How can your life be complete without Yet Another Home Office Bill ?
Such is the miserable Police and Justice Bill 2006, which , together with the allegedly Explanatory Notes, makes such dismal reading.
This Bill extends the powers of the Police, mucks around with existing policing structures, creating extra bureaucracy, and contains a portmanteau of ill-thought out miscellanous measures, for which there has been no public consultation, and for which no cost / benefit case has been presented, whatsoever.
The level of complexity, obscurity, ineffectiveness and a total disregard for the costs which it will impose on the rest of society which this Bill displays, now seems to be normal for a Home Office Bill.
Why are these people allowed to continue to produce such shoddy legislation ? Why have their salaries not been docked, and any chance of an Honour blocked ?
TalkPolitics has already noticed how ineffectual and pathetic the proposed changes to the Computer Misuse Act 1990 are. We will have more to say on this later, but be assured that it is as badly draughted as we have come to expect any Home Office Bill which steps beyond its competence to try to deal with anything technical.
There should be a proper Green Paper, 12 week minimum Public Consultation and a Draft Bill of a new, internet and mobile phone etc. aware 21st century Computer Misuse Act, which makes a distinction between attacks on our Critical National Infrastructure and on real time control systems where lives might be put at risk if they fail, rather than every other less important system. What about the debate about criminal liability or negligently maintaining computer systems which attack or inflict damage on their neighbours in cyberspace ?
This botched attempt to cover Denial of Service attacks does not even have the merit of the Computer Misuse (Amendment) Bill 2002 put forward as a Private Bill by the Earl of Northesk in 2002, and it is apparent that the Home Office has managed to ignore all the debate and advice since then, given their ludicrous attempts to cover Denial of Service attacks solely for the proposed National Identity Register in the Identity Cards Bill 2004 and 2005 in the controversial Clause 31 Tampering with the Register etc.
According to the Explanatory Notes, the motive for this mess appears to be a box ticking exercise, so that NuLabour Home Office Ministers can pretend that they have complied with the Article 5 of the Council of Europe Cybercrime Convention and Article 3 of the EU Framework Decision on Attacks Against Information Systems, by increasing the criminal penalties, as a cheap substitute for actually tackling the core problems properly.
The increase of the maximum penalty to 10 years in prison and / or a fine, will make no difference whatsoever to the majority of computer criminals or amateur "hackers". The claim that it will make Extradition "easier" is also rubbish, The European Arrest Warrant includes the category "computer-related crime" provided that the maximum penalty is 3 years or more, a condition which is already satisfied by the current 5 year penalty.
Extradition to and from the USA regarding computer "hacking" offences is a completely different affair, as illustrated by the case of Gary McKinnon, who is facing his next court hearing on February 14th 2006. Such extraditions are complicated by the unequal way in which the Extradition Act 2003 does not require prima facie evidence to be presented in a UK court, although this has to be done (as is only proper) if someone in the USA is to be extradited to the UK.
The Police and Juxtice Bill also proposes to amend the already hugely complicated Extradition Act 2003, but without bothering to correct the anomalous situation regarding the USA, which is the subject of Early Day Motion 241, now signed by 140 Members of Parliament.
The reasons for there having been no extraditions whatsoever of any foreign based computer criminals (a couple of them have been lured to the UK where they have been arrested) have nothing to do with the prison penalties, and everything to do with the low prioirity given to computer crimes by the Home Office crime recording and police budget priority setting schemes. How could they possibly achieve their promised 15% reduction in the crime figures, if they actually recorded all the computer crimes happening every day ?
Since these "computer hacking" clauses are numbered well towards the end of this large and complicated BIll, we fully expect there to be minimal, if any, actual Parliamentary scrutiny of them, due to the inevitable guilotines which will lomit the time available for debate, which will be mostly taken up with the complexities and lobby group pressure over the proposed analgamations of police forces and the the powers of Community Support Officers.
Astonishingly, the Home Office now plans to spy on all domestic airlines and ferry operators, demanding advanced passenger information land freight ists. presumably so that the pathetic experience of attempting to match misspelled, anglicised versions of foreign names, often written in non-western eurropean alphabets, against so called "terrorist watchlists" can be used to inconvenience internal domestic travellers as well a international travellers, all without actually catching any real terrorists this way at all.
Even more incredibly the Police and Justice Bill proposes to do this by amending the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill which has still not yet finished its passage through Parliament ! What possible reason is there for these clauses not having been included in the original Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill, or having been presented as Government amendments to it ?
OK, this might be paranoia, but ...
I don't think that it is only air and sea transport that is in their sights. Notice how Ken Livingstone's Transport for London is making incredible efforts to ensure that all users of the bus and underground systems use their Oyster card? With the sole exception of pay as you go cards, funded by a deposit of money with TfL on which interest is NOT paid, all Oyster cards must be registered by the user with TfL! So this time next year it will probably be possible to say who travelled on which train or bus. The continuing steps to abolish walk-on, pay cash, fares on National Rail (by making them extortionately expensive) will ensure that a passenger manifest can readily be built from the knowledge of which train was booked, the details of the credit card used to buy the advance purchase, discounted tickets, and the address to which the tickets were despatched.
Of course, at this stage there will be strenuous denials that anything like this is planned, but in true EU fashion, we will be presented with it as a fait accompli in about 15 months. [Just like the ANPR database of every car movement in the country, only that was a bit quicker.]
Even more paranoia ...
When will pedal cycles be required to display a registration plate for ANPR tracking, or will they be dealt with by more widespread use of RFID technology for citizen tracking?
@ Jeff - "paranoia" on Spy Blog ? What can you mean ? 8-)
We are worried about the combination of the Oyster Card and CCTV surveillance camera monitoring and other surveillance technologies such as millimetre wave imaging.
We have been shielding our Oyster Card(s) with aluminium foil for nearly 2 years now, partly not to be remotely tracked by non-authorised RFID readers and partly because Transport for London cannot be trusted not to deduct the maximum fare when you are not expecting it to, from a poorly maintained or calibrated reader, which have a nuch longer factory default range than they are set to as deployed by TfL. Consequently we are then carrying something which would show up as "suspicious" on any "see through your clothes" scanners like the current waste of money at the Heathrow Express platform at Paddington railway station.
Currently the vast array of different , incompatible, often unreliable analogue / video tape based CCTV cameras installed on the London Underground and mainline railways and on the Buses means that the total transport surveillance state is very flawed.
The recent CCTV photos released by the Metropolitan Police of a man who failed to use the Oyster Card which belonged to the Welsh solicitor who had been mugged and murdered the night before, shows how poor the images are , for identification purposes, rather than for their primary ability to show if congestion and queues are building up or not.
Had this murder victims Oyster Card been blocked by mistake ? Its multiple use at different stations should have been quietly tracked (with a proper judicial warrant), thereby increasing the chance of a postive identification of either one of those involved, or perhaps of someone who had been given or sold the Oyster Card by the gang of attackers who could be an important witness.
However, things will get worse from a privacy point of view, as even more newer, cheaper, digital cameras and small hard disk or solid state recorders get deployed.
It appears that we have Tom Harris Labour MP for Glasgow South to thank for the unworkable amendments to the Computer Misuse Act in the Police and Justice Bill clauses 33 to 36.
According to his press release, these incorporate his Private Members Bill on the subject.
Every Oyster card has a unique serial number. This serial number is read by the UTS gates and other devices everytime they are swiped.
The data is collected and uploaded on a regular basis to a data centre - for accounting and reconciliation purposes.
All devices are montitored regularly on a "phone home" basis to check they are working. If something fails to phone home the engineer will come and visit.
The possibility exists within the structure of the present system to track patterns of travel - but I believe - only after the event.
With the recent upgrades to the system - it might be possible to track in real time - but given the antique nature of the LUL systems it is highly unlikely that real time tracking of Oyster transactions has been implemented.