PJC Journal – Original » 2007 » August

Aug

UK Passports – banks validate – recruiters copy

UK financial services firms are saving hundreds of thousands of
pounds a year by using a passport validation service to screen and
security check their customers, according to a Financial Times report.

Reports
first surfaced in 2005 that the UK's passport office was working with
Abbey and HSBC to set up a service that willl enable banks to
cross-reference passport details with information held in the passport
database. Although the Data Protection Act prevents the passport
service handing out data, banks are now able to use a call centre to
check passport details provided by customers.

James Hall,
the chief executive of the Identity and Passport Service, told the FT
that the service has now been running for one year and has been a
success. Firms regulated by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) are
able check and validate passports provided by customers by calling a
special hotline.

In one case, a check on a customer
applying for a business loan from a bank showed the passport had been
forged, even though the customer had passed other checks, says Hall.

Several arrests have been made and 211 forged or stolen passports have been seized, he adds.

The
service is a precursor to the sort of customer checks that the national
ID cards will be eventually be used for, says the FT.

(source)

Now link that to this story, where recruiter phishing is becoming big business in obtaining passport copies, and even in the UK because of the enforcement of the Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses Regulations 2003 (No.3319), especially section 19, and Schedule 4, section 11, recruiters are now obliged to take photocopies of the passport of everyone who applies for work.

Because they are photocopies, they are not covered by the DPA, and with no regulation or protocol as to the storage of these passport copies within each recruitment firm, there are now millions of copies of passports floating around in an unregulated market.

Any betting on how many have now found their way to third world countries to be used for replacement applications at British Embassies or using the discredited outsourced system.

A case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing?, or is it just deliberate (if you can make something virtually worthless, then it needs to be replaced by a system of governments choice).
As the Banks say above: The
service is a precursor to the sort of customer checks that the national
ID cards will be eventually be used for.

NuLab – Destroying Britain from the inside out.

I've been put on a UK Government watch list

IanPJ Main Page Add you comment

I am advised by an anonymous 'well-wisher' that I have apparently been placed on a Government watch list.

By all accounts I was placed on this list in early 2002, but the communication that I received did not specify a watch list name, nor the Government department that is running said watch list.

After racking my brains looking for a possible reason for this listing, I tried tracking back my movements and business during this period, and it would seem to coincide with an IT proof of concept presentation that was delivered by myself and some colleagues to the then Saudi Ambassador Prince Turki at the Saudi Arabian Embassy in London.

Unfortunately the presentation did not progress into a project, but the timing would certainly match the beginning of a long period during which business opportunities began to dry up, and new projects became harder and harder to find, extending right up to the present day.

My memory is pretty good, and I do recall around that time a personal visit to my home from an Inspector at Special Branch, to be interviewed ostensibly as part of a positive vetting exercise for a friend of mine. He got his clearance so I thought no more of it.

The timing of my supposedly being placed on this list would have been within 6 months of 9/11, so I can well imagine that the security services were running around like headless chickens in panic mode, looking for anything, and certainly logging every entry into Arabic embassies, and the complicated nature of the technical brief meant that I both made multiple visits to the Embassy, and entertained embassy staff at my home.

I am astounded however, but not entirely surprised, that in Britain today, that doing business, or even attempting to do business with overseas clients can get you placed on a watch list. If anyone is aware that this is the case, I would be most interested to know.

Whether this is indeed the reason for my entry onto a list I do not know, its the only possible explanation I can think of, but I am somewhat at a loss as to what to do next, as I cannot make any requests for information unless I am in receipt of more details. Who do I ask? I can just imagine the kind of response from the Home Office if I telephone and say, “Am I on one of your watch lists”.

Nor do I know which department I need to look to, whether it be Home Office, Foreign Office, MI5, HMRC or whoever…

If anyone has any more information, so that I can at least find out which list I am supposed to be on, I would be most grateful, meantime, I think that I need to get some legal advice to discover what steps I can now take.

This, to put it mildly, is exceptionally concerning and worrying.

UPDATE: Now that I have time to think and speak with a few people, I thought that I would calm down, but the anger is just welling up inside me, and I am now seething, ready to vent my spleen.

WHO THE FUCK put me on a Watch List?.
WHAT watch list ?
WHAT THE FUCK are they watching FOR?

How often are Watch Lists updated, who updates them and on what criteria, who are these faceless minions who take decisions about MY life?

This has nothing to do with this blog, this started some 4 years before I began blogging. Sooner or later, someone will pay for this, how dare they restrict my rights without confronting me about it first. The only words that keep coming into my head are GESTAPO, NKVD, KGB.

I think the style of this country is definitely being set clear, and this is the man who has been making the rules for the past 10 years.

NuLab – Destroying Britain from the inside out.

p.s. now that I'm a victim, can I get victim support compensation…..and to whoever it was who had the balls to contact me this morning, please give me some more information to work with.

Cuts at IAH? What Cuts?

IanPJ Main Page Add you comment

The Daily Telegraph have picked up today on the funding and staff cuts at IAH and quote Peter Ainsworth, the shadow environment secretary…

“I am worried about reports we have seen in recent months
about funding cuts to the institute and remarks made by the director of
the IAH saying he is being asked to run a Rolls-Royce service on the
budget of a Ford Cortina. That might have something to do with it.”

It is therefore interesting to note submission the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technologyon 23rd November 1999 explained their role and the problems with MAFF funding.

“The
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) sponsors
eight Research Institutes which represent a major element of the
Science Base underpinning the agriculture, food and environmental
industries. The funding for these institutes is drawn from a range of
sources; overall the BBSRC's strategic grant accounts for 36 per cent
of total funding, and MAFF and other government departments account for
28 per cent. Over the past 15 years, the decline in MAFF and
other departmental funding has put major pressure on the BBSRC's
Science Vote to meet redundancy and other costs. “

They go on to quantify the effects on funding …

2.3 The
decline in MAFF research expenditure has placed serious pressures on
the BBSRC's science budget income over the past decade and a half.
Following the 1972 White Paper “A Framework for Government Research and
Development” (Cmnd 5046), £19 million was transferred from the then
Agricultural Research Council to MAFF as the “customer department”.
This sum would be worth around £90 million in 1999 prices, while MAFF
research spending within the BBSRC institutes currently runs at just
over £30 million. The gap between these figures represents a
loss of funding broadly equivalent to the total Science budget
expenditure on institute-based research in 1999-2000. The decline has caused the Council to reduce employment in the institutes from 5,750 in 1982 to 3,400 in 1999.

2.4 Over that period, there have been some 1,800 compulsory redundancies and 700 voluntary redundancies, funding for which has predominantly had to be found from within the AFRC/BBSRC Science Vote.

This represents a very significant loss to science

It
also means that money to be spent paying people for undertaking
scientific research was actually spent on providing generous terms of
redundancy – presumably to the older more experienced staff.

If therefore you turn to the same committtee meeting November 2006 you
find that there is eveidently a reluctance for DEFRA (the successor to
MAFF) to continue funding at the same level. Exposing a major hole in
the funding of scientific institutes. For example, the Chairman placed
his concerns (and the public's ) very squarely ..

Q171
Chairman: But it is very difficult to reconcile that with the need to
have a science facility on tap for when you, as a government, need it when there is an outbreak of foot and mouth or bird flu arrives or whatever.
How do you reconcile those two things of maintaining the institute base
or, if it is not going to be the institute base, what will it be—the
universities?

Lord Rooker: No, I might say the two examples you
give are bird flu and foot and mouth and we make sure that our
procedures are in place to account for that. We have to account—

Q172 Chairman: But you do not know what you are going to account in the future.

It
is instructive to read the whole day's events to appreciate the quality
of the mind of Geoff Rooker who attempts to explain a reduction in
funding to the IAH is not a cut .. or a cut is not a reduction … or

We have Dr Harris to
thanks for nailing the bastard ,but it does expose how the IAH and
associated Research Institutes are being underfunded, understaffed and
not the places where graduates naturally seek employment, as their
funds, facilities and reputation decline.

Q192 Dr Harris:
That is consistent with the government evidence regarding this which is
why I was asking you about it. On this question of cuts, Lord Rooker is very clear that there were no cuts,
but the impression out there is that there have been cuts in Defra
funding, as you are aware, possibly because the figures reduced for
funding. Last year, 2004-05, for the Institute of Animal Health it was £9.6 million from Defra and it is now £8 million in 2005-06,
for IGER in 2004-05 it was £8.2 million and it is now £7.1 million and
from Defra for the Rothamsted Research Institute it was £6.4 million in
2004-05 and it is now £5.1 million in 2005-06, so that is a reduction year on year in the funding from Defra for those three organisations. In what way is that reduction not a cut?

It is worth remembering that it was only in August 2006 that it became apparent that The DEFRA / Rural Payments Agency (RPA) had paid about 500 farmers £30,000 each too much, while about 800 have been overpaid by £7,000… a loss of over £20Mn.

Of course it was not until March this year that
the scale of the RPA cock up revealed that the UK would be obliged to
pay fines of up to £500Mn which would come out of DEFRA budgets.

With her crazy European Trading Scheme for carbon and the RPA fiasco and the rundown of funding for agricultural research Mrs “Mad Cow” Beckett (and Gordon Brown whose Treasury happily mopped up the savings to squirt elsewhere) have a lot to answer for.

PS
: The Foot and Mouth outbreak in 2001 led to between 6.5 million and 10
million animals being destroyed and cost as much as £8.5bn.

NuLab – Destroying Britain from the inside out.

HatTip Postman Patel