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]
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Internetnews.com reports that the U.S. Senate voted to delay by one year the looming Oct. 26 deadline for Visa Waiver Program (VWP) countries to begin issuing machine-readable passports. The House of Representatives has already approved a one-year extension.
The VWP allows visitors from Europe, Japan, Australia and 22 other countries to visit the United States without having to obtain a visa. In 2002, Congress approved the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act, which required those countries to issue tamper-resistant passports that incorporate biometric identifiers.
According to the U.S. Department of State, neither the United States nor any of the larger VWP countries, including England, France, Italy, Germany, Ireland, Spain or Japan, are in a position to meet the Oct. 26 deadline.
The legislation now goes to the White House, and, although President Bush sought a two-year delay, he is expected to sign the bill.
Maura Harty, assistant secretary of the Bureau of Consular Affairs, told the Senate Judiciary Committee last month that a delay in the program implementation is necessary because of technological challenges encountered by the United States and the visa waiver countries. She cited issues, such as chip availability, the security of the data on the embedded chips and the international interoperability of readers.
Harty said the United States does not expect delivery of the 64 kilobyte “contactless” chips needed for the passports until next year, and the State Department does not anticipate completing the transition to biometric passports until the end of 2005.
Whenever we touch on the issue of state controlled health system versus private healthcare, we get a smattering of outraged readers who cannot understand why we attack that venerable (in their eyes, not ours) dinosaur, the NHS. It’s free and for everybody they screech, you heartless capitalists… would you let your parents/grandparents/children die without treatment and care, if they couldn’t afford to go private?!.
The fact is that those I care about are more likely to be in need of treatment and care, as a result of coming into contact with the NHS. I want them to stay away from the NHS, and the government to give them back their money taken to support the giant leech known as national healthcare.
Many people are now frightened that they could pick up a dangerous infection if they go into hospital. It is hardly surprising. More and more of us know someone who has been infected with the superbug, MRSA (methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus). Marjorie Evans has been infected with it on eight occasions at the same hospital in Swansea. Now wheelchair-bound as a result, she says: “I’d rather go abroad and trust foreigners.”
As James Bartholomew writes in the Telegraph opinion section one is vastly safer in a private hospital and the danger of getting MRSA is a risk affecting patients of the NHS.
The NHS both is the most state-controlled hospital system in the advanced world and has the worst record in Europe. At a practical level, it is because of things like ministers driving hospitals at full capacity to reduce waiting lists, with the result that patients with MRSA cannot always be isolated.
But at a more profound level, the MRSA crisis is because the NHS is a state monopoly. Ministers are always making hospitals respond to the latest newspaper headlines rather than doing what is best in the overall interest of patients; hospital workers – like many employees of state industries – are demoralised and their pay rates are unresponsive, thus causing the local shortages. The state has also closed too many hospitals. The list of ways in which it has increased the risk is endless.
This is a result of the fundamental dynamics (or statics) of the public sector, not any lack of funding. There is no legitimate role for the state in healthcare, education and many other sectors that it appropriated for perpetration of what is so misleading called ‘public services’.
The dynamics of the private sector, meanwhile, are simpler and more effective. If you don’t treat your customers well, you go out of business.
Indeed, unless you take their money first and then help yourself to it…
The Montreal Gazette has a comprehensive article about how cutting-edge technologies work as tattle-tales for a surveillance-minded state containing warnings by Canadian privacy advocates. Stephanie Perrin, president of Digital Discretion in Montreal says:
There is a widening and yawning gap between the surveillance that is actually happening and people’s understanding for the capacity for surveillance. People just have no clue, and I’m describing intelligent people. At the very broad level, we have a society that thinks it’s democratic and absolutely has no concept of what the technology does.
Personal information often lies dormant in huge data banks that people contribute to constantly – through use of everyday items such as credit cards and telephones. Increasingly, corporate, government and law enforcement entities sift through that material with sophisticated data-mining programs, looking for relationships between individuals and whatever interests them.
Cellular telephones and vehicles can be tracked, too. The term telematics refers to any marriage of location-tracking technologies, such as global positioning systems, with wireless communications, such as cellphones. Applications include General Motors’ OnStar program. The Telematics Research Group estimates that by 2008, more than 40 per cent of new vehicles in the United States will have some form of telematics.
There is no question that law enforcement agencies have used tracking technology to solve crimes, possibly save lives. It’s all relative. Knowing exactly where employees are may be reasonable in a hazardous chemical plant but less reasonable in an insurance office.
Even though I’m a screaming privacy advocate, there is an argument on the other side for this stuff. That’s what makes it so difficult and so easy to give everything away.
There is more interesting (and frightening) stuff in the article such as Privacy Timeline: The Data Trail, read the whole thing.
There is a dilemma, I agree. But I disagree about it being a straightforward trade-off between security and privacy. When it comes to everyday technologies, one way to decide how to use a particular technology is what effect it has on the individual and how much power it gives to the state over that individual.
FCW.com reports that the long-awaited 9/11 Commission report from the bipartisan commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks calls for better information sharing among government agencies, adoption of biometric technologies and the completion of a visitor tracking system as soon as possible.
The report called for better technology and training to detect terrorist travel documents and the use of biometric identifiers, or unique physical characteristics, to authenticate such documents. United States officials are taking steps already, such as requiring foreign visitors to have machine-readable, tamper-resistant passports with embedded biometric identifiers. However, commission officials said Americans should not be exempt from carrying biometric passports as well.
The Homeland Security Department should complete a biometric entry/exit screening system, called the U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology (US-VISIT) program as soon as possible, according to the report. There should be improved use of no-fly lists to screen airline passengers as discussions for revamping the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS) II continue.
I so look forward to travelling to the US…
This is one scary, scary animation… It may seem exaggerating and a bit on the cheesy (or sprout submarine combo) side but it is certainly my impression that things are moving in that direction.
via Dan Gillmore and cross-posted from White Rose
This is one scary, scary animation… It may seem exagerating and a bit on the cheesy (or sprout submarine combo) side but it is certainly my impression that things are moving in that direction.
via Dan Gillmore
Today is the deadline for the Home Office consultation period on ID cards bill. Phil Booth of Infinite Ideas Machine and No2ID campaign draws our attention to the fact that there are still a few hours left…
Just in case you need any inspiration he has published the full text of his e-mail submission to the Home Office consultation on ID cards.
He also points his readers to Spy Blog’s excellent annotated blog of the Draft Bill, Mark Simpkins’ equally excellent blog of the entire consultation document. For those with some time on their hands he recommends reading Stand.org.uk’s submission [219KB MS Word document].
Please do send something (even if it’s just a simple ‘I am against the proposed scheme and legislation’ type mail) to identitycards@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk, making sure the words ‘consultation response’ appear in the Subject line.
Thanks.
Cross-posted from White Rose.
Phil Booth of Infinite Ideas Machine and No2ID campaign draws our attention to the imminent deadline for the Home Office consultation period on ID cards bill, 20th July 2004.
He urges us, correctly, to send individual objections to the Draft ID cards Bill and I would like to pass that on to White Rose readers. There are still a few hours left!
Just in case you need any inspiration he has published the full text of his e-mail submission to the Home Office consultation on ID cards.
He also points his readers to Spy Blog’s excellent annotated blog of the Draft Bill, Mark Simpkins’ equally excellent blog of the entire consultation document. For those with some time on their hands he recommends reading Stand.org.uk’s submission [219KB MS Word document].
Please do send something (even if it’s just a simple ‘I am against the proposed scheme and legislation’ type mail) to identitycards@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk, making sure the words ‘consultation response’ appear in the Subject line.
Thanks.
Wired has more on the government’s controversial plan to screen passengers before they board a plane. The Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening System II (CAPPS II) is dead – but it may return in a new form with a new name.
Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge bluntly told a reporter Wednesday that CAPPS II was effectively “dead” and jokingly pretended to put a stake in its heart. His comment went far beyond Tuesday’s statement to members of Congress by the Transportation Security Administration’s acting chief, Adm. David Stone, who said the program’s main components were being “reshaped”.
For its part, the American Conservative Union warned that it would oppose any successor program that is not fundamentally different from CAPPS II. ACU spokesman Ian Walter said:
Renaming a program does not satisfy the civil liberties concerns of conservatives so long as that program turns law-abiding commercial airline passengers into terrorism suspects. Civil liberties-minded conservatives will never support it.
Any new program will likely not be deployed anytime soon, as the TSA will likely need to reissue a Privacy Act notice detailing how the system will work, collect comments on the notice, issue new rules or a secret order to force airlines to provide passenger data to the system and have it certified by the GAO (General Accountability Office).
ComputerWorld reports that a U.S. law enforcing privacy rules for radio frequency identification (RFID) isn’t needed because companies experimenting with the technology are committed to protecting privacy, two such corporations told a U.S. House subcommittee yesterday.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. continues to move forward with plans for case- and pallet-level tagging of products with RFID chips. But most item-level tagging, where individual products are identified with RFID chips, is about 10 years away, Linda Dillman, executive vice president and CIO of Wal-Mart, told the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection.
Privacy advocates told the committee that legislation is needed to protect consumers from potential uses of RFID. Three privacy advocates testifying yesterday offered few current examples of privacy concerns caused by RFID, but as the range of RFID scanning grows beyond the current 10 to 20 feet, RFID could allow corporations and governments to track people’s movements and purchases.
Red Herring has an article about Supernova panel moderated by Doc Searls that discusses Fighting networked wars.
John Robb, author: Warfare is changing to an attack on critical points in infrastructures to create damage far beyond the cost of an attack. Al Qaeda sees the West as a system that it must attack on a distributed basis to make the most of its limited resources.
How do you fight these folks? Looking at the size of these networks, what is characteristic of al Qaeda and affiliated organizations looks like a crime network combined with traditional terror. They have mastered terrorist best practices and that has allowed him to unplug the organization from nation-states, which subverts the nation-state system itself. Al Queda is in a new zone. They have no restrictions on behavior.
A distributed problem has to have a distributed response.
Exactly, and that is one of the central arguments of White Rose, if you address a distributed threat such as terrorism by tightening and establishing centrally imposed and managed security, you will produce a sense of false security and ‘crowd out’ the only distributed security – the individual and in the society.
Silicon.com reports on Japanese authorities decision that tracking is best way to protect kids.
The rights and wrongs of RFID-chipping human beings have been debated since the tracking tags reached the technological mainstream. Now, school authorities in the Japanese city of Osaka have decided the benefits outweigh the disadvantages and will now be chipping children in one primary school.
The tags will be read by readers installed in school gates and other key locations to track the kids’ movements.
Apparently, Denmark’s Legoland introduced a similar scheme last month to stop young children going astray.
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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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