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I'm not sure whether to tip my hat to Linda Jack for highlighting this non-story or to criticize her for regurgitating excitedly and in the manner of a parrot a scurrilous and unthinking story from the Torygraph that Chris Huhne owns shares in surveillance firm.

By James Kirkup, Political Correspondent
Last Updated: 3:07am GMT 03/11/2007

Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat leadership contender who has strongly criticised both supermarkets and the surveillance state, is a major shareholder in a company that supplies "people monitoring" technology to Tesco.

The revelation by The Daily Telegraph of Mr Huhne's links to the country's biggest supermarket may raise questions among party members about his consistency.

Mr Huhne, 53, the party's environment spokesman, owns £250,000 worth of shares in Irisys, a Northamptonshire company that makes thermal imaging technology used to track people as they move.

It's a bit like saying we should criticize the medical use of morphine because some people misuse its close cousin heroin. So far as I can see the criticism of the "surveillance state", criticism which I fully join with , is about being able to snoop on and track identifiable individuals, usually as they go about mundane ordinary lives. This is the heroin, open to abuse and getting worse.

However the company in which Chris owns a significant shareholding, Irisys, does not do this sort of stuff. What it provides is the morphine of the surveillance world - generally beneficial when used properly. It does infra-red surveillance. Individuals cannot be identified*.

Its original application of this technology was to examine structures for stress points - it's the stuff that stops the plane you're traveling falling out of the sky because nobody noticed a hairline crack in the wing, or that keeps oil rigs safe from the stresses of the open sea.

Can you tell who it is yet?
Originally uploaded by carolyne_ej_smith

Used on humans, its thermal imaging technology allows for such helpful things as finding a person buried in rubble in an earthquake zone. More sophisticated applications combining it with computers in various situations would have helped prevent the Hillsborough disaster by preventing too many thermal blobs getting into the enclosed area where all the crushing took place. It helps to prevent unauthorized access to secure areas by one thermal blob "tailgating" someone with a card (it alerts a security guard who goes to take a look presumably) or keeps a count of the number of thermal blobs having entered a building so that if it needs to be evacuated the emergency services can see that everyone who went in is accounted for.

All good stuff I think you would agree. Then there are also applications that simply enhance the experience of the user - Tesco (amongst others) use it to tell how many people are in the store and to open up extra tills so that when they get to the end of their shop they don't have to wait in a queue. Others use it to count "footfall" into a shop or shopping centre to help them provide the optimal layout in the store. One could imagine it being used for example to check how many "thermal blobs" there are at bus stops along a route and decide to put on extra buses.

Of course, just as you can abuse morphine alongside its cousin heroin if you want to, you could couple this technology with CCTV and do actual snooping on identifiable individuals. But it's not what Irisys does. So I reckon Chris is in the clear here, personally. Indeed, by investing in a non-invasive application of modern technology, he is probably more than in the clear - he is on the side of the angels!

All this is readily discoverable from the firm's website. It's just lazy journalism and even lazier parroting of that journalism to peddle that this is some conflict of interest portraying Chris as a secret supporter of the surveillance state.

*There is research going on at the moment that suggests that you can identify an individual solely by their gait and I suppose this could be an issue even with medium resolution infra-red images, but so far as I am aware it's neither proved yet or in production applications. Presumably Irisys, and their shareholders, would take a view on whether this is an area they would want to get into when it is possible and proven.

Jock writes extensively about Open Capital at The 1909 Group blog, and how we could bring private investment into public assets without losing the public assets for one minute. A non-toxic alternative to PFI and privatisation, creating a return for investors without handing them control.

So, I've just once again put my trust in delivery companies to get an address right and follow fairly simple instructions about what to do because I'll be out when they arrive. But I do want them tomorrow, or I would not have paid the premium to get it delivered quickly rather than wait a week.

But if that had been Tesco I would have been able to sign up for a particular time slot when hopefully it would have been convenient for me to be around to take delivery personally, even in the evenings or at weekends. If this is the way of commerce in the future, mainstream delivery firms, whose main business is shipment and delivery rather than grocery sales of course, need to do something similar.

Is it just their size that makes Tesco viable doing it? I suspect not - there are ways I am sure retailers could collaborate in a delivery service. Is it because Tesco probably tend to concentrate on what business courier services would say were "out of hours"? Maybe, but it's surely a very logical growth area? Is it the logistics? All goods in the Tesco system are there at the local store or you don't get them. You could make such a system of convenient time slots contingent on the goods getting into the shipping system at a particular time perhaps.

Either way, it needs to happen. If the deliveries are not delivered properly tomorrow it's a twenty mile round trip, and, without taking time off work to do it, not till a week Saturday, to go and fetch it from the local courier depot during opening hours - the very least they could do would be to staff those delivery offices till late at night and at weekends and allow people to collect goods "out of hours".

In the future the big high volume shipping and delivery companies are going to control more and more of our commerce; they need persuading to change their MO to fit around the lives of an increasing proportion of their clients' customers.

The architect that put the windmill on Cameron's Notting Hill pad is proposing an idea to build artificial islands in the tropics to harness the natural energy that exists in those latitudes to produce electricity.  For a while now I've been interested in something similar, but subtly different - the idea that if we could harness just a tiny proportion of the solar energy that reaches the earth we could solve all our energy needs.

From a distance it looks like an island paradise, but get closer and those tall structures that could be palm trees turn out to be wind turbines - and the surf laps against wave barrages instead of sandy beaches. Welcome to "Energy Island", a vision of how humans could help meet our future needs for energy, food and water using the power of nature in the tropics.

Alex Michaelis, the architect who gave David Cameron's west London home a green makeover - complete with miniature wind turbine, solar panels and water recycling system - will launch the concept this year with a bid for funding worth $25m (£12.6m) from Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Earth Prize.

His proposal, which is dramatically more ambitious than the work he did on the Conservative leader's semi-detached house, is to build archipelagos of artificial islands that will produce electricity, clean water and even food in the belt of warm water that passes from the Caribbean across to the south China Sea, the Indian Ocean and west Africa.

When I suggested using giant solar power stations to produce electricity in the Sahara the most common objection was the transmission losses that would incur transporting that power to where it was needed.  So I developed my idea a bit.  My solar power stations would not produce electricity, but take sea water and turn it into hydrogen for fuel cells.  This hydrogen would be the thing that was transported to power hungry parts of the world, probably by ships themselves powered by fuel cells, and there used in its raw form for motor engines, but also turned into electricity for the grid closer to its destination and so with less transmission loss.

Maybe I should apply for the Branson money? 

When they tell you that access to ID database information will be strictly controlled and how telephone and internet service provider records will not be accessible to every petty bureaucrat wanting to chase a council tax debt or whatever, remember this:

BBC NEWS | Politics | Met given real time C-charge data:

Met given real time C-charge data

The congestion charge covers central London

Police are to be given live access to London's congestion charge cameras - allowing them to track all vehicles entering and leaving the zone.

Anti-terror officers will be exempted from parts of the Data Protection Act to allow them to see the date, time and location of vehicles in real time.

They previously had to apply for access on a case-by-case basis.

Oh, and of course, it only has to be done by regulation, not law, so parliament has no recourse on this. What next, your Oyster Card used to track your movements via public transport? Oh, they already do you say?

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