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The Guardian reports that a “watch list” drawn up by Mexican security forces of 80 anti-globalisation activists who are believed to be headed for Cancun for the World Trade Organisation gathering next month has provoked an angry response – from those whose names are missing. Ten days ago, the Mexican daily La Reforma ran a story on a “watch list” that has been compiled by the security forces concerned about possible trouble at the September 10-14 event. The list named 60 international and 20 Mexican anti-globalisation activists.
A letter addressed to “Government Agents Bent on Re stricting Civil Liberties”, which is currently being circulated for signatures, reads:
Despite hefty expenditures of tax money on intelligence gathering … we are concerned that you were only able to find 60 internationals and 20 Mexicans who are opposed to the World Trade Organisation. Haven’t you noticed that the tide of public opinion is turning decidedly against the WTO? …Please add my name to your ‘watch list’ immediately!
If you are unwilling to add my name to the list, then I must insist that you remove those singled out for special attention. I can assure you that we have similar views – we are all opposed to the WTO and a ‘free’ trade agenda that impoverish the majority of us while enriching a few corporations.
Heh.
Maybe White Rose should have an additional category entitled “Better Late Than Never”. I’ve certainly done several such WR postings.
Here’s another, from the Independent on August 25th:
The case of Stephen Kelly, who was found guilty in February 2001 of culpable and reckless behaviour, exemplifies the way the police and courts can access medical details collected as part of a research project.
That establishes that we’re dealing with a different Kelly. The guts of the story is that supposedly anonymous research data ended up being used to prosecute somebody, which is just the kind of thing we are constantly promised isn’t going to happen, can’t happen, must never happen, etc.
During the investigation of Kelly, police obtained the anonymised codes from patient medical records and used them to seize the scientific evidence that established the genetic similarity between the Aids viruses Kelly and his girlfriend had.
So much for “anonymised”.
Professor Leigh Brown was angry at the information being used. “These databases will have an important role to play in developing our understanding of genetic variation and disease, but what will protect them from seizure by legal authorities?”
Indeed.
Another good excuse for infringing our privacy that governments are wont to provide is efficiency. In such cases, the best bet is to challenge the government agency in question to spell out exactly how these efficiencies are going to be achieved.
The latest gambit in Australia is to provide an electronic health records database. The government claims that this will improve the safety and quality of health care delivery. How, the newspapers do not say.
In another gambit to get this through, the government says there will be no electronic identification numbers, and that patient involvement was voluntary.
Both these gambits need to be challenged. If there are no numbers, one wonders how they propose to deal with the many people known as “Smith” in our country. Not everyone has a unique surname like Wickstein.
And one wonders how ‘voluntary’ this scheme will be in five years time. No doubt, after the scheme has been up and running for a few years, we will be told that to be more ‘efficient’ the scheme needs to be made universal (read, compulsory).
Privacy Commissioner Mal Crompton noted that people might be reluctant to reveal details about themselves if they had doubts about the privacy of their medical records.
There are of course sound medical reasons for the sharing of medical records with, for example, hospitals. But electronic records can stray far and wide.
I don’t think I’d have any real objections to this scheme as it stands now. However, we’ve seen in the past how one government agency likes to dig in the files of another, and frankly, I don’t trust the Australian health system to keep my details private.
How does this matter? Well, how would you like the Tax office auditing you and having access to your medical history? I wouldn’t like the creep auditing me and giving my financial records the third degree knowing my medical details.
More on ID cards from Stephen (“A free country”) Robinson.
This week it emerged that “smart” passports, containing the sort of biometric information to be used in ID cards, are to begin trials in an unnamed market town of about 100,000 people. Meanwhile, schools around the country are being encouraged to issue ID cards to pupils as another part of the campaign to soften us up for the scheme.
I wonder if Robinson has actually been reading White Rose. I’d like to think so, and that sooner or later he may get to stories a few minutes quicker because of it.
CNET News.com reports that the labs at RSA Security on Wednesday outlined plans for a technology they call blocker tags, which are similar in size and cost to radio frequency identification (RFID) tags but disrupt the transmission of information to scanning devices and thwart the collection of data.
According to Ari Juels, a principal research scientist with RSA Laboratories. Blocker and RFID tags are about the size of a grain of sand and cost around 10 cents.
RFID technology uses microchips to wirelessly transmit product serial numbers to a scanner without the need for human intervention. While the technology is potentially useful in improving supply chain management and preventing theft in stores, consumer privacy groups have voiced concerns about possible abuses of the technology if product-tracking tags are allowed to follow people from stores into their homes. Many retailers view RFID as an eventual successor to the barcode inventory tracking system, because it promises to cut distribution costs for manufacturers and improve retailing margins.
RSA’s technique would address the needs of all parties involved, according to Juels. Other options, such as a kill feature embedded in RFID tags, also are available, but with blocker tags, consumers and companies would still be able to use the RFID tags without sacrificing privacy.
This Telegraph article gives a slightly different angle to Guardian’s story yesterday as it talks about the ID pilot scheme in the context of a new biometric passport:
David Blunkett was accused yesterday of using a pilot scheme for a new biometric passport as a test run for a national identity card. Civil liberties campaigners said the Home Secretary was disguising his true purposes in a backdoor attempt to gauge public reaction to ID cards.
Over the next few years, passports are to be adapted to resemble credit cards containing biometric information, such as iris patterns or fingerprints.
Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, said:
The Home Office is being disingenuous. They know that they can’t trial ID cards without parliamentary approval, so they are doing it through the back door… They have admitted that the information gleaned from this so-called passport trial will be used for the purposes of an ID card.
The state is not your friend.
I don’t think that this article from August 13th, by Paul Craig Roberts, has had any mention here. If it has, apologies for not noticing. If not, better very late than never, I hope you agree.
Opening paragraphs:
When will the first lawyer be arrested, indicted and sent to prison for failing to help the government convict his client? You can bet it will be soon. Once the Securities and Exchange Commission, Internal Revenue Service and U.S. Department of Justice (sic) complete their assault on the attorney-client privilege, they will rush to make an example of a lawyer, lest any fail to understand that their new role in life is to serve as government informants on their clients.
Just as government bureaucrats used the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 to assault the Bill of Rights and our constitutional protections, they are now using “accounting scandals” and “tax evasion” to assault the attorney-client privilege, a key component of the Anglo-American legal system that enables a defendant, whether guilty or innocent, to mount a defense against the overwhelming power of the state.
This is the sort of thing that David Carr has been writing about in Britain, for some time now.
Today’s Guardian reports:
The home secretary, David Blunkett, is to stage a pilot scheme this autumn to test the introduction of a national identity card despite the lack of strong cabinet backing for the idea.
The Home Office confirmed last night that a six-month trial, testing the use of new generation fingerprint and eye-scanning technology, would be completed by April to “assess customer perceptions and reactions” and estimate costs. It is believed that the trial will be carried out in an as yet unnamed small market town with a population of about 10,000.
Note, as did Guardian home affairs editor Alan Travis, the creepy use of the word “customer”.
UPDATE: Paul Staines comments at Samizdata.
Layman’s Logic has a brief summary of some of the issues surrounding RFID tags (radio transmitters in products), which soon may be in most goods in large stores. One issue is quite how kooky a number of the opponents of the tags are. Another is persistent rumours Euro bills with have tags in in the future. Another is what to do about them:
“[W]hat I need to know is how to kill the tags when I get them. I don’t care that people can see what I’m buying when I use cards – they can see that anyway if they can access credit info, and they want to track stock. Not a problem. On the other hand, I would like to know how to kill the tags the moment I’ve bought something to avoid any nasty privacy surprises. Fortunately, Slashdot seem to have identified a few possibilities“
There’s an interesting White Rose relevant posting at 2 Blowhards just now. 2 Blowhards? Mostly culture in the paintings-movies-literature sense, but often they wander towards culture in the Brian’s Culture Blog sense (where culture means whatever I want it to mean). Anyway, Blowhard “Friedrich” put a piece up yesterday called They Know Two Much, which is about targetted marketing, in this case at the extremely rich. It’s surveillance in its way. As Friedrich says, of the people he’s writing about, the “geodemographic segmentation” merchants:
Well, the next time you get some direct mail or other advertising that seems to know exactly who you are and where you live and how much tread life remains on your right rear tire, you know who to thank – or blame.
Which makes the point nicely that these people will surely be getting into bed with the CCTV minders if they haven’t already. Which would supply the CCTV people with lots of money and motivation.
“Looks like a worn tyre there – give me the number would you? Make? Owner? Address? Phone? Thank you.” Then: call one from the police about driving with a worn tyre, and call two from the tyre salesman offering immediate delivery and fitting.
Ah, brave new world.
There was a White Rose relevant piece by Alasdair Palmer about the DC Stevens case in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph.
The more repulsive the crime, the greater the temptation to weaken the burden on the prosecution to prove its case beyond reasonable doubt. Child abuse – and child pornography cannot be produced without child abuse – is a very repulsive crime. Yet the result of giving in to the temptation to lower the standard of evidence required to convict someone suspected of child abuse is inevitably that innocent people are convicted.
That’s good, but I recommend all of it.
For an attack on many of the articles that get cited here, arguing that the US Government’s War on Terror is dangerous for civil liberties, see Straight Talk on Homeland Security by Heather Mac Donald in City Journal (lLink from Iain Murray). Penultimate paragraph:
When the War on Terror’s opponents intone, “We need not trade liberty for security,” they are right – but not in the way they think. Contrary to their slogan’s assumption, there is no zero-sum relationship between liberty and security. The government may expand its powers to detect terrorism without diminishing civil liberties one iota, as long as those powers remain subject to traditional restraints: statutory prerequisites for investigative action, judicial review, and political accountability. So far, these conditions have been met.
We here are mostly not opponents of the War on Terror, but we are opponents of it being used as an excuse to expand government power in ways that will then be available to government officials to use across the board.
We agree here that it isn’t a zero sum thing between liberty and security, but that’s because we believe security is best protected by free people protecting themselves and each other. Some of us might even agree that the government “may” expand is powers with no harm done, but that’s hardly the point, is it? “So far, these conditions have been met.” And there the disagreement really begins. But that “So far” suggests that we and Heather Mac Donald might in due course all be re-united.
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