UK – The police state
(BTW, I haven't written before because I'm lazy. Such is life.)
BBC:
Action to prevent an "illegal rave" in Devon last week has been defended by police, despite claims the event was merely an organised birthday barbecue.
[...]
Andrew Poole, who was celebrating his 30th birthday, claimed police riot vans turned up before any music was played.
But police said it had been advertised on the internet as an all-night party.
Mr Poole, a coach driver from Sowton, said 15 family and friends had come to the event, where they were watched by a police helicopter for about 15 minutes.
[...]
"The decision to close down a rave or illegal music festival is not taken lightly," a police spokeswoman said.
Yeah, I guess they just got bored of chasing witches terrorists, so they had to justify their paycheck. I wouldn't take my uselessness lightly either. Sure, unlicensed raves are actually illegal in the UK for a while, but that's hardly something the police should give a fuck about.
Then, there's also this, which I hadn't watched yet. Very very appaling.
The harassment and exclusion of legal observers, the violent arrest of women refusing to be searched, the aggressive interrogation of local residents, the threatening of journalists with arrest for doing their job, the confiscation of 100s of items such as childrens' costumes and crayons, attempted dawn raids on the camp, the use of batons and CS gas against peaceful protesters, and the forced search of 1000s of people and the adding of their personal data to a secret database. This type of political policing has to stop, and the right to legitimate protest re-established.
I will definitely be avoiding the UK the same way as I'll be avoiding Iran.
OMG, the terrorrists use mobile phones!
Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance.
Phone buyers would have to present a passport or other official form of identification at the point of purchase.
How nice. It completly stops criminals. Unless they steal mobile phones or something.
The UK is a shining example of data getting lost.
How long before a terrorist hacker steals the info and spoofs a phonecall to a bomb that is detonated via cellphone?
Suddenly the possibilities of being wrongly implemented in a terrorist plot is so much more possible.
This is a bad idea all around.
I am glad that I do not live in the US or the UK - if my country implements this kind of policy I would start browsing using the TOR network, set up my own mailserver to do direct relay and eventually fall back on using older means of communication - snail mail and pretty much nothing else.
Who is it that said "As soon as we change our way of living the terrorists have won"?
I tell you now - terrorists are holding the citizens of the US and the UK captive via proxy, and the proxy is ironically the very governments they are battling.
They win on all fronts at this moment.
What happens when thugs search your luggage?
What Is TSA?
We are the Transportation Security Administration, formed immediately following the tragedies of Sept. 11. Our agency is a component of the Department of Homeland Security and is responsible for security of the nation's transportation systems.
It is a company made of very friendly people. They help you when you have to much nice things when you travel by taking them away.
As a screener at Newark Liberty International Airport, Pythias Brown was supposed to keep deadly objects off airplanes. But for the past year, authorities allege, Brown has been swiping electronic equipment from luggage of the passengers he was supposed to protect.
A laptop here, a cell phone there. Within months, he had snatched more than 100 items, authorities say.
But this summer, Brown got too ambitious for his own good, allegedly stealing a $47,900 camera from an HBO crew and a camcorder from a CNN employee, authorities said.
Fuck with regular people is ok (ask Paulson), fucking rich people is not ok.
Uselding said the TSA worked closely with homeland security investigators to bring the charges against Brown. She also said that his crimes were rare and that less than 300 TSA employees have been terminated for theft.
"The actions of a few individuals in no way reflect on the outstanding job our more than 43,000 security officers do every day to ensure the security of the traveling public," she said.
Yeah, that makes it so unlikely to happen... (For those outside of the US, I have learned that Americans travel a lot, especially by plain.)
But, if you travel with a gun...
Well, no they can't [search your luggage away from you,] at least when traveling with a firearm. You get to have real locks, the bag(s) are inspected in front of you, and you lock 'em. They also can't label it as having a firearm in it, in plain English or in a code/symbol/special tag, other than the bag has been cleared.
And any firearm will do. For under $100, you can get the action (serial numbered part, the part BATFE says is the gun) for a single shot shotgun - you don't need to keep the stock, barrel, etc. attached. You can put it in a camera sized case, locked, and put that in your regular luggage, also locked with a proper lock. Check in, tell them you need to declare a firearm (helps to have your airlines policies printed out, as well as the FAA and BATFE regs), get it checked, adn life is good.
Best part is getting to watch the look on the luggage guys face if your stuff doesn't show up or has been opened. Amazing what the phrase "Will you call the BATFE, or do I need to?" will do.
Of course, this doesn't help with international travel, but for domestic it works like a champ.
Why sex offenders are not always bad people
It was Rocio Palacios who first noticed the woman who appeared to need help.
It was 8 a.m. when she and her husband, Erasmo, dropped their 6-year-old daughter off at school and had picked up their 22-year-old daughter to go out for breakfast when they saw the woman waving her arms at 53rd Street and Kedzie Avenue last November.
The Palacioses, of Chicago, claim the woman approached their car, parked outside Manolo's restaurant, leaned in to the passenger side where Rocio was sitting and asked Erasmo if he wanted oral sex for $20 or sex for $25.
The couple laughed, realizing this wasn't a woman in distress after all.
But within seconds, Chicago police swarmed the family car, hauling Erasmo Palacios out in handcuffs. He was charged with solicitation of a prostitute.
[...]
'I'm so lucky I was with my wife -- imagine if I had to try to tell her and she wasn't with me,' he said, before laughing at the image. 'She'd never believe me. Never.'
[...]
Attorneys Lonny Ben Ogus and Joe Cavanaugh also want to know what happened to the family's 1983 Mercedes. It was impounded that November day and, Palacios said, his wife and daughter were even threatened with arrest as they tried to stop police from taking it, as they were left stranded that morning.
What happens to Facebook?
Huh, the internet user's current favorite child has some interesing issues and connections...
On Isreal
Why oh why Israel is not heaven on earth.
Palestinian women and children are strip searched while traveling. And if they have their period while traveling and need pads, well, bleed at will during the flight. If they need meds, tough shit, just vomit.
And if you're Israeli, you better not complain about your countries human rights violations either.
Shit happens. And now they don't go back.
The Nazis sure left a few scars alright.
American States Have The Backbone That European Ones Do not
Americans may need passports to board domestic flights or to picnic in a national park next year if they live in one of the states defying the federal Real ID Act.
The act, signed in 2005 as part of an emergency military spending and tsunami relief bill, aims to weave driver's licenses and state ID cards into a sort of national identification system by May 2008. The law sets baseline criteria for how driver's licenses will be issued and what information they must contain.
The Department of Homeland Security insists Real ID is an essential weapon in the war on terror, but privacy and civil liberties watchdogs are calling the initiative an overly intrusive measure that smacks of Big Brother.
More than half the nation's state legislatures have passed or proposed legislation denouncing the plan, and some have penned bills expressly forbidding compliance.
Several states have begun making arrangements for the new requirements -- four have passed legislation applauding the measure -- but even they may have trouble meeting the act's deadline.
To be realistic the reason is probably
The NCSL is calling Real ID an "unfunded mandate" that could cost states up to $14 billion over the next decade, but for which only $40 million has been federally approved. The group is demanding Congress pony up $1 billion for startup costs by year's end or scrap the proposal altogether.
Anyway, the problems could be:
Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation say the IDs and supporting databases -- which Chertoff said would eventually be federally interconnected -- will infringe on privacy.
EFF says on its Web site that the information in the databases will lay the groundwork for "a wide range of surveillance activities" by government and businesses that "will be able to easily read your private information" because of the bar code required on each card.
The databases will provide a one-stop shop for identity thieves, adds the ACLU on its Web site, and the U.S. "surveillance society" and private sector will have access to the system "for the routine tracking, monitoring and regulation of individuals' movements and activities."
The civil liberties watchdog dubs the IDs "internal passports" and claims it wouldn't be long before office buildings, gas stations, toll booths, subways and buses begin accessing the system.
Which is something that has not even been publicly discussed in Europe. Now, the situation in the US is not that simple. They do not have the privacy laws that we have in Europe and, as such, a lot of that swap of information is not illegal and already happens. And, there are no obligation to have proper data security in place: every month now there's a case of misplaced citizen information that gets stolen. The real problem is that people believe that it, like DNA, is irrefutable. In actual fact, DNA tests are not as conclusive as that (you might mistake relatives, say), and ID's can be forged, if nothing else by bribery. But, as in the new passports, they'll likely be cracked in a year regardless of implementation.
best part, you can use your passport to get a real ID, in compliant states.
So in order to get your "Real ID" you have to possibly use a passport as one of your multiple documents, but if you dont HAVE a "Real ID" ID you only have to use your passport to get in and not the 3-4 other forms of ID you need JUST to get the Real ID license.
I had this same issue of stupidity getting my "Real ID" license from the NJ state DMV. In order to get my new license because of the federal rules, I needed a official copy of my birth certificate (one with a seal) which meant I needed to go to the court in the city I was born in. This was along with a bill with my official address, my credit card, and my bank card (since they refused to use my school work ID DESPITE it being a officially accepted means of showing ID by both the state AND the federal governments and pointing out this fact to them by UNDERLINING the print on her sheet showing her what she could use.)
You know what I needed to get my birth certificate, which counts for the most points in documents?
Picture ID with my name on it. Didnt matter from where. And could have been easily forged.
That was it.
This system is completely fucking flawed, and I swear it will be a Real ID toting terrorist who next strikes the US. Because our government is full of idiotic assholes who think safety comes from a stupid piece of plastic.
OMG! Pr0n is teh EV1L!
A man addicted to violent porn websites has been convicted for the second time of murdering a teacher.
Legislation to ban such sites is going through Parliament, but a small group of otherwise law-abiding people say the changes will criminalise them.
Damn, I thought games were to be blamed for violence... I'm confused now!
His barrister, Christopher Sallon QC, asked him at one point: "The suggestion is you were acting out a fantasy from a pornographic image that you accessed with the internet? Were you charged up and sexually aroused by Jane Longhurst, dead, with a ligature on?"
Coutts denied it. But then he had lied about so much else, including his claim she had agreed to sex on the day she disappeared and acquiesced when he suggested a sex game involving her being partially strangled with a pair of tights.
After the original trial Miss Longhurst's mother, Liz, organised a petition of 50,000 people and succeeded in persuading the home secretary to introduce legislation banning the downloading and possession of violent or "extreme" pornography.
Because the problem wasn't her daughter being stupid enough to talk to him or the guy being demented. No, porn.
Ms Longhurst's former partner Malcolm Sentance said at the time: "Jane would still be here if it wasn't for the internet."
She would still be here if she had better taste. She would still be here if she never went out of the house. She would still be here if ligatures were banned. Get over it.
"At the end of the day it is all too easy for this stuff to trigger an unbalanced mind."
So is braindead politicians, but so what?
But, look at the bill... Jesus Christ on a popsicle!
802. The Government believes that these clauses constitute an interference with Convention rights under Articles 8 and 10 but that for the reasons set out below this is justified as being in accordance with the law, and necessary in a democratic society for the prevention of crime, for the protection of morals and for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
803. The material to be covered by this new offence is at the most extreme end of the spectrum of pornographic material which is likely to be thought abhorrent by most people. It is not possible at law to give consent to the type of activity covered by the offence, so it is therefore likely that a criminal offence is being committed where the activity which appears to be taking place is actually taking place. The House of Lords upheld convictions for offences of causing actual and grievous bodily harm in the case of Brown [1994] 1 AC 212 which involved a group of sado-masochists who had engaged in consensual torture. The threshold that the clauses have set is very high, so while those taking part might argue that they had consented to it, such consent is not valid at law.
804. In the case of images of staged activity , the Government believes that banning possession is justified in order to meet the legitimate aim of protecting the individuals involved from participating in degrading activities. This is also the case with images of bestiality, which while involving harm to animals can also involve the non-consensual participation of humans who are harmed in the process of making the images.
805. The Government considers that the new offence is a proportionate measure with the legitimate aim of breaking the demand and supply cycle of this material, which may be harmful to those who view it. Irrespective of how these images were made, banning their possession can be justified as sending a signal that such behaviour is not considered acceptable. Viewing such images voluntarily can desensitise the viewer to such degrading acts, and can reinforce the message that such behaviour is acceptable.
806. The Government considers that the restrictions on this material also achieve the aim of protecting others, particularly children and vulnerable adults, from inadvertently coming into possession of this material, which is widespread on the internet.
On Child Porn and Copyright
I love reading KFG on slashdot. Here's a comment on the last story.
Now, as for suing end-users who unknowingly bought a pirated design, well, that's like suing teenagers for buying what they thought were real music CDs from their neighborhood music store or pawn shop.
Traditionally this would not be allowed. Copyrights do not address possession, they are copyrights.
But the law creeps, and one of the more pernicious ways it has found to creep of late is the redefinition of words with well understood legal meaning for the purposes of a single bill:
"For the purposes of this bill when we say "cat" we mean dog and when we say "dog" we mean your sister."
Thus it is now sometimes necesssary to build a glossary just for a single law to be able to read it and understand what it means. Black's is a useless anachronism for these bills.
And you can blame one of the granddaddies of the modern slippery slopes; the "war" on child pornography.
You see, the justification of anti-child pornography laws is the direct harm to children. The harm comes in the production, not in the possession. In the production illegal abusive acts are actually perpetrated against actual children. The mere images actually had an umbra of Constitutional rights about them.
So to arrest and convict a child pornographer you had to actually catch them in the production phase committing an actual illegal act. Doing something proscribed to a child.
But criminals have this nasty habit of hiding their crimes. The bastards. Catching them was difficult. It required investigative police work. We hate doing that, especially in this case where it often required cooperation across international legal frontiers.
So a new law was created to get at them without having to actually get at them directly. Promotion of child pornography was made a crime. This stretched the law a considerable bit, but didn't go so far as to actually break it. Now the word "promotion" has specific legal meaning. Distribution, sales and directly related activities. Ya know, "promotion."
The idea being that by making the business too risky and breaking the profit chain production would be curtailed and we could now go after a broader range of activities much easier to see, since promotion is harder to hide than production, since, well, to promote you have to promote. Become visible to your customers somehow.
Funny thing is, the law didn't work. Oh, sure, a lot of porn store owners were arrested and convicted of promoting child pornography, but production, i.e. actual abusive crimes against actual children, didn't diminish, at least in part because the increased strictures increased the profitabilty (see the war on drugs we're morally opposed to for some reason), thus justifying the increased risks involved. Go figure that strengthing contraban strictures only serves to strengthen the black market. We never saw that coming.
Something "had to be done," and here's what that something was:
They passed an anti child pornography bill that, for the purposes of that bill only, redefined "promotion" to include purchase, because if something is shown to be ineffective the obvious cure is to do it more and harder. This didn't merely break the law, it literally twisted it into unrecongnizability.
But here's the really pernicious step:
Possession was then held to be defacto evidence of "promotion" as defined in the bill. To have it, you must first have recieved it (this is not only a fracture of law, but of logic, but, weeeeeeell, they're just scum, right?)
So now some poor schmuck with a picture of some kid that gives a judge a hard on is "guilty" of the crime of possession, even though possession is not a crime (and with the side effect that often there is no actual primary crime even involved in the matter, an actual criminal act against an actual child. We now simply need to make a moral judgement against an image to convict).
And they got away with it; and a funny thing about law is that if you can do it in one place you can do it anyplace; and any fracture of the law that is used to go after "scum" will, at some later date, define you to be among the "scum" for doing something that has always been considered not only legal, but perhaps completely innocuous.
So along come Disney's lawyers who notice what is going on here (Snow White is a hot, underage chick. So is Pocahontas, notice they changed her age; and cup size? Disney pays attention to child porn laws very carefully) and commission new copyright law that defines both "promotion" and "profit" to include recieving; and thus, as per above, it can be argued that even possession is criminal promotion and/or profitable (if you saved money on the purchase, you profited, see?).
But there's another funny side effect of these laws. Go over the newspaper reports for the last year or three. Pick out all the child porn busts. Please note that virtually all of the busts involve these new, fractured laws. They're busting the "traders" in droves, but the producers have all but disappeared from the prosecutorial framework. It's still just as hard to investigate, arrest and convict them, but some poor schlub living at the Y who downloads a picture is easy to bust, isn't likely to shoot at you when you pick him up, can't afford a lawyer; and your headlines are just as big.
The law now looks at the issue through the wrong end of the telescope, as it is wont to do.
Once upon a time Sam Goody was busted for running a pirate vinyl pressing plant. People who bought pirate copies of LP's from Sam Goody were not considered criminals, they were considered the victims of fraud.
Your granny is still a victim of fraud for simply buying an infringing copy of a program (God forbid she should lend that infringing copy to a friend though, that would be promotion with a profit motive), but times and laws change. Oh boy do they change.
Watch the child pornography/drugs laws very, very carefully. Whatever they are doing there to arrest and convict people who were formerly unprosecutable, will, sooner or later, be used to come after you for tying your shoelaces in a manner that some religious whackjob thinks is a mortal sin.
Think I'm stretching there? Look at what has happened cultureally after 50 years of the war on child pornography. It used to be illegal to fuck a child. In Britain there has recently been an arrest for kissing a child on the cheek and you may be suspected of criminal activity for simply looking at a child. Many places now ban all taking of photographs where children are present, because such photos of children as they appear in public might be child porn.
Get ready for a future where simply listening to an infringing sound recording may well place you under suspicion of crime.
KFG
Big Brother is shouting at you
Big Brother is not only watching you - now he's barking orders too. Britain's first 'talking' CCTV cameras have arrived, publicly berating bad behaviour and shaming offenders into acting more responsibly.
Real progress there. A real lesson learned from Stalin.