More on School Entry Wellbeing Report

Firstly, a correction to my earlier post: the organisation mentioned was Big Brother Watch, not Statewatch. This has been corrected in the relevant post.

Secondly, the story headlines this morning's Lincolnshire Echo:

Parents of Lincolnshire children who have just started school have been sent an 83-point Big Brother-style questionnaire probing into family life.

Lincolnshire Community Health Services has begun sending out questionnaires to parents of every child who entered reception class in September.

Along with routine health questions, parents are asked whether their child lies, has temper tantrums, steals from home or has at least one good friend.

Other questions directed at parents include "did you enjoy school?" and "how does your child engage/connect with strangers?"

Lincolnshire Community Health Services insists the pilot questionnaire is confidential and will only be viewed by school nurses.

To repeat: it is not compulsory to fill in this questionnaire.

It is intrusive, unnecessary and impertinent.

If you get one, bin it - and complain.

Dutch Drivers To Be Taxed On Road Time - The EU Future

The Associated Press: Dutch drivers to pay tax on road time, not on car

AMSTERDAM — Dutch drivers will pay less to buy a car but will be charged tax for every mile on the road, a system the government says will reduce traffic jams, fatal accidents and carbon emissions.

The Cabinet approved a bill Friday calling for drivers of an average passenger car to pay a base rate of euro0.03 per 1 kilometer (7 US cents per mile), beginning in 2012. Drivers of heavier, more polluting vehicles will pay more, and the cost will go up for driving in peak hours.

GPS will track the time, hour and place each car moves and send the data to a billing agency.

But the annual road tax and purchase tax for new cars will be abolished, reducing the price of a new car 25 percent, the Transport Ministry said.

Nearly 6 out of 10 drivers will benefit under the system, the ministry said, but government revenue would remain the same. Public transportation, including taxis, will be exempt.

The kilometer tax has been debated for several years, amid concerns that it would unjustly raise the cost of car travel and intrude on privacy.

The ministry said, however, the travel information would be protected, and the data would not be accessible to the government for other purposes.

The ministry calculated that overall traffic will drop about 15 percent, peak-hour congestion will be halved, traffic deaths will fall 7 percent and carbon emissions from road travel will be cut by 10 percent.

The tax will increase every year until 2018 and could be adjusted if it fails to change traffic patterns.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

That would work a treat here in the UK, wouldn't it? I can just see our government 'protecting' our data. And I certainly wouldn't be happy with being tracked everywhere I'm driving.

This is the future of driving in the EU - road pricing is one of the things the colleagues are keen to establish whether we want it or not.

Put Politicians Under 24 Hour Surveillance

Worst families in Britain will be put in 'sin bins' - Telegraph.

This scheme ought to be extended to all politicians, their officials, advisers, consultants and PR people.

Badly conceived, ethically unacceptable, unworkable, intrusive and expensive. A typical stunt by a flow-blown corpse of a government.

Thomas Paine:

But how often is the natural propensity to society disturbed or destroyed by the operations of government! When the latter, instead of being ingrafted on the principles of the former, assumes to exist for itself, and acts by partialities of favour and oppression, it becomes the cause of the mischiefs it ought to prevent.

Family Intervention Projects

Comments by Anticant.

The Big Brother Future The EU Is Planning For You

C/o I Hate Jacqui Smith another powerful and disturbing reason to get us out of the EU: The EU Future Group's plans to put the whole of Europe under total surveillance.

“Every object the individual uses, every transaction they make and almost everywhere they go will create a detailed digital record. This will generate a wealth of information for public security organisations, and create huge opportunities for more effective and productive public security efforts." (EU Council Presidency paper)

Details at Statewatch.

Here is a great example of why the EU actually prefers general ignorance and apathy about its activities. People may think it is irrelevant to their everyday lives. They wouldn't think that if they understood the following:

The EU is responsible for:

the introduction of the Intercept Modernisation Programme which requires the logging of the details of ALL our telephone and internet activity;

the requirement of all first-time adult passport applicants to attend an interrogation centre (at their own expense and in their own time) to prove their identity and, later, to provide fingerprints;

the issuing of driving licences which bear a photograph of the holder, which has to be renewed every ten years (at the holder's expense and under penalty of a fine for not renewing in time);

plans to create an EU Health Card containing all your medical details;

plans to create an EU-PNR system, ie a Passenger Name Record database that records all details of travel by individuals into and out of the EU, but also at some stage all travel within the EU (so much for 'free movement');

plans to issue 'e-government' cards, ie ID cards, which will be necessary for people to access healthcare, library services, benefits, etc.

There's more, of course, but read Tony Bunyan's analysis at Statewatch.

All of this will cost enormous amounts of money - our money, that is, since the EU, like all governments is parasitical and unproductive. It won't work properly (thank God) most of the time because the computer systems won't be up to scratch and no country will be able to employ the enormous numbers of people needed to operate things.

But it will cause immense amounts of inconvenience and cost to us; people will be harassed and wrongly accused; glitches in the system will mean that fines will be sent to the wrong people, that delays will occur, that records will not be updated correctly and in time, that people will be denied healthcare, benefits, bank accounts, etc.

And also that hundreds of thousands of 'professionals' will have access to the most private details of our lives, and that criminals will have a field day stealing data and using it for their own ends.

All for our own good, of course, to protect us from criminals and terrorists.

The other point to remember is that these and hundreds of other such laws and planned laws come down from the EU with either no resistance from our own government, or, worse, with its backing. Once they become directives our government, whoever is in place, has to enact them - the EU is our boss and our politicians are its servants - not ours.

Bring These Bastards Down NOW

The Observer headline is "Fury as Commons denied DNA vote", though the word "fury" is probably overdone, considering the supine nature of the Commons to date on any of these surveillance matters.

Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, has been warned that the government risks further damaging the public's faith in politics after it emerged that plans for the police to keep innocent people's DNA profiles for up to 12 years will become law without a Commons vote.

What this action shows is the complete contempt the government has for us and our rights. It's incredible that even in their death throes they are still arrogant enought to push this kind of legislation through.

These bastards have to be removed as soon as possible and it must be made clear to the incoming government that ALL of the authoritarian surveillance legislation introduced by Labour, from RIPA onwards, must be totally scrapped. Otherwise there will be strife.

Useless Surveillance Generation EU Bilge

* Perhaps we should should all chip in some extra cash for MI5 so they can recruit more people to follow up all that data the've been collecting. The fact that they had been watching a couple of the July 7 bombers for a number of years but couldn't afford any spooks to stop them (or be bothered to notify the local police) says a lot about the people running our surveillance society.

Imagine the even vaster amounts of data now being collected and which will be collected if the National Identity Register and ID card set up come on stream. Pointless, expensive and unjustified. You can bet they won't catch any terrorists or criminals as a result but there will be a lot of ordinary innocent people harassed, bullied and wrongly convicted.

* In Euro Fantasy Land Mary Dejevsky reckons her generation has failed to 'promote a vision of Europe'. What a surprise. As I've said before, the EU doesn't really like too much publicity, because if people started to find out the truth the whole project would begin to unravel.

The EU is a new form of organisation, in which a little sovereignty is sacrificed, by consent, to the greater good. We Europeans can live, work and travel with a freedom not experienced except by the rich in the days of the Grand Tour. Most internal EU borders have melted away, while a common sense of security has given each individual nation the security to be itself.

Oh, the wonders of the EU. How could we survive without it?

Data Surveillance Legislation UK

Following the last post and comment re: Right To Reply, here are basic details of the legislation:

The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA); the British government paves the way for total communications surveillance. Comment and explanation from the Guardian. The Act is currently being reviewed in the light of concerns that local authorities have been using its powers for inappropriate purposes.

Data Retention Directive 2006/24/EC from the EU laying down requirements for all ISPs and telephone companies to log and store personal data. Apparently the British government lobbied hard for this legislation.

Transposition of part of above Directive into UK law by Statutory Instrument, 2007 (the part covering telephone companies – the remainder, covering ISPs to be implemented in 2009). Further comment. The relevant Statutory Instrument.

Transposition of remaining part of above Directive concerning ISPs into UK law, 2009 (the part covering ISPs and all internet activity). Further comment. Schedule to relevant Statutory Instrument.

The Intercept Modernisation Programme, ie the government's own plan to create a central database of all recorded phone and internet data.

The government appears to drop plans for a centralised database, April 2009.

Any broken, incorrect links, please let me know. And any more direct links to the legislation.

More Nonsense from the Braindead Brigade

The Times reports that officials have 'floated the idea' of compelling all buyers of new mobile phones to register their details on a government database. This is, apparently, to combat (you've guessed it) terrorism and crime. Because, as any fule kno, crims love prepay phones because they're anonymous, so the government doesn't know what they're up to. Except in the case of the Omagh bombers, where they were tracking two of them via their mobiles but still did nothing to stop them blowing up lots of people.

The idea is based on the IMEI number of each phone, not the SIM. This is programmed into the hardware and can, supposedly, be changed. Free software is available if you want to do this - which you might, just out of bloody-mindedness. Be warned, though, because changing the IMEI number of your own phone is ILLEGAL in the UK.

If you don't fancy the idea of having this extra layer of surveillance imposed on you, then you can keep on using your existing phone or only use old or recycled ones. Or perhaps not even bother with one at all.

Don't forget that soon all the details of all your phone calls (not the content - not yet, anyway), mobile, landline and internet, plus all your internet usage, will be logged and stored automatically. See my previous post on this.

Have a nice day.

Creationism in British Schools Row

Clarification re: Professor Reiss's article about how to deal with pupils who raise the question of creationism in science classes. How the media can distort anything.

See earlier post.

Plus an article I missed, by Katharine Whitehorn, laying into the government's mania for surveillance.

Unions Oppose ID Card Scheme

The TUC has pledged to oppose ID cards and the National Identity database. About time. Probably the first significant move against New Labour's Stasi state, since what's needed is organisation, awareness and action; which is harder to achieve with individuals or disparate groups.

David Cameron, Leader in Waiting, has already pledged his opposition both to the ID cards scheme AND the National Identity database and said he will scrap them. Whether he will in fact do this when he's in power is another thing, of course, so he needs to be aware that there will be trouble if he doesn't keep his word.