Author: info@amberhawk.com

At the moment, we are all being bombarded with numbers associated with New Labour’s financial legacy. Well there is another number which reveals a further legacy of the last administration. Under New Labour, for each UK citizen in the last year (i.e. you), there was a 1 in 50 chance that your communications could have been accessed by the law enforcement and national security authorities. This translates into a “Governmental Annual Surveillance Probability” (known as the “GASP”) of at least

Yesterday, the Chief Constable of West Midlands went on TV to apologise for its plans to undertake comprehensive and overt CCTV surveillance of all cars and individuals who entered or left the Sparkhill area of Birmingham. This apology is even though “No cameras associated with the Project have ever been used” and the publication of an investigation into “Project Champion” by the Chief Constable of Thames Valley Police (see references for details). Having read the report, I think Project Champion

Last week, the Government published its ideas as to how it would implement the changes to EU Directive 2002/58/EC. In relation to spammers and behavioural advertising it has decided to keep the low privacy standards that were acceptable to the previous New Labour government. The changes discussed in the consultation (see references) are modifications to Directive 2002/58/EC introduced by the need to implement Directive 2009/136/EC. These new provisions have to be brought into UK law by 25th May next year

The voice-mail hacking incident is still exercising MPs – especially the Labour ones who did little to protect individual privacy in its decade in power (see last week’s blog). So when Assistant Commissioner John Yates of the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) gave evidence on “Specialist Operations” to the Home Affairs Select Committee (last week), MPs on the Committee took the opportunity to ask a range of questions about the lack of prosecutions re such hacking. Mr Yates’ answers reveal that

When on holiday in the Dordogne two weeks ago (feels like two months now!), I picked up a Sunday Times newspaper which stated that the Government was reducing grant-funding for speed cameras. This was given the “thumbs-up” by the paper which reported that many motorists see such cameras as a tax first and a life-saver second. Some speed cameras are already history. Conservative controlled Swindon Borough Council switched off its cameras in April this year, whilst a funding shortfall of