ID-Watch

The arrest of Damian Green MP

deepspacemillar — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 15:27:48 +0000

From what I understand, Damian Green was arrested earlier this week by a team of 9 anti-terrorist officers in connection with government leaks. The reason he was arrested is may be because he (or a junior minister also arrested this week) actively tried to persuade civil servants to leak documents or actually accessed the documents themselves with the intent of leaking them.
Why this required 9 specialist anti-terror police to arrest him, I do not know. Why apparently Jacqui Smith, Gordon Brown, or anyone else for that matter didn’t know about it, I also do not know.

This article sums things up rather nicely.

Personally, I think it would be very much within the public interest to know these things without it having to be ‘leaked’. Perhaps government communications (that don’t affect security) should be publicly available for all to scrutinise, in the same way the government wants to be able to read all our communications with the IMP database.

A quick update…

deepspacemillar — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 14:44:43 +0000

Hey everybody. Sorry for the lack of updates recently. Over the last month I’ve had a small avalanche of work to get through, which means I havn’t had the time to update the blog. It seems to be easing up a bit though, so hopefully I’ll be able to update on a more regular basis again…

However, I wouldn’t mind getting someone else or even several people to write some posts for the blog if they are interested. If you would be interested in doing so, fire me an email, and we can discuss it

Police vet live music, DJs for ‘terror risk’

deepspacemillar — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 23:32:40 +0000

El Reg, again, reports that a dozen boroughs in London have implemented a new ‘risk assessment’ policy that attempts to vet performers at any live music event. The policy means the Police can ban any event if they do not receive the personal details of the performers involved. Apparently, the policy has “…already been used to pull the plug on an afternoon charity concert of school bands in a public park organised by a local councillor”. Fair enough, school bands are usually pretty dire, but perhaps this is a little over the top.
The police want information on these events 14 days in advance, so they can evaluate the potential ‘terror threat’. The policy seems to be targeted at music favoured by the black community.
“Have a look at the papers and tell me where the black-on-black shootings happen? They’re around the night time economy, music promotions attract people who have a propensity to use violence. That’s not speculation. We have a duty to prevent that from happening.”
Well fair enough, there’s a point there, but why vet the performers? Surely the crowd are the people who are the potential trouble. I’m a gigging musician myself and I can tell you that if my band(s) incited violence, we would be screwing ourselves over. No venue wants to invite a band that is going to incite a riot or stir up violence, it’ll only cause them trouble. If a band does that sort of thing, they are quite frankly, irresponsible and stupid, and are throwing their future gig chances away. I am involved in and attend gigs of the ‘metal/death metal’ variety and despite the injuries from mosh pits, circle pits and ‘walls of death’ or what have you - there isn’t a focus on violence or incitement, despite these gigs being probably the most ‘violent’ one will come across.
How the police have decided live music is now a potential terror threat is beyond me. All this will do is discourage live music, by making venues less likely to host gigs, and making it harder for bands to be seen and heard. Another example of short-sighted idiocy.

DNA database effectiveness lessens, despite doubling in size

deepspacemillar — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 23:04:03 +0000

El Reg has noted that despite the constant growth of the criminal DNA database, help in convictions has actually dropped slightly.
In 2000/2001, the database contained ~1.2 million people’s data, and had an effectiveness of about 0.29% in solving crimes.
Since then, the database has ballooned to hold 4.7 million, and its effectiveness has risen slightly to 0.36%, down from 0.37% last year, despite the addition of around half a million new records.
It just goes to show that despite having a massive database of biometric information, the effectiveness of the database to assist in solving crimes isn’t all that impressive, and also probably contains the records of a truckload of innocent people who just happen to have been arrested for whatever reason. I would love to see more relevant and detailed statistics on the database, relating to the amount of crimes that rest primarily on biometric evidence etc.
It’s sad that despite the great cost and concerted effort, many innocent people will be caught up in it.

ID card costs rise - now doubly more expensive

deepspacemillar — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 22:41:40 +0000

Well, who didn’t see this one coming?
The Guardian has noted that the cost of the ID card system has risen roughly £50m, with complications causing the bill to rise, even as measures are being taken to try and control the costs. Some of the cost-cutting measures also seem to have potential security implications - one of those being the reduced checking of cards against the NIR. Some have called this a security lapse, as it provides a way for visually forged cards to be adequate, therefore making the system more insecure, therefore eroding the very point of them in the first place.
And the good news continues - now not only will it cost more of your tax money, it will also cost more at point of sale:
The Telegraph reports that both passport fees and ID card fees are now to rise, with passports being £72 + an extra £28 for the ID card associated with it, and £58 for a stand-alone ID card. Costs are expected to rise further, even as the £200 million business ‘market’ for ID cards will mean many different companies will be providing registration services.

I share the sentiments of several commentators that have pointed out that these price rises and general cost rises are particularly galling given the current economic climate. I’m also amazed that the government seems to think that ID cards will be immensely popular, even going so far as to effectively hold a competition to win an ID card for people who really want one. I hope it is they, and not I who has completely lost their sense of all reality…

Mirrors

deepspacemillar — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 20:25:11 +0000

I have heard from several people who managed to save entire copies of the MyLifeMyID forum, and who have been dilligently been going through the saved pages, reconstructing the links etc in an effort to make a complete archive of the site, available to all. Recently, these efforts have been successful, and I have heard that at least one complete archive is ~~soon to be~~ uploaded to the net. While this site will not be hosting the files directly - this post is now a mirror page linking to any archives.
http://rapidshare.com/files/158489851/mylifemyid-original.zip
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=1S9YPF70
http://sharebee.com/c2bf2260
Copy maintaining original layout and design

http://rapidshare.com/files/158491574/mylifemyid-text.zip
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=6C720IS0
http://sharebee.com/aedf148f
A stripped down text version

Many thanks to ‘David Blunkett’ and “The Mysterious Mr S” for the great work.

I would just like to point out that the views expressed do not neccessarily match my own (unless of course, I wrote them).

Any new links or changes, please contact admin(at)id-watch.co.uk

UPDATED: added links to ’sharebee’ mirrors

Police to use mobile fingerprint scanners

deepspacemillar — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 20:11:13 +0000

According to Engadget, the Police will within the next 18 months start using mobile fingerprint scanners to carry out identity checks right in the street, at a cost of £30 million+.
The new scanners will allow police to check a persons fingerprints against records in a database (likely ID database/police databases). They will be used on those suspected of a crime when a positive ID cannot be verified. The new scanners will be able to receive pictures of suspects and other data over ’secure’ connections. The Police claim that it will greatly speed up processing suspects, help identifying bodies at the scene, and have other uses.

Originally found over at the Guardian

A response to Ray Poynter

deepspacemillar — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 19:33:53 +0000

Ray made several comments to the Economist last week after a story that mentioned the MyLifeMyID site. I’ve put both these comments below:

“First the declaration of interest, I am one of the Admins from the mylifemyid site and a director of Virtual Surveys, the company that ran and hosted mylifemyid.Secondly, a couple of quibbles. Surely, the use of the word “purportedly” is a tad tendentious. Over 50 million online ads were placed in locations such as Bebo and Facebook to promote the site, and over 1000 young people have indeed had their say. You are right to say many people dismissed the site as propaganda, but most of them said that before they saw the content. It is hard to describe a website which hosts so many anti-ID Card comments and Government propaganda.Finally, some information. The site reached its scheduled end on October 15, after three months of listening. The content of the site is now being analysed and a report will be presented to the Identity and Passport Service, who have committed to publishing the report on their website.”

and the second…

“Oops! What I meant (and what I thought I had typed) was “It is hard to describe a website which hosts so many anti-ID Card comments as Government propaganda.”

Very few comments were taken down from the site, and these were for abuse of the Ts&Cs, general abuse, or because they had been flagged by users as offensive. There were many posts that made comments about the site, its motivation, the way it was moderated, and except for the handful that fell foul of the abuse rule, they remained on the site.

I take Morel’s point about the case for not removing this type of project at the end of its period of action. We will certainly be recommending that future projects provide some sort of ongoing, public record of the discourse.

For example, I would be happy to debate whether the moderation was neutral or biased, but, without the material being available to all parties, I would be expecting people to simply take may word for it, and that would be unfair (and not necessarily likely to happen).

Ray Poynter, an Admin at mylifemyid”

———————————————————————————————————————————

Firstly, I’d like to address the comment that “many people dismissed the site as propaganda, but most of them said that before they saw the content”. What forum were you on, Ray? A lot of users who were on the site for a great deal of time were (and still are) convinced it was a proaganda exercise. There were quite a few individuals expressed this sentiment, and while personally I don’t quite agree, I definitely see their point. Many came to the site to contribute and found a number of questions that displayed what they interpreted as bias. The main page of the site even had a video that many felt was blunt PR spin.

Secondly, your point about it being hard to call the site propaganda when the replies were so anti-ID is pretty weak. One must distinguish between comments made by Virtual Surveys and those of its users. The fact that a number of Virtual Surveys posts were very much seen as and attacked as propaganda challenges your view. Just because so many people disagreed and refuted the posts doesn’t mean it wasn’t propaganda, it just means it was bad propaganda. The bias in several posts was glaringly obvious, especially in earlier stages of the forum. So I’ll have to disagree with you Ray, I think people have every justification to describe it as a propaganda exercise. Whether that was actually the intention remains to be seen, but I don’t think you have a leg to stand on when you claim people couldn’t/didn’t call it propaganda.

Finally - you mention that ‘very few’ comments were taken down from the site. Sorry to burst your bubble Ray, but at least one entire thread disappeared from the forum. All sorts of different actions could have been taken that would have resolved any situation you had with an individual thread - editing some offensive language, warning users, locking the thread, etc etc. You chose the sledgehammer option, and deleted a thread that had from what I recall >30 posts within it. There were also lots of posts moved - either to a different forum or to the purgatory known as ‘miscellaneous posts’, where finding the post that had been moved was often rather difficult. There was at times, significant intervention on the forum where a lot more subtle action would have done much better - and so I can’t agree with you on this statement either.

All in all, I disagree with your responses - you have a much more positive interpretation of events than I.

Site update

admin — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 16:39:28 +0000

~~I received an email today from a user who couldn’t post a comment because of issues with the ‘did you pass math’ plugin I was using to avoid spam.~~ EDIT: turns out this wasn’t the problem, so I’ve turned it back on. The problem seemed to be the hashcash plugin when using a proxy site to view the page. I have since deactivated the plugin, and hopefully these issues should be resolved. Sorry to anyone who was having problems with this.
If problems persist or if there are any other issues that are evident, please feel free to contact admin here or by leaving a comment.

An update on Virtual Surveys/MyLifeMyID

deepspacemillar — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 00:45:40 +0000

Over the last few days, I’ve been sending several emails to Virtual Surveys to ask some questions I had about a few issues. So to keep you in the loop, here is what I have found out.

Firstly, and probably most importantly - Virtual Surveys will have no more interaction with the MyLifeMyID users. That means there will be no discussion of the report, no reinstatement of the forum in any form, and generally no further action whatsoever. They will provide a link to their report on the IPS website when it appears from the current blank MyLifeMyID page. Virtual Survey’s position seems to be that they have fulfilled their obligation to the Home Office/IPS in terms of collecting the research, and therefore will not dedicate any further resources as it isn’t in their contract.

Secondly - Since VS themselves are effectively abondoning us, I asked if it were possible for them to send out an email to all (ex) users with a link to here or any other site where users could continue to discuss the ID card issues and the VS/IPS report. Although they sympathised that users no longer had a means of discussing the report, they refused to do so on the grounds that it would apparently not be part of the research project, and therefore their use of the email addresses for this would violate MRS guidelines and the Data Protection Act.

Now, I fully understand some of their positions here. Obviously, linking to what is essentially my personal blog would be almost an endorsement of it, and that isn’t really acceptable. I didn’t want this to occur, nor was I expecting it to, it wouldn’t be good practice. However, considering the total deletion of the MyLifeMyID forum, I thought it would have been perfectly legal and reasonable to provide a number of links to users of pro and anti ID sites where they can continue to stay informed and debate the matters. For them to have done nothing strikes me as a bit callous, however, I’m not a legal expert on this, and they may indeed be forced into this hand. It is however hugely disappointing that VS will not provide a forum for discussion of their report. I believe it would be beneficial to them in many ways to do so, but they have made their position clear.
I have since had the idea that providing links on the mostly blank holding page at MyLifeMyID would mean no problems with email addresses and the DPA. However, I do think this is likely to be met with the same response. I think Virtual Surveys simply aren’t interested anymore.

Finally - following up on the last post, I have sent an email off to Virtual Surveys asking for Ray Poynter to comment on or clarify what exactly he meant in his comments to the Economist. I will post a follow up to this as soon as I can…
EDIT: Ray has responded - please check the previous entry for details.