THE END OF FREEDOM?

THE END OF FREEDOM

The above was the bold headline in the Daily Telegraph on 24^th March 2020.

The Government is now in the process of passing an Enabling Act, every bit as draconian as the one Hitler got passed after the burning of the Reichstag.  This is on the back of the current scare over the Corona Virus pandemic and has been called by the media the “Coronavirus Act”.

Behind all the new rights to make legislation for Ministers, behind the new detention without trial and the end of freedom of assembly and, indeed, the end of the role of Parliament itself, there is also the creeping use of technological surveillance on “citizens”. 

There was an article buried where most people would not see it in the Business section of the Sunday Telegraph, which confirms the direction of travel and below that is an article demonstrating what use the Chinese Communist dictatorship has put this technology to use for so far

Does anyone think that, once the Government has got such access, that it will ever be released? 

Here is the article:-

BT ready to share data that tracks people’s movement

By Christopher Williams, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH BUSINESS EDITOR

22 March 2020 • 5:00am

The chief executive of BT, who is recovering from coronavirus, has said the company stands ready to use its technology to help track and manage the outbreak.

In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Philip Jansen said BT is working with officials on plans to share data to monitor population movements and on a system of mass communications via smartphones.

He said: “If the Government feels it’s appropriate in the next few weeks we can help understand the flow and dynamics of people as the situation develops.” It is envisaged that mobile operators such as BT could share such insights with officials on how mobile phone users are moving around the country as the pandemic spreads.

The data could be used alongside the latest NHS figures to help decide when and where to tighten or lift restrictions on travel and businesses, for instance.

Mr Jansen, 53, said BT and other mobile operators are also talking to officials about how they could help communicate public health advice. He said: “We are looking at whether we can be a helpful communication vehicle for our 30 million customers.

“There would be push notifications for all mobile customers on all operators.”

The most advanced communications work involves simple mass nationwide text messaging. However, a more advanced “cell broadcast” system that would allow alerts to be targeted to coronavirus hotspots is also under discussion.

Mr Jansen said the BT network is currently coping well with increased demand from people working from home and that he expects to return to the office on Monday.

Here is a link to the original article>>> https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/03/22/bt-ready-share-data-tracks-peoples-movement/

Here is the earlier article on what the Chinese Government has done:-

China unleashes its surveillance technology to fight coronavirus

From facial recognition to infrared cameras, authorities have deployed a range of technologies – but at what cost?

By Michael Cogley, TECHNOLOGY CORRESPONDENT11 February 2020 • 11:29am

China is the hallmark of the surveillance state – the living experiment of George Orwell’s Big Brother.

The watchful eye of the Chinese government uses a range of technologies to monitor its citizens, ranging from social media monitoring to CCTV cameras boasting facial recognition and thermal tracking.

The cameras can be used to spot people with low-grade fevers while its railway systems can provide a list of people sitting nearby should a patient hop on board a train. Authorities are using the technology to monitor the spread of the deadly virus.

Trading one’s privacy for a safer country is a constant debate. If China can prove its monitoring methods are a force for good in battling something like the coronavirus then it could set the world on course for more widespread adoption.

Facing up to failure

Facial recognition has been deployed in numerous public locations across China, from train stations and airports to hotels and city streets. While it is used in many cases to cull criminal activity it is also vital to everyday life, such as entering gated communities and paying for things.

The technology has hit something of a snag however in its bid to monitor the spread of the virus: surgical masks. The ubiquitous adoption of masks has proven to be a nuisance to those trying to use FaceID to unlock their phones or pay but has also caused Chinese authorities headaches when it comes to tracking its citizens that may have been exposed to the virus.

“The practice of facial surveillance has been enthusiastically embraced in China,” says Jessica Helfand, author of ‘Face: A Visual Odyssey’.

“It is evident in everything from scanners installed in public restrooms in Beijing to catch toilet paper thieves, to a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise in Hangzhou where you plug into Alibaba’s “smile to pay,” online paywall, to a rise in supermarkets so certain of their surveillant skills that they are increasingly free of clerical staff.”

In some cases faces can be identified despite the obstruction, however much of the time the tech can prove to be useless.

A study from the University of Florence found that the removal of the upper half of the face led to a “more significant” drop in recognition that the bottom half. However, coverage by an item like a mask still led to significant levels of confusion in the software.

Similarly, Huawei’s vice-president Bruce Lee said that the mask-wearing scenario was tested on the company’s Mate 20 Pro.

“The eyes and head have too few feature points to guarantee security,” he said in a post on Chinese social media site Weibo.

“Eventually, the face recognition unlocking in the scene with masks and scarves is abandoned. That’s why we still keep fingerprints on our phones that support 3D face unlock.”

Other technologies

Facial recognition is far from the only technology being deployed by the Chinese to fight the virus. Should a patient suffering from the virus board a train, the railway network’s “real name” system can provide a list of people sitting nearby.

Similarly mobile apps can tell users if they’ve been on a flight or a train with a carrier. Maps can even show the locations of buildings where infected patients live.

Surveillance camera firm Zhejiang Dahua says it can detect fevers with infrared cameras to an accuracy within 0.3ºC.

One such app, the “close contact detector”, tells citizens if they have been near someone who has been confirmed or suspected of having the virus. It was developed alongside the China Electronics Group Corporation and uses data from the country’s health and transport authorities.

The state-run news agency Xinhua reported that users can make an inquiry as to their current condition by scanning a QR code on their phones. 

Elsewhere Chinese telecoms providers have quietly tracked the movement of their users. Text messages were sent to Beijing residents this week telling them they could check where they had been over the last 30 days as part of a service offered by China Mobile. Reuters reported that it did not explain why users might need this but that it could be useful if they’re questioned by police.

“In the era of big data and internet, the flow of each person can be clearly seen. So we are different from the SARS time now,” epidemiologist Li Lanjuan said in an interview with China’s state broadcaster CCTV last week, comparing the outbreak to a virus that killed 800 people in 2003.

“With such new technologies, we should make full use of them to find the source of infection and contain the source of infection.”

Deadly killer

More than 43,000 people have been affected by the disease and its spread has continued at a rapid pace. Four more people in the UK have been tested positive for the virus, bringing the total number of infections in England to eight.

The total death toll of the virus is at least 1,016, following the death of another 108 in China people on Sunday.

The unsettling spread of the virus has forced the Chinese government into drastic actions, including the construction of a 1,000-bed facility in Wuhan, where the virus is believed to have originated from.

The ethical question

China’s use of mass surveillance has constantly drawn the ire of privacy advocates, even in scenarios where it is being used to tackle the spread of a deadly virus.

Director of Big Brother Watch Silkie Carlo says the surveillance infrastructure was designed for “population control” and that it could easily be “weaponised against its own people”.

“Facial recognition cameras are reportedly being used to log people's whereabouts and proximity to others, for example on public transport, creating detailed searchable records of exposure to people who might have the virus,” she said.

“China's mass surveillance architecture could have especially sinister consequences in this crisis. This tinderbox for turnkey tyranny should be a warning to every aspiring 'smart' city and surveilled nation in the world, including our own.

Helfand says the surveillance protocols employed by China are “vast” and that this level of people-watching can isolate, label, and stigmatise.

“That a country seeks to contain a viral epidemic is understandable,” she says.

“That cameras embed themselves everywhere to catch us in public seems a different issue entirely, and strikes me as more socially aggressive than clinically wise.”

Here is a link to the original of the article>>>

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/02/11/china-unleashes-surveillance-technology-fight-coronavirus/

"No defence for shrinking the military in times of terror"

"No defence for shrinking the military in times of terror"

Sometimes in all the fog of fake news and pointless or downright silly opinion pieces there shines through an article of real insight. Here is a really good example of one such.



It is sober reading for all who want to know the genuine geo-strategic situation of the UK.



It is only by understanding this kind of issue that we can get a real bearing on just how close to collapse the vainglorious post imperial British political system has now come to.


What do think?



Sunday Telegraph 17thSEPTEMBER 2017

General Lord Richards interviewed by Simon Heffer

"No defence for shrinking the military in times of terror"

In one of London’s grandest military clubs, its walls hung with portraits of moustachioed generals and field marshals evoking an age when Britain’s Armed Forces were perhaps the finest in the world, General Lord Richards and I discuss how well the country is defended today. Despite David Richards’s measured tones, it is an unsettling conversation.

He retired as Chief of the Defence Staff, a post he had held for three years, in 2013. Before that, he had been Chief of the General Staff. Lord Richards saw plenty of action. He did three tours of Northern Ireland and commanded the 4th Armoured Brigade in Germany in the 1990s. He served in East Timor and Sierra Leone, where his initiative prevented revolutionaries from overthrowing the capital, Freetown, in 2000.

He then commanded Nato’s rapid reaction force, and the international force in Afghanistan, before becoming Commander-in-Chief, Land Forces. He brought a high level of practical soldiering to the CDS’s job, and it still underpins his thinking.

I ask him whether the world has become more dangerous since he retired. “I think it’s at least as dangerous, and potentially more. I give advice on geostrategy to governments around the world, and if I were to look at Britain, I’d say it’s a particularly dangerous time for a country that’s steering an unknown course post-Brexit and has global pretensions.”

North Korea is one such danger. “I think Kim [Jong-un] has no intention of provoking a war,” he says. “He knows it would be the end of him. But my worry is that he miscalculates, and America is forced to intervene. And the result of a military intervention will, in the short term, be awful. There should be a diplomatic outcome in which Russia – or, more likely, China – is the major influence.”

And what could Britain do? “Very little. This is not something we could any longer become involved in. Even if the new aircraft carrier were up and running, why would we send it all the way over there to add a few planes to the American effort? This is not one for us.

"For Britain, with its Army of 78,000 and its Navy of 20 frigates and destroyers, to have the conceit to think it can fight a war in the Far East is almost laughable. Our practical role should be confined to Nato, Africa and the Middle East. We lost all other capability not in the recent cuts, but in the cuts of the early 1990s, at the end of the Cold War.”

A year after Lord Richards ceased being CDS, he compared Britain’s declining capability to that of a “banana republic”. Now he says: “I exaggerated for effect. We’re certainly not at the banana republic stage. But the runes are not good.

“The nation’s apparent ambitions are not going to be met without putting significant amounts of fresh money into defence. At a time when we are leaving the European Union and there’s much talk of being global, and with a navy that effectively cannot get out more than 12 to 14 destroyers and frigates, even if you look just at the maritime component of military power, things don’t look good. It hardly fits an image of a prosperous Britain with active, vibrant, sizeable Armed Forces that can influence other nations.”

Some of the decisions that cut the Forces were taken on Lord Richards’s watch. “I do feel guilty in that I was part of a process that led to very disappointing outcomes. In 2010, when I took over as CDS, the decisions on the Strategic Defence and Security Review had been taken. Even David Cameron said it hadn’t been very sensible to let another CDS be the major influence on this.

"I should have owned the process. The way I rationalised it was that that country was in a hell of a state. We agreed to a 7.8 per cent cut, but were given all sorts of promises that, come 2015, things would improve: and I think, to be fair to David Cameron, he meant to deliver.

“But there was another cut the following year, and in 2015, while there was in theory a one per cent increase in equipment, overall there was a cut. So the Army today is far smaller than I signed up to as CGS, which I think was 94,000. My successor agreed to a cut to 82,000, and it’s only 78,000 today.”

A plan to use reservists to bolster the numbers has failed. “I’m afraid it hasn’t been able to deliver and never will, because of real combat capability. However proficient they are, a part-time soldier cannot be as effective as someone who’s devoted his life to it and puts on a uniform every day.”

Despite Kim’s instability, he says that “extremism in all its forms, notably jihadism, is the biggest threat. I don’t buy the idea that Russia need be the big threat everyone says it could be. There are regimes – and North Korea is obviously one – that could be pitched into doing things they perhaps don’t intend to. One day you can find yourselves fighting a war you didn’t expect, and I suspect we are neither psychologically nor physically ready for that to happen.”

I press him about Russia. “I think we’ve mishandled Russia since the end of the Cold War. I think good diplomacy, of which military activity is a part, and clear red lines will enable us to have a good relationship. We share many things in common, not least a concern about extremism. Russia doesn’t need to become a threat. In any case, we’re all dependent on America for any effective response to Russian aggression.”

The Libyan intervention also happened under Lord Richards: he says it was prompted by Downing Street saying that “we cannot have a Srebenica on our watch”, referring to massacre of Muslims in Bosnia in 1995. “Bearing in mind we had no plan for what came next, I had the temerity to say: ‘This is an opportunity to pause and negotiate with Gaddaffi.’

"But it had become a regime change operation, and there was a view in Paris and London that we were on a roll and ought to finish the job off. Asking what the plan was then was an inconvenient question. You shouldn’t go to war unless you have a good plan that you are confident in for the day after.”

He adds: “Even in 2011, Britain and France could not run a war against a pretty minor dictator, because of the technicalities of a modern military operation. We needed Nato, because we needed America. That should have been another lesson.”

Nor was Libya the only problem “Back in 2012, I gave the Government a plan to deal with Assad. There was no interest in it. We did enough to keep the war going, but not enough to give our putative allies there a chance to win.

"I said if our Government were not prepared to do this then it would be best to let Assad win and win quickly, because otherwise we were fomenting all sorts of other problems further downstream – but that was politically unacceptable. So we let it drag on. Then Russia intervened and demonstrated the decisive use of the military instrument. And now we are tacitly supporting Assad, because the real enemy is Isis.”

He claims that, then, Islamic State "was not a huge military challenge. They could have been dealt with in weeks. Now there are five to 10 million Syrians displaced, their lives ruined, hundreds of thousands killed. Much of that could have been avoided by early decisive action. But we couldn’t contribute the sort of force we had in 1990-91, or in 2003.

“If our ambition is to be the second military power within Nato, and to be conspicuously proficient so that the Americans see us as their partner of choice, then having a navy of 19 ships, 12 or 13 of which might be available, but even some of those prevented from getting out of harbour because of financial constraints, then we are in a pretty sorry state.”

He feels his own service is struggling. “The Army, which has made a gallant effort to retain all its skills, can’t do so because it can’t re-train soldiers to the highest degree. The Challenger tank becomes obsolete in four years. The Warrior vehicles are 1970s designs. There’s a lot of gesture strategy – putting 200 or 300 people in somewhere. We’ve got 350-500 people in Afghanistan now, but there’s a debate about whether we should do more, as America now is.

"It’s a prime example of how our forces can fight extremism. If Afghanistan collapsed tomorrow, because we haven’t finished the job properly, we’d have to start all over again and sort it out. We couldn’t leave Afghanistan as a massive rogue state exporting extremism around the region and to us.”

He believes the Army is desperately short of soldiers. “I think mass matters hugely. That’s why the numbers of ships in the Royal Navy and the number of planes in the RAF are so important, too. A ship can only be in one place at a time: and an example of where we are caught short through and absence of ships has been the hurricane in the West Indies. It’s not just fighting wars, extremism or insurgencies in which you need mass.”

Mass, of course, costs money. “Our ambitions and the requirements of the various challenges we are confronting cannot be matched by the capabilities we have.” The new aircraft carriers, which he opposed, “are having a huge distorting effect on the rest of the defence budget. Now we have them we have to make them work. But you make them work at the expense of the rest of the Navy, of the RAF and of the Army.”

He says we may have to revert to being “a maritime nation with a good little Navy, with the Army put on the back burner and used only in very selective ways. If we go on as we are, we won’t even deliver on the government’s goals for defence.”

Although retired, he is constantly among soldiers of all ranks - and discerns that morale is “fragile”.

“At the moment there’s a consensus that joining the Forces, whether you’re heir to the throne or the son of a dustman, is a good thing. If the government breaks that consensus by not looking after the people in the Armed Forces properly, word will get out. It will affect potential recruits and those we wish to retain.

“These people aren’t idiots. They know the sums don’t stack up. Recruitment and retention are very difficult. I think there’s a question about the government’s commitment, notwithstanding the much-vaunted military covenant, to people rather than equipment.”

He is concerned that married quarters aren’t being properly maintained, and there’s no commitment to their provision in the long term. The Major government sold them to the private sector, and from 2021, the owners can charge a commercial rent.

“It all creates doubt and worry, and so people take the chance to leave when they might previously have continued a career with the Armed Forces.”

He hopes an element of defence spending might soon be included in our overseas aid contribution of 0.7 per cent of GDP, to pay for more “mass” – and he knows ministers, including Priti Patel, the Overseas Development Secretary, share his frustration that it isn’t already.

“I think the Government must conduct a campaign with those who write the rules, and if that doesn’t work unilaterally extract themselves from the process. To not be able to include the military contribution to overseas aid is ridiculous.”

But then, he concludes: “There is an absence of grand strategic thinking in Whitehall. Where is Britain trying to position herself in the world in 20 or 30 years time? And where is the plan to get us there?”

It sounds like a challenge to Sir Michael Fallon, the Defence Secretary, who rarely allows the present CDS to speak in public on such matters, and only then when he has vetted the remarks. Grand strategy, like our first-world defence capability, seems already a thing of the past: and Lord Richards is unlikely to be alone in expressing the concerns that such a vacuum inevitably raises.
Here is a link to the original article >>> General Lord Richards: Why I'm certain North Korea won't start a war

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/general-lord-richards-certain-north-korea-wont-start-war/