new authoritarianism

David Cameron consorts with tax-dodgers to censor the web

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Image of Jimmy Savile and Margaret Thatcher
Jimmy Savile and Margaret Thatcher

It is announced today that Downing Street is to work with massive search engine tax-dodgers Google to hugely censor the web. Under the guise of attempting to frustrate paedophiles, Downing St and Google intend to censor 100,000 search terms.

Cameron and the UK government are simply hugely censoring the internet. This measure will not affect paedophiles since they don’t use Google to search for paedophile material. Instead it will frustrate users legally searching for legitimate materials. It is quite simply huge censorship of the web. It will actually – and is quite possibly intended to – have the opposite effect of assisting internet paedophiles by posing difficulties to independent researchers.

It is a mistake to think that the internet is not already hugely censored. Do you think that search engines do not already censor paedophile and alternative political materials? This blog is hugely censored for political reasons: you won’t find this blog in a school or library. Try searching for some terms from this blog like “war of bullshit”. [Just realised that it works on Google]

There are not 100,000 paedophile search terms and paedophiles don’t use Google anyway. How can this be anything except a huge exercise in censorship?

We have already seen that UK Conservatives want to censor the web. Their lobbying bill is a huge attack on democracy attempting to neuter charities and unions. They are simply trying to take out their opposition in a very evil way totally opposed to democracy, freedom and liberty.

If it is accepted that there simply is not 100,000 search terms related to paedophilia then what is going to be censored? There are elite paedophile rings protected by the UK authorities. Jimmy Savile and Cyril Smith were protected by UK authorities. I know of one paedo who was close to Tony Blair who is protected by UK authorities. When you censor the web, you are protecting these paedos.

8.30pm 18/11/13

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/10457465/David-Cameron-Spies-tracking-internet-paedophiles-are-like-the-Enigma-code-breakers-of-World-War-II.html

Jim Gamble, former Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) chief executive, said that while Mr Cameron’s influence has “accelerated” the process of getting the search engines to ban 100,000 search terms.

However he said it was the peer-to-peer networks that need to be targeted if the Government wants to track down paedophiles.

He said: “Very few paedophiles in my experience use Google.”

“At the end of the day a pop up message is not going to inform, educated or scare a paedophile they know what they do is wrong, that’s why they are secretive about it that’s why they hide in the peer to peer of the dark web where they cant be found.”

  1. Confirmation that paedos do not use Google as I stated earlier in this post.
  2. There is a confused use of terms. The dark web is a reference to Tor, which is not a peer-to-peer network (like BitTorrent).
  3. The paedos are using Tor not peer-to-peer.

[19/11/13 This story seems to have died very suddenly – there are only a few mentions today of yesterday’s events.

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/david-camerons-crackdown-on-child-porn-needs-some-work

… Cameron claimed the search queries targeted, which were drawn up by child protection experts, were “unambiguous,” but that seems quite frankly impossible. There are reportedly as many as 100,000 terms on the list—for comparison, the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains 231,100 entries. There seems a real risk, then, of the algorithm overreaching and preventing web users from accessing perfectly legal content. …

[like (conservative or tory or lord or rich or falconer or blair) and (paedo or paedophile or nonce),

“straw rendition torture”,

“dodgy dossier”,

“misled parliament”,

“public inquiry”,

“conservative broken promises”,

etc. ]

Join the IWF to see child porn. This achieves nothing – police and intelligence services already have access.

[20/11/13 To clarify this.

Tor works by routing encrypted requests through a circuit of relays. The circuits change often. The Tor exit node is at the other end to the user and is unencrypted to the requested resource (on the open web, not if the target resource is on a Tor hidden service e.g. illegal paedo porn). The Tor user cannot be identified unless she has made a mistake e.g. identifying herself through an email address or has been infected as Anonymous did.

The confusion that spooks, ex-spooks, prime ministers and news reporters are showing between the Tor anonymity network and peer-to-peer networks is due to two issues.

  1. Prime Ministers and news reporters don’t understand it and are following the lead of spooks, ex-spooks and spooky advisors, and
  2. At the network level i.e. where spooks are intercepting traffic, they can’t distinguish Tor from peer-to-peer traffic so to them it is the same. {Later edit: 2 is based on intuition. It should not be taken as a statement of fact or knowledge.} ]

Confusion between Tor and peer-to-peer continues. Pursuing peer-to-peer seems a wasted effort.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/18/online-child-abuse-peer-to-peer

The Internet Watch Foundation does not at the moment pursue images and videos on so-called peer-to-peer networks because it lacks permission from the Home Office. But it was announced on Monday that the watchdog would begin a six-month pilot scheme in collaboration with Google, Microsoft and the Child Exploitation and Online Protection agency (Ceop), so that IWF can develop procedures to identify and blacklist links to child abuse material on P2P services.

Independent: Search engines take on child abuse: The ‘massive breakthrough’ where little has changed

This post subject to change.

Continue ReadingDavid Cameron consorts with tax-dodgers to censor the web

Theresa May must not further erode Britons’ rights to citizenship

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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/14/theresa-may-erode-britons-citizenship-right

Image of UK Home Secretary Theresa May

Theresa May has said she wants to extend her powers to strip citizenship from suspected terrorists, even if doing so renders them stateless. Under current law the home secretary may denaturalise anyone with dual nationality whose UK citizenship is deemed by her to be “not conducive to the public good”. But if May has her way, even British-only nationals will lose their citizenship. The consequences will be profound.

…

In her first 30 months in office, May deprived 16 Britons of their citizenship, almost all of them on grounds of being linked to terrorist activities. One such ex-Briton is Mahdi Hashi, a Somali-born UK citizen who grew up in Camden, north London, and subsequently became involved in the al-Shabaab group. The home ecretary ordered that he be stripped of citizenship while he was in Somalia, cancelling his passport and right to re-enter Britain, and leaving him vulnerable to rendition to the US. Hashi now languishes in jail in New York on terror charges.

The vast majority of these former citizens were outside the UK at the time, giving the lie to their right to appeal to a UK court, and freeing the home secretary from full scrutiny. Few of them have ever been charged in a British court with any criminal offence. The protections that each and every British citizen should have against arbitrary decision-making and against a life without citizenship have been gradually and deliberately stripped away.

During the dark days of the second world war, when Britain was in mortal danger, only four people were stripped of citizenship. Theresa May has denaturalised more than four times that number of in the last three years alone. Now she wants to increase the state’s power further by consigning British-only citizens she deems undesirable to statelessness. We would do well to note the refugee scholar Hannah Arendt’s observation that one can measure the extent to which authoritarianism has infected a government by the number of denaturalisations it orders. This growing erosion of the security of UK citizenship needs to be reversed.

[It’s important to realise that we are discussing suspects. It is likely that there is little or any evidence against them and that action to deny nationality is essentially arbitrarily applied.]

Continue ReadingTheresa May must not further erode Britons’ rights to citizenship

Bad management and cruelty: Iain Duncan Smith and the failures of the Work Programme

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http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2013/11/bad-management-and-cruelty-failures-work-programme

A toxic mixture of policy by soundbite, twisted statistics and a spurious belief in the efficacy of the private sector has created a programme that is going to fail a whole generation.

by Alan White

Image of IDS Iain Duncan Smith

 

 

 

 

Earlier this year, Cait Reilly, a 24-year-old Geology graduate, won a legal battle at the Appeal Court after claiming that her unpaid work placement at Poundland, which she had been required to undertake in return for continued benefits payments, breached laws on forced labour.

Iain Duncan Smith vented his frustration on The Andrew Marr Show:

I’m sorry, but there is a group of people out there who think they’re too good for this kind of stuff […] The next time somebody goes in – those smart people who say there’s something wrong with this – they go into their supermarket, ask themselves this simple question, when they can’t find the food they want on the shelves, who is more important – them, the geologist, or the person who stacked the shelves?
It was despicable, if unsurprising, to watch a cabinet minister smearing a young woman who’d been volunteering in her preferred career field. And the second part of his statement was the kind of populist hokum that carries as much intellectual weight as an X-Factor judge’s comments (“Well when there’s an earthquake and you’re buried under a pile of tinned tomatoes in Tesco ask yourself who’s more important THEN? You, or the geologist, or the shelf stacker? Yeah. I don’t know either. Makes you think.”)

But such rhetoric is indicative of Duncan Smith’s modus operandi: policy by soundbite. To quote Jane Mansour, a policy consultant who has been involved in welfare-to-work in the UK and Australia for the last 15 years:

‘Tough’ is consistently used as a synonym for ‘effective’. They are not the same thing. It is unclear how the complexity of issues that underpin worryingly high levels of youth unemployment will be addressed by benefit removal for under 25s, or how any job churn and negative impacts on wages that occur as a consequence will be mitigated.

A considerable amount of research data, particularly that on the value of specific interventions, has been compiled or commissioned by DWP and funded by the taxpayer. Wasting such a valuable resource should be condemned forthrightly […] It’s like deciding to buy a house, paying for a full structural survey, ignoring the issues it identifies, and then building an extension on walls, that (had you read the report you would know) are not strong enough to hold it up.
So it’ll come as absolutely no surprise to hear that – by the DWP’s own reckoning – mandatory work activity schemes such as the one Cait Reilly was supposed to attend are ineffective. That analysis didn’t even mention the impact on disabled people. And it’ll also come as no surprise that the analysis was published alongside an announcement that the department was, erm, expanding the scheme.

Perhaps part of the floundering’s due to the fact Iain Duncan Smith’s trying to solve an impossible problem. You might see him ranting about a something-for-nothing culture, or alleged job snobs like Reilly – but you won’t hear a peep from him about the long-term political and economic failure that’s left nearly five people chasing every vacancy, that saw 4,300 people apply for 150 jobs at Tesco in Gosport and which has left youth unemployment a ticking economic and social time bomb.

…

Continue ReadingBad management and cruelty: Iain Duncan Smith and the failures of the Work Programme

The lobbying bill is a gift to union bashers

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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/11/lobbying-bill-gift-to-union-bashers-blacklisting

Given what we know about blacklisting, the lobbying bill’s demands on union membership lists pose a sinister threat

The government’s lobbying bill may be in trouble, but its attack on the confidentiality of union membership records continues in the Lords on Monday. To avoid what would have been a stonking defeat, ministers last week announced a “pause” on part two of this troubled bill, which would restrict free speech for groups other than political parties during an election campaign. The huge opposition it has provoked from across the political spectrum forced the government into this tactical retreat.

But this is no time to celebrate. The government has merely delayed debate in the House of Lords until December on part two – and it has brought forward to later on Monday the attacks on trade union membership contained in part three of the bill. They still aim to finish the bill by Christmas. Debating it in a different order is no victory for campaigners.

No one other than unions might be thought to be interested in plans for tying up union membership systems in blue tape. But there are wider questions at stake about how much personal data should be open to the state and its organs. The bill requires unions to appoint independent membership “assurers” from a list provided by government. These assurers, plus the government-appointed union regulator (the certification officer), and any other investigators appointed, will all have access to union membership records.

Any employer or political opponent of trade unionism will be able to make complaints about membership, which have to be investigated. As the extent of blacklisting in the construction industry has been revealed, members are naturally concerned at union lists being made open.

The government is unable to say why this section of the bill is needed. There is already a strong legal requirement on unions to have robust membership lists. Unions need efficient systems to collect subscriptions and they know that if there is anything dodgy about the membership in a strike ballot, the employer will win an injunction.

Freedom of information requests have established that no one has called on the government to introduce such a measure. And, according to its website, the Certification Office has received no complaints from trade union members relating to registers since 2004. On top of that, between 2000 and 2004 only six complaints were received – five of which were dismissed and no declaration was issued for the sixth.

…

Continue ReadingThe lobbying bill is a gift to union bashers

New Asbo plans are assault on basic freedom, says former DPP Lord Macdonald

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/10437127/New-Asbo-plans-are-assault-on-basic-freedom-says-former-DPP-Lord-Macdonald.html

Plans to replace Asbos with wide ranging new orders clamping down on anything likely to cause “annoyance” amount to “gross state interference” with basic freedoms, Lord Macdonald warns

Image of a preacherman

Christian preachers, buskers and peaceful protesters could effectively be driven off the streets under draconian new powers designed to clamp on anyone deemed “annoying”, according to a former Director of Public Prosecutions.

Lord Macdonald QC said Theresa May, the Home Secretary’s plans for a new civil injunctions to replace Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (Asbos) amount to “gross state interference” with people’s private lives and basic freedoms.

In a formal legal opinion being circulated to peers, he savages the proposals as opening the way for the outright “suppression” of anything deemed “potentially annoying” with only “vague” justification.

The proposed safeguards to prevent abuse of the new system are “shockingly” weak, he writes.

Under proposals currently before Parliament, Asbos are to be scrapped and replaced with wide-ranging new orders known as Ipnas (Injunctions to Prevent Nuisance and Annoyance).

They are designed to be easier to obtain, require a lower evidential threshod and yet cover a wider range of behaviour.

…

Continue ReadingNew Asbo plans are assault on basic freedom, says former DPP Lord Macdonald