Robin Wilton's esoterica

       
 
« Previous day (Oct 13, 2005) | Main | Next day (Oct 14, 2005) »

14 Oct · Fri 2005

New Liberty Alliance guidelines (2)


I promised a bit more after my initial, rather rushed post of a couple of days ago. Here's a link to the Liberty Press Release about the new Policy and Implementation Guidelines. With its discrete Expert Groups for Technology, Public Policy and Business and Marketing, the Alliance has always recognised that a viable approach to fixing the business problems of identity depends on a lot more than technical specifications. I think it's also a symptom of having a consortium made up of 'user' companies and not just technology vendors. For some reason they won't let us only do the techie stuff... we have to work on how to put it into practice too. Mind you, that does also encourage a certain realism. After all, there's no point defining a constellation of specifications which are technically great but too complex to be put into productive use.
Posted by racingsnake @ 07:34 PM GMT+00:00

UK anti-terror legislation


Well, The Independent newspaper appears to have woken up to the implications of the proposal to extend to 90 days the period for which a terrorism suspect can be detained without charge. If you remember, this is something the law enforcers asked Tony Blair to arrange, so that they have time to do things like look through hours of CCTV surveillance footage in search of evidence. Yesterday's front page splash in The Independent was partly prompted by the publication of a Foreign Office report comparing the UK proposals with the current status of similar legislation in other countries. It should not surprise anyone that the UK proposals are far harsher than anything they could find in the countries they surveyed. As I noted a few days ago, Home Office ministers trying to defend the proposals were even prepared to cite the measures in place in legal systems radically different from ours, such as France. The Foreign Office report presents Mr Blair with an embarrassing dilemma. It makes it abundantly clear that the UK proposals are way out of line with other democracies. Unfortunately for him, the only rational counter to that is to point out that the risk analysis in the UK justifies more stringent measures. Of course, he can't deploy that argument, because it would imply a causal relationship between taking the UK to war pre-emptively against a Muslim state, and the resulting increase in the terrorist threat against this country. That's a link which he would rather we did not think about. So to date, his only defence against the criticism that these measures are draconian is to bleat that "the Police will not be locking people up indiscriminately just because we introduce powers for them to do so". Of course, the fact that a police officer detained Walter Wolfgang under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act for the heinous crime of heckling the Foreign Secretary at Labour's party conference rather gives the lie to that, doesn't it? There is no way to avoid this conclusion: if these legislative powers are introduced, then not only will they be used, they will also be abused.
Posted by racingsnake @ 11:05 AM GMT+00:00
 
 
 
 
 
« October 2005 »
MonTueWedThuFriSatSun
     
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
      
Today

unsubscribe from human rights abuse in the war on terror
Locations of visitors to this page
Such views as I express in this blog are based on my own opinions, experience and judgements. They do not necessarily represent the policy or views of my employer. It is not my intention to offend readers in any way. If you find anything on this blog offensive, please contact me in the first instance.
Robin Wilton
www.flickr.com

Links to recent entries

[RSS Newsfeed]

Valid XHTML or CSS?

[This is a Roller site]
Theme by Rowell Sotto.
What's this?
 
© racingsnake