Longrider

I don’t often discuss my work here, but today I’ll make an exception; partly because of the absurdity that I observed. This story is not unique, much as I would like to claim that it is.

One of my roles as an auditor is to observe assessors and trainers in action. This is to ensure that they maintain the standards laid down by Network Rail and that the candidate gets value for money. The job today was an assessment of a COSS (controller of site safety). The COSS is the person responsible for setting up the safe system of work for the track-workers under his control. The COSS may or may not be taking part in the actual work – it is the setting up of the safe system that they are responsible for. That is; ensuring that trains and people remain separate. Okay, so far, so good. The requirements are that these people undergo regular assessment to ensure that they remain competent and I audit the process to make sure that everything is ticketty-boo; that is, that the assessor is working to the standards. Given that track workers are still being killed, a robust safe system of work that protects them is necessary.

Good, that’s the scene set.

These people had to access the line to set up temporary lighting for a job this weekend. The work they had to do was planned and published and on arrival at site the arrangements were discussed and my assessor set about observing his candidate in action. Unfortunately, the signaller was not able to grant a block of the line at the time requested. Quite why, was not immediately obvious as there were trains running roughly half hourly, so if the hand-signaller was in place, it would have been a few minutes to take the block and give it back when the next train was about. Well, you would think so. However, in the time it took to phone backwards and forwards, work through reams of paperwork and then decide where the hand-signaller was to be placed, several trains and the best part of two hours had passed. Given that this gang is back at work tonight, they had to be away from site by midday at the latest, so things were not going exactly to plan. We had arrived on site at 08:30. The COSS got his block at 10:40 for half an hour. This was just enough time to walk along the line for about thirty yards and drop the lights in position. There was no time to set them up before the gang had to walk back to the access point and give up the block.

From the assessor’s point of view, he saw what he needed to see; the COSS set up and withdrew a safe system of work. I saw what I needed to see; the assessor planned and completed a competent assessment on the COSS. There was just one thing missing…

…there was no actual work carried out…

I received a letter from my MP the other day. It was a missive put out by David Milliband stating that there would be arrangements in place for the interpreters. However, Dan Hardie advises that all is not as it would seem. I quote from an email he sent me:

I’ve had emails from three people who claim to be - and who almost certainly are- Iraqi former employees of the British Government. All three say that they and their former colleagues are still at risk of death for their ‘collaboration’.

We’ll call the first man Employee One.. He worked for the British for three years: ‘I started in the beginning of the war with Commandos (in 30 of March 2003) then continued with 23 Pioneer Regt, and in 08 / 07 / 2003 I have joined the Labour Support Unit (LSU)’. His British friends knew him as Chris. The British Government has announced that he can apply for help if he can transport himself to the British base outside Basra, or to the Embassies in Syria or Jordan. It doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that there might be problems with this. I can email and telephone this man: so can any Foreign Office official. It should not be impossible to verify his story and then send him the funds he needs to get to a less unsafe Arab country. But that is not happening.

1) Are you still in Iraq?

‘Yes, I’m still hidden in somewhere in the hell of Basra.’

2) Is there any reason you cannot travel to the British Army base at Basra Airbase to ask for asylum?

‘Of course, we cannot travel to BIA (Basra International Airbase) due to the militia keep watched all the ways to BIA and they got their own fake check points there although, we claimed for asylum through the internet (we sent our application to the claim office at BIA) . But we afraid that the British are going to take a long time to process our claims also we are very worried if they will offer just some money instead of asylum, please sir inform all the British people that we looking for asylum and just the asylum will save our lives, also we can’t travel to Syria anymore to claim for asylum there as the Syrian government issued new conditions for Iraqis who want to travel to their country.’

3) Can you tell me how and when the militias threatened you?

‘In 2006 I have threatened by militia that hated me because I work and help coalition forces in Iraq, I told my bosses about that but they said we can’t do anything for you because we have nothing to do with civilian and we don’t have any army rules or orders to help you, then I continued my daily work with British army, few days later the militia attacked my house trying to catch me but I was at the work at that time, they beaten my family and told them: we want your son or we will kill all of you!!!!

‘Since that day I decided to leave my job and change my home place but until this moment the militia trying to find and kill me, I’m always changing my place trying to hidden from them, they know that I left my job but they don’t care, they just want to kill me they called me collaborator and traitor and they asked everybody know me about my place, they told them: anyone know anything about  (name) he should tell us immediately and also they said: we will never give up until we catch (name). They work for ministry of interior so they controlled most of government departments and they work under that cover.’

4) Do you have any family members who are also threatened by militias or who depend on you? If so, how many of them are there and how old are they?

 ’Of course, my family depends on me especially in the finance side as I’m the older son between seven sons and daughters they got, on other hand my parents cannot working as they are very old.’

Employee Two is in Syria, and is applying for aid from the British Embassy in Damascus. He can prove that he has worked for the British for over 12 months, after the magic date of 1st January 2005. But he still isn’t safe.

He is staying illegally in Syria, having considerably over-run the 15-day visa on which he entered the country. He’s been obliged to get forms for asylum or resettlement aid from the Syrian Government security men who guard the British Embassy. He tells me ‘If I see any syrian officer i really get fear , becuase of my expired visa.’ The British Government, which asked us to accept that it was invading Iraq in part because of its horror at the brutality of the Ba’athist dictatorship, is now perfectly happy to leave its own former employees to the mercies of Syrian Ba’athists.

Colleagues of this man are also hiding in Damascus and are even worse off than he is, because they don’t meet the perverse and arbitrary time stipulations.  He writes: ’I know 4 former interpreters worked less than a year (for the British: DH), but they went to the embassy and they filled the paper with out telling the guards we had worked for less than a year. The syrian guards have got instructions from the embassy (British Embassy in Damascus: DH), that (they) do not give that form to any interpreter who worked for British less than a year or any former interpreter who worked in 2003 and fled to syria before 2005.’

Employee Three sent me copies of his Army ID card and photos of him with smiling Scottish soldiers. He worked for the Army in 2003, who then recommended that he work for Erinys- a private security firm which the British Government hired to form an Oil Protection Force. Both when working for the Army and when working for the British Government’s proxies, he was identified as a target by the militias. The British Government made him a death squad target.

That same British Government will not be giving him any kind of assistance; not even a small cash handout to help him live elsewhere in the Middle East. It has announced that it will not help any Iraqi whose direct employment ended before the 1st January 2005: that Johnson Beharry was awarded the Victoria Cross for acts of courage in May and June 2004, when the Mahdi Army attacked the British and were fought off with many hundreds of casualties.

You’ve heard this before, but it’s now more important than ever. The last lot of letters and emails got the Government to announce a change in policy: an inadequate change,badly implemented.  The next lot of letters and emails will force the Government to announce another change in policy, one that will be properly implemented and will not be based on leaving people to die.

Your MP’s address is The House of Commons, Westminster, London, SW1A 0AA.

His or her email address is probably SURNAMEINITIAL@parliament.uk (eg BROWNG@parliament.uk).  Please use the talking points below to send an email and a print letter to your MP, and chase them for an answer. And be courteous: an insulted MP will not raise this matter with Ministers, and that will lead to more avoidable deaths.  When you get an answer, email me at danhardie.blog@gmail.com and let me know what they said. 

 I agree that it seems egocentric for me to ask you to put your MP in touch with me: but what alternatives do we have? I am in direct contact with Iraqi employees pleading with me to do something to help them. I cannot help them. Members of Parliament- including David Miliband- need to read what these Iraqis are saying.

Talking points:

On October 9th David Miliband announced that the British Government would assist former employees in Iraq, so long as they had worked for it after 1st January 2005 and for 12 months or more. That abandons several hundred Iraqis who have been targetd for murder because they worked for the British before that date- and in 2004 fighting between the Mahdi Army and the British was at its peak- or because they worked for less than that period, often leaving their jobs at the end of a British battalion’s six-month tour. The British Government must help Iraqi employees on the basis of the risk they face, not according to an arbitrary time stipulation. This only affects a few hundred Iraqis, whom we are well able to shelter, and for whom we have a direct moral responsibility.

Even those Iraqi employees who qualify for assistance are not being properly assisted. Iraqis in Basra are not able to apply via the British Army in Basra Interational Airbase, since it is ringed with militia checkpoints. Iraqi ex-employees in Damascus are being screened by Syrian policemen guarding the British Embassy and delayed by lengthy bureaucratic procedures when they apply for asylum, although many of them are illegally overstaying their Syrian visas and face deportation back to Iraq.

A blogger called Dan Hardie is directly in touch with a number of Iraqi employees via email and phone. He is willilng to brief MPs- as concisely as possible- either over the phone or via email. He can be reached at danhardie.blog@gmail.com

Footnote re authenticity: The ISPs confirm that one email was definitely sent from Damascus, the others from satellite networks serving the Middle East including Iraq. I have spoken to two of them on the phone, using Iraqi telephone numbers. (Many thanks to Alex Harrowell and Surreptitious Evil for their work on this.) A Times journalist in the region tells me that ’Employee Two’ and ’Employee Three’  are certainly authentic: she has been in contact with them herself. The other has sent me scanned copies of his British Army IDs, and photographs of him with smiling soldiers, as well as a lengthy reference from Erinys.  He either is who he says he is, or has stolen the documents of the man he is claiming to be: and given that he names soldiers who know him, and will have to turn up in person and be photographed to claim asylum at a British Embassy, he would have no chance of perpetrating a successful fraud.

Footnote re the wider refugee crisis: Conceivably the Sunni-Shi’ite violence in the American-occupied areas of Iraq is diminishing:  this  story (LINK: http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/11/07/iraq.main/ ), quoting Iraqi Governmentsources, argues that it is, though the Iraqi Government has a vested interest in claiming an improvement. In response, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees argues that there has been no improvement (LINK: http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5gk3604xpjrJp2zCqN1N7ks7tltGg ). But even if the UNHCR is wrong, the Iraqi Government is right and things have got better for refugees from Baghdad and neighbouring areas that is, sadly, irrelevant to Britain’s employees in the South of the country. What’s still the case is that Basra is now effectively under the control of various Shi’ite groups who have varying amounts of loathing for the British and their Iraqi employees, and that one of the most powerful is the Mahdi Army, who fought several outright battles against British troops and have a long track record of killing ‘Locally Employed Civilians’.

Tim points us to a fascinating article by Ben Goldacre on faking fingerprints. This is not particularly new – the idea has been around for a while. Indeed, I recall reading about the technique pretty much as soon as the execrable Big Blunkett first came up with his abhorrent “entitlement” cards scheme. However, Goldacre serves to remind us that ministers who continue to spout “biometrics” as if they are, somehow, a panacea to their inability to cope with the simplest of data management are lying, deluded or ignorant.

Sometimes just throwing a few long words around can make people think you know what you’re talking about. Words like “biometric”. When Alistair Darling was asked if the government will ditch ID cards in the light of this week’s data cock-up, he replied: “The key thing about identity cards is, of course, that information is protected by personal biometric information. The problem at present is that, because we do not have that protection, information is much more vulnerable than it should be.”

Yes, that’s the problem. We need biometric identification. Fingerprints. Iris scans. Gordon Brown says so too: “What we must ensure is that identity fraud is avoided, and the way to avoid identity fraud is to say that for passport information we will have the biometric support that is necessary.”

Alastair Darling and Incapability Brown are not the only ones. Their sock puppets come out with the same ignorant bollocks (although what this discussion has to do with the original post about football, I don’t know):

…if all a fraudster needs is a few details like name, address, bank sort and account number, NI number and they can obtain loans etc in your name. It says to me that the system is wrong. Surely this info should not be enough? When I see supermarkets in Germany where customers pay with their fingerprints (and this makes it more secure for both) I think surely we can make it a bit harder for the fraudster and biometrics seem ideal for this task. The biometric pin seems a good idea.

Sure. If you want to. However, if these things take off, then don’t be too surprised when the criminal fraternity breaks the system. They could use the Goldacre method for capturing prints:

Tsutomu Matsumoto is a Japanese mathematician, a cryptographer who works on security, and he decided to see if he could fool the machines which identify you by your fingerprint. This home science project costs about £20. Take a finger and make a cast with the moulding plastic sold in hobby shops. Then pour some liquid gelatin (ordinary food gelatin) into that mould and let it harden. Stick this over your finger pad: it fools fingerprint detectors about 80% of the time. The joy is, once you’ve fooled the machine, your fake fingerprint is made of the same stuff as fruit pastilles, so you can simply eat the evidence.

Or, if you have neither the time nor inclination, you can be a little more brutal:

But what if you can’t get the finger? Well, you can chop one off, of course - another risk with biometrics.

The downside of this is that the victim will be aware of the theft, so the usefulness of the finger is going to be limited. For the victim, of course there is the matter of having had the biometric identifier compromised, it can never be un compromised – not to mention the loss of dexterity. It is for this purely pragmatic reason that I am opposed to any system of biometric shopping. I can change a PIN at will, just as I can change a password, so, if compromised, I can limit my losses. Once lost or compromised, a fingerprint is compromised forever.

Goldacre goes on to explain just how simple it is to steal a fingerprint without the owner being aware of it:

But there is an easier way. Find a fingerprint on glass. Sorry, I should have pointed out that every time you touch something, if your security systems rely on biometric ID, then you’re essentially leaving your pin number on a post-it note.

You can make a fingerprint image on glass more visible by painting over it with some cyanoacrylate adhesive. That’s a posh word for superglue. Photograph that with a digital camera. Improve the contrast in a picture editing program, and print the image on to a transparency sheet, then use that to etch the fingerprint on to a copper-plated printed circuit board (it sounds difficult, but you can buy a beginner’s etching set at Maplin for £10.67). This gives an image with some three-dimensional relief. You can now make your gelatin fingerpad using this as a mould.

I like the analogy of leaving one’s password on a post-it note. It really is that insecure. Only the technologically illiterate will believe that this is a suitable mechanism of security in a mass market. In a limited population (such as a workplace) then, yes, it has its uses. But for securing the financial information – or, if ministers get their way, personal and private information – of a whole population, such reliance on immature and unreliable technology is pure bullheadedness in the face of the evidence.

Neil in the same discussion accuses me of being obsessive:

As for this obsession with cutting off fingers - it is you that is not using common sense. By the time the criminal has made his elaborate finger moulds - the biometric pin would have been changed. Anyhow most muggers might opportunistically nick a wallet or even drag someone to the cashpoint with a knife - but cut their fingers off for a small chance of a few quid - no way.

Sigh… I am not the one touting biometrics as a panacea. Neil is also assuming that muggers will always behave rationally. They behave irrationally for a few quid now, why should they change in the future?

Security is best achieved with simple methods. Robust alphanumeric passwords (preferably not involving proper nouns), for instance. Keeping information in separate compartments, so that a compromise causes limited damage. Frankly, I am not happy with the supposedly secure Chip ‘n’ PIN as this places the onus back on the customer – like that was never intended…

While my objection to the government’s obsession with our personal information is, indeed a moral one, my objection to giving biometric information to private companies is a consequence of choice based upon pragmatism.

If you want to take advantage of fingerprint technology to simplify your shopping, then go ahead, be my guest. Just bear in mind that it is not a guarantee of security. I trust also, that you will understand why I choose not to engage…

Incidentally… My new Toshiba notebook has a fingerprint scanner much like the unsued one on my iPAQ. I gave up with the iPAQ one as it was so unreliable. I have to admit, the technology on the Toshiba is vastly improved and seems to be reliable. However, having played with it for a bit, I don’t use it; preferring a simple (well, not that simple) password. If someone does decide to mug me for the computer, at least they won’t need to have my fingerprints too.

According to today’s Groan, Facebook is continuing to play fast and loose with peoples’ information – without their explicit consent:

Thousands of Facebook users are protesting against the social networking site’s decision to publicise details of their online shopping habits without their permission. The group Facebook: Stop Invading my Privacy is growing by 1,000 members every few minutes, according to users. Its petition reads: “Facebook must respect my privacy. They should not tell my friends what I buy on other sites - or let companies use my name to endorse their products - without my explicit permission.”

It seems barely a day passes without a news story featuring this nasty little website’s misuse of personal information.

Of course, the best option is not to have anything to do with them in the first place. And, if you really, really, want to play their game, share only that information that you are willing to have shouted from the rooftops.

Facebook is nasty; very, very, nasty. It is set up to gather personal information so that others can use it for their advantage, and thousands of young people are queueing up to hand over private and personal details before realising all too late what they have done. By then, unfortunately, the damage has been done. Also, there is no opt-out. Once Facebook has you in its grasp, it doesn’t let go.

If you want my advice (for what it’s worth) steer well clear. If you want to indulge in a web presence and share information of your choice, setting up a blog using Wordpress or similar will let you do it with full control over what is shared. If you want to, you can delete the whole thing. Although, do bear in mind the little matter of the Wayback Machine and Google’s cache…

So, if you are worried about people finding it… don’t share it in the first place.

In the wake of the government’s utter incompetence – well, the latest manifestation of it – this week, that nasty, ignorant authoritarian arsewipe, Big Blunkett crawls out of the rotten woodwork to peddle his new employer’s wares:

The database is simply about identity — not about the plethora of information that already rests elsewhere. It will actually make it easier to protect your identity, including in circumstances such as these where information has gone missing. This is because it gives an absolutely robust form of identification that stops other people being able to pretend that they are you, simply because they’ve got hold of some of your personal details. It will allow a proper check to be made between your own biometric and that held on the database, giving greater protection.

As Dizzy points out, this is pure bunkum, Gold plated bunkum, but bunkum for all that (which is nothing new from this foul begotten canker on the shit encrusted arse of Westminster). Here, Blunkett merely underlines his utter ignorance of data management and IT systems. That he is deeply stupid and ignorant is bad enough – and he is entitled to tell the world just what a fuckwit he is (free speech and all that), but one would, at least, expect him to express some small mote of honourable behaviour and declare his interest in shackling us all to the state, wouldn’t you? Ah, but honour and a NuLabour politician are not words that sit comfortably in the same sentence. An oxymoron, perhaps, with the emphasis on the final syllable.

Earlier in his epistle, this jackanape engages in a side-swipe at refusniks:

This is simply a diversion by those who have never wanted ID cards anyway, and who do not appear to have ever understood them.

Oh, we understand alright – it is Blunkett and the other unreconstructed communists who do not.

Or perhaps they do…

Think about it, identity cards offer no solutions to any problems that we might have. Desperately looking for a problem to fix, the obvious one is the one that ministers would rather not discuss; that of exerting power over the populace. That is why these evil people want this scheme – because they will benefit, not us. We don’t need them and after the debacle just experienced, people are just waking up to how untrustworthy government can be with personal information, so we don’t want them, either.

As far as my protection is concerned, the only person who should be charged with that is me. I do not require any “secure” management of my identity from these incompetent, corrupt identity thieves. It is not up to Blunkett and the rest of the nest of cockroaches to have access to my information without my consent (and they do not have my consent). It is not up to them to decide what is or is not secure for my data – I will be the judge of that; and the government is not a body in which I would trust anything, let alone anything so valuable as my personal information. The state is subservient to me, not the other way around. I do not and will never consent to this scheme, to the point of open refusal to cooperate.

That so few people understand this is the problem that government faces in persuading people that such a system will be better then any other, precisely because it will be robust, efficient and verifiable.

Words fail me. What a bollockbrain this man is.

Mr Eugenides also picks up on the story.

Aunty has more details about the type of questions the European Commission wants included on member states’ censuses:

In addition to data on nationality, size of family, ethnicity, it wants to find out about such matters as computer literacy, number of cars owned, cooking facilities and “durable consumer goods possessed by the household”.

Sigh… Is there no end to the obsessive desire for poking about in our private lives by politicians and civil servants? (Rhetorical question) The answers to the questions by the way are:

A – Fuck off!

B– Mind your own fucking business!

C – Go fuck yourself!

D – That’s fucking personal and private!

Oh, and when you voyeuristic arseholes have finished fucking yourselves, please reply back so that I can put the details on my database.

The excluded questions were:

The dropped question would have asked the “date(s) of the beginning of consensual union(s) of women having ever been in a consensual union: (ii) first consensual union and (ii) current consensual union”.

Frankly, things have gone far beyond beggaring belief. That this is none of their business should have been blindingly obvious to even the most casual of observers.

Incapability Brown apologises…

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said he “profoundly regrets” the loss of 25 million child benefit records.

He apologised in the Commons for the “inconvenience and worries” caused and said the government was working to prevent the data being used for fraud.

And this power-crazed fucktard wants to put all our sensitive personal details on his National Identity Register?

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And on the matter of power crazed fucktards and personal data:

The European Commission has denied suggestions that it wants to include questions about women’s sexual history in its proposed harmonisation of censuses across the EU.

The UK Independence Party had claimed the census included questions about the beginning of sexual union.

The commission says the term is an error of translation and that the question refers to co-habitation, not sex.

Oh, well, that’s alright, then. The answer is the same though… “Fuck off and mind your own damned business!”

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I see that Neil Harding is determined to underline his utter ignorance of just what liberty is:

Bloggertarians mostly seem to think that liberty is just about ‘not banning something’. They fail to see how unfair wealth distribution (for example) can restrict liberty or how the state can play a positive role in enabling liberty (by regulating dysfunctional markets to maintain competition and reign in big business). As the freed slaves used to say ‘they took chains off me ankles and put them on my pockets’.

Having been pretty close to destitute this past couple of years, I can assure Neil that I understand fully that wealth (or the lack thereof) is not the same as liberty (or the lack thereof). Not having money to spend has not curtailed my liberty one jot. I recovered from this situation by going out and getting work. Having money (or at least I will when the first invoices get paid) has not made one iota of difference to my liberty. Neil, as usual, talks bollocks. There is, I suppose, a solution; steal money from those people like me who go out and work hard for it and give it to the lazy, feckless wastrels who would rather spend their time watching daytime TV. But no one is mad enough to think that is an ideal solution, are they?

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And another thing…

I notice that more and more petrol stations are putting up notices demanding that I remove my helmet when paying for petrol. It would be paranoia to presume that they believe all motorcyclists are out to rob them, so it must be that they want to see our faces. I wear a flip-up type helmet for that very reason; I can converse with people without going through the faff of removing my helmet during such short stops. I’ve been studiously ignoring these notices and no one has challenged me. A little disobedience is a healthy thing.

Toodle pip!