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Silicon.com reports that police and Internet service providers (ISP) in the UK have started working together to combat crime on the Internet. Private seminars held behind closed doors later this month aim to identify which electronic evidence could – and should – be made available to police investigating a crime. Detective chief superintendent Keith Akerman, chair of the Computer Crime Group set up by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), said:
We aim to cover all crimes. We will publish working guidelines on how evidence is gathered, its integrity, and its presentation in court
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The actual content of emails is expected to remain private, in all circumstances, in line with Akerman’s statement that the new guidelines will follow the Data Protection Act’s existing laws for telephone operators. Those laws state that police may access details of the timing of a phone call, and who participated, but not the content of the call. “Content is not at issue here,” Akerman added.
The emotive issue of child pornography and internet ‘grooming’ represented the biggest headache for ISPs. While they would never wish to be seen to be condoning such crimes, they risked a serious backlash if they were to implement the more wide-ranging surveillance and monitoring measures which would have been required.
According PR Newswire press release Tim Lord, chief executive of the Tobacco Manufacturers’ Association, responded today to the news that EU Health Commissioner David Byrne proposes to use EU Health and Safety Law to impose a blanket ban on public smoking all across Europe.
Everyone, smokers and non-smokers, employees and the rest of us, should have access to clean air. We all agree with that – the issue is how do you deliver it? Commissioner Byrne wants a draconian solution – to ban smoking wherever people may work – and do so via a Brussels directive to all of Europe. The Commissioner should leave health issues to individual countries as envisaged under EU protocol and let them handle their own affairs. He should also note the impact of blanket smoking bans in other countries.
Seattle voters have rejected a tax on coffee. You can read about it here (registration required).
There are many definitions of the Rule of Law, and I’m no lawyer, which may or may not be a good thing, but if freedom before the Rule of Law is to mean anything, surely it means only answering to well-defined pre-established law, rather than to the arbitrary and discretionary edicts of governments, particularly retrospective legislation where you get punished for something you did before it was made ‘illegal’.
Now I’m no card-carrying member of the Jeffrey Archer fan club, but when a government arbitrarily singles out just one man, even one as notorious as Lord Archer, and then ramrods through a piece of retrospective legislation deliberately designed to harm and humiliate just this one single individual, then if the Rule of Law was already on the critical injuries list, comatose in a life support unit, I think now is time to simply turn the ventilators off. What’s the point of keeping them on? The Rule of Law, in the UK, is dead.
Nurses, quickly please, the screens.
Over at Oxblog, Josh Chafetz has some surprising quotes of Gordon Brown on the subject of the EU. I nearly fell off my seat when I read this one:
First, Europe — both within the euro area and outside it — must reject old models that failed and embrace labor market flexibility combined with policies that equip people with the skills they need for work. Because just 5% of Americans out of work experience unemployment for more than a year — in contrast to 50% of Germany’s, 30% per cent in France, and 60% in Italy — we should reject any new directives that damage employment and growth.
I would perhaps not go so far as Josh and say this indicates the reality of the break of Labour with its past. Still… I cannot ignore a sign of economic sanity in early 21st century Britain.
One does need some hope.
Peter Hitchens, the arch-conservative (small-c) journalist and detester of Blairite Britain, might be thought on the surface to have a few things in common with the scribes at this blog. Well, this article in The Spectator in which he defends the British Broadcasting Corporation, should nail that idea in short order.
Hitchens – brother of maverick left-liberal fellow journalist Christopher – shares with many people a widespread loathing of the BBC, the trashiness of its downmarket programmes, the bias of its news service, and so forth. And yet he is fiercely opposed to abolishing the BBC’s licence fee, the tax which is imposed on all current purchasers of television sets to fund that organisation.
Indeed, Hitchens seems to bemoan the rise of commercial television, cable and satellite outlets, as having created pressures on the BBC to dumb down. He yearns for the days before the mid-1950s when the BBC had a total monopoly on broadcasting. He seems to be saying that the BBC is okay so long as it is run in the way he likes. It is totally outside his frame of mental reference to imagine how quality television, however defined, can thrive in a market where consumers pay out of their own free will.
To be fair, he says the BBC should openly allow its broadcasters to admit their political biases in full rather than cover them up under a pretence of impartiality, but also ensure that for each avowed leftwing journalist, there should be a counterpart of a conservative. This may sound quite an improvement, but it is entirely unrealistic to suppose that the programme makers who run the BBC in its present privileged state would concede such ground. The beast cannot be tamed. It must be consigned to the abbatoir.
There is a broader point. Even if the BBC was a genuine paragon of truth, objectivity and high culture, its licence fee would still be unjustified. It is a tax and increasingly hard to justify in a world of diverse broadcasting channels, not to mention the Internet.
In his great book, The Constitution of Liberty, the late FA Hayek wrote in his final chapter, “Why I am Not a conservative.” Hitchens’ article is a good reminder to me why I am of the same view as the great Austrian economist.
Chief Wiggles is is on the warpath. I wouldn’t approach him too closely today if I were a reporter.
He’s absolutely right. The correspondents in Iraq are lying to us by choosing to report only the negatively spectacular. It’s an inherently false view and doesn’t help anyone understand what is actually going on.
I personally saw the same thing happen here in Belfast. I can remember more than one lovely peaceful day on which I found out from the international news there had been rioting a mile away from where I live. From what I have heard, there were times when reporters outnumbered rioters. You can do wonders with the right camera angle.
You see, reporters are like flies. The entire forest can be full of sunlight through leaves and the smell of spring flowers… but they will manage to find and congregate on that pile the bear left behind in the back of its’ dark den.
In the heated discussion prompted by my statement that “I hope we win”, commenter Julian Morrison posted the following comment, much of which I disagree with but which struck me as worth “promoting” to a post to give it better visibility and its own discussion. I have removed the quotes from other comments in the discussion so it can be read as a stand-alone.
Terrorism is a tool to influence governments, via scaring the electorate. In the absence of governments to scare, it would be a pointless tactic, just stupid and non-effectual murder. By analogy with the famous quote, “terrorism is the continuation of lobbying by other means”.
There is no war.
I hear “terrorists”, but all I see is (a) “clerics” with more mouth than sense, but more sense than balls, failing to convince the rest of Britain’s moslems to rise up in Jihad (they would rather sell you groceries) (b) the security state having a big happy “who needed civil liberties anyway” party.
The western world is not under attack by moslems. It is, at most, “under rant” by a few hotheads, if that’s even a phrase.
There are no WMDs. Iraq didn’t have any. The terrorists don’t have any. They’re a bunch of illiterate backwater arab yokels. They wouldn’t know a nuke from a microwave oven. The nearest they come to microbiology is the infestations upon their own scabrous hides.
If there were real terrorists in Britain or the USA, then they wouldn’t need WMDs. They could drive either country into a blue shivering funk by randomly suicide-machinegunning a few crowded malls, while screaming “allahu akbar!” Far more bang for the buck. There’s nothing effectual preventing them. They haven’t. They don’t exist.
9/11 wasn’t indicative of a national malaise. It was a fluke.
It may be because I’m reading too much Rothbard, at the moment, but when you see the world through the tinted glare of Rothbardianism, even the tiniest stories acquire potentially ghoulish significance. One such story that caught my eye today, over a celebratory coffee espresso, was John Prescott’s decision to abolish polling booths for local elections, and introduce postal-only ballots.
No doubt once this has been hailed a great success in such paragons of civic virtue as Doncaster City Council, this policy will be transferred to General Elections and the much anticipated Euro referendum.
Again and again through Rothbard’s writings you find references along the lines of, “the state will try to acquire control of the roads, in order to march its forces to trouble spots more easily, it will try to acquire control of the schools, in order to more easily educate the public on the munificence of the state, and it will try to acquire control of the postal system, in order to more easily monitor and control its citizens’ communications”. Or possibly to get ‘Yes’ votes on Euro referendums, or to get vital councillors elected in hung councils, or to get marginal seat Labour MPs returned to Westminster?
No, surely I’m not accusing a clearly honest administration, like Mr Blair’s, of deliberately rigging elections via a state-owned postal system? Surely I wouldn’t even dare to suggest such a calumny? I wouldn’t put it past them for a second. These parasites, these useless feckless human beings, these politicians, I wouldn’t put a single corrupt thing past them, and if I was a politician in control of this country and I wanted to take full control of the ‘democratic’ process, for the long-term good of the people naturally, I would make all elections postal-vote only. And then get all my ‘democratic’ friends in MI5 to do the decent thing and fix all my election results for me. It’s nice work if you can get it. Just ask all those nice French people who made up the majority of those who voted ‘Yes’ in the skin-of-the-teeth Maastricht vote in the French 1992 referendum. If any of them actually exist, of course.
Democracy in the UK? It’s a holiday in Cambodia.
Reuters reports that Britain has become the second country in Europe to criminalise spam, that unwanted barrage of e-mail and mobile phone text messages that promise get-rich-quick schemes, cheap home loans and a better sex life.
The unsolicited messages, which industry groups say account for more than half of all e-mails sent, have become the scourge of Internet users everywhere. Under the new UK law, spammers face a 5,000 pound fine if convicted in a magistrates court. The fine from a jury trial would be unlimited. Spammers would not face prison, according to the new law, which was introduced by Communications Minister Stephen Timms.
The law does not however cover workplace e-mail addresses. Anti-spam proponents had been calling for a blanket law that would criminalise all forms of spam. Steve Linford, founder of anti-spam group Spamhaus Project says:
To say it is permissable to spam somebody at work but not at home could put an extremely large burden on British businesses. It says it’s okay to spam companies.
The biggest spammers are based in the United States and Asia. Strenuous anti-spam laws there are seen as key to shutting off the valve.
James Lileks has a piece today on the war and its critics that is worth reading (scroll down a bit, although the first few paragraphs about his daughter culminate in a nice insight into diplomacy).
James can certainly speak for himself, but his point is that there is a war on, and wars are all about who wins, which means that anyone who cares about the war has to pick a side sooner or later. He hopes that we win (as do I). While it is certainly possible to criticize a war effort in order to help it succeed (and indeed, such criticism is very helpful to ensuring success), it is clear, and has been for awhile, that some critics of the war do not particularly care if we win or lose. Some are quite open about their desire for us to lose, others seem simply not to care that the result of their preferred policies is the advancement of terrorism.
Quick sample, but you really should read the whole thing:
→ Continue reading: “I hope we win”
The BBC reports that Tesco branches in Sandhurst and Leicester are running trials of the controversial Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips.
These chips – each of which contains a unique identification number – will be attached to the packaging of almost every DVD in the stores.
What makes this trial unacceptable is that the chips will not be deactivated when the customer leaves the shop. Instead they will remain functional and will be broadcasting the customers’ purchase details wherever they go until they dispose of the packaging.
A useful reference regarding RFID is notags.co.uk.
Cross-posted from Chestnut Tree Cafe
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