Liberty News

Tax inspectors are to get wide-ranging powers to open people's post without their permission for the first time, it can disclosed.

Currently, Royal Mail staff have a legal right to intercept suspicious letters and parcels in mail centres and sorting offices and pass them to HM Revenue and Customs. Tax inspectors must then notify the addressee and agree a mutually acceptable time to open the letter or parcel, before deciding whether to take any enforcement action.

However the Government is now proposing to remove the legal requirement which will now allow inspectors to open suspicious post without asking permission first. Treasury documents say: HMRC will no longer be required to notify the addressee and invite them to attend before such packets can be opened .

The new measure will be passed into law as part of the Budget over the next few weeks, and amend section 106 of the Postal Services Act 2000.

Under current law, the only other enforcement officers who can open mail are border guards who can open the post without permission at ports and airports.

The change was disclosed in a Treasury document published alongside the Budget headlined Tackling tobacco smuggling in the post . However a HM Revenue and Customs spokesman said the powers would be applied much more broadly. The spokesman said: The change is mainly directed at helping to combat tobacco smuggling but the powers in s106 apply to any contraband including prohibited or restricted goods.

Heather Taylor, a senior tax partner at Grant Thornton, said: This seems like a very small and limited change, but it could be a very big step for increased powers HMRC. Once new powers are in the hands of HMRC they tend to be extended.

Civil liberties campaigners were appalled about the increased powers. Alex Deane, a spokesman for Big Brother Watch, said: This is a dreadful development. The post has always been regarded as near-sacrosanct in law. The last time our mail was opened by the authorities without notice, our country was fighting a World War. I hardly think that the situation produced by the government's tobacco tax compares.

A new government commercial currently running on one of Britain's most popular radio stations is selling one thing -- fear -- by encouraging Londoners to report their neighbors as terrorists if they use cash, enjoy their privacy, or even close their curtains.

That chap at no 17 has closed his curtains again!

The advertisement, produced in conjunction with national radio outlet TallkSport, promotes the anti-terrorist hotline and encourages people to report individuals who don't talk to their neighbors much, people who like to keep themselves to themselves, people who close their curtains, and people who don't use credit cards.

This may mean nothing, but together it could all add up to you having suspicions, states the voice on the ad, before continuing We all have a role to play in combating terrorism (we're all indentured stasi informants for the government).

If you see anything suspicious, call the confidential anti-terrorist hotline... if you suspect it, report it, concludes the commercial.

Researchers have produced a mobile phone that could be a boon for prying bosses wanting to keep tabs on the movements of their staff.

Japanese phone giant KDDI Corporation has developed technology that tracks even the tiniest movement of the user and beams the information back to HQ.

The company plans to sell the service to clients such as managers, foremen and employment agencies.

It works by analysing the movement of accelerometers, found in many handsets. Activities such as walking, climbing stairs or even cleaning can be identified, the researchers say. Until now, mobile phone motion sensors were capable of detecting only repetitive movements such as walking or running.

For example, the KDDI mobile phone strapped to a cleaning worker's waist can tell the difference between actions performed such as scrubbing, sweeping, walking an even emptying a rubbish bin.

The aim of the new system, according to KDDI, is to enable employees to work more efficiently and managers to easily evaluate their employees' performance while away from the office.

Critics of such systems accuse the makers of pandering to an over-controlling, Big Brother-type managerial class and say that with this new technology there comes the increased opportunity for abuse.

This is treating people like machines, like so many cattle to be monitored and watched over, Kazuo Hizumi, a leading human rights lawyer, told BBC News: New technology should be used to improve our lives not to spy on us. It beggars belief that a prominent company such as KDDI could come up with such a surveillance system. It's totally irresponsible.

The United States, with the UK and France close behind, have now caught up with Russia and are gaining on China, North Korea and Belarus.

The key developments driving this are the following:

• The USA has negated their Constitution's fourth amendment in the name of protection and in the name of wars against terror, drugs and cyber attacks.
• The UK is aggressively building the world of 1984 in the name of stopping anti-social activities. Their populace seems unable or unwilling to restrain the government.
• France and the EU have given themselves over to central bureaucratic control.

An electronic police state is characterized by this: State use of electronic technologies to record, organize, search and distribute forensic evidence against its citizens.

The two crucial facts about the information gathered under an electronic police state are these:

1. It is criminal evidence, ready for use in a trial.
2. It is gathered universally ( preventively ) and only later organized for use in prosecutions.

In an Electronic Police State, every surveillance camera recording, every email sent, every Internet site surfed, every post made, every check written, every credit card swipe, every cell phone ping… are all criminal evidence, and all are held in searchable databases. The individual can be prosecuted whenever the government wishes.

Here are the top 20 worst police states, with last year's ranking is shown in parenthesis.

1. North Korea (2)
2. China (1)
3. Belarus (3)
4. Russia (4)
5. United States of America (6)
6. United Kingdom (5)
7. France (9)
8. Israel (8)
9. Singapore (7)
10. Germany (10)
11. Ireland (12)
12. Malaysia (11)
13. Netherlands (14)
14. Italy (24)
15. South Korea (15)
16. Australia (18)
17. Belgium (17)
18. Spain (43)
19. Austria (21)
20. Ukraine (16)

  48.  Thailand (48)

Germany's High Court has told police and secret services that they must stop storing email and telephone data and delete information already collected.

The storage of six months' worth of German comms data for police and anti-terrorism purposes was required by a European Union directive.

Opponents of the snooping measure hoped the court would rule the law was unconstitutional, but instead the court found that data was not properly protected and that authorities were not sufficiently clear as to why they needed it.

The court also ruled that Germany's data protection commissioner should be involved in how the data was dealt with.

The case was sparked by a record number of complaints - 35,000 people including Germany's Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger. East Germany was famously one of the world's most-spied upon nations, and it seems some kind of a backlash is now in progress.

Secret radar technology research that will allow the biggest-ever extension of Big Brother'-style surveillance in the UK is being funded by the Government.

The radical new system, which has outraged civil liberties groups, uses mobile phone masts to allow security authorities to watch vehicles and individuals 'in real time almost anywhere in Britain.

The technology sees the shapes made when radio waves emitted by mobile phone masts meet an obstruction. Signals bounced back by immobile objects, such as walls or trees, are filtered out by the receiver. This allows anything moving, such as cars or people, to be tracked. Previously, radar needed massive fixed equipment to work and transmissions from mobile phone masts were thought too weak to be useful.

By using receivers attached to mobile phone masts, users of the new technology could focus in on areas hundreds of miles away and bring up a display showing any moving vehicles and people.

An individual with one type of receiver, a portable unit little bigger than a laptop computer, could even use it as a personal radar covering the area around the user. Researchers are working to give the new equipment X-ray vision - the capability to see through walls and look into people's homes.

Ministry of Defence officials are hoping to introduce the system as soon as resources allow. Police and security services are known to be interested in a variety of possible surveillance applications. The researchers themselves say the system, known as Celldar, is aimed at anti-terrorism defence, security and road traffic management.

The system, used alongside technology which allows individuals to be identified by their mobile phone handsets, will mean that individuals can be located and their movements watched on a screen from hundreds of miles away.

After a series of meetings with Roke Manor, a private research company in Romsey, Hants, MoD officials have started funding the multi-million pound project. Reports of the meetings are classified .

Like all instrusive surveillance, we need to be sure that it is properly regulated, preferably by the judiciary, said Roger Bingham of Liberty. Bingham expressed concerns that the new equipment, which would be virtually undetectable, could be used by private detectives or others for personal or commercial gain.

The Crown Prosecution Service has revealed that it is working with a top barrister on a potential criminal case against BT over its secret trials of Phorm's targeted advertising system.

BT had covertly intercepted and profiled the web browsing habits of tens of thousands of its customers, the CPS told campaigners this week that it is still investigating the affair.

The Crown Prosecution Service is working hard to review the evidence in this legally and factually complex matter, a spokeswoman said.

Campaigners gave prosecutors a file of evidence, including a copy of BT's detailed internal report on a trial of Phorm's technology in 2006, obtained by The Register. The experiment monitored 18,000 broadband lines without customers' knowledge or consent.

This week the CPS said: We are currently awaiting advice from a senior barrister which we will review before coming to a conclusion. We are giving the matter meticulous attention and will reach a proper and considered decision as soon as it is possible for us to do so.

The main law BT is alleged to have broken is the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). It restricts the interception of communications.

Edinburgh City Council has begun sending staff on courses designed to train them to look out for anything that might resemble terrorist activity .

According to the Edinburgh Evening News:

Staff sources say that the sessions have included being told how to spot anything suspicious, and being asked to report anything – no matter how trivial – to police, such as quantities of empty bottles of bleach.

Support workers who visit a range of clients in their own home including vulnerable groups, people with addictions and elderly people, have been among the first to get the training.

Concierges, community safety teams and other front-line staff across the council are also to be sent on the sessions, which are hosted by police as part of the Home Office's counter-terrorism strategy.

This is disgraceful fear-mongering that erodes trust in society and encourages spying, snooping and suspicion. A sad state of affairs.

Anyone with an e-mail account likely knows that police can peek inside it if they have a paper search warrant. But law enforcement agencies say they are frustrated by the speed of traditional methods of faxing, mailing, or e-mailing companies these documents. They're pushing for the creation of a national Web interface linking police computers with those of Internet and e-mail providers so requests can be sent and received electronically.

CNET has reviewed a survey scheduled to be released at a federal task force meeting, which says that law enforcement agencies are virtually unanimous in calling for such an interface to be created.

The survey, according to two people with knowledge of the situation, is part of a broader push from law enforcement agencies to alter the ground rules of online investigations. Other components include renewed calls for laws requiring Internet companies to store data about their users for up to five years and increased pressure on companies to respond to police inquiries in hours instead of days.

But the most controversial element is probably the private Web interface, which raises novel security and privacy concerns, especially in the wake of a recent inspector general's report [pdf] from the Justice Department. The report detailed how the FBI obtained Americans' telephone records by citing nonexistent emergencies and simply asking for the data or writing phone numbers on a sticky note rather than following procedures required by law.

Some companies already have police-only Web interfaces. Sprint Nextel operates what it calls the L-Site, also known as the legal compliance secure Web portal.

Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace's chief security officer, said in an interview with CNET: You can be very supportive of law enforcement investigations and at the same time be very cognizant and supportive of the privacy rights of our users. Every time a legal process comes in, whether it's a subpoena or a search order, we do a legal review to make sure it's appropriate.

Nigam said that MySpace accepts law enforcement requests through e-mail, fax, and postal mail, and that it has a 24-hour operations center that tries to respond to requests soon after they've been reviewed to make sure state and federal laws are being followed. MySpace does not have a police-only Web interface, he said.

Creating a national police-only network would be problematic, Nigam said. I wish I knew the number of local police agencies in the country, or even police officers in the country, he said. Right there that would tell you how difficult it would be to implement, even though ideally it would be a good thing.

The Times has reported that the £8.1 billion rollout of smart meters in Britain could be knocked off course unless the Government and Ofgem, the energy regulator, act urgently to convince the public that the information provided by the meters will be held securely.

Fears that data on energy consumption could be misused by criminals, police or insurance companies have curtailed the compulsory introduction of the meters in the Netherlands, according to a report by Datamonitor, the market analyst.

Dutch consumer and privacy organisations were concerned that information relayed as frequently as every 15 minutes could allow employees of utility companies to see when properties were empty or when householders had bought expensive new gadgets.

The doomsday scenario is that once such intricate details of a person's energy habits are made available, the government could start proscribing ever-more individual taxation or even cut-off someone's energy supply on the basis of how much they were using.

The u-turn by the Dutch government represents a tremendous victory for privacy campaigners in the Netherlands and demonstrates that if enough noise is made about a civil liberties issue, eventually politicians will fold rather than face an electoral backlash.

A key weapon of the Government's anti-terror laws was in tatters after the European Court of Human Rights ruled that police stop and search powers were unlawful.

The surprise ruling stunned the Home Office, which swiftly announced that the Government would seek to appeal against the unanimous ruling by seven judges. Despite the judgment, Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, said that police would continue to use the powers, which allow them to stop and search people without having to suspect them of involvement in terrorism.

The Strasbourg court ruled that Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 violated individual freedoms guaranteeing the right to private life. The court criticised the arbitrary nature of the power and also the way in which its use was authorised.

Under Section 44, the Home Secretary can authorise police to make random stop and searches in a designated area for up to 28 days, after which the power is renewable.

The case was brought by Kevin Gillan and Pennie Quinton, who were stopped by police while on their way to a demonstration outside an arms fair at the ExCeL centre in Docklands, London, in September 2003. Quinton, a journalist from London, was ordered to stop filming despite showing her press card, while Gillan, who was riding his bicycle, was only allowed to go on his way after 20 minutes. They were awarded £30,400 in costs.

The court said that the power to search an individual's clothing and belongings in public involved an element of humiliation that was a clear interference with the right to privacy. The judges criticised the way in which the power was authorised, noting that there was no requirement that the power should be considered necessary, only expedient. They were also concerned that the decision to stop and search someone was based exclusively on the hunch or professional intuition of the police officer .

The independent reviewer of anti-terrorism legislation, Lord Carlile of Berriew, QC, said that the judgment could have serious implications and might require parts of the Terrorism Act 2000 to be rewritten. Lord Carlile has repeatedly said that police forces are making too much use of their power to stop and search under the Act. In his last report he estimated that between 8,000 and 10,000 stops per month were taking place under Section 44 in early 2009 but none of the searches had resulted in a conviction for a terrorism offence. More than a quarter of a million Section 44 stop and searches took place in Britain in 2008-09, leading to 1,452 arrests.

Alberic Guigou from online reputation management firm Reputation Squad said many people were becoming public figures on the internet: They are being on Facebook, on Twitter. They are communicating a lot of information about themselves . But the issue is that a lot of people also remain anonymous. They take advantage of that to ruin other people's reputations,

The impact of all those online revelations has made France consider the length of time that personal information should remain available in the public arena.

A proposed law in the country would give net users the option to have old data about themselves deleted. This right-to-forget would force online and mobile firms to dispose of e-mails and text messages after an agreed length of time or on the request of the individual concerned.

Divina Frau-Meigs, Professor of American Studies and Media Sociology at the Paris Sorbonne University, believes the law would counter against unguarded communications becoming an official record.

Alberic Guigou said: This debate is also connected to the right of presumption of innocence in many ways, so that people are not found guilty even before they start on life. People and young people need to be protected by the State so that there is fairness in the way this protection is established, she added.