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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Many of us are aware bin Laden was not US funded. Fewer of us have the information at hand to prove it when faced with an adamant statement that “the US funded and trained bin Laden!”.
Osama paid his own way. Through his wealthy Saudi friends he helped finance a jihad against the Russians by forces entirely seperate from other, less religiously fanatical, guerrilla forces. Even those forces were not funded directly by the CIA. The money went to Pakistan and the arms went in via the Pakistani ISI. In hindsight this had some some serious downsides. It made the ISI nearly independent of the central government. Later the ISI did indeed back the Taliban during the post-Russian Kabul free-for-all.
But not bin Laden. The linked story by Richard Miniter (author of Losing bin Laden) has an extra nice touch to it. This bin Laden quote:
“We were never, at any time, friends of the Americans. We knew that the Americans supported the Jews in Palestine and that they are our enemies.”
comes from an article written by… Robert Fisk.
This strikes me as rather draconian:
The software giant Microsoft declared war on internet paedophiles last night by announcing the closure of its thousands of UK-based chatrooms used by millions of people.
It will also restrict access to chatroom systems around the world, allowing only identifiable, adults living in the same country to use them.
The decision is a significant precedent, the first time one of the biggest internet service providers has cut off an element of the World Wide Web in reaction to concerns over misuse.
Calls to place all internet chat rooms under strict state regulation and control cannot be far off.
Now this is one American import we could well do without especially as it appears to be selling rather well.
Among the distributors are Simon Jenkins who devotes his latest column in the UK Times to ‘The Untimely Death of a Liberal Generation’:
Three British liberals have died in the past few days, all before their time. Jim Thompson, Gareth Williams and Hugo Young were still in their sixties. Each was outstanding in his profession, as priest, lawyer and journalist. They cut their political teeth with the rise of the welfare state and sharpened them on the Thatcher era. They lived to see what they regarded as Thatcherism’s denouement in the Labour landslide of 1997. They are gone. Something has died with them.
I certainly hope so because, as the brief obituaries which follow make abundantly clear, these men were not ‘liberals’ they were socialists.
I don’t care if I am ploughing a lonely furrow, I am not going to stop campaigning against this gross distortion of language.
There are several disturbing features of this panoptican state in which we will soon be living not the least of which is the sheer breakneck pace of its assembly.
It seems like only yesterday that speed cameras suddenly appeared on every lamppost but even they are so much old hat now:
Automatic Number Plate Recognition systems are set to be deployed by police forces throughout the UK as a major plank of a campaign of “denying criminals the use of the roads.” The system will link up to the DVLA, Police National Computer and a National Insurance Database, with these links alone giving it the capability of identifying untaxed, unroadworthy and uninsured vehicles, but they’ll also facilitate police surveillance operations, the swapping of data on “prolific offenders” between forces and, well, other stuff… Take this, for instance:
“Eventually the database will link to most CCTV systems in town centres, meaning that all vehicles filmed on one of the many cameras protecting Bedford High Street, for instance, can be checked against the database and the movements of wanted cars traced to help with serious crime investigations.”
As far as the drivers are concerned, well, that just about wraps it up, folks.
But truly one hardly has time to digest one horror before the next one comes galloping over the horizon. Dr.Sean Gabb has suggested that our rulers our ‘drunk with the technology’ but I am not so sure. More like they are stone-cold sober and determined to get the whole country locked down before the public realises exactly what has been done to them.
After reading Natalie Solent’s article, posted both here and on White Rose called A law-abiding person has nothing to hide?, reader Matt Judson wrote in with a cautionary tale of his own as a case in point.
Check out his close encounter with the reality of CCTV over on White Rose.
CCTV is not your friend.
After reading Natalie Solent’s article called A law-abiding person has nothing to hide?, reader Matt Judson wrote in with this cautionary tale as a case in point. The camera does indeed lie.
I have read with interest your posts on security cameras, and the threat they represent. I was especially interested in your post on the idea that law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear from security cameras and other surveillance technology, because I was recently unjustly accused of vandalism due to security video.
I recently moved to Nob Hill in San Francisco. Nob Hill is justly famous for the lack of parking; After a few weeks of struggle, I surrendered, and chose to pay $255 per month to park in the Masonic Garage.
Purely by coincidence, my friend works in IT for the Masonic Center of San Francisco, which oversees the garage. Friday morning, he sent me an email: “Emergency: call me now! This is not a joke.” I called him, and he told me that the garage manager had asked for his help in emailing security camera video. The garage had caught someone keying a car on camera; they identified the suspect because he drove off a few minutes later, and they had his license plate number. They wanted to send the video to the owner of the car, so that the owner could take it to the police and file charges.
When he looked at the video, he was shocked to see that I was the suspect on the video. He did not think that I was the kind of person who would vandalize a car, but he thought I looked very suspicious on the tape. If he had not known me, he would have sent the video off without a second thought.
I told my friend that I have never keyed a car in my life. That was me on the tape, no question. I knew what I was doing when I was on the camera: I checked for my car on one level, but did not see it; I then turned around, thought about heading for the stairway, and then decided to take the elevator to the next level. I did all of this next to the car that had been vandalized.
At lunchtime, I went to the garage to speak to the garage manager. I told him that it was not me, and asked him to review the tape carefully. He replied that the garage had already reviewed the tape carefully, and they were convinced that they had the right person. He suggested that I call the car owner and try to work out a deal so that I would not be charged.
My friend believed me, and spent the rest of the day reviewing video. Two days after I was caught on video, he found video of a group of teenagers doing something to the car in question; when the teenagers noticed the security camera, they covered their faces and ran away. My friend took the video to the manager, and forced him to call me to apologize. His apology was grudging, of course: “Your friend found someone who was maybe more suspicious than you were.”
If it had not been for an incredible stroke of luck, I would have been in for a major headache, perhaps charged with a crime. The initial reviewers of the video tape were completely untrained in viewing video; they did not bother to review the tape carefully; the way they passed on their suspicions resulted in a psychological set that I was guilty; if I had not had a close friend in the process, it would have been very hard to convince anyone of my innocence. Lastly, the garage was going to pass the video on to the owner of the car without telling me; if the car owner had seen me in the garage and recognized me from he video, what would he have done?
Law-abiding people do indeed have something to fear from security cameras.
Matt Judson, San Francisco
David Sucher has another post on ubiquitous computing. He quotes from the sales puff for one manifestation of this stuff:
IntelliBadgeTM: Towards Providing Location-Aware Value-Added Services at Academic Conferences … The major characteristic of this project is the fusion of RFID technology, database management, data mining, real-time information visualization, and interactive web application technologies into an operational integrated system deployed at a major public conference. The developed system tracks conference attendees …
Sounds like another one for Natalie’s list.
In today’s Telegraph a reader comments:
Sir – The scheme for national identity cards that David Blunkett proposes (report, Sept 22) goes beyond the bounds of what is tolerable. The ordinary people of Britain are neither criminals nor potential terrorists, and will not be frightened into accepting this clampdown on our civil liberties. I, for one, will follow the lead of Nelson Mandela and the oppressed people of South Africa and burn my “pass”. I hope millions of Britons who cherish their freedom will do the same.
The Guardian’s Simon Jeffery explains some of the issues about identity cards.
I was just thinking up a few scenarios in answer to the assertion that “a law abiding person has nothing to fear from ID cards, in-car tracking systems or surveillance cameras”. These are some wholly or mostly law-abiding persons who do have something to fear:
- A person who has unpopular political beliefs of left or right that might lose them their job or promotion.
- A person who is homosexual but their family does not know.
- A teenage girl secretly visiting her boyfriend. He is of a different race to her family, and they have forbidden her to see him.
- A man who is seeking to change his job needs to attend interviews with other companies. He doesn’t want his present employer to know for fear that if the interviews don’t work out he might end up worse off than before, having lost the confidence of his boss.
- A woman scouting out places to go to get away from her violent partner.
- Someone going to Alcoholics Anonymous or drugs rehabilitation sessions.
- Someone going to church, synagogue or mosque who fears the scorn of their secular friends, colleagues or family.
- Someone attending classes of religious instruction prior to converting to another religion who fears the vengeance of their family if their apostasy becomes known.
- A son or daughter visiting an estranged parent without the knowledge of the parent they live with.
- An ex-criminal seeking to go straight who must meet his probation officer or register with the police.
- An adulterer. (I think adultery is very wrong, but I don’t want the government involved in exposing it – besides the intrinsic nastiness of state intervention in such matters, you can bet they would expose the adulteries of their opponents and pass over the adulteries of their friends.)
That example takes us to a more general point: there are so many laws that nearly all of us are breaking some of them all the time. This fact gives local and national authorities enormous scope for quiet blackmail. You think it’s unlikely that they would be so wicked? Well, the blackmailers themselves might scarcely see it as blackmail. Imagine this scenario: they get to know that X, an irritating serial complainer, writer of letters to the editor, and general thorn in the side of several local councillors, is attending an adult education class for more than the number of hours permitted to an unemployed person who is meant to be actively seeking work. How satisfactory to take action against this pest! Meanwhile Y, who sat next to X in the class and is equally unemployed and equally breaking the rules (or equally unaware of them), is ignored because he is not a troublemaker.
Cross-posted from Samizdata.net
Guardian columnist David Aaronovitch, who occasionally writes quite sensible things about Iraq and All That, has decided to resume normal service as Bullying Blairite Columnist, on the subject of compulsory ID cards.
The usual reasons in favour are trotted out. He says they are convenient. No doubt they are in many cases. So, for that matter, would be carrying a tattoo on one’s forehead with an ID number and message, saying, ‘State Licensed Guardianista’ or whatever.
I can quite see how, in a minimal or even anarcho-capitalist private ‘state’, how citizens could freely choose to have ID cards carrying all kinds of info. Then again, they might not choose to do so. I find it a great bore to point out to collectivists of various hues that if X is such a grand idea then it should not be necessary to compel citizens to have X. Take banks, for instance. I see no reason why, in a truly liberal order, banks could not give clients incentives to carry photo-ID credit cards to cut fraud and hence cut charges to their customers. Indeed such transactions would be quite normal and no-one would have grounds to complain given sufficient consumer freedom.
Then, perhaps realising that the usual reasons for compulsory ID cards amount to little more than making life easy for the police and the security authorities, Aaronovitch comes to his guiding motive: “What is convenient or aesthetic for the individual is not, unfailingly, what is good for society.”
That is true. It’s one reason I always rather liked Mrs Thatcher’s misquoted remark about there being no such thing as society. ‘Society’ may indeed in some sense be better off if Pc Plod and his colleagues knew of my wherabouts 24 hours a day. ‘Society’ can take a hike, thankyou very much.
So when Liberty (one of those annoying civil liberties groups, ed) talks of ID cards turning people into “suspects not citizens”, I am bound to ask whether Liberty has any concept of the duties – as opposed to the rights – of citizenship.
Well, those folk over at Liberty can no doubt answer Aaronovitch’s question for themselves. But I think we ought to feel grateful to him for framing the question so bluntly. He is right. Social democrat statists like him think that the entity he calls ‘society’ is somehow possessed of some claim on the citizens who compose it. For him, carrying an ID card is a badge of collective solidarity and hence non-ownership of such a thing demonstrates one’s anti-social (heaven forbid) character.
One thing is for sure. No one is ever likely to be in danger of thinking Aaronovitch believes in personal liberty. The next time I read one of his more sensible pieces about the Middle East, I will bear that in mind.
The latest social engineering proposals from the government are out on University education.
If I wanted my son to get into Britain’s ruling class, this is what I would now have to do, according to these plans. First, I would get him into the most expensive private school I could possibly afford. Then at sixteen I would have an arranged divorce with my wife, and I would move with him to the worst sink estate I could possibly imagine. Somewhere grim and remote would do the trick, perhaps the Belle Vue South estate in Carlisle?
And now comes the tricky bit. Once ensconced in Carlisle, we would track down the very worst comprehensive school or sixth form college in North Cumbria, and bung him right in there on the register. But what we wouldn’t do, of course, is actually send him there, oh no. → Continue reading: An admission of failures
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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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