ID card proposals offer a golden opportunity for the government to show real leadership. A serious trial programme for ID cards should first be applied to ministers, then all MPs, requiring them to have their irises and fingerprints scanned before each entry to parliament. This would be an important practical first test.
The scheme should then be given a few years of extended trials involving all civil servants. If access to all this data were made available to the many appropriate possible users, government departments, local councils, police etc, then by about five years from now it would be more clear whether it is practical, economic, safe and useful enough to be extended to the rest of us.
– The Guardian
Flight attendants foiled an attempted attack on a Chinese passenger jet, senior officials from Xinjiang announced yesterday, claiming that terrorists had also plotted to target the Olympics.
Their remarks came as they vowed to crack down on the “three evil forces” of terrorism, extremism and separatism in the far-western region, home to a large Muslim Uighur population.
Overseas Uighur and human rights groups allege that the authorities have exaggerated the threat of violence to strengthen their control over the region in the past.
– The Guardian
Canadian spies are set to help India’s intelligence agencies to intercept BlackBerry messages to prevent the mobile e-mail service being shut down across the sub-continent.
The Indian Government believes that messages sent via the BlackBerry system, which is licensed to mobile operators by Research in Motion (RIM), a Canadian company, pose a threat to security because of the difficulty of tracing and intercepting them.
– The Times
President Bush has vetoed a law preventing the CIA using interrogation techniques condemned by many as torture, because it “would take away one of the most valuable tools in the War on Terror”.
In his weekly radio address the President defended practices such as waterboarding, claiming that they alone had prevented another 9/11.
– The Times
