Speed cameras don’t reduce casualties – they are just for revenue generation
– Northumbria Police’s Acting Chief Inspector, Paul Gilroy
I really cannot add much to that.
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October 27th, 2003 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
 The GATSO killers must be starting to give the state a serious headache. From the UK Times:
And then other cameras to film those cameras and still more cameras to film those cameras and……
Of course this means that the closed-circuit security cameras will become targets as well. It seems that the campaign of the GATSO killers is moving beyond the sporadic outbursts of pique and onto a low-grade insurrection. October 13th, 2003 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
The great gift of cash (fiat currencies included) is the anonymity it affords the bearer. Nobody but the bearer knows just how much cash he has. Nobody knows how much may have been earned, paid, spent, saved or transported. But that is all about to change:
So the dogs will miraculously detect ‘criminals’. Is this Trial by Canine? Do the sniffer dogs have to prove their case on a mere balance of probabilities or is proof beyond all reasonable doubt required? Will there be Defence Dogs standing by to rebut the charges? And how is anyone supposed to know that the cash is ‘illicit’? Unless, of course, all cash is presumed to be illicit. Given its hitherto undetectable properties I can think of why certain institutions would insist on precisely that assumption:
It is the logical last piece of the jigsaw. What with the Money Laundering Laws and the War on Tax Havens, I reckon that the lockdown is pretty near to completion. October 1st, 2003 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
After reading Natalie Solent’s article, posted both here and on White Rose called A law-abiding person has nothing to hide?, reader Matt Judson wrote in with a cautionary tale of his own as a case in point. Check out his close encounter with the reality of CCTV over on White Rose. CCTV is not your friend. September 23rd, 2003 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
I was just thinking up a few scenarios in answer to the assertion that “a law abiding person has nothing to fear from ID cards, in-car tracking systems or surveillance cameras”. These are some wholly or mostly law-abiding persons who do have something to fear:
That example takes us to a more general point: there are so many laws that nearly all of us are breaking some of them all the time. This fact gives local and national authorities enormous scope for quiet blackmail. You think it’s unlikely that they would be so wicked? Well, the blackmailers themselves might scarcely see it as blackmail. Imagine this scenario: they get to know that X, an irritating serial complainer, writer of letters to the editor, and general thorn in the side of several local councillors, is attending an adult education class for more than the number of hours permitted to an unemployed person who is meant to be actively seeking work. How satisfactory to take action against this pest! Meanwhile Y, who sat next to X in the class and is equally unemployed and equally breaking the rules (or equally unaware of them), is ignored because he is not a troublemaker. September 23rd, 2003 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
Like I said, respect for the law appears to be on the wane. Although the word ‘hostility’ might be even more apposite:
Forsooth, methinks the commoners may be in need of folk-songs.
Of course, we at Samizdata.net could not possibly condone these irresponsible actions by an anti-social minority. 
The Target for Tonight? [My thanks to Dr.Chris Tame for posting this story to the Libertarian Alliance Forum.] September 13th, 2003 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
There’s a lovely case of the punishment fitting the crime to read about at Dave Barry’s blog. On Aug 31, Barry wrote a Miami Herald article, describing the menace of what they call in the USA telemarketers, and what we call here junk fd*&%$ing phone calls.
And for all I know that is, approximately speaking, what the US Constitution says. Plus, if junk phone calling stopped, lots of junk phonies would be out of their junk jobs. Much the same, Barry pointed out, applies to muggers. Anyway, what’s the answer? → Continue reading: Junk phoners junk phoned September 10th, 2003 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
Stephen Lewis of the Sterling Times message board sent this link. Follow it, please. Now would be a good time. Mr Lewis has found a report on the Radio Nederlands website stating that the BBC, the BBC, is to monitor message boards for hate speech on behalf of the authorities. Once upon a time the only official way your home could be searched was by a policeman backed by a warrant issued by the courts. OK, as a libertarian I could raise certain objections even to that, but it was the evolved and generally agreed custom of my country and that counts for a lot. Then the privilege of search spread first to customs officers and then to tax-gatherers, until now practically any parasite of an environmental health officer or social worker can walk in. Count on it. The same process is happening with restrictions of freedom of speech. Fifty years ago the legal right to impose restrictions was the preserve of the courts. Many of the restrictions were ridiculous: the Lord Chamberlain censored naughty bits out of stage plays until as late as 1968. However, in terms of political speech, freedom fifty years ago was greater than freedom now. Speakers in Hyde Park Corner could and did call for the gutters of Mayfair to run red with the blood of the rich and the copper would just say, “steady on mate, steady on.” Part of the reason for this freedom was that the right to restrict was itself restricted to the justice system. It’s a sign of a half-way healthy state (half-way being about as good as states get) that it is very clear who is doing the state’s dirty work. Now, it seems, the job of spying on British citizens has been franchised out to that “much loved” institution, the BBC. As Mr Lewis says, that is not their role. Later on in the post some Radio Nederlands commentary is quoted saying that it might be better to have “trained journalists” doing the monitoring than others. Not surprising, I suppose, that the trained journalists at Radio Nederlands rate their fellow trained journalists at the BBC as the best people to employ for this task. I must disagree: if I had to choose I’d rather be spied on by professional spies. At least they live in the real world, and in particular have the peril of Islamofascism very much in the forefront of their minds. I’d trust them way above the BBC to be able to tell the difference between clear statements warning against Islamofascism and genuine hate speech 1. When it comes to judging others – judging us here, for instance – the BBC is very likely to imply that anyone who says out loud that a kind of death-cult has infected to some degree a disturbingly high proportion of the Muslim world is thereby an Islamophobe. But when it comes to judging themselves, or judging the groups they have a soft spot for, the standard is very different. You can see the double standard in operation by the BBC’s choice of Jew-hating ranter Mahathir as official BBC “expert” on Islam for an upcoming forum. (See Biased BBC here and passim.) Tell you what, Beeb guys, if you want to monitor “hate speech” why don’t you start with him? September 6th, 2003 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Guardian reports that ID cards are to be pilot tested in ‘a small market town’ by the home office. Biometrics will be tested – facial, iris and fingerprint recognition systems. I am horrifiied that the government is inching towards making us instantly identifiable and knowing too much. Once they have ID cards they will be that much nearer to integrating tax and passport systems, no doubt under the cover of anti-terrorist rhetoric. “To be controlled in our economic pursuits means to be…controlled in everything” said Hayek. To control us they need to know us, this is a fight we must not lose. Paul Staines Ed. update: White Rose has more on the subject as it keeps a closer eye on issues of ID cards, privacy, surveillance and other vagaries of state… August 28th, 2003 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
In more traditional police-states, citizens may be blissfully unaware that they have done wrong until they are woken in the wee small hours by an ominous rapping on their front doors. In modern police-state Britain, the knock on the door is to be replaced by the thud on the doormat. If this report from the UK Times is accurate (and it is just about creepy enough to be true) then it may be time to think about buying a bicycle:
Who the bloody hell are the ‘other enforcement agencies’? And the very notion of an informer in every vehicle! Saddam Hussein could only dream about that level of control.
The same old, same old. Every accursed and intrusive state abuse is sold to the public as a cure for crime and ‘drug-dealing’. The fact that it still works is proof that we live in the Age of Bovine Stupidity. A media advertising campaign showing seedy drug-dealers and leering child-molesters being rounded up as a result of this technology will have the public begging for a ‘spy in the dashboard’. Having already expressed my doubts about the viability of new government schemes (see below) I should just add that the fact that this relies on technology rather than human agency means it just might work. The next step is an electronic device in your car which will immediately detetct any infringement of any regulation, then lock the doors, drive you to a football stadium and shoot you. HMG is reported to be very interested and is launching a feasibility study. [This article has been cross-posted to White Rose.] August 25th, 2003 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
I wonder how many of our readers went to see the film ‘Minority Report’ and came away thinking, ‘Hey, what a great film’? Contrast this with one of HMG’s advisers who went to see the film and cam away thinking, ‘Hey, what a great idea!:
Alright, let’s get the obvious question out of the way, such as, exactly what does ‘at risk’ mean? What constitutes a ‘potential troublemaker’? Who decides these things and on what basis? Who guards the guardians? Oh I daresay that there are answers (or, rather, great globs of state-management gobbledekook that purport to be answers) but they will almost certainly remain occluded behind the volumes of policy documents that filter through the ziggurat of state agencies charged with enforcing it all. For the record, I denounce this but I do so merely as a matter of form. My stores of furious indignation have all but dried up leaving a residue of doleful resignation. And, to be fair, we’ve always had mechanisms for controlling the poor; this is merely the latest manifestation, albeit dressed up in the fashionable terminology of ‘caring and concern’. The chink of light (well, a fissure really) is that this grand plan may not get off the ground at all and, even if it does, it will probably be a shambles. HMG already has far more laws, regulations, rules, plans, initiatives, schemes and regimes that it can possible see through or enforce and nothing they announce nowadays is likely to work as intended or at all. Still, it will keep a few state bureaucrats busy for a few more years and that is probably enough. August 25th, 2003 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
There are times when I compare 2003 with the Orwellian world of 1984. In one respect at least, the fictional Airstrip One was far better than present day Britain: kids could have more fun! Consider this report, that children are being harrassed by intolerant adults into staying locked indoors. Of course we live in an age where most children are treated at best as designer lap dogs or fashion accessories and at worst like punchbags or sex toys. So that actually letting children run around parks, fall in streams, get muddy and avoid obesity and truancy by burning off their excess energy in creative or harmless pursuits are not an option. The streets where I grew up have too many cars parked in them to play football, never mind the traffic. The contrast with the Orwellian child utopia of Airstrip One is amazing: kids can run around as they wish, there is no shortage of activities for them to enjoy, from attending public executions, to outings in the countryside. But the real fun is in the “spies”. Children are actively encouraged to look through keyholes, snoop into the affairs of adults and they can earn plaudits for exposing corrupt and treasonable behaviour. So when that nasty Mrs B. at the corner of A***** Rd and M****** Rd would should at my friends and I for kicking a football outside her house, we could pick up the phone and denounce her to the Party as an agent of Emmanuel Goldstein! I wonder if there are any equivalent means for children today to get even with bossy and intolerant adults? They could try this phone number: 0800 11 11 (Airstrip One only). August 6th, 2003 | Comments are closed
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