e-nsecure.net blog - Comments on IT security and Privacy or the lack thereof.
Rat's Blog -The Reverend Rat writes about London street life and technology
Duncan Drury - wired adventures in Tanzania & London
Dr. K's blog - Hacker, Author, Musician, Philosopher
David Mery - falsely arrested on the London Tube - you could be next.
James Hammerton
White Rose - a thorn in the side of Big Brother
Big Blunkett
Into The Machine - formerly "David Blunkett is an Arse" by Charlie Williams and Scribe
infinite ideas machine - Phil Booth
Louise Ferguson - City of Bits
Chris Lightfoot
Oblomovka - Danny O'Brien
Liberty Central
dropsafe - Alec Muffett
The Identity Corner - Stefan Brands
Kim Cameron - Microsoft's Identity Architect
Schneier on Security - Bruce Schneier
Politics of Privacy Blog - Andreas Busch
solarider blog
Richard Allan - former Liberal Democrat MP for Sheffield Hallam
Boris Johnson Conservative MP for Henley
Craig Murray - former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, "outsourced torture" whistleblower
Howard Rheingold - SmartMobs
Global Guerrillas - John Robb
Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends
Vmyths - debunking computer security hype
Nick Leaton - Random Ramblings
The Periscope - Companion weblog to Euro-correspondent.com journalist network.
The Practical Nomad Blog Edward Hasbrouck on Privacy and Travel
Policeman's Blog
World Weary Detective
Martin Stabe
Longrider
B2fxxx - Ray Corrigan
Matt Sellers
Grits for Breakfast - Scott Henson in Texas
The Green Ribbon - Tom Griffin
Guido Fawkes blog - Parliamentary plots, rumours and conspiracy.
The Last Ditch - Tom Paine
Murky.org
The (e)State of Tim - Tim Hicks
Ilkley Against CCTV
Tim Worstall
Bill's Comment Page - Bill Cameron
The Society of Qualified Archivists
The Streeb-Greebling Diaries - Bob Mottram
Your Right To Know - Heather Brooke - Freedom off Information campaigning journalist
Ministry of Truth _ Unity's V for Vendetta styled blog.
Bloggerheads - Tim Ireland
W. David Stephenson blogs on homeland security et al.
EUrophobia - Nosemonkey
Blogzilla - Ian Brown
BlairWatch - Chronicling the demise of the New Labour Project
dreamfish - Robert Longstaff
Informaticopia - Rod Ward
War-on-Freedom
The Musings of Harry
Chicken Yoghurt - Justin McKeating
The Red Tape Chronicles - Bob Sullivan MSNBC
Campaign Against the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill
Stop the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill
Rob Wilton's esoterica
panGloss - Innovation, Technology and the Law
Arch Rights - Action on Rights for Children blog
Database Masterclass - frequently asked questions and answers about the several centralised national databases of children in the UK.
Shaphan
Moving On
Steve Moxon blog - former Home Office whistleblower and author.
Al-Muhajabah's Sundries - anglophile blog
Architectures of Control in Design - Dan Lockton
rabenhorst - Kai Billen
(mostly in German)
Nearly Perfect Privacy - Tiffany and Morpheus
Iain Dale's Diary - a popular Conservative political blog
Brit Watch - Public Surveillance in the UK - Web - Email - Databases - CCTV - Telephony - RFID - Banking - DNA
BLOGDIAL
MySecured.com - smart mobile phone forensics, information security, computer security and digital forensics by a couple of Australian researchers
Ralph Bendrath
Financial Cryptography - Ian Grigg et al.
UK Liberty - A blog on issues relating to liberty in the UK
Big Brother State - "a small act of resistance" to the "sustained and systematic attack on our personal freedom, privacy and legal system"
HosReport - "Crisis. Conspiraciones. Enigmas. Conflictos. Espionaje." - Carlos Eduardo Hos (in Spanish)
"Give 'em hell Pike!" - Frank Fisher
Corruption-free Anguilla - Good Governance and Corruption in Public Office Issues in the British Overseas Territory of Anguilla in the West Indies - Don Mitchell CBE QC
geeklawyer - intellectual property, civil liberties and the legal system
PJC Journal - I am not a number, I am a free Man - The Prisoner
Charlie's Diary - Charlie Stross
The Caucus House - blog of the Chicago International Model United Nations
Famous for 15 Megapixels
Postman Patel
The 4th Bomb: Tavistock Sq Daniel's 7:7 Revelations - Daniel Obachike
OurKingdom - part of OpenDemocracy - " will discuss Britain’s nations, institutions, constitution, administration, liberties, justice, peoples and media and their principles, identity and character"
Beau Bo D'Or blog by an increasingly famous digital political cartoonist.
Between Both Worlds - "Thoughts & Ideas that Reflect the Concerns of Our Conscious Evolution" - Kingsley Dennis
Bloggerheads: The Alisher Usmanov Affair - the rich Uzbek businessman and his shyster lawyers Schillings really made a huge counterproductive error in trying to censor the blogs of Tim Ireland, of all people.
Matt Wardman political blog analysis
Henry Porter on Liberty - a leading mainstream media commentator and opinion former who is doing more than most to help preserve our freedom and liberty.
HMRC is shite - "dedicated to the taxpayers of Britain, and the employees of the HMRC, who have to endure the monumental shambles that is Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC)."
Head of Legal - Carl Gardner a former legal advisor to the Government
The Landed Underclass - Voice of the Banana Republic of Great Britain
Henrik Alexandersson - Swedish blogger threatened with censorship by the Försvarets Radioanstalt (FRA), the Swedish National Defence Radio Establishement, their equivalent of the UK GCHQ or the US NSA.
World's First Fascist Democracy - blog with link to a Google map - "This map is an attempt to take a UK wide, geographical view, of both the public and the personal effect of State sponsored fear and distrust as seen through the twisted technological lens of petty officials and would be bureaucrats nationwide."
Blogoir - Charles Crawford - former UK Ambassodor to Poland etc.
No CCTV - The Campaign against CCTV
Barcode Nation - keeping two eyes on the database state.
Lords of the Blog - group blog by half a dozen or so Peers sitting in the House of Lords.
notes from the ubiquitous surveillance society - blog by Dr. David Murakami Wood, editor of the online academic journal Surveillance and Society
Justin Wylie's political blog
Panopticon blog - by Timothy Pitt-Payne and Anya Proops. Timothy Pitt-Payne is probably the leading legal expert on the UK's Freedom of Information Act law, often appearing on behlaf of the Information Commissioner's Office at the Information Tribunal.
Armed and Dangerous - Sex, software, politics, and firearms. Life’s simple pleasures… - by Open Source Software advocate Eric S. Raymond.
Georgetown Security Law Brief - group blog by the Georgetown Law Center on National Security and the Law , at Georgtown University, Washington D.C, USA.
Big Brother Watch - well connected with the mainstream media, this is a campaign blog by the TaxPayersAlliance, which thankfully does not seem to have spawned Yet Another Campaign Organisation as many Civil Liberties groups had feared.
Spy on Moseley - "Sparkbrook, Springfield, Washwood Heath and Bordesley Green. An MI5 Intelligence-gathering operation to spy on Muslim communities in Birmingham is taking liberties in every sense" - about 150 ANPR CCTV cameras funded by Home Office via the secretive Terrorism and Allied Matters (TAM) section of ACPO.
FitWatch blog - keeps an eye on the activities of some of the controversial Police Forward Intelligence Teams, who supposedly only target "known troublemakers" for photo and video surveillance, at otherwise legal, peaceful protests and demonstrations.
Unless criminals have been throwing wads of their ill-gotten gains into a furnace then crime hasn't cost the country a penny. That money has simply been recirculated in the economy. What I assume the figure of £20bn is meant to signify is the money lost to the treasury from the black economy, which bears no relationship to the real cost of crime, namely the cost to the taxpayer of policing and the cost to the individual in insurance, loss, and personal suffering.
The plan seems to be to recruit 5000 SOCA staff.
Will each of them be expected to achieve, on average, a crime reduction target of £4 million or £8 million a year ?
Will SOCA as a whole, achieve a crime reduction of £55 million or £110 million every day of the year ?
What is the success criterion for SOCA ?
What level of Serious or Organised Crime do we tolerate ?
Against the background of these figures, even a million pound drugs seizure every day of the year, should be seen as a disaster, and not as an unprecedented triumph, which is how it would be spun.
I am currently on trial in a "Missing Trader Fraud". I unwittingly got involved in a paper trail and an now in a paper trial, facing 5 years in jail if convicted. The judge is biased and directing the jury, the prosecution are withholding/not disclosing evidence, despite other similar cases being thrown out for similar reasons to the London City Bond fiasco where Customs Officers systematically lied in court.
The real people behind this are getting off scot free.
To the gentleman in the VAT MTIC trial - you may be the exception that proves the rule (obviously i do not know about the case you are involved in and cannot comment anyway)- but I have to say that in the vast majority of MTIC cases the persons both up line and down line do know what is going on - otherwise it would be a major coincidence that the goods virtually always end up leaving the UK again - whats the point of bringing them here in the first place if they are only to be re-exported (and in the case of mobile phones they are not even of a spec (always being Euro 2 pin) that could have an end user in the UK)- it may not be seen as criminal fraud (but rather an exploitation of loopholes) but it is. As to disclosure, the reality is that most of what is disclosed has not the slightest bearing on the case at hand and is not relavant to the Disclosure Test anyway (ie material that potentially undermines the prosecution or aids the defence - of course the problem is that where the defence is in effect my client is being picked on - why did Customs prosecute him when MTIC fraud is going on everywhere - then I suppose you could claim that everything is relevant) - but really outside the unreal view that unless everyone is prosecuted then no-one must be, why is it relevant to whether a person did an act to know whether or not in 1999 Customs did or did nto have a suspicion about a particular company - the defence position is similar to that in LCB - whatever Customs may have done in terms of MTIC does not mean that persons had to commit the offences - the position at present in the case of disclosure is more akin to that of the motorist done for speeding demanding to know about every other speeder dealt with by that force to try and establish if some were treated differently and more than that to want to know why he was stopped when others who were speeding were not. As the "real people behind this" getting off - well if you know who they are (and I don't mean just blaming it all on the missing traders who "by chance" were happened upon by the brokers - where the latter never knew that this was all a big con (if I had a £ for everytime I had been told that by a buffer then I would be a rich man) then you should, via your legal reps, advise the authorities
I have not cost the UK anything as I conduct all my buisness in LA and Vegas.
anyway the UK is small potatos to me.
Did you know that SOCA have recruited quite a few of their old pals back into the new organisation? Those ex-police on hefty pensions have now been given their jobs back effectively - jobs for the boys and all that!
Not much transparancy here is there?
I am a UK citizen working in Singapore on a 2-year work permit/visa. One of the most noticable aspects of living/working here is the low incidence of crime (all categories), and the high standard of government and business honesty, as compared to the UK. Transparency International, the corruption watchdog, rate Singapore as 5th best nation in the world for lack of corruption - an impressive achievement for a nation of 4.2m living on an island the size of the Isle of Man. Low crime = more money available for the improvement of infrastructure and social welfare. Here, the infrastructure and social welfare programs are first class, and the cost of Government is just 4% of GDP. In the UK, the cost of government is now over 40% of GDP, yet it presides over a failing infrastructure and a disfunctional social welfare system. Perhaps the cost of government as a % of GDP should be used as a useful indicator for the real cost of crime?
@ Joe - you may be interested in our blog article where we compared the Transparency International scores with The Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Survey for the countries listed by Privacy International:
See: "Where is the UK ranked in the international Privacy, Democracy and Corruption Indices ?"
Singapore and the United Kingdom both fall into the worst "Endemic Surveillance Society" category.
The Transparency International Corruption Perception Index score for Singapore is a bit better (9.4 fifth best in the survey) than the UK (8.6 thirteenth best), but not by much.