We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
News yesterday of the steady expansion of Britain’s national DNA database. From the Guardian:
Civil liberties campaigners last night claimed the government was intent on building a national DNA database “by stealth” as police prepared to enter the two-millionth genetic profile on to the system later today.
The police minister, Hazel Blears, who will load the sample on to the system, claimed last night that since 1995 the national DNA database has transformed the fight against crime, helping to catch not only serious criminals but also more minor offenders such as burglars and car thieves.
The British DNA database was the first and is the biggest in the world with currently more than 1.8 million criminal profiles and around 200,000 DNA samples from unsolved crimes, including blood and semen stains.
. . .
The Liberal Democrat Simon Hughes said this meant those who were never charged or who were subsequently found innocent would be unable to remove their details.
“Now that one in every 30 people features on the police DNA database, the government must come clean on its intentions,” he said. “If ministers want a database of every citizen’s DNA, let them say so instead of trying to create one by deception.”
The civil rights organisation Liberty claimed the government was hell-bent on creating a national DNA database by stealth, and that academics had warned it was not foolproof.
Several test cases are in progress in the US over how unique a DNA match actually is. Even the British founder of DNA fingerprinting, Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys, has warned that samples involving only a small number of cells could prove misleading, as we are all potentially covered in bits of other people.
But Ms Blears last night defended the growing use of the DNA database. “DNA profiles… play a vital role in the search for truth, establishing innocence as well as proving guilt. Law abiding citizens have nothing to fear and today I will have a sample of my own DNA taken and loaded on to the database.”
Ah yes, law abiding citizens have nothing to fear. But that is assuming that there are only a reasonable number of laws, and that most of us never break them. But what if there are tons of new laws being passed every year, and most of us, including Ms Blears, have no idea what they all consist of, and most of us are breaking some of them every day of our lives? What, in short, if none of us are “law abiding” any more?
In a comment on a posting in the small hours of this morning (how time does the opposite of fly (it’s the blogging that flies) when you are blogging) about the fall of the Roman Empire, Terence Kealy, etc., Guessedworker said this:
If one is looking at parallels with the present day they exist a-plenty. The starkest and most fundamental is the destruction we allow of our own traditions and mores, by and large in the pursuit of self-gratification. Close behind that is the weakness of understanding, the blind altruism that permits a river of foreign humanity to flow into our midst.
These are great moral failings then and now, against which any failing in the promotion of science and technology is decidedly minor.
To which I replied thus:
Guessedworker
I couldn’t agree with you less.
→ Continue reading: Here’s where we’ll have the immigration flamewar please
The dominant ‘story’ of economic development is that science gives birth to technology, and technology makes money. But who pays for science? That has to be the government, the community, all of us. Because, who else will? So, economic development depends on a strong state, because only a strong state will pay for all that science.
Terence Kealey, in his book The Economic Laws of Scientific Research, tells a different story. Strong states destroy freedom. Weak states allow it, and thus allow capitalism, which pays for technology, which stimulates, pays for and is in its turn stimulated by science (the causal link between technology and science is that technology causes science at least as much as science causes technology), and technology also (Kealey accepts the usual causal link about this bit) causes increased prosperity.
The early chapters of this book supply an excellent potted history of pre-industrial Western Civilisation and its development. Here are the paragraphs that describe the fall of the Roman Empire:
So unconcerned with research did the Roman State become, that the Emperors actually suppressed technology. Petronius described how: ‘a flexible glass was invented, but the workshop of the inventor was completely destroyed by the Emperor Tiberius for fear that copper, silver and gold would lose value’. Suetonius described how: ‘An engineer devised a new machine which could haul large pillars at little expense. However the Emperor Vespasian rejected the invention and asked “who will take care of my poor?”.’ So uncommercial had the Romans become, their rulers rejected increases in productivity. In such a world, advances in science were never going to be translated into technology. Thus we can see that the government funding of ancient science was, in both economic and technological terms, a complete waste of money because the economy lacked the mechanism to exploit it.
The fall of the Roman Empire was frightful. The growth of the Empire had always been based on conquest, and the Empire’s economy had been fuelled by the exploitation of new colonies. When the Empire ran out of putative victims, its economy ceased to make sense, particularly as the mere maintenance of the Empire, with its garrisons and its bureaucrats, was so expensive. From the beginning of the second century AD, the State had to raise higher and higher taxes to maintain itself and its armies. It was under the Emperors Hadrian and Trajan, when the Empire was at its largest, that residual freedoms started to get knocked away to ensure that revenue was collected. Special commissioners, curatores, were appointed to run the cities. An army of secret police were recruited from the frumentarii. To pay for the extra bureaucrats, yet more taxes were raised, and the state increasingly took over the running of the economy – almost on ancient Egyptian lines. In AD 301, the Emperor Diocletian imposed fixed wages and prices, by decree, with infractions punishable by death. He declared that ‘uncontrolled economic activity is a religion of the godless’. Lanctantius wrote that the edict was a complete failure, that ‘there was a great bloodshed arising from its small and unimportant details’ and that more people were engaged in raising and spending taxes than in paying them. → Continue reading: Terence Kealey on the fall of the Roman Empire
Here’s news of a portable phone that can view through your home webcam.
Now that REALLY sounds like the democratisation of surveillance to me. Who says your “home” webcam has to be at home? What happens when webcams get REALLY small? They’ll be everywhere, accessed by who the hell knows who?, is what.
Via boingboing. “Self-surveillance”, Xeni Jardin calls it. Xeni Jardin is missing the bigger picture.
Last night I gave a talk at the Tim Evans household on the theme of “Which Does Freedom Better? Ideas or Institutions?” I followed my usual practice of trying to organise my thoughts during the day of the talk, but this time the procedure didn’t go smoothly, because my thoughts remained stubbornly disorganised throughout the day and remained so on the night. So instead I just flung out as many disorganised thoughts as I could – enough to provoke a dozen postings here, another half dozen at White Rose, and a dozen more at my Culture Blog – and enough to make a decent evening of it for those gathered, if not such a decent talk.
Here is just one idea that I alluded to last night, and I apologise if you think it’s a rather obvious one.
This – to me anyway – fairly obvious idea is that the Internet has surely shifted the balance of power away from the defence of particular institutions and towards the proclamation of universal, “disembodied” ideas. (That word “disembodied”, cropped up a lot last night, as did “embodied”.) → Continue reading: On the particular and the universal – how the Internet has shifted the balance
At present I am not in the market for a longer penis, or for more energy when my mind turns to the sexual as opposed to urinary use of the penis that I already have, so most junk emails are for me just that: junk. Delete. However, I got one this morning, and I’m sure millions of others did too, which interested me, White Rose wise, and (although in the years to come I will probably mark this moment as the one when my life stopped working and went to hell, my identity stolen, my bank account emptied, my hard disc and that of all my friends virused, etc.) I pressed this link.
For the benefit of those wiser or more cautious or more internet savvy than me, the link leads to a website devoted to a computer programme which enables you to learn everything there is to learn about all of your friends and all of your enemies.
Now, once downloaded to your computer, the INTERNET INVESTIGATOR quickly sorts through the maze of over 800 million web pages and other information sources, easily and effortlessly, and turns your personal computer into a POWERFUL information goldmine.
The democratisation of joined-up government, you might say. Everyone can be a member of the surveilling class. (And by the way I think “surveilling class” or maybe “surveilling classes” is a meme with a future.)
As with current strength surveillance cameras, the actual effectiveness of this particular programme as of now – it sounds to me a lot like an old fashioned search engine (but what do I know?) – is not really the big point here, or not the point that interests me. What I think is the big point is that, sooner or later, such programmes surely will do what this one promises to do.
Not surprisingly, the same web site also pushes another programme called “Privacy Protector”, which, I guess, enables you to defend yourself against Internet Investigator. Maybe Privacy Protector is the real product, and Internet Investigator only exists to scare up business for Privacy Protector.
Whatever. It all has the smell of the new battles that people are going to be fighting in this brave new twenty first century. And they won’t just be government-people or people-government battles, they’ll be people-people battles.
In this posting I want to pull together all the reasons for thinking that the “New Labour” project may now be unravelling, and unravelling so seriously that there is a real possibility that they might even lose the next general election. There is no one cause of this phenomenon, just lots of things coming together.
My first because deals head-on with the – I presume – widespread American belief that … well, how could we not love Tony Blair? But there are many other becauses now assembling themselves, and the list that follows is surely not exhaustive:
Because being popular in the USA doesn’t necessarily make you popular in your own country. Like Thatcher and Gorbachev before him, Tony Blair is now revered by many Americans, but this doesn’t make him any more liked here. If anything, probably rather less so. Being thought of as a Prime Minister who is more concerned to play the world statesman than to grapple with the actual problems on your own desk is not a plus. Prime Minister Callaghan never recovered from the public perception (“Crisis? What crisis?”) of him as a man who didn’t care about his own country’s problems because they were too boring and too intractable. Blair is flirting with the same stuff now.
Because now fewer and fewer people are Labour or are Conservative, they merely vote Labour or Conservative. Party membership of all parties is now tiny. When there’s a shift of voter mood, such shifts can be bigger than they used to be, because more people are willing to switch. Even majorities like the current Labour one can vanish, as quickly as they arrived. → Continue reading: Labour could lose the next general election because …
Evidence, if you ever needed it, that surveillance cameras are getting smarter:
Britain’s first digital speed cameras are being installed today and will go “live” next month.
The new “super cameras”, which need no film or servicing, are being tested at Limehouse, in east London. With traditional cameras, motorists hope that there is no film in the camera and that they can get away with speeding.
But there will be no escape with the new digital version, which sends a stream of images and data along a phone line to a Metropolitan Police centre in Kent.
The first cameras are being installed at the Limehouse Link tunnel, which is an accident blackspot. Surveys have shown that drivers of nearly all of the 80,000 vehicles using the tunnel each day break the 30mph speed limit.
In the last three years, 14 accidents there have led to death or serious injury.
And evidence too of why surveillance cameras are widely believed to be a good thing, not just by the surveilling classes, but by the surveilled also.
I’m no China hand, but this (Headline: “Bill to Curb Hong Kong Civil Liberties Is Shelved – Experts: Move may be a signal the territory’s leader is in trouble”) sounds like good news:
Hong Kong – One week after half a millon people marched through this city’s sweltering streets to protest the government’s efforts to impose sweeping anti-subversion legislation widely seen as a threat to civil liberties, the territory’s leader abruptly decided to shelve the bill.
This popped up yesterday on the Libertarian Alliance Forum, courtesy of Libertarian Alliance Director Chris Tame. Is it for real, or are we in paranoid fantasy territory? Either way, all White Rosers should know the story, about which, until this, I knew nothing.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 7, 2003
CASPIAN asks, “How can we trust these people with our personal data?”
CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering) says anyone can download revealing documents labeled “confidential” from the home page of the MIT Auto-ID Center web site in two mouse clicks.
The Auto-ID Center is the organization entrusted with developing a global Internet infrastructure for radio frequency identification (RFID). Their plans are to tag all the objects manufactured on the planet with RFID chips and track them via the Internet.
Privacy advocates are alarmed about the Center’s plans because RFID technology could enable businesses to collect an unprecedented amount of information about consumers’ possessions and physical movements. They point out that consumers might not even know they’re being surveilled since tiny RFID chips can be embedded in plastic, sewn into the seams of garments, or otherwise hidden.
“How can we trust these people with securing sensitive consumer information if they can’t even secure their own web site?” asks CASPIAN Founder and Director Katherine Albrecht. → Continue reading: Is this for real?
I just caught a snippet news item on the BBC about how magazines are complaining about people browsing through their mags in the shops, and photoing favourite pages with their camera-portable-phones and immediately phoning them to their friends. Information theft! Couldn’t find anything about this on the BBC website, but maybe someone else can.
I think this presages the moment when it won’t only be Big Brother who wields surveillance cameras in the street. Everybody will be able to! And they’ll be able to phone in the footage to – I don’t know – their personal websites or something. It’ll get even more fun, if that’s the word, when the cameras are in people’s buttons or glasses and you won’t even know that someone is doing it.
This kind of thing is probably happening already, on the quiet. The real excitement happens when doing it becomes a teen fad, and it starts being known about, and argued about by people saying they have a right to do it. Which maybe they do. After all, the government does it.
What happens then? What will White Rose make of that.
I’ve always been better at questions than at answers.
The usual practice here is to denounce France, and certainly (with only occasional and admirable exceptions) the French, as one of God’s more incomprehensible derelictions of His creative duty. But this device, the Trottoir Roulant Rapide – which means “fast rolling pavement”, is, I think, impressive.
Science fiction buffs have long been able to read about such gadgets. At Heathrow, as in many other places I’m sure, there’s a slow rolling pavement, which makes your journey a bit less wearisome from the tube station to one of the terminals. And I seem to recall something similar connecting a couple of bits of the London Underground somewhere in the City, although I could be imaging that. But this TRR is an altogether more serious creation, because it is fast. It is rapide.
“People have to learn how to use it and that takes time,” the trottoir’s inventor, Anselme Cote, told BBC News Online.
He added that escalators had presented travellers with a similar challenge when they were first introduced.
People stepping directly on to the TRR would be sure to lose their balance, so they first have to be accelerated – and then decelerated again at the other end.
“The problem lies in the transitions; one has to glide from one phase to the next; we ask people not to move, but they are not used to it,” says Mr Cote.
“One must keep one’s feet flat between the two phases, but people walk. There’s a technique to it. But people get used to it very quickly.”
Fair enough. → Continue reading: A nouveau kind of trottoir
|
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.
|
