Miraculously, modern technology has come up “the face of Jack the Ripper“. Although the image has been constructed using new technology, it’s not as if the Victorian force could not have knocked together an artist’s impression of the serial killer if witness statements matched: the problem was, they didn’t.

The BBC quotes Metropolitan Police Commander John Grieve, who rightly states:

“It’s a popular misconception that nobody ever saw the murderer, that he just vanished into the fog of London. Well that’s just not right. There were witnesses at the time who were highly thought of by the police. If we were doing this investigation today, we could pool together all these descriptions and the kind of face that the police were clearly looking for.”

Where I tend to disagree with him is this:

“This is further than anyone else has got,” he said. “It would have been enough for coppers to get out and start knocking on doors… they would have got him.”

And not just because the coppers did go door to door at the time.

In some cases, witnesses’ descriptions – and they exist, although there are not many – flatly contradict each other. It’s virtually impossible to know which were accurate, which were fabricated, and which were describing men other than the murderer (or someone guilty of a “non-canonical” murder). It becomes a matter of deciding, based on little information from over a century ago, which witnesses you trust – and that makes any composite image suspect.

This is all in aid of a documentary on Five tomorrow. Apparently, “investigators have even been able to pinpoint his address” – although that’s not quite what one of them says:

“We can name the street where he probably lived; and we can see what he looked like; and we can explain, finally, why this killer eluded justice.”

Hmm. In case you can’t tell, I have my doubts. I’ll tune in anyway to see if their method of picking an address is any better than plotting the murder sites on a map and picking a street in the middle.

The new Liberal Democrat party political broadcast will be on TV this evening. Here’s a sneak preview. In keeping with a regular theme of this blog, see if you can spot three Doctor Who guest stars in this clip. Two of them were also in Blake’s 7. It’s pretty easy if you’re a fanboy – answers in the comments please.


Hang on, that’s not right. My mistake. Easily done. Here’s the new LibDem film:


That’s more like it. All hail Ming!

theguardian, working with No2ID, have carried out an excellent investigation into the new “more secure” biometric passports, of which three million are already in circulation. These passports contain information on RFID chips – entirely unnecessary for a valid passport – from which a hacker can extract your biometric information, making it possible to clone the information into a forged passport. So much for security.

Compare the reactions. Nick Clegg:

“Three million people now have passports that expose them to a greater risk of identity fraud than before. We need an urgent redesign of the biometric passport and a recall of all insecure passports once a new protected design is available. In the interim the government should provide commercially available RFID-shields for passports to those with the insecure design.”

The Home Office:

“This doesn’t matter.”

And these people want us to trust them with our biometric data on a giant national database.

While we’re talking about civil liberties, here’s an excellent quote about 90-day internment from today’s Telegraph via Radio 4’s newspaper review:

Habeas corpus is a fundamental part of the British constitution. The liberty of subjects must not be subordinated to the preferences of a prime minister, however trustworthy, or to the convenience of police forces. Mr Blair sometimes acts as if being locked in a cell for 13 weeks was equivalent to waiting for holiday snaps to come back from the developer.

The Prime Minister’s website has a new petitions system set up by those clever people at mySociety. It’s currently in beta test but there are plenty of petitions already up there (some saner than others). While I don’t hold out much hope of the Government taking much notice of these (except by cherry-picking the ones with which it already agrees), they take only a few seconds to sign and there are some worthwhile issues.

The two I’ve signed this morning are two of the most popular:

• scrap the proposed introduction of ID cards
• create a new exception to copyright law that gives individuals the right to create a private copy of copyrighted materials for their own personal use, including back-ups, archiving and shifting format

The first is a new anti-ID cards petition, so even if you’ve signed one before it’s worth adding your name here too.