Jamie Buchan, Sarah Anderson, and Katrina Morrison have published a 'Criminal Justice in Scotland' textbook 📚🍷📖👏

I had the joy of chairing their well attended book launch today.

It has gone straight onto #Criminology Uni reading lists.
🔗
www.routledge.com/Criminal-Jus...
@kmmorrison.bsky.social

📣 Germany's close to reversing its opposition to mass surveillance & private message scanning, & backing the Chat Control bill. This could end private comms-& Signal-in the EU.

Time's short and they're counting on obscurity: please let German politicians know how horrifying their reversal would be.

Hey look www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Has this all be throught through. In short, this has all the makings of another fiasco like the Post Office scandal. People will be wrongly denied access to basic services, employment, and other aspects of day to day life when this all breaks down.

On the BritCard - in theory better government systems are a great idea, but implementing it requires very high levels of management competence to cope with the ambition and complexity; the costs will correspondingly be very high.

Systems like this need real institutional legitimacy to work.

netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2025/09/26/t... great overview of the history and evidence on ID cards by Wendy

The other countries where this kind of digital ID has been implemented are far smaller, and don’t have our appalling track record of expensive government IT disasters.

There are absolutely real cybersecurity risks as well - not least, from the people with legitimate access to the system. For example, every year more than half of the prosecutions under the Computer Misuse Act are of serving police officers caught misusing their access to police databases.

Linking together all these different government systems and databases and tying them to a single point of truth about you - the obsession of the Tony Blair Institute - is going to be incredibly complicated, and is a disaster waiting to happen.

This isn’t just about ID - most people have some form of ID, and digital ID systems can be designed well and preserve our privacy and basic rights. It’s about the particular design of this system and what they want to achieve with it.

Nominal popular support for SOME kind of digital ID v different to support for this specific system brought in by this specific government. Would be interesting to see if the polling being thrown around for ID card popularity is the same in a month once the policy irrevocably associated w/ Starmer.

When combined with the ‘sex-based’ papers please approach being trailed by Streeting for public institutions, this has the potential to be a massive further clampdown on access to public life for trans people in the UK

Also important to ask - how will trans people, ever the punching bag of this govt and the assembled UK press, be represented in this single point of truth about the data self?

On why the #UK #LabourParty is increasingly looking like an arm of US platform capitalism...

When combined with the ‘sex-based’ papers please approach being trailed by Streeting for public institutions, this has the potential to be a massive further clampdown on access to public life for trans people in the UK

Also important to ask - how will trans people, ever the punching bag of this govt and the assembled UK press, be represented in this single point of truth about the data self?

It’s Labour’s conference week, so the Government is announcing digital ID cards and re-announcing its politically-controlled centralised database of all of your medical notes.

medconfidential.org/2025/single-...

Also hard to see a ‘Brit card’ going down particularly well in the devolved nations.

The attempt to link this to a nationalist and frankly racist border politics in particular is liable to simultaneously double down on the anti immigrant rhetoric of Reform and conspiracist far right narratives playing off the real issues of UK surveillance overreach.

www.theguardian.com/politics/202... This is an extremely dangerous idea to propose right now. We can argue on civil liberties and privacy aspects, but the one thing systems like this need is institutional legitimacy, something that the UK’s media and political elite have been torching in recent yrs.

The Tor Project has joined the Rust Foundation as an Associate Member! Read the announcement to learn more about our investment in the Rust Project: rustfoundation.org/media/rust-f...

Labour’s plan for compulsory digital ID risks creating a more authoritarian state.

Under constant surveillance, we would have to pass through digital checkpoints just to live our daily lives — with even more barriers for minorities, migrants and the digitally excluded.

Also hard to see a ‘Brit card’ going down particularly well in the devolved nations.