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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Via the indispensable Bishop Hill blog, is this scary Henry Porter article about how many Britons, including professional photographers, are being arrested for taking photos of supposedly “off-limits” buildings. I also notice in the article that yet another Tory MP has been arrested.
The police seem to be developing quite a taste for arresting MPs on dubious charges these days. But at least some judges are beginning to tighten the screws on coppers demanding to arrest or search people in “high profile” cases. But what about the rest of us plebs?
The UK Culture Gauleiter, Andy Burnham, gives an interview in the Telegraph today in which he says:
If you look back at the people who created the internet they talked very deliberately about creating a space that Governments couldn’t reach. I think we are having to revisit that stuff seriously now. It’s true across the board in terms of content, harmful content, and copyright. Libel is [also] an emerging issue.
Actually the people who ‘created’ the internet did it so that parts of the state could stay in touch after a nuclear attack… the idea the net does not need the government was an emergent realisation that came later. And of course there is nothing a government hates more that being thought irrelevent, which is what this is really about. Internet censorship is never ever about ‘protecting’ people, it is about extending and maintaining state power. That is the whole reason why advocates of censorship pretend child pornography is vastly more prevalent than it actually is. And you may be sure kiddie porn will be wheeled out yet again in this latest attempt to expand the power of the state.
There is content that should just not be available to be viewed. That is my view. Absolutely categorical. This is not a campaign against free speech, far from it; it is simply there is a wider public interest at stake when it involves harm to other people. We have got to get better at defining where the public interest lies and being clear about it.
Which of course is indeed a naked, direct and unambiguous attack on free speech.
He is planning to negotiate with Barack Obama’s incoming American administration to draw up new international rules for English language websites. The Cabinet minister describes the internet as “quite a dangerous place” and says he wants internet-service providers (ISPs) to offer parents “child-safe” web services.
Yes, no doubt Andy Burnham dreams of marching forward with The One across the internet in a sort of virtual Operation Barbarosa, presumably with UKGov in the roll of the Loyal Ally. But then unlike Barbarosa, this attack comes as no surprise to the ‘enemy’ (i.e. folks like us) and there is that pesky ‘First Amendment’ on the other side of the Atlantic sitting like 20,000 T-34 tanks waiting at Kursk. There is a reason Samizdata is hosted in the USA and not on this side of the puddle.
This crass power grab needs to be opposed on every level and not just attacked on the sheer technical difficulty of making it happen but also assaulted morally and politically.
But I agree when he says “If you look back at the people who created the internet they talked very deliberately about creating a space that Governments couldn’t reach. I think we are having to revisit that stuff seriously now.” Yes we do need to revisit that and remind everyone that if the history of the previous century teaches us anything, it is that governments cannot be trusted. Free speech cannot be left to the sufferance of political systems and venal politicians like Andrew Burnham. We need to smite any attempt to encroach on the internet at every level and distribute technical ‘solutions’ to every initiative the state comes up as widely as possible regardless of what laws they pass.
We simply will not cooperate.
Henry Porter, who to his immense credit has been telling it like it is on the civil liberties issue in Britain for several years, has a strong article in the Guardian on the arrest of Damian Green and the government’s miserable behaviour since.
As he puts it, the arrest of one of their own has finally woken MPs up to what is going on. It is hard not to feel a certain bitterness at MPs’ complacency on these issues for many years, but better late than never. The arrest of an MP in such circumstances must count as the ultimate “canary in the coalmine”.
What a way to mark the State Opening of Parliament. At the time of writing I do not know if the Speaker of the House of Commons has been sacked yet or resigned.
As someone who has certainly conspired with Damian Green (and LibDem MPs too) to embarrass the Government and the Home Office. I spent some time Thursday and Friday making provision in case I were to be arrested and my property searched. The reaction from the media and parliamentarians in the Green affair has been so strong that I don’t now think it likely. But it does seem possible. Before Thursday night I would have laughed at someone who suggested things had got so bad.
I was misinformed. Nick Cohen in the Observer picks up a case I should have known about:
Admittedly, when anti-terrorist officers arrested him, it was the first time they had held a suspect for trying to protect national security. But their motive was clear. Green had embarrassed the Home Secretary and made Home Office civil servants look idle fools. He and his source had to pay.
The accusations against Sally Murrer, on the other hand, were incomprehensibly trivial. The state said that Mark Kearney, a police officer and Murrer’s co-defendant, had given her the story that Thames Valley Police did not intend to prosecute the star striker of the MK Dons after a fight in a hotel. It also alleged he had passed on a tip that a man who had been murdered in the town had a conviction for drug dealing.
Journalists in free countries receive similar steers every day. Yet the police bugged her phones, ransacked her home and office, confiscated her computers, interrogated her, humiliated her with a strip search, separated her from her daughters and handicapped son and left her with the threat of a prison sentence hanging over her for 18 months.
As I noted for US readers over on another thread, none of this of course required a judicial warrant. Though the charges were thrown out when a trial finally came, the process is the punishment. And someone searched under these conditions might easily end up being prosecuted for something else, if police find evidence of any other offence in the course of it. After all, a lot of very common conduct is now illegal.
As the terrible events in Mumbai have reminded us – I have some ex-colleagues who work there – terrorism remains an ever-present threat. Even while the economic stories dominated our news headlines in recent months, I had a nagging worry that the jihadis were not going to pass up the chance to strike, particularly with a new US president on the way. So terrorism is back as a topic in the most awful way imaginable.
So it is all the more extraordinary that counter-terrorist police, instead of actually trying to deal with terrorists, were instead employed in the highly dodgy arrest of Tory MP Damian Green, who had received leaked information on immigration into the UK and who, like any half-competent politician, was trying to use this information to add to the debate on immigration. Now whatever one thinks about immigration – and Samizdata has gone over this issue many times – it seems deeply sinister that a man who had received leaked details about the numbers involved should find his collar felt by Pc Plod. Considering all the vast numbers of leaks out of the government, which sometimes have direct impacts on markets and livelihoods, this is bad. This is the first time I can recall that a senior MP has been arrested on what looks suspiciously like an attempt by the authorities to shut up a political party. No wonder that Tory leader David Cameron is demanding action on this. Whether he gets it remains to be seen.
Mr Green’s actions are not remotely in the same bracket as the very serious allegations of receipt of oil-for-food funds that have been levelled against the Saddam apologist, George Galloway. At least in the latter case one could see why Galloway should, at the very least, have had a little chat with the police. As for Mr Green, his treatment looks downright sinister. When people throw around the words “police state” to describe what Britain has become, it all too easy to roll the eyes. But if this case does wake this country up a bit, it will have served some purpose.
Philip Johnston in the Daily Telegraph agrees.
Update: Old Holborn puts up this graphic, via Guido Fawkes.
Suggestion to the Tories: refuse to turn up for the State Opening of Parliament on Wednesday. Seriously. Do not turn up, but tell the government to go and boil its collective head.
Things have really got that bad. Can a no-confidence motion be far off?
These are all internet problems and [internet users] think someone should do something about it. Although many internet users think the government should keep out of the internet, I suggest to you that most ordinary people who just use the internet like they use the banking system or the trains think that the government should make sure it all works properly for them and that bad things get stopped from happening.
– David Hendon, Director, Business Relations 2, Business Group , Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, speaking to the registrars’ meeting of Nominet. Imagine, if the government regulated it, then the internet would run as well as the banking system and bad things would get stopped from happening. This was a speech made yesterday.
(Hat-tip: The Register)
The Sunday Times today reports that certain celebrity TV license fee refuseniks are not being harassed, on account of being too famous and too keen on getting the splurge of publicity that they would get if arrested, taken away in chains, thrown into a government dungeon, etc.. Vladimir Bukovsky, noted dissident against an earlier evil empire, thinks the BBC is too biased. Charles Moore doesn’t like Jonathan Ross.
Noel Edmonds thinks the TV licence televised threats are too threatening. Personally I don’t see how those threatening ‘adverts’ could do their job if they were not threatening. After all, their purpose is to threaten. If, instead of threatening, and as Edmonds would apparently prefer, they emphasised what very good value the BBC is, and then only slipped in as afterthought that, oh-by-the-way just-thought-we’d-mention-it, you have to pay the license fee whether you agree with all that or not, this would be at least as obnoxious. The threatening messages Edmonds objects to at least tell the story as it is. But, he doesn’t like them, and objects to being made to pay the license fee. Fair enough. He shouldn’t have to, no matter how unreasonable his objections may seem to others. And nor should anyone else, whatever their disagreements with the BBC may be.
Meanwhile, guilty but too famous is an interesting verdict, nicely calculated to elicit contrasting reactions. On the one hand, one law for the famous and another for the rest, and that’s bad. But, at least someone is making this point, and at least some of those doing this are not just getting away with it, but willing to say so in public. I am sure that we all await the BBC’s response to this public defiance with great interest.
If the BBC does nothing, then here, surely is a great opportunity for people not just to get more famous, but to get famous from a starting point of more or less complete obscurity. It will not have escaped the attention of obcurities thinking along these lines that one of the refuseniks the Sunday Times reports on is a UKIP guy by the name of John Kelly whom you have probably never heard of in any other connection.
In particular, here is a great opportunity for a blogger. All it needs is for one of our tribe to say, there, I am still watching my telly, but have not paid the license fee, and screw you BBC, and get his mates around to video everything that then ensues, and for the rest of us to link to all the hoopla and make sure that Instapundit and Guido link to it also (the latter being a certainty because it was at Guido that I learned of this Sunday Times piece in the first place), etc. etc., and, well, … there is surely a big slice of anti-authoritarian pro-libertarian anti-nationalised-industry fun to be had here.
Personally I like the BBC and feel that I get rather good value from it, much as people on the dole (at my expense) and bankers whose jobs have just been saved (ditto) must likewise feel satisfied. I like the classical music. I also like to copy telly movies onto DVDs and much prefer the BBC’s output, because it is so much easier not to have to edit out all those annoying adverts. I even like Jonathan Ross. I regard his regular outbursts of rudeness as the price we who like him must all pay (and people like the unfortunate Gwyneth Paltrow especially) for the sake of the less tasteless and more interesting conversations that his wacky/rude style also precipitates.
I do not think that there is much future in the notion that the BBC might one day become less biased. It is a nationalised industry. Only those who favour or at least tolerate that are likely to apply to work for it in any numbers. And those who do not fit that mold but who do show up in the BBC’s output are more likely to be caricatures of pro-capitalism than the real thing. No, the only answer is to dump the whole principle of compulsory payment for telly, and in the meantime for all who despise that principle to stir up as much trouble around it as we can. And here is a fine chance to do that.
Andy Burnham MP to the Royal Television Society (in questions after the speech):
The time has come for perhaps a different approach to the internet. I want to even up that see-saw, even up the regulation [imbalance] between the old and the new.
[Reported by The Register]
Twice is coincidence…
In response to a letter from the UK Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR), Nominet is announcing an independent review of its current corporate governance structure, to be benchmarked against established best practice corporate governance standards.
Three times is enemy action…
Hazel Blears MP:
There will always be a role for political commentary, providing perspective, illumination and explanation. But editors need to do more to disentangle it from news reporting, and to allow elected politicians the same kind of prominent space for comment as people who have never stood for office. […]
Unless and until political blogging adds value to our political culture, by allowing new and disparate voices, ideas and legitimate protest and challenge, and until the mainstream media reports politics in a calmer, more responsible manner, it will continue to fuel a culture of cynicism and despair.
I take it that “adds value” means ‘supports us’; “legitimate protest” means ‘sneering at our enemies’; and a “more responsible manner” means ‘without questioning our control of the discourse’.
Free speech is about the state dictating what is or is not acceptable, not about free people freely expressing contempt for contemptible behaviour.
– Commenter Counting Cats
You might think that with all the worries about recession, bank failures and so on, that political leaders might want to avoid making ever greater commitments on public spending. Not so. Just to remind us about the kinds of concerns that animate the political classes, here is this story:
Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance.
Phone buyers would have to present a passport or other official form of identification at the point of purchase. Privacy campaigners fear it marks the latest government move to create a surveillance society.
It is hardly a fear. It is a reality.
A compulsory national register for the owners of all 72m mobile phones in Britain would be part of a much bigger database to combat terrorism and crime. Whitehall officials have raised the idea of a register containing the names and addresses of everyone who buys a phone in recent talks with Vodafone and other telephone companies, insiders say.
It is important to remember that even supposedly private sector firms such as Vodafone can easily find it next-to-impossible not to co-operate with governments on stuff like this, particularly if the government can threaten to cut off licences.
The move is targeted at monitoring the owners of Britain’s estimated 40m prepaid mobile phones. They can be purchased with cash by customers who do not wish to give their names, addresses or credit card details.
So let’s assume that the government has data on the 40 million-plus people who buy a pre-paid phone. Even leaving aside the moral objections to such a database, the practical issue of how on earth one can sift through the haystack of millions of such details for the possible pin of a terrorist plot does not seem to register.
But then again, one must remember that the database state is not really about terrorism. It is a beast that is now acquiring a life of its own. After all, thousands of jobs, millions of profits, are tied up with this. If the Tories really do stick to their pledge to shut this thing down – and I would not want to bet my house on it – it is going to put a lot of “consultants” out of a job. A certain grim satisfaction would be involved in that. My wife, who is a consultant, refuses to work on any such things, god love her.
Poor naive George W. Bush! For all his shambolic presidency, his dreadful mistakes, and the horrors of aggressive imperialism, his last couple of months in office could end up being the most disastrous for the world.
Bloomberg reports:
The leaders of the U.S., France and the European Commission will ask other world leaders to join in a series of summits on the global financial crisis beginning in the U.S. soon after the Nov. 4 presidential election.
President George W. Bush, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and European Commission President Jose Barroso said in a joint statement after meeting yesterday that they will continue pressing for coordination to address “the challenges facing the global economy.”
The initial summit will seek “agreement on principles of reform needed to avoid a repetition and assure global prosperity in the future,” and later meetings “would be designed to implement agreement on specific steps to be taken to meet those principles,” the statement said.
Just how bad this could be is already showing. The report continues:
Sarkozy and Barraso are pressing Bush for a G8 agenda that includes stiffer regulation and supervision for cross-border banks, a global “early warning” system and an overhaul of the International Monetary Fund. Talks may also encompass tougher regulations on hedge funds, new rules for credit-rating companies, limits on executive pay and changing the treatment of tax havens such as the Cayman Islands and Monaco.
Just what has the continuation of the OECD nations’ campaign to plunder smaller states and institute globally uniform (high) taxation got to do with the market crash? Nothing. Executive pay? Irrelevant, too, save in the politics of envy. Mainstream banks, not hedgies, were the ones that crashed after playing iffy games with CDOs, and governments helped pump-up house prices – with enthusiasm. Where this agenda comes in is as an opportunity to kick the resented “Anglo-Saxon” model of capitalism while it is down – even, and especially, in those places where it is not down yet. (Are we missing Commissioner Mandelson yet?)
Mr Bush has lost the thread entirely if he really thinks a transnational “reform” of the financial system can do other than damage “free markets, free enterprise and free trade”. He may have a patchy record on liberty, and a bad record on limited government. His guests in November will have no interest in either. They will tempt him (have tempted him) with the mantle of world saviour, and will try to get him to bind his successors. We shall have to hope that his successor, either one of whom would be well to the economic right of the self-selected ‘international community’, depressingly enough, is more wily and far-sighted.
Meanwhile, where is there left to run?
It has been a memorable weekend for yours truly, nearly all for very nice reasons. Over the past few days, the weather in much of the UK – after a truly crap summer – has been glorious. There are few things to beat than walking along in a leafy park, with the autumn season turning the leaves into golds and reds, then sitting on the side of a river, cold beer in hand, in the company of close friends. I did all that in Cambridge over the weekend. The credit crunch and the worries of the financial world seemed, if only for a few hours, very far away. But then when walking with a friend around the Quad of Pembroke College, I felt as if I could have been in another century.
But perhaps I should have been prepared for a surreal weekend when I opened my mail on Saturday morning. First off, I got a letter from those admirable folk at the NO2ID campaign urging me to help contribute some money. I have already paid over a cheque and was happy to send another (please follow my example). And then I opened another, very different letter, from the UK Department Of Health. The DoH has something called a “Biobank”. This is a government-run research project designed to track the health of a cohort of the UK population aged between 40 and 69. As I and my wife are both in our early 40s, we are obviously in the cohort. I was informed that a “provisional appointment” had already been made on my behalf and that I nevertheless had the option to refuse. I have refused. While checking the health of certain people and attempting to judge their vulnerability to certain diseases or conditions can be a worthwhile thing for say, a private insurer to do, I had no desire to go along with a government programme. The reason is not simply that it would involve acquiring yet more intimate health details on myself, but recent embarrassing losses of government data give me no confidence that such details will not be lost. Also, one has to ask to what purpose will the “Biobank’s” findings be put? Presumably, to help drive government policy to cajole, encourage or indeed coerce UK citizens to change their personal habits. I consider that taking part in such a campaign would involve my giving my sanction to such things.
Well, at least I had the option to refuse to take part in this project, which is something. But one wonders how long such indulgence might last. Sooner or later, the DoH might consider it necessary to make involvement in such surveys compulsory.
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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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