Calls to ban 'anti-teen' device

Campaigners are calling for a ban on a device that emits a high-pitched sound to disperse groups of teenagers, saying it is not a fair way to treat them.

There are estimated to be 3,500 of the devices, known as the Mosquito, in use in England, many at shopping centres.

Their sound causes discomfort to young ears - but their frequency is above the normal hearing range of people over 25.

England's children's commissioner backs a ban but stores say the devices can be useful against anti-social youths.

What humans can hear

The devices, which exploit the fact that a person's ability to hear high frequencies generally declines once they reach their 20s, have proved popular with councils and police who aim to tackle anti-social behaviour by using them to disperse groups of youths.

But a new campaign called "Buzz off", led by the children's commissioner for England and backed by groups including civil liberties group Liberty, is calling for them to be banned.

Full Story here

Tony Blair is Resurgent on the International Scene

Will the British former Prime Minister Tony Blair be the first person to hold the powerful new position of President of the European Council, due to be established in 2009? This is the question being asked in British, European and international political circles, and increasingly the answer is 'yes'.

It is understood that Blair wants the job - on condition that it is not just a symbolic or bureaucratic job but one that brings him real political power, fulfilling his dream of becoming a major player on the international political stage. However, the position is a new post created under the Lisbon Treaty signed last December at a summit in the Portuguese capital, and its exact nature, scope and power are still not decided. In fact the first person to hold the position will play a major part and influence in how the role of EU President develops. Some of Blair's critics fear he will use the position to influence EU policy on the basis of what many see as his simplistic, shallow view of the world and of politics.

Blair is consulting some of his closest allies over a campaign to the launched later this year to become the EU President. The strongest public supporter of his candidacy for the post is the French president Nicola Sarkozy.

Blair has discussed the possibility of his being considered for the position of EU President with his successor as Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. Downing Street is reported to be willing to give his backing to Blair's candidacy, but it is urging Blair to declare publicly his interest in the job soon. In reality, Brown has little choice but to support Blair as a British candidate for the job. However, given the past history of rivalry and hostility between Blair and Brown, Brown must have mixed feelings about the prospect of Blair becoming EU President.

Full Story here

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 ... all » repressive legislation.

Since terrorism has become a global threat, especially after 9/11, governments all over the world have started enforcing laws which, so the governments say, should increase national security.

These laws obviously aim at another goal: the states gaining more and more control of their citizens at the cost of our privacy and freedom.




http://www.huesforalice.com/bbs/

Exosquad NWO Defense Video

Exosquad was a cartoon that ran from 1993-1995. The writers were obviously clued in as many of the issues covered foretold events more than a decade later. In this clip, the bad guys force everyone to attend "civil registration" where an ID chip is implanted under their skin as a "New World Order" is announced.

Gordon 'New World Order' Brown.

Bush Pleased on Intelligence Bill

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Bush on Wednesday urged the House to complete work on new rules for government eavesdropping on phone calls and e-mails and he said he will not sign a temporary extension of the law.

The president said the legislation is necessary to determine who terrorists are talking to, what they are saying and what they are planning. He urged the House to act promptly.

"The time for debate is over," said the president.

Source

Arrested, caged and DNA tested - for using MP3

A commuter was arrested at gunpoint and had his DNA and fingerprints taken simply for listening to his MP3 player while waiting for a bus.

Darren Nixon was surrounded by armed police after his music player was mistaken for a gun.

When a passer-by saw the 28-year-old get out his black Philips machine to change tracks, she panicked and dialled 999.

Police tracked Mr Nixon using CCTV. As he got off the bus home from work he was surrounded by a firearms unit, who bundled him into a van.

He was then put in a cell and his fingerprints, DNA and mugshot were taken before he was released.

Although police realised it was a false alarm, Mr Nixon, from Stoke-on-Trent, now has to live with his DNA stored on a national database.

The force will also keep on record that he was arrested on suspicion of a firearms offence.

Mr Nixon said: 'It was unreal – I had a completely clean record before this and have always been a law-abiding citizen.' The mechanic said that, as he got off the bus, he saw a policeman gesture but could not hear what he said.

Mr Nixon added: 'As I got closer, I could see that two of the cops had guns. My heart was racing a mile a minute. One of them was hiding behind a car door, looking down his sight at me, and the other was shouting orders and pointing a gun at me.

'I turned the music off and they were telling me to put my hands up in the air.'

DNA records are kept for life so that they can be matched to future samples.

Even suspects who are wrongfully arrested normally stay on the database. Staffordshire Police said a member of the public reported seeing a man pull a gun from his pocket, grip it with both hands and aim.

A spokesman added: 'An operation was put in place and a man matching the description was detained.'

Story here

When surveillance cameras talk.

Big Brother is not only watching you; in Barking and Dagenham, Big Brother wants a word. The disembodied voices of authority offering advice and warnings that now issue as if from thin air in the hardscrabble east London borough are, in fact, talking CCTV cameras — the latest high-tech weapon in the war on littering, graffiti, vandalism and other antisocial behavior. Sixteen of the borough's 84 surveillance cameras have been wired for sound, making London's first video monitoring network with a broadcasting capacity. A second borough, Southwark, will soon adopt the same system.

Both communities are among the 20 nationwide awarded $50,000 grants by Britain's Home Office to test the cameras, following an initial trial run last year in the Northern city of Middlesborough. The talking cameras are the latest advance in a country that's embraced video surveillance with an enthusiasm that would make Orwell shudder. Liberty, a civil liberties group, conservatively estimates there are 4.2 million CCTV cameras currently in operation in the UK, one for every 14 residents. Anyone living or working in London will likely be captured on camera 300 times a day, the group claims. Indeed, the government's information commissioner, Richard Thomas, has called Britain a "surveillance society" in danger of becoming overly reliant on tracking technologies.

Video here

Full story here

State spying that would make the Stasi proud.

When it was passed into law, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act
(2000) sounded a pretty innocuous piece of legislation. But in truth it represented a significant victory for the busybody state over our ancient liberties.

Labour claimed it was responding to demands from civil liberties campaigners for more control over state snooping.

But it soon became clear that the legislation which Jack Straw, the then Home Secretary, was introducing would have the opposite effect, massively expanding the ability of the public sector to pry into our private lives.

The Act, which has been quietly amended several times (each time handing more powers to the public sector), now gives an unprecedented range of state agencies the right to listen to our phone conversations, tap our emails and open our post.

In the last months of 2006, 960 new applications for the right to peer into the private lives of Britons were made every day.

It is a level of Government surveillance that would make even the Stasi, the former East German secret police renowned as the world's most effective intelligence agency, proud.

There are three different types of surveillance. The first, interception of communications - listening in while people are on the phone, or watching what we do on the internet - is the most difficult to justify.

But the grounds for interception are so wide as to allow most requests to be approved. As well as the more predictable excuse of "national security", they include "safeguarding the economic well-being of the UK".
The police, the security services and Customs can all use this technique but they need authorisation from the Home Secretary herself or, in urgent cases, get temporary permission from one of her senior officials.

The second type is surveillance - old-fashioned spying. The list of possible justifications for this is absurdly long - including "to prevent and detect crime or prevent disorder, public safety, public health, to assess or collect any tax, duty, levy or other charge payable to a government department". Just about any of us could be under surveillance using one of this list.

Most worryingly, a long list of government agencies - including 474 councils - can put us under the spotlight. Senior officials in each one can simply give the go-ahead and apply for a rubber stamp to be given later by the Interception Commissioner.

This Commissioner, former judge Sir Paul Kennedy, with a team of five inspectors, is supposed to check to make sure that all the bugging and spying waived through by the Home Secretary or others has been justified.
His report identifies more than 1,000 cases over a period of nine months where he found that the rules had been broken.

The third type of surveillance is the most common - access to communications data.

This includes discovering the identities of who we phone and which internet sites we visit. This information is even easier for public authorities to obtain with relatively junior officials able to authorise it.
Later, as in the case of surveillance, justification for needing this information is considered by overworked bureaucrats accountable to the Interception Commissioner.

But by the time his staff gets round to looking at the paperwork, the trading standards officers down at the town hall, for example, may have been peering at your phone and internet records for more than a year.
There is a tribunal to which you can complain, but since virtually no one under surveillance will know they are being watched, the tribunal isn't busy and has virtually never found in favour of a complainant.

How did the Government get away with this? Well, the Lords did make a fuss at the time. Tory peer Lord Northesk said it "sanctioned mass domestic surveillance measures".

The Government appeared to be forced into a climbdown. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) initially only covered the nine most crucial law enforcement agencies (police, the taxman, the intelligence agencies etc).
But this merely delayed the stealthy march of Big Brother. In 2004, the number of groups with the right to poke in our lives expanded to 792; the laws to allow this had been slipped quietly through the Commons by David Blunkett.

As usual, Whitehall got its way by waiting for the fuss to die down. Incidentally, the only group with an exemption from being bugged are MPs themselves.

But the Act didn't merely extend the rights of bureaucrats to check on us, it also forced the larger internet service providers to build into their systems the technological capability to cater for all this snooping.

In practice, the result was that "black boxes" were installed in all ISPs, copying all the information available to them straight to the security services.

Then, when MI5 or the police obtain an authorisation for surveillance, they merely tap into the black box. In return, the internet companies have been able to recoup some of their costs from the taxpayer.

While writing this , I made several phone calls and looked at a number of sources on the internet. If anyone in Whitehall can think of a plausible reason why this post threatens the economic security of Britain, or any of the myriad excuses detailed above, they will be able with use of a key board ,to see who I spoke to and where I went on the net, to conduct my research.
(thanks to narvick devil for the post)here