We can’t change the way that newspapers are written but we can sure change the way people read them.
– Perry de Havilland
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June 8th, 2003 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
 The Times (which we do not link to) has reported that Home Secretary, David Blunkett believes the public will back the introduction of identity cards if reassured that their privacy would not be violated. Mr Blunkett indicated that, in conjunction with Cabinet colleagues, he will assess the desirability of introducing an ID card system by the end of the summer. Apparently, the Home Office has been conducting a consultation exercise on such schemes. Any idea as to when, where and with whom? June 8th, 2003 | Comments are closed
Phil Zimmermann, the man who in the early 90s developed the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption product, believes that Moore’s Law and surveillance cameras make for a particularly dangerous cocktail, as reported by ZDNet. Moore’s Law represents a “blind force” that is fuelling an undirected technology escalation, referring to what he sees as the threat to privacy from the increased use of surveillance cameras.
Zimmerman sees surveillance as the biggest threat to civil liberties and nowhere, he believes, is this more egregious than in the UK.
Another problem with using technology for surveillance according to Zimmermann is that while laws that are brought in during times of a perceived increase in threats to national security, they can be relatively easily repealed. I find it hard to believe that anything can be more inert and irrepealable than laws but his point about technology still holds:
 June 8th, 2003 | Comments are closed
6 June 1944… the start of the Anglosphere’s armed liberation of western Europe from National Socialism.   It never hurts to keep reminding some people of that. June 6th, 2003 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
Sabine Herold is a courageous young woman who has put herself at the head of a popular uprising against the tyranny of union militancy to which President Chirac constantly kowtows, as reported by the Telegraph. She has been compared to Joan of Arc, and her impatience with her Gaullist government is certainly reminiscent of the saint’s frustration with the French monarchy. She is another example that despite the Left’s intellectual hegemony established since the 1960s that turned France into a second-rate country with delusions of grandeur, some French individuals can transcend that context. The kind of liberal, cosmopolitan conservatism Mlle Herold embraced is almost extinct in France.
The good news is that she is by no means the first and only one. One only needs to visit Dissident Frogman’s dacha or Merde in France to see how the blogosphere helped to flush out the illuminated few. The bad news is that if their numbers start growing, that popular Anglo-Saxon past time, ‘frog bashing’, may no longer be completely justified. Vive les Français liberes! June 6th, 2003 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
Letter to editor (from Blunkett) Sir – I was entertained by Wednesday’s leading article (leader, May 7), which managed to cobble together critical comment about secure passports using biometric technology with laments about state bureaucracy. Here is a “free country”, “free enterprise” newspaper failing to address the consequences of what free-thinking America is about to do, namely introduce biometric-based entry requirements that will make free entry to that country very difficult for people whose countries do not follow suit. June 1st, 2003 | Comments are closed
Salam has got a great post defending himself and his family. A lot is happening around him, not least the news that Guardian just hired him to write a “Baghdad Blog” for them. Salam’s passionate defence of his father was sparked off by comments from those who see conspiracy theories behind everything outside their everyday experience. Salam is real, alright, I have my reasons not to doubt him. Those who challenge his identity and connections are simply ignorant of the workings of a world profoundly different from theirs. It does not fit the same categories and does not conform to the same black&white distinctions. The fact Salam is disillusioned with American ‘occupation’ of Iraq and that he falls into the same ‘liberal mindset’ traps as many intellectuals in the West is not a sign of Ba’atish mis-information machine at work, as some have suggested. Simply, Salam has seen enough of the West not to believe that it has a panacea for Iraq’s woes. Can you blame him for that? He may take a very different journey from that point to the one we take at Samizdata.net but so what? That can happen to anyone and it does not make them a KGB agent. I do feel a bit of regret that Salam has been dragged to the media spotlights, not because I begrudge him the popularity but because his idiosyncratic style and personality will get edited and analysed ad nauseam. Until, of course, something else becomes the flavour of the day. I hope Salam’s future is safe and wish him best of luck. May 30th, 2003 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
OK, so I Googled for federast too. And yes, we are the first result and we rock. Whatever. But unlike this commenter, I looked beyond the second result and look what I found. A record of Parliamentary debates dated 20 Apr 1999 (column 687) that shows that “federast” was not used by David or Perry for the first time (sorry guys, but this is worth it). I have reproduced most of the debate as I think it is interesting to see what discussions our ‘representatives’ were having in 1999 about the EU:
Perhaps, we should warn Mr John Bercow, MP about the company he keeps… May 30th, 2003 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
Robert Matthews, a regular writer for QED column in the Sunday Telegraph, looks at the “wonders of technology” David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, decided it was time we should all benefit from.
So there you have it. You just need to calculate your probability of being one of the incorrectly accused one in 1,000 bona fide people and books your ticket accordingly. May 30th, 2003 | Comments are closed
Everyone in Britain will have to pay around £25 for a compulsory identity card under proposals being put to the cabinet by David Blunkett, the Home Secretary. The “smart” card will identify the holder using iris-recognition technology. Failure to carry the card will not be an offence but police will be able to order people to present it at a police station. So, you won’t need to carry the card with you at all time. How is that going to help the ‘fightagainstterrorism’? Ah, the terrorists will just report to a police station to show off their hi-tech faked ID cards… The charge is aimed at overcoming resistance to the scheme from the Treasury. Until now Cabinet support for a national compulsory identity card has been outweighed by the Treasury, which has objected to footing the estimated £1.6 billion bill. Notice how the main reason that ID cards have not been introduced is that the Treasury opposed the £1.6 billion bill. Concerns for privacy or individual rights? Blank stares around the Cabinet meeting table… While forcing people to pay for the card could add to the anticipated objections from human rights campaigners, Mr Blunkett believes that concern about national security is sufficient to ensure that individuals will be prepared to bear the cost. Damn, the one time Mr Blunkett uses the word individual is to charge him the cost of extending governments reach over the individual. Senior figures in the Cabinet strongly support the plan for the card, which would use a microchip to hold details including age, place of birth, home address and a personal number to identify the holder. It is also hoped that the card could be used to entitle the holder to a range of state benefits, thereby cutting benefit fraud. Mr Blunkett discussed his plan for a national ID card with Tom Ridge, the head of the US Department of Homeland Security, at a meeting in Washington earlier this month. Mr Blunkett agreed to develop a joint programme, using the same technology, with the US, which has already agreed a similar protocol with Canada. US and Canada?! Anglosphere, help! May 29th, 2003 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
A report from AP about how Iraqis are trying to learn what it means to be free after more than thirty years of tyranny under Saddam. Apperently, more than 60 percent of Iraqis were born after Ba’athist party took power and it takes more than absence of Saddam and his henchmen to make sense of the alien concept of freedom.
May 29th, 2003 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
The European Central Bank (ECB) is in talks with Hitachi Ltd. about embedding radio tags in euro bank notes to prevent counterfeiting of euros. The ECB is deeply concerned about counterfeiting and money laundering and is said to be looking at radio tag technology. Last year, Greek authorities were confronted with of 2,411 counterfeiting cases and seized 4,776 counterfeit bank notes while authorities in Poland nabbed a gang suspected of making and putting over a million fake euros into circulation. To add to the problem, businesses also find it hard to judge a note’s authenticity as current equipment cannot tell between bogus currency and old notes with worn-out security marks. Among the security features in current euros are threads visible under ultraviolet light. According to Prianka Chopra, an analyst with market research firm Frost and Sullivan the main objective is to determine the authenticity of money and to
Besides acting as a digital watermark, the use of radio chips could speed up routine bank processes such as counting. With such tags, a stack of notes can be passed through a reader with the sum added in a split-second, similar to how inventory is tracked in an RFID-based system. Hitachi is developing noncontact chips for use in bank notes and other paper documents, Kantaro Tanii, confirmed the company’s corporate communications manager for Europe. Hitachi’s Web site describes a 0.4-mm by 0.4-mm by 60-micron radio frequency identification chip, called the Mu Chip, that works in the 2.45-GHz frequency band and has a 128-bit ROM for storing its identity number. It was originally conceived as a bank-note-tracking device but could also be used in passports, driver’s licenses and other official documents. May 29th, 2003 | Comments are closed
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