Liberty News

Schools have installed CCTV cameras and microphones in classrooms to watch and listen to pupils.

The Big Brother-style surveillance is being marketed as a way to identify pupils disrupting lessons when teachers' backs are turned.

Classwatch, the firm behind the system, says its devices can be set up to record everything that goes on in a classroom 24 hours a day and used to compile evidence of wrongdoing. The equipment is sold with Crown Prosecution Service-approved evidence bags to store material to be used in court cases.

Data protection watchdog the Information Commissioner has warned the surveillance may be illegal and demanded to know why primary and secondary schools are using this kind of sophisticated equipment to watch children. Officials said they would be contacting schools to seek proper justification for the equipment's use. A spokesman said the system raised privacy concerns for teachers, students and their parents. The use of microphones to record conversations is deeply intrusive and we will be seeking further clarification on their use in schools and, if necessary, we will issue further guidance to headteachers.

Classwatch is set to face further scrutiny over the role of Shadow Children's Minister Tim Loughton, the firm's £30,000-a-year chairman.

The systems cost around £3,000 to install in each classroom or can be leased for about £50 per classroom per month. The firm says the devices act as impartial witnesses which can provide evidence in disputes and curb bullying and unruly behaviour and protect teachers against false allegations of abuse – plus provide evidence acceptable in court.

Schools are required to inform all parents that microphones and cameras are monitoring their children.

Jack & Jacqui Jack: A word of warning re your cerebrally challenged snooping policies, PM says he's keeping an eye on you

The UK is not a surveillance society as some have said, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith claimed. Smith conceded, though, that surveillance powers needed to be reviewed to cut back on excessive use.

The Information Commissioner and others have claimed that the unusually intensive use of closed circuit television cameras in the UK and the creation of children's, DNA and health databases have turned the UK into a surveillance society.

Smith said that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), which defines to what degree citizens can be spied on by state agencies, had been abused. Much criticism has been attached to local authorities' use of powers under RIPA to spy on individuals suspected of trivial offences.

There are clearly cases where these powers should not be used, Smith conceded: I don't want to see them being used to target people for putting their bins out on the wrong day, for dog fouling offences, or to check whether paper boys are carrying sacks that are too heavy.

Smith announced a review of the use of the powers and said that better safeguards should be put in place by requiring the approval of more senior staff before powers are used, as well as some accountability to elected officials.

One question I will be asking of local authorities is whether the powers are authorised at a high enough level. Would it reinforce public confidence, and avoid frivolous use of the powers, if they could only be done with the consent of a senior executive, and subject to a form of oversight from elected councillors? she said.

The Home Office will conduct a review next year, proposing changes to RIPA related to which authorities can use it, increasing the level of authority needed to use RIPA powers and revising codes of practice in relation to the Act.

The German parliament's upper house has approved a Big Brother bill that gives police powers extensive new powers, clearing the way for it to become law.

The upper house, the Bundesrat, approved the bill by a vote of 35-34.

The new law reforms the federal police and give authorities powers to break into personal computers during preventive inquiries into terrorism and other serious crime.

The revised bill requires a judge to authorize police access to a suspect's personal computer and to oversee the search of data by law enforcement officers.

It also clarifies the jurisdiction for such searches between the federal government and state authorities.

Police have been studying whether they could either enter premises to plant monitoring devices in computers or send viruses to the computers via the internet so that investigators could covertly read the hard disks.

Legislators, clergymen and defense lawyers are fully protected from such searches, but journalists, other lawyers and doctors are not.

Michael Konken, chairman of the German Journalists Association has called the bill a farce: We are worried in the editorial department, because people no longer know what they should do with their information.

Yahoo threw down the gauntlet to rivals Google and Microsoft by cutting the length of time that it retains information about what its users are doing online.

It will now keep information about online searches for only 90 days - down from 13 months - before 'anonymising' the data by getting rid of any information about the computer address of the user.

Crucially Yahoo has also widened the scope of the data that is covered by its new privacy policy to include information about which websites its users visit and the adverts they see and click on.

Search engines have come under increasing pressure from privacy campaigners and regulators, including the European commission, to do more to protect the anonymity of their users.

Yahoo will make the switch next year, but it is unlikely to be in place across all its global operations until 2010.

Regular web users can now access anonymously-published websites that are masked by Tor's hidden services thanks to a new tool called tor2web.com .

The tool, created by former Reddit developer Aaron Swartz and WikiScanner creator Virgil Griffith, enables people to view these hidden websites (designated by the .onion domain suffix) without diving into Tor, which can be a pain for casual surfers.

The creators hope that the existence of tor2web will encourage more organizations to publish content anonymously through Tor, now that such a heavy access restriction has been lifted.

The Tor project is most famous as a tool that allows Internet surfers to access websites privately and anonymously from within the onion router. Put simply, it works by passing your requests to another node that acts as a middleman between you and a website, which in turn passes the request onto other nodes, and so on. Every step is encrypted except for the final exit node to the content server connection, and the network is run almost entirely by volunteers.

Tor's hidden services allow web publishers to publish content anonymously so that law enforcement (and general snoopers) can't detect where the information is coming from. The only problem with publishing websites under Tor is that they can only be accessed from within Tor, meaning that the available audience at any given time is infinitesimally small compared to the overall Internet-using population. This is the problem that Swartz and Griffith hope to address with tor2web.

Britons could find themselves forced to prove they are innocent of crimes abroad after the Government agreed to EU-wide access to its 'Big Brother' databases.

All 26 other member countries will be able to check against sensitive personal information held on driver registration, DNA and fingerprint computer systems.

Where there is a match, a suspect-could be extradited to face trial abroad or - at the least - be forced to explain their movements or provide an alibi.

Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve warned last night: There is a real risk that a disproportionate number of innocent British citizens will be sucked into foreign criminal investigations.

Grieve said people could even be arrested in Britain for something which is not a criminal offence, or be whisked away to face punishment abroad after being tried in their absence: My fear is that ministers have magnified the risk of British citizens becoming the victim of miscarriages of justice that take place abroad but have effectively been sanctioned by their own government at home.

The agreement stems from the Prum Convention, signed in Prum, Germany, in 2005 between Belgium, Germany, Spain, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Austria. The then junior Home Office minister Joan Ryan signed the UK up to its terms in 2007. Officials are now preparing to formally approve the agreement, following technical talks.

Phil Booth, of the NO2ID privacy campaign, said the Government was allowing its own assault on the principle of innocent until proven guilty to be extended to other EU nations.

Jack Straw's proposal to rebalance the Human Rights Act is an insult to even the Daily Mail's intelligence

Preying on the intellectual dysfunction on the right, Jack Straw went to the Daily Mail to announce his new policy of rebalancing the Human Rights Act on its tenth anniversary. He proposes to end the aspect he calls the villain's charter , adding responsibilities to obey the law and to be loyal to the country.

The poor fools at the Daily Mail swallowed Jack's bait and put the story on the front page, in the process completely forgetting about their long running campaign against police state Britain, which they made so much of last week.

...Read full article

Simon Davies, of Privacy International, has re-instituted the UK Big Brother Awards, to recognise some of the people who have been trying to keep the monsters of state and corporate mass surveillance , snooping and control at bay.

At a ceremony held at the London School of Economics, the evil Big Brother Award, with the boot forever stamping on the human face, was awarded simply to New Labour.

The 2008 UK Big Brother Awards Roll of Honour

• Baroness Sarah Ludford MEP - one of the Liberal Democrat Members of the European Parliament whose Human Rights Committee has been trying to stem the onslaught of necessarily repressive legislation in the past few years.
   
• Phil Booth, the National Coordinator of the cross political party
  NO2ID Campaign -against the Database State. Phil was recently described as the hardest man in NGO-world.
   
• Helen Wallace from GeneWatch UK, who did so much to help educate politicians and lawyers and the media about the counterproductive evil policy of keeping innocent people's DNA tissue samples and DNA profiles, seemingly for ever, This has been overturned in the very recent European Court of Human Rights judgement in the Marper case.
   
• Gareth Crossman - retiring Director of Policy at Liberty Human Rights
   
• Becky Hogge - retiring Executive Director of the Open Rights Group
   
• Rt. Hon. David Davis MP, the fomer Conservative Shadow Home Affairs spokesman, who was re-elected as the Member of Parliament for Haltemprice and Howden, on the principles of freedom and liberty.

One of the eminent outsiders brought into Gordon Brown's government of all the talents has revealed that he quit in disgust at what he describes as Labour's dismal lack of political leadership on human rights.

Lord Lester, a Liberal Democrat and distinguished human rights lawyer, quit as the prime minister's adviser on constitutional reform a month ago. In a scathing attack yesterday, he revealed for the first time how he felt tethered by the government, describing its record on human rights as dismal and deeply disappointing.

He was speaking on the 60th anniversary of the UN's declaration of human rights, and singled out the justice secretary, Jack Straw, for failing to produce a radical constitutional renewal bill or to defend the Human Rights Act.

Straw angered human rights campaigners by giving an interview in the Daily Mail this week in which he said many people felt the act, passed by the government in 1990 while he was home secretary, was perceived as a villains' charter.

Lester angrily described the interview as a sly attempt to undermine public support for the act. Under the headline Straw gets tough, the Mail described his pledge to reform villains' charter .

Lester went on to criticise the government's failures to fight for human rights across a range of issues.

He said the government's failures to pursue constitutional reform were why I decided, with regret, to cease to be a government-tethered 'goat' - that is, one of those flatteringly and misleadingly described as part of a government of all the talents. Lester is understood to be dismayed that Straw has allowed the constitutional reform bill not to find a firm slot in the Queen's speech, and fears the justice secretary is using his plans for a bill of rights and responsibilities to weaken rather than strengthen British commitment to human rights.

Jack Straw's attack on the Human Rights Act is sly populism of the worst kind, and in keeping with his party's statist tradition

Jack Straw's headline-grabbing declaration that Britain's Human Rights Act has become a villain's charter, and must be rebalance d, should be seen for what it is: a rejection of the simple notion that all of us, no matter how rich or poor, how powerful or weak, possess certain inalienable rights.

Of course, these rights do not entitle anyone to break the law. In a mealy-mouthed sop to the opponents of the Human Rights Act, Straw has declared that our human rights should be qualified by new responsibilities to obey the law and be loyal to the country. But no one has ever claimed that human rights should absolve anyone of their responsibilities .

The justice secretary is picking a meaningless fight to generate a favourable headline, while conning opponents of the Human Rights Act into believing that he's saying something of greater significance. In short, it's sly populism of the worst kind.

...Read full article

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that it is illegal for the government to retain DNA profiles and fingerprints belonging to two men never convicted of any crime.

The landmark decision could mean the more than 570,000 DNA profiles in the National DNA Database belonging to innocent individuals will have to be deleted. Police in England, Wales and Northern Ireland currently have powers to take DNA and fingerprints from everyone they arrest.

The case was heard by the 17 judges of the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. They unanimously found that UK DNA and fingerprint retention policies infringe individuals' rights to privacy.

Home secretary Jacqui Smith said: The existing law will remain in place while we carefully consider the judgement. In in April the Home Office committed itself to a consultation on DNA and fingerprint retention powers following today's ruling, regardless of the outcome.

The challenge was brought by two men from Sheffield. DNA was taken from Michael Marper, when he was charged with harassing his estranged partner in 2001. The charges were dropped when the couple reconciled. The second man, a teenager identified as "S", was charged with attempted robbery, also in 2001, but was acquitted.

The pair took their case to Europe after the House of Lords, the highest court in the UK, rejected their arguments in 2004. In November this year, the Lords voted that National DNA Database rules should be change to make it easier for innocent people to demand their profile is deleted.

In its ruling, the Grand Chamber said retention of innocent people's DNA profile was a violation of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Article 8 states: Everyone has the right for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence. It said it was not necessary to consider Marper and "S'" complaint under Article 14, which prohibits discrimination.

The 17 judges wrote: The Court was struck by the blanket and indiscriminate nature of the power of retention in England and Wales. In particular, the data in question could be retained irrespective of the nature or gravity of the offence with which the individual was originally suspected or of the age of the suspected offender; the retention was not time-limited; and there existed only limited possibilities for an acquitted individual to have the data removed from the nationwide database or to have the materials destroyed.

They were particularly concerned about the risk of stigmatisation caused by treating innocent people the same as convicted criminals.

Personal information detailing intimate aspects of the lives of every British citizen is to be handed over to government agencies under sweeping new powers. The measure, which will give ministers the right to allow all public bodies to exchange sensitive data with each other, is expected to be rushed through Parliament.

The new legislation would deny MPs a full vote on such data-sharing. Instead, ministers could authorise the swapping of information between councils, the police, NHS trusts, the Inland Revenue, education authorities, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority, the Department for Work and Pensions and other ministries.

Opponents of the move accused the Government of bringing in by stealth a data-sharing programme that exposed everyone to the dangers of a Big Brother state and one of the most intrusive personal databases in the world. The new law would remove the right to protection against misuse of information by thousands of unaccountable civil servants, they added.

David Howarth, the Liberal Democrat justice spokesman, added: The Government shouldn't try to sneak through further building blocks of its surveillance state. Unrestricted data-sharing simply increases the risks of data loss. This is particularly troubling since the Government has already shown itself entirely incapable of keeping our personal data safe.

The data-sharing measure is referred to in the Coroners and Justice Bill outlined in the recent Queen's Speech. It could, for instance, pave the way for medical records to be sent to the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency to identify drivers who pose a health risk, or school attendance data being handed to the Department for Work and Pensions to verify social security claims made by parents.

NO2ID, a group which campaigned against government plans for ID cards and the associated National Identity Register, said the proposals went far beyond data protection and were intended to build the database state, concealed under a misleading name. The group's national co-ordinator, Phil Booth, said: This is a Bill to smash the rule of law and build the database state in its place. Burying sweeping constitutional change in obscure Bills is an appalling approach. Having proved – and admitted – they cannot be trusted to look after our secrets, they are still determined to steal what privacy we have left. Parliament needs to wake up before it has no say any more.

A suicide case involving MySpace concluded last week, with the jury finding Lori Drew guilty of three misdemeanor counts of gaining unauthorized access to the popular social-networking site.

While most of the press attention has been focused on the specifics of the case, the more important issue is the potential impact this could have on the Internet in general.

Web site terms of service, which end users universally ignore, suddenly have teeth: violating them is now considered a federal hacking offense, punishable with jail time. The days of being able to freely lie on the Web could be coming to an end. This could mean serious trouble for people who lie about their age, weight, or marital status in their online dating profiles.

The specifics of the Lori Drew case are messy and emotional. The important fact is that there is no federal cyberbullying statute, so the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles turned to a novel interpretation of existing computer hacking laws to try to punish the woman. The general idea is that in creating terms of service, a Web site owner specifies the rules of admission to the site. If someone violates any of those contractual terms, the "access" to the Web site is done without authorization, and is thus hacking.

Unfortunately for Internet users everywhere, a jury bought the theory last week and found Lori Drew guilty of three misdemeanor violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, punishable with up to one year in a federal prison and a $100,000 fine for each of the three counts.

Until the Drew case is overturned, terms of service would appear to have the power of federal hacking laws to back them up, at least in cases where an ambitious federal prosecutor is interested in making a name for himself.

UK officials are to be given powers previously reserved for times of war to demand a person's proof of identity at any time. Anybody who refuses the Big Brother demand could face arrest and a possible prison sentence.

The new rules are presented as a crackdown on illegal immigration, but lawyers say they could be applied to anybody who has ever been outside the UK, even on holiday.

The civil rights group Liberty, which analysed clauses from the new Immigration and Citizenship Bill, called them an attempt to introduce compulsory ID cards by the back door.

Liberty said: Powers to examine identity documents, previously thought to apply only at ports of entry, will be extended to criminalise anyone in Britain who has ever left the country and fails to produce identity papers upon demand.

We believe that the catch-all remit of this power is disproportionate and that its enactment would not only damage community relations but represent a fundamental shift in the relationship between the State and those present in the UK.

One broadly-drafted clause would permit checks on anyone who has ever entered the
UK - whether recently or years earlier. Officials, who could be police or immigration officers, will be able to stop anyone to establish if they need permission to be here, if they have it, and whether it should be cancelled.

No reasonable cause or suspicion is required, and checks can be carried out in country - not just at borders. The law would apply to British citizens and foreign nationals, according to Liberty's lawyers. The only people who would be exempt are the tiny minority who have never been abroad on holiday or business.

A second clause says that people who are stopped must produce a valid identity document if required to do so by the Secretary of State. Failure to do so would be a criminal offence with a maximum penalty of 51 weeks in jail or a £5,000 fine.

Currently, police are allowed to ask for identity documents only if there is a reasonable suspicion that a person has committed an offence.

Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti said: Sneaking in compulsory identity cards via the back door of immigration law is a cynical escalation of this expensive and intrusive scheme.

LibDem spokesman Chris Huhne said: Ministers seem to be breaking their promise that no one would ever have to carry an ID card. This is a sly and underhand way of extending the ID card scheme by stealth.

Frightening new police powers have emerged following the shocking treatment of Stoke City fans prior to their team's away fixture with Manchester United on Saturday, November 15, 2008.

An estimated 80 Stoke supporters visited the Railway Inn pub in Irlam, Greater Manchester, on their way to Old Trafford. The pub was a natural stop-off point, being on en route to the stadium via the M6 and a local railway station. By all accounts that the Football Supporters' Federation have heard it was a relatively quiet atmosphere, with little singing, never mind trouble.

However, at 1.15pm a number of officers from Greater Manchester Police (GMP) entered the premises and told fans they would not be allowed to leave the pub, would be forcibly taken back to Stoke, and not be allowed to visit Old Trafford.

Each supporter was then issued with a Section 27 from the Violent Crime Reduction Act of 2006. This allows police to move someone from a specified area for a period of up to 48 hours. You do not actually have to have committed any offence for the act to be enforced. Section 27 gives police the powers to move anybody, from any place, at anytime, if they think there's a possibility an alcohol related offence may be committed.

Stoke City fan Lyndon Edwards, who is making a formal complaint to GMP and the Independent Police Complaints Commission, was one of those in the pub: I asked for it to be stated on the Section 27 form given that I was not intoxicated and that there was no evidence of any disorder on my part. This was refused so I refused to sign the form. I was told to sign it or I would be arrested. We were then loaded onto buses and had to sit there for what seemed like an eternity.

There were no football chants being sung at the Railway Inn and no evidence of disorder whatsoever. If there had of been we would have left the pub and made our way elsewhere.

The Stoke supporters were then driven back in convoy to Stoke city centre, regardless of whether this was actually where they were from.

I have spoken to a number of Stoke fans who were there and I am quite satisfied that they did absolutely nothing wrong, but they end being hauled back to Stoke against their will and missing the game, said Malcolm Clarke, chair of the FSF and a Stoke City fan: They were treated very badly by the Greater Manchester Police. This new law gives the police a great deal of instant power which can severely affect the basic civil rights of football supporters, if they happen to be in the wrong pub or on the wrong train at the wrong time.

German police will get sweeping new powers to hack into people's home computers with 'Trojan' viruses sent through the internet.

Under a compromise between the hardline Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble and dissenting MPs, Germany's Parliament is put unprecedented power in the hands of the Federal Criminal Police (BKA). Under the compromise, the police will need a judge's approval before using the Trojans, even in an emergency.

Trojans will carry Remote Forensic Software that can search hard drives and send evidence back to investigators without their having to enter the suspect's home.

Rolf Tophoven from the Institute for Terrorism Research and Security Policy said: We need this. The masterminds among the terrorist groups of today are highly qualified, very sophisticated people. The police need as much power as we can give them so that they can remain at the technological level of the terrorists. After all, the terrorists already have a huge advantage: they have the first shot."

Based on article from theregister.co.uk

In practical terms there are many potential drawbacks to this Trojan approach.

For starters, infecting the PC of a target of an investigation is hit and miss. Malware is not a precision weapon, and that raises the possibility that samples of the malware might fall into the hands of cybercrooks.

Even if a target does get infected there's a good chance any security software they've installed will detect the malware. Any security vendor who agreed to turn a blind eye to state-sanctioned Trojans would risk compromising their reputation, as amply illustrated by the Magic Lantern controversy in the US a few years back.

CCTV cameras which can predict if a crime is about to take place are being introduced on Britain's streets.

The cameras can alert operators to suspicious behaviour, such as loitering and unusually slow walking. Anyone spotted could then have to explain their behaviour to a police officer.

It will also fuel fears that Britain is becoming a surveillance society. There are already 4.2million cameras trained on the public. The technology could be used alongside many of these to allow evermore advanced scrutiny of our movements.

Civil rights campaign group Liberty is sceptical. A spokesman said: Bringing expensive Hollywood sci-fi to our car parks will never be as effective as having police on the street leading the fight against crime.'

The cameras, trained on public places, such as car parks, are being tested by Portsmouth City Council. Computers are programmed to analyse the movements of people or vehicles in the camera frame. If someone is seen lurking in a particular area, the computer will send out an alarm to a CCTV operator.

The operator will then check the image and – if concerned – ring the police. The aim is to stop crimes before they are committed. If a vehicle is moving too fast or slow – indicating joyriding or kerb-crawling, for example – a similar alert could be given.

Tory Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve said: We will look at this carefully… but there is no argument for CCTV that invades your privacy without being effective in the fight against crime.