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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The State of California has, I’d guess almost unnoticed, passed new financial privacy laws that require banks and other financial service providers to obtain their customer’s consent before passing or selling on their client’s financial details.
It shows that it is still possible to get legislators to pay attention to privacy issues, but, as this interview with the new law’s proposer, State Senator Jackie Speier reveals, you do have to be persistent.
Still, it’s good to see hard work paying off.
Here’s an article by Tom DeWeese of NewsWithViews.com, entitled Total Surveillance Equals Total Tyranny.
First three paragraphs:
In the name of fighting terrorism a new kind of government is being implemented in Washington, D.C. We are witnessing the birth of a powerful multi-billion dollar surveillance lobby consisting of an army of special interest groups, Washington lawyers, lobbyists, and high-tech firms with wares to sell.
The personal rights of American citizens, protected until now by the Bill of Rights, are the farthest thing from their minds as they seek to fill their pockets while enabling government to monitor and control our lives to a degree unheard of prior to September 11, 2001. This army seeks riches as it pushes for laws and regulations to spy on and control the lives of law-abiding Americans.
The Government Electronics and Information Technology Association (GEIA) reports that there are more than 100 federal entities involved in forging the largest conglomeration of government-private contractor interests since the creation of the Pentagon. GEIA represents hundreds of corporate members seeking to cash in on the Homeland Security-citizen-surveillance-spending spree.
The counter-terrorist-industrial complex?
For reasons best known to themselves the proprietors of the British tabloid newspaper the Daily Mail have elected not make the contents available on-line. As a result I cannot link to this story, so thanks are due to Dr.Chris Tame for posting it to the Libertarian Alliance Forum:
I went to a cafe in central London to meet a stranger.
I handed over £1,300 and a mere 48 hours to assume the new identity of ‘Odette Hinault’ complete with fake EU passport, driving licence and French ID card, together with a genuine National Insurance number. Within a day of becoming ‘Miss Hinault’ she had opened a bank account, registered with a GP, obtained a phone number and had claim forms for housing allowances and council tax benefits.
There was nothing to stop her plugging into an entire system of state handouts that would have more than repaid her £1,300 outlay within weeks.
So says a Daily Mail reporter called Sue Reid who went undercover (presumably) and succeeded in obtaining all manner of forged official documents.
Two of the many oft-floated (and disposable) justifications for establishing a national ID card system are that it will a) stop illegal immigration (or, at least, make it a lot harder to do) and b) stop cheats from defrauding the welfare state (or, at least, make it much harder to do).
Ms.Reid’s investigations prove pretty conclusively that both claims are manifest rubbish.
Here’s a description of a helpful and amusing mapping system that they’ve developed in Amsterdam, linked to by David Sucher.
For the exhibition Maps of Amsterdam 1866-2000 at the Amsterdam City Archive Waag Society together with Esther Polak have set up the Amsterdam RealTime project.
Every inhabitant of Amsterdam has an invisble map of the city in his head. The way he moves about the city and the choices made in this process are determined by this mental map. Amsterdam RealTime attampts to visualize these mental maps through examining the mobile behaviour of the city’s users.
During two months (3 Oct to 1 Dec 2002) all of Amsterdam’s residents are invited to be equipped with a tracer-unit. This is a portable device developed by Waag Society which is equipped with GPS: Global Positioning System. Using satellite data the tracer calculates its geographical position. Therse tracers’ data are sent in realtime to a central point. By visualizing this data against a black background traces, lines, appear. From these lines a (partial) map of Amsterdam constructs itself. This map does not register streets or blocks of houses, but consists of the sheer movements of real pepole.
When the different types of users draw their lines, it becomes clear to the viewer just how individual the map of amsterdam can be. A cyclist will produce completley different favourite routes than someone driving a car. The means of transport, the location of home, work or other activities together with the mental map of the particular person determine the traces he leaves. This way an everchanging, very recent, and very subjective map of Amsterdam will come about. If you spend (or should we say move) a good amount of time within the ‘ring’ of the Amsterdam A10 Highway, you can apply here
for becoming a testperson during rhe testing and development-stage or for becoming a participant during the time of the exhibition. Participants receive a print of their personal routes through the city, their diary in traces.
As Sucher says, this could be
…the first step to charging for street use. Or more.
My attitude to charging for street use is: if it’s your street? … But: “Or more.” Exactly. The whole point of the Internet is that we don’t each of us, separately, any longer have to do our own personal filing. The great Giant Filing Cabinet in the Sky can do our filing for us, and we can share each other’s files. There are huge advantages to this process. Huge.
But what are the disadvantages? Who else gets to look at your “personal” files, and what use to they make of what they learn? The White Rose agenda is, among things: the disadvantages of the Internet. What if they price we pay for this thing ends up being a whole lot more than just the price of getting connected to it?
White Rose: Depress yourself about the future of technology.
If only to have something of interest up here today, here’s a New York Times article from yesterday about a TV show which specialises in harrassing celebs.
It seems to me that what viewers of this show are likely to witness is techniques of harrassment and privacy violation applied to somewhat secondary and somewhat unpopular “fair game” type celebrities, which will thereby be established as reputable, or at least excusable, or okay, or done before so what are you fussing about? – for later use by anyone, against anyone.
Television is an efficient biosphere where the perfect predator evolves for every species in the food chain. If reality shows are the coral reef of prime time, then the television-oriented Web site, the Smoking Gun, is its crown-of-thorns starfish.
It was the Smoking Gun (thesmokinggun.com) that revealed in 2000 that Rick Rockwell, the beau ideal of the hit FOX show “Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire,” had once been under a restraining order from a former girlfriend. The Smoking Gun, which digs up arrrest records, mug shots, show business contracts and divorce papers, became a tip sheet for journalists and a cult Web site for reality show aficionados. It managed to embarrass seemingly squeaky-clean contestants on reality shows from CBS’s “Survivor” to Fox’s “Joe Millionaire.” (Most memorably, it uncovered the early bondage films of a bachelorette, Sarah Kozer.)
Whoever she is. Which is my exact point. Next in line: non-celebs. Yes, these people are probably fair game. If they can’t take the heat they shouldn’t be prancing about in the kitchen. But who’s next?
I’m not saying shut the damn show down. I’m just, you know, saying.
If you are one of those who favours privacy laws, to protect people against being snooped on, you might want to make sure you aren’t asking the government to make operations like this one illegal.
That link was in David Carr’s Samizdata piece yesterday, and there’s more comment from him and from the Samizdata comment pack.
The BBC reports that US Attorney General John Ashcroft has launched a strident defence of the controversial Patriot Act, saying it was the government’s responsibility to defend Americans in any way it could.
Mr Ashcroft highlighted support for the Patriot Act given earlier by members of Congress and the website lists quotations from members of both parties supporting the legislation, almost wholly dating back to October 2001 when it was introduced.
But since then dozens of cities and counties across the country have approved resolutions criticising the Patriot Act and various lawsuits have been brought to declare it unconstitutional.
Even the Republican-led House of Representatives has become involved in recent weeks, striking down “sneak-and-peek” rules which allowed government agents to search private property without telling the owner.
Other controversial areas – such as agents being allowed to scrutinise people’s library records without showing what crime they believe could be being committed – still stand despite challenges.
Telegraph reports that Tesco, a British supermarket chain, is taking pictures of everyone buying razors in a bid to cut down on shoplifting.
The experiment, at a Tesco store in Cambridge, has been condemned by civil liberty campaigners. Demonstrators have gathered outside the supermarket calling for a boycott until the “Big Brother” scheme is dropped.
Gillette razors in the company’s Newmarket Road branch are being tagged with individual microchips developed by Cambridge University’s Auto-ID Centre.
When anyone removes a product from the Mach 3 display, the chip triggers an in-store CCTV camera which takes a picture of the shopper.
Greg Sage, a spokesman for Tesco, said that the scheme was designed to keep track of its products within the store and stressed that the chips would have no further use once the products left it.
We would never compromise the privacy of our customers.
Police are said to be “impressed” with the images taken of shoppers, but civil rights activists claim that the microchips could soon be placed on a much wider range of products.
News of a new ID card scheme, in China:
BEIJING, Aug. 18 – For almost two decades, Chinese citizens have been defined, judged and, in some cases, constrained by their all-purpose national identification card, a laminated document the size of a driver’s license.
But starting next year, they will face something new and breathtaking in scale: an electronic card that will store that vital information for all 960 million eligible citizens on chips that the authorities anywhere can access.
Surprise, surprise.
Instapundit hates Microsoft Word, because it can reveal more about you than you want revealed. It violates your privacy, you might say.
Here’s a Washington Post story which shows that merely passing a law which makes privacy compulsory is not the whole answer to the problem of maintaining privacy:
The transplant patient was recovering well when doctors discovered that his new heart might have been infected with bacteria before the operation. When the doctors sought more information so they could give the man the right antibiotics, the hospital where the donor had died refused, citing new federal patient privacy rules.
“It was ridiculous. The only live part of the donor was in our patient,” said Deeb Salem, chief medical officer at the Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston.
As it turned out, Salem’s patient was in no danger from the infection. But because the donor’s hospital refused to release any information, doctors were forced, as a precaution, to put the man on multiple antibiotics, potentially exposing him to dangerous side effects.
“It cost our patient the risk of being on multiple antibiotics for 12 to 15 hours, not to mention a lot of money,” Salem said.
Thanks to privacy.org for the link.
Creepy stuff in Florida:
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement is putting together a computer network that would allow police to analyze government and commercial records on every Florida resident, and the agency is planning to share that information with police in at least a dozen other states.
Critics say the system – known as the Multistate Anti-Terrorist Information Exchange, or MATRIX – is an Orwellian technology that would allow police to assemble electronic dossiers on every Floridian, even those not suspected of crimes.
Here’s all of the story from the Gainsville Sun.
“Everybody makes this out to be more than it is,” said Clay Jester, MATRIX program director for the Institute for Intergovernmental Research, a nonprofit group that is helping FDLE find grant money to fund the system.
“Really, this isn’t very different from doing a Lexis-Nexis search on someone,” he said.
Right.
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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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