The sinister potential of coronavirus lockdown to suppress dissent was on display on Monday as police broke up a small group of protestors outside Westminster Crown Court during a case management hearing for Julian Assange. The dozen protestors, who included Julian’s father John Shipton, were all social distancing at least 2 metres apart (except where living in the same household). The police did not observe social distancing as they broke up this small and peaceful protest.
This is a stark illustration of the use of the current emergency powers to suppress legitimate dissent.
For the first time, there was something of a court victory for Assange’s defence team, as they obtained their preferred date of September for resumption of the extradition hearing. Last week magistrate Baraitser had tried to impose a choice of July or November based on the availability of Woolwich Crown Court. As defence witnesses have to come from around the world, July was too early for the defence, while November would mean another lengthy period of incarceration for the unconvicted Assange. This is not the first time the defence have secured the agreement of the US-led prosecution to a procedural request, but it is the very first time Baraitser has acceded to anything proposed by the defence, throughout all the lengthy proceedings.
SO the Assange hearing will resume in September, and of course I intend to be there to report it, if not myself incarcerated. The exact date is not yet known nor the venue. It will not be Woolwich but another Crown Court which has availability. I suspect it may be at Kingston-upon-Thames, because the government will want to maintain the theatre of the peaceful Julian being an ultra-dangerous offender and that is the other purpose built “anti-terrorism court” in London.
It is well worth reading this excellent article from El Pais by Julian’s partner, Stella Morris. It says a great deal that in the state that is actually holding Europe’s most prominent political prisoner, no newspaper would publish it. It is a truism that the general public fail to notice the slide into authoritarianism before it is too late. I confess I never thought to witness the process first hand in the UK. The information on guns in the article is new to me:
After Julian was arrested a year ago, Spain’s High Court opened an investigation into the security company that had been operating inside the embassy. Several whistleblowers came forward and have informed law enforcement of unlawful activities against Julian and his lawyers, both inside and outside the embassy. They are cooperating with law enforcement and have provided investigators with large amounts of data.
The investigation has revealed that the company had been moonlighting for a US company closely associated with the current US administration and US intelligence agencies and that the increasingly disturbing instructions, such as following my mother or the baby DNA directive, had come from their US client, not Ecuador. Around the same time that I had been approached about the targeting of our baby, the company was thrashing out even more sinister plans concerning Julian’s life. Their alleged plots to poison or abduct Julian have been raised in UK extradition proceedings. A police raid at the security company director’s home turned up two handguns with their serial numbers filed off.
We are now to be expected to entrust ourselves to a new coronavirus tracing app, currently being trialed on the Isle of Wight, that allows the government to know precisely where we are and with whom. The results will be permanently stored in a central database – something that is not required for the ostensible purpose of the app. The UK is alone among European states in seeking to create a national centralised database containing traceable unique identifiers for individuals. Precisely to address civil liberties concerns, all other countries are using a devolved database approach with amalgamation only of research useful date which cannot identify individuals. The UK is also refusing to share code with the public, or even precise detail of developers. The US firm Palantir, which has developed the app for NHSX, is coy about where its development is carried out and by whom. So far nothing has been released on the architecture of the App.
I highly recommend this podcast by Matrix Chambers on the very alarming civil liberties implication of the approach to the tracing app by Boris Johnson’s government.
There is no organisation or group with an interest in data privacy which is not sounding the alarm. The Register reports:
Controversially, the NHSX app will beam that contact data back to government-controlled servers. The academics who signed today’s open letter fear that this data stockpile will become “a tool that enables data collection on the population, or on targeted sections of society, for surveillance.”
As we reported yesterday, Britain has abandoned the international consensus on how much data should be collected to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.
The letter said:
We hold that the usual data protection principles should apply: collect the minimum data necessary to achieve the objective of the application. We hold it is vital that if you are to build the necessary trust in the application the level of data being collected is justified publicly by the public health teams demonstrating why this is truly necessary rather than simply the easiest way, or a “nice to have”, given the dangers involved and invasive nature of the technology.
Then a further report in The Register emphasised still more the UK government’s rejection of the Apple-Google app being used by virtually every other country, which is specifically devised to make impossible centralised storing of information which identifies individuals:
Presumably the goal with this kind of explanation is to comfort the vast majority of UK folk who don’t understand how the entire internet economy works by connecting vast databases together.
So long as you can rely on one piece of per-user data – like a “big random number” – everything else can be connected. And if you also have a postcode, that becomes 100 times easier. Ever heard of Facebook? It’s worth billions solely because it is able to connect the dots between datasets.
Indeed, it may be possible to work out who is associating with whom from the app’s ID numbers. Bear in mind, the Apple-Google decentralized approach produces new ID numbers for each user each day, thwarting identification, especially with the ban on location tracking.
Levy also glossed over the fact that as soon as someone agrees to share their information with UK government – by claiming to feel unwell and hitting a big green button – 28 days of data from the app is given to a central server from where it can never be recovered. That data, featuring all the unique IDs you’ve encountered in that period and when and how far apart you were, becomes the property of NCSC – as its chief exec Matthew Gould was forced to admit to MPs on Monday. Gould also admitted that the data will not be deleted, UK citizens will not have the right to demand it is deleted, and it can or will be used for “research” in future.
Yes, that is Matthew Gould in charge of the whole project. Matthew Gould, who as Private Secretary to first David Miliband and then William Hague, and then as UK Ambassador to Israel, held an extraordinary total of eight secret meetings with Liam Fox and Adam Werritty together.
1) 8 September 2009 as Miliband’s Principal Private Secretary (omitted from O’Donnell report)
2) 16 June 2010 as Hague’s Principal Private Secretary (omitted from O’Donnell report)
3) A “social occasion” in summer 2010 as Ambassador designate to Israel with Gould, Fox and Werritty (omitted from O’Donnell report)
4) 1 September 2010 in London (only one September meeting in O’Donnell report)
5) 27 September 2010 in London (only one September meeting in O’Donnell report)
6) 4-6 February 2011 Herzilya Conference Israel (omitted from O’Donnell report)
7) 6 February 2011 Tel Aviv dinner with Mossad and Israeli military
8) 15 May 2011 “We believe in Israel” conference London (omitted from O’Donnell report)
Funnily enough, I was recalling Matthew Gould last week when the Cabinet Secretary, after his “investigation”, published his report “exonerating” Priti Patel of bullying. It reminded me of when then Gus O’Donnell as Cabinet Secretary published his “investigation” into the Fox-Werritty affair, in which Gus O’Donnell systematically lied and covered up the meetings between Fox, Werritty and Matthew Gould, claiming there had only been two such meetings when in fact there were eight. It is also a good moment perhaps to pay tribute to the redoubtable Paul Flynn MP, recently deceased, who after I briefed him attempted to question Gus O’Donnell on the Public Administration Committee about the meetings he was covering up. With admirable persistence, despite continual efforts to block him, Flynn did manage to get Gus O’Donnell to admit directly that one of the Fox/Werritty/Matthew Gould meetings was with Mossad.
Hansard Public Administration Committee 24/11/2011
Q<369> Paul Flynn: Okay. Matthew Gould has been the subject of a very serious complaint from two of my constituents, Pippa Bartolotti and Joyce Giblin. When they were briefly imprisoned in Israel, they met the ambassador, and they strongly believe—it is nothing to do with this case at all—that he was serving the interest of the Israeli Government, and not the interests of two British citizens. This has been the subject of correspondence.
In your report, you suggest that there were two meetings between the ambassador and Werritty and Liam Fox. Questions and letters have proved that, in fact, six such meetings took place. There are a number of issues around this. I do not normally fall for conspiracy theories, but the ambassador has proclaimed himself to be a Zionist and he has previously served in Iran, in the service. Werritty is a self-proclaimed—
Robert Halfon: Point of order, Chairman. What is the point of this?
Paul Flynn: Let me get to it. Werritty is a self-proclaimed expert on Iran.
Chair: I have to take a point of order.
Robert Halfon: Mr Flynn is implying that the British ambassador to Israel is working for a foreign power, which is out of order.
Paul Flynn: I quote the Daily Mail: “Mr Werritty is a self-proclaimed expert on Iran and has made several visits. He has also met senior Israeli officials, leading to accusations”—not from me, from the Daily Mail—“that he was close to the country’s secret service, Mossad.” There may be nothing in that, but that appeared in a national newspaper.
Chair: I am going to rule on a point of order. Mr Flynn has made it clear that there may be nothing in these allegations, but it is important to have put it on the record. Be careful how you phrase questions.
Paul Flynn: Indeed. The two worst decisions taken by Parliament in my 25 years were the invasion of Iraq—joining Bush’s war in Iraq—and the invasion of Helmand province. We know now that there were things going on in the background while that built up to these mistakes. The charge in this case is that Werritty was the servant of neo-con people in America, who take an aggressive view on Iran. They want to foment a war in Iran in the same way as in the early years, there was another—
Chair: Order. I must ask you to move to a question that is relevant to the inquiry.
Q<370> Paul Flynn: Okay. The question is, are you satisfied that you missed out on the extra four meetings that took place, and does this not mean that those meetings should have been investigated because of the nature of Mr Werritty’s interests?
Sir Gus O’Donnell: I think if you look at some of those meetings, some people are referring to meetings that took place before the election.
Q<371> Paul Flynn: Indeed, which is even more worrying.
Sir Gus O’Donnell: I am afraid they were not the subject—what members of the Opposition do is not something that the Cabinet Secretary should look into. It is not relevant.
But these meetings were held—
Chair: Mr Flynn, would you let him answer please?Sir Gus O’Donnell: I really do not think that was within my context, because they were not Ministers of the Government and what they were up to was not something I should get into at all.
Chair: Final question, Mr Flynn.
Q<372> Paul Flynn: No, it is not a final question. I am not going to be silenced by you, Chairman; I have important things to raise. I have stayed silent throughout this meeting so far.
You state in the report—on the meeting held between Gould, Fox and Werritty, on 6 February, in Tel Aviv—that there was a general discussion of international affairs over a private dinner with senior Israelis. The UK ambassador was present…
Sir Gus O’Donnell: The important point here was that, when the Secretary of State had that meeting, he had an official with him—namely, in this case, the ambassador. That is very important, and I should stress that I would expect our ambassador in Israel to have contact with Mossad. That will be part of his job. It is totally natural, and I do not think that you should infer anything from that about the individual’s biases.
When I put in Freedom of Information requests for the minutes of the eight meetings involving all of Liam Fox, Adam Werritty and Matthew Gould, they came back as blank sheets of paper, with literally everything removed but the date, in the interests of “national security”. When I put in a Freedom of Information request for all correspondence between Adam Werritty and Matthew Gould, I received a refusal on the grounds it would be too expensive to collect it.
I should make my position perfectly plain. I think a coronavirus tracing app is an important tool in containing the virus. I would happily use the safeguarded one being developed by Google/Apple with decentralised data and daily changing identifiers, not linked to postcodes, being adopted by major European governments.
But I think serious questions have to be asked about why the UK government has developed its own unique app, universally criticised for its permanent central data collection and ability to identify individuals from their unique codes. That this is overseen not by a scientist or health professional, but by the man who held all those secret meetings with Fox and Werritty, including with Mossad as admitted to Parliament by the then Cabinet Secretary, frankly stinks.
With grateful thanks to those who donated or subscribed to make this reporting possible.
This article is entirely free to reproduce and publish, including in translation, and I very much hope people will do so actively. Truth shall set us free.
——————————————
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.
Choose subscription amount from dropdown box:
Paypal address for one-off donations: [email protected]
Alternatively:
Account name
MURRAY CJ
Account number 3 2 1 5 0 9 6 2
Sort code 6 0 – 4 0 – 0 5
IBAN GB98NWBK60400532150962
BIC NWBKGB2L
Bank address Natwest, PO Box 414, 38 Strand, London, WC2H 5JB
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
The moral of this, and most of the other shocking stories that we discuss here, is that those who, very sensibly, distrust the motives of a state acting in the interests of the ruling class and its capitalist system of exploitation should consider organising to overthrow that state and replace it with a democratic structure, responsive to the wishes of the people.
There was a time when such organisations, including political parties thrived and garnered the support of large sections of the working class including those sincerely concerned about the civil liberties that are the foundation of freedom.
It is a mistake to believe, as many appear to do, that exchanging opinions, discussions and arguments, useful as they are to the formation of public opinion, are a form of political action.
What capitalist system do you have in mind?
Capitalism requires savings, savings that are accumulated to invest into capital. The entire world has devolved into a debt based dystopia. Absent savings there can be no capitalism.
What you are actually referring to is the state mandated and state enabled looting of the population so as to transfer all wealth to a select clique of people. A clique of people that can only exist because they are created and protected by the state. Unbelievably some people seem to believe that corporate criminals are somehow separate from the state. They are the state – just operating at one remove from the more obvious institutions of the state.
There is no working class – only a serf class. By definition serfs cannot have civil liberties otherwise they would not be serfs. The only interesting question is whether the state stole the freedom of the people or whether the people sacrificed their own freedom for an endless succession of meaningless baubles and a cowardly surrender to their own fears of mortality.
“Give me liberty or give me death” is so much more than a slogan – but its true meaning has long been forgotten, with the wiping of the collective memory being fostered by the brutality of the stupidity imparted by state education systems.
“Give me liberty or give me death”
– Patrick Henry, in a speech to the Second Virgina Convention, in a speech urging the Commonwealth of Virginia to declare war on Britain. Many of the signers of the later American Declaration of Independence were present.
Incidentally: In a school mock election in Virginia, I once heard a pupil whose surname was Liberta give a stump speech containing the line “Give me Liberta, or give me death”. The origins of the phrase are far from forgotten in Virgina – it’s almost a state motto.
“In this way, perhaps, our people might get into their heads some glimmering of the fact that the State’s criminality is nothing new and nothing to be wondered at. It began when the first predatory group of men clustered together and formed the State, and it will continue as long as the State exists in the world, because the State is fundamentally an anti-social institution, fundamentally criminal. The idea that the State originated to serve any kind of social purpose is completely unhistorical. It originated in conquest and confiscation — that is to say, in crime. It originated for the purpose of maintaining the division of society into an owning-and-exploiting class and a propertyless dependent class — that is, for a criminal purpose.
No State known to history originated in any other manner, or for any other purpose. Like all predatory or parasitic institutions, its first instinct is that of self-preservation. All its enterprises are directed first towards preserving its own life, and, second, towards increasing its own power and enlarging the scope of its own activity. For the sake of this it will, and regularly does, commit any crime which circumstances make expedient. In the last analysis, what is the German, Italian, French, or British State now actually doing? It is ruining its own people in order to preserve itself, to enhance its own power and prestige, and extend its own authority; and the American State is doing the same thing to the utmost of its opportunities.”
Albert Jay Nock
https://mises.org/library/criminality-state
Thanks for the quote and link, Kev!
Propagandists don’t half love their numbers! Citizens who feel like criticising the government can say the government’s promise to carry out x Covid-19 tests is insufficient and they should really carry out x+y.
Should it be 100000 per day, or 3 million a fortnight, or 27000 a week, or whatever other number has been okayed by Dominic Cummings?
As if it matters.
It doesn’t matter one jot of a damn.
The government (of course calling itself “the NHS”) could test everybody or nobody and it wouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference to anybody’s health at all.
The “tests” could be earbuds soaked in piss for all the difference it would make.
It’s all propaganda.
Get the herd used to standing in line to be health-checked, in the manner of a group of farm animals, and then either given a thumbs-up (a “freedom passport” subject to recall by smartphone) or a thumbs-down (an order to go straight home and never to dare to go to the shops until they receive a flash on their smartphone from the army or from some c*** at the council telling them they’re allowed).
Meanwhile the middle class left prattles on about civil liberties, quoting from D Notice Committee okayed places like the Register.
(yawns)
‘prattling on about civil liberties’ – you’re so right, give us a rest from it.
I’m not sure it’s civil liberty vanishing, more like intelligence.
I’m struck by the contradiction between the state protecting the identities of its own actors, in the Salmond trial, and them wanting to knowing everything about us. Logically that divides society into two parts , those that are doing something that is criminal, like lying to a court, and those that have nothing to hide.
Why would the state want to persuade the people that they are criminals, when at the moment the majority trust them? It has got to the state now that I don’t believe the results of the election even.
When there is no trust left, just a state apparatus making money for itself, there will be a revolution.
Why would that be good for the elites, having no clothes? Doesn’t make sense to me.
The more power the state has, the less authority. The only place they can go from there is a dictatorship to stop us exposing what they are doing. It’s like the fisherman’s wife who kept asking the flounder for more and more. When she got to wanting to be Pope, she was returned to the shack by the sea.
The widespread diminution of intelligence, happening fast, is reminiscent of the past 4 years of prehistory in the US, and if that is so we can expect an increasingly loud stomp stomp stomp from a popular statist and parastatist (because what does the difference matter?) far right…and we are close to the definition of fascism right there. We are already way beyond the ken of chatterers who go on about “populism” as some kind of electoral phenomenon (or essence, but chatterers don’t know the difference). That’s the previous period now, even if it said much about that, which it didn’t really, but since when did “liberal democratic” assumptions ever help with the understanding of dynamics? A wipeout of savings looks bolted on. Food shortages? Well anyone who thinks “Don’t be silly” and has a shred of intellectual honesty is going to have lots of egg on their face even if no eggs in their fridge!
Well, you can have 20 years talking about it all and losing the freedoms because those in power respond not to decency but to power.
Or you can decide that enough is enough, democracy as is has completely failed and you have to use some kind of force (5 million people storming Westminster and Downing Street is force, even if not one of the five million is carrying a weapon) to simply kick the criminals out.
Then having inherited all the power that you hated the criminals having, you have to ensure that you dismantle the state powers before a fascist who MI5 implanted into your revolutionary grouping kicks you out to become the next dictator who can reinstall all the criminals.
You have to be a dictator until such time as you have neutralised your enemies. Only then can you start to release the freedoms.
Unfortunately, history tells us that the last bit usually falls by the wayside.
Interesting,ahem,scene between Ferguson,Staats and Lucas.
Wonder who is really fucking who and,more importantly,who are they fucking on behalf of,and why exactly?
“Fancy hanging out with Theresa may and a giant Rupert Murdoch sometime? Look no futher, AVAAZ is hiring.” Antonia Staats
https://twitter.com/Ian56789/status/1257945450432401408/photo/1
Johnson’s former employer (telegraph) has a photographer camped outside the house of the main scientist who was going to oppose Johnson’s end to the lock down. Story published on day lockdown announced over. Just a coincidence? He was inconvenient, and now he is silenced.
Who’s replacing him? What contract was the division over? I don’t know the answer to either question. If we want some fundamentals, the only big business interests Cummings is on record as fawning to are Google and Apple (and one of those is far more powerful than the other). There’s also Fidelity who have been doing some PR. It would be funny if Fidelity went bust but maybe that’s wishful thinking. There’s a question mark about Big Insurance too. That would be quite a pedestrian observation in a time of such a hiatus in economic production, but hardly anyone is making it. Glad I’m not a name at Lloyd’s! ?
Are you sure you meant Fidelity? Fidelity investments? Maybe you meant Faculty? (I don’t understand what you mean.)
I wouldn’t mind putting a quid on, the government “encouraged” hacks to stake out Fergie,
as he needed explicitly to be proved a charlatan.
This a precursor to Sundays coming performance by our hero, Boris.
Boris could hardly stand on his head, if he still followed Fergie?
It is amazing quite how many of these Establishment actors are flagrantly breaking the rules they impose so carelessly on all the rest of us.
Do not be surprised to see Ferguson reemerge being paid even more. He will be rewarded for pushing the Gates agenda, make no mistake.
Just like Tony Blair got £50m for pushing the wanton murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis.
Because of the UK political obsession with media management, the government are deliberately overstating and oversimplifying the rules. According to the rules, when she turned up at his door needing “comfort” he should have turned her away, which is obviously over-the-top. Nobody would do that, and nobody else is doing that.
“Stay home to protect the NHS” and “Don’t see your family or friends, so as to protect the NHS” reminds me of utility companies that ask for your mother’s maiden name and say “that’s for data protection”. Perhaps a kick up the a*se will help with earache. “Doctor” said it would. Bend over, or else you’re killing nurses.
Basically the rulers are using a titchy bit of slightly different flu (that otherwise nobody would even have noticed) as an excuse for having a massive economic clearout at a global level – a clearout that they are getting away with because minds have been so softened up by smartphones, a clearout that includes
* murdering the elderly
* tagging everyone
* making food and fresh air and socialisation into privileges
* imposing (has anybody noticed?) huge nationalistic branding in every country, and
* getting everybody used to waiting for the OK from “experts” (and soon from the army and a bunch of c***s at the council) before they breathe or do anything else they need or want to do.
Most of what the NHS does has been SHUT DOWN. That’s how much the government loves the population it is bending over backwards to “protect” and “save” from the lergy.
Quite N_ and that I’m afraid is what you get from the British Brainwashing Corporation and other corporate-owned broadcasting services.
I really applaud the work our NHS workers do. They should be clapped every day. With this blanket coverage of the “bad case of flu” it has mobilised people into recognising just how dedicated their roles are. That’s what the media can do.
Like you John, I am grateful for the individual efforts of each and every NHS worker and others who provide a similar service. I am appalled by the necessity for them to work up to 14 hours shifts in our hospitals, but I cannot subscribe to the weekly Thursday evening ritual of clapping because, as a nation, we can do better than that by ensuring our apology for a government junks the policy of having our student nurses take out bank loans to fund their learning. Clapping is an insult which provides the government with a no-cost impact activity. The Minister taking the daily briefing this afternoon was asked if he would support a campaign to abolish student nurse training costs as they are at the present time once the immediate crisis is deemed over and he gave no such undertaking. I think that demonstrates how truly grateful this government is despite saving the life of their leader.
they’d prefer a raise rather than applause.
I am afraid Mr Goss that the collateral damage of you thinking we have to ‘appreciate the NHS’ is millions of economic lives destroyed.
I consider absolutely unacceptable and if the NHS workers are sanguine about it they do not need clapping, they need a jolly good beating.
The NHS workers are Poland selling Mrs Thatcher stockpiles of coal and the millions of SME owners shafted toward bankruptcy are the miners.
And the SME owners did zero, flat zero, in terms of rebellion, lawbreaking, infringing the liberties of others.
They were just euthanised in business terms.
Just like the Jews in nazi Germany.
I’m all for the lock-down.
It slows the spread of a very nasty virus.
It takes the steam out of a fucked up economy that rewards trolls with billions and condemns billions to a life of toil.
There are numerous instances of NHS selling medical data to big pharma, insurance companies and other third parties. The data is used, we are assurred, to help drug research, adjust premiums and who knows what. It is “anonymised” whilst providing date of birth and post code which effectively de-anonymises you. I was going to post some links but there are so many reports even in the MSM that I didn’t want to give them traffic. Do a search in any search engine.
No consent for this is taken from patients by either GP’s or in hospitals other than possibly a vague “is it ok for us to use this in research”. David Cameron changed the NHS constitution to allow data to be sold off.
Privacy issues have been a bugbear of mine ever since I discovered index.dat files in Windows 95 and found out about cookies back in the late 90’s. I try to discuss these issues with family members, who are all pretty much convinced I am deluded and part of the tin foil hat brigade. I am. Very soon you will start hearing the “if you have nothing to hide what have you to fear,” and “I don’t care if the government sees what I do as it isn’t that interesting.”
The problem with data surveillance is that it is complex and obscured and therefore hard to fully understand. I have yet to find the killer argument that convinces even members of my own family that I am not a nut job after 20 years of trying. If anyone has such a killer agrument please let me know. Two UK organisations you might be interested in, whose purpose is to investigate and campaign in these matters are:
https://privacyinternational.org/
https://www.openrightsgroup.org/
Meanwhile wear your tinfoil hat with a modicum of pride.
Asking questions about government initiatives you’ve been signed up for unknowingly seems pretty sensible to me.
The whole point about surveillance is that it makes people feel that they have lost their privacy.
I reached a point where I just said ‘I cannot afford to let the perverts in MI5 turn me into a drone’.
I write abusive things all the time about MI5 and it is entirely their own fault. They deserve every piece of bad language they get because 99% of what they do has nothing to do with fighting terrorism, it is about subverting democracy to ensure that true democracy can never take hold. For that, most of them deserve carpet bombing.
I barely use the NHS for the very good reason that when I used it in the past, it simply did not serve my true needs in any way whatever. They are addicted to prescribing pills and incapable of prescribing healthy living. They have no right to share my data and mercifully they have no recent data to share about me.
To be clear, I think there is huge potential for the proper use of big data for the public good in almost every area but especially in health care.I am not against it use as long as the proper safe guards are in place
it must be properly anonymised,
who gets access to it and for what use is made public,
that third parties get access to it for a particular use and only that use
That any party only gets access to it and can never own or transfer it to their own servers
That it is secured ie. the best anti-hacking protection (security angencies could help here, I bet they have very sophisticated procedures and protocols)
Many others I haven’t thought of yet or can’t express properly yet.
The big data resource has huge potential for public good but sadly the underlying premise is to use it for profit above all else. Pretty much the problem with the entire planet, profit first everything else is an afterthought.
I am not against it use as long as the proper safeguards are in place………that’s like getting vampires to run the blood transfusion service on the basis that they promised not to sample the product. State intrusion is out of control and growing every day, nothing is off the table for them.
I totally agree with you. I can however still try to conceptualise a form of big data collection legislated for the benefit of the common good and not for the profiteering of surveillance capitalism. We must begin somewhere.
ET
The governments has gone way too far, in its continual war against Islam, in its revolving door with supposedly secure social media sites, with propaganda CIA the MSM through universal credit , through its lies about the Skripals, the list is endless, to be trusted on this App.
Also with rigging the last general election.
The time has come to fight back against all forms of government data espionage. Its hypocrisy re Russia and China about state espionage is as outrageous as its lies from senior ministers like Matthew Gould.
The EU recognises there is no place for state access to personal location information. This government is operating by military dictat if it accesses this type of information. Next thing will be chipping or facial recognition.
So if there were any medical benefits to be had from this technology, the government has closed them by wanting to piggy back on it to know exactly where we all are .
If the government doesn’t get it, they must be overthrown.
The state shows it’s true colours as the biggest enemy of the people as it always is. People better wake up to the fraud and theft that is happening undercover of the faker virus.
This is the deepest depresion since the Great Depression and we are doing it to ourselves with this insane Lock-Down.
When we are forced to use smart money, they can lock your bank and stop yoiu doing transactions, remotely.
When we are forced to use electric cars, they will know where you are at all times, they will turn it off so you can’t use it, same with smart metres and smart tv’s, no licence, no looking at tv.
We are going to be buggered.
You’ve said it Steven and Michael. You know this social distancing is a fraud when its chief advisor demonstrates it only applies to others. And it is not just Professor Neil Ferguson but Dr Catherine Calderwood too, chief medical officer for Scotland, who resigned for doing the same thing. They know most people are not going to suffer with COVID-19. They should have concentrated on the most vulnerable from the start – the elderly and sick and let the rest get on with their lives.
One thing we must never do is let our government get away with this a second time. Having written that I despair that the majority will succumb countless times before becoming aware. Then should a wolf really come . . . Whatever happens let this be a lesson. Expose them through statistics when they become available. It would have been the real thing if the virus had been worse. What they unleash next time might be.
A German constitutional court ruled against the strict lockdown measures of the federal state of Saarland. The court found that forbidding people from leaving their homes was not significantly more effective than “restrictions on contacts” (social distancing). The court’s finding was partially based on research by Swiss scientists that had concluded that strict rules on leaving the home were only slightly more positive than contact restrictions
The case was brought by Saarland resident who believed the state government’s restrictions were an impingement of his constitutional rights.
https://www.lto.de/recht/nachrichten/n/verfgh-saarland-lv-7-20-ausgangsbeschraenkungen-verfassungswidrig-corona-freiheit/
Thanks for that article, OnlyHalfALoony!
NCSC: Could someone please translate that acronym?
National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC):
https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/
Seems it is even worse.
Aside from the privacy concerns Craig mentioned in his post it seems that the UK app is also much less effective at doing the job it is meant to be doing. In countries that share a border, for example, N.Ireland and Rep of Ireland there is a curious dilemma.
https://sluggerotoole.com/2020/05/05/if-the-uk-doesnt-change-its-disastrous-contact-tracing-app-strategy-northern-ireland-should-align-with-the-irish-government-approach/
Seriously?
Is the spyware any good at its stated purpose? If you have to ask, then frankly you’ve already accepted the premise.
‘Basically the rulers are using a titchy bit of slightly different flu (that otherwise nobody would even have noticed) as an excuse for having a massive economic clearout at a global level – a clearout that they are getting away with because minds have been so softened up by smartphones, a clearout that includes etc.’
Am I the only person that thinks that if the Government had really wanted to save its people and its NHS (from this titchy bit of slightly different flu) then it should have locked down its borders early, enforced quarantine and inconvenienced the rest of the world instead of the people it is so desperate to save, allegedly. Nope, that would have required balls anyway!
A question arises.
What is the motivation of all of the people so keen to not only follow government diktats but to also pressurize their fellow citizens into conformity.
Most will be afraid – having had their capacity for critical thinking destroyed by education systems and reinforced by an endless barrage of propaganda unleashed as part of the psychological terror campaign being waged by governments.
Others will be useful idiots who somehow imagine that shutting down the economy will usher in a new form of new age paradise as envisioned by Extinction Rebellion and climate change fanatics. Seemingly these people cannot understand that the pressure of over 7 billion people means that the imagined paradise will soon turn into a vision of hell. They of course may not live to see the fruits of their labors as their ultimate controllers will dispose of them shortly after it is calculated that the rubicon is crossed.
These are very dangerous times and as Bachman Turner Overdrive observed – you aint seen nothing yet.
Do you reckon Cummings will ask Extinction Rebellion on to his team? He may do. He’s got Steinerite-helping form from when he was with Michael Gove at “education”. Climate change b*llocks hardly gets a look-in on his blog, where he prefers to use things like building a base on the Moon as the central “project” that will help the whole of governance to get Neumanno-Cummingsised. That could be because he knows the ideology of anthropogenic climate change is garbage, but why would that matter?
Given the Covid-19 lies – shutting down most of the economy and putting the population under house arrest the way that Adolf Hitler probably would never have dared, ostensibly because there’s a bit of flu going around – what will the response be to a bit of snow in the autumn or perhaps an unusually high tide somewhere or something like that? If visiting your family is endangering the NHS, then maybe households will find they get capped at using no more than 0.5 kilowatt hours of electrical energy per person per day, or else Google will turn their mains off. Even that’s optimistic given the problems there will certainly be with the 2020 harvest.
Very dangerous times indeed. How governments of the world have cajoled people into shutting down, and encouraging others to do the same, has been painful to watch. Even Ferguson’s way out predictions (which are clearly not going to occur now) of 250,000 deaths are nothing in comparison to Bill Gates’ prediction of 33 million deaths worldwide in 6 months. Up to now there have been 71,000 deaths in the US.
When the world wakes up to real figures it may become aware that the US is predicting 1.8 million new cancer cases this year. And a lot of people are going to die. This has been overshadowed by the big blanket coverage story.
I thought Ferguson predicted 500,000 deaths not a mere 250,000?
So people got things wrong. I don’t find it a great fault when computer modelling is concerned. GIGO = garbage in, garbage out.
Viruses know neither left nor right politically, can spread from poor to rich and back again.
Calling out flagrant violations and those violating stems from the practice of calling out queue jumping and jumpers.
The Tories only shut down the economy as cover for tracking the movements of the tin foil men.
NHS = “Never Have Surgery”?
That’s how it’s looking for millions of people whose operations have been cancelled while so many hospital wards lay largely empty supposedly because of a minor flu epidemic.
I think many operations were postponed when the NHS was in a panic about being overwhelmed, but probably (no proof) they’re getting back, now that it’s been demonstrated that the Nightingale emergency hospitals weren’t really necessary. I have a relation who had her cancer op just before the big crisis. She thinks she was lucky, but the post-op radiotherapy looks like it will proceed normally. Yes, the NHS got in a panic, and it turns out that intubation is far less useful than it was thought in March. Personally I don’t blame them. Nobody really knew quite what the best treatments were going to be.
Good grief, I’m sure there never used to be quite so much paranoid conspiracy theory nonsense below the line. Some posts wouldn’t be out of place at Chris Spivey or David Icke!
—
[ Mod: At times we also discover certain people using multiple identities, ‘AmyB‘ … ]
I can’t see that much difference between what the BTL conspiracy theorists are saying, and what ATL Craig is saying.
‘Conspiracy theorists’ in inverted commas, I think. What do you expect people to say?
It’s always been that way. It’s a shame, Craig’s posts rarely get the debate they deserve. Just the same old axes being ground and soapbox rants. Apart from a couple of exceptions.
As usual many including Craig, are sounding the alarm too late. You’ve been getting tracked, your metadata and actual data of explicit contacts you’ve had, and implicit proximity contacts logged, and your web-browsing and emails, texts, whatever they are, kept for so long now by your devices and the infrastructure that such bleating now is pitiful and pitifully late. That train has left the station, taking with it the cat that was let out of the bag and the genie from the bottle. The future is wired, a phone on a short cable in the hall, ethernet not wi-fi, and if you need to make a call when at-large such as to ring the coastguard on spotting someone adrift up creek without paddle, the only such nature of reason I could think justified, then a phone box, preferably of cast iron and painted red is what you need. We get enough EMR from space that lead on your roof would be worth having, but there’s no need to have it disrupting our cells, immune and nervous system needlessly from terrestrial sources too.
Good luck finding a public telephone these days Tony,they’ve been disappearing very steadily over the last 25 years.
No matter where or what you call from our voice ‘prints’ have been captured many years ago too.
Several things will change, some good.
Heathrow runway three will be no longer needed.
Fat people now have another good reason to try to get fit and lose weight and reverse type 2.
No need for anymore aircraft carriers, they have recently been proved very vulnerable with covid-19
same goes for nuclear subs.
We will not now take 5g huawei
as Chinese have proved unreliable “partners”
We will have to grow all our own grub, so as there will be less, we will all lose weight and throw less away.
We will start to open factories and actually make stuff, instead of buying everything from China.
What I find objectionable about a centrally data-based COVID app is the secretive nature of the objectives. The notion of national identity cards, I don’t find too difficult. The French and Germans have had them for generations without losing individuality. But quite what the UK is going to do with the information is quite unclear.
My feeling is that the app is going to be largely rejected, and it won’t succeed. Simply because they’re not open.
It is a truism that the general public fail to notice the slide into authoritarianism before it is too late. I confess I never thought to witness the process first hand in the UK.
I’ve been saying this since the height of the Syrian war and the mainstream media’s shocking (at the time) transformation into blatant pro-empire propagandists. We are in the first stage of the post-democratic era.
When I first visited this blog, in 2016, you still believed that liberal democratic institutions would persevere and reassert themselves. Since then, the slide into authoritarianism has continued apace and the scales have fallen from your eyes.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of people are as blissfully ignorant of this reality as ever. They are stuck in their bubble of fake happiness, desperately clinging to the delusional fantasy that western society is just and free.
During the coronavirus outbreak influential media outlets like the BBC have ramped up their overbearing saccharine paternalism, treating their readers and viewers like infantilized idiots who would be frightened and lost without the friendly, helpful and oh-so-concerned media to offer them guidance “during these difficult times.”
In polite society bringing up “contentious issues” like the case of Julian Assange or having an opinion that is absent from, or challenges, the conventional wisdom served up by the media is liable to get one labelled ‘eccentric’ or ‘weird’ or even shunned. As they “socially isolate” people have become even more glued to their media of choice and conditioned to follow its lead and accept the norms and boundaries it lays out.
In programs and discussions about 1930’s Germany and how most people at the time quietly adapted to, and went along with, their increasingly authoritarian society, the standard response is still that such a thing could never happen now because we are so much more enlightened and “informed”. This is of course laughable.
People who consider themselves educated and enlightened liberals, e.g. Guardian readers, have been successfully convinced by their media that they, the ultimate cowardly conformists and enablers of stealth totalitarianism, are in fact the principled carriers of the democratic flame, bravely lighting the path forward as “our democracy” is under attack from Russians, Chinamen and strange bloggers who urge people to think for themselves.
No, it’s been like this for the working class since the 70s. Welcome to the club.
Yes, well said.
Maybe we’d have been somewhere different now with real leadership.
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-merkel/germany-eases-lockdown-as-merkel-hails-end-of-pandemic-first-phase-idUKKBN22I248?il=0
I’ve sent a message to all my contacts that they should remove me from their contacts and friends and delete all my emails and messages to and from me if they insist on loading this particular app into their life.
That’s not a bad idea
Dear Craig ,
Hi , I’ve wondered about the choice of the Isle of Wight and its main industry running the prisons . Apparently the first batch of app downloaders have been public servants , maybe disproportionately in the prison service . Could prisoners somehow be ‘tagged’ 100% , so as to make them the main objects of surveillance and so provide a completely ‘wifi-ed’ population to study ? I think our authorities know full well that they have zero chance of getting the majority of the citizenry to voluntarily take part in this clearly English restricted pilot scheme . So I think GCHQ may be doing a ‘pilot study’ for ‘what if’ scenarios
Derek
Just me or is the comment section seething with spooks today?
Nah….its society as a whole.
CM – “But I think serious questions have to be asked about why the UK government has developed its own unique app, ”
Matthew Gould, who is the CEO of NHSX gives a corporate blurb of his thinking here:-
https://healthtech.blog.gov.uk/2020/03/28/the-power-of-data-in-a-pandemic/
One line in this is – “To provide a single source of truth about the rapidly evolving situation, data will then be integrated, cleaned, and harmonised in order to develop the single and reliable information that is needed to support decision-making” . A single source of truth.
Gould has awarded a contract on the nod to Marc Warner at Faculty. Marc Warner is the brother of Ben Warner who also used to work at Faculty. Ben Warner is the oppo of Cummings who went along to the Sage meeting.
https://bylinetimes.com/2020/04/22/palantir-coronavirus-contract-did-not-go-to-competitive-tender/
Notice that loads of taxpayers money is being paid out to private companies by the NHS. Many of the 18,000 contact tracers will be minimum wage employees sitting in private company call centres doubtless gathering more data for Gould’s moloch.
It’ll probably be one more failure in the long line of NHS IT failures. The data gathered will probably be sold off to Amazon or Google to ‘save money for the NHS’, and will be described as ‘anonymised’. Maybe the whole thing is a McGuffin to gather data for the NHS’s ‘partners’ in the USA. Trade talks with the USA began recently.
Ha Ha, Matthew Gould again! Werrity will doubtless turn up as being connected to the Wuhan lab, which will surprise nobody here. For where is Werrity anyway?
In the Aus Health sector, they do a lot of work at de-identifying data. I’ve seen it first hand, it forms a part of every IT project. It’s actually hard, as you can imagine, and adds to costs, but it’s also a) a legal requirement, b) the right thing to do. These 2 things are not always linked. I won’t download the Aussie version, and advise others to avoid the UK one. For one, I hold a deep suspicion that it simply doesn’t work, and has zero effect on any virus whatsoever. Nowadays it seems that everything is bullshit.
“The UK is also refusing to share code with the public, or even precise detail of developers. The US firm Palantir, which has developed the app for NHSX, is coy about where its development is carried out and by whom. So far nothing has been released on the architecture of the App.”
But looking over at the FT: https://www.ft.com/content/d44beb06-5e3e-434f-a3a0-f806ce06576c
“The initial version of the UK app .. was developed by Zuhlke in conjunction with Silicon Valley-based firm Pivotal”.
So not Palantir (or Faculty come to that).
And some notes on the app, including the promise to open source it:
https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/blog-post/security-behind-nhs-contact-tracing-app
https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/report/nhs-covid-19-app-privacy-security-report
The government are literally briefing that “social distancing” may have to be reimposed in October if there’s an outbreak of seasonal flu – which of course there always is. How strange they haven’t said that in previous years.
To coincide with US elections!
I have just watched a BBC (Scotland) documentary titled “Eminent Monsters.” It sheds light on the British and USA use of psychological torture techniques that fit exactly with the psychological torture of Julian Assange.
Please watch.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000j0lh/eminent-monsters
Contact-tracing apps are not a solution to the COVID-19 crisis
April 27, 2020 Ashkan Soltani, Ryan Calo, and Carl Bergstrom
https://www.brookings.edu/techstream/inaccurate-and-insecure-why-contact-tracing-apps-could-be-a-disaster/
“We have no doubts that the developers of contact-tracing apps and related technologies are well-intentioned.” Uh-oh they clearly don’t think that at all, but their jobs depend on saying quite the opposite of what they believe; the presence of such a disclaimer, which is quite at variance with what the rest of the article, is a dead giveaway.
Also something on the US (in)justice system, coming soon to a courtroom near you: “The question before the judges, who are working remotely amid the coronavirus crisis, is whether a prosecutor has any power to right a wrongful conviction — a decision that will resonate far beyond the current case. According to Schmitt’s office, the answer is no. Giving a prosecutor that power “has the potential to undermine public confidence” in the criminal justice system, Shaun Mackelprang, chief of the attorney general’s criminal division, told the judges. “The prosecutor’s interests are broader than the interests of a single individual.””
https://theintercept.com/2020/05/04/missouri-attorney-general-lamar-johnson-prison/
Worth a read, links via https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-mar-jun.html – RS – who never carries a portable phone.
No Help for Seniors.
No Hope of Surgery.
Nice Holidays for Surgeons.
National Hoax Scam.
Meanwhile, any news from the homeless? Media have gone into silent mode since they disappeared from the streets.
The inventors of Bluetooth are aghast at the idea.
https://theintercept.com/2020/05/05/coronavirus-bluetooth-contact-tracing/
I think this idea is dead in the water, if it’s persisted with then the motives are purely ulterior -control-freakery or profitable boondoggle.