Samizdata

I don’t know how many Americans have been dismayed at the breast-beating of the British elite and much of the British media over the apparent (and in most cases alleged) condition of the Al-Qaeda fighters currently cooped up in Cuba.

Incantations of solicitous concern for their welfare jostle for front page space with dire warnings to the US government about the consequences of ignoring the Geneva Convention. The BBC has just stopped short of launching ‘Taliban-Aid’

It’s all a delicious irony really. Most of these Guardianistas would pay good money to be hooded, handcuffed and pushed around by big, burly men in uniform

Maybe the Americans have been disappointed by all this, maybe not. Maybe they couldn’t care less. But in the event that they have been taken aback then let them take heart from, of all places, the Richard and Judy Show

The ‘Richard and Judy Show’ is a daytime magazine programme aimed strictly at the ‘British Street’, and the female part of that street to boot. It is wall-to-wall gossip, recipes, beauty tips, agony aunts, fashion reviews and is wildly popular. Occasionally, though, the producers like to get serious and hold a phone-in poll on some hot current topic or other. Yesterday that topic was the Al-Qaeda prisoners in Cuba and was their treatment fair or unfair?

Some 5000 viewers phoned in. The result? 8% thought their treatment was unfair and a whopping 92% thought that the US was doing the right thing

Assuming that these kind of polls are an accurate reflection of grassroots opinion then clearly pro-Amercian feelings are far thicker on the ground than they are in the lofty towers of the political/media nomenklatura and yet another indication of the ever-widening gap between the people of Britain and the establishment that rules over them

As has been argued on the Samizdata in previous articles, liberty is not genuinely advanced by legal maneuvers but by cultural shifts. I am all for the overturning of laws that infringe civil liberty on-line and certainly I wish well to groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation which fights the good fight against attempts to censor the Internet and the monstrous Digital Millennium Act in the USA… but this is not an American or a British or an Australian problem. It is a global problem and the solution is a global one.

Encryption cracks, DVD decoders and all that good stuff can be made illegal in the USA but so what? If it can be found on a server in Romania or Taiwan or Indonesia, who cares what the law says in America? You want what the US called non-exportable ‘weapons grade encryption’? No problem, if you know where to look: there are several servers in Eastern Europe that offer you crypto as good as or better than what is commercially available in the USA, plus it is less likely to have a NSA or GCHQ backdoor. Much of the good stuff of that nature is written outside the USA and EU to begin with. If a server gets shut down, there will be another with the same software up and running a day or a hour later somewhere else. Peer-to-peer transfers make this an even more robust process.

Liberty is furthered by simply making unreasonable laws unworkable and this happens when enough people refuse to comply and find viable ways to circumvent them. This can take form from minor disobedience all the way up to Boston Tea Parties. Let the democratically sanctified congresses and parliaments of thieves spew out ever more regulations: if the reality is that continually evolving technical means of distributing the codes of liberty continue, then we win and they lose regardless of who wins in the courts.

Sure, they can find a few people using these unauthorized things and throw them in jail, but if a code crack for a DVD can be downloaded for free in a matter of seconds off some off-shore server and used in the privacy of your own home, the fact is 99.999% of the people who do that will go undetected regardless of the huffing and puffing of the large US media companies and the finest politicians their money can buy.

But no, do not write to Samizdata asking where to find this stuff… that is what UseNet and Search Engines are for.

There is an excellent editorial in The Telegraph called Not your business, Mr Straw which makes the points that need to be made about the Al Qaeda prisoners in Cuba

Yesterday’s Mail on Sunday [Ed: mouthpiece of the British Idiotarian right], on the basis of a few photographs, told its readers that the suspects had been “tortured”. This has sparked some predictable howls of rage from America’s traditional foes on the Left – may of whom were oddly silent when the Taliban were practising genuine torture on their own citizens.

Although the US is understandably being careful with potentially dangerous men, there is no evidence of human rights violations. These, after all, are not prisoners of war, but terrorist suspects.

The whole point is that these people are accused of either terrorism or war crimes, neither of which accord them the protections of the Geneva Convention, not that such legalisms are all that important. What is important is that they be treated in an objective, appropriate and reasonable manner according to the nature of what they are: extremely dangerous terrorists.