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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Microchips buried inside your vehicle could soon be tipping off the authorities about your driving misdeamenors, says Jason Barlow in the Telegraph.
Reports this week indicate that the Government is working on a scheme that will lead to every car in the country being fitted with a personalised microchip, enabling the powers-that-be to identify and prosecute motorists who break the law.
Electronic vehicle identification (EVI) allows the chip buried within your car to collude with the existing network of roadside sensors to provide a host of information about the individual behind the wheel, as well as monitoring exactly how vigorous their progress is on any given journey. An in-car informer, in other words, to go with the mobile phone, the Switch and credit cards, and the army of CCTV cameras already tracking our every move.
The police and the DVLA claim there are obvious benefits. Stolen cars could be traced more effectively, and uninsured vehicles more efficiently identified, reducing premiums among middle England’s most law-abiding citizens. EVI could also eliminate potentially dangerous cars without valid MoTs. The Treasury stands to recoup an estimated £185 million in unpaid vehicle excise duty.
But the truth of the matter is that it is merely another way – the most pernicious yet – of squeezing revenue out of the poor, beleaguered motorist. Motorists already supply a tenth of all government revenue – that’s £38 billion – and because we value our freedom so highly, a freedom typified by our desire to travel by car, we reluctantly continue to stump up even in the face of over-regulation and exorbitant fuel prices.
It could be worse. And, in five years, it will be – you’ll be fined for doing an illegal U-turn in the middle of nowhere at three in the morning, while someone burgles your house and gets away with it. Cue calls for everyone on the planet to be fitted with a microchip. After all, the innocent will have nothing to fear.
Truer words have rarely been spoken…
Shami Chakrabarti, the new director of Liberty, is planning a monitoring operation on Britain’s giant retailers. Chakrabarti, formerly a high-flying legal advisor to two home secretaries, takes up her new post today.
Liberty is to set up a unit to monitor the experiments being carried out by various retailers with radio frequency identification technology. M&S and Tesco are pioneering the use of tiny microchips, the size of a grain of sand, which are inserted into the packaging of goods or sown into the labels of clothes.
Chakrabarti believes Britain, already the world leader in the use of CCTV cameras, is set to become the ‘surveillance capital of Europe.’
As from today Liberty will be monitoring the supermarkets and big chain stores. If we think a legal challenge can be mounted to stop their experimentation then we will make it. We will certainly be in touch with the company executives and we will do all in our power to let customers know what is happening. It is up to consumers to decide whether or not they want to boycott a particular store or chain but the companies must be made aware that this is the risk.
Florida police have scrapped a security camera system that scanned city streets for criminals, saying it had failed to recognise anyone wanted by authorities since its introduction two years ago. The system was intended to recognise the facial characteristics of criminals and runaway children by matching passers-by in the Ybor City district of Tampa with a database of 30,000 mugshots.
“It’s just proven not to have any benefit to us,” Captain Bob Guidara, a department spokesman, said. The cameras have led only to arrests for such crimes as drug deals.
Tesco has ended a trial of new technology that tracked customers buying Gillette razor blades. The retailer denied that the technology was being used for security reasons, but shoppers considered it to be an invasion of their privacy.
After Tesco’s use of radio frequency identification (RFID) chips was revealed, protests were held outside the store and consumers wrote to Gillette demanding that plans to use the chips be shelved.
Gillette has reportedly backed away from introducing RFID chips into individual products on a wider scale, despite being an enthusiastic supporter of the technology. The company is heavily involved in the Auto-ID consortium, which is looking at ways of developing RFID for shops, but it says that chips may not be used to monitor individual products for at least 10 years.
Tesco said its Cambridge trial had finished as planned; it was only meant to be in place for six months from January, and decisions had not been affected by the protests. The company has now moved to its next phase in testing RFID, by placing chips in DVDs at its store in Sandhurst, Berkshire.
Barry Hugill, of the civil rights group Liberty, was concerned at “function creep”, in other words, information recorded for one purpose being used for another.
We want clear legal guidelines as to what information companies, government agencies, local authorities are allowed to glean [and] what they can do with it.
The Guardian reports that a “watch list” drawn up by Mexican security forces of 80 anti-globalisation activists who are believed to be headed for Cancun for the World Trade Organisation gathering next month has provoked an angry response – from those whose names are missing. Ten days ago, the Mexican daily La Reforma ran a story on a “watch list” that has been compiled by the security forces concerned about possible trouble at the September 10-14 event. The list named 60 international and 20 Mexican anti-globalisation activists.
A letter addressed to “Government Agents Bent on Re stricting Civil Liberties”, which is currently being circulated for signatures, reads:
Despite hefty expenditures of tax money on intelligence gathering … we are concerned that you were only able to find 60 internationals and 20 Mexicans who are opposed to the World Trade Organisation. Haven’t you noticed that the tide of public opinion is turning decidedly against the WTO? …Please add my name to your ‘watch list’ immediately!
If you are unwilling to add my name to the list, then I must insist that you remove those singled out for special attention. I can assure you that we have similar views – we are all opposed to the WTO and a ‘free’ trade agenda that impoverish the majority of us while enriching a few corporations.
Heh.
The Guardian has an article about France’s rearguard battle against the invasion of English:
“What is at stake is the survival of our culture. It is a life or death matter,” said Jacques Viot, head of the Alliance Française, which promotes French abroad, warned last month. Hélène Carrère d’Encausse of the Académie Française was equally apocalyptic: “The defence of our language must be the major national cause of the new century.”
Within France, the language benefits from a veritable battery of protective laws, decrees and directives. Radio stations must play mostly music with French lyrics, and advertisements in English are, with few exceptions, outlawed unless accompanied by a translation.
Most of the legislation stems from the 1994 “loi Toubon”, which briefly threatened jail for anyone using words like “le weekend” or “le parking”. Even today, companies are occasionally prosecuted – although not as often as organisations such as the Committee for the Defence of the French Language, one of a myriad of similar militant bodies, would like – for using anglicisms in ads and brochures.
“The time has come for concrete and targeted action,” said Michel Herbillon, a campaigning conservative MP who recently completed a report on France’s language problems within the EU. “The union recognises the principle of equality for all official languages, and that principle is manifestly being flouted. It is wholly unacceptable.”
The situation is serious enough for President Jacques Chirac – who speaks excellent English but avoids using it as a matter of principle – to intervene. Earlier this year, he asked France’s media companies to come up with plans for a French-language global news channel, a kind of “CNN à la française”, to ensure France’s voice continues to be heard in the world.
What can we say to that? C’est la vie…
All is well at the Samizdata.net HQ as one of its current inhabitants missed the blackout by a few minutes having just left the affected area. The blackout was reported to have ocurred at 18.20, halted the traffic in Central London with effects spreading as far as M25 (a beltway surrounding the London metropolitan area). I left the City, which has the post code EC1 after 17.30 and managed to avoid the traffic lights failure all the way to South West London. As far as I know there was no power failure in this part of town and everything seems fine now everywhere.
CNET News.com reports that the labs at RSA Security on Wednesday outlined plans for a technology they call blocker tags, which are similar in size and cost to radio frequency identification (RFID) tags but disrupt the transmission of information to scanning devices and thwart the collection of data.
According to Ari Juels, a principal research scientist with RSA Laboratories. Blocker and RFID tags are about the size of a grain of sand and cost around 10 cents.
RFID technology uses microchips to wirelessly transmit product serial numbers to a scanner without the need for human intervention. While the technology is potentially useful in improving supply chain management and preventing theft in stores, consumer privacy groups have voiced concerns about possible abuses of the technology if product-tracking tags are allowed to follow people from stores into their homes. Many retailers view RFID as an eventual successor to the barcode inventory tracking system, because it promises to cut distribution costs for manufacturers and improve retailing margins.
RSA’s technique would address the needs of all parties involved, according to Juels. Other options, such as a kill feature embedded in RFID tags, also are available, but with blocker tags, consumers and companies would still be able to use the RFID tags without sacrificing privacy.
Yesterday the Telegraph published an interesting account of life in Italy, namely Rome. The author opens his article with the following paragraph:
“How lucky you are to be living in Italy.” “That must be heaven.” “I do envy you.” If you live in Rome, as I do, you get used to comments like these. But you soon realise that the idyllic vision of Italy suffers from just one drawback: it is almost complete rubbish.
I must admit this caught my attention since Rome has long been my favourite place of escape for a long weekend. The scenery, food, wine, weather, shopping… Indeed, what’s there not to like?
For the first few months after you move here, all is indeed perfect. The sun is warm, the people are welcoming, the language is a joy, the food is delicious, the wine is cheap, and everyone is a pleasure to look at. You congratulate yourself on your wisdom and you pity your friends who are still locked up in their grey, northern offices.
The enchantment, however, does not last long:
But then you begin to realise that in this new paradise you face a major problem: it is virtually impossible to earn a living. Take Rome. To live here with a minimum of dignity (renting a small flat, eating out occasionally, but no car and no proper holidays), you need a good 3,000 euros a month pre-tax, say 1,800 euros post-tax (roughly £2,100 and £1,250 respectively). However modest this seems, it is not what you will get. While in the Anglo-Saxon world most adults expect to be able to live independently off their salaries, in Italy most don’t. They stay with their families. Indeed, a staggering 70 per cent of single Italian men between the ages of 25 and 29 live in subsidised comfort at home, where their meagre earnings do very nicely as pocket money. And when they do move out to the stability of marriage or cohabitation, it is generally into a flat that is provided by the family.
…after a while, you begin to appreciate the true cost of the many undoubted joys of living in Italy. You realise, for example, that the flip-side of the cheerful noise and chaos is the mind-boggling complication of life here, the Italian inability – no, refusal – to organise anything or to think ahead.
How does the EU fit into the picture?
In other words, Italy is, in many ways, a banana republic. That is why, until recently – until they realised what a forlorn hope it was – the Italians were so mightily keen on the EU: they were praying that Brussels would save them from themselves. As a British ambassador once said to me: “Italy? No one takes it seriously. The place is a joke.”
And finally, there is the conclusion that Luigi Barzini came to 40 years ago at the end of The Italians, his classic portrait of the nation:
The Italian way of life cannot be considered a success except by temporary visitors. It solves no problems. It makes them worse. It would be a success of sorts if at least it made Italians happy. It does not. Its effects are costly, flimsy and short-range. The people enjoy its temporary advantages, to be sure, without which they could not endure life, but are constantly tormented by discontent The unsolved problems pile up and inevitably produce catastrophes at regular intervals. The Italians always see the next one approaching with a clear eye but cannot do anything to ward it off. They can only play their amusing games and delude themselves for a while.
Interesting… Any comments, insights or opinions?
This Telegraph article gives a slightly different angle to Guardian’s story yesterday as it talks about the ID pilot scheme in the context of a new biometric passport:
David Blunkett was accused yesterday of using a pilot scheme for a new biometric passport as a test run for a national identity card. Civil liberties campaigners said the Home Secretary was disguising his true purposes in a backdoor attempt to gauge public reaction to ID cards.
Over the next few years, passports are to be adapted to resemble credit cards containing biometric information, such as iris patterns or fingerprints.
Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, said:
The Home Office is being disingenuous. They know that they can’t trial ID cards without parliamentary approval, so they are doing it through the back door… They have admitted that the information gleaned from this so-called passport trial will be used for the purposes of an ID card.
The state is not your friend.
The BBC reports that US Attorney General John Ashcroft has launched a strident defence of the controversial Patriot Act, saying it was the government’s responsibility to defend Americans in any way it could.
Mr Ashcroft highlighted support for the Patriot Act given earlier by members of Congress and the website lists quotations from members of both parties supporting the legislation, almost wholly dating back to October 2001 when it was introduced.
But since then dozens of cities and counties across the country have approved resolutions criticising the Patriot Act and various lawsuits have been brought to declare it unconstitutional.
Even the Republican-led House of Representatives has become involved in recent weeks, striking down “sneak-and-peek” rules which allowed government agents to search private property without telling the owner.
Other controversial areas – such as agents being allowed to scrutinise people’s library records without showing what crime they believe could be being committed – still stand despite challenges.
Telegraph reports that Tesco, a British supermarket chain, is taking pictures of everyone buying razors in a bid to cut down on shoplifting.
The experiment, at a Tesco store in Cambridge, has been condemned by civil liberty campaigners. Demonstrators have gathered outside the supermarket calling for a boycott until the “Big Brother” scheme is dropped.
Gillette razors in the company’s Newmarket Road branch are being tagged with individual microchips developed by Cambridge University’s Auto-ID Centre.
When anyone removes a product from the Mach 3 display, the chip triggers an in-store CCTV camera which takes a picture of the shopper.
Greg Sage, a spokesman for Tesco, said that the scheme was designed to keep track of its products within the store and stressed that the chips would have no further use once the products left it.
We would never compromise the privacy of our customers.
Police are said to be “impressed” with the images taken of shoppers, but civil rights activists claim that the microchips could soon be placed on a much wider range of products.
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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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