Gordon Brown (the ugly one on the left) congratulates Colonel Gaddafi, thinking he is Sarah Boyle, winner of Britain's Got Talent

Over the past three days, as the Lockerbie ‘terrorist’ release turns into a full-blown international incident, we have heard not one word, or even a Twitter, from the man who saved the wurreld (and its banks). This is highly unusual; Gordon and his wife Sarah Twittered from Inverkilliecrankie, or wherever they are on holiday, catching crabs and burying each other in the sand, when the ungrateful Evil Empire dissed the NHS. This time it’s serious. Somebody gave Gordon’s independent-minded fellow Jocks a pass to give Abdulbasset al-Megrahi, the only person convicted for the Lockerbie bombing, a get out of gaol free card on the spurious pretext that he had less than three months to live.

Let’s leave aside the mountain of evidence that al Megrahi and Libya probably didn’t do it. He was threatening to appeal, a process which would have certainly opened the UK and US to wide and embarrassing scrutiny of their highly circumstantial fingering of Libya, then THE axis of the axis of evil, now everybody’s best friend and a bulwark against terror. Blame switched from Syria, the HQ of the PFLP- GQ terrorist cell allegedly paid by Iran to carry out the bombing as revenge for the downing of Iran Air Flight 655 six months earlier (1988) by the USS Vincennes, killing 290 civilians, when Syria joined the Bush 1 and Thatcher ‘Coalition of the Willing’ in the first Gulf War. Let’s ignore Scottish due process which dictates that a terminally ill prisoner should be released on compassionate grounds to die in dignity. Let’s ignore the oft-repeated fact that post-devolution, Scotland makes its own decisions in law. Let’s try and pretend that Britain isn’t the 51st US state, even if the antics of the past few years have understandably left the opposite impression.

Let’s try and focus on the facts. Last Friday UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband furiously demanded that BBC news presenter John Humphrys retract the ‘slur’ that the FCO had anything to do with it. Today’s Sunday Times revealed that Ivan Lewis, UK Foreign Minister responsible for Libya, ‘is said to have written to the Scottish government, encouraging officials to send home’ al-Megrahi. Ten days ago ‘Lord’ Peter Mandelson, Business Secretary and de facto ruler of Great Britain, admitted discussing the subject a couple of weeks ago with Colonel Gaddafi’s son Saif at the Rothschild villa in Corfu. Today, after a mysterious prostate operation (in sympathy with al Megrahi or the result of some other sort of probe?) Mandelson broke his own uncharacteristic silence to declare it ‘offensive to claim’ that this meeting was connected to the release of the Libyan or to trade deals, despite the fact that Saif-al-Islam Gaddafi had emphatically declared the opposite. Colonel Gaddafi, meanwhile, has effusively thanked just about everybody in the UK:

Sarkozy is pissed off because he thought he was welcoming Michael Jackson to the G20 Summit. All Gaddafi had to offer was unlimited supplies of oil, gas and cash, though he performed a passable moonwalk.

“To my friends in Scotland, the Scottish National Party, and Scottish prime minister, and the foreign secretary, I praise their courage for having proved their independence in decision making despite the unacceptable and unreasonable measures that they faced. Nevertheless they took this courageously right and humanitarian decision.” And I say to my friend Brown, the Prime Minister of Britain, his Government, the Queen of Britain, Elizabeth, and Prince Andrew, who all contributed to encouraging the Scottish Government to take this historic and courageous decision, despite the obstacles.” (Reuters).

Barack Obama came slowly out of the traps to declare the decision ‘highly objectionable.’ Despite the fact that the release of al Megrahi was ‘on the agenda at every meeting between Blair and Libyan officials’ it was highly OK for St Tony to broker a return of Libya to the international coalition of the hypocrites in 2004 when we realised we were running out of oil and there was rather a lot of it there, not to mention a strongman capable of bullying the bejasus out of many of the the other whackjobs in Africa, especially Sudan, and Mahgreb Middle East. Despite the fact that we knew more than a week before it happened that this release was on the cards, FBI Head, Robert Mueller, sent a hissy letter expressing outrage and astonishment to Kenny MacAskill, Scottish Justice Minister, clearly intended for public consumption (printed in full in The Times). Various neocons (and David Cameron) have postured their horror at the release of this convicted terrorist and outrage at his hero’s welcome in Tripoli as though this was a bolt from the blue.

Exclusive: what they found when they operated on Mandy's prostate - a banana AND a Miliband.

Those are the facts. Here’s some outrageous speculation. Gordon Brown desperately needs sovereign funds. Mandelson told him that this was a small step to take and that nobody would bother once the dust had settled, and anyway, his new friend (and UK homeowner) Gaddafi jr had assured him the return of al Megrahi would pass off quietly. Scotland, an oil and gas economy, was promised lucrative oil supply contracts and plentiful exports of Dundee rock, Irn Bru, tartan and sporrans. The US agreed to turn a blind eye on the condition that Gaddafi refrained from dancing the Highland Fling. Besides, it’s a big bonus if al Megrahi dies without making an appeal – the dirty secrets surrounding massive CIA manipulation of witnesses and evidence, including the possibility that Pan Am Flight 103 was carrying US secret service contraband die with him. Mandelson wins either way: if Brown is discomfited and if the Scottish National Party is put in the hole, his task of bullying the Labour Party is strengthened (Labour desperately needs seats in Scotland in the upcoming General Election). The inconvenient truth is that Colonel Gaddafi is a loony and his son appears to be a blowhard, so the whole yellow ribbon homecoming was unfortunate, but you can’t win them all. Champagne all round at Chateau Rothschild, Corfu branch. Another dinner guest has provided immense entertainment value on the international stage.

John J Kelly

Gordon's got a hard hat and two pairs of brown trousers, more than the army had when they were sent into Basra.

In the past week the clueless yet relentlessly authoritarian UK government scaled new heights of ineptitude and plumbed new depths of contempt for public sensibilities. Announcing the long-awaited Iraq War enquiry on a timetable that would ensure its publication only after the next election is one thing. Appointing five government/Whitehall stooges to hold said enquiry, at least two of whom were responsible for the policy and strategy which led to Britain’s involvement in the war in the first place is another. Claiming on national radio, as did Blairite Foreign Secretary, ‘banana boy’ Miliband, that ‘every secret service in the world’ thought Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and that ‘if you’re looking for a conspiracy, you won’t find one’ gives a further clue to the ‘outcome’ of the enquiry. Announcing that this epic search for truth would be held in secret on the twisted logic that this would ensure that those questioned would feel more inclined to tell the truth on the precondition that nobody would be held accountable sums up the depths of degradation into which the current government has sunk our ‘democratic’ system. Had enough yet? Well think again, there’s more.

The familiar excuse that the enquiry needed to be held in camera ‘in the interests of national security’ was a spin too far for the men in black glasses and the men in nylon khaki. It is an open secret that the spooks felt hard done by at being blamed for the amateurish and deeply mendacious ‘dodgy dossier,’ lifted from a PhD student’s C grade essay and allegedly sexed up by Alastair Campbell, which Blair brandished as his ultimate casus belli. (Had they been involved, the document would at least have been spellchecked).

Every security service in the world thought this was Yellow Cake Uranium when in fact it was a deadly weapon of my image destruction.

Though Austin Powers (aka John Scarlett) was the source of the Yellow Cake Nigerian uranium nonsense which Bush used as part of his ultimate casus belli, this appears to have been a combination of wishful thinking and routine incompetence, rather than politically-motivated mischief. ‘In the interests of national security,’ we might never know whether the sources and judgment of the UK security services were corrupted (think Mossad) and its advice overridden (think Blair/Campbell) in the haste to rush to war and support the carpet bombing of tens of thousands of civilians and cause an insurgency which took the death toll to more than 100,000, not to mention the turkey shoot of over 22,000 Iraqi soldiers in the first glorious ‘victory week’ of an engagement which has lasted far longer than WW2 and Vietnam.

The British army, justifiably angry at having held their tongues after holding Basra for five years with cheap equipment, clown cars, mail order uniforms and armour that wouldn’t pass muster at a girl guide’s paintball party, then ridiculed by the US for leaving the place in a mess – ie. with lots of Iraqis left alive – also declared themselves off side. With (Sir) John Chilcot, a dab hand with the Persil, cf the Butler Report, at the helm, Professor (Sir) Lawrence Freedman (co-author of Blair’s 1999 Chicago ‘Humanitarian Intervention‘ speech and alleged architect of the government strategy on engagement in Iraq) riding shotgun and three other sockpuppets to make up the numbers, there was little chance of a fair hearing. Faced by a mutiny led by General (Sir) Richard Dannatt and dark, professionally deceitful Oxbridge twats turning against their lords and masters, the government executed a partial U-Turn (which could yet become a full one).

How, or why, did they ever think they could get away with another cover-up? God told them to do it. In today’s Observer, it is alleged – and predictably denied by this Pinocchio government – that Brown was asked by Tony Blair (through Mandelson, one presumes) to hold the enquiry in secret, for fear that he (Blair) would be tried in the court of public opinion. Well, yes he would, should and well might be, except that a more appropriate and less biased place might be the International Criminal Court at the Hague, where the tribunal would not be stacked with Blairite cronies.

Meanwhile, Thus has thought long and hard as to how to drag the truth of the situation out of Blair and his fellow alleged war criminals. Since it was also revealed this week, in the first of a series of leaks designed to soften the impact if and when they are later confirmed, that while Blair had not authorised the use of torture by UK forces or agencies, he had not stood in the way of other countries who chose to use it, we have our answer! Hold the enquiry in Morocco. Transport can be arranged. After a professional application of waterboarding, a spot of Binham Mohamed on the Old Man, electric shock therapy and constant repetitive exposure to loud music – may we suggest ‘Things Can only Get Better? (Thus passim) – we won’t need any high fallutin’ experts to tell us who did what and when. After all, as any Blairite will tell you, torture works. It formed the basis of much of the intelligence gathering behind the War on Terror, after all.

]]> http://thusmagazine.com/2009/06/we-have-ways-of-making-you-talk-mr-blair/feed/ 0 http://thusmagazine.com/2009/05/obama-opts-to-continue-with-preventive-detention/ http://thusmagazine.com/2009/05/obama-opts-to-continue-with-preventive-detention/#comments Sun, 24 May 2009 21:28:35 +0000 John Kelly http://thusmagazine.com/?p=3496 This article, originally published on ProPublica, deals with the Obama volte-face on holding prisoners without charge in Guantanamo Bay. It’s a long piece, but not as long as the sentences already served and, by all accounts, about to be extended, to several people who have been denied the right to a fair trial and held in breach of international law, whatever their alleged offences. Thus doesn’t agree with the premise of detention without trial, but, contrary to received opinion, President Obama does, according to author Chisun Lee, who argues that the issue revolves around how to legitimise the indefinite detention of suspected terrorists without the inconvenience of proving their guilt or complicity in conspiracy to attack the United States, in a continuation of Bush/Cheney policies and the ‘War on Terror’ to which Obama declared his opposition on inauguration.  

President Barack Obama’s support for preventively detaining terrorism suspects undoubtedly surprised some of his longtime backers. Holding prisoners at Guantanamo, without the certainty of trial or release, was a defining feature of the previous administration’s counterterrorism policy – and some of its fiercest critics expected Obama to change the policies. But the possibility had been percolating for months. With his pledge in January to close the Guantanamo prison within a year, Obama set off a fierce, mostly under-the-radar debate among legal experts about whether it will be possible to meet the goal he announced yesterday: to build “a legitimate legal framework” for imprisoning terrorism suspects indefinitely.

The question affects more than Guantanamo. The fates of 169 detainees there remain undecided, according to Obama’s numbers yesterday, and administration officials have suggested that they will be unable to prosecute as many as 100. But the legal status of thousands more held by the United States in Afghanistan and elsewhere overseas also hangs in limbo, and any detention policy will have ongoing effects as the fight against al-Qaida continues. Here are some of the key issues facing the architects of a new preventive detention system, or, as it’s sometimes called, a “national security court”:

President Obama said yesterday that some suspected terrorists “cannot be prosecuted.” How could that be – haven’t there been plenty of previous cases involving terrorism?

Yes, there have been. A significant number of people have been convicted of terrorism-related offenses in federal trials, including several accused of acting on behalf of al-Qaida. From September 2001 to May of last year, the government won 145 convictions against terrorism suspects, according to an analysis by former federal prosecutors for the progressive legal nonprofit, Human Rights First. That’s not to say it’s easy. The criminal justice system was built to safeguard the rights of defendants. Prosecutors can’t win a case without enough admissible evidence. Sometimes, as in this week’s arrest of four suspects in New York, investigators have tape-recordings of the alleged illegal activity. But more often than not, they depend on witnesses. They can’t use testimony obtained through abusive interrogations. And intelligence agencies are typically loath to collaborate with a public prosecution that puts their sources on a witness stand.

Recent court filings by the Obama administration in cases challenging the legality of Guantanamo detentions offer a glimpse of possible hurdles to prosecuting an accused terrorist. Criminal defendants have the right to see information in government files that could help show their innocence, so prosecutors have a duty to search for all plausibly relevant documents to turn over. Officials said in the filings that evidence about the Guantanamo detainees tops 1.8 million pages, total. All of those would need to be searched for exculpatory information. A test query for several detainees yielded between several hundreds and tens of thousands of “hits” each.

Isn’t detention without trial illegal on its face?

Not necessarily. The traditional laws of war permit preventive detention of both enemy soldiers and hostile civilians until the end of the fight. Standards like the Geneva Conventions require humane treatment of these detainees. Holding aggressors without any intention of trying them is a time-honored right of fighting nations. Why? In wartime, combatants are supposed to fight – so, fighting itself is not a crime. Fighting dirty – for instance, purposefully killing innocent civilians – is prosecutable as a war crime. But even then, there’s no right to a speedy trial, and the captor nation can take its time deciding when or even whether to press charges. It has long been accepted that a nation at war has the right to protect itself by keeping enemies from returning to the battlefield, without having to invest resources or risk public release of military secrets in full-blown trials.

Every trial risks the possibility that a defendant could be acquitted or receive a moderate sentence. Under the laws of war, governments don’t need to take that risk.The possibility that convicted terrorists could win relatively quick release isn’t just theoretical. Of the three military commission convictions so far at Guantanamo, two resulted in sentences of, essentially, time served. One of those convicted was Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s driver, for providing material support to al-Qaida. He was sentenced last year to five-and-a-half years in prison – six months more than time served – and now lives free in Yemen, in a case where the government had sought life imprisonment. A detention system premised on the laws of war would permit Obama to keep his promise of yesterday: “We are not going to release anyone if it would endanger our national security.”

So is the United States at war with terrorists?

A trickier question than it might seem. Terrorists don’t wear uniforms or rush to a battlefield. The front, many argue, could be anywhere – a hotel room in Albania or an alley in Manila. For its part, al-Qaida declared war on the United States in 1998, shortly before its operatives blew up American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Obama has expressed no skepticism on this point, saying in his speech: “We are indeed at war with al-Qaida and its affiliates.” He was able to say so because Congress, which has the constitutional power to declare war, issued the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force after the 9/11 attacks.

That means some terrorists can be held indefinitely as prisoners of war, according to David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor long associated with civil liberties causes. Cole recently stunned the progressive legal community by supporting preventive detention for some detainees in a Boston Review essay. Cole explained in an interview, “You might not have evidence that would satisfy the criminal-conviction standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but perhaps you have very good evidence that a person was a fighter for the Taliban. Should we just release him to go back to the caves and start shooting at U.S. soldiers, just because we don’t have sufficient proof to convict him of a crime?”

Retired U.S. Army Major General John Altenburg, who until resigning in November 2006 had the task of deciding which Guantanamo detainees would be slated for military commission trials, said the Bush administration’s “arrogance and naiveté” about public perception had tarnished the otherwise valid notion of detaining terrorism suspects under a wartime rationale. He said in an interview, “What the previous administration did was allow critics to define the terms of the debate to be the terms of domestic criminal law. So the public is reacting with, ‘What about their lawyer? What about their right to a speedy trial?’”

In fact, Altenburg said, the al-Qaida detainees are not entitled to a speedy trial any more than German prisoners of war in World War II were.

If wartime detention is OK, and the U.S. is at war with terrorists, then why does the nation need a new detention law?

This appears to be as much a question of political support as one of legal reasoning. Obama said yesterday that he’d seek a law spelling out procedures for preventative detention for reasons of political legitimacy. He said he wanted to avoid his predecessor’s “ad hoc legal approach for fighting terrorism.” Earlier this week, top Obama aides invited the most ardent opponents of preventive detention, including the head of the American Civil Liberties Union, to a two-and-a-half-hour meeting. Although administration officials have not publicly discussed that session, some guests were startled by the argument that the president already has sufficient authority to preventively detain terrorism suspects. Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said afterward on a conference call with reporters that there was a “surprising misapprehension about what the laws of war permit.”

The legal authority that courts have recognized for the current military detentions of “enemy combatants” is the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, which doesn’t even mention detentions. If captives are moved to U.S. soil, they’ll likely be able to invoke greater legal protections than they’ve got now, according to a January analysis by Congressional Research Service lawyers. Possibly, some will even be able to seek political asylum under immigration laws. Long-term preventive detention would therefore require a new law and possibly amendments to others.

Part of the legal puzzle has to do with trying to apply traditional laws of war to the “novel” type of conflict that is terrorism, says Harvey Rishikof, professor of law and national security studies at the National War College. It’s just harder to tell who’s a combatant – and therefore detainable as a POW – and who’s a criminal suspect due for trial, because terrorists are “stateless actors” eschewing uniforms and avoiding battlefields. Attorney General Eric Holder hinted at the complexity of the “battlefield” question as it applies to terrorist combatants at his confirmation hearing. “There are physical battlefields, certainly, in Afghanistan,” he said. “But there are battlefields, potentially, you know, in our nation. There are cyber battlefields.” He went on, “There’s a battlefield, if you want to call it that, with regard to the hearts and minds of the people in the Islamic world.”

Major General Altenburg said, “I personally think the battlefield has to be beyond the ground of an Afghanistan, because al-Qaida is everywhere. Now, there’s no [court] holding anywhere that says that is the law of war, because again, this is unprecedented.”

How would preventive detention of terrorism suspects work?

The closest the public has gotten to a legislative blueprint for preventive detention of terrorism suspects appeared in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed by Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham and John McCain. They called for a “uniform set of standards and procedures administered by a civilian judge,” who would decide the challenges to the legality of detention that the Supreme Court has said are a detainee’s right, and “an annual interagency review” to determine whether a detainee continues to threaten national security and should be held. The senators are expected to be influential voices as any new policy develops.

But before looking at the procedures, policymakers will have to decide who will face detention. The Bush administration initially claimed that it could indefinitely detain anyone the executive branch deemed an “enemy combatant.” The courts trimmed back that sweeping view, saying that the authority was shared with Congress and subject to judicial review. The question is especially acute for terrorism detention, says Harvard law professor and former Bush official Jack Goldsmith, who with Neal Katyal – then a Georgetown law professor, now Obama’s principal deputy solicitor general – was one of the earliest proponents of a new legal regime for terrorism suspects. Because this enemy doesn’t wear a uniform and, to the contrary, takes pains to blend with civilians, identifying candidates for military detention is harder. But since the end of this conflict may similarly be hard to know, there’s a risk that wrong decisions could harm innocent people for a very long time, Goldsmith warns.

One way to get lawmakers to seek utmost accuracy in any detention system, said Goldsmith at a recent Brookings Institution forum, would be to apply it to U.S. citizens as well. “The threat of terrorism can come as easily from a U.S. citizen,” he said. He noted, though, that the idea “is controversial and probably a nonstarter.” It could also be struck down by the Supreme Court, where there are some strong views that citizenship comes with special constitutional protections.

Cole, the Georgetown law professor, stressed that only detainees fitting a classic war-captive profile – members of an organization against whom Congress has authorized the use of military force, who deliberately act or plan harm in order to advance the military goals of the enemy – should be considered for preventive detention. Other terrorists, he said, “should be dealt with through the criminal law.” Broadening the field, he said, would be “a first step on a slippery slope of a broader use of preventive detention for other crimes.”

Some opponents of preventive detention say it’s Orwellian that such a system would imprison a person based on future dangerousness. But, says Cole, even if “we can’t predict the future,” it is possible to measure whether there is “a substantial risk that someone will engage in future dangerous conduct. Waiting for a wrong is not adequate.” Such judgments are made all the time, he said, in civil commitment proceedings, bail hearings and immigration decisions. He said that the key was to focus the inquiry narrowly, not on suspects’ character or beliefs, but on “whether they pose a risk of returning to the battle.”

Retired U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift, who as a military lawyer represented Hamdan in his commission trial, worries that a preventive detention option will allow inaccurate judgments of dangerousness. He said that, after hearing all the evidence, “military [jurors] didn’t view Mr. Hamdan as a substantial war criminal.” But someone like Hamdan would be a prime candidate for indefinite detention over prosecution, he said: “The indicia of his criminality were extremely low, but his proximity to bin Laden was extremely high. The adversary system helped show how Hamdan was not dangerous – the question is, whether a national security court would allow that.”

Crucial questions will have to be answered about what burden of proof the government would have to meet to put someone in preventive detention. In civil trials, the prevailing party has to win by a preponderance of the evidence – meaning it’s more likely than not that the party is right. The criminal standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt is much higher. Cole advocates that preventive detention be permitted if the government shows “clear and convincing evidence” that the detainee fits certain dangerousness criteria – the current standard for deciding whether an ordinary criminal suspect can be released on bail.

Proponents agree the government should have to periodically renew its case for detaining a person. While wartime detention permits imprisonment until the end of hostilities, no one assumes that it will be clear when hostilities with al-Qaida and its affiliates have ended. Holder said at his confirmation hearing that he could see such reviews happening annually.

Any new system will also have to build in rights for people facing detention. Should they have lawyers of their own choosing? Can hearsay evidence – the testimony of people who don’t have to show up in court and answer for themselves – be accepted against them, as it is under certain exceptions in ordinary court proceedings? Should detention hearings be open or secret? Federal courts are permitted to seal documents or close sessions in cases involving classified or other sensitive information. The presumption, however, is that the courts are open. Goldsmith said preventive detention proceedings should also be presumed public, calling it “essential” to establishing legitimacy here and abroad.

Finally, there is the question of who will decide. The Supreme Court has said that a neutral decision-maker is required to ensure due process for detainees. One of many criticisms of Guantanamo’s Combatant Status Review Tribunals – instituted by the Bush administration and still in effect today – is that the decision-makers are subordinates of the very military commanders who claim the detainees should be held as enemy combatants. Most current proposals for a new detention system say independent federal judges should make the final call.

How the other half live - Viggers ducks live in a £1600.00 Stockholm-inspired floating gazebo

This morning The Telegraph reported that Conservative MP Sir Peter Viggers would stand down at the next election, at the request of David Cameron, having claimed over £30,000 in gardening-related expenses, including £1600.00 for a floating duck house. Some wags wondered whether it fell under the MPs’ second home category. Another Tory grandee, Michael Fallon, MP, overclaimed £8300.00 in mortgage repayments. Financial News pointed out that both, as members of the Treasury Select Committee, have been fierce in their criticism of the lack of governance, excessive salaries and expenses of executives of failed UK banks such as Royal Bank of Scotland, HBOS, Northern Rock and the financial sector in general. More pertinent, the Treasury Select Committee, a cross-party group, is tasked to examine the expenditure, administration and policy of HM Treasury, with all of its agencies and associated bodies, including HM Revenue and Customs, the Bank of England, the Financial Services Authority and the Royal Mint. 

The good news is that so far only two of its 15 members have been found to have only a sketchy knowledge of accounting and principles of sound governance as regards the use of taxpayers’ money, so we should all feel safe that our watchdogs are beyond reproach. Now, back to Tony McNulty, Minister for Welfare and Employment, (who voted strongly against a transparent parliament) and Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, who votes against transparency of any sort. These staunch allies of Gordon were in the frame long before the general mayhem erupted. Why has Brown not acted in the new spirit of hang-em-high and why have we heard nothing about the domestic finances of Mr and Mrs. Balls? I leave it to you to join up the dots.

John J Kelly

In response to the excellent comments posted following my piece about browsers and spyware, I need to point out that the problem goes much deeper than browser technology. Internet Service providers (ISPs) have the direct ability to pinpoint, log and aggregate every site you visit, irrespective of your choice of browser or what type of spyware detection software you might employ to clean up your local computer files. They are (roughly) equivalent to the network exchanges of the internet,  connecting your computer via servers to other computers or servers, each of whom has a unique identifier, whereas the search engines and browsers are (roughly) equivalent to telephone handsets. Every connection to and from a server is logged and can be traced. Phorm and others are advocating profiling using ISP data. This is not conspiracy theory. A leaked memo indicated that British Telecom, for example, tested out Phorm profiling in June 2008, in alleged violation of UK Privacy laws.

For the ISPs, operating in a cut throat market with wafer-thin margins, this could be seen as a lucrative lifeline, and therein lies the danger. So far, despite sporadic outbreaks of sanctimonious finger-wagging, mainly directed against Microsoft, the European Union has failed to legislate against what is increasingly becoming a threat to civil liberties and the free market. Cloud computing could take the problem beyond the tipping point.

Thus welcomes further information and comment on this important topic, strictly on the grounds that you don’t hassle me too stridently for not knowing what the hell I’m talking about. John J Kelly