Your rights

[Dave]

If various different government departments have been given the right to enter your home, just where does this put your basic European rights to privacy?

Dave

[jim]

Well, there's questions...and there's stupid questions....

[Unbeliever]

Privacy, what privacy? Under the various regulations and laws spouting from both this country and the EEC there is no such thing as privacy now - George Orwell's 1984 has arrived! (It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.)

All private telephone calls, e-mails and internet traffic is now intercepted (and can be kept for up to 2 years), and the various bits of stored information can be accessed by the police etc along with various town hall mandarins - and even the ambulance service using RIPA and a few other bits of legislation.

As for access to your home - this generally needs a warrant (usually fairly easy to get from an obliging magistrate).

You can be stopped in the street, searched and questioned under anti-terrorism laws.

Your are photographed in almost every city, town and village in the land at some point.

Your are followed on all the major road routes by ANPR cameras.

The list is endless - and privacy non-existent!

BTW, how the hell is this a d-i-y question????

Unbeliever

[The Medway Handyman]

The ambulance service can track the address of a landline phone or the location of a mobile in seconds. They only do so because of the idiot Govmint targets that insist on an 8 minute response on Cat A calls, regardless of clinical outcome. The clock starts from the time the call is recieved, not the time the controller actually gets confirmation of the address and the exact nature of the problem from an often panicking & agitated caller. In other words its retrospective.

[nightjar]

Not around here. I made a call, just before Christmas, when I found someone collapsed in the street and it took ages before they worked out where I was, even with me giving road names.

Colin Bignell

[tim.....]

I don't get your problem with this (assuming it wasn't ironic which the bit I snipped suggested not)

As you can't know the clinical outcome until the person has reached the hospital (or otherwise received treatment), how can you set a target for attending to that person, that takes the outcome into account?

tim

[TheOldFellow]

Here's some DIY cryptography to help you find a way to hide what you say from the 'Govmint of GoreDoom'.

In this case it's just a signature, but if you had a public key I could have encrypted the whole thing.

R.

[Man at B&Q]

Don't be stupid.

MBQ

[The Medway Handyman]

It was ironic I suppose because the crews main motivation is the clinical outcome.

If they can restart someones heart, get them breathing or stem excessive blood loss it effects the clinical outcome. If they can get a patient to A&E alive its obviously much better.

Current 'solution' to beating the time target is to use FRU's (fast response cars). This could well mean a young female paramedic, attending a violent situation, in a rough area, in the early hours - alone.

90% of the time an ambulance has to attend as well, because the FRU isn't as well equipped & can't transport people to A&E.

This ties up 2 vehicles & 3 crew members on 1 incident + 2 journeys. They would rather use the resources to put more fully crewed ambulances on the road, which they reckon would improve clinical outcome, but that wouldn't meet the immediate 'target'.

[Huge]

On Fri, 16 Jan 2009 00:56:15 +0000, "nightjar" "The Medway Handyman" wrote in

Nor here. When someone dumped and set fire to a stolen car in a nearby layby, the fire brigade worryingly couldn't find us.

[Huge]

Oh, the irony.

They already do. Anybody who runs a mail server will have logs showing what was sent where. Here's mine;

Jan 15 22:07:54 anubis postfix/qmgr[2106]: [ID 197553 mail.info] E37576B5A: from=, size=700, nrcpt=1 (queue active) Jan 15 22:07:54 anubis postfix/smtpd[9619]: [ID 197553 mail.info] disconnect from dhcp247[175.80.103.247] Jan 15 22:07:56 anubis postfix/smtp[9623]: [ID 197553 mail.info] E37576B5A: to=, relay=smtp.tiscali.co.uk [212.74.100.35]:25, delay=3.1, delays=0.16/0.05/2.7/0.15, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 ok: Message 127432731 accepted) Jan 15 22:07:56 anubis postfix/qmgr[2106]: [ID 197553 mail.info] E37576B5A: removed

That won't do you any good. Any system that the mail transits will have records, or be able to get them. And likely the large interchanges already have Echelon or Carnivore boxes in them already.

Quite so.

[Dave Liquorice]

Or here, I don't think we have even working day ambulance/paramedic cover now that isn't >1hr away. They'll miss the target for calls out here but so what? There is an average of 1.5/week it won't affect the overall score one iota. The fcat it could well cost some one their life doesn't seem to figure in the Ambulance Services view.

I have told the Ambulance Service our address and phone number so, in theory, if we call them our address and location pops up on screen. Don't know if that information is passed to the crew though, or if control has a GPS feed of ambulance locations so could "talk them in", always assuming the ambulance radio works out here.

The Fire Service I haven't told but then unless the pump is out on another shout several of the fire officers will have driven past to get to the pump to come back to us. B-)

[Unbeliever]

MBQ,

I really would suggest that you look up the information on a little program called Echelon. This was developed in the USA and is now used widely in Europe and this country to eavesdrop on *all* methods of electronic and tele communications, which are then stored for up to a year at the moment (generally not the text of the message, but certainly any information that can trace that call right back to you and any assignation that you want hidden from the 'other half') - also check out Cheltenham for more info on surveillance.

If you disbelieve that is not happening, then I would suggest that you simply look through the parliamentary legislation for the last few years (particularly since 9/11) and have a look for your self.

This is set to get worse, as the EEC is now starting to jump on the bandwagon and starting to introduce even more draconian legislation that will erode any vestiges of 'privacy' that you think you already have.

As a matter of interest, I believe that legislation may well be in the pipeline to follow that of the USA whereby *all* mobile phones must be fitted with a tracking device to enable your location to be pinpointed within a few metres (this is already in operation here but on a voluntary basis at the moment).

I really would suggest that the "stupid" one is yourself, if you genuinely think that what I have said is untrue - hell, even the government's own Information Minister has stated that we are walking blindfold into a surveillance society.

Wake up and get your head from up your bum and have a look at the real world.

Disbeliever

Who is now very likely to end up in Orwell's room 101. :D

[Unbeliever]

Just replying so that the group can see.

Clever, but if I was undergoing any nefarious activity, I would certainly not transmit such information electronically - encrypted or not.

Governments are now spending millions on technology to try and crack the codes - and besides, I can see a day coming whereby it will against the law to use such methods of data transmission, and ISPs will be told to either 'block' such messages or redirect them to decoding stations.

This thought is from something that I read a few days ago where terrorists are now using paedophile websites to encrypt and send messages to each other and I can't see that door being left open for too long.

Fantasy?

But 40 years ago, who would have believed that you could be tracked across the country simply by withdrawing cash from a machine or using a card to buy things in a shop?

Nice to stir things up once in a while eh? *eg*

Unbeliever

[John Rumm]

At which point people will just move to steganographic techniques to hide the encrypted information.

[John Rumm]

Indeed, much of the privacy we believe we have now is illusory.

There is already loads of stuff that can be done with mobile comms that often seems to get ignored as well. e.g. low level manipulation of the GSM command stack can remotely enable the mic and transmit capabilities of a phone - turning it into a eavesdropping device. (moral of that story, if you don't want to be overheard, take the battery out!)

Sadly very true. Legislation like the RIP act combines that with a reversal of the burden of proof as well - which is a major change to the premise of our legal and justice system.

[Unbeliever]

And governments will simply move to developing programs that will reveal such hidden information John - remember, we the public are paying the bills for them to spend vast amounts to enable then to spy on us.

They will have the technology to search every page that we send electronically - and that system (under the guise of targeted advertising) is being introduced by BT and possibly Virgin Media (and one other ISP which escapes me at the moment) - and it's called Webwise oo Phorm

Unbeliever

[John Rumm]

Oh indeed. These things are always an "arms race".

One thing that works against blanket electronic surveillance (especially if you are attempting to find potentially hidden encrypted information[1]) is the shear volume of it carried these days, and the need for human intervention to actually establish if the content is sinister. A typical daily feed through a news server must now represent more than a lifetimes reading for a significant number of people.

(IIRC they did attempt to validate a claim that stega technology was already being extensively used in images on web sites some time back. I thing the results were either non conclusive or not found to support the suggestion).

Having said that, any money spent on "security" that can be circumvented by a terrorist simply changing their behaviour is largely wasted anyway.

[1] And if you are sending information like that, it makes sense to send several orders of magnitude of junk information as a diversionary mechanism to bog down the decoding system (while possibly using an alternative back channel for doing the real comms - carrier pigeon anyone ;-)

[Steve Firth]

You may think that, I couldn't possibly comment.

[tim.....]

You wouldn't need to.

Doing what you clime would flatted in in hours anyway so I think that owner might notice.

It might be possible but it doesn't happen