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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.

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As strange as it may sound, I still maintain a smidgeon of sympathy with all those wretched, deluded souls who sincerely believed that technology was going to liberate us all from the leviathan. I am but fearful. They, on the other hand, must be both fearful and crushed:

The British government acknowledged Monday that it would consider using implanted ID chips to track sex offenders, raising the specter of forced chipping.

While not yet a reality, implants that can remotely check bodily functions and location are just around the corner: Microchips are being developed for a variety of health functions, and a Florida company is planning to develop a prototype of an implanted GPS device by the end of the year.

When the Food and Drug Administration green-lighted the use of ID chips in humans last month, civil liberties advocates worried that people could be forced to get chipped as a condition of employment or parole. News that the British government may implant sex offenders in the future fanned those fears.

Of course, it will start with convicted (or maybe even suspected) child molesters. Who could possibly object to that?

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This BBC story could have come straight out of a comic novel:

A man in Australia tipped off police in Devon after seeing a suspected burglary on a webcam based in Exmouth.

Andrew Pritchard, 52, from Boorowa, New South Wales, saw two men run from a car to a beach-front kiosk.

After searching for the number of Devon and Cornwall police he was able to direct them to the scene of the crime.

However it turned out not to be a crime:

It transpired the pair were a man and a woman having an argument, not conducting a burglary, but the police praised Mr Pritchard for his actions.

I actually believe them. They were able to bustle about and investigate, but it turned out they had no actual criminals to deal with, so no horrid fighting and no horrid paperwork. Instead, they had a nice little story to trade with their local media.

As for the idea of people in Australia looking at pictures from our spycams, it has often puzzled me who on earth is supposed to keep track of all our spycam pictures, what with there now being about ten times as many spycams in Britain as there are people. I seem to recall that in this Libertarian Alliance publication, in the bit where I discuss how to exploit old people and thus keep them feeling important for longer, I suggest that oldies might like to do this. Let them earn their pensions. And now that we all have broadband connections, there is no need for these oldies to be in Britain. In fact, given what our criminals like to do to witnesses who grass them up, Australia is probably the ideal spot for them.

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Airport security gets ever more surreal. Yesterday, I set off with my fiancee for the lovely island of Malta to spend the Easter break. At London's Gatwick airport I had my first real experience of the wonderful charm for which security staff are famed, having never really had a glitch before. My hand luggage was seized by a woman who asked that I opened the bag. I was happy to do so. She fished out three novels from the bag, and after loudly making some rude comments about them and sniggering to a colleague (which was thoroughly unprofessional on her part) she picked up a small hair brush, and put it through an X-ray machine. She handed it back and with a grim expression pronounced that a hairbrush, at a certain angle, looked like a gun. Yes, a gun.

In future it is definitely going in my heavy luggage. It really makes me wonder about what your average security guard thinks a gun is actually supposed to look like, let alone as to whether any of them have used a gun. Or maybe they comb their hair with an automatic.

Oh, and the next time I fly down I'll take a couple of porn magazines to really give some security jobsworth the vapours. Heh.

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Although I knew this day was coming, it is profoundly depressing nevertheless. It is now the law that ID cards will be imposed by force in Britain, with the support of the Leaders of the Conservative Party and the Labour Party. They have won and as far as I am concerned, the guttering flame of the culture of liberty in Britain just blew out.

I do not expect a truly repressive state to be implemented for many years yet (hopefully), but the infrastructure of tyranny is now well and truly in place, all of which came to pass with a soundtrack of a faint bleating sound of an indifferent public in the background. You might as well flip a coin to figure out which party will usher it in but a authoritarian panoptic state is coming. If this is what the majority of British people want, then may they get exactly what they deserve, but I am out of here. For those of you who will be happy to see me go, trust me, the feeling is mutual.

I realise most people will just shrug their ovine shoulders and find my worries inexplicable, crazy even, as it is not like Blair and Howard are setting up Gulags, right? No, of course not. Who needs those when there is a camera on every corner and your every purchase and phone call will eventually be logged on a central government database? As far as I concerned, the war is over and my side lost.

I have to try and speed up my business ventures and get out as soon as I can afford to do so. I shall try to be out of Britain and have my primary residence in the USA by 2007 at the latest to avoid being forced to submit to this intolerable imposition... and I shall be taking my wealth generating assets with me. I cannot say I am looking forward to winters in New Hampshire but I do not really see that I have much choice anymore. I do not see the United States as a paragon of civil liberties (to put it mildly), but at least it is a place in which the battle can be fought within the last bastion of the Anglosphere's culture of liberty.

Damn it.

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Yes, I am glad a few people in the Conservative party have the backbone to stand against Michael Howard and refuse to back the imposition of mandatory ID cards. Yet the truth is than they are outnumbered both by those in the party's authoritarian faction and in the others who say they opposed ID cards, such as possible future leader David Davies, but place their political careers above both their principles and what they presumably think would be best for the nation. Still, I suppose we should thank Michael Howard for making it clear to all but the most blinkered that they offer no alternative to Labour in any substantive way over an issue that offers much downside and no clearly explained upside.

If you ever want to see an effective opposition in this country, vote for the one party who can deliver that by destroying the Conservative party once and for all by making it permanently unelectable, thereby showing the true cost of Conservative 'moderation' on the EU and civil liberties. Only once the last bitter hope that the Tories might ever form a new government has been removed by 10 to 15% of their vote defecting for the foreseeable future can something better emerge from their ashes. Vote UKIP.

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Hard to believe! That Tory leader Michael Howard, the second most repressive Home Secretary in living memory, should support mandatory ID cards is hardly a revelation, but that up to 40 Tory MP's, including some on the front bench, might vote against or abstain regardless of the demands of the whips, well that is quite a pleasant surprise.

Mr Howard has come down in favour of the Government scheme because he was preparing to introduce an ID card Bill himself when he was Home Secretary in 1997 and fears charges of hypocrisy if he does not support it now. Some MPs complained that he has been heavy handed in whipping the issue. One said: "I think it is disgraceful. I don't know where our leadership is heading."

I know exactly where it is heading...

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The No2ID campaign has established an e-petition aimed at 10 Downing Street demanding the end to plans for imposing mandatory ID cards and pervasive state databases recording a vast range of what you do in your life.

The No2ID campaigners have taken the line of principled objection, given that the government seem to have decided that there is no longer any room for public debate and refuses to engage with serious - and growing - civil liberty and privacy concerns with the scheme. The Home Office have not met once with civil liberties organisations yet say their concerns have been addressed whilst at the same time avoiding public meetings but at the same time having private briefing with technology partners for introducing the schemes.

Take a stand and make your voice heard while you still can at www.no2id-petition.net. Time is fast running out.

The state is not your friend.

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As US legislators act to make covertly installing spyware on computers illegal, I would be curious to know why Ron Paul thinks otherwise?

Surely installing unrequested spyware is no different than any other unauthorised intrusion onto private property? Is it any different from inviting a travelling salesman into your house only to later discover he covertly installed bugs and hidden cameras when you were not looking so that he could monitor your behaviour for his own benefit?

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Something tells me that HMG does not expect their proposed fox-hunting ban to be awfully popular with the country folk:

Police are planning to use spy cameras in the countryside to enforce a ban on fox hunting.

Chief constables intend to site CCTV cameras on hedgerows, fences and trees along known hunting routes to enable them to photograph hunt members who break the law after hunting with hounds is outlawed.

They used to warn that 'walls have ears'. Now walls will have eyes as well. I suppose the panopticon countryside is nothing more than a logical extension of our panoptican cities. It is merely a matter of time before every workplace and every home is wired up to the Big Eye of Big Brother. Then the nightmare really begins.

There exist all manner of varying justifications for this surveillance-fever but there is only one reason that our political masters are deploying it with such alacrity: because they can.

The same technology that enables us to chatter with each other across national boundaries is being used to create a tightly-wrapped police state.

What a very, very grim future we face.

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It was with something akin to delight that I saw the Times, not a newspaper overly concerned with civil liberties, have on its front page 1 an article about objections to Britain's developing surveillance state.

This is modern Britain

If we cannot get these issues out in the open, we will indeed see Britain 'sleepwalking' into what may some time in the future be a panoptic nightmare. Blair or Howard are not going to be having the security services doing 'midnight knocks' on the doors of those they disfavour (well, maybe for a few people in the Finsbury Park area) but make no mistake about it, the infrastructure of repression is being put in place at an astonishing rate and someday (hopefully long after I have decamped to New Hampshire) this information is going to be used by statists of both left and right with fewer qualms than Tony Blair to order every single aspect of people's lives in Britain in ways that places the state at the centre of everything you do in ways earlier totalitarianisms could only dream of... for your own good, of course.

We have a serious battle to win and the more these issues are out of the committee rooms and in the more general public arena, the better we can argue the case for resisting the emerging Panopticon State.

When the state watches you, dare to stare back

1 = Readers outside the UK may have difficulties accessing this link once it is archived due to the benighted policies of the Times newspaper.

(Cross posted from White Rose)

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Last night many Samizdatistas heading for Aldwych as the 2004 Big Brother Awards were held at the London School of Economics. The list of winners, who are in fact losers, can be found here1.

Simon Davies of Privacy International is the driving force behind the Big Brother Awards...

The stout lads from No2ID were out in force...

About 450 people turned up to heckle cheer...

This was probably the best propaganda shirt I saw!
The left has always been good at that sort of thing

1 = Update: The link to the Big Brother Award details has been changed, which is not very clever. Link updated to a somewhat less informative page.

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In what may one day give people a way to keep even GCHQ and the NSA out of their private affairs without them makes a huge effort, quantum cryptography is starting to finally emerge as a useable technology.

I look forward to the day the entire global communications network is a less friendly place for systems like Echelon and Carnivore.

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The pseudonymous 'Slowjoe' sends in this article to ponder on the subject of ID cards. Incidentally, anyone with articles on that subject would do well to consider submitting them to our sister site White Rose, which really specialises in civil liberties issues such as this.

The Register has the story of a man jailed because of a flaw in a fingerprint identification program which appears to have been chosen as the basis of the UK ID card scheme.

A number of disturbing points:

1. The victim in this case didn't realise that the software was flawed until 4 years after he'd been jailed.


2. There have been at least 97 cases where mistaken identification took place that the state of Oregon was aware of. Since these involved fingerprints, it's likely that this means "97 cases of wrongful arrest".


3. This story appeared in the Register on May 11th. No mainstream news site has considered it worth covering. (My basis for this is are two searches at new.google.com, a search of the UK site and of the US site. For the lazy, these links show that no mainstream news organisation has gone beyond printing Mr. Benson's press release. A couple of finance websites and trial lawyers sites seem have also run it.)


4. The defendants are crass enough to ask for the suit to be dismissed because the victim didn't know about their software bug in time.

Next time someone suggests that "fingerprints are flawless", the kicker is, the chosen system apparently cannot distinguish between men with 10 fingers, and those with only 9. How anyone can trust such a system is beyond me.

Is anyone still in favour of ID cards?

Slowjoe

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Remember that scene in that dreadful movie The Phantom Menace where Anakin's mother explains that slaves have tracking devices implanted to prevent them escaping?

An American company has developed such technology, and they have more then just slaves in mind.

The process is oh so easy:

Once implanted just under the skin, via a quick, simple and painless outpatient procedure (much like getting a shot), the VeriChip can be scanned when necessary with a proprietary VeriChip scanner. A small amount of radio frequency energy passes from the scanner energizing the dormant VeriChip, which then emits a radio frequency signal transmitting the individual’s unique personal verification (VeriChip ID) number. The VeriChip Subscriber Number then provides instant access to the Global VeriChip Subscriber (GVS) Registry – through secure, password-protected web access to subscriber-supplied information. This data is maintained by state-of-the-art GVS Registry operations centers in Riverside, California and Owings, Maryland.

And the implications are oh so scary....

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How the Soviets would have loved this kind of technological capability:

A US requirement for visitors to be fingerprinted and photographed is being expanded to include citizens from America's closest allies.

The move will affect visitors from 27 countries - including the UK, Japan and Australia - whose nationals are able to visit the US without a visa.

Though even if the technology had been available to the Soviets they would not have been to afford it. But Western democracies can afford it so these fingerprint-reading machines will be coming soon not just to an airport near you but, in due course, a bank, a supermarket, a sports stadium and just about everywhere else.

I was so impressed with all those books written in the 1990's that confidently predicted that the new age of digital technology would empower the individual and neuter the state. The implementation is having exactly the reverse affect.

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Here is a new hack that has been making the rounds of the computer security community. It seems bluetooth lays many very common mobile phones wide open to one or more attacks. On at least one Nokia (the very one I have in fact), someone walking past you on the street can lift your entire address book and calendar even if your Bluetooth setting is HIDDEN. There are other sorts of possible abuse as well: read the article.

No, I did not get caught out. I spend too much time in bad company to trust any system which hasn't been source-code audited by people I trust. Since mobile phones are all based on proprietary code, I have always taken the precaution of only enabling such features (on mobiles or other systems) during time of use.

For those of you who religiously follow slashdot, this is probably not news. Most of our readers are not engineers so this may be news to them.

If you have bluetooth, turn the bloody thing OFF!!!!

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Did you know your twenty dollar bills have RFID tags in them? That is what these people think... and they have the burned bills to prove it.

A year or so ago I suggested microwaving as a way to de-louse items with RFID tags in them. From the state of the bills in the picture, I think we will need a gentler method of disinfection.

It is apparent to me that the chips are just soaking up too much energy from the rather high intensity inside an oven. It doesn't really take all that much to waste a chip so a much milder power source is called for. Suggestions and experimental results are welcome.

All you need is some engineering creativity and money to burn.

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What does this sound like to you?

[From UK Times]

DOZENS of speed cameras are to be replaced with electronic signs that display a frowning face when a driver is speeding but do not result in fines or penalty points.

The devices are to be placed where police can no longer justify having a speed camera because there is no recent history of crashes.

Police hope that the speed indicator devices (SIDs) will defuse some of the anger generated by the huge increase in camera fines. Last year an estimated two million drivers caught on camera were fined £60 and given three penalty points.

The new devices use radar to detect the speed of an oncoming vehicle, and flash it up on a screen. If the driver is within the limit, the screen changes to a smiling face.

At just 1mph over the limit, the face will frown.

Because it sounds to me like the Home Office are starting to back down.

At this rate it will take about another year for the 'frowny faces' to be replaced by an All-Weather Traffic Co-Ordination Officer whose job it will be to stand on the verge of a dual carriageway and shout "fascist, fascist" as the cars whizz by.

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While channel hopping in the early hours of this morning through the unwatched digital end of the British TV spectrum (no doubt that is a technologically impossible thing to do literally but I'm sure you understand), I encountered the beginnings of or an advertisement for (I switched off and am only now remembering it) one of those Kilroy-Silk type programmes in which a sleek self-important talk-leader wanders around among various people desperate to be on television talking about something too interesting and lowbrow to be of interest to the kind of people who watch analogue TV with a number like 1 or 2, such as what it is like to sleep with your nephew or why you want your grandmother to stop getting any more tattoos. This sleek Kilroy-man was called Walsh, I think. (Yes.) And, this time the subject was going to be … and here I confess to forgetting the technical term which the unwatched TV industry has coined for this phenomenon … but it was video/digital/TV cameras for looking up girls' skirts in public places. Apparently some unfortunate girl had become the victim of one of these freelance soft porn Spielbergs and video of her bottom and underwear was even now circulating on the internet.

I don't know exactly how the cameras are organised. Perhaps they are placed in the shoes of the filmer. Perhaps they are operated from the basements of sleazy restaurants. A particular unfortunate girl had become more unfortunate in that she had sued her voyeur-tormentors in an American court, and the court had found that although disgusting, the behaviour of the electro-digital-voyeurs was not illegal. So now the unfortunate girl was taking her case to a higher court: unwatched television.

And that was when I switched off, which I now regret. It was the most memorable and interesting thing I saw on the telly yesterday, but I only realised this today.

As I say, I don't know how the argument then proceeded, although I do know that they had managed to entice or fake up some sleazoids willing to argue in favour of the rights of people to make movies by pointing cheap cameras up girl's skirts. So presumably there was an argument.

What might I have said if I had found myself in the middle of such an argument? I have no idea, but here are some guesses.

First, this is not only an argument for privately owned public spaces amongst people like those who read Samizdata, it is a circumstance which will surely cause people generally to prefer privately owned public spaces to publicly owned public spaces. Whatever the constitutional right to film people may consist of exactly, upheld by the US Constitution or by the European Convention of Human Rights and only challengeable after months if not years of legal foolishness, most girls don't want cameras pointed up their knickers, and will prefer to, e.g., shop in places where this is forbidden throughout, as I surmise that it already is in privately owned shopping centres. No doubt, in a world of ubiquitous privately owned public spaces, such as we are more and more seeing, there will also be places where such filming is allowed and even encouraged, and some girls of the naughtier and show-offier sort will visit such places on purpose.

Second, whatever the rules for such filming end up being, whether state-proclaimed or privately-proclaimed, it will be devilishly difficult to enforce them very completely. A likely result is that many girls will just get used to it. They will just say: if you look up my knickers, you're the one with the problems, not me. That would certainly make sense to me as a reaction.

But others may adapt their costumes. Will there be revival of voluminous layered ladies' underwear, which will give strategically places camera-persons you about as much of a view of the lower half of a lady's body as a naked human body gives you now of the skeleton that supports it? The fashion industry is always looking for excuses to make girls frocks look entirely different to what anyone was expecting. Redoing dresses to make them proof against invisible cameras in the floor could provoke amazing new fashion statements. Will young girls be urged by their mothers always to wear clean underwear, not in case they have a road accident, but in case their underwear gets filmed and internetted?

In other words, to summarise the above points, the market, in space and in clothing, will supply solutions that the ponderous absurdities of litigation and legislation will be powerless to offer.

Third, I wonder how this will all play out in Scotland, where men also wear skirts, concerning which much controversy now rages (in Scotland and elsewhere) about what they wear underneath them. Will the fashion of men wearing skirts which is now spreading outside of Scotland be stopped in its tracks? Or will it, perchance, be encouraged? There's a certain kind of man who loves to show off his manhood. Scottish (coincidence?) film star Ewan McGregor springs to mind. I was going to supply a pertinent link there but I would be doing most of our readers no favours, trust me.

Fourth, well, I don't want to go on at too great length about this. People might think that there was something wrong with me.

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Over on White Rose I have put up some remarks by Josie Appleton of Spiked On-Line regarding ID Cards. To which all I can add is... yeah!

And while you are at it, you might like to check out Trevor Mendham's worthy anti-ID cards campaign on iCan.

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...from an Internet café in Japan to be exact. Michael Jennings is en route to Australia and stopped off at Narita International Airport long enough to blog about some very odd demands made of him before he was allowed to use the Internet.

Check out the article on White Rose.

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Speed cameras don't reduce casualties - they are just for revenue generation
- Northumbria Police's Acting Chief Inspector, Paul Gilroy

I really cannot add much to that.

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The GATSO killers must be starting to give the state a serious headache.

From the UK Times:

THE police have come up with a new way to catch irate motorists who vandalise speed cameras: set up other cameras to film them in the act.

And then other cameras to film those cameras and still more cameras to film those cameras and......

A closed-circuit television system would be installed beside the speed traps under plans being considered to curb a spate of attacks in which 700 cameras have been burnt, pulled down or had their lenses spray painted.

Of course this means that the closed-circuit security cameras will become targets as well. It seems that the campaign of the GATSO killers is moving beyond the sporadic outbursts of pique and onto a low-grade insurrection.

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The great gift of cash (fiat currencies included) is the anonymity it affords the bearer. Nobody but the bearer knows just how much cash he has. Nobody knows how much may have been earned, paid, spent, saved or transported.

But that is all about to change:

Dogs trained to sniff the ink on bank notes are being used for the first time on trains to detect criminals carrying large amounts of illicit cash.

The "currency dogs" have already been used successfully by Customs and Excise at ports and airports, where they have detected more than £800,000 in mainly drugs cash, and are now being targeted at mainline train routes into London.

So the dogs will miraculously detect 'criminals'. Is this Trial by Canine? Do the sniffer dogs have to prove their case on a mere balance of probabilities or is proof beyond all reasonable doubt required? Will there be Defence Dogs standing by to rebut the charges?

And how is anyone supposed to know that the cash is 'illicit'? Unless, of course, all cash is presumed to be illicit. Given its hitherto undetectable properties I can think of why certain institutions would insist on precisely that assumption:

However, those caught with such volumes of cash, even if not criminal, are likely to be investigated by tax authorities. Customs sources said they will only seize cash in cases of £10,000 or more.

It is the logical last piece of the jigsaw. What with the Money Laundering Laws and the War on Tax Havens, I reckon that the lockdown is pretty near to completion.

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After reading Natalie Solent's article, posted both here and on White Rose called A law-abiding person has nothing to hide?, reader Matt Judson wrote in with a cautionary tale of his own as a case in point.

Check out his close encounter with the reality of CCTV over on White Rose.

CCTV is not your friend.

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I was just thinking up a few scenarios in answer to the assertion that "a law abiding person has nothing to fear from ID cards, in-car tracking systems or surveillance cameras". These are some wholly or mostly law-abiding persons who do have something to fear:

• A person who has unpopular political beliefs of left or right that might lose them their job or promotion.

• A person who is homosexual but their family does not know.

• A teenage girl secretly visiting her boyfriend. He is of a different race to her family, and they have forbidden her to see him.

• A man who is seeking to change his job needs to attend interviews with other companies. He doesn't want his present employer to know for fear that if the interviews don't work out he might end up worse off than before, having lost the confidence of his boss.

• A woman scouting out places to go to get away from her violent partner.

• Someone going to Alcoholics Anonymous or drugs rehabilitation sessions.

• Someone going to church, synagogue or mosque who fears the scorn of their secular friends, colleagues or family.

• Someone attending classes of religious instruction prior to converting to another religion who fears the vengeance of their family if their apostasy becomes known.

• A son or daughter visiting an estranged parent without the knowledge of the parent they live with.

• An ex-criminal seeking to go straight who must meet his probation officer or register with the police.

• An adulterer. (I think adultery is very wrong, but I don't want the government involved in exposing it - besides the intrinsic nastiness of state intervention in such matters, you can bet they would expose the adulteries of their opponents and pass over the adulteries of their friends.)

That example takes us to a more general point: there are so many laws that nearly all of us are breaking some of them all the time. This fact gives local and national authorities enormous scope for quiet blackmail. You think it's unlikely that they would be so wicked? Well, the blackmailers themselves might scarcely see it as blackmail. Imagine this scenario: they get to know that X, an irritating serial complainer, writer of letters to the editor, and general thorn in the side of several local councillors, is attending an adult education class for more than the number of hours permitted to an unemployed person who is meant to be actively seeking work. How satisfactory to take action against this pest! Meanwhile Y, who sat next to X in the class and is equally unemployed and equally breaking the rules (or equally unaware of them), is ignored because he is not a troublemaker.

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Like I said, respect for the law appears to be on the wane. Although the word 'hostility' might be even more apposite:

They are the black knights of the road; balaclava-wearing highway hitmen out to burn, bomb, decapitate and dismember. But drivers need not fear, for it is speed cameras that this growing band of rebels are after.

Up and down the country, the tools used to keep roads safe are being ripped down, blown up and even shot apart as part of a campaign orchestrated by a gang of web-surfing outlaws. They threaten to become the most popular gang of criminals since Robin Hood and his Merry Men stalked the countryside.

Forsooth, methinks the commoners may be in need of folk-songs.

From the south coast to the Highlands no camera is safe. Known as Gatsometers, or Gatsos, they are being destroyed at a rate that has alarmed police forces. Particularly destructive cells are operating in north London, Essex and Wales - where they rage against machines deployed by renowned anti-speeding police chief Richard Brunstrom.

With each unit costing £24,000 to replace, a huge bill is being run up. But the rebels are unrepentant, claiming the cost is more than met by speeding drivers' fines. Speed cameras, they argue, are not about keeping roads safe, but about raising revenue. The charred remains of their victims are often adorned with stickers or graffiti which declare cameras to be stealth tax inspectors.

Of course, we at Samizdata.net could not possibly condone these irresponsible actions by an anti-social minority.

The Target for Tonight?

[My thanks to Dr.Chris Tame for posting this story to the Libertarian Alliance Forum.]

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There's a lovely case of the punishment fitting the crime to read about at Dave Barry's blog.

On Aug 31, Barry wrote a Miami Herald article, describing the menace of what they call in the USA telemarketers, and what we call here junk fd*&%$ing phone calls.

… the telemarketers are claiming they have a constitutional right to call people who do not want to be called. They base this claim on Article VX, Section iii, row 5, seat 2, of the U.S. Constitution, which states: ''If anybody ever invents the telephone, Congress shall pass no law prohibiting salespeople from using it to interrupt dinner.''

And for all I know that is, approximately speaking, what the US Constitution says. Plus, if junk phone calling stopped, lots of junk phonies would be out of their junk jobs. Much the same, Barry pointed out, applies to muggers. Anyway, what's the answer?

So what's the answer? Is there a constitutional way that we telephone customers can have our peace, without inconveniencing the people whose livelihoods depend on keeping their legal right to inconvenience us? Maybe we could pay the telemarketing industry not to call us, kind of like paying ''protection money'' to organized crime. Or maybe we could actually hire organized crime to explain our position to telemarketing-industry executives, who would then be given a fair opportunity to respond, while the cement was hardening.

Tempting. But then there's that Constitution again. Apparently, in America, crime isn't allowed. So Barry carried on thinking aloud:

I'm just thinking out loud here. I'm sure you have a better idea for how we can resolve our differences with the telemarketing industry. If you do, call me. No, wait, I have a better idea: Call the American Teleservices Association, toll-free, at 1-877-779-3974, and tell them what you think. I'm sure they'd love to hear your constitutionally protected views! Be sure to wipe your mouthpiece afterward.

In America, there are so many people, so many of whom will do anything you suggest to them, that of course several million people did ring this toll-free number, 1-877-779-3974, and the junk phonies ("direct marketers") didn't like it one bit:

The ATA received no warning about the article from Barry or anyone connected with him, Searcy said. The association first learned about the column when it received calls from fact checkers at about 100 newspapers checking whether the phone number was correct prior to printing the article.

Though meant as a prank, the Barry column has had harmful consequences for the ATA, Searcy said. An ATA staffer has spent about five hours a day for the past six days monitoring the voice mail and clearing out messages.

Nevertheless, Searcy said the effect on the ATA has been minimal and that it hasn't complained to Barry or taken follow-up action.

Very wise. …

(While I was typing that last sentence, after I'd put "very" and just before I had typed "wise" some wanker phoned to try to sell me a complete graphic design service. Thank goodness I didn't lose my train of thought.)

… As Barry says at his blog:

Gosh, that must have been awful! Imagine! Receiving unwanted phone calls! Without warning! How could anyone DO such a thing?

The trouble is, you can phone-nuke the "trade association" of these pests, but it just sneaks into the basesment until the radiation passes. Taking out the pests themselves is a lot harder. Barry's punishment may have fitted the crime, but it wasn't nearly severe enough and it left the real culprits unpunished, namely all the damn people who are doing this. In his Aug 31 article Barry mentions this new government website they have over there which means you can put yourself on a list of people who don't like junk phone calls …

(The wanker just called again, this time wanting to talk to someone in my administration, no doubt to offer them a complete graphic design service unimpeded by me telling them to go to hell. How can I be expected to blog with these morons interrupting me? I had to switch off the music as well before answering. A Mendelssohn string quartet, rather nice.)

… full stop. That sentence was actually complete when it was interrupted, but I didn't realise at the time. Bastards.

Anyway, drop whatever else you may be wanting to do, at once, and answer my questions. What should be done about phoners phoning to sell you rubbish you don't want at times of maximum inconvenience, just when you are expecting other important incoming calls or about to go out? Should there be any new laws against it? Would that be libertarian? Does that matter – a lot, quite a lot, a bit, not really very much at all, not at all completely? Come on, come on, I haven't got all day. I've got another two thousand intrusive blog postings to write before midnight.

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Stephen Lewis of the Sterling Times message board sent this link.

Follow it, please. Now would be a good time.

Mr Lewis has found a report on the Radio Nederlands website stating that the BBC, the BBC, is to monitor message boards for hate speech on behalf of the authorities.

Once upon a time the only official way your home could be searched was by a policeman backed by a warrant issued by the courts. OK, as a libertarian I could raise certain objections even to that, but it was the evolved and generally agreed custom of my country and that counts for a lot. Then the privilege of search spread first to customs officers and then to tax-gatherers, until now practically any parasite of an environmental health officer or social worker can walk in.

Count on it. The same process is happening with restrictions of freedom of speech. Fifty years ago the legal right to impose restrictions was the preserve of the courts. Many of the restrictions were ridiculous: the Lord Chamberlain censored naughty bits out of stage plays until as late as 1968. However, in terms of political speech, freedom fifty years ago was greater than freedom now. Speakers in Hyde Park Corner could and did call for the gutters of Mayfair to run red with the blood of the rich and the copper would just say, "steady on mate, steady on." Part of the reason for this freedom was that the right to restrict was itself restricted to the justice system.

It's a sign of a half-way healthy state (half-way being about as good as states get) that it is very clear who is doing the state's dirty work.

Now, it seems, the job of spying on British citizens has been franchised out to that "much loved" institution, the BBC. As Mr Lewis says, that is not their role. Later on in the post some Radio Nederlands commentary is quoted saying that it might be better to have "trained journalists" doing the monitoring than others. Not surprising, I suppose, that the trained journalists at Radio Nederlands rate their fellow trained journalists at the BBC as the best people to employ for this task. I must disagree: if I had to choose I'd rather be spied on by professional spies. At least they live in the real world, and in particular have the peril of Islamofascism very much in the forefront of their minds. I'd trust them way above the BBC to be able to tell the difference between clear statements warning against Islamofascism and genuine hate speech ¹.

When it comes to judging others - judging us here, for instance - the BBC is very likely to imply that anyone who says out loud that a kind of death-cult has infected to some degree a disturbingly high proportion of the Muslim world is thereby an Islamophobe.

But when it comes to judging themselves, or judging the groups they have a soft spot for, the standard is very different. You can see the double standard in operation by the BBC's choice of Jew-hating ranter Mahathir as official BBC "expert" on Islam for an upcoming forum. (See Biased BBC here and passim.) Tell you what, Beeb guys, if you want to monitor "hate speech" why don't you start with him?

1. I do not make this distinction between real and apparent hate speech in order to say we should forbid one and allow the other. I am a free speech absolutist. That means I must support the political right to make truly hateful hate speech, however vile, while also asserting my right to condemn it. This includes hate speech about Muslims and hate speech by Muslims. But the distinction between real and apparent hate speech is crucial in terms of moral assessment and national security.

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The Guardian reports that ID cards are to be pilot tested in 'a small market town' by the home office. Biometrics will be tested - facial, iris and fingerprint recognition systems.

I am horrifiied that the government is inching towards making us instantly identifiable and knowing too much. Once they have ID cards they will be that much nearer to integrating tax and passport systems, no doubt under the cover of anti-terrorist rhetoric. "To be controlled in our economic pursuits means to be...controlled in everything" said Hayek. To control us they need to know us, this is a fight we must not lose.

Paul Staines

Ed. update: White Rose has more on the subject as it keeps a closer eye on issues of ID cards, privacy, surveillance and other vagaries of state...

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In more traditional police-states, citizens may be blissfully unaware that they have done wrong until they are woken in the wee small hours by an ominous rapping on their front doors. In modern police-state Britain, the knock on the door is to be replaced by the thud on the doormat.

If this report from the UK Times is accurate (and it is just about creepy enough to be true) then it may be time to think about buying a bicycle:

EVEN George Orwell would have choked. Government officials are drawing up plans to fit all cars in Britain with a personalised microchip so that rule-breaking motorists can be prosecuted by computer.

Dubbed the “Spy in the Dashboard” and “the Informer” the chip will automatically report a wide range of offences including speeding, road tax evasion and illegal parking. The first you will know about it is when a summons or a fine lands on your doormat.

The plan, which is being devised by the government, police and other enforcement agencies, would see all private cars monitored by roadside sensors wherever they travelled.

Who the bloody hell are the 'other enforcement agencies'? And the very notion of an informer in every vehicle! Saddam Hussein could only dream about that level of control.

Police working on the “car-tagging” scheme say it would also help to slash car theft and even drug smuggling.

The same old, same old. Every accursed and intrusive state abuse is sold to the public as a cure for crime and 'drug-dealing'. The fact that it still works is proof that we live in the Age of Bovine Stupidity. A media advertising campaign showing seedy drug-dealers and leering child-molesters being rounded up as a result of this technology will have the public begging for a 'spy in the dashboard'.

Having already expressed my doubts about the viability of new government schemes (see below) I should just add that the fact that this relies on technology rather than human agency means it just might work.

The next step is an electronic device in your car which will immediately detetct any infringement of any regulation, then lock the doors, drive you to a football stadium and shoot you. HMG is reported to be very interested and is launching a feasibility study.

[This article has been cross-posted to White Rose.]

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I wonder how many of our readers went to see the film 'Minority Report' and came away thinking, 'Hey, what a great film'?

Contrast this with one of HMG's advisers who went to see the film and cam away thinking, 'Hey, what a great idea!:

Tony Blair is to announce plans to put up to half a million children deemed at risk of becoming criminals or getting into other trouble on a new computer register.

Teachers, family doctors and other professionals working with youngsters will be asked to name potential troublemakers whose personal details will then be placed on the database.

The new "identification, tracking and referral" system will allow the authorities to share information on vulnerable children, including their potential for criminal activity.

Alright, let's get the obvious question out of the way, such as, exactly what does 'at risk' mean? What constitutes a 'potential troublemaker'? Who decides these things and on what basis? Who guards the guardians?

Oh I daresay that there are answers (or, rather, great globs of state-management gobbledekook that purport to be answers) but they will almost certainly remain occluded behind the volumes of policy documents that filter through the ziggurat of state agencies charged with enforcing it all.

For the record, I denounce this but I do so merely as a matter of form. My stores of furious indignation have all but dried up leaving a residue of doleful resignation. And, to be fair, we've always had mechanisms for controlling the poor; this is merely the latest manifestation, albeit dressed up in the fashionable terminology of 'caring and concern'.

The chink of light (well, a fissure really) is that this grand plan may not get off the ground at all and, even if it does, it will probably be a shambles. HMG already has far more laws, regulations, rules, plans, initiatives, schemes and regimes that it can possible see through or enforce and nothing they announce nowadays is likely to work as intended or at all.

Still, it will keep a few state bureaucrats busy for a few more years and that is probably enough.

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There are times when I compare 2003 with the Orwellian world of 1984. In one respect at least, the fictional Airstrip One was far better than present day Britain: kids could have more fun!

Consider this report, that children are being harrassed by intolerant adults into staying locked indoors. Of course we live in an age where most children are treated at best as designer lap dogs or fashion accessories and at worst like punchbags or sex toys. So that actually letting children run around parks, fall in streams, get muddy and avoid obesity and truancy by burning off their excess energy in creative or harmless pursuits are not an option. The streets where I grew up have too many cars parked in them to play football, never mind the traffic.

The contrast with the Orwellian child utopia of Airstrip One is amazing: kids can run around as they wish, there is no shortage of activities for them to enjoy, from attending public executions, to outings in the countryside. But the real fun is in the "spies". Children are actively encouraged to look through keyholes, snoop into the affairs of adults and they can earn plaudits for exposing corrupt and treasonable behaviour. So when that nasty Mrs B. at the corner of A***** Rd and M****** Rd would should at my friends and I for kicking a football outside her house, we could pick up the phone and denounce her to the Party as an agent of Emmanuel Goldstein!

I wonder if there are any equivalent means for children today to get even with bossy and intolerant adults? They could try this phone number: 0800 11 11 (Airstrip One only).

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Over wide areas of the urban first world, the Panopticon State is already very much a reality. Folks like us, the contributors to Samizdata.net, White Rose and the grizzled veterans over at Privacy International cry out warning pretty much daily alerting people not so much about the simple fact of surveillance per se but rather surveillance plus data-pooling.

Yet it is important to draw people attention to the basic facts and encourage them to notice the evidence right in front of their eyes, peering down at them like menacing mechanical crows perched on metal branches jutting from walls everywhere, that we are increasing under surveillance by the state directly...

...and by companies whose surveillance footage states are increasingly reserving themselves the right to gain access to on demand...

But the people who would like our every move recorded and subject to analysis are not fools. They would rather you did not actually notice what is before your very eyes and so we are seeing the second age of CCTV: more aesthetically pleasing and less intrusive cameras, rather than the stark utilitarian carrion crows which currently predominate...

...rounder, blending in with the background...

...looking more like the lighting fixtures than the all-seeing-eye.

The second age of security cameras is at hand...still quite literally staring you in the face, but increasingly hiding in plain sight, counting on a mixture of clever design and the fact that familiarity breeds contempt. But Big Brother is still watching, only with a little more style and taste now. That just makes it more dangerous.

(Cross-posted from White Rose)

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When one objects to something, it is important to have a clear idea exactly what you are objecting to and why. Fleet Online is a company offering an inexpensive way to track the location of someone else's mobile phone to within 50 yards in an urban area. The system has built in safeguards that prevent someone tracking someone else without their permission (a text message is sent to the target phone notifying them of the ping and asking if they are content to be located. Also certain times in which being located is acceptable can be set up as a preference).

I have no problem with companies keeping track of their employees whilst they are on-the-job... for example the advantages to a courier company and their clients are too obvious to need elaboration. I don't even have much of a problem with parents keeping track of their children. Like so much in the world, this ability to track one of the increasingly ubiquitous tools of modern life is not intrinsically good or bad in and of itself. The problems I foresee spring from the Regulation of Investigative Powers Act in Britain and the various equivalent powers of state found in many other nations. Almost certainly there will be a requirement for services like Fleet Online to allow the state to locate people without their permission and under the various provisions of the aptly names RIP Act, notifying the target they are subject to state scrutiny will itself be a crime.

When the RIP Act was first imposed, it was with assurances that access to private information like e-mail, ISP activity records and even decryption keys¹ would be tightly controlled and limited to only a few essential key government agencies. Of course it did not take long for the state to try and expand the list of people who can get access to your private internet traffic details to essential key government agencies like local town councils, the Department of Health, the Environment Agency, the Food Standards Agency, the Postal Services Commission, and Fire Authorities. Previous assurances as to who would have access proved to be worthless and the people who uttered them straightforward liars. No real surprises there to any but the credulous. So does anyone seriously want to trust the same people with the ability to track not just your online life but your physical movements in the real world at the click of a mouse?

Technology is not the problem... the problem is a state with takes such power to itself with little more than an imperious demand to its subjects to 'just trust us' and 'if you are not guilty, you have nothing to fear'.

¹ = or more accurately the decryption keys of those 'criminals' who did not have a completely corrupted floppy disc to surrender on demand 'on which their key codes are stored'. Corrupted you say? No! Really? Well I never. I guess I'll never be able to access those files again... and nor will you.

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I have heard of 'co-operating with the police' before but never with quite this degree of enthusiasm:

Speaking at a conference this winter on Internet crime, eBay.com's director of law enforcement and compliance, Joseph Sullivan...

They actually have one of those?

Brags Sullivan, "If you are a law-enforcement officer, all you have to do is send us a fax with a request for information, and ask about the person behind the seller's identity number, and we will provide you with his name, address, sales history and other details--all without having to produce a court order."

And Mr.Sullivan went further:

"Why if you're a law enforcement officer we will also do your laundry, collect your shopping, pick up your kids from school, tidy up your house, make your bed, weed your garden, fix your dinner, fetch your slippers, repair your leaky guttering, pay all your household bills, walk your dog and even clear the snow from your front path. You don't even have to ask."

But if all that is not enough to leave a queasy feeling in your innards, try this:

eBay itself goes further than this, employing six investigators who are charged with tracking down "suspicious people" and "suspicious behavior."

Perhaps they're expecting to find something like this:

For sale: Nuclear centrifuge. One exceedingly careful owner. Contact s.hussein@ba'athist.com

Or perhaps they are just keeping a beady eye open for those suspicious antique Staffordshire teapots.

[My thanks to Dr.Chris Tame of the Libertarian Alliance for the link.]

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The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and except in darkness, every movement scrutinised.
- George Orwell, from 1984

Today is George Orwell's birthday. Happy birthday George, you were right... just a few years too early. And now we have thermal imagers which means even darkness is no shield from the Panopticon State.

Nah! You must be paranoid! It'll never happen here!

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To be honest I have never understood what the fascination people have with so-call 'reality TV' programmes like Big Brother. I have forced myself to watch a couple times and ended up despairing for the future of western civilization. Suddenly my taste for explosion filled action movies and lycra clad starlets with guns does not seem so low-brow after all.

Oooo! Very exciting!

No doubt some of our faithful commenters will put me right on this area of complete disconnection between me and an entire baffling area of popular culture.

But maybe this Disneyfication of the entirely unfunny term 'Big Brother' that George Orwell coined will soon be coming to an end.

Then maybe we can start getting more people frowning with concern rather than smiling vacuously at the sound of the words 'Big Brother'. Why bother watching the TV to see a bunch of self-absorbed cretins in a room back-stabbing each other when you can be in your very own rolling endless episode of 'Big Brother' by just walking down almost any CCTV filled high street in Britain?

Here is some real reality TV, staring... you.

 

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A new speed camera installed at the urging of Robert Marshall, a Conservative on South Staffordshire district council has caught its first few victims, one of whom was... Robert Marshall.

The Tory speed demon was nailed doing a whopping 43mph in a 30mph limit.

Gotcha, you Tory bastard!!!

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Miceal O'Ronain spotted a new item in the Times of London yesterday. He has also looked between the lines and seen where this will eventually go

The issue is, at least for now, congestion on the roads:

"...Satellite equipment to monitor every car journey will be ready only in a decade or more."

[...]

"Satellite tracking and charging will be tried out on the lorries that use Britain's roads under a scheme that will begin in 2006. If the experiment is successful, the system could be extended to cars as well."

Here are the technical specifications for the system:

• EU network is preferred system

• A nationwide system would be likely to use the EU's Galileo global-positioning network, an array of 30 satellites scheduled for launch in 2006 and 2007.

• The alternative, the US military GPS network, used by the current generation of satellite navigation and tracking devices, does not guarantee access to civilian clients. Galileo is designed for civil use and guarantees an uninterrupted service.

• Galileo will be accurate to 1 metre, GPS to only 30m. The lower accuracy of the US model could cause disputes on whether vehicles had actually entered charging zones.

But why stop with cars? Just surgically implant a transponder into each citizen of the UK. If you can do it for cars and wild life, you can do it to people.

Miceal O'Ronain

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Sadly none of Britain's mainstream political parties are, they just vary (slightly) in who they want to benefit from their regulation of civil society. When it comes from choosing amongst which tribal faction of statists will regulate your life, we are spoilt for choice.

So next time you have an earnest young Tory hopeful turn up on your doorstep asking for your vote and pledging to save you from those beastly Labour socialists, ask him where his party stands on the issue of ID cards, which will naturally start off as 'National Health Benefit Cards' and then very quickly become mandatory for pretty much anything you try to do, such as open a bank account or rent an apartment.

And then look 'earnest young Tory' in the eye, explain why his party is part of the problem rather than part of the solution and then tell him to fuck off. A choice between a party which brought us Michael 'a touch of the night' Howard and one which has brought us David 'RIP' Blunket is no choice at all. But if you cannot bring yourself to resist the syren call to the ballot box, vote UKIP.

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You may think the Belgians are a bit presumptuous by granting themselves jurisdiction over the entire planet in the matter of alleged war-crimes, but they have nothing on our Home Secretary David Blunkett who is trying to turn everyone in the developed world into lab rats:

Even before the Government has decided how to proceed with its identity card scheme, the Home Secretary David Blunkett claims to have persuaded his G8 colleagues to take a look at "smart" passports.

No firm commitment was made by Mr Blunkett's G8 counter-parts at Monday's meeting, and most of them were probably just being polite in expressing support in principle. But Mr Blunkett is seemingly determined to press ahead with a plan to require all British passports to contain chips capable of storing unique biometric information about the bearer, including fingerprints and iris scans.

I realise how much this sounds like wishful thinking but it does sound to me as if Mr.Blunkett's G8 counter-parts were humouring him. As indeed they should. Not only is the technology referred to unlikely to work in the way that Mr.Blunkett has suggested or at all, but it is also to be hoped that his counter-parts have recognised this scheme as merely the latest manifestation of New Labour's neurosis.

As per usual, the British Home Office has its portentious-sounding reasons. They have shuffled through their pack of disposable justifications and come up with stopping 'illegal immigrants' and 'terrorists' as the raisons du jour and I can only assume that they are blissfully immune to the hollow ring which has now grown resonant enough to shatter glass.

If such technology could indeed prevent some terrible terrorist atrocity then it would, at least, be worthy of consideration (if not necessarily implementation) but surely everybody knows that it will do no such thing. Mr.Blunkett may as well claim that his biometric passports will reduce sun-spot activity, prevent child abuse and turn base metal into gold without being any less plausible.

Overwhelmingly, illegal immigrants and potential terrorists originate from Third World countries where no databases exist and few people have genuine passports let alone biometric ones. So they will continue to swan in to collect their welfare cheques in South London and plan bomb attacks in Manchester without so much as let or hindrance while the law-abiding, tax-paying British holidaymakers and business travellers get turned into day-release prisoners; watched, tracked and monitored feverishly to no end whatsoever.

But this is all a part of the game we play in Britain. Our political masters work night-and-day to come up with frightfully impressive techno-whizzbangs while we all turn away and pretend not to notice the godawful, augean mess they have made out of every single thing they have laid their hands on.

New Labour politicians are like the idiot children of wealthy tycoons, skilled only in lavishing around vast sums of other people's money in a squalid attempt to purchase popularity and self-esteem. Scratch the surface and what you find is stupid, loathsome and incompetent. They are deserving of nothing except our unalloyed contempt.

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A pal close to our hearts (and purses) comes into conflict with the authorities. More specifically, on-line auction company eBay said its PayPal auction payment unit is being investigated for possible violations of the USA Patriot Act. Shock! Horror!

Last month eBay received a letter from the U.S. attorney's office for the Eastern District of Missouri about the alleged violations. The letter states that PayPal's earlier practice of providing payment services to online gambling merchants violated provisions in the Patriot Act that "prohibit the transmission of funds that are known to have been derived from a criminal offense or are intended to be used to promote or support unlawful activity."

Sound dangereous. I am so glad Americans are now protected by the Patriot Act against PayPal wretched practices. Apparently, the 'crime' happened almost 2 years ago, before eBay acquired PayPal. Part of the transaction was a committment to stop using the PayPal unit for gambling business. You can breath out now, it is not as if they were secretly raising funds for terrorists.

The authorities offered to "rescind the allegations if PayPal pays the amount of money it earned by handling online gambling transactions from October 2001, through July, 2002, plus interest." So justice will be done and the American public can sleep safely again.

If I remember correctly, the Patriot Act, passed after the September 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S., was to give law enforcement authorities "expanded tools for investigating and deterring future terrorist acts". We live in dangerous times, when on-line auction payment units can commit crimes under anti-terrorist legislation at will...!

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The British Broacasting Corporation, as many readers will know, is paid for out of a tax, the licence fee. And here is further evidence that the BBC, which regards much of the terrestrial television world as its personal fiefdom, will stop at nothing to track down those who don't believe the BBC has a divine right to permanent existence.

As the saying goes, you couldn't make it up.

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There are signs of an unwelcome strain of unilateralism in this country. It is leading to dangerous instability:

"A £10,000 motorway speed camera has been cut down with a blow torch and thrown off a bridge.

PC Adams said the camera was a write-off and the film inside would have been ruined."

I wish it to be known that I am outraged by this senseless, fascistic attack on an innocent speed camera that was simply going about its lawful business. All civilised people should rise up in righteous anger and resolve that this kind of thing should never happen again!

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Lastminute founder Martha Lane Fox admitted to a little indiscretion. The dotcom kept a record of all men who had ordered red roses for Valentine's Day 2002 and then sent them an email this year asking if they'd like to do the same thing.

Lane Fox revealed that, since some ended up going to home email addresses, the result was "quite a few phone calls from wives who didn't get any flowers from their husbands last year, demanding to know where we'd sent them".

Now we know why exactly is data collection bad. Sod privacy and civil liberties - there is a threat of confronting wives 'foxed' over missing flowers...

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Yesterday, the Assets Recovery Agency has been set up to seize the wealth of previously untouchable "Mr Bigs" who have not been convicted of an offence but whose way of life is paid for by crime. It will take on cases referred to it by UK police forces, Customs & Excise, the Inland Revenue, the National Crime Squad and the Serious Fraud Office. Its work is considered so sensitive that its agents will be allowed to use pseudonyms - including in court - and the Government refuses to say where it is based.

The Assets Recovery Agency (ARA) will not have to prove that the people whom it prosecutes are guilty of any crime. The onus will be on the man with the Jaguar, the gold bracelet and the holiday home in Ocho Rios to show that he came by his luxuries legally. Under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, which set up the agency, cases will be decided on the balance of probabilities, rather than the stricter criminal test of certainty beyond reasonable doubt.

The prosecutors will need only to accuse someone of living 'above their means' to bring them to court (without a jury, I might add), if they have "reasonable grounds" for believing that their wealth had been acquired illegally. However, it is the owner's responsibility to prove otherwise and assets could be seized on the "balance of probabilities". This is a far cry from the "beyond reasonable doubt" requirements of the criminal courts. It will, therefore, be possible for the civil courts to seize the assets of someone found not guilty in the criminal courts. Oh, and the presumption of innocence has gone out of the window long before the judge's 'balancing act'.

David Blunkett, the Home Secretary elaborates:

The agency is coming after the homes, yachts, mansions and luxury cars of the crime barons. This is also about cracking down on local crooks well known in their communities for their flash cars, designer clothes and expensive jewellery but no legitimate means of income.

And Jane Earl, director of the ARA reassures:

If you have a large house and five places in the Caribbean, with no visible means of support, no rich aunties who have recently died leaving the odd five million and no successful lottery tickets, it will not do to say that someone gave you the money.

It is as if all their hatred is directed not so much against criminals as against the trappings of wealth. If Mr Blunkett and Ms Earl think they have a case against somebody, they should be made to prove it.

Oh, but they can't do that because the justice system is so screwed up. Let's hire some anonymous thugs then. First we get the Bad Big Criminals and then let's see what we can do without any competition...

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Arguments are getting quite heated among libertarians about the claim that the US is a potential threat to freedom versus the view that the US is the best guarantor of freedom in the world today. I happen to agree with both statements.

It would be absurd to claim that the US is a worse place to live than peacetime Iraq, unless one happened to enjoy being part of a quasi-fascist police state. It is reasonable to worry about the potential threat to freedom posed by the world's only superpower: there is no one to overthrow that state if it should go rotten.

I am disappointed in the complacency of some US libertarians and conservatives who ought to remember that wartime is the time when most encroachments on freedom can be justified. I have been accused of hype for using Hillary Clinton as an example of what a horrible US could be. Surely there can't be anyone who thinks that none of Presidents Lincoln, Wilson, Hoover, F.D.Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Bush senior and Clinton were ever a threat to freedom? Or that no one will ever be elected to the US presidency who is a bad person?

I certainly wish the US forces in the Middle East a speedy and successful trip. I equally hope that the plan is to remove the tyrant with no or low civilian casualties, both for humanitarian reasons, but also because a post-Saddam Iraq will be less resentful of US troops if there hasn't been carpet-bombing, or bad target intelligence.

I remain convinced that the British forces will either be as symbolic or ineffective as the Piedmont-Sardinian contingent during the Crimean War, or worse that they are headed for a repeat of Isandlwana, Majuba Hill, or Dunkirk. Bluntly the best troops in the world are cannon fodder when they run out of ammunition, the comms equipment doesn't work and their boots have melted in the sun.

As for ID cards for use against terrorism. Yes they can help. Yes they are also a violation of personal liberty. But I would be rather more convinced if the British government weren't providing safe havens for terrorists whether leftist, Islamist or Irish.

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As a dual national I have a French national identity card. As a British national who doesn't have a driving licence and whose passport expired in December of last year, I have no state approved form of identifying myself.

Naturally I have never been asked to produce a form of identification in France by a state official except when crossing a border. Equally naturally I have been asked numerous times by police officers in the United Kingdom to identify myself (despite this being illegal without some probable cause, but then I suppose I have a shifty look).

Therefore I fear that a British identity card will become the pretext of even more bullying of white middle-class people by the low-life pigs that pass for law-enforcement officers in the UK today.

During the Second World War, I am told that a well known local dignitary in Ulster was chatting to a police officer at a railway station whilst waiting for a relative to arrive from Belfast. After twenty minutes the police officer said to the local businessman he'd known for years: "Mr Smith, please show me your identity card." He then proceeded to arrest Mr Smith for failing to carry proper documentation. I suspect that a Gestapo officer would have shown more common-sense.

The chances are that the present loutish types will not behave better than the Royal Ulster Constabulary's treatment of a Protestant businessman in 1942. Unfortunately, there is a genuine security advantage to identity cards (even when they can be forged). They provide an audit trail for car hire, bank accounts etc.

But of course in France, of course no self-respecting hotelier would dream of asking a single male for identification, unless they wished to cash a cheque...

(0) (20)

The government's 'consultation exercise' on the introduction of ID cards and which we flagged up last month officially ended yesterday.

A lot of people who hold strong views on this subject, including the Samizdata team, have made those objections known to the Home Office but I rather doubt that that will stymie the determination of HMG to press ahead with their introduction. The governments wants an ID card scheme and, if opinion surveys on the matter are to be believed, so does much of the British public. It is only a matter of time.

A trifling relief though, is that the Independent has decided to live up to its name for a change:

"Initially the state bureaucracy made showing one's card a precondition for dealing with it. Today, it is business that increases the reach of identity cards. Spaniards have long needed them to open bank accounts; now they are vital for any credit-card purchase, and bureaux de change won't serve you without them. It's also impossible to buy a mobile telephone without theDNI, for the network will log its number with that of the phone. I guess the police can see such records: they are certainly told who is checking into Spanish hotels, since Spaniards must show their DNI. The hotel passes its number straight to the police.

Employers love identity cards. They photocopy the DNIs of new staff, whose payslips then carry the number for tax purposes. This, linked to bank records, allows the authorities to track individuals all through Spain's financial system. What really amazes me is the way Spain's card is needed for such harmless activities as renting a car or flat – or getting married. Our church did not read the banns but instead asked for DNI numbers. Even the nursery school expected to see it before taking our child.

When I ask Spaniards "Why?", they seem surprised. Then I remember that at 14 they all had to visit their local police station to be fingerprinted and photographed before receiving their first DNI card. It's a rite of passage that makes young Spaniards feel grown up, yet the first time they use their card is to sit school exams. Many will argue that such obsessive bureaucracy is cultural and could never come to Britain, but I predict it will. In Spain, British giants such as Barclaycard and Vodafone already ask to see customers' identity cards and will do so here."

A salutory reminder of not just the way that compulsory ID cards turn a society into an open-air prison but also of the profound difference between Anglo-Saxon ethos and that of Continental Europe. In Britain sadly, the former has been discarded in favour of the latter. Madness, utter madness.

"Continental experience shows that identity cards will dramatically change life in Britain. It also reveals why Whitehall really wants them. The daily logging of their unique card numbers will create audit trails that lead to that Blairite dream, joined-up government! This already exists in Europe because entire populations dutifully troop along to acquire identity cards, just because they always did. I wonder how Mr Blunkett will force 50 million-odd Britons to do likewise."

All true enough but, unlike the author, I do not expect either Mr.Blunkett or any of his successors to be thwarted to any significant degree by the public. Due to the enactment of anti-money laundering laws, it is already impossible to open a bank account, transact money or buy a property in Britain without being required to produce a passport or driving licence. These impositions were introduced by stealth in the 1990's without either a word of dissent or murmer of complaint. Moving to a universal ID card of the continental variety is but another few steps, especially in a few years when the principle of a government audit trail will have become widely accepted as a part of the social landscape.

I daresay the introduction of the cards will prove to be fraught with bungling and bureaucratic horrors but if anyone expects the British people not to stand for it, then they are heading for a crashing disappointment.

(0) (3)

It is a hallmark of all sinister government programmes that they are never advertised in advance as being sinister. Some might argue that this kind of deception is only to be expected, given the old 'gently-boiling-frog' theory. My own view is that the architects of these schemes genuinely don't see them as the slightest bit sinister. In fact, quite the opposite.

For example, I have no doubt that the Whitehall mandarins behind this proposal regard it as a laudable exercise in sound administration:

"The Office for National Statistics has told the BBC it is planning the first official national wealth survey.

The new survey could include collecting data on a range of wealth indicators, from secured loans, investments, possessions and pensions take-up to house prices - and is aimed at getting a better picture of the country's and individual wealth."

A modern 'domesday book' listing who has got what and how much of it; a one-stop reference resource that will prove indispensable to the next generation of public sector wealth-grabbers.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps this is just another sterile technocratic exercise formulated for the purpose of providing lots of bureaucrats with years-worth of statistic fiddling, an exercise which they appear to love for its own sake. I certainly hope so but I can't seem to get the word 'sinister' out of my mind, especially when the proposal is expressed in terms like this:

"It is believed the data could be used to formulate fiscal and social policies and to link the government's policies closer to people's real wealth."

Management-speak or polite euphamism?

(0) (6)

Peter Carayiannis writes in to alert us about the state of privacy & civil liberties in Canada.

The Canadian Privacy Commissioner yesterday released a damning report of the Canadian federal government with respect to its approach to the privacy of the citizens of Canada. According to him, fundamental human rights are at stake and September 11th is being used as an excuse for the infringements. Frankly, as a Canadian, I have been consistently dismayed with Ottawa's response to all matters related to September 11th.

There are articles in the major Canadian newspapers - including the National Post.

"The government is, quite simply, using Sept. 11 as an excuse for new collections and uses of personal information about all of us Canadians that cannot be justified by the requirements of anti-terrorism and that, indeed, have no place in a free and democratic society."

[...]

Mr. Radwanski also took issue with proposals that would allow the government to monitor Internet activities and cellphone calls, stating: "I do not see any reason why e-mails should be subject to a lower standard of privacy protection than letters or phone calls."

[...]

Mr. Radwanski's complaints about anti-terror measures relate primarily to "function creep," when information collected ostensibly to stop terrorists is subsequently used for a host of other purposes.

Additionally, you can go directly to the source, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

Peter Carayiannis

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The excellent folks at Stand.org.uk, who describe themselves as "a group of volunteers who originally came together in 1998 in a vain attempt to fix the worst aspects of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Act", are mobilising efforts to oppose the imposition of ID cards in the UK. They enable you to contribute your comments to the 'consultation' process, which Downing Street is claiming shows Growing support for entitlement cards... We think you should go to Stand.org.uk website and let them show you how to tell the British government exactly how you feel about this. I did and left comments saying:

To put it bluntly, this is clear evidence, not that any more is needed, that the Labour government is as utterly inimical to civil liberties as the Tory party was. I shall never cooperate with what is clearly just a euphemism for a national ID card which will enhance the state's ability to monitor and control its subjects. It is clear that any 'voluntary' system you offer up will just the thin end of the wedge for a mandatory system that will enable policemen to stop you on the street and demand "your papers". I will never consent or cooperate with this.

Be polite but tell them what you think. Kudos to Stand.org.uk for their efforts to defend what is left of civil liberties in the United Kingdom.

The state is not your friend

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There has been much discussion lately how assorted snooping organizations of assorted governments are creating the infrastructure of the Big Brother state as fast as their evil little hands can do so. Fortuneately for those who love Liberty more than Government, there are ways to defeat them. Long ago I said to some friends: "The hacker giveth and the hacker taketh away", meaning what one programmer designs for a government or corporation, another programmer can bypass or subvert. It is, after all, nothing but patterns of ones and zeroes.

The advantage of numbers falls to our side. Whatever number of bright people any government collects for some nefarious project, there will be larger numbers of even brighter and perhaps more committed people out to undo the damage. There is a near certainty someone, somewhere on this large hunk of rock and water will find the work around. Minutes later, everyone will have it.

This brings me to the point of this ramble: those who are seriously interested in the technology of privacy may find of interest this talk from the 1999 Ottawa Linux Conference on "Linux and the Freedom Network" by Zero Knowledge of Canada. Right click and download. It's a largish mp3 but well worth the effort. The sort of thing to drive Statists mad...

And that can't ever be a bad thing.

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It's final. Instapundit reports DeCSS (a DVD encryption unscrambler) is legal... if you live in the free world.

We send our heartfelt congratulations to the author of DeCSS, Jon Lech Johansen, on his acquittal and total victory over the forces of evil.

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The Home Office is to publish a consultation paper to help gauge how much electronic invasion of privacy the public is willing to accept.

This is a second attempt at a code of practice for controversial snooping laws, the first draft code was shelved by the government after causing outrage among privacy advocates who protested against allowing
a broad range of government agencies, including all local authorities, the NHS, the Postal Services Commission and the Food Standards Agency, to demand the communications records of Internet and telephone users.

Home Office officials insist that the new consultantion document to be published early this year will be placed in the public domain and show the totality of how data is accessed.

All departments responsible for authorities accessing communications data are being asked for help to make sure the paper properly reflects what is being done and by whom.

I bet you anything that the 'whom' will be faceless government departments with names George Orwell would be proud of.

The state is not your friend

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Crikey! This news story suggests certain elements in the Chinese police are actually concerned about privacy, so much so that they apologised to a family after busting into a man's house where the guy was watching porn with his wife.

The world turns. Are we getting close to the point where China, a communist state albeit one hurtling ever faster down the capitalist path, may be becoming more concerned about privacy than Britain?

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Whilst looking for something entirely different I stumbled across the public domain slides and script for a talk given by John Poindexter: "Information Awareness Office Overview". Since there was some discussion about this DARPA research project a few weeks ago, I have acquired copies and placed them on our server.

That way, if a slashdot occurs, instead of causing headaches for some unsuspecting research site administrator, I'll only annoy the ISP that hosts us.

You will probably want to do "the rightclick download thing" as these are pdf documents.

• Information Awareness Office Overview script

• Information Awareness Office Overview slides

Cheers!

Addendum: If there is sufficient interest, I will acquire and post some of the other talks.

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Following up another story about the extermination of some weird garden weed (don't ask), I came across news from the BBC of a public meeting tomorrow afternoon organised by Privacy International on the subject of those compulsory ID cards that our government is so determined to introduce willy nilly, by hook or by crook, or by any other cliché that will work the trick. Bottom line, at the end of the day, when push comes to shove, they're probably going to go the final five yards on this and bring home the bacon, but let's at least put a spoke in their frying pan, eh?

In July, the Government announced a six-month public consultation on proposals to establish a compulsory national Identity Card to establish entitlement to benefits and services, including healthcare, welfare benefits, education and public housing. The consultation period ends in January. This event at the LSE will be the only public meeting during the consultation exercise.

The proposals involve issues of vital importance for everyone living in the UK. The government envisions a compulsory registration of the entire population, backed by a national database of "biometric" identifiers such as digital photographs, fingerprints and retina scans. The scheme will form the basis for the matching of personal information between government and private sector organisations, and will involve a legal requirement to produce the card in a wide variety of circumstances. Failure to disclose your card will result in denial of access to a wide range of essential services such as healthcare and education.

Wednesday 11th December 2002, 2.15 - 5.30, The Old Theatre, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE. Chair and session summariser: Simon Davies, Director of Privacy International. Speakers: Lord Falconer of Thoroton, QC, Minister of State for criminal justice; Baroness Sharples (Conservative); Simon Hughes, MP, Liberal Democrat Shadow Home Secretary; Dr Nick Palmer MP (Labour); Charles Moore, Editor, The Daily Telegraph; Dr Ross Anderson, Computing Laboratory, Cambridge University; Peter Lilley MP, former Secretary of State for Social Security (Conservative); Terri Dowty, Joint national coordinator, Alliance for Childrens Rights for England; Dr Clarence Lusane, Director of Social Research, The 1990 Trust.

Finally, there'll be a Q&A with Stephen Harrison, Head of the Entitlement Cards Unit, Home Office. (For more information about the Entitlement Card proposal, see the Privacy International UK ID Card Page.)

Admission free. To reserve a seat, please email london2002@privacy.org or call 0207 955 6579. Media enquiries to 07947 778 247.

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According to Carlton Vogt unless you have been living in a cave, you're aware of the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness (TIA) programme. My cave has an internet connection so I can blog about it eventually. Although the news about it has already been round the blogosphere I liked Mr Vogt's article.

The goal of TIA is to accumulate every bit of transactional online data worldwide and use data mining techniques to provide intelligence information. This means TIA will give the Pentagon access to your credit card data, school records, medical information, travel history, church affiliation, gun ownership, ammunition purchases, library records, video rentals, you name it:

"This will all be collected into a database, the purpose of which is ostensibly to fight terrorism, but which will present a massive opportunity for government abuse. There comes a point in almost every science fiction "B" movie where someone suggests that the new invention can be beneficial, but will be dangerous if "it falls into the wrong hands."

The problem is that this technology has not only fallen into the wrong hands, it was conceived by "the wrong hands." The chief architect of this new data gathering and mining scheme is none other than John Poindexter:

"Those who are old enough will remember him from the arms-for-hostages scandal, in which many of the arms currently threatening us in the Middle East were illegally traded to Iran by the Reagan administration.

Poindexter subsequently was convicted of several felonies, including conspiracy, perjury, and obstruction of justice. The convictions were later overturned on a technicality. The disgraced former admiral re-entered public life this year as a civilian Pentagon employee."

InfoWorld deals mainly with computer and technology related news or issues. It was most encouraging to read the following analysis by one of the senior editors in his regular column Ethics Matters:

"We are in the midst of vast fundamental changes in the body of rights, legal and moral, that we have taken for granted for so long. I am constantly amazed at how passively most people have accepted these changes, which will affect the way we live and work. It is a dangerous path on which false beginnings and missteps along the way can end in disaster.

If we scroll down to the bottom line, we find that the TIA project places too much information on too many people into the hands of too few people with too little oversight. It portends disaster.

...We have the opportunity to put the brakes on here before the situation becomes that grave. Perhaps it's time for people to shake off their post-9/11 stupor and find out what mischief is being done under the guise of fighting terrorism. You may not like what you see."

Absolutely. The state is not your friend.

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Looking for a job?

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Secretary of Homeland Security to be Tom Ridge commented on domestic spying:

"Ridge said his recent visit to MI5, the British domestic intelligence agency, was "very revealing," but that the powers the British agency wields would be unacceptable under the U.S. Constitution."

I can't really say I find this surprising. (Hi guys, did you get all that?)

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I have been decrying the rapid emergence of a British panoptic total surveillance state but do not think this is a purely British problem. A NYTimes article reports Pentagon plans a computer system that would peek at personal data of Americans
(Free registration required to link). Peek is of course a euphemism for 'spy on'.

Historically, military and intelligence agencies have not been permitted to spy on Americans without extraordinary legal authorization. But Admiral Poindexter, the former national security adviser in the Reagan administration, has argued that the government needs broad new powers to process, store and mine billions of minute details of electronic life in the United States.

Admiral Poindexter, who has described the plan in public documents and speeches but declined to be interviewed, has said that the government needs to "break down the stovepipes" that separate commercial and government databases, allowing teams of intelligence agency analysts to hunt for hidden patterns of activity with powerful computers.

"We must become much more efficient and more clever in the ways we find new sources of data, mine information from the new and old, generate information, make it available for analysis, convert it to knowledge, and create actionable options," he said in a speech in California earlier this year.

Naturally anyone who values civil liberties and is not blindly trusting of the state is far from enthusiastic about this.

"A lot of my colleagues are uncomfortable about this and worry about the potential uses that this technology might be put, if not by this administration then by a future one," said Barbara Simon, a computer scientist who is past president of the Association of Computing Machinery. "Once you've got it in place you can't control it."
[...]
If deployed, civil libertarians argue, the computer system would rapidly bring a surveillance state. They assert that potential terrorists would soon learn how to avoid detection in any case.

Yet of course that is not what the official line. Predictably...

"What we are doing is developing technologies and a prototype system to revolutionize the ability of the United States to detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists, and decipher their plans, and thereby enable the U.S. to take timely action to successfully pre-empt and defeat terrorist acts," said Jan Walker, the spokeswoman for the defense research agency.

And how will they "detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists"? By spying on the communications of tens of millions of Americans daily without so much as a search warrent of course. This is far from just a British problem.

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When looking at the world around us, it is impossible to constantly take everything upon which we must form an opinion back to first principles: life is simply too short for that.

But to decide if a dog might be about to bite you, one must have at least some understanding of the nature of dogs and how they might act differently to cats or parrots or foxes or hippopotamuses (the later being a rare sight in London it must be noted). Whilst the propensity of a Golden Labrador and a Staffordshire Bull Terrier to chomp on you varies considerably, both are nevertheless dogs and thus act within the range of doglike behaviours to which their natures impel them.

And so to understand anything done by a state, the workings of its parts and how they are likely to impact upon your life, one must understand some of the basic underlying truth about the nature of states. All states are not exactly the same just as all dogs are not exactly the same: whilst a libertarian such as myself might lambast the United States or the United Kingdom for many and varied sins, it is clear to all but the 'rationality impaired' that the USA and UK are currently significantly less harmful to their subjects than the likes of Iraq or Myanmar or China or Belarus or Zimbabwe.

So when I recently wrote a couple articles about posters by a government body (Transport for London) aimed at garnering public support for increasingly panoptic mass surveillance, some commenters (a minority it must be said) took exception to the idea there might be anything sinister about the vast proliferation of CCTV cameras in Britain to which the state has access. Britain after all, is not Nazi Germany or North Korea, so what is the problem?

Trust us. Constantly. The second you step out of your front door.

Nevertheless, all states, like all dogs, do indeed share some common irreducible aspects to their natures. Without getting into the intractable and interminable minarchist versus anarchist inter-libertarian debates of the legitimacy of any form of state, it is fair to say all modern states however democratic and 'liberal' suffer from a type of progressive moral cirrhosis. Take the remarks in the Telegraph regarding Britain's socialist National Health Service:

Rather as in the old Soviet Union, many managers now think it safer to fiddle their returns rather than send bad news back to the centre. This week, for instance, the Department of Health claimed that no one now has to wait more than 24 hours in accident and emergency, a claim that was flatly contradicted by the BMA [British Medical Association]. It has got to the point where we now routinely expect schools to massage their test results and hospital managers to fiddle their waiting lists. No wonder people's everyday experience of schools and hospitals so rarely seems to accord with the glowing reports presented by the Prime Minister and his colleagues in the House of Commons.

Yet Britain is not the Soviet Union and although it does imprison the most number of people per capita in Europe, there is no network of gulags or mass murders to enforce the governing party's supremacy. Unlike Saddam Hussain, who holds sham elections in which 100 percent ('if not more') vote for him, in the democratic western world, elections are free and fair. Well, sort of. They just gerrymander the way people vote. Of course this is not the same as what Saddam Hussain does but it is certainly the same species of behaviour.

Democracy, Iraqi style: happiness is mandatory




Democracy, American style: representing who exactly?




Democracy, British style: looking after you, like it or not.
(Photo: Mike Scott)

So why, given that we are constantly told how superior democratic states are to their benighted totalitarian counterparts, do we see time and time again the same toxic behavioral characteristics, albeit manifested in less homicidal ways?

It is because all modern states exist primarily to do things. By this I mean do more than just guard the boundaries of society (i.e. keep out marauding Turks, put out fires, run law courts). All states have always done things, such as waged wars, built aqueducts or whatever, but not all states have existed to primarily do things beyond aggrandise the King/Tzar/Chief/Khan/Sultan etc... stay out of the state's way and it tended to leave you alone. That did not mean that such states were not capable of acts of breathtaking tyranny, just that unlike an overtly interventionist state such as we all live under these days, to a large extent the pattern of your life was social rather than political: if your children were schooled, it was because that was the custom and it seemed the thing to do, rather than because the state threatened you with arrest if you did not acquiesce to your children being conscripted for mandatory collective education.

Much like dogs, some states are more vicious than others but ultimately the people who grasp the levers of power do so in the knowledge that they are there to do things and that knowledge alone is the source of their inevitable corruption by the system they are part of. That is why in the long run it does not matter which state wants to envelop their subjects in panoptic surveillance, because in the end no state can be trusted to have such information at its casual disposal because states cannot be trusted to act other than as states, and all states are to a lesser or greater extent corrupt. It is the nature of the beast.

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There has been enormous interest regarding the Samizdata.net article last Wedneday about the bizarre poster appearing across London. The large number of comments and e-mails that people have left present a wide range of fascinating views and a few rather odd theories.

This is a spoof, a cultural hack! No one in authority could be so daft as to use such obvious 1984'ish imagery.
No, it is entirely true. As mentioned by Brian Micklethwait in the previous Samizdata.net article, here is the appropriate link to the London Transport website.
• Whoa! There is a UFO up in the corner! This is creeping me out!
Relax! I went out and looked at the poster again and it is just a reflection of a lighting fixture from the bus shelter... the imagery is sinister enough without any UFO references!
• What is wrong with trying to make buses safer?
Nothing at all. However the point I was making is the 1940's imagery and choice of words in the poster suggests far more than keeping Granny safe on the bus. It is a propaganda poster in the most literal 1940's sense of the word, and what it is advocating is 'Safety through Panopticon' : nothing less than a surveillance state.
• Totally Cool! What great graphics! I want one!
Yes, I agree. Although I may be an arch-capitalists libertarian individual rights advocate who hates the message and sub-text these posters convey, I also have a nifty Communist Chinese poster on my wall and would love to add one of these babies next to it. However they are enormous and I do not think they are available for sale yet.

However, we at Samizdata.net think our often used slogan 'When the state watches you, dare to stare back' (which we have on our coffee mugs and tee-shirts) suggests some alternative poster designs:





Samizdata-ized images by Alan K. Henderson

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Serial comment writer Molly does not like the look of Britain's future

The poster of the 'kindly' authorities watching us that Perry de Havilland wrote about on Wednesday scared the hell out of me. Is that really how they see themselves? Do they really think we want to have our movements watched? Do they actually think that a bunch of gobshites full of beer on a bus are going to be made to behave by a camera?

The fact is if you have ever had your house broken into in Newcastle (and I have lost count) then you know that the boys in blue, when they turn up a day later to take down your details, are never ever going to catch them. They are just going through the motions. If you are assaulted and raped by someone you do not know, they will take a statement and look around for evidence for a few minutes (like, maybe he dropped his f**king business card perhaps?) and then give you the telephone number of some tax funded and utterly pointless 'counsellor' to talk to who will keep forgetting your name.

And yet if you take a baseball bat to a burglar, they will throw the book at you because they know who you are and where you live. Of course they do because you foolishly called them to come.

All the people who live off my taxes, both the ones who empty my meagre bank account to 'provide me with services' and the ones on the dole who break into my house to steal what I have left, seem to me to be on the same side most of the time. David Carr is right that if 'security' is why the state is watching us, it certainly does not seem to be our security.

No, I am not sure why the cameras are going up but it sure as hell has nothing to do with my safety. The people who put them up do not give a f**k about that, this much I know for sure.

Molly

The future?

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Taking a bus to Brixton from Streatham this afternoon, I saw the Big Brother posters which assured me I was safe. Considering I was in one of London's three murder hotspots, the posters seemed appropriate. In Coldharbour Lane the new multimedia telephone kiosks were empty yet there were queues outside them. These were the drugs hustlers who called out "Grass", "Charlie" and "Horse" as I walked past.

Directly beneath a bus lane camera a car blocked the bus lane. I was reminded that when the security cameras were installed in Coldharbour Lane one of them didn't work. Any guesses where a murder was committed? Yup, directly beneath the faulty camera.

In Kingston-upon-Thames a few years ago a jeweller's shop was discovered to be the only shop in the street which couldn't be seen from the array of cameras. A nice dark alleyway running alongside was also unaccountably off-screen. Any guesses how this was discovered? Yup, when a gang burgled the shop.

At least there is no suggestion that inside information could possibly have contributed to these crimes.

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I was prompted by Perry's post below to refer to a London newspaper story I saw yesterday.

The fig-leaf justification provided for establishing a panopticon state is that we all be a lot safer as a result. Pity it didn't work in the case of this gut-wrenching story of a man who was set upon by a gang outside an underground station in North London and beaten to death for no other reason than he had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Where was all the security state apparatus? What about all those CCTV cameras? Do you think this man's family might want to ask themselves why they're being sold a pup?

Police States are all about security; not our security, mind.

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Across London, these posters can be seen telling us all that we are 'Secure beneath The Watchful Eyes' of the Metropolitan Police. I cannot tell you how much better that makes me feel. The imagery is pure 1930's/1940's and conjurors up the 'Golden Age of Totalitarianism'.

Britain is already a Police State in so far as the means for total repression are already well and truly in place. As the poster indicates all too well, Britain is the nation most under surveillance on Earth, Echelon monitors our domestic communications, our Internet usage is logged for years due to the Draconian RIP Act, our locations detected via our mobile phones and logged, all for the apparatus of state to access on very low level authority. Civilians are not just deprived of any firearms, in reality we are forbidden to defend ourselves and our property with so much as a broom stick. Our right to trial by Jury faces abridgement, even our ancient protection of Habeas Corpus is now a dead letter under European extradition laws.

Yes, we still have a fairly free press, in so far as the media are strong enough to prevent restrictions against their actions... yet do not dare to make an allegedly 'racist' remark or pour scorn on someone's religion or make a joke about Wales: if you do then expect to find yourself up in front of the Beak justifying yourself under threat of fine or gaol, and forget saying "I was just exercising my right to freedom of speech".

Is it any surprise that the powers that be feel they can dare put posters announcing that you are 'Secure beneath The Watchful Eyes'. Secure? From what? Surveillance increases daily at the same times as crime soars out of control, so if we are not 'secure' from crime, then what exactly is being secured? We face many threats in the modern world but the biggest comes from the people who would watch our every action so that the State may choose to judge us when it sees fit.

How long before we start seeing this poster?

Update: See follow up articles to this one on Samizdata.net here and here

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After periodic, and if the truth be known, inevitable paedophile scandals in Britain of the sort that occurs in every school system in the world, checks on the backgrounds of teachers have been stepped up and made more rigorous. No problem there as if someone has a history of paedophile activities, it is entirely reasonable that a potential educational employer should want to discover that.

But then why does the state insist that as part of this information gathering process, that the prospective teacher reveals their banking details and how to access their secure password to get at their financial details?

It is because the Panopticon state regards privacy as in and of itself a cause for suspicion.

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Let me write a little fiction for a moment:

John is in his late twenties and an Internet power-user. He uses it for work (he is an independent consultant of some sort), he uses it for games (he is a dab hand at playing on-line, feared amongst the community of Alien vs. Predator 2 gamers) and, being a guy, he likes to trawl through Usenet newsgroups to find pictures of who ever his babe-de-jour is... he is currently rather keen on Britany Spears (my, my, she is aging well).

One night, he visits one of his favourite newsgroups: alt.binaries.celebrities.nude

The list of articles builds, then he casts his eye down the displayed article headers, selecting several posts which indicate they contain images of Britany Spears. He sees one that says 'Britany Nude'. 'Hmmm, probably another fake,' he thinks to himself, 'no doubt some twit has used PhotoShop to put the divine Miss B's head on the body of some porn star'..

He clicks 'extract binaries' to download the images that people have posted in 120 or so articles and while that chugs away in the background, he launches Excel to catch up on some work he has been putting off.

A few hours later, he goes back to the directory in which his UseNet reader saves extracted binary images and sees a long list of 120 .jpg and .gif pictures. He starts to check them out, keeping the good ones, junking the dross and any duplicates. Then he comes to a file called nudebritney.jpg. He opens it and his lip twitches up in disgust. It is a scared looking little girl, maybe 12 years old, naked and posed suggestively with her legs apart, a web address ending in .ru is written across the bottom of the image.

'What type of vermin do that to a little girl?' he growls to the un-hearing screen. With a couple clicks of the mouse, he deletes the offending image and moves on to the next, which turns out to be a picture of the real Britany Spears dancing with a snake at the MTV awards. The angry scowl fades and the smile reappears on his face.

About 2 months later, there is a knock on his door and there is a tax inspector with a warrant. They seize his computer as part of an ongoing tax related dispute... two days later they return, not to charge him with tax evasion but with child pornography offenses! They used an un-delete utility (such as Norton Utilities) to recover supposedly 'erased' files and found a file called nudebritany.jpg.

Is this a far fetched scenario? Unfortunately not.

There is a fascinating article in Wired magazine about the terrifying approach taken by the FBI towards eradicating child pornography on the Internet:

As one FBI agent put it, "Even my friends can't believe there's a federal offense that's so easy to commit. One click, you're guilty."

Possession of child porn is a strict-liability offense, like possession of cocaine. Possessing it, though, does not only mean you have intentionally downloaded and stored the images on your hard drive. Under Title 18 of the US Code, the felony is committed the first time sexually explicit images of minors — defined as anyone under 18 — appear on your screen. If your computer is searched, even files that have been dragged to the trash or cached by your browser software are counted as evidence. Some offenders have been sent to jail for "possessing" images that only a computer-forensics technician can see.

So even if you receive an unsolicited spam mail with attached pictures of child porn and delete the images without opening them, you cannot prove you did not look at them but the state sure as hell can prove they were on your hard drive once!

Much as RICO statutes in the USA were passed to fight against the Mafia but ended up being used against anti-abortion activists and environmental protestors, so too will laws against Internet kiddie porn be used to criminalise people the state just happens to want to criminalise, regardless of whether or not they have the slightest thing to do with the problem of child pornography. This will be hard to stop... after all, who wants to stand up and protest when that risks you being called an 'apologist for child pornographers'. Nasty.

The Internet gives us many and varied ways to fight the state's constant attempts to regulate our lives and livelihoods, but is also gives the state new ways to attack us. The state is not your friend.

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The attempt by statist corporations to allow their Big Media interests to hack your computer with the US government's blessing is moving into high gear with the Berman bill.

Critics say Berman and Hollings have no choice but to respond to the wealthy lobby of the entertainment industry, which has dumped generous campaign donations into their laps. But supporters of the legislation suggest the lawmakers are just doing the right thing.

"The essence of capitalism is for people to profit from the fruits of their labors," said James Miller, a professor of economics at Smith College and proponent of government intervention. "I don't think the Berman bill goes far enough."

Ah yes, blesséd democracy... in fact the finest democracy money can buy. Of course what idiots like Professor Miller do not seem to grasp is that it is not "the essence of capitalism" at all: the essence of capitalism is allowing market forces (i.e. capital) to determine what is or is not a viable business model. By arguing that the state should prop up what is clearly becoming a non-viable business model (the existing music business), Miller is describing not capitalism but statist stasis based economic systems like socialism and fascism. Miller is free to propose what he likes for the benefit of th existing structure of Big Music but to describe propping it up with restrictive, innovation destroying, market mechanism deadening laws as "The essence of capitalism" suggests to me that perhaps the article has a typo and he is in fact a Professor of Ergonomics.

And that is without even considering the civil liberties aspects to this.

"It gives me pause that the only entities trying to block Internet access is the communist government of China and the entertainment industry," said Phil Corwin, a technology attorney who represents music file-sharing service Kaza.

Also does anyone seriously think that if this law makes it onto the books in the USA that Big Music will restrict its Denial of Service Attacks and direct hacks to computers and networks in the USA? You must be joking. Of course two can play at that game, fellahs. Hackers are a moving target... which cannot be said for the corporations now threatening to hack personal computers by the million.

I wonder if the next 'shot heard around the world' will be fired at the state backed corporates from ten thousand keyboards of people who have finally seen an intrusion too far. We will just have to wait and see.

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Teddy Sherrill over on The American Kaiser has an article lambasting the RIAA for attempting to gain the legal right to hack your computer in order to protect a flawed and obsolete business model.

If anything Sherrill's article actually understates the horrendous civil liberties implications of this power grab.

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Given the previous post on the subject of state surveillance, it is good to hear that The Register is reporting that PGP encryption is back in the hands of an independent company.

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Although I have never been a huge fan of Statewatch, a civil liberties advocacy group whose membership contains a high proportion of socialists (which I have always thought analogous to a temperance society whose membership contains a high proportion of brewers), the latest Statewatch press release is well worth reading.

They clearly lay out how the European Union is about to take a giant leap towards the sort of total surveillance super-state that the Soviet Union could only dream of implementing. As Tony Bunyan, Statewatch editor, comments in the press release:

EU governments claimed that changes to the 1997 EC Directive on privacy in telecommunications to allow for data retention and access by the law enforcement agencies would not be binding on Members States - each national parliament would have to decide. Now we know that all along they were intending to make it binding, "compulsory", across Europe.

The right to privacy in our communications - e-mails, phone-calls, faxes and mobile phones - was a hard-won right which has now been taken away. Under the guise of fighting "terrorism" everyone's communications are to be placed under surveillance.

Gone too under the draft Framework Decision are basic rights of data protection, proper rules of procedure, scrutiny by supervisory bodies and judicial review

The Panopticon super-state 'of the future' is now very much upon us.

When the state watches you,
dare to stare back

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The awful disappearance of two young girls in Britain who were possibly lured to a meeting via the Internet and then kidnapped by some vile monster has renewed calls for a clamp down on the Internet. The sort of things being talked about to contain the perceived threat from on-line 'paedophiles' (by which people really mean pederasts) is fairly mild stuff but that is always how it starts out. I just hope that this is not used as yet another excuse for the Panopticon state to stick its proboscis ever deeper into our private on-line lives.

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As of yesterday, the Japanese government brought a nightmarish integrated national resident registry network system on-line called Juki Net. Privacy activists in Japan see this as an alarming tool in the hands of a state with a long history of intrusion into civil society and even some municipal authorities are uneasy about the privacy implications.

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A British solicitor has been sentenced to six months in prison under the money laundering provision in the Drug Trafficking Act 1994

Not that he was actually laundering money, mind you. He 'failed to report suspicions of money laundering' i.e. he did not go behind his clients back to snitch him out to the authorities and he has now paid the price.

He has paid the price for not sufficiently appreciating that he has been conscripted by the government and that his first and last loyalty belongs to them. I fear he is not the last 'draft-dodger' to feel the wrath of the State.

'When the Proceeds of Crime Bill goes through (it should recive its Royal Assent this week), money laundering will apply to the proceeds of any crime. The implications for the profession will be widespread.'

The Proceeds of Crime Bill will extend the current obligation to report suspicions of money laundering to cover all and any unlawful activity. And it will not be a question of what the professional adviser did know but what they should have know.

The professional classes are going to have their lives made hell and, whilst this is an undoubted injustice to the many who work hard and serve their clients interests as best as they can, there is also a raging irony and a fable here.

The professional classes have always anxiously sought the help of the State in order to establish the restrictive practices and barriers to entry upon which much of their wealth and influence has been built. The same State has now turned on them with a rapacious fury.

This should serve as an object lesson to everyone that the Leviathan may have strong arms in which to cradle you but it also has big, sharp teeth to eat you all up. And the beast cannot help its nature.

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As I've often said before, my own political journey began to the left of the Nolan chart. One of the reasons it did not end there was the forward into the past mentaility I ran across time and again. The problem is, there are important issues at stake in the United States, issues with far more import than the assinine Politically Correct Hate Me I Was Born Here mentality.

Some of the very foundations of freedom are under threat. Rather than go into details, I suggest you read and act on these two: Lessig and Stallman and UCITA.

My message to the Left: GET OFF YOUR FRIGGIN' ARSES AND JOIN THE 21^ST CENTURY BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!

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During a phone conversation the other night I commented to Perry on the pointlessness of Apple's decision to charge for formerly free email accounts. We'd both read an item sent us by a friend, and Perry was wondering if perhaps this is a sign of a shift to fees in many areas of the internet. Today he pointed me to this Dodgeblog item and gave my arm a severe virtual twisting in hopes I'd pass my comments on to the world.

It's quite simple actually. Apple and others are battling for a market in email hosting just as it is about to go the way of horseshoes and buggy whips. This is perhaps more apparent to me than it would be to most since I do consultancy to data centres. My question to Perry, and to anyone else is "In a world where broadband into the home is common, why on earth would anyone leave their email hosting in the hands of a distant large corporation?" Or even a nearby small one for that matter!

It really hasn't sunk in to the heads of most people yet that broadband to the home means much more than the opening of a huge market of passive consumers. It's many to many communication, not one to many like television, radio and the movies. The internet is not just a new mass media. It is a total bypass of central control.

For a few hundred quid today and probably less tomorrow, I can put in a Linux firewall; I can run my own email and web hosting for my family photos from home; I can connect with my laptop from anywhere in the world through a secure encrypted virtual tunnel. All with trusted, vetted, peer-reviewed open source applications.

So I ask again. Why exactly should anyone care if companies start charging for email hosting? It will just drive the market towards home internet appliances. In a very few years the rest of you will be recieveing your PGP encrypted email over SSL connections into your own secure server where it is stored on an encrypted disk.

It's not science fiction. A lot of us are already there.

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The British government's maniacal desire to transform this island into a Police State grows by the day. Our dear old friend, the State ID card, made another appearance on Wednesday, the pet scheme of Home Secretary (interior minister) David Blunkett. What is encouraging is that media coverage in the press and television has so far given full rein to objections to such a monstrous proposal from the likes of privacy campaigner Dr. Simon Davies of Privacy International and other civil liberties groups. In the press, even the relentlessly pro-corporatist 'on-message' Financial Times gives the ID card idea a skewering in its editorial pages, although it focusses as much on the practical arguments against as ones of principle.

Now I may be getting carried away here, but I cannot help thinking that the current wide coverage of hostile views to ID cards has something to do with the commendable work by libertarians to take a stand on this issue. The privacy meme is out there, and we helped achieve that. But we have to keep up the pressure and make a stink about this latest proposal. And it is worth noting that this is the kind of issue where libertarians, misleadingly bracketed as being on the political 'right', can linkup with sympathetic souls on the 'left', and maybe even sow some other libertarian seeds in the process.

When the state watches you,
dare to stare back

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Last month, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft acknowledged that privacy is a central concern for e-businesses and individuals alike and announced the appointment of a new Internet privacy aide within the office of the Deputy Attorney General, who will be charged with the protection of consumer rights on the Net. Other than customer service, no single issue has hampered the growth of online business more than public perception of Internet businesses compromising in the privacy of individuals. Although new privacy aide's initial assignments will apparently be focused on the FBI's controversial "Carnivore" e-mail surveillance system, Ashcroft's decision apparently signals the government's recognition of personal privacy online as an national priority.

Or does it?

On May 30 John Ashcroft also gave the FBI expanded authority for its agents to monitor Internet chat rooms, Web sites, and commercial databases in search of clues to suspected terrorist activities; and to initiate inquiries at libraries and other public places without a warrant or even the need to show that a crime was committed. The new guidelines allow the FBI to send undercover agents to any event “open to the public”—including political gatherings and places of worship—to look for signs of terrorist or criminal activity. The agency will also be able to collect information on consumers through magazine subscriptions, book purchases, charitable contributions, and travel itineraries.

The new powers clash dramatically with the obligation of public libraries to maintain the privacy of their records, an issue that caused consternation when the FBI confiscated library computer records following the terrorist attacks of September 11. And last month Mr Ashcroft said something to the effect that churches, libraries and the Internet are public places where law-abiding citizens should have no expectation of privacy.

I have voiced my objections to such powers wielded by a government agency in a previous posting. It was encouraging to see that P.J. Connolly of InfoWorld takes issue with Ashcroft's position that people have little, if any, expectation of privacy in public places.

"I don't know about you, but I insist on a certain amount of privacy in public places. I don't let store clerks recite my credit card numbers over the phone if their swipe terminals malfunction. I certainly don't let people get too close to me when I'm using an ATM. You can bet that I want to know why someone wants my Social Security number, driver's license information, or anything that I consider my business and no one else's. If I don't insist on the same degree of privacy in my Internet transactions, I'm asking to get robbed."

He also admits to being 'a conflicted libertarian' (small 'l') who doesn't trust any governmental institution that he can't walk to and challenges his audience:

"Spare me your e-mails claiming that the war on terrorism requires that we give up our freedoms and similar drivel.... I do want to know how many of you think what you ordered from the online grocery or pharmacy is the government's business, absent any crime being committed. Depending on the response I get, I may need to redefine what it means to be an American."

That's the spirit. Together with yesterday's postponement, and hopefully amendment, of the Regulation of Investigative Powers Act (RIPA), it is a positive blip in the battle against the steady erosion of personal freedoms by the state.

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The widely reported attempt by the state to extravagantly expend the list of state bodies with access to e-mail and telephone intercepts has been withdrawn in the face of strong cross-party opposition from politicians with a modicum of respect for at least the fiction of civil liberties.

However it is very important that people not judge the government just by the laws it has passed but by the laws it has tried to pass. The Regulation of Investigative Powers Act (RIPA) is bad enough as it stands without the latest astonishing power grab by the state, yet it shows once again if anyone doubted it that no matter what the state says about its modest intentions when taking upon itself new powers, the belly of Leviathan is filled with an insatiable hunger for more.

Bob Ainsworth, the Home Office minister is using The Big Lie technique to claim this is not in fact about crushing civil liberties but 'protecting' us all, so do not kid yourself that the advocate of a Panopticon Britain will give up so easily. What we need protection against is the British state or we will soon have a system of pervasive surveillance and intrusion that rivals that of the INS and IRS in the United States. Tony Blair was not joking when he promised to bring us 'joined up government'. The line being drawn between those dots being joined up runs through the centre of our lives.

When the state watches you,
dare to stare back

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This letter not just to, but in, today's Daily Telegraph is worth reproducing in full. Its relevance to earlier posts here about "joined up government" is obvious.

Re: Government assists sinister Euro plans
Date: 13 June 2002

SIR - The Government intends to give public sector bodies the capacity to find out what we access on the internet, who we e-mail and who we phone.

This is part of a broader drive by the European Union to give its fledgling police force, Europol, the capacity to accumulate information on all EU citizens. The Europol Convention gives that organisation the right to keep a database of information on any individual, including "sexual orientation, religion or politics". Europol was also charged last August by the Council of Ministers with adding the names of "troublemakers" to the Schengen Information System, so they could be "tracked and identified" with a view to preventing them leaving their home countries shortly before major EU summits.

Under the existing EU Convention on Mutual Legal Assistance, Europol and any national police force can request information on any citizen living in another member country. The legislation being introduced by the Government will greatly assist this sinister process.

On May 30, the European Parliament voted for a new directive granting the police and others the powers referred to above. The Labour leadership instructed its MEPs to support a measure that, until recently, the group had rhetorically opposed. Only Arlene McCarthy abstained. The Tories also voted for it, with the honourable exception of Lord Stockton. To their credit, the Greens, the Lib Dems and UKIP voted against it.

From:
Marc Glendening, Democracy Movement, London SW6

Marc Glendening was one of the speakers at that Liberty Conference we've been going on about. According to what people said to Chris Tame, who was also a speaker but didn't hear Marc's talk, it was extremely good.

For as long as I can remember, every change of importance imposed upon Britain by its political rulers has been (a) something to do with European integration, but (b) announced without the European Union being so much as mentioned. This joined-up government crap seems to be no exception to that rule.

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Orwell's vision of a Big Brother state that knew everything about everyone had, over the past five years, finally borne fruit. And it was a strange fruit, fertilised largely by computer scientists' urge to do things the Right Way. At last, they had managed to get government to adopt universal standards that allowed the free exchange of data between official computers. And thus they had overcome the bureaucratic friction that had always been freedom's invisible friend.

According to an article by Mike Holderness in New Scientist (May 25, subscription necessary, home page link only) it is compatibility of government databases that will destroy privacy, not surveillance. A standard definition of privacy, by Alan Westin, professor of public law at Columbia university, is 'the right to control how much information other know about you'. The existence of a unified database, linking let's say the Inland Revenue, Social Services, the County Court Service, the Passport Office, airline booking computers, Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency and the National Criminal Intelligence Service, oh, and health information database, would mean that few people could keep any important secrets from the British government. For decades it had collected a great deal of information. Each time it gave itself powers to collect more - the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Act 2000 and the Anti-terrorism Crime and Security Act 2001 - civil libertarians had warned about the disappearance of privacy. But it was the gathering together of all this data, not its existence or deficiencies in the technology limiting access to it, that threw the whole notion of privacy into question.

Mike Holderness points out that the unification had been made possible by the development of XML, the Extensible Markup Language, described as ' the universal format for structured documents and data'. In November 2001, E-envoy, part of the British government's Cabinet Office, mandated XML as the key standard for data integration.

"The best defence of our privacy until now has been that government departments are fed up with paying contractors oodles of money to produce custom-built links between databases that are five year late. XML solves that technological problem, because it allows a simple 'wrapper' to be built around each database to a standard specification."

Although the Information Society Forum, which is charged with advising the European Commission on such matters, has recommended in January 2000

"Privacy and anonymity are human and citizen's rights. They are vital to citizens' and consumers' trust in the working of the information society. People must have control over the use of their personal data. They must feel free to communicate without being subject to permanent surveillance."

I wonder how much more it will take for the public concern for privacy and anonymity to rise... I think our only hope is that bureaucratic inefficiency will not let us down. Let's hope that as various blunders such as coincidental misidentifications cause misery to individuals with increasing frequency, the public realisation of how much and who exactly is watching them will increase too.

The New Scientist article is laced with a narrative, which is a brilliant illustration of the point. Given the restricted access to the original article I reproduce the story below:

Wednesday 2 May 2007 will always stick in Professor Max Buttle's memory. He was about to leave for a conference in Berlin, but was detained by the arrival of the US secret service. Three debt collectors, a social worker and a court bailiff were also anxious to talk to him. The arrival on Buttle's doorstep of a district nurse with urgent news about his cervical smear test saved the day. Clearly he wasn't the woman they were all after.

He could see why the secret service agents were jumpy, though. The previous day had been dubbed "Weird Tuesday". Terrorists calling themselves the Atheist Revolutionary Fundamentalist Front had laced Wall Street's water supply with hallucinogens. The dollar's exchange rate against the euro had briefly been an imaginary number. And that evening, a suspected atheist had been seen getting into a friend's car outside a derelict house in North London. A police-woman's helmet-cam fed its image to the DVLA computer. It recognised the number plate as Buttle's. The computer instantly cross-checked with other government agencies, which contacted the American authorities.

What Buttle would never discover - because it was officially secret - was the conclusion of the internal inquiry into the disappearance of Ms Max Tuttle, suspected atheist. The helmet-cam pictures clearly showed a moth alighting on the number plate at the crucial moment.

In the end, Buttle got off fairly lightly. Once he'd come to official attention, however, he faced a tax audit in the course of which his wife learned of an expenses claim for a stay in Bonn when he was supposed to have been in Barcelona.

He is now single.

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Here we go again... ever-expanding government surveillance powers and reduction of privacy as part of the drive for greater security. This time it is the US government digging deeper into the Web to capture and corral more of our digital detritus in the name of fighting terrorism.

The new FBI guidelines currently examined by the Senate Judiciary Committee would give federal investigators new licence to mine publicly available databases and monitor Web use. Civil liberties advocates warn that last week's proposal is the latest step along a worrying path back to the 1950s and '60s - days when investigators compiled dossiers on innocent American citizens based on their religious and political practices. FBI guidelines from Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI director Robert Mueller would allow field agents to gather information outside of criminal investigations, relaxing regulations set in the 1970s. Those rules, named after then-Attorney General Edward Levi, barred the FBI from attending political meetings unless they had a reasonable suspicion that a crime was being planned.

The new rules, by contrast, would authorise field agents to attend public meetings freely and request warrants with less interference from the main office. In addition, they would allow the FBI to monitor public Internet sites, libraries and religious institutions. Jim Dempsey, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology protests:

"I hate to be in a position of telling people 'don't go online and speak' or 'watch what you say,' but you have to take from this that on an arbitrary basis, the FBI is going to be tagging people as terrorists based on what they say online,"

Well, actually, I am not sure what is wrong with that. Your mother told you (or should have told you) not to speak to strangers and be careful about what you say in public. And the Web is a public place whether because of its interconnected structure or because no communication is entirely secure and therefore private. I do want to be able to say what I want and where I want, as that is the most immediate and tangible demonstration of my individual and personal liberty. But at the same time, I also want the government that takes my money in order to 'protect' me to pay attention to any communication containing information about an event that could jeopardise my security, life and property.

So the same reforms can be seen as a long overdue end to restrictions that have hobbled investigators and denied them access to research tools available to anyone with an Internet connection. Intelligence failures in the FBI and CIA have come under the spotlight (and fire) amid new questions over who knew what in advance of 11 September suicide hijackings, which left more than 3,000 people dead.

I can imagine the phalanx of hard-core anti-statist libertarians bristling with indignation at the mere suggestion that I might consider any legislation that expands law enforcement's ability to monitor communications anything but an infringement on privacy and individual liberty. Despite my sound libertarian track record on these issues (see related articles below), I would like to explore this issue further.

It seems to me that the problem is not merely removing restrictions on investigators to monitor, gather and analyse information. Surely, amassing and making use of publicly available information with research tools available to anyone does not constitute abuse of powers ...or does it? The difference between Joe Bloggs carrying out his equivalent of obsessive monitoring of other people's communications and the FBI's agent J.B.1984 is that whilst the former cannot do much with it (unless he is a cyber-freak villain in a Hollywood movie), the latter has access to considerable resources and monopoly on force that enable him to act on it. On the other hand, isn't that what the US citizens are paying him to do?!

The issue here is not just what information is collected, by whom and for what purpose but the nature of the state and its authority. We don't trust the state and its agencies to use the information for the designated purpose, i.e. our security and protection. We fear that information will instead be used for other purposes, namely, to increase the state's hold on its citizens. There is no guarantee that after the crucial information about the terrorist plans has been extracted from the monitored data, the information about our private lives, incomes, interests etc, will be discarded. National security has always been used as a cloak for such exercise and it was mainly the US judicial system embedded firmly in the US Constitution that provided some recourse for the most flagrant breaches of individual liberty by the state.

So what is to be done, campaigned for or against, and posted on this blog? The usual stuff - discussions about the state and the legitimacy of its authority and powers, the limited or no government and most of all how the state has expanded beyond any justification. And so although I am willing to grant the state legitimate authority for the purpose of external (army) and internal (police) security in theory, I do not trust the state in its present practice. I will therefore continue writing about the issues of privacy, security and its impact on individual and civil liberties.

When the state watches you,
dare to stare back

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This (in the New Scientist and which was posted last Saturday on the Libertarian Alliance Forum) is really a story for expert Adriana to comment on, but it sounds good on the face of it.

Computer activists in Britain are close to completing an operating system that could undermine government efforts to wiretap the internet. The UK Home Office has condemned the project as potentially providing a new tool for criminals.

Of course it could just be that the Home Office is writing it, and wants to round up lots of would-be secret persons into one pen, so that it can snoop on them all with greater ease, and save itself the bother of trawling through the emails of all the people like me who don't give a prune about secrecy.

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It will come as no surprise to anyone who habitually reads British newspapers that the state likes the idea of being able to intercept any and all of your communications on the Internet. Well it just so happens that some people are not going to roll over for the government and play ball. Just as the state comes up with new technological ways to spy on its subjects (i.e you), those same subjects are finding ways to prevent them from doing so.

Mathematician Peter Fairbrother simply refuses to just accept the Draconian powers that the state has taken upon itself via the Regulation of Investigative Powers Act and is developing M-O-O-T, an integrated privacy system that you just pop in your PC or Mac at startup. As it uses off-shore key storage, the user can rest safe knowing that the British state cannot get access to your sensitive data at a whim. Bravo!

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The Council of the European Union is pushing to introduce measures that would force internet service providers and phone companies to keep records of all communications for many years. The Internet bill is supposed to aim at protecting the confidentiality of electronic communication to boost confidence in e-commerce. But it also contains provisions to allow police access to phone, fax and email records, something that governments view as a useful tool to fight crime and terrorism in the wake of the 11 September attacks in the United States.The information recorded and archived would consists of URLs of web pages visited, news groups and numbers dialled. It would then be made available for the police and other security agencies in gathering criminal intelligence.

Despite strong opposition from civil liberty groups and the industry, the bill is likely to include the data retention rules because of support from the European Socialist Party and the European People's Party, the assembly's main political groups. Also, documents leaked to civil liberties groups, reveal that powerful lobbying is taking place on behalf of power-grabbing thugs law enforcement agencies to try to destroy existing data protection and privacy laws in member states.

"These proposals would allow fishing expeditions into the only activity, browsing habits, and internet associations of every citizen in the EU for up to seven years. They could do this without any warrant or court order."

Civil liberties groups such as Statewatch and the Foundation for Information Policy Research warn that this would give police and other security forces the powers normally expected of an oppressive regime:

"Authoritarian and totalitarian states would be condemned for violating human rights and civil liberties if they initiated such practices. The fact that it is being proposed in the 'democratic' EU does not make it any less authoritarian."

This is all rather standard and predictable given what we know about the EU and its practices. However, there is a rather worrying twist to the story. Instead of the usual heavy-handed, freedom-quashing bill drafting by the EU, the latest version of the bill has been made more oppressive at the request of none other than the good HM Government! Originally, the EU Parliament had drafted the law to limit access to electronic data by public authorities to the strict minimum. But this move was criticised by member states, notably Britain, which wanted greater power to monitor the Internet. US officials also criticised the bill, fearing that the request to erase data would hinder prosecution of criminals. Fearing that this legislative clash would ultimately kill the bill, the two biggest parliamentary groups have now aligned themselves with the member states.

What is going on here?!

Well, nothing much, actually, just the usual state stuff. The fact that the system of government in the member states is democratic does nothing to stop them from abusing an undemocratic institution such as the EU. In fact, they are being democratic, using the powers of the EU to reduce the liberties of their citizens, just like the majority of their citizens use domestic institutions to do the same to individuals.

So predictably, for me, democracy - the rule of the majority - has negative connotations as it has for Perry de Havilland. Democracy is far from the political and social panacea it is made out to be. It does not bring about the kind of fluffy bunny utopia socialists would like us believe in. Although the un-democratic EU together with its democratic member states are doing their best to have the bunnies stuffed... And just like Mr Franklin, I do want to see the bunny (or the lamb) well armed.

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The accumulation of medical information by the state is a bad idea for too many reasons to list here. The reason its being done is part of the desperate attempt to make the National Health Service work at any cost. For my part I look forward to the News of the World (a very downmarket British tabloid) informing us which cabinet minister's wife has head lice, which one takes Prozac, who's receiving treatment for haemorroids and which cabinet minister's children won't have the autism jab.

Of course it is rather difficult arguing against breach of doctor-patient confidentiality on pragmatic grounds: first national databases could be handy in a bio-warfare emergency, it would be handy for the state to know where the greatest threat of smallpox epidemics are. Second, lawyers caved in on this issue of client confidentiality, banks on financial records, now doctors. Oddly enough the most principled professionals are the media. Perhaps it makes a difference that journalists, unlike doctors or lawyers, aren't working in a licensed sector: a journalist who rats on sources is competing with others who will protect theirs.

The existence of the blogsphere and web media provides a "back street" media which is what the medical profession needs right now. If we had a flourishing industry of back-street abortionists, state centralized records would be meaningless. I confess that's the most unlikely argument I've ever put forward for banning abortions.

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The Sunday Telegraph has commented on the latest and most worrying example of the Labour Goverment's accumulation of power by controlling information. The good Dr Liam Fox, also the Shadow Health Secretary, alerts us to the fact that last week the Government effectively dismantled the UK system of medical confidentiality. Under new regulations, slipped in using procedural devices to prevent debate in the House of Commons, the Secretary of State will be able to demand that doctors hand over medical records - and fine them if, in order to protect your confidentiality, they refuse to do so. The language of 'the public interest' is used to assert the right to demand, and receive, confidential medical information. Boringly, the 'public interest' is defined as whatever the Secretary of State says it is....

Having worked as a doctor myself, it horrifies me that doctors will now have to choose between breaching their ethics and breaking the law. To make matters worse, the new law is not restricted to doctors: the behaviour of every health care professional to his or her patients will now be subject to the direct control of politicians. The new law places the administrative convenience of the NHS not only above the bond of trust between doctor and patient, but above the dignity and privacy of patients....the change marks the death of the principle of the patient's right to give consent before identifiable personal data about them is shared. It is yet another restriction of our liberty - and one we have surrendered to with barely a whimper of protest.

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British government plans for data sharing mentioned earlier in the Libertarian Alliance press release I posted yesterday are a clear indication of the casually authoritarian attitudes of those who would control every aspect of our lives. What I find so infuriating is that the supporters of this giant leap towards the Panopticon State are so arrogant that they are hardly even trying to hide the scope of what they want.

The Orwellian sounding Performance and Innovations Unit (PIU), who are the cutting edge of the leviathan state's intrusions into every aspect of private life, have had the gall to announce (emphasis added):

Information is processed without people's knowledge only where necessary for national security, public safety, statistical analysis, the protection of the economy, the prevention of crime, the protection of health, morals, or the rights and freedoms of others

Can anyone out there please tell me ANYTHING that the state does which cannot with the barest minimum of effort be classified under one of these amazingly broad categories?

In short, any functionary of the state with a computer terminal can examine any aspect of your life they wish. They are not even really trying to hide what they are planning.

Government bodies with names like the 'Performance and Innovations Unit', a body finding new ways to intermediate the state into every aspect of private life, have always reminded me of the Terry Gilliam movie Brazil , in which the 'Information Retrieval Unit' was the name for the agency who extracted information from people by torture. Perhaps it is time for Harry Tuttle to pay the PIU a visit, spanner in hand.

When the state watches you,
dare to stare back

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"Government's data sharing plan is a dagger to the heart of liberty", says Free market and civil liberties think tank.

The Labour's government's plans to integrate the personal data held on British citizens by various government departments and agencies is a dagger to the heart of liberty, says the Libertarian Alliance, the radical free market and civil liberties think tank and pressure group.

Libertarian Alliance Director, Dr Chris R. Tame, says:

"In the light of the ever-more blatant attack on civil liberties in this country - including the proliferation of camera surveillance systems, the increasing involvement of intelligence agencies in political surveillance and dirty tricks operations, the push for a national ID card and DNA database, the gradual abolition of common law liberties by the removal of jury trials, of the presumption of innocence, of the right of silence and of double jeopardy, and by the adoption of the EU's despotic corpus juris - this proposal is even more ominous. The government's claim that data would be processed only 'where necessary' is laughable - especially when one sees that their list of 'necessary' reasons covers every conceivable excuse for nanny statism, paternalism, censorship, socialism, prudery, puritanism and prohibitionism.

It is ironic that when the state has demonstrated that it is incapable of providing any 'public service' adequately, when it cannot defend its citizens from predators of every stripe, that is should be attempting to turn us into supplicants and serfs. The common argument that 'if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear' is absurd. In an age when health fascists have declared smoking to be a form of child abuse, it is clear that everyone can be subjected to the prejudices of demented paternalists - whether of the fundamentalist religious nutters, the peddlers of PC pieties, the environmentalists, or the feminist anti-sex cranks. Your life style, your tastes, your sexuality, your political and social views, can be subjected to tomorrow's moral panic, propaganda scare campaign and witch-hunt and legislated as 'crimes' or as 'politically incorrect'.

The citizens of Britain need to send a message to our would-be masters that we are not numbers, that we will not be pushed, filed, indexed, stamped, briefed, debriefed, or numbered - that our lives are our own.

It is now clear that the 'social contract' has been broken by the state. Resistance to the usurpations of the state is both a right and a moral duty. It is the right, the duty, of all to resist and disrupt the state's data gathering and record-keeping ability, by whatever means are necessary".

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I seem to be stuck with the privacy and security topic but since it is what interests and worries me, here it is. According to an artricle in CNET New.com Is your email watching you? the spam choking your e-mail inbox may be loaded with software that lets marketers track your moves online, and you may not even be aware that you've been bugged.

Apparently, enhanced messages that share the look and feel of Web pages are being used to deliver the same bits of code through e-mail, in many cases without regard for safeguards that have been developed to protect consumer privacy on the Web. E-mail also seems to be the focus of the security and privacy issues on the Web at the moment. While web sites now cloak visitors' identities and collect data anonymously, junk emailers and marketers have begun to use cookies and other techniques to link specific addresses to surfing behaviour. In some cases, spammers can link surfers with their e-mail addresses.

Lance Cottrell a privacy services expert warns:

"In many ways, email tracking is more powerful because they can correlate the email address with online history....there isn't an opportunity to be fully informed when you receive a spam with remotely loaded graphics used to track your computer. It's a bit of a loophole in the whole process."

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An article in Computerworld responds to the fears for privacy as a trade-off to security after September 11^th. Jay Cline lists a number of scenarios that would signal that privacy and American's civil liberties are in danger and actually being reduced.

If a nationwide loss of privacy has occurred, we should be seeing at least one of the following scenarios: a widespread expansion in the scope of the government's collection of personal data, courts setting dangerous legal precedents or a surge in the number of people harmed by abuses of government-collected data. These are the speed bumps on the road from liberty to tyranny, and none has been crossed.

So far in the war on terrorism, there has been no widespread increase in the government's collection of Americans' personal data....and there is no pattern of government abuses of personal data stemming from Sept. 11. The congressional oversight committees have certainly been busier, but so far, we haven't seen any members seeking hearings on privacy abuses.

The Patriot Act also enables government agencies to share more law-enforcement information. Many Americans think the federal government already has a huge big brother computer file on each person. But the reality is that big brother is a hodgepodge of little cousins -- the same sort of motley collection of stovepiped and uncoordinated databases that most large corporations have..and...the FBI certainly hasn't taken upon itself to conduct random keyword searches of all the e-mail coursing through the servers of U.S. ISPs.

There are two reasons for drawing attention to this article. First, I have blogged about privacy and security before where I applauded an article in the same magazine for pointing out the dangers of the drive for security at the cost of privacy. To balance that concern, the inefficiency inherent in governments and their bureaucracies often seems more tangible to me than extensive and elaborate conspiracies. Secondly, I would welcome any information about measures that do pose a definite threat to privacy as a result of September 11^th and indeed any comments regarding privacy versus security issue. As they say, the truth is out there.

When the state watches you,
dare to stare back

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Yes, I realise we can deactivate/avoid/subvert anything the bastards come up with but wouldn't it be nice if we didn't bloody well have to in the first place?

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American Express Co. agreed on Monday to turn over to U.S. tax authorities information on offshore accounts held by Americans suspected of evading taxes, the second major card company to do so after MasterCard International Inc. A settlement agreement between the government and American Express, filed in federal court in Miami, allows the tax agency to collect identifying information, such as passport and driver's license numbers, of customers with accounts in Antigua, Barbuda, Bahamas and the Cayman Islands. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is looking for records showing charges greater than $2,500 for purchases of cars, boats, hotels or travel services in the U.S. In trying to detect unreported income and prosecute people who are failing to file tax returns, the IRS is pursuing a form of tax evasion that uses credit cards issued by offshore banks.

I find it hard to comment on such news as there is nothing I could add to fire up the appropriate sentiments concerning this topic among us, libertarian bloggers. The warning is contained within the words of Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Charles Rossotti:

"Simply put, the guarantee of secrecy associated with offshore banking is evaporating..."

although I am sure he was swelled with pride as he said them and not fear for liberty and property rights....

When the state watches you,
dare to stare back

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Anyone opened a bank account of late? Transferred an account? Dealt in cash? Sent money abroad? Have you been sent half-insane by the form-filling and ID checking it involved?

If so, then please point an accusatory finger at people like Jonathan M. Winer a former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State International Law Enforcement who has written a rather plaintiff article in the Financial Times exhorting the entire world to join him in his campaign against what he calls 'dirty money'.

The anti-money laundering regime, in which doubtless Mr. Winer was instrumental, sought to scupper international terrorists and drug-dealers by imposing a regulatory regime on all financial institutions requiring them to act as investigators and policemen on the state's behalf. I have witnessed the absurd results of this first-hand as lowly pensioners from Essex are told to hand over their passport when signing a loan agreement just in case they are really Osama Bin Laden in deep cover.

Added to the humiliation of treating people like criminals, the cost-burden on financial institutions are awesome and let us not forget the many small countries which have been bullied into surrendering their banking secrecy and legal safeguards of anonymity which are the only comparative advantages they possess.

After all that, it is more than a little galling to hear Mr. Winer say:

"Long before September 11, many other victims of wrongdoing have found that global evil-doers are better at taking advantage of the financial infrastructure of globalisation than the world's police and regulators are at catching them"

Is it just me, or does that sound suspiciously like an admission of failure? I cannot say that I am surprised. I (along with many others) predicted long ago that these regulations would do nothing to stop or even slow down determined terrorists or drug-runners. People who are ruthless enough to fly aeroplanes into buildings are hardly going to be phased by having to practice some sleight-of-hand with a bank teller or two.

Mr. Winer goes on to remind us of just how evil money-laundering can be but, rather hilariously, cites economic woes in countries such as Argentina, Mexico and Albania as proof, while forgetting to mention that these countries were hardly paragons of financial virtue to begin with. But, this aside, there is some refreshing frankness in the article. Mr. Winer admits:

"In practice, even the most sophisticated and best-regulated financial centres have proved incapable of adequately overseeing the global enterprises they license"

You'd think that Mr. Winer might have considered this beforehand because it is screamingly obvious. Asking bankers to become policemen is not only a good way to ensure that policemen get lazy but it is also an attempt to get banks engaged in an activity that is diametrically in conflict with their primary function, like asking a cat to bark.

Mr. Winer goes on to suggest a better method for bringing these terrible terrorists and drug-runners to their knees:

"But imagine instead a white list, to make compliance a profit centre, rather than a burden on a bank. A white list - and a reward for being on it."

This is an idea born of hope rather than judgement and is likely to be as successful as his last good idea i.e. a total dud. Complying with the standards required to get on this 'white list' would cripple any bank with unendurable profit-eating costs and any that were stupid enough to try would slide dolefully into liquidation while their competitors died laughing.

I am quite pleased that the likes of Mr. Winer are pinning their hopes on this because it is further confirmation that they have lost. That's what the whole article smacks of really; an almost pathetic, desperate attempt to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. This may be futile but it is, from Mr. Winer's point of view, understandable because the 'anti-money laundering regime' is not really about drugs or terrorists at all, it is a sordid attempt at self-preservation. The global movement of capital represents a grievous threat to national tax bases, particularly those that demand up to one-half of their citizens earnings. But that little game is up if the citizens in question can move their money beyond their local tax inspectors reach.

All this chaffe about drugs and terrorists is really a vehicle by which the public sector can try to defend itself against the vigour (or what they see as 'virulence') of the free market and, in doing so, they are quite happy, indeed almost compelled, into press-ganging every bank clerk and accountant into their fight. But no laws that Mr. Winer can pen will upend the immutable laws of physics and, sooner or later, the international money-laundering regime will be buried in the Graveyard of Grand Schemes.

Mr. Winer's article is not so much a helpful analysis or even a plea for help so much as notice of his intention to go down fighting.

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Please applaud Dan Gillmor for spelling out that security and privacy are not incompatible in his article Don't Deny Privacy for Security's Sake in Computerworld. He mourns the fact that despite their supposed libertarian principles, Silicon Valley companies and their competitors around the world are racing to help the snoops. An example of technology that promotes both security and privacy is encryption and if we want a safe economy in the Digital Age, strong cryptography - with its positive and negative uses - isn't an option but a requirement. His challenge is to the IT industry:

IT should be considering what happens when businesses are forced to put holes into everyday systems so that law enforcement can easily find wrongdoers or potential criminals. If government has a back door to every communication or collects vast amounts of data in central locations, the potential for a privacy debacle is enormous.

Please read and rejoice that someone has stood up to the post-September 11^th tendency to compromise liberty in the supposed interest of security.

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I do not often post about specific bits of government legislation as it makes for awfully dry subject matter but I am unable to resist publishing this example of incandescent lunacy.

A year ago or so I wrote an extensive piece for the Libertarian Alliance about the nature, scope and effects of the UK Money Laundering laws (soon to be codified in the Proceeds of Crime Act).

One of the offences specified is that of 'Tipping-Off'. If a banker/lawyer/ financial adviser suspects a client of money laundering then he is obliged to report the matter to a responsible officer within the firm who must then decide whether or not to make a report to the National Criminal Intelligence Service. All this must be done in secret because the client must not be told that he is under suspicion (in case he flees the jurisdiction). To spill the beans is to commit the offence of 'Tipping-Off' (maximum sentence 2 years in prison).

Well, as if destroying the principle of client confidentiality and trust is not bad enough we all now have to contend with Section 29 of the Data Protection Act 1998 which requires all companies to disclose all internal memoranda to their clients upon demand, even those voicing suspicions of money laundering and, hence, tipping them off!!

One law now forces lawyers/bankers/accountants to break another law!! How long can it be before one is liable for prosecution just for turning up at work in the morning?

Do we have a Government or do we just have a Random Regulation Generating Machine up there?

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UPI reported recently in an article titled Big brother is big business that the UK is the most remotely surveilled state in the world.

Advocates point to its efficacy at the same time as national crime rates are soaring. A study by the Scottish Center for Criminology suggested that "spy" cameras had little or no effect on crime. It concluded that "reductions were noted in certain categories, but there was no evidence to suggest that the cameras had reduced crime overall."

Yet more and more CCTV cameras appear on our streets every day as companies vie for state contracts to bring Orwell's vision of a Britain under all pervasive observation to reality. Authorities invariably claim that they are to discourage violent crimes and burglary, yet increasingly they are used to prosecute people for transgressing traffic and litter regulations. Nightmarish.

When the state watches you,
dare to stare back

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Christmas 1914. On the Western front, British and German soldiers face each other off across the barbed wire and the frozen, blood-caked mud and stiff, decomposing bodies of dead comrades. This was warfare as Europe had not witnessed it before: grim, static, total, hellish.

For reasons nobody has ever adequately explained, on this Christmas Day, 1914, a truce was felt necessary and soldiers from each side rose from their positions and enemy met enemy between the trenches in No-Man's Land and played a game of football.

For a few euphoric hours, soldiers became laughing, playing, carousing men and war was forgotten. But peace had not broken out and fences had not been mended. The game over, the officers led their troops back to their respective lines and the carnage went on and on and on.

There was a faint echo of this legend last night at the 'Big Brother Awards' hosted by Privacy International and to which I had been invited by fellow blogger Tom Burroughes. I did not know quite what to expect, but I am customarily on hand to lend such support as I can muster in the battle against Big Brother.

However, as I entered the debating chamber in the London School of Economics, my internal geiger-counter screamed off the scale. It was being bombarded with reds. My hackles never let me down and, boy, were they up. The place was wall-to-wall dreadlocks, canvas knapsacks and sandals complimented by a troop of students in 'Boycott Esso Oil' T-shirts and George Bush rubber face-masks.

I was being choked by Chomsky, I could feel the Fisk and smell the Sontag. If I stayed one minute longer I would be pickled in Pilger. I broke out in a feverish sweat and panic set in but, before I could leave a Tom-and-Jerry style hole in the LSE wall, I spotted Tom and, then, to my further bug-eyed surprise, fellow arch-capitalist Tim Evans. And not only was he attending but he was actually reading the nominations!! Just what on earth was going on here?

Further staggering revelations followed when I found out that yet another Libertarian, Malcolm Hutty was there and, in fact, it was his company, Internet Vision, which was co-sponsoring the event together with, wait for it, GreenNet.org!! This was Matter vs. Anti-Matter. Why hadn't the Universe evaporated in a great, cosmic bang?

Before I could splutter further, the ceremony began and we all settled, a little uneasily, into our seats. We could sense their force and they could sense ours. Somehow, though, the Universe remained stable and the evening was conducted amidst an atmosphere that was appreciative and cordial though far from joyous.

My worst fears were allayed when it became clear that the agenda was being steadfastly adhered to. Privacy was the issue and the sole issue and just about every 'golden boot' for its grievous infringement went to HM Government and its agencies. Even I could not suppress a loud whoop when a special 'boot' went to the Department of Education and Skills for its ghoulish plans to draw up a clandestine national database for every schoolchild in the country.

Undoubtedly the strangest moment in the evening came when the committee announced that it had been unanimous in wishing to bestow its 'Freedom Fighter' award on The Daily Telegraph for its 'Free Country' campaign. It was like watching Mullah Omar step up to accept a gong from the B'nai Brith. A crackle of electricity went round the room but, despite some isolated heckles, the recipients were warmly applauded.

When the ceremony was over they all drifted away a little dazed and light-headed. They felt like an audience who had just seen a dazzling magic show and they know that the magic isn't real but just how did he make that tiger disappear? The Bush-baiters, now unmasked, trooped out again a little sheepishly. It was not the anti-globo ruckus that they (or I) had been expecting.

You know for sure you are living in interesting times when the kind of people whose most prized possession is a bust of Lenin gather together with the followers of Adam Smith and all agree that privacy is important and the state is the biggest threat to it. Interesting and also significant because if my otherwise trenchant ideological foes think that privacy is important then it is to be hoped that they have asked themselves why privacy is important. And if they have, could they possibly come to any conclusion other than the ownership of self and the sovereignty of the individual? It takes questions like that to configure the circuit-boards of the mind into just the right order necessary to illuminate a line of flashing bulbs that light the way to freedom.

If that happens than last night's ceremony was a mini-milestone in the evolution of political ideas.

On the other hand, it may just have been a Christmas truce between the trenches in No-Man's Land.

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I'm going to read more deeply, but the allegations in the Evidence Eliminator link posted below leave me thinking extreme paranoia on the part of Evidence Eliminator:

In considering the exceptionally defamatory content, (the article delivers a propaganda payload of 16 lies) and the conduct of WIRED.COM we have to ask readers to consider the question of whether or not WIRED.COM, LYCOS and/or their trademark holders Carnegie Mellon University (who allegedly have CIA connections) were involved in sending the emails as part of a deliberate covert action to defame and discredit Robin Hood Software Ltd. and Evidence Eliminator™.

Firstly let me state that I know CMU SCS (School of Computer Science) as well as anyone. I was a CMU undergraduate and graduate student, a founding employee of Compuguard, CMU's first hight tech spin off company, worked for years in the Robotics Institute and then in the Music Lab for several more years. Just to establish my credentials, here is my web page at my old home.

Lycos, like most of the new high tech companies in Pittsburgh is a spinoff from CMU. It was one of the very first web indexers, if not the first. It was done by students.

Lycos went commercial and moved off the campus. Since the work was done with university resources, the university took some stock. CMU is quite a good place for entrepreneurs. Perhaps because for many years the President was a business school type (yes, CMU also has a top business school), the university policies both encourage entrepreneurs and make loads of dosh for the Alma Mater.

We (and I still strongly identify myself with CMU SCS) were always very good at getting DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) funding because we were successfully churning out some of the most advanced work in the world, year after year. CMU (and myself) were on the internet before it was the Internet. I would go so far as to say CMU SCS (along with MIT and Stanford) created the whole ethos of the internet, an ethos which has survived a growth from 20 machines in 1973 to hundreds of millions today.

CMU has been a central clearing house for computer security for ages; formally so with the founding of CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) within the freestanding Software Engineering Institute in the 80's, around the time of the Morris Internet Worm. CERT tracks software vulnerability reports and patterns of computer breakins. Any SysAdmin who isn't aware of them doesn't know his job.

Now as to the allegation. Does CMU SCS have "ties" to NSA? Probably, but only in the sense it has "ties" to any of it's Industrial Affiliates, or anyone else from whom the researchers can extract money. CMU is a private university and a very businesslike place as far as money is concerned. As far as lifestyle and research, SCS runs almost like a libertarian anarchy but based on our "reasonable person" principle. The place would drive an experienced cat-herder mad.

Next, Lycos has been a freestanding company for some years. That means it has outgrown the university roots. Although I have not been in Pittsburgh in nearly 10 years, I would bet they are in the industrial park on the Monongahela River where the mile long Johns & Laughlin Steel Mill stood when I was a kid. CMU and the City of Pittsburgh and I think the University of Pittsburgh jointly developed it into a high tech industrial park. It's a couple miles from the campus at any rate.

Now down to the meat of it. If CMU SCS grads ran tests against Evidence Eliminator and found it wanting, I know which party I would believe. In any case, I'll be contacting the department to get "our" side of the story.

If you are really worried about keeping your machine clean, you had better just discard your Microsoft products altogether, and you had better be prepared to switch to Linux and (at this point in history) to learn a great deal about security and forensics.

If you're too lazy or too busy to do it yourself, I'm available on the subject for £70/hr and up.

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Yours truly and fellow blogger David Carr attended an awards ceremony hosted by Privacy International for its annual Big Brother Awards at the London School of Economics. When we got there my heart sank. Ok, one or two mates from the Libertarian Alliance were in the room, but my worst fears were aroused when I saw a bunch of twerps sporting George W. Bush face masks. Oh God, I thought, we've got the usual mix of muddle-headed Blame-America-First lefties, peaceniks and other delusional types.

But, I have to report that the evening turned out better than I, or I am sure Mr Carr, could have expected. As well as handing out these "awards" to such bodies as the Department of Education (UK) for various infringements of privacy, Privacy International also handed out genuinely positive awards to those who have protected or advanced the course of liberty over the past 12 months, including the right-leaning Daily Telegraph.

It was a genuinely wonderful moment as various lefties hissed and cringed as Telegraph reporter Stephen Robinson went up on stage to pick up the award for the paper's A Free Country campaign. The Telegraph has opposed state ID cards, supported decriminalisation of some drugs, opposed threats to trial by jury, and also opposed the ongoing encroachments on British liberty from Brussels.

I think something very important happened last night. What we saw were a bunch of peaceniks forced to acknowledge, through gritted teeth, that there is such a thing as a non-left libertarian movement that is passionate about freedom, determined to protect it, but also savours capitalism. I think this is a meme that is going to continue infecting the body politic.

Tom.Burroughes@reuters.com

When the state watches you,
dare to stare back

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I have no idea if this is a pukka story but it certainly looks interesting. Anyone out there have a take on this?

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The danger of the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA)

By Paul G. Allen

Before anyone remarks about this being Off Topic for the various mailing lists I've sent this to, please think about the effects this could have to Linux. In addition, even though many of you may not be US citizens, the recent happenings with international laws against cybercrime, copy protection and the like could make this US law relevant to you as well, not to mention the impact to your company should you not be able to do business in the US because of such a law. Therefore, it really is on topic, and the time to think about and act on such things is before they are written in stone, not after.

In case you haven't heard, the SSSCA is before the Senate Commerce Committee, with a hearing earlier today (for the story and several links, including a draft of the bill). The SSSCA, if passed, would basically require that all interactive digital devices, including your PC, have copy protection built in. This protection would not allow digital media from being viewed, copied, transferred, or downloaded if the device is not authorized to do so. The bill also makes it a crime to circumvent the protection, including manufacturing or trafficking in anything that does not include the protection or that would circumvent it.

Even if there is no SSSCA, the entertainment industry as well as the IT industry both agree: we must have copy protection of some kind. While I do not disagree that many movies, songs, and other media are distributed illegally without their owners consent, and that copyright owners need some sort of protection, this is not the way to fight the problem, and doing so can, and probably will, have drastic and far reaching consequences for not only the IT industry, but the entertainment industry and the consumer as well.

Many of us have become increasingly involved with, and dependent upon, Free Software (as in GNU GPL or similar), especially the Linux operating system. This type of software is distributed with the source code, allowing anyone to modify it as they choose and need. Linux has become popular to the point that many companies, especially those that provide some kind of service on or for the Internet, rely upon it heavily. Because of the free nature of Linux, and other Free Software, it is extremely difficult to place actual numbers on how many systems are out there employing such software. Some of you, like me, can approximate the number of such systems in your own company or realm of knowledge. So how does this relate to the SSSCA?

As any programmer worth his/her salt will attest, given the resources, anything that can be programmed into a computer can be programmed out, or worked around. In the case of copy protection such as the SSSCA would require, the resources needed for circumventing it is simply the source code for the operating system of the computer, and/or other source code for applications used on the computer (such as one of the many free video/audio layers available). Now given the wording of the SSSCA, along with the DMCA and other supporting laws, it stands to reason that such Free Software would suddenly become a target for legislation. Such legislation logically may require such software to be judged illegal. Such a decision may have serious consequences to the IT industry as well as the entertainment industry and the consumer as well. Little may the consumer or entertainment industry know, but much of the technology they rely upon today is provided at low cost by Free Software. Take that software away, and suddenly doing business costs a lot more, and eventually the consumer just will not be willing to pay for it.

Now aside from the consequences to Free Software, what about the consequences to those who do not use such software. Imagine that home movie you shot last weekend on vacation. Now you wish to send that home movie to a relative, friend, whoever, over the Internet, or place it on your web site for all to download. Well, with many of the protection technologies suggested, this would not be possible, or would be extremely difficult. Some of these technologies require digital watermarks to be placed in the media, for one example. CD burners, digital cameras, etc. can not make these watermarks. The copy protection works by checking for such a watermark, and if it does not exist, the system either will not allow the media to be played, or will not allow it to be transmitted over the Internet as the case may be. So much for sending your cousin your latest home movie, or allowing your whole family to see it from your web site. An additional problem is all current media, including CDs and DVDs, you may currently legally own would not work on proposed new CD and DVD players with copy protection hardware. You would not be able to copy CDs, tapes, or anything else that you legally own in order to exercise your right to fair use, so as to listen to that CD on the cassette deck in your car.

I could go on, but I think this is long enough and has given some food for thought. Besides, I have work to do. Election time is near, so think about what that person you are voting for represents. Think about actually writing a letter to a congressman or other legislator, to a magazine (I actually had one published once, so its not beyond the realms of possibility), newpaper, etc. Many people have the attitude that they can do nothing and make no difference. Well, I say to them they are right, because there are so many people with that attitude, that none of them do anything and they make no difference in doing so. The ones that make the difference, are the ones taking a stance, and the ones taking the stance are the ones that are causing these ridiculous laws to be passed. Guess who those people are?...

Welcome to The United Corporations of America.

[Paul has been circulating this article among the various Open Source mailing lists and we at Samizdata felt it so important we've gotten his more than willing permission to reprint it in its' entirety. What is happening should be of concern to all Libertarians and open source folk as well as civil liberties advocates of all stripes. The media industry is up to nothing less than buying congress so they may seize control of a resource (the Internet) they could not otherwise conquer. If they wished to build their own infrastructure from scratch, using their own money, we would have no complaints. That is not even remotely a picture of what they are attempting.

We agree wholeheartedly with law school professor Glenn Reynolds position. The media industry is ripe for a RICO. This is far more real than the so called Enron "scandal". Enron failed to buy support. The market took its course and they are gone. The media industry is apparently much better at the bribery game and have a number of congressmen (Hollings and Stevens in particular) actively on their payroll. - Ed]

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The British government feels it no longer even has to hide the fact it wishes to be the centre of a vast spider web of surveillance. Gone are the days of 'no comment' regarding Echelon and Carnivore. Now the state is demanding the ability to control all communications between British scientists and foreign colleagues on pretty much any subject the state deems appropriate.

The situation is little better in the USA and as the editorial in the latest print edition of New Scientist aptly puts it:

The government there is withdrawing thousands of technical papers that amount to cookbooks for chemical and biological weapons. It has also asked journal editors to leave out details from papers that would be essential for anyone replicating the work. This undermines the whole notion of ensuring that research results can be checked by others. It also raises a paradox: terrorists, it seems, are deemed smart enough to understand arcane science, but too dumb to fill in the gaps in research papers

The deadening effect this will all have on a vast swathe of scientific progress is not hard imagine. Inevitably some types of research will just migrate to places where the state does not impede its development resulting in more, not less, diffusion of critical knowledge and technologies. Rather than a narrowly targeted moderation of clearly weaponised technologies, the state has elected to implement an Orwellian oversight on all technical discussions on subjects to be determined by semi-qualified bureaucrats who will always have a presumption of the legitimacy of intervention. A disappointing response but hardly a unexpected one to someone such as myself who assumes the worst of states and is rarely surprised.

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Any one who migrates to Windows XP must be a very trusting soul. Pathologically trusting in fact. An excellent InfoWorld article (via Instapundit) demonstrates why if you have Win XP you are more or less granting Microsoft access to whatever they deem their business on your hard drive any time you connect that Windows XP machine to the Internet.

Use Linux, Unix, Macintosh, Windows 98 or Windows 2000...hell, use DOS if you must but for goodness sake stay away from Windows XP unless you think it is just fine and dandy for a company not known for its benevolence to have a access to your data in the pursuit of their interests. You will not even know when they are looking or what they have downloaded to your machine 'for security' (their security, not yours). Bill Gates already has quite enough money to live happily ever after, he does not need any more of yours. Friends don't let friends buy Windows XP.

And while we are on the subject, don't forget to regularly check out Privacy Digest if you happen to think your business is your business.

Just because we libertarians deplore the state's intrusions does not mean we give the Mega-Corporations a free ride.

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The Oracle of Delphi was the flip side of the ancient Greek culture that brought us the underpinning genius of modern western thought. The Oracle was the voice of superstition and irrationality. As a result I have always thought it appropriate that the name of the company founded by supporter of the Panopticon surveillance state Larry Ellison was 'Oracle'.

Over on Matt Welch's blog, he reports the inane comments of my pet hate Ellison who, it turns out, is a great fan of Napoleon. Hold on to your tricorn hat for a trip into the history à la Larry:

Napoleon codified the laws for the first time in Europe. He was constantly limiting kings and other tyrants.

Quite right Larry. He constantly limited other tyrants as he insisted on being the only tyrant allowed. Military dictators generally don't like political competition.

He opened the ghettos and stopped religious discrimination. He was an extraordinary man who wrote a lot of laws himself.

Indeed he did. He used the French Army to impose his own will on most of Europe. I wonder if Larry thinks when this was tried again in 1939, it was necessarily a bad thing?

He was incredibly polite, generous almost to a fault, a remarkable person who was vilified. By whom? The kings that he deposed. The kings of England, and the old king of France, and the kings of Prussia, and the Czar of Russia were all threatened by this man who was bringing democracy. […]

I see. So EMPEROR Napoleon, self-crowned military dictator of the French EMPIRE, conquered much of Europe and caused several million deaths during the Napoleonic Wars because he wanted to bring democracy to everyone? Including democratic Britain (that's 'England' to you Larry)?

He was a liberator, a law-giver, and a man of incredible gifts. He never considered himself a soldier, he considered himself a politician, though he was probably the greatest soldier -- the greatest general --perhaps in all history.

For a man who never considered himself a soldier that was quite some military career. Particularly the bits where he went to military school, joined the French army, gave some folks a 'whiff of grapeshot', hijacked the French Revolution and then led the French army on a war of aggression against most of Europe. My guess is that Larry Ellison has probably never considered himself a poorly educated jackass either. Other than the fact unlike Mussolini, Napoleon was indeed a great general and he had a more extravagant tailor, there is actually little to differentiate him from any number of brutal collectivist military despots. Today he would have been called a fascist. Of course as many of the political causes Larry Ellison backs are indeed aimed at turning nations into police surveillance states I am hardly surprised he admires Napoleon-the-lawbringer, albeit from the perspective of a historical ignoramus.

I can certainly understand admiring Napoleon-the-General, but to praise him for authoring the world's first truly global war in order to impose his will, his Code Napoleon on everyone at bayonet point? It is rather like admiring Heinz Guderian not because he was a brilliant general but because he was a Nazi.

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Lots of good but wrong stuff...

...In Kevin Holtsberry's blog. I would like to join battle with the redoubtable Mr Holtsberry on several issues, but can I start with just this one. I am as he is of sick of e-mails headed "heya..." and "hi?" that turn out to be porn. These e-mails disgust me when I see them, waste my time while I delete them, and mean that my children cannot be let out even for a moment from the kiddie-ghetto of Kids' AOL. I don't deny there is a problem. His proposed solution is to have a law. I have to point out that there probably are laws already, dozens of them. How long does a new one take to come in? How effective will enforcement be? Is there any special reason to suppose that it will be any more effective than the laws prohibiting drugs?

Slowly, imperfectly, but definitely, the market has provided solutions to related problems before. We first hooked up to Compuserve in 1995. At that time you paid for every message you received. We received a lot of junk, got sick of it, and quit. (Our family would be classified in advertiser's jargon as not so much "early adopters" as "early rejecters".) When we came back five years later the payment structure problem had been solved, and the quantity of junk mail much decreased. (Yes, really.) It's an arms race. At the moment the attackers are winning - but who is going to be more motivated to research on means of defence: AOL, who are going to lose my custom one of these fine days if they don't get a move on, or the government?

It's not the case that I deny any role for law in this issue. Separate contracts, enforceable in law, between ISP and users as to what could and could not be sent by the ISP's services, would be fine by me. Different ISP's could compete on their various brand contracts. "We always prosecute pornographers who send unsolicited mail!" some would boast. Others could proudly say, "You choose: this service is completely unrestricted and unsupervised." Contrast that with the obvious dangers of blanket supervision by not just the present government but all future ones. But the law is always likely to trail behind the power of angry customers (like me) with the right of exit. The lowlife that Mr Holtsberry rightly describes as being "creative and dishonest" in evading the software barriers that Internet Service Providers try to put up against them are scarcely likely to be less creative and more honest in evading legal barriers.

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We received an e-mail from Samizdata reader Kevin Connors asking why we do not focus more on the dire state of civil liberties in Britain and pointing us at an article in Reason on the subject.

I responded that is was 'old news' over here but in truth he is quite right, if we are indeed a Libertarian Samizdata, then we should spend more time on this far from trivial issue. After all, there is news out there other than the war against Al Qaeda. If we do not loudly rant on this issue, we are part of the problem rather than part of the solution!

I have often noticed when I casually mention in the course of a conversation that Britain is a police state and then continue on without missing a beat, I often see people's expressions subtly change, as if perhaps they misheard me. Sometimes I hear "Oh, you're one of those libertarians. Don't you realise there is a war on?"

Yet we were living in a police state well before September 11th, so exactly what war is it that they had in mind?

The facts speak for themselves. The Regulation of Investigative Powers Act (aptly known as RIP) is one of the most draconian Big Brother surveillance laws of its type in the western world and that came into effect in October 2000. Not only is it intentionally worded as to be largely unintelligible (thus providing 'wiggle room' for whatever the state wishes to do), but it reverses the burden of proof when the state demands crypto-keys. The key holder, not the state, is required to prove they do not have access to them if they are demanded or face two years in jail.

Whilst on the subject of surveillance, Britain has the dubious honour of leading the world in closed circuit television (CCTV), with more per capita than that 'bastion' of civil liberties, Israel, which at least has the excuse of a genuine and demonstrable daily security threat.

This government is also attempting to restrict the automatic right to trial by jury. This is one of the fundamental ancient bedrocks of British liberty and yet it is under attack for reasons of crude utility. Although there is opposition to this astonishing assault, it is a testament to British apathy that people are not rioting on the streets at the mere prospect of such a huge diminution of a basic underpinning of liberty.

And civilian gun ownership in Britain? Oh, don't get me started on that monstrous tale of confiscation and repression. That deserves an article of it's own.