Terrortruslen: Årtiets største svindelnummer.

Den amerikanske advokat og samfundsrevser Glenn Greenwald, forklarer i dagens blogindlæg hvorfor han mener, at den stærkt overdrevne terrortrussel er det største svindelnummer i det nye årtusinde, idet den bruges til at berige store multinationale selskaber i det militær-industrielle kompleks for befolkningens penge, altimens teltbyer opstår overalt i USA og nationen er håbløst forgældet.

"Exaggerating, manipulating and exploiting the Terrorist threat for profit and power has been the biggest scam of the decade; only Wall Street's ability to make the Government prop it up and profit from the crisis it created at the expense of everyone else can compete for that title. Nothing has altered the mindset of the American citizenry more than a decade's worth of fear-mongering So compelling is fear-based propaganda, so beholden are our government institutions to these private Security State factions, and so unaccountable is the power bestowed by these programs, that even a full decade after the only Terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, its growth continues more or less unabated."

Læs resten på Greenwalds blog.

Why Privacy Matters.

Daniel J. Solove, professor of law at George Washington University, has a highly recommendable essay on The Chronicle of Higher Education's website in which he refutes the most common argument against privacy, namely "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about."

Alfred McCoy - Surveillance State: The Making of the U.S. Internal Security Apparatus.

Pilger om den britiske politistat.

Den legendariske australske BBC-journalist John Pilger.....

Freedom is being lost in Britain. The land of Magna Carta is now the land of secret gagging orders, secret trials and imprisonment. The government will soon know about every phone call, every email, every text message. Police can wilfully shoot to death an innocent man, lie and expect to get away with it. Whole communities now fear the state. The foreign secretary routinely covers up allegations of torture; the justice secretary routinely prevents the release of critical cabinet minutes taken when Iraq was illegally invaded. The litany is cursory; there is much more.

War Comes Home To Britain

Juraprofessor: Bush-administrations politistatslige virksomhed.

Den som regel interessante juraprofessor Majorie Cohn har idag en veloplagt artikel om Bush-administrationens politistatslige virke, som takket være nyligt lækkede memoer, nu kendes i endnu mere forstyrrende detaljer.

Memos Provide Blueprint for Police State

Seven newly released memos from the Bush Justice Department reveal a concerted strategy to cloak the President with power to override the Constitution. The memos provide “legal” rationales for the President to suspend freedom of speech and press; order warrantless searches and seizures, including wiretaps of U.S. citizens; lock up U.S. citizens indefinitely in the United States without criminal charges; send suspected terrorists to other countries where they will likely be tortured; and unilaterally abrogate treaties. According to the reasoning in the memos, Congress has no role to check and balance the executive. That is the definition of a police state.

whistleblowing on surveillance

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Independent: New powers for police to hack your PC.

Civil liberties groups raise alarm over extension of surveillance without warrant

By Nigel Morris, Deputy Political Editor, Monday, 5 January 2009

Police have been given the power to hack into personal computers without a court warrant. The Home Office is facing anger and the threat of a legal challenge after granting permission. Ministers are also drawing up plans to allow police across the EU to collect information from computers in Britain.

The moves will fuel claims that the Government is presiding over a steady extension of the "surveillance society" threatening personal privacy.

Hacking – known as "remote searching" – has been quietly adopted by police across Britain following the development of technology to access computers' contents at a distance. Police say it is vital for tracking cyber-criminals and paedophiles and is used sparingly but civil liberties groups fear it is about to be vastly expanded.

Remote searching can be achieved by sending an email containing a virus to a suspect's computer which then transmits information about email contents and web-browsing habits to a distant surveillance team.

Alternatively, "key-logging" devices can be inserted into a computer that relay details of each key hit by its owner. Detectives can also monitor the contents of a suspect's computer hard-drive via a wireless network.

Computer hacking has to be approved by a chief constable, who must be satisfied the action is proportionate to the crime being investigated.

Last month European ministers agreed in principle to allow police to carry out remote searches of suspects' computers across the EU.

Details of the proposal are still being developed by the Home Office and other EU ministries, but critics last night warned it would usher in a vast expansion of police hacking operations.

Shami Chakrabarti, director of the human rights campaign group Liberty, said such a vast expansion of police powers should be regulated by a new Act of Parliament and that police should be forced to apply to a court for a warrant to hack into computers.

She said: "This is no different from breaking down someone's door, rifling through their paperwork and seizing their computer hard drive."

Ms Chakrabarti said the organisation believed it had strong grounds to challenge the practice both under British and European law.

Dominic Grieve, the shadow Home Secretary, said: "The exercise of such intrusive powers raises serious privacy issues. The Government must explain how they would work in practice and what safeguards will be in place."

A spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers, said police carried out 194 hacking operations in 2007-08 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, including 133 in private homes, 37 in offices and 24 in hotel rooms.

The spokesman said such surveillance was regulated under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.

"The police service in the United Kingdom will aggressively pursue serious and organised criminality, including where that takes the modern forms of hi-tech crime," he added.

The Government faces criticism over the erosion of civil liberties on a series of fronts. It is working on plans for a giant "big brother" database holding information about every phone call, email and internet visit made by everyone in the United Kingdom.

The first Britons will receive biometric identity cards at the end of the year, paving the way to the world's largest identity register. Genetic details of more than four million people are on the DNA national database, the highest proportion of any Western country. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Britain's policy of retaining samples from people never convicted of a crime – including children – breaches human rights.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/new-powers-for-police-to-hack-your-pc-1225802.html

Overvågnings propaganda

Blogging against surveillance, or: who's the terrorist?

On July 31 of last year, at 7 in the morning armed police stormed into the apartment where my partner Andrej Holm, I and our two children live. We learned that day that he was a terrorism suspect and that an investigation had been going on for almost a year. Andrej was arrested and flown to Germany's Court of Justice the next day. The search of our home lasted 15 hours. I was forced to wake my children, dress them and make them have breakfast with an armed policeman watching us. That day my new life started, a life as the partner of one of Germany's top terrorists.
Andrej spent three weeks in investigative detention. The arrest warrant was signed on grounds that caused a public outcry, not only in Germany but also in many other countries. Open letters were sent to the court that were signed by several thousand people protesting against the arrests. Among the signatures were those of David Harvey, Mike Davis, Saskia Sassen, Richard Sennett and Peter Marcuse.

What had happened?

Some hours before Germany's federal police came to us, three men were arrested near Berlin, who were said to have tried to set fire to several army vehicles. The original investigation was started against four other men, of which Andrej is one, who are suspected to be the authors of texts by a group called “militante gruppe” (mg, militant group). The group is known in Germany for damaging property for years, but never using violence against people. The texts claim responsibility for arson attacks against cars and buildings in and around Berlin since 2001. German anti-terror law §129a of the penal code was used to start an anti-terror-investigation against the four. All of them write and publish online. Andrej works as a sociologist on issues such as gentrification and the situation of tenants. Outside academia he is actively involved in tenants' organizations and movements that deal with gentrification and urban development. Using words such as 'gentrification', 'marxist-leninist', 'precarisation' oder 'reproduction' in their texts was enough to start complete surveillance (a linguistic analysis by the Federal Police later showed it's most unlikely they wrote these texts). As we saw later in the files, the profile for the 'militant group' was based on several assumptions: Members of the 'militant group' are assumed to

* have close ties within the group (all four have been good friends for years)
* be political activists (of the left)
* have no prior police record
* use 'conspiratorial behaviour', such as encrypting email, using anonymous mail addresses (not made of proper first and last names)
* be critical researchers and as such have access to libraries and a variety of daily papers, a profound political and historical knowledge.

How to make a terrorist

The initial suspicion based on an internet research for similarities in writing and vocabulary led to different measures of surveillance: phone tapping, video cameras pointed at living spaces, emails and internet traffic being monitored, bugging devices in cars, bugging operations on people's conversations etc. None of these produced valid evidence, so every two or three months surveillance measures were extended. Anti-terror-investigations according to §129a of the penal code are known and infamous for the fact that they are carried out secretly and only less than 5% ever produce enough evidence to lead to actual court cases. The vast majority entail lengthy investigations, during which huge amounts of data (mostly on activists) are collected and after years the case is dropped without anyone ever knowing about it.

Not the 'terrorist' deeds themselves are being prosecuted, but rather membership or support of the said terrorist organization. Therefore investigations focus on 'who knows who and why'. For the time being we know of four such cases carried out against 40 activists in Germany last year. Participation in protests against the G8 played a prominent, but not the only role. In all four cases the names of more than 2000 people were found in the files that were handed over to the defendants: a good indication of what these investigations are really good for.

In 'our' case most likely all people who had any kind of interaction with Andrej during 2006/07 were checked by the police. Doing this they noticed two meetings that allegedly took place in February and April of 2007 with someone who was later included in the investigation as a fifth suspect, and then two others who were in touch with this 'No. 5'. The two meetings took place under "highly conspiratorial circumstances": no mobile phones were taken along, the meeting had been arranged through so-called anonymous email accounts and during the meeting – a walk outside – the two turned around several times.

The three who were later included in the investigation are the same three who were arrested after the alleged attempted arson attack. Some hours later special police forces stormed our home and Andrej became 'the brain behind the militant group'. My identity changed to being 'the terrorist's partner'.

Becoming 'the terrorist's partner'

I was in shock. All of Berlin was on summer break. The few of us who were not away got together to gather the little we understood about the accusation. The media rejoiced with headlines such as 'Federal Police finally succeeded in arresting long searched for terror group' and we had to deal with media inquiries, talking to lawyers, talking to relatives, talking to friends, colleagues, neighbors and our children. We had to find out about life in prison, start a campaign for donations to pay for lawyers, make a website, agree on how to proceed between a rather heterogeneous group of suspects and even more heterogeneous network of friends and supporters and discuss how to deal with the media.

I realized slowly that my children and I were the collateral damage to this case. My computer was confiscated, things were taken from my desk, all of my belongings searched. My kids (2 and 5 years old last summer) lived through two searches carried out by armed police. Their father was kidnapped and disappeared for weeks.
Being a political activist myself, I am of course aware of the fact that phones can be tapped and that this is used extensively against activists. In Germany close to 40.000 phones (including mobiles) are tapped each year – we have a total population of 80 million. (http://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/media/archive/13600.pdf). To realize and later to read on paper that this concerns you is an entirely different thing from the somewhat abstract idea that you may be subjected to it.

When Andrej was released on bail after three weeks, Germany's Federal Prosecutor filed a complaint and wanted him back in detention right away, based on the idea that he might flee the country or the danger of repetition. How do you repeat membership in a terrorist organization? One of the many mysteries inside the prosecutors mind. The complaint was not granted right away, but instead Germany's Court of Justice decided it needed time to reflect thoroughly on the details of the arrest warrant (which was the origin of the huge wave of solidarity that was perceived widely in the media), the question of whether the so-called group actually qualified as 'terrorist' and whether the presented evidence justified detention.

Obviuos surveillance

It was impossible to overlook that Andrej was the focus of police observation. Our phones went crazy – not just once did people try to call Andrejs mobile number but ended up in my phone instead. When I in turn also tried to call him, I got my own mailbox talking to me. Our TV behaved oddly (as a result of silent, or stealth pings that were sent to Andrej's mobile phone regularly to locate him). Emails disappeared.

At some point in the middle of this, I considered starting a weblog about it. Nobody to my knowledge had ever done a blog about living with anti-terror surveillance. It was not an easy decision: were people going to believe me? Would I be portrayed as crazy or paranoid? On the other hand, unlike many other people, I know for certain that surveillance is taking place and why not write about what it feels like? Germany had a major debate about data retention last summer – the law was just passed and was to go into effect 2008 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_retention for details). A new anti-terror federal police law was discussed in parliament and a public debate about data protection grew to dimensions nobody had thought possible some months before. The War on Terror serves to justify more repressive laws here as well. A blog about the consequences of such an investigation to a family that is admittedly interested (and actively involved) in politics, but otherwise not exactly your typical terrorist stereotype opened many eyes.

The idea of blogging had not appealed to me very much before, precisely because I am quite fond of my privacy. Why present my personal daily life to a widely anonymous public? Absurd. But now, when my privacy was already violated beyond anything imaginable, why not talk about what it feels like to people who are more sympathetic than the Federal Prosecutor? Why not talk about how ridiculous the 'facts' to prove the case really are? And there are so many amazingly strange interpretations in the files of how we live our life, of what Andrej said on the phone, of what my mother said on the phone, that I thought nobody would believe these details just a few months later.

A weblog to protect my privacy

I can't think of many situations when it would make sense to publish details about yourself on a website with the intention to protect your privacy. In this case it did make sense. We were subjected to a powerful and (for us) uncontrollable invasion of our life: we had the said video cameras pointing at the doors of the house we live in, phones tapped, email and internet traffic monitored, mail read, the stealth pings sent to Andrejs mobile phone to locate him every hour, undercover agents following him around and who knows what else. It's likely that this is going on until now. Surveillance by police and secret services done in a very obvious way for you to notice is (also) meant to scare you, maybe to provoke reactions. Is also meant to scare others who just might have the same inclination to want to make the world a better place. Fear works best when your alone with it. Publishing details about how this fear is incited is not only a good way to open eyes about how the 'War on Terror' looks likefrom the receiving end but is also a great method to stay sane and get it of (some of) the fear.

And so I started blogging. Mostly in German, basically because I don't find the time to translate more and maybe also because I thought that there would be more German readers interested - it is a minor case of terrorism, if you want, and hardly known outside Germany. You can find some texts in English here: http://annalist.noblogs.org/category/en.

Reactions

I wasn't familiar with the world of blogs, and probably still am not very much. I didn't have time to find out how to 'make your blog popular' and was not particularly interested in that. I wasn't really sure how much attention I'd like, and so I started by publishing in the blog the same things I had previously sent by email to people interested in the development of the case and in how we personally were doing. And I only told people I knew about it. It took about three weeks until some of the more popular political German blogs picked it up, wrote about us and the number of visits exploded. In the beginning people wondered whether this, whether I 'was real'. The blog got lots of comments and it was obvious that many people were completely shocked about what was going on. They compared the investigation to what they imagined having taken place in the Soviet Union, in China, North Korea, East German, but not 'here', in a Western democracy, a constitutional state. Another group consists of people who want to help us secure our privacy by explaining about email encryption, switching SIM cards in mobile phone and the like, not realizing that at least in the first months we actively avoided anything that could only appear as though we wanted to behave in a conspiratorial way, as this was one of the reasons Andrej became a suspect to begin with.

I thought it was pretty funny that being 'the sociologist's wife' (we are not married), people seemed to assume that Linux or encryption is something I'd never heard of. Many people expressed fear that already by reading my blog or even commenting on it they might endanger themselves. I was glad they did anyway. Others expressed admiration for us to have chosen to be so public about the case. All of this was great and very important support that made it much easier to deal with the ongoing stress and tension that come with the threat of being tried as a terrorist.

Development of the investigation

Fortunately Germany's Court of Justice took several decisions that were very favorable for Andrej. In a first, two months after the prosecutor's objection to his release on bail, the court decided not only to not allow the objection, but instead completely withdrew the arrest warrant, arguing that 'pure assumptions are not sufficient'. This decision was perceived as a 'slap in the face' of Germany's Federal Prosecutor by many journalists. One months later the same court had to decide whether the 'militant group' can be considered a 'terrorist organization' and decided against this. The German definition for terrorism demands that a terrorist act is meant and able to shake the state to its very foundations, or else to terrify the population as such. When Germany's minister of justice, Brigitte Zypries, was asked in an interview with Der Spiegel, one of the biggest political weekly magazines, about the case against the alleged members of the 'militant group', she said that she thought that the attacks of September 11 are a terrible tragedy, but in her definition not a terrorist act as it didn't manage to endanger the American state. We were rather surprised by this, to say the least. In November the Court of Justice decided that the 'militant group' can't be considered to be terrorist and ordered the other three arrested to be released on bail. At this point, the investigation is being conducted on the basis of §129 (instead of §129a), which prosecutes criminal instead of terrorist organizations, with possible sentences of up to five instead of ten years.

When Andrej was arrested for 'being terrorist', on the grounds of being intelligent, knowing many people from different spheres of society, accessing libraries and publishing texts, being an activist, behaving in what is seen as a conspiratorial way (not always taking the mobile phone along or using encryption) it felt that if this is possible, then it is thinkable that they'd even sentence him to a prison term. With months of public support and more details of the investigation becoming public, like many others, I started believing that this nightmare is terminal, that the case would have to be dropped eventually. Most people don't realize that the investigation is actually still going on. All of our phone calls are still being listened to, our emails read, Andrej's every step is being watched. Germany discusses online searches of computers and using hidden cameras in people's living spaces to detect terrorists, and we know that the secret service is using what the police only dream of. It has been an extremely straining life for a year and a half now, but I am convinced that a good way to survive something like this, which terrorized us, our children, families and friends, is to not go into hiding. I understand the feeling very well of wanting to not move anymore until it's all over, to not provoke any (legal) action when you're in the focus of this kind of attention. To do the contrary - seek as much public attention and thus support as possible - was the best thing we could do.

Links:
http://annalist.noblogs.org/category/en
http://einstellung.so36.net/en
http://einstellung.so36.net/en/ps/392
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrej_Holm
http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/worldwide/story/0,,2153121,00.html

Copyright according to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/deed.en.

WTF? TERRORISM OR TRAGICOMEDY?

TERRORISM OR TRAGICOMEDY?

On the morning of November 11, 150 police officers, most of which belonged to the anti-terrorist brigades, surrounded a village of 350 inhabitants on the Millevaches plateau, before raiding a farm in order to arrest nine young people (who ran the local grocery store and tried to revive the cultural life of the village). Four days later, these nine people were sent before an anti-terrorist judge and “accused of criminal conspiracy with terrorist intentions.” The newspapers reported that the Ministry of the Interior and the Secretary of State “had congratulated local and state police for their diligence.” Everything is in order, or so it would appear. But let’s try to examine the facts a little more closely and grasp the reasons and the results of this “diligence.”

First the reasons: the young people under investigation “were tracked by the police because they belonged to the ultra-left and the anarcho autonomous milieu.” As the entourage of the Ministry of the Interior specifies, “their discourse is very radical and they have links with foreign groups.” But there is more: certain of the suspects “participate regularly in political demonstrations,” and, for example, “in protests against the Fichier Edvige (Exploitation Documentaire et Valorisation de l'Information Générale) and against the intensification of laws restricting immigration.” So political activism (this is the only possible meaning of linguistic monstrosities such as “anarcho autonomous milieu”) or the active exercise of political freedoms, and employing a radical discourse are therefore sufficient reasons to call in the anti-terrorist division of the police (SDAT) and the central intelligence office of the Interior (DCRI). But anyone possessing a minimum of political conscience could not help sharing the concerns of these young people when faced with the degradations of democracy entailed by the Fichier Edvige, biometrical technologies and the hardening of immigration laws.

As for the results, one might expect that investigators found weapons, explosives and Molotov cocktails on the farm in Millevaches. Far from it. SDAT officers discovered “documents containing detailed information on railway transportation, including exact arrival and departure times of trains.” In plain French: an SNCF train schedule. But they also confiscated “climbing gear.” In simple French: a ladder, such as one might find in any country house.

Now let’s turn our attention to the suspects and, above all, to the presumed head of this terrorist gang, “a 33 year old leader from a well-off Parisian background, living off an allowance from his parents.” This is Julien Coupat, a young philosopher who (with some friends) formerly published Tiqqun, a journal whose political analyses – while no doubt debatable – count among the most intelligent of our time. I knew Julien Coupat during that period and, from an intellectual point of view, I continue to hold him in high esteem.

Let’s move on and examine the only concrete fact in this whole story. The suspects’ activities are supposedly connected with criminal acts against the SNCF that on November 8 caused delays of certain TGV trains on the Paris-Lille line. The devices in question, if we are to believe the declarations of the police and the SNCF agents themselves, can in no way cause harm to people: they can, in the worst case, hinder communications between trains causing delays. In Italy, trains are often late, but so far no one has dreamed of accusing the national railway of terrorism. It’s a case of minor offences, even if we don’t condone them. On November 13, a police report prudently affirmed that there are perhaps “perpetrators among those in custody, but it is not possible to attribute a criminal act to any one of them.”

The only possible conclusion to this shadowy affair is that those engaged in activism against the (in any case debatable) way social and economic problems are managed today are considered ipso facto as potential terrorists, when not even one act can justify this accusation. We must have the courage to say with clarity that today, numerous European countries (in particular France and Italy), have introduced laws and police measures that we would previously have judged barbaric and anti-democratic, and that these are no less extreme than those put into effect in Italy under fascism. One such measure authorizes the detention for ninety-six hours of a group of young – perhaps careless – people, to whom “it is not possible to attribute a criminal act.” Another, equally serious, is the adoption of laws that criminalize association, the formulations of which are left intentionally vague and that allow the classification of political acts as having terrorist “intentions” or “inclinations,” acts that until now were never in themselves considered terrorist.

Kilde: http://www.liberation.fr/societe/0101267186-terrorisme-ou-tragi-comedie

Databasestaten Af Cory Doctorow

Da jeg flyttede fra mit hjemland Canada til Storbritannien i 2003, fandt jeg det ironisk, at familien Doctorow nu var vendt tilbage til Europa. Min far blev født af polsk-russiske forældre i en flygtningelejr i Aserbajdsjan lige før anden verdenskrigs afslutning. Mine bedsteforældre - deserterende værnepligtige fra den Røde Hær - destruerede deres dokumenter og blev, med tidens egen betegnelse, internt fordrevne.

Ved krigens afslutning drog de atter vestpå, men da de nåede Rusland, fortsatte de. Da de nåede Polen, fortsatte de. De fulgte den store flygtningestrøm ind i Tyskland, til en lejr nær Hamburg (hvor min faster blev født), før de gik ombord i et flygtningeskib og sejlede til havnebyen Halifax, hvor en bureaukrat afkortede deres navne - Doctorowicz blev til Doctorow - og gav dem en togbillet til Toronto, hvor min grandonkel Max og hans familie boede.

Min farmor er stadig i live og så frisk som en havørn. Jeg spurgte hende for nylig, hvorfor de ikke blev i Sovjetunionen. Trods sin modvilje mod militærtjenesten var hun en krigshelt. Hun havde tilbragt sine ungdomsår i civilforsvaret under den hårde tid med belejringen af Leningrad og havde som 12-årig pige gravet skyttegrave og slæbt lig, indtil hun som 15-årig blev evakueret til Sibirien. Hendes familie boede stadig i Leningrad - mor, far, lillebror. Leningrad er en majestætisk by, kosmopolitisk og pulserende selv med krigens ar på sit ansigt. I Toronto kendte hun ingen og talte ikke sproget. Hendes år som flygtning kom til at strække sig over fire hele årtier, før hun endelig for alvor kunne føle sig som canadier.

Jeg spurgte hende, hvorfor hun ikke var blevet, og hun rystede på hovedet, som om jeg havde stillet det dummeste spørgsmål i hele verden. "Det var Sovjetunionen", sagde hun. Hun viftede med hånden, famlede efter svaret. "Papirer," sagde hun til sidst. "Vi skulle gå rundt med papirer. Politiet kunne til hver en tid standse dig og tvinge dig til at vise dine papirer." Sluseportene åbnede sig: De udspionerede dig. De tvang folk til at udspionere hinanden. Din farfar ville ikke have fået lov til at blive - han var polak, og de ville ikke have ladet ham blive hos familien i Rusland, han ville have været nødt til at tage tilbage til Polen.

Mit hoved nikkede ubevidst, mens hun fortalte mig det. Jeg vidste det hele fra hentydninger og vink, der var faldet gennem årene, men jeg havde aldrig hørt hende sige alt sammen på en gang. Jeg havde endda selv set det, da vi besøgte familien i Leningrad i 1984 og vi fik vore samtaler afbrudt, når de strejfede ind på politisk område, med blikke over skulderen efter de spioner, som kunne tænkes at lytte i forventning om at kunne melde min familie til KGB.

Et halvt århundrede senere kom familien Doctorow tilbage til Europa. Jeg slog mig ned i London, hvor jeg arbejdede for Electronic Frontier Foundation, en amerikansk borgerretsbevægelse, og kørte deres europæiske aktiviteter. Jeg var så privilegeret at få status af "højtuddannet indvandrer" (den eneste visumkategori, som jeg kunne kvalificere til givet min mangel på universitetsgrad).

Nogle år senere boede jeg sammen med min kæreste og var blevet far til en britisk datter (da jeg nævnte dette for en britisk indvandringsfunktionær i Heathrow, kaldte han hende hånligt for " en halv britisk statsborger"). Vi var ved at planlægge et kæmpemæssigt bryllup for hele familien i Toronto, da nyheden kom: Indenrigsministeren havde ensidigt og med 24 timers varsel ændret reglerne for højtuddannede indvandrere, så der nu kræves en universitetsgrad. Mine advokater bekræftede: Folk, der havde været bosat i Storbritannien i årevis, som havde skabt virksomheder her og ansat briter i dem, som ejede huse og havde født britiske børn, blev smidt ud af landet og tog deres skattepenge, arbejdspladser og familier med sig.

Min kæreste og jeg gik i panik. Vi blev gift. Vi søgte et ægtefællevisum. Et par uger senere indfandt jeg mig i Indenrigsministeriets immigrationscenter i Croydon for at afgive mine biometriske data og få et visum limet ind i mit canadiske pas. Jeg fik to års pusterum. Min familie kunne blive i Storbritannien.

Så kom sidste uges bekendtgørelse: Indehavere af ægtefællevisum ville (sammen med udenlandske studerende) øjeblikkelig få udstedt obligatoriske, biometriske, radio-aflæselige ID-kort, som vi skal have på os til hver en tid. Og så begyndte jeg at kigge mig over skulderen.

Endnu engang ser det ud til, at familien Doctorow kan blive nødt til at forlade Europa. Det ID-kort, som jeg vil få udstedt, næste gang jeg fornyr mit visum, vil være knyttet til alle mine daglige aktiviteter: Lægebesøg, brug af offentlig transport, bankforretninger, skat - én enkelt identifikator, der for altid vil følge mig gennem tid og rum. Det således indsamlede dossier vil blive administreret af de samme instanser, som alene det seneste år har mistet (bogstaveligt talt) snesevis af millioner af optegnelser om folk i Storbritannien.

Det vil alt sammen være bundet til mine biometriske data, såsom fingeraftryk. Medmindre du hele tiden har handsker på, efterlader du denne identifikation konstant, hvor du end går. Disse mærker er ikke kun til rådighed for staten og den udøvende myndighed, men for alle, der har lyst til at fjerne dem fra en hvilken som helst glat overflade, du tilfældigvis har rørt ved. Hvis denne identifikation først er kompromitteret, er der ingen måde - bortset fra amputation - hvorpå den kan ændres. Tænk på den tyske indenrigsminister Wolfgang Schäuble, som er fortaler for biometrisk ID: Hans fingeraftryk blev kopieret fra et vandglas ved en offentlig debat og offentliggjort på 10.000 stykker acetat af en gruppe provokatører uden budget, som ikke stod til at få nogen økonomisk fordel af deres aktion. Vil velforsynede identitetstyve, der kan bruge de biometriske data til at begå forbrydelser og tømme bankkonti, være mindre opfindsomme?

ID-kortet vil udsende mine personlige oplysninger til personer, som befinder sig på stor afstand fra mig, og det uden mit vidende eller samtykke. RFID-elementerne i kortet er ligesom Oyster-kort [chipbaseret kort til brug i Londons undergrundsbane, o.a.] annonceret som kun læsbare på få centimeters afstand, men ligesom for Oyster-kortet har sikkerhedseksperter påvist, at kortet kan læses på snesevis af meters afstand og kan klones ved hjælp af billigt og lettilgængeligt udstyr.

Så det er heldigt, at jeg fik mit ægtefællevisum netop da jeg gjorde, før disse identitetspapirer blev gjort obligatoriske. Faktisk er det heldigt, at jeg overhovedet fik mit ægtefællevisum, eftersom Labour planlægger at begrænse det årlige antal af nye visa af enhver art til 20.000 mennesker, hvilket betyder, at briter, som gifter sig med udlændinge, ikke længere kan være sikre på at kunne bosætte sig og opfostre deres familier i Storbritannien.

Det nationale ID-kort eksisterer ikke i et tomrum. Det er en del af en enestående og hidtil uset plan om at bruge moderne teknologi til at udspionere og kontrollere menneskers færden i Storbritannien. Vore internetforbindelser bliver censureret og aflyttet af annoncører. Snart vil vore internetudbydere blive tvunget til at registrere og gemme oplysninger om al vores aktivitet online, så regeringer, ansatte med for megen tid eller enhver forbryder, der kan hacke eller bestikke sig ind i overvågningsdatabaserne, kan snage i dem. Vores billede bliver taget hundredevis af gange, hver gang vi går uden for en dør. Vore nummerplader bliver fotograferet hundredevis af gange af trafikkameraer, hvilket skaber et kort over, hvor vi har været henne. Oplysningerne på vore Oyster-kort registreres og stilles til rådighed for politi, spioner, forbrydere og hvem der nu ellers måtte være i stand til at få fat på dem.

Vi kan anholdes og tilbageholdes i ugevis uden sigtelse. Regeringen fortæller akademikere, hvilke frit tilgængelige oplysninger om terrorister, de har lov til at studere, og hvilke, de ikke må se på.

Vi opfordres til at udspionere vore naboer og indberette deres mistænkelige aktiviteter. Vi kan blive standset og visiteret uden særlig mistanke, og under disse visitationer kan og vil politifolk undersøge sådanne ting som de bøger, vi læser, og personlige notater, vi har skrevet.

Hver eneste af disse foranstaltninger blev beta-testet på dårligt stillede grupper, før den blev rullet ud til befolkningen som helhed. Overvågningskameraer var oprindelig forbeholdt bankbokse og fængsler. Aflytning og censur af Internettet begyndte i skolerne, "for at beskytte børnene".

Nu er det så meningen, at vi indvandrere skal være betatestere for Storbritanniens blinde vandring ind i overvågningssamfundet. Vi skal gå med interne pas og pressen vil sige, "Hvis du ikke kan lide det, behøver du ikke bo her - det anstår sig ikke for en gæst at klage over gæstfrihedens vilkår." Men denne beta-test er ikke beregnet på at standse ved indvandrerne. Regeringen indrømmer åbent, at indvandrerne kun er første etape af en universel udbredelse af obligatoriske ID-kort med RFID-chips. Hvad der sker for os nu, vil ske for dig næste gang.

Skønt, ikke for mig. Hvis regeringen den dag i 2010, hvor jeg fornyer mit visum, kræver at jeg går med disse papirer som betingelse for at lade mig bo her, vil familien Doctorow igen forlade sit land og finde et andet, der er mere frit. Min kone - som er født her, opvokset her, med familie her - er med mig. Vi vil ikke opdrage vores datter i databasestaten. Det er ikke sikkert.

oversættelse sakset fra Faklen.dk

P1's Dokumentarzonen om Overvågningssamfundet og Angst

http://www.dr.dk/P1/Dokumentarzonen/Udsendelser/2007/12/20071212180146.htm

Linket henviser til en fin radiodokumentar om overvågningssamfundet og angst, med professor i psykiatri Tom Bolvig om angstens grundlag i krybdyrhjernens pirmitive kamp/flugt mekanisme, og juraprofessor Simon Davies der er leder for Privacy International om den Orwellske NewSpeak ift. Overvågningssamfundet i Storbrittanien, samt nogle enkelt forklarende skits om trinnene mod lignende tilstande i DK.