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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At present I am not in the market for a longer penis, or for more energy when my mind turns to the sexual as opposed to urinary use of the penis that I already have, so most junk emails are for me just that: junk. Delete. However, I got one this morning, and I’m sure millions of others did too, which interested me, White Rose wise, and (although in the years to come I will probably mark this moment as the one when my life stopped working and went to hell, my identity stolen, my bank account emptied, my hard disc and that of all my friends virused, etc.) I pressed this link.
For the benefit of those wiser or more cautious or more internet savvy than me, the link leads to a website devoted to a computer programme which enables you to learn everything there is to learn about all of your friends and all of your enemies.
Now, once downloaded to your computer, the INTERNET INVESTIGATOR quickly sorts through the maze of over 800 million web pages and other information sources, easily and effortlessly, and turns your personal computer into a POWERFUL information goldmine.
The democratisation of joined-up government, you might say. Everyone can be a member of the surveilling class. (And by the way I think “surveilling class” or maybe “surveilling classes” is a meme with a future.)
As with current strength surveillance cameras, the actual effectiveness of this particular programme as of now – it sounds to me a lot like an old fashioned search engine (but what do I know?) – is not really the big point here, or not the point that interests me. What I think is the big point is that, sooner or later, such programmes surely will do what this one promises to do.
Not surprisingly, the same web site also pushes another programme called “Privacy Protector”, which, I guess, enables you to defend yourself against Internet Investigator. Maybe Privacy Protector is the real product, and Internet Investigator only exists to scare up business for Privacy Protector.
Whatever. It all has the smell of the new battles that people are going to be fighting in this brave new twenty first century. And they won’t just be government-people or people-government battles, they’ll be people-people battles.
Evidence, if you ever needed it, that surveillance cameras are getting smarter:
Britain’s first digital speed cameras are being installed today and will go “live” next month.
The new “super cameras”, which need no film or servicing, are being tested at Limehouse, in east London. With traditional cameras, motorists hope that there is no film in the camera and that they can get away with speeding.
But there will be no escape with the new digital version, which sends a stream of images and data along a phone line to a Metropolitan Police centre in Kent.
The first cameras are being installed at the Limehouse Link tunnel, which is an accident blackspot. Surveys have shown that drivers of nearly all of the 80,000 vehicles using the tunnel each day break the 30mph speed limit.
In the last three years, 14 accidents there have led to death or serious injury.
And evidence too of why surveillance cameras are widely believed to be a good thing, not just by the surveilling classes, but by the surveilled also.
Sir John Stevens, head of the Metropolitan Police, has supported removing the automatic right to trial by jury in some serious cases.
In a speech he argued that the move was necessary to fight organised crime by preventing “jury nobbling”. BBC report here.
If juries are in danger then it is the job of the police to protect them – not throw out a fundamental part of our constitution because it is inconvenient and expensive.
To be fair Stevens did say that the restriction to trial by jury – proposed in Big Blunkett’s discredited Criminal “Justice” Act – should be limited to special cases and determined by a judge. However any erosion of this basic Magna Carta right is unacceptable. This proposal is akin to saying “we already know you’re guilty so we won’t give you the same rights as anyone else.”
Remember how door-to-door DNA testing was initially introduced for “special cases” only? Now any time there is a serious crime police roam the neighbourhood asking innocent citizens to “volunteer” a DNA sample.
Special cases have a tendency to become commonplace.
Partially cross-posted to The Chestnut Tree Cafe.
Jason and stuff has a brief but relevant pointer to the draft bill on Civil Contingencies:
The definition of emergency is, it seems, quite broad. It doesn’t appear to define what scale of emergency is “major” enough to require emergency powers, nor allow for less extreme emergencies to trigger less extreme powers.
The measures that introduce those emergency powers are not subject to being suspended or struck down by the courts under the Human Rights Act. Parliament “has no role in confirming or approving” a state of emergency – it can be proclaimed by the Queen, or ordered by a Secretary of State, and then Parliament just has to be told about it. And those emergency powers, incidentally, appear to be a little scary – they may “make any provision of any kind that could be made by Act of Parliament or by the exercise of Royal Prerogative”, with a few restrictions (no conscription, no banning strikes, no creating of offences punishable by more than 3 months in jail or without trail).
Jason hopes that things will improve from the draft version, especially if we pester them…
I am in the process of researching and writing a (long) piece on the story of how Australia came within a hair’s breadth of introducing compulsory ID cards in 1987, which will be posted either here or to my own blog in the next couple of days. However, while researching this, I ran the following 1986 quotation from then Australian (Labor) Health minister Dr Neal Blewett, who was in charge of the ID card plan at the time.
… we shouldn’t get too hung up as socialists on privacy because privacy, in many ways is a bourgeois right that is very much associated with the right to private property.
Yes, that’s right. This was meant as an argument in favour of ID cards.
On the issue of the (ultimately defeated) proposal for ID cards in Australia, I strongly recommend this article, which was written at the time and gives a thorough overview of what happened. The early stages of the then Australian government’s efforts to introduce the card seem eerily similar to anyone who has been watching the recent efforts of the British government. The later stages – a long drawn out battle on the part of the government to pass the enabling legislation which was blocked by the Australian senate, rising opposition to the scheme as the public learned more and more about the proposal and eventually a defeat for the government due to flaws in the drafting of the legislation – are much less likely here due to the lack of the strong bicameral system, sadly.
That said, the lesson that the more that is known about such proposals the less the public like them is surely an important one. In Britain, we really need to get the message out as fast and as comprehensively as possible. The other encouraging thing about the Australian example is that by the end of the fight the public was so against the idea that no Australian government has even dreamed of suggesting an ID card since, and none will any time soon. (This hasn’t prevented the government constructing extensive databases of information on its citizens, however).
I’m no China hand, but this (Headline: “Bill to Curb Hong Kong Civil Liberties Is Shelved – Experts: Move may be a signal the territory’s leader is in trouble”) sounds like good news:
Hong Kong – One week after half a millon people marched through this city’s sweltering streets to protest the government’s efforts to impose sweeping anti-subversion legislation widely seen as a threat to civil liberties, the territory’s leader abruptly decided to shelve the bill.
This popped up yesterday on the Libertarian Alliance Forum, courtesy of Libertarian Alliance Director Chris Tame. Is it for real, or are we in paranoid fantasy territory? Either way, all White Rosers should know the story, about which, until this, I knew nothing.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 7, 2003
CASPIAN asks, “How can we trust these people with our personal data?”
CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering) says anyone can download revealing documents labeled “confidential” from the home page of the MIT Auto-ID Center web site in two mouse clicks.
The Auto-ID Center is the organization entrusted with developing a global Internet infrastructure for radio frequency identification (RFID). Their plans are to tag all the objects manufactured on the planet with RFID chips and track them via the Internet.
Privacy advocates are alarmed about the Center’s plans because RFID technology could enable businesses to collect an unprecedented amount of information about consumers’ possessions and physical movements. They point out that consumers might not even know they’re being surveilled since tiny RFID chips can be embedded in plastic, sewn into the seams of garments, or otherwise hidden.
“How can we trust these people with securing sensitive consumer information if they can’t even secure their own web site?” asks CASPIAN Founder and Director Katherine Albrecht. → Continue reading: Is this for real?
I said nothing because I wasn’t a panhandler. In Cincinnati, they are coming for the panhandlers through mandatory ID card registration. I’m not a terribly large fan of panhandlers, but is the solution tagging them and releasing them back into the wild?
I understand why it is necessary for people to register for drivers licenses. Driving is a privilege, not a right. But is panhandling? Surely I have the right to sit on a public street corner and, while not harassing anyone, say or do whatever I want. And certainly people have the right to give me money if they want to, so why is it that panhandlers need to register?
Cross posted from miniluv.
Commenting on David Blunkett’s proposal for a £40 compulsory ID card, Liberty spokesman Barry Hugill said:
The real beneficiary of such a policy will be the fraudsters who will make a fortune selling forged cards. There is no evidence that ID cards lead to a reduction in crime yet the Government is contemplating spending at least £1.5bn on the scheme.
This is a Government that cannot manage to pay tax credits, deliver passports or enforce child maintenance payments without catastrophic system failure. Does anyone seriously believe it could manage something as technologically complex as a national ID card?’
Liberty
An opinion piece about the identity cards news in Telegraph is yet again explaining what is wrong with Blunkett’s argument. Basically, each of the claims made by the Home Secretary in support of his pet scheme is wrong.
- First, Mr Blunkett says that there is strong public support for the idea. In fact, the Home Office’s recent consultation exercise focused on the concept of an entitlement card, a very different prospect. (Also, according to this Out-law article, the goverment has admited that the public opposes the ID card scheme.)
- The Home Secretary goes on to argue ID cards will help fight crime. This is one of those assertions that is forever being made, but hardly ever substantiated… The public mood is said to have changed since September 11, 2001, but no one has explained – or even seriously tried to explain – how ID cards would have thwarted those bombers, many of whom died in possession of forged papers.
- Nor, by the way, are ID cards a solution to illegal immigration. The root of the asylum problem is not that we cannot find clandestine entrants, but that we never enforce their deportation.
- More faulty still is Mr Blunkett’s central proposition, as set out in a letter to his Cabinet colleagues: “The argument that identity cards will inhibit our freedom is wrong. We are strengthened in our liberty if our identity is protected from theft; if we are able to access the services we are entitled to; and if our community is better protected from terrorists.” In an appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell describes how a concept can be traduced if the words used to express it lose their meaning. The example he gives, uncannily, is the word “free”. Now here is Mr Blunkett using “freedom” to mean more state control.
- Any doubts as to the wisdom of the scheme must surely be removed by the Home Secretary’s final argument in its favour: that we are “out of kilter with Europe”. Indeed we are, thank heaven. Policemen in Britain are seen as citizens in uniform, not agents of the government.
The most worrying is Blunkett’s spin on the concept of freedom. In his view we are strengthened in our liberty if our identity is protected from theft; if we are able to access the services we are entitled to; and if our community is better protected from terrorists. This is vaguely based on the distinction between negative and positive liberty, which are not merely two distinct kinds of liberty; they can be seen as rival, incompatible interpretations of a single political ideal.
Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints. One has negative liberty to the extent that actions are available to one in this negative sense. Positive liberty is the possibility of acting – or the fact of acting – in such a way as to take control of one’s life and realize one’s fundamental purposes. While negative liberty is usually attributed to individual agents, positive liberty is sometimes attributed to collectivities, or to individuals considered primarily as members of given collectivities.
Blunkett and his New Labour chums are classic and rather unexceptional anti-liberals. I use the term liberal in its original meaning, based on negative definition of liberty and claiming that in order to protect individual liberty one should place strong limitations on the activities of the state. In Blunkett’s mind, the pursuit of liberty (whether of the individual or of the collectivity) requires state intervention, which, by definition, is not contradictory with limitations on personal freedom. As a result, the protests of civil liberties groups do not make sense to him.
The concept of freedom as being unprevented from doing whatever one might desire to do is alien to him. According to Isaiah Berlin the defender of positive freedom will take an additional step that consists in conceiving of the self as wider than the individual and as represented by an organic social whole – “a tribe, a race, a church, a state, the great society of the living and the dead and the yet unborn”. The true interests of the individual are to be identified with the interests of this whole, and individuals can and should be coerced into fulfilling these interests, for they would not resist coercion if they were as rational and wise as their coercers.
I will not grant Blunkett’s social and political philosophy such level of ‘sophistication’. I will say that his are the simple and toxic insticts of a collectivist and a statist and that those protesting policies based on them will have their words muffled by the Big Blunkett.
The Telegraph reports that a leaked memo revealed that David Blunkett is pushing the Cabinet to back national identity cards for everyone aged 16 and over. The Home Secretary insists in a memo to Cabinet colleagues that rather than limiting freedom, his plan for ID cards would reinforce people’s sense of liberty by making it easier for them to use services and protecting them from criminals and terrorists.
It is understood that he wants to introduce legislation in the autumn to allow cards to be brought in within the next few years. A full Cabinet discussion is expected within the next fortnight.
Privacy International, the civil rights watchdog, will mount a campaign against the plans this week. Simon Davies, its director, said:
This is without doubt the most threatening issue for civil rights and freedoms since the Second World War.
I just caught a snippet news item on the BBC about how magazines are complaining about people browsing through their mags in the shops, and photoing favourite pages with their camera-portable-phones and immediately phoning them to their friends. Information theft! Couldn’t find anything about this on the BBC website, but maybe someone else can.
I think this presages the moment when it won’t only be Big Brother who wields surveillance cameras in the street. Everybody will be able to! And they’ll be able to phone in the footage to – I don’t know – their personal websites or something. It’ll get even more fun, if that’s the word, when the cameras are in people’s buttons or glasses and you won’t even know that someone is doing it.
This kind of thing is probably happening already, on the quiet. The real excitement happens when doing it becomes a teen fad, and it starts being known about, and argued about by people saying they have a right to do it. Which maybe they do. After all, the government does it.
What happens then? What will White Rose make of that.
I’ve always been better at questions than at answers.
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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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