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]

Random Stop and Search on the Tube?

Following last week’s atrocity in Madrid, the media are reporting London Underground’s plans to increase security. These plans include more plain clothes police patrolling the network and encouraging passengers to be vigilant.

There’s another aspect to the plans not mentioned in most reports. According to the BBC:

British Transport Police have also said more people using the Tube will be randomly stopped and searched

Increased security is definitely welcome, however random stop and search is worrying. It is vital that any such moves be clearly seen as a limited response to a specific threat and not allowed to become standard operating procedure.

Do we really want to live in a country where being randomly stopped and searched is considered an acceptable part of everyday life?

Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe

Beyond Reasonable Doubt

Amongst the announcement of the new Serious Organised Crime Agency one comment seems to have been largely overlooked. Tony Blair said, concerning serious crime:

My impression sometimes is that the system is struggling against a presumption that you treat these crimes like every other type of crime, and that you build up cases beyond reasonable doubt. I think we have got to look at this.

On the balance of probabilities, Blair supports Big Blunkett’s latest attacks on our basic liberties.

Excuses, excuses

Reproduced below is the text of yesterday’s press release from the Libertarian Alliance:

“Any Excuse for a Police State: Blunkett Secret Trial Plans as Bad as Foreign Conquest”, Says Free Market and Civil Liberties Think Tank

Home Secretary David Blunkett wants to bring in laws allowing pre-emptive arrest of suspects, secret trials without juries, with state-chosen defence lawyers, on undisclosed evidence provided by the security services, and a lower burden of proof. He says this is to protect the country from “terrorism”.

“Nonsense”, says Dr Sean Gabb, Director of Communications for the Libertarian Alliance. “We did none of this in the second world war, when the enemy was poised to invade from across the Channel, and killing 60,000 British civilians in bombing raids. We did none of this when Irish terrorists were killing thousands of state and civilian victims within the United Kingdom.

“The truth is, this government wants a police state and will use any excuse to get one. We are told these new laws will only apply in terrorism cases. That is a lie. We were once told that confiscation orders would only be used for drug dealing cases, and after normal conviction: now we have a Confiscation Agency trying to seize assets from suspected criminals without the need for criminal charges. This legislation would soon become the normal mode of trial of all offences.

“Do you want a criminal justice system where you can be tried in secret by another Lord Hutton, on the basis of secret evidence supplied by the same security services that did such a good job at proving Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction? I don’t. Looking at these proposals, anyone who fell asleep in 1940 and woke today might almost think the Germans had won the war. I wonder if all those who fought to prevent that ever suspected our own government would behave like an army of occupation?”

Perhaps that is now how they think of themselves.

Weak justice

The Big Blunkett’s draconian measures to ‘fight terrorists’ would not be necessary if the British justice system was functioning. When this and this can happen with increasing frequency, no wonder that terrorists have a ball in the British courts and Mr Blunkett can continue warping British laws with self-righteous indignation of a politician.

Blunkett attacked over secret trials for terror suspects

Telegraph reports that civil liberties groups and Muslim community leaders lined up yesterday to denounce plans from David Blunkett to conduct secret trials of suspected terrorists.

He said the threat from extremists was now so great that the burden of proof in criminal trials should be reduced from “beyond reasonable doubt” to “the balance of probabilities”.

He also wants a debate over whether intelligence information against suspects should be given in camera to avoid compromising security. Mr Blunkett’s ideas – to be proposed formally in a Home Office paper later this month – are intended to address what the Government sees as a serious threat from Islamist fundamentalists.

We need to debate how we deal with these delicate issues of proportionality and human rights on the one hand and evidential base and the threshold of evidence on the other.

That is quite a challenge because we are having to say that the nature of what people obtain through the security and intelligence route is different to the evidence gained through the policing route. It needs to be presented in a way that doesn’t allow disclosure by any of the parties involved which would destroy your security services.

Lady Kennedy, QC, a Labour peer, compared Mr Blunkett to Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe and described the proposals as “a classic Blunkett tactic”.

He really is a shameless authoritarian. We can be confident that many of his colleagues in the Cabinet, including particularly the Attorney General, will sit on this, because it really is an affront to the rule of law.

You suggest all kinds of outrageous and awful things because then you get away with half of them.

Mark Littlewood, the campaigns director of Liberty, said:

Simply introducing more laws, greater powers and stiffer penalties will go a long way to undermining British justice and will not make our country any safer.

Michael Howard, the Tory leader, said:

You have to try and strike the balance between giving the British people the proper protection against terrorism and not depriving innocent people of their liberty.

Massoud Shadjareh, the chairman of the Islam Human Rights Commission, said:

This sort of legislation in Germany led to concentration camps.

Let’s hear it for the sharia law solution to terrorism.

Big Blunkett Wants Yet More Powers

The BBC reports that Big Blunkett is proposing to introduce yet more draconian powers to lock up suspected terrorists without a fair trial.

The new proposals are an extension of the current anti-terrorism laws rushed into being after September 11th. Those have already been condemned as creating “Guantanamo Bay in our own back yard”.

The new proposals would see British citizens tried partly in secret and denied access to the evidence against them. They would also reduce the burden of proof from “beyond reasonable doubt” to “on the balance of probabilities”.

Speaking on the Today programme, Senior lawyer Baroness Kennedy described the proposals as “a disgrace”. She went on to say:

“It is as if David Blunkett takes his lessons on jurisprudence from Robert Mugabe”

Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe

Excessive regulation leads to arbitrary government

I’ve just done a posting at Samizdata about the phenomenon of excessive regulation, so excessive that even if an organisation wants to obey it, it can’t. It’s just too voluminous, too complicated, sometimes even too contradictory. (One of the Samizdata commenters told of how his encryption duties seemed to require some sort of infinite regress and were un-obeyable.)

The White Rose Relevance of this is, Cicero apparently said:

Excessive law is no law at all.

Which means that in practice the law becomes whatever those in charge decide to make it. And that is the point at which White Rosers should sit up and notice, because that is when people who make trouble for the authorities by saying things that the authorities disapprove of, get prosecuted not for their wicked sayings (which might be a rather hard charge to make stick and would anyway draw attention to the sayings) but for non-compliance with plumbing regulations, for failure to fill out the proper forms concerning employee sick-leave, for baking bread of the wrong size and shape, etc. The completely we are all likely to be breaking this or that law, the more completely they have us by the proverbials.

T. M. Lucas also commented as Samizdata, drawing the attention of its readers to a series of posts his blog has on these themes.

Free speech equals exclusion

I went from her to him to this.

Quote of beyond America interest:

The Bush administration’s anti-protester bias proved embarrassing for two American allies with long traditions of raucous free speech, resulting in some of the most repressive restrictions in memory in free countries. When Bush visited Australia in October, Sydney Morning Herald columnist Mark Riley observed, “The basic right of freedom of speech will adopt a new interpretation during the Canberra visits this week by the US President, George Bush, and his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao. Protesters will be free to speak as much as they like just as long as they can’t be heard.” Demonstrators were shunted to an area away from the Federal Parliament building and prohibited from using any public address system in the area.

For Bush’s recent visit to London, the White House demanded that British police ban all protest marches, close down the center of the city, and impose a “virtual three day shutdown of central London in a bid to foil disruption of the visit by anti-war protesters,” according to Britain’s Evening Standard. But instead of a “free speech zone” – as such areas are labeled in the U.S. – the Bush administration demanded an “exclusion zone” to protect Bush from protesters’ messages.

And the concluding paragraph:

Is the administration seeking to stifle domestic criticism? Absolutely. Is it carrying out a war on dissent? Probably not – yet. But the trend lines in federal attacks on freedom of speech should raise grave concerns to anyone worried about the First Amendment or about how a future liberal Democratic president such as Hillary Clinton might exploit the precedents that Bush is setting.

Precedents hell. I agree with Kim Du Toit. This is already bullshit. Never mind all the bullshit it brings on in the future.

Disaster plans due to be unveiled

The BBC reports that planned new powers for dealing with a major terrorist attack and other big emergencies are unveiled today. Ministers have already published drafts of the new laws, which were criticised by an influential committee of MPs and peers for putting human rights at risk.

They fear that unless the Civil Contingencies Bill contains suitable constraints its powers could be abused by a future government. Civil rights campaigners want the new powers to be more strictly defined.

Summary of key power in draft bill:

  1. Ministers will be able to bypass Parliament to make emergency regulations
  2. Police will be able to ban public gatherings, impose curfews, seize property
  3. The Human Rights Act could be suspended

A parliamentary committee set up to look at the plans said they had “potentially dangerous flaws”. The Committee chairman Lewis Moonie said his main concern was over human liberty and rights because the terms used in the bill were “too vague”.

The basis under which the government could take these powers to itself – the way in which government defines an emergency – I think is the first concern. If they listen to us, as I’m pretty sure they will, they should have changed the terms on which this is done and made it much more explicit how they take these powers in the first place.

Dr Moonie, a former defence minister warns:

We should not put such power into the hands of anybody without suitable constraints.

Truer words are rarely spoken by politicians.

Full text of the civil contingencies bill here (pdf). Via the Guardian.

Here is Liberty’s response to the government’s civil contingencies bill.

Whenever the authorities try and vote themselves greater powers, there is a need to be cautious and sceptical. By reinstating the courts’ powers to consider human right abuses under these laws, the government has made an important concession.

And Statewatch has a detailed commentary on the issue:

The concessions made by the government in no way change the fundamental objections to this Bill. The powers available to the government and state agencies would be truly draconian. Cities could be sealed off, travel bans introduced, all phones cut off, and websites shut down. Demonstrations could be banned and the news media be made subject to censorship. New offences against the state could be “created” by government decree. This is Britain’s Patriot Act, at a stroke democracy could be replaced by totalitarianism.

The Listerner’s Law

A reader alerted us to an interesting vote happening on the Radio 4 today programme: vote for a law to be submitted to the House of Commons. So far there are five ‘Law Ideas’ and at No.5 is a bill to allow homeowners to defend their property with any force, by deleting “reasonable” from the phrase “reasonable force”.

You can vote by phone or online, if you are registered with BBCi.

Police re-arrest terror suspects

Guy Herbert finds this is a bit worrying.

The BBC reports that six people suspected of terror activities have been re-arrested on lesser charges. All six were originally arrested under section 41 of the Terrorism Act, on suspicion of involvement in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism. They were released under terror laws but re-arrested on other matters such as bank fraud and immigration offences.

What’s wrong with this picture? Under the Terrorism Act reasonable suspicion is not required to arrest or search. Therefore it has potential to be used for fishing expeditions – police arrest you and search your property without proper cause. Of course, they’ll have an actual cause, such as being uncooperative with officials or some such pretext, and give themselves a week to find something on you. Once they have found something on you, their actions are justified in the eyes of the Lawn Order brigade.

Given the state of the criminal law and bureaucratic reach, I sincerely doubt there is anyone in the country who could not be charged with some crime after a week of interrogation and search, even among those whose lawns are in perfect order and believe they have nothing to hide.

Aussie rules interrogation – rules change from 24 hrs to 48 hrs and you mustn’t tell anyone about it

ASIO stands for Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, and the ASIO is in the news, here, and here:

An international law expert believes the Federal Government’s proposed changes to its ASIO laws to extend the questioning time allowed for non-English speakers would be a “clear contravention” of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Associate Professor Donald Rothwell, from the University of Sydney, said amendments expected to be introduced today into Parliament, which would extend the period ASIO could question people who needed interpreters from 24 hours to 48 over a week, would breach Article 26 of the covenant.

… and here:

Labor is expected to agree to key legislative amendments that will provide stiff penalties for unauthorised disclosure of information relating to ASIO’s new special questioning and detention powers.

Attorney-General Philip Ruddock will introduce the amendments today, with an expectation they will be passed by both chambers before the parliament rises next week for Christmas.

The most contentious aspect of the legislation relates to the disclosure provisions by which the subject of an ASIO warrant or his lawyer or other persons convey information about the course of ASIO’s investigations.