Religion and sex life among passenger details to be passed on to officials

Jamie Doward, home affairs editor
Sunday, July 22, 2007
The Observer

Highly sensitive information about the religious beliefs, political opinions and even the sex life of Britons travelling to the United States is to be made available to US authorities when the European Commission agrees to a new system of checking passengers.

The EC is in the final stages of agreeing a new Passenger Name Record system with the US which will allow American officials to access detailed biographical information about passengers entering international airports.

The information sharing system with the US Department of Homeland Security, which updates the previous three-year-old system, is designed to tackle terrorism but civil liberty groups warn it will have serious consequences for European passengers. And it has emerged that both the European parliament and the European data protection supervisor are alarmed at the plan.

In a strongly worded document drawn up in response to the plan that will affect the 4 million-plus Britons who travel to the US every year, the EU parliament said it ‘notes with concern that sensitive data (ie personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, and data concerning the health or sex life of individuals) will be made available to the DHS and that these data may be used by the DHS in exceptional cases’.

Under the new agreement, which goes live at the end of this month, the US will be able to hold the records of European passengers for 15 years compared with the current three year limit. The EU parliament said it was concerned the data would lead to ‘a significant risk of massive profiling and data mining, which is incompatible with basic European principles and is a practice still under discussion in the US congress.’

Peter Hustinx, the European Data Protection Supervisor, has written to the EC expressing his ‘grave concern’ at the plan, which he describes as ‘without legal precedent’ and one that puts ‘European data protection rights at risk’.

Hustinx warns: ‘Data on EU citizens will be readily accessible to a broad range of US agencies and there is no limitation to what US authorities are allowed to do with the data.’

He expresses concern about ‘the absence of a robust legal mechanism that enables EU citizens to challenge misuse of their personal information’.

Hustinx concludes: ‘I have serious doubts whether the outcome of these negotiations will be fully compatible with European fundamental rights, which both the Council and the Commission have stated are non negotiable.’

The new agreement will see US authorities gain access to detailed passenger information, from credit card details to home addresses and even what sort of food may have been ordered before a flight. In addition, US authorities will be free to add other information they have obtained about a passenger, leading to concerns about how the information will be shared.

It has emerged that neither Hustinx nor the European parliament were aware of the final draft of the plan.

‘If you are going to have this kind of agreement it should involve parliament and the data protection supervisor,’ said Tony Bunyan of Statewatch, the civil liberties organisation that campaigns against excessive surveillance.

He warned that under the new system the data will be shared with numerous US agencies. ‘The data protection supervisor and the European parliament are angry that they were not consulted,’ Bunyan said. ‘But they are also angry with a number of elements of the plan such as giving the US the absolute right to pass the data on to third parties.’

Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, another group that campaigns against state surveillance, said the new agreement gave huge powers to the US authorities. ‘We have no guarantee about how this data will be used,’ Davies said.

A spokeswoman for the Information Commissioner’s Office in England and Wales said it would be discussing the matter with European counterparts shortly. ‘We are working with the European Data Protection Supervisor and our other EU data protection colleagues to come to a joint opinion on the level of data protection set out in the final agreement,’ the spokeswoman said.

YouTube
Video Posted Thursday, April 27, 2006

The Associated Press
By JON GAMBRELL
Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, July 3, 2007

LITTLE ROCK (AP) — A police officer who appeared to choke a skateboarder and put two others in a headlock in a video posted online used appropriate force when making his arrests, an internal police investigation found.

The Hot Springs Police Department Internal Affairs Board found the use of force was within the police department’s policy on non-deadly force and recommended “no changes to this policy.” The decision was released Monday.

Officer Joey Williams confronted a situation that “would have overwhelmed any single officer” when he stopped those breaking a Hot Springs city ordinance by skateboarding on a downtown sidewalk June 21, the report said.

However, Williams was faulted for leaving a handcuffed suspect unattended while chasing another youth in the resort town’s historic Bathhouse Row.

Williams has been on administrative leave since the video hit YouTube on June 25. Police said he would return to active duty Thursday in the city’s downtown.

“I think it was fair,” City Manager Kent Myers said. Witnesses “consistently supported the actions of the officer and his efforts to control the situation.”

Video from a business’ security cameras shows 10 skateboarders rolling down the city sidewalk at a good clip, followed by Williams, who sprints past the last skater.

A video taken by skateboarders and later posted on YouTube shows Williams on top of one of the skaters, apparently choking him. The video also showed Williams putting another two skateboarders in a headlock, and the officer can later be heard threatening to use pepper spray on a skateboarder lying on the ground.

Police said they arrested Matthew Jon McCormack, 21, and Skylar Nalls, 19, both of Hot Springs, and four juveniles. McCormack faces a misdemeanor battery charge accusing him of pushing or striking a 67-year-old city employee during the melee. Nalls was cited for skateboarding and faces misdemeanor charges of fleeing and obstructing governmental operations.

McCormack has previously disputed many of the police allegations, especially his battery charge. He has said he pulled on the city employee’s arm after the man lifted a girl off her feet in a choke-hold.

Hot Springs is a resort town about 50 miles west of Little Rock.

LA Times / Associated Press
Monday, July 2, 2007

BOSTON — RoboCops and robot soldiers got a little closer to reality last week as a maker of floor-cleaning automatons teamed with a stun-gun manufacturer to arm track-wheeled robots for the police and the Pentagon.

By adding Tasers to robots it makes for the military, Burlington, Mass.-based IRobot Corp. says it hopes to give soldiers and law enforcement officers a defensive, nonlethal tool.

But some observers fear that such developments could ultimately lead to robots capable of deciding on their own when to shoot and kill.

“It’s one more step in that direction,” said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, an Alexandria, Va.-based military research organization.

“It is not the first step in that direction, but I think at some point toward the end of the next decade, you’re going to start seeing RoboCops or a Terminator,” Pike said, referring to a pair of 1980s robot-themed sci-fi films. “We may see autonomous robots capable of inflicting lethal force.”

Jim Rymarcsuk, vice president for business development at IRobot, said notions of armed robots acting on their own were far beyond what the company envisioned for the partnership announced Thursday with Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Taser International Inc.

“Right now, we have no plans to take any robot with a lethal-weapon approach to the market,” Rymarcsuk said. “For this system, and all systems we have looked at, there is a human in the loop making the decisions. This in no way is giving the robot the capability to use force on its own.”

Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed. The companies said they had developed a model that would be demonstrated at a Taser-hosted conference in Chicago on July 9 and 10. The model pairs IRobot’s existing PackBot Explorer with the Taser X26 in what IRobot calls “the first robot of its kind with an on-board, integrated Taser payload.”

There’s no word when the system will be offered for sale, or for how much.

Car Bomb Attacks Herald New Wave Of Strategy of Tension

Prison Planet / Infowars | June 30, 2007
Paul Joseph Watson

The discovery of two unexploded car bombs in London and a bizarre incident today in which a flaming jeep was crashed at high speed into a terminal building at Glasgow Airport could herald a new wave of staged terror carefully timed to coincide with Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s installation at Number 10.

The hysteria reached new heights this afternoon when a Jeep Cherokee ploughed into a terminal building at Glasgow Airport before two Asian men on fire exited and were tackled by holidaymakers and police.

Despite the fact that in both this incident and yesterday’s events the cars involved were filled with nothing more deadly than gasoline, which is hardly a carnage-inducing explosive, the British government and the media have embarked upon a fresh assault of fearmongering and are hyping the inevitability that more attacks are imminent.

Gordon Brown has swept into Downing Street with the aid of a new injection of the strategy of tension.

In yesterday’s article, we underscored the history of car bombings in the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland and how the fingerprints of the security services and MI5 were all over them in every case.

Whether recent events represent another round of staged terror attacks or are the sole work of Muslim extremists, the true culprits are the the government.

Under the active stewardship of Tony Blair, Britain has left itself wide open to the ravages of rampant and unchecked immigration and is now inundated with an army of radicalized and hate-filled Muslims that are routinely prodded and provoked as a result of Britain’s blind support for America’s military adventures.

If we were really at war with Islamic terrorists then the British government would impose stringent controls on letting Muslims into the country in the first place and would deport others en masse - but instead the opposite has happened, while everybody’s rights are violated and abused in the name of security.

Interesting details are already starting to emerge concerning what authorities might have known before this new wave of attempted attacks.

Despite the use of car bombs being labeled a surprise development, intelligence was obtained and published days before yesterday’s incident concerning the likely use of car bombs in Britain.

“Contingency plans have been revised following a review last week and in light of intelligence that extremists might adopt tactics used by insurgents in Iraq,” reported the London Telegraph.

Security sources feared that the Wimbledon tennis event would be vulnerable to a car bomb attack. It was also reported that nightclubs may be a target for car bombs. The first vehicle discovered on Friday morning was parked outside a night club.

It is important to stress that there are several kinds of “staged” terror attacks and we have made this distinction on numerous previous occasions and presented the evidence to back it up on a case by case basis.

The first kind is where the operation is wholly planned and executed by rogue units of intelligence agencies after which patsies are framed. The second is where a group is infiltrated and radicalized by a government informant and provocateured into attempting terror attacks. The third is where government policy stirs resentment amongst groups which are essentially prodded into committing acts of violence.

Whatever category these latest events fall into, they will be overhyped, massaged and exploited by the state to achieve its political agenda, thereby defining the state as the true terrorists.

The new hysteria is already being exploited to push the 90 day detention without trial law that the government had previously failed in passing along with a raft of other measures to eviscerate whatever rights Brits had left.

Stay tuned for more reports as events unfold.