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The land of the free is imposing privacy-busting requirementson its visitors.
At America’s insistence, passports are about to get their biggest overhaul since they were introduced. They are to be fitted with computer chips that have been loaded with digital photographs of the bearer (so that the process of comparing the face on the passport with the face on the person can be automated), digitised fingerprints and even scans of the bearer’s irises, which are as unique to people as their fingerprints.
There are so many concerns that one does not know where to start:
For one thing, the data on these chips will be readable remotely, without the bearer knowing. And—again at America’s insistence—those data will not be encrypted, so anybody with a suitable reader, be they official, commercial, criminal or terrorist, will be able to check a passport holder’s details.
So we have unencrypted details about an individual, recorded in by an unreliable manner (biometrics). That’s what I call the worst of both worlds…
A second difficulty is the reliability of biometric technology. Facial-recognition systems work only if the photograph is taken with proper lighting and an especially bland expression on the face. Even then, the error rate for facial-recognition software has proved to be as high as 10% in tests. If that were translated into reality, one person in ten would need to be pulled aside for extra screening. Fingerprint and iris-recognition technology have significant error rates, too. So, despite the belief that biometrics will make crossing a border more efficient and secure, it could well have the opposite effect, as false alarms become the norm.
And far more unpleasant as you already be ‘guilty’ of not having your non-papers in order.
The scariest problem of all is the remote-readability of the chip, which combined with unencrypted data on it, make is designed for clandestine remote reading. Deliberately.
The ICAO specification refers quite openly to the idea of a “walk-through” inspection with the person concerned “possibly being unaware of the operation”.
Privacy and liberty implications of this are enourmous… and it gets worse. Identity theft will become a matter of setting up such clandestine remote readings. Terrorists will be able to know the nationality of those they attack.
Even the authorities realised that this would be double-plus-ungood and are looking for ways to ‘protect’ the chip either by blocking radio waves with a Faraday cage or an electronic lock. As a result, some countries may need special equipment or software to read an EU passport, which undermines the ideal of a global, interoperable standard. And so we come the full joyous circle of government ‘compentence’…
Cross-posted from Samizdata.net
The land of the free is imposing privacy-busting requirements on its visitors.
At America’s insistence, passports are about to get their biggest overhaul since they were introduced. They are to be fitted with computer chips that have been loaded with digital photographs of the bearer (so that the process of comparing the face on the passport with the face on the person can be automated), digitised fingerprints and even scans of the bearer’s irises, which are as unique to people as their fingerprints.
There are so many concerns that one does not know where to start:
For one thing, the data on these chips will be readable remotely, without the bearer knowing. And—again at America’s insistence—those data will not be encrypted, so anybody with a suitable reader, be they official, commercial, criminal or terrorist, will be able to check a passport holder’s details.
So we have unencrypted details about an individual, recorded in by an unreliable manner (biometrics). That’s what I call the worst of both worlds…
A second difficulty is the reliability of biometric technology. Facial-recognition systems work only if the photograph is taken with proper lighting and an especially bland expression on the face. Even then, the error rate for facial-recognition software has proved to be as high as 10% in tests. If that were translated into reality, one person in ten would need to be pulled aside for extra screening. Fingerprint and iris-recognition technology have significant error rates, too. So, despite the belief that biometrics will make crossing a border more efficient and secure, it could well have the opposite effect, as false alarms become the norm.
And far more unpleasant as you already will be ‘guilty’ of not having your non-papers in order.
The scariest problem of all is the remote-readability of the chip, which combined with unencrypted data on it, make it designed for clandestine remote reading. Deliberately.
The ICAO specification refers quite openly to the idea of a “walk-through” inspection with the person concerned “possibly being unaware of the operation”.
Privacy and liberty implications of this are enourmous… and it gets worse. Identity theft will become a matter of setting up such clandestine remote readings. Terrorists will be able to know the nationality of those they attack.
Even the authorities realised that this would be double-plus-ungood and are looking for ways to ‘protect’ the chip either by blocking radio waves with a Faraday cage or an electronic lock. As a result, some countries may need special equipment or software to read an EU passport, which undermines the ideal of a global, interoperable standard. And so we come the full joyous circle of government ‘compentence’…
We interrupt your browsing for this bulletin:
Mark Steyn is back on-line.
That is all.
The Great International Petroleum Exchange Uprising was noted here earlier, and plans for a T-shirt commemorating the event are in the works.
We all knew that, of course. But when the Manolo puts the evil eye on you, well, time to update your will, launder your cash, gas up the Lear, and oil the hinges on the back door.
Beautiful shoes for everyone! Death to the tyrant who would deny the peoples the beautiful shoes! This it is the political philosophy of the Manolo.
The Cuban embargo should be lifted, not for ideological libertarian reasons, but for pragmatic ones. Doing so will unleash a tide of cash and goods into Cuba, not to mention Americans, and nothing could be more corrosive of the tyrannical regime there.
Much as I love cigars, I won’t buy Cuban cigars, because that is a state-controlled industry and I choose not to do business with the Cuban state. (Plus, I think they are overrated). I would go to Cuba, though, after the embargo is lifted because doing so would allow me to circumvent the state, meet real Cubans, and undermine a Stalinist bastard in my own small way.
I am watching the BBC’s Culture Show, and they are telling a sad little story. Apparently, the regional theatre companies of Britain have, during the last five years or so, enjoyed a bonanza of government money. There has apparently been a mini theatrical renaissance in the provinces. Hurrah!
But now, the horrid government is imposing a pay freeze, and this “great achievement” is in jeopardy. For the sake of a few more million quid, this great achievement could all collapse. Woe!
I could have told them. Never, I would have said to them (had they thought of asking me), depend upon government money and the promises of politicians. Never get addicted to the contents of the public purse, for they can be snatched away from you without warning. Renaissances funded only by politicians have a way of dying very prematurely. Getting money from mere customers may be harder in the short run, but once you learn the trick, you have a foundation you can build on more confidently.
Probably all this is just the political machine doing what it does. It spends. It cuts back on its spending. Occam’s Razor says that this is what is happening here. But, although it was not discussed on the show, I wonder if the end of the romance (that is to a Times on Line piece, which may be a problem for some, but it tells this story better than any other I could find) between New Labour and the Luvvies – caused by such things as New Labour going to war in Iraq, and the Luvvies going to war against the war in Iraq – might have something to do with this story of theatrical feast and threatened theatrical famine.
Last night I started to get into the mood for the Capitalist Ball (that being a link to David’s piece about it last year), which will take place in Brussels this evening, by playing waltzes by Johann Strauss II, on my medium- to lo-fi hi-fi machine.
And what lovely music it is! I remember reading that when Herbert von Karajan got hired to conduct the New Year’s Day concert in Vienna, in 1987, he experienced a sense of both musical and personal renewal. This makes perfect sense to me.
With these waltzes, marches and dances, the symphony orchestra had its one great age of pop superstardom. Before then, pop music was played in taverns and in the open air, and classical music was for the aristocracy. As the audience for orchestral music widened, and as the symphony orchestra widened with it, composers like Brahms and Dvorak, in among grander works like piano and cello concertos, and symphonies of course, also wrote dances for the orchestra. But there was about these pieces an air of down-market music being ever-so-slightly elevated by these grandees of the concert hall. The music of the Strauss family was the genuine, popular article, the purest example of orchestral popular dance music ever created.
In Italy, opera was enjoying a similar period of genuine popularity, where high art and popular art were similarly united.
With arrival of the twentieth century, and the age of electronic recording, and then of electronically enhanced instruments, pop music and classical music again went their separate ways. While the classical musicians concentrated on recording what would now be called their back catalogue, the popsters switched back to more raucous sounds, more suited to the limitations of early recording, and then more attuned to their new audiences, no longer beholden to the musical conventions of an earlier epoch. And opera also divided, the torch of popularity being handed on, via operetta, to the stage ‘musical’.
Meanwhile, the once imperial city of Vienna has been dining out on the music of the Strauss family just about ever since, first for real as it were, and then – and now, still – in reaction to the very different and disappointing reality by which it was increasingly engulfed, and to which it made its own baleful contribution, in the form of the influence and perverse inspiration it supplied to the young Adolf Hitler. No wonder the Viennese still prefer the Beautiful Blue Danube version of their past to more recent horrors. (The moment of transition, when what had been a joyous reality was sliding into history, was memorably captured by that other Strauss, Richard, no relation, in the waltzes he wrote for his opera, Der Rosenkavalier.)
But the music of the original Strausses still plays on. As the centuries pass, it seems all too possible that, horrifying though they were, the wars and massacres of the twentieth century may eventually be topped by later and greater horrors as yet unimaginable. The slaughters that now seem to us so uniquely evil may in due course seem only banal, like the murders and feuds of the Italian Renaissance, which we now think of as the mere backdrop to all those wondrous paintings. But those waltzes, dances and marches of the century before the one just concluded – the waltzes especially – will never be bettered.
At the Capitalist Ball, one of the organisers has just told me, there will be a French swing band in action. A different and later style of dance music, but one I am greatly looking forward to hearing.
by Rick Tumlinson
Rick Tumlinson of the Space Frontier Foundation is an old friend of mine who has been directly involved in much behind the scenes in commercial space, including the private attempt to save MIR. Here, with his permission, is an article like the one I have been intending to write. I am still traveling and just have had no time do so. Rick probably did a better job of it anyway
There are three initiatives from 2004 that if built upon the right way will rapidly accelerate the human breakout into space.
The first was U.S. President George W. Bush???s vision of permanent human presence beyond Earth orbit, which was endorsed by congressional funding and clarified by the Aldridge Commission.
The second was the flight of SpaceShipOne, the first major triumph of the new space movement and its goal of opening space to the people. This was solidified by a multi-million-dollar contract from Virgin Galactic to build a fleet of commercial spaceships.
Finally, the passage of legislation in Congress that begins to create regulatory certainty in the New Space transportation field clears the way for the long-term development of this nascent industry.
→ Continue reading: Private Industry Can Help NASA Open the Space Frontier
We bit off more than we could chew. They were just Cockney barrow boy spivs. Total thugs. I’ve never seen anyone less amenable to listening to our point of view.
– An unnamed member of a group of Greenpeace activists, who failed to stop trading on the International Petroleum Exchange yesterday, but who did succeed in having the crap beaten out of them by traders.
(Link via Tim Blair)
Freedom of speech makes it much easier to spot the idiots.
– Jay Lessig, quoted in the Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web.
Smoking, Class and the Legitimation of power
Sean Gabb
Hampden Press 2005
What are you first reactions to reading this?
In any society, the main function of government is to provide status and incomes for the ruling class. However recruited, the members of such a class will be motivated by a disinclination to earn their living by voluntary exchange, or by a delight in coercing others, or by a combination of the two. Its size and activities will be determined by the physical resources it can extract from the people, by the amount of force it can use against them, and by the nature and acceptance of the ideology that legitimises its existence. None of these factors by itself will be decisive, but each is a necessary factor. Change any one, and the working of the other two will be limited or wholly checked.
Just the use of the phrase ‘ruling class’ is sufficient, among many people, to conjure up unfortunate images of Trotskyite college professors and bed-sit Che Guevarras. But read the above paragraph carefully. If you assumed that this was a bit of Marxist cant, you were wrong. In fact, it is an extract from the Introduction to the latest book by classical English liberal academic, Dr. Sean Gabb.
A large part of the book actually consists of reprints of three long articles that Sean originally penned in the late 1980’s for FOREST. Each article consists of defence of the right to smoke from a historical perspective, a Christian perspective and a Conservative perspective. Each is discussed in more detail below.
But this is more than just a reprint of previously iterated views. Dr. Gabb now concedes that while has analysis of the methodology of the anti-smoking lobby was accurate, even he was unclear as to the primary motivation behind the crusade, blaming various phenomena such as junk science, resonant Puritanism or decaying Marxism. But, as he now admits, he overlooked (or failed adequately to comprehend) the primary cause of the war on tobacco. → Continue reading: Smoking is a subversive act
Every Thursday I do a posting for this blog about intellectual property rights etc., and I am getting paid for this, so this is a commitment that I take seriously. It means that I tend to follow up anything (this link trail started here and went via here) with words like “copyright” or “patent” or “intellectual property” in it with less than my usual level of casualness about internet chitchat.
The Eiffel Tower’s likeness had long since been part of the public domain, when in 2003, it was abruptly repossessed by the city of Paris. That’s the year that the SNTE, the company charged with maintaining the tower, adorned it with a distinctive lighting display, copyrighted the design, and in one feel swoop, reclaimed the nighttime image and likeness of the most popular monument on earth. In short: they changed the actual likeness of the tower, and then copyrighted that.
As a result, it’s no longer legal to publish current photographs of the Eiffel Tower at night without permission…
So far so depressing, and I will probably do my next Thursday’s CNE-IP posting about this, unless something more compelling of an IP-related sort comes my way. Suggestions for that, and for my IP postings generally, are of course very welcome.
The bit that got me wanting to write about this for Samizdata comes immediately next:
…Technically, this applies even to amateurs. When I spoke to the Director of Documentation for SNTE, Stéphane Dieu,…
I love that surname.
…via phone last week, he assured me that SNTE wasn’t interested in prohibiting the publication of amateur photography on personal Web sites. “It is really just a way to manage commercial use of the image, so that it isn’t used in ways we don’t approve,” said Mr. Dieu.
In a way this is fair enough, if the property rights in question are not in any way controversial or even confusing. I let people into my flat and can still then control their behaviour by not allowing them in any more. But Intellectual Property rights with regard to something like open-air photography of architectural monuments, followed by Internet display, are hardly a model of clarity and certainty. What bothers me about this is the sense I have that the French Official Mind is not making very nice distinctions here between what is simply private property, and that which is public property, but still supposedly in need of protection. The protective methods they are using suggest a definite preference for benign tyranny over clear definitions of what is and what is not allowed. There is an air of “everything is prohibited, so that in practice most of it can still happen, but can then be arbitrarily interrupted whenever we feel like it”, about this.
It is surely not a good sign when things are described as “technically” illegal.
I will certainly regard myself from now on as entirely entitled to photo the Eiffel Tower at night, and to display my pictures of it on the Internet in any way I like that does not insult it or severely misrepresent its shape or nature. Yet I have the feeling that if Mr Dieu took against me for some other reason (perhaps for also photographing something more definitely forbidden than the Eiffel Tower at night), my Eiffel Tower pictures might still be used against me.
I would welcome comments on any of that, and also on the even more potentially fraught matter of the rights and wrongs of taking (interesting word use that) pictures of strangers and putting those up on the www, which is something I have already done quite a lot of, and hope in due course to do a lot more of.
A link to a reasonably simple explication of the legal facts in, on the one hand, Britain, and, on the other hand, on the Continent (my understanding being that the law is very different on either side of the Channel), would be especially welcome. Plus: will this contrast soon be ironed out of existence by the EU? Something tells me that if it is, it will be in the form of tighter prohibitions in Britain rather than any relaxation of the law on the Continent.
Maybe my fellow Samizdatista and more to the point fellow CNE-IPer David Carr has already written about all this, here, or here, and I either missed it or forgot about it.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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