Recently in Security Category

The Blogfather's position on climate change has certainly evolved over the years. 

The decision that ID cards would be voluntary (alongside renationalisation of the East Coast main line and the shelving of Royal Mail's destruction), was made to look like Labour turning the narrative around on some of their most unpopular policies.

The Liberal position on Trident set out by Ming Campbell, and backed by his party, never made any sense to me. Let's wait and see, they said, presumably wondering if the Cold War was about to kick off again, or if terrorists might after all be deterred by a multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle submarine-launched ballistic missile.

Whatever the police should be doing, it's not this: trying to bribe environmentalists with secret bank accounts (clue: it usually won't work, we're pretty committed), threaten their job prospects, suggest they'll be sent to brutal violent prisons and generally intimidate them.

It strikes me as odd that the Middle Englander type opposed to Google's Street View are often the same people yammering for more CCTV in their areas. To give one tangential illustration, for the Mail, Street View is a 'burglar's charter', yet the paper objects to the removal of CCTV from 'crime-ridden areas' on some supposedly spurious human rights grounds.

The news tonight was dominated by three stories: the dangerous foolishness of Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick in revealing anti-terror raids, the lethal recklessness of PC John Dougal who killed a girl doing 94 miles an hour in a 30 zone in pursuit of an out-of-date record in a numberplate database, and the decision by an unnamed officer to turn himself in having probably caused the death of Ian Tomlinson during last week's G20.

The Times has a great scoop, a leaked document setting out the latest wheeze from the ID card people. All contractors associated with the project will, if the plan goes ahead, be vulnerable to warrantless searches for twenty-five years.

From 1st September 2008, the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust Ltd has generously agreed to match, pound for pound, any *new* income that NO2ID receives. 

Which means that for every pound you give from 1st September NO2ID will receive TWO pounds to spend campaigning against the ID scheme and database state.

Please send your donation by cheque to the NO2ID office (please mark your envelope 'JRRT'):

The NO2ID Campaign
Box 412
19-21 Crawford Street
London W1H 1PJ

Or you can donate by credit card or via PayPal using the 'Donate' button on their website.

The Independent reports today that the firm which lost personal data for 84,000 convicted criminals is also lined up to work on the ID cards. This scheme is destined to fail or be scrapped, so the £33m they've been paid will be wasted no matter what, but if I had my way every company that ever fails on personal security should be blocked from any future Government IT contracts.

Uber-crypto-geek Bruce Schneier has today posted some advice to the next US President on how to get online security right. Some of it could usefully be applied here by the Scottish and UK Governments, even though we've got less leverage and smaller economies of scale. But given some of the recent data loss incidents, Ministers shouldn't rule it out. 

Oh, and if you're geeky enough to appreciate the image to the left (click to enlarge), you can buy it on a t-shirt. No, I'm not on commission.

There's a lot of debate going on about where aircraft carriers should be built. But surprisingly, given the £4bn cost, no debate about whether they should be built.

This despite many in the near-pacifist left in the SNP knowing that the carriers are designed, in the Navy's own words, to provide "a coercive presence worldwide".

So late last night we chipped in, arguing that the carriers shouldn't be built at all, and that the skills on the Clyde and the money from the Treasury should instead be redeployed to develop cutting-edge renewables industries and other similar green tech.

The prize for the best response goes to the following, found in my inbox this morning.

"Are you suggesting that we shouldn't be spending billions on the world's biggest floating cocktail party venues? Where will Prince William be able to land his jets? This all sounds dangerously close to treason to me."

So we're on the cusp of the post-oil age, as you know. 

Joe Stalin (pictured telling dirty jokes at Yalta) is rumoured to have said "it's not the people who vote that count, it's the people who count the votes", although it's unlikely to be true given his attitude to actual voting. Nowadays, of course, it's not people who count the votes, it's machines.

This is even harder to fix when it goes wrong, as Florida found out when it had trouble with hanging chads, and as we discovered when electronic counting went astray in May last. I'm sure you're all well up on the Diebold story too.

Could London be next? The Reg has evidence that it might be.

Reports today suggest that people with multiple mobile phones should be considered potential terror subjects.

What other groups of people, beyond Al Qaeda, tend to have several phones? I mean press officers, not Hollywood starlets.

I'm nervous. I've got about seven phones in my house. But I am not a terrist. Seriously.