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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After periodic, and if the truth be known, inevitable paedophile scandals in Britain of the sort that occurs in every school system in the world, checks on the backgrounds of teachers have been stepped up and made more rigorous. No problem there as if someone has a history of paedophile activities, it is entirely reasonable that a potential educational employer should want to discover that.
But then why does the state insist that as part of this information gathering process, that the prospective teacher reveals their banking details and how to access their secure password to get at their financial details?
It is because the Panopticon state regards privacy as in and of itself a cause for suspicion.
Let me write a little fiction for a moment:
John is in his late twenties and an Internet power-user. He uses it for work (he is an independent consultant of some sort), he uses it for games (he is a dab hand at playing on-line, feared amongst the community of Alien vs. Predator 2 gamers) and, being a guy, he likes to trawl through Usenet newsgroups to find pictures of who ever his babe-de-jour is… he is currently rather keen on Britany Spears (my, my, she is aging well).
One night, he visits one of his favourite newsgroups: alt.binaries.celebrities.nude
The list of articles builds, then he casts his eye down the displayed article headers, selecting several posts which indicate they contain images of Britany Spears. He sees one that says ‘Britany Nude’. ‘Hmmm, probably another fake,’ he thinks to himself, ‘no doubt some twit has used PhotoShop to put the divine Miss B’s head on the body of some porn star’..
He clicks ‘extract binaries’ to download the images that people have posted in 120 or so articles and while that chugs away in the background, he launches Excel to catch up on some work he has been putting off.
A few hours later, he goes back to the directory in which his UseNet reader saves extracted binary images and sees a long list of 120 .jpg and .gif pictures. He starts to check them out, keeping the good ones, junking the dross and any duplicates. Then he comes to a file called nudebritney.jpg. He opens it and his lip twitches up in disgust. It is a scared looking little girl, maybe 12 years old, naked and posed suggestively with her legs apart, a web address ending in .ru is written across the bottom of the image.
‘What type of vermin do that to a little girl?’ he growls to the un-hearing screen. With a couple clicks of the mouse, he deletes the offending image and moves on to the next, which turns out to be a picture of the real Britany Spears dancing with a snake at the MTV awards. The angry scowl fades and the smile reappears on his face.
About 2 months later, there is a knock on his door and there is a tax inspector with a warrant. They seize his computer as part of an ongoing tax related dispute… two days later they return, not to charge him with tax evasion but with child pornography offenses! They used an un-delete utility (such as Norton Utilities) to recover supposedly ‘erased’ files and found a file called nudebritany.jpg.
Is this a far fetched scenario? Unfortunately not.
There is a fascinating article in Wired magazine about the terrifying approach taken by the FBI towards eradicating child pornography on the Internet:
As one FBI agent put it, “Even my friends can’t believe there’s a federal offense that’s so easy to commit. One click, you’re guilty.”
Possession of child porn is a strict-liability offense, like possession of cocaine. Possessing it, though, does not only mean you have intentionally downloaded and stored the images on your hard drive. Under Title 18 of the US Code, the felony is committed the first time sexually explicit images of minors — defined as anyone under 18 — appear on your screen. If your computer is searched, even files that have been dragged to the trash or cached by your browser software are counted as evidence. Some offenders have been sent to jail for “possessing” images that only a computer-forensics technician can see.
So even if you receive an unsolicited spam mail with attached pictures of child porn and delete the images without opening them, you cannot prove you did not look at them but the state sure as hell can prove they were on your hard drive once!
Much as RICO statutes in the USA were passed to fight against the Mafia but ended up being used against anti-abortion activists and environmental protestors, so too will laws against Internet kiddie porn be used to criminalise people the state just happens to want to criminalise, regardless of whether or not they have the slightest thing to do with the problem of child pornography. This will be hard to stop… after all, who wants to stand up and protest when that risks you being called an ‘apologist for child pornographers’. Nasty.
The Internet gives us many and varied ways to fight the state’s constant attempts to regulate our lives and livelihoods, but is also gives the state new ways to attack us. The state is not your friend.
The attempt by statist corporations to allow their Big Media interests to hack your computer with the US government’s blessing is moving into high gear with the Berman bill.
Critics say Berman and Hollings have no choice but to respond to the wealthy lobby of the entertainment industry, which has dumped generous campaign donations into their laps. But supporters of the legislation suggest the lawmakers are just doing the right thing.
“The essence of capitalism is for people to profit from the fruits of their labors,” said James Miller, a professor of economics at Smith College and proponent of government intervention. “I don’t think the Berman bill goes far enough.”
Ah yes, blesséd democracy… in fact the finest democracy money can buy. Of course what idiots like Professor Miller do not seem to grasp is that it is not “the essence of capitalism” at all: the essence of capitalism is allowing market forces (i.e. capital) to determine what is or is not a viable business model. By arguing that the state should prop up what is clearly becoming a non-viable business model (the existing music business), Miller is describing not capitalism but statist stasis based economic systems like socialism and fascism. Miller is free to propose what he likes for the benefit of th existing structure of Big Music but to describe propping it up with restrictive, innovation destroying, market mechanism deadening laws as “The essence of capitalism” suggests to me that perhaps the article has a typo and he is in fact a Professor of Ergonomics.
And that is without even considering the civil liberties aspects to this.
“It gives me pause that the only entities trying to block Internet access is the communist government of China and the entertainment industry,” said Phil Corwin, a technology attorney who represents music file-sharing service Kaza.
Also does anyone seriously think that if this law makes it onto the books in the USA that Big Music will restrict its Denial of Service Attacks and direct hacks to computers and networks in the USA? You must be joking. Of course two can play at that game, fellahs. Hackers are a moving target… which cannot be said for the corporations now threatening to hack personal computers by the million.
I wonder if the next ‘shot heard around the world’ will be fired at the state backed corporates from ten thousand keyboards of people who have finally seen an intrusion too far. We will just have to wait and see.
Teddy Sherrill over on The American Kaiser has an article lambasting the RIAA for attempting to gain the legal right to hack your computer in order to protect a flawed and obsolete business model.
If anything Sherrill’s article actually understates the horrendous civil liberties implications of this power grab.
Given the previous post on the subject of state surveillance, it is good to hear that The Register is reporting that PGP encryption is back in the hands of an independent company.
Although I have never been a huge fan of Statewatch, a civil liberties advocacy group whose membership contains a high proportion of socialists (which I have always thought analogous to a temperance society whose membership contains a high proportion of brewers), the latest Statewatch press release is well worth reading.
They clearly lay out how the European Union is about to take a giant leap towards the sort of total surveillance super-state that the Soviet Union could only dream of implementing. As Tony Bunyan, Statewatch editor, comments in the press release:
EU governments claimed that changes to the 1997 EC Directive on privacy in telecommunications to allow for data retention and access by the law enforcement agencies would not be binding on Members States – each national parliament would have to decide. Now we know that all along they were intending to make it binding, “compulsory”, across Europe.
The right to privacy in our communications – e-mails, phone-calls, faxes and mobile phones – was a hard-won right which has now been taken away. Under the guise of fighting “terrorism” everyone’s communications are to be placed under surveillance.
Gone too under the draft Framework Decision are basic rights of data protection, proper rules of procedure, scrutiny by supervisory bodies and judicial review
The Panopticon super-state ‘of the future’ is now very much upon us.
 When the state watches you, dare to stare back
The awful disappearance of two young girls in Britain who were possibly lured to a meeting via the Internet and then kidnapped by some vile monster has renewed calls for a clamp down on the Internet. The sort of things being talked about to contain the perceived threat from on-line ‘paedophiles’ (by which people really mean pederasts) is fairly mild stuff but that is always how it starts out. I just hope that this is not used as yet another excuse for the Panopticon state to stick its proboscis ever deeper into our private on-line lives.
As of yesterday, the Japanese government brought a nightmarish integrated national resident registry network system on-line called Juki Net. Privacy activists in Japan see this as an alarming tool in the hands of a state with a long history of intrusion into civil society and even some municipal authorities are uneasy about the privacy implications.
A British solicitor has been sentenced to six months in prison under the money laundering provision in the Drug Trafficking Act 1994
Not that he was actually laundering money, mind you. He ‘failed to report suspicions of money laundering’ i.e. he did not go behind his clients back to snitch him out to the authorities and he has now paid the price.
He has paid the price for not sufficiently appreciating that he has been conscripted by the government and that his first and last loyalty belongs to them. I fear he is not the last ‘draft-dodger’ to feel the wrath of the State.
‘When the Proceeds of Crime Bill goes through (it should recive its Royal Assent this week), money laundering will apply to the proceeds of any crime. The implications for the profession will be widespread.’
The Proceeds of Crime Bill will extend the current obligation to report suspicions of money laundering to cover all and any unlawful activity. And it will not be a question of what the professional adviser did know but what they should have know.
The professional classes are going to have their lives made hell and, whilst this is an undoubted injustice to the many who work hard and serve their clients interests as best as they can, there is also a raging irony and a fable here.
The professional classes have always anxiously sought the help of the State in order to establish the restrictive practices and barriers to entry upon which much of their wealth and influence has been built. The same State has now turned on them with a rapacious fury.
This should serve as an object lesson to everyone that the Leviathan may have strong arms in which to cradle you but it also has big, sharp teeth to eat you all up. And the beast cannot help its nature.
As I’ve often said before, my own political journey began to the left of the Nolan chart. One of the reasons it did not end there was the forward into the past mentaility I ran across time and again. The problem is, there are important issues at stake in the United States, issues with far more import than the assinine Politically Correct Hate Me I Was Born Here mentality.
Some of the very foundations of freedom are under threat. Rather than go into details, I suggest you read and act on these two: Lessig and Stallman and UCITA.
My message to the Left: GET OFF YOUR FRIGGIN’ ARSES AND JOIN THE 21ST CENTURY BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!
During a phone conversation the other night I commented to Perry on the pointlessness of Apple’s decision to charge for formerly free email accounts. We’d both read an item sent us by a friend, and Perry was wondering if perhaps this is a sign of a shift to fees in many areas of the internet. Today he pointed me to this Dodgeblog item and gave my arm a severe virtual twisting in hopes I’d pass my comments on to the world.
It’s quite simple actually. Apple and others are battling for a market in email hosting just as it is about to go the way of horseshoes and buggy whips. This is perhaps more apparent to me than it would be to most since I do consultancy to data centres. My question to Perry, and to anyone else is “In a world where broadband into the home is common, why on earth would anyone leave their email hosting in the hands of a distant large corporation?” Or even a nearby small one for that matter!
It really hasn’t sunk in to the heads of most people yet that broadband to the home means much more than the opening of a huge market of passive consumers. It’s many to many communication, not one to many like television, radio and the movies. The internet is not just a new mass media. It is a total bypass of central control.
For a few hundred quid today and probably less tomorrow, I can put in a Linux firewall; I can run my own email and web hosting for my family photos from home; I can connect with my laptop from anywhere in the world through a secure encrypted virtual tunnel. All with trusted, vetted, peer-reviewed open source applications.
So I ask again. Why exactly should anyone care if companies start charging for email hosting? It will just drive the market towards home internet appliances. In a very few years the rest of you will be recieveing your PGP encrypted email over SSL connections into your own secure server where it is stored on an encrypted disk.
It’s not science fiction. A lot of us are already there.
The British government’s maniacal desire to transform this island into a Police State grows by the day. Our dear old friend, the State ID card, made another appearance on Wednesday, the pet scheme of Home Secretary (interior minister) David Blunkett. What is encouraging is that media coverage in the press and television has so far given full rein to objections to such a monstrous proposal from the likes of privacy campaigner Dr. Simon Davies of Privacy International and other civil liberties groups. In the press, even the relentlessly pro-corporatist ‘on-message’ Financial Times gives the ID card idea a skewering in its editorial pages, although it focusses as much on the practical arguments against as ones of principle.
Now I may be getting carried away here, but I cannot help thinking that the current wide coverage of hostile views to ID cards has something to do with the commendable work by libertarians to take a stand on this issue. The privacy meme is out there, and we helped achieve that. But we have to keep up the pressure and make a stink about this latest proposal. And it is worth noting that this is the kind of issue where libertarians, misleadingly bracketed as being on the political ‘right’, can linkup with sympathetic souls on the ‘left’, and maybe even sow some other libertarian seeds in the process.
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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