their details up to date when, for example, they change address, face fines of up to £2,500."

Then on January 28, the Daily Telegraph reported: "Anti-ID cards campaigners accused the Home Office yesterday of misleading parliament and the public over plans to include radio tracking devices in ID cards. "Only last month, Andy Burnham, the Home Office minister, said in a parliamentary written answer that there were 'no plans to use radio frequency identification (RFID) tags in ID cards'. However, a leaked letter from Mr Burnham indicates that the chips will use radio frequencies to allow "contactless" reading of the card by special scanners." Phil Booth, co-ordinator of the No2ID campaign, said this would allow anyone carrying the card to be tracked in the street or entering a building.

If all this makes you want to go up to London and tell Mr Blair what you think of his Big Brother state, watch out! Milan Rai, a Sussex peace campaigner, was on January 19 formally charged with organising a protest outside Downing Street. Never mind that this amounted to just him and one other person - quite a feat of "organisation"! And never mind that all they did was ring a handbell and read out the names of victims of the Iraq war. None of that is allowed any more, under the new Serious Organised Crime and Police Act which bans "unauthorised" free speech within a one-mile radius of Westminster. The maximum penalty for this heinous crime is a week short of a year in prison. (To support Milan go to www.j-n-v.org or write to Justice Not Vengeance, 29 Gensing Road, St Leonards on Sea, East Sussex TN38 0HE).

And it doesn’t end there. Did you know that more than five per cent of the UK population are now registered on the DNA database - just by being arrested, though not necessarily charged, let alone found guilty? This figure will now shoot up as the good old Serious Organised Crime and Police Act also means you can be arrested for any minor alleged offence, even something like dropping litter.

Did you also know that a fifth of the world's CCTV cameras are in the UK and the average person is caught on film 300 times a day? Or that the NHS is building a database of everyone's medical history to which, it is believed, MI5 will have access? Or that body scanners are being installed at mainline stations, which will probably include Brighton, using mobile phone technology to create a virtual image of people minus their clothing.

Things are not looking too good in the future. Victor Keegan wrote in The Guardian (January 5): "If you think surveillance in Britain has reached the limits of acceptability, then think again. Last week's successful launch of Europe's Galileo global satellite navigation system will take surveillance into a whole new era. When it is fully operational in 2010 it will be able to locate people, cars, mobile phones, planes, trains, goods in transit, front door keys and maybe even footballs, to within a metre of where they are."

With the "threat of terrorism" now being used as a cover-all excuse to strip away the last vestiges of English freedom, it is essential as many of us as possible stand up and make our opposition known.

We can't pretend we don't know what's happening. As Henry Porter wrote in The Observer on January 23: "Make no mistake – we are wiring up for the police state".

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That's a good summary of the current 'state of play'. It's good that it mentioned RFID chips as they're often overlooked but represent a very serious danger to liberty by facilitating universal and ubiquitous personal tracking. Stores plan to put RFID tags into items they sell, including clothes, without the knowledge of customers. The purpose is more irritating than sinister, to prevent shoplifting, track stock and boost marketing, but then that was the original purpose of CCTV in shops and look how that's mutated into an important tool for State surveillance. More worryingly, RFID is being used to identify and track people, for instance hospitals planning to radio-tag surgery patients - the purpose is benign, maybe even beneficial if it prevents potentially fatal mix-ups, but the application is easily adaptable for State purposes. Companies are already using RFID to track workers on their premises, even in the bog.

The worrying thing about RFID is that the chips are cheap as, well, chips, so tiny as to be unnoticeable, and can be read without the user's knowledge. Now that newborns are having their DNA scanned and stored, it's only a matter of time before they're implanted with ID chips. Paranoid? Considering that what we have now would have seemed the most febrile paranoid fantasy 20 years ago, I don't think we can be paranoid enough. Technology 'advances' at such a rate that 24/7 cradle-grave State surveillance is a realistic prospect.

Another article on ID chips by George Monbiot appeared in the Guardian yesterday.

Nothing to hide, nothing to fear?

One of the local no2id sites has a link to a story in the Grauniad printed last September, by and about a French guy who was arrested by paranoid cops in a tube station because he was wearing a jacket "too warm for the season" (now where have we heard that before?) and carrying a rucksack. This led to the tube station being evacuated and part of the line being closed down. He was taken to a copshop, held overnight in a cell, fingerprinted and DNA'd, and had his flat ransacked by cops and his stuff nicked (sorry, 'held for further investigation'). He was eventually released with a sort of apology, so on the plus side he wasn't summarily executed, perhaps on account of having a white face, and was released the day after, rather than being held for up to a month without charge. However, he is now forever a suspect in the War Against Terror ^TM:

"Under current laws the police are not only entitled to keep my fingerprints and DNA samples, but according to my solicitor, they are also entitled to hold on to what they gather during their investigation: notepads of arresting officers, photographs, interviewing tapes and any other documents they entered in the police national computer (PNC). So even though the police consider me innocent there will remain some mention (what exactly?) in the PNC and, if they fully share their information with Interpol, in other police databases around the world as well." ("Suspicious behaviour on the tube", Guardian online, 22/9/05)

This is a professional guy, able to call on the services of a solicitor and write a story for a national newspaper. What of the rest of us grunts who don't have access to Briefs and hacks? What would happen to us in a similar situation? What if you're Jane Bloggs, plasterer, or Tariq Ahmed, taxi driver, or Joe Punter, unemployed? Your life would be turned upside down because you looked a bit dodgy to the cops. As well as all your stuff being nicked and you being held without charge for as long as the cops want to, you'd at best be regarded with suspicion by all your neighbours after vanloads of white-overalled cops took your house apart in public, and at worst be subjected to vigilantism - just look what happens to suspected pedos, and the only thing worse than a pedo is a terrorist. You would almost certainly have to move out of the area, a non-trivial matter if you're a 'homeowner'. Your licence plate would be watched by the ubiquitous road cameras, your financial transactions monitored, and all your movements out of the country would be flagged so that foreign cops could keep an eye on you. You'd be surveilled to your grave, and indeed afterwards if you have family as they'd be under suspicion as well.

Nothing to hide, nothing to fear? Pull the other one! Not whilst the State gives carte blanche to the cops to act like Judge Dredd. Cops have always acted by the unwritten NOAIDLFUATWOIKYHIJ law (NAIDLYF for short) [1], but that was always unofficial 'police practice' - now NAIDLYF has the force of The Law, and there's fuck-all you can do about it. This is what NuLabor calls "striking a balance" (© New Labour 1997-whenever) between "freedom" and "security".

[1] Thank you, Steve Bell, as this law was first coined in his If... strips back in the 80s.