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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Arnold Kling makes an excellent point about Doc Searl’s ‘statement of geekonomics’ dating back to 2000.
There is a classic line attributed to John Gilmore that “The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” Economists might say that markets try to route around the damage caused by monopolists or government regulators. I view Searls as saying that with the Internet and markets, consumers do not need their paternalistic advocate so much.
To me, Searlsian Geekonomics sounds more like Hayekian libertarianism than Deanian re-regulationism. I don’t think that the Dean campaign deserved such a strong Geekbone. To me, the logic of Geekonomics is to lead one to be skeptical of the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party.
I find Doc Searls very sound on almost all issues other than his support for Dean’s campaign. I am glad that someone pointed out the contradiction in his position.
Infoworld’s Ephraim Schwartz paints a picture:
Picture this: You’re sitting in the food court at your favorite mall with the family, munching on greasy kung pao chicken from Panda Express, followed by a warm, sweet Cinnabon, when a cordon of mall police surround your table, guns drawn, screaming at you to “Drop the bun and put your hands up!”
Reluctant as you are to give it up, you comply.
What went wrong? Your wife is wondering if you’ve been leading a secret life, but it’s nothing so exotic. Rather, the clerk at the Gap forgot to deactivate the RFID (radio frequency identification) tag in the sweater you just bought. When you passed an RFID reader, connected to the Wi-Fi enabled network, it sent a message to the security desk, and as you passed each RFID reader along the way, they tracked you down in the food court.
There is no doubt that RFID tags will be sewn into the lining of every item of clothing manufactured. Current RFID prices are about 16 cents each on orders of 10 million tags, with the price expected to reach a nickel a tag in a year or two.
By using RFID in clothing, not only will companies be able to discourage shoplifting, they’ll also be able to spot other frauds, such as counterfeit brand names or buyers who purchase an item at a discount outlet and then try to return it for the retail price at a regular store. Warranties can now also be easily tracked to date of purchase.
With those benefits to the supply chain, the question is, will the store really want to turn off the tag after the item is purchased, and how can you, as a consumer, tell? “What if you have some strange hobbies you’d like kept private?” Etterman asks.
It is certainly a small step from deploying RFID tags, which have a reach of only about three feet, to putting the readers in public places that already have hot spots. The combination is potent. Suddenly, the information in the tag can be transmitted over the Wi-Fi network and associated with all kinds of other data by all kinds of organizations, such as insurance companies. Or, you may be on the Most Wanted list at your local public library. Why shouldn’t they have a piece of you, too?
While these scenarios are not possible today, there is no technological barrier preventing them from becoming reality. Who can really say what’s next?
The sound Christopher Booker of his notebook in the Sunday Telegraph asks the age-old questions – What do we pay taxes for?
He then proceeds with a list of ‘mundane’ examples of people being charged for things done to them by government agencies such as HM Customs, the Home Office immigration department. He points out that the old principle that government is funded by taxpayers to carry out its duties seems to be breaking down in all directions. Well, it has taken him a while to notice but better late than never.
My reader concluded: “Presumably we can expect the same ‘user must pay’ principle to be applied to the cost of providing the health service, policing, prisons, libraries and state benefits.”
But the question remains, what then do we pay our taxes for? (Until the day, of course, when the Inland Revenue charges us a fee for reading our tax forms and taking our money.)
The answer is obvious – the taxes are necessary to support disabled black lesbian single mothers living in council estates…
This news has been around bits of the blogosphere but it is still shocking enough to write about a week later.
When linguist Sibel Dinez Edmonds showed up for her first day of work at the FBI, a week after the 9-11 attacks, she expected to find a somber atmosphere. Instead, she was offered cookies filled with dates from party bowls set out in the room where other Middle Eastern linguists with top-secret security clearance translate terror-related communications.
She knew the dessert is customarily served in the Middle East at weddings, births and other celebrations, and asked what the happy occasion was. To her shock, she was told the Arab linguists were celebrating the terrorist attacks on America, as if they were some joyous event. Right in front of her supervisor, one translator cheered:
“It’s about time they got a taste of what they’ve been giving the Middle East.”
It gets worse.
When Edmonds reported the incident and other breaches in security, mistranslations and potential espionage by Middle Eastern colleagues she was fired “without specified cause”. Edmonds’s supervisor, “a naturalized U.S. citizen from Beirut” reportedly told his employees to take long breaks, to slow down translations, and to simply say no to those field agents calling us to beg for speedy translations so that they could go on with their investigations and interrogations of those they had detained.
The FBI, which like the army suffers from a severe shortage of Arabic translators, instated a bureau-wide Muslim-sensitivity training program after 9-11. Edmonds is said to have detailed these allegations further in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee last month. Edmonds wrote Justice’s Inspector General Glenn A. Fine in a Jan. 5 letter.
I have alleged, and the FBI has confirmed (to Senate investigators), that there are in fact such persons in the language department.
I do not know whether these allegations are true, but I have no reason to doubt their validity. I have no problem believing that a government agency swamped with bureaucracy and with departmental biases can foster such shocking behaviour within its ranks. An allegded shortage of arabic translators seems to have opened floodgates to greedy and hostile behaviour of the Middle Eastern linguists in residence whose allegiances cannot be doubted.
Any chance of a more appropriate ‘sensitivity training’? Once more, without feeling…
The General Accounting Office warned today that the Transportation Security Administration’s high-tech system to screen airline passengers for terrorist connections faces significant testing and deployment delays, which could affect the program’s ultimate success.
According to a report by the GAO, the TSA has not only fallen behind in testing the new Computer-Assisted Passenger PreScreening System (CAPPS II), but also has yet to fully identify all of the functions it would like the system to perform. In addition, the TSA has not yet completed work on at least seven key technical challenges that could stand in the way of the system’s final deployment.
These issues, if not resolved, pose major risks to the successful deployment and implementation of CAPPS II.
There are other significant issues facing U.S. airport security, according to a former top Israeli airport security official and the director of security at Virgin Atlantic Airlines. According to these officials, who spoke Tuesday during an online Terror and Technology conference sponsored by IDPartners LLC, the U.S. runs a major risk by focusing too much on information technology and other high-tech solutions to uncover terrorist plots against airports and airlines.
Rafi Ron, president of New Age Security Solutions and the former head of security at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv explains that the terrorist threat against airlines is a relatively new experience in the U.S.
There is a tendency to solve problems through the use of technological means. Focusing on technology sometimes makes you lose your overall perspective. That can lead to unbalanced planning, unbalanced investment and misuse of funds.
Rather than rely on IT systems for the bulk of security monitoring, Ron said airport authorities should use personnel training programs in behavior pattern recognition, which has been highly successful in Israel.
Behavior analysis can fill the gap of a purely technological approach. Technology is not yet good enough to provide us with a 100% solution.
Wired reports that privacy groups, business travelers and members of Congress asked the federal government this week to reconsider its plans to implement a passenger-profiling system because agencies have not adequately addressed privacy concerns or shown effectiveness in detecting potential terrorists.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-California), joined by 25 other Democrats, sent President Bush a letter Wednesday asking his administration to protect passenger privacy. The group also proposed that airlines should tell passengers exactly what information they pass along as travelers make reservations.
Before the Computer-Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening Program (CAPPS II) is implemented, we urge the adoption of a specific policy that makes clear the role of airlines in sharing consumer information with the federal government.
Members of Congress and the public have no real assurances that the system will not rely upon medical, religious, political or racial data.
CAPPS II will require passengers to give more personal information when buying airline tickets, information that will then be checked against mammoth commercial databases, watch lists and warrants to screen for suspected terrorists and people wanted for violent crimes.
An ideologically diverse group of public-interest groups – including Common Cause, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Free Congress Foundation -joined the letter-writing campaign, asking Congress for hearings.
One interpretation is that it is meant to indicate, from left to right, priority of the seats should go to any person with a broken arm, a person with a child, a pregnant woman or a person with an injured leg…
The Big Blunkett’s draconian measures to ‘fight terrorists’ would not be necessary if the British justice system was functioning. When this and this can happen with increasing frequency, no wonder that terrorists have a ball in the British courts and Mr Blunkett can continue warping British laws with self-righteous indignation of a politician.
Telegraph reports that civil liberties groups and Muslim community leaders lined up yesterday to denounce plans from David Blunkett to conduct secret trials of suspected terrorists.
He said the threat from extremists was now so great that the burden of proof in criminal trials should be reduced from “beyond reasonable doubt” to “the balance of probabilities”.
He also wants a debate over whether intelligence information against suspects should be given in camera to avoid compromising security. Mr Blunkett’s ideas – to be proposed formally in a Home Office paper later this month – are intended to address what the Government sees as a serious threat from Islamist fundamentalists.
We need to debate how we deal with these delicate issues of proportionality and human rights on the one hand and evidential base and the threshold of evidence on the other.
That is quite a challenge because we are having to say that the nature of what people obtain through the security and intelligence route is different to the evidence gained through the policing route. It needs to be presented in a way that doesn’t allow disclosure by any of the parties involved which would destroy your security services.
Lady Kennedy, QC, a Labour peer, compared Mr Blunkett to Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe and described the proposals as “a classic Blunkett tactic”.
He really is a shameless authoritarian. We can be confident that many of his colleagues in the Cabinet, including particularly the Attorney General, will sit on this, because it really is an affront to the rule of law.
You suggest all kinds of outrageous and awful things because then you get away with half of them.
Mark Littlewood, the campaigns director of Liberty, said:
Simply introducing more laws, greater powers and stiffer penalties will go a long way to undermining British justice and will not make our country any safer.
Michael Howard, the Tory leader, said:
You have to try and strike the balance between giving the British people the proper protection against terrorism and not depriving innocent people of their liberty.
Massoud Shadjareh, the chairman of the Islam Human Rights Commission, said:
This sort of legislation in Germany led to concentration camps.
Let’s hear it for the sharia law solution to terrorism.
All the ‘idiotarians‘, Left and Right, both subscribe to the same fallacy: violence is the greatest evil, the state has a monopoly of violence, the USA is the most powerful state, therefore the USA is the home of evil, and all evil events have their roots in USA policy. The idiotarians stand to the responsible anti-statists (such as our host) as the Ku Klux Klan stood to the sensible American patriots. They are what happens when a principled objection to force hardens into a reflexive aversion. They end up condoning the worst crimes a state can commit, provided the state in question is not their own, and if the alternative is inflicting violence themselves.
– Michael Brazier, in a comment on a post at Armed and Dangerous
College student Lara Hayhurst was not prepared to let officials treat her little pet like Osama ‘fin’ Laden… Forgive the pun but the story is quite funny, well, mainly because she got away with it.
In today’s Telegraph Charles Moore has an excellent summary of what is wrong with the BBC, its deeply entrenched institutional bias and its undeserved influence:
It seems to me that the BBC today is the enemy of conservative culture in Britain. This is not immediately obvious, because elements of the BBC’s output, particularly on radio, are justly loved by many conservative-minded people. But it is nevertheless the case. The few glorious programmes are used as the camouflage behind which political correctness can advance.
How does the BBC approach subjects such as American power, organised religion, marriage, the EU, the Middle East, the actions of the Armed Forces, the rights of householders to defend their property against burglars, public spending, choice of schools, or any perceived inequality?
Who will be more politely treated – Gerry Adams or Norman Tebbit, a spokesman for Hizbollah or Paul Wolfowitz? If someone appears on a programme described as a “property developer” with someone described as a “green activist”, who will get the rougher ride? If a detective drama features a feisty lesbian and a chilly aristocrat, which is more likely to be the murderer?
And when it comes to a war – it applied both in the Falklands and in Iraq – the BBC takes a pride in being what it calls “even-handed”, which means inventing moral equivalence between the forces of our country and those of aggressive dictatorships.
None of these attitudes is unique to the BBC, but what is unique is the BBC’s power to impose them. In order legally to have a television in your home, you have to pay the BBC £116 a year. This allows it to dominate virtually all forms of broadcast media, many of which have nothing to do with any idea of “public service broadcasting”.
Out of the deference that this power instils, senior BBC executives are paid more than anyone else in the entire British public service. Greg Dyke, the now ex-director-general and editor-in-chief who seems to have been too busy to edit, got £464,000 last year. BBC executives are like the princes of the Church of England before the commutation of the tithes. They are rich and powerful, and no doubt they mean well, but there comes a time when non-conformists get fed up with paying for their sermons and their privileges.
That time is surely near. We must find a way of abolishing or hugely reducing the licence fee while reviving the core of public service broadcasting. How half-witted of Tory Britain to hand this chance to Tony Blair, instead of claiming it for itself.
Apologies for such a long quote but apart from a tiny disagreement about the license fee – it should be scrapped, not just reduced – I have nothing to add.
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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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