The Guardian reports that former SAS soldier Ben Griffin has been served with a high court order yesterday preventing him from making fresh disclosures about how hundreds of Iraqis and Afghans captured by British and American special forces were rendered to prisons where they faced torture. [via]
The full text of the statement he read at a press conference hosted by the Stop the War Coalition is available here.
Dispatches: Checking-in To Airport Chaos
Andrew Gilligan investigates the priorities and business tactics of the airports industry, asking how secure our airports are and who will be the winners and losers from airport expansion?
Explosives expert Sidney Alford highlights how ill-thought out and arbitrary the security rules regarding the carrying liquids is by creating an explosive that could be carried on in bottles of no more than 100ml and mixed on board and assuming there were co-conspirators on board an even greater amount could be accumulated. Alford doesn’t explain what exactly the liquids he was using are but does say that they are not particularly tightly controlled substances and can be sourced from several disparate industries in which their use is commonplace. so an amateur such as a terrorist could with a little research carry out exactly the same process.
Other experts such as Norman shanks BAA head of security 1991-1996 says that the industry always reacts to the last known threat.
Philip Baum Editor of Aviation Security International says it is all just security theatre and that he cannot cite a single example of when a bomb has been detected by the x-ray machines alone. He has carried out tests for governments and the results are very worrying one test involving a woman carrying bomb parts through 24 different airports every single one failed to detect a single component that she carried. Other results show that operators succeeded only 73% of the time to detect guns or knives.
Behaviour pattern recognition where staff are trained to spot suspicious behaviour was deemed not to be testable by the department of Transport and so the programme wasn’t implemented. They are far keener on technological answers!
I’m not sure why BAA don’t implement such procedures anyway. Where does responsibility lie? What role do they and the DoT play?
BAA also didn’t respond quickly enough to deal with the new security procedures and the result was huge queues at their airports whereas other airports owned for example by local government returned to normality pretty soon after the security scare.
Airlines are not happy with the way that BAA measures queues and would appear to be undercounting them and it is in their interest to lie as they are required to refund landing fees if queues are over a certain point. Independent surveys find their airports to be far less satisfactory than BAAs own surveys.
Almost seems designed to create long waiting times in BAAs airport shopping areas to maximise their retail revenues.
Expansion plans the government seems to have been influenced by BAA to allow the Heathrow third runway to be built ironically the CAA indicates there might not be sufficient airspace to accommodate the scale of predicted traffic growth.
British internet users face ban for illegal downloads. A draft copy of a Green Paper produced by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport was leaked to The Times newspaper which detailed how the government was considering introducing legislation that would require ISPs to take action against users who access pirated material.
The Government’s resolve on the issue has apparently been stiffened following similar proposals made by the governments of the US and France. The proposal is designed to bolster the UK’s creative industries but it is questionable how much impact it will have on piracy and how willing Internet Service Providers will be to cut off their revenue by banning their own customers.
The Archbishop of Canterbury says the adoption of Islamic Sharia law in the UK seems “unavoidable”.
Dr Rowan Williams told Radio 4’s World at One that the UK has to “face up to the fact” that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system.
Dr Williams argues that adopting some aspects of Sharia law would help maintain social cohesion.
For example, Muslims could choose to have marital disputes or financial matters dealt with in a Sharia court.
He says Muslims should not have to choose between “the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty”.
I don’t think the adoption of Islamic Sharia law in the UK is unavoidable nor desirable. Just because some British citizens don’t relate to the legal system does not mean that a parallel legal system that they’d be more comfortable with should be adopted. As it is it could be argued that British prisons are full of people that don’t relate to the British legal system should we adopt a separate system for them too. One legal system for drug dealers and another for the rest of us.
This is not the way the British legislative process works nor should it be.
Although if you believe crackpots like Melanie Phillips it is inevitable anyway because of the Government’s appeasement to Islamic extremists and the onset of the Islamification of Europe.
I don’t see how having separate systems brings out social cohesion either as surely it does the exact opposite and only serves to increase the differences between communities.
Also it seems unworkable to me. Which system would take primacy when one party wanted their case heard in a Sharia court but the other party didn’t or in the case of something like adultery which the British legal system doesn’t take a view on but Sharia law does.
He suggests that marital disputes could be dealt with in a Sharia court but in the case of marriages and divorces British civil law takes precedence over Canon law of the Church of England so why should Muslims have it any different.
Using Google maps The Baltimore Sun have plotted all the murders that were committed in 2007 and so far in 2008. As well as switching between the year that the murders took place in the results can be filtered by age, gender and race and it can be seen that a disproportionate number of them are young black men.
That last statistic won’t surprise viewers of The Wire though.
The four guys that run The Pirate Bay have been charged with conspiracy to break copyright law in Sweden.
Well it was bound to happen wasn’t it as the Swedish authorities have been building their case against The Pirate Bay since they seized their computers back in late May of 2006.
But it is by no means clear cut whether or not they will actually get convicted of the offence they’ve been charged with. They would contend that what they are doing is merely running a search engine and that there are not any substantial differences between them and Google other than the fact they they restrict their searches to torrent files.
In any case whether convicted or not The Pirate Bay website will still continue as it is no longer hosted on a server located in Sweden and the founders claim that they do not actually know where the server is located.
Amateur cryptographer Joachim Schueth has beaten the British World War II computer Colossus of Bletchley Park in a code-cracking challenge.
Joachim Schueth solved a German cipher in just 46 seconds, more than three hours quicker than the 60 year old PC.
He received a prize from the National Museum of Computing, which included a valve from the Colossus machine.
Mr Schueth deciphered the code using a laptop and a program he wrote specifically for the challenge.
To be clear he beat out other competitors who had themselves written their own cryptanalysis tools to crack the encrypted message rather than just Colossus as that would not really have been a fair contest at all.
BoingBoing Leaked UK gov’t doc reveals plan to “coerce” Brits into national ID register
UK campaigners NO2ID this morning enlisted the help of bloggers across the world to spread a leaked government document describing how the British government intends to go about “coercing” its citizens onto a National Identity Register. The ‘ID card’ is revealed as little more than a cover to create a official dossier and trackable ID for every UK resident – creating what NO2ID calls ‘the database state’.
The Guardian The great ID card rebellion
No2ID has attracted more than 40,000 “registered supporters”, as well as 100 or so affiliated organisations. The latter betray just what a mind-boggling coalition of people the campaign has attracted: as well as the Green party, the Lib Dems and the SNP, the list features UKIP and the ultra-libertarian Freedom Association, as well as the Association of British Drivers and Newhaven town council.
The Guardian Costs set to rule out register of fingerprints
The future of the UK’s identity card scheme was thrown into further confusion last night after it emerged that the Home Office is looking to scrap one of its key components – a national register of fingerprints.
Weird I’ve just had in the space of a few minutes four different people turn up for the 6pm screening of Control with a Q&A with director Anton Corbijn. That’s four people who have separately managed to arrive an hour late!
In the BBC Horizon documentary How to Kill a Human Being former politician Michael Portillo investigates the current methods of execution used by countries that carry out capital punishment concentrating on those used in the United States
Prompted by the American Supreme Court’s examination of whether the lethal injection is causing prisoners to die in unnecessary pain Michael Portillo set out to find a solution which is fundamentally humane.
I was suspicious of his motives throughout this documentary as he started by explaining his changing views on the death penalty and how he had been in his political career initially in favour but then as more and more miscarriages of justice came to light in the UK he altered his stance and voted against it’s reintroduction in Britain. If it was the case that he was opposed now why is he investigating methods so as to find the most humane?
But as the programme went on and Portillo discovered that each and every method was deeply flawed I began to think that perhaps he was not in fact doing what he’d stated but had in fact set out with the purpose of failing so as to create a credible argument in opposition to capital punishment. Throughout he is exclaiming that “it’s the 21st century surely science can come up with the perfect way to kill a human being!” And of course he is correct and it’s hypoxia, the restriction of oxygen, and which is one of the primary methods used to humanely kill animals used in medical research.
He then visits a couple of facilities in Holland that have been designed to measure the effects of oxygen depletion through extreme G forces or through extreme altitude so that he can experience it for himself to the point shortly before loss of consciousness and death. Discovering that it is completely painless and far from being stressful is actually euphoric Michael Portillo now thinks he has the answer but needs a more practical method of administering it. He turns to Dr Mohan Raj of Bristol University who has been researching more humane methods for use in slaughterhouses and who has developed the very simple system of using inert gases such as Nitrogen, which are non-toxic and tasteless and the subject is completely unaware of the gases presence.
Now armed with his ‘perfect’ method of how to kill a human being Portillo returns to the United States to put his findings to the pro-death penalty side of the debate to gauge their reactions and he doesn’t get the reaction he was hoping for.
Oddly he only seems to have a discussion with a single person and that is Professor Robert Blecker of the New York School of Law who as a known retributivist advocate of the death penalty surely can not be representative of the views of most Americans who are in favour of capital punishment.
Robert Blecker is very much in favour of the method of executing criminals being horrific and painful (despite the US constitution prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment) and is appalled by Michael Portillo’s perfect method.
I would think that the majority of those who are in favour would also respect the US constitution and believe if the state is to kill people that it should not come down to the level of those it is executing but do it in a humane manner. In a way I’ll be glad if Portillo’s perfect method doesn’t gain traction for the longer the debate rages in the US about their current methods being cruel and unusual the more likely it is that it will abandon the death penalty entirely.
Plus we have to return to the point that Michael Portillo made right at the start and that is with the dozens of miscarriages of justice coming to light and the investigations that have revealed a number of people have been wrongly convicted and subsequently executed in the US how can capital punishment be justified when it is likely to be used again on the wrongly convicted. I’m left confused as to what Portillo’s current position really is.