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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Receiving junk snail-mail and spam e-mails can certainly be irritating, particularly when it is yet another pyramiding scam/’teen-slutathon’/debt consolidation/shyster solicitation/weepy group-hug chain letter or whatever the annoyance-of-the-week is. As a result the urge to legislate over what is frankly a pretty trivial matter is on the agenda on both sides of the Atlantic.
Matthew Edgar wrote a worthwhile piece on this as it pertains to the USA. In Britain, ever since 1832, Election Rolls have been for sale and have been used by marketing professionals as a source of information and ‘list cleaning’ ever since. In this age of spam, we sometimes forget that marketing is an essential aspect of capitalist economics. Restricting it with regulations that go beyond anti-fraud measures adds unnecessary costs that we, the consumer, inevitably end up paying in the end via more expensive products.
Under the absurd British Data Protection Act, the recording of marketing data has been made subject to ever more bureaucratic red tape and imposed cost. This has made Election Rolls a particularly valuable source of reliable data. Yet now there are plans to require local authorities to produce a severely edited version of the Electoral Roll, which will be available for sale, whilst the unexpurgated version will be available only to the government and for ‘election purposes’… in other words, parties will have unrestricted access to your personal information in order to market their political candidates, yet people who want to sell you something you might actually need are told to get stuffed. If I dislike a piece of junk mail I can bin it; if I an annoyed by e-mail spam I can delete it… oh how I wish we could remove the intrusions of our political ‘masters’ so easily.
In an EU Observer report, the authoritarian nature of the European ‘Union’ is demonstrated yet again as Swedish citizen, Per Johansson, has been expelled from Belgian and can no longer travel in 14 European countries after pasting up an anti-EU poster at a Belgian police station.
The Belgian police in Brussels arrested the Swede, who is an active member of a legal Swedish left wing party, just three days before the Laeken summit. The police expelled the man for only one reason: he had been helping friends putting up the poster, announcing an anti-EU meeting.
Hopefully such cack-handed suppression of dissent will just encourage more resistance against the EU by people who value freedom of expression, free association and reject unaccountable socialist diktats governing every aspect of civil life.
It is good to hear that Dmitry is finally free to return to Russia. What puzzles me about this case is how did a US court even feel they had the appropriate jurisdiction to try him?
The way I understand it, he wrote the decryption software in Russia, for a Russian company, ElcomSoft. The software is entirely legal in Russia and yet somehow because the program can crack codes in ways prohibited by the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Sklyarov was arrested when he visited a conference in the USA.
Imagine for a moment that a US citizen, living the USA, writes an article in the Wall Street Journal (a newspaper which is sold world wide). Say that in this article, the US journalist makes remarks that are illegal in Russia (a nation not known for its free press) but in the USA are protected by the First Amendment and hence entirely legal.
How would the USA react if, when that journalist makes the mistake of going to Russia to attend some conference, he gets arrested by the Russian police, thrown in jail and charged with a crime because the Wall Street Journal with the offending remarks was also available in Moscow hotels? Would some US lawyer care to explain how that works?
There is a good article by Douglas Carey called Wartime’s Lost Liberties over on the Ludwig von Mises Institute site.
Many others say that any lost liberties will be restored once the war is past us, or once terrorism has been eradicated. Although history has shown us that the most egregious laws and orders are usually rescinded eventually, each bold step by the government has led to even bolder steps in the future.
That is the trouble with laws: they are easy to pass but hard to repeal. One merely has to look at the idiotic British Pub Licensing Laws, introduced as a ‘temporary measure’ to curtail alcohol related absenteeism in the factories during World War I. They are still on the books today.
I have already had some peeved e-mails saying I am overstating things by calling Britain a Police State. Well, just yesterday Britain agreed to extradition to any country in the European ‘Union’ simply on the order of a foreign judge or magistrate. On nothing more than their say so that the person in question is a suspect in some crime, you can find yourself arrested and taken by force from your own country. This is regardless of wether or not the alleged crime is even an offence in Britain. You have NO recourse to a British court to prevent your extradition.
Thus British people can now find themselves in courts in which there is a presumption of guilt rather than innocence, under the Napoleonic legal systems that prevail in most of Europe. They will also be without any protection of habeas corpus. Is it any wonder the British state has ensured its population of subjects are well and truly disarmed? Given the option of shooting it out with British police attempting to serve a Greek arrest warrant on me or trying my luck with a corrupt Greek court answering to an establishment that sponsors domestic terrorism, that is not a choice with an obvious answer. In fact by accusing the Greek establishment of actually supporting the N-17 terrorist group, I am probably breaking Greek law and could soon be theoretically liable for arrest here in London.
Another e-mail questioned how any country with a free press could be regarded as a police state. Well, Britain has a free press only if you ignore the Official Secrets Act,the variety of Race Relations Acts and the fact the law will soon prohibit inciting ‘religious hatred’. Many of the anti-Islamic post found on numerous blogs will soon be illegal in Britain. There is no British ‘First Amendment’. And does no one remember the farcical situation of the TV media being prohibited from broadcasting the words of Sinn Fein/IRA leader Gerry Adams? The media responded by showing his image and having an actor dub over the words he was speaking. Free press? Sure, just so long as you don’t say things the state does not approve of. The capacity for self-delusion amongst British people never ceases to amaze me.
The fact the astonishing raft of repressive British laws is only lightly enforced (at the moment) just shows that the liberties of British society is now at the sufferance of the state, rather than by right. Given that it was largely British legal concepts that underpin the American legal system, this should serve as a salutary lesson to people in the USA as to what happens when a culture of liberty is allowed to decay… and please, I do not want e-mails from Americans telling me “Oh, but we have our wonderful constitution.” I have two words for you: forfeiture laws. So much for the 4th and 6th Amendments.
I am a great admirer of Western Civilisation and particularly the Anglosphere’s traditions of liberty. In many ways, we can see very encouraging trends as the communications revolution drives economic globalisation ever wider. Our ability to freely associate and trade outside the bounds of the state grow almost daily. Yet there are also trends in the other direction. As governments lose their largely illusionary ability to ‘control’ national economies, they are resorting to other means of applying power and coersion. Our liberties, regardless of where we live, do not come from judges or democratically ‘legitimised’ politicians or from a sanctified scrap of 200 year old paper. They come from us ourselves and are made real only by our willingness to refuse to let ourselves be the ‘things’ of any state. The best, no, the ONLY defence for liberty is a culture that values it and will fight for it by whatever means are required. There is no other way and there never has been.
There is an interesting article in the Virginian-Pilot called Gun shop owner sues ATF over reports. The owner of a gun shop in Virginia is suing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms because it has demand records of the shop’s used gun sales. The owner says the government is compiling a database of gun owners, which is strictly illegal. I particularly liked:
“While no one has accused me of committing a crime, they’re going on a fishing expedition, and I’m not going fishing with them,” Marcus said in a recent interview from his shop.
Excellent. The state can only tie liberty in knots if enough people are willing cooperate with it. Don’t cooperate.
When I read about people like the hilarious American Center for Law and Justice and Family Research Council calling for on-line censorship, I am not sure if I should laugh or snarl… perhaps both. In an article in Charisma News Service, they say things like:
This is an important opportunity for the Supreme Court to protect children in the ongoing battle against online porn,” said Jay Sekulow, of the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), which filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA). “This measure…represents a proper and constitutional protection to ensure that pornographers don’t commercially profit from making pornography available to children,” Sekulow said. “The First Amendment protects free speech — but was never intended to permit the sale or distribution of porn to children on the Internet or anywhere else.
Hmmm. Although as a libertarian I do not usually argue matters on constitutional grounds but rather moral ones (a constitution is just a statement of rights, not the source of them), let us look at the First Amendment of the US Constitution:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Now perhaps my copy of the US Constitution is an abridged version but no matter how many times I read it, I cannot see the bit that says:
However freedom of speech, and of the press, can have the crap abridged out of it if computers and the Internet are involved.
Will some legal scholar who reads the Samizdata please take pity and e-mail me and point out in which section of the US Constitution’s apocrypha is that passage to be found?
Now even if these authoritarian statist clowns got their way (unlikely), exactly how do they think a US law is going to prevent 15 year old Hank from Peoria taking a peek at a nice pair of titties on a web server in Amsterdam? These people are not just control freaks, they are pretty damn stupid
Have you ever noticed that groups calling themselves Pro-Family are often the ones who actually want the state to pass laws which remove responsibility from the family and make it a matter of criminal law? If little Hank from Peoria wants to look at porn on-line, why is that not a matter for the family to sort out? I suspect if these people think a US law will have the slightest effect on the global proliferation of on-line porn, then perhaps they are also sufficiently obtuse not to realise that the computer they purchased for little Hank also has an off switch. Doh!
An article in Wired reports a victory against the ‘forces of darkness’ with a US court refusing to allow the French state to impose Internet restrictions across the world. Does this mean I think wacko groups like the KKK or Nazi historical fantasists are ok? No I don’t. However I do not want my judgement and prejudices to have force of law, unlike the lawyer for the forces of statist authoritarianism, Stephane Lilti.
“If this ruling, which we will appeal against in the United States, is upheld, it will give total impunity to all those who seek technological asylum in the United States,” Stephane Lilti told Reuters. “This would make America a haven for all types of people on the extreme right and racists … for us French it will be extremely difficult to ensure our justice system’s decisions are respected because we will be dealing with someone who can take refuge in a U.S. computer.”
Excellent. Every time we can make a repressive law in France or anywhere else unworkable, the light of liberty shines a little brighter across the entire world. Why should anyone respect the French justice system’s decisions to repress free speech? Notice Lilti does not seem to worry about ‘the extreme left’. I guess this means a post to the Internet in support of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot is just fine by him.
What force advocating statist lawyers like Lilti do not choose to realise is that the best way to destroy irrational buffons like the KKK is not by forcing them underground but by actually shining the light of day on them. Let them out into the open where everyone can see what preposterous little people they are by reading their own words… sort of like the way Stephane Lilti is exposed by his words as a noxious enemy of liberty who rails in fury against the rest of the world’s refusal to be a party to the repression of French internet users.
As Sinead O’Connor put it in a song:
Though their own words.
they will be exposed,
they’ve got a severe case
of the ‘Emperor’s new clothes’
So I would like to raise my glass to all you technological asylum seekers, yearning to speak free…the brave ones, the oppressed ones, the articulate ones and yes, even you stupid hateful ignorant ones.
And to those who would gag us, censor us and unplug us… fuck you
An article in the Washington Post reports moves against a couple of the larger ‘Hawala’ networks. Also: “Under the new anti-terrorism legislation passed by Congress last month, hawalas will be required by year-end to register with the Treasury Department and, like banks, to report suspicious activities, such as unusually large cash transfers.”
The idiots seem to completely miss the point about why people use hawala (or Chinese ‘Fei Qian’) to move money internationally. It is so that the state cannot see what they are doing. To demand hawalas register with the state and report ‘suspicious activities’ is rather like passing a law requiring bank robbers to register and file a report prior to conducting a robbery. Do terrorists use hawala? Probably. So do millions of other people. Will they manage to shut the system down (which has been around since the 11th Century in India, China and other parts of Asia)? My guess is they will be even less successful than that other triumph of the state’s excursion into international paramilitary policing, namely the ‘Drug War’. These hawalas occur within ethnically homogenous tight knit communities. It is going to be impossible to shut down more than a few of these dispersed, multiply redundant networks as they are semi-underground as it is and extremely easy to set up again by others if any given hawala is disrupted.
What is a hawala?
A hawala (or fei qian) is a simple network set up to transfur funds internationally, usually using a member of an extended family or personal friend on both sides of the network (though a few larger hawalas are almost like banks). Vijay (or Abdul or Deng) goes to a hawala (typically a small back street office) in London (or Los Angeles or Paris or Toronto) and gives them a quantity of cash plus a small brokerage fee. He tells the hawala who he wants to collect the money in Calcutta (or Karachi or Cairo or Shanghai) and then leaves. The business is conducted with a handshake and trust. The hawala in London calls his contact in Calcutta (often a cousin or other family member) and tells him how much to disburse and to whom. This is often done on the phone but increasingly it is done by PGP encrypted e-mail. Next day, a relative of Vijay (or Abdul or Deng) goes to the hawala in Calcutta, identifies himself to the associated hawala there and collects his cash. The hawala run accounts with each other and periodically settle up the old fashioned way: a guy with a suitcase packed full of used 50 pound notes (or 100 dollar bills) gets on a plane in London, flies to Calcutta and settles the tab in cash. It is that simple!
In fact they are an excellent example of highly successful, completely unregulated, handshake based international capitalism. Hence is it hardly surprising so many people in government do not like these networks as it gives lie to all the smug claims about the supposed superiority of the West’s regulated international financial systems.
As usual, the state wants to see all and know all… of course it will still understand nothing. Wired magazine has a good article about the current state of play.
Remember boys and girls, when crypto is outlawed, only outlaws will have crypto. I have the greatest confidence we will always find new and innovative ways of keeping the state blind, deaf and dumb about things that are none of it’s damn business… namely our business.
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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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