Henry Porter

February 21, 2010,  Alan Cheuse, Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

Every step you take / I'll be watching you ... The refrain from the stalker's love song, "Every Breath You Take," by the Police, might serve as the epigram for this gripping new British thriller. The book tells of the dangers of an overreaching prime minister and his supporters, some of them multibillionaire media and public relations magnates. Over the course of a few years sometime in the near future, they create software programs and camera monitors that make it possible for government to know the private details of the population's hopes, dreams, fears and finances.

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February 7 2010,  Anna Mundow interviews Henry Porter, Boston Globe 

Henry Porter, political columnist for The Observer and UK editor of Vanity Fair, is the author of five novels including “Brandenburg Gate,” which was set during the fall of the Berlin Wall. Porter’s new novel, “The Bell Ringers” is a dark counterpoint to that previously optimistic vision. This superb political thriller depicts England in the near future as a place where fabricated security threats, state surveillance, and antiterrorist legislation advance political ambitions and control. Porter spoke from his home in London.

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3 February 2010,  Jennie Bristow, Spiked

Anthony Horowitz, author of the bestselling teenage spy novels, talks to Jennie Bristow about vetting and the poisoning of adult-child relations. 

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February 1, 2010,  By Patrick Anderson, The Washington Post

English journalist Henry Porter's "The Bell Ringers" (published in England last year as "The Dying Light") is one of many novels that have attempted to update "Nineteen Eighty-Four" -- and one of the more impressive. But while Orwell offered a worst-case scenario of what could happen 35 years in the future, Porter is writing about what, as he sees it, is already starting to happen... This is a sophisticated, engrossing and important political thriller. Porter wants us to see that the same technological tools that can be used to fight terrorism or to make government more efficient can also, in the wrong hands, be used to destroy freedom.

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31 January 2010,  Mark George QC, The Observer

A noted Manchester QC writes to Observer columnist Henry Porter in support of his campaign

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23 Jan 2010,  Urmee Khan and Martin Beckford, Telegraph

Internet users are being spied on in their own home as the Government uses the threat of terrorism and the spread of child pornography to justify launching a dramatic expansion of surveillance society, according to a leading academic. 

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20 Jan 2010,  Richard Vize, Editor's blog, Health Service Journal

The vetting and barring scheme - introduced by the government in the wake of the Soham murders - will cost the NHS millions, put managers under intense pressure to report staff to the Independent Safeguarding Authority to cover their own backs, and could all too easily lead to innocent staff being barred from working with vulnerable adults and children. As HSJ reports this week, the widely criticised scheme will force managers to make moral judgments about staff behaviour and lifestyles. Draft guidance from the ISA circulated this month and being considered by the Department of Health identifies a wide range of personal characteristics which should prompt managers to consider whether to trigger an alert.

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19 January 2010,  Michael Savage, Independent

A series of botched IT projects has left taxpayers with a bill of more than £26bn for computer systems that have suffered severe delays, run millions of pounds over budget or have been cancelled altogether.

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14 January 2010,  Jago Russell, Law Gazette

In 2002 the EU created the European Arrest Warrant (EAW), a fast-track system for extraditing people from one EU country to another. It was rushed in as part of Europe’s response to the terrorist threat, and was meant to help tackle serious cross-border crime more effectively.

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14th January 2010,  By John Ozimek • The Register

Police officers could find themselves on the wrong end of a citizen’s arrest if they follow advice issued by Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, after the European Court of Human Rights slapped the UK's stop and search laws.

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14 January 2010,  Graham Stuart, guardian.co.uk

Government proposals requiring officials to make annual visits to homes where children are taught are an invasion of civil liberties

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By Nick Heath, 12 January 2010, Silicon.com

Labour's track record on bringing home major new IT systems is littered with messy and expensive failures - from the Rural Payment's Agency Single Payment Scheme (RPA SPS) system, which delayed the payment of £1.5bn of subsidy payments to British farmers, to the Department for Transport's shared services centre, a project intended to save £57m that will cost £81m to complete.

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11 January 2010, Letters, The Guardian

We believe that schedule 1 of the children, schools and families bill represents an unacceptable imposition of state control over families.

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10 January 2010,  Marcel Berlins, guardian.co.uk

A strange kind of criminal trial begins in the royal courts of justice in London this Tuesday.

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7 January 2010,  by Robert Heslett, Law Gazette

To my mind, legal aid is no less of a ‘frontline service’ than health, education and policing.

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January 7 2010,  Raj Jayadev and Aram James, New America Media

In what is being heralded as a landmark decision, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit recently declared that police officers could be held liable for using a Taser without proper cause.

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7 January 2010,  Joshua Rozenberg, Law Gazette

The biggest reforms to the law of bribery for more than a century will come under detailed scrutiny today as the government’s Bribery Bill begins its committee stage in the House of Lords. You would expect a bill of this sort to criminalise both the person who pays a bribe and the person who accepts one. And so it does. But the Bribery Bill also makes it lawful for a very broad range of law enforcement agencies to provide or receive what would otherwise be improper financial inducements. They include not just the police, prosecutors and bodies such as HM Revenue & Customs and the UK Borders Agency. Clause 12 would allow every environmental health officer and local authority trading standards officer in the land to go around handing out or accepting cash if they can prove, on the balance of probabilities, that this is necessary for the prevention, investigation or detection of ‘serious’ crime.

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Wednesday, 6 January 2010,  Julian Baggini, The Independent

...For now that both government and opposition have embraced the happiness agenda, sceptical voices are warning that this marks a disturbing intrusion of the state into the private lives of citizens, and that, far from being benign, attempts to regulate the subjective states of citizens could have sinister implications.

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6 January 2010,  by Linda Geddes,  New Scientist

WHEN a defendant's DNA appears to match DNA found at a crime scene, the probability that this is an unfortunate coincidence can be central to whether the suspect is found guilty. The assumptions used to calculate the likelihood of such a fluke - the "random match probability" - are now being questioned by a group of 41 scientists and lawyers based in the US and the UK. These assumptions have never been independently verified on a large sample of DNA profiles, says the group. What's more, whether some RMPs are truly as vanishingly small as assumed has been called into question by recent insights into DNA databases in the US and Australia.

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4th January 2010,  Damian Green, Daily Mail

In my 12 years as an MP, I have never seen such extraordinary letters as the ones sent to me by innocent citizens who have found that their DNA is held on a Government database. Hundreds of thousands of us have been affected and many, rightly, are very angry.

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27 December 200909,  Big Brother Watch  REPORT

Research conducted by Big Brother Watch - the new campaign fighting intrusions on privacy and protecting liberties - reveals that there are at least 14,793 officers in 73 per cent of local councils in Britain who can enter private property without requiring a warrant or police escort

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23 December 2009,  Andrea Leadsom, Big Brother Watch

Last week I had the pleasure of accompanying a group of students from Sponne and Campion Schools to the Houses of Parliament.  But over our sandwiches afterwards, sitting on a wall in the drizzle of a cold Monday in Westminster, one of the students raised an issue with me that I found truly shocking. He wanted to know if I thought that fingerprinting/iris scanning of children in schools might breach their Human Rights under EU legislation. 

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18 December 2009,  Big Brother Watch  REPORT

Research conducted by Big Brother Watch reveals that in less than 10 years the number of CCTV cameras controlled by local councils has risen from 21,000 to 60,000.

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14 December 2009,  Josie Appleton and James Panton, Spiked

Two key campaigners against Britain’s vetting database argue that Ed Balls’ ‘u-turn’ isn’t nearly enough: the vetting regime must be dismantled.

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14th December 2009,  Chris Cheesman, Amateur Photographer

This is the guidance that Metropolitan Police staff and officers have been told to follow, as supplied by the Met to Amateur Photographer 

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11 December 2009, Paul Lewis, guardian.co.uk

It felt like a minor terror alert. Four security guards were watching me, whispering into microphones on their collars. A plainclothes police officer had just covered my camera lens, mentioned the words "hostile reconnaissance" and told me I would be followed around the city if I moved. 

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3 December 2009,  By Hilary Wilce,  Independent

The answer appears to be a resounding yes. According to the law firm Cobbetts, a biometric system like this raises issues of data protection, and unless the school is rigorous in how it obtains, stores and uses these fingerprints it could be in breach of the Data Protection Act. The new system also raises questions of possible unlawful pupil surveillance.

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Thursday, 3 December 2009,  Independent

If police stop and search you, the first thing you should ask is on what grounds they are conducting the search and under what powers.

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3 December 2009,  Independent

I was on the South Bank of the Thames trying to compose a shot of the Houses of Parliament last week when two police officers stopped me.

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1 December 2009,  Valerie Hartwich,  Spiked

Valerie Hartwich spoke to the angry academics who are taking a stand against stringent new visa rules for foreigners wishing to study in Britain. 

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27 November 2009  By Marc Settle Producer, BBC Radio 4

The Thick of It creator Armando Iannucci - whose long and distinguished CV also includes The Day Today, Knowing Me, Knowing You... with Alan Partridge - is one of a number of leading figures who fear the rules of comedy writing in Britain are changing ... "There is this build-up of self-censorship taking place," Iannucci told Radio 4's PM programme.

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23 November 2009,  Anthony Barnett, Our Kingdom

For the first time the EU-wide moves towards a surveillance society and a database state are set out in all their appalling glory. A major report has recently been published, NeoConOpticon. It has its own webpage . The authors, with Ban Hayes of Statewatch in the lead, have put together the military and the domestic aspects of the European Security Research Programme.

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24 November 2009  Human Genetics Commission

Balancing individual rights and the public interest in the governance and use of the National DNA Database

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November 20, 2009,  Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing

The British government has brought down its long-awaited Digital Economy Bill, and it's perfectly useless and terrible. It consists almost entirely of penalties for people who do things that upset the entertainment industry (including the "three-strikes" rule that allows your entire family to be cut off from the net if anyone who lives in your house is accused of copyright infringement, without proof or evidence or trial)

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19 November 2009, Rupert Goodwins,  ZDNet.co.uk

Without debate, without public consulation, without any form of mandate, Lord Mandelson - an unelected politician - is preparing to place the rights of powerful industrial concerns above those of Parliament and above ours.

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19 November 2009,  Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing

A source close to the British Labour Government has just given me reliable information about the most radical copyright proposal I've ever seen. Secretary of State Peter Mandelson is planning to introduce changes to the Digital Economy Bill now under debate in Parliament. These changes will give the Secretary of State (Mandelson -- or his successor in the next government) the power to make "secondary legislation" (legislation that is passed without debate) to amend the provisions of Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (1988). What that means is that an unelected official would have the power to do anything without Parliamentary oversight or debate, provided it was done in the name of protecting copyright.

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5 November 2009, Chris Huhne, guardian.co.uk

Powers originally given only to the police and police agencies to seize criminal assets are now being extended to councils and other public bodies, including the Royal Mail. Once again, legal powers voted in to deal with terrorism and organised crime are being rolled out for use against minor offences.

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30 September 2009,  Stephen Cragg,  guardian.co.uk

The government's legal aid proposals endanger one of the pillars of our democracy – the ability to call government to account

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29 September 2009,  By Ian Dunt, Politics.co.uk

Brown's plans to tackle anti-social behaviour and teen pregnancy are scary, dangerous and Stalinist.

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September 29, 2009,  By John Travis,  ScienceMag.org 

Scientists are greeting with surprise and dismay a project to use DNA and isotope analysis of tissue from asylum seekers to evaluate their nationality and help decide who can enter the United Kingdom. “Horrifying,” “naïve,” and “flawed” are among the adjectives geneticists and isotope specialists have used to describe the “Human Provenance pilot project,” launched quietly in mid-September by the U.K. Border Agency. Their consensus: The project is not scientifically valid--or even sensible.

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23rd September 2009, By John Ozimek • The Register

Radical Think Tank Open Europe has this week exposed a study by the EU that could lead to the creation of a massive cross-Europe database, amassing vast amounts of personal data on every single citizen in the EU. 

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17 September 2009, Pauline Hadaway, Manifesto Club

A new report, by Pauline Hadaway, director of Belfast Exposed gallery, reveals the growing restriction of citizen photography. Policing the Public Gaze: The Assault on Citizen Photography shows that although there is no overarching ban, there has been a creeping restriction of everyday photography - by community safety wardens, private security guards, and self-appointed ‘jobsworths’.

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17 September 2009,  Josie Appleton,  guardian.co.uk

From nativity plays to fooball matches we must defend amateur photographers from creeping restrictions

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September 17, 2009,  David Hare,  The Times

A message for politicians of all parties – with your expenses comes a responsibility . . .

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14 Sep 2009, Telegraph

Shortly before the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Bill completed its journey through Parliament in October 2006, the Government tabled no fewer than 25 new clauses, four new schedules and 250 amendments. The Bill had already been debated in the House of Lords and had been before a Commons committee. Because of timetabling restrictions, the flood of last-minute amendments received cursory scrutiny, if any. This is the Bill that established the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA), which will decide the suitability of an estimated 11 million people either to work or take part in voluntary activity with children or the infirm.

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1, Sep 2009, By Alex Stevenson, Politics.co.uk

The government's addiction to lawmaking is driving the legal world "mad", the new head of the Criminal Bar Association (CBA) has told politics.co.uk. Paul Mendelle QC claimed lawyers have been overwhelmed by the volume of legislation passed by the New Labour government. Accusing ministers of "legislative hyperactivity", he said: "We have been deluged with criminal justice legislation at a rate several times that of the previous decade. "Law should be accessible to the people who are affected by it. Barristers and judges find it increasingly hard to work out exactly what the law says.

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August 30 2009, Zach Woodham, Our Kingdom

Last month the Home Office announced that the National Identity Card Scheme would no longer be compulsory and that implementation would be delayed until 2011 or 2012. Online magazine The Register has, however, uncovered proposals to merge the National Identity Register with Criminal Records Bureau background checks, potentially forcing millions of people into ‘applying' for an Identity card that they neither want nor need in order to avoid facing unemployment.

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19th August 2009,  Vince Cable,  Daily Mail

A quarter of a century has passed since 1984, the titular year of George Orwell’s novel which described a world constantly spied upon by an all-powerful dictator, the fearsome Big Brother. It never happened. Orwell’s nightmarish vision was realised, for a while, in communist Eastern Europe but the Stasi and similar agencies have now gone. And yet in a quiet, insidious way our own democratic society is producing a surveillance state that Big Brother would have been proud to call his own.

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July 17 2009,  FSI Genetics

Over the past twenty years, DNA analysis has revolutionized forensic science, and has become a dominant tool in law enforcement. Today, DNA evidence is key to the conviction or exoneration of suspects of various types of crime, from theft to rape and murder. However, the disturbing possibility that DNA evidence can be faked has been overlooked. It turns out that standard molecular biology techniques such as PCR, molecular cloning, and recently developed whole genome amplification (WGA), enable anyone with basic equipment and know-how to produce practically unlimited amounts of in vitro synthesized (artificial) DNA with any desired genetic profile.

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June 2009,  The Manifesto Club  REPORT

The Manifesto Club has launched a report on the police abuse of alcohol confiscation powers. Alcohol control zones were supposedly created to tackle serious public disorder - yet police officers are confiscating alcohol from people who are doing absolutely nothing wrong.

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