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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It’s like a cancer that we can battle against but never truly defeat. As it creeps purposefully through our national lymph system some of us can summon up the courage to fight it back and, for a while, it can appear as if we are in remission. But then comes the hoping and the praying for the final ‘all clear’ that signals a rebirth and a new lease of disease-free life.
It never comes. The cells are corrupted again and the cancer returns to devour us:
Sweeping powers for Government agencies to carry out covert surveillance, run agents and gather the telephone data of private citizens were contained in legislation published yesterday.
State bodies ranging from the police, intelligence services and Whitehall departments to local councils, the Postal Services Commission and the chief inspector of schools will be able to authorise undercover operations.
The measures were activated by David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, under the controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which became law three years ago. They need to be approved again by both Houses of Parliament before they can be used.
These horrors first made their appearance about a year ago and set off a call-to-arms that, in turn, caused the Home Office to drop the proposals. Or, at least, they made an appearance of dropping them because, like that lurking cancer, they never really went away. They were merely stacked neatly in the pending trays until an another opportune moment presented itself. Seems that the moment is now.
Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said the British people were “the most spied upon in the Western world”.
I reckon that’s a pretty fair prognosis. But why? Why are our political elites so determined to construct this panopticon? Why are they so single-minded about this project that they appear immune to sweet reason, protest or appeals to decency? What exactly is driving them? Are they so riddled with paranoia and insecurity that they see monsters and assassins lurking behind every curtain? Is that how they see us? I cannot think of any other reason why a democratically elected government would come to think of themselves as colonial occupiers of their own country.
What has led to this calamitous collapse of trust? Is it repairable? I rather fear that it is not.
Questions, questions. Answers may come in due course but I suspect none will be satisfactory or stop the cancer from spreading. Time for palliative surgery?
[This has been cross-posted to White Rose.]
Like I said, respect for the law appears to be on the wane. Although the word ‘hostility’ might be even more apposite:
They are the black knights of the road; balaclava-wearing highway hitmen out to burn, bomb, decapitate and dismember. But drivers need not fear, for it is speed cameras that this growing band of rebels are after.
Up and down the country, the tools used to keep roads safe are being ripped down, blown up and even shot apart as part of a campaign orchestrated by a gang of web-surfing outlaws. They threaten to become the most popular gang of criminals since Robin Hood and his Merry Men stalked the countryside.
Forsooth, methinks the commoners may be in need of folk-songs.
From the south coast to the Highlands no camera is safe. Known as Gatsometers, or Gatsos, they are being destroyed at a rate that has alarmed police forces. Particularly destructive cells are operating in north London, Essex and Wales – where they rage against machines deployed by renowned anti-speeding police chief Richard Brunstrom.
With each unit costing £24,000 to replace, a huge bill is being run up. But the rebels are unrepentant, claiming the cost is more than met by speeding drivers’ fines. Speed cameras, they argue, are not about keeping roads safe, but about raising revenue. The charred remains of their victims are often adorned with stickers or graffiti which declare cameras to be stealth tax inspectors.
Of course, we at Samizdata.net could not possibly condone these irresponsible actions by an anti-social minority. 
The Target for Tonight? [My thanks to Dr.Chris Tame for posting this story to the Libertarian Alliance Forum.]
Rand Simberg has done another brilliant piss-take. Just imagine! Japan bombs Pearl Harbour and we go off and invade Italy! My, my….
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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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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