Yet more controversy over the police’s handling of protests:

Government officials passed secret police intelligence to energy firm E.ON before last summer’s environmental demonstration at Kingsnorth in Kent.

Environmental action group Climate Camp had planned a peaceful demonstration at the proposed site of a new coal-fired power station.

Emails obtained by Liberal Democrat MP David Howarth under the Freedom of Information Act show that civil servants from the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform gave details of meetings and activists’ movements to E.ON.

From the Guardian:

At first officials at BERR refused to release the emails, despite a request under the Freedom of Information Act from the Liberal Democrats. The decision was reversed on appeal and although large sections have been blacked out, they show:

• BERR officials passed a strategy document belonging to the “environmental protest community” to E.ON, saying: “If you haven’t seen this then you will be interested in its contents.”

• Government officials forwarded a Metropolitan police intelligence document to E.ON, detailing the movements and whereabouts of climate protesters in the run-up to demonstration.

• E.ON passed its planning strategy for the protest to the department’s civil servants, adding: “Contact numbers will follow.”

• BERR and E.ON tried to share information about their media strategies before the protest, and civil servants asked the energy company for press contacts for EDF, BP and Kent police.

David Howarth said, “It is as though BERR was treating the police as an extension of E.ON’s private security operation. The question is how did that intelligence get to BERR? Did it come via the Home Office or straight from police?”

Some people’s taste in music can be pretty bad, but criminal??

A jazz musician in Wales was arrested by armed police as part of a major anti-terror raid. Victor Frederick had been aware of police surveillance days before his arrest.

From WalesOnline, via Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing:

Victor Frederick, 63, was arrested and strip-searched just yards from his home, just moments after his partner Andrea Heath and their daughter had infra-red sights trained at them and were told they would be shot if they moved.

No charges were ever brought against Mr Frederick…[who told how] police interpreted soundproofing equipment and wiring from his musical studio as a potential sign of illicit activity.

Mr Frederick was informed he was being arrested on suspicion of making explosives, but later during questioning, police told him they had found nothing.

Figures obtained by the Liberal Democrats show that thousands of council staff have been using anti-terrorism powers to keep watch on people suspected of non-terrorist type offences.

From the Telegraph:

“A survey of 400 councils in England and Wales by the Liberal Democrats using the FOI Act found that many of them were using the powers to investigate trivial misdemeanours.

In the study, 182 local authorities admitting employing 1,615 staff who had used the powers 10,133 times in the past five years.

If the figures are extrapolated for all 400 councils in England and Wales, it would mean that 3,600 staff have spied on local people 22,000 times since 2004.

The study found that less than one in 10 of spying missions resulted in a prosecution, caution or fixed penalty notice.

Across the 180 councils, the spying powers were mostly used to tackle benefit fraud (1,782 times), noise nuisance (942 times) and trading standards breaches (734 times).

However the powers were also used on 451 investigations into fly-tipping investigations and on 88 cases of unlawful dog fouling.

Other reasons included “establishing the identities of those taking fairy lights from a Christmas tree”, “illegal sale of shellfish” and “unauthorised internet access by staff.”

Julia Goldsworthy, the Libdems Local Government spokesman, said that the Regulation of Investigative Powers Act risked becoming a “snoopers’ charter” unless the powers were reformed.

She said: “Surveillance powers should only be used to investigate serious crimes and must require a magistrates’ warrant.

“The Government has seen civil liberties as little more than a temprorary inconvenience. Slowly but surely freedoms have been eroded.”

The Government intends to store all Britons’ international travel details on a new database.

Every passenger in and out of the UK will have their details held on computer for up to 10 years, including their name, address, telephone number, credit card details, seat reservation and travel itinerary.

The UK Border Agency already counts people who enter or leave the country by “high risk” routes, including via Heathrow and Gatwick airports.  Under the “e-borders” programme it is planned that all 250m annual movements will be counted by 2014.

From The Times:

Some immigration officials with knowledge of the plans admit there is likely to be public concern.

“A lot of this stuff will have a legitimate use in the fight against crime and terrorism, but it’s what else it could be used for that presents a problem,” said one.  “It will be able to detect whether parents are taking their children abroad during school holidays. It could be useful to the tax authorities because it will tell them how long non-UK domiciled people are spending in the UK.”

The database is also expected to monitor people’s travel companions.

A spokesman for the NO2ID campaign group said, “When your travel plans, who you are travelling with, where you are going to and when are being recorded you have to ask yourself just how free is this country?” [Source: Press Association]

The location of the database? It’s a secret: for a government so keen to know our exact whereabouts, they are very coy about revealing theirs.

Although believed to be in Wythenshawe, Manchester, staff have been told to refer to it only as “a new operations centre in the northwest.”

A private firm will be asked to manage a database of all UK communications traffic, according to a consultation paper to be published shortly by the Home Secretary.

Despite assurances that laws will be tightened to minimise losses and accidental leaks of private information, Sir Ken Macdonald, former Director of Public Prosecutions said,

“Authorisations for access might be written into statute. The most senior ministers and officials might be designated as scrutineers. But none of this means anything.

“All history tells us that reassurances like these are worthless in the long run. In the first security crisis the locks would loosen.”

 

From the Guardian:

“Until now most communications traffic data has been held by phone companies and internet service providers for billing purposes but the growth of broadband phone services, chatrooms and anonymous online identities mean that is no longer the case.

“The Home Office’s interception modernisation programme, which is working on the superdatabase proposal, argues that it is no longer good enough for communications companies to be left to retrieve such data when requested by the police and intelligence services. A Home Office spokeswoman said last night the changes were needed so law enforcement agencies could maintain their ability to tackle serious crime and terrorism.”

… because the Government is thinking about keeping all the records for you. Yes indeed, the BBC brings the news that the Home Office is thinking of introducing a national database containing details of every email sent in the UK.

Only a spoilsport would mention Big Brother, unnecessary surveillance, IT project failures, invasion of privacy, money being diverted from other more worth causes, risk of data being stolen, problems if there are any errors or any of that other stuff.

Britain’s the most watched country in the world, with more CCTV cameras per person than anyone else. That CCTV is hopelessly inadequately regulated - you don’t even have to have any qualifications or background checks to be an operator, and there are few restrictions on who gets access to images and what they can do with them.

So it’s rather alarming, to say the least, to read that 19 out of 20 CCTV systems don’t even comply with the piffling rules there are in place.

Personally, I can’t wait until the ID cards programme gives the government a high-resolution photograph of each and every one of us, facial recognition technology improves so people can be picked out from moving CCTV, and cameras are installed at eye-height in lamp posts to get a clear shot.

Sound like a fantasy?

Tell that to the Information Commissioner, who suggested such systems could be routine by 2016 in his report on the Surveillance Society:

34.3. CCTV is also less noticeable. Smaller cameras are embedded in lampposts at eyelevel and walls, which allow the more efficient operation of the now universal facial
recognition systems. Morphing software which combines images from multiple
cameras to build a 3-dimensional picture is also being pioneered, although
campaigners and lawyers argue it is inaccurate and not a ‘real’ image.

34.4. It is not just the cameras themselves. Almost universal wireless networking
allows the cameras to be freed from bulky boxes and wires. In addition, the cameras
are linked to intelligent street lighting which provides ‘ideal’ lighting conditions for
recognition software, and also movement activated floodlighting and extra cameras
in the case of crowd ‘clumping’ or unusual movement.

See today’s Independent for news of Nick Clegg’s plans to take on Gordon Brown on the growing surveillance society.

Of course, Dave’s Conservatives have abandoned the defence of civil liberties and personal privacy and decided to abolish the Data Protection Act (or rewrite, or reform, or, oh we’re not sure).

Fortunately the Liberal Democrats aren’t so fickle, so there’ll be a motion debated at this year’s conference on curtailing the excesses of this growing surveillance society.

Automatic Number Plate recognition gets 1 in 25 read-outs wrong, the Department for Transport reveals.

We discovered last week - thanks to an inadvertent leak from the Home Office - that the whole national network of ANPR cameras will soon be linked in to the police.

So the accuracy of the cameras is pretty vital.

And while 96% is pretty good as a mark in a maths test, it’s less good when it comes to tracking car drivers’ every movement. When you consider that the cameras monitor millions of cars, 4% failure turns into thousands upon thousands of false positives.

The Times, among others, reports the news that:

The details of journeys taken by millions of motorists are to be handed to police under a government “Big Brother” plan to use road pricing technology in the fight against crime.

The proposal is to introduce new legislation to give police routine, open door access to all number plate recognition data collected by third parties - Transport for London initially, but in the long run any council or transport authority that runs these cameras.

There will be extensive debate about the merits and disadvantages of these proposals, so instead of that I thought I’d recount the more amusing story of how the story got out.

The government tabled a Written Ministerial Statement explaining about the new arrangement between TfL and the Metropolitan Police. They sent it to Hansard and to the House of Commons Library, who forwarded it to interested MPs.

Unfortunately, someone forgot to turn off “track changes”.

The statement had been written over a wholly separate internal document marked “Policy - Restricted” which set out details of:

- the plans to roll out the London scheme nationally with legislation in the autumn
- the split with the Department for Transport over the proposals
- the government’s “handling strategy” for proposals they themselves dub “Big Brother”

Good to see the department in charge of Identity Cards has such a grasp of modern technology.