Richard's Kingdom

There were a bunch of news stories last week ridiculing the Government’s ID card strategy by revealing that, though 50,000 cards will have been issued by April, no official (or unofficial) organisation is yet capable of reading them. No card readers have been issued and the back-end systems aren’t ready yet either. Ministers say they’ve [...]

There’s an interesting discussion on David Davis’ opinions about CCTV on Samizdata. Quoth Davis: Today I have been explaining that I am not against CCTV- but if it is going to be used the cameras should be able to provide clear images and all of the evidence should be usable in court. Currently only 20% [...]

I was saddened to read this letter, dated 20 August 2007, on the problems being caused by the intrusive, interventionist and illiberal social care policies this government has introduced. Wouldn’t it be better if social workers, teachers, the police, healthcare professionals and others in public service were empowered to build respectful, constructive relationships with their [...]

If you live in the UK you’ll be aware of the pervasiveness of Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) systems, which apparently film the average Brit hundreds of times per day (although there are no reliable figures). It turns out this is a pointless exercise. CCTV is rubbish at preventing crime, uneconomical at detecting it, useless at helping [...]

Updated @ 2008/05/20 21:40 GMT Spy blog reports it has received more details on the FootPath system from the manufacturer. Their update provides factual corrections to the original story. I have therefore included appropriate updates here too. The Times reports that customers in some shopping centres are being secretly tracked without their knowledge using signals [...]