Eyesight Restored with Stem Cells

Russell Turnbull from Consett, County Durham lost his sight in a chemical attack on his way home following a night out in Newcastle in 1994.

On his bus journey home he tried to intervene in an altercation between two men which eventually spilled into a fight.

When Turnbull attempted to break up the scuffle, one of the men began squirting ammonia around the bus. The chemical hit his right eye, causing great damage to his cornea, leaving him with severely impaired vision – a condition known as Limbal Stem Cell Deficiency (LSCD).

“I was in agony instantly, my eye was clamped shut,” he said.

“I went home and my mum tried to wash out the chemical and then I went to hospital”

“I was in hospital for two weeks and eventually I was able to open the eye again”.

LSCD is a painful, blinding disease that requires long-term, costly treatment with frequent clinic visits and intensive hospital admissions.

“It was like looking through scratched Perspex. My eye was sensitive to light, it was constantly watering. I was unable to drive as any bright light would cause me pain” he said

The vision loss due to LSCD makes this disease not only costly, but often requires social support due to the enormous impact on the patient’s quality of life. This is further magnified by the fact that LSCD mostly affects young patients.

After undergoing various treatments with creams and washes Turnbull became a guinea pig for trials towards his eventual stem cell procedure.

He was one of eight patients with impaired vision who have been treated successfully by surgeons at the North East England Stem Cell Institute.

The treatment involved using a tiny amount of stem cells from the good eye and growing them in a lab.

The growth was then implanted in the damaged eye, which then helped it to begin functioning as normal – eventually restoring sight.

Dr Francisco Figueiredo, a consultant eye surgeon, that led the project said:

“Corneal cloudiness has been estimated to cause blindness in eight million people world wide each year. This new treatment will alleviate patient suffering and remove the need for long term multiple medications as well as returning the patient to functional and social independence.”

Mr Turnbull said: “I can’t thank the staff at the RVI (Royal Victoria Infirmary) enough. This has transformed my life, my eye is almost as good as it was before the accident.

“I’m working, I can go jet-skiing again and I also ride horses. I have my life back thanks to the operation.”

Crime: Refusal to De-crypt

Exclusive The first person jailed under draconian UK police powers that Ministers said were vital to battle terrorism and serious crime has been identified by The Register as a schizophrenic science hobbyist with no previous criminal record.

His crime was a persistent refusal to give counter-terrorism police the keys to decrypt his computer files.
The 33-year-old man, originally from London, is currently held at a secure mental health unit after being sectioned while serving his sentence at Winchester Prison.

In June the man, JFL, who spoke on condition we do not publish his full name, was sentenced to nine months imprisonment under Part III of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). The powers came into force at the beginning of October 2007.

JFL told The Register he had scrambled the data on several devices as part of security measures for his business, a small software company.

He was arrested on 15 September 2008 by officers from the Metropolitan Police’s elite Counter-Terrorism Command (CTC), when entering the UK from France. Sniffer dogs at Gare du Nord in Paris detected his Estes model rocket, which was still in its packaging and did not have an engine.

On arrival at St Pancras, JFL was detained under the Terrorism Act and taken to Paddington Green police station, a highly secure facility where UK police hold their most dangerous suspects.

He was returning to the UK for an appointment with customs officials, to surrender after a missed bail appearance. This separate customs investigation – since dropped without charges – surrounded a failed attempt to enter Canada, and JFL missed bail following a move to the Netherlands. This contact with British authorities was apparently part of CTC’s decision to arrest JFL.

While interviewing him, CTC, the unit that in 2006 replaced Special Branch as the UK’s national counter-terror police, also seized more luggage. JFL had sent packages separately via Fedex to the Camden Lock Holiday Inn, where he had booked a room.

Throughout several hours of questioning, JFL maintained silence. With a deep-seated wariness of authorities, he did not trust his interviewers. He also claims a belief in the right to silence – a belief which would later allow him to be prosecuted under RIPA Part III.

A full forensic examination found nine nanograms of the high explosive RDX on his left hand, but JFL was given police bail. His passport was seized, however.

JFL says he does not know how the RDX, which has has military and civil applications, came to be on his hand. A result of five nanograms or less is routinely discounted by forensics and no charges were ever brought over his result of nine nanograms.

He returned to Paddington Green station as appointed on 2 December, and was re-arrested for carrying a pocket knife. During the interview CTC officers told JFL they wanted to examine the encrypted contents of the several hard drives and USB thumb drives they had seized from his Fedex packages.

Again he maintained silence. Police then warned him they would seek a section 49 notice under RIPA Part III, which gives a suspect a time limit to supply encryption keys or make target data intelligible. Failure to comply is an offense under section 53 of the same Part of the Act and carries a sentence of up to two years imprisonment, and up to five years imprisonment in an investigation concerning national security.

Following the warning he was bailed again, to reappear on 4 February.

GCHQ, home of NTAC

JFL did not attend the bail date. Instead he moved to Southampton, living in a series of temporary homes. He says he felt harassed by authority and helpless against police he believed were determined to pin a crime on him.

His disappearance led to a raid on 7 March this year. Officers bearing sub-machine guns broke down the door of JFL’s flat. He rang local police before realising CTC had come for him.

At the local Fareham police station he was served with the section 49 notice. Signed by CTC’s Superintendent Bell, it said: “I hereby require you to disclose a key or any supporting evidence to make the information intelligible.”

JFL maintained his silence throughout the one hour time limit imposed by the notice. He was charged with ten offences under section 53 of RIPA Part III, reflecting the multiple passphrases needed to decrypt his various implementations of PGP Whole Disk Encryption and PGP containers.

The list had been compiled by the National Technical Assistance Centre (NTAC), part of the intelligence agency GCHQ, which attempts to decipher encrypted files for intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

In his final police interview, CTC officers suggested JFL’s refusal to decrypt the files or give them his keys would lead to suspicion he was a terrorist or paedophile.

“There could be child pornography, there could be bomb-making recipes,” said one detective.

“Unless you tell us we’re never gonna know… What is anybody gonna think?”

JFL says he maintained his silence because of “the principle – as simple as that”.

He was also charged for his February missed bail appearance and for two attempts to get a new passport falsely claiming his was lost. He says CTC told him he would not get the one they had seized back, so he applied for a new one.

After three months on remand JFL faced trial on 2 June. He pleaded guilty to all the charges, wrongly believing he would be released that day with an electronic tag thanks to time served. Instead, taking into account the passport offences and missed bail, he received a total of 13 months.

Before finishing what would have been a six-and-a-half-month prison term during September, JFL was sectioned under the Mental Health Act. He now does not know when he will be released from hospital.

In his judgment, Judge Hetherington accepted JFL was no threat to national security and noted his outsider lifestyle. “You… wished to involve yourself in a world which was largely based upon the access to the internet and using computers and not really interacting with other people in the ordinary outside world to any great extent,” he said.

Steal This Book – ‘How to make pipe bombs’

“It is said on your behalf that you lead an existence rather akin to that of a monk, and that there is nothing sinister in any of this but it is essentially private matters and you do not see why you should have to disclose anything to the authorities.”

The judgment also took note of JFL’s unusual hobbies and interests. He describes himself as an “amateur scientist” and his Fedex packages contained lab equipment, putty, devil bangers (which explode with a snap when thrown to the ground and are sold in joke shops), a metal detector and body armour. He also had a book on gun manufacture, a book on methamphetamine production and an encryption textbook. All are available from Amazon.

JFL also had a copy of Steal This Book, Abbie Hoffman’s 1970s counter-culture bestseller. Judge Hetherington described it as “a book that detailed how to make a pipe bomb”.

Images of the evidence haul were sent to the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), an MoD agency that carries out assessments in explosives cases. A scientist wrote: “Some of the contents of the luggage could [DSTL's emphasis] be used for the manufacture of explosives or explosive devices but none of the items (as far as I could tell from the images) were obviously for this purpose and, with the exception of the throwdowns [devil bangers] and model rocket they all appeared to have other non-explosive uses.”

Judge Hetherington backed CTC’s initial suspicions. Added to the encrypted files, he said, the luggage made it “understandable in those circumstances that the various authorities were highly concerned initially as to whether there was some link to terrorism and a threat to national security”.

During sentencing, the judge seemingly confirmed that NTAC staff had been unsuccessful in their attempts to crack the encrypted files – or had not bothered trying. “To this day no one really has any idea as to what is contained in that equipment,” he said. One file encrypted using software from the German firm Steganos was cracked, but investigators found only another PGP container.

The suspicion of terrorism was dropped long before trial and JFL was sentenced under RIPA Part III as a general criminal rather than a threat to national security. Although he admitted guilt, JFL argues he did nobody any harm and the offences were all related to not cooperating fully with police.

Despite referencing his solitary existence, Judge Hetherington appeared not to know about JFL’s mental health problems and criticised him for not speaking to authorities.

Jack Straw – ‘We knew that terrorists were going to use this”

Abandoning normal court procedures, he said: “It was because I was satisfied you would not tell the Probation Service anything significant further that I saw no purpose in obtaining a pre-sentence report which is normally a prerequisite for someone of no previous convictions who has not previously received a prison sentence,” he said.

Sticking to normal procedure might have helped explain much of JFL’s behaviour in interviews and while on bail. Pre-sentence reports include mental health records and JFL himself sought psychiatric treatment once before, while a computer science student.

His given reason for not cooperating with CTC – the fact that a section 49 notice overrides the right to silence – echoes the original debate over RIPA and encryption. When the law was drafted at the end of the last decade it sparked protests from civil liberties groups and security experts.

In September 2001, shortly after his stint as Home Secretary, when he had introduced RIPA, Jack Straw took to the airwaves to defend the powers.

“It was government trying to put in place increased powers so that we could preserve and sustain our democracy against this new kind of threat,” he said in a Radio 4 interview.

“We needed to take powers so that we could de-encrypt commercially encrypted e-mails and other communications. Why? Because we knew that terrorists were going to use this.”

News that the first person jailed for the offence of not talking in a police interview has been judged no threat to national security and suffers from a mental condition associated with paranoia and a fear of authorities is unlikely to win RIPA Part III new supporters.

It will also be news to at least the part of government that administers the justice system. On 3 November, Claire Ward, a junior Minister in the Ministry of Justice told Parliament (http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2009-11-03c.296657.h&s=ripa#g296657.r0): “Up to the end of 2007 (latest available) there have been no persons reported to the Ministry of Justice as being cautioned, prosecuted or convicted under section 53 of the Act in England and Wales.

“The government are satisfied that offenses set in RIPA are appropriate and that the legislation is being used effectively”.

Surveillance Widens in U.K.

All telecom companies and internet service providers will be required by law to keep a record of every customer’s personal communications, showing who they have contacted, when and where, as well as the websites they have visited.

Despite widespread opposition to the increasing amount of surveillance in Britain, 653 public bodies will be given access to the information, including police, local councils, the Financial Services Authority, the ambulance service, fire authorities and even prison governors.

They will not require the permission of a judge or a magistrate to obtain the information, but simply the authorisation of a senior police officer or the equivalent of a deputy head of department at a local authority.

Ministers had originally wanted to store the information on a single government-run database, but chose not to because of privacy concerns.

However the Government announced yesterday it was pressing ahead with privately held “Big Brother” databases that opposition leaders said amounted to “state-spying” and a form of “covert surveillance” on the public.

It is doing so despite its own consultation showing that it has little public support.

The Home Office admitted that only one third of respondents to its six-month consultation on the issue supported its proposals, with 50 per cent fearing that the scheme lacked sufficient safeguards to protect the highly personal data from abuse.

The new law will increase the amount of personal data that can be obtained by officials through the controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), which is supposed to be used for fighting terrorism.

Although most private firms already hold details of every customer’s private calls and emails for their own business purposes, most only do so on an ad hoc basis and only for a period of several months.

The new rules, known as the Intercept Modernisation Programme, will not only force communications companies to keep their records for longer, but to expand the type of data they keep to include details of every website their customers visit, effectively registering every online click.

While public authorities will not be able to view the contents of these emails or phone calls, they can see the internet addresses, dates, times and identify recipients of calls.

Firms involved in storing the data, including Orange, BT and Vodafone, will be reimbursed at a cost to the taxpayer of £2 billion over 10 years.

Chris Grayling, the shadow home secretary, said he had fears about the abuse of the data. He said: “The big danger in all of this is ‘mission creep’. This government keeps on introducing new powers to tackle terrorism and organised crime which end up being used for completely different purposes. We have to stop that from happening”.

David Davis, the former shadow home secretary, added: “Whilst this is no doubt necessary in pursuing terrorist suspects, the proposals are so intrusive that they should be subject to legal approval, and should not be available except in pursuit of the most serious crimes.”

The Information Commissioner’s Office also opposed the moves.

“The Information Commissioner believes that the case has yet to be made for the collection and processing of additional communications data for the population as a whole being relevant and not excessive,” a spokesman said.

Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, has criticised the amount the scheme will cost for what he said is effectively “state spying”.

He added yesterday: “It is simply not that easy to separate the bare details of a call from its content. What if a leading business person is ringing Alcoholics Anonymous?”

Ministers said that they still have to work with the communications industry to find the correct way of framing the proposal in law — meaning it will not come before Parliament until after the general election. But the Home Office yesterday insisted it would push the legislation through. Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, originally released a consultation paper in April.

Only 29 per cent of respondents supported the Government approach. Meanwhile the communications providers themselves questioned the cost of the scheme and whether it was even technically feasible.

John Yates, Britain’s head of anti-terrorism, has argued that the legislation is vital for his investigators.

David Hanson, the Home Office minister, said: “The consultation showed widespread recognition of the importance of communications data in protecting the public .. we will now work with communications service providers and others to develop these proposals, and aim to introduce necessary legislation as soon as possible.”

U.K DNA Policy Changed

The British government said it would end the policy of indefinitely storing the DNA of people arrested but then cleared of crimes, following criticism from the European human rights court.

“Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said authorities would wipe out DNA and fingerprint samples of people who are arrested but not convicted of most crimes after six years,” reported the Associated Press. “Those arrested for serious crimes, including sexual violence and terrorism, will only have their details removed after twelve years, even if they are not convicted.”

However, civil liberties groups and political opponents said this was still too long and accused the government of dodging real reform.

The European court condemned Britain in a ruling last December for not destroying DNA samples of Michael Marper, a man accused but never charged of harassing his partner, and an unnamed 11-year-old acquitted of theft.

‘In one of the clearest ever condemnations of UK law, the court’s grand chamber of 17 judges said it had been ’struck by the blanket and indiscriminate nature’ of the government’s powers to take and keep DNA samples and digital profiles from anyone arrested in the UK (except Scotland) – a policy that has so far led to almost a million innocent people’s details being entered on a national DNA database,” reported the Guardian.

“The court said that because of the sensitive information contained in the biological samples used to generate DNA profiles, including information about health, race and sex, retaining these interfered with the right to respect for an individual’s private life. Under the current law the samples, usually taken from mouth swabs, can be kept indefinitely, even if a person is under 18 or never charged with an offence.”

The Strasbourg court noted Britain was the only one of the 47 members of the Council of Europe to authorize the indefinite preservation of personal data logged in police files of anyone suspected of committing an offense.

It ruled “there had been a violation of Article 8 (right to respect for private and family life) of the European Convention on Human Rights”.

“The current UK database holds some 4.5m records and has provided 400,000 crime scene matches over a decade,” reported the BBC.

“Supporters say it has played a key role in some ‘cold case’ crimes where serious offenders have been caught – or innocent people cleared – many years after the original investigation.”

Shami Chakrabarti, head of civil liberties group Liberty, said: “Wholly innocent people — including children — will have their most intimate details stockpiled for years on a database that will remain massively out of step with the rest of the world.”

U.K. Protests, Spying Government, Greedy Bankers

Today one of Britain’s most senior police officers with responsibility for public order raises the spectre of a ’summer of rage’, with victims of the increasingly bitter recession taking to the streets in possibly violent protest.

Superintendent David Hartshorn, who heads the Metropolitan police’s public order branch, warned that law-abiding middle-class individuals who would never have considered joining demonstrations may now seek to vent their anger through protests this year.

Many will consider such a scenario unlikely, or point out this has not been the ‘British way’ over the past two decades.

Violent protests take place in Europe – in recent weeks Greek farmers have blocked roads over falling agricultural prices, a million workers in France took to the streets to demand greater protection for their jobs and wages and Icelandic demonstrators have clashed with police in Reykjavik – but not here.

But can we really be so sure? The public’s rage with the banks and the Government is growing by the day.

Thousands are losing their jobs through no fault of their own because bankers who made millions during the good times are calling in the loans which their employers need to stay afloat.

Homes are being repossessed across the country, but not the penthouse flats and country piles of bank bosses who thought nothing of taking home vast seven-figure bonuses, and consider £1 million a year a modest income.

Protesters expressed anger at being made to pay for the folly of those who caused the financial collapse

The innocent are being punished while the guilty continue to lead affluent lives.

As Ken Macdonald, the former Director of Public Prosecutions says today: ‘If you mug someone in the street and you are caught, the chances are that you will go to prison. In recent years, mugging someone out of their savings or their pension would probably earn you a yacht.’

Add to this a second issue highlighted by Sir Ken: the march of the surveillance state.

Ministers have been spending their time focussing on eroding our most treasured individual freedoms, while doing little or nothing to curb criminal behaviour by the banks.

The DNA database containing the samples of hundreds of thousands of entirely innocent people…the largest number of CCTV cameras in the world…anti-terrorist powers being deployed against dog foulers…restrictions on telling religious jokes…

All of these intrusive, liberty-sapping polices were developed while the banks were blowing billions on reckless sub-prime lending.

How much better a place Britain would be today if Labour had focussed on regulating the banks and getting a grip on the shambolic, toothless Financial Services Authority, rather than building a surveillance state.

That the public is being watched by Big Brother at every turn is deeply alarming. That the innocent were being tracked going about their every day lives while a blind eye was being turned to a financial sector apparently hell-bent on destruction is unforgivable.

Thus, the idea of the ’summer of rage’ may not be as far-fetched as it first appears.

Superintendent Hartshorn talks of the banks, particularly those that still pay large bonuses despite receiving billions in taxpayer money, becoming ‘viable targets’. Likewise, the headquarters of multinational companies and other financial institutions in the City which are being blamed for the financial crisis.

It is to their eternal shame that our banks should find themselves in such a position, and that Labour – while eroding the civil liberties Britain has fought so hard to defend over the centuries – was prepared to sit back and allow it to happen.