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]
|
London Underground is set to roll out high-tech CCTV surveillance software that will automatically alert operators to suspicious behaviour, unattended packages and potential suicide attempts on the capital’s Tube system. The move comes as London remains on a high state of alert against a possible terrorist attack following the bombs in Madrid earlier this month.
LU has been trialling the technology at Liverpool Street station during the past two months and is now evaluating the results with a network-wide rollout tipped to follow across the Tube’s 6,000 CCTV cameras, which cover 95 per cent of stations.
The Intelligent Pedestrian Surveillance system from Ipsotek compares CCTV footage against pictures of the empty station and alerts operators to strange behaviour such as people loitering or bags that have been left on the platform.
Sergio Velastin, director of research and founder of Ipsotek, said that it cuts down on operator time and costs related to blanket monitoring of all CCTV screens by alerting staff only when there is a potential problem. Privacy groups are concerned about the increasing coverage of monitoring technology such as CCTV. Velastin dismissed privacy concerns over IPS and said the software monitors only behavioural patterns and not the individual.
We have tried very consciously to stay away from facial recognition issues. None of our system is capable of recognising an individual – just behaviour. Then the police can come in and say ‘we need to find out who that person is’. It is a balance between being free to do what we wish and being protected.
The Independent reports that ID Cards could be compulsory within less than five years. This is much sooner than the ten year cooling off period originally agreed by Cabinet. Blunkett’s scheme apparently has Tony Blair’s personal support.
A draft Bill will be introduced next month with legislation proper in the November 2005 session (assuming Labour are still in power). The “fast track” Bill will allow compulsion to be introduced without further legislation being necessary, probably by 2008.
The Independent also reports an unnamed Minister repeating Blair’s line that “The argument has moved on from concern about civil liberties”.
It hasn’t.
The civil liberties issues with ID cards are just as strong today as they were fifty years ago. If the Government doesn’t want to talk about them then we must do so, loudly and publicly. We need to make this an election issue.
If we give up our civil liberties then the terrorists will have won.
Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe
Fifteen suspected Islamic extremists linked to the Casablanca bombings of 16 May 2003 have been arrested this morning, according to the Europe 1 radio station which broke the news.
The bomb attacks last year killed 45 people, including 3 French citizens.
The arrests were made by the DST (French equivalent of MI5) and the RAID (elite Police unit) in two Paris suburbs, Aulay-sous-Bois and Mantes-la-Jolie. They come as Queen Elizabeth II makes an official visit to Paris, to coincide with the centenary of the ‘Entente Cordiale’ between the United Kingdom and France.
Over the week-end French police made a number of arrests of Basque ETA terrorists, including Felix Ignacio Esparza Luri, alias “Navarro”, at Saint-Paul-lès-Dax in the Landes département.
One of the very many arguments in which I was embroiled while I was a student in the 1980’s involved one of my house-mates who steadfastly held that the government should pay students a handsome monthly salary in return for all the hard studying they did. Now this was at a time when, in fact, the government did pay most students an annual grant which covered the costs of their education and left them with a bit of spending money to boot.
But that was not enough for my protagonist. As far as he was concerned this was ‘mere crumbs’; a demeaning insult from a skinflint Tory government. No, students were so precious and valuable that they deserved an ‘executive’ style pay package so that they would not be subjected to the indignities of having to buy second-hand clothes from charity shops. → Continue reading: “Down with Reality”
At last, someone is doing something to curb the terrifying menace of the Flying Spring Roll:
Yum cha restaurants in Chinatown will now have to train workers who push food carts to pass a “driving licence” under new regulations from Sydney City Council.
The move comes after a spate of accidents in which novice or careless trolley-pushers have crashed carts, injuring or making a mess of patrons and co-workers.
In one case last year, an elderly customer at a large yum cha restaurant was covered in plates of sticky black bean sauce after a trolley waitress lost her load while she was text messaging on her mobile phone.
Waitress was texting: “going to spoil rude customers day…ha…ha…ha..”
In another incident in 2002, a yum cha trolley waiter lost control of a cart laden with steamed dumpling as she was trundling down a steep ramp between levels of a Chinatown restaurant. The dumpling cart ended up ploughing head on into an unattended trolley at the bottom.
The unattended trolley spent several weeks in hospital and is still convalescing. It cannot sleep at nights, suffers from flashbacks, life has been ruined etc etc.
After completing the course, they will be required to carry a small “L” plate on their carts for six months before being granted full licences. Learners can only push a cart while accompanied by fully licensed waiting staff.
Too little, too late. Reckless trolley pushers are a danger to us all. Get those tax-cameras up now! And don’t try to tell me that all those steamed dumplings are not adding to the threat of global warming. Save the planet from the greedy, capitalist Trolley Menace now!!
[My thanks to reader Tim Smith for the link.]
Stephen Pollard publishes an honest obituary to British actor Peter Ustinov:
I have tried to fathom how else a man with Ustinov’s record of excusing tyrants and defending tyranny could have been so eulogised. The butchers of Tiananmen Square, Stalin, Milosevic, bin Laden, Saddam: he defended or gave succour to the lot.
There were some people he did want to convict, though: businessmen. “The formation of the committee for the World Criminal Court is very important because there are corporations more powerful than many governments.” Stalin: OK; business: criminal; al-Qaeda and the US: moral equals. Murdering Chinese dissidents: good; removing tyrants: bad. That was the world view of Sir Peter Ustinov, “humanitarian”.
And now for sanitised BBC version:
He worked as an ambassador for charity Unicef, whose executive director Carol Bellamy said: “The children of the world had no greater champion.”
And neither did its despots and thugs.
How the Soviets would have loved this kind of technological capability:
A US requirement for visitors to be fingerprinted and photographed is being expanded to include citizens from America’s closest allies.
The move will affect visitors from 27 countries – including the UK, Japan and Australia – whose nationals are able to visit the US without a visa.
Though even if the technology had been available to the Soviets they would not have been to afford it. But Western democracies can afford it so these fingerprint-reading machines will be coming soon not just to an airport near you but, in due course, a bank, a supermarket, a sports stadium and just about everywhere else.
I was so impressed with all those books written in the 1990’s that confidently predicted that the new age of digital technology would empower the individual and neuter the state. The implementation is having exactly the reverse affect.
According to the ABC website (Spanish conservative daily newspaper), the Islamists blew themselves up rather than face capture. My Spanish is not great so any better linguists can check this out. (not permanent link). Three suspects implicated in the Madrid railway station bombing were pursued to the residential building where the explosion occured this evening.
Following yesterday’s find of an explosive device along the Madrid-Seville railway, an energetic series of police actions in Spain and France against both ETA and the Islamic terrorists.
According to the Spanish government two leading members of ETA have been arrested in South-West France and other suspects detained over the past two days. Four explosive devices were found, two of them ready for immediate use. The French government, whilst confirming that arrests have been made has not been forthcoming with any details.
Meanwhile in Madrid, an explosion was heard today and small arms fire during a police raid on an appartment complex in the Leganes suburb (my thanks to Susan for the link to Jihad Watch ). Official sources say the explosion was a controlled detonation.
My friend Bernie emailed me with the link to this short Radio Times film review of The Godfather, shown last night on Channel 5. Spot the anti-capitalist bit.
This crime drama and its 1974 sequel are among American cinema’s finest achievements since the Second World War.
The production problems are well documented — how Paramount wanted a quickie, how Francis Ford Coppola came cheap and how he turned the picture into an epic success, a box-office hit that was also an artistic triumph.
His first masterstroke was casting Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall and Diane Keaton, four relative unknowns and one known risk; his next masterstroke was to keep cool under fire, like Michael Corleone himself, turning Mario Puzo’s pulp novel into art and showing how capitalism and crime go hand in hand.
It’s thrilling, romantic, tense and scary – a five-course meal that leaves you hungry for more.
“… capitalism and crime go hand in hand.” Another of those implied solutions that dare not spell itself out clearly. Wanna get rid of crime? Rub out capitalism. But if thus challenged, the anti-capitalist replies: “but I never said that”. If unchallenged (which is how most readers will get the message), he did say it.
This is why we need our own publications, to edit out sneaky little innuendoes like that, and to insert our own.
It would be truer to say that the legal creation of victimless crimes goes hand in hand with crime, and that the state (a) claiming a universal monopoly in the supply of law and order but then (b) not supplying it anything like universallly goes hand in hand with crime.
Will this get a link from Biased BBC?
One reason for not wanting England to go ahead with its projected cricket tour of Zimbabwe this winter is that the despotic ruler of that unhappy land, Robert Mugabe, will undoubtedly regard such a tour as proof of his own international magnificence, and of the indifference of all people in Britain to his many murders and other atrocities.
Things in Zimbabwe are so bad that even the UN has noticed, and wants to throw other people’s money at the problem.
The United Nations is appealing for more than $94 million to provide urgent humanitarian aid to Zimbabwe. The United Nations says economic mismanagement has brought Zimbabwe to the brink of a serious humanitarian crisis.
Yes. Things are about to get really bad out there. Hurry. Give money, before people start to die.
The United Nations says Zimbabwe’s economy is a shambles and getting worse. It says inflation has shot up from 100 percent in 2000 to 600 percent this year. And, last year, it says, the Gross Domestic Product dropped by 13 percent.
When I say throw other people’s money at the problem, I actually mean throw other people’s money at Robert Mugube, for it is undoubtedly he who will hoover it all up.
Money isn’t going to solve this problem. In fact that kind of money is the damn problem, or at any rate a big slice of it. Serious international pressure, on Mugabe’s version of Zimbabwe, and on all the scumbag politicians in other countries who are protecting Mugabe’s version of Zimbabwe, might make some small difference by speeding the collapse of that disgusting regime by a few months and hence saving a couple of hundred thousand lives, or whatever it would be. Anything which might draw attention to this horror story, such as a nice little row about the England cricket tour, is all to the good.
But now here is another reason to hope that the England cricketers cancel their trip. If they do, it may mean that London will not get the 2012 Olympics. → Continue reading: Another reason to want the England cricket team not to tour Zimbabwe this winter
French TV is running a story about explosives found along the high-speed railway link between Madrid and Seville today.
The explosives with copper wiring similar to that used in the 11 March attacks on Madrid appear to have been abandoned when a routine track patrol was made near Toledo.
N.B. Toledo was the site of two decisive battles: the first confirmed the Moorish conquest of Spain in 712, and the second was the launchpad of the Spanish Reconquistada with the Moorish defeat there in 1212. If this is the work of an Islamist cell, we have an answer to the question: “Did voting for the PSOE appease Al-Qaeda?”
The report adds that the new (Socialist) Interior Minister – responsible for law enforcement and internal security – is having a meeting today with the outgoing (conservative) Defence Minister. Bi-partisanship in Spain is about as frequent as Bible rallies in Riyadh. Nice one!
|
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.
|
