The vile ContactPoint database, which held details about every child in England and was accessible to hundreds of thousands of professionals has been switched off.

I have to say that in pulling the plug the government has confounded my gloomy predictions that no matter who won the election civil liberty and privacy would be equally poorly served.

Good comment to a BBC article on the subject here:

I work with large data sets professionally (I am a data architect working with large companies). ContactPoint was always going to fail, either disastrously through its own failings, or through an eventually inevitable political decision. The experience of data management within public and private organisations is that almost any data set like this will eventually end up on a laptop or a memory stick which then gets lost, and that users need to be carefully trained and monitored to ensure appropriate use. That was never going to happen here, with 300,000 users in a number of organisations, roles and lines of business, spread across the country.

Dr Robert Daniels-Dwyer, Oxford

However Simon from Doncaster feels differently:

David Cameron, in my view, will be directly responsible for any child who is abused in whatever form as a result of scrapping this system. How long before another Victoria Climbie? Well, with the cut backs to child social care, expect more and more and no doubt it will be local authorities who take the blame. This government is a disgrace.

Where did you say you worked again, Simon?

My good friend Stateside, Russell E Whitaker, is, like an increasing number of Facebook users, getting annoyed at how any privacy settings that might seem to be available on the service are not being respected and have in fact been eroded, according to this report. Now, I have always taken the view that the internet is not a fully robust thing from a privacy point of view, but then again, if a business claims to respect privacy, but it turns out there is a problem, then users are entitled to feel angry.

I have a FB page, but I never put sensitive personal stuff on there and I tend to prune so-called "friends" pretty ruthlessly if I find that anyone is taking liberties with me. But I take the risk, at least for the moment.

But the beauty of this technology and indeed of capitalism is that complaints about an issue - such as privacy - are already spawning new ventures and ideas. I am not sure how this venture will work out (based in NY) but I wish it the best of luck.

I am fairly seriously prosopagnosic. That may be why I am so skeptical about identification in general, but the research into the condition is beginning to militate quite strongly against the presuppositions many people in the law-and-order business make about the utility of photo-ID.

The BBC has an interesting radio programme on how bad people are at facial-recognition, here:
Health Check

The points in this that I suggest are important for policy are:

1. Most people are not in fact very good at matching strangers to their photographs. People tend to be much better at recognising people they know than people they do not know, and mistakenly generalise what you could call 'Easy Matching' from their experience with their familiars. This is not a mistake you would make if, like me, you find recognising people you know hard.

Looking at someone's 'photo-ID' on a one-off occasion will ordinarily be hit-and-miss, unless you are one of the rare people the radio programme calls "super-recognisers".

2. A significant number of people (the programme suggests 3%) are sufficiently bad that it handicaps them in everyday life, but generally they do not realise it. I was 30 before I understood I had a problem, though I can recall incidents back to 6 or 7 years old that are examples. Yet officialdom assumes that anyone can recognise others from pictures, to the degree suggested by the false Easy Matching supposition. There is no testing of passport control staff, police, security guards, bar-staff... anyone, who is expected to do the matching.

Yet 3% or thereabouts not only are ordinarily useless at it but are being put to an impossible task. They may well compensate intuitively by responding to other behavioural or bodily clues that have nothing to do with facial features—the Clever Hans syndrome. I know I do. But I was not always aware that is what I was doing, or that I was different in that respect from other people.

Some Hypotheses:

Photo-ID for age-checking is rather like voice-stress or polygraph "fraud detection". There is no real evidence for its accuracy, yet the story that it 'obviously' works is so plausible to so many, that few even question it. There is a massive confirmation bias, and it is probably not acting as more than an intimidatory deterrent.

Software facial-recognition is thought of as pretty bad for the purpose that it is put to (fact) - but it may well be better than 90%+ of people under the same circumstances of matching strangers in large numbers, and infinitely better than the small fraction of checkers who, unknown to themselves and their employers, are getting it wrong almost all the time. Criticisms of the technology are often as based in the mistaken Easy Matching idea as support for it. Both sides of that argument assume people are better than machines. But in practice ID-ing travellers and drinkers doesn't do a lot. It is an imposition and a cost on everyone, but the attitudes struck in security theatre do not stop competent imposture.

Flash and dash is close to useless, but there's a huge industry of ID badges built on it. The false assumption is that replacing a doorkeeper who knows everyone (and in most cases will therefore recognise them quite well), with picture-passes that 'anyone can check', is more efficient and more secure. Quite the reverse. But look at the reception area in any large firm and what to you see? Picture passes with RFID tracking of the pass and bored temps concerned that you display a badge properly, operating on the assumption that your badge is you.

(Technology keeps ever more track of those tokens, however. So, as long as you are compliant, regardless of the fact that linking ID with people does not work, ID does work as surveillance.)

There is now in the system a prejudice and an interest in not facing (ha!) these ideas. Everything in fact tends towards dismissing them. The authoritarian mindset is particularly prone to confirmation bias (Cf. the catastrophic DNA database arguments), and Clever Hans will sucker them every time. The most modern fashions in government are close to superstition.

Yesterday Google remembered its Don't be Evil maxim and announced A New Approach to China:

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. [...]

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

This has been long time coming - and by long I mean a few months as apparently Google has recalled most of their engineers from China leaving behind skeleton staff in September last year - and yet vastly overdue. The move is surprising as the world got accustomed to 'business' justifications for dealing with totalitarian states - size of the market, encouragement of progress, which in turn breeds freedom, benefits to the oppressed, er, markets. Blah, blah, blah.

In as much as progress is encouraged by competition and customer sophistication, this argument is valid. In as much as these need to evolve in a framework based on the rule of law, lack of corruption, some respect for property rights and notions of individual rights and freedom, it clearly doesn't apply to countries like China. During the Cold War, the detente of the 70s and its aftermath have shown that trading with the communist countries does not have marked impact on their political ruling class. Actually, it does as they are the ones who benefit from any foreign investment and trade. Both Coca-cola and Pepsi were widely available and I do not recall any tangible improvement to dissidents' existence. Fair enough, Google is in business of information distribution and filtering, which is far more relevant to any regime opposition, however, what with compromise and censorship, it has ruled itself out that 'game' some time ago. As for technology transfer and indigenous competition they certainly had a constructive role - Baidu, the local search engine has most of the search market, having learnt much from the likes of Google.

A cynic might say Google has not much to lose by exiting China, the revenue from that market was 'immaterial' by their own account. Let the cynics have their moment. There are enough people and companies who worship Google as the ultimate modern corporation, or simply as a success story, and the signals this move would send can only be good. And long overdue.

I am not holding my breath for other companies to follow. There is no comment from Yahoo or Microsoft as yet but I suspect this quote by Tang Jun, former President of Microsoft China sums up a lot of thinking in the business world right now.

For Chinese netizens, it does not matter whether Google quits from China or not. But this was the most stupid decision they had ever made since giving up China was giving up half of the future world.

Mr Tang Jun is right, of course. The Chinese government and its business champions are hardly going to notice and bother even less. They have been hoovering up some of the best software engineers the Western businesses have made redundant in the last couple of years and growing their own breed too. All of the search engines in China have helped the Chinese government to censor speech, some of which we covered here before. Other companies, namely Cisco's Panopticon Chinoiserie, have assisted in more active ways, though last year, the government tried, but failed, to force computer manufacturers to install a censorship program on their new PCs called Green Dam. Perhaps there is hope but, for now, count me among the cynics.

This is not a joke.

Well, it is a joke. However, the Home Office does not seem to realise this.

Reading the comments at The Register is always good value in times like this, too.

Somebody please tell me that this is really a withering piece of satire dreamed up by Guy Herbert. Please.

A number of governments - the UK and German - have used information stolen from a Liechtenstein bank in a bid to hunt after alleged tax evaders. And now, there is a story that data has been stolen from HSBC Private Bank (Suisse), divulging data on scores of French clients. The French government, you will not be surprised to learn, gentle reader, is probably not all that shy of using stolen material. It will be interesting to see what happens to such data. Here is another news report.

As I keep saying in my defence of tax havens, bank secrecy is not really about allowing dodgy folk to squirrel away ill-gotten gains, which is the usual image presented these days. (That is not to say that such secrecy has not been abused in the past). In past ages, groups fleeing persecution - such as Jews from Nazi-controlled Europe - availed themselves of banking secrecy in order to protect what was left of that wealth. We should not be so naive as to imagine that even without a repeat of such horrors, there is not a need for client privacy to be rigorously enforced. It is monstrous that governments should use stolen material in this fashion, but then, as the founding editor of this site likes to remind us, the state is not your friend.

And then ask yourself: What is to be done? What can I do? How far am I prepared to go?

John Osimek reports for The Register:

The government obsession with collecting data has now extended to five-year-olds, as local Community Health Services get ready to arm-twist parents into revealing the most intimate details of their own and their child’s personal, behavioural and eating habits.

The questionnaire – or "School Entry Wellbeing Review" – is a four-page tick-box opus, at present being piloted in Lincolnshire, requiring parents to supply over 100 different data points about their own and their offspring’s health. Previously, parents received a "Health Record" on the birth of a child, which contained around eight questions which needed to be answered when that child started school.

The Review asks parents to indicate whether their child "often lies or cheats": whether they steal or bully; and how often they eat red meat, takeaway meals or fizzy drinks. [...]

The BigBrotherWatch campaign has a rather neat idea for a networked protest against the bully state, designed to encourage people to notice how much of it has insinuated itself into everyday life.

You put a standard sticker on some physical evidence of intrusion, threat, surveillance, overregulation, nannying... by or authorised by, an official body. You photograph it. You send in the photograph to them and/or publish it by other means... and that's it. There's a running competition for the best pics.

It is a smart use of the networked world to do something that is not quite the direct action loved by old-fashioned activists, but more directive action, to get the public's attention on the world around us and how needlessly oppressive it has become. And it is a game, too.

Alex Deane of BBW tells me he has already had hundreds of requests for stickers, and some very serious and respectable think-tankies appeared to be taking them at a meeting I attended last night.

I wonder whether anyone will manage to tag an FIT unit?

This comes as no surprise whatsoever...

All telecoms companies and internet service providers will be required by law to keep a record of every customer's personal communications, showing who they are contacting, when, where and which websites they are visiting.

Despite widespread opposition over Britain's growing surveillance society, 653 public bodies will be given access to the confidential information, including police, local councils, the Financial Services Authority, the Ambulance Service, fire authorities and even prison governors. [...] John Yates, Britain's head of anti-terrorism, has argued that the legislation is vital for his investigators.

The Scotland Yard Assistant Commissioner said: "The availability of Communications Data to investigators is absolutely crucial. Its importance to investigating the threat of terrorism and serious crime cannot be overstated".

It is just a bit ironic that is comes on the day celebrating the Berlin Wall coming down. It is not enough to just defeat this legislation, the likes of John Yates and all his ilk need to be driven from positions of power because these are the Orwellian people who are the true clear and present danger to our very civilisation. The threat from terrorism is real, but the threat from our own insatiable security state is even greater.

Well, I cannot say I am remotely surprised.

An estimated 11.3 million people – including parents who join school rotas to take pupils to sports events – already face having their backgrounds checked to allow them to work with children.

But Sir Roger Singleton, the chairman of the Independent Safeguarding Authority, said the scope of the database could increase significantly because companies would fear losing business if they did not have their employees vetted.

It is really hard to know how a satire publication like the Onion or Private Eye can make a living these days.

Via Iain Dale's blog, I came across this nifty piece of Conservative Party electioneering poster art. As Mr Dale says, this is incredibly prescient. Of course, the glee of Mr Dale in finding this is somewhat undermined by the fact that the Conservatives have not, to put it mildly, covered themselves with glory on this issue down the years, even though, to be fair, that it was Churchill's Conservatives who axed ID cards and the final bits of rationing in the early 1950s. But whatever quibbles one might have, there is little doubt that today, Labour MPs will struggle ever to be taken seriously on the civil liberties issue. That is for certain.

Last night I listened to a great talk by Henry Porter, the journalist and book author, and the spy fiction novelist Charles Cumming. For Porter, civil liberties issues form a part of his latest book. Recommended.

The Castrol oil company (a subsidiary of BP) is about the run an advertising campaign that does the following:

At certain intersections, they will be erecting electronic billboards combined with cameras. Cameras will photograph registration plates of oncoming vehicles. Using the registration data, the make and model of car will be pulled from a database that has been helpfully sold to Castrol by the DVLA (ie the government body that handles vehicle registrations in most of the UK). The billboard will then displace to the motorist recommending which particular type of oil should be used in his car.

No registration data will be stored for later use. I guess that makes it all right then.

Someone please tell me that this is an April Fools joke. Yes, I know it is September.

The Morning Advertiser essentially reproduces what the IPS press office told them (there's a shorter version of the same flacking in The Publican), and no doubt other drinks trade press will be printing some of it in due course, so here is most of it.

National ID cards will eventually replace current ID used to buy alcohol in pubs, says the man heading the national ID card roll-out.

Identity and Passport Service chief executive James Hall also revealed that “several thousands” have already registered interest in applying for one of the new cards.

The cards, which are not compulsory, will cost £30. People in Manchester will be the first who can apply for them in the autumn, before the national roll-out in 2011/2012.

“Several thousand have registered on the website to show their interest,” said Hall. “We will be focusing on Manchester to start. We’ll then be moving forward cautiously before we start to scale this up.”

Asked if he predicted a large take-up among young people, he replied: “Yes I think there will be.

“I think it’s a little bit like the telephone. On it’s own it isn’t of great benefit to people. As they become more popular businesses will turn to ID cards as proof of age and as businesses start to ask for them more regularly, customers will find it more natural to get one.

“In the next 12-18 months we can build a virtuous circle among businesses and consumers.”

Hall said the new cards will be more convenient than passports as ID for pubs, and there is “some nervousness” about carrying driving licences because they include people’s addresses, unlike the new cards.

As for Pass-accredited cards, Hall said: “There’s lots of them about and almost in the multiplicity is their weakness. A lot of people pubs and clubs are reluctant to accept them.”

He added: “I think over time the ID card will replace these things and become the most convenient and effective form of ID.

“My expectation is in due course, people will get a passport and ID card together, keep one as their core travel document and put the card in their wallet - that will become their de-facto way of proving ID.”

Hall said the cards will be advertised across the trade within the next few weeks. Adverts will raise awareness among firms and showing where to get hold of supporting material to educate staff about the cards.

“As we get closer to the launch between now and Christmas, we will be supplementing these with direct adverts to consumers.”

Note that the existing proof-of-age cards, the PASS scheme, that he goes to such trouble to rubbish, have been supported by the Home Office hitherto, and millions have them. (One of the better ones, CitzenCard, has 1.8 million cards in issue.) They are cheap. They are private and secure, the information on them being minimal and the back-up systems being separate from anything else. Suppliers take no more information from you than necessary to establish your age. They will destroy it on request. They will in general not share it with anyone without your permission. And it is a relationship in which you have contractual and statutory rights which can't be waived to suit the supplier.

The IPS line is that drinkers will prefer to be fingerprinted at their own expense, and provide a massive amount of personal information to a government agency, which will then be held on a central register for life (and likely for ever), used to cross reference other information about them, and passed out to a range of government agencies that are entitled to ask for it. The 'convenience' of this card will be enhanced by criminal penalties if you lose it and don't report it, civil ones if you fail to inform the authorities about changes to your residence or other circumstances, a log of every time the card is used and where, and the possibility that the information required, what can be done with it, and the obligations attaching to the scheme can all be altered by regulation.

Who-whom?

"It's a no-brainer," says Alan Johnson, 59-and-a-half.

In Britain, you probably are.

Both the Shetland Islands Council (101) and Corby Borough Council (90) - among the smallest local authorities in the UK - have more CCTV cameras than the San Francisco Police Department (71)

- BBC Report Pretty pictures here.

That's nothing, it seems. We learn today that a single school in Stockwell, south London, has 96.

Various forms of coercion, such as designation of the application process for identity documents issued by UK Ministers (e.g passports), are an option to stimulate applications in a manageable way. Designation should be considered as part of a managed roll-out strategy, specifically in relation to UK documents. There are advantages to designation of documents associated with particular target groups e.g. young people who may be applying for their first Driving Licence.

- 'National Identity Scheme, Options Analysis - Outcome', the Home Office document from the end of 2007 that succinctly describes its approach to the imposition of the national identity scheme onto the population.

The new Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, says “Holding an identity card should be a personal choice for British citizens — just as it is now to obtain a passport.” This is no change. It always has been intended that it should become the same personal choice, that any application for a passport (or another official document that you need to live a normal life) should entail an application to be on the national register for the rest of your life. As voluntary as sleeping.

...says the person calling himself the Right Honourable Alan Johnson MP.

Amusing comments.

The Times, assisted by Mr Justice Eady, who seems to preside over the whole mess that stands in the place of proper privacy law in England, has unmasked the police blogger NightJack. NightJack had just won the Orwell Prize for his blog. I am guessing that drew it to the attention of higher authority, and such articulate dissent must be punished.

It took just six weeks, including a court-case, to reveal his identity. The blog has now been deleted, and the DC formerly known as NightJack has been disciplined in some unspecified way. Apparently it is in the public interest to maintain a disciplinary code under which police officers are not permitted to express their opinions. That is what Sir David Eady implied, obiter, in giving his judgement.

But deleting from public knowledge what has once been on the web is difficult. Here is a celebrated sample, NightJack's advice to the arrested, which Samizdata readers may find both useful and enlightening (there is a situational irony in the sideswipe at those who have learned how to use the forces of law and order to score points and extract revenge):

A Survival Guide for Decent Folk

Paul has posted a number of lengthy replies on the “Modest Proposal" thread. In these days of us increasingly having to deal with law abiding folk who have fallen foul of the “entitled poor” and those who have learned how to use us to score points and exact revenge, I thought it would be a good idea to give out a bit of general guidance for those law abiding types who find themselves under suspicion or under arrest. It works for the bad guys so make it work for you.

Complain First Always get your complaint in first, even if it is you who started it and you who were in the wrong. If things have gone awry and you suspect the cops are going to be called, get your retaliation in first. Ring the cops right away and allege for all you are worth. If you can work a racist or homophobic slant into it so much the better.

Make a counter allegation
Regardless of the facts, never let the other side be blameless. If they beat you to the phone, ring anyway and make a counter allegation against them. Again racism or homophobia are your friends. If you are not from a visible minority ethnic culture, may I suggest that that the phrase “You gay bastard” or similar is always useful. In extremis allege sexual assault. It gives us something to bargain with when getting the other person to drop their complaint on a quid-pro-quo basis. This is particularly good where there are no independent witnesses. When it boils down to one word against another and nobody is ‘fessing up, CPS run a mile and you, my friend, are definitely on a walk out.

Never explain to the Police
If the Police arrive to lock you up, say nothing. You are a decent person and you may think that reasoning with the Police will help. “If I can only explain, they will realise it is all a horrible mistake and go away”. Wrong. We do want to talk to you on tape in an interview room but that comes later. All you are doing by trying to explain is digging yourself further in. We call that stuff a significant statement and we love it. Decent folk can’t help themselves, they think that they can talk their way out. Wrong.

Admit Nothing
To do anything more than lock you up for a few hours we need to prove a case. The easiest route to that is your admission. Without it, our case may be a lot weaker, maybe not enough to charge you with. In any case, it is always worth finding out exactly how damning the evidence is before you fall on your sword. So don’t do the decent and honourable thing and admit what you have done. Don’t even deny it or try to give your side of the story. Just say nothing. No confession and CPS are on the back foot already. They forsee a trial. They fear a trial. They are looking for any excuse to send you home free.

Keep your mouth shut
Say as little as possible to us. At the custody office desk a Sergeant will ask you some questions. It is safe to answer these. For the rest of the time, say nothing.

Claim Suicidal Thoughts
A debatable one this. Claiming to be thinking about topping yourself has several benefits. If you can keep it up, it might just bump up any compensation payable later. On the other hand you may find yourself in a paper suit with someone watching your every move.

Always always always have a solicitor
Duh. No brainer this one. Unless you know 100% for sure that your mate the solicitor does criminal law and is good at it, ask for the Duty Solicitor. They certainly do criminal law and they are good at it. Then listen to what the solicitor says and do it. Their job is to get you off without the Cops or CPS laying a glove on you if at all possible. It is what they get paid for. They are free to you. There is no down side. Now decent folks think it makes them look like they have something to hide if they ask for a solicitor. Irrelevant. Going into an interview without a solicitor is like taking a walk in Tottenham with a big gold Rolex. Bad things are very likely to happen to you. I wouldn’t do it and I interview people for a living.

Actively complain about every officer and everything they do
Did they cuff you when they brought you in? Were they rude to you? Did they racially or homophobically abuse you? Didn’t get fed? Cell too cold? You are decent folk who don’t want to make a fuss but trust me, it pays to whinge and no matter how trivial and / or poorly founded your complaint there are people who will uncritically listen to you and try and prove the complaint on your behalf. Some of them are even police officers. Nothing like a complaint to muddy the waters and suggest that you are only in court because the vindictive Cops have a grudge against you. Far fetched? Wait until your solicitor spins it in court and you come over as Ghandi.

Show no respect to the legal system or anybody working in it
You think that if you are a difficult, unpleasant, sneering, unco-operative and rude things will go badly for you and you will be in more trouble. No sirree Bob. It seems that in fact the worse you are, the easier things will go for you if, horror of horrors, you do end up convicted. Remember to fake a drink problem if you haven’t developed one as a result of dealing with us already. Magistrates and Judges do seem to like the idea that you are basically good but the naughty alcohol made you do it. They treat you better. Crazy I know but true.

So there you go, basically anything you try and do because you are decent and straightforward hurts you badly. Act like an habitual, professional, lifestyle criminal and chances are you will walk away relatively unscathed. Copy the bad guys, its what they do for a living.

[I]n much the same way that political control of statistical data can grant the holder control over the policy agenda, so control of an individual’s personal and sensitive information can grant dominance over the individual himself. It is precisely this that, in the information age, makes identity theft such a harrowing crime: the dual sensations of violation and helplessness arising from a realisation that one is no longer in control of one’s own life. The fact of the matter is that our personal and sensitive data are the core statistics of our own unique lives and, by extension, the wholesale collection, retention and sharing of our data by government is equivalent to a state-sponsored and thereby legitimised form of identity theft.

- The Earl of Northesk

What the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four could never have predicted is that the citizens would subject themselves to the scrutiny of the cameras voluntarily. The deeper threat to human dignity in 2009 is not state surveillance but pathological exhibitionism. In so many respects, what Orwell foretold has come to pass — with the crucial difference that it has been embraced by consumers not imposed upon them by the totalitarian state.

- The Spectator.

I posted this item almost as Brian hit the button on his own entry on the same subject. But I think it is worth a second bite at this cherry.

Great work by Fraser Nelson at the Spectator for revealing that Royal Bank of Scotland, which is now almost totally owned by the UK government, has been asking prospective clients about their political affiliations. The exact term is to ask whether a wannabe client is a "politically exposed person". Now, this maybe more of a cockup than a sign of anything more sinister, so my trigger finger may be getting unnecessarily twitchy, but still. This is, as the commenters on the article Fraser writes says, a classic demonstration of why state-owned banks are bad and ripe for corruption. Special favours will be demanded by the ruling party's clients. In France, remember, the former state-run Credit Lyonnais bank was a sink of corruption.

RBS is also the parent of Coutts, the private bank, and RBS Coutts, the international version of said. These banks provide clients with offshore accounts. The risk is that such a bank could be put under political pressure to deliver details about its clients, a fact that becomes particularly relevant with so many governments currently trying to shut down so-called "tax havens" such as Switzerland.

If it is the case that RBS has been trying to prize out details of potential clients' political affiliations, then at the very least the management responsible for this dim-witted idea should resign. In fact, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, should serious consider his own position. On his watch, the once very solid, in fact gloriously dull, UK banking group Lloyds has been pressured into buying the debt-laden UK banking group HBOS. Result: Lloyds' share price has crashed and most of that bank is now owned by the government. (Full disclosure: I bank with Lloyds).

Unbelievable.

Fraser Nelson:

Some of the worst events in history take place because no one is really in charge. That RBS could blunder their way into this is almost as scary as the idea that they did it deliberately. I accept it was a blunder: God knows, RBS has made enough of them already. But the banking industry should urgently review and clarify the way it handles the issue of "politically exposed persons." No one in this country should ever again be asked about party political affiliation by their bank.

Fine prose, I think you will agree. At first I had in mind to make that first sentence there into today's SQOTD. But think about it. To Nelson, it is obvious that nobody should "ever again be asked about party political affiliation by their bank". Excuse me? If I am wondering whether or not to lend you money, I will ask you any questions I feel like asking, and if I don't like the answers, then it will be no deal. If you don't like me asking such questions, you are free to look elsewhere for the funds you want to borrow, even if I say yes. If you don't like a bank you lend money to asking such questions, then don't lend it to them. I am talking about the right to discriminate, both by lenders and by borrowers. Discrimination is, or should be, at the heart of banking. The attempt to drive discrimination out of banking has been at the heart of our recent banking woes.

That Fraser Nelson, a man most definitely on our side in the broad loves-capitalist-success hates-socialist-slums way that we regularly here celebrate, should write something like that, with no apparent sense of self-contradiction, tells you just how debased - how nationalised - the state of banking already is now in Britain, and has been for some while. It's not that Nelson favours state micro-management of banks in the deliberate manner which I do agree is suggested by my heading. It's worse than that. He just takes it for granted. His only question is: how should it be done?

Because you see, what makes this question about whether you are a "politically exposed person" scary and Soviet, which is Nelson's point, is that the banks already are nationalised, in the sense of their databases being, you know, like that (hands brought together into a combined, intertwined, two-handed prayer fist) with government databases.

If banks operated in a true free market, banks asking about politics, or for that matter being suspected of having (and in fact having) political preferences which they make a point of not asking about, would just be stuff discussed in Which Bank? magazine. And the readers of such magazines would have plenty of banks to choose between, just as they now have plenty of magazines to choose between.

Clive Davis, who blogs at the Spectator's Coffee House site these days, reckons the concerns that civil libertarians have about CCTVs all over the UK are "over-hyped". Well maybe they are but it seems that Mr Davis does rather miss the point slightly. CCTV may not, of themselves, be a threat to civil liberties in the same way as some of other vast collection of laws now on the statute books in the UK, but they are not harmless in this respect, either. True, society has always had its snoops, its "nosey parkers" - as we Brits used to say - and curtain-twitching neighbours. Sometimes such vigilant folk performed a kind of public service, even if unintended, by creating a social network in which certain kinds of delinquent behaviour could be spotted and dealt with. But clearly there are costs to this in that innocent people can find their actions being picked on by the hyper-vigilant. On a more practical level, the obsession with surveillance can crowd out resources better devoted to deterring crime in other ways.

In fairness to Mr Davis, I am sure that readers can come up with any numbers of contenders for laws that are far worse than CCTV. My personal favourite is the Civil Contingencies Act, which confers on government a whopping collection of powers to use in emergencies; this act received virtually no serious press coverage in the MSM whatsoever. But CCTV, and the sheer number of them in the UK, is all of a piece of a move by this country towards a Big Brother state. Yes, if one wants to be nit-picky about it, one could argue that CCTVs in privately-owned shopping malls, for example, are not intrusive since a person is not forced to go into such places, whereas cameras in public streets for which the public has a right of access are intrusive. Also, there is the sheer, practical issue of information overload: there comes a point where there are so many cameras that it is hard to know if the police can physically track all of their photos all the time. So maybe panic is unjustified.

But I think Clive's sang froid on this occasion is just as mistaken as screaming hysteria. We have moved decisively towards a police state in recent years and on some measures, are already in one. CCTVs are part of this state of affairs. Trying to pretend otherwise is not very credible. I am not entirely sure why Mr Davis wants to take the line he does.

As an aside, Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute, who is a man not to get hysterical about anything, is fairly scathing about the recent British love affair with CCTV in his book, The Rotten State of Britain. It looks like a good read and I will review it later.

If you are a Samizdata reader, you probably don't have a lot of use for your Member of Parliament. However, now is the time to use them - especially if you have a Labour MP.

Here is Phil Booth:

At the Convention on Modern Liberty, I launched NO2ID's request that everyone at the convention – and around the UK – tells their MP right now that they refuse their consent to having their information shared under any "information sharing order", a power currently being slipped onto the statute books in clause 152 of the coroners and justice bill .

Please tell yours too. It's important, and urgent – and something that only YOU can do. If you never have before, now's the time to write to your MP – in a letter, or via www.WriteToThem.com.

Jack Straw has been making noises that could signal a 'compromise', but the only acceptable action is to remove clause 152 entirely from the bill. It is not linked to any other clause, despite being sandwiched between other powers and so-called safeguards offered to the information commissioner. It cannot be improved, and Straw can't be allowed to merely "dilute" it. Clause 152 just has to go.

It's imperative that in coming days every MP hears from his or her constituents. Please tell them you refuse consent to having your information, taken for one purpose, arbitrarily used for any other purpose. And ask them to vote clause 152 off the bill.

If you are skeptical about whether anything is important enough to write a polite letter to your Labour MP, then please read my detailed briefing for parliamentarians, here (pdf).

--
Note: If you followed the link to Jack Straw and now feel sick, I am sorry. Here is the retired Law Lord, Lord Bingham, to make you a bit better.

The splendiferous Doc Searls has an alarming article about an outfit called the Global Internet Freedom Consortium.

Global Internet Freedom Consortium sell tools to break the Great Internet Wall of China. Cool. They also sell the private details of their clients who have purchased these tools to 'vetted' companies for 'personalised advertising'. Extremely un-cool... catastrophically so if one of the 'vetted' companies turns out to be a front for the Chinese government.

I despise most internet 'push marketers' at the best of times (not only does it not really work, it is intensely annoying... those two points are not unrelated) but to sell that sort of client list to any third party is just all kinds of a bad idea.

These do not sound like people I would care to trust my liberty and quite possibly my life with if I was planning to most righteously dig a hole under the Great Internet Wall. I know two people in China who do exactly that on a regular basis and this article is probably the fastest way I have to let them know about the worm in the "Global Internet Freedom Consortium's" apple.

The moral of the story? Read the fine print when buying the tools you need to stick it to The Man... before you pull out that credit card.

The innocent have nothing [left] to lose

- The answer to the question "What was the winning tagline in the government's competition to relaunch the ID card?", according to The Register's perhaps slightly satirical Christmas quiz.

Their lack of imagination will also protect them from the apprehension that they have anything to hide.

It is only people who behave suspiciously who should – and quite rightly deserve to – fear. That is the purpose of having ID cards!”

“Like my friends and acquaintances, I cannot understand how a law abiding citizen can object to the proposal or how they will limit or infringe my “civil liberties”.

- Unnamed members of the public quoted as endorsing the Home Office view in its consultation summary (2003) (pdf).

The national identity cards scheme will give people confidence, convenience and security in an increasingly vital aspect of modern life – proving and protecting their identity.

- David Blunkett, launching the Identity Cards Bill in 2004

Such views are surprisingly persistent. To tackle them, we (NO2ID) have produced what I suppose is the first NO2ID commercial:

The other night I rented out the DVD based on life in former East Germany, The Lives of Others. It is about what life in the former Communist state was like in the fag-end of the Cold War era. It portrays the extent to which people were spied on by the Stasi, and the brutal efficiency with which that organisation went about its job. It does not sound very promising material for an evening in front of the TV but the film is simply outstanding. I strongly recommend it.

Inevitably, given recent UK events and the government's mania for CCTV, abuse of civil liberties and assault on the Common Law, the film has a certain poignance for a British viewer. It is also clearly apparent to me that once a critical number of people become involved in spying on others and earning a living from doing this, it is very hard to dislodge it but East Germany eventually crumbled along with the Berlin Wall. When, I wonder, will ZanuLabour have its 1989?

This is even better.

One of the hardest things for a libertarian to do at the moment is to maintain any kind of optimism or sense of confidence that his or her ideas will catch on. The danger is that if one sinks into despair, then that despair will come across as a form of defeatism, which turns into a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. If I have a criticism of one of the head honchos of the UK-based Libertarian Alliance, Sean Gabb, is that he used to wallow so much in this sort of "we are all doomed" schtick that I almost imagined, that in a perverse kind of way, that he was secretly rather enjoying it and that it was all a bit tongue in cheek. Funnily enough, at last year's annual LA conference in London - the next one is held this weekend - I sensed that Mr Gabb had cheered up a bit. Even so, reasons for to be grim about civil liberties issues remain but sometimes I think that momentum might be slowly changing at the level of public debate. Increasingly, if the government comes out with some new measure, it is geeted with a sort of wearied resignation or outright derision; enthusiasm for such measures are few, or supported by obvious toadies and fools.

Take this story in the Daily Telegraph today. The outgoing Director of Public Prosecutions, no less, talks about the UK embracing the politics of fear:

Outgoing Director of Public Prosecutions Sir Ken Macdonald warned that the expansion of technology by the state into everyday life could create a world future generations “can’t bear”.

Maybe they will not just bear it, but do something about it.

In his wide-ranging speech, Sir Ken appeared to condemn a series of key Government policies, attacking terrorism proposals - including 42 day detention - identity card plans and the “paraphernalia of paranoia”.

Paraphernalia of paranoia - that is a nice turn of phrase.

Home Office plans to require registration of mobile phones (and to register the identities of hotel guests (pdf), record who calls whom and what they read online, etc ...) have a familiar feel. In the Soviet Union, all printing machinery and typewriters were registered just in case they might be used for 'anti-social' purposes, when the people who had access to them could be tracked-down, watched and questioned.

You might think that with all the worries about recession, bank failures and so on, that political leaders might want to avoid making ever greater commitments on public spending. Not so. Just to remind us about the kinds of concerns that animate the political classes, here is this story:

Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance.

Phone buyers would have to present a passport or other official form of identification at the point of purchase. Privacy campaigners fear it marks the latest government move to create a surveillance society.

It is hardly a fear. It is a reality.

A compulsory national register for the owners of all 72m mobile phones in Britain would be part of a much bigger database to combat terrorism and crime. Whitehall officials have raised the idea of a register containing the names and addresses of everyone who buys a phone in recent talks with Vodafone and other telephone companies, insiders say.

It is important to remember that even supposedly private sector firms such as Vodafone can easily find it next-to-impossible not to co-operate with governments on stuff like this, particularly if the government can threaten to cut off licences.

The move is targeted at monitoring the owners of Britain’s estimated 40m prepaid mobile phones. They can be purchased with cash by customers who do not wish to give their names, addresses or credit card details.

So let's assume that the government has data on the 40 million-plus people who buy a pre-paid phone. Even leaving aside the moral objections to such a database, the practical issue of how on earth one can sift through the haystack of millions of such details for the possible pin of a terrorist plot does not seem to register.

But then again, one must remember that the database state is not really about terrorism. It is a beast that is now acquiring a life of its own. After all, thousands of jobs, millions of profits, are tied up with this. If the Tories really do stick to their pledge to shut this thing down - and I would not want to bet my house on it - it is going to put a lot of "consultants" out of a job. A certain grim satisfaction would be involved in that. My wife, who is a consultant, refuses to work on any such things, god love her.

What follow is a somewhat edited version of a comment I left on a Hollywood gossip blog called JJ's Dirt. As the blog owner decided not to approve my comment (as is indeed his right of course, so no nonsensical bleating about 'censorship'... it is JJ's blog and any comments on his turf are quite rightly at his unconditional sufferance. His blog = his rules), so I thought I would post my comment here. As it never saw the light of day, I have slightly expended it to more fully express my views.

I came across the article in a google search for something quite unrelated and saw a short list of people who are purported to be homosexual or bisexual in various so called 'public' walks of life in the USA. Although I am utterly indifferent to people's consensual sexual behaviour provided it is not aggressively thrust unwanted in my direction, I have always been deeply uncomfortable with the self-righteousness of people who 'out' others. This was the trigger phrase that moved me to comment and my (slightly expanded) reply follows.

"The failure to come out on the part of figures in the public eye seemingly sends a message that homosexuality or bisexuality is something shameful that needs to be hidden."

Or maybe they just have the notion that it is none of anyone else's damn business and that unless they choose to openly discuss their private life, they should have their privacy respected by others when they are not on the job.

If someone is a politician, they are a person controlling the violence backed means of collective coercion and quite reasonably should have no right to privacy whatsoever, be it sexual, social or financial.

Being an athlete or actor/actress on the other hand is just a job, not a public office. Why should your wish to 'out' someone trump their wish to perhaps not have what they do in private known? Certainly no one can or should force you to stop this (unless they feel you have defamed them, which is a rather different issue that I am not addressing), but that does not make what you are doing right. Perhaps you define yourself by your sexuality but most homosexual people I know do not, so why try to force them to make common cause with you when they may well feel no affinity with you or your world view at all? It is already the case that in most of the civilised world (i.e. the western world) the law does not prohibit homosexual public displays of affection. You have legal protection against violence directed at you and being homosexual no longer mitigates your legal right not to be assaulted... and rightly so of course.

Moreover by and large you have tolerance socially too, in that people will not take action to try and stop you holding hands with your partner. That is what tolerance means. It is the natural right of everyone to have their consensual behaviour with others tolerated.

However if your 'comfort' means it is 'acceptance' you want from straight people, rather than just tolerance, well you may ask people for it but you have no right to it and a significant number of people will choose to not accept you. No one has a right to be accepted. As long as someone tolerates you (as they must), it is their right, not yours, to judge you according to their sensibilities.

In short, if all someone does is sneer at you and your partner holding hands in public, deal with it. The world is full of jackasses and always will be. But please, stop poking into people's private affairs if they do not want them poked into. I do not think what you are doing is immensely harmful but it is neither admirable nor justified.

Congress notes that the Government proposes to require workers in aviation to enrol in the National Identity Scheme in 2009. Congress has deep concerns about the implications of the National Identity Scheme in general and the coercion of aviation workers into the scheme in particular. Congress sees absolutely no value in the scheme or in improvements to security that might flow from this exercise and feels that aviation workers are being used as pawns in a politically led process which might lead to individuals being denied the right to work because they are not registered or chose not to register in the scheme.

Congress pledges to resist this scheme with all means at its disposal, including consideration of legal action to uphold civil liberties.

Overwhelmingly carried by the TUC. Coming not very long after the British Air Transport Association (the association of airlines and airports) expressed its "joint and determined opposition to the proposal" [pdf], this suggests the current scheduling of the UK National Identity Scheme may have some problems.

Expect yet another repositioning shortly. (My guess: it'll be about "immigration control".)

This release is just in from Michael Babka at Downsize DC:

We knew that the state of Montana was resisting the REAL ID Act, but we just learned some of the details of that resistance. The story is so good we had to share it, in case you hadn't heard . . . Brian Schweitzer, the governor of Montana, wrote a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. The letter informed Chertoff that Montana would not be complying with the REAL ID Act. Our quote of the day supplies one of the reasons for Governor Schweitzer's rebellion. In response to the letter . . .

Secretary Chertoff called Governor Schweitzer and threatened him. Chertoff told Schweitzer that Montana residents would be banned from airplanes, or subjected to severe, time-consuming inspections at airports.

The Governor countered with his own threat, "How about we both go on 60 Minutes a few days after the DHS starts patting down Montana driver's license-holders who are trying to get on the planes and both of us can tell our side of the story."

Chertoff didn't like that suggestion. He said, "I see the problem. We need to get this fixed."

So far, the "fix" involves granting Montana and all other rebellious states an extension of the deadline for complying with the REAL ID Act. But the real fix is to repeal REAL ID.

Have you protested to your elected representatives that the Secretary of Homeland Security has been threatening the citizens of states that don't comply with REAL ID? If not, please do so. You can mention the Chertoff-Schweitzer exchange in your personal comments. Ask Congress
to repeal the REAL ID Act. You can send your message here.

If you've sent a REAL ID Act message recently, consider sending another "I am not afraid" message. We have a lot of new people who probably aren't familiar with our "I am not afraid" campaign. You can check it out here.

Please also consider making a donation to further our work. You can do so here.

Thank you for being a part of the growing Downsize DC army.

Jim Babka, President
DownsizeDC.org, Inc.

I would also suggest that if you are a Montana resident you write your governor a hearty thank you for standing up to the power hungry DC bureaucracy. If you do not live in Montana, find out if your governor is one of the ones rebelling against DC and thank them if they are and ask them to join with the others if they are not.

Liberte! Fraternite! Up the Revolution! May the fleas of ten thousand camels reside in Michael Chertoffs armpits!

When I made my last post about the small piece of incompetence I had encountered from the Home Office upon attempting to apply for a passport immediately upon becoming a naturalised British citizen, I wrote the sentence

Theoretically, when I became a citizen, one thing I gained was the right not to suffer the petty humiliations and bureaucratic hassles and incompetence from the Home Office that a non-citizen goes through just to live here.

One commenter left a response that more or less translated as "You poor deluded fool". I concluded the post on a surprisingly upbeat note, however

My passport will hopefully still come in a couple of weeks...

It is now two and a half weeks later, and all I can conclude is that yes, I was a poor deluded fool. However, the situation is somewhat more sinister than this.

The general layout of passport application forms has not changed particularly since the Home Office started setting up its apparatus for ID cards and databases. Essentially you are asked to prove that you are a British citizen and also prove your identity. If your claim to citizenship is based upon being born to parents of particular nationality and/or in particular places at particular times, the combination of supporting documents required can be very complex, as the unravelling of the British Empire and the creation of many different kinds of citizenship in the former empire when there used to be only one has led to British nationality law being extremely complex. However, if your claim to citizenship is a simple one, the supporting documents requested are quite simple. There are (at least so I thought) fewer simpler and less controversial proofs of citizenship than an obviously genuine naturalisation certificate dated the previous Wednesday. In addition to this, I was also requested to send my Australian passport as proof of identity. The Home Office probably at least partly wants this to record its details and index them with my British passport in its database so that my movements and actions become clearer to then, but this is a reasonable thing to ask for. Checking that my place of birth and date of birth on my Australian passport are the same as those on my naturalisation certificate, and that the photograph and signature in my Australian passport and the new British one are obviously of the same person.

In any event, these documents were all that the form and its supporting notes asked me to send. They proved pretty unambiguously that I was a British citizen and that the new passport was being issued to the same person who had been naturalised. I was not expecting any problems. The form had sated that people applying for their first British passport might be required to attend an interview, so I thought this was a possibility. Although the Home Office have set up "passport interview offices" as part of the infrastructure for issuing ID cards in the future, this is again something I don't find inherently wrong. Asking the person who is applying for a passport to appear in person to confirm that he is indeed the person in the photograph doesn't strike me as particularly unreasonable, and when I had to replace a stolen Australian passport the Australian officials did precisely this.

However this is not what happened. Instead, a few days after I had sorted out the payment issue (and after I had passed that "Your application cannot be processed further until...." roadblock, I received another letter. This one rather sadly needs fisking.

Thank you for your recent passport application.

A passport is an important document that provides evidence of a holder's nationality and identity. A passport may only be issued once we are satisfied that the information and documents submitted with the application form confirms the applicant's right to hold a British passport

Well, as mentioned, what I submitted was a week old naturalisation certificate and an Australian passport that confirmed that I was the person who had been naturalised. I cannot imagine less ambiguous evidence

In order to fight the increasing threat of identity fraud, we need to verify the information provided on the passport application form. To do this we need to know where you have lived for a period of time

You do? Why? I can't see how it is relevant to whether I am entitled to a British passport. I can just about see that you might need confirmation of where I live now so that you are certain you are sending the passport to the applicant, but beyond that, not so much. Of course, the fact that I have recently been naturalised means that I have already supplied my addresses for the last five years, undergone a police check to determine whether I am of good character, had my financial records checked to determine whether I have paid taxes, and assorted other things

To do this, please provide one or more letters on business headed paper addressed to the Identity and Passport Service from one of the following:

Note the phrasing of this sentence. Existing evidence of my address that I may have already is not good enough. I am required to get new evidence of the form that they require addressed to them specifically. I obtained similar evidence as part of my application for naturalisation, but this was subtly different (I was attempting to prove that I had been present in the UK, not that I had lived at specific addresses) and was not addressed to the Identity and Passport service, so I now must waste my and other people's time obtaining new evidence.

Your bank or building society

I bank with one of the large five high street banks in the UK. When I was attempting to obtain proof of my presence in the UK (which I couldn't do by the usual means of providing my old passports, as these had been stolen), I attempted to obtain a very similar letter from my bank. I called the bank, spoke to a perfectly friendly person in India for half an hour, and was eventually told to write a letter to the bank at a specific address asking for such a letter. This was in January, and I am yet to receive a reply. A couple of months later, I switched my accounts to the offshore private bank belonging to the same banking group, and my private banker chased up the retail bank to provide me with such a letter. Howeve, trying to obtain such a document as a regular retail customer was close to hopeless, as the bank is more bureaucratic and incompetent than the Home Office.

Your employer

I have had two employers over the period the Home Office is requesting documents for. The end of my employment with the first employer could be described as "not entirely amicable". This was due to the fact that the company had essentially self-destructed. The company is now so terrified of being sued and/or pursued by regulators that that its lawyers and HR department will not do anything for an ex-employee other than the minimum of what they are required by statute and contract. That means they will write a letter giving my period of employment and location of employment, but that they would write a letter giving what they know of my address history is unlikely. In truth this is fair. Why is this any of their business?

Your landlord or mortgage company

I have had a number of landlords during the period the Home Office is asking for. The building in which I was renting a flat (from a perfectly reasonable and helpful landlord) was sold. The new landlord and his agents were so incompetent that they were incapable of as much as even telling the tenants how to pay the rent. The agents would not even tell the tenants who the landlord actually was, above giving the name of a company registered in the Channel Islands. After a few months of this, the landlord defaulted on the mortgage, and the property spent several months in the hands of a receiver and the agents of a receiver. After that, the landlord who had defaulted managed to somehow refinance the mortgage and regain control of the property, but his agents were once again so incompetent that they could barely collect the rent. And I never found out the actual identity of the landlord. Getting a letter for the Home Office from him therefore seems unlikely. In any event, why is it any of his business?

My previous landlord before that would also be unlikely to provide me with a letter, as he was (probably foolishly) trying to pretend to his ex-wife that his income was less than it was in order to avoid the possibility of being asked to pay part of the cost of his daughter's university education, and therefore preferred to do everything with a hand-shake.

Regardless of my own personal circumstances, many people would be unable to provide such evidence, simply because they live in a property where the mortgage and/or lease is held by another member of the household.

Your school, university, or education authority

Well, I have not been in education for some time. But if I had been, it might well take some time to get such a letter. And anyway, why would it be any of the school, university, or education authority's business?

Your local authority

This is one I probabkly could manage, at least for most of the required period. I paid the council tax diligently throughout my last tenancy, so my local authority would have a full record of my address. How long they would take to give me such a letter, I have no idea. Again though, many people are not able to manage this. In my previous tenancy, however, I was living in a house where the principal occupier was the owner, and he paid the council tax. My only interactions with the local authority there were that I had a library card and used the local public library. I doubt the local authority would write a letter of the kind the Home Office wants on that evidence. If I had used lots of services of the British welfare system, then the local authority would no doubt have a more detailed record of me, but I didn't. In fact, as a general rule I was not eligible to, as immigrants are not eligible for most of the services provided by the welfare system until they become permanent residents, which I did not do until 2006. At least, not unless they play a more complex bureaucratic game than I am willing to.

The Department of Work and Pensions

This one is possible, as they probably have a detailed record of me as a consequence of my having a National Insurance number. However, we have another dreadful bureaucratic and incompetent government department here. Heaven knows how long it would take to get such a response - it can take months to get a National Insurance number in the first place, and until you do your employer is required to tax your income at "Emergency" (ie extremely high) rates. And what part of the Department of Work and Pensions do you contact in the first place? I have no idea.

Your dentist, or, only if absolutely necessary, your GP. (We ask that you not trouble your GP for non medical reasons if it can be avoided).

Firstly, in order to get a passport I have to get a note from my dentist?

Secondly, it is bad to contact your GP for non-medical reasons unless it is absolutely necessary. However, it is okay and desirable to waste the time of banks for non-financial reasons, employers and ex-employers for reasons that have nothing to do with their businesses, landlords and mortgage companies for reasons that have nothing to do with real estate, and schools and universities for reasons that have nothing to do with education. Bothering local authorities and the Department of Work and Pensions is fine as far as I am concerned though. Hopefully it might stop them doing a little bit of whatever it is they are otherwise doing.

Thirdly, I get non-emergency dentistry done in Australia, as I cannot face the NHS and private dentistry is a good deal cheaper there. And I am not registered with a GP, as I fnd the NHS too unbearable to face. Every time I attempt to register with a GP I make a couple of phone calls, get told that such and such a doctor will not accept me as a patient because I have the wrong postcode, and give up. Yes, this is bad. I should take better care of my health. Over the past few years, I have visited doctors when visiting Australia for non-emergency stuff, and have visited an "NHS Walk in centre" once or twice when I needed something immediately.

Your Commanding Officer (if you are a member of HM Forces)

I am not a member of HM forces, but if I was I am sure this would be easier than most of the other things given.

The letter must confirm that you have been known to them between July 2005 and July 2008. They must also confirm your previous address and all previous addresses known to the organisation

So this means that if I have banked with the same bank since 1934, the bank is required to give the Home Office my entire address history since 1934?

Or you may provide evidence such as a tenancy agreement that show you were resident between the above dates

Okay, this is sort of a get out clause. More on this a little further on

If you provide a letter from your bank, building society, Mortgage Company or local authority the letter must also confirm than you have held an active account throughout this period (ie it should have been in use the whole time). If you have been resident abroad please forward the passport used for travel.

Please note we will not accept a Bank Statement or utilities bill as suitable confirmation

Please sign date and return the following statement to us with the evidence provided

I agree to you checking the information I provide with this letter, with the relevant organisations to confirm my identity and process my passport application.

Your Signature...............................

Date................................

I am unsure how many people applying for passports are getting this letter. For the moment it may be, and probably is, simply people applying for first passports or naturalised citizens doing so, or perhaps I am just unlucky as I have recently changed my address. I am sure though that there is a wedge strategy being applied here: first demand these things of people for which we can sort of find a reasonable reason, and then expand it with the "Well, we have already demanded it of these people, so you next lot can't complain if we require this of you too. What it obviously isn though is a simple fishing expedition for information for the ID card database. The signed statement that I give the Home Office consent to contact the organisation that provided the information is a nice touch though. Many such organisations are unlikely to give the information to the Home Office without my consent (and in fact in many cases it may be illegal for them to do so) but here I have clearly given my consent, voluntarily but with the understanding that if I do not sign it I cannot exercise fairly basic rights.

What I am struck by, though, is simply how officious, and how presciptive it is. A a starting point, we have the favourite straw man from the pro ID cards folks, the "It is all about protecting you from identity theft" line. We have a prescribed form of the letter that I need, and a strict list of people it must be from, what it must say, and how it must be worded. Many documents that you might have handy are specifically excluded. As I have outlined, many of the organisations that may provide a suitable letter may may well be reluctant and slow to give it. Some people may not be able to provide any of the listed documents, which is why (I presume) that the get out clause ("evidence such as a tenancy agreement..." ) is there. There will genuinely be people who have a good reason for not being able to provide one of the listed documents, and in a last resort, the passport office will take something else, because they cannot ultimately refuse to give a passport to a British citizen without a good reason. At least, not yet. Previous documents from the Home Office that I have dealt with have been far less prescriptive. When I was proving that I had lived in the UK for five years and had a lost passport, they simply asked for evidence to prove residency, which I provided from various sources of my choice.

Which gets me back to the question of where my application is.

When my citizenship application was approved, the Home Office returned a seemingly random selection of the supporting documents I had sent them. The others were either retained or lost. I had hoped that within these I could find proof of address documents from some of the organisations listed - enough to prove my address for the three years. They wouldn't be addressed to the Identity and Passport Service, but they might be worth a try. Alas, though, they didn't contain quite the right information. So I asked my private banker for another letter. He was perfectly happy to help me, but that was two weeks ago and the letter hasn't arrived yet. I am sure he sent it - he rang me up to check that the wording was what I wanted, and when I sent him a follow up e-mail mentioning that it had not come, he sent me a (useless for Home Office purposes) pdf and offered to send me another copy, but the fact is that I still don't have it. What has happened is that the Royal Mail have lost it - another useless service run by the government. While I don't have it, the Identity and Passport Service will not process my application further. For the moment, they still have my Australian passport, even though I actually paid extra to have it returned to me by a secure mail service as soon as they no longer needed it. If I had my Australian passport, then I would be less irritated: I would still be able to travel. As it is, I have missed a month for the first time since the three month period in 1996 when the Home Office last had my passport. From a practical point of view this does not matter - it was probably time I stopped playing that particular game anyway. However the principle of it is quite offensive - taking away the right to travel is something you normally only do to criminals.

What conclusion do I come to here? Well, as we knew already, much of the infrastructure for ID cards and the associated database is already in place. Perhaps worse, the mentality behind them is already in place, and is in the process of hiring many more people to strengthen itself. The Home Office is full of people who believe that this is all necessary, and that it perfectly right and correct to be intensely intrusive of privacy, and who are intensely officious in the way that they do so. I can hear them in my head right now, saying that "If you had ID cards already, then we would already know this information and we wouldn't have to inconvenience you like that". If I belive that, I am a Dutchman, but I fear that they do.

Another way of looking at this, of course, would be that if I had lived my life in the way the state wants and in close contact with its "services", then complying with requests such as this would be relatively simple and straightforward. However, if I don't want to live my life the way the state thinks I should, then life is made harder. This may not be deliberate. It may not even be comprehended that anyone would want to do this, but it is so. Or it may be deliberate.

Getting all rid of all or any of this is likely to take a major and rather singleminded purge on the part of a future government. Given that the next government is likely to consist of rather inexperienced and self important although not particularly bright Tories who will probably get and accede to a "We are the experts and let us tell you all about it" line from the bureaucrats, one cannot really be very optimistic about our chances of getting this mentality out of the Home Office. One thing that I am sure about, though, is that it is going to get worse in the final, dark two years of this government. I suspect we will see an administrative scorched earth as well as the judicial and legislative ones predicted by Brian and Guy. Look for departments even further stacked with people loyal to the present agenda and unable to imagine anything else. If we could throw the government now, we could at least avoid this.

I wonder if it would have been easier if I had chosen to become a Dutchman.

It may be disgustingly authoritarian, but it is risibly incompetent too. It appears the Home Office has just spent a very large amount of UK readers' money making a vast online advertisement for NO2ID. We'd despaired of reaching 'the youth' ourselves, too expensive. I'm very glad they decided to do it for us.

With audience participation. Which embarrassingly for the Home Office shows 'kids' not to be quite the suckers they'd hoped. Enjoy.

Pretty gruesome stuff happening. This is old news:

The ongoing Google/YouTube-Viacom litigation has now officially spilled over to users with a court order requiring Google to turn over massive amounts of user data to Viacom. If the data is actually released, the consequences could be far more serious than the 2006 AOL Search debacle.

But this not so. And happening via backdoor of telecoms regulation.

The Telecoms Package (Paquet Telecom) is a review of European telecoms law. [...] buried within it, deep in the detail, are important legal changes that relate to enforcement of copyright. These changes are a threat to civil liberties and risk undermining the entire structure of Internet, jeopardising businesses and cultural diversity.

The bottom line is that changes to telecoms regulations are needed before EU member states can bring in the so-called "3 strikes" measures - also known as "graduated response" - of which France is leading the way, but other governments, notably the UK, are considering whether to follow. A swathe of amendments have been incorporated at the instigation of entertainment industry lobbying. These amendments are aimed at bringing an end to free downloading. They also bring with them the risk of an unchecked corporate censorship of the Internet, with a host of unanswered questions relating to the legal oversight and administration.

The Telecoms Package is currently in the committee stages of the European Parliament, with a plenary vote due on 1st or 2nd September. This does not leave much time for public debate, and it reminds me of the rushed passage of the data retention directive (see Data Retention on this site). It is, if you like, regulation by stealth.

These two items have in common the attempt to undermine the infrastructure of the net/web by controlling those who provide or maintain it. Not good.

That invaluable organisation, the Taxpayer's Alliance, has worked out that the total cost of the various surveillance and data-gathering services favoured by the UK government is just under £20 billion, or about £800 per household. The figure is a total, not an annual sum. £20 billion is a huge figure, even in these times of inflated financial sums.

Now the question arises whether, if we really do face serious security threats - and I think we do - what else could that £20 billion have purchased that might actually have made us safer?

Of course, £20 billion could also enable quite a few tax cuts, but that is obviously hark heresy these days (sarcasm alert).

At my education blog late last night, I found myself putting, in connection with this (which is a story about how two French science students were brutally murdered in London yesterday), this:

It’s somewhat off topic for this blog, but I say: allow non-crims be be armed!

It may yet happen. London, full of disarmed non-crims and armed crims, is rapidly becoming like New York used to be but is now so conspicuously not, a "crime capital". Any decade now, something might just give. Or, to use the language of this blog, the lesson might be learned.

Something about the extreme savagery of that double murder yesterday made me think that now was the exact time to be saying such a thing, not just to those few of my devoted libertarian friends so devoted that they read that education blog of mine, but also to any eco-friendly home-schoolers or weary school teachers who happen to drop by there. Suddenly, the anti-gun-control message felt very right, like an idea whose time, finally, might have come.

Having blogged my fill about that and other things, I read some bloggage by others, which happened to include a piece by Bishop Hill, which I really recommend you to read all of. The Bishop offers an interesting speculation about the origins of all the authoritarianism and surveillance that now afflicts our country.

He starts by noting the dramatic superiority of the USA now compared to Britain now, when it comes to public safety and sense of public menace. In the USA there is now lots of the former. Britain is rife with the latter. In the USA, they can now defend themselves. But here in Britain, we have surrendered the means of doing that, so we must depend upon the state to defend us, and must permit it to be ever more overbearing and intrusive and ever less impeded by safeguards that date from a time when people trusted themselves more than they trusted their rulers. It's not that Britain is now ruled by pure totalitarians, or by any obvious totalitarian urge, merely that totalitarianism seems to be our only hope to protect us against chaos. It isn't that we really do trust our rulers, merely that we feel we have no choice. But it isn't working, not least because woolly liberals have refused to allow the necessary prison sentences to be handed down, even to those miscreants who are still caught.

Looked at this way the root cause of the wave of authoritarian legislation which threatens to swamp us is not authoritarianism so much as "woolly liberalism". We won't punish criminals adequately, so we get more criminals. We won't allow the law-abiding to uphold the law, so our streets get swamped with CCTV. Witnesses can't defend themselves, so we have to allow anonymous evidence in court. Women can't defend themselves from rapists, so they shouldn't go out alone. The opinionated can't defend themselves from retribution, so better to legislate them into silence.

We find ourselves between the horns of a dilemma. The idea of rearming the populace is greeted by most "right-thinking" members of the middle classes as evidence of a kind of madness, an idea to get you cast out from polite society. "We don't want to end up like America", they will say, as they check the locks on their doors and windows, and test the burglar alarm one more time.

But the alternative is to continue our increasingly precipitous slide down the slippery slope that ends up with the UK resembling North Korea.

America or North Korea. You decide.

And, as I say, he already has decided. As did I, many years ago.

In the USA there has already been a sea-change, in favour of the right of the individual US citizen to bear an arm (forgive my imperfect grasp of the language of liberation here). The Supreme Court has decreed against only criminals having guns. And it is not now just the unwild West that is more peaceful and secure than Britain. New Jersey and New York are now far more comfortable to walk about in than they used to be.

But if Bishop Hill is right, then there is another sea-change happening in Britain which is relevant to all this. Oh, we are not yet willing to accept guns in our own hands, rather than just in those of criminals. But we do now seem to be turning against the surveillance state. It is yielding nothing in the way of safety against the criminals; it is merely becoming something else to fear. We sense that we are trading our birthright – "Magna Carta, did she die in vain?" as the old but now newly relevant Tony Hancock joke goes – in exchange for ... nothing. Those woolly liberals may be reluctant to send robbers and murderers to prison, certainly not for long enough for them to be old and defeated when they get out again. But at least some of the woolly liberals remain uneasy about our Ancient Liberties. And now the general public is starting seriously to share such worries. All those lost data discs are working the very magic we here hoped they would. The Database State is starting to seem seriously scary, not just for the power it is amassing, but because of its inability to control this power, let alone use it for our benefit. It does not protect us. It is but one more huge thing to fear. It hoovers up everything it knows or thinks it knows about everyone and everything, and then leaves it all on trains and in taxis. Who knows where else it is leaking? The Database State has become like one of those medieval bad kings, tyrannical and ineffectual in equal measure, like Edward II or Richard II, or like King John, the original object of Magna Carta herself.

When, in politics, the question changes, the answers can be startling, to those who didn't see what just happened. If the Database State will not - and, actually, must not - protect us, who, or what, will? If that now becomes the new question, then rolling back gun control might just become one of the new and newly respectable answers. At the root of the idea of the rule of law is that we do not trust Them, and prefer instead to trust ourselves, fallible though we may also be. When it comes to the use of violence to resist and deter violence, that notion may just be making a British comeback.

Some splendid person, writing pseudonymously in the obscurity of an open thread on the Guardian's Comment is Free semiblog, has provided a parallel text translation of the Report of the Independent Scheme Assurance Panel. His discussion begins here. It deserves a wider audience. Excerpt:

DAMN, I really must get back to work, but this is just so wonderful...

3.3 Identity management within Government

Early on, the Panel challenged the assumption that existing sources of identity data should be ignored in favour of a new set.

Like a lot of people, we couldn't understand why the NI number and its related data wouldn't do.

However, safe and reliable maintenance and use of a shared asset across multiple parties is a challenge for any organisation, not least Government with its many departments, each with its own priorities, objectives and challenges.

Then somebody showed us the figures that with a total population of 60M people in this country, maybe a sixth of them under 16, there are over 75M currently-issued NI numbers, and we finally started to understand that the entire current system is a complete balls-up.

People say to me, "Don't worry, it won't work." I would like to remind them that grand government schemes that are not working tend to be adopted anyway, and all the suffering they cause is declared a good thing, necessary for the progress of the nation. Lysenko's 'winterizeation' of wheat, did not work. Protectionism does not work. Most of the world's 'development' projects do not work. It did not stop governments implementing them at the expense of humanity. It does not stop massive numbers of politically influential people still believing in the grand reconstruction of deep natural systems and human institutions by government power, and devoting their working lives to promoting it. The National Identity Scheme still has every prospect of being Britain's 'Great Leap Forward'.

(Hat-tip: Wendy M. Grossman)

We are marvelling at the multiple possibilities of Oyster, but come back here in 10 years’ time and we will have chips inserted under our skin or inside our heads

- Ken Livingstone, mayor of London, quoted by Computing

[Those foreign readers who are unfamiliar with Oyster should maybe start here. Those unfamiliar with our dear leader, the mayor, can read his official bio here, but Red Ken is a massive subject, and if you can understand his career then you know more about British politics than I do. Here is a recent friendly (!) blog post. Now if you'll excuse me, it is 6.43am and I am off to vote.]

Laban Tall, blogging at Biased BBC, has posted the latest BBC public service advertisement warning citizens not to fail to pay for a TV licence.

I thought it might be of interest to Samizdata readers.

You should trust us, because we're trustworthy people who would never do anything wrong (please ignore all we've done wrong over the past few years). So, now that that's settled, let's get this baby rolling...

-Mike Masnick interprets Department of Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff's response to critics of the planned expansion of the US spy satellite program

"The background to this method of policing is that NuLab became increasingly irritated with the police detecting crime. This tended to militate against the working classes (few question the link between poverty and crime). Being so unutterably incompetent, NuLab were were unable to tackle poverty (unless by increasing it, they can claim to be tackling poverty). One solution to this was to make crime detection a more egalitarian process. By criminalising "anti-social" behavior that was more likely to committed by the middle classes (speeding, hunting etc), then issuing directives for police to ramp up their response to such infractions, the thinking was that this would highlight how criminality was not the preserve of the put upon working classes.

On top of this, there existed a situation whereby the number crunchers claimed that the fear of being a victim of crime far outweighed the reality of being a victim of crime. Hence the emphasis shifted away from tackling crime i.e oppressing the working classes, to tackling the fear of crime. This had a cheap solution: high visibility policing. It is this thinking that lead to the introduction of those decaffeinated police officers known as "PCSOs", along with the requirement for high visibility vests worn with officers. This type of thinking also results in situations such as the Forest Gate incident, whereby the number of officers present seems to far outweigh the threat and the inclusion of the press in high profile operations. All of these things are designed to tackle the FEAR of crime, not crime itself."

From one of our readers, "Fed_Up", commenting on my recent encounter with the police. Thanks for the comments. The one here raises the issue of class. It is sometimes said that these days, the cops, or at least some of them, are the "paramilitary wing of the Guardian newspaper". This represents a significant shift in the cultural/political standing of the police over my lifetime.

Consider this: there is no doubt that during the 1980s, when the Conservatives were in power, some of the police powers used at the time got on to the statute books with relatively little complaint from what I might loosely call "the right". Not everyone was complacent, of course. Libertarian Alliance Director Sean Gabb and the LA's founder, the late Chris R. Tame, were early in pointing out at the time that no consistent defence of liberty makes sense if it is confined purely to economics, a point that some Tories to this day don't seem to grasp. While coppers were pinching Rastafarians in Brixton and hitting coalminers on the head in Yorkshire, a lot of the middle classes were happy to look the other way. As an unashamed middle class Brit with mortgage, happy marriage and decent job, I am the sort of person, I suppose, that has in a certain way been radicalised by the CCTV state, or "parking warden culture", as one might call it. It is important to understand, however, that the sort of petty exercise of power has been going on, sometimes unremarked, for years. So I certainly don't feel sorry for myself. I am, more than anything else, depressed at the fatuity of "security theatre" policing. It must, at one level surely, gnaw away at the morale and self respect of decent coppers. But there is no doubt that the role and status of the police has changed and so has the type of person that might be attracted to making a career in it.

I must say I am still stunned by the open admission of one commenter on my earlier posting that random searches are good for "fishing expeditions". We were not very kind to him on the previous thread. Justifiably.

For a good take on what has been going on with policing in the US, Gene Healy of the CATO Institute think tank has a sharp analysis. Several US readers expressed their horror at what is happening here in Britain; I am afraid that things are not so great in parts of the US, either. And as for France, etc.....

Random searches of Britons going about their business are now established features of life in this country. The old refrain - "It could not happen here", no longer applies. On Saturday, while driving along the side of the Thames towards Westminster, passing by the Tate Gallery, I was flagged down by a policeman.

Officer: "Could you show me your driving licence? This is a section 41 search" (at least I think that is what he said).

Me: "Section 41 or whatever of what?"

Officer: "The Terrorism Act"

Me: "Why have you pulled me and my wife over?"

Officer: "We are doing searches of vehicles in the area."

Me: "Well obviously you are. Is this a random thing?"

Officer: "Yes. Please hand over your driving licence and we want to search the car."

They searched the car, called up the driving licence authority, and were able to their enormous satisfaction confirm that I was whom I said I was. I was then asked to sign a document stating that the search had been carried out as it should have been. The officer gave me his name, rank and police station number and address. When I signed the form, he asked me how I wanted to classify myself as there were about 15 options, including "White British". He was polite. My treatment was fine. The officer and his colleagues told me they were on duty, searching vehicles, for the rest of the day and into the evening.

Now I will spare you a rant about the impertinence of this. You can, gentle reader, assume as a matter of course that I regard such random searches of members of the public as impertinent. What makes me wonder, though, is what on earth the supporters of such searches expect? Do they honestly, really believe that would-be terrorists will be deterred, frightened off or caught? Unless the police put up roadblocks across London, at god-knows what disruption and cost, I do not see how doing this on one of many major roads will cause a blind bit of difference.

This is what has been called "security theatre": lots of action signifying little. Even the copper who carried out the search had the good grace to look slightly embarrassed.

Update: One commenter has complained that I am getting all upset for no good reason and has used the argument that this sort of behaviour is okay as it can act as a "fishing" expedition to unearth potentially other crimes. It is hard to summon breath to deal with such a brazen argument in favour of abolishing the idea that one is presumed innocent until otherwise.

Update 2: a reader asked for further details on the search. From the time I was pulled over to being let on my way, the process lasted 15 minutes. The police officer's colleague called up the driving licence authority to give them my licence registration number and the authority took about 10 minutes to get back. An officer opened the car boot, rummaged around some bags and luggage - I was travelling up to Cambridge with my wife - and had a look inside the car. They also inspected my clothes and checked my footwear. They did not ask me to open the glove compartment of the car. They also did not look under the car with a mirror or anything similar, or look under the bonnet.

Apparently they are exclusive alternatives. According to Wired:

Maine is now the lone state not to have been given an extension to long-delayed Real ID regulations, after three fellow protesting states - Montana, New Hampshire and South Carolina - got their extensions in the last two weeks despite not pledging allegiance to Real ID.

What was it Maine in particular did to offend? There is no clue. One might suspect being the easiest to blockade has something to do with it. Bullies like to pick on the weakest victim when making an example.

Assuming no actual bombs get on the plane, then it scarcely matters who the passengers are - particularly since the rules did change in one important respect on September 11th 2001 and few are likely to sit quietly and do what a hijacker says, as they were advised to before that date. If someone could explain to me why any identification at all is needed to board a plane - other than that the government just wants to know where you are going - then I'd be most grateful for the explanation.

[* Yes I know that is New Hampshire, but presumably it is in the line for the DHS's third degree.]

London and the Database State

A mayoral hustings organised by NO2ID

Londoners are among the most watched people on earth. As well as housing Whitehall, Parliament and the other self-protecting security apparatus, London has many information and identity management systems of its own. How do candidates feel about the civil liberties and privacy implications of, among other things, the Oyster Card, congestion charging, telephone parking? Would they support or oppose national ID schemes as mayor? What is their attitude to the database state?

Invitations have been issued to every party with London representation at Westminster, in Strasbourg or in the GLA. Gerrard Batten (UKIP), Sian Berry (Green), Lindsay German (Respect/Left List), Boris Johnson (Conservative), and Brian Paddick (LibDem) are currently expected to participate, and written responses from other invitees will be read from the chair.

Chaired by Christina Zaba, journalist and NO2ID's Union Liason Officer.

Time: 7pm Tuesday 8th April 2008
Place: Friends House, 173 Euston Road NW1 2BJ
Free and open to all.

[I'd like to take this opportunity to remind EU and commonwealth citizens resident in London, they have a vote in this too.]

There is a great little article in Slashdot about a well known German hacker group, Chaos Computer Club, publishing the fingerprints of German Secretary of the Interior as part of their protest against state use of biometric ID.

The club published 4,000 copies of their magazine Die Datenschleuder including a plastic foil reproducing the minister's fingerprint - ready to glue to someone else's finger to provide a false biometric reading. The CCC has a page on their site detailing how to make such a fake fingerprint

Sweet. I suppose that is a 'hardware hack' of sorts!

Hackers in Indonesia have defaced a government website in protest over that increasingly authoritarian nation's plans to block internet access to porn (and what is the internet for if not porn?)... Sadly the site has now been repaired, but nice one, guys. Stick it to them!

And here is a nice list of proxy servers for our Indonesian readers (yes, we do have at least a couple).

Something for the afternoon tea break:

One of this Government's proud achievements has been helping to bring democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq - where elections were policed by imprinting a finger of every voter with indelible ink. Yet at home it has corrupted an electoral system that the world once looked up to. Ministers were warned as long ago as May 2000 about the lack of security in postal votes. Yet they ploughed on, claiming that postal voting would reinvigorate the electoral system by encouraging more to vote.

- Ross Clark.

Heathrow Airport is a horrible place: overcrowded, dirty and unable to cope with the volume of traffic. A few days ago, Terminal 5 was opened. As a result of the demented decision by the British Airports Authority, the Spanish-owned company which has a monopoly franchise on UK airports, to blend international and domestic passengers going through the terminal, BAA has decided to fingerprint everyone who goes through terminal five. Soon all passengers going out of Heathrow, and other BAA airports, such as Gatwick, will be affected. The queues will get worse, and ironically, so will the vulnerability of passengers to terrorist attack during peak times. One hates to think what it will be like during the summer holidays and over the Christmas break.

Richard Morrison has a good old rant in the Times of London today about this issue. He points out that BAA has introduced the system at its own behest, not because of the government. For once, a libertarian cannot just bash the state for this, at least not as the direct culprit. I have no problem per se in a private airport operator setting certain rules which customers are free to ignore by going elsewhere, but as BAA has a monopoly, it hardly is a model of free market capitalism. BAA was privatised initially with its monopoly largely intact, which was a mistake. Of course, if passengers feel safer going to airports which demand iris scans, fingerprints, ID cards, body searches, intense questioning, and all other manner of intrusions into privacy, by all means go to these places. For the rest of us, even those who fear terrorism, we might prefer to take our chances and travel like free law-abiding adults, rather than convicted criminals.

For a good, sober look at the trade-offs with security measures and the unintended bad effects of things like this, this book is a good place to start. The author is not some hard-line civil libertarian and quite friendly to a lot of security ideas, but he understands that there is no security system in the world that is fail-safe and argues that it is about time people were allowed to weigh the risks more intelligently.

Dallas City Hall has idled more than one-fourth of the 62 cameras that monitor busy intersections because many of them are failing to generate enough red-light-running fines to justify their operational costs, according to city documents.

- Dallas Morning News (with thanks to Engadget for picking up on the story)

All the London newspapers today are full of a new but familiar "report on strange people to the wonderful and efficient experts in the police" anti-terrorism advertisement.

I am a foreigner. I have five mobile phones. Readers are invited to speculate as to why this is (although it could just be that "I need communication", or perhaps that I find that sitting in a bar sending text messages to myself relieves the monotony of life). I swap their SIMs around all the time, often in public places and for sinister reasons like "The battery ran out on my main phone and I still want to receive calls on that number"..

Also, I like to wander around London and other cities photographing things like bridges, container ports and other critical infrastructure.

When am I going to be reported? Will I be sent to Guantanamo? Will Brian be there too? Why the fuck are these people wasting my taxes like this?

Also, where did the "thousands" come from? If we are talking the whole world, it would be "billions". If we are talking the UK it would be "tens of millions". Statistics actually suggest that there are around seventy million active mobile phones in the UK. Given that that is ten million more than there are people in the national population, and given that there must be at least ten million people who realistically are too young to have one, there are at least twenty million suspicious phones in the UK.

Who knew the terrorism problem was this big?

I have just received my new passport. I am not British, and I will be deliberately vague about the country that issued it. The fee for getting it renewed was significantly higher than last time. I do like the nice touch of requiring me to pay a "priority fee" for getting the new passport in a reasonable time. The idea that we should help our citizens by being prompt and efficient in the first place is gone completely.

Upon receiving the passport, I perhaps discovered the reason for the higher fee. The passport has a little logo of a chip on the front cover and on the details page. There is an insert stating that "This is an ePassport. This passport contains a microchip which stores the same information that as appears on the data age. The chip can be read electronically to confirm the identity of the bearer. This document complies with International Civil Aviation Organisation standards and incorporates security features to prevent illegal access to the information stored on the chip. See the centre page of the passport for further information".

My country is the sort of place that tends to be proud of being first on the block with respect to implementing fancy new international protocols, so I suppose this does not greatly surprise me. If the chip only contains the same data as the details page, then I rather fail to see the point, given that the passport is machine readable already. If the intention is to add more data to such chips later, I am not sure that the present "This is just a new way of storing the same data" claims are entirely honest. Storing digitally signed data on the chip probably does make sense and genuinely does make such a passport harder to forge. So I will concede that point.

Still, making it possible to read the passport without requiring it to be opened seems to me to rather reduce my security rather than increase it. As for the security features to prevent illegal access, surely for technology to be useful it must be made possible for every border post in every country in the world to be able to obtain equipment for reading it. Even if I made the ludicrous assumption that I trust every government in the world, I still find it hard to believe that such a widely distributed technology would not fall into private hands.

So, where from here. Well, as it happens I can turn to the centre page of the passport. This page is stiffer than the others, presumably due to having a chip embedded in it. It also has information written on it. "This passport contains sensitive electronics. For best performance, please do not bend, perforate, or expose to extreme temperatures or excess moisture".

So, which of those things should I try first?

Even the most hard-bitten student activist would recognise its not an abrogation of his radicalism to get an ID card if it helps him to provide an assurance of his identity to those who provide services to him.

- Ms Home Secretary Jacqui Smith (quoted in Computer Weekly) reacting to criticism by the National Union of Students of plans to hustle and hassle students to register themselves for life on the great and glorious National Identity Register. It is just extraordinary how tone deaf to human life, how uncomprehending of the impulses to privacy and personal liberty, this strange class of apparatchiks is. Jacqui Smith's own concept of radical activism may not extend very far. A friend who was her contemporary at Hertford College commented:

Yes, I remember Jacqui Smith from college but only vaguely. She was a fairly inoffensive JCR/political hack... you know... terribly earnest. I think she may have been president of the JCR at some point.

It seems she has grown, changed, and reinvented herself - as a monstrously offensive political hack.

For me the idea of the state installing cameras everywhere to ensure compliance with its edicts was the most memorable aspect to George Orwell's dystopian 1984, with Newspeak a close second. But of course here in the real world, the state would never try to force private business owners to allow the state to place cameras to make sure people are following regulations, right?

Wrong.

Cameras could be placed in about 800 U.S. slaughterhouses to watch for improper procedures and inhumane handling of cattle, a federal official said Thursday. A Senate committee recommended installing the cameras three years ago, but the proposal is getting new consideration in the wake of a massive recall of beef last month, Agriculture Undersecretary Richard Raymond told a House committee Thursday.

And what comes next? Cameras in schools and daycare centres naturally. For the children of course. And after that? I mean, why stop there?

Last week the Metropolitan police spent shed loads of taxpayers money on pointless advertising launched a new counter-terrorism campaign.

Londoners are being urged to help stop terrorists in their tracks by reporting suspicious behaviour, in a new counter terrorism advertising campaign.

The Metropolitan Police Service is asking people to trust their instincts and pass on information about any unusual activity or behaviour to the confidential Anti-Terrorist Hotline on 0800 789 321.

And now for the visuals:

When I saw those for the first time, I honestly thought these were a joke. And lo and behold, it did not take long for them to become just that...

And of course the Lolcats version:

Long live the internetz.

Suppose that Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs have lost your personal financial information (along with that of 25 million other people) on a set of lost CDs, or perhaps they have simply lost all the details of your VAT registration.

In any event, the criminals have your National Insurance number. You are worried about fraud. It is good that HMRC have provided information to help you deal with it.

(Via the Register).

You should see an ID card like a passport in-country.

- Meg Hillier MP, the minister responsible for the scheme, to the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, today.

And it is The Economist. Unlike some of my fellow Samizdatistas, I am a fan ^[1]. But then, I am a liberal - conservative only in my suspicion of social management and 'fixing' things without enquiry as to whether they are actually broken.

This week in the print edition there is an excellent supplement: The electronic bureaucrat (introduction here). It is clear-sightedly critical of e-government of all kinds, without falling into the know-nothing technophobic rants that I fear some of those who oppose the database state do:

[G]loom, fear and optimism are all justified.

^[1] Though I sincerely hope putting Martin Sheen on the cover of the Intelligent Life quarterly was one of its deadpan jokes.

Late last year, HM Revenue & Customs succeeded in losing details on 25m Britons. That was quite an impressive achievement; the loss of data on disks, unencrypted, had an almost artistic quality about it. It was glorious to watch BBC rottweiller Jeremy Paxman reduce some hapless junior Treasury minister to dogfood on the BBC Newsnight programme. (The Chancellor, Alisdair Darling, was too busy dealing with the disaster of Northern Rock to go on the show). As Paxman argued by way of a statement more than a question to the hapless government minister (I forget her name, she is totally forgettable): "This does rather kill off the idea of ID cards, doesn't it?"

It certainly does. And alas, my wife this morning received a letter from HMRC to inform her that details she sent to it in relation to her business (I will not give any further details for obvious reasons), have all been lost: date of birth, registration numbers for VAT, the whole shebang. The letter informed us of the need to be super-vigilant about bills, invoices etc. We will have to use services like Equifax or Experian, the credit-check companies, to ensure that our credit history is not damaged. All a great nuisance. I am also writing to my local member of Parliament, Mark Field (Conservative), who voted against ID cards to his immense credit, to inform of this latest case. About 40 or so forms, according to the letter sent to us, have been lost in this latest HMRC cockup. I will ask Field to raise this matter as part of the Tories' opposition to ID cards. There is, of course, no point informing anyone on the government side about this.

Or is it a cock-up? I wonder about what is happening at the moment. If you are a conspiracy theorist, you might start to wonder whether there are criminals working in civil service jobs or major banks - which increasingly operate like state departments due to the amount of regulations these days. The recent massive fraud that hit Societe Generale, the French bank, was, remember, carried out by at least one, if not more, insiders who had knowledge of how the compliance operations of these complex organisation work. Or, it is possible that someone in HMRC has an agenda against ID cards and is using incidents like this to discredit the whole project.

Anyway, whatever your views about ID cards and government use of data, I strongly urge people to use credit-check and verification services at least once a year to ensure they have a clean bill of health. In the current difficult credit market environment since the US sub-prime mortgage disaster, even the smallest blemish on a credit record could cause an individual serious problems, such as inability to get a loan.

Bastards.

I write a lot of letters to the press. They are usually edited for length by the letters pages subs, and often improved thereby. If you can say something shorter it is usually better. However, occasionally it goes wrong. This week the London Evening Standard mangled something I wrote so badly as to remove most of the point.

The original may not be the most eloquent piece, but it should be published somewhere. I have added a few links to give blogospheric readers the context:

Sirs,

A man is held without charge at the instance of a foreign power and a visit from his MP is secretly recorded on the instructions of police acting without a warrant. A decade ago this would have been Britain only in a science-fictional parallel-world. David Davis is quite right (Article, 5 February) to condemn it. But things are still getting worse. Surveillance powers - most of which date from 2000, before the "War on Terror" was declared - are old hat.

The Government obsession now is "information sharing", connecting the numerous databases now kept on us by various departments. This "Transformational Government" multiplies the attack on privacy and liberty many-fold. Its shadow falls on almost all new legislation. The Counter-Terrorism Bill currently before parliament, for example, would allow information to be disclosed to and passed on by the Intelligence Services, regardless of how it is obtained and despite confidentiality or privilege. Meanwhile the Ministry of Justice has been given a programme to weaken in general the existing controls on information in government hands, and the National Identity Management Scheme (ID cards), the means to join it all up, is being pressed forwards on a new schedule.

We are facing not just a surveillance state, but the building of a new phenomenon, the database state.

Yours faithfully

Guy Herbert
General Secretary, NO2ID

Anyone worried by Natalie's posting below should be aware that you ain't seen nuttin' yet. Tom Griffin of The Green Ribbon has obtained a full listing of the information it is intended to collect (and distribute among various authorities) concerning those buying tickets to move from any one of Britain, the Irish Republic, and Northern Ireland to any of the others.

There has been a common travel area since St Patrick, and this was formalised in the 20th century when the countries of Britain and Ireland came incompletely apart. Now it seems both governments are in effect conspiring to introduce internal passports and replace a common travel area with a common surveillance area.

[hat-tip: spyblog]

The writer of this Times story: Pensioner died in attack on his home after parking space row, has, perhaps understandably, concentrated on what exactly Mark, Zoe and Steven Forbes did to the late Bernard Gilbert and whether "We'll smash his car to bits and then his hire car and then whatever he gets after that until he dies" constituted a considered plan.

However that may be, there is an aspect of the story that deserves a story - and a trial - of its own:

Mrs Forbes was upset and called her husband Mark, who told her to note down Mr Gilbert’s numberplate. He then asked a policeman friend to check Mr Gilbert’s address on the police national computer, using the car registration number.

The innocent have nothing to fear - so long as they have not annoyed anyone who knows a copper who can be persuaded to look up an address.

A most interesting document has come into our possession - and quite coincidentally, we understand, into the possession of several other well-known blogs. It is a scan of the internal document of the Identity and Passport Service outlining the new implementation strategy for the UK's identity card scheme, liberally annotated by the experts at NO2ID.

We think it tends to disprove the denials only just issued by HM Government in relation to the scheme, as well as some half-lies and full lies they have been telling all along. (It may also show up the feeble grip of Gordon Brown's paper Stalinism. "In government, but not in power," ministers will rubber-stamp anything - just as long as it doesn't look like a retreat.) But judge for yourself: (pdf 1.17Mb)

Anyone in Britain who wishes to file a tax return to Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs must do so online. Oh goody:

The security of the online computer system used by more than three million people to file tax returns is in doubt after HM Revenue and Customs admitted it was not secure enough to be used by MPs, celebrities and the Royal Family.

Thousands of "high profile" people have been secretly barred from using the online tax return system amid concerns that their confidential details would be put at risk.

Of course, as the Daily Telegraph rightly points out, the HMRC is the department that managed to lose details of 25m people back in the autumn; it may be a rash prediction to make, but the more this sort of nonsense piles up, the less likely it is that the ID card will go ahead as planned. We can all live in hope, anyway.

The British Government does not seem to be able to keep anything secret.

Still, this is 'only' 600,000 people affected, which is quite modest, when you compare it to other recent fiascos.

Ministers are planning to implant "machine-readable" microchips under the skin of thousands of offenders as part of an expansion of the electronic tagging scheme that would create more space in British jails.

Amid concerns about the security of existing tagging systems and prison overcrowding, the Ministry of Justice is investigating the use of satellite and radio-wave technology to monitor criminals.

But, instead of being contained in bracelets worn around the ankle, the tiny chips would be surgically inserted under the skin of offenders in the community, to help enforce home curfews. The radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, as long as two grains of rice, are able to carry scanable personal information about individuals, including their identities, address and offending record.

This is beyond belief, or, at least, it would be if we had not been covering the various madcap schemes coming out of Whitehall the past few years. What we have here is a government that believes that the rights and liberties of its people ought to be ordered to suit the priorities of British police forces.

Now if you take this to be a good idea, you are going to be hard pressed to deny the logical conclusion, that if we were all implanted with RFID tags, it would be much easier to solve and prevent crimes in the first place. This is very probably true, but it also degrades the individual to the point where humans become mere vassals of the almighty British State.

Given the trend of affairs in the UK, that is probably the way things are going to go- give it a decade or two. Early adapters should get themselves arrested and tagged early, to beat the rush.

I am prepared to believe that there may be some things (though not many of them) that are of such public benefit that they should be provided at the general expense. That is not to say that I think that if something is good it should be compulsory. Let alone that if it sounds like a good, that is justification for its being compulsory.

But when you are dealing with the state, "free" does not mean 'free as in free speech', nor does it mean 'free as in free beer'. It means 'compulsory'. If the government is advertising free beer, it wants everybody drunk; prepare to have your head held under if you don't feel like a tipple just now.

Hence this Guardian headline, a classic of pusilanimity against spin:

Plan to give every child internet access at home

The actual story is somewhat, er... more nuanced:

Parents could be required to provide their children with high-speed internet access under plans being drawn up by ministers in partnership with some of the country's leading IT firms.

[...]

The initiative is part of a major push which could also see the parents of every secondary school student given access to continuous online updates on their child's lessons, performance and behaviour as early as next year. So-called "real-time reporting", which was first mooted in the government's children's plan last month, could be extended to primary schools within two years.

A sub less versed in the cult of the benign state might have abstracted that as:

"Big business bonanza: Parents must pay for children to be watched at home by online officials."

Via Andrew Sullivan's blog, I came across this rather nifty map showing how different countries around the world vary in their treatment of privacy. Both Britain and America get a black. Some parts of the world are a sort of grey, like Africa (I guess the thugs that run parts of that continent have other things to worry about besides snooping on everyone). It looks as if Germany is less intrusive than France, and less than Britain. Canada is less intrusive than the USA, etc. The link takes you to the methodology that Privacy International, a civil lberties group, uses to calculate its rankings.

Here's hoping that British lovers of liberty have rather more reason to feel less ashamed of what has happened in this nation in 12 months' time.

Sometimes it is worth plagiarising yourself.

I was asked in a pre-interview chat the other day, about 30 seconds from live TV, "Why is the government doing this? 'Terrorism' doesn't seem to make sense; there has to be something more to it." It's hard to be snappy on the point even without crazy pressure, so mumbled something about my interlocutor going to Google and typing "Transformational Government". I do recommend it, but I have a fairly neat explanation for why Transformational Government too. Just not quite neat enough to recall and pitch in 30 seconds on a GMTV sofa at 6:30 in the morning.

I actually wrote it about 3 years ago, in the days when I had time to think, as a comment on Phil Booth's (whatever happened to him) blog, the Infinite Ideas Machine:

My answer arises from a pub conversation a while back with the post-Marxist commentator Joe Kaplinsky. He maintains "they" don't know what they want the information for, they are just collecting it just in case it should ever come in useful, because that's what bureaucrats do. There is much in that, but I think there's slightly more.

The slightly more is a glimpse of bureaucratic fundamentalism to rival the more explicit fundamentalisms of religious and political fanatics. The administrative class ("class" in the cultural not economic sense) in Britain, but also in Europe more generally - and from which New Labour is almost exclusively drawn - holds it as self evident that the life and personality of an individual is a unitary object capable of being better managed if only there is enough information collected and enough "best practice" followed.

It is a fundamentalist faith in that if the world is out of line with the model, the world is wrong; that written rules and established methods are unquestionable from outside the tradition; and that forcing people to live within the categories determined by the faith is justifiable for a general and individual good that is evident to the elect.

It's not that control is sought for its own sake, more that they yearn for the best well-ordered and coherent society, and believe this can be determined and imposed given sufficient expertise and information. Hence joined up government. They really do believe that efficiency is achieved by connecting everything to everything else in a giant bureaucratic system. It is the Soviet illusion, dressed up in "new technology" and market-friendly initiatives that co-opt corporate bureaucracies into the dream rather than setting them up as enemies.

The same people who claimed to have absorbed Hayek's explanation of why 5-year plans can't work during their turn away from Old Labour are too dull (or too intoxicated by the vision of the power to make a good society) to see that replacing some of the clerks with machines and the telegraph with the internet makes no difference to the basic proposition.

My sparser (even) than usual blogging lately is largely the result of the expanding demands of NO2ID. Thank you to everyone (including several Samizdata contributors) who has added to the avalanche of cheques into our legal fund. The bank clerks in Marylebone High Street are grateful for the work, too.

We (NO2ID) are about to make things even more fun by recruiting a new cohort of refuseniks to join those 10,000 immortals who committed themselves in 2005. In the aftermath of the HMRC data-sharing scandal, the British public is ready for the message that the only way to stop the state from debauching your personal information is not to give it a chance.

When Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne vowed to defy the ID scheme recently, it quickly became clear that not many people really understood what this meant. We have formulated a nice clear promise that anyone at all can make, and set it free, online and off. It will be an interesting exercise in network effects.

What follows is a piece I wrote for public distribution explaining the point of the whole thing:

You might be prepared to go to gaol rather than have an ID card. But you can't.

David Blunkett has been smugly pronouncing that there will be no ID card martyrs because the intent is to have a system of penalties – like monstrous parking fines – hard to contest in court. So further punishments would relate to failure to pay, not ID cards. That silly distinction is currently irrelevant, since powers of direct compulsion have been dropped, for now. It has not stopped Mr Blunkett repeating it, though.

Subtler minds have been at work. The Home Office plans to make you to "volunteer". It hopes almost all the population will "volunteer", before most people have even noticed what is happening. Well before it rounds-up and force-fingerprints a few pariahs. Official documents will one by one be "designated", so that you cannot get one without at the same time asking to be placed – for life – on the National Identity Register.

The civil servant, Sylvanus Vivian who originated this idea in 1934 – yes, that’s right, nineteen thirty-four – called it "parasitic vitality". In other words, the scheme is a vampire. It has no life of its own, and thrives only if it feeds.

There is its weakness. We, collectively, can choose to starve the Identity and Passport Service. It only works smoothly if few are prepared to face a little inconvenience to resist. It only works at all if a large majority of the population can be hypnotised into thinking that it is just routine, no big deal. If enough of us refuse to be bled willingly, the beast will either starve or show its fangs.

Already 'e-Passports' have been used as a pretext to build a chain of interrogation centres to service the ID scheme. But further growth of the parasite will be harder to hide. Which is where you come in.

Making martyrdom hard, made resistance easy too. Actually breaking the law at this stage is hard to do. There is scarcely any ID card law to break; it is designed to be brought in silently by regulations, alongside administrative changes.

So that’s why NO2ID is suggesting a new form of non-violent direct action: pre-emptive resistance. You can do something positive now. Something totally legal; that has its own life, not determined by us, but by you. Anyone can do it. Anyone can help others do it. The more who do, the easier it is.

You can resolve openly, and clearly, not to do those specific things that give the ID scheme its "parasitic vitality":

I solemnly and publicly promise that:

• I shall not register for a national identity card
• I shall not supply personal details or fingerprints to a National Identity Register
• I shall not apply for any document or service if joining the National Identity Register is a condition of obtaining it
• I shall not co-operate with any Identity and Passport Service interview concerning my identity.
• I also promise by my example to encourage others to do the same.

In just one month of 2005, over 10,000 people pledged online not to register. Many more will take this NO2ID Pledge, and pass it on to others. Maybe the Government thinks it could force tens of thousands to submit by denying them access to their own lives. It would be a very brave Government that tried.

Not since Sue Lawley invited him on to Desert Island Discs can Gordon Brown have agonised for so long over his CD collection.

- Alice Thompson.

I am old enough to remember the run-up to the 1979 general election, and a lot of what swung that for Thatcher was the feeling that our country seemed about to descend into a state of South Americanness. This extraordinary lost data discs business is, I think, particularly wounding to the Brown regime, for it gives off that same vibe, of a government descending into anarchy, and not in a good way. The whole world is now sniggering at Britain.

However, good news for Brown comes from a commenter on this posting at Guido's:

There are about 13million children under the age of 16, most of whom have two parents. So that gives us about 25million individuals listed. However, only about a quarter of these will have bank details listed, so the BBC's claims that the bank details of 25million people have been lost is actually misleading. It is probably about 7million.

Oh, only seven million. That's okay then.

This comment reminds me of an amazing peacenik meeting I once attended, almost as long ago as the 1979 election, in which the speakers on the platform all took it in turns to explain how ghastly a nuclear explosion over a built-up area would be and that therefore we should chuck away our nuclear weapons, and a particularly bonkers middle-aged woman in the audience, called Daphne if I remember it right, got up to explain that actually, if you got lucky with the prevailing wind, and if proper civil defence measures were taken, it might not be that bad. The looks on the faces of the platform speakers were truly treasurable. I got up and said that the speakers certainly had me convinced me that nuclear war would indeed be rather nasty, and how about the replacement of Soviet communism with liberal democracy, as the least implausible way to end the nastiness? But that's another story.

Getting back to this lost discs thing, I agree with everyone else here who is, quite rightly making such a fuss of this business. Don't collect the damn data into these huge compulsory gobs in the first place.

Whatever David Cameron, says now ...

Mr Cameron said people were "desperately worried" and they would "find it frankly weird" that Mr Brown still wanted to go ahead with plans for a national ID cards scheme and register.

... his conclusion if and when he becomes Prime Minister (which this whole thing makes that much more likely) will presumably be that it will be a sufficient answer for his noble self to be in charge of the government's compulsory databases, and that all will then be well.

But it does occur to me, just as Black Wednesday saved the pound from being swallowed up by the Euro - which it surely did, whatever you think about that - this fiasco might just have done something similar to the database state. Not abolished it, or even reversed it seriously, but at least thrown a bit of a spanner into its works. Suddenly, ID cards are looking truly scary, combining malevolence with incompetence – Soviet even - to Mr and Mrs Average. I wrote that before reading what Guy Herbert said in the previous posting but one here, and I see that he reaches an identical conclusion. If so, good. Campaign for Database Disarmament anybody?

You cannot trust any agency with people's personal data.
- Frank Abagnale, quoted in The Daily Telegraph.

The quote of Britain's political week. There is a massive breakthrough in the public understanding of the database state, and the Government is finding it a real struggle to contain it. BBC journalists (Eg. Newsnight, The World Tonight, etc) are making an explicit connection between the three real monsters: the National Identity Scheme, Connecting for Health, and ContactPoint. My personal touchstone for success is when Criminal Records Bureau disclosure starts to be criticised in the public presses.

Bonus quote:

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,
Or close the wall up with our English dead!
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility;
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger:
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood.

Now is not a time to rest.

A commenter on Samizdata wrote the following lines, which got me thinking:

Has anyone here heard anyone (other than another libertarian) suggest that child benefit should be abolished so that this never happens again?

No I had not, but now that you mention it....

I don't think it's difficult to follow the argument that child benefit is a waste of everybody's money except that of net welfare recipient families.

I do not have a problem with welfare for poor families - it is state welfare that is the problem. The all-important word "state" is the problem.

It certainly cannot operate without a database of every child and their parents.

Indeed. As the late Ronald Reagan used to say, a state that is powerful enough to give the public everything it wants is powerful enough to take it from them too. And I think that one, perhaps unintended insight of this debacle is how it demonstrates that 25m British citizens receive some form of state benefit, or 'tax credit' (ie, benefit). That is a shocking statistic in its own right. 25m people, the vast majority of whom are not poor by any objective basis, now are caught into the welfare system. I am not saying, of course, that if the welfare system is rolled back, that disasters like this will not happen, but the need to hold so much data on us in the first place would certainly be greatly reduced, if not eliminated.

It goes without saying that this fiasco is a gift to opponents of ID cards. The sun was shining on my way to work this morning.

I have just sent NO2ID a cheque. Now might be a good time for many people to do the same, whether or not they took the pledge.

Further to my recent post about new measures from our Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families. Foreign readers may be surprised that we have a department for children schools and families (sic). I, on the other hand, am alarmed: even the name indicates the totalitarian intent of the New British state.

Prompted by a clip on TV news, I have now found the full text of Ed Balls's speech given to the Fabian Society yesterday. Didn't the resolution to announce new policy to parliament, not outside bodies - in this case a para-Party body - last a long time? It bears close reading:

Excerpt I:

Our ambition must be that all of our young people will continue in education or training.

That is what our Bill sets out to achieve - new rights for young people to take up opportunities for education and training, and the support they need to take up these opportunities; alongside new responsibilities for all young people - and a new partnership between young people and parents, schools and colleges, local government and employers. ....
But it is important to make clear that this is not a Bill to force young people to stay on at school or college full-time. They will be able to participate in a wide range of different ways through:

* full-time education, for example, at school or college
* work-based learning, such as an apprenticeship
* or one day a week part-time education or training, if they are employed, self-employed or volunteering more than 20 hours a week.

But the Education and Skills Bill is a bill of responsibilities as well as a bill of rights.

Because if young people fail to take up these opportunities, there will be a system of enforcement - very much a last resort - but necessary to strike the right balance between new rights and new responsibilities.

Phew - not necessarily locked up in schools then, but on probation otherwise (as will of course any employers be - they'll have to have enhanced CRB checks, of course). This is enlightening as to what Mr Brown means when he talks about a Bill of Rights and Duties, "building upon existing rights and freedoms but not diluting them - but also make more explicit the responsibilities that implicitly accompany rights...". It confirms what many listeners will have guessed: you have the right and freedom to do exactly what the big G tells you to. This is the traditional line of Calvinism and Islam, is it not?

Don't you love that "our young people"? Völkisch, nicht wahr?

Excerpt II:

The second building block [after mucking around with exams and the curriculum some more - GH] is advice and guidance - so that young people know and understand what is out there, and can be confident that they can make choices that will work for them.

First, this means local authorities taking clear responsibility for advice and guidance as part of the integrated support they offer to young people – making sure that youth services, Connexions and others who provide personal support to young people come together in a coherent way.

Second, clear new national standards for advice and guidance.

Last week my colleague Beverley Hughes set out clearly what we expect of local authorities as they take responsibility for the services provided by Connexions.

Third, a new local area prospectus available online, already available from this September in every area - setting out the full range of opportunities available, so that young people can see the choices available to them clearly in one place.

So not only will whether you do something state-approved be checked, but what you do will be subject to state advice and monitoring and made from a menu provided by the state. For the uninitiated Connexions is a formerly semi-independent, and notionally voluntary, database surveillance scheme for teenagers set up under the Learning and Skills Act 2000.

Well, actually, no. For their information. You have been warned, however. Statewatch notes:

The European Commission is to put forward, on Tuesday 6 November, a proposal to collect personal data (PNR) on everyone flying in and out of the EU. ... The data to be collected is almost exactly the same as that being collected under the controversial EU-US PNR scheme.

You recall that famous passage from The Wealth of Nations?

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.

It applies with even greater force when the 'people of the same trade' are states and their governments.

I do not pay attention to the Libertarian Alliance Forum, but many do of course, and according to one of these guys, Sean Gabb recently posted there a link to this:

It is a video clip of a bolshy brummy filming a couple of policemen. The policemen spot him doing this and tell him to stop. He tells them to take a hike. He is breaking no laws. He also, as if interchangeably, says: "I'm doing nothing wrong", and of course I agree. But, however right, and however desirable from the point of view of restraining the misdeeds of the powerful, how long before this kind of behaviour becomes illegal in Britain? I actually worry that too much publicity might be given to stuff like this, because it may give our meddling legislators ideas (was it wise to do this posting?)

Somebody told me last night (I think it was Perry de Havilland) that it is already illegal in some states of the USA to record the police. Commenters here often say that freedom etc. is doomed in Britain and that if you want such things you must emigrate to the USA. Hm.

At present the British Government already films whatever it wants. But cheap video cameras are rapidly becoming so small that soon everyone else who is inclined – rather than just wannabee spies and private investigators with money to burn – may be filming whatever they want, wherever they want. How will that play out, I wonder?

The ubiquity of surveillance cameras in Britain does not appear to be having any very detectable effect upon the level of crime.

Well, actually, that is not quite right. Total surveillance does dissuade the law-abiding from straying across the line. Surveillance cameras do slow up speeding motorists, for instance. But with one exception. They do far less to slow up motorists who are already criminals. These persons have little further to fear from the criminal-processing system than the complications they already have to live with as a result of already being criminals. In the unlikely event that they are traced, driving a car that isn't theirs or that they have not reported to the various authorities that the rest of us must keep informed about everything, they are processed slowly and clumsily by the criminal-processing system. It is noted yet again that they are criminals, which everyone already knows, and that, pretty much, mostly, is it. Any punishments they suffer are as likely to be badges of honour as they are to be truly feared.

A law abiding citizen, on the other hand, wants very much not to be tarred, even faintly, with the brush of criminality. Being law-abiding, he is not an expert on how the criminal-processing system works and cannot take being processed by it in his stride. He does not know how and when to lie to it, for instance. He does not know how to phrase the statement "Do you know who I am?" in at all the correct manner. So, the law does restrain the law-abiding. (And that is a not insignificant benefit, provided only that at least some of the laws make sense, as a lot of them do.)

The most spectacular and often newsworthy instances of this contrast between the law-abiding and the criminals occur when the law-abiding fight back against criminals when they are attacked by them. When this happens, and in those cases when both parties are scooped up by the police, perhaps because the law-abider summoned the police and the police actually turned up, the criminals often come off better, because they then know how to handle things. The criminal lies about having aggressed, and in due course walks away. The law-abider tells the truth about how he defended himself, and can land in a world of trouble.

The effect of total surveillance, then, when combined with the rest of the criminal-processing system, is not to abolish criminality, but rather to ensure that we all have to decide, as one big decision for each of us: Am I going to be a criminal, or not? If I am, that's one set of rules, criminal rules, which I must obey. If I am going to be law-abiding, then I must obey the law, whatever that exactly is. (And at all times, now that all infractions can be photographed and recorded for ever, everywhere. If that is not the case now, it soon will be.) But, because the law is so very intrusive and annoying and so full of complexities and arbitrarinesses and injustices, that creates a constant pressure on people to say: To hell with it, I'm going to be a criminal. Meaning: someone who doesn't care who else knows he's a criminal, and who can accordingly relax about being totally surveilled.

Let me be clear. I do not recommend the abolition of the criminal-processing system merely because it has such severe limitations. There are not nearly enough prisons to accommodate all criminals, but there are some. And my clear understanding is that a much higher proportion of the people in them are what I understand by the word "criminals" than is the case out here in the big, progressive, open prison that total surveillance is creating for the rest of us. Becoming a criminal means buying, so to speak, an anti-lottery ticket. If you lose, that is to say if you become a criminal and the criminal-processing system decides to go after you, you can suffer, and I hope that this is not merely wishful thinking on my part, quite severe grief. But it is also now my clear understanding that the odds facing the purchasers of these anti-lottery tickets are now quite good, and that the anti-prizes, even if you are awarded one, are in many cases not that severe. None of which deters criminals very much. They have placed their bet. But it must surely deter a great many people from deciding to become criminals in the first place. It certainly deters me. (But then, I have a lot to lose.)

The above ruminations are a mixture of my own opinions and those supplied to me by Theodore Dalrymple in a recent City Journal article. If you want to read his opinions uncontaminated by mine, do.

They keep on coming on, like a sort of rank of killer insects in one of those terrible B-movies. Here is the latest shaft of wisdom from the judiciary:

The entire population of Britain - and every visitor - should be added to the national DNA database, a senior judge has argued.

Marvellous. None of that "presumed innocent" namby-pamby nonsense.

Appeal Court judge, Lord Justice Stephen Sedley, said the database, which holds the DNA from millions of suspects and crime scenes, should be extended to all residents and even tourists, in the interests of fairness and crime prevention.

Fairness? What about the state and its officials leaving the innocent alone and not demanding every greater controls over our lives? Has this judge read his Blackstone lately?

"Where we are at the moment is indefensible," Sedley told BBC radio.

I agree. It is indefensible that such a person holds such office. Cleaning toilets might be more his line:

"Everybody, guilty or innocent, should expect their DNA to be on file for the absolutely rigorously restricted purpose of crime detection and prevention -- and no other purpose."

"For no other purpose". Why, are there other purposes that the judge knows about?

This is a public service announcement to save time for those who would rather get on with irrelevant vituperation and not bother digesting the point of my post: In a moment I'm going to say something positive about Gerry Adams.

First, consider this from The Washington Post:

The government's terrorist screening database flagged Americans and foreigners as suspected terrorists almost 20,000 times last year. But only a small fraction of those questioned were arrested or denied entry into the United States, raising concerns among critics about privacy and the list's effectiveness.

A range of state, local and federal agencies as well as U.S. embassies overseas rely on the database to pinpoint terrorism suspects, who can be identified at borders or even during routine traffic stops. The database consolidates a dozen government watch lists, as well as a growing amount of information from various sources, including airline passenger data. The government said it was planning to expand the data-sharing to private-sector groups with a "substantial bearing on homeland security," though officials would not be more specific.

....

Jayson P. Ahern, deputy commissioner for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said focusing on arrests misses "a much larger universe" of suspicious U.S. citizens.

"There are many potentially dangerous individuals who fly beneath the radar of enforceable actions and who are every bit as sinister as those we intercept," he said.

Gotta love those adjectives: "Potentially dangerous", not "dangerous". "Dangerous" would invite the question: How dangerous, exactly? And: What mayhem have these invisible pseudo-threats caused that the forces of security could not have created all by themselves? As for the visibly suspicious, the "sinister", just how threatening they are is shown up by the US Customs and FBI's own account - a "small" number of arrests, not necessarily related to terrorism, a number in the hundreds turned back at the airport. Which can happen even if you have been arrested without charge at some other time in your own country and didn't realise that in consequence you need a visa.

Which brings us to Mr Adams.

He has an amusing little piece in The Guardian, Panic at Passport Control about being selected for secondary security screening selection, or SSSS.

I hand the FBI young gun a copy of my travel schedule - a document that has been in the possession of the US state department for the past month or so.

"Huh," he says. "Why are you going to the White House, sir?"

"To see the president."

"Huh. Why?"

"He asked me," I say evenly.

My deadpan delivery is wasted on him. Maybe he is used to dealing with wise guys.

"Why, sir?"

Now we all know - maybe even the callow G-man knows - that Mr Adams is formerly a terrorist by most modern definitions. At the very least he was a leading member of a banned organisation, which is quite enough to get you locked up in many places - or extraordinarily rendered to unpleasant conditiond in secret parts of the world, if it is Banned Organisation of the Month. But Mr Adams is a former terrorist whose current business is known and accepted by the US government, so pulling him aside and interrogating him is not just a waste of his time. It is a monumentally stupid misapplication of the FBI's time.

I am inclined to believe it is also a stupid waste applied to everyone else as well. If the guy isn't carrying a bomb the first time you check his luggage, he won't be the second time, half an hour later. If he's been specially screened before, then doing it again has no benefit at all. Severe disbenefit in fact. All that is time and money that could be spent on real HUMINT, or at least recruiting officers and teaching them the languages and culture to do real intelligence work. However, once you are on a list of the sinister, you may never get off. Look at the trouble even Teddy Kennedy had. If you don't have influential friends, like the senator and the Sinn Féin leader do, fat chance. And the inconvenience involved is likely to be greater.

Lists feed other lists. And feed back again. Confirmation bias, the prosecutor's fallacy, and the spirit of ley-lines do their work. The shade of Profesor Parkinson hovers over all: "Look, this is important work. Because we are doing it, and because we are doing a lot of it." "We suspect 20,000 persoons now, and we are working on suspecting 60,000."

As Adams says: " This is usually a random selection, we are told. The legend SSSS is stamped on the tickets of those randomly selected, and the lucky ticket holder gets extra attention. Richard and I are randomly included for this treatment all the time." It is a common experience. A consitutional reformer of my acquaintance is also randomly selected more often than not. Unlike Mr Adams, she has never justified violence (I'm fairly sure she's against smacking children), but like him she has publicly criticised government. A sometime commentator on this blog and friend of the Samizdata family is formally on the US Homeland Security Register. The reason: he was born in Kabul and lived there till the age of one year, and has a sinister surname. This despite the triple absurdity that (1) lots of people have the same name who are entirely unrelated in any sense, (2) names even if they do indicate family connection don't signify character - imagine pulling in Peter Hitchens and questioning him based on Christopher Hitchens's writings - and (3) middle-eastern names don't follow the western European pattern, so suspecting people on that basis is to elevate ignorant misconception to an operating standard.

Now if you only want to fly to Croatia for a bit of skinnydipping in the Adriatic, you may not think this affects you. (Me, I've stopped flying. Not that I ever could bear airport bureaucracy much.) But where one idiot government programme goes, another government is likely to follow with its own idiot programme. Particularly if the idiot government programme is brought to you by the Pax Americana As Perry pointed out recently, Britain's shiny new Borders and Immigration Agency (BIA), is also a borders and emmigration agency. It not only contributes to those "various sources, including airline passenger data," for the convenience of US securocrats, but is keen to start operating its own no-fly and supplementary screening programmes.

And the point is? Well it doesn't do, and cannot do, anything for its purported purpose of "protecting the travelling public". It is counterproductive as at the very least a waste of resources. And it pointlessly delays, inconveniences, iritates and humiliates, tens of thousands of people, from minor statesmen (whether or not they are retired... er... 'freedom fighters'), to government critics, to those more "randomly" selected on the basis of being a bit sinister. It is for the latter it will be most frightening, since they are unlikely to be fortunate enough to know specialist lawyers, politicans and media people who might be able to protect or rescue them if things turn nasty. There is another group we must not forget who will be frightened and overawed unnecessarily: all those other travellers who see one of the previous categories escorted away by officials, not to return to sight. They who will think, "Omigod that could be me - I musn't make any trouble."

That's the point, I suggest. The exercise is about exercise of power. Demonstration that the state is doing something, and you ought to be frightened - of the state or of the "threat". Either will do. Keep your head down "beneath the radar of enforceable actions".

It sends a message. Those people being marched away are a massively expensive exercise in dramatising insecurity in an objectively safe world. It is 'security theatre' in Bruce Schneier's enduring phrase. And it is the biggest, longest lasting production in the history of security theatre, being brought direct to you at any of 1,000+ airports throughout the world on an indefinite run. At massive taxpayer expense (remember, you bought your own ticket for this performance, and every other one, for the rest of you life, at a special block-rate) it helps keep you frightened about bad people, reassured that the government cares about your fear and is doing something, and discouraged from questioning authority.

It is a huge vanity project, in essence. Securocrats in praise of themselves and the power of the state for good as the state defines good. Not so different from this. Or this. At least the Bolshoi Ballet could really dance.

Lately it seems that hardly a week goes by that we do not get some new chilling preview of the Police State that many in the political class are trying to bring about . How about this one?

Tens of thousands of people who have failed to pay court fines amounting to more than £487m would be banned from leaving the country under new powers outlined by the Home Office. Ministers are also looking at ways of using the new £1.2bn "e-borders" programme to collect more than £9m owed in health treatment charges by foreign nationals who have left the country without paying.

The programme, to be phased in from October next year, will also allow the creation of a centralised "no-fly" list of air-rage or disruptive passengers which can be circulated to airlines. The e-borders programme requires airlines and ferry companies to submit up to 50 items of data on each passenger between 24 and 48 hours before departure to and from the UK. With 200 million passenger movements in and out of the UK last year to and from 266 overseas airports on 169 airlines, an enormous amount of data is expected to be generated by the programme.

Of course as the government freely admits, it will use this to monitor everyone's movements for all manner of purposes beyond "air-rage" or people using the NHS. I can only imagine how quickly the list of thing that will get you stopped at the border is going to grow. Sorry, you have an appointment with a 'social' worker next week and we need to make sure you turn up. Failed to put your recycling out? BBC tax not paid yet? Outstanding parking tickets? Your carbon ration has been used up? Your kiddies refusing to attend the local educational conscription centre?

You think I am joking?

And not just for other people, which is the usual way of things:

I am responsible. I think. I care. I hold myself back from all sorts of desires and wishes which are impulsive, brought on by the clamour and disturbance of this corrupt over-materialistic world we live in, separated from nature and in intense competition with each other. We live in a sick society which is not going to cure itself. Like small children, we need forcibly calming down, we need to be held to account, we need to 'learn'.

You may find this deeply disturbing as a view. But then, I'm not romantic about our so-called 'liberties' as Henry Porter is. I'm not a sentimentalist about old-style 'freedoms'.

A commentator on Henry Porter's article Each DNA swab brings us closer to a police state on the Observer website. Depressingly much more where that came from.

The neo-puritans hate their own desires and the possibility of choosing between them. They think surveillance is good because 'if you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear', and they know you need watching in case you might do something wrong. They have bad impulses too, which by awful effort they control. The total control of the state - conceived as an undesiring arbiter of good - can relieve us of the burden of choice and keep us working for the good of society. It will free us from fear; because the freedom of bad people, who might be anyone, is what we have most to fear.

The impulse to control everything pervades those who make up the governmental class. That is, after all, why someone decides to spend their working life in politics and applying the collective means of coercion to others. The extent to which this desire to impose force backed control can be realised is exactly what defines whether or not you are 'free' or a 'slave' of the state.

So when yesterday I read that the state plans to take DNA samples that will be retained forever, from people accused of speeding or littering or failing to wear a seatbelt, I realised that if this happens, we will have finally reached the point where the only response left to being stopped for even the most minor offence, is to run and if need be to use violence to escape, and to make no apology for that if you are caught. The offences are trivial but the prospect of being DNA sampled upon being accused of a trivial offence, and that being kept on record forever, is something worth getting violent about. Being fingerprinted is bad enough but this is intolerable.

The only thing that will stop this appalling state of affairs from coming to pass is if enough people react with outrage to this proposal.

The sooner my affairs contrive to let me get out of this godforsaken country the better.

For those here determined to hate the BBC and all its works, here is a reminder that it does do some useful things. That it isn't quite in the mould of the fawning state broadcaster found almost everywhere in the world. Along with a reminder that some would like it to be.

This week File on 4 did the first really serious, probing investigation into HM Government's National Identity Scheme that there has been in any media yet. You can listen to it here, and it is full of fascinating things for the attentive listener.

The most extraordinary is this testimony from IT consultant Peter Tomlinson:

The meetings were called by people in the Cabinet Office. There were topics on the agenda that were set by people in the Cabinet Office and we kept on thinking: why are we not seeing people from the Home Office.

Why are we not seeing technical people from the Home Office, or people involved in technical management? Eventually they began to come along but they never produced anyone who had any technical understanding of large-scale systems. We were just completely puzzled.

This is the first really solid public evidence I have seen that the scheme really is [or was?] intended by strategists at the highest level as a complete population management system and revolution in the nature of government, rather than being one by accident. That it is the emanation of a philosophy of government. It is it is not always good to have one's analysis confirmed. In this case I would prefer not to have been vindicated.

Remember Philip Gould? He's one of those high-level strategists.

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.

The philosophy is probably best summed up by a word from Foucault: governmentalism. Christopher Booker to the contrary, it is not a 'mental' creed of "The Mad Officals" but a pervasive pragmatism - using the natural history of humanity the better to shepherd it. The better shepherd is a member of the new innominate politico-bureaucratic class: maybe a civil 'servant', maybe a politician, maybe officially neither.

And just today a new example of the sage. A strategy memo has leaked to the Daily Mirror's sharp political editor Kevin Maguire. Lord Gould allegedly writes:

No-one in Britain should have any doubt about what you stand for, what you want to achieve. You should position yourself as a powerful, muscular modernisation politician with the power and the determination to change Britain. You should aim to be a great reforming PM.

You have to meet this mood for change. You have to exemplify renewal and a fresh start.

Your Premiership has to have a dynamism and an energy that pulls people along in its slipstream. You must become the change that Britain needs.

There is a name for this, too. It is one of the most widely used populist techniques in world politics: Strong Man government, tribal leadership, caudillismo. A national security state, presided over by a Big Man - has "a nation of freemen, a polite and commercial people" (Blackstone), really come to that? When exactly did liberty become such a minority taste in Britain that it were possible?

[Just a footnote on the BBC below the fold.]

And the BBC? Well. it remains independent, but since 1st January 2007, it too has fundamentally changed, though fundamental changes work slowly through large flabby organisations.

It is now defined by its duties (where have I heard that before? - oh yes...): They are headed by: "sustaining citizenship and civil society," and include, "representing the UK, its nations, regions and communities". Its previous objects were to provide broadcasting as a public service, as it saw fit, subject to certain restrictions, impartiality being the most prominent requirement. "Impartiality" is not to be found in the new charter. It is relegated to the supplementary "Agreement" between the BBC Trust and Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for
Culture, Media and Sport.

I have no doubt the BBC will retain its capacity to irritate me. (Some other recent Files on 4 have been predicated on some classic lefty axioms.) The question is, will "sustaining citizenship and civil society," and "representing the UK," allow it to continue to irritate the Government of the day?

I missed this sharp and wise article by US columnist Jonah Goldberg a few days ago - but I had the excellent excuse of being on holiday - but his piece, which nicely sums up what is happening in Britain from a US perspective, demonstrates how some Americans are waking up to what a nannied country Britain now is. Of course, north American readers of this blog have been aware of this progressive infantilisation of the UK adult public for some time.

The question that keeps coming up, and which makes an appearance in Jonah's article, is exactly when will the conveyor belt of nanny-state interference in our liberties stop? When, exactly, does the excrement hit the fan? Just how bullied do we have to be before something snaps?

I am still none the wiser as to whether we really know the answer to those questions.

Not only is innocent until proven guilty on the way out. The idea of limited and defined punishment for crime is too.

It appears the Sex Offenders Register which is supposed to.... well, I am not really sure what it is supposed to do, other than provide meat for the slavering tabloids, creates an ad hoc police power to get you banned from performing on TV. The BBC reports Police alert over TV contestant, in which a police spokesman says:

"There were concerns that with him being on the programme he might be seen by his victim or the victim's family and there would be consequences from that. Lancashire Police spoke with the producers and suggested that it would not be in anyone's interests for him to continue with the programme."

One does not suppose the "victim or victim's family" could remain unaware after an entirely predictable national media alert. And the consequences for the man concerned of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people who had no reason to know being told in the broadest terms he is "a sex offender" and the rest left to the mob's squalid imagination? While 'sexual offences' is a broad category, from thought-crime, to bad manners, to genuinely consensual but officially barred conduct, ... to the most serious violent crimes, one can be registered for any of them, even if there is no trial and no other punishment. The public obsession runs only one way, however.

A Carnegie Mellon study suggests that shoppers are willing to pay more if they are re-assured about privacy. The premium mentioned is about $0.60 (30p) on goods worth $15 (£7). This is good news. Privacy is one of the 'goods' with benefit distributed over time and like security you wish you had it most only when you discover you have none. Usually not in circumstances of your choosing. The heartening point about the report is that before many studies were showing that despite peoples fears about what happens to their data, they continued to surrender it in exchange for low prices.

Lorrie Cranor, director of the Usable Privacy and Security Lab at Carnegie Mellon and lead author on the study:

Our suspicion was that people care about their privacy, but that it's often difficult for them to get information about a website's privacy policies.

So if users are happy to pay a bit extra for re-assurances that privacy of their information is respected, perhaps they would be equally willing to use tools that give them control and ownership over that data. Of course, there are issues with that, especially with the current state of online security and lack of more flexible and selective privacy. However, there are people already looking into this so I might start holding my breath. :)

cross-posted from Media Influencer

Mr Clarke: Concerns about police powers have been widely expressed, particularly in regard to stop and search. I want to make it clear that the Bill, and the introduction of identity cards, will make no difference to the general powers of the police to stop people for no reason and demand proof of identity. The Bill will make no difference to the powers that exist under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. In fact, quicker, reliable access to confirmed identification would help to reduce the time a suspected person might spend in police custody. The effect of that would be to reduce the number of people wrongly held in police custody while their identity was being checked, which would be of benefit to the individual and to the police.

I also want to confirm that there is no requirement to carry an identity card at all times, as there have been many questions about that.

- Hansard, 28 June 2005

NEW anti-terrorism laws are to be pushed through before Tony Blair leaves office giving “wartime” powers to the police to stop and question people.

John Reid, the home secretary, who is also quitting next month, intends to extend Northern Ireland’s draconian police powers to interrogate individuals about who they are, where they have been and where they are going.

Under the new laws, police will not need to suspect that a crime has taken place and can use the power to gain information about “matters relevant” to terror investigations.

If suspects fail to stop or refuse to answer questions, they could be charged with a criminal offence and fined up to £5,000. Police already have the power to stop and search people but they have no right to ask for their identity and movements.

- The Sunday Times, 27 May 2007

BBC online's heading on the latter matter was "Stop and quiz powers considered" which seems much less frightening.

"Good evening, Sir. What was the subject of the Pet Shop Boys' 2006 single Integral?"

CNet news.com reports:

The networking giant announced late Monday that it plans to buy privately held BroadWare Technologies in an effort to bulk up its video surveillance business.

Just what we have been waiting for... with the kind of record Cisco has in China (and probably elsewhere) it is not a comfortable thought to have them helping their customers to be able to monitor, manage, record and store audio and video that can be accessed anywhere by authorized users through a Web-based interface. Especially, if some of those customers are the most oppressive regimes in the world. And even without that I would not find much enthusiasm for this particular technological advancement until individuals have some kind of recourse and defence against the jungle of surveillance cameras already in existence.

Marthin De Beer, senior vice president of Cisco's Emerging Market Technologies Group, said in a statement:

Cisco views the video surveillance infrastructure market as an immediate high-growth opportunity that requires the ability to support both IP and analog device installations. Through the acquisition of BroadWare, Cisco will be able to address both existing and greenfield video surveillance opportunities.

How innocuous the corporate-speak phrase video surveillance opportunities sounds!

There is a reason why we keep saying here that we are not pro-business but pro-market...

Update: Mike Masnik of TechDirt has a great post Surveillance Camera Video Finding Its Way To YouTube.

This seems like a good time to second the call for some recognition of Harper's Law: "The security and privacy risks increase proportionally to the square of the number of users of the data." Remember that the next time the government wants to set up some large database and insists your data will be kept private.

On the BBC television news programme this morning, I glimpsed a brief and largely uncritical segment on the rollout of what are called Home Information Packs. These will be compulsory for people looking to sell their property and cost, so the BBC programme stated, about 500 pounds (a nice revenue earner for the government). The packs, or "HIPs", will have to include details about the energy efficiency of a house and they are driven, in part, by the current focus on environmental issues. It is further evidence of how the green movement is replacing old-style socialism as a prime driver of regulation and tax.

The BBC programme profiled a number of people who have taken up the stirring job of checking people's homes. They will inspect properties, take all manner of measurements, and generally have a wonderful time poking around the homes of would-be sellers of properties. The people on the show seemed a fairly pleasant, if faintly bland bunch - not the sort of people to get Britons irate. The image presented by the programme was all, so, British in its "what a jolly sensible idea to let people check around your home" sort of line that is bog-standard BBC these days. It was vaguely reminiscent of those old 1940s public information films shown in WW2 urging us all to cut the amount of water we use when taking a bath and to keep our gasmask with us at all times.

Tim Worstall, a blogger focusing on economic and environmental issues, has a suitably sceptical line on the need for compulsory Home Information Packs. If they are such a great idea for buyers and sellers of properties, then surely the market would react accordingly. I agree.

But leaving aside the daftness of these packs as a compulsory measure, the broader point here is how enforcement of HIPS is adding another layer of people to the public payroll. True, the HIP inspectors are not state employees, but self-employed. Even so, their jobs have been made possible by the HIP rules. This demonstrates that a lot of jobs today owe their existence to often-questionable legislation rather than consumer demand.

Remember, more than 900,000 public sector jobs have been created since 1997, at vast cost to the wealth-creating part of the economy. People are being recruited to inspect pubs and restaurants to ensure that consumers - even if they have the consent of the property owners - do not smoke. The increasing crackdown on cars in big UK cities means that traffic wardens are also a growth industry. Since 9/11, meanwhile, the security industry has expanded enormously, swelling the profit margins of firms like Kroll or Reliance. The trend is likely to continue. All this is a deadweight on the economy, even though in some cases, such as counter-terrorism and protection against thievery, it is necessary.

We keep wondering at this blog at what point Britons will ever start to seriously complain. ID cards? Not much of a general stir. Erosion of the right to trial by jury? Yawn. EU Arrest Warrant? Yawn again. But maybe things are moving. The recent proposal by the government to impose road pricing across the land and enforce it by tagging cars drew forth a deluge of complaints via the government's own internet-based petition system. I wonder whether the prospect of busybodies crawling all over a home before it is put up for sale will have the same effect. Let's hope so.

There is an old and wise saying that 'an armed society is a polite society'. It is also the case that a private society remains a private society as well. That is, the importance and respect paid by governments to a citizen's right to privacy flows on to the rest of society. In contrast, when a government disregards the right of its citizens to keep matters private, other organisations in society will take their cue from the government's lead.

Take gambling for example. The online sports betting industry in Australia has sprung up like mushrooms after autumn rain in Australia since the advent of the Internet. People used to like to have a wager on a football or cricket game in the friendly environment of a pub, but since the online bookmakers have opened, the betting habits of Australians have increased markedly.

It is not only Australians that have been bitten by the sports betting bug either. But it is illegal in many parts of the world, and that has created more problems then it has solved. When a market is not allowed to be filled by honest business folk, it is instead filled by organised crime figures and all the baggage that this brings. One of the biggest items of luggage is the curse of match-fixing in popular sports.

It is in countering this that the right to privacy has come under strain as global sporting bodies try to grapple with the curse. Cricket has been dealing with this problem for over a decade now, and the net result of that is that there is a special anti-corruption unit to deal with it. Also, they have done deals with the legal betting agencies to try and trace irregular pattens of betting, and betting by players. The privacy policy at Centrebet, Australia's largest online betting agency, say this:

Cricket Agreement
Centrebet has entered an Agreement with the International Cricket Council, to provide the International Cricket Council Anti Corruption and Security Unit (ICC ACSU) with betting related information to assist it in investigating conduct connected with cricket.
The ICC ACSU may request from Centrebet any information on betting activity relating to cricket and any identification information held by Centrebet pertaining to:

1. An individual employed by, contracted to or associated with the ICC;
2. An individual employed by, contracted to or associated with one of the National Cricket Boards who are Full Members, Associates or Affiliates of the ICC;
3. An individual whom the ICC ACSU believes is connected to person in (1) or (2) above where the ICC ACSU has reasonable grounds to suspect that the individual in question has breached, or is intending to breach, one or more of the Rules of Conduct as set out in the ICC Player's and Team Official's Code as amended from time to time or incite another to do so; or
4. Any person whom the ICC ACSU has reasonable grounds to suspect has engaged in conduct prejudicial to the interests of the game of cricket and/or who may have relevant knowledge concerning corruption within cricket.

Centrebet will not provide any information unless it is satisfied in its discretion that the ICC ACSU has reasonable grounds for requesting the betting related information.
By placing bets on cricket, you consent to the use and disclosure of your personal information for the purposes, and in the manner, described above.

Of course that means, in effect, that a person who is betting when they shouldn't be will have to use an illegal bookmaker to accept the bet. So any inside betting will be in the hands of the mob from the start. I would hardly think that is an ideal solution.

Give Centrebet due though, they at least agree not to provide any information unless they smell a rat; that is a lot better then giving the ICC Cricket people open slather. But the new Australian football deal threatens to do just that.

In the wake of a player-betting scandal a the start of the season, the Australian Football League has agreed to a deal with a host of big online bookmakers that has exactly the same problem; anyone involved in betting that is in the game now, has to do it through illegal agencies. The betting agencies have promised to do 'regular audits' of their accounts.

It all comes back to the 'right to privacy' of the individual versus the right to have honest sporting events for the entertainment of the public. However, in sacrificing one, sports administrators have increased the dangers to the other. It is a conundrum worthy of a government. And given that betting on Australian football takes place overwhelmingly in one jurisdiction, it is possible that this infringement in the public's right to private betting will soon be enforced, ever so arrogantly and hamfistedly, by the power of the Australian government.

We have come a long way from the day when a gentleman's word was his bond.

The only substantive issue on which David Cameron declaimed that made him in any way preferable (or to be more accurate, distinguishable) from the Blairite Labour Party was the issue of ID cards.

Cameron (eventually) came down against them once he realised just how unpopular the scheme was. Well it seems that the impending Brown government is also going to give ID cards the heave-ho, which if true is indeed a good thing.

So, no excuse left for actual conservatives not abandon the Tories and vote UKIP then.

There is a scandal in the UK Department of Health's IT management. The BBC reports it thus:

The Department of Health has apologised for an apparent security lapse which allowed the personal details of junior doctors to be accessed online.
Channel 4 News reported that a breach on the NHS Medical Training Application Service website allowed public access for at least eight hours. The department said the details had only been available briefly, and only to people making employment checks.
[...]
Phone numbers, addresses, previous convictions and sexual orientation were among details available since at least 0900 BST, it reported. The Department of Health was alerted at 1635 BST and the breach closed at 1705 BST.

The opposition spokesmen were on it straightway, pointing out that if this could happen with temporary information on 7,000 junior doctors, what hope was there for the medical records of the entire country intended be held on the NHS Connecting for Health system, or all those personal details being sought out for the NIR, to remain secure?

All very well and good. They won't be. And we should thank Andrew Lansley MP for taking the opportunity to point it out. But I cannot help feeling let down by the response of media and politicians. "Insecure!" they bleat.

Nowhere, yet, have I heard or read in the mainstream discussion of this incident what seems to me the most screamingly obvious and fundamental questions. What business is it of the DoH to supervise the selection of individual doctors for individual hospital placements at all? And what the hell is it doing collecting information about doctors' religions, sexual preferences and criminal records in the first place? If you have committed a crime the nature of which debars you from being a doctor, then you're no longer a doctor, so you should not be on the list. If you have not then your crimes are as irrelevant as your religion or your sexuality, and they should not be. No doubt they were also as carefully classified as to race and ethnic origin as would satisfy apartheid authorities re-equipped with modern computers.

When are people going to rebel against the presumption that government may pigeonhole as it pleases, and anything a bureaucrat with a checklist asks he is entitled to know?

Unless you have a damn good reason, I decide what I'll tell you about myself based on the nature of our relationship. Information is power. Information is intimacy. Forced disclosure of private information is data-rape.

Those 7,000 young doctors were only incidentally abused by the feeble security. They were deliberately data-raped by the Department of Health first.

Steven Baker of Blogspotting writes about his experience of casino backstage:

They have banks and banks of TV screens looking at the tables and the traffic of people. They have fixed cameras over every table, and tracking cameras operating within what look like black cantaloupe-sized half domes on the ceilings.

They zoom on one woman's behaviour:

Then he saw it. She had her cards, a black jack, and with one quick movement she upped her bet by adding another $5 chip. We watched again and again in slow motion.

This is still fine by me. The casino is private property, in a business where some people are highly motivated to cheat. It is what happened afterwards that I find interesting.

They decided she was no pro. Still, they sent a security person to talk to her as she was leaving the table. We watched. She was surprised, confused, then grave. Then he said something that put her at ease. She relaxed, smiled, joked, and then went along her tipsy way.

I share Steven's unease and his realisation that these casinos are giving us a preview of life in the coming age of surveillance.

Increasingly our movements and gestures, online and off, will be open to scrutiny by companies and governments alike. It will be up to them to decide what to crack down on, what to let pass. In making these decisions, they'll be weighing not only our innocence or guilt, but also our happiness as customers, our ability to stir up a fuss, the cost of the public perception that they're snoops. The upshot: We won't have much privacy, but crafty governments and companies will give us the illusion we do.

In other words, technology in an environment that has not evolved to match it, i.e. does not have respect for the individual as a fundamental principle, eventually leads to a dystopia. In a society without openness and individual autonomy, technology amplifies and entrenches the power of the centralised system, however benign the original intention. I am reminded of The Difference Engine, a novel by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. The story is set in Victorian times, in a society with all the pathologies of an authoritarian system, i.e. one lacking proper checks and balances. It is taken to the point of grotesqueness and shown as ultimately fragile - its strength rests on the technology to the exclusion of individual freedom. Innovation is institutionalised, variety killed, leading to vulnerability to outside innovation and to inherent flaws within the system.

The difference between the impact of technology online and offline could not be more stark. Offline we have the modern Panopticon, surveillance cameras of increasing sophistication and intrusiveness. Online we still have the ability to protect ourselves or can find those who can help us do so rather than have our 'protection' imposed by a centralised institution. Yes, the internet is an anarchy and a sewer - as Ben Laurie who ought to know describes it :). But it is also a space where new ways of doing things can emerge and more importantly where individuals can flourish without depending on organisational resources. Offline we are defenceless against somebody building the aforementioned Panopticon, online there are ways to design against it.

So simply put, I would rather have the anarchy and the sewer with individual sovereignty than a Big Brother in whatever disguise.

cross-posted from Media Influencer

Not a film review. Truth is more horrifying than fiction, sometimes.

The truth in question being the willingness of those close to power openly to advocate ever more interference with you and me, not ad hoc for venal, corrupt, human reasons, but in order systematically to enforce the currently approved good life on society.

From the BBC (Public Policy Research¹ is by subscription, and I am not subsidising the bastards any more than I already do from taxes):

Jasper Gerard argues in PPR: "When it comes to booze, society seems to have lost its senses."

He says current regulations are failing to tackle the growing trend of under age and binge drinking. By raising the age threshold, he claims: "It is at least possible that those in their early and mid teens will not see drink as something they will soon be allowed to do so therefore they might as well start doing it surreptitiously now."

Alternatively, he proposes getting 18-year-olds to carry smart cards which record how much they have drunk each night and making it an offence to serve more alcohol to anyone under-21 who had already consumed more than three units. [Cant for a pint and a half of ordinary beer - or one decent cocktail - GH]

He conceded that no measure would stamp out youthful drinking entirely, but said it was time for a crackdown.

I note the BBC has this story under 'health', rather than 'politics'. It does not have a 'neo-Puritanism' category (perhaps we should have). Medicalised bullying sails past the questioning pickets of journalism and gets straight into the credulous baggage train. As does technological bullying. And here we have medicalised state bullying enabled by technology. Woo-hoo!

One can not quote this fragment of C.S. Lewis too often:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber barons cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

It may spoil the mesodiplosis, but those first too mays should be ises. The robber baron pursues his own whims and pleasures, regardless of others; the neo-Puritan is only happy when the lives of others are under control.

¹ = The journal of the Institute for Public Policy Research, the tank in which New Labour thinking goes on.

<child's voice>

"Stand still, citizen! Facial recognition software has identified you and made a cross-check with the national 'Good Citizen' data base."

"You have not denounced anyone for...thirty... days... please remember that community policing is a civic duty and reporting people is easy and fun! Just use your mobile phone and send a text SMS to Whitehall 1212 with the name, address and crime of a school mate, family member or co-worker!"

"And remember, if you accumulate ten 'Good Citizen' points for denouncing smokers, homophobes, people eating high fat food, anyone making racist jokes in private, people making unauthorised D.I.Y. repairs to 'their' houses, anyone using illegal light bulbs, anyone questioning the unanimous and state approved scientific truth about global warming, home schoolers or people who buy banned war toys for 'their' children, you will get to appear on the Big Brother reality TV show by having your home's internal CCTV footage broadcast live for seven days!"

</child's voice>

From the linked article: "According to recent studies, Britain has 4.2million CCTV cameras - one for every 14 people in the country - which amounts to 20 per cent of the global camera total."

Welcome to modern Britain.

This story in the Telegraph is no doubt just crazy right-wing paranoia, and we have in fact no need to worry, get annoyed or even become the tiniest bit cheesed off. Oh no. Polly has explained it all for us. To be worried about the surveillance state is a middle-class thing, apparently. All true denizens of a socialist Britain should be proud to carry ID cards and be photographed constantly.

If Polly Toynbee did not exist, we would have to invent her. Not even Ian Fleming could cook up a female villain as good as this woman. Henry Porter, meanwhile, has scathing remarks on his fellow Guardian columnist. Good for him.

Of course, if CCTVs are installed in privately owned streets, shopping malls or other privately owned buildings, I do not have a problem so long as it is pretty clear that such cameras are installed. But that is not quite the issue.

.. because someone else may be watching, too.

Pippa King is rightly outraged by the bad bargain Bury schools appear to be getting for taxpayer's money with their their "cashless" fingerprint-based school meals systems. However, I do not think that is the most disturbing element of the story.

There is nothing wrong in principle with using a biometric instead of a separate token to charge an account. And cash-handling is expensive, so you need to minimise it. When I was a child, the school took dinner-money once a week and issued paper tickets: one ticket, one meal. What you ate for your ticket was up to you, though choice was limited. Poor children entitled to free school meals were handed the tickets free, and what money changed hands from whom was invisible to all other children. Each stage involved discrete self-checking transactions in truck/tuck, with no need for continuing accounting for individuals.

Having created individual accounts, the system might still be a simple acounting tool, if those accounts were private. But much more than that is happening here.

Pupils even register points for making healthy choices and are rewarded for healthy eating.

And this being information on 'risk' to children - the risk of eating chips, in this case - it will be shared with other authorities, common law confidentiality is expressly excluded [Children Act 2004, s12]. But the information need not be collected; it is because it can be.

The concept of limited government power under law is almost dead: any system in the hands of a British public authority, whatever its ostensible purpose, now acquires a function in surveillance and behaviour control.

My apologies for writing very little for a while. I have ideas but not much time. And I am a slow writer. By way of explanation if not excuse:

A Conservative front bench spokesman has been sacked for racially insensitive remarks, leading one former Conservative cabinet minister (Michael Portillo) to note that while people complain about the professionalisation of politics, this is what happens when you bring in people with life-experience outside politics: they do things no professional would.

A true professional can get away with more than dodgy anecdote. He can make a direct appeal to public xenophobia, and hang a major strand of government policy on it. And do it in such a way that no-one calls him out on it:

It is unfair that foreigners come to this country illegitimately and steal our benefits, steal our services like the NHS and undermine the minimum wage by working.

Of course he is a socialist, so he could not be a racist, could he? But make no mistake about it, this is a dog-whistle to the political base of the Labour Party among the white working class.

It is not the legality of immigrants that makes their competition unwelcome. It is the fact of competition. Those who compete most effectively are legal migrants from the Commonwealth or Eastern Europe who have rights to the services as well as work ethic and education. Resentment does not check your papers: 'illegal immigration' is code for 'immigrants' tout court. Note John Reid's language: "foreigners".

So when your landlord checks your ID and registers where you live for the authorities, in fear of a £20,000 fine; when Kylie and Madonna, Rupert Murdoch's children, Sheikh Maktoum, Shilpa Shetty and all have to be fingerprinted for their ID cards* to make sure they are not "stealing our services" as well as adding to the colour of our national life; when you have to prove your residential status to see a doctor, who probably has to have an ID Card marked "Foreigner" if he is one of the tens of thousands of overseas doctors working in Britain (and threatening the minimum wage); when you.have to prove your own identity constantly for the official record even in private transactions and it would be so much easier to 'volunteer' to join the National Identity Register... then remember it is all the fault of filthy foreigners coming here, not in the least the exploitation of popular racist sentiment for political advantage. The Home Office has to watch you, just in case you might be a foreigner.

* Or not, since I can not see them hanging around to put up with it. All the world's interesting people, who live here for the combination of privacy and open society, might well go elsewhere.

And while we are on the subject of the Antichrist, is there not something very sign-of-the-apocalypse about this?

CHILDREN aged 11 to 16 are to have their fingerprints taken and stored on a secret database, internal Whitehall documents reveal.

The leaked Home Office plans show that the mass fingerprinting will start in 2010, with a batch of 295,000 youngsters who apply for passports.

'Leaked', my balls! This is being floated in order to measure public reaction. A muted response and all the right boxes will be ticked. A mass cry of protest and the plans will be shuffled off to another in-tray to await re-floating later in the year or early next year (preferably under cover of some news-consuming natural disaster or terrorist attack). These people believe that time is on their side and maybe it is.

Our masters are not only deeply and irredeemably malignant but they are also intoxicated with the heady fumes of power and verging on the insane. The question is, what do we do about it?

I read the headline of John Lloyd's article in the FT Magazine this week, and I read it again, and again. Every time it seemed to make less sense than before:

Personal politics: There are times when the government is right to intrude into the realm of private morality

Regardless of what it is or is not right for the government to do, state intrusion means something is no longer a matter of private morality, or morality at all. It is certainly not private, once the state is involved. And regulation displaces morality. The capacity for choice is required for morals to play a role.

Reading the article was even more perplexing. To the extent Lloyd's piece is about the Catholic/gay-adoption argument, it is as tedious as most of the vacuous discussion on the question. What engaged and enraged me were his premises. Mr Lloyd in this discussion treats the state as a kind of super person, possessed of its own opinions and moral sense, and that hectoring people who do not conform to those pseudo-desires is legitimate.

The morality of the welfare state depends on contribution and responsibility. Since some people don't contribute and many are irresponsible, the choices of those who do contribute and are responsible is [sic] either to tolerate the free riders, refuse to pay for the effects of their irresponsibility or trust the state to educate them.

False dichotomy and all, this is the authentic voice of the New Labour branch of civic republicanism: 'citizenship', which is to say personhood, defined by duty to the state-collective. He notes entirely accurately that:

[T]he British state has progressively, and under New Labour very significantly, delved deeper into both the prejudices and the private behaviour of citizens, and sought to reform both [...] ensuring that society as a whole observes the new order.

The square brackets there stand for the omission of two and three-quarter paragraphs, so apologists for the New Labour point of view may object that the last clause refers only to removing some disadvantages from homosexuals. But I am not being unfair. Ensuring that society as a whole observes the new order is the key to the project.

Despite there being other theories of the welfare state that I and other Samizdatistas might reject but that are less repugnant to human autonomy, we are now offered a Hobson's choice: be treated as drone in the sense of a worthless idler - or become a drone in the Borg sense, actually not a fertilising drone but a sterile ergate, emptied of all capacity for moral choice.

What is the eGovernmental equivalent of soft hands, marking the unproductive drones out for hounding to destruction of their dronish identity? Inadequate contribution. Failure to comply with whatever compliance is required.

You will not will incorrectly. You will comply.

The Register reports:

Following four hours of heated debate, the San Francisco Police Commission voted 5-0 in favor of adding 25 new cameras in eight locations throughout the city's roughly 50 square miles. Currently there are 33 cameras in 14 sites.

I had to read that story several times to acclimatise myself to the culture shock. If you do not live in Britain compare another Register story:

The police and Home Office are to press for regulatory powers that will insist that every one of the 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain is upgraded so it can be deputised to gather police evidence and provide a vehicle for emerging technologies that will automatically identify people and detect if they are doing anything suspicious.

Now (if you do not live in Britain) count your blessings.

I don't do not know if the sainted editors will tolerate the colloquial English - the Samizdata style-guide proscribes contractions - but I couldn't could not. So I won't will not.*

A.C. Grayling pithly outlines the absolutism behind Tony Blair's total information awareness scheme on The Guardian Unlimited. Do read it. I know a few of our readers refuse ever to move out of the safety of right-thinking reading, but they are missing comfort as well as understanding when they seek to avoid mental pollution from the liberal left.

* [editor's note: does that answer your question, Guy?]

Am I still going to be regarded as a wild-eyed loony by quite so many members of the general public after this?

Probably. Note the delicate way in which one big file on everything in your life - a British Dang An - is justified by a lacrymose anecdote about a family having to have dozens of contacts with government agencies after someone died. Who makes them do that in the first place?

Labour has contrived to do something very difficult indeed... they have made the 'Conservative' party look good. By announcing that failure to produce your ID card will make a person liable for a £1000 (about $1,850) fine if, for example, they cannot find and return the ID card of a recently dead relative, they have allowed David Davies, the Tory shadow home secretary to very reasonably point out that the ID card scheme...

...will hit the taxpayer not the terrorists" and is "just another Labour stealth tax" [..]"It is shocking that the Government is considering charges and fines on people at some of the most sensitive times in life. The Conservatives would scrap this plastic poll tax and invest the savings in practical measures to improve security."

...which puts me in agreement with the 'Conservative' party and that does not happen very often.

This is a weird story. From The Mail on Sunday, 2nd December 2006:

Estate agents secretly selling home details to tax inspectors

Snooping: tax officers can now find out exactly what your home is worth.

Government officials have been given access to a vast database of properties, revealing their sale prices and detailed floorplans, under a deal with the website Rightmove.co.uk.

The site, run by four of Britain's biggest estate agents, contains information on 800,000 properties - and the contract, which runs until 2008, also gives inspectors access to old records.

The Valuation Office Agency - the department of HM Revenue & Customs that allocates a council tax band to every home in England and Wales - will be able to use the data to find out about improvements such as double-glazing and conservatories that may increase tax bills.

What's weird is this: Property sales in Britain now involve a direct return to the Revenue as part of the new Stamp Duty Land Tax regime. And the Lands Registry has a definitive record of all such transactions, now online, which ought to be accessible to the Revenue. Unless the transaction is registered, you haven't bought the property. And a house's recent, actual, sale price is going to be pretty conclusive evidence of its valuation.

So why pay a website whose coverage can be at best partial? Either HMRC is wholly incompetent (possible). Or they think transactions are being under-declared in the hot market (difficult in most cases, when two sets of solicitors and bankers are involved). Or the Mail on Sunday is missing the point and HMRC is not targeting sellers but renters and landlords. Or this is a publicity exercise, and HMRC is engaging in its favourite hobby: public intimidation of the public.

It is a reflexive tic among libertarian types to describe Britain's NHS as 'Stalinist', in reference to its vast monolithic structure and institutional preference for central state planning. Now some indications that the parallels run a little deeper.

The Department of Health's first reaction to the campaign for people to opt out of the "Spine" medical records database, that I mentioned a couple of days ago, is not to attack it as 'irresponsible' as I was expecting. It is to demand that doctors report any patients who try to the authorities. "Let us deal with them," it appears to be saying.

The Guardian reported yesterday:

The Department of Health provoked uproar among doctors yesterday by asking GPs in England to send in correspondence from objectors who do not want their confidential medical records placed on the Spine, a national NHS database.

Sir Liam Donaldson, the chief medical officer, said letters from patients who want to keep their private medical details out of the government's reach should be sent to Patricia Hewitt, the health secretary, for "full consideration".

You will recall that such suggested letters were personal communications with doctors, asking them personally to do something: to code patients records so that they would not be uploaded to the Spine. That's something that can only (as I understand it) be done locally. "Consideration" by the Secretary of State defeats it.

It also seems to me that it would be a fundamental breach of confidentiality, and if the letter were posted, possibly a criminal offence contrary to the Postal Services Act 2000, for the letter to be forwarded to the Secretary of State without patient consent.

But neither law nor morals may stand in the way of the great plan.

...

BBC Radio 4 had another example this evening. Its File on 4 programme considered endemic MRSA and other antibiotic resistant bacteria in NHS hospitals. It interviewed a couple of epidemiological specialists who said with the current control regime slow progress was to be expected and the government target of 50% reduction in MRSA infections by 2008 is unrealistic. Andy Burnham MP, usually characterised as one of the brightest and best of the Primrose Hill group of New Labour heirs presumptive, was asked to comment. He said the complacency and defeatism of the clinical scientists was unacceptable: there was a target and the Health Service would meet it.

... Gave a very good account of themselves at NO2ID's public meeting on "The Database State" at Imperial College on Wednesday night. Sir Malcolm Rifkind, Professor Ross Anderson, and Henry Porter tore pieces out of, respectively, the ID card scheme, Connecting for Health, and generalised surveillance in the UK. People keep telling me how good the chairman was as well [blush].

Meanwhile, continuing one of the main themes of the meeting, another wise man, Phil Booth (formerly of the infinite ideas machine, but now too busy being my boss at NO2ID to post, sends an email that I thought I'd share with you all.

From: Phil Booth [mailto:national.coordinator@no2id.net]
Sent: 30 November 2006 19:04
To: Guy Herbert (general.secretary@no2id.net)
Subject: Please don't send me a Christmas card this year
Importance: High

Instead, use the stamp to send a copy of this letter to your GP:

http://www.TheBigOptOut.org/?page_id=23

Doing this will not only keep your own medical records where they should be – between yourself and your doctor - it will help protect medical confidentiality for everyone by demonstrating that you, like millions of others*, do not consent to your personal health information being uploaded to NHS central systems and made accessible to over 400,000 people - very few of whom would have anything to do with your clinical care.

Opting out in this way will not affect your access to healthcare but, if enough of us do it, it will send a powerful message to those in Whitehall who are currently trying to seize all of everybody's most private information without even seeking permission.

I was half-kidding about the Christmas card, but I'm deadly serious about opting out. Please read the letter and, if you agree that your privacy (and the privacy of everyone else in your family) is worth the price of a stamp, fill it in and send it to your GP.

And if you could also forward this mail to *your* Christmas card list, 2007 might end up being a very good New Year...

Phil

*The latest Medix poll [pdf here - GH] shows that 52% of GPs would not upload their patients' records to the spine, and only 13% would be willing to proceed without consent. An even more recent survey by JRRT shows that 53% of patients are opposed to automatic uploading of their records, with only 27% in favour - even though most people haven't heard about this yet.

You would all be on my Christmas card list, dear readers, if I had any idea who you are (and did not have to sign 2,000 already in my various capacities). You know what to do.

I found it via engadget and The Raw Feed, but I might have found it in the Guardian. The Raw Feed reported it this way:

In the belief that the world's most surveilled society isn't surveilled enough, eight London cops are getting HEAD-MOUNTED VIDEO CAMERAS to record their run-ins with drunks, soccer hooligans and unrestrained American tourists. The battery-operated cams will record police interactions, and may be used in court.

I do not see this as a problem. But what if the day ever comes when only government employees may use such gadgets? If present trends continue that may become the rule, especially when you consider that in a few short years time, we will be talking about devices that are pretty much invisible.

Next step, having to have a license.

It's the danger of tidy-minded people...

- Andrew Marr, in an extempore line, almost thrown away, to close an item on the surveillance state on the BBC's radio talk-show Start the Week.

I think Marr pins it down precisely. Oppressive regimes are frequently driven by a desire for order, seen as conformity to explicit rules. The most insidious, most universally oppressive castes, don't seek order because they want to be obeyed. They seek order for its own sake. They want the security of rules for everything, and recording everything.

NO2ID has demonstrated how it is possible to clone the Home Office's wonderful new ePassport while it is still in the post, without taking it out of the envelope.

The Home Office is unconcerned: with classic disingenuity its spokesman told The Guardian, which carried the first part of an unfolding story:

By the time you have accessed the information on the chip, you have already seen it on the passport. What use would my biometric image be to you? And even if you had the information, you would still have to counterfeit the new passport - and it has lots of new security features. If you were a criminal, you might as well just steal a passport.

But of course the Home Office does not care. If there is a conflict between your personal security and official convenience in logging the details of passports at borders - which is what it means by 'improving the security of passports' (note plural) - then there was never any doubt which would win.

An Anonymous Coward on slashdot pinned it down:

The basic problem isn't the algorithm they choose. It's that their goal is incompatible with security.

They wish to establish a world where all people can be instantly identified, correlated with commercial profiles, and tracked wherever they travel.

How can this be done "securely"? It cannot.

Thank you, Admiral Poindexter.

Road pricing has just got a big push in the Queen's Speech. Quoth Her Maj:

A draft bill will be published to tackle road congestion and to improve public transport.

More detail here:

The government will press ahead with plans to introduce trial road-pricing schemes across England, in an effort to cut congestion.

The draft Road Transport Bill gives councils more freedom to bring in their own schemes in busy areas and will look at the scope for a national road toll.

It also gives councils a bigger say in improving local bus services.

I am in favour of all this. At present, transport in the entire Western World is a mess worthy of the old USSR, the extra dimension of insanity being that the queues for the products park themselves on top of the products.

To me, this is the most interesting bit:

If the trials are successful, a national scheme could be investigated - with drivers possibly paying £1.34 a mile to drive on the busiest roads at rush hour. Black boxes in cars could work out how far they travel on toll roads.

Once you have "black boxes" in cars, the way is open to start arguing that the black boxes need not provide the Total Surveillance State with a constant stream of surveillance material, but only with information about whether the fees have been paid or not, for that particular black box. Obviously that will not be how the scheme starts by being implemented. The black box will reveal everything about you, your fingerprints, your grandmother, etc.. But nevertheless, these black boxes just might be the thin end of a wedge that separates road pricing arguments from civil liberties arguments, sane pricing of road use (good) from the Total Surveillance State (bad).

I now have an Oyster card for use on the London Underground which I bought, without telling them even my own name. This is just a debitable ticket. Black boxes in vehicles could be like that. Like I say, they won't be. But they could. Black boxes could merely be the automation of the process of chucking a coin out of your car window into a big bucket and proceeding on your way.

Black boxes will surely also make it possible to have much more precise pricing, of how much road you use, and when. At present, in London, all you are allowed to do is buy the equivalent of a one-day all zones travel card, or not. Those are your only choices, even if all you want to do is pop into the edge of the C-zone for a quick lunch, and then pop out again.

Could it be that those people who have been stealing number plates to pass their London Congestion Charges on to the poor suckers they stole them from are the ones we have to thank for this? Could that be what blew the whole photo-everyone's-number-plates paradigm for road pricing out of the water? If so, well done them.

Or am I being just too crazily optimistic? But please note: I am not saying that any such separation, between pricing and surveillance, ever will occur, merely that it will become a little bit easier to argue for.

I do not know (I seldom do) whether this is original or not, but it sounds like a very significant achievement, which these people have at least copied and marketed quite well, or, better yet, may actually have semi-invented.

Gizmodo reports:

An amazing innovation in the software world today: ALIPR (Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures) is a program that takes a look at digital images, applies some fancy math and then spits out a list of appropriate tags for the picture. It isn't perfect, but the designers claim it has a 98 percent accuracy rate. They've been letting it dig through Flickr and the software has matched at least one user-defined tag almost every time.

As a constant searcher for photos, I have often found myself exclaiming "I wish you could search pictures!" By that I do not mean merely search the titles and wording that people have attached to pictures. I mean search the actual pictures themselves. It would appear that this process is now well and truly under way.

But, does this stuff have a dark side? How soon before you can take a photo of someone, and say to the internet: Show me all the other photos you can find of this person. You could learn a lot, including quite a few things he might not want you to know. Imagine that kind of thing combined with searching through pictures like these, which I like to take of London tourists.

I have been browsing through John Battelle's book The Search (no problem finding books on the internet) in recent days, and he has interesting stuff on the privacy-invading potential of this kind of thing. (And oh look, Battelle's Searchblog reports on something very similar to the ALIPR thing, by the sound of it.)

Oh dear. The original idea of this posting was to be writing about something good, to counter the relentless temptation of those who want the world to get better but cannot help noticing all the ways in which it is getting worse. Never mind. Gizmodo has lots of other stuff like this. (Now you can do your work on one screen, and have crazy pictures on the other.)

As does this blog, which I also recommend. Sample quote:

Women aren't even trying to pretend they don't like having sex with robots any more.

More bad news. But the good news is that if you want more pictures along those lines, they just got easier to find.

On BBC News 24 TV this morning there was a tech show that was dominated by a report from the Republic of Korea ('South Korea').

After explaining how nasty some Korean people are in writing their opinions about other people, the BBC person said that the government of Korea was going to bring in a new law that would demand that anyone writing an opinion on to the internet would have to give their name and ID number. The only criticism of this new law (which I believe is going to come into effect next year) offered was "some people do not think it goes far enough".

I wonder if the 'Federalist' would have been written if 'Publius' and the rest had to sign their correct names. Or 'Cato's letters' - or so many of the other great publications in history.

Or indeed most opinion comments on this (or many other) internet sites.

"If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear by giving your right name" - I hope I do not have to explain how absurd that position is. Some people (such as me) really do not have anything to lose and can sign their name to any opinion they believe in - but most people have families, jobs, positions (and so on) and may sometimes wish to give their true opinion about a person or issue without putting their life on the line.

I could mention historical examples to the BBC (some of which I mention above), but as the BBC people think (to judge by one show I watched) that the "tribes of Angles and Saxons" brought Christianity to "pagan Roman Britain" and (in the ads for another show) claimed that the war that brought Constantine to power had broken "centuries of peace" I do not think they would understand what I was talking about.

I do not know whether it is the statism of the BBC or their lack of knowledge that bothers me more.

You don’t need identifiable personal information to understand trends and patterns, but British government data sharing focuses on pinpointing individuals. Some government departments are already planning to analyse public and private-sector databases for suspicious activity. The new Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) is reviewing public and private-sector databases, to find data-matching opportunities that could highlight suspicious behaviour by individuals that implies they are involved in organised or financial crime. The SOCA consultation paper ‘New Powers Against Organised and Financial Crime’, says the public sector could share private-sector suspicions of fraud by joining CIFAS, the UK’s fraud-prevention service. It also proposes matching suspicious activity reports with data from Revenue & Customs, the Department for Work and Pensions, the Passport Office and Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA) databases. This, it says, would be quite legal.

- from Share and share alike by Christine Evans-Pughe on IEE Networks. (Thanks to the great Chris Lightfoot for pointing out this piece.)

Naive foreigners with a belief in privacy and liberty may not understand that if in Britain you oppose state surveillance of just about everything, then you'll be accused of wanting to protect people who torture and/or murder children. The article in passing explains how, if not why.

Tom Wright of wrightwing.net wrote the following as a comment but it is simply too splendid to languish in the comment section...

I have said this before and in other venues:

I will support public [CCTV] cameras only if they are first placed in those areas where the worst and most egregious crimes occur:

In every room and every hallway of every police station in every nation.

In every room and every hallway of every legislative body in every nation.

In every room and every hallway of every executive and judicial branch of every nation.

And, as a condition of employment, upon taking the oath of office, permanently bolted to the head of every elected official, every appointed official, and every official authorized to carry arms in the course of duty.

Turned on, broadcasting, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in a manner I, and every one else, can monitor and record.

Then I will support cameras on me.

Not before.

Mark Edwards lays out some arguments against the Panopticon State

Yesterday I spent rather more time than I should have reading and commenting on the BBC 'Have Your Say' discussion about the surveillance society. Faced with the predictable response from the obedient serfs that "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" I tried to make three main points.

The first was that you have nothing to fear only if the authorities are perfect, all the time and every time. Imperfections could be mistaken identity, linking you with some criminal activity; if the bloke who asked me for the time as I bought my paper this morning went on to rob the newsagent after I left, might I be an accomplice? There is also the risk of blatant corruption, where a government employee abuses the data they collect as part of their job to identify you as being worth burgling, or to watch through your teenage daughters' bedroom windows.

My second point was that all of this surveillance does not make us any safer; the least implausible case for it suggests that evidence may be obtained that makes conviction of those committing crimes easier. This however is not proven beyond doubt. What is well established is that the constant surveillance creates an atmosphere of paranoia, in which we are convinced there is a greater threat to each of us than is actually the case. I have found no evidence that crime has fallen where cameras have been installed (I have seen reference to situations where crime fell when cameras were installed and police activity on the ground increased, but that is by no means the same thing).

Thirdly, I tried to explain that the level of surveillance in Britain had radically changed the relationship between government and governed, and between people and the law. There is no longer any presumption of innocence, because we are all suspects. Worse than that, we are suspected of crimes that we may not have committed yet. I feel we have moved from having a Civil Service that was motivated to serve the public (even if they were often misguided), to government employees who now see themselves as 'the authorities'.

Later in the evening I thought back over the day and realised that I had tried to justify, on purely utilitarian grounds, something that should need no justification; why should I have to justify my desire to protect my privacy? And why are so many people so careless of theirs?

You may be asking why I would want to spend my time posting to what is actually an authoritarian left wing site (the BBC), when I regard myself as libertarian right wing. My reason is simple, and, frankly, arrogant. I kid myself that my arguments may be so persuasive that someone will read my comment, and understand it enough for me to have sown a seed of doubt. I suspect this is so unlikely as be a delusion, but I keep trying. I fear I am not even nearly as persuasive as I like to think I am, and my arguments are doomed to failure, so I am wasting my time but I continue anyway.

To end on a positive note, I counted the most recommended comments at 16:00, and found the first pro camera comment was number 70. None of my contributions were in the preceding 69 but at least the forces of common sense seemed to be carrying the argument.

In today's news, media channels bring Samizdata readers this stunning, shocking announcement:

The UK is becoming a "surveillance society" where technology is used to track people's lives, a report has warned.

CCTV, analysis of buying habits and recording travel movements are among the techniques already used, and the Report on the Surveillance Society predicts surveillance will further increase over the next decade.

Information Commissioner Richard Thomas - who commissioned the report - warned that excessive surveillance could create a "climate of suspicion".

One of the many justifications for creating this all-seeing, all-knowing state is that it will help reduce crime. Well, it does not appear to be having much impact on Britain's lovely teenagers, at least according to a new report. Of course, one wonders how much of the worries about crime are partly a moral panic and partly based on hard, ugly reality (a bit of both, probably). Even so, Britain's approach to crime, which involves massive use of surveillance technology to catch offenders, appears not to be all that much of a deterrent to certain forms of crime, although arguably it does mean that there is a slightly greater chance of catching people once a crime has been carried out (not much consolation for the victims of said, obviously).

I recently got this book on the whole issue of crime, state powers, surveillance and terrorism, by Bruce Schneier, who confronts the whole idea that we face an inescapable trade-off, a zero sum game, between liberty and security. Recommended.

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies, The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

- C.S. Lewis

A lot of people have been talking to me about the pubs of Yeovil this week. Not because of my unwise enthusiasm when young for rough cider. But because of this, first covered at the beginning of the year:

Revellers in the Somerset town of Yeovil, often seen as Britain's answer to the Wild West on a Friday and Saturday night, were this weekend getting to grips with a unique scheme which is more science fiction than Wild West. Customers entering the town's six main late-night drinking and dancing joints were being asked to register their personal details, have their photograph taken and submit to a biometric finger scan.

That's from a report in The Guardian in May, which went on to explain:

The clubs and Avon and Somerset police, who are supporting the scheme, argue that it is not compulsory. Nobody can be forced to give a finger scan, which works by analysing a fingertip's ridges and furrows. However, the clubs admit they will not allow people in if they refuse to take part in the scheme.

But things have moved on. "Don't like it? You can drink elsewhere. Let the market sort it out... let these awful surveillance clubs go out of business and free-wheeling ones thrive," was my immediate reaction. It appears that was naive. While it may be "voluntary" for drinkers, it appears that it is not voluntary for pubs and clubs. Not any longer. The Register explains,

"The Home Office have looked at our system and are looking at trials in other towns including Coventry, Hull & Sheffield," said Julia Bradburn, principal licensing manager at South Somerset District Council.

Gwent and Nottingham police have also shown an interest, while Taunton, a town neighbouring Yeovil, is discussing the installation of fingerprint systems in 10 pubs and clubs with the systems supplier CreativeCode. [...]

The council had assumed it was its duty under the Crime and Disorder Act (1998) to reduce drunken disorder by fingerprinting drinkers in the town centre.

Some licensees were not happy to have their punters fingerprinted, but are all now apparently behind the idea. Not only does the council let them open later if they join the scheme, but the system costs them only £1.50 a day to run.

Oh, and they are also coerced into taking the fingerprint system. New licences stipulate that a landlord who doesn't install fingerprint security and fails to show a "considerable" reduction in alcohol-related violence, will be put on report by the police and have their licences revoked.

The fingerprinting is epiphenomenon. What's deeply disturbing here is the construction of new regimes of official control out of powers granted nominally in the spirit of "liberalisation". The Licensing Act 2003 passed licensing the sale of alcohol and permits for music and dancing - yes, you need a permit to let your customers dance in England and Wales - from magistrates to local authorities. And it provided for local authorities to set conditions on licenses as they saw fit.

Though local authorities are notionally elected bodies, and magistrates appointees, this looked like democratic reform. But all the powers of local authorities are actually exercised by permanent officials - who also tell elected councillors what their duties are. And there are an awful lot of them.

Magistrates used to hear licensing applications quickly. They had other things to do. And they exercised their power judicially: deciding, but not seeking to control. Ms Bradburn and her staff have time to work with the police and the Home Office on innovative schemes. I've noted before how simple-sounding powers can be pooled by otherwise separate agencies to common purpose, gaining leverage over the citizen. I call it The Power Wedge.

They are entirely dedicated to making us safer. How terrifying. "A Republic?" said the Seagreen, with one of his dry husky unsportful laughs, "What is that?"

GIve me the foul air of corruption, if that is the only way I may be permitted to breath at all.

The threats to liberty in Britain are too numerous to keep track of. Thanks to Josie Appleton on Spiked! for this, which I had entirely missed before now:

The Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Bill, due to return to the House of Commons next week, will mean that 9.5million adults - one third of the adult working population - will be subject to ongoing criminal checks.

It is a House of Lords Bill, but has Government backing.

The Bill would create an Independent Barring Board (IBB), which would maintain "barred lists" preventing listed individuals from engaging in "regulated activities". "In respect of an individual who is included in a barred list, IBB must keep other information of such description as is prescribed." [cl.2(5)]

As the Bill was originally presented, you would have no right to damages if you were mistakenly or maliciously included in a barred list, and nor would anyone else. And the IBB would have been an absolute finder of fact, with appeal allowed only on a point of law. So among the things the IBB would have been independent of is responsibility for its actions.

Now things are slightly better, but there's a cunning pseudo-compromise. You can sue. And you can now appeal the facts. But the criteria applied in the application of policy to an individual case - the core of what the IBB would do - is expressly (with a shade of Guantanamo) deemed not to be a matter of law or fact, and are therefore not to be subject to examination by the courts [cl.4(3)].

The schedule of "regulated activity" is 5 pages long in the printed copy. So you'll have to look it up yourselves if you are interested.

The practical effect? Well, as an example, as I understand it, if the Bill were currently law, I would be committing a criminal offence in paying someone I trust to look after my elderly mother, who is currently convalescing from an operation, without both of us being made subject to official monitoring first.

Once it is in force, if you wish to be self sufficient - even if you don't value your privacy, and are confident that theree's nothing about you to which an official could possibly have objected in the past, and that you might not be confused with anyone else - you'll need to know if a family member is going to be ill in sufficient time to fill in all the forms and wait for them to be processed. Better leave it to the state - which is of course always perfect.

From The Guardian yesterday:

The Department for Education has drawn up a series of proposals which are to be sent to universities and other centres of higher education before the end of the year. The 18-page document acknowledges that universities will be anxious about passing information to special branch, for fear it amounts to "collaborating with the 'secret police'". It says there will be "concerns about police targeting certain sections of the student population (eg Muslims)".

There are two things I find fascinating about this. Not that it explicitly suggests staff may want to report students to the authorities for "using a computer while Asian" - something which if followed would bankrupt every scientific, economic and medical faculty in the country, from the postage and staff time used in denouncements - but the institutional presumptions involved, and the political context.

First, institutions. It appears most of this document is more of the same general-terms bloviation we've seen before about "radical Mulsim groups recruiting on campuses" from tame ex-spooks in academia with research grants to foster. As if it were novel or significant. Young middle-class people toying with extreme ideas? Whatever next? (The Cambridge spies did inestimable damage; fellow '30s commie intellectuals Denis Healey and Alfred Sherman changed their minds, and respectively maintained Western defences and laid the foundations for the resurgence of liberalism. Student fervour is no guide to future performance.)

The meat is in the way delation on flimsy grounds is justified, as not harmful:

Special branch are aware that many HEIs [higher education institutions] will have a number of concerns about working closely with special branch. Some common concerns are that institutions will be seen to be collaborating with the 'secret police'.

HEIs may also worry about what special branch will do with any information supplied by an HEI and what action the police may subsequently take [...] Special branch are not the 'secret police' and are accountable.

Given that Special Branch is in the course of absorption into the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, perhaps this assertion is just irrelevant, but it is hard to see what it might mean in respect of either institution. In what way are Special Branch operations not secret? And how does "accountable" help? If you ask, accountable to whom? the only plausible answers are: to themselves, and to the Home Office [Department of Internal Security].

Doesn't sound any different to a traditional secret police to me. I'm perfectly prepared to believe that Special Branch, or a successor organisation, is necessary to anticipate underground threats to the Queen's peace. But its manner of operations, controlled by law, responding to real dangers to the people not cultural threats to the state, is what should distinguish it from the Stasi. The Department for Education is dressing up, "You can trust us", in the procedural language of human rights.

Second, politics. Why is this leaked now as a pre-announcement of something due later? I suggest timing is significant. It follows a week after a speech from Gordon Brown on 'Meeting the Terrorist Challenge' in which he called for "cultural action against terrorist extremism", and explicitly referenced a surprising announcement by Jack Straw of a week earlier still that he is uncomfortable with the niqab and asks constituents to remove theirs when they talk to him.

Plenty of inconsequential fuss has previously been made about the influence of the barking but mostly harmless Hizb-ut-Tahrir on campuses. (Somehow HMG has never got round to outlawing it, despite repeated sabre-rattling. Could it be a lightning-rod?) Mr Brown has adumbrated his totalitarian vision before, though he repeats the message more as he approaches the succession. Mr Straw has been interfering privately with his Muslim constituents' habits for many years, we are to believe, but never felt the need to mention it before. Islamism has been a pest in the West for twenty or more years, but we're not significantly more under threat from it than we were this time last year.

What is more under threat than it was this time last year is the Government. This is part of a rolling broadside of media presentations to indicate that the government is "doing something" about a putative Islamist threat. It is designed not to make us be more secure (as was old-time Special Branch activity, quietly gathering intelligence) but to make us feel less secure. Fear favours the incumbent. The Government is hastening to squash Mr Cameron's timid, discreditable, flirting with anti-Muslim sentiment in his (rather silly) policy announcement on quotas for faith schools by going all-in, knowing he cannot check, let alone raise.

A Big Theme distracts from the failures of the government that were beginning to trouble the polls of late. Liberty and justice to individuals be damned, if the mob can be fed.

The Pearce household is getting a paper shredder to cut up all those documents: old bills, etc, that can be used by thieves to steal a person's identity. It is, as this BBC report shows, a major problem. I do not imagine for a second that identify cards will significantly reduce this problem. In fact they may merely open up a whole new avenue for fraud. So, I am getting a shredder.

This looks like a decent website on where to get these machines.

(Those more fortunately blessed with space can of course just chuck this stuff on the bonfire.)

The EU and the US have failed to reach an agreement on airline passenger data sharing. This is a euphemism. The US is demanding information on all travellers that the European Court of Justice says violates our privacy, and the EU countries have been trying to square the circle. They have failed so far.

Let us be clear. The member states want to do it. All 25 of them, despite Germany's constitutional data protections. They would love to give the FBI your travel plans, bank account details and dietary preferences. UKgov is particularly keen, and makes sure such information is always sent ahead from UK flights to such friendly, peaceful and enlightened regimes as the People's Republic of China (it bullied the other EU states into accepting the principle of requiring carriers to retain all communications data for state inspection). What is stopping this becoming an universal convention is not European states but the independent, supra-national institutions of the Union.

Brendon O'Neill reports:

Throughout the country are an estimated five million CCTV cameras; that's one for every 12 citizens. We have more than 20 per cent of the world's CCTV cameras, which, considering that Britain occupies a tiny 0.2 per cent of the world's inhab itable land mass, is quite an achievement. The average Londoner going about his or her business may be monitored by 300 CCTV cameras a day. Roughly 1,800 cameras watch over London's railway stations and another 6,000 permanently peer at commuters on the Underground and London buses. In other major city centres, including Manchester and Edinburgh, residents can expect to be sighted on between roughly 50 and 100 cameras a day.

So if these cameras are so good, why is there any crime at all in the United Kingdom?

Those Samizdata readers who like to see Blair attacked, but do not read The Guardian paper edition - which I guess includes most of you - are missing a treat this Monday morning. Have a look at the NO2ID website, and enjoy a very crisp piece of advertising created for the campaign pro bono*. I am glad to say that the Guardian is distributed in bulk to Labour Conference delegates.

* PS - But not, unfortunately, inserted by the Grauniad pro bono. If you want to see more of this sort of thing, then you know the words of St Bob.

PPS - I did not put in any picture for copyright reasons. Perry put in the version from the Mail, which is a crude mock-up. So I have changed it back to the original version, by linking to the properly licensed copy on the NO2ID website. The Daily Mail's crop and bland retouching destroys the entire intention and subtlety of the adveritisement.

It seems the NO2ID campaign is starting to build up some momentum. We are not just nerds and rabble-rousers any more. We are nerds, rabble-rousers and comedians.

Yes, it is time for a comedy benefit. When 10 of the sharpest acts from the London stand-up circuit turn out on a Sunday night to support a two-year-old pressure-group, you feel we might just be getting somewhere...

By numbering everybody and everything, the world is going to be a better place? Unless you’re a bureaucrat, that’s a laughable idea. So why not laugh at it? That's what we intend to do at the Hackney Empire on the evening of October 1st.

Those of you in other parts of the world will just have to content yourselves with sending money to help save what remains of British liberty... but if you are handy for London, please come along. You can even book online (£12.50 a seat) by clicking the jolly banner:

I was distracted this morning by Mr Blair's predictable difficulties with the TUC, and nearly everyone else seems to have missed it too. There was nothing in The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Daily Telegraph or the early edition of The Evening Standard about this. But this is the important UK story today. Congratulations to the Financial Times on actually reporting the plan to abolish privacy.

It was trailed a little way back by a selective leak to The Guardian, but now seems forgotten. The Information Commissioner is playing dead. Or perhaps he has been reduced to a depressive paralysis by the tedious presentation and appalling implications of HM Government's Data sharing vision statement [pdf].

This Government wants to deliver the best possible support to people in need. We can only do this with the right information about people's circumstances [...] That is why Government is committed to more information sharing between public sector organisations and service providers. [...] We recognise that he more we share information, the more important it is that people are confident that their personal data is kept safe and secure. The Data Protection and Human Rights Acts offer a robust statutory framework to maintain those rights whilst sharing information to deliver better services."

I'm really not much reassured by assurances about "proper respect for the individual's privacy [...] supported by ensuring the security and integrity of personal information both before and after it has been shared". How about not sharing it?

If you actually have privacy, you don't need government Codes of Practice to tell bureaucrats how to 'respect' it. If you actually have privacy, then the private sphere is beyond regulatory intervention and 'support'. If you actually have privacy, you actually have freedom.

Pre-empting the failure of the national ID scheme to deliver total surveillance soon enough, HMG is opening the other portals to its totalitarian hell.

When even former cheerleaders for centralised government by technology and datasharing get scared, you have to wonder can it be stopped after all? Michael Cross of The Guardian, now gets it, it seems:

Ministers are preparing to overturn a fundamental principle of data protection in government, the Guardian has learned. They will announce next month that public bodies can assume they are free to share citizens' personal data with other arms of the state, so long as it is in the public interest.

The policy was agreed upon by a cabinet committee set up by the prime minister, and reverses the current default position - which requires public bodies to find a legal justification each time they want to share data about individuals.

This is straight reporting, there is none of the sneering at privacy advocates we are used to from Cross.

But extended government data-sharing is already happening. This, for example, was unwelcome news to me.