International Law

Sir David Omand on Protint - 'protected information' data mining of personal sensitive data by intelligence agencies

Perhaps because of the media interest in the Convention on Modern Liberty, both The Guardian and the Press Association via the The Independent newspapers, have quoted from a discussion paper published over 2 weeks ago by the NuLabour "think tank" lobbyists at the Institute for Public Policy Research, through which several Labour party surveillance nanny police state policies have been "market tested", to see if they can be slipped through past the public and Parliament, without too much vocal opposition.

IPPR seem to have funded and have now published, "A discussion paper for the ippr Commission on National Security for the 21st Century" by Sir David Omand. an eminent retired Whitehall security and intelligence insider, on whose watch under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, many of the most repressive Labour laws and policies were trotted out.

The Commission brings together leading experts from the fields of security, defence, intelligence and development.

Commission panel members are:

* Lord Paddy Ashdown, Co-Chair, former leader of the Liberal Democratic Party and former High Representative for Bosnia.
* Lord George Robertson, Co-Chair, former Secretary of State for Defence and former Secretary General of NATO.
* Dr Ian Kearns, Deputy Chair, ippr.
* Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Director of the Ditchley Foundation and former British Ambassador to the United Nations.
* Sir David Omand, former security and intelligence coordinator in the Cabinet Office and former Permanent Secretary in the Home Office.
* Lord Charles Guthrie, former Chief of the Defence Staff.
* Lord Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.
* Sir Chris Fox, former Chief Constable of Northamptonshire and former President of the Association of Chief Police Officers.
* Professor Michael Clarke, Director, Royal United Services Institute, and Professor of Defence Studies at King's College London.
* Professor Tariq Modood, Director of the Leverhulme Programme on Migration and Citizenship, Bristol University.
* Constanze Stelzenmüller, Director of the Berlin office of the German Marshall Fund.
* Professor Jim Norton, former chief executive of the Radio Communications Agency and now at the Institute of Directors.
* Ian Taylor MP, Chair of the Conservative Party Policy Task-force on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, Conservative MP for Esher and Walton and former minister for Science and Technology at the Department of Trade and Industry.

Who pays for this, apart from the UK taxpayer ?

ippr would like to thank EDS, Raytheon Systems Ltd, De La Rue and Booz Allen Hamilton for their generous support of the Commission's activities. For more information on the work of the Commission please go to www.ippr.org/security

i.e. what are known in the USA as "Beltway Bandits": military / security / intelligence sub-contractors and consultants, who have a vested financial interest in selling expensive , complicated systems, to technologically inept politicians and and Whitehall mandarins, in search of technological magic fixes to social and political problems.

The views in this paper are those of the author alone and are being published here in the hope of advancing public debate. They do not represent the views of the Commission panel or the views of any sponsoring organisation.

We welcome this new found idea of "advancing public debate".

It is a pity that Sir David Omand and his Whitehall securocrat colleagues are not speaking at the Convention on Modern Liberty - they should be invited to future events.

The National Security Strategy: Implications for the UK intelligence community

ISBN:

Author: Sir David Omand GCB, Visiting Professor, Department of War Studies, King's College, London
Contributors:
Price: Free
Publication Date: 09 February 2009

http://www.ippr.org/members/download.asp?f=%2Fecomm%2Ffiles%2FNational+Security+Strategy%2Epdf (.pdf)

Sir David introduces us to a new acronym 'protected information', or Protint, which seems to be the very essence of the Database / Surveillance / Nanny / Police State dystopian nightmare which this Labour Government has created the foundations for:

Full post as published by Spy Blog on February 25, 2009 (boomark / email).