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.
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On Saturday January 6th of what is still next year – Happy New Year when it comes everyone! – I will be giving the first of Christian Michel’s talks in his 6/20 Series of the year 2007. My talk will be entitled “Getting to grips with the Total Surveillance State and the Total Surveillance Society”. And for reasons which will become all too clear if you read the rest of this posting, I would appreciate some help. Last week I sent Christian the rather long and discursive ramble below concerning my thinking on this subject, which he had to shorten to turn it into a useful email announcement. What follows is a very slightly amended and extended version of that original ramble. As I say, all pertinent answers to and comments on the many questions I am now asking myself would be greatly appreciated… by the way, I already know that I need to be paying a lot of attention to this guy.
Some talks are given because the speaker has something important to say, and is very confident about what that something is, and that it is important. The first talk I gave to the 6/20 Club (on January 6th 2006) was of this sort. Oh, it had blurry edges, as all talks will, but the central thesis was something I was really pretty sure about and still am, namely that A-bombs and H-bombs had turned major war from something that Great Powers had to prepare for at all cost, into something they had to avoid at all cost. Hence globalisation. A nice and clear, nice and understandable thesis. Not necessarily right, but if wrong, then wrong in a nice clear way.
But then there are the talks such as the one I will be giving on January 6th 2007, which I am giving not because I know what to say about the Total Surveillance State and the Total Surveillance Society, but because I do not, but want to find out. About the only thing I am sure of concerning this topic is that it is an important topic, and worthy of all our best efforts to make sense of it. And if I agree to talk about this topic, I will have to think about it, no matter how much of an effort that may be.
Here are some of the questions, points, thoughts now rattling through my head on this topic:
- Total Surveillance is definitely on its way. Saying that the technology won’t work is delusional. Sure, governments waste millions on technology, but it eventually works, if only because eventually you can buy the necessary kit in the High Street. On the other hand, so long as progress persists, new kit will means new blunders, neand w surprises (often nasty) about what it can be used for.
- The USSR tried totally to control economic outcomes. Can its abject failure illuminate what I now sense will be a similar failure to control safety outcomes and crime outcomes? Crime statistics certainly have a USSR steel production feel to them.
- Is total surveillance such a bad thing? Maybe not, if the only laws and behaviour enforcements are modest in scope, and very reasonable. But total surveillance enforcing crazily voluminous and tyrannically intrusive laws is very bad news.
- In general, what happens to the world when everyone else can easily learn anything in particular about us that they want to learn? What social institutions falter? (Marriage? Insurance?) Is privacy a human right or a mere historical phase? A phase which now may be passing?
- Is celebrity obsession a pre-echo of a world in which all are potential celebrities, due to the ubiquity of completely invisible and unblockable cameras and microphones?
My main conclusion so far is that Total Surveillance will mean very different things depending on what else happens along with it. You cannot analyse the phenomenon in isolation.
For instance, just who will be allowed to browse through all those sound and vision files. Will it be everyone? Or only a self-appointed elite? Both arrangements have major hazards attached to them.
Since writing the above stuff to Christian, I have begun to fixate on another question, which is this: What does an individual have to gain by being totally surveilled? Fewer aggressive attacks against him is an obvious answer. Insurance premiums might be another. (If you live a totally safe and careful life, you might gain greatly if your insurance company can see this for themselves.) But I suspect that there are many other answers. (Simple showing off springs to mind.) Which is why I think that a great deal of, if perhaps not total, surveillance is probably here to stay.
As already stated above, I wish all of Samizdata’s readers a Happy New Year, but fear that for many of them, the above thoughts will have done little to contribute to such happiness.
Defenders of ancient British cultural rites have thumbed their nose at Tony Blair’s government edicts and have apparently had a magnificent turnout for Holiday fox hunts.
Government authority exists only for those who accept its invisible bars, so I am exceedingly happy to see so many exercising their liberty and cocking a snoot at the State.
A tip of the hat to Glenn Reynolds for the link.
I have noted before that an inordinate number of doctors seem to be totalitarian inclined folks, dead keen on using the force of law to impose their view of what is best on other people.
This, however, takes the biscuit not just for the totalitarian meta-context within which it is framed, but also for sheer idiocy:
The prevention of attacks involving kicking or blunt objects is just as important as preventing knife violence, new research from Cardiff University shows. A team from the University’s Violence Research Group found that injuries inflicted with feet were more likely to result in severe injury than any other method of assault
[…]
The research, published in the international academic journal Injury Prevention, is the first ever to compare injuries by method of attack. Professor Jonathan Shepherd, who led the research, said the surprisingly severe injuries from kicking and blunt objects should make them just as high priorities as knives in violence reduction strategies. Professor Shepherd said: “This might be achieved through public awareness campaigns and tackling alcohol misuse to reduce the chances of people falling over, since victims of violence are usually kicked after they have fallen. “We also need to take action to reduce the availability of blunt objects coming to hand in licensed premises and city centre streets.” [emphasis added]
So… Professor Jonathan Shepherd (a Professor of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery from Cardiff and Director of the Violence Research Group) wants to find a way to make it less likely that people will fall over in a fight (he must mean that as people tend not to get kicked when they fall over unless they are in a fight) and he wants to reduce the availability of blunt objects coming to hand in licensed premises and city centre streets. Blunt objects? As in, well, anything you can pick up? Bottles? Chairs? Bins? Umbrella stands? Ashtrays (oh, silly me, those are due to be made illegal in effect anyway)? So how exactly would you do that? Needless to say ‘bovver boots’ are going to be frowned on.
Presumably the Good Professor wants a panoptic state in which we all wear state approved (and mandated) padded clothing, state approved soft shoes and require everything (and and I do mean everything) be screwed to the floor. Amazing. This is not a man I would like to see in a position of power over me or anyone else.
The Times reports that Rickshaw pullers reach end of ‘inhuman’ road
Rickshaw pullers … could soon be out of work after the Indian city of Calcutta banned the trade as inhuman.
The vote was boycotted by the Opposition, but Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, the West Bengal Chief Minister, told the state legislature: “In the 21st century it is not right for a human being to pull another human being.
I shall try not to be diverted into asking what the date has to do with it and go straight to the main issue. Why, out of all the millions of possible services that one human can perform for another is pulling a cart someone else rides on deemed “inhuman”?
It certainly would be inhuman if the rickshaw pullers were forced to this labour – but they are not. The only force involved is that Mr Bhattacharjee is forcing the rickshaw pullers to give up their livelihood. Compensation is promised but the plan for that seems haphazard and uncertain. In any case compensation diminishes but does not annul the wrong done to people who were making an honest living.
What is so bad about human muscle rather than batteries or internal combustion engines being used to power a conveyance? There are plenty of dirtier jobs, plenty more dangerous, plenty (if it were any business of Mr Bhattacharjee’s, which it is not) in which the generally perceived difference of class between the person paying for a service and the person providing it is greater than it is between a rickshaw puller and the person riding on the rickshaw. (Though if the class aspect is what bothers you, bear in mind that according to the leader of the Opposition in the state Assembly, quoted in Kolkata Newsline, many of the users of rickshaws are “school goers and senior citizens”. Not that it matters. If every rickshaw user were a sneering rich businessman with a villain’s moustache, it would still be a private matter between the sneering rich businessmen and the rickshaw pullers whether and at what price the latter sold transportation to the former.)
Such has been the strength of the idea of socialism for a century or more that even those who explicitly reject it often adopt its assumptions.
Socialists have always claimed to defend the dignity of labour, and have always been lying. If they really believed that the man who labours with his body was fully equal to the man who labours with his brain they would not have presumed to deny him the right to direct his own life and sell his own labour in the way he thought best. Rickshaw pullers are only one example of people whose dignity has been violated in this way, and India is far from being the only place where it happens. Readers will be able to think of many other examples closer to home.
Incidentally, pound to a rupee the twenty first century will not have run its course by the time the city of Calcutta bans everything but human-powered rickshaws on evironmental grounds.
… Gave a very good account of themselves at NO2ID’s public meeting on “The Database State” at Imperial College on Wednesday night. Sir Malcolm Rifkind, Professor Ross Anderson, and Henry Porter tore pieces out of, respectively, the ID card scheme, Connecting for Health, and generalised surveillance in the UK. People keep telling me how good the chairman was as well [blush].
Meanwhile, continuing one of the main themes of the meeting, another wise man, Phil Booth (formerly of the infinite ideas machine, but now too busy being my boss at NO2ID to post, sends an email that I thought I’d share with you all.
From: Phil Booth [mailto:national.coordinator@no2id.net]
Sent: 30 November 2006 19:04
To: Guy Herbert (general.secretary@no2id.net)
Subject: Please don’t send me a Christmas card this year
Importance: High
Instead, use the stamp to send a copy of this letter to your GP:
http://www.TheBigOptOut.org/?page_id=23
Doing this will not only keep your own medical records where they should be – between yourself and your doctor – it will help protect medical confidentiality for everyone by demonstrating that you, like millions of others*, do not consent to your personal health information being uploaded to NHS central systems and made accessible to over 400,000 people – very few of whom would have anything to do with your clinical care.
Opting out in this way will not affect your access to healthcare but, if enough of us do it, it will send a powerful message to those in Whitehall who are currently trying to seize all of everybody’s most private information without even seeking permission.
I was half-kidding about the Christmas card, but I’m deadly serious about opting out. Please read the letter and, if you agree that your privacy (and the privacy of everyone else in your family) is worth the price of a stamp, fill it in and send it to your GP.
And if you could also forward this mail to *your* Christmas card list, 2007 might end up being a very good New Year…
Phil
*The latest Medix poll [pdf here – GH] shows that 52% of GPs would not upload their patients’ records to the spine, and only 13% would be willing to proceed without consent. An even more recent survey by JRRT shows that 53% of patients are opposed to automatic uploading of their records, with only 27% in favour – even though most people haven’t heard about this yet.
You would all be on my Christmas card list, dear readers, if I had any idea who you are (and did not have to sign 2,000 already in my various capacities). You know what to do.
Our next Prime Minister speaks.
In the wake of the BNP pair’s acquittals, Chancellor Mr Brown said: “Any preaching of religious or racial hatred will offend mainstream opinion in this country.
“We have got to do whatever we can to root it out from whatever quarter it comes.
“And if that means we have got to look at the laws again, we will have to do so.”
On the other hand there are countries where the law is changed in order to prosecute the ordinary activities of those whom the government chooses to classify as criminals because it is politically convenient to do so. Should there be no evidence on which a jury will convict, the law can be changed till the public enemy is punished, you can punish them anyway even if they are acquitted, or you can always keep juries, burden of proof and testing of evidence out of it altogether in selected cases.
The traditional test in designing the criminal law in western legal systems – common law or civil law – was to ask, “What mischief does the law address?” or “What harm to persons, property, or society as a whole, does it seek to prevent or punish?” Libertarians might be troubled by the unlimited scope of “society as a whole”, but universalism – the treatment of all persons the same in the same circumstances, and framing the law on general principle rather than special cases – was once deemed fundamental to the rule of law. Indeed there is a common law maxim: hard cases make bad law, that warns that attempts to extract jurisprudence from the merits of the parties involved result in dangerous incoherence and uncertainty (the career of the late Lord Denning is replete with example) .
What should we call a jurisdiction where criminal liability is determined principally by the identity of ‘the criminal’ which is to say, whoever it is the authorities determine should be punished? Not lawless, because all these things are done under the colours of law, most legalistically. I think Tony Blair would call it ‘modern’. I think I would call it a ‘pyramid of bullies’.
[I]f they have got drug dealers living in the street, you know, love is not the answer to that I am afraid, evicting them from their houses and locking them up is the answer.
– The Right Honourable Tony Blair MP, at his monthly press conference yesterday (At least the cleaned-up transcript from No.10.).
Lobby correspondents are united in thinking the Prime Minister was belligerent and bad tempered about everything. Has he finally gone completely round the bend? The people he wants to evict and lock-up are implicitly those suspected of being Bad People. The rest of the conference made clear he is not interested in due process, civil liberties, all that old-fashioned nonsense.
Following on the pubs being leant on to fingerprint their customers and take names and addresses, another egregious example of police and licensing authorities clubbing together to force a business to stop its paying customers behaving in ways officialdom does not approve of.
West Ham are under pressure from Newham Council and the Football Licensing Authority to limit persistent standing inside Upton Park, and several supporters have been banned from attending the next two home games at Upton Park for persistent standing.
Those who have been sent letters informing them of the action, will miss West Ham’s Premiership games against Blackburn and Arsenal on the next two Sundays.
– from VitalFootball.co.uk
“Persistent standing”? I am no soccer fan as I abhor the tribalism of team sports, and it is really, really, dull to watch – almost as dull as horse- or motor-racing. I would not know about this at all but for Duleep Allilrajah’s column on Sp!ked. But is not leaping up and down, along with shouting and singing as part of a crowd, a significant part of football supporting? And unlike cheering and community singing, standing or sitting has no effect on the world outside the stadium. What has it got to do with anyone but the club and its supporters?
Perhaps if I had taken more notice of soccer before now, I would have known of the existence ot the Football Licensing Authority, too. It is a public body created under Thatcher, for those tempted to idealise Britain before Blair. But we should all take notice of it now, because its imperial ambition is charted out on its website, a clear mission to tell everyone involved in doing or watching sport what to do:
In December 1998, following a major review, the Government announced that we would in due course become the Sports Ground Safety Authority. It presented legislation to this effect to Parliament but the 2001 General Election intervened. Ministers are committed to reintroducing it when they can find a place in the Parliamentary timetable.
One small mystery. Why should the Borough of Newham connive at undermining one of the poor borough’s richest sources of trade and employment? Could it be that the bureaucrats who seek such petty restrictions will get paid and pensioned from taxes raised in other places regardless of how blasted into feebleness the people in their care remain? Or are they just getting into practice to discipline the Olympics?
On BBC News 24 TV this morning there was a tech show that was dominated by a report from the Republic of Korea (‘South Korea’).
After explaining how nasty some Korean people are in writing their opinions about other people, the BBC person said that the government of Korea was going to bring in a new law that would demand that anyone writing an opinion on to the internet would have to give their name and ID number. The only criticism of this new law (which I believe is going to come into effect next year) offered was “some people do not think it goes far enough”.
I wonder if the ‘Federalist’ would have been written if ‘Publius‘ and the rest had to sign their correct names. Or ‘Cato’s letters‘ – or so many of the other great publications in history.
Or indeed most opinion comments on this (or many other) internet sites.
“If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear by giving your right name” – I hope I do not have to explain how absurd that position is. Some people (such as me) really do not have anything to lose and can sign their name to any opinion they believe in – but most people have families, jobs, positions (and so on) and may sometimes wish to give their true opinion about a person or issue without putting their life on the line.
I could mention historical examples to the BBC (some of which I mention above), but as the BBC people think (to judge by one show I watched) that the “tribes of Angles and Saxons” brought Christianity to “pagan Roman Britain” and (in the ads for another show) claimed that the war that brought Constantine to power had broken “centuries of peace” I do not think they would understand what I was talking about.
I do not know whether it is the statism of the BBC or their lack of knowledge that bothers me more.
You don’t need identifiable personal information to understand trends and patterns, but British government data sharing focuses on pinpointing individuals. Some government departments are already planning to analyse public and private-sector databases for suspicious activity. The new Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) is reviewing public and private-sector databases, to find data-matching opportunities that could highlight suspicious behaviour by individuals that implies they are involved in organised or financial crime. The SOCA consultation paper ‘New Powers Against Organised and Financial Crime’, says the public sector could share private-sector suspicions of fraud by joining CIFAS, the UK’s fraud-prevention service. It also proposes matching suspicious activity reports with data from Revenue & Customs, the Department for Work and Pensions, the Passport Office and Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA) databases. This, it says, would be quite legal.
– from Share and share alike by Christine Evans-Pughe on IEE Networks. (Thanks to the great Chris Lightfoot for pointing out this piece.)
Naive foreigners with a belief in privacy and liberty may not understand that if in Britain you oppose state surveillance of just about everything, then you’ll be accused of wanting to protect people who torture and/or murder children. The article in passing explains how, if not why.
There has been some interesting discussion on Peaktalk in the subject of freedom of expression, marking the second anniversary of the murder of Theo van Gogh. As there are several relevant articles, I have not linked to any in particular.
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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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