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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Wired reports that privacy groups, business travelers and members of Congress asked the federal government this week to reconsider its plans to implement a passenger-profiling system because agencies have not adequately addressed privacy concerns or shown effectiveness in detecting potential terrorists.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-California), joined by 25 other Democrats, sent President Bush a letter Wednesday asking his administration to protect passenger privacy. The group also proposed that airlines should tell passengers exactly what information they pass along as travelers make reservations.
Before the Computer-Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening Program (CAPPS II) is implemented, we urge the adoption of a specific policy that makes clear the role of airlines in sharing consumer information with the federal government.
Members of Congress and the public have no real assurances that the system will not rely upon medical, religious, political or racial data.
CAPPS II will require passengers to give more personal information when buying airline tickets, information that will then be checked against mammoth commercial databases, watch lists and warrants to screen for suspected terrorists and people wanted for violent crimes.
An ideologically diverse group of public-interest groups – including Common Cause, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Free Congress Foundation -joined the letter-writing campaign, asking Congress for hearings.
I rather think this may be the first posting about animal rights and their potential violation here on White Rose. (For some dumb reason I can’t make that link work, so go via the link below, where for some equally dumb reason the exact same link does seem to work.)
Anyway, this just in, via Dave Barry:
AKRON, Ohio – More stray cats could find their way home under a proposed plan to implant microchips that would electronically identify the cats’ owners.
Democrat Renee Greene introduced legislation Monday to implant microchips beneath the fur of 1,000 cats, giving the animals a permanent identification tag. A runaway cat’s owner would be identified by scanning the chip, which would be about the size of a grain of rice, then checking the scan against a voluntary registry maintained by the city.
Buying and installing the microchips would cost the city nearly $10,000. The City Council still must approve the legislation.
The legislation is an amendment to a cat law passed about 18 months ago that added cats to the city’s laws governing dogs and gave the city’s animal wardens the right to capture free-roaming cats, which can be killed if they aren’t claimed. The Summit County Animal Shelter, where stray cats are taken, already has the scanners that would be used on the microchips.
First they came for the cats …
Do you also get the feeling that humans will be next?
Paul of Manchester United Ruined My Life has this to say about ID cards, and the claim that they might prevent horrors like the recent mass drowning of those unfortunate Chinese:
The recent tragic death of 19 Chinese cockle pickers demonstrates why ‘Mad Dog’ Blunket’s ID card scheme will fail to address his issues.
If you are willing to live in terrible conditions as reported here by icWales (40 to a house, no bedding, etc) and work for £1/day, do you seriously think that you could care less about a voluntary ID card?
It simply shows that if you are willing to break numerous laws, that the police can’t enforce anyway, then further legislation introducing ID cards, is a futile measure when it comes to stopping criminal activity. In fact the only people ID cards will significantly affect are the law abiding citizens of the UK who will not doubt adopt and follow the rules to the detriment of their own personal freedom.
UPDATE: Blunkett is saying more of the same (Thur 12th) again, so so is Paul of MURML again.
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.
Here is an interesting piece about the impact of the Data Protection Act on the world of higher education. As so often, the attempt to suppress badness results in the suppression of, if not goodness, then at least the entirely reasonable.
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.
Government invasion of privacy – for example via Identity Cards – is high profile. Arguably a greater danger is when society itself ceases to respect privacy and believes it OK to breach it as a matter of course.
I’ve recently learned via the Liberty discussion board and handbag.com about an organisation called Millenium AuPairs.
I must stress that as far as I know this organisation is entirely reasonable and above board. Unfortunately their application form is not. See here:
Millenum AuPairs registration form
Now, the question about weight might be non-PC, but that’s not the issue. Scroll down and you see that they are asking prospective nannies if they have “ever been a victim of sexual, emotional or physical abuse?”. And “If you have answered yes to any of the above, please give details”. Details!
This is outrageous. Why ask? Are they assuming that victims of abuse are more likely to be abusers? I don’t know. What I do know is that this question is an invasion of privacy.
As chocalatedrop put it on handbag.com:
can you imagine someone asking if you’d ever been raped on an application form in as many words, because this is what is being asked.
OK, this probably doesn’t affect you today. But imagine if this sort of intrusive question becomes accepted practice on any application form…
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.
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.
College student Lara Hayhurst was not prepared to let officials treat her little pet like Osama ‘fin’ Laden… Forgive the pun but the story is quite funny, well, mainly because she got away with it.
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
Paul Smith is a man with a profound interest in driving and road safety. As a driver myself I, too, have a vested interest in these matters. Whenever I depart from point A I much prefer it to be overwhelmingly probable that I will reach point B with all my favourite limbs and organs in situ and functioning as nature intended.
The British government and its various agencies claim that they share this interest as well. Moreover, they assure us that the solution to the problem lies with forcing everyone to drive more slowly and punish those drivers who fail to comply. Hence the virus-like proliferation of the ‘GATSO’ or ‘Speed Camera’ which (just by complete coincidence I am sure) has also raised tens of millions of pounds for the public coffers from already over-taxed motorists who infringe blanket and arbitrary speed limits.
In response to the wave of discontent this has caused, the government, the police and the various lobbyists that support them, have doggedly stood their ground and explained that, yes, it is all very regrettable but the point of the GATSO’s is most assuredly not to raise revenue (no, perish the thought!) but merely to save lives. In other words, they are relying on the canard that freedom must be sacrificed in order to achieve safety.
Well, they are wrong and Paul Smith has made it his business to prove, publicly and beyond argument, that they are wrong. His website, Safe Speed, cuts a swathe through the cant and the piety:
We have never seen any credible figures that put road accidents caused by exceeding a speed limit at even 5% of road accidents. We object to speed cameras mainly because they fail to address the causes of at least 95% of road accidents. The Government claims of 1/3rd of accidents being caused by excessive speed are no more than lies according to the Government’s own figures.
I am shocked, SHOCKED I tell you!
Mr Smith has amassed a treasure trove of documentary, audio and video evidence that entirely discredits the myth that Tax Speed Cameras are anything whatsoever to do with either road safety or saving lives. In fact, so confident is Mr Smith in his own research that he throws down this gauntlet:
So here’s the challenge. We promise to publish here (in this box, on the first page of the web site) web links to any serious credible research that implies a strong link between excessive speeds and accidents on UK roads.
So if you are one of those people who thinks that the GATSO is a life-saver, you know exactly what to do.
In the meantime, more power to Paul Smith and his campaign for common sense and reason. When we eventually win this battle, the victory will be due in no small part to the dedication and integrity of people like him.
Cross-posted from Samizdata.net.
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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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