Jeber’s

The web is the world, writ electronically

Humans started to form societies as soon as we learned to communicate. Small groups of hunter-gatherers formed larger groups to ensure their survival. In order to coordinate their hunting parties, they had to develop a means of communication. Communication became the means of cooperation.

Look at the terminology I just used; communicate, coordinate, cooperate. The prefix co means together; joint; jointly; mutually. Co is the prefix that defines human society. As individuals, early man was nearly helpless. He had no fur, not very good teeth, relatively poor eyesight. He was near the bottom of the food chain. Yet collectively, humans survived, even prevailed against adversity.

Communication, the ability to share ideas, is what has enabled us to reach the 21st century without becoming extinct. Our means of communication have evolved from the written word to the printed page, from smoke signals to the telephone, from street singers to MP3s. And now we have the internet.

Even though it’s only a few decades old, the internet has begun to evolve, too. At first it was a simple repository of electronic pages; you had to know where to look to find what you needed. Hyperlinking gave this electronic library continuity, a means to get from one document to another. Soon this medium earned its title as the world wide web. Anyone anywhere with internet access could communicate with others from across the globe. The internet reduced the time it took to send a message from one pole to the other to a matter of seconds.

Just as early man had the entire world to himself, early users of the web felt like citizens of the planet. Eventually, though, just as mankind settled into towns and cities and states, electronic communication is becoming more localized. Ebay is a world market, Craigslist is a local one. Local communities are finding new ways to use the internet to stay in touch, to be politically active, to recruit volunteers. Just like society, the internet is becoming more and more community oriented. Just as you can be a member of the human race while at the same time be a member of your neighborhood, the internet will always be a global means of communication, but the true value of the medium is shifting toward those around you. Social networking is starting to focus more on the small scale, the local group. It’s not unprecedented; it’s exactly the way human society itself evolved.

Content – Everything Old is New Again

There’s a lot of talk today on FriendFeed about the quality of blog posts. Some people contend there’s too little original content being posted. They say most blogs are nothing more than a rehash of someone else’s post with a link or credit, or a “me, too” entry.

I don’t dispute there are a number of bloggers, some even on the A-list, who provide links with hardly any commentary, or repost someone else’s blog entry with a sentence or two of agreement or disagreement. I’ll admit I’ve posted my share of those. I do it when I come across a well-written entry on a blog I suspect my readers won’t find themselves. I never hesitate to point my friends in the direction of a worthy blogger or website. It’s often the case that they’ve written so well that I would only detract from the message if I were to follow up with a long exposition of my own.

When I do have an original point to make, I wonder if I should make a long post to expound on every thought I have on the topic or if I should instead post a few key points and wait for the comments to draw the conversation out. I’m seldom consistent with my choice. It tends to depend on how well formed my thoughts are.

The very first writing I did with any regularity was poetry. I enjoy being brief and concise with the language. Writing poetry teaches a writer to say as much as possible in as few words as possible. It encourages the author to create images rather than simply construct sentences. Later I wrote screenplays. Between the stage directions and dialogue, a screenwriter churns out hundreds of words. Every little detail must be noted and often explained. No doubt these early experiences are evident in my blog writing. When my entries are short, I try to be poetic. When I can write at length, I have time to get more into the details.

So I don’t necessarily agree that the issue with content is whether or not it’s original. Even a “me, too” post tells me what the blogger is thinking, that he or she agrees with the original content they are re-posting. There’s also the linking of content that re-posting facilitates so that those who never would have seen the original post on its original site can be exposed to it. That’s not to say I can enjoy a blog that consists of nothing but links. There has to be some content at some point.

I always try to appreciate the content on its own merits. Does it make me think, does it challenge my preconceptions, does it encourage me in a positive way? If it does, I’m not going to worry if it was original with this particular blogger. Most likely I’ll follow a link to read the post on its original site, to see if I like the primary poster’s other entries. But I’ll still be grateful to the first blogger for pointing the way.

WordPress 2.5

I had already decided to dump e107, the CMS I was using on this site, and replace it with something better (easier to manage, faster loading, cleaner looking) when Word Press released version 2.5 out of beta. The timing was perfect. After trying out many platforms intended for both blogging and website creation, I’ve come to accept that Word Press offers the best experience for the website builder. I never could have created a layout, added all the widgets I wanted, imported posts, set permissions and had it all up and running within the same 5 hour window it took with Word Press had I used Dreamweaver or Contribute.

I’m composing this and you’re reading it on Word Press 2.5. There isn’t much different to see on your side of the screen, but the backend has undergone a major overhaul. The control center has been entirely redone, not so much with new controls and options as a reorganization of the former controls. It was a bit intimidating at first. I kept losing track of where I had to go to change a widget or add a link. Even the interface of the posting page has been redone. Selecting a category for a post has moved down below the fold, a less convenient place than before. With several scrollable windows on the page, it can be an awkward process getting down to those lists. The settings and plugin controls have been inexplicably moved to the right of the menu bar, separate from the other major options. I’m not sure what the point of that is, but once I adjust I don’t think it will be a real issue.

The inconveniences are few, though, while the improvements are worthwhile. I was able to import posts from three other blogs quite easily using the import option. The widget controls are much easier to use than in previous versions, and all the widgets I was using on other, older blogs, still functioned properly under this version.

I still wish we could change the color scheme of the backend. I’m so tired on what I call “internet blue”. I’m getting to where I won’t, if at all possible, have a blue layout on any of my sites.

All in all this appears to be a worthwhile upgrade. If you give in to the constant nagging on your older version of Word Press to upgrade your blog, just be sure you follow the upgrade suggestions. A full backup is always necessary, and don’t casually overwrite the /contents folder if you have plugins or themes you want to keep.

Now I have three more blogs to upgrade before it gets too late. If I can avoid checking FriendFeed for two hours, I should be able to get it done.

Quote for the day

“We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear — fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts, or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer.”

Hunter S. Thompson

Ben Stein Wins Money from Intelligent Design Community

My ability to appreciate absurdity is being taxed to the limit with this story;

Ben Stein, known for his lead role in the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and his Comedy Central show Win Ben Stein’s Money, believes in liberty and truth. In recognition of this, Biola University’s masters in science and religion program will present him with the 2008 Phillip E. Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth on March 27, a month before the release of his major controversial motion picture, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

In light of Stein’s contribution to the pursuit of liberty and truth, particularly as it relates to the field of Intelligent Design, he is being honored with the 2008 Johnson Award. The award ceremony will feature premiere clips from the forthcoming movie, the personal appearance of scientists who were expelled from their jobs because they are sympathetic to Intelligent Design, and will include a brief address by Stein.

Biola University, a Christian university in Southern California, established the Phillip E. Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth in 2004 to honor legal scholar and Berkeley law professor Phillip E. Johnson, who was the award’s first recipient. The award recognizes Johnson’s pivotal role in advancing our understanding of design in the universe by opening up informed dissent to Darwinian and materialistic theories of evolution. British philosopher Antony Flew, once considered the most prominent defender of atheism in the English-speaking world, became the second recipient of this award in 2006 for his Socratic approach of “following the evidence where it leads” and abandoning atheism on account of design arguments.

The sentences I made bold almost made me spit coffee on my keyboard.

In the dark

Bakunin vs. the gods

The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.
– Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State (1871), quoted from The Columbia Dictionary Of Quotations

People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy.
– Mikhail Bakunin, quoted from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief

Religion is a collective insanity.
– Mikhail Bakunin, from Rufus K Noyes, Views of Religion, quoted from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief

The idea of god implies the abdication of human reason & justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty & necessarily ends in the enslavement of manking both in theory & practice.
He who desires to worship god must harbor no childish illusions about the matter but bravely renounce his liberty & humanity.
– Mikhail Bakunin, his classic statement on the matter

All religions, with their gods, their demi-gods, and their prophets, their messiahs and their saints, were created by the prejudiced fancy of men who had not attained the full development and full possession of their faculties.
– Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State (1871), quoted from Emma Goldman, “The Philosophy of Atheism” (1916)

When a rationalist and believer clash

The outcome is no surprise to rationalists and atheists.

On 3 March 2008, in a popular TV show, Sanal Edamaruku, the president of Rationalist International, challenged India’s most “powerful” tantrik (black magician) to demonstrate his powers on him. That was the beginning of an unprecedented experiment. After all his chanting of mantra (magic words) and ceremonies of tantra failed, the tantrik decided to kill Sanal Edamaruku with the “ultimate destruction ceremony” on live TV. Sanal Edamaruku agreed and sat in the altar of the black magic ritual. India TV observed skyrocketing viewership rates.

Millions of people must have uttered a sigh of relief in front their TVs. Sanal was very much alive. Tantra power had miserably failed. Tantriks are creating such a scaring atmosphere that even people, who know that black magic has no base, can just break down out of fear, commented a scientist during the program. It needs enormous courage and confidence to challenge them by actually putting one’s life at risk, he said. By doing so, Sanal Edamaruku has broken the spell, and has taken away much of the fear of those who witnessed his triumph.

In this night, one of the most dangerous and wide spread superstitions in India suffered a severe blow.

Read the full story and watch the videos here.

Two reasons more people believe in gods than aliens

These may not be the only reasons more people believe in gods than aliens, but they’re the most obvious to me.

Since we have as much supporting evidence for the existence of aliens as we do gods, you’d think both would be equally embraced. Yet they aren’t, because…

…our interest in the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe is fairly recent. (Only in the last few hundred years have we come to better understand the requirements for life to exist. Only in the last century have we developed the means to explore the universe in such a way that the conditions that would permit life to exist might be detected. Within the last century we’ve come to accept that space flight is possible.)

…the reward for believing in gods is substantial while believing in aliens doesn’t have any pay-off. (Nearly every religion offers a reward for belief. Forgiveness for transgressions, eternal life, community with other believers, peace of mind, the belief you are loved and cared about. Belief in aliens doesn’t promise any benefit, temporal or eternal.)

The Whack-A-Mole Method of Ending Hate In Our Time

Originally submitted to David Farber’s Interesting People mailing list:

Clearly whatever it is that Dutch politician Geert Wilders wants to talk
about in his film is going to be the end of the internet. The news that
Network Solutions decided to pre-empt his use of a domain name registered
through them for the purpose of promoting his film need not be re-hashed
here.

However, before bemoaning yet another registrar freely deciding, as is its
right, with whom it chooses to do business, it’s important to look at the
big picture. No, it is not “censorship” for Network Solutions to decide how
it wants its services to be used. There are a number of internet registrars
all over the world, and as recently demonstrated with Enom having been
notified by the US State Department that, yes, the OFAC SDN list means
something, one might do well to select one’s registrar based in part on an
understanding of the legal climate where that registrar is located.

But, perhaps we might understand Network Solutions policy more clearly by
looking at domain names registered through NSI which freely promote killing
Muslims rather than merely making films about them. Take for example the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam, affectionately the Tamil Tigers – a nearly
universally recognized terrorist group perhaps best known for the
assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, but which has engaged in far more numerous
outright massacres in predominately Muslim areas of Sri Lanka.

The Tamil Tigers maintain at least two, if not more, domain names through
Network Solutions – eelam.com and eelamweb.com. Here, one can learn the
answers to all of your frequently asked questions about ethnic cleansing
such as at: http://www.eelamweb.com/faq/ which states “Muslims have been
asked to leave the Tamil Eelam territory until the independence of Tamil
Eelam.” This polite request is normally made at gunpoint during operations
of the Tamil Tigers.

So, the takeaway from these two actions of Network Solutions: (1)
prohibiting an NSI domain name to be used to promote an anti-Muslim film,
and (2) permitting two NSI domain names to be used to promote the mass
eviction and murder of Muslims in Sri Lanka; indicates that one needs to
apply a balanced perspective of how NSI would like its domain name services
to be used, before making rash judgments of alleged “bias”. If the
continued operation of eelam.com and eelamweb.com is any indication, NSI’s
view would appear to be that Mr. Wilders just isn’t going far enough.

Next up, the Islamic Army of Iraq, and their Louisiana brigade, courtesy of
iaisite.info, registered through Directnic.

John Berryhill, Ph.d., Esq.

While humorous, Mr. Berryhill’s comment does raise a serious question. What is the role of a host in monitoring and controlling the content of sites that register through them? If AT&T gets its way, webhosts may soon be legally and financially liable for the content carrid on their networks. Can we trust private companies to decide what is available on the internet?

Internet company suspends politician’s website over Qur’an film

Have the terrorists won yet?

An American internet company has inactivated the website of a Dutch right-wing politician, who was planning to release a critical film about the Qur’an, the Islamic holy book, on the site.

Network Solutions announced late Saturday that it had suspended the site, www.fitnathemovie, as the company assesses whether it contravenes its “acceptable use policy.”

Politician Geert Wilders says he’s made a 15-minute film as a warning to the  West about the teachings of the Qur’an.

Wilders is a well-known anti-Islamist who has called for a stop to immigration from Muslim countries and a halt to the building of new mosques in his country.

Wilders has said he’s not against Muslims but against their faith. He has previously talked about the “tsunami of Islamization” in the Netherlands, which is home to about one million Muslims.

After being turned down by at least four broadcasters in the Netherlands, Wilders announced this week that he planned to release Fitna  —the Koranic term for “strife” — on March 31 over the internet.

“If need be, I will personally distribute DVDs,” Wilders told Dutch news agency ANP after hearing about the website’s inactivation.

On Saturday, about 2,000 protesters gathered in downtown Amsterdam to demonstrate against Wilders and his film.

Calling their protest ”Netherlands shows its colours,” demonstrators say they were upset over what they saw as a right-wing witch hunt against Muslims.

Dutch officials fear the movie could spark violent protests in Muslim countries, and have emergency evacuation plans in place for their citizens in those countries.

Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende has said he rejects Wilders’s views, but supports his freedom of speech.  (Source)

The Muslim terrorists  have done better than killing all the infidels, they’ve made us afraid.  In our fear, we will do what they couldn’t, destroy Western civilization from within.  In our fear we’ll restrict liberty, bypass Constitutional protections and permit our government to act in any way they see fit…just save us from the terrorists.  We once thought the greatest threat to our way of life were the Japanese, the Germans, the Muslims.  We were wrong.  The greatest threat we face is our own fear, our own impotence to provide security while at the same time maintaining our freedom.

Atheism renounced to avoid working bank holiday weekend

Before you all go and get crazy about this story, please note the category. It’s just a bit of good old satire. I thought it was a rather good story to post for this particular Sunday.

Charles Richards, a previously strident atheist, was forced to renounce his beliefs under exerted pressure from his employer to work on Good Friday and Easter Monday.

‘My supervisor had approached me in the break room and asked me what I thought about the resurrection of Jesus Christ,’ explained Richards. ‘Now I’d had a bad morning so was more than happy to debate with a religious nutter, and decided to dismiss millennia of spiritual reflection and meditation by some of the greatest minds of their time with a joke about the Easter Bunny. But I wasn’t prepared for what happened next.’

Instead of the indignant response Richards expected, his supervisor began to ask him if he believed that in the modern secular age the last vestiges of religious observation should be removed from British society. ‘It was then that I clicked,’ said Richards, ‘we’re supposed to be open for calls over the bank holiday weekend and he was looking for volunteers. I started backtracking faster than Rowan Williams saying there might be something in Sharia Law.’

Scrambling for a way to avoid coming in on the holidays, Richards spotted something on the break room bench. ‘I just really went for it, saying ‘Look! What’s that on that pastry? It’s a sign! Christ will rise again!’ and started genuflecting and crossing myself furiously. The boss just stood there looking at me a little strangely. I then made a break for it before he realised I’d been worshipping a hot cross bun, and hid in the toilets till home time.’ At 5.31 Richards left the office to return to the bosom of his Christian family. He plans to rejoice in the resurrection of Christ our Lord by buying a new sofa at DFS.

He also takes it as an article of faith that their sale will end at 8pm Monday. (Source)

They Told You Not To Reply

From the Washington Post online (warning: popups):

When businesses want to communicate with their customers via e-mail, many send messages with a bogus return address, e.g. “somethinghere@donotreply.com.” The practice is meant to communicate to recipients that any replies will go unread.

But when those messages are sent to an inactive e-mail address or the recipient ignores the instruction and replies anyway, the missives don’t just disappear into the digital ether.

Instead, they land in Chet Faliszek’s e-mail box.

As owner of www.donotreply.com, the Seattle-based programmer receives millions of wayward e-mails each week, including a great many missives destined for executives at Fortune 500 companies or bank customers, even sensitive messages sent by government personnel and contractors.

But many of the misdirected e-mails amount to serious security and privacy violations. In February, Faliszek began receiving e-mails sent by Yardville National Bank in New Jersey (now part of PNC). Included in the message were PDF documents detailing every computer the bank owned that was not currently patched against the latest security vulnerabilities. Faliszek has so far amassed more than 200 reports about the bank detailing computers, full branch reports and graphs showing the top 10 most vulnerable systems.

In a blog post cleverly titled “What’s in Your Return Address Field,” Faliszek posted another bank screw up last month after he began receiving replies from Capital One customers inquiring about various details of their accounts. He says Capital One appears to have used donotreply.com as the return address for automated payment transfers and debits set up by customers.

Faliszek also routinely receives bizarre e-mails from Kellog Brown & Root, a Houston-based engineering company and former subsidiary of Halliburton. He said it looks like someone at KBR has set up a system that scans incoming faxes as PDFs and mails them off to various recipients.

“It’s really kind of weird, because I’ll get these faxes from Iraq, where they talk about various camps, when and where they’re moving the support equipment, what they’re buying, accident reports, and information on people applying for jobs,” Faliszek said.

With the exception of extreme cases like those mentioned above, Faliszek says he long ago stopped trying to alert companies about the e-mails he was receiving. It’s just not worth it: Faliszek said he is constantly threatened with lawsuits from companies who for one reason or another have a difficult time grasping why he is in possession of their internal documents and e-mails.

“I’ve had people yell at me, saying these e-mails are marked private and that I shouldn’t read them,” Faliszek said. “They get all frantic like I’ve done something to them, particularly when you talk to the non-technical people at these companies.”

Instead, he blogs about the most interesting ones. Companies embarrassed by having their e-mails posted online can get him to pull the entries from his blog for a small payment. The normal fee to be removed from the site is proof of a donation to an animal protective league or humane society. So far, Faliszek says his blog has raised roughly $5,000 for local dog pounds.

Think twice, and check the return email address, before you hit that reply button.

Time magazine invents facts to claim that Americans support Bush’s domestic spying abuses

Glenn Greenwald, in a Salon.com opinion piece, provides a refutation of the points in the previous Time article. While he doesn’t challenge the underlying premise that the U.S. government is acting in ways detrimental to and incompatible with our Constitution, he does question the conclusion Time reached, that Americans just don’t care.

No matter how corrupt and sloppy the establishment press becomes, they always find a way to go lower. Time Magazine has just published what it purports to be a news article by Massimo Calabresi claiming that “nobody cares” about the countless abuses of spying powers by the Bush administration; that “Americans are ready to trade diminished privacy, and protection from search and seizure, in exchange for the promise of increased protection of their physical security”; and that the case against unchecked government surveillance powers “hasn’t convinced the people.” Not a single fact — not one — is cited to support these sweeping, false opinions.

Worse still — way worse — this “news article” decrees the Bush administration to be completely innocent, even well-motivated, even in those instances where technical, irrelevant lawbreaking has been found…

Does Calabresi or his Time editors have the slightest idea how secret, illegal spying powers have been used, towards what ends they’ve been employed and with what motives? No, they have absolutely no idea. Not even members of Congressional Intelligence Committees know because the Bush administration has kept all of that concealed. So Time just makes up facts to defend the Bush administration with wholly baseless statements that one would expect to come pouring out of the mouths only of Dana Perino and Bill Kristol — the “motivating factor” for secret, illegal spying was nothing “other than law and order or national security.” This article literally has more factual errors — pure, retraction-level falsehoods — than it has paragraphs. It makes Joe Klein look like a knowledgable and conscientious surveillance expert. It’s one of the most falsehood-plagued articles I’ve seen in quite some time.

The proposition that “polls consistently” find that Americans don’t mind incursions into their civil liberties is a rank falsehood.

Read the full article for a well-supported contention that Americans do care about the situation. What to do about it may well be the most important question in the upcoming election.

Do Americans Care About Big Brother?

Via Time Magazine online:

A quick tally of the record of civil liberties erosion in the United States since 9/11 suggests that the majority of Americans are ready to trade diminished privacy, and protection from search and seizure, in exchange for the promise of increased protection of their physical security. Polling consistently supports that conclusion, and Congress has largely behaved accordingly, granting increased leeway to law enforcement and the intelligence community to spy and collect data on Americans. Even when the White House, the FBI or the intelligence agencies have acted outside of laws protecting those rights — such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — the public has by and large shrugged and, through their elected representatives, suggested changing the laws to accommodate activities that may be in breach of them.

In all the examples of diminished civil liberties, there are few, if any, where the motivating factor was something other than law and order or national security. There are no scandalous examples of the White House using the Patriot Act powers for political purposes or of individual agents using them for personal gain. The Justice IG report released Thursday, for example, examined some 50,000 National Security Letters issued in 2006 to see whether the FBI misused that specialized kind of warrantless subpoena. The IG found some continuing abuse of the power, but blamed it for the most part on sloppiness and bad management, not nefarious intent. In a press release accompanying the report, Fine said, “The FBI and Department of Justice have shown a commitment to addressing these problems.”

For now, however, civil libertarians will have to continue to argue that the danger lies not in how the government’s expanded powers are being used now, but how they might be used in the future. So far, that argument hasn’t convinced the people.

There’s an old joke; The two most destructive attitudes in society are ignorance and apathy…but I don’t know and I don’t care. It seems this may no longer be a joke.

Do the words attributed to Ben Franklin apply here? “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety“, used as a motto on the title page of An Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania (1759). It could be argued that the colonialists could not envision the threats we now face and that Franklin (or Richard Jackson or whoever) would not have been so absolute in saying that had they lived today.

Is security and national defense sufficient cause to restrict liberty and add conditions to our freedoms? Or are those concepts being used by a malevolent government in order to suppress dissent and control the population through fear and intimidation?

These are perhaps the most important questions we face as we move into the 21st century.

Atheists and free thinkers on Twitter, FriendFeed

Twitter and FriendFeed are becoming popular ways for like-minded people to communicate and keep in touch.

So how many of you use those services? It would be cool to share our usernames and build a network of atheist and free thinking folk.  You may also want to check out Twhirl as a Twitter desktop client.

I’ll go first. I’m jeber on both services. Among my Twitter friends are several atheists and free thinkers. Add them as your friends. Let’s talk.

Playing with memes

I just heard a TV ad for a clothing store that repeats the phrase “Family Values” several times. Ostensibly they’re referring to values (savings) for the whole family.

On another level, they’re parroting a phrase popular in society. That some customers might associate this store with a religious right catchphrase that appears to imply wholesomeness and decency is a subtle attempt to manipulate opinion. Of course all advertising is an attempt to manipulate opinion, but I don’t often see advertisers trying to incorporate phrases more appropriate to the political spectrum to sell dresses and shirts.

Being aware of these efforts to put thoughts in your head that have nothing to do with the product in question is the first step in resisting such efforts.

Further erosions of British liberty

Is the only way to effectively combat terrorism the creation of a police state?

MI5 seeks powers to trawl records in new terror hunt

Millions of commuters could have their private movements around cities secretly monitored under new counter-terrorism powers being sought by the security services.

Records of journeys made by people using smart cards that allow 17 million Britons to travel by underground, bus and train with a single swipe at the ticket barrier are among a welter of private information held by the state to which MI5 and police counter-terrorism officers want access in order to help identify patterns of suspicious behaviour.

The request by the security services, described by shadow Home Secretary David Davis last night as ‘extraordinary’, forms part of a fierce Whitehall debate over how much access the state should have to people’s private lives in its efforts to combat terrorism.

It comes as the Cabinet Office finalises Gordon Brown’s new national security strategy, expected to identify a string of new threats to Britain – ranging from future ‘water wars’ between countries left drought-ridden by climate change to cyber-attacks using computer hacking technology to disrupt vital elements of national infrastructure.

The fear of cyber-warfare has climbed Whitehall’s agenda since last year’s attack on the Baltic nation of Estonia, in which Russian hackers swamped state servers with millions of electronic messages until they collapsed. The Estonian defence and foreign ministries and major banks were paralysed, while even its emergency services call system was temporarily knocked out: the attack was seen as a warning that battles once fought by invading armies or aerial bombardment could soon be replaced by virtual, but equally deadly, wars in cyberspace.

While such new threats may grab headlines, the critical question for the new security agenda is how far Britain is prepared to go in tackling them. What are the limits of what we want our security services to know? And could they do more to identify suspects before they strike?

One solution being debated in Whitehall is an unprecedented unlocking of data held by public bodies, such as the Oyster card records maintained by Transport for London and smart cards soon to be introduced in other cities in the UK, for use in the war against terror. The Office of the Information Commissioner, the watchdog governing data privacy, confirmed last night that it had discussed the issue with government but declined to give details, citing issues of national security.

Currently the security services can demand the Oyster records of specific individuals under investigation to establish where they have been, but cannot trawl the whole database. But supporters of calls for more sharing of data argue that apparently trivial snippets – like the journeys an individual makes around the capital – could become important pieces of the jigsaw when fitted into a pattern of other publicly held information on an individual’s movements, habits, education and other personal details. That could lead, they argue, to the unmasking of otherwise undetected suspects.

Individuals wrongly identified as suspicious might lose high-security jobs, or have their immigration status brought into doubt, he said. Ministers are also understood to share concerns over civil liberties, following public opposition to ID cards, and the debate is so sensitive that it may not even form part of Brown’s published strategy.

But if there is no consensus yet on the defence, there is an emerging agreement on the mode of attack. The security strategy will argue that in the coming decades Britain faces threats of a new and different order. And its critics argue the government is far from ready.

(Source)

What they need are some technologically intelligent people who can conceive of ways to protect their citizens without violating all their liberties.

English police want a children’s DNA database

Primary school children should be eligible for the DNA database if they exhibit behaviour indicating they may become criminals in later life, according to Britain’s most senior police forensics expert.Gary Pugh, director of forensic sciences at Scotland Yard and the new DNA spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), said a debate was needed on how far Britain should go in identifying potential offenders, given that some experts believe it is possible to identify future offending traits in children as young as five.’If we have a primary means of identifying people before they offend, then in the long-term the benefits of targeting younger people are extremely large,’ said Pugh. ‘You could argue the younger the better. Criminologists say some people will grow out of crime; others won’t. We have to find who are possibly going to be the biggest threat to society.’

Pugh admitted that the deeply controversial suggestion raised issues of parental consent, potential stigmatisation and the role of teachers in identifying future offenders, but said society needed an open, mature discussion on how best to tackle crime before it took place. There are currently 4.5 million genetic samples on the UK database – the largest in Europe – but police believe more are required to reduce crime further. ‘The number of unsolved crimes says we are not sampling enough of the right people,’ Pugh told The Observer. However, he said the notion of universal sampling – everyone being forced to give their genetic samples to the database – is currently prohibited by cost and logistics.

A recent report from the think-tank Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) called for children to be targeted between the ages of five and 12 with cognitive behavioural therapy, parenting programmes and intensive support. Prevention should start young, it said, because prolific offenders typically began offending between the ages of 10 and 13. Julia Margo, author of the report, entitled ‘Make me a Criminal’, said: ‘You can carry out a risk factor analysis where you look at the characteristics of an individual child aged five to seven and identify risk factors that make it more likely that they would become an offender.’ However, she said that placing young children on a database risked stigmatising them by identifying them in a ‘negative’ way.

Shami Chakrabarti, director of the civil rights group Liberty, denounced any plan to target youngsters. ‘Whichever bright spark at Acpo thought this one up should go back to the business of policing or the pastime of science fiction novels,’ she said. ‘The British public is highly respectful of the police and open even to eccentric debate, but playing politics with our innocent kids is a step too far.’

Last week it emerged that the number of 10 to 18-year-olds placed on the DNA database after being arrested will have reached around 1.5 million this time next year. Since 2004 police have had the power to take DNA samples from anyone over the age of 10 who is arrested, regardless of whether they are later charged, convicted, or found to be innocent. (Source)

One has to wonder if children who refuse to believe in gods or otherwise think for themselves will be suspect.

A slice of (real) life