So what exactly is Twitter?

Are you any the wiser?

Twitter

Of course, I have digressed from my original post, of how to go about publicizing my book.

Well over 100,000 books are published each year. With bookstores jammed from floor to ceiling it seems the odds are stacked against the author’s book becoming that longed for Best-Seller.

How do you get word out that you have written a book? That it’s a great book and entertaining and people will love it?

The first piece of advice I received was to join face-book. That led to me ranting about the surveillance society.

I then started to hear about “Twitter”. It seemed that everywhere I went the word would pop up and every newspaper I picked up had some mention of “Twitter”.

I decided to go on-line and have a look. Find out what it was all about. I opened a "Twitter" account and that was as far as I got. In fact, I forgot all about it.

That is until two days later when I checked my emails.

DowningStreet is now following you on Twitter!

Monday, 16 February, 2009 9:52 AM
From:
"Twitter"

To:
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hi, judy marks

DowningStreet (DowningStreet) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out DowningStreet's profile here:
http://twitter.com/DowningStreet


Best,
Twitter

Oh my God, it’s that damned Big Brother again!!!

Amber Marks and Who's Invading Your 'Headspace'

Buy Amber's book now. You won't regret it.

"HEADSPACE" by Amber Marks

Many people reading my posts may get the impression that I am against modern technology. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I love technology. I love the advances in medicine. I love the convenience of mobile phones and I absolutely adore the internet.

But what terrifies the life out of me is the steady erosion of privacy and the slow descent, (which in recent years appears to be quickening) into the Orwellian nightmare of 1984.

Supporters of the surveillance society continually bleat “If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear”.

I for one do not subscribe to this. I have my privacy and my liberty to fear for.

One of the best books about the ‘surveillance society’ is HeadSpace, by my daughter Amber Marks.

The book is an investigation into surveillance and especially scent-related technologies.

In the book Amber raises concerns about how our privacy and freedom has been seriously undermined by successive British and other governments.

Amber raises some fascinating legal points, both theoretical and from precedent, as well as raising real and pressing human rights issues.

“Headspace" is genuinely well researched, insightful and investigative writing at its best.

And miraculously, despite it being such a serious subject she manages also to inject humour into the content.

To buy your copy click on the cover below.

To find out more about Amber follow the links below;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_Marks

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/mar/31/internationalcrime

http://www.kbkcl.co.uk/2008/08/amber_marks/

Cashless Society

The Human Chip is slowly becoming more and more of a reality.

What do you think?

ID Cards For Manchester

Tony Blair’s government chose Manchester as the surprise location of Britain's first Las Vegas-style super-casino. Gordon Brown, when he became the unelected prime-minister shelved the plans.

Now the residents of Greater Manchester will be the first in the country to get identity cards.

Identity cards are already in use by foreign nationals to show that they have the right-to-work in the UK.

The credit card-size ID cards will carry fifty separate pieces of personal data including face scans and fingerprints securely encrypted onto an electronic chip.

A huge database will store the collected information which will become a magnet for con artists. The growing catalogue of lost data and missing discs has already illustrated the Government cannot be trusted with personal sensitive information.

Highlighting the feebleness of the argument “if you’ve nothing to hide you’ve nothing to fear” that champions of the cards so readily proclaim.

Residents will be able to apply for a £30 card from the autumn to enjoy the privilege of Labor’s stasi agents harassing them. Local residents wanting to apply for a card have been told to sign up on the governments Directgov web site which will inform users when the cards become available in their area.

Because the ID cards are so despised by British citizens the Government can only proceed to introduce them by stealth. From Manchester the voluntary scheme will gradually cover the rest of the country until they can be made mandatory in 2012

The Home Office is planning to allow post offices, high street pharmacies and photographic shops to offer application processing services.

Jacqui Smith said that it will not only be private companies that benefit from offering the service. "Their customers will benefit from being able to quickly provide their biometrics while they are out doing the shopping," she said.

Almost as if giving such personal information was no more important than buying a tube of toothpaste.

The government claims the scheme will offer increased protection against identity fraud and help protect communities against criminals, illegal immigrants and terrorists trying to exploit multiple identities.

They argue that, “Many people currently use their passport for such purposes but it is not a terribly convenient method and 300,000 of them are either lost or stolen every year.”

But what is to say that ID cards will not be lost or stolen?

The news of the voluntary scheme comes as airline pilots said they would boycott a compulsory ID card scheme for workers at Manchester and London City airports which will also be launched in the autumn.

Critics say the scheme is nothing more than an expensive risk to privacy.

Allied to mass surveillance of the population, monitoring of all telephone calls, e-mails, and internet traffic, introducing ID cards represents another milestone on our descent into socialist totalitarianism.

Do you want an ID card? Do you trust the Government to safeguard all your personal information?

ID Cards

Are you going to volunteer for an ID card?

Goodlad

My interest in surveillance has always been large. I suspect because of my long marriage to Howard Marks aka Mr Nice (the infamous charismatic dope dealer).

Before the birth of our children Howard was a fugitive and we lived much of the time with phony passports, driving licenses and bank accounts.

The DEA alleged that Howard at one time had as many as forty-three aliases, eighty-nine phone lines and owned twenty–five companies trading throughout the world.

To find out more buy my book Mr Nice and Mrs Marks: Adventures with Howard

Surveillance today is far more pervasive than in the days of our escapades. The recent House of Lords committee report warns that it “threatens to undermine democracy” and that it “represents one of the most significant changes in the life of the nation since the end of the second world war”.

Civil liberties campaigners have warned about the risks of a “surveillance society” in which the state acquires ever-greater powers to track people’s movements and retain personal data.

Many would argue that surveillance and identity cards were needed to stop the likes of Howard and I continuing in a life of crime.

“There can be no justification for this gradual but incessant creep towards every detail about us being recorded and pored over by the state”

Lord Goodlad, chairman of the House of Lords constitution committee.

Do you agree with Lord Goodlad?

American Civil Liberties Video

The following is an American Civil Liberties Video, made in 2004.

It illustrates how new technology and weak privacy laws can be used to reveal sensitive information about a person involved in even the most mundane of activities.

Although the video is highly amusing it is also exceedingly disturbing.

Do you want to order that takeaway now?

Huge Internet Spy Centre

SPY chiefs are forging ahead with secret plans to monitor all internet use and telephone calls in Britain. This is despite Jacqui Smith's announcement earlier this week that proposals for a central warehouse of communications data had been abolished on privacy grounds.

A mass internet surveillance system known as Mastering the Internet (MTI) will cost hundreds of millions of pounds. It will consist of thousands of deep packet inspection probes inside communications providers' networks.

MTI will grant intelligence staff in Cheltenham GCHQ complete visibility of UK Internet traffic. It will allow them to intercept and monitor all e-mails, website visits and social networking sessions in Britain. The agency will also be able to track telephone calls made over the internet, as well as all phone calls to landlines and mobiles.

At the moment the agency is able to use probes to monitor the content of calls and e-mails sent by specific individuals who are the subject of police or security service investigations.

Today these interceptions must be approved by a warrant signed by the home secretary or a minister of equivalent rank.

The new GCHQ internet-monitoring network will shift the focus of the surveillance state away from a few hundred targeted people to everyone in the UK.

Last week, in what seemed to be a concession to privacy campaigners, Smith announced that she was dropping the controversial plans for a single “big brother” database to centrally store all communications data in Britain.

Jacqui Smith said. “The government recognised the privacy implications of the move [and] therefore does not propose to pursue this move.”

Smith announced that up to £2 billion of public money would instead be spent helping private internet and telephone companies to save information for up to 12 months in separate databases.

She neglected to mention that substantial additional sums — amounting to more than £1 billion over three years — had already been allocated to GCHQ for its MTI programme.

Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said “We opposed the big brother database because it gave the state direct access to everybody’s communications. But this network of black boxes achieves the same thing via the back door.”

Ministers have said they do not intend to snoop on the actual content of e-mails or telephone calls. The monitoring will instead focus on who an individual is communicating with or which websites and chat rooms they are visiting.

Supporters of MTI and IMP say they are essential if intelligence agencies are to preserve their capability to monitor terrorist and other criminal networks. GCHQ does not want to discuss how the data it gathered will be used.

Are they gathering this information to “protect us?” What do you think?

Data lost, stolen, mislaid

Public alarm is growing about the dangers of identity theft. Nearly every week in the press we read reports of data loss.

These losses are not caused by criminals hacking computers (a huge area of concern) but by human error.

Not only is it bad enough that a vast realm of private information is gathered about us. We then have to read about its loss or theft.

And only wonder “Who has it?”

Towards the end of 2007 HM Revenue & Customs lost two CDs containing the banking details of 25 million Britons. Ministers admitted they had vanished.

In December 2007 The News of the World obtained two disks mislaid by the Department for Work and Pensions containing the national insurance numbers of 18,000 claimants.

The Ministry of Defence revealed in October 2008 that a laptop had been stolen.

The laptop contained passport details, National Insurance numbers, family details, medical records, and the bank records of at least 3,500 people who had expressed interest in joining the Armed Forces.

On the 26 April '09 the Serious Organised Crime Agency reported that a Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) officer left her handbag containing a memory stick containing downloaded data on undercover agents and their informants on a bus.

The SOCA officer was on route from Quito, Ecuador to Bogotá, Columbia, to start a new job as a liaison officer working with MI5 and MI6, the British security and intelligence services, and the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

This significant data breach of 600,000 potential services recruits included passport details and bank account data.

The above are just a few instances of many such cases, not only in the UK but in the US as well.

Do you feel protected?

DNA Data Bank

The UK Forensic Science Service (FSS) established the world’s first DNA database in April 1995.

It is allegedly the largest in the world. It contains samples from more than 7% of the population. The database grows by 30,000 samples each month.

Police forces in the UK (excluding Scotland) can take DNA and fingerprints from anybody arrested on suspicion of a recordable offense and hold the samples indefinitely whether people are charged or not.

The privacy of samples stored in these data banks has become a major legal, political, ethical, and moral issue.

The potential for error and privacy violations become greater each day, and yet, many are quick to assume that the only people who have reason for concern are the guilty.

On 4th December 2008, 17 judges at The European Court of Human Rights unanimously ruled that keeping DNA samples of innocent people was unlawful. As a consequence, thousands of DNA samples on the UK DNA database may have to be destroyed.

The UK government has responded by saying, “The existing law will remain in place while we carefully consider the judgement."

In early 2007, five employees of Britain's national DNA database agency were arrested on charges of industrial espionage for allegedly stealing DNA information from the database and using it to set up a rival firm.

Civil rights activist Shami Chakrabarti said the alleged theft from the database, which houses DNA samples from nearly 4 million people, was cause for concern.

"This is hugely significant and should make every law-abiding person seriously worried. People are looking after these databases who have less and less of a public-service ethic,"

Civil rights groups have long been critical of the controversial database, arguing there are no real safeguards to prevent misuse.

Are you worried?

Talking CCTV cameras

Talking Cameras? Dogbook? Catbook?

Is the world going barking mad?

Every Step You Take