Samizdata

Last night I managed a bad connection somewhere in the chain of connectors and adaptors between my laptop and the Chinese power supply, and as a consequence my laptop battery failed to charge. And I wasn’t anywhere near a Chatea and their friendly power sockets today, so I now find myself in an internet cafe rather than using my own laptop. It is about twenty to one on a Sunday morning. This internet cafe is a gamers cafe and not a tourist cafe, so it is full of Chinese people playing Counterstrike and the like. In short, lots of people around twenty years old enjoying themselves. Which is fine.

However, to check into this internet cafe, I had to present my passport at the front desk of the cafe. The concierge then filled out a form with my details on it, and then entered them into a computer. She then took my passport, scanned the personal details page, and entered the details into the computer. A scanned picture of me then appeared on her screen, and a new directory of personal information about me was created on her computer. I was then given a plastic card with logon details, and every page I now look at is probably being logged somewhere. I think it is unlikely that I will be identified as a Samizdatista and taken out and interrogated at the end of the session, but who knows?

In actual fact, I am lying. The above is not what happened, but was more what was supposed to happen. I did indeed hand the concierge my (Australian) passport. She then looked at it for a couple of minutes, and then pointed to a page in the passport and asked if that was the passport number.

She was not actually pointing to the personal details page, but to the page with my UK residence permit attached to it. This looks rather like a personal details page (it has a photo, and some machine readable codes on the bottom and a few other details) but isn’t quite, and she had opened the passport at the wrong page and copied down details until she had noticed the differences and become confused. When I pointed out the correct page, she put the details in correctly and attempted to scan the passport. A picture came up on the screen, but it was a picture of the ID card of some Chinese guy, not the personal details page of my passport. She repeated the process seven or eight times, and kept getting the photo of the Chinese guy. She called over a supervisor. He clicked on different options, and said something to her. Then he want away, she scanned my passport again, and a picture of the same Chinese guy’s ID card came up again. Then it happened again. Then the supervisor came over again, said something else, and she finally did something and got it right. This all took maybe 20 minutes. After that, I was eventually allowed to sit down and do some blogging. (Throughout this time, Chinese people came, presented ID cards, and were dealt with fairly rapidly).

Now in terms of safety or surveillance, what does this identification and surveillance process actually achieve. Unless I am really stupid, the only answer I can think of is “nothing”. I have been using wireless hotspots in hotels or just randomly picked up in restaurants and coffee shops all week. I have never had to identify myself, so using the internet in China without identifying yourself is not that hard. (This is not to say that this kind of surveillance doesn’t catch people doing things the government doesn’t want – as any law enforcement agency will tell you, a gread deal of criminals are in fact very stupid). Any smart criminal, terrorist, or dissident who wants to step around this internet cafe surveillance system can do so relatively easily, however. When the Blairites force such a system on us, as they appear to want to, I can’t imagine it will be very effective at increasing security for them either. (It will be very useful at allowing bureaucrats to be petty and malicious, but in terms of increasing security, I expect it will be close to useless).

However, the twenty minutes of bureucracy, confusion and computer screw ups are the future, I fear. An additional level of dealing with incompetence and computer systems and bureaucracy that doesn’t work is going to be added to our lives. And any person who tries to live in a way that is unusual or a little out of the ordinary (for instance like a Chinese person in Britain, to reverse what just caused my problems) is going to find that it is much worse for them than for the conformists.

But this is apparently what the Blairites want.