Category: Security

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Security Uncategorized

Taking Liberties with the British Library

The British Library are housing a new exhibition titled Taking Liberties, which examines current debates about vital rights and freedoms in society: detention without charge, the right to privacy, devolved government, free speech and so on.

One important feature of Taking Liberties is an interactive activity available both in the gallery, and online here. You are placed right in the centre of current debates about vital rights and freedoms in society: detention without charge, the right to privacy, devolved government, free speech and so on.

Taking Liberties Interactive is the online part of the exhibition.

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Computing Surveillance

Surveillance State: No worries, nobody’s watching

Telegraph: Only incompetence will save us from Orwell’s surveillance state

The vast amount of data now being generated, and the impossibility of looking at it all, is, together with bureaucratic incompetence, the best guarantee we have that we’re not going to wake up one morning and find we are living in a version of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

True to an extent but the worry is that eventually when the state realises that the flaw in the system is the human element they will move towards more and more automated systems that can’t be bargained with, can’t be reasoned with and doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear.*

Seriously though, the failures of major IT projects like the NHS database might be the one thing that prevents the implementation of the National Identity Register and if they don’t then I can guarantee that Britain will end up with one hell of a flawed database with people being misidentified as benefit cheats or fraudsters or in extreme cases terrorist suspects due to the incompetence of the data entry.

* The Terminator (1984)

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Politics Surveillance Uncategorized

The abusive relationship that are we are stuck in with the British government.

Charlie Brooker vents in his inimitable fashion about the state of British politics. To politicians, we’re little more than meaningless blobs on a monitor.

My personal snapping point was reached last week, at the precise moment Jack Straw announced the government was vetoing the Information Tribunal’s order for the release of cabinet minutes relating to that whole invasion-of-Iraq thing

I agree that many of the British people will reach their own snapping point with regard to our government sometime soon and that perhaps the state of the economy will be the metaphorical straw that causes them to stop rolling over and accepting the ongoing series of government malfeasance.

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Surveillance Uncategorized

Motion Triggered Spy Cam

A project for the weekend. [via]


Motion Triggered Spy Cam – More DIY How To Projects

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Politics Security Uncategorized

Spy centre will track you on holiday

The Times reports that THE government is building a secret database to track and hold the international travel records of all 60m Britons.

The intelligence centre will store names, addresses, telephone numbers, seat reservations, travel itineraries and credit card details for all 250m passenger movements in and out of the UK each year.

The computerised pattern of every individual’s travel history will be stored for up to 10 years, the Home Office admits.

The government says the new database, to be housed in an industrial estate in Wythenshawe, near Manchester, is essential in the fight against crime, illegal immigration and terrorism. However, opposition MPs, privacy campaigners and some government officials fear it is a significant step towards a total surveillance society.

The Government have this mindset that damn the consequences that the more they know about its citizens then the safer we all will be even in the face of intelligent and reasoned opposition. [via]

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Surveillance Uncategorized

The Big Brother State

The Big Brother State is an educational film about what politicians claim to be protection of our freedom but what we refer to as repressive legislation.

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Surveillance Uncategorized

I Know You’re Listening


http://xkcd.com/525/

I’m tempted to do this sometimes especially when on the phone as it is quite probable that all phone conversations in the UK are being monitored although probably only by a computer.

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Security Uncategorized

"I hunted down the woman who stole my life."

How Karen Lodrick tracked down and caught the woman who’d stolen her identity.

read more | digg story

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Computing Security

Cryptonomicon data haven

The world’s most super-designed data center is described as being fit for a James Bond villain. [via]

Located in an old nuclear bunker deep below the bedrock of Stockholm city, sealed off from the world by entrance doors 40 cm thick, it can withstand a hydrogen bomb and has German submarine engines for backup power.

It reminds me however of the data haven that Epiphyte gets involved in building on the island of Kinakuta in Neal Stephenson’s novel Cryptonomicon.

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Surveillance Uncategorized

Libertarian Party UK 1984 campaign

Libertarian Party have decided to send a copy of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to every single MP. The books will be inscribed with the words, ‘This book was a warning, not a blueprint’, and will arrive at Parliament on or before November 5th — a date of well known historical significance for that building. [via]