All politicians are collectivists. They don’t care about privacy.
– Professor Ian Angell, quoted on ZDNet
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July 21st, 2006 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
 The official in this case being the senior civil servant in charge of the project review, according to emails leaked to the Sunday Times:
Oh there is so much more. Read the whole thing. Now how does this square with numerous ministerial statements that all was fine and dandy? For instance, Charles Clarke,(Hansard, 18 October 2005, Col.800):
Or Baroness Scotland of Asthal, to the lords (Hansard, 16 Jan 2006, col.459):
Or the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman on 17th January:
Rubbish, for reasons I may go into some other time. You might however expect it to have some idea what those costs are. In the light of the officials’ view on the facts of the matter, in what way are all these Government comments not lying to the press and to parliament? July 9th, 2006 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Paul Routledge in the Mirror (not a permalink, sorry) offers a follow up to the “Bollocks to Blair” story covered here by Brian the other day:
But more scarily…
Well that we knew. In fact the government is building a database of everybody just in case it might not like them – or might have some reason to ‘assist’ them personally (as a matter of ‘enabling’ a more ‘active citizenship,’ you understand) by telling them what to do – at any time in the future. For myself I’m only surprised the cops did not take careful note of the brand of footware, and take his footprints for the national footprint database, which they have recently acquired the power to do – I kid you not. Or perhaps they did… July 7th, 2006 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
Here is a sight calculated to warm the hearts of anyone who has been bitten by the state’s fetish for surveillance. June 9th, 2006 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
I oppose the ID card & panoptic centralised database plans of the UK government on the grounds it is a monstrous abridgement of civil liberties and truly deadly expansion of state power… but even on the utilitarian basis of the state’s own objectives, the entire scheme is a disaster in the making. This comes not from some civil rights activist but from an IBM researcher whose specialty is secure ID cards.
Read the whole article. (hat tip to commenter Shaun Bourke) May 22nd, 2006 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
Among the main reasons for opposing a compulsory state ID card is the risk, all too real in a country like Britain with shoddy state-run IT, of being wrongfully identified. For example, imagine the danger of being wrongfully described as a criminal, and having that error imprinted in a database. The risk is all too real. May 21st, 2006 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
The novellist William Gibson was interviewed on open source radio talking about the NSA wiretap scandal. The wonderful folks at BoingBoing transcribed part of it, and one part of it struck me as particularly interesting.
I was particularly taken with the idea that popular culture has a role to play here. Did Hollywood create the paranoid ‘they are all listening in to us’ culture, or was it merely responding to popular demand. Who creates the zeitgeist that can often have a very big impact on the way the public perceives political and economic and social events? No one controls it, no one can control it, and no one person is in charge of it. And I think that makes it all the more an interesting phenomena to observe. May 12th, 2006 | 61 comments - (Comments are closed)
Once again the ‘we know whats best’ brigade is out in force, targeting pharmacutical giant GlaxoSmithKline. They are upset about some obscure point of medical research. However the tactics that they are employing are rather sinister, even for the creepy ‘animal rights’ fraternity.
GlaxoSmithKline has set up an information page for shareholders, which is welcome. However the company is deserving of censure, or, indeed, of a right-royal kick in the bollocks over this matter. Shareholders have a right to privacy and how the animal rights fanatics managed to obtain shareholder details is a question that the company should make great efforts to find out the answer to. Given the highly emotive and irrational nature of the animal-rights lobby, this is not a matter that GlaxoSmithKline should be taking lightly. May 9th, 2006 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
Australian government efforts to foist an ID card on its subjects have not really worked out, but the statist desire to identify and regulate its subjects are as perennial as weeds, and the latest gambit looks likely to get the go-ahead, with the cabinet to discuss a photo-ID ‘government services card’. This half-way house measure could be announced in next month’s budget, despite costs that look likely to be north of $A 1 billion. As well as a photograph, the card will carry a computer chip with all of the subject’s details on it. April 25th, 2006 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
Charles Clarke, the current boot boy in the Blunkett-Howard tradition, is upset that the government’s abridgement of fundamental rights is being called for what it is. It is at least a good sign they feel the need to be a bit defensive as previously they scarely seem to try and diguise their contempt for notions of privacy or personal civil liberty. Although the Tories (or at least David Davies) have said in the recent past that they would scrap the whole monstrous ID card plan, I wonder if that will remain their view if they actually end up in power with this scheme already in place. I have my doubts that any party which so recently has Michael ‘a touch of the night’ Howard as its leader really has any honest commitment to civil liberties. April 25th, 2006 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
More official exhortation from the British state. This a poster on the underground.  Quite an interesting case, I think, because it isn’t the standard minatory approach: Do X as the Y agency demands, or get a big fine. This has the superficially laudable object of preventing children from bullying one another. You may think (I do) that it ought to be unnecessary to urge people to protect children against bullies, and that this is not a suitable topic for state propaganda – that most adults could be counted on to intervene as a matter of ordinary humanity. But that reckons without the passivity and inanition fostered by 60 years of welfarism, and 30 years or so of ‘child protection’ doctrine under which speaking roughly to a little boy (let alone touching him), makes one the wickedest of criminals. You might have to work on people these days to get them to do something. But plainly that isn’t the object of the exercise here. This ad doesn’t encourage people to stop bullying. For all the empty vapourings about ‘active citizenship’ (See here for an example of the Government propaganda on that topic that is churned out by notionally independent organisations), nothing may undermine the dependency culture. What this campaign is for is to get people to report incidents they think might be bullying to the authorities. There is a website and a subsidised telephone line for you to do so. It is obviously impossible that this could help the unfortunate smaller boy. One has to conclude that isn’t really the point. The point is to get members of the public to adopt official attitudes, and engrain them by providing a mechanism to rehearse, to act out, concern. It is for to prove you are a compliant member of society by watching others carefully and reporting deviant behaviour. The state will deal with the problem, however minor, however fleeting, however apparently amenable to personal decision. I don’t think that this is a deliberate, explicit project. I think it is a natural outcome of the cultural assumptions of those who commission such ads. We are not just supposed to love the surveillance camera, but to identify with it. The ideal citizen is a passive tool that reports back as requested; that fits in with the total bureaucracy’s demand for record. For those of us – left and right – who still hold to the western liberal tradition of individual moral responsibility, this is a sickening, vertiginous conception of social life. The life of ants, not human beings. For those who are broadly conservative communitarians – right and left – who would like embedded institutions, direct relationships and personal responsibilities to dominate, likewise. The possibility that we may – all taken together – be in the minority should be a source of terror. Secure beneath the watching eyes? Not in the slightest, me. April 11th, 2006 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
Last night I managed a bad connection somewhere in the chain of connectors and adaptors between my laptop and the Chinese power supply, and as a consequence my laptop battery failed to charge. And I wasn’t anywhere near a Chatea and their friendly power sockets today, so I now find myself in an internet cafe rather than using my own laptop. It is about twenty to one on a Sunday morning. This internet cafe is a gamers cafe and not a tourist cafe, so it is full of Chinese people playing Counterstrike and the like. In short, lots of people around twenty years old enjoying themselves. Which is fine. However, to check into this internet cafe, I had to present my passport at the front desk of the cafe. The concierge then filled out a form with my details on it, and then entered them into a computer. She then took my passport, scanned the personal details page, and entered the details into the computer. A scanned picture of me then appeared on her screen, and a new directory of personal information about me was created on her computer. I was then given a plastic card with logon details, and every page I now look at is probably being logged somewhere. I think it is unlikely that I will be identified as a Samizdatista and taken out and interrogated at the end of the session, but who knows? In actual fact, I am lying. The above is not what happened, but was more what was supposed to happen. I did indeed hand the concierge my (Australian) passport. She then looked at it for a couple of minutes, and then pointed to a page in the passport and asked if that was the passport number. She was not actually pointing to the personal details page, but to the page with my UK residence permit attached to it. This looks rather like a personal details page (it has a photo, and some machine readable codes on the bottom and a few other details) but isn’t quite, and she had opened the passport at the wrong page and copied down details until she had noticed the differences and become confused. When I pointed out the correct page, she put the details in correctly and attempted to scan the passport. A picture came up on the screen, but it was a picture of the ID card of some Chinese guy, not the personal details page of my passport. She repeated the process seven or eight times, and kept getting the photo of the Chinese guy. She called over a supervisor. He clicked on different options, and said something to her. Then he want away, she scanned my passport again, and a picture of the same Chinese guy’s ID card came up again. Then it happened again. Then the supervisor came over again, said something else, and she finally did something and got it right. This all took maybe 20 minutes. After that, I was eventually allowed to sit down and do some blogging. (Throughout this time, Chinese people came, presented ID cards, and were dealt with fairly rapidly). Now in terms of safety or surveillance, what does this identification and surveillance process actually achieve. Unless I am really stupid, the only answer I can think of is “nothing”. I have been using wireless hotspots in hotels or just randomly picked up in restaurants and coffee shops all week. I have never had to identify myself, so using the internet in China without identifying yourself is not that hard. (This is not to say that this kind of surveillance doesn’t catch people doing things the government doesn’t want – as any law enforcement agency will tell you, a gread deal of criminals are in fact very stupid). Any smart criminal, terrorist, or dissident who wants to step around this internet cafe surveillance system can do so relatively easily, however. When the Blairites force such a system on us, as they appear to want to, I can’t imagine it will be very effective at increasing security for them either. (It will be very useful at allowing bureaucrats to be petty and malicious, but in terms of increasing security, I expect it will be close to useless). However, the twenty minutes of bureucracy, confusion and computer screw ups are the future, I fear. An additional level of dealing with incompetence and computer systems and bureaucracy that doesn’t work is going to be added to our lives. And any person who tries to live in a way that is unusual or a little out of the ordinary (for instance like a Chinese person in Britain, to reverse what just caused my problems) is going to find that it is much worse for them than for the conformists. But this is apparently what the Blairites want. April 1st, 2006 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
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