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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Rand nails ’em again

· North American affairs

Rand Simberg has done another brilliant piss-take. Just imagine! Japan bombs Pearl Harbour and we go off and invade Italy! My, my….

September 13th, 2003 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)

Carry on snooping

· Surveillance

Does any of this sound familiar?

Government agencies will be able to access e-mail and phone data, under measures unveiled by ministers.

Local councils will be among the bodies able to use surveillance to investigate crimes, protect national security and protect public safety.

They will be able to use the powers to collect taxes.

It should.

Initial plans to revise legislation were dubbed the “snooper’s charter” when announced by home secretary David Blunkett last summer.

Yes, I remember that.

In a separate development phone companies and internet service providers will be told by the government to keep records of phone calls and internet visits for a year.

Is anyone complaining?

The civil rights campaigners Liberty have denounced the latest plans which give agencies such as fire authorities, jobcentres, the Postal Services Commission, the Gaming Board and the Charity Commission the power to use surveillance to investigate crime.

Liberty director Shami Chakrabati said: “This underlines the uncomfortable fact that the British public are the most spied upon people in the Western world.”

“The government has failed to learn from its mistakes.

“After the original “snoopers’ charter” was published last year, the government was forced to retreat after enormous public outcry. We hope the same happens again”.

What the government seems to have learned is: if at first you don’t get your snoopers’ charter, try, try and try again.

September 13th, 2003 | Comments are closed

Caring Big Brother

· Technology

This Guardian article, which basically starts out as an extremely optimistic take on the domestic possibilities of new computer and camera and screen technology, has White Rose Relevance.

Nanotechnology – science at a billionth of a metre – and mobile technology could together turn the house of the future into something out of science fiction, according to scientists at the British Association science festival yesterday.

Which is not very White Rose Relevant at all. But gradually this changes.

“There are all sorts of things that can happen, from simple lighting through computing, security labelling, getting rid of bar codes and checkouts in supermarkets – just wheel your trolley through a gate, it will be scanned and the cost will be deducted from your bank account – electronic noses, maybe, sitting in your fridge and telling you if anything is off, and so on.

Getting a bit nearer to our territory.

Long before the walls of the house became sentient, the objects within it would be in touch through mobile technology. Nigel Linge of the University of Salford told the conference that he and colleagues were already working with the Greater Manchester police on a potential project called Crimespot.

Crimespot. Now it’s getting a bit creepier.

“We are therefore creating a future in which your mobile device knows everything about you, including your current location to within a few metres, and what you are presently doing,” he went on.

“Does this bring back memories of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where Big Brother kept careful watch over everyone and, if you stepped out of line, whisked you off to room 101?”

Room 101. Bloody hell.

In fact, the watchful house could keep an eye on people who needed extra care.

Extra care. That’s how it spreads. What makes all this potentially so scary is that it is potentially so helpful. If it was nothing but scary, it wouldn’t be scary, because it would never catch on. As it is, you can see the genuinely security-driven private sector setting all this stuff up, and then the government moving in and demanding to have access to everyone’s mega hard drive. So that it can care for us all even better.

September 12th, 2003 | Comments are closed

Another one bites the dust

· Self defence & Security

According to FEE Missouri has joined the free states:

Concealed-Handgun Law Passes in Missouri (9/12/03)

Lawmakers today granted most Missourians the right to carry concealed guns, overriding a veto by Gov. Bob Holden (D) and reversing the outcome of a statewide election on the issue four years ago. Missouri becomes the 45th state to allow concealed guns, although nine sharply restrict permits, according to the National Rifle Association. (Washington Post, Friday)

I understand Michigan is also very close to falling in line.

Correction: It’s Wisconsin, not Michigan

September 12th, 2003 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)

Intellectual property – a defense

· Economics, Business & Globalization

Eugene Volokh, the head Volokh Conspirator, has a thoughtful post on the conceptual validity of intellectual property.

Long, but worth a read if you are interested in the topic. I confess I haven’t fully digested it myself, but it seems pretty sound (his stuff generally is).

September 12th, 2003 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)

Rumsfeld again

· Middle East & Islamic

Here’s another Rumsfeld quote, this one from his talk at the The National Press Club:

My view is — maybe it’s because I’ve been a business man for so many years, but my view is that governments can do relatively little for people, and that investment, outside investment, inside investment, people voting with their dollars that they want to make something work in a given place, is what really is the engine that drives things. Government doesn’t create the jobs, the opportunities, the wealth in our country; it doesn’t create the jobs and opportunities in most countries. Private investment does, human capital does. And that’s ultimately what will have to be the case in Iraq. Although they have the benefit of oil, and with some significant investments in their infrastructure, they could get significant increases in revenue from oil above where they currently are. But there’s no one thing that is the answer, in my view.

It’s rather hard to disagree with.

September 12th, 2003 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)

Controversy – not!

· Self defence & Security

The British media this morning, including the Daily Telegraph is reporting that Prime Minister Tony Blair was warned of a heightened terrorist threat in the event that we went to war in Iraq. And the coverage implies that somehow that it was a great scandal that he failed – allegedly – to make this warning public.

I don’t know. It should have been blindlingly obvious to all that by threatening to topple Saddam, terror groups with a vested interest in his staying in power would try to foil said effort by attacking us.

Of course it is a repeated refrain from the tin-foil hat brigade on the pacifist left pessimistc right and head-in-sand Raimondo libertarian sect that if we act, we will only make Islamic groups even angrier. Problem is with this argument is that it is a “heads I win, tails you lose” sort of position. If we act – such as topple Saddam – the Islamo-loons will get mad. If we do nothing, they will hold us in contempt and attack us again for being weak.

Personally, I can live with their hate. They hate us anyway, so we might as well give them something to actually hate us for, by trying to establish liberty and prosperity in the Middle East.

September 12th, 2003 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)

Slip sliding away

· UK affairs

I do sometimes wonder if the British press has much room for actual news at all. So much of the available space (both pixelated and dead-tree) appears to be taken up with the results of surveys, opinion polls and studies all of which emanate from very august-sounding bodies but which are usually, like as not, merely trojan horses for some vested interest or other.

That said, this latest ‘shock, horror report’ does have a certain resonance to it. Even if it turns out not be accurate it still sounds as if it should be or could be:

The middle classes are turning to crime in the belief they have been victimised research finds.

More than 60% of people surveyed in England and Wales admitted they had exaggerated an insurance claim, paid cash to avoid tax or kept money when given too much change.

But they would not consider themselves criminals, scientists told a science conference in Salford.

This appears to be causing something of a hubbub and I am not surprised, given that we like to think of ourselves as reliably law-abiding people. I cannot entirely discount the possibility that this is all the result of the same old method of stringing together a bunch of manipulated statistics into a pre-determined theory but it would not surprise me in the least if it turned out to have some basis in reality.

British civil behaviour was never an accident. It was the entirely predictable result of a lightly and reasonably governed country which allowed all those tacit, civic relationships to grow and bloom. But that was then and this is now and now we are monstrously over-governed and intolerably regulated. Hence, the reverse effect begins to set in.

The forgotten lesson is that obedience to the law is not and never has been a one-way street. It’s a deal under which the law gets respect provided it acts respectably. Too much top-down and you begin to crowd out all the spontaneous good that comes from ground-up.

We’re not talking about revolution here or anarchy on the streets. At least not yet. But we are fraying at the edges and that is a warning sign.

September 12th, 2003 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)

Big brands getting even bigger by giving it away

· Education & Academia · Independent sites & social media · Media & Journalism

Posting looks as if it may be thin here today, so a quick comment on the economics of the internet.

The usual story is that the big, bad, old organisations could be in trouble now as the internet whistles into existence a million new nimble players to run rings around the big, bad, etc. … blah blah.

But how about this for a train of thought?

Selling text on the internet is working, okay, sort of, but it hasn’t really taken off. There’s too much free stuff, and anyway, people don’t want to pay. Maybe they’re scared that if they start surrendering £30 here and £30 there, it will never stop and they’ll be bankrupt. Maybe they just reckon the prices will come down, and they’re waiting.

But what if you are a huge, globally celebrated organisation which wants to be able to swank even more than you do now about how much beneficial impact you are having on the world, to your donors, charitable or political, and would actually quite welcome the simplicity of not having to be too businesslike about it all, and to have to chase every last cent for every bit of virtual stuff that you part with?

What if you are the BBC? Despite all that our bit of the blogosphere may say, the BBC still counts for a hell of a lot in the world; that’s why our bit of the blogosphere complains about it so much.

Or what if you are the Massachusetts Institute of Technology? → Continue reading: Big brands getting even bigger by giving it away

September 12th, 2003 | One comment - (Comments are closed)

Two years and counting

· North American affairs

I did not post anything about the second anniversary yesterday but only because I logged on to find that Dale Amon had beaten me to it. I judged his sentiments to be so appropriate that they left me with nothing I could usefully add except the confirmation that Dale spoke for us all.

As has the Dissident Frogman who has applied his exceptional talents to a stirring presentation of his own. From France with love (for a change).

Puits fait, mon ami.

September 12th, 2003 | Comments are closed

The nowhere man

· Humour

In a shock move, last night, the UK’s Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon, spectacularly failed to resign when given an open goal opportunity to do so. In a powerful and sometimes moving soliloquy from the floor of the House of Commons, Mr Hoon looked on as someone else made a dramatic speech demanding the Defence Secretary’s resignation. This was Mr Hoon’s reply:

I don’t know what all the fuss is about. I didn’t fool anyone important when I lied to the intelligence and security committee, just the proles.

Under strong media pressure, UK Premier Tony Blair also defended his beleaguered colleague:

Come on, guys, look, well, you know. Geoff can’t resign now, I need him to resign when the Hutton Report comes out. If I throw his body out the back of the plane before then, there’ll only be me left to carry the can, and I’m not having that. Don’t worry, you’ll get your scalp, but only when Mandy, Alastair, and I decide you will. We’ve got all the ‘least worst’ resignation moments mapped out on the grid, and it’s not Geoff’s turn yet. So can we draw a line under this, guys, and move on?

When pressed on whether it was a disastrous though retrievable situation for British troops to be in the line of fire, in Iraq, while their Ministry of Defence Chief hid in a hole in the ground in London waiting for his resignation grid appointment, a furious Mr Blair went on to add:

Look, come on, do you really think Geoff Hoon is the real Secretary of State for Defence? He’s just a stooge, a figurehead, a nobody. I’ve got one of my Downing Street boys running the real operation, and he’s reporting back directly to me. It makes the lines of control much easier.

Mr Archie Scroggins, 17, a former apprentice gas-fitter from Lewisham, was later revealed as this vital kitchen cabinet insider. His mother, Mrs Olive Scroggins, was as surprised as anyone:

Archie got this job installing a new boiler, in 10 Downing Street, and Mrs Blair took a shine to him. Archie’s been there ever since. He told me he was an assistant masseuse, when I saw him on telly in the back of a car with Tony. But to find out he’s Secretary of State for Defence is a mum’s dream come true! I’m made up for him! And he hasn’t even started shaving yet!

Archie Scroggins was later said to be unavailable for comment, as he was on a plane to Iraq to discuss British and American troop deployments. His father, Mr Reginald Scroggins, 74, was said to be down the pub.

September 12th, 2003 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)

Words of Wisdom

· Middle East & Islamic

I’m in the midst of my nightly reading and this dialogue from Donald Rumsfeld on Jim Lehrer’s News Hour caught my attention:

Now, there’s another reason it’s a bad idea. If you go to Afghanistan, the Soviet Union had 300,000 troops in Afghanistan and they couldn’t do the job. We have 10,000 in there and it’s making steady progress. Why? Because we don’t want to occupy a country. The Soviets wanted to own Afghanistan.

We don’t want to own Afghanistan. We don’t want to own Iraq. We want to help them get on their feet and then move out. We do not want to put so many forces in there that we create a dependency on us and then have to stay. We want to keep creating an environment where they can take over their security.

Maybe our way of looking at things is catching on.

September 11th, 2003 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
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