Unmasking the state

“We don’t want to stop you doing what you are doing. We’re just asking you to consider a proposal… almost a business proposal…At least you’re thinking logically. If you’re going back to school you’re going to have loans to pay off. […] wouldn’t it be nice to have tax-free money you’d be getting?” and “UK plc can afford more than 20 quid.”

These not too subtle attempts at seducing an indebted student were part of the overtures made by undercover Strathclyde police officers to Plane Stupid activist Tilly Gifford in an attempt to recruit her as a paid informant. But the anti-airport expansion group turned the tables on the covert coppers seeking to set Tilly against her comrades.

When she realised what police were trying to do, she used her mobile phone to record them. Then she fitted a recording device into her waistcoat which transmitted live feeds into a computer set up nearby. Her fellow campaigners were able to tape almost three hours of conversations with two men.

The recordings reveal the carrot-and-stick tactics used by the secret police to compromise and entrap activists so that they can monitor their activities as well as plant provocateurs in their midst. It’s not just the state that are at it either. An article in the New Statesman last year by Stephen Armstrong claimed that roughly 25% of all those attending activist camps and protests, particularly those concerned with the environment, are corporate spooks. The estimate came from the so-called “private espionage industry” itself.

Plane Stupid’s revelations have emerged on the eve of today’s publication of a government consultation document called the Interception Modernisation Programme. If implemented, the police and security services will have the power to monitor every communication we make and to store it in a vast national database. This means that all our telephone calls, text messaging, emails and internet browsing would be tracked.

The justification? Not too surprisingly, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith claims the extra surveillance is needed to fight terrorism and crime. The new powers would be so sweeping that even the official data watchdog, Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, has said that the keeping of such records could be “highly intrusive”.

Intrusive? New Labour’s efforts to create a monster Big Brother state through a combination of informants and electronic surveillance bring to mind the tactics of some of the most repressive regimes in history. Doesn’t the following sound familiar?

“We can make use of revolutionaries living in poverty, who without renouncing their convictions agree out of necessity to hand over information.” You could be forgiven for thinking that this last sentence is drawn from the Strathclyde police guidelines for recruiting informants like their attempts with Tilly. In fact it is from the Tsarist secret police’s Directive on the Secret Service.

Over the weekend, The Guardian gave major coverage to Plane Stupid’s recordings. It described the intelligence officers’ conduct as “sinister”. But to moan that “British policing is losing its way” as its leader writer does, is to play down the evidence so courageously uncovered by Plane Stupid.

Tilly Gifford and her fellow campaigners deserve the thanks, not only of their fellow eco-activists, but all those who struggle for the right to organise and campaign politically. They have laid down a serious challenge which needs to be continued and widened.

There is indeed an urgent need for “a new settlement of Britain’s policing system”. But this must be part of the deconstruction of the entire apparatus of the unaccountable and undemocratic “state within the state” which pulls the strings in Britain. Ways in which this could be achieved are outlined in A World to Win’s book, Unmasking the State.

Corinna Lotz
AWTW secretary

Beware police 'troublemakers'

Two reports published today provide evidence of the deepening assault on human rights in Britain. Read alongside Metropolitan Police plans to deal with anti-G20 protesters in London on April 1, they lift the lid on the state’s preparation for major social unrest.

The Database State published by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust pulls no punches. The report report assesses 46 databases across major government departments, and finds that:

 A quarter of public-sector databases reviewed are almost certainly illegal under human rights or data protection law
 Fewer than 15% of the public databases assessed are effective, proportionate and necessary, with a proper legal basis for any privacy intrusions
 In Britain, data is increasingly centralised, and shared between health and social services, the police, schools, local government and the taxman, whereas in other countries it is held locally
 Sharing can harm the vulnerable, not least by leading to discrimination and stigmatisation
 The UK public sector spends over £16 billion a year on IT. Over £100 billion in spending is planned or the next five years. Yet only about 30% of government IT projects meet their claimed objectives.

Among those rejected as unlawful is the National DNA Database, which holds DNA profiles for approximately 4 million individuals, over half a million of whom have not been convicted, reprimanded, given a final warning or cautioned, and have no proceedings pending against them. It includes more than 39,000 children.

The authors assert that the National Identity Register, which will store biographical information, biometric data and administrative data linked to the use of an ID card, will also break the law. So too will ContactPoint, the new national index of every child in England.

Two more databases criticised are a communications database introduced as part of the Interception Modernisation Programme which will hold everyone’s communication traffic data such as itemised phone bills, email headers and mobile phone location history; and the Prüm Framework, which allows law enforcement information to be shared between EU Member States. The report recommends that these are scrapped. Not much chance of that happening, unfortunately.

Also published today is the Parliamentary joint committee on human rights report into policing protests. The report is critical of the use of anti-terror laws to stop and search activists at events like the climate camp in Kent last summer and notes the swamping of protests by large numbers of police.

"Protesters and journalists reported a number of specific incidents where they felt intimidated by the police, as well as a more general sense that the policing of protest had become more heavy-handed," the report says. As to the police, when asked whether it was appropriate to use counter-terrorism powers against protestors, one senior officer replied that “there are occasions when we do need to use our counter-terrorism powers: I would say that that is why we have them”. There’s no arguing with that kind of logic.

More intimidation is clearly on the way, whatever the MPs and Peers who drew up the report say. The Met has let it be known that it will deploy thousands of police, including armed officers and riot police, in London next week when protests are planned to coincide with the G20 economic summit. Leaking the plans is aimed at putting people off taking part. The police want to discredit protesters and activists, and no doubt have agents working inside the protest to cause trouble. You don’t have to look further than Scotland Yard to identify who the real “troublemakers” are.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor

In the state's firing line

Behind the turmoil of the economic and financial crisis, New Labour is stepping up its construction of a surveillance state that assumes that every citizen is an “enemy within”. The latest threat is contained within the innocuous sounding Data Communications Bill.

This will authorise the construction of a single massive database to hold the details of every phone call and email sent and received and every Internet site visited by the UK population. This is Big Brother writ very large indeed. It has alarmed even the government's own reviewer of anti-terrorist legislation, Lord Carlisle, who openly says such a database is too “awful” to contemplate.

Awful or not, it is full-steam ahead on all fronts. ID cards are being introduced for airport workers and no doubt pressure will mount for everyone to carry one. You can see it being a requirement when you open a bank account, transfer money or use your credit card. A sign of this is the requirement in the new bill for people to produce their passport when buying a mobile phone. In this way, the database state will build up details of everyone’s mobile.

As an article by Martyn Warwick on the TelecomTV site warns: “Currently, these can be bought, anonymously, for cash over the counter and there is no doubt that pre-pay phones are the communications devices of choice for terrorists and criminals. However, despite the hysteria the government, post 9/11 and 7/7, likes to whip-up and maintain to keep us fearful and biddable, terrorists and criminals form a minute part of British society. What's more, most of them are clever and can, and will, easily and quickly circumvent appearing on any Big Brother phone-ownership database while the rest of us will be ‘on The List’ and subject to God knows what disproportionate secret surveillance.”

Meanwhile, a conference of IT, security and finance executives has been warned that suppliers who collaborate with the government may be at risk of acts of violence, including the smashing of computer centres. Ian Pearson, a former BT "futurologist" and a chartered fellow of the British Computer Society, predicted that the government's crackdown on law-abiding people could lead to marches in the street, demonstrations outside some computer centres and targeted acts of violence.

He told the invited audience : "By 2012 to 2013 tops you will see a technology backlash in the major population. Why is it relevant to you? Because if your firm is providing services to government authorities, which help the government to crack down on law-abiding people, you are in the firing line." He added: "Be careful how you market new products. Make sure people do not understand the link between you and the government which is trying to crack down on their everyday lives. That will make you on the wrong side of the firing line." Pearson listed what he called examples of “The Stepford Society”:

• Road tolls via satellite-tracking
• Speed cameras
• DNA databases
• Identity cards
• 25% of the world's CCTVs
• Face recognition systems
• Tax enforcement via integrated databases
• Speed limits built in car management system
• Government knows everywhere you go
• Extensive and permanent police records
• One stop shop for all government data
• Monitoring of e-cash
• Number-plate recognition
• Abuse of millimetre wave cameras (which measure waves naturally emitted by the human body, exposing "cold" objects under clothing)
• Extensive monitoring of all electronic activity.

While Pearson is warning suppliers to get out of the firing line, ordinary people remain right in the government’s sights. The proposals made in Unmasking the State for a new, democratic system in place of the authoritarian, surveillance, database capitalist state are more relevant than ever.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor