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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It’s a day or two late to be passing this on, but here it is anyway:
A government report that urges the U.S. Postal Service to create “smart stamps” to track the identity of people who send mail is eliciting concern from privacy advocates.
The report, released last month by the President’s Commission on the U.S. Postal Service, issued numerous recommendations aimed at reforming the debt-laden agency. One recommendation is that the USPS “aggressively pursue” the development of a so-called intelligent mail system.
Though details remain sketchy, an intelligent mail system would involve using barcodes or special stamps, identifying, at a minimum, the sender, the destination and the class of mail. USPS already offers mail-tracking services to corporate customers. The report proposes a broad expansion of the concept to all mail for national security purposes. It also suggests USPS work with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to develop the system.
If you want to. read the whole thing.
I’ve just done a posting on my education blog about an organisation called Connexions Direct, which, together with its website ending in .gov.uk, I’ve just seen advertised on TV. It strikes me as just a tad creepy, at any rate potentially.
Finding someone to talk to.
Connexions Direct Advisers are here to listen to your relationship problems and can also help you to find support in your area. You can contact us via email, text, phone or webchat or pop into your local office. Look in the Connexions Service section for details of where your local office is.
Should an organisation with .gov.uk at the end of its website address be offering relationship advice?
I can see it developing into a sort of database of the unhappy. It of course swears that it won’t abuse all the information it will nevertheless be hoovering up, but then it would, wouldn’t it?
And since doing that posting at my blog, I’ve also noticed this. Guess what? Yes, it’s the Connections Card:
The Connexions Card is a secure smartcard, designed specially for you, which allows you to collect reward points for learning, work-based training and voluntary activities. These can be exchanged for discounted and free goods and services and other rewards, including some exclusive ‘money can’t buy’ experiences. The Card can also be used for on-the-spot discounts and special offers from outlets and business displaying the Connexions Card window sticker.
I’d be interested to hear what anyone else thinks about all this.
Most of us are fortunate enough to live our lives in peaceful obscurity. Not many of us do things that attract attention from more then our circle of friends and family.
There are those though that either through their skill or through opportunity attract unwanted attention. While Brian writes about the attention that Prince William is getting, in Australia, we who make princes of our sportsmen are debating the latest scandal involving cricketer Shane Warne.
Warne is one of the most gifted bowlers in the history of the game, but away from the field he is a rather unsavoury man who has gathered a well earned sleazy reputation.
An enterprising South African woman has tried to cash in on that reputation by making allegations against Warne. It seems that for once there is little truth to the story, and indeed she’s been charged by the South African police with extortion. Whatever the truth of this sordid affair, the media spotlight is once again firmly on Shane Warne. Sometimes that spotlight steps over the boundary of what is acceptable by the media after News Corporation’s flagship newspaper “The Australian” took a photograph of Warne having a smoke in his backyard.
While in general little sympathy need be wasted on Warne, in this case, I feel for him. His response to the affair has been to keep as low a profile as possible, and every person has the right not to be photographed if they don’t want to be.
Governments are notoriously inquisitive about the private matters of their citizens, but they are not the only intrusive Big Brother out there.
I’ve just done a posting here using this BBC report, about the Prince William 21st Birthday break-in at Windsor Castle, concerning the matter of who is supposed to watch all the surveillance cameras that the world is now being flooded with.
But another point about that report struck me as also worth commenting on, and in a separate posting. One thing at a time, and all that.
Here’s the bit that particularly caught my attention, concerning the report on the incident that has just been published:
The report – by Commander Frank Armstrong of the City of London force – gives 28 recommendations for changes to the way the Royal Family is protected in future.
Among them, it calls for legislation to create a new offence of trespassing on royal or government property.
Now is it just me, or is this not a rather odd thing to recommend? Surely the problem that this “comedian” posed to police that night was not that they didn’t have the law on their side to enable them to stop something bad. It was simply that they didn’t do the job that the law already gave them ample entitlement to do.
It’s extremely common among silly people who know no better, such as voters and politicians, to want to solve every problem that ever happens by suggesting a new law to stop it. I once took part in a vox-pop studio debate of the sort one agrees to be on but would never dream of watching, in which one of my fellow debaters on the subject of bank robbery came within about a quarter of a second of saying, on national television, that there ought to be a law against it. Okay, from the mere public you can maybe expect no better. But when a senior police officer, invited to comment on a security cock-up and suggest lessons to be learned, also reaches for the law, we really are in trouble, it seems to me.
It may be that in this particular case, there really is good reason to think that a “new offence” should indeed be created. But me, I choose to doubt it.
So what? A policeman thinks a new crime should be invented. Why does that matter?
It matters because there is already a Himalayan mountain range of legislation, with tons more pouring forth from Parliaments everywhere, every day, week, month, year.
And a world in which there is so much law that nobody – not even lawyers, let alone policemen, politicians, and certainly not the general public – can possibly be aware of what it all consists of is not a good world to live in. It actually has quite a lot in common with a world with no law at all.
I don’t know when it happened, but some years ago I came to two conclusions about my own personal law-abidingness. (1) At any particular moment I am probably always breaking some damn law or other. (2) To hell with it. I still try to be good. But I have given up trying to obey the law.
The trouble starts for me if the powers-that-be, or more likely a power-that-is decide(s) that they (it) want(s) to get me. Suppose I surprise all of us and say something here which really angers the government, or, more likely, some particular powerful individual towards the top end of it. In a world of infinite law, this person can be absolutely confident that a search for a law that I am breaking will turn up something, and maybe a great deal. He may never take it as far as me having to talk my way out of it in a court of law, but he may be able to make a deal of trouble for me nevertheless, just by going through the legal motions and stopping them just before they go public, but not letting me know about that until the last minute.
Remember all those poets and academics who used to annoy the government of the old USSR? What did the government of the USSR do to them? Did it complain about their poems, or have complicated arguments with them about the nuances of how to interpret the Soviet “Constitution”? Did it hell? It just found some law that the poor wretch had been breaking (because everyone broke the law in the old USSR – just to stay alive) and set the legal wheels in motion. I mean, we can’t have currency smuggling, now can we? Course not.
That’s the world we may find ourselves in quite soon, and I dare say that the experience of not a few persons is that we are already there. It may seem a long argument from a policeman trying to avoid blaming idiot fellow policemen for some policing fiasco and instead blaming the law, to Soviet dissidents, but I hope I have explained that there is a genuine connection here. Discuss.
The case of the comedian who strolled into Prince William’s 21st birthday party on June 21 illustrates the point that surveillance cameras are only as much use as the people supposedly manning them and paying attention to them. That night, the members of the Metropolitan Police and of the various Royal Security organisations who were supposed to be doing this weren’t. Had our joker been a real suicide bomber he might have landed us all with King Edward, so I heard on the TV today.
The thing is, criminals of the more usual in-out don’t-make-a-fuss sort have already worked out that merely being photographed doesn’t matter if no one is paying attention to the photographs until they’ve done their criminal deeds.
I believe that the spread of surveillance cameras means that there will soon be a whole new class of people in the world, the surveillers. We will become aware of these people rather as we recently became aware of call centre operatives, for there will have to be a lot of them to keep up with the flow of pictures. One thing’s for sure. They’ll know a lot more stuff than they’ll officially be allowed to tell, and there’ll be lots of arguments about what their rights and responsibilities will be, and who they will have to report to.
I suppose it is possible that “expert” computer programmes will enable CCTV security to be entirely automated, to the point where robots will spot trouble and act against it, but it seems unlikely. Too much to go wrong, I would have thought. (Comments on the immediate likelihood, say in the next two decades, of such expert systems would be most welcome.) I wonder, will the day ever come when a human can be arrested and charged by a robot? Maybe not. But computers will have work to do in observing what they think might be unusual or anomalous events, which require serious human attention.
An extra dimension of interesting could be added to such matters by the fact that, what with modern communications racing ahead the way they are, the people looking at the pictures (assuming computers don’t muscle in on this job) won’t even have to be in the same countries as the cameras, any more than call centre people have to be now. People who became skilled in the art of watching television (I reckon I’m pretty good at this myself) could win national awards for export achievement.
The Baby Boom is getting old, and is going to be very hard to keep in nice fat juicy pensions like they (we) are now expecting, and they (we) will have a lot of votes. We will, I anticipate, be demanding undemanding jobs to top up our pensions. Snooping on other people with CCTV cameras would be just the thing. The 21st century equivalent of peeking at the passing scene through net curtains.
Not a very pretty picture. Not a definitely nice world. Please understand that I am describing the way I think things are heading, not recommending it or approving of it.
The government has enthusiastically taken up the cause of introducing more ‘flexible’ voting methods in order to increase electoral turnout. The fragility of their new experimental systems was brought home to me when my father asked me to witness his postal vote (a requirement that is now being dropped). I wasn’t too concerned because he was voting for the Residents Association rather than a political party.
I am not the only one. The e-voting systems have been criticised. Dr Ben Fairweather, Research Fellow at De Montford University, has analysed the local elections and found some disturbing results. These involved eighteen elections and 1.5 million voters.
He said the system used in Shrewsbury and Kerrier, Cornwall adopted a CESG security model that called for candidate codes to be sent to voters by post, as a security precaution. But people could request this information online on the day in violation of this security policy.
In Sheffield matters were worse. Many polling stations were without an Internet connection on polling day. As a result voters could get a vote at a poling station while still being able to vote again online from home.
The good fellow is also concerned about inappropriate influences within the home, and one could point to our more tight-knit communities where vulnerable members could be forced to vote for particular candidates. These changes encourage communalism in voting patterns.
“For one thing how do you know who’s in the room with someone when they vote and how can you be sure they are not trying to influence someone’s vote?” he asked.
Dr Fairweather’s work is here. The Foundation for Information Policy Research made similar criticisms.
So far, none of these elections have been rerun, even though their flaws have been documented.
In an amazingly petty act of vengeful spite, the US Treasury Department is fining a peace protestor $10,000. Faith Fippinger was one of many who went to Iraq to act as a “human shield”. She has now been told that her action was in breach of trade sanctions because whilst in Iraq she spent around $200, mainly on food and water. She has also been accused of “providing services” to the Iraqi regime by her presence.
If she can’t or won’t pay she could face 12 years in jail.
Whether or not you supported the war, the right to protest against it was supposedly one of the things that US citizens had and Iraqi citizens were denied. Now a minor technical breach of sanctions legislation is being used to punish a citizen who dared exercise her civil liberties.
The message from King George’s regime is clear: defy us at your peril.
BBC report here
Cross-posted from An It Harm None
An international coalition of 47 civil liberties groups and consumer rights campaigns sent a letter to the European Union today urging rejection of the proposed Intellectual property Enforcement Directive .
The coalition warns that the proposed Directive is overbroad and threatens civil liberties, innovation, and competition policy. It requires EU Member States to criminalize all violations of any intellectual property right that can be tied to any commercial purpose, with penalties to include imprisonment. Andy Müller-Maguhn, a board member of European Digital Rights and speaker for the Chaos Computer Club explains:
If this proposal becomes a reality, major companies from abroad can use ‘intellectual property’ regulations to gain control over the lives of ordinary European citizens and threaten digital freedoms. Under this proposal, a person’s individual liberty to use his own property is replaced with a limited license that can be revoked or its terms changed at any time and for any reason.
Ville Oksanen, a lawyer and Vice Chairman of Electronic Frontier Finland (EFFi) who signed the letter, points out:
Currently EU-Member states are implementing the EU Copyright Directive and the EU Software Patent Directive is next in the line. We should really wait and see what effect these new laws have before adding any new legislation organizational letter. Contrary to what the Enforcement Directive claims, Member States are already obliged by international treaties like TRIPS to protect intellectual property rights.
The letter marked the launch of the Campaign for an Open Digital Environment (CODE) to raise awareness about the IP Enforcement proposal’s threat to consumer rights and market competition. → Continue reading: IP Enforcement Directive – DMCA on steroids
CNET News.com reports:
Lawmakers in California have scheduled a hearing for later this month to discuss privacy issues surrounding a controversial technology designed to wirelessly monitor everything from clothing to currency.
Sen. Debra Bowen, a California legislator recently on the forefront of an antispam legislation movement, is spearheading the August 18 hearing, which will focus on an emerging area of technology known as radio frequency identification (RFID), a representative for Bowen has confirmed.
RFID tags are miniscule microchips, which already have shrunk to half the size of a grain of sand. They listen for a radio query and respond by transmitting their unique ID code. Retailers adore the concept, which enables them to automatically detect the movement of merchandise in stores and monitor inventory in warehouses using millions of special sensors. CNET News.com wrote about how Wal-Mart and the U.K.-based grocery chain Tesco are starting to install “smart shelves” with networked RFID readers.
According to Declan McCullagh of CNET News.com Proponents hail the technology as the next-generation bar code, allowing merchants and manufacturers to operate more efficiently and cut down on theft. The privacy threat comes when RFID tags remain active once you leave a store. That’s the scenario that should raise alarms – and currently the RFID industry seems to be giving mixed signals about whether the tags will be disabled or left enabled by default.
Further, unchecked use of RFID could end up trampling consumer privacy by allowing retailers to gather unprecedented amounts of information about activity in their stores and link it to customer information databases. They also worry about the possibility that companies and would-be thieves might be able to track people’s personal belongings, embedded with tiny RFID microchips, after they are purchased. Katherine Albrecht, the head of Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering, a fierce critic of RFID technology says:
If you are walking around emanating an electric cloud of these devices wherever you go, you have no more privacy. Every door way you walk through could be scanning you.
Policy makers in Britain are also starting to ponder the privacy implications of RFID. A member of Britain’s Parliament has submitted a motion for debate on the regulation of RFID devices when the government returns from its summer recess next month.
We noted here earlier the controversial proposed appointment of a new Director of Public Prosecutions. Today’s Telegraph reports that Britain’s Conservative Opposition are continuing to making an issue of this:
The appointment of one of Cherie Blair’s “cronies” as the new Director of Public Prosecutions is a “matter of deepest concern” because of his work on terrorist cases, Michael Howard, the shadow chancellor, said yesterday.
Mr Howard suggested that Ken Macdonald was not fit to serve as the country’s top prosecutor because of his views on the motives of those charged with terrorism.
Mr Howard, a QC, singled out Mr Macdonald’s website at Matrix Chambers, where Mrs Blair works as a public law barrister, and his use of the phrase “political violence”.
A website? Yes, this one.
The website detailing Mr Macdonald’s work as a criminal lawyer says: “He is very well known for his work in cases where serious allegations of political violence are made against Irish republicans, Sikhs, Palestinians and Islamists. He is especially interested in fair trial issues arising out of recent anti-terrorist legislation in Britain and abroad.”
Although Mr Howard stopped short of suggesting that Mr Macdonald was sympathetic to the cause of terrorist groups, he said the concept of “political violence” was not recognised under English law.
This is an argument that will presumably divide White Rose readers along political lines. But it is very White-Rose-relevant, as I’ve been saying of a number of stories here.
Howard admits that if Macdonald hadn’t had that Blair connection he wouldn’t be making so much fuss. Fair enough. Neither would I. As it is, says Howard, the appointment should be closely scrutinised. Here’s what is probably Howard’s most telling punch:
“If you engage in that kind of scrutiny, you discover that this is a man who has no experience of prosecution at all. He’s never prosecuted a single significant case in his career.
If you want to get stuck into Michael Howard, the Telegraph also supplies the link to his website.
In the factory where I work we have been given magnetic swipecards to enter and exit the factory through the new security gates. The main point of these security gates is to protect the car park, which was targeted by a gang of thieves late last year. They do a good job- it’s going to take a fair effort to get in the carpark now. The carpark is also monitered by a security camera.
Some of the lads have made joking remarks to the effect that we are now ‘inside’; as if it was a prison environment, but no one really objects, as we all want our cars to be there and in one piece when we finish our shifts.
Some other employers though use far more extensive surveillance in their working areas. I used to work in an internet datacentre, and the company that operated it had security cameras operating over every part of the centre where our customers might go. These cameras recorded everything on magnetic tape. Part of my job in the Network Operations Center was to monitor these cameras for anything that might be a security breach.
There was one camera that covered the front door to our building which faced the street. This was by far the most interesting camera, as the datacentre was just around the corner from Crown Casino, a huge entertainment complex in Melbourne. Nothing livened up a dull nightshift as watching throngs of drunks, strays and vagabonds doing their thing at 5am.
There was one time, when I was safely on dayshift as it was, when the cameras recorded an assault right outside our building. As I remember it, the fellow who was on shift called the police and volunteered the tape to help identify the assailant.
This raises the issue of privacy. While it might be reasonable to help the police in dealing with a criminal offence, there were other times and other scenes that, while not criminal, might well have been of interest to a wider viewing audience, and would have been of great embarrassment to the participants, who were not aware of the well hidden camera.
Private companies operate transport services and many sports stadiums have cameras strategically placed to film the public. I wonder about what rights and obligations these private entities have to protect the privacy of the people that they film.
I think that Big Brother is big enough and doesn’t need any little helpers.
The attitude of most people like me, who live in London, is that civil liberties are only of interest at present if they will blow very cold air at you. Nevertheless, I can just about sit long enough next my computer (equals fan heater) to tell you that these people (“Unpersons – a British group-blog focusing primarily on UK, EU and Anglosphere affairs from a free-market laissez faire perspective” – they got started last month) seem like they are going to be good and of interest on the civil liberties front. They have a “civil liberties” category, and if you click on that you get good stuff, although of course everything they say won’t suit everyone here (e.g. guns etc.).
Their latest is a discussion of how a DNA database of spit spat at British Railway staff is being talked about.
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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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