The new ban includes underwear and stationery. It's not about restricting what inmates read, it's about enforcing the new 'earned privileges' regime.

Books and magazines sent into UK prisons are already censored. For example, porn is now banned.

Google does have a way to report spam;

Other than the bloody huge 'Report spam' button, the same size and right next to the 'delete' button, that is.

Ask, and you shall receive! ;-)

Just two off the top of my head:

Tamil Tigers (yes, atheist suicide bombers, no less!)

INLA

I'm sure there are plenty of other (pretty much by definition atheist) Marxist-Leninist terrorist groups.

British citizens are citizens, not subjects. It says so right on the passport.

In other British news, it's not foggy in London all the time, and no-one wears a bowler hat.

Absolutely. If I was a suicide bomber, this is exactly where I'd explode my bomb. I reckon I could get a devastating quantity of explosive in a carry-on bag and detonate it in the snake-line. Also get an accomplice to do the same in a check-in line with a full-size suitcase packed with HE.

While it might not have the glamour of bringing down an aircraft, no matter where the TSA or local equivalent move the security line to (pre-security security, pre-security security security...), passengers are still vulnerable to this attack. I can't see a practical defence against it.

It's truly chilling that they could do this trivially, tomorrow.

The Guardian supported the Iraq war, which doesn't seem very hard-left or anti-American.

Perhaps the world is not black and white.

The new Paperwhite starts shipping on September 30th.

Says it right there on Amazon.com.

By the time the plane is out of the airport zone, it is too high for the phone to have any contact with cell towers - whose antenna don't point up in the sky.

How do you explain the many calls made from United Airlines Flight 93?

In the UK, there are legally sanctioned surveillance cameras (with a great deal of public support) in public places and on public transport -- where you have no reasonable expectation of privacy.

In the US, the government illegally bug everyone as though the constitution doesn't apply to them.

And illegally holding David Miranda for nine hours and demanding that the Guardian smash a few laptops is hardly on the same level as what the US government is up to.

However he was _required_ to answer all questions, no matter how irrelevant to a case, asked by the police.

While this has been widely reported to be the case, it's not technically true.

From the statute:

2 (1) An examining officer may question a person to whom this paragraph applies for the purpose of determining whether he appears to be a person falling within section 40(1)(b).

40(1)(b) says:

40 Terrorist: interpretation.

(1) In this Part “terrorist” means a person who—
(a) has committed an offence under any of sections 11, 12, 15 to 18, 54 and 56 to 63, or
(b) is or has been concerned in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism.

So the officer is allowed to ask any questions in order to determine if the detainee is a terrorist, and the detainee is compelled to answer those questions.

But the officer isn't given the power to ask any questions on any matter he likes, and the detainee is therefore not required to answer them.

Obviously, the schedule 7 powers are ripe for abuse, and have been abused in abused in this case. MIranda claims he wasn't asked any questions about terrorism at all.

Miranda says he's going to sue, and he has a good case.

Yeah, Scotland isn't known at all for having any nationalist pride.

It's not like they made a fucking movie about it or anything.....

Oh yeah! I've seen that one:

TOMMY: Doesn't it make you proud to be Scottish?

RENTON: I hate being Scottish. We're the lowest of the fucking low, the scum of the earth, the most wretched, servile, miserable, pathetic trash that was ever shat into civilization. Some people hate the English, but I don't. They're just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonized by wankers. We can't even pick a decent culture to be colonized by. We are ruled by effete arseholes. It's a shite state of affairs and all the fresh air in the world will not make any fucking difference.

;-)

Thanks, I must have glossed over the fact that they can't prove that they instructed the contractor to destroy the data.

But still the issue remains that verifying that the data has been destroyed is more work than destroying the data, so is the ICO really saying that responsibility for data security cannot be subcontracted?

Personally, I hope so. But like I say, it flies in the face of privatisation dogma.

I don't really get this. The NHS contracts out the disposal of the machines to a private contractor, who then royally screws up, and it's the fault of the NHS?

Surely the responsibility lies with the contractor?

FTA:

“Should they [the contractor] be accountable? Definitely not, because NHS Surrey have been entrusted with the welfare of their patients. Should the contractor be responsible? Absolutely, yes,” Jones added.

This seems to me an argument that the NHS cannot outsource or subcontract anything.

What is NHS Surrey supposed to do in this scenario? Use in-house people to analyse the machines to make sure there is no data remaining before disposing of them?

Or just keep data-disposal services in-house? Personally, I think this would be a great idea, but it goes against the dogmatic 'privatise absolutely everything possible' trend in the UK.

“We should not have to tell organisations to think twice, before outsourcing vital services to companies who offer to work for free.”

Except they didn't work for free: they worked for the salvage value. I can't really see how the low value of the contract proves fault.