An MP wants credit card companies to identify buyers of pre-paid credit cards and fine them heavily if consumers use them to buy online images showing child porn.

Raising the issue in Parliament, Geraint Davies said he wanted an end to anonymity for the cards used to pay to download images of illegal content.

Davies recommends that pre-paid credit card consumers should have to provide proof of identity such as passport or driving license. In addition, he said credit card companies should be liable for penalties when their cards were used to download abusive images.

Both Visa Europe and MasterCard Worldwide said they both work aggressively to identify and eliminate any illegal activity involving the use of their respective payment networks.

Councils are secretly rifling through thousands of dustbins to find out about families' race and wealth.

Waste audits allow officials and private contractors to check supermarket labels, types of unwanted food - and even examine the contents of discarded mail.

The local authorities are using social profiling techniques to match different types of rubbish to different ethnic groups or wealthy and poor households, as part of a recycling drive initiated by the last Government.

Critics condemned the move as highly intrusive. Most homeowners have no idea that their rubbish is being searched or that data collected could be used to prosecute those who place rubbish in the wrong bin.

At least 90 councils ran covert bin-rifling operations last year, according to Freedom of Information requests. They targeted a total of more than 10,000 families and argue that Government guidance suggested all checks on bins should be done without the knowledge of householders.

Councils in Leeds, Poole, Kensington and Chelsea, Swindon and Cheshire East all used some form of social profiling to target homes for bin searches.

Councils cited little-known guidance from the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs for secret searches. Enfield Council, in North London, said: In line with Defra guidance we took the view that householders would not be notified in order to avoid prejudicing the results. When waste is placed out for collection by the householder the law regards this as being discarded, ie: not wanted or owned by the householder. When collected by the local authority the waste falls into their ownership.'

The UK has already suffered EU wide extradition and arrest powers whereby British people have been arrested in the UK and extradited to Europe and particularly Poland for totally trivial crimes. Also people have been arrested in Britain for things that are not even against the law here, like holocaust denial.

But now it seems that such cross-border policing powers will be extended to crime investigations.

The proposed power would allow officers from an EU country to demand information on anyone they suspect of an offence, no matter how minor or whether it is even criminal in the UK.

The directive would see UK police almost powerless to prevent the handing over of personal details such as DNA, bank account or even telephone records. They could even be ordered to carry out investigations and live surveillance for their EU counterparts, despite already stretched resources.

The European Investigation Order (EIO), which is already backed by countries such as Spain, Bulgaria, Estonia and Slovenia, would also allow foreign police to investigate alleged crimes themselves directly on UK soil.

Critics warned it could lead to serious breaches of fundamental rights and called on the UK Government not to sign up to the directive. Fair Trials International (FTI) said it could result in disproportionate requests, such as demands for the DNA of plane loads of British holidaymakers following a murder in their resort.

It could also see British officers chasing crimes that are not even covered by UK law such as criminal defamation.

Police would not be able to argue that the request or alleged offence being investigated is disproportionate.

Dominic Raab, Tory MP for Esher and Walton, who raised the issue in the House of Commons said: Britain should not opt into this half-baked measure. It would allow European police to order British officers to embark on wild-goose chases. It would force our police to hand over personal information on British citizens, even if they are not suspects and the conduct under investigation is not a crime in this country. And it gives foreign police law enforcement authority on British soil.

The FTI report added the directive is far from satisfactory in terms of guaranteeing fundamental rights and ensuring proportionality.

The Home Office has until July 28 to decide whether to opt in to the order or not.

A bonfire of draconian anti-terror laws was promised by Theresa May to reverse the substantial erosion of civil liberties by Labour ministers.

The Home Secretary said powers that could be scrapped or scaled back include 28-day detention without charge, control orders, stop and search and Big Brother snooping by town halls.

She also pledged a sweeping review of laws that allow the arrest of people who take pictures of police officers or hold peaceful protests without permission outside Parliament.

There will be a new drive to kick out foreign terror suspects who currently enjoy protection from the Human Rights Act to avoid deportation, and an investigation into allowing intercept evidence in court. There will be a drive to secure agreements to deport foreign suspects placed under the orders by reaching deals with their homelands that they will not be ill-treated. This would stop courts blocking their removal on human rights grounds.

Lord Macdonald, the former director of public prosecutions and an outspoken critic of the last government's legislative record, will lead the review.

In a statement to MPs, May said she wanted to correct mistakes made by Labour, which was allowed to ride roughshod over Britain's hard-won freedoms.

She added: National security is the first duty of government but we are also committed to reversing the substantial erosion of civil liberties. I want a counter-terrorism regime that is proportionate, focused and transparent. We must ensure that in protecting public safety, the powers which we need to deal with terrorism are in keeping with Britain's traditions of freedom and fairness.

The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, used by town halls to spy on dog foulers and people suspected of cheating school catchment area rules, is likely to be scaled back. Councils will have to seek permission from a magistrate to use it, and only for serious crimes.

The stop and search of people without reasonable suspicion, which is already under an interim ban, is likely to be ditched.

The right to protest close to the House of Commons without prior police permission -restricted by the last government, is likely to be restored.

As Apple's iPhone grows in popularity, technology experts and US law enforcement agencies are devoting increasing efforts to understanding their potential for forensics investigators. While police have always tracked mobile users by locating their position via conventional mobile phone towers, iPhones offer far more information, say experts.

There are a lot of security issues in the design of the iPhone that lend themselves to retaining more personal information than any other device, said Jonathan Zdziarski, who teaches US law enforcers how to retrieve data from mobile phones.

Zdziarski told The Daily Telegraph he suspected that security had been neglected on the iPhone as it had been intended as a consumer product rather than a business one like rivals such as the Blackberry.

An example was the iPhone's keyboard logging cache, which was designed to correct spelling but meant that an expert could retrieve anything typed on the keyboard over the past three to 12 months, he said.

In addition, every time an iPhone's internal mapping system is closed down, the device snaps a screenshot of the phone's last position and stores it.

Investigators could access several hundred such images from the iPhone and so establish its user's whereabouts at certain times, he said.

In a further design feature that can also help detectives, iPhone photos include so-called geotags so that, if posted online, they indicate precisely where a picture was taken and the serial number of the phone that took it.

Police are to be stripped of the power to stop and search anyone for no reason, the Home Secretary has announced.

Theresa May told the Commons she will immediately limit Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 so members of public can only be stopped if officers reasonably suspect they are terrorists. The threshold of suspicion will bring the Act into line with traditional stop and search powers.

The move follows defeat for the UK government in January at the European Court of Human Rights. The court found that Section 44 violated the right to respect for private life; article eight of the European Convention on Human Rights.

May said: The Government cannot appeal this judgment although we would not have done so had we been able. I can therefore tell the House that I will not allow the continued use of Section 44 in contravention of the European Court's ruling and, more importantly, in contravention of our civil liberties.

Police use of Section 44 to stop individuals will no longer be allowed, although it will still apply to vehicles.

The legal challenge against Section 44 was brought by Liberty, the human rights charity, following the stop and search of a peace protestor and a journalist who were planning to attend a demonstration against a large arms fair in London in 2003.

Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti hailed the withdrawal of the power today. It is a blanket and secretive power that has been used against school kids, journalists, peace protesters and a disproportionate number of young black men, she said: To our knowledge, it has never helped catch a single terrorist. This is a very important day for personal privacy, protest rights and race equality in Britain.

Home Secretary Theresa May is calling for the police network of automatic number plate recognition cameras to be put under some form of regulation.

ANPR is used by all local police forces as well as Customs and Excise, SOCA and the MoD.

Some 4,045 fixed and mobile cameras contribute 10 million reports of motorist movements every day from England and Wales.

The database supports data mining for detailed tracking information.

Home Office minister James Brokenshire told the Observer: Both CCTV and ANPR can be essential tools in combating crime, but the growth in their use has been outside of a suitable governance regime. To ensure that these important technologies continue to command the support and confidence of the public and are used effectively, we believe that further regulation is required.

Options for regulation include:

• Establishing the lawful right to collect and retain ANPR data for policing
• Defining exactly how this information can be used for policing purposes
• Limiting by whom and for how long ANPR data can be stored
• Establishing who can have access to ANPR data and for what purposes
• Enabling the bulk transfer of data between agencies and between the private sector and the police for agreed purposes
• Making ANPR cameras transparent to the public, except when they're being used for covert surveillance
• Establishing a means of redress around the use of ANPR data

Birmingham muslim spy camera scheme abandoned

Based on article from bigbrotherwatch.org.uk

There is quite rightly an ongoing furore in Birmingham over Project Champion - the network of spy cameras that has been installed there. 218 cameras ring a community, covering every route into a residential area, set up to automatically monitor those who enter and leave. A further 72 covert cameras are installed in the same area (a number which has grown significantly after Freedom of Information requests forced the authorities to come clean).

You will not be surprised to learn that the people who live in that community are mostly Muslim. In the form of Project Champion, hundreds of households are being singled out by the state for surveillance on the basis of (i) where they live and (ii) the god to whom they pray. Fortunately for us, the good people of Birmingham are not taking this lying down. They have protested and protested, and they have been heard.

The scheme has now been suspended pending a review. The authorities claimed that they suspended the scheme because they retrospectively realised that they should have held a local consultation. This is not true, of course. Local residents are never consulted on the erection of cameras in their areas (although as outlined in our manifesto, we believe that they should be). The scheme was stopped only because local residents made them stop.

At the Long Beach, California, airport, a 28 year-old married student, Halime Sat, tried to board a plane to Oakland. She was denied access. Ms. Sat, a resident of Corona, California, has suddenly been put on the government's no-fly list. She has no criminal record nor affiliation with any outlawed organization anywhere in the world. The only crime committed by this young German citizen, who is married to an American: Flying while Muslim.

Ms. Sat is one of a ten plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed this week by the American Civil Liberties Union, alleging that thousands of people have been added to the no-fly list and barred from commercial travel, without any opportunity to learn about or refute the basis for their inclusion on the list. Plaintiffs in the case include a disabled U.S. Marine Corps veteran stranded in Egypt and a U.S. Army veteran stuck in Colombia.

Ms. Sat was only trying to fly from one place to another in the state where she is a permanent resident. Denying people such fundamental rights in complete secrecy and without due process is unconstitutional and un-American. They become pariahs, deemed unworthy to fly — but no one says why.

While Muslim residents like Ms. Sat are being kept off our nation's airlines, Latinos in the Southwest are worried about what might happen to them on the Arizona highways. The ACLU of Southern California is so concerned about what the Arizona police that they have issued a travel alert to educate Latinos (but not just Latinos) about the dangers of driving to Arizona.

The ACLU is distributing a cardboard pocket guide in Spanish and English, explaining what to do if people are stopped by the police in Arizona. I should say, our guide is for Latinos and those who look as if they might be Latino — because Arizona's new law gives police broad powers. They are required to investigate the immigration status of every person they come across whom they have reasonable suspicion to believe is in the country unlawfully. To avoid arrest, citizens and immigrants will effectively have to carry their papers at all times. The law also makes it a state crime for immigrants to willfully fail to register with the Department of Homeland Security and carry registration documents.

These powers are so broad, they've created a new Arizona-specific crime: Driving while Latino.

The White House has outlined a national strategy for trusted digital identities that could ultimately eliminate the username-and-password model and lay the groundwork for a nationwide federated identity infrastructure.

Howard Schmidt, cybersecurity coordinator and special assistant to the president, unveiled the administration's strategy for what he called an identity ecosystem for users and organizations to conduct online transactions securely and privately such that identities of all parties are trusted.

For example, no longer should individuals have to remember an ever-expanding and potentially insecure list of usernames and passwords to login into various online services. Through the strategy we seek to enable a future where individuals can voluntarily choose to obtain a secure, interoperable, and privacy-enhancing credential (e.g., a smart identity card, a digital certificate on their cell phone, etc) from a variety of service providers -- both public and private -- to authenticate themselves online for different types of transactions (e.g., online banking, accessing electronic health records, sending email, etc.), Schmidt blogged late last week.

The new National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace [pdf] (NSTIC) draft paper is open for public comment and input until July 19.

The paper, a product of the White House's cybersecurity policy review last year, was created with input from government agencies, business leaders, and privacy advocates. Among other things, it calls for designating a federal agency to lead the public-private sector efforts to implement the blueprint, and for the federal government to lead the way in the adoption of secure digital identities.

The Holy Grail of trusted online authentication -- a so-called high-assurance authentication vouching for the identity of a banking customer conducting a transaction online, for example -- has yet to take off. No one has stepped up to the plate to vouch for identities ... a Bank of America or a high-assurance provider to make all of this work, says Gartner's Avivah Litan, adding we may never get systems in the U.S. to say an online user is who he or she says he is, she adds. They may not want to assume the liability and pay you if they are wrong, she says.

A Big Brother stop and search power which has been used by police to harass hundreds of thousands of innocent people will remain in force despite being ruled illegal.

The news that police may continue to search members of the public without having any reasonable grounds for suspicion provoked fury among civil liberties campaigners.

The power - section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 - has been ruled unlawful by the European Court of Human Rights.

The Home Office now has no remaining grounds for appeal. But, despite the crushing Strasbourg defeat, officials say they will not stop the police from using the power for months or even a year or more.

In the meantime, tourists, photographers and other members of the public will continue to be subjected to the humiliating searches - of which 256,000 were carried out last year, without catching a single terrorist.

Isabella Sankey, policy director for the campaign group Liberty, said: The objectionable policy of broad stop and search without suspicion was wrong in principle and divisive and counterproductive in practice.

The Lib Dems and Tories now say that they want to wait until a review of all Labour's draconian anti-terror laws has been completed before deciding what to do next. Ministers are given a period of grace by the European court to implement its ruling which, based on previous examples, can last for up to a year, or even longer. Enlarge High-profile victims of terror legislation

The High Court has triggered sharp criticism from civil liberties campaigners by approving the eviction of peaceful demonstrators from Parliament Square. The ruling follows a legal challenge brought by the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson.

Green Party politician Jenny Jones, a member of the Greater London Assembly said that the eviction was at the cost of democracy.

The Christian activist Brian Haw has camped outside Parliament since 2001, when he began to campaign against the war in Afghanistan. Other peace activists have joined the camp since then, with the numbers rising this year. The site has become known as Democracy Village.

The judge, Griffith Williams, ruled that the protesters must leave the Square by 4.00pm on Friday (3 July). The terms of his ruling mean that Brian Haw may continue to use a tent there, but only with the Mayor's permission. The judge warned Johnson that he is expected at least to consider Haw's request before enforcing his removal.

Johnson claims that the campaigners have caused considerable damage. But Jenny Jones insisted that, The lack of police presence showed that the protesters were not causing a problem.

The European court of human rights has rejected an attempt by the UK government to appeal a judgment over its stop-and-search powers.

The decision means that a January 2010 court judgement which found section 44 of the Terrorism Act to be illegal is final.

This appeal was always doomed, said Isabella Sankey, director of policy for Liberty: The objectionable policy of broad stop and search without suspicion was wrong in principle and has proven divisive and counterproductive in practice.

The original court judgement in the case of Gillan and Quinton v the United Kingdom found that section 44 violated the right to respect for private life guaranteed by Article 8 of the Convention on Human Rights.

In April 2010 the government requested that the case be referred to the Grand Chamber - a request which has now been denied.