Recidivist with alert populations

Reid wants to change the law so you can be tortured if he says you're evil enough. Not only that, he wants one of the people who the courts found innocent of preparing ricin in the great no-ricin no-plot tortured, presumably to get out of him why he didn't prepare any ricin. This is an important point about the state without laws - once you open the door to rule by whim, you can't assume that any principles hold, not even the notion that there is a difference between guilt and innocence.

John Reid is the most dangerous man in Britain.

Another data point for this thesis is here. The control bureaucrats are apparently trying to set up real-time interworking between the US Department of Homeland Security's various databases and the Police National Computer. This, a week or so after the Americans legislated to explicitly permit torture and suspend Habeas Corpus. Where is the parliamentary scrutiny? Where is, as they say, the outrage? After all, even in the event that our turd-ridden, vomitous government was to fall tomorrow, who imagines that this will be reversed? It's in the nature of information that once shared, it stays shared.

If you doubt Reid's relevance to this, try out the following quote from one Robert Mocny, director of the USVISIT program at DHS:

"We cannot allow to impediment our progress the privacy rights of known criminals."

The law is what I say it is, and you're either with us, or you're with the terrorists. Perhaps literally with them, in the cells. Joseph Sensibaugh, manager of biometric interoperability for the FBI, meanwhile opines that "It helps the Department of Homeland Security determine who's a good guy and who's a bad guy," targeting "suspected terrorists" and "remaining recidivist with alert populations". Not to mention the president of Bolivia and a dead bluesman, apparently.

Why does it specifically have to be illiterate authoritarianism, by the way? What does that last phrase actually mean, anyone? Anyway. Enquiring minds want to know more. What was this "pilot project"? Whose records were given to the DHS? Will they be told? What are the safeguards? Where are the guarantees?

And what access will DHS have to the National Identity Register? Just think, if you had to present your ID card in Dewsbury...