I was following a story over at The Register, which involved the UK government’s ID card forum. The original article contained allegations that some of the supporters of the ID card scheme were in fact students who had just sat through a presentation by Jacqui Smith (the Home Secretary), and not bona fide people who had registered to actually discuss anything. It appears that the wonderful Labour spin masters had taken parts of the pupil’s original messages (anything pro-ID card obviously), renamed them to Shooter1, Shooter2 etc. Messages querying whether Shooter1 et al were genuine were not answered at the time. (The Shooter part of the user names was based on the school the talk was given at (Shooters Hill College, Greenwich), not anything to excite conspiracy nuts 🙂 ).
Anyway, the forum has now been shut down (as planned), but the discussions that took place appear to show that the alleged (by the government) majority support for ID cards amongst young people may not exist. It will be interesting to see if this sort of public experiment in gathering actual opinions is repeated any time soon for other controversial topics.
Oct 24 2008
Caught Out, Closed Down?
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May 27 2007
Who Are You And What Are You Doing?
The BBC has reported that the UK government is looking at introducing new stop and quiz powers for the police. Although not as controversial as the stop and search issue, the idea that a innocent citizen can be stopped, asked for proof of identification, and exactly what they are doing does not fill me with joy.
True, these powers are being considered as an attempt to assist the ‘war on terror’, the very use of the phrase itself does not lend much credibility to the scheme, at least to some people. I still have some small sliver of hope left that the compulsory ID card scheme will be dropped – anyone who has seriously nefarious plans is not going to find difficulty in forging cards, no matter what the (government paid) experts declare…
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Mar 01 2007
ADSL arrived and We, The Undersigned Petition
Found a link to a UK Government beta web site that held a petition on the price of Windows Vista, compared to USA prices.
This next caught my eye – …..petition the Prime Minister to Recognize Borat As The Leader Of Kazakhstan (!)
This petition should be of interest to AlexC.
This petition will be of interest to John as it concerns proposed legislation on taking photos in a public place.
Here we have a petition that publicly funded (UK) software should be released under a free licence, so the whole nation may reap benefits.
This one came as news to me
Fingerprinting is being introduced in thousands of UK Primary Schools as part of a subsidised library package called Junior Librarian that they have purchased, encouraged by central government. New schools are joining the scheme at the rate of around 20 a week. To date, more than 3500 schools and nurseries (manufacturer’s official figure, given to the Daily Mirror) have fingerprinted and photographed 3/4 million children, ranging in age from 3 to 11; impressionable, trusting and naive. Involved companies have given premier partners with access to their SQL database AND a commercial arrangement for the reselling or endorsement or their products.
This is always done without explicit parental consent, and even in some cases, without parental knowledge.
Schools strongly resist sending parents the opt-in consent slips that are used for just about everything else. Some parents only find out AFTERWARDS
Finally, we have a petition for Seb & any other schmokers out there…
Oh yes, and we finally have ADSL installed at home. I’m going to have to use the internet LESS than I did on dial up, as we only get 700 megabytes per month (up AND download :< ), but it means I can do my work in the daytime, so I'm really chuffed that it has arrived.
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