Insidious infiltration

I regularly read Dizzy Thinks, who had this article linking to this article in the Daily Mail (well, it could have been the Mail on Sunday) about how there are 8 "Al Qaeda" "sleepers" or sympathisers on the police.

Well, it has to be said this is to be expected. They are not stupid and this sort of thing, or rather attempts at doing this sort of thing are to be expected. The shock is, it seems to me that there are not systems to vet applicants so that this does not happen.

What concerns me more, because it is less easy to spot and is not yet high on the agenda is the way state officials from some communities are playing a part in "honour" killings by looking people up on state databases or indeed bank and other systems to tell families where their "errant" offspring" are.

I heard that on an edition of BBC Radio 4's File on 4 program on honour killings. We all have unique identification numbers of one form or another whether it is a National Insurance number or bank account or credit card number. These are all stored in databases accessed by a variety of members of staff. All any community needs, and often in the case of honour killings many members of the community are in support of them, is someone on "the inside" and then if the said child uses their credit card, national Insurance number or notifies a change of address and then they know where they are.

Yet this government wants to ignore that problem but create an over arching database that will allow any criminal gang access to the data they need to track down anyone they want as long as they have someone one "the inside".

Scary isn't it?