Thursday 28 February 2008

A question of Security

Bruce 'shits unbreakable ciphers' Schneier has commented on a report on how and why some terrorist attacks fail. He has picked out his favourite quote:

One phenomenon stands out: terrorists are rarely caught in the act during the execution phase of an operation, other than instances in which their equipment or weapons fail. Rather, plots are most often foiled during the pre-execution phases.
And who am I to disagree, this is why the hysteria over the climate change protestors getting onto an airplane (and to a lesser extent the palace of Westminster) and the furore of Andrew Gilliagan's "liquid bomb" is all a lot of hot air. Helping both the terror groups and the government in their aim of keeping the public scared.

On a similar note, Jackart is down on Matt Drudge for revealing where Prince Harry is, yeah keeping a secret was a good plan, but if that was the only plan for keeping him and his squadron safe then someone isn't doing their job right. We know this isn't the case, there are big intelligence operations going on out there as the Taliban are trying to attack the mobile phone networks to get them shut down as they think the big operation to find them is using that technology to track them. Not satellites of course?

Odds and sods

There is another story of purported data loss from the government. I think this has to be false or a spoof or something else, because the newspaper report says the laptop and disk were encrypted and as we all know the government doesn't do that.

I am also a Terrorist, like a good number of people I have my own mobile and one for work, I suppose I just have to hope no-one thinks I look suspicious.

I saw a poster at lunchtime for some kind of protest against Richard Branson because he is involved in talks, along with companies such as Boots and Lloyds pharmacy, to run "GP services". Apparently the problem is that they are businesses, what I am wondering is what these people think a GP's surgery is?

Wednesday 27 February 2008

Quake

The USGS has the following data:

Magnitude 4.7
Date-Time
Location 53.321°N, 0.314°W
Depth 10 km (6.2 miles) set by location program
Region ENGLAND, UNITED KINGDOM
Distances 50 km (30 miles) S of Kingston upon Hull, England, UK
70 km (45 miles) NE of Nottingham, England, UK
80 km (50 miles) E of Sheffield, England, UK
205 km (125 miles) N of LONDON, United Kingdom
Location Uncertainty horizontal +/- 6.8 km (4.2 miles); depth fixed by location program
Parameters NST= 50, Nph= 50, Dmin=291.4 km, Rmss=1.02 sec, Gp= 54°,
M-type=body magnitude (Mb), Version=7

Find it hard to stay out of trouble?

Think you could hack a stint behind bars?

Have you got what it takes to survive Prison life?

These are the opening lines from the advert for young men to join a new program for five called banged up, later on it talks about the "respected experts" who would work with these kids during a simulated prison stint. The Register reveals on of those involved is David Blunkett. A great moral example to the nation's youth!

Tuesday 26 February 2008

Grrrrrr

Very tired today so my apologies if this turns into more of a rant than I intend. My favourite moderate newspaper has been running a campaign to bring back the death penalty. I'm not going to have a go at the paper for pandering to their readership, or that readership for being who they are. My bile is reserved for Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, who while is happy to rail against embryological research and campaign against abortion can't bring himself to say that the death penalty shouldn't happen full stop. What kind of spineless wet is the man? What constituency is he worried he will alienate if he does? What part of "Thou shalt not kill" does he not understand? Has he never in his fifty-two years in the church read the Sermon on the Mount?

The other thing that caught my eye this morning was this piece from Iain Dale about an email he had received. On one hand I agree about the nanny state, there is far to much proscription in schools as was show over the child who wasn't allowed to ware her faith based ring a while back. On the other very little of the discussion is about the most important line in the original email: Of course, they ripped the kitchens out of this school years ago. We shouldn't be making rules about chocolate or going to the chip shop to get the kids to eat healthily, we just need to give them the old the cardinal points of fingering a murder suspect, motive, means and opportunity. Opportunity means a canteen in every school serving a good selection of balanced meals, means means they should be priced to the market[1]; motive is the difficult one, I would hope that if we get a generation of children growing up under the previous two conditions they may develop a taste for wholesome food on their own. That is almost certainly rank optimism, it may even be just as gullible to suggest that teaching this generation domestic science may catch their kids but I just fear that there are some people that consider obesity like benefits as a right.

While I'm probably not going to go as far as Dizzy and say that Jacqui Smith's new seizure plans are "quite possibily the most anti-liberty, anti-justice policy ever", since I can think of a few that could well be considered worse including most of the anti-terrorism measures, anything that makes peacefully protest less lawful, compulsory or even effectively compulsory by hanging essential services or benefit entitlement on them ID Cards, I do think that (almost miraculously) she has continued the tradition that each Home Secretary is more fascist than the last, this runs all the way back to Kenneth Clarke (it is fair to say he wasn't to the right of Kenneth Baker).

[1]Of course beanz meanz heinz(scroll down to 1967, I love that factoid)

Monday 25 February 2008

The Internet is a pals' network

Not everyone on it is a pal.

As this BBC blog story illustrates that the way the Internet is organised is still based on trusting everyone; you just can't any more.

Friday 22 February 2008

Temporary and Agency Workers (Equal Treatment) Bill

Today is the second reading of this private members bill introduced by Andrew Miller; who would seem by his actions to be one of the few socialists left in the parliamentary labour party. Because believe it or not this labour government opposes the bill because all of Gordon's friends in industry, you know the ones he keeps giving big fat IT contracts to that get fatter by the second and who keep doing so well in PFI arrangements asked them to.

John Cridland of the Confederation of British Industry claims the bill's approach is “scattergun” which is quite a weak attack, the bill is exceptionally simple, it gives each “agency worker” the right to access the employment tribunal system and while in that system they are given the presumption that fair treatment is what a “direct worker” of the some company would receive; the only slight use of smoke and mirrors is where a tribunal would have to extrapolate a directly comparable “direct worker” because one doesn't exist. I can see the argument that this makes things that bit more expensive for employers but that is the price we have to pay for behaving like human beings.

Wednesday 20 February 2008

You can set your watch by it

The rules are:

  1. BBC announces new way of getting their content
  2. Within hours someone complains

This time it is the putting of content onto iTunes, Iain is saying that the BBC are making him pay twice.

Perhaps someone from the BBC could get in touch to explain why licence fee payers are now expected to pay £1.89 to watch a programme they have already paid for through the licence fee

While this is technically true, it isn't new and it isn't a rip off, the BBC have been selling on their content after free transmission for years, I would estimate that the biggest single supplier of DVDs to my collection is the BBC. Aunty gives everyone in the UK an opportunity to watch a programme on the television, usually several times, then you get 7 days more to watch it on iPlayer or your rich content providers "listen again" service (Virgin Media's has a slight annoyance, I don't get the whole 7 days to watch a programme as the clear the previous weeks content from a day at midnight) and these days you then probably get repeats on one of the many cable channels. If after all that you still haven't seen it but you want to you go and buy it. What the iTunes move is trying to do is make that last bit easier, not impinge on all the other ways you can get the content that have been paid for by the licence fee, in fact it is trying to make it easier for a specific group of people, those that don't buy the DVDs (and thus pay for more BBC programmes to be made) but go hunting for video captured copies of the content to download of the internet. What the BBC are hoping is that enough of these people will think it is easier to pay the money than spend the time trawling for downloads to make the whole project worthwhile. It would be interesting to know how much of the technology to get this done was already there in the iPlayer backend that cost most of the money that people were complaining that the BBC spent on the project.

Or maybe Iain is right, we have paid for this, let us ban the BBC from commercialising the content, pull the DVDs from the shelves and pull the cable channels they partner in. Of course shutting down the commercial arm of the BBC would mean the licence fee having to be raised by about 20% but that has to be worth it if we have already paid?

Monday 18 February 2008

The ranting of a grieving father.

Mohamed Fayed is at it again:

"Prince Philip rules the country behind the scenes. I think Prince Philip is the actual head of the Royal Family. He is a racist. He was brought up by his aunt who married one of Hitler's generals. This is the man who is in charge who is manipulating and can do anything.

"Time to send him back to Germany from where he comes. You want to know his original name — it ends in Frankenstein."

Now I do recall that the prince was brought up by an "interesting" relative but I thought that she was Marie Bonaparte, distant relation to Napoleon I of France and a psychoanalyst. Then mostly he was raised by the British public school system, Gordonstoun if I recall correctly. As for his 'original name' I assume he means Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg which admittedly does share one syllable with the one the phoney pharaoh used.

To be perfectly honest none of this forms the most outrageous parts of Mr Fayed's testimony it is his outline of the participants of the conspiracy; along with the British Royal Family he lists: Sarah McCorquodale, two former Scotland Yard Commissioners Lord Condon and Lord Stevens, two French pathologists, the French police and the French Establishment. I mean it beggars belief that anyone, no matter how delusional would believe there could exist a conspiracy like this between the English and French establishments!

Darling and Brown, Undertakers, Est MMVII

Does my right hon. friend accept that the policy of nationalisation would lead to a slow lingering death for the jobs of the Northern Rock workers, its assets and Britain's reputation as a major financial services centre, with my right hon. friend the chancellor cast in the role of undertaker — Jim Cousins MP

I agree with my hon. friend. — Alastair Darling MP

Now this is just my own opinion as I am not an economist, but I bet that if they had done this right at the outset it would have done a lot less damage than it will do now. All because Darling and Brown decided that if the bank collapsed due to no fault of the government they would lose votes. So all of us now own a chunk of a bank to try and save this Labour government from losing votes.

Sunday 17 February 2008

Highlighting the wrong problem.

Dizzy has had a go at OpenID pointing out the potential for man-in-the-middle attacks and phishing. This is akin to blaming tube and bus drivers for the 7/7 attacks or suggesting the roads are at fault for car accidents. The whole point of OpenID is it distributes other sites authentication, it doesn't shouldn't and can't enforce the level of security surrounding that process. Given that the model it uses is pretty much the same as that used by Paypal, Google and Worldpay for third party payment processing and Microsoft, Yahoo and many others for authentication it is a bit much to say it is the process. If you are going to have a go at something for this, I would suggest going after Mastercard secure code and verified by Visa for trying there bast to look like phishing sites.

So what is the real issue, it is the same problem that we all have everyday on the internet whether we are using OpenID or not. It is about the tremendous efforts people put into to trying to steal things from us. It is (hopefully) the death knell for simple username and password based logins over the internet and the era of two factor authentication, challenge-response, certificate validation moving away from being hidden away as a little padlock or a colour change in the address bar. Well we can but hope.

Saturday 16 February 2008

One of the advantages of insomnia

Is that on occasions you get to see, and comment upon, things that get released in the early hours first. On this occasion, it isn't such a great advantage as it is a subject the author has covered on a number previous occasion. Ben Goldacre is almost certainly known to all of you as the author of the Bad Science column in the Grauniad. When he isn't gaining nutritional accreditation for his dead cat he writes about  people making scientific, especially medical, claims without the evidence to back them up. Proper evidence mind, correctly run trials producing reviewed papers in respectable journals for example.

One example of the utter rubbish he has been railing against over the years is Brain Gym an expensive proprietary set of exercises used in thousands of schools in the UK. There isn't anything intrinsically bad in any of those statements about the system, what is a problem is the pseudo-scientific justifications used to sell these exercises to teachers. The exact nature of the what and whys of how this mumbo jumbo is used to peddle this stuff has even become the subject of a level 3 psychology module.

So while today's Bad Science column is telling us anything new, we still aren't listening enough to ensure that there isn't any more than the necessary amounts of cods wallop being taught to the children of this country.

Friday 15 February 2008

The name is Morris, Philip Morris

Licence to smoke

Health for England have coughed up a proposal to bring in a smoking licence, somewhat similar to the Rod Licence you have to obtain from the environment agency if you want to go fishing. Now I dislike both activities about as much but thanks to the recent smoking ban they both happen outside in the drizzle away from me. Apparently the bureaucratic nightmare involved in obtaining the licence will persuade people to give up as that is the easy path.

Let us examine some typical users shall we, your average Gruaniad reading smoking  hippy is unlikely to be put off by the forms neither is the stereotypical low income single parent who has already filled in thousands of forms for tax credits and free prescriptions etcetera. Oh hang on, why bother separating these people out, they are all in one category, addicts, they will do anything for a fix, why do these people think a little paperwork is going to get in the way?

Thursday 14 February 2008

Graham Calvert is a loser

The BBC and other news outlets are carrying the pathetic whining of a man who through his own actions spent lots of money doing something incredibly stupid, gambling. We will come to his specific reasoning as to why he thinks he is justified later, but first the compulsory complaint about the inexorable slide down into the fiery pits of a hell where no-one is personally responsible for their actions and they have to point the finger at the other people that *could* have stopped them, probably with the other hand outstretched for a handout.

Mr Calvert is contending his bookmaker is liable because he asked them to put him on their "self exclusion" list for six months, this means his account would have been in a state where he couldn't use it. As far as I can tell from the media coverage this is what happened. He then opened another account and gambled with it. Now there could be an issue here if he used the same credit card that should have been marked as excluded with his original account. But if he opened the new account with a new card then there is nothing the bookies could have done to stop him.

Take this hypothetical situation: Graham Calvert is not the only person with that name at his address, his father or son is also Graham Calvert, if they try and open an account they should be allowed to, no matter what their relation has done. In fact it is stronger than that, if William Hill refused them because of the suspended account they have just revealed that the other Graham Calvert has a suspended account and thus a gambling problem. They have just committed a very serious data protection offence.

"I think it was irresponsible of William Hill exploit me the way they did. It has ruined my life."

The bleeding heart crowd agree with his statement that he has been exploited by a nasty company when he subverted their systems and opened another account. Why can't he just show some backbone and get on with putting his life back together?

Wednesday 13 February 2008

The information scrum

The client facing teams at $DAY_JOB have regular update meetings that they call scrums, making sure everyone is aware of current issues and the status of projects etc.[1] My various friends groups don't do this, not so much because it smacks of management psuedoscience but because we don't need to. Facebook tells me when people have split up or got together, I found out that a friend's waters had broken via LJ and new cars/toys/furniture are photographed and posted to flickr. It isn't just us, Ryan Kuder used to work for Yahoo and used Twitter to detail his "downsizing" Andrew Olmsted even blogged his death. I know most important things about my friends almost instantly and a lot of intimate details about people I barely know in the really real world, or have never met, just as fast.

[1]The technical teams don't we spend all day keeping each other up to date by shouting insults across the room, jabbering cool links and making "your mum" jokes.

Tuesday 12 February 2008

Difficult subject

After someone linked to this post about self defence I was set off thinking about rape. This is another of those subjects about which I have doubt and uncertainty; not of course on whether it is evil, but how we get rid of it.

Actually I have even more doubt about if we can. How many more years of civil society and punishment will it take to eradicate it from society?

Sorry for anyone who was expecting anything erudite and informative on the subject but I am stumped basically because while it is utterly evil, all the things that have been suggested so far that are guaranteed to annihilate it are also in their way evil. Obviously (as far as I am concerned) the death penalty is right out. Something else often put forward is castration (in general chemical rather than physical) but will that really help, it will remove the ability but will it extinguish the desire, or will the frustration cause more violence? Life, meaning life, imprisonment is of course an option, well it would be if our prison system wasn't screwed royally, full of the disaffected that several governments have failed to educate. As opposed of course to those deserving of being banged up, the very politians themselves.

Don't type angry

As mentioned yesterday the key driver for me posting here is anger. Today nothing is making me angry enough to post. Actually that isn't true, lots of things are making me angry, but they are either things I can't blog about at work, things I have already posted on or utterly trivial things that are getting my goat. Like finding a plugin for live writer that does almost exactly what I want in the way of adding a few bits of functionality but needs a little tweaking. Not a huge problem given that the source is released under the MIT licence, but it has been released as a VS2008 solution, I only have VS2005 on my machine at work and of course can't do much about that as it is not my kit. I suppose this is yet another driver to get a desktop machine up and running at home (my laptop wouldn't cope reasonable with VS2005 so I dread to think what it would do with VS2008)

See wasn't that a worthwhile rant?

Monday 11 February 2008

Food Post

You may have noticed that despite mentioning food in the blurb about this blog I don't post about it that often. This is firstly due to the number one driver for a post here is me getting riled about something and food rarely does that. Secondly I am notoriously bad with recipes. Apart from baking which requires some accuracy, a recipe going in gets done while referring to the cook book, once maybe twice (and even then I tend to riff a bit with the minutiae) and after that it is from memory. In the other direction, when I am trying to create a dish from scratch I never quite manage to note it down. This weekend, while still not creating an accurate account, you will note the use of terms like "some" and "pinch" I at least made sure I set aside jars as I used them so I could make some stab at what I had done. So here is my Prawn Puree.

Before I start a note on chillies. My house mate is a chilli fiend and there are always some interesting specimens, both bought and home grown in the freezer. I usually use a pinch test to work out the strength of any that I get out that I am not utterly sure of. Pinching the fruit under your nose usually gives a fair idea of the pungency, even of frozen ones. This time it failed, what I thought mild was a Bhut Jolokia this lead to a far stronger sauce than I intended especially given the chilli was used whole, seeds and all. Luckily this one was home grown so nowhere near the octane of a hot country/housed version.

Firstly in a dry pan I toasted a large pinch of each of the following, coriander seeds, cumin seeds and whole Bristol blend five pepper; blitz these with a teaspoon of Garam Masala and a table spoon of flour. Into the spicy flour throw all but a handful of your prawns and get them covered well. Put some oil in the pan and gently brown four cloves of garlic, one hot chilli and a quarter of an onion roughly chopped. Into your blitzing device put the reserved prawns, a good squeeze of tomato puree, the browned garlic, chilli and onion, a pinch of salt a glug of oil and some Ginger Conserve (I follow the ways of Ken Hom who dictates that you must always have some sweetening with chilli, using conserve gives this dimension alongside getting some ginger into the sauce) and blend to a fine paste. Gently fry the prawns (timings here depend on if they are pre cooked or not, but neither take long) then when they are cooked/warmed through add the sauce. At this point I struggle for the word that describes how you know you are done, but when it smells right you know you are done. Serve on warm chapattis I buy mine but if you want to make them, finding a recipe for these is an exercise left to the reader.

If you think that is vague, my recipe for my idea of an excellent omelette is

More than enough eggs, too much cheese, a sufficiency of bacon, an uncomfortable amount of garlic and one tomato.

Anonymous V Scientology

You would think with all the furore over the Tom Cruise YouTube video recently that protests outside the offices of the Scientologists would be worth at least a small piece. Seems to be the case everywhere but England. Google news search has 47 hits round the world, including Edinburgh but London doesn't get a mention.

So given that even a little read blog like this spreading the news makes a difference have a blog account and another, oh plus some flickr pictures.

Now I will admit that I haven't personally looked into scientology in any depth so don't want to argue that what these people are doing is a force for good. But currently any protest against any issue or group you feel strongly against has to be encouraged to remind the government that we value it as a right. I hope that V for Vendetta masks don't get over used in this manner, we should of course save them for if we have to oust Gordon from number 10 when he throws away the next election but doesn't feel like leaving. I just have this feeling of impending doom that he will make Mrs. T's exit look utterly dignified.

Sunday 10 February 2008

To follow on

The feelings I have about the England Rugby team at the moment I just cannot put into words. The best way of explaining it is remembering watching the English Cricket team in the 80s.

I think I am going to rub chillies into open wounds, it will be far more pleasurable then watching the second half of that match.

One point that John Inverdale made during the coverage over the weekend that I would support, taking the Heineken pool stage scoring system for use in the six nations. I especially like the use of bonus points for close losses and multiple tries.

Saturday 9 February 2008

Can we just skip the Internationals?

Five matches into this years 6 Nations and I am already looking forward to it being all over. Then we can have the Heineken Cup knockout stages which will almost certainly be much better games of Rugby. Then it is a matter of waiting for the two UK rounds of the IRB sevens, admittedly England aren't doing well this year, but the action is so spectacular it is easy to just sit there and support anyone or indeed everyone! Of course the other good thing about the year ticking on is we will get some cricket in the right bloody time zone so I won't have to try and hide from the score until I can get to watch it.

Friday 8 February 2008

Suplimental

As per usual, the nastysphere[1] spew bile, I and others Jerk Knees come the sensible reasoned blog posts on the subject.
I want a google news mashup that adds a spleen rating to each instance of a related story and then maps it across the media spectrum.

[1]Still don't have a decent name for them.

Thursday 7 February 2008

As a stereotypical geek...

I do my fair share of Microsoft bashing, but I use their products when I think they are the best for the job (coincidently I am trying out Live Writer to make this post). I so far haven't had any great personal reaction to the idea of them buying Yahoo, in fact as long as they don't roger flickr senseless I don't really care. However I am genuinely happy that they along with Google, IBM, Yahoo and VeriSign have joined the OpenID Foundation. I love the idea behind OpenID, a transparent system of passing trust relationships round the internet without exposing any of your credentials; contrast it with the looks more like phishing than phishing itself approach of 3-D Secure (I know that in the not previously authorised flow for OpenID they are very similar but the fact that you can be already logged in by going to the URL you know with OpenID is the important difference). Companies like Microsoft, IBM and VeriSign have a lot of weight with serious thinking men who will look at this kind of technology and compare it with everything else they are running. Microsoft also offers a section of the young non-geek market with their messenger and hotmail accounts that this sort of concept needs to really make it.

The only real surprise with the current assault on everything open is that Sun isn't on this list.

Your help please

I need a word for a section of the reporting spectrum, you can probably imagine which papers are included, which bloggers, most commercial radio news fits in. The defining characteristics are those outlets that enrage me when they report anything that needs a shred of human decency. They will have used the term McALevel for a start. Any suggestions for a collective term for these bastards most welcome.
Today they are reporting a speech by Dr Rowan Williams about faith based law, they are mostly ignoring what he actually said which was measured, calm, and advised caution. It was about all faiths including other sections of Christianity who may feel they are not directly served. It was about civil issues, marital disputes or financial matters for example. What they are reporting is that he wants to introduce Sharia Law.
What none of them are reporting either is we have plenty of this happening on a semi-formal basis, backed by money from several bodies as an offshoot of the sharia councils. The other thing they are glossing over is how any of this is different from the rabbinical courts. If you are going to make a fuss about law from other faiths surely all of it bad? Of course all this has flared up at the smae time as the debate over the blasphemy laws.

Don't believe a word Gordon Brown says.

He defence in the court case brought by Stuart Wheeler of IG Group for breach of contract is that you can't trust what politicians say in manifesto promises.
"manifesto pledges are not subject to legitimate expectation" — Brown's personal barrister
Story from Trixy

Wednesday 6 February 2008

Chickens going cheap

At the end of Hugh and Jamie's week of programmes highlighting the plight of the humble meat chicken there was a faint whiff of optimism. A good chunk of the supermarkets gave indications of targets for reduction or eradication of products that didn't at least meet the RSPCA's Freedom Food standard.
Today's news about Tesco shows that there is still a long way to go. The government has stepped in to ensure that all egg production will have to conform to a minimum welfare standard, perhaps it is time they did the same for meat birds.

Tuesday 5 February 2008

The absolute and the rest.

I am, in part, a technologist, when in that mode and asked "can I do this" my answers are based on having translated the question into terms of "is it at all possible". The rest of the time I am a pragmatist and a solution provider and in that case I am answering the question in terms of business cases, cost-benefits or having to translate the question from some impenetrable non-technical (generally marketing based) misunderstanding.
When thinking about the political space I do my best to do my thinking in the latter mode, which is why I emitted a Homeric Doh! when I read this piece about the "Wilson Doctrine" by Nick Robinson. Of course no sitting prime minister would tie their hands like that without leaving a suitable loophole.
"But if there was any development of a kind which required a change in the general policy, I would, at such moment as seemed compatible with the security of the country, on my own initiative make a statement to the House about it." &mdash Harold Wilson
How, as a dedicated fan of Yes Prime Minister I didn't think about it in those terms I didn't know.

Quis cust... oh I can't be bothered the irony is lost on them.

This morning you were going to get a rant about the waste of space speaker Michael Martin and his "root and branch" review of MP's expenses or more accurately the fact that it is being conducted by a standing committee of MPs. They couldn't be bothered to find a tame cross bench lord after a juicy post enquiry position to whitewash the matter.
Then I read Guido's account of the MPs involved. If even half of his mud is the accurate sticky kind (I don't have time to go and check on its veracity at the moment) then it shows just how much respect Martin has for the public these days, he makes Derry Irvine look like a sensitive man of the people.
I really despair at quite how much common sense is lacking in the upper echelons of government in this country.

Sunday 3 February 2008

The "save Sir Ian next time" plan

A large number of people are rightly making a lot of fuss about the measures to allow the Home Secretary to replace coroners and mandate inquests be held without juries and the human rights issues therein. I shall allow those others to carry on with those arguments and put forward two of my own.
  1. This won't actually be used that often for any sinister human rights infringements, I know that anything that has potential to do so should be protested about, what it will be used for is to cover up embarrassment hence the title of this post. I was instantly reminded of the Spycatcher trial and all the measures that were suggested at the time to make sure that "this kind of thing can never happen again" and have the feeling that this is far more about saving the governments blushes than protecting those that risk their lives in the security services.
  2. That this is a measure designed to protect the police and security services is highlighted by it being a power given to the Home Secretary; coroner's courts are no longer her purview
    We are responsible for the law and policy governing coroners — Ministry of Justice
    if there really is a national security angle here then applications should be made to the Lord Chancellor/Secretary of State for Justice and even then it should probably be from the Attorney General not the Home Secretary.