Ministers are preparing to overturn a fundamental principle of data protection in government, the Guardian has learned. They will announce next month that public bodies can assume they are free to share citizens’ personal data with other arms of the state, so long as it is in the public interest.
more from the Guardian here.
to think that some people – not me, obviously – *voted* for these fuckwits.
PayPal has frozen Brit Mohammed Hassan’s account and banned him from using the service if he refuses to fax the company a raft of personal information.
The online payments service told him his name is “similar to or a match to” a name on the US government’s anti-terror assets freezing list.
. More from El Reg here.
sigh.
the Libdems have an online petition going to replace Council Tax with a local income tax.
if you think it’s a good idea, why not pop along and sign up.
perlmonger and I have a standard set of phrases which we recite to news items – things like, oh, the mistaken shooting of people who unsportingly turned out not to be terrorists or, as last night, the spokesperson from Stoke Mandeville on the story about the infections there, to name a couple of examples.
it goes thus:
here’s a new one, culled from Home Office minister Joan Ryan, on the outrageous increase in passport fees, taking them from £42 last October, to £66 this October (wish I could impose a price rise like that on my customers):
I’m damn glad I renewed my passport five years early in August of last year, so it’s a price *I* won’t be paying for a while …
is their overdraft. Which is £27m, apparently.
BBC story here.
SO LET’S get this clear. Fact one: the Government believes that, properly designed and run, a new generation of nuclear power stations would be perfectly, absolutely, indubitably, demonstrably, assuredly and without qualification, safe. Got that? Safe. S-a-f-e. People who might live nearby can be assured, on the basis of impeccable scientific advice, that these power stations represent no danger at all: neither of low-level radiation, nor of a nuclear disaster.
now read on
“The governor of Florida is playing hardball abortion politics with a severely disabled woman’s life when he should instead be worried about her best interests.”
more here
so we went to our first local LibDem meeting last night. Are you local?
from the always excellent Snowmail, Jon Snow writes on the subject of Abu Hamza:
There’s no doubting the odious nature of the utterances captured on video tape, but I must also confess a very slight concern about the extend to which he and his hook may have been demonised . My editor tells me that it’s a typical wet liberal view (not for the first time).
which is pretty much how I feel. He’s been here for 25 years – if what he did, and said, was so heinous, why did nobody deal with it sooner. If he didn’t have a hook instead of a hand, and didn’t wear a headdress, would people be so frightened?
why aren’t we doing this with the Animal Liberation people, and the BNP?
I think, on balance, I’m not very happy with this verdict. But then I’m a woolly liberal too.
The police and security services are to be given access to advanced travel details on more than 40 million passengers a year who travel on domestic flights and ferries within Britain under legislation to be announced tomorrow…
…It is expected that airlines will have to provide the personal online details of all passengers as they book seats and subsequently check in at the airport. There are discussions with the travel industry over what documents passengers will have to show before they can board a flight in Britain.
more on this from the Guardian.