Despite these apparently turbulent developments, BT is ploughing ahead with the implementation of its ‘Webwise’ tracking software which profiles user behaviour by tracking online viewing through ISP data. BT should think carefully about the effect this may have on its already-tarnished reputation, but it probably won’t.

Lies, damned lies and statistics. Over 1000 people asked for ID cards – counted over TWO years

carving up the crime statistics

In a demonstration of the contempt for sensible interpretation of statistics which recently got the UK government into trouble for claiming that knife crime had fallen based on a sample of 78 incidents over three months, “Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has said that 1,142 messages from the public to the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) between November 2006 and October 2008 were classified as ‘wants an ID card’. This made ID-card requests “by far the most common subject matter”, Smith said on Thursday, in response to a parliamentary question from Liberal Democrats’ Home Affairs spokesperson Chris Huhne.” In real terms, that’s around 1.5 ‘messages’ a day. By contrast, up to 2 million people actively protested against the Iraq War in one day, but the government ignored them. Worse yet, Ms Smith admitted that “the IPS received 3,073 items of correspondence on the scheme between 1 November, 2006, and 31 October, 2008 but admitted that the IPS did not sort the correspondence according to support for or opposition to the scheme. (Thanks to ZD Net). So the erosion of democracy and slide into banal authoritarianism continues apace. We already know the endgame. We’ll get ID cards, the system will fail and vastly exceed its budget. The data warehousing will be managed at great expense by US companies. There will be huge breaches of security and fraud. But the statistics hold out a glimmer of hope. At this rate of take-up, the government could save a huge amount by purchasing card-making kit and laminators from Woolworths and individually making up the identity cards. There are plenty of out-of-work folks who could help, taking photos of the 1100 people who definitely want an ID card and putting their names in a special ‘Loonytunes’ databank. Their psychological profiles identify them as prime targets to vote positively for any mad government initiative, volunteer for crazy scientific experiments, buy Jaguar cars and sign up for BT Broadband. So it’s not all doom and gloom.

Another victory for profiling.

Police went Crackers in Wimbledon, aided and abetted by the tabloids, they hounded the wrong man for 12 years

With the conviction of Robert Napper, the Metropolitan Police announced today that there was no need for an enquiry into the Colin Stagg fit-up, on the grounds that ‘lessons were learned.’ In other words, the Police know what they did wrong and it won’t happen again. So that’s alright then. Except it’s not. It has not been too widely reported that the female police officer who participated in a ‘honey trap’ to frame Colin Stagg received £125,000 compensation, early retirement and a pension, while Napper, the person responsible for the crime, who had been reported to the police by his own mother for rape, was arrested twice for carrying a loaded handgun within eight weeks of the murder on Wimbledon Common, had a history of copycat crimes, including rape and battery of a mother and child and was allowed to roam free to commit further horrible crimes while the police and tabloid media engaged in a vicious miscarriage of justice aimed at clearing up the case of a mother brutally murdered in front of her infant child. Their grotesque entrapment antics led to further crimes being committed. It has been claimed that using today’s technology, the same ‘mistakes’ could not happen, yet contrary to media reports, DNA samples from both Napper and Stagg were available and could have been used to at least eliminate Stagg from their ‘enquiries.’ This is doubtful: Stagg was ‘convicted’ by the police, egged on by the media, keen to find a perpetrator for a heinous crime, at an early stage. The ‘honey trap’ was sordid, illegal and reckless. There should be an enquiry, but there won’t be. 

John Baker’s piece for THUS (below) summarises the details of this case better than I can. It is sad and remarkable that we are not taking this opportunity to re-examine the lack of police (and media) accountability which led to this gross miscarriage of justice. The victims were not just the family of the murdered woman, nor Colin Stagg and his family. Several other people raped and possibly murdered by Napper, certifiably criminally insane, might have been spared had the police not behaved like actors in a bad TV drama. As far as we know, nobody lost their job or has been called to account – at least not publicly.

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

Although I don’t necessarily think that Norman Lamont joining the board of Phorm is particularly sinister, thanks to Bad Idea for highlighting the activities of this interesting adware company. I personally have no problem with advertising-supported sites, provided they are upfront and there is a clear ‘opt-out’ option, but most adware is pernicious and far from transparent. In its most extreme form, which appears to be the business model proposed by Phorm and others, including, dare I suggest, established mom and pop sites such as Amazon and Google, internet user ‘profiles’ are established by aggregating and analysing browser usage, and internet users are then ‘targeted’ by email with blandishments to buy and view ‘complementary’ products. In essence, this is no more sinister than traditional direct marketing, where a list broker sells names and addresses of buyers of one type of magazine, for example, to another magazine publisher to canvas subscribers. The difference comes when an internet user is unaware or only partly aware that their browsing and viewing patterns are being saved and stored for sale to third parties. It becomes very worrying if data relating to searches made, for example, on muscle cars was accessed by an insurance company as part of their risk assessment profile of a claimant or customer.

While I don’t think Phorm should necessarily be singled out, the trend towards profiling is at least as worrying as government snooping activities related to the Utopian notion of the Panopticon State’s benevolent gaze, if not more so, because commercial organisations stand a much better chance of getting the enabling technology right, leaving them in a wonderful position to use the data to wreak havoc with unsuspecting folks’ lives. Simply because I know it works, Thus recommends viewing our site with the Firefox browser, which you can download for free and configure to clear all your data after every session. Firefox is an open-source package (but is actually supported financially because it uses Google as its search engine). If you don’t have spyware protection on your computer, you should, but it’s worthwhile making sure that the anti-spyware package really works. PC users suffer more than us smug MacUsers, so I can’t recommend a package, except to say that McAfee, Norton and Symantec have been around a long time. That much said, is recommending them a sort of example of adware in itself? 

So far nobody has offered, but as and when a sinister mega-corporation offers to sponsor this site, I willtake their cash, provided they advise visitors of their involvement by means of lots of garish, conspicuous banners and gratuitous advertisements, hopefully featuring scantily-clad girls smoking and drinking, admiring firearms and playing card games.  I doubt that this will happen, since I am obviously the wrong profile and so are you, probably, or you wouldn’t be looking at this site. I’m happy to consider offers of sponsorship from beard-stroking retired conspiracy theorists with a poetical agenda. I’m not prepared to compromise on the smoking, gun-toting card-sharking girls bit, however.