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UK: Council bans parents from play areas

Tom Whitehead
The Telegraph
Sun, 08 Nov 2009 03:14 EST

Parents have been banned from supervising their children in public playgrounds, because they have not undergone criminal record checks.

Only council-vetted "play rangers" are now allowed to monitor youngsters in two adventure areas in Watford while parents must watch from outside a perimeter fence.

The Watford Borough Council policy has been attacked as insulting and a disgrace by furious relatives who say they are being labelled as potential paedophiles.

It will further fuel concerns over a growing nanny state amid the deepening row over the Government's new national anti-paedophile database.

That will see at least 11 million adults have to be vetted to work with children or vulnerable adults, including parents who give officials lifts to and from social or sports clubs.

Iran Arabic channel taken off air

BBC News
Wed, 04 Nov 2009 02:36 EST

Iran's Arabic language satellite television channel, al-Alam, has been taken off air by two Arab-controlled satellite companies.

The operators of Nilesat and Arabsat cited a breach of contract according to Egypt's MENA news agency, but al-Alam said they had not been given a reason.

Analysts say some Arab governments are worried about the channel's popularity and Iran's growing regional influence.

Saudi Arabia hosted a meeting of Arab information ministers on Tuesday.

The Mail Online
Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:15 EST

© Mail Online
'Ludicrous': Poole Borough Council spied on Jenny Paton, pictured arriving at the tribunal with her partner Tim Joyce yesterday, 21 times in three weeks

A council which used controversial laws to spy on a mother and her family 21 times in three weeks insisted today that its actions only 'minimally' invaded their privacy.

Poole Borough Council had also used Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) legislation on two other occasions to determine whether families were living in the right school catchment areas, a landmark hearing was told.

Mother-of-three Jenny Paton had applied for a school in Poole which was 'educational gold dust', Ben Hooper, counsel for the district's borough council, said.

Ms Paton, 40, had branded the authority 'ludicrous and completely outrageous' as she took the authority to court for its use of Ripa legislation.

In the second day's evidence before the Investigatory Powers Tribunal in central London, Mr Hooper told the panel: 'It was minimally invasive of privacy.'

Daniel Silva
mb.com.ph
Sat, 07 Nov 2009 13:13 EST

Madrid - The new ''smart meters'' utilities are installing in homes around the world to reduce energy use raise fresh privacy issues because of the wealth of information about consumer habits they reveal, experts said Friday.

The devices send data on household energy consumption directly to utilities on a regular basis, allowing the firms to manage demand more efficiently and advise households when it is cheaper to turn on appliances.

But privacy experts gathered in Madrid for a three-day conference which wraps up Friday warned that the meters can also reveal intimate details about customers' habits such as when they eat, what time they go to sleep or how much television they watch.

With cars expected to be fuelled increasingly by electricity in the coming years, the new meters could soon be used to gather information on consumer behaviour beyond the home, they added.

Martin Beckford and Graeme Paton
The Daily Telegraph
Sat, 07 Nov 2009 13:07 EST

© Getty
The long-delayed £224 project will make England?s 11million young people safer by providing a single register that can be used by all child protection professionals

Every child in England will have their personal details stored on a controversial database despite fears over security and privacy.

Ministers are pressing ahead with the introduction of ContactPoint to every local authority in the country after claiming that a pilot project has proved a success.

They say the long-delayed £224 project will make England's 11million young people safer by providing a single register that can be used by all child protection professionals.

But there are concerns that the sensitive data could fall into the wrong hands, after an official review concluded that it could never be completely secure.

It is also feared that police or council workers will use it to search for evidence of crime or pry into family arrangements, rather than safeguarding children.

The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats are both committed to scrapping ContactPoint, should they win the general election.

Rebecca Thompson
Computer Weekly
Thu, 29 Oct 2009 06:21 EDT

Over 90,000 innocent people have been added to the DNA database since the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled against the practice

The figures, which were obtained by the Liberal Democrats, showed 433,752 DNA profiles had been added to the database since the ECHR ruling on 5 December 2008, equalling 1,480 per day. In the same period, only 611 profiles were removed.

There are now nearly 5.5 million DNA profiles on the database relating to 4.8 million people. The government estimated in 2008 that 20% of people on the database are innocent - meaning records of one million innocent people may be held on it.

The Home Office recently dropped proposals to keep the DNA of innocent people for 12 years, but privacy campaigners want it to go further.

Adam Smith
Halesowen News
Thu, 05 Nov 2009 06:18 EST

Children in Halesowen are having their fingerprints taken for a new £23k biometric school dinner scheme.

Windsor High School has insisted the biometric 'kiddyprinting' is not out of the ordinary but parents have complained the measure is another sign of a 'Big Brother' society.

The cashless school dinner system allows parents and the school to check children are eating healthy meals and prevents them spending their dinner money at the local chip shop.

The new system cost £23,000 to install but the school received a Government grant to cover half the costs. Concerned parent Heloise Morgan has demanded all evidence of her child's fingerprint be destroyed.

She said: "Where is it all going to end? If we have come to the stage when children think it is normal to give their fingerprints to get school dinners then the world surely has gone mad."

Yakub Qureshi and Neal Keeling
Manchester Evening News
Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:12 EST

Police seized video footage from a primary school after children were filmed on a CCTV system as they changed for gym lessons.

The recording was seized after angry parents protested outside Charlestown Primary School in Salford.

The parents had discovered that the school's surveillance cameras were running round the clock and some children had been inadvertently filmed changing into gym gear in their classrooms before PE lessons.

Staff at the school had contacted police to ask them to remove the protesting parents. But after speaking to the parents officers took the footage from the cameras and a computer hard drive.

Police have studied the images and decided no further action is needed.

Katie Drummond
Wired.com
Wed, 04 Nov 2009 05:16 EST

The Air Force is looking to harness advances in bio-science so they can "degrade enemy performance and artificially overwhelm enemy cognitive abilities." It's all part of a $49 million dollar bio-research effort unveiled last month by the Air Force Research Lab's "Human Effectiveness Directorate," and it's the latest in a series of out-there military ideas to mess with adversaries' heads.

Once upon a time
Fri, 06 Nov 2009 05:23 EST

Hey, relax. It's not going to be the end of the world -- but as my headline says, in time it may be the end of the internet as you know it.

Cory Doctorow:

The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to "national security" concerns, has leaked. It's bad. It says:

* That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.

* That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet -- and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living -- if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.

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"The free press is the mother of all our liberties and of our progress under liberty" Adlai E. Stevenson

"There is no more important struggle for American democracy than ensuring a diverse, independent and free media. Free Press is at the heart of that struggle." Bill Moyers

"This is, in theory, still a free country, but our politically correct, censorious times are such that many of us tremble to give vent to perfectly acceptable views for fear of condemnation. Freedom of speech is thereby imperiled, big questions go undebated, and great lies become accepted, unequivocally as great truths." Simon Heffer in The Daily Mail, 7 June 2000

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One of the shrewdest ways for human predators to conquer their stronger victims is to steadily convince them with propaganda that they're still free. N.A. Scott