Crikey! There’s going to a good few pissed off BNP members today! The British National Party has lost its membership list - the whole thing has been published online. The list includes names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of all members up to September 2008. It also includes some people’s ages, especially those under 18 - the BNP offers family membership for £40. Many entries also contain more personal comments about jobs or hobbies. That’s how we know that that BNP members include receptionists, district nurses, amateur historians, pagans, line dancers and a male witch. Members have unsurprisingly reacted with outrage. One commenter said: “I’m also on the list, what the f#ck is going on? I could lose my job.” Another: “The most...

I don’t want to get into a debate as to the rights and wrongs of whether people should agree to donate their organs, although I am willing to state, for the record, that I support the organ donor programme. What concerns me is when government, in spite of advice to the contrary, determines that it knows best. The UK Organ Donation Taskforce have stated that they do not believe that ‘presumed consent’ would boost organ donation rates. In fact chair of the taskforce, Elisabeth Buggins said: “We found from recipient families and donor families that the concept of gift was very important to them and presumed consent would undermine that concept.” This was not what the government wanted to hear and Alan Johnson was said to be disappointed by their findings,...

California is being rocked with protests against Proposition 8 - a measure that Californians passed in a statewide vote during the national elections - banning gay marriage. Last weekend protests were even held across the country demanding a change in the law so gays could marry. Of course, I believe gays should be allowed to marry as heterosexual couples are. The problem I have is - what the hell is the point of organising yourselves now fools? This should have been done before the vote, no? This is what happened. Most people thought Prop 8 wasn’t going to pass because California is the liberal hub of America after all. Except, money poured in from the Mormon Church and religious conservatives also rallied hard to ensure a high-turnout on election day. By a small measure the vote...

A Burmese blogger has been sentenced to 20 years in jail for posting a cartoon of the military leader Than Shwe. Nay Phone Latt, 28, was sentenced by a court in Rangoon's Insein prison, said his mother, Aye Than.Nay Phone Latt's colleague Thin July Kyaw was sentenced to two years imprisonment, Aye Than reported.Another dissident, Saw Wai, was sentenced to two years in jail for publishing a poem mocking Than Shwe in the weekly Love Journal.The first words of each line of the Burmese language poem spelled out the message "Senior General Than Shwe is foolish with power".This specific cartoon idea is by Dr. David Law.[Pippa Wagstaff is currently on a blogging...

As Big Brother Britain gathers pace, news is released that more than 12,000 people had Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) checks completed on them, which indicated that they had a criminal record, when in fact that was not the case. That is not a statistic, but 12,000 individuals that have incorrectly been branded a thief, fraudster, paedophile etc. In each case, it is for the individual to pursue the authorities to have the records amended by the CRB. It would appear that this was, in effect, a clerical error, for example when a criminal record has been incorrectly allocated to the wrong person. Now lets turn it on its head, if 12,000 people have had someone else’s misdeed attached to them, what of the people that were guilty, do they have a clean sheet? This brings me to my point,...

(Picture of Paul Dacre from Gurdian website)There is, almost inevitably, a tension between politicians and journalists that revolves around what parts of a person’s life is ‘fair game’ and what should be off limits as nothing more than an intrusive exposure of an individual’s private life. At the same time, there is an attempt by legislators to try to limit reporting that might impinge on ‘national security’. Paul Dacre’s recent attack on an individual judge, Mr Justice Eady, was, in my view, extraordinary. As with many journalists, rather than railing against other journalists’ inaccurate and perjorative reporting, Paul Dacre appears to want the press to have the freedom to make things up without consequence. Journalists have a responsibility to take care to ensure...

Ken Gude: Barack Obama may close the prison, as promised, but creating a new national security court would be a terrible...

This is really chilling: “Britain’s security agencies and police would be given unprecedented and legally binding powers to ban the media from reporting matters of national security, under proposals being discussed in Whitehall. The Intelligence and Security Committee, the parliamentary watchdog of the intelligence and security agencies which has a cross-party membership from both Houses, wants to press ministers to introduce legislation that would prevent news outlets from reporting stories deemed by the Government to be against the interests of national security.” The existing, voluntary system works pretty well. Nor would such stringent rules necessarily make Britain safer, as surely the security services benefit from scrutiny. Oh, and does anyone believe that these...

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have a real bee in my bonnet over the way our civil liberties are being eroded by a government completely obsessed with turning our country into Big Brother Britain. I have also made public my concern over the general apathetic views of the majority of British citizens to this massive infringement on our right to privacy and to get on with our lives without state interference. The announcement that this government wanted to spend £12bn on a ’super’ database which would collate information on every call, text message, email and the browsing habits of every individual in this country, in spite of our dire economic position, had me raging. I wrote a number of posts on this topic and then decided that it was such an important...

Security information about terrorism is not being shared with two-thirds of the local authority chief executives and neighbourhood police commanders involved in the government's preventative drive against violent extremism, an official report is to warn on Monday.This lack of trust is hampering the government's pathfinder programme to prevent violent extremism under which 70 councils have received £6m in the last two years. A further £45m is to be spent expanding the programme in the next three years.The joint report by the Audit Commission and Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary was commissioned by the communities secretary, Hazel Blears, to assess the progress that has been made. It is based on visits to 14 councils that have received pathfinder funding and includes...

A Malaysian court has ordered the release of a prominent government critic free from detention on grounds that his arrest under a colonial-era security law was unlawful, local media and his lawyer have said.Raja Petra Kamarudin, a high-profile political blogger, was detained in September for allegedly stoking racial tensions by publishing articles that the government said insulted Islam, inflamed racial tensions and tarnished the country's leadership.But the high court in the state of Selangor ruled on Friday that the Malaysian home minister had acted beyond his powers in having the blogger arrested under the Internal Security Act (ISA), Malik Imtiaz Sarwar, Raja Petra's lawyer, said.He quoted Judge Syed Ahmad Helmy Syed Ahmad as saying that the grounds given for Raja Petra's detention...

HOME OWNERS FLEECED BY DEVIOUS BANKS “An important factor behind the increase in mortgage foreclosures is the rise of so-called subprime loans. Subprime loans are made to borrowers with credit deemed insufficient to qualify for a standard home mortgage. They sometimes entail predatory practices including exorbitant interest rates, additional fees and prepayment penalties that make it...

I ask this question because I have to confess, my understanding of what a Bill of Rights should be, seems to differ from that of the current Labour administration and I suspect, those views held by the other political parties. I understood that the new British Bill of Rights was going to be based loosely on the classic Bills of Rights, from Magna Carta in 1215 to the English Bill of Rights of 1689, or perhaps the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789 or the American Bill of Rights of 1791. Which was principally the protection of an individual’s liberty against the intrusive and interfering power of an overbearingstate. I figured that the government may seek to include some general  human rights issues. Such as those included in the “Four...

So, we see a Cabinet kerfuffle over plans for a new "Bill of Wrongs Rights".Brown talked earlier in the year about a new constitutional settlement. This "Bill of Wrongs Rights" is part of that. Brown likes the term "new settlement", for he has used it in terms of the financial crisis, too.What Brown &Co forget, is that a Bill of Rights is - or damn well should be - about restraining government, NOT restraining people. I take that back. Brown did not forget this. He knows that is what it should be, but I suspect the old Marxist-Manse nexus inside him cannot but interfere with, pester and control the population.Brown said that such a bill would open a new chapter on British liberty. Epilogue, more like, for he is using the idea of "rights", which are more like "entitlements" to then...

Old Holborn has invited readers of Power to the People to join him and thus far, another 102 “ramblers” for a brisk stroll from Trafalgar Square to Parliament Square at midday on the 5th November. Alas, given I am in Frankfurt at the moment, as Big Brother Britain will be able to confirm, I can only be there in spirit, however, I am more than happy to both extend his invitation and recommend supporting this excellent 30 minute exercise! You can find more information here: Old Holborn is going for a walk. As is befitting for the day, 5th November, Old Holborn will be easy to spot at Trafalgar Square. Fellow ‘ramblers’ are also invited, if they wish, to dress in similar fashion and to bring a friend along if they wish.  Old Holborn believes in free speech and to...

Gordon Brown admitted yesterday that ministers can never guarantee the security of sensitive data, after a memory stick containing user names and passwords for a government computer system was found in a pub car park."I think it's important to recognise that we can't promise that every single item of information will always be safe, because mistakes are made by human beings," the prime minister told ITN during his visit to the Gulf.The government was forced to shut down the Gateway website, which allows people to register for tax forms and benefits, as a result of the loss of the memory stick. The site was restored yesterday after it became clear that the user names and passwords of 11 individuals on the memory stick were encrypted.The device was lost by an employee of Atos Origin, which...

“Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, has asked the attorney general to investigate possible “criminal wrongdoing” by the MI5 and the CIA over its treatment of a British resident held in Guantánamo Bay, it was revealed tonight. The dramatic development over allegations of collusion in torture and inhuman treatment follows a high court judgment which found that an MI5 officer participated in the unlawful interrogation of Binyam Mohamed. The MI5 officer interrogated Mohamed while he was being held in Pakistan in 2002.” While this seems like good news, I doubt that anything concrete will come of it. (Hat-tip: Douglas...

Leben der Anderen, Das (2006).I have not commented here (though I did at his blog) on the arrogance and ignorance of Glasgow South MP, Tom Harris. Please go to his site and read his post about the copy of 1984......

Gordon Brown's terror claims for ID cards are "bunkum" says GCHQ expert - Telegraph.Don't believe a mere security expert. Why would our beloved politicians lie to us? After all, if..the only real value of identity cards would be to help......

From the Magna Carta to CCTV, a new exhibition at the British Library tells the definitive story of the nation's fight for liberty. Historian Tristram Hunt is...

I don't often make Lib Dem Voice's Weekly Golden Dozen, probably because most of my readership aren't Lib Dems and rarely click through from the Lib Dem blogs aggregator. so therefore I have to rely on well written pieces that get picked up for the 5 positions not gained through through traffic. Well my little piece on the DUP, 42 days detention without trail and the abortion amendments...

Every police force in the UK is to be equipped with mobile fingerprint scanners - handheld devices that allow police to carry out identity checks on people in the street.The new technology, which ultimately may be able to receive pictures of suspects, is likely to be in widespread use within 18 months. Tens of thousands of sets - as compact as BlackBerry smartphones - are expected to be distributed.The police claim the scheme, called Project Midas, will transform the speed of criminal investigations. A similar, heavier machine has been tested during limited trials with motorway patrols.To address fears about mass surveillance and random searches, the police insist fingerprints taken by the scanners will not be stored or added to databases.Liberty, the civil rights group, cautioned that...

I'm not the biggest fan of the European parliament, which often resembles little more than outdoor relief for second-rate politicians and embodies in its procedures an unremitting federalism. Sometimes, though, it has its uses. On Friday it rejected - by a huge margin of 361 to 16 - a Commission proposal to introduce a new and intrusive generation of body scanners at airports throughout the EU. Or at least to shelve any such proposals until far more research - both into the safety and social acceptability of the devices - had been carried out. The size of the majority, and the tone of the debate, suggests that many MEPs were against the things on principle.And one can see why. The scanners subject anyone walking through them to a virtual strip search. A clear computer-generated...

Since I was sufficiently outraged to write an article about the goverment’s latest move to increase its powers to spy on the its own citizens, there has been a healthy and, for the most part, positive response. It is clear that there are many people out there that share most, if not all of my sentiments and are able, and willing to add their voice, or blog, to the cause by reproducing the article with their own comments or thoughts. For all of those people that have done this, I would like to offer my thanks and I would also urge those who have not, that believe the state is gaining too much power, to do likewise and reprint my article, or a version of their own, based on the same theme. Please feel free to use as much of the content of my article as you wish. Over at...

Whilst many of us deplore the way in which the tabloids act on occasions, we can at least console ourselves with the fact that our press is one of the freest in the world. We have a wide range of newspapers, TV channels and blogs to choose from, and even the BBC, though paid for through tax, is at least independent in the sense that the government does not control its world view (not that it needs to). Yet a new report from Reporters Without Borders ranks the UK only 23rd in the world for press freedom (up one place from last year), behind a number of Eastern European countries and level with Namibia. The USA does even worse, finishing 36th (albeit up from 48th), one place behind France, which traditionally has had an image of a restricted press. India also did worse then I would have...

The other day Jacqui Smith called - with the usual spuriousness of a government that only lauches consultations when it has already decided the answer - for a wide-ranging debate on her plans for a massive new communications database. Well, it looks like she's going to have her wish. Last night the departing Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Ken McDonald, spoke movingly of the dangers of throwing away centuries of legal and constitutional principle in the name of security. "We need to take very great care not to fall into a way of life in which freedom's back is broken by the relentless pressure of a security State", he said. And he left little doubt that, in his mind, the present government has been careless in that regard.Sir Ken is not the first to make such a plea; he certainly...

Ministers are considering spending up to £12 billion on a database to monitor and store the internet browsing habits, e-mail and telephone records of everyone in Britain. GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre, has already been given up to £1 billion to finance the first stage of the project. Hundreds of clandestine probes will be installed to monitor customers live on two of the country’s biggest internet and mobile phone providers - thought to be BT and Vodafone. BT has nearly 5m internet customers. With an international recession on the way (or it’s already started depending on who you speak to), the Labour government want to expand the role and powers of the Government Communications Headquarters - at the cost of £12 billion. No doubt this is in part because the...