Triplesourced

Ok, so this is outside of my main area of focus of sustainable and green tech but I do track some security issues too. I was at a meeting last week with Microsoft's security advisor and ex-FBI agent Ed Gibson (speaking at the RSA Security Conference, in London on 27 October) who told us to expect some news about a new e-crime unit and seems he was spot on as a message to that effect has just landed in my in-box.

Having spoken to some ex National High Tech Crime Unit coppers, none of them seemed very happy to see the NHTCU collapsed into the Serious and Organised Crime Unit (SOCA) - so maybe this new unit will go some way to make up for that. Then it could just add another confusing layer to an already muddled strategy that has to be one of the reasons why companies are so backwards in coming forwards about reporting e-crime (that and the obvious brand damage etc)

Here's the release in full:

A new £7M police unit dedicated to tackling cyber crime and clamping down on internet fraud was announced by e-crime Minister Vernon Coaker today.

The new Police Central e-crime Unit (PCeU) will provide specialist officer training and co-ordinate cross-force initiatives to crack down on on-line offences.

E-crime is a global menace, and with an estimated 80-90 percent of crime on the internet (excluding crime relating to children or images of child sexual abuse) believed to be fraud-related the unit will focus on supporting the new National Fraud Reporting Centre (NFRC) when it comes into operation in 2009. It will also work closely with other crime fighting agencies to tackle international and serious organised crime groups operating on the internet.

E-crime Minister Vernon Coaker said:

"It is important that we stay one step ahead of criminals who increasingly use sophisticated computer networks and the internet to commit and facilitate crime.

"The new PCeU will work closely with the NFRC to tackle electronic crime reported to it. This will ensure that the NFRC has support in this highly specialised area.

"The PCeU will also play a vital role in helping police forces across the country improve skills and techniques needed to clamp down on e-crime."

Based in the Metropolitan Police Service, the PCEU will work with the National Fraud Reporting Centre and support the development of the police response to e-crime across the country.

Deputy Assistant Commissioner Janet Williams, Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) lead for e-crime, said:

"I am delighted that the Home Office has confirmed funding for this new unit that ACPO and law enforcement agencies have been developing. We can now work towards creating a national coordination centre to combat e-crime in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

"It is our aim to improve the police response to victims of e-crime by developing the capability of the Police Service. We will be coordinating the law enforcement approach to all types of e-crime, and providing a national investigative capability for the most serious e-crime incidents."

Attorney General Baroness Scotland said:

"It is widely recognised that e-crime is the most rapidly expanding form of criminality and knows no borders. The network is a good example of the UK leading on an international initiative which improves our capability to prosecute e-crime.

"The new e-crime unit will work closely with the National Fraud Reporting Centre and National Fraud Intelligence Bureau, both currently in development, recognising the fact the majority of e-crime is fraud-related. I believe this relationship will deliver a strong and emphatic response to fraudsters and help encourage public confidence in electronic services and communication."

City of London Police Commissioner Mike Bowron said:

"The City of London Police as lead force for fraud welcomes the Government's decision to fund a police e-crime unit. Once established, the unit will work closely with the City of London Police and other agencies as a key partner within the national fraud programme."

The Serious Organised Crime Association's Deputy Director for E-crime Sharon Lemon said:

"SOCA fully supports and welcomes the formation of the new Police Central e-Crime Unit. In conjunction with the National Fraud Reporting Centre, this will add real clarity to the reporting mechanisms for internet crime in the UK. SOCA looks forward to working closely with both bodies to gain a much more detailed picture of the nature of this crime. This will greatly assist in identifiying any aspects of Organised Crime's involvement in it, and enable SOCA to better fulfill its remit of tackling the most serious criminality and the consequent harm it causes to the UK."

Notes to editors:

1. The PCeU will receive £3.5M of Government funding and £3.9M from the Metropolitan Police Service over three years. The unit will also seek support from industry partners. The unit is expected to be operational in spring 2009.

2. Its creation builds on proposals by ACPO for increasing capacity and capability within the police service to get to grips with modern forms of hi-tech internet crime.

3. The Met will run the PCeU as a national resource, in conjunction with the National Fraud Reporting Centre and the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau.

4. The PCeU will not overlap with existing organisations such as SOCA's e-crime unit or with CEOP, both of which have different and separate responsibilities, but the PCeU and these organisations will communicate regularly and will work together if required.

5. The ACPO Press Office can be contacted via 020 7084 8946/47/48 (office hours) or via 07803 903686 (out of office hours).

6. ACPO is an independent, professionally led strategic body. In the public interest and, in equal and active partnership with Government and the Association of Police Authorities, ACPO leads and co-ordinates the direction and development of the police service in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. In times of national need ACPO, on behalf of all chief officers, coordinates the strategic policing response.

7. ACPO's 341 members are police officers of Assistant Chief Constable rank (Commanders in the Metropolitan Police and City of London Police) and above, and senior police staff managers, in the 44 forces in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and other forces such as British Transport Police and States of Jersey Police.

Not got time to digest this at the moment but here's the information from the government press office on the trial of the ID Card scheme which happened a couple of hours ago:

(Home Office) First ID card unveiled by Home Secretary as scheme builds momentum

The first UK Identity Card was unveiled today by the Home Secretary. Building on the Government's commitment to begin issuing the first ID cards to foreign nationals from November 2008, the card's design was revealed for the first time.

The new credit-card sized document will show the holder's photograph, name, date of birth, nationality and immigration status. A secure electronic chip will also hold their biometric details, including fingerprints, and a digital facial image.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said:

"Today shows we are delivering on our commitment to introduce the National Identity Scheme in order that we can enjoy its benefits as quickly as possible.

"ID cards will help protect against identity fraud, illegal working, reduce the use of multiple identities in organised crime and terrorism, crack down on those trying to abuse positions of trust and make it easier for people to prove they are who they say they are.

"ID cards for foreign nationals will replace old-fashioned paper documents, make it easier for employers and sponsors to check entitlement to work and study, and for the UK Border Agency to verify someone's identity. This will provide identity protection to the many here legally who contribute to the prosperity of the UK, while helping prevent abuse."

Compulsory identity cards for foreign nationals will kick start the National Identity Scheme, with the first applicants having to apply for cards from 25 November.

Within three years all foreign nationals applying for leave to enter or remain in the UK will be required to have a card, with around 90 per cent of foreign nationals in Britain covered by the scheme by 2014/15.

To ensure the benefits of the programme are felt from the start, the UK Border Agency will start with categories that have been targeted by those wanting to abuse our immigration system, including students and people seeking leave to remain on the basis of marriage. The introduction of the first card supports the Government's tough new Australian-style Points Based System for managed migration. To earn and retain their licence as a sponsor businesses and education providers must keep records of the migrants they have sponsored including, in time, a copy of a migrant's identity card. Businesses found employing illegal workers face fines of up to £10,000 per person.

The introduction of cards for foreign nationals will be followed by the first ID cards for British citizens, targeting workers in sensitive roles and locations like airports from 2009. Then from 2010 ID cards will be available to young people who want them and from 2011/12 cards will be available to the general population. The introduction of ID cards will provide a convenient and secure means to protect identity by locking it to one person using their fingerprints.

Tom Hadley, Director of External Relations of the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC), said:

"Recruitment professionals in the front-line of the UK labour market play an increasingly pivotal role in checking the identity, background and status of individual job seekers.

"Within this context measures to simplify the checking requirements can be welcomed and must be backed with an extensive communication programme. Recruiters take their responsibilities to verify an individual's right to work in the UK extremely seriously and support initiatives to enhance safe and ethical recruitment."

Julian Gravatt, Association of Colleges' Director of Funding and Development, said:

"Issuing ID cards to overseas students should assist in the reduction of identity fraud.

"Colleges welcome any measure which facilitates the recruitment of genuine students to study in the UK and the economic benefits this brings."

Tim Cowen, Director of Communications for NCP Services, said:

"This is good news for employers, and a credit to the work the UKBA has done to help make the hiring of migrant workers more streamlined for UK organisations.

"Employers will, quite rightly, still need to make sure their systems for spotting forgeries are robust, but the biometric cards will cut down on fraud and make it easier for us to do this.

"Crucially, it will also help those who genuinely have the right to work in the UK get employment quickly - since it will be easier to check their identity and get them working."

This builds on the successful delivery of other work to ensure the integrity of our borders. So far:

* 2.8 million visa applicants have been fingerprinted;

* 3,500 cases of identity swap in the UK have been identiifed and dealt with; and

* over 12.5 mill

You can either look at this as a pilot which may completely fail or the first beach-head in the government's attempt to get us to all to adopt ID Cards.

At 11.30 on Thurs, Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, is set to show off the first National ID Card to journalists at an event at the Home Office. The card is only going to be aimed at immigrants initially who will have to carry the card from November.

Expect more on this later when the press has had time to question the Home Secretary.

A lot of companies out there would like us to believe that data centres can somehow be green. But as one data centre builder admitted to me this week, "Anyone who claims they have a green data centre is lying". Data centres are just inherently unsustainable places.

According to a report last year from the charity, Global Action Plan, An Inefficient Truth, the intensive power requirements needed to run and cool data centres now account for around a quarter of the ICT sector's C02 emissions. Another report from the US Environmental Protection Agency that in the USA in 2006, 1.5 percent of national electricity demand came from energy consumption in data centres.

The other thing about data centres is that they cost a lot of money to run. Expensive kit and building costs aside, power and cooling eats electricity and consequentially buckets of cash. In an effort to grab the zeitgeist of saving money and being green, data centre specialist Migration Solutions has launched what it claims is the "industry's first tool to provide a 360 degree view of the environmental impact and performance of data centres". The company claims that by cross referencing and analysing about 120 different data points , the audit acts as a "health check on the data centre's environmental impact".

Now some of that will seem like greenwash - basically a financially motivated data centre audit dressed up as environmentally sustainable - but Migration's MD Alex Rabbetts, a 20 year veteran of the data centre industry has some interesting things to say about how data centres are managed and his industry's basic lack of thinking about efficiency - and cardboard!

Yep, it seems that just by getting the rid of the cardboard from a data centre you can get it to run more efficiently. Cardboard courses dust, and dust is the enemy of the data centre, it clogs cooling fans and makes the whole system work harder and run hotter. The problem is that data centres are magnets for cardboard. Whereas your PC comes fully assembled in one or two boxes, servers come in up to fifteen different boxes, with all the different components individually wrapped in evil cardboard.

So according to Rabbetts, forget Fresh Air cooling or siting your server in Iceland, one of the key things you can do as a data centre owner is make it very clear to hardware vendors where to stick their excess packaging.

Just seen this in from IT charity Computer AId which takes old PCs from UK companies and refurbishes them for the developing world.

The organisation has launched a petition calling on the government to give the Environment Agency enough funds to be able to police the WEEE supply chain effectively - and fight dumping of e-waste in developing countries.

“The Environment Agency must be provided with the resources to police e-waste, prosecute anyone involved in a supply chain that results in the dumping of e-waste and remove licences from organisations in breach of the WEEE legislation," says Louise Richards, chief executive of Computer Aid.

Apparently the Environment Agency has had its funding cut by up to a third over recent years and just doesn't have the man-power to either make sure vendors are complying with WEEE or to inspect shipments that are supposed to be legitimate containers of re-used PCs for the developing world but can be just be e-waste destined for scrap heaps and child labour in countries such as India.

"It’s imperative that the government clamps down on fraudulent traders posing as legitimate re-use and recycling organisations, who are enticing unwitting UK businesses to use them for disposal of electrical equipment," says Louise Richards, chief executive of Computer Aid.

Computer Aid also highlights how it thinks existing legislation is failing to hold manufacturers to account if their products are found dumped in developing countries. Tony Roberts, founder and director of International Programmes, says producers/vendors need to take responsibility for the products they are placing into the global market.

“Under the Producer Pays principle of the WEEE directive, producers of electrical equipment are responsible for funding the end of life recycling of equipment within the European Union, but no such legislation exists for the millions of electronic products sold in Africa, Latin America and Asia," says Roberts.

"Producers should be made to accept the producer pays principle on a global scale, and take responsibility for the safe recycling of products in developing countries. They must also consider the design of their products and reduce their use of hazardous substances in the manufacturing process, so they can be more easily recycled," he adds.

Computer Aid claims it has refurbished more than 130,000 PCs and laptops in it ten year history which are being used to support e-learning, e-health, e-inclusion and e-agriculture projects in countries such as Kenya, Madagascar and Zambia.

The organisation claims that asset tracking ensures all computers can be traced to the exact hospital, school or project they are benefiting - avoiding the kind of accusations of e-waste dumping that have been leveled at some organisations that send old IT kit to the developing world.