As Bruce Schneier has pointed out previously, when you introduce two different classes of security into the security theatre, you degrade overall security because now all the bad guys need to do is defeat a machine and they’ve overcome all your anal-probing, abbrasively annoying manual human inspection and any other security used for “regular people”. But the bad guys don’t know this, so we’re ok.

I’ve often thought Heathrow security was an annoying, humorless joke, and this just serves to back up my thoughts on the subject – closed source biometric security systems are not only a bad idea but they’re actively dangerous because people don’t see what could be wrong with them. But they’re digital! They use computers! They use words like biometric in their descriptions! How could they possibly be a bad idea?

Jon.

And they don’t even see the police state coming.

Jon.

Next time this country accuses other countries of being Xenophobic, I think people need to take a long hard look at what we allow people to get away with in the UK today. It’s called introspection folks. Many of these Daily Mail, The Sun, The News Of The World “people” seem to think it’s perfectly acceptable to treat foreign people like dirt. It’s somehow acceptable not to embrace other cultures and welcome them but instead, we need to fear them for some reason. Monarch should know better than to pander to racists – they should have delayed the flight and ejected those making the unfounded accusations. I won’t fly with an airline that openly panders to these British racist extremists.

Jon.

[0] I saw the BBC News TV reports in which the couple being interviewed were actually holding a copy of that foul newspaper whilst being “interviewed”. That pretty much destroyed their “credibility”.

Things that pissed me off so far today:

• BBC Breakfast interviewed two people about lesbian/single women getting IVF and similar treatments. A Liberal Democrat (the party I support) was suggesting that such women should have equal access to treatment, while a right wing sociologist with an agenda repeatedly “informed” us that single parent families work out much worse on average, so they shouldn’t be promoted or furnished with opportunities through new medical treatments. The sociologist really pissed me off – she’d be up right against the wall in my revolution.
• MPs are apparently calling for the immoral 28 day terror detention limit to be raised. This is the time that the UK can run “gitmo” prisons, holding people for 28 days without due process. Fundamentally, this is possible because the UK has no constitution (and thus is not a free country by definition), so the government can arbitrarily decide to lock people up and throw away the key, without any reasonable possibility for recourse. They wanted 90 day detentions originally, and they’ll probably get them now. After all, Friday is the one year anniversary of “7/7″ and I’m sure that mentioning that a few dozen times will be all that’s needed for the idiot press to get with the programme.

We live in very dangerous times. I’m not talking about terrorists with WMDs, dictators with or without oil, or any of that. I’m refering to governments who will happily throw our civil liberties (the right to tell the government to fuck off) right down the toilet. Sure, on some level I can understand the desire to keep known bad guys off the streets – even if the evidence isn’t quite there to justify it – but there are many other ways to achieve that goal. For example, court ordered monitoring of those individuals so they don’t have time to make evil nasties, and many other mechanisms that exist in law and which have worked for hundreds of years so far. Ah, but now “9/11″ and “7/7″ have happened…

I’m not just some left-wing nutjob who is defending the rights of terrorists, I’m defending the rights of the rest of the population, who are often far too dumb to realize what’s going on even when it is too late. I know the UK has been around for a long time, but these days there’s too much MTV and cheap crappy TV to keep people sedated enough to refrain from taking action. This country will, very soon, have a national ID card (I give it a couple of years), start holding people without trial (trial by jury is itself under threat) for 90 days or longer, and generally just continue with the big brother crap until it’s not possible to take a crap without it being recorded, analyzed and processed by some government agency.

Anyway, two major annoyances so far today and it’s only 8am. If only regular people would care so much about these things, we’d be living in a better world by 9 o’clock. I’m talking about the kind of people who watched the Live Aid/Live 8 followup programmes for the Madonna and U2 content, not the message that was allegedly being sent through such popsical farce.

Jon.

If you’ve done nothing wrong you’ve got nothing to fear
If you’ve something to hide you shouldn’t even be here
You’ve had your chance now we’ve got the mandate
If you’ve changed your mind I’m afraid it’s too late
We’re concerned you’re a threat
You’re not integral to the project.

I happen to like the Pet Shop Boys quite a lot too. It’s unfortunate that there aren’t a lot more people out there who realise the distructive damage of the ID cards legislation on the UK way of life. On that subject, I just renewed my passport until the end of 2016, don’t require another renewal for the US (since the deadline for biometric passports just got extended) and can probably get by for the next decade without renewing again. That’ll hopefully give me time to not need another UK passport in the future (I really don’t plan on returning here in the longer term – this country is getting worse by the day).

I suggest that any other UK passport holders immediately renew their passport in case the legislation is repealed before the mandatory introduction of ID cards in 2010 as you really don’t want those evil fuckwits having all of that personal data in their giant wankerbase. They’ll be selling your details on ebay, thanks to some missing laptop, before not too long. I’d rant for a bit longer, but it’s just not worth it. This country has gone to the dogs. Who can really claim that the US is any worse? They’ve both got idiots at the helm.

Did you know that you too can join liberty?

Jon.