Dear all,
People working on mega events and ID may be interested in the story
below. You may recall I posted an invitation  to a consultation on
security surrounding London 2012 to the list last year. This article is
from the Daiy Telegraph last week.
Thanks
Kirstie 
________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________

Ministers plan 'Big Brother' police powers
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/02/04/ncrime04
.xml

By Patrick Hennessy and Ben Leapman, Sunday Telegraph Last Updated:
12:35am GMT 04/02/2007

A swathe of controversial "Big Brother" style crime-fighting techniques
are to be introduced by the Government under the cover of the 2012
London Olympics, a leaked memo has revealed.

The document, drawn up by officials at the Home Office and sent to 10
Downing Street, paves the way for a much wider use of the police's DNA
database to identify suspects through their relatives.

Police are also to be empowered to scan postal packages to find drugs
and to monitor an individual's progress in even greater detail than they
can today, by using advances in CCTV technology as well as electronic
travel passes such as the Oyster cards in use in London.

The Conservatives and civil liberties campaigners are leading protests
against the proposals, with Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty,
accusing John Reid, the Home Secretary, of presiding over a "make
liberty history" campaign.

The memo, entitled No 10 Policy Working Group on Security, Crime and
Justice, Technological Advances, asks: "To what extent should the
expectation of liberty be eroded by legitimate intrusions in the
interests of security of the wider public?" advertisement

It goes on to explore how to win over public opinion and concludes:
"Increasing [public] support could be possible through the piloting of
certain approaches in high-profile ways such as the London Olympics."

The games are expected to see millions of extra visitors to the capital
in what will present the police with the biggest peacetime security
threat on British soil.

The leaked document paves the way for a big leap in forensics,
particularly with the "volume of information now available on the
national DNA database", on which details of more than three million
Britons are stored.

It suggests that police will make much greater use of a technique known
as "familial DNA" where a suspect whose details are not on the database
can be traced through a family member whose details are already
recorded. The memo states: "Records could be trawled more routinely to
identify familial connections to crime scenes, providing a starting
point to investigations through a family member that is on the database
to a suspect that is not, for example."

It admits: "Such use is clearly controversial and requires careful
controls."

Familial DNA relies on the fact that close blood relatives share much of
the same DNA coding; for example, a parent and child, or two siblings,
have DNA that is 50 per cent identical.

Scientists can match DNA found at a crime scene with a named sample on
the database which is similar but not identical, indicating that the two
individuals are related.

The technique was used last year to snare a serial sex attacker known as
the "shoe rapist" because he kept his victims' shoes as trophies.

The crimes, in the early 1980s, went unsolved for more than 20 years;
but when police stopped June Lloyd for alleged drink-driving, tests
showed that her DNA was similar to samples taken from the rape scenes.

The evidence led police to her brother, James Lloyd, who admitted the
offences and is now serving a 15-year -sentence.

However, Sir Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial
Equality, is already investigating the database after The Sunday
Telegraph revealed that up to three in four young black men have their
DNA stored, far more than their white counterparts.

Because of the imbalance, black criminals are more likely to have a
relative on the database, so are more likely to be caught through
familial DNA.

Ms Chakrabarti said: "Fundamental debates about freedom and security
belong in public and Parliament, and should not be left to the
praetorian guard at Number 10.

"It's particularly worrying to hear that the London Olympics - supposed
to be a celebration of our multicultural democracy - might be
manipulated for political ends into part of the Home Secretary's 'make
liberty history' campaign.

"The document describes liberty as a mere 'expectation', but in Britain
it should be a way of life."

The Home Office refused to comment

_______________________________________________

****************************************************
This is a message from the SURVEILLANCE listserv
for research and teaching in surveillance studies.

To unsubscribe, please send the following message to
<[log in to unmask]>:

UNSUBSCRIBE SURVEILLANCE

For further help, please visit:

http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/help
****************************************************