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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. July 12th, 2003 | Comments are closed
 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 July 11th, 2003 | Comments are closed
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 July 11th, 2003 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
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.
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. July 11th, 2003 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Evidence, if you ever needed it, that surveillance cameras are getting smarter:
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. July 10th, 2003 | Comments are closed
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. July 9th, 2003 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
Jason and stuff has a brief but relevant pointer to the draft bill on Civil Contingencies:
Jason hopes that things will improve from the draft version, especially if we pester them… July 9th, 2003 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
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.
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). July 8th, 2003 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
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:
July 8th, 2003 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
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? July 8th, 2003 | Comments are closed
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. July 8th, 2003 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
Commenting on David Blunkett’s proposal for a £40 compulsory ID card, Liberty spokesman Barry Hugill said:
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?’ July 7th, 2003 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
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