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In the wake of the massacre in Madrid, and the subsequent election result, it has become the conventional wisdom that the election went according to al-Qaeda’s design. Robert Clayton Dean expressed this view concisely here at Samizdata a few days ago:
Spanish voters reacted to the election eve bombings by doing exactly what the bombers undoubtedly wanted: elect a Socialist who will take a soft line in the war on terror.
However, there is in fact little direct evidence that such was the goal of al-Qaeda. It does sound rather logical, of course, but there may well be other factors at work. And it is not clear that logic is a useful tool in analysing the methods and aims of this enemy.
What follows is a purely speculative guess to make the case that the political goal of al-Qaeda was in fact the direct opposite- their goal may well have been to ensure the re-election of the Popular Party.
al-Qaeda as an organisation has been going through a rough couple of years, and it has not achieved much in terms of murder and mayhem in the West. If we consider al-Qaeda as a company, it would aim to market itself as the organisation of choice to the Islamic Fundamentalist section of the Islamic marketplace. → Continue reading: What is Al Qaeda up to? An alternative view
The press likes to present itself as an advocate of people’s freedoms; certainly vis a vis the state, the Fourth Estate proports to be the people’s friend. But many of the state’s urges to control and dominate it’s citizenry strikes a chord with elements of the media, and this editorial from the Sydney Morning Herald is remarkable. The remarkable feature is that ID Cards have not actually been on the government agenda in Australia. The effect of this article is to actually put ID cards on the public agenda, rather then respond to a government initiative.
For all the repudiation of Big Brother that defeat of the Australia Card supposedly symbolised, Australians do not know the extent of state surveillance of their everyday lives today. Surveillance of their financial arrangements is more exact and accessible than ever before. In the vacuum since the 1987 debate on the merits and demerits of a compulsory ID system, we are not to know whether Australian sentiment has changed. It is likely though that we will soon get the chance to find out.
What is extraordinary is that the SMH, a supposedly liberal minded journal, seems determined to put ID cards on the agenda. It is true that the editorial did not advocate an ID card system, but nor did it condemn it. An extraordinary state of affairs.
Adelaide is swathed with security cameras that observe comings and goings in the Adelaide CBD.
The local police love this and are boasting about how well it is going.
The company in charge of the cameras is well pleased as well, and are so pleased that they are providing live feeds from the cameras on their website. They have had the good grace to omit a privacy policy. After all, that would be a bad joke.
In Australia it is common for voters to receive letters from their political representatives, and these letters are becoming more and more sophisticated in targeting the interests of the individual voters.
The two major political parties are able to do this because they have established databases. The inner workings of the databases have been somewhat elusive, but Wayne Errington and Peter van Onselen have written an academic paper (warning- PDF file) on how these databases work. The implications for the privacy of voters are odious, especially considering the temptations for political parties in government to cross check their party databases with government ones.
I found this via Ken Parish, and check out the comments on his post where Wayne Errington makes some further good points about the database’s operation. He says the saving grace (so far) is that the political parties are actually rather slack in maintaining their databases; however, as time goes on, you can expect the party machines to become more professional in this matter.
John Walker thinks that big brother and big media can put the Internet genie back in the bottle.
Earlier I believed there was no way to put the Internet genie back into the bottle. In this document I will provide a road map of precisely how I believe that could be done, potentially setting the stage for an authoritarian political and intellectual dark age global in scope and self-perpetuating, a disempowerment of the individual which extinguishes the very innovation and diversity of thought which have brought down so many tyrannies in the past.
This is a massive document that is highly technical in some places, but is well worth slogging your way through. (And I always did wonder why IPv6 flopped.)
(Hat-tip to Joe Katzman)
One of the depressing trends in modern life is the way in which political figures use the politics of fear to garner support for legislation which degrades our rights and our liberties.
I live in South Australia, and here the Premier (equivalent to a US state governor, although he models his government on New Labour), one Mike Rann, has ordered his ministers to come up with new legislation to curb the rights of bikie gang members to work in certain industries.
In South Australia a couple of small groups of motorcycle gangs have become noted for their involvement in drug dealing and other forms of organised crime. You’d have to look hard to notice them, though. Although South Australians love their motorcycles, I can’t recall seeing anyone from these “bikie gangs”.
Be that as it may, the powers that be have determined that they are a threat to the good folk of South Australia. And, as the powers that be are wont to do, they are arming themselves with legal clubs. The gist of the legislation is:
the aim is to ensure that people associated with bikie gangs and organised crime can be prevented from holding a security firm licence.
The term ‘bikie gang’ is used loosely. I would be concerned if I was a motorcycle enthusiast to know whether or not innocent social gatherings with fellow devotees were to make one a member of these dreaded ‘bikie gangs’.
Mr Rann gives no comfort:
I’ve made it clear that if it means the new laws must be radical and draconian in nature, then so be it.
So presumably, the civil liberties of people will go by the wayside if that is what it takes. South Australians are going to have their freedom of association challenged, as well as their right to seek employment where they wish, in order to deal with a piddling problem. South Australia’s crime rate is hardly alarming, and what we have here is a politician playing up people’s fears to drive through legislation that is iniquitous.
Another good excuse for infringing our privacy that governments are wont to provide is efficiency. In such cases, the best bet is to challenge the government agency in question to spell out exactly how these efficiencies are going to be achieved.
The latest gambit in Australia is to provide an electronic health records database. The government claims that this will improve the safety and quality of health care delivery. How, the newspapers do not say.
In another gambit to get this through, the government says there will be no electronic identification numbers, and that patient involvement was voluntary.
Both these gambits need to be challenged. If there are no numbers, one wonders how they propose to deal with the many people known as “Smith” in our country. Not everyone has a unique surname like Wickstein.
And one wonders how ‘voluntary’ this scheme will be in five years time. No doubt, after the scheme has been up and running for a few years, we will be told that to be more ‘efficient’ the scheme needs to be made universal (read, compulsory).
Privacy Commissioner Mal Crompton noted that people might be reluctant to reveal details about themselves if they had doubts about the privacy of their medical records.
There are of course sound medical reasons for the sharing of medical records with, for example, hospitals. But electronic records can stray far and wide.
I don’t think I’d have any real objections to this scheme as it stands now. However, we’ve seen in the past how one government agency likes to dig in the files of another, and frankly, I don’t trust the Australian health system to keep my details private.
How does this matter? Well, how would you like the Tax office auditing you and having access to your medical history? I wouldn’t like the creep auditing me and giving my financial records the third degree knowing my medical details.
The State of California has, I’d guess almost unnoticed, passed new financial privacy laws that require banks and other financial service providers to obtain their customer’s consent before passing or selling on their client’s financial details.
It shows that it is still possible to get legislators to pay attention to privacy issues, but, as this interview with the new law’s proposer, State Senator Jackie Speier reveals, you do have to be persistent.
Still, it’s good to see hard work paying off.
Most of us are fortunate enough to live our lives in peaceful obscurity. Not many of us do things that attract attention from more then our circle of friends and family.
There are those though that either through their skill or through opportunity attract unwanted attention. While Brian writes about the attention that Prince William is getting, in Australia, we who make princes of our sportsmen are debating the latest scandal involving cricketer Shane Warne.
Warne is one of the most gifted bowlers in the history of the game, but away from the field he is a rather unsavoury man who has gathered a well earned sleazy reputation.
An enterprising South African woman has tried to cash in on that reputation by making allegations against Warne. It seems that for once there is little truth to the story, and indeed she’s been charged by the South African police with extortion. Whatever the truth of this sordid affair, the media spotlight is once again firmly on Shane Warne. Sometimes that spotlight steps over the boundary of what is acceptable by the media after News Corporation’s flagship newspaper “The Australian” took a photograph of Warne having a smoke in his backyard.
While in general little sympathy need be wasted on Warne, in this case, I feel for him. His response to the affair has been to keep as low a profile as possible, and every person has the right not to be photographed if they don’t want to be.
Governments are notoriously inquisitive about the private matters of their citizens, but they are not the only intrusive Big Brother out there.
In the factory where I work we have been given magnetic swipecards to enter and exit the factory through the new security gates. The main point of these security gates is to protect the car park, which was targeted by a gang of thieves late last year. They do a good job- it’s going to take a fair effort to get in the carpark now. The carpark is also monitered by a security camera.
Some of the lads have made joking remarks to the effect that we are now ‘inside’; as if it was a prison environment, but no one really objects, as we all want our cars to be there and in one piece when we finish our shifts.
Some other employers though use far more extensive surveillance in their working areas. I used to work in an internet datacentre, and the company that operated it had security cameras operating over every part of the centre where our customers might go. These cameras recorded everything on magnetic tape. Part of my job in the Network Operations Center was to monitor these cameras for anything that might be a security breach.
There was one camera that covered the front door to our building which faced the street. This was by far the most interesting camera, as the datacentre was just around the corner from Crown Casino, a huge entertainment complex in Melbourne. Nothing livened up a dull nightshift as watching throngs of drunks, strays and vagabonds doing their thing at 5am.
There was one time, when I was safely on dayshift as it was, when the cameras recorded an assault right outside our building. As I remember it, the fellow who was on shift called the police and volunteered the tape to help identify the assailant.
This raises the issue of privacy. While it might be reasonable to help the police in dealing with a criminal offence, there were other times and other scenes that, while not criminal, might well have been of interest to a wider viewing audience, and would have been of great embarrassment to the participants, who were not aware of the well hidden camera.
Private companies operate transport services and many sports stadiums have cameras strategically placed to film the public. I wonder about what rights and obligations these private entities have to protect the privacy of the people that they film.
I think that Big Brother is big enough and doesn’t need any little helpers.
In a welcome turnabout for US citizens, MIT has launched the Government Information Awareness website.
The website developer Ryan McKinley explains
“Our goal is develop a technology which empowers citizens to form their own intelligence agency; to gather, sort and act on information they gather about the government,” said MIT graduate student Ryan McKinley, who developed GIA under the direction of Christopher Csikszentmihályi, an assistant professor at the MIT Media Lab’s Computing Culture group.
“Only by employing such technologies can we hope to have a government by the people and for the people,” McKinley said.
The method that McKinley uses is pilfered straight from the government itself.
GIA site users can submit information about public figures and government programs anonymously. In an attempt to ensure the accuracy of submitted data, the system automatically contacts the appropriate government officials and offers them an opportunity to confirm or deny submitted data.
But like an FBI file, information is not purged if the subject denies its veracity; the denial is simply added to the file. McKinley wryly added that those government officials who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear from GIA.
A nice touch!
The site itself is a bit limited; also, when I tried it out it was very slow. It might have underestimated the demand for it. This is a work in progress, but it’s a great start. This gives Big Brother a taste of his own medicine, and we need something like this in Australia.
Cross posted at The Eye of the Beholder
Australia has a federal form of government, and there is a division of power between the Federal Government and the various state governments. As in the US, security issues are dealt with federally, while day to day matters of law and order are dealt with at a state level.
The agency which the Australian government uses for internal security in Australia is the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO).
In the wake of the Bali bombing, which deeply affected Australia, the government has been trying to broaden ASIO’s powers. However, they have not demonstrated how these new laws will actually make Australia safer, nor has there been any demonstrated inadequacies with the already ample powers that ASIO has.
The new law gives the government the right to hold someone for a week. This is not suspects we are talking about, it is dealing with people that might know something about terrorism. They ask you questions, you answer them, we all live happily ever after but they still have the power to detain you for a week.
Moreover, if there is new information that you reveal under questioning, the government have the power to apply for another warrant. There goes another week. And there is no limit to the number of warrants that the government can apply for. This can lead to indefinant confinement.
The provisions of the act are by no means hypothetical; the media is pointing out that journalists can be forced to reveal their sources. Either that, or face a five year jail term.
The key point is that this reform is not aimed solely at those who have committed a terrorism offence. The ASIO plan allows for people to be detained solely because they have information about a terrorism offence – a power even police officers do not have when questioning a suspected murderer.
The police are not given powers to detain people solely to gain information. As a society which respects human rights, this is seen as a power that is just too intrusive.
The issue is dealt with through criminal offences for concealing a major offence. There is no reason to think those laws will not apply to terrorism offences.
Moreover, the powers that the government now enjoy are pretty much unaccountable. The government say that there are sufficient accountability mechanisms in place already, but there’s actually no watchdog for ASIO.
The Australian government has acted very poorly throughout it’s long efforts to get this legislation passed. They haven’t demonstrated why there is such a pressing need for such an oppressive statute. The existing powers at their disposal remain quite adequate to deal with terrorism.
One can’t help but get the suspicion that this bill is a power-grab to take advantage of the troubled times that we live in.
Semi-cross posted from The Eye of the Beholder
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