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This letter not just to, but in, today’s Daily Telegraph is worth reproducing in full. Its relevance to earlier posts here about “joined up government” is obvious.
Re: Government assists sinister Euro plans
Date: 13 June 2002
SIR – The Government intends to give public sector bodies the capacity to find out what we access on the internet, who we e-mail and who we phone.
This is part of a broader drive by the European Union to give its fledgling police force, Europol, the capacity to accumulate information on all EU citizens. The Europol Convention gives that organisation the right to keep a database of information on any individual, including “sexual orientation, religion or politics”. Europol was also charged last August by the Council of Ministers with adding the names of “troublemakers” to the Schengen Information System, so they could be “tracked and identified” with a view to preventing them leaving their home countries shortly before major EU summits.
Under the existing EU Convention on Mutual Legal Assistance, Europol and any national police force can request information on any citizen living in another member country. The legislation being introduced by the Government will greatly assist this sinister process.
On May 30, the European Parliament voted for a new directive granting the police and others the powers referred to above. The Labour leadership instructed its MEPs to support a measure that, until recently, the group had rhetorically opposed. Only Arlene McCarthy abstained. The Tories also voted for it, with the honourable exception of Lord Stockton. To their credit, the Greens, the Lib Dems and UKIP voted against it.
From:
Marc Glendening, Democracy Movement, London SW6
Marc Glendening was one of the speakers at that Liberty Conference we’ve been going on about. According to what people said to Chris Tame, who was also a speaker but didn’t hear Marc’s talk, it was extremely good.
For as long as I can remember, every change of importance imposed upon Britain by its political rulers has been (a) something to do with European integration, but (b) announced without the European Union being so much as mentioned. This joined-up government crap seems to be no exception to that rule.
Orwell’s vision of a Big Brother state that knew everything about everyone had, over the past five years, finally borne fruit. And it was a strange fruit, fertilised largely by computer scientists’ urge to do things the Right Way. At last, they had managed to get government to adopt universal standards that allowed the free exchange of data between official computers. And thus they had overcome the bureaucratic friction that had always been freedom’s invisible friend.
According to an article by Mike Holderness in New Scientist (May 25, subscription necessary, home page link only) it is compatibility of government databases that will destroy privacy, not surveillance. A standard definition of privacy, by Alan Westin, professor of public law at Columbia university, is ‘the right to control how much information other know about you’. The existence of a unified database, linking let’s say the Inland Revenue, Social Services, the County Court Service, the Passport Office, airline booking computers, Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency and the National Criminal Intelligence Service, oh, and health information database, would mean that few people could keep any important secrets from the British government. For decades it had collected a great deal of information. Each time it gave itself powers to collect more – the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Act 2000 and the Anti-terrorism Crime and Security Act 2001 – civil libertarians had warned about the disappearance of privacy. But it was the gathering together of all this data, not its existence or deficiencies in the technology limiting access to it, that threw the whole notion of privacy into question.
Mike Holderness points out that the unification had been made possible by the development of XML, the Extensible Markup Language, described as ‘ the universal format for structured documents and data’. In November 2001, E-envoy, part of the British government’s Cabinet Office, mandated XML as the key standard for data integration.
“The best defence of our privacy until now has been that government departments are fed up with paying contractors oodles of money to produce custom-built links between databases that are five year late. XML solves that technological problem, because it allows a simple ‘wrapper’ to be built around each database to a standard specification.”
Although the Information Society Forum, which is charged with advising the European Commission on such matters, has recommended in January 2000
“Privacy and anonymity are human and citizen’s rights. They are vital to citizens’ and consumers’ trust in the working of the information society. People must have control over the use of their personal data. They must feel free to communicate without being subject to permanent surveillance.”
I wonder how much more it will take for the public concern for privacy and anonymity to rise… I think our only hope is that bureaucratic inefficiency will not let us down. Let’s hope that as various blunders such as coincidental misidentifications cause misery to individuals with increasing frequency, the public realisation of how much and who exactly is watching them will increase too.
The New Scientist article is laced with a narrative, which is a brilliant illustration of the point. Given the restricted access to the original article I reproduce the story below:
Wednesday 2 May 2007 will always stick in Professor Max Buttle’s memory. He was about to leave for a conference in Berlin, but was detained by the arrival of the US secret service. Three debt collectors, a social worker and a court bailiff were also anxious to talk to him. The arrival on Buttle’s doorstep of a district nurse with urgent news about his cervical smear test saved the day. Clearly he wasn’t the woman they were all after.
He could see why the secret service agents were jumpy, though. The previous day had been dubbed “Weird Tuesday”. Terrorists calling themselves the Atheist Revolutionary Fundamentalist Front had laced Wall Street’s water supply with hallucinogens. The dollar’s exchange rate against the euro had briefly been an imaginary number. And that evening, a suspected atheist had been seen getting into a friend’s car outside a derelict house in North London. A police-woman’s helmet-cam fed its image to the DVLA computer. It recognised the number plate as Buttle’s. The computer instantly cross-checked with other government agencies, which contacted the American authorities.
What Buttle would never discover – because it was officially secret – was the conclusion of the internal inquiry into the disappearance of Ms Max Tuttle, suspected atheist. The helmet-cam pictures clearly showed a moth alighting on the number plate at the crucial moment.
In the end, Buttle got off fairly lightly. Once he’d come to official attention, however, he faced a tax audit in the course of which his wife learned of an expenses claim for a stay in Bonn when he was supposed to have been in Barcelona.
He is now single.
Here we go again… ever-expanding government surveillance powers and reduction of privacy as part of the drive for greater security. This time it is the US government digging deeper into the Web to capture and corral more of our digital detritus in the name of fighting terrorism.
The new FBI guidelines currently examined by the Senate Judiciary Committee would give federal investigators new licence to mine publicly available databases and monitor Web use. Civil liberties advocates warn that last week’s proposal is the latest step along a worrying path back to the 1950s and ’60s – days when investigators compiled dossiers on innocent American citizens based on their religious and political practices. FBI guidelines from Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI director Robert Mueller would allow field agents to gather information outside of criminal investigations, relaxing regulations set in the 1970s. Those rules, named after then-Attorney General Edward Levi, barred the FBI from attending political meetings unless they had a reasonable suspicion that a crime was being planned.
The new rules, by contrast, would authorise field agents to attend public meetings freely and request warrants with less interference from the main office. In addition, they would allow the FBI to monitor public Internet sites, libraries and religious institutions. Jim Dempsey, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology protests:
“I hate to be in a position of telling people ‘don’t go online and speak’ or ‘watch what you say,’ but you have to take from this that on an arbitrary basis, the FBI is going to be tagging people as terrorists based on what they say online,”
Well, actually, I am not sure what is wrong with that. Your mother told you (or should have told you) not to speak to strangers and be careful about what you say in public. And the Web is a public place whether because of its interconnected structure or because no communication is entirely secure and therefore private. I do want to be able to say what I want and where I want, as that is the most immediate and tangible demonstration of my individual and personal liberty. But at the same time, I also want the government that takes my money in order to ‘protect’ me to pay attention to any communication containing information about an event that could jeopardise my security, life and property.
So the same reforms can be seen as a long overdue end to restrictions that have hobbled investigators and denied them access to research tools available to anyone with an Internet connection. Intelligence failures in the FBI and CIA have come under the spotlight (and fire) amid new questions over who knew what in advance of 11 September suicide hijackings, which left more than 3,000 people dead.
I can imagine the phalanx of hard-core anti-statist libertarians bristling with indignation at the mere suggestion that I might consider any legislation that expands law enforcement’s ability to monitor communications anything but an infringement on privacy and individual liberty. Despite my sound libertarian track record on these issues (see related articles below), I would like to explore this issue further.
 It seems to me that the problem is not merely removing restrictions on investigators to monitor, gather and analyse information. Surely, amassing and making use of publicly available information with research tools available to anyone does not constitute abuse of powers …or does it? The difference between Joe Bloggs carrying out his equivalent of obsessive monitoring of other people’s communications and the FBI’s agent J.B.1984 is that whilst the former cannot do much with it (unless he is a cyber-freak villain in a Hollywood movie), the latter has access to considerable resources and monopoly on force that enable him to act on it. On the other hand, isn’t that what the US citizens are paying him to do?!
The issue here is not just what information is collected, by whom and for what purpose but the nature of the state and its authority. We don’t trust the state and its agencies to use the information for the designated purpose, i.e. our security and protection. We fear that information will instead be used for other purposes, namely, to increase the state’s hold on its citizens. There is no guarantee that after the crucial information about the terrorist plans has been extracted from the monitored data, the information about our private lives, incomes, interests etc, will be discarded. National security has always been used as a cloak for such exercise and it was mainly the US judicial system embedded firmly in the US Constitution that provided some recourse for the most flagrant breaches of individual liberty by the state.
So what is to be done, campaigned for or against, and posted on this blog? The usual stuff – discussions about the state and the legitimacy of its authority and powers, the limited or no government and most of all how the state has expanded beyond any justification. And so although I am willing to grant the state legitimate authority for the purpose of external (army) and internal (police) security in theory, I do not trust the state in its present practice. I will therefore continue writing about the issues of privacy, security and its impact on individual and civil liberties.
 When the state watches you, dare to stare back
This (in the New Scientist and which was posted last Saturday on the Libertarian Alliance Forum) is really a story for expert Adriana to comment on, but it sounds good on the face of it.
Computer activists in Britain are close to completing an operating system that could undermine government efforts to wiretap the internet. The UK Home Office has condemned the project as potentially providing a new tool for criminals.
Of course it could just be that the Home Office is writing it, and wants to round up lots of would-be secret persons into one pen, so that it can snoop on them all with greater ease, and save itself the bother of trawling through the emails of all the people like me who don’t give a prune about secrecy.
It will come as no surprise to anyone who habitually reads British newspapers that the state likes the idea of being able to intercept any and all of your communications on the Internet. Well it just so happens that some people are not going to roll over for the government and play ball. Just as the state comes up with new technological ways to spy on its subjects (i.e you), those same subjects are finding ways to prevent them from doing so.
Mathematician Peter Fairbrother simply refuses to just accept the Draconian powers that the state has taken upon itself via the Regulation of Investigative Powers Act and is developing M-O-O-T, an integrated privacy system that you just pop in your PC or Mac at startup. As it uses off-shore key storage, the user can rest safe knowing that the British state cannot get access to your sensitive data at a whim. Bravo!
The Council of the European Union is pushing to introduce measures that would force internet service providers and phone companies to keep records of all communications for many years. The Internet bill is supposed to aim at protecting the confidentiality of electronic communication to boost confidence in e-commerce. But it also contains provisions to allow police access to phone, fax and email records, something that governments view as a useful tool to fight crime and terrorism in the wake of the 11 September attacks in the United States.The information recorded and archived would consists of URLs of web pages visited, news groups and numbers dialled. It would then be made available for the police and other security agencies in gathering criminal intelligence.
Despite strong opposition from civil liberty groups and the industry, the bill is likely to include the data retention rules because of support from the European Socialist Party and the European People’s Party, the assembly’s main political groups. Also, documents leaked to civil liberties groups, reveal that powerful lobbying is taking place on behalf of power-grabbing thugs law enforcement agencies to try to destroy existing data protection and privacy laws in member states.
“These proposals would allow fishing expeditions into the only activity, browsing habits, and internet associations of every citizen in the EU for up to seven years. They could do this without any warrant or court order.”
Civil liberties groups such as Statewatch and the Foundation for Information Policy Research warn that this would give police and other security forces the powers normally expected of an oppressive regime:
“Authoritarian and totalitarian states would be condemned for violating human rights and civil liberties if they initiated such practices. The fact that it is being proposed in the ‘democratic’ EU does not make it any less authoritarian.”
This is all rather standard and predictable given what we know about the EU and its practices. However, there is a rather worrying twist to the story. Instead of the usual heavy-handed, freedom-quashing bill drafting by the EU, the latest version of the bill has been made more oppressive at the request of none other than the good HM Government! Originally, the EU Parliament had drafted the law to limit access to electronic data by public authorities to the strict minimum. But this move was criticised by member states, notably Britain, which wanted greater power to monitor the Internet. US officials also criticised the bill, fearing that the request to erase data would hinder prosecution of criminals. Fearing that this legislative clash would ultimately kill the bill, the two biggest parliamentary groups have now aligned themselves with the member states.
What is going on here?!
Well, nothing much, actually, just the usual state stuff. The fact that the system of government in the member states is democratic does nothing to stop them from abusing an undemocratic institution such as the EU. In fact, they are being democratic, using the powers of the EU to reduce the liberties of their citizens, just like the majority of their citizens use domestic institutions to do the same to individuals.
So predictably, for me, democracy – the rule of the majority – has negative connotations as it has for Perry de Havilland. Democracy is far from the political and social panacea it is made out to be. It does not bring about the kind of fluffy bunny utopia socialists would like us believe in. Although the un-democratic EU together with its democratic member states are doing their best to have the bunnies stuffed… And just like Mr Franklin, I do want to see the bunny (or the lamb) well armed.
The accumulation of medical information by the state is a bad idea for too many reasons to list here. The reason its being done is part of the desperate attempt to make the National Health Service work at any cost. For my part I look forward to the News of the World (a very downmarket British tabloid) informing us which cabinet minister’s wife has head lice, which one takes Prozac, who’s receiving treatment for haemorroids and which cabinet minister’s children won’t have the autism jab.
Of course it is rather difficult arguing against breach of doctor-patient confidentiality on pragmatic grounds: first national databases could be handy in a bio-warfare emergency, it would be handy for the state to know where the greatest threat of smallpox epidemics are. Second, lawyers caved in on this issue of client confidentiality, banks on financial records, now doctors. Oddly enough the most principled professionals are the media. Perhaps it makes a difference that journalists, unlike doctors or lawyers, aren’t working in a licensed sector: a journalist who rats on sources is competing with others who will protect theirs.
The existence of the blogsphere and web media provides a “back street” media which is what the medical profession needs right now. If we had a flourishing industry of back-street abortionists, state centralized records would be meaningless. I confess that’s the most unlikely argument I’ve ever put forward for banning abortions.
The Sunday Telegraph has commented on the latest and most worrying example of the Labour Goverment’s accumulation of power by controlling information. The good Dr Liam Fox, also the Shadow Health Secretary, alerts us to the fact that last week the Government effectively dismantled the UK system of medical confidentiality. Under new regulations, slipped in using procedural devices to prevent debate in the House of Commons, the Secretary of State will be able to demand that doctors hand over medical records – and fine them if, in order to protect your confidentiality, they refuse to do so. The language of ‘the public interest’ is used to assert the right to demand, and receive, confidential medical information. Boringly, the ‘public interest’ is defined as whatever the Secretary of State says it is….
Having worked as a doctor myself, it horrifies me that doctors will now have to choose between breaching their ethics and breaking the law. To make matters worse, the new law is not restricted to doctors: the behaviour of every health care professional to his or her patients will now be subject to the direct control of politicians. The new law places the administrative convenience of the NHS not only above the bond of trust between doctor and patient, but above the dignity and privacy of patients….the change marks the death of the principle of the patient’s right to give consent before identifiable personal data about them is shared. It is yet another restriction of our liberty – and one we have surrendered to with barely a whimper of protest.
My question is ‘why is this not on the main news but on page 22 in the Comments section….?!’
British government plans for data sharing mentioned earlier in the Libertarian Alliance press release I posted yesterday are a clear indication of the casually authoritarian attitudes of those who would control every aspect of our lives. What I find so infuriating is that the supporters of this giant leap towards the Panopticon State are so arrogant that they are hardly even trying to hide the scope of what they want.
The Orwellian sounding Performance and Innovations Unit (PIU), who are the cutting edge of the leviathan state’s intrusions into every aspect of private life, have had the gall to announce (emphasis added):
Information is processed without people’s knowledge only where necessary for national security, public safety, statistical analysis, the protection of the economy, the prevention of crime, the protection of health, morals, or the rights and freedoms of others
Can anyone out there please tell me ANYTHING that the state does which cannot with the barest minimum of effort be classified under one of these amazingly broad categories?
In short, any functionary of the state with a computer terminal can examine any aspect of your life they wish. They are not even really trying to hide what they are planning.
Government bodies with names like the ‘Performance and Innovations Unit’, a body finding new ways to intermediate the state into every aspect of private life, have always reminded me of the Terry Gilliam movie Brazil , in which the ‘Information Retrieval Unit’ was the name for the agency who extracted information from people by torture. Perhaps it is time for Harry Tuttle to pay the PIU a visit, spanner in hand.
When the state watches you,
dare to stare back
“Government’s data sharing plan is a dagger to the heart of liberty”, says Free market and civil liberties think tank.
The Labour’s government’s plans to integrate the personal data held on British citizens by various government departments and agencies is a dagger to the heart of liberty, says the Libertarian Alliance, the radical free market and civil liberties think tank and pressure group.
Libertarian Alliance Director, Dr Chris R. Tame, says:
“In the light of the ever-more blatant attack on civil liberties in this country – including the proliferation of camera surveillance systems, the increasing involvement of intelligence agencies in political surveillance and dirty tricks operations, the push for a national ID card and DNA database, the gradual abolition of common law liberties by the removal of jury trials, of the presumption of innocence, of the right of silence and of double jeopardy, and by the adoption of the EU’s despotic corpus juris – this proposal is even more ominous. The government’s claim that data would be processed only ‘where necessary’ is laughable – especially when one sees that their list of ‘necessary’ reasons covers every conceivable excuse for nanny statism, paternalism, censorship, socialism, prudery, puritanism and prohibitionism.
It is ironic that when the state has demonstrated that it is incapable of providing any ‘public service’ adequately, when it cannot defend its citizens from predators of every stripe, that is should be attempting to turn us into supplicants and serfs. The common argument that ‘if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear’ is absurd. In an age when health fascists have declared smoking to be a form of child abuse, it is clear that everyone can be subjected to the prejudices of demented paternalists – whether of the fundamentalist religious nutters, the peddlers of PC pieties, the environmentalists, or the feminist anti-sex cranks. Your life style, your tastes, your sexuality, your political and social views, can be subjected to tomorrow’s moral panic, propaganda scare campaign and witch-hunt and legislated as ‘crimes’ or as ‘politically incorrect’.
The citizens of Britain need to send a message to our would-be masters that we are not numbers, that we will not be pushed, filed, indexed, stamped, briefed, debriefed, or numbered – that our lives are our own.
It is now clear that the ‘social contract’ has been broken by the state. Resistance to the usurpations of the state is both a right and a moral duty. It is the right, the duty, of all to resist and disrupt the state’s data gathering and record-keeping ability, by whatever means are necessary”.
I seem to be stuck with the privacy and security topic but since it is what interests and worries me, here it is. According to an artricle in CNET New.com Is your email watching you? the spam choking your e-mail inbox may be loaded with software that lets marketers track your moves online, and you may not even be aware that you’ve been bugged.
Apparently, enhanced messages that share the look and feel of Web pages are being used to deliver the same bits of code through e-mail, in many cases without regard for safeguards that have been developed to protect consumer privacy on the Web. E-mail also seems to be the focus of the security and privacy issues on the Web at the moment. While web sites now cloak visitors’ identities and collect data anonymously, junk emailers and marketers have begun to use cookies and other techniques to link specific addresses to surfing behaviour. In some cases, spammers can link surfers with their e-mail addresses.
Lance Cottrell a privacy services expert warns:
“In many ways, email tracking is more powerful because they can correlate the email address with online history….there isn’t an opportunity to be fully informed when you receive a spam with remotely loaded graphics used to track your computer. It’s a bit of a loophole in the whole process.”
An article in Computerworld responds to the fears for privacy as a trade-off to security after September 11th. Jay Cline lists a number of scenarios that would signal that privacy and American’s civil liberties are in danger and actually being reduced.
If a nationwide loss of privacy has occurred, we should be seeing at least one of the following scenarios: a widespread expansion in the scope of the government’s collection of personal data, courts setting dangerous legal precedents or a surge in the number of people harmed by abuses of government-collected data. These are the speed bumps on the road from liberty to tyranny, and none has been crossed.
So far in the war on terrorism, there has been no widespread increase in the government’s collection of Americans’ personal data….and there is no pattern of government abuses of personal data stemming from Sept. 11. The congressional oversight committees have certainly been busier, but so far, we haven’t seen any members seeking hearings on privacy abuses.
The Patriot Act, passed in October last year giving the FBI new powers to monitor the e-mail of suspected terrorists, is mentioned in a relaxed manner:
The Patriot Act also enables government agencies to share more law-enforcement information. Many Americans think the federal government already has a huge big brother computer file on each person. But the reality is that big brother is a hodgepodge of little cousins — the same sort of motley collection of stovepiped and uncoordinated databases that most large corporations have..and…the FBI certainly hasn’t taken upon itself to conduct random keyword searches of all the e-mail coursing through the servers of U.S. ISPs.
There are two reasons for drawing attention to this article. First, I have blogged about privacy and security before where I applauded an article in the same magazine for pointing out the dangers of the drive for security at the cost of privacy. To balance that concern, the inefficiency inherent in governments and their bureaucracies often seems more tangible to me than extensive and elaborate conspiracies. Secondly, I would welcome any information about measures that do pose a definite threat to privacy as a result of September 11th and indeed any comments regarding privacy versus security issue. As they say, the truth is out there.
When the state watches you,
dare to stare back
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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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