Tory position on extension of detention without charge

The BBC:

Mr [David] Davis said the Conservatives would oppose any moves to extend the pre-trial detention of terror suspects from the current 28 days to 90 days.

“For one thing those on the front line in counter-terrorism warn that it risks cutting off vital local intelligence and serving as a recruiting sergeant for terrorists,” he said.

All comrade-electors to be stored in new New Labour database

A comrade from Computing reports:

The Party is engaged in building a huge database of UK comrade-electors to enhance its ability to campaign more effectively at the next general election – if Beloved Leader Gordon Brown allows long enough to complete the work before naming the day.

Party Treasurer Jack Droney unveiled the programme at Labour’s Bournemouth conference yesterday after detailing claims that its accounts – £14.5 million in the red [how appropriate! - ed] the previous year – have recovered to a deficit of just £814,000 last year.

Droney told delegates in his report: “Despite an overall reduction in expenditure we have also been investing roubles in the future.

“Work has begun to provide the party with a flagship voter database, which will far outstrip anything non-patriots have developed.

“This will enable our comrades at all levels to have professional tools to effectively communicate with Party comrades.”

The Economist on privacy

Via Schneier, the Economist on privacy.

Religious hatred law

Will people be convicted of religious hatred?  Very few, if any.

Will it have a chilling effect?  Most certainly.

I think this sort of backdoor clampdown is a bit sinister.

AC Grayling on identity cards

In Prospect magazine:

Are ID cards either philosophically or pragmatically justifiable?

Emphatically no. A requirement for every citizen to carry a device that enables the authorities to demand immediate information about them dramatically changes the relationship of individuals to the state, from being private citizens to being numbered conscripts. An ID card or device (technology will rapidly supplant plastic cards because the latter are too easily lost or stolen) is a surveillance instrument, a tracking device, like a car number plate or the kind of tag punched into a cow’s ear.

Any animal (including, soon, the residents of Britain) thus tagged and numbered is a trackable, controllable unit, exposed 24/7 to monitoring. And history teaches that once an instrument of control lies in the hands of authorities, they will use it: from “protecting against terrorism” (if only!) to catching tax-avoiders to finding defaulting child support-payers to collecting parking fines to watching members of the Socialist Workers’ party to snooping on individuals against whom rumours and gossip have turned attention: and so on. Who can guarantee that a government in these islands 20, 40, 60 years hence will be as benign as the one, today, that wishes to tag us all for the greater ease of policing us? In the absence of a guarantee, why create now a giant computerised “national identity register” ready for the hands of a possibly less benign future?

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