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.
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As British citizens we have very little actual power to influence government. One weapon we do have is words, that’s why we write blogs. However if we’re honest the impact is small. Only a tiny proportion of the population will ever read any blog at all. Most will read ones they agree with – we’re largely preaching to the converted.
What we need to do is take our words out on to the street – to get other people using them for us. We can do that not with lengthy arguments or rants but with simple phrases that encapsulate our position. Soundbites, memes, call them what you will. Politicians, advertisers and the media all know the power of a simple slogan: “Things can only get better”, “Beanz Meanz Heinz”, “the innocent have nothing to fear”…
The term I want to popularise is Big Blunkett. David Blunkett is an authoritarian Home Secretary who believes in monitoring innocent citizens. He is responsible for some of the worst threats to civil liberties this country has seen for many years. In particular he seems determined to introduce compulsory National Identity Cards – yet the average person on the street seems unaware of the threat he poses.
I’m not trying to offend or hurt David Blunkett personally. He might be a really nice man socially – but as a politician he is dangerous. The thought that he might become Prime Minister is frightening.
The expression “Big Blunkett” sums up the dangers simply and effectively, especially in the Orwell centenary year. When people hear the name David Blunkett they should automatically think “Big Brother”. The fact that Blunkett is blind simply adds irony and provides a talking point.
I want to get “Big Blunkett” into common usage and I want to do it fast – time is running out. Please help me. Use the term “Big Blunkett” at every opportunity. Use it with your mates down the pub, use it in your blogs, use it in letters/emails to the media. If you’re a journalist use it in your reports, even if only to the extent of saying “some people are calling him ‘Big Blunkett'”. I search Google daily for the phrase “Big Blunkett”, hopefully soon I’ll find 5000 entries instead of just 5.
Words can make a difference. Let’s use them.
I don’t want Big Blunkett watching me.
Cross-posted from An It Harm None and the brand new Big Blunkett blog.
The Sunday Times reports that in a leaked letter Home Secretary David Blunkett describes the case for Compulsory National Identity Cards as “overwhelming”.
Citizens would pay £39 for the privilege of carrying a card containing biometric information. It would not be compulsory to carry your card at all times however you would have to show it to the police within a few days of demand. So don’t forget to take it with you if you’re on holiday.
Blunkett adds that “a highly organised minority” would “campaign vocally” against the cards.
Too right we will. This plan is a serious threat to civil liberties in Britain and must be stopped.
Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe
The article on the ST site appears unavailable just now, you can read the BBC summary.
This article is from nearly a week ago, but it is of interest still, I think:
Newspaper owners responsible for publishing racist or xenophobic articles in Britain are to be protected from being sent for trials abroad under government plans to soften the impact of the new Extradition Bill.
Ministers will introduce amendments today to tough European-wide laws that allow courts to extradite EU citizens accused of committing one of 32 generic criminal offences.
Concerns raised by the media that they could fall foul of the new law when it comes into force in January have prompted the Government to act to remove the threat of prosecution.
The Bill makes “xenophobia and racism” one of 32 crimes for which a British citizen can be sent for trial in another EU country – such as Germany or Austria, where it is illegal – although there is no such standalone offence in this country.
But because British newspapers are sold abroad and their articles are published on the internet, editors and their proprietors could face prosecution for racist offences committed in this country.
I can’t say I understand the full ramification of this, but my brain is abuzz with questions.
For instance. Will these amendments apply only to newspaper proprietors, or will, for example, the proprietors of group blogs be exempt also, in similar circumstances? If one of us junior contributors here did a White Rose posting that the government of Austria deemed to be xenophobic or racist, would Gabriel and Perry, the named organisers of White Rose, then still be in the firing line? Or do these amendments apply to them as well?
Looking at the larger picture here, the stink of this piece is that “Europe” is a place where what seems to matter is not what you have done but who you are.
What’s so special about these newspaper proprietors, other than that they have the power to affect the fortunes of major politicians? Are they like the drivers of fire engines needing to exceed the regular speed limits? I suppose they would argue that, metaphorically speaking, this is indeed what they are, sort of. They are our protectors, and therefore they themselves need special protection.
But one fears, on the contrary, that maybe these big media newspapers may ease off on their concern-raising about the other 31 of those 32 generic criminal offences – and about, you know, things in general – just so long as they themselves are not directly threatened by the new arrangements. One fears, in other words, that in exchange for their own protection, they’ll relax about protecting the rest of us.
Still, at least the Indy gave these other 31 criminal offences a passing mention. Can anyone say, or point to a place which does say, what they all are?
I’m afraid I don’t have a link for this – the FT’s web-site wouldn’t let me find the story. One of their columnists suggested a way to beat spam: this is roughly the gist:
Each ISP identifies mail addressed to more than, say, 100 receipients. An employee retained for the purpose glances at the mail, and accepts or rejects the mail. This should be relatively easy, as most spam is readily spotted, compared to mailing list entries, etc.
The employee reviews, say, 1 a minute, for 7 hours a day, stopping 60 * 7 * 100 = 42,000 pieces of spam a day. Over a 200 day working year, and at a salary of say £20,000, that works out at about a quarter of a penny per spam stopped.
The author went on to suggest given the global volume of spam, only a couple of people would be needed to stop it all. This seems fallacious, as EACH ISP would need to employee their own blockers.
I think most people reading this site would see the implications for privacy – ISPs would (perhaps be legally required to) read any mail sent to large numbers of individuals. This is not something I’d look forward to.
Hopefully, the idea will die the death of a thousand rapidly knocked up columns, but it’s worrying that privacy didn’t even strike the writer (or his editor) as an issue. Particularly as, once the proposal had been brought in, there would be a natural pressure to reduce the number of receipients that “triggered” checking. Spammers would drop the size of their mailings, and so the checkers would have to look at an ever higher proportion of mails to have any effect.
In a welcome turnabout for US citizens, MIT has launched the Government Information Awareness website.
The website developer Ryan McKinley explains
“Our goal is develop a technology which empowers citizens to form their own intelligence agency; to gather, sort and act on information they gather about the government,” said MIT graduate student Ryan McKinley, who developed GIA under the direction of Christopher Csikszentmihályi, an assistant professor at the MIT Media Lab’s Computing Culture group.
“Only by employing such technologies can we hope to have a government by the people and for the people,” McKinley said.
The method that McKinley uses is pilfered straight from the government itself.
GIA site users can submit information about public figures and government programs anonymously. In an attempt to ensure the accuracy of submitted data, the system automatically contacts the appropriate government officials and offers them an opportunity to confirm or deny submitted data.
But like an FBI file, information is not purged if the subject denies its veracity; the denial is simply added to the file. McKinley wryly added that those government officials who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear from GIA.
A nice touch!
The site itself is a bit limited; also, when I tried it out it was very slow. It might have underestimated the demand for it. This is a work in progress, but it’s a great start. This gives Big Brother a taste of his own medicine, and we need something like this in Australia.
Cross posted at The Eye of the Beholder
Having been published last month, this article, in blogosphere terms, is verging on the archaeological but it is well worth a delve into the archives for a sobering illustration of just how despotic and deranged our ruling classes have become.
Not content with having turned our justice system into a playground for victimologists, parasites and professional race-baiters, the Home Office is now preparing the ground for an arbitrary police-state:
The government’s war against men is now plumbing ever more astonishing depths. On Radio Four’s Today programme yesterday, the Home Secretary David Blunkett could scarcely wait to boast of new proposals to deal with domestic violence.
Anyone truly concerned with civil liberties could not fail to have been appalled by Mr Blunkett’s comments. The problem was, he enthusiastically explained, that at present ‘you have to get someone through court’ before a domestic violence suspect can be restrained.
So his solution is to restrain them before they even get to court. In other words, he wants action taken against a man on the basis of an unproven allegation by a woman– made under the protection of anonymity, to boot. So much for this Home Secretary’s understanding of the presumption of innocence, the meaning of justice and the necessity for a trial of the facts.
The article deserves to be read in it entirety in order to understand the extent to which the Home Office has deliberately ignored or manipulated statistical data in order to justify their insistence that male violence in the home is far worse and far more common than it actually is. Another case of tailoring the data to fit the political agenda.
These wicked and spiteful proposals are not on the books yet but they are clearly on the drawing board and, as per usual, it is only a matter of time before they are enacted thus ending the protection of the law for every man in this country.
The scope for abuse of powers like this is simply enormous and any case of abuse will lead to a man losing his home, access to his children and possibly even his livelihood all on the basis of an unproven and unanswerable allegation.
The damage this will cause to families and the fabric of society remains to be seen but, tragically, it will be seen thanks to a regime which is deeply in thrall to dangerously extremist femininst ideologues and which has now run out of easy targets.
Police yesterday released footage of the moment a 16-year-old girl was dragged into bushes as she walked home at 3am. A police officer driving home from work had spotted the girl walking on her own and had rung colleagues at the local police station, telling them to train the camera on her. Officers watching the CCTV footage saw the man carry her 20 yards into bushes.
An urgent message was sent over the police radio and several patrol cars raced to the scene. It is thought the man ran off when he either heard or saw the police cars in the distance. Det Con Mick Blunt, of Adwick CID, said last night:
The feeling among officers is that it could have been a lot worse. A man approached the girl from behind and had a brief conversation before picking her up and dragging her into adjacent bushes. The girl fought back, kicking and screaming, which resulted in her attacker releasing her.
This is good news – the girl was relatively unharmed, if traumatised, and it certainly appears that the CCTV camera was instrumental in saving her. Surveillance cameras are popular with the public precisely for this kind of assistance in crime prevention.
My opposition to surveillance is unabated though. It is based on two arguments. One is, installing a CCTV camera somewhere does not protect people in the area effectively. The effectiveness of such devices is determined by the way in which they are used. In this case, it was the police officer who spotted the girl and decided to instruct his colleagues to train the camera on her who made the difference.
We live in a country with three million surveillance cameras. Why does a case of a surveillance camera being partially instrumental in preventing and potentially solving a crime make it to the headline news? In order to justify the instrusion into its citizens’ privacy, the state has not made a case strong enough for surveillance effectivness. I do not see any corresponding decrease in crime. The only practical use of surveillance camera footage is forensic, after the event. The lenient criminal justice system in the UK is making even that use insignificant.
The main reason of opposing surveillance cameras rather than putting up with a minor ‘inconvenience’ of being monitored in public places (after all, an honest citizen has nothing to hide, does he?) goes to the very nature of the state. Under the guise of public security, governments happily assume the role of the Big Watcher and lay down an infrustructure that give them greater control over the lives of individual citizens. And as Brian pointed out in his post on road pricing and total surveillance, it is impossible to pry it out of the state’s cold intrusive fingers…
Andy Duncan may take up smoking again…
The UK government’s chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, has claimed that outlawing smoking in bars, pubs, clubs, restaurants and at work would dramatically reduce levels of lung cancer, and other lung diseases, caused by passive smoking. It seems the push is on, by the UK do-gooding society, to follow the example recently set by Michael Bloomberg, in New York.
Significantly, Sir Liam cited a recent government report, which claimed that 88% of people were in favour of smoking restrictions in restaurants. He obviously knows where to hit a government hard, especially one with no other principles than those dictated to it by opinion poll.
No doubt the UK government’s response will be to say, at first, that it has no plans to impose a public area smoking ban. Then it will say if private businesses fail to co-operate with a ‘voluntary’ ban, it will be ‘forced’ to take the necessary action to impose one, and then eventually, it will ‘regretfully’ impose the ban, if the appropriate opinion polls tell it to.
I am non-smoker myself, having taken seven New Year Eves to finally give the filthy weed up, but I am with South Oxfordshire’s very own TV celebrity chef on this one; Antony Worrall Thompson said on Channel 4 News last night:
I believe in smoking and non-smoking areas. If you don’t like a place because people are smoking don’t go in.
No doubt one day smoking will be banned completely in the UK, if these do-gooders keep up their do-gooding work, even in the privacy of your own home. The fact that people have to die of something, eventually, seems to have fully escaped them.
On the day they do successfully get smoking fully banned, thereby creating an enormous black market and making it even more sexually attractive to teenagers causing them to start up in the first place, is the day I will light up again. I am not looking forward to smoking Golden Virginia roll-ups again, but if it is in the cause of freedom, and helps the US economy to boot, so be it!
Cross-posted from Samizdata.net
UK Chief Medical Officer Sir Liam Donaldson has called for smoking to be banned in public places including bars and restaurants. The Department of Health has said that there are no plans to implement this but are considering the proposal.
Smoking is unpleasant and dangerous, it is sensible to encourage people to give up. However the proposed ban goes too far. The individual should retain the right to choose.
It would be acceptable to ban smoking in genuinely public places such as railway waiting rooms. However bars, clubs and restaurants are simply private leisure businesses which the public can choose whether or not to enter. Many of these would undoubtedly gain customers through choosing to provide non-smoking areas or choosing to ban smoking on their premises whilst others allow it. That would provide customers with increased choice.
This proposal would set a dangerous precedent. In a free society the role of government should be education and regulation, not prohibition.
Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe
This site, MagnaCartaPlus, looks like it could be very useful to the sort of people who read this, and for that matter who write for this.
Mission statement
The purpose of this site is to promote civil liberties and to provide information in pursuit of that objective. It is a watch on any attempts by governments to reduce or interfere with civil liberties and freedoms.
Objectives
1. To make British citizens and the international community aware factually of the content of recent repressive legislation passed by the British Parliament and the effect it is having or will have on the lives, businesses and rights of British citizens and those of their descendents using every legally available means of publicity, including, inter alia, the Internet, international, national and local newspapers and periodicals, television networks and radio stations.
2. To illustrate through the use of history and the identification of patterns the effect that repressive legislation developed in Britain (and other pioneering countries) is having or could have globally and to welcome and publish comments and observations from interested people worldwide.
I’m one of life’s intellectual butterflies; not one of its worker ants. So I’m not going to trawl chew through this site and then tell you whether I think it is really as good as it says it is trying to be. Suffice it to say that this page, entitled An overview of Civil Liberties legislation since 1900, which was the page I first got to (by typing “UK” “Civil Liberties” into Google) certainly seems to live up to the promises. Students of British civil-liberties-hostile legislation will find a blow-by-blow account of all the recent legislation, together with links to more detailed analysis of each Act. It’s not a blog. Sorry. This man is not chattering away three times a day, he’s carving his truths into stone tablets.
The only criticism of Matthew Robb I can come up with in twenty minutes – he seems to be the guy doing most of this – is that despite his best efforts he sometimes muddles the subject of “Civil Liberties” with that of “Civil Liberties in the UK”. That trifling complaint aside, this looks like an excellent resource.
But as I said, I’m only a butterfly, and if some of our worker ant contributors and/or commenters were to take a look … If it looks the part, then maybe a permanent mention of and link to it could be put here, somewhere.
At the advanced age of 41 I have some pretty old fashioned ideas. One of these is an absolute belief in the importance of personal privacy.
Invading the privacy of celebrities is a long-standing media tradition and one could argue they deserve it. The danger is when ordinary individuals start to lose their privacy – and welcome that loss.
It probably started with US daytime TV shows of the Oprah variety. Being “on TV” was so important for people that they were willing to share their most personal secrets with the world. As these shows spread and multiplied, hanging one’s dirty linen out in public started to become a goal in life for some. Privacy was willingly sold for a few minutes of fame.
Reality TV shows took this a stage further. People became used to the idea that privacy was something so unimportant that it could be given up in the name of entertainment. Big Brother worked initially because it was new and shocking; now it is commonplace. Most of the “contestants” are canny enough to know they’re playing to the cameras. The danger is the viewing public who come to accept the whole concept as a harmless bit of fun.
These attitudes spread throughout society as a whole. Michael Jennings wrote an interesting piece about bag searches in Australia. We don’t have those here without probable cause, however we almost got to the stage where they were unnecessary. A while back there was a fad for using transparent carrier bags and rucksacks so that the whole world could see your baggage. Even that most sacred of receptacles the woman’s handbag was being exposed to all.
Why does this matter? What dirty secrets am I trying to hide?
Privacy is essential for individuality and diversity. Lack of privacy makes it more difficult to be “different”, it drives people towards uniformity and conformity. If “no privacy” becomes the norm then those of us who insist on privacy will be automatically branded as “suspicious”.
Lack of privacy leads to a bland, safe, boring world. No colours, just shades of grey. A stagnant society that is easily led – and easily sold to. A perfect world for government and big business.
Which is one reason I’m vehemently against compulsory National Identity Cards. People say “if you’re innocent you’ve nothing to fear”. I fear loss of privacy. Where I go and what I do is not illegal, it’s just no business of the police, the government or anyone else.
I don’t want Big Blunkett watching me.
Cross-posted from An It Harm None
More surveillance, straight from the school locker room to the internet.
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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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