Town hall snoopers are demanding access to people's bedrooms. Officials say they need to enter and inspect properties where a council tax discount is claimed.

Seven and a half million people are entitled to 25% off their annual bill because they live on their own.

The Conservatives warned that householders are being pressured into signing a declaration agreeing to an internal inspection of their homes in order to prove they really are single.
council tax

One form, produced by Thurrock Council in Essex, reads: To be completed and returned immediately if you wish to continue to claim single person discount... I authorise the Council or its agents to make enquiries to corroborate this claim. I will permit the Council or its agents to inspect the property on request... If you do not do so, we will have to cancel your discount and send you a revised bill for the increased amount.

Shadow local government secretary Eric Pickles said there was evidence that other councils were making similar demands. He said the move raised the prospect of town hall officials entering law-abiding people's homes looking for evidence of a 'hidden partner'.

Government guidance encourages councils to undertake 'spot check' internal inspections of properties, giving practical tips how to 'maximise their time spent on inspections'.

Pickles said: Day by day under Labour, the rights and liberties of law-abiding citizens are being undermined, with more and more state officials trying to enter and spy on people's homes.

It may be appropriate for local authorities to check that council tax discounts are not wrongly claimed. But it is wholly disproportionate to threaten higher council tax bills if residents do not allow state officials into their bedrooms. This is another worrying sign of function creep.

Google is pushing tools that facilitate sharing and communication by maintaining files on its own servers.

Tools such as Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs, for creating and working together on documents, spreadsheets and presentations and Google Sites: One-stop sharing for all types of team information, provide Google with transparency into users files an data.

But the initiative is running headlong into another new phenomenon of the information technology age: the unprecedented powers of security officials in the United States to conduct surveillance on communications.

Eighteen months ago, Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, had an outdated computer system that was crashing daily and in desperate need of an overhaul. A new installation would have cost more than $1-million and taken months to implement. Google's service didn't cost the university a penny.

However the U.S. Patriot Act gives authorities the means to secretly view personal data held by U.S. organizations ie Google.

At Lakehead, the deal with Google sparked a backlash.  Professors say the Google deal broke terms of their collective agreement that guarantees members the right to private communications. The [university] did this on the cheap. By getting this free from Google, they gave away our rights, said Tom Puk, past president of Lakehead's faculty association, which filed a grievance against Lakehead administration that's still in arbitration.

Some other organizations are banning Google's innovative tools outright to avoid the prospect of U.S. spooks combing through their data. Security experts say many firms are only just starting to realize the risks they assume by embracing Web-based collaborative tools hosted by a U.S. company, a problem even more acute in Canada where federal privacy rules are at odds with U.S. security measures.

Darren Meister, associate professor of information systems at the Richard Ivey School of Business,said: If I were a business manager, I would want to be very careful about what kind of data I made accessible to U.S. law enforcement.

Using their new powers under the Patriot Act, U.S. intelligence officials can scan documents, pick out certain words and create profiles of the authors - a frightening challenge to academic freedom, Puk said. For instance, a Lakehead researcher with a Middle Eastern name, researching anthrax or nuclear energy, might find himself denied entry to the United States without ever knowing why: You would have no idea what they are up to with your information until, perhaps, it is too late. We don't want to be subject to laws of the Patriot Act.

Google's free Web tools are advertising-based and they automatically extract information from personal content to build a profile for advertisers. Lakehead professors also object to this feature, although Puk says Google has refrained from attaching ads until the grievance is settled.

Google claims it has a strong track record in regard to protecting customers' data. The firm cites a court case it fought in 2006 against attempts by the U.S. Justice Department to subpoena customer search records.

But the company will not discuss how often government agencies demand access to its customers' information or whether content on its new Web-based collaborative tools has been the subject of any reviews under the Patriot Act.

A powerful coalition of children’s charities is urging ministers to make it illegal for companies to trawl Facebook and other social networking websites for information on prospective recruits.

They say that employers and educational establishments are known to be browsing the internet looking for “digital dirt” on young people who have applied for positions.

The eight charities acted partly in response to a report in The Times that revealed one in five employers used the internet to check on candidates, and two thirds of those who did said that their decisions were influenced by what they found.

A senior tutor at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, had also said that he used Facebook to check up discreetly on applications for a college position.

The charities, including the NSPCC, the Children’s Society and NCH, said that the call for a new law is part of their wider concerns about online safety for children.

John Carr, secretary of the Children’s Charities’ Coalition on Internet Safety, who is coordinating the campaign, said that pictures or gossip up-loaded during the teenage years should not be used against a young person ten years later: When young people put up their personal profiles they are not thinking about job or university applications. Typically, they are simply talking to their mates. Employers or admissions tutors who delve into these places are being highly and inappropriately intrusive. It’s a bit like looking at someone’s diary.

A world where even a 14-year-old has to think twice before posting an adolescent poem suddenly looks very unappealing and increases the pressure on children and young people to conform to a set of tightly focused adult norms.

The children’s charities are seeking clarification on whether discrimination legislation could be used to stop companies from using social networking sites for recruitment purposes.

Margaret Moran, Labour MP for Luton South, is to lead the campaign in Parliament. She is discussing with Commons authorities the terms of a ten-minute rule Bill to tighten legislation. She has also written to James Purnell, the Work and Pensions Secretary, asking him to give his opinion on whether it is legitimate for employers to use information from social networking sites for recruitment.

Plans to fingerprint millions of passengers a year at Heathrow's new fifth terminal have been put on hold hours before it opens for business.

BAA, the airport operator, took the decision after being warned by the Government's Information Commissioner that the move could breach the Data Protection Act.

It has left BAA is facing huge embarrassment at a time when it was hoping that public attention would be fixed on the long-awaited £4.3 billion terminal when it handles its first passengers tomorrow.

The controversial scheme meant that, for the first time ever, travellers would be fingerprinted before being allowed to board a plane. It would have affected about four million domestic passengers a year who use the terminal, which will become the British Airways base at the airport.

A BAA spokesman said that it will hold further talks with both the Information Commissioner and the Border and Immigration Agency before deciding its next move.

For the time being instead of leaving a fingerprint before passing through security - which is verified at the departure gate - passengers will be photographed.

Although BAA is keen to press ahead with the plans, no date has been fixed for when it will be able to do so. The decision to fingerprint all domestic passengers at the terminal was triggered by the demands for heightened security by the Home Office. With domestic and international passengers sharing the departure lounge at the terminal, it was feared that this would make it possible to bypass border controls.

The scheme hit the buffers late last week when David Smith, the Deputy Information Commissioner, questioned its necessity. He said photographing – the option now being adopted – would be far less intrusive.

Even the Home Office, which had put pressure on BAA to tighten security, distanced itself from the move. This was despite officials previously demanding some form of biometric tests in addition to photographs – and having approved the fingerprint scheme during months of negotiations.

At the Digital Living Room conference, Gerard Kunkel, Comcast’s senior VP of user experience, told me the cable company is experimenting with different camera technologies built into devices so it can know who’s in your living room.

The idea being that if you turn on your cable box, it recognizes you and pulls up shows already in your profile or makes recommendations. If parents are watching TV with their children, for example, parental controls could appear to block certain content from appearing on the screen. Kunkel also said this type of monitoring is the “holy grail” because it could help serve up specifically tailored ads.

Kunkel said the system wouldn’t be based on facial recognition, so there wouldn’t be a picture of you on file (we hope). Instead, it would distinguish between different members of your household by recognizing body forms. He stressed that the system is still in the experimental phase, that there hasn’t been consumer testing, and that any rollout “must add value” to the viewing experience beyond serving ads.

I can’t trust Comcast with BitTorrent, so why should I trust them with my must-be-kept-secrets...

Phorm is a way to enable advertisers to meet web users' needs: no one gets hurt, right? Wrong. There's another reason this invasion of privacy is of such a concern and it is the potential effect of some worrying legislation that is currently being debated very quietly in the UK.

The proposed criminal justice and immigration bill contains a disturbing element within it: if passed and made into law, it will then be "an offence for a person to be in possession of an extreme pornographic image". It will be illegal to have in your possession certain pictures deemed "offensive" or "obscene" by the government. No, this is not 1984, surprisingly. According to this proposed bill, if you have in your possession hardcore BDSM sexual imagery you can be criminalised and potentially imprisoned for it.

So, let's say you're a man who gets off on being tied up and spanked. One day your girlfriend strips you naked, binds you and your genitalia tightly with some rope, hits you with a paddle, and perhaps you both have an orgasm or two. She also photographs you in situ. Let's then say that the next day you decide to upload those photos to a blog, so you can both look at them. Your girlfriend likes the pictures so much she decides she's going to download a couple to her computer so that she has permanent offline access to them and can enjoy them at her own leisure.

Guess what? If this law gets passed, you both would have just broken it, and risked a large fine, if not imprisonment, even though you were willing, mutually consensual participants, and your photos were for your own personal use. Both owning and downloading the pictures would be a criminal offence, and bar searching every home in the country, it'll surely be users' web history that allows others, whether it be ISPs, advertisers, or the government, to have access to what people are privately looking at and downloading from the web. While Phorm might look innocuous now, its use in the future may be more about gathering personal web viewing data, for legal purposes, rather than for targeted advertising and we should be challenging it now, for this reason.

Liberty has joined forces with the organisation Backlash in opposing the bill, not least because it breaches at least two aspects of the European convention on human rights. Given this, and the fact our private information is soon to be readily available to third parties courtesy of our ISPs, we should all be concerned about protecting the future privacy of our online use. Right now people have the chance to opt out - and by that I mean they have the choice to leave an ISP if it signs up to Phorm and join another one that will not be collecting data about its customers. But if we rest on our laurels and do not fight for online confidentiality, we may soon find that our right to privacy is eroded without our consent: once that is gone, it is unlikely we will ever win it back.

...Read full article

Update: Privacy Guardian

31st March

The boss of Phorm defended the embattled online advertising technology developer yesterday, offering to open the company up to outside scrutiny by a panel of independent web experts after the firm was blasted by privacy campaigners.

The challenge followed a 5% drop in Phorm shares as the Guardian declared it would not be signing up to the firm's advertising platform because of worries over the information the company had on internet users.

The Guardian's advertising manager, Simon Kilby, said: Our decision was in no small part down to the conversations we had internally about how this product sits with the values of our company.

The security services could be given access to footage from CCTV cameras that will allow them to spy on people across the country.

Home Office officials have had talks with the information watchdog to establish whether it is possible to make images available to track suspects.

Currently, the police and security services have to apply for permission to examine images taken from thousands of cameras across Britain.

A spokesman for the Information Commissioner's Office confirmed yesterday that the meeting had involved discussions about national security and the issue of cameras and traffic.

Civil liberties campaigners expressed concern that the move would expand Britain's "surveillance society".

Guy Herbert, the general secretary of the NO2ID campaign, said: I don't think anyone who is sensible would object to proper regulation of CCTV images by the security services or the police in a real inquiry. But the worry is that it might become a routine fishing investigation that produces two different effects: that everyone becomes a suspect and that it is not controlled.

In the current debate about the erosion of civil liberties, a stock claim aimed at dampening the ardour of their defenders is that "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear".

The answer to this is - oh indeed? - nothing to fear from legislation that reduces civil liberties by extending the power of the state to detain, inspect, question, collect personal information, intercept communications, and deploy new and more instruments of surveillance and monitoring such as CCTV cameras and ID cards?

The assumption behind the "if you have nothing to hide" claim is that the authorities will always be benign, will always reliably identify and interfere with genuinely bad people only, will never find themselves engaging in "mission creep" with more and more uses to put their new powers and capabilities to, will not redefine crimes, and even various behaviours or views now regarded as acceptable, to extend the range of things for which people can be placed under suspicion - and so considerably on.

...Read the full article

To live in society at all, we have to keep a reservoir of private thoughts, which, whether wisely or unwisely, we share only with intimates. This sharing of private thoughts is called private life.

Until recently, the concept of private life was basic to civilisation. Its value could be measured by the thoroughness with which totalitarian states and religions always did their best to stamp it out. But now we have to face the possibility that the latest stage of civilisation might also be trying to stamp it out.

You can still keep your thoughts to yourself - nobody has yet invented a machine that can get into your head and broadcast what it finds - but if you try to communicate those private thoughts to anyone else you run an increasing risk that they will be communicated to everyone.

...Read the full article

BT has admitted that it secretly used customer data to test Phorm's advertising targeting technology last summer, and that it covered it up when customers and The Register raised questions over the suspicious redirects.

The national telecoms provider now faces legal action from customers who are angry their web traffic was compromised.

Stephen Mainwaring, a BT Business customer said he suffered sleepless nights after detecting the dodgy DNS requests, and said today: It is very likely that I and others will take legal action against BT for what they did last summer.

In a statement, BT said: We conducted a very small scale technical test of a prototype advertising platform on one exchange in June 2007. The test was specifically conducted to evaluate the functional and technical performance of the platform. Absolutely no personally identifiable information was processed, stored or disclosed during this trial.

Speaking to El Reg on Friday, Stephen said: If they wanted to run a trial, they should have asked. I would have told them I did not want to be part of it.

Stephen has already filed a complaint with the Information Commissioner's Office and is consulting on how to proceed through the courts with other BT subscribers who believe their connection was subject to illegal Phorm tests.

When The Register first asked BT about its relationship with Phorm in July 2007, when it was widely known as 121Media, a firm deeply involved in spyware. BT denied any testing and said customers whose DNS requests were being redirected must have a malware problem.

It wasn't until 14 February this year, when the deals between BT, Virgin Media and Carphone Warehouse to pimp customer web browsing were announced, that a cover-up was revealed.

BT's belated confession that it secretly used its customers' traffic to test the safety of ad targeting technology can only add to the distrust around Phorm.

As part of its admission that it lied over the 2007 trials, BT also said it will follow Carphone Warehouse's lead and develop an opt-out that does not involve cookies and means no data will be mirrored to a profiling server, even if it is ignored.

The Oyster card was introduced to London's public transport users purportedly to make their lives easier.

Now, British Intelligence services want some of the benefits by trawling through the travel data amassed by the card to spy on the 17 million Britons who use it.

An article from Boiled Frog from a Nation of Suspects states: Currently the security services can demand the Oyster records of specific individuals under investigation to establish where they have been, but cannot trawl the whole database. But supporters of calls for more sharing of data argue that apparently trivial snippets — like the journeys an individual makes around the capital — could become important pieces of the jigsaw when fitted into a pattern of other publicly held information on an individual's movements, habits, education and other personal details. That could lead, they argue, to the unmasking of otherwise undetected suspects.

More than 300 ministerial and electorate staffers have been ordered to fill in a 25-page form and attend an in-depth interview into their personal finances, drug habits and sexual history before gaining high-level security clearance.

Senior staff say they have been told the security form is designed to protect them from blackmail. But several have told The Sunday Telegraph they were affronted at the personal information they had been forced to divulge. Friends are also interviewed, and information about drug use and sexual history is cross-checked.

Special Minister of State and Cabinet Secretary John Faulkner admitted some ministerial staff had found the form intrusive but said the clearance was necessary for those who handled sensitive and classified material.

I'm ensuring the Government makes the obtaining of these security clearances a high priority, given the nature of the work and the sensitivity and classification of material that is handled. The higher level of clearance is more intrusive. There were too many staff who simply didn't have security clearance under the former government. I'm keen to ensure all staff have security clearance and that ministers are aware of that responsibility.

An Australian Federal Police source confirmed the security-clearance process requested personal details. In the interview process, they ask you about your sexual orientation and whether you've ever had a homosexual experience. They ask you how many sexual partners you've had, whether you've cheated on your wife and about your sexual habits.

Laws against unauthorised wiretaps should not be used to prevent ISPs providing targetted advertising services, provided ISPs users consent and the service has the highest respect for the users’ privacy, according to a Home Office memo released to the ukcrypto mailing list.

The memo analyses the legality of Phorm and similar services in detail, and concludes with a policy statement that:

The purpose of Chapter 1 of Part 1 of RIPA is not to inhibit legitimate business practice particularly in the telecommunications sector. Where advertising services meet those high standards, it would not be in the public interest to criminalise such services or for their provision to be interpreted as criminal conduct. The section 1 offence is not something that should inhibit the development and provision of legitimate business activity to provide targeted online advertising to the users of ISP services.

The memo’s legal analysis also provides comfort for Phorm in three key areas. It suggests that there are arguments that Phorm’s service might not constitute an interception under RIPA:

Where the provision of a targeted online advertising service involves the content of a communication passing through a filter for analysis and held for a nominal period before being irretrievably deleted - there is an argument that the content of a communication has not been made available to a person.

It suggests that even if Phorm’s services does constitute an interception, it might still be lawful provided the ISP user consents to it, as the required consent from a web site operator might be inferred from the fact that they’re publishing content on the public Internet

A question may also arise as to whether a targeted online advertising provider has reasonable grounds for believing the host or publisher of a web page consents to the interception for the purposes of section 3(1)(b). It may be argued that section 3(1)(b) is satisfied in such a case because the host or publisher who makes a web page available for download from a server impliedly consents to those pages being downloaded.

It also suggests that ISPs might be able to redefine their service from being “Internet access” to “Internet access with value-added targeted advertising", and by so doing take advantage of wiretap exemptions originally intended to protect routers and web proxies.

Regardless of the legal debate, it is highly significant that the government has decided that as a matter of public policy RIPA should not stand in the way of Phorm and similar services, provided user consent is obtained through the ISP’s Terms and Conditions of Service. This implies that even if the legal arguments remain contested, ISP prosecution is unlikely and the government might contemplate legislative reform to clarify the legal situation in favour of Phorm and their ISP partners.

FIPR Consider Phorm to be Illegal

See full article from The Register
See also Open Letter to the Information Commissioner

The Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR), a leading government advisory group on internet issues, has written to the Information Commissioner arguing that Phorm's ad targeting system is illegal.

In an open letter posted to the think tank's website today, the group echoes concerns voiced by London School of Economics professor Peter Sommer that Phorm's planned partnerships with BT, Virgin Media and Carphone Warehouse are illegal under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA).

The letter, signed by FIPR's top lawyer Nicholas Bohm, states:

The explicit consent of a properly-informed user is necessary but not sufficient to make interception lawful.

The consent of those who host the web pages visited by a user is also required, since they communicate their pages to the user, as is the consent of those who send email to the user, since those who host web-based email services have no authority to consent to interception on their users' behalf.

Phorm claims that all sensitve data will not be profiled, but FIPR argues its "restricted sites" blacklist system will be ineffective because of the vast array of webmail and social networking sites web users now visit.

Bohm uses the letter to urge the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, to ignore the conclusions of the Home Office, which advised BT and the other ISPs that Phorm's technology is legal.

Earlier today web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee said he would personally not want his traffic to be profiled by Phorm, and called on BT, Virgin Media and Carphone Warehouse to make the "service" opt-in only.

He also raised concerns that what a person looked at online could be used for other purposes. He said: I want to know if I look up a whole lot of books about some form of cancer that that's not going to get to my insurance company and I'm going to find my insurance premium is going to go up by 5 per cent because they've figured I'm looking at those books.

A German art project could help the British avoid the oppressive proliferation of surveillance cameras in their country. The IRASC is simple, consisting of a circle of infra-red LEDs mounted on a headband. The infra red is invisible to The Man, but will cause CCTV cameras to flare out over the face of the wearer, obscuring his identity and making this the digital equivalent of a hooded sweatshirt.

This is not a production unit, but given that you'd only need a hat, a battery and a few LEDs, you could easily knock one up in the garage.

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Stop ISP's from breaching customers privacy via advertising technologies.

We petition the Prime Minister to investigate the Phorm technology and if found to breach UK or European privacy laws then ban all ISP's from adopting it's use. Additionally the privacy laws should be reviewed to cover any future technologies such as Phorm

The UK's three largest ISP's, Virgin Media, BT and TalkTalk are all in talks with a view to introducing the Phorm technology. This would result in the browsing habits of the majority of the UK population being sold to a third party for advertising purposes. The opt out system for this technology is vague and unproven, even when opting out your every move on the Internet might be recorded. Surely this must be a breach of privacy laws, if not then the privacy laws need to be changed to cover such invasive technology.

The essence of the Phorm scheme is straightforward. It will have equipment at ISPs that will track your activities on port 80 (used for the web).

BT, Virgin and Talk Talk have signed up to try the technology.

With each site you visit it will capture the URL (and, for a search engine, the search terms too) plus enough of the header data from the page to "categorise" it into one of a number of areas. Your IP address is not captured, but a cookie with a unique number is set on your browser when you start using it, which persists into the future.

The data about what websites you tend to visit is then categorised to generate a profile. When you then visit a page whose adverts are sourced from the Open internet Exchange (oix.net) - set up by Phorm - your browser will see adverts targeted to your profile. (Adult, gambling, political, drugs and smoking-related adverts are not allowed.) Your browsing history is not retained; instead the profile for the cookie is refined as it "sees" more of your browsing. Sites that join OIX are told they will get a better per-click payment than with other services.

News of the deal has leaked out ahead of the service's launch. BT says it will begin trialling soon with "a few thousand" customers, though the Guardian has learnt that BT and Phorm tested the service in secret last summer; at least one customer noticed and began worrying that his machine had been infected by a Trojan. BT's support centre had not been told, but later said there was "an issue" affecting "a small number of users". BT denied any involvement with Phorm at the time. The lack of candour has now aroused the ire of many who have learnt about it, who see this as a matter of trust - and are not convinced that ISPs are earning that trust.

...Read full article

Millions of British airline passengers face mandatory fingerprinting before being allowed to board domestic flights when Heathrow’s Terminal 5 opens later this month. For the first time at any airport, the biometric checks will apply to all domestic passengers leaving the terminal, which will handle all British Airways flights to and from Heathrow.

The controversial security measure is also set to be introduced at Gatwick, Manchester and Heathrow’s Terminal 1, and many airline industry insiders believe fingerprinting could become universal at all UK airports within a few years.

All four million domestic passengers who will pass through Terminal 5 annually after it opens on March 27 will have four fingerprints taken, as well as being photographed, when they check in.

To ensure the passenger boarding the aircraft is the same person, the fingerprinting process will be repeated just before they board the aircraft and the photograph will be compared with their face.

BAA, the company which owns Heathrow, insists the biometric information will be destroyed after 24 hours and will not be passed on to the police. It says the move is necessary to prevent criminals, terrorists and illegal immigrants trying to bypass border controls. The company said the move had been necessitated by the design of Terminal 5, where international and domestic passengers share the same lounges and public areas after they have checked in.

Without the biometric checks, the company says, potential criminals and illegal immigrants arriving on international flights or in transit to another country could bypass border controls by swapping boarding passes with a domestic passenger who has already checked in.

They could then board the domestic flight, where proof of identity is not currently required, fly on to another UK airport and leave without having to go through passport control.

Most other airports avoid the problem by keeping international and domestic passengers separate at all times, but the mixed lounges exist at Gatwick, Manchester and Heathrow’s Terminal 1.

Civil liberties campaigners have raised concerns about the possibility of security agencies trying to access the treasure trove of personal data in the future.

There are also fears that fingerprinting will add to the infamous "Heathrow hassle" which has led to some business travellers holding meetings in other countries because they want to avoid the sprawling, scruffy airport at any cost.

Dr Gus Hosein, of the London School of Economics, an expert on the impact on technology on civil liberties, is one of the scheme’s strongest critics. He said: There is no other country in the world that requires passengers travelling on internal flights to be fingerprinted. BAA says the fingerprint data will be destroyed, but the records of who has travelled within the country will not be, and it will provide a rich source of data for the police and intelligence agencies.

Simon Davies, of campaign group Privacy International, suggested the photograph alone would be a perfectly adequate - and much cheaper - way of identifying passengers.

Two things are striking as you read through the oral evidence presented to the Joint Committee on Human Rights. The first is the measured calm of the majority of your witnesses and, indeed, of the majority of the committee, in the face of the most serious attack on personal freedom and privacy ever mounted during peacetime in this country. British democracy is on the brink of being changed beyond recognition, yet nothing seems to disturb the equanimity of your proceedings. Even allowing for the well-mannered traditions of parliamentary committees, the lack of urgency and of a sense of crisis seems remarkable.

The second point that occurs to an outsider unfamiliar with parliamentary routines is that this campaign against Britain's historic rights and freedoms began at almost the precise moment the European Human Rights Convention was incorporated into British law as the Human Rights Act (HRA) in 1998. In other words, the HRA, a Bill of Rights by any other name, has allowed the executive and Civil Service to roll back individual liberty and privacy and has done almost nothing to defend the British public from the accumulation of centralised power.

Let me make it clear that the HRA has brought many benefits, for instance in the questioning of rape victims, treatment of old people and ensuring that foreign prisoners who may be tortured in their countries are not deported. But despite its many advantages, the reality is that the HRA does not work effectively as a Bill of Rights and cannot guarantee the civil liberties necessary for a free society, a point perhaps tacitly admitted by the appearance of Gordon Brown's green paper last summer.

The shocking loss of rights in Britain is now being noticed with bafflement abroad by people who do not understand this turn of events in one of the oldest democracies in the world. On a book tour last month in France, I was repeatedly asked by journalists: 'Why in Britain? Why are there no demonstrations?'

...Read full article

Germany's highest court has ruled that spying on personal computers violates privacy, but governments across Europe are under pressure to help their security services fight terrorism and organised crime.

Here, BBC reporters give a snapshot of the extent of surveillance across Europe.

• The threat of terrorism has forced the German government to take stricter measures:
  Paul Kirby on Germany
• Privacy campaigners say the UK has some of the world's leading surveillance systems:
  Dominic Casciani on the UK
• On the whole, the French are not big fans of surveillance equipment:
  Emma Jane Kirby on France
• Italians are among the most spied upon people in the world, says the Max Planck Institute: David Willey on Italy
• Greece has such strong constitutional protection against state sponsored spying: Malcolm Brabant on Greece
• CCTV monitoring, while extensive in other parts of Europe, is not widespread: Julian Isherwood on Denmark

Read full article

Disproportionate policing was the name of the game in Westminster on Saturday, where hundreds if not thousands of police were on duty over the area in an obvious attempt to avoid a repeat of the January Freedom to Protest debacle.

Despite the gravity of the issue, only a small group of demonstrators turned up, and at the start of the event they were outnumbered by the media - and were only a minute fraction of the police presence. A few arrived later, and some went home quickly, but at the peak numbers were still under 50.

A senior officer came over at the start and issued a warning that serious action would be taken if any demonstration in the SOCPA designated area were attempted, handing out copies of the usual notice. A demonstrator took notes and the Forward Intelligence Team (FIT) photographer photographed and filmed everything that moved.

A small group of demonstrators decided to set off for Parliament Square, walking quietly along the pavement. One young man who managed to evade the police (but not several press photographers) was stopped and searched by police opposite Downing St, who forced him to remove his balaclava. The most suspicious things found on him were a National Express ticket and a strong Newcastle accent.

Later in the day a small group of the Freedom to Protest demonstrators walked down Whitehall and through Parliament Square, and a short protest was held. Followed by a police van and the FIT photographer and minder they then made their way to a pub on the Horseferry Road, causing a little consternation among police around the Home Office as they passed close by. But the demonstrators went into the pub and police and press went home.

Germany's highest court has restricted the right of the security services to spy on the computers of suspected criminals and terrorists.

Under the technique, software sent in an email enables the authorities to spy on a suspect's computer hard drive.

The case - which began last year - was brought after the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia allowed officials to begin using the technique.

The Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe said cyber spying violated individuals' right to privacy and could be used only in exceptional cases. Court President Hans-Juergen Papier said that using such software contravened rights enshrined in Germany's constitution, adding that the decision would serve as a precedent across the country. The ruling emphasised that cyber spying by the authorities would have to receive the permission of a judge.

The German government has described cyber spying as a vital tool in fighting terrorism. Interior Minister Wolfgang Schauble welcomed the possibility of using the strategy and said it would be considered as part of plans to change the law: The court's decision must be carefully analysed and will be accounted for as the legislation is modified.

Judicial approval is already required in Germany for a suspect's telephone to be tapped, and the interior ministry had been expecting the court to make a similar requirement for spying on computers.

During the case, Germany's independent privacy commissioner Peter Schaar argued that the measure would be a further alarming step towards ever more sweeping surveillance

Passengers travelling between EU countries or taking domestic flights would have to hand over a mass of personal information, including their mobile phone numbers and credit card details, as part of a new package of security measures being demanded by the British government. The data would be stored for 13 years and used to "profile" suspects.

Brussels officials are already considering controversial anti-terror plans that would collect up to 19 pieces of information on every air passenger entering or leaving the EU. Under a controversial agreement reached last summer with the US department of homeland security, the EU already supplies the same information [19 pieces] to Washington for all passengers flying between Europe and the US.

But Britain wants the system extended to sea and rail travel, to be applied to domestic flights and those between EU countries.

According to a questionnaire circulated to all EU capitals by the European commission, the UK is the only country of 27 EU member states that wants the system used for "more general public policy purposes" besides fighting terrorism and organised crime.

The so-called passenger name record system, proposed by the commission and supported by most EU governments, has been denounced by civil libertarians and data protection officials as draconian and probably ineffective.

The scheme would work through national agencies collecting and processing the passenger data and then sharing it with other EU states. Britain also wants to be able to exchange the information with third parties outside the EU.

Officials in Brussels and in European capitals admit the proposed system represents a massive intrusion into European civil liberties, but insist it is a necessary part of a battery of new electronic surveillance measures being mooted in the interests of European security.

The Liberal Democrat MEP Sarah Ludford said: Where is this going to stop? There's no mature discussion of risk. As soon as you question something like this, you're soft on terrorism in the UK and in the EU.

Britain is pushing for a more comprehensive system based on the experience of a UK pilot scheme that has been running for the past three years. Officials say Operation Semaphore, monitoring flights from Pakistan and the Middle East, has been highly successful and has resulted in hundreds of arrests.

The scheme has seen one in every 2,200 passengers warranting further investigation, with a tenth of those "being of interest". British officials say rapists, drug smugglers and child traffickers have been arrested and want the EU scheme to cover all fugitives from crown court justice.

Following the convictions of Steve Wright for the murder of five women in Ipswich and of Mark Dixie for the murder of Sally Anne Bowman it was inevitable that one or two MPs would seek to defy the obscurity of their careers with public calls for a full compulsory DNA collection from every living soul in Britain.

Martin Salter for Labour said a mandatory database was a logical extension of biometric passports, and a Tory foot soldier, Philip Davies, declared that he was not averse to a national database if it would help police clear up crime. With that kind of mental process it is astonishing that this pair can dress themselves in the morning let alone find their way to Parliament.

The point which must be evident to anyone who looks at the Wright and Dixie convictions for more than a few minutes is that both men had form. In Wright's case, DNA had been collected and retained by police because of a conviction for theft. In the case of Dixie, DNA was removed after his part in a pub brawl and quickly matched with the sample he left on the body of his victim. If his previous sexual offences had been committed during the operation of the database he would have been found more quickly.

But does this support the argument for a mandatory database? Clearly not, because the damage done to the liberty and privacy of 60 million people would be out of proportion to any gain, to say nothing of the administrative nightmare of collecting everyone's DNA and the flaws already in the system, which are obscured by the police and the Home Office.

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For years now, ISPs have been searching for alternative revenue streams to avoid just being "dumb pipes."

A few years ago, they picked up on the fact that they have a tremendous amount of data about what you do online. A bunch of ISPs then started selling your clickstream data to companies that could do something useful with it (though, those ISPs probably neglected to tell you they were doing this).

Late last year, we heard about a company that was trying to work with ISPs to make use of that data themselves to insert their own ads based on your surfing history -- and now we've got the first report of some big ISPs moving into this realm.

Over in the UK three big ISPs, BT, Carphone Warehouse and Virgin Media have announced plans to use your clickstream data to insert relevant ads as you surf through a new startup called Phorm.

While Phorm claims that it keeps your data private by tracking individual users with an assigned number only, that's hardly assuring. After all, remember that both AOL and Netflix have released similar anonymized data where identifying info was replaced with an assigned number... and it didn't take long for both sets of data to be de-anonymized.

While it's no surprise that ISPs would want to get into the advertising business it's going to freak some people out (and potentially cause some serious privacy problems).

All the more reason to figure out how encrypt your traffic and hide your activities from your ISP.

Entry Denied! It says here that you were caught taking a drag on a spliff behind the bike sheds

All 14-year-old children in England will have their personal details and exam results placed on an electronic database for life.

Colleges and prospective employers will be able to access students’ records online to check on their qualifications. Under the terms of the scheme all children will keep their individual number throughout their adult lives. The database will include details of exclusions and expulsions.

The introduction of the unique learner number (ULN)  will be seen as the latest step in the Government’s efforts to computerise personal records.

Last night teachers’ leaders, parents’ organisations, opposition MPs and human rights campaigners questioned whether this Big Brother approach was necessary and said that it could compromise the personal security of millions of teenagers.

The new database — which will store a “tamper-proof CV” — will be known as MIAP (managing Information Across Partners). To be registered on the new database every 14-year-old will be issued with a unique learner number. Unlike the current unique pupil number now given to children in school but destroyed when they leave, the ULN will be used by government agencies to track individuals until they retire. Ultimately, it will create a numbered database for every citizen aged 14-plus in the UK.

The MIAP is part of a push for more government departments to share information on ordinary citizens with each other.

Margaret Morrisey, of the National Association of Parent Teacher Associations, said that plans for MIAP, which will be compulsory for all 14-year-olds throughout the UK, would fill parents with horror: I suspect there will not be more than two parents in the land who would have faith in the Government that this information will be secure.