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Ministers are preparing legislation for the next session of parliament to make local authorities create files on every child in England, including intimate personal information about parents’ relationships with other partners and any criminal record, alcohol or drug abuse in the extended family. The files will be available to teachers, social workers, NHS staff and other professionals dealing with children to help them piece together symptoms of neglect or abuse that might require intervention by the authorities.
The green paper produced as a response to the murder of Victoria Climbié, an eight-year-old who died in London in 2000 after months of torture and neglect, said the need to protect children had to be balanced against preserving the privacy of parents. But Charles Clarke, the education secretary, said yesterday that the interests of children “absolutely” took precedence over the civil liberties of adults.
Mark Littlewood, the campaigns director of Liberty, said Mr Clarke’s remarks were even more disturbing than the green paper.
We have to make sure social workers are sharper, smarter and better focused. That’s done by better training, not by casting the net so wide that every child in the country will be in it. That creates the danger that investigations will be triggered by supposition, guesswork, gossip and rumour. Our concern is that there will be witchhunts rather than protection of the relatively small number of children in real danger.
The Adam Smith Institute Weblog seems to have hit the ground running, and Jonny Fraser’s piece about harassment in the USA by cops and bureaucrats and stupid laws is provoking a fine old comment fest. Quote:
On entering the country, with no matter what passport, you are treated like a criminal or socio-economic migrant. Several forms need to be filled in, many of their requirements duplicated, unnecessary and arbitrary. This practice does not stop at international boundaries. There are occasional police checks on interstate roads, and even occasionally at state borders. Post 9/11 fear is all encompassing.
Rights are being eroded and regulations piled on like cheese and freedom fries at a burger joint. It seems that obesity and laughable laws have a bizarre relationship. In America, you can die for your country at 18, but you cannot buy a beer until you are 21. In America you can kill on the roads with reckless driving at 15 in some states, but experienced drivers usually have to stay below 55 miles per hour or risk a ludicrously overpriced speeding ticket.
California is the worst state for this sort of thing. Their claim to liberalism extends as far as a blanket ban on smoking in public places, …
I particularly liked Kevin Carson’s comment, responding to American critics of American critics. Final paragraph:
Well guess what? I DO have a bad attitude. It’s because of people with “bad attitudes” that we’re not still working on chain gangs to build a pyramid, or eating our lunches standing up during a sixteen hour shift on an assembly line. For every liberty that sets us above the level of a slave, you can thank somebody with a bad attitude. Rights are not granted by government; they are forced on it from below.
It is good that the ASI blog is not confining itself to municipal bus privatisation and such like. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
There are several disturbing features of this panoptican state in which we will soon be living not the least of which is the sheer breakneck pace of its assembly.
It seems like only yesterday that speed cameras suddenly appeared on every lamppost but even they are so much old hat now:
Automatic Number Plate Recognition systems are set to be deployed by police forces throughout the UK as a major plank of a campaign of “denying criminals the use of the roads.” The system will link up to the DVLA, Police National Computer and a National Insurance Database, with these links alone giving it the capability of identifying untaxed, unroadworthy and uninsured vehicles, but they’ll also facilitate police surveillance operations, the swapping of data on “prolific offenders” between forces and, well, other stuff… Take this, for instance:
“Eventually the database will link to most CCTV systems in town centres, meaning that all vehicles filmed on one of the many cameras protecting Bedford High Street, for instance, can be checked against the database and the movements of wanted cars traced to help with serious crime investigations.”
As far as the drivers are concerned, well, that just about wraps it up, folks.
But truly one hardly has time to digest one horror before the next one comes galloping over the horizon. Dr.Sean Gabb has suggested that our rulers our ‘drunk with the technology’ but I am not so sure. More like they are stone-cold sober and determined to get the whole country locked down before the public realises exactly what has been done to them.
After reading Natalie Solent’s article called A law-abiding person has nothing to hide?, reader Matt Judson wrote in with this cautionary tale as a case in point. The camera does indeed lie.
I have read with interest your posts on security cameras, and the threat they represent. I was especially interested in your post on the idea that law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear from security cameras and other surveillance technology, because I was recently unjustly accused of vandalism due to security video.
I recently moved to Nob Hill in San Francisco. Nob Hill is justly famous for the lack of parking; After a few weeks of struggle, I surrendered, and chose to pay $255 per month to park in the Masonic Garage.
Purely by coincidence, my friend works in IT for the Masonic Center of San Francisco, which oversees the garage. Friday morning, he sent me an email: “Emergency: call me now! This is not a joke.” I called him, and he told me that the garage manager had asked for his help in emailing security camera video. The garage had caught someone keying a car on camera; they identified the suspect because he drove off a few minutes later, and they had his license plate number. They wanted to send the video to the owner of the car, so that the owner could take it to the police and file charges.
When he looked at the video, he was shocked to see that I was the suspect on the video. He did not think that I was the kind of person who would vandalize a car, but he thought I looked very suspicious on the tape. If he had not known me, he would have sent the video off without a second thought.
I told my friend that I have never keyed a car in my life. That was me on the tape, no question. I knew what I was doing when I was on the camera: I checked for my car on one level, but did not see it; I then turned around, thought about heading for the stairway, and then decided to take the elevator to the next level. I did all of this next to the car that had been vandalized.
At lunchtime, I went to the garage to speak to the garage manager. I told him that it was not me, and asked him to review the tape carefully. He replied that the garage had already reviewed the tape carefully, and they were convinced that they had the right person. He suggested that I call the car owner and try to work out a deal so that I would not be charged.
My friend believed me, and spent the rest of the day reviewing video. Two days after I was caught on video, he found video of a group of teenagers doing something to the car in question; when the teenagers noticed the security camera, they covered their faces and ran away. My friend took the video to the manager, and forced him to call me to apologize. His apology was grudging, of course: “Your friend found someone who was maybe more suspicious than you were.”
If it had not been for an incredible stroke of luck, I would have been in for a major headache, perhaps charged with a crime. The initial reviewers of the video tape were completely untrained in viewing video; they did not bother to review the tape carefully; the way they passed on their suspicions resulted in a psychological set that I was guilty; if I had not had a close friend in the process, it would have been very hard to convince anyone of my innocence. Lastly, the garage was going to pass the video on to the owner of the car without telling me; if the car owner had seen me in the garage and recognized me from he video, what would he have done?
Law-abiding people do indeed have something to fear from security cameras.
Matt Judson, San Francisco
David Sucher has another post on ubiquitous computing. He quotes from the sales puff for one manifestation of this stuff:
IntelliBadgeTM: Towards Providing Location-Aware Value-Added Services at Academic Conferences … The major characteristic of this project is the fusion of RFID technology, database management, data mining, real-time information visualization, and interactive web application technologies into an operational integrated system deployed at a major public conference. The developed system tracks conference attendees …
Sounds like another one for Natalie’s list.
In today’s Telegraph a reader comments:
Sir – The scheme for national identity cards that David Blunkett proposes (report, Sept 22) goes beyond the bounds of what is tolerable. The ordinary people of Britain are neither criminals nor potential terrorists, and will not be frightened into accepting this clampdown on our civil liberties. I, for one, will follow the lead of Nelson Mandela and the oppressed people of South Africa and burn my “pass”. I hope millions of Britons who cherish their freedom will do the same.
The Guardian’s Simon Jeffery explains some of the issues about identity cards.
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:
- A person who has unpopular political beliefs of left or right that might lose them their job or promotion.
- A person who is homosexual but their family does not know.
- A teenage girl secretly visiting her boyfriend. He is of a different race to her family, and they have forbidden her to see him.
- A man who is seeking to change his job needs to attend interviews with other companies. He doesn’t want his present employer to know for fear that if the interviews don’t work out he might end up worse off than before, having lost the confidence of his boss.
- A woman scouting out places to go to get away from her violent partner.
- Someone going to Alcoholics Anonymous or drugs rehabilitation sessions.
- Someone going to church, synagogue or mosque who fears the scorn of their secular friends, colleagues or family.
- Someone attending classes of religious instruction prior to converting to another religion who fears the vengeance of their family if their apostasy becomes known.
- A son or daughter visiting an estranged parent without the knowledge of the parent they live with.
- An ex-criminal seeking to go straight who must meet his probation officer or register with the police.
- An adulterer. (I think adultery is very wrong, but I don’t want the government involved in exposing it – besides the intrinsic nastiness of state intervention in such matters, you can bet they would expose the adulteries of their opponents and pass over the adulteries of their friends.)
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.
Cross-posted from Samizdata.net
In an attempt to marshal my thoughts and arguments on the subject I’ve added some pages to my web site:
UK Compulsory National Identity Cards – The Case Against
Hopefully this’ll be of some use to those opposing Big Blunkett. There’s a load more that could be added (for example I haven’t even mentioned the problems with biometrics) but at least it’s a start.
It’s one thing to promise not to pass on data to other organisations, and it’s another thing again not to pass on data to other organisations:
JetBlue Airways passengers, more than a million of them, have been unsuspecting guinea pigs in a Defense Department contractor’s experiment in mining commercial databases to assess the risk of a person turning out to be a terrorist. The airline admits it violated its own privacy policy when it acceded to the Pentagon’s request to give passenger records to Torch Concepts, a private technology business that was ostensibly creating a program to enhance security at military bases.
That’s paragraph one of a New York Times story today. This is the final para:
This misstep only feeds legitimate consumer fears that companies and governments are too quick to use private data in unauthorized ways. It is worrisome, in this regard, that the Homeland Security Department has already backtracked from its original vow to use its passenger-profiling program only to fight terrorism. There is now talk of turning it into an all-purpose law-enforcement tool. For its part, in addition to ascertaining what actually took place, Congress may also need to consider new legal protections for consumers’ privacy.
Mission creep, in other words.
I really don’t know how all these so-called ‘civil libertarians’ can possibly live with themselves. Don’t they care about the children?
Children are frightened of speeding traffic and want more measures to make roads safer, a survey has suggested.
Three-quarters of children questioned said they wanted more speed cameras.
About 70% thought drivers should go slower near their school, with almost as many wanting drivers to slow down near their house.
Half of the 1,500 children surveyed wanted safer places to cross the road.
The findings of the survey of children aged 7-14 in city schools by road safety charity Brake were released to coincide with the annual Road Safety Week.
A good friend of mine who has been professionaly engaged in market research has provided me with chapter and verse on just how ludicrously easy it is to get the answers that the researcher wants. Quadruple the easiness when the views being solicited are those of children.
A ‘road safety charity’?
David Sucher has news of a conference, and reckons that White Rose ought to be monitoring what was being talked about.
Says David:
“Ubiquitous Computing” means “computing technology that migrates beyond our desktops onto our hands, heads and clothing, and becomes increasingly embedded in a wide variety of other objects, such as walls, cars and appliances.”
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