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Increasingly in Britain people are punished for who they are; but it is not a completely new trend. Here, from today's London Evening Standard is a sad, and to me disturbing, instance of a thoughtcrime that's been on the books and zealously pursued for over a decade:

Paul Thomas, 45, a former Hackney councillor, had more than 60 CDs of child pornography in his Bow Home, many showing underage girls in swimwear, Southwark Crown Court heard. Damian van Duyvenbode, prosecuting, said: "This defendant has stored large numbers of images of children in swimwear which the prosecution say is part of his sexual gratification."

Thomas, who did have previous convictions, admitted 14 counts of "making indecent photographs of children" and was jailed for 18 months.

We don't know from the account what the pictures were that didn't feature girls in swimwear. But it is pretty clear that the swimwear is being offered as an aggravating factor. Why?

Holiday supplements of magazines and newspapers, clothes catalogues, travel brochures, and family albums are all full of children in swimwear. Though perhaps they ought to fear it, since there appears to be no defence, at least half the households in the land must therefore possess similarly "indecent" photographs without fear of prosecution.

But they aren't downloading them from the internet and storing them on disk - which is all that "making" means in this context. They aren't presumed to be getting sexual pleasure from seeing them. Nobody thinks that children are injured merely by being photographed in swimwear, do they? That man is being prosecuted and punished, or at least his punishment is being increased, for what he might be thinking.

This is the chain of magical contagion at work, an arpeggio of tendentious definitions: The man's a textbook middle-aged usual suspect; the pictures he collects are indecent because he collects them; indecent pictures of children are child pornography; child pornography is child abuse, by definition. Note that it has a doubly magical property... the presumptive equivalences turn a sad case into a mass rapist and they work both ways at once. Everything in the chain is bound by taboo and high emotion. We're not allowed to ask, "Was anyone harmed?" It's irrelevant. The existence of indecency is sufficient to convict. And the court, taking the advice of prosecution experts, will decide what's indecent.

So be careful what you think. Be careful, in fact, what others might think you think. That you aren't hurting anybody, that nobody has in fact been hurt, is no excuse.

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Danny Finklestein has had a nightmare. About Britain becoming a despotic state. This one-time advisor to John Major (oh dear, we all make errors), even says this:

"But I have to admit that the legislation being debated in the Commons this week — the new ID cards, the smoking ban, the measure on the glorification of terror — has tempted me to take up smoking and start attending lectures about Hayek organised by earnest men with pamphlets in carrier bags."

Nice patronising tone there Danny - I tend not to bother with carrier bags these days. Welcome to the concept of liberty and limited government.

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MPs have just voted in favour of making it compulsory for Britons to have an ID card when they apply for a passport. Bastards.

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I wrote to the Department of Culture, Media & Sport (!) back on 10th January to nominate the CCTV camera as an 'icon of England'... and they have just written back accepting the nomination.

Interesting.

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Those who have felt left out by the various cartoon demonstrations recently, and fancy getting out on the streets in support of something they care about have a chance on Monday lunchtime. In my capacity as General Secretary of NO2ID, may I extend an open invitation:

NO2ID and Liberty will be holding an emergency lobby of Parliament on 13th February 2006, when the Identity Cards Bill returns to the Commons for consideration of Lords' amendments. Mr Blair will be wielding the whip for MPs to assent to the nationalisation of the people with as little fuss as possible.

The lobby will take place from 12 noon until 1:00pm on the sundial in Old Palace Yard. This is opposite the St Stephen's Gate entrance to the Houses of Parliament. [Location marked 'H' on this map (pdf)]

This will be your last chance to make a visible protest against the Bill before it goes into the final stages of negotiation between the two houses. And for Samizdata people, it is a rare chance to make common cause with a true rainbow coalition - the fabulous collective of security professionals and technologists, business-people and anti-capitalists, spooks and mooks, great and good, lefties, ultra-lefties, Greens, red-greens, nationalists, internationalists, peaceniks, Old Labourites, New Tories, LibDems, Europhiles, Euroskeptics, Muslims, evangelical Christians, not-so-evangelical Christians, outright pagans, constitutional wonks, geeks, babes, and Trots that are backing the NO2ID campaign.

As always, we shall be laying on some props, but please do bring your own (death-threat-free) banners and placards - the bigger and clearer the better.

To get an idea of numbers, for our own comfort and the helpeful people from Charing Cross police station. we'd appreciate a note to events@no2id.net to let us know if you're intending to come, though it is not obligatory.

End of commercial. Here's the musical version.

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I have been in the habit of buying zone 1 (i.e. very central London) tube (i.e. London Underground railway) tickets, in clutches of ten, for a reduced price, compared to what such tickets would cost if you bought them one at a time. I tried again, a few days ago, but it seems that as of January 1st 2006, the only way to get cheaper tube travel is to buy an Oyster Card. Oh no, please no, I said, you'll make me fill in a ludicrously complicated form. No, they said, just buy an Oyster Card. What just buy it? No name, no address, no grandmother's maiden name. Yes, just buy it, and put some money on it. Okay then.

A day or two ago, I was out and about, and had forgotten how much money I had left on my Oyster Card, and saw a machine which looked as if it might tell me, if I put my Oyster Card on the sign, like the one you use when you are passing through a ticket barrier. It duly told me how much cash I had left, and it also gave me the option of learning about my 'card usage'. I pressed that. And this is what I got (click to get it bigger):

The message is loud and clear. We know where you have been, and when, and we want you to know it. Because, combine all that with surveillance camera info, and they can tell at once who you are.

The times we now live in.

How long before not wanting to buy an Oyster Card is itself regarded as cause for suspicion?

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Only a complete ass would make the cost of ID cards, rather than principle behind them, the main thrust of their opposition to such an imposition. And it would appear that Tory Blair David Cameron is exactly such as ass.

So presumably Cameron, who does nothing not somehow calculated to help return the Tories to power, thinks that such a stance will play well with people who actually care about civil liberties? Well if that really is his objective, does he really think that the NO2ID crew and the LibDems (the two main anti-ID card groups) are really just worried about another small tax? In short, is he really that stupid? And if he is trying to curry favour with 'Middle England', is this not the group we are told do not really care one way or the other on the issue?

All he needs to do to get the serious civil libertarians to cheer him to the rafters is stand up and say "regardless of what it costs, we oppose them because they are wrong and any government that tries to impose them is not just wrong, it is wicked. And if they are imposed, we will scrap them the moment we take power, again regardless of what was spent to impose them."

There is of course no chance whatsoever he will ever say that because clearly the idea of that ID cards are all about civil liberties does not really resonate with a Blairite like Cameron... but of course I would love to be proven wrong.

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While in the US there is an argument going on about whether the intelligence services may spy on Americans without a warrant, in Britain we have had unsupervised surveillance for years. But The Independent on Sunday reports that Mr Blair's quest for total power has started to worry even some cabinet ministers. This in particular:

Until now, successive administrations have pledged that there should be no tapping "whatsoever" of MPs' phones, and that they would be told if it was necessary to breach the ban.

But that convention - known as the Wilson Doctrine, after Harold Wilson, the prime minister who introduced it - is to be abandoned in an expansion of MI5 powers following the London bombings.

American readers may wish to note that our equivalent of attorney-client privilege is very nearly dead, too.

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This was the text of what I submitted for inclusion as an 'icon of Britain' via the Department of Culture, Media & Sport website mentioned by Guy Herbert yesterday:

The CCTV camera is the perfect icon for Britain today, summing up the nature of the changing relationship between civil society and political state. They are an innovation in which Britain leads the world both technologically and in usage and are the visible manifestation of so many things which happen out of sight. It is almost impossible to avoid their gaze for an entire day and sitting like steel crows on their perches above us, truly they are emblematic of modern Britain.

The thing is, I am not taking the piss, this really is modern Britain...

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I look forward to Blair apologists spinning this unsurprising revelation.

Town hall bureaucrats are to be given sweeping new powers to investigate homes for identity card evasion and to impose heavy fines on occupants found without one. The revelation, in an obscure Whitehall consultation paper, calls into serious doubt the Government's repeated promises that planned ID cards, already hugely controversial, will be voluntary and that no one will be forced to carry one.

But we should trust the government because... well, just because.

At least the Telegraph is putting out bloggy articles like this one in opposition. I wonder, is the rest of the Fourth Estate going to sleep through this?

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Do not count on it but there is a much belated push on in Westminster to undermine the ID cards legislation that, if successful, would in effect make them voluntary. The Tories and LibDems peers (the later of which have at least been consistent in their opposition to ID cards) are at least going through the motion of blocking this monstrous intrusion by the state but I will believe it when I see it.

So... will David Cameron make the immediate scrapping of ID cards and abolition of the national register a manifesto pledge? If not then clearly it is still very much the party of Michael 'a touch of the night' Howard. Even if the move to prevent back-door compulsion succeeds, as long as the infrastructure of surveillance and branding us like cattle remains in place, Britain will remain nothing more than a Police State being held in abeyance.

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The Independent has a terrifying story, if there is no public outcry over which, I have no hope for the short-term survival of liberty in Britain. Perhaps it is just our turn to live under totalitarianism, and our children's and grandchildren's too (assuming liberati and other anti-social types are permitted to breed in the well-ordered society) ...

Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.

Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years.

Read the whole thing here. Then answer me this question: by what right is this power assumed? It is no doubt being done in the name of 'public safety', in which case where's the democratic mandate, and when was parliament asked?

Cross-posted to White Rose

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The U.S. Senate has blocked a vote to extend the Patriot Act, about which Perry de Havilland wrote the other day. Maybe some sanity is breaking out. Many of the Act's provisions are tenuously linked to protecting the public from terrorism, to put it mildly, and violate parts of the U.S. Constitution. Let's hope Congress reflects more before passing such laws at such high speed in the future. And the same applies to our own benighted Parliament and the wretched UK Civil Contigencies Act.

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The only people who object to ID cards and CCTV are 'bad people', right? I mean after all, everyone knows that the people who work for the State are of a more incorruptable and moral nature than us mere private people.

Yeah, right. The State is not your friend.

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This is a remarkable story, concerning the DVLA. It is yet another case of the evil way in which the mixed economy is often mixed these days. What happens is that a government agency is compelled by some idiot law or other to pretend that it is a business, and to sell its "product", to businesses who then stop being proper businesses and become crypto-state parasites.

And something like this happens:

What is happening is this: requests come in from businesses that have relevance to parking – clampers, car park managers, even a financial services company that happens to have a car park in which, notionally, people might leave their cars without permission. The DVLA charges a few thousand pounds for a link to its database, and thereafter the commercial company has only to tap in any registration number to be sent the owner’s name and address. If crooked, it could collect car numbers from anywhere in the country, enter them and thereafter know when you are away from home. Or it could send you threatening letters, of extortion or blackmail, citing your car details and claiming a violation.

But the DVLA wouldn’t deal with such people, would it? Yep. It does. It has been forced to hand over its list of the 157 companies registered to buy personal information about drivers – the list includes bailiffs, debt collection agencies and financial services companies. DVLA bleats that it is obliged – under an undebated Statutory Instrument of 2002 – to sell the information to anyone with “reasonable cause”.

As Libby Purves goes on to say:

. . . this piece of roughshod arrogance, done in the interests of tackling only the moderate nuisance of bad parking, throws a lurid light on what could happen to our privacy if we get ID cards to boost the “war on terror”. So far I have been lukewarm on the issue, only doubting that the cards would be good value (every atrocity so far has been committed by people whose papers were in order). But now I am not lukewarm. I am almost prepared to join Simon Hughes, the fiery Lib Dem, who has just pledged to go to prison over the issue. Given the casual attitude of the DVLA, willing to turn a penny by selling our addresses to any old crook, what would happen with information-rich ID cards and bureaucrats of similar calibre?

Indeed.

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This is not some silly idea of the phoney left. It is a mainstream idea of modern times. It is a new kind of identity and a new kind of freedom. I respect the noble Lords' views, but it would help if they respected the fact that the Bill and the identity cards represent the future: a new kind of freedom and a new kind of identity.

- Lord Gould of Brookwood (most decidedly New Labour) speaking at yesterday's Committee of the Whole House on the Identity Cards Bill.

Chilling, eh?

I file this under "Self ownership" because the Bill (do read it) seeks to end all that sort of thing. No more of the messy business of people deciding for themselves who they are and how much to involve the government in their lives.

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It seems a Japanese company has invented a human steering device. It is external, harmless and affects the sense of balance.

The article suggests uses in gaming where tweaking the balance system helps make immersive gaming more realistic. One must wonder: how much time will pass before the porn industry picks up on this?

There are darker uses I am sure you can easily imagine. A company is already studying the use of the ideas for crowd control by affecting their sense of balance. One can imagine implants to control gulag prisoners of future Stalin's.

My dark crystal gets darker still from there.

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Prepare yourself for a mega-dose of bitter irony. Please take a look at this link to a splendid 100% Che-free site, kindly sent to me by Toni.

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With yet another long international flight stretching ahead of me, I finally have time and boredom enough to write a good deal more on network security issues than I have in the past. I have been at least peripherally involved in the area (self defense of my own and customers business networks) for quite some time.

There has been a sea change in the threat model over the last few years. The underworld of the Gibson novel has come to pass although things are perhaps not so dramatic as in the stories. Reality does not fit neatly between two covers.

I recently wrote about a possible case of industrial scale industrial espionage. There is much evidence in security literature that this is occuring and KGB/FSB bugged Russian hotels are not the only place one need worry. Everyone is getting into the game. For those who might be interested in such things I recommend a Dartmouth paper "CyberWarfare: An Analysis Of The Means And Motivations Of Selected Nation States", Bilko And Chang, December 2004.

While reading Bilko and Chang a number of other strands of thought came together. It puts a whole new light on the recent move of major internet equipment suppliers into Chinese production facilities. Among these, two are of particular note.

• IBM Thinkpads: the laptop of choice of many network professionals.
  
• Cisco Routers: These are ubiquitous in the infrastructure of the Internet from major backbone to small office.

Then there is the Lynn debacle. Michael Lynn gave a presentation at DEFCON this last summer in which he showed beyond a shadow of a doubt Trojans can be inserted into Cisco backbone routers... and by extension most other brands as well. His slide presentation was not of a specific exploit but of a generic method.

Cisco and ISS, the company from which he had just resigned, went totally over the top. They sent a crew to the DEFCON to remove pages from the programs. Afterwards they threatened to sue Michael Lynn unless he agreed to allow their forensics people to cryptographically wipe anything to do with the the research from his disk drives. They sent nasty letters to all and sundry who posted his slide set. They tracked down and took possession of every bit of video of the session they could get their hands on. Despite their best efforts to pull a "1984", they failed.

It was not just failure, it was total, abyssmal, embarrasing, hang-your-head you idiot failure. Instead of a few interested hackers and security analysts with copies stored in dusty corners of the internet they made it a slashdot affair. Absolutely everyone has the document now. I will not post a link here because if you really are interested you already have a copy and if you do not you can find it easily enough.

Another reason these actions were foolish on the part of Cisco brings me back to the central point of this article. The Cisco heap smash attack described by Michael Lynn was only an improvement on already published literature... and it may have already been implimented... by Chinese hackers.

The Dartmouth report suggests the Chinese hacker community is at least partly state organized. Of particular interest is page 36:

In addition, with increased "out-sourcing" to China in recent years, there is the risk that software companies could deliberately embed back-doors in the programming code which would render the software vulnerable to intrusion. The presence of a software "time bomb" might not be detected until it is too late.

Do not get me wrong. I have nothing against China... at least so long as they keep their hands off Formosa. China is not the only player in this game. It would be difficult to find a global or regional power that is not.

The United States is one of the bigger fiddlers on the net: Cisco and others purportedly gave NSA a backdoor; and then there are the quite official and public FBI 'CALEA' wiretap requirements on all new hardware and software.

Whether an individual or a nation, the idea so many people are trying so hard to capture and archive your life is repugnant and something to be avoided if possible. The desire of States to force the equivalent of listening devices into commercial software is one of those risks which can be avoided... by using open source instead of closed systems. Actions have consequences and the result of statist meddling is to make proprietary software less viable in any market where the users are aware of and care about privacy.

This is not just personal pontification on my part. It is already happening:

Sensing a power shift, multinational companies and governmental bodies such as the European Union are beginning to insist that Microsoft provide open interfaces--that is, public descriptions of its software that let other programs interoperate with it. China, in particular, is determined to avoid dependence upon proprietary American software. It is concerned about trade disputes, about building its own software industry, and also about vulnerability to "back doors" that could be used for espionage. This last fear is not entirely irrational. Although there are no publicly known cases of espionage against China involving software, other technologies have been so employed. Five years ago China purchased a new, unused Boeing jet and hired U.S. contractors to refit it in Texas as China"s equivalent of Air Force One. Upon taking possession of the plane, Chinese security officers found that it harbored more than two dozen highly sophisticated, satellite-controlled listening devices, hidden everywhere from the bathrooms to the headboard of the presidential bed.

If the proprietary closed source of corporate entities have government backdoors, then any who care about privacy or security will migrate to open source. Backdoors will be found and removed. If any government tries to make such removal 'illegal', they will be ignored and there is nothing they can do about it.

Just ask the lawyers from Cisco.

References:

1. CyberWarfare: An Analysis Of The Means And Motivations Of Selected Nation States, Bilko And Chang, December 2004.

2. National Security in Network Age -- An Interview

3. The Internet surveillance cash cow

4. Exploiting Cisco with FX

5. Router Flaw Is a Ticking Bomb

6. Cisco tries to silence researcher

7. Cisco, ISS file suit against rogue researcher

8. Cisco Security Upgrades

9. Security researcher faces scrutiny, FBI probe

10. Cisco Seeks to Quiet Software Flaw Talk

11. Update 2: Cisco, Security Researcher Settle Dispute

12. How Linux Could Overthrow Microsoft

Correction: One of our readers pointed out that the conference at which Lynn spoke was the Black Hat conference, not DEFCON as I said above.

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I promise only mild amusement, but sometimes mild amusement is what one needs. And there's a subtle mordancy underneath.

The latest splendid animation from Will Flash for Cash Productions in aid of the UK campaign against ID cards is here, and will explain the title of the post.

For those who missed it, their earlier biting attack on Mr Secretary Clarke and the glorious scheme using a cute musical puppy is here.

Welcome to a strange world. Sound, and familiarity with British political figures, most definitely an advantage.

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I have just heard a rumour from a usually reliable source that effective either yesterday or today, the UK state has put on-line some system by which all access to the internet in the UK now goes through a government server system to enable them to monitor, well, everything you do on-line. Is the UK state now rivaling China in its efforts to control and monitor its subject people?

Has anyone else heard anything about this?

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Spiked carries a fascinating, if frightening, piece by Charles Pither, a private doctor, on the invasive requirements of galloping regulation on those working in the healthcare sector. Just being able to check and list their employees (and their own) slave-number online will no doubt come as a relief.

What I hadn't appreciated, until the man came to make his inspection, was all the personal data that we needed to keep for our staff (in a locked cabinet, of course). Two references, a recent photo, a copy of their passport, copies of their qualification certificates, a curriculum vitae with explanations for any gaps, a copy of their contract and job description.

Including the cleaner? Yes, including the cleaner. 'It's not me who makes the regulations', said the man from the HCC. 'The onus is on you to comply with the statutory requirements as set out in the standards of care regulations.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

What's most disturbing is how suddenly these bureaucratic personal checks have sprung up, and how it has happened with no resistence. The Health Care Commission was created by the Health and Social Care (Community Health and Standards) Act 2003, and started its interfering on April 1st 2004. The Criminal Records Bureau was established under the Police Act 1997, but its functions have been rapidly widened, in legislation on children, education, financial services, and health, but also notably by a series of Exceptions Orders to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Acts that have made the idea of a spent conviction (an old, minor one you need not acknowledge) pretty much obsolete. The operative Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations are dated 2002.

Never mind 1890, it would be nice to get the British state back to the size it was in 1990.

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Here is an interesting contrast between the UK and the US.

The Boston Globe, a Democrat newspaper in a Democrat town, is attacking President Bush's Supreme Court nominee, John Roberts. Nothing particularly exciting or shocking about that. You might not agree with them, but it's legitimate, and that is how things are done there.

What intrigues me is the manner of the most recent attack:

Roberts, as Reagan aide, backed national ID card, yells the headline.

It is plainly the Globe's assumption that its readers will take this is a sign of a fundamentally illiberal personality, not fit to be entrusted on the bench with the defence of American liberties. British popular assumptions, even in the liberal press, have a long way to go. It is still not appreciated much here that state control of personal identity is a big deal, never mind that its fans are poisionous advocates of evil.

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Hate the idea of ID cards? Do not keep your views to yourself.

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The government's plans to impose ID cards on British people get wobblier by the day and at last they seem to realise that there is no point in pretending otherwise. Nevertheless, it is important for everyone to remember who cast their votes in Parliament and thereby allowed us to get this close to a civil liberties calamity in the first place. We are by no means in the clear yet but it does seem that things are going our way to some extent and so it is important to kick and stamp on this beast hard whilst it is down.

If we are to avoid this issue coming back to haunt us again and again, we need to make sure that forgiveness is left for the afterlife and use the voting record to MPs who voted in favour at any time to question their fundamental morality and trustworthiness, regardless of party. It is essential not just now but in the foreseeable future to make this issue as fraught and unpleasant as possible for all concerned. If we can make 'the ID cards issue' synonymous with political calamity, politicos might just avoid the issue in favour of lower hanging fruit.

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I implied here that I would let Samizdata readers know when a new, more inclusive ;) anti-ID-card pledge was up and running. It is now.

We are lucky to have the charming former stand-up Franky Ma as the pledge leader. As the covers of more consumer magazines, in more countries, than it is comfortable to imagine attest, you cannot go far wrong associating an attractive young woman with your product.

You can give your word to support the nearly 11,000 ID refuseniks here and you can support NO2ID itself, as ever, here.

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I cannot claim to have been brave very much in my life. And I do not know that I am being brave now. But I do know that I am now committed along with more than 10,000 others to refuse to register with the National Identity Register, whatever the Government may now choose to do to me.

The first NO2ID "Refuse" pledge through the MySociety PledgeBank site has been successful. 10,000, and counting, British people value freedom enough that they are prepared to become an un-person, rather than submit to lifelong supervision under the fallaciously named "ID card" system that the Government hopes to introduce. In four weeks we have raised promises of £100,000 for legal defence. And people are still joining in.

In a few days we will launch a bigger pledge, a million-pound-plus fighting fund, for everyone to subscribe to who supports the refuseniks, but cannot (because they have dependents or professional obligations) join in the identity strike. We need 50,000 people willing to pledge £20 if the bill passes. Look out for it.

And to the American readers of this blog I say: Help us now. If we go down, you are next...

"I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered.
My life is my own."

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Now that we know what everyone except Tony Blair suspected (that the suicide bombers were probably British born or at least legal residents), perhaps it is worth noting that had mandatory ID cards been in force, they would have been perfectly entitled to avail themselves of one each.

Yes, I can see how this will help stamp out terrorism. Right? Right?

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So London was attacked and hundreds were killed or wounded by Islamic fanatics (showing incidently why we are utterly right to be fighting these vermin wherever they are to be found)... and having ID cards would have made not one damn bit of difference.

Next time some pontificating dissembling jackass holds up 'terrorism' as why Britain need these odious things, I am likely to spit in their face.