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]
|
British civil serpents And while we are on the subject of the Antichrist, is there not something very sign-of-the-apocalypse about this?
CHILDREN aged 11 to 16 are to have their fingerprints taken and stored on a secret database, internal Whitehall documents reveal.
The leaked Home Office plans show that the mass fingerprinting will start in 2010, with a batch of 295,000 youngsters who apply for passports.
‘Leaked’, my balls! This is being floated in order to measure public reaction. A muted response and all the right boxes will be ticked. A mass cry of protest and the plans will be shuffled off to another in-tray to await re-floating later in the year or early next year (preferably under cover of some news-consuming natural disaster or terrorist attack). These people believe that time is on their side and maybe it is.
Our masters are not only deeply and irredeemably malignant but they are also intoxicated with the heady fumes of power and verging on the insane. The question is, what do we do about it?
|
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.
|
I saw the story this morning. Yes, I thought to myself, the screws are tightening yet further. But my problem is this – do my fellow Britons feel even remotely the same way that we do? Are we instead just a mass of Euan Grays (if you remember that pompous nitwit who used to comment here before Paul Marks destroyed him) who shrug, say it does not matter, the state has to “do its job”, that these things happen abroad and there is no great problem, blah, blah, blah.
My great sadness is that we are just a small minority of “weirdos” in the eyes of most people. I guess we’ll just have to keep bashing away.
I have never felt so alienated from the people who run this country as I have now. Perhaps it is old age setting in. Blair and Co should count themselves lucky that most law abiding people don’t own guns.
No, it is a leak. Or at least a partial leak. Some of the information, notably the headline item, was available in the IPS Strategeic Action Plan for the National Identity Scheme released just before Christmas.
I have some evidence the Home Office is panicking about the bad press it is currently getting.
The Government on the other hand will be particularly unhappy about the projected fees for changes to Register entries that appear in public for the first time in this article. Many Labour backbenchers are extremely sensitive to their poorer constituents paying fees for it. They would rather the money came from “general taxation” (which they don’t seem to get means the same poorer consituents paying more tax and/or receiving lower benefits).
One piece of evidence I can share is the IPS/Home Office issued a press release on a tangentially related subject this morning in a vague attempt to draw fire.
Have you seen this…?
New chip passports are copied in transit
Somebody would have exposed that soon enough, there have been foreign analogies already.
The Government is getting their shots in first, it seems.
It is a feeble spoiler. Full story shortly.
“…what do about it?”
Attack the database with a reallly malignant virus? Say one that overwrites the database with 0’s.
And there was me thinking George Bush was the Anti-Christ as foretold in the Book of Revelation and predicted by Nostradamus.
Refuse to do it. Raise hell. Tell them you have guns buried in the boonies. Make them toss you in jail. Challenge the screwballs at every turn. Remember, resistance is not futile.
Full story (well, as full as can be presented in the Mail) now available. Here.
Attack of the killer zeros sounds like a good solution. Hacking, not being a state “industry” will be bound to be able to keep ahead of any such system.
Why replace the data in the database with zeros? Much more havoc could be caused by adding millions of extra records for people who don’t exist. This would mean that resources were spent trying to track these imaginary people down in real life, people would be able to choose a ‘fake’ identity from the database (or to have a custom one inserted). If done properly it has the possibility of dealing a blow not not only against the database itself but against the bureaucrats running it. Get them chasing their own tails for a few decades and they might leave us alone.
Filling it with zeros would be to easy to fix as a zeroed record would be easy to spot, whereas an authentic looking record with all the right boxes ticked and information filled out has to be verified manually.
I’m sure some enterprising hacker could come up with a bit of software that will read the database and then create new records by randomising the combinations of data. Then adding the new records back into the database, assuming that only each complete record is considered to be unique then all thats really neaded is to shift everyone’s surname three records to the left and you’ve got 60 million new records
Mandrill, it would need to be little more random than that or when discovered it could be undone with software. But only a little. And your system has the added advantage of protecting even the people for whom legitimate records still exist in the system. With all the bad ones around, who knows what’s real?
I suggest that some degree of this is going to happen in any case for criminal intent. That is, criminal intent beyond just not wanting to be surveilled. As soon as the data base begins to get used for anything that matters, insurance claims, benefits, or voter registration for example, it will be compromised for financial etc gain.
One important thing to bear in mind is that none of these government databases can be made to work. In the case of the NHS, the predictable trajectory is continuing delays/over-runs, eventual despairing and disastrous introduction, ensuing medical disasters, several rounds of cripplingly expensive lawsuits, and “withdrawal of support” from a system which, anyway, is already being abandonned by the nursing staff (they use PDAs and bluetooth to “pass the book” at the end of each shift, apparently). There is no other possible trajectory, since as any well-informed database designer will tell you, the NHS project is essentially impossible.
It’s a pup, well-sold by clever salesmen to some of the stupidest and most ignorant people ever to have got into government.
When they’ve been well and truly reamed by the NHS database disaster, they’ll quietly realise their mad dreams of total power via biometric ID databases, are just that: the fantasies of madmen.
The Pyramids.
How many of you use Bloomberg? Quite a lot, I guess. Ask yourself how many times, on average, you have to give your pawprint before you’re recognised? My guess is a working average of about three attempts before you get recognised. If BBG can’t get it right two thirds of the time, can you even begin to imagine the scope for disaster with HMG’s project? I’m not sure I can.
Really the worst thing about the project is likely to be the arrogant assumption of justification for any authoritarian imposition upon the populace. And that’s what we’re getting right now. But these people in power now – the future will see them as such dolts and dullards that they’ll just be laughed at. So that’s the good news – the worst suffering they’ll inflict is right here, right now.
Mandrill – absolutely, zeroing out the DB would just make it clear to the administrators where the corrupted data was, and even if data was lost they could restore from a backup.
Midwesterner – just so.
I’d add one further step to your suggestion – the garbage records would need to be added gradually, a few at a time, over a number of months. This would make working out the point at which the corruption started much harder, and that would screw up any attempt to restore from the backup even if it was decided that losing some data was acceptable.
This could work really well if you kept to ordinary names- how many more Smiths or Jones can the system accept? In some multicultural countries, like America and Australia, we’d have difficulties, but isn’t Wales full of Joneses? Or is that just a myth that TV perpetuates?
Thank God you’re finally going to get those 11 year-olds off the streets.
– Josh
It may have been a very good spoof, but I once heard a recording of a radio commentary on an England Wales rugby match from the 30s in which 12 of the Welsh players and one English were named Williams.
Please God, let it be true!