ARM WITH OF SCIENCE

The National Police Computer Bank being established at Hendon, north London, will store data on more than 2 mil lion citizens.

What information is kept on the computer about each individual is not known. There will certainly be the obvious things-full date and place of birth, nam last known address and even physical description.

But will the police computerize ALL its records of private citizens? If so, the files will contain political informaIt will also include information of any political grouping to which a person belongs, his record of trade union militancy and the names of his associates.

If this information is not specifically included in the computer bank when it opens in 1974, then it soon will be. The Home Office cannot disguise the fact that it is now spending more money and appointing more personnel on Special Branch work.

The Special Branch is not a regional squad; it is the only national branch of the police force and the quick transmission of its information from one centre to the next is regarded as an essential technological requirement.

Plans for the police data bank were announced in 1969 by the late Lord Stonham, a junior Labour minister at the Home Office.

He couched the announcement In extravagant praise about the need for the police to keep pace with the modern criminal. He promised that the scheme would be inaugurated in 1971 as part of Labour's great drive against crime. The scheme was nothing of the sort. It was the fulfilment of à long-cherished alm of the ruling class to establish a national public surveillance system along the lines developed by the FBI in America.

The police and the army had learnt through bitter experience in Ulster that the ack of basic intelligence information-names, addresses fingerprints, photographs, and political associations - is serious handicap when attempting to smash social unrest.

When the first officers of army intelligence arrived in Ulster they were astonished to find that the local Special Branch and army had so little information on the republican and civil rights organizations.

'We had to start from the beginning,' one army officer stated.

He said that the RUC operated on the basis that various senior officers had 'special knowledge' of leaders in one or two groups. But nothing was kept on file. one of the officers went holiday we were left witł any information. The situa was ludicrous,' he said.

LIFE HISTORIES Professor Alan Westin, noW conducting a series of demic investigations in Britain on the use of computers in local government, has written extensively Big Brother" techniques used in the US.

Westin says that the private lives of tens of millions of Americans are stored on computers, private and governmental. The Retail Credit Company maintains dossiers on 42 million people. In the security Pentagon listed 14 million life histories and in those of the civil service 8 million.

The FBI refuses to disclose its figures, but its number of personal records is reckoned about 20 million. these, at least 100,000 are described as 'reds'.

Sensing the necessity of the state to increase its surveillance techniques, the larger computer corporations have been expanding their knowconstructing more sophisticated data banks. The Precision Instrument Company of Palo Alto, California, has demonstrated the model of a new laser process capable of putting 645 million bits information on one square inch of tape.

single unit containing one 4,800 foot reel of one-inch plastic tape, using the laser memory capable sprocess, storing in digital form up to 20 pages of datathat is, about 5,000 words of typing-for every man, woman child in America.

Any information needed from an individual's dossier could be extracted in not more than four minutes, while the entire dossier could printed out for despatch to an inquirer in a few more minutes. Ten such reels could provide 200-page dossiers on the entire population while 100 reels could record their life histories from birth to death!

Writing about velopments, journalist Nigel Calder has said: 'Government departments will presumably make wholesale use of the system, thereby increasing their efficiency and making better use of the information known severally to them. The authority power state will be increased and, to the extent that various partments keep tabs on citizens, suveillance of the activities alder consluded nty de.

scribing emergence these techniques as 'an infrastructure of tyranny.

The unit masterminding the police data bank in Britain was set up under the direction of the Labour Cabinet in 1964. " One of the leading lights in this little known outfit, the Police Scientific Development Branch, is Mr Geoffrey Philips, a physicist who three years ago transferred from an army research establishment to 'the science of internal security' Beginning with only a handful of personnel, this obscure branch now has an annual £750,000 budget. Only recently it opened new laboratories north of St Albans.

Commenting on the branch's rames growth, recent nancial said recently: 'The scientists work closely with industry, usually with companies experienced in advanced techniques for national defence. A few weeks ago they began the experimental stage a £500,000 scheme in Birmingham with Ferranti as their industrial partner in which an entire police force of 2,500 men and some hundreds of vehicles has been brought under the control of a central computer, complete with visual displays for the inspectors of the resources of each subdivision. The computer is kept constantly informed of the whereabouts of each man and vehicle on the beat, through radio to his sub-divisional controller, who relays the information to the data bank. In this way the computer provides a visual display of police resources in any sub-division that has received a 999 call.' The electronic control room at Birmingham police • station which • records the movement of all police vehicles in the scene of a crime and those on the official record.

The opening of the computer centre based near the Hendon Police Training College has been postponed on several occasions.

The reasons for this are both complex and revealing. First of all the project has turned out to be much more files of Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle be mitted to code? quickly comWhat sounded like a good idea to the police at the time rapidly turned into a bureaucratic nightmare with literally millions of pieces of information needing to be reduced to computer symbols.

Another unforeseen obstacle amount of police corruption is notoriously high.

It is interesting to recall that earlier this year a senior Lancashire officer, Harold Prescott, was brought to London to conduct an inquiry into a drugs scandal involving officers in the metropolitan force. It was common knowledge that during his inquiries VILLA establish the surveillance th As the cr capitalism wo ployment gro soar, the Torie will face civ massive:-scale. this situation 1 tools of repr disposal.

P. J. ARKELL.

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