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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ComputerWorld paints a wonderfully gloomy picture of an IT security meltdown and a complete redirection of current security practises (or lack of them):
Predictions: A Web services security breach will wreck the supply chain. And stolen fingerprints or eye scans will thwart biometric systems.
Bye-Bye Incompetents
The fakers, charlatans and incompetents will be purged from the IT security industry. In three years, 40% of the current gaggle of alleged security professionals will leave the industry—some to other professions, many to prison for egregious misrepresentation of their skills.
XML Catastrophe
In the next two years, there will be a major XML Web services security breach. The consequences will be much more severe than the defaced Web sites and stolen credit cards that caused mostly embarrassment in the early days of e-commerce. Instead, automated production lines will grind to a halt, company bank accounts will be emptied, 100-company-long supply chains will break, and the most proprietary corporate data may be disclosed.
Surgical Strikes
Three or four years ago, hackers were taking a haphazard, shotgun approach to Internet attacks, but now they’re using their tools to penetrate very specific and lucrative targets, especially enterprise networks containing valuable intellectual property. These highly targeted attacks are on the rise, each one more intelligent and harmful than the last. By 2005, targeted attacks will account for more than 75% of corporate financial losses from IT security breaches.
Stolen Fingerprints
Biometrics is perceived as the ultimate in security, but what does somebody do once their bioprint is stolen? Within three years, hackers will have all sorts of scanned fingerprints, retinal patterns, etc., and these will be used to bypass biometric network security. When your credit card is stolen, you phone Visa and have a new card issued. When your bioprint is stolen, do you call God and ask for a new set of fingerprints or eyes?
Firing the Clueless
P.T. Barnum knew that a sucker was born every minute. Since most cyber risk is directly attributable to insider activity, including the social engineering of digital dullards, a renewed focus on background checks is necessary. The chief security officer of the future, working with the HR chief, is going to find and fire digital “suckers” before their dimness puts the enterprise at risk.
There is more. Go and get scared… I am.
When you type “Surveillance” into google, some of the more interesting stuff is the adverts on the right. The top one in the list today was this. The one with the creepiest name was this.
A commenter (“Grace”) on a previous surveillance related post of mine here said that governments will always be more powerful users of this stuff than the general run of surveillance-inclined people:
We’re deluding ourselves if we think there’s ever going to be any degree of equality in information collection between the government and the (no-longer) private citizen. 1) The government has the money, the power, the inclination and – increasingly – the ability to carpet the nation with surveillance. 2) Forms of counter-surveillance proving to be effective will be declared illegal – in the interest of public security, of course – and forced underground. (That’ll be interesting.)
We’re fighting a rear-guard action.
And then she recommends a book.
But she’s missing my point. I’m not saying that all these regular punters are going to try to spy only on the government and thereby to hold it at bay, although no doubt that will be part of the story, in the form of spying on lesser government officials and the like. My point is that people concerned about surveillance don’t just have the government to worry about. They’ll also have the amateurs spying and spooking all over them. These amateurs may not have mainframe computers and super-intelligent software, but they are awfully numerous, compared to the government.
And the kit that the amateurs need is now getting very cheap, and very easy to use, and to hide. As these adverts prove.
I second Brian’s post on the same topic. The Evening Standard reports that one in 30 Britons now has their DNA stored on a national database of genetic fingerprints. The database reached the two million mark today, and is one of the world’s largest. It is used to help solve an average of 15 murders and 31 rapes each month.
The government is trying to make it easier to add DNA entries to the database. A law before Parliament would allow samples to be stored from people when they are arrested and retained regardless of whether they are convicted or not… Have a brush with the law and you are on file for life. Currently a sample can be stored only if a person is charged.
The move is expected to dramatically increase the number of samples stored but has led to claims from civil liberties groups and the Liberal Democrats that the system is being abused by the government.
Home Office Minister Hazel Blears said that only criminals should be worried by the scale of the database.
Law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear from the retention of DNA samples.
Yes, we do.
The State is not your friend
The House of Lords has thrown out Big Blunkett’s proposals to limit the right to trial by jury. They voted 210 to 136 to reject the proposals in the government’s Criminal Justice Bill.
The government now has to decide whether to try and force their plans through, accept the Lords’ amendment or drop the entire Bill.
Downing Street had suggested earlier that the entire Bill might be dropped.
We can but hope.
Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe
White Rose readers will surely appreciate being told, if they don’t know it already, that a short posting by Gabriel Syme about compulsory ID cards, and about White Rose’s campaigning against them, was put up at Samizdata.net last Sunday.
The point is the comments, of which there have been 22 so far (Tuesday evening). The worst of the comments about anything on Samizdata are the usual abusive or incomprehensible nonsense (and the worst of them of all get deleted), but the average is good, and the best are often outstandingly interesting and informative, fully worthy to be postings in their own right on the average blog.
The ID card debate can get subtle, and lots of these subtleties are teased out in these particular comments.
News yesterday of the steady expansion of Britain’s national DNA database. From the Guardian:
Civil liberties campaigners last night claimed the government was intent on building a national DNA database “by stealth” as police prepared to enter the two-millionth genetic profile on to the system later today.
The police minister, Hazel Blears, who will load the sample on to the system, claimed last night that since 1995 the national DNA database has transformed the fight against crime, helping to catch not only serious criminals but also more minor offenders such as burglars and car thieves.
The British DNA database was the first and is the biggest in the world with currently more than 1.8 million criminal profiles and around 200,000 DNA samples from unsolved crimes, including blood and semen stains.
. . .
The Liberal Democrat Simon Hughes said this meant those who were never charged or who were subsequently found innocent would be unable to remove their details.
“Now that one in every 30 people features on the police DNA database, the government must come clean on its intentions,” he said. “If ministers want a database of every citizen’s DNA, let them say so instead of trying to create one by deception.”
The civil rights organisation Liberty claimed the government was hell-bent on creating a national DNA database by stealth, and that academics had warned it was not foolproof.
Several test cases are in progress in the US over how unique a DNA match actually is. Even the British founder of DNA fingerprinting, Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys, has warned that samples involving only a small number of cells could prove misleading, as we are all potentially covered in bits of other people.
But Ms Blears last night defended the growing use of the DNA database. “DNA profiles… play a vital role in the search for truth, establishing innocence as well as proving guilt. Law abiding citizens have nothing to fear and today I will have a sample of my own DNA taken and loaded on to the database.”
Ah yes, law abiding citizens have nothing to fear. But that is assuming that there are only a reasonable number of laws, and that most of us never break them. But what if there are tons of new laws being passed every year, and most of us, including Ms Blears, have no idea what they all consist of, and most of us are breaking some of them every day of our lives? What, in short, if none of us are “law abiding” any more?
Telegraph reports that David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, obtained political backing at a meeting of the Cabinet’s domestic affairs committee and a statement has been pencilled in for next Thursday, the last day of the current Commons session.
Whitehall officials said final details had still to be agreed but no meeting of the full Cabinet is considered necessary to endorse what will be one of the most controversial decisions of Labour’s six years in power.
The ID card will be required by everyone over 16 – more than 40 million people – and cost around £40, though with concessions for the elderly and the poor. Each card will contain biometric data, such as an image of a person’s iris or fingerprint, so police and other authorities can confirm the holder’s identity.
So this is it then? Tagged, finger-printed, iris-scanned, data about us stored on a ‘central database’, at the mercy of government bureaucrats.
I suppose the only thing left is the way of the late Mr Willcock who was the last person prosecuted in Britain for refusing to produce his wartime ID card and he spearheaded a public campaign that led to their abolition 50 years ago.
ID cards were introduced in 1939 but remained in use after the war to help in the administration of food rationing. The police had powers to see ID cards in certain circumstances. If an individual did not have one when asked, it had to be produced at a police station within two days.
This was where the law stood when Mr Willcock, 54, was stopped by Pc Harold Muckle as he drove in Finchley, north London, on Dec 7, 1950. The constable asked him to produce his national registration card. Mr Willcock refused.
Mr Willcock was charged under the provisions of the National Registration Act 1939. He argued that the emergency legislation was now redundant because the emergency was clearly at an end. The magistrates convicted Mr Willcock, as they were obliged to, but gave him an absolute discharge. He decided to test the law in the higher courts. Each found against him on the grounds that the statute remained in force and could only be reversed by an Order in Council.
In 1951, the Tories won the general election, and abolished ID cards the following year. Mr Willcock lived just long enough to see them go. He dropped dead in the National Liberal Club in December 1952 while debating the case against socialism.
I am not sure this would work nowadays, after many years of Labour rampaging through the justice system. However, it may be worth a try…
Stand have written a letter to Guardian regarding the news a Cabinet memo from Home Secretary leaked over the weekend about the introduction of an ID card scheme:
Several newspapers have been quite sensible and seen through Mr Blunkett’s rather optimistic, misleading and unrealistic assessment of the “help” they might provide in some areas (asylum seekers, terrorists, benefits fraudsters, identity thieves etc) and have published articles on the subject. Some others (curiously, all the ones owned by a certain Australian-American) have been rather more swayed by Mr Blunkett’s rhetoric. The Guardian, though — who were very good at giving the consultation due exposure and who raised some interesting and valid points on the subject some months ago — have been strangely silent. So we wrote them a letter. They’ve not yet published it, but we’ll put up a link, should they do so.
MPs are planning to introduce a new law specifically to allow them to remove a protester who has been living outside the House of Commons for more than two years. With all previous attempts to remove Mr Haw having failed – a High Court judge last year ruled that his protest was an expression of freedom of speech as defined by the European convention on human rights – the MPs are now recommending passing a special law which would ban protesters from permanently demonstrating outside Parliament without permission. The move has, however, been labelled “draconian” by civil rights groups.
Here’s news of a portable phone that can view through your home webcam.
Now that REALLY sounds like the democratisation of surveillance to me. Who says your “home” webcam has to be at home? What happens when webcams get REALLY small? They’ll be everywhere, accessed by who the hell knows who?, is what.
Via boingboing. “Self-surveillance”, Xeni Jardin calls it. Xeni Jardin is missing the bigger picture.
Some good news for once:
The House of Lords has supported repeal of Clause 28 of the local Government Act. An amendment seen by many as an attempt to preserve Clause 28 was defeated by 50 votes.
In theory Clause 28 doesn’t discriminate against homosexuals, merely against using public money to “promote” homosexuality. In practice this wide ranging and ill-defined prohibition has resulted in a climate where low-level institutional discrimination has become commonplace. Decent people have been forced to discriminate through fear of breaching Clause 28.
Clause 28 was introduced by the Thatcher government in 1988. It was a massive attack on the civil liberties of a significant minority of British citizens and has been the jewel in the crown of British homophobes. The fact that a single group was specifically targeted in this way meant that apart from anything else it was simply bad legislation.
Good riddance.
Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe
Ian Boys of Dissident UK points out that essential civil liberties are collateral damage in the war against terrorism
For better or for worse the war against terrorism is Britain’s war too: we sent a few thousand soldiers to Afghanistan and made our political support for President Bush quite clear. Now it has come back to haunt us: nine of our citizens are held incommunicado in Guantanamo Bay, together with several more from the Commonwealth. We do at least know who and where they are, even if we do not know why they are being held. Their families cannot visit them and they cannot speak to outside lawyers. Their status has been determined by the US Secretary of Defence and the only lawyers they will be allowed are US military officers: it has been suggested that their conversations even with these will be overheard. The same camp holds children as young as 13, while 16-year olds are mixed in with the adult detainees.
Imagine that Argentina’s Junta of the 1980’s or today’s Iran were holding these 680-odd detainees, including nine Britons. The outcry would be phenomenal. There would be talk of sanctions at the very least.
Yet these are actually the ‘lucky few’ among the hundreds detained by the USA. Many many more have disappeared. Let’s look at that word – reminiscent of the dictatorships of the 1960’s and 70’s. Do I mean that they have been murdered? No, probably not. Do I mean that they have been tortured? Yes – whether outright physical pressure or just being held in a steel container at Bagram airbase in the blazing sun. Do I mean that they have vanished, held in some solitary hell-hole? Most certainly. → Continue reading: The disappeared
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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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