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This story is old hat by now, but it reminded me of an unusual anomaly when I was in China recently. Most readers are probably aware that some time ago China erected a firewall that censors parts of the internet it deems too sensitive for ordinary Chinese to view. Consequently, the more uncontrollable realms of the internet (like Blogspot.com) that could be exploited by computer users with a dissenting streak – as well as sources of critical news and the like – cannot be accessed within China. Wikipedia is also out of bounds.
Whilst in the Middle Kingdom, I visited a Sinophilic friend of mine. I would go so far as to say he has a case of the old rose-tinted glasses regarding China and the nature of its administration – needless to say we enjoyed a number of discussions about the direction China is heading in. Apart from being a China enthusiast, he is also an Apple Macintosh fanatic, and he owns one of those rather handsome new and expensive Apple Powerbook laptops. In one of our debates about Chinese freedom – or lack thereof – I parried with an example of China’s neutered internet access. Why, I was not even able to access my own (and now defunct) Blogspot blog in the country! Rubbish, cried my friend. He read my blog all the time on his Macintosh.
Of course, I had to see for myself, and sure enough it was able to be accessed on his computer. I know that sometimes the firewall does not work and once in a while you can view sites that are normally off limits. Then the firewall kicks in again and the illicit page is unable to reload. However, I accessed a number of different Blogspot sites on his Mac several times over a period of days without the slightest bit of hindrance, even though all Blogspot sites I tried to visit were blocked across the country on computers that ran Windows platforms. I even tried using a different browser – Firefox was no different to MSIE. I would have liked to have been able to test the theory further and Google up some Falun Gong links, but this did not seem prudent on someone else’s machine, given the Chinese government’s attitude to that group.
The above got me thinking – when the story broke about Microsoft shutting down that Chinese blog, I wondered if Microsoft and the Chinese government had colluded in the construction of the Great Internet Wall. In the eyes of the computing world, this would surely be a far more heinous crime. Since the Windows platform enjoys considerably less competition in China than it does in the MS-dominated West, ensuring Chinese Windows machines cannot access sites the Government disapproves of means the job is pretty much done.
I admit, if China and Microsoft did work together to construct the wall, it seems like an unusual and inelegant solution – relying on the software of the end user to filter out content. Surely some specific backdoor entrance would need to be engineered into the programme. I am certainly no computer expert – there could be a perfectly reasonable explanation for the above, and there are some pretty switched on people who comment here. Ideas?
While in the US there is an argument going on about whether the intelligence services may spy on Americans without a warrant, in Britain we have had unsupervised surveillance for years. But The Independent on Sunday reports that Mr Blair’s quest for total power has started to worry even some cabinet ministers. This in particular:
Until now, successive administrations have pledged that there should be no tapping “whatsoever” of MPs’ phones, and that they would be told if it was necessary to breach the ban.
But that convention – known as the Wilson Doctrine, after Harold Wilson, the prime minister who introduced it – is to be abandoned in an expansion of MI5 powers following the London bombings.
American readers may wish to note that our equivalent of attorney-client privilege is very nearly dead, too.
Jamie Whyte in The Times is a paragon of rational liberalism. Today he neatly skewers the fallacious thinking of those who impose their own heirarchy of values and risk aversion on the rest of us.
Doctors, he points out, will tend to overvalue health relative to other goods, such as pleasure. They “confound what is good for us with what is good for our health.” And this analysis is readily applicable to the army of experts who struggle to control us and get use of our taxes to pursue their own preferences. They all fail to accept that other people have different tastes that in conditions of liberty are traded-off by those people.
Jamie Whyte again:
Politicians always claim that their safety regulations are motivated by concern for people in dangerous jobs. Yet the beneficiaries are always people who do not do dangerous jobs. Workplace health and safety meansures are a zero-sum game in which wealth is transferred from the brave to the timid.
And yet, I think Whyte here simplifies and understates the case. He concentrates on the loss of ‘danger money’ to workers if the market price of the safer jobs falls. That, adding in workplace costs, might look like a zero-sum game, but a business is not a closed isolated system linking effectively infinite reservoirs of labour and capital. → Continue reading: The reality of compliance
Andrew Zalotocky makes a useful point that we need to stop pretending that we have free speech in Britain, we do not. Time for a new description.
Regular Samizdata readers will probably be aware of the cases of Lynette Burrows and Iqbal Sacranie, who have both recently fallen foul of ‘hate speech’ legislation. The latter case prompted Guy Herbert to comment that “whatever it is, it is not freedom of expression”. I propose that we should call it ‘permitted speech’, in contrast to ‘free speech’.
For speech to be truly free it must include the right to say things that others would find grossly offensive. If a government uses the threat of prosecution to suppress speech that it considers offensive it is asserting that the people may only express the views that their rulers deem appropriate. No matter how lightly the government uses this power it is still establishing the principle that citizens do not have a right to speak freely, only a license to engage in the officially permitted forms of speech. America has ‘free speech’ and Britain has ‘permitted speech’.
Of course, the majority of people are not in the habit of expressing controversial views in the mass media and are therefore unlikely to feel immediately threatened by such restrictions. Even cases like that of the student who was arrested for calling a horse “gay” are likely to be seen as a joke rather than a demonstration of how criminalising the expression of certain opinions affects everybody. However, that just makes it even more important to explain why the right to freedom of speech must be defended, and to make clear that permitted speech is not the same thing at all.
The clampdown on disrespect continues. Sir Iqbal Sacranie is under police investigation. The putative crime, a public order offence, disorderly conduct: behaviour likely to cause alarm, harrassment or distress contrary to the Public Order Act 1986.
So, has Sir Iqbal been staggering aggressively around a shopping centre waving his fist at passers-by? Has he been picketing a building yelling threats at workers? Has he been hanging around on a street corner with his legal director and PR man, holding open bottles of cheap cider and throwing traffic cones at one another?
No. Sir Iqbal is a genial, if quite intense, man. He has been doing the sort of thing he got knighted for.
The alleged offense took place in the course of a serious discussion of his religious beliefs on Radio 4. He reportedly said that homosexual behaviour is not acceptable on moral or health grounds, and that civil partnerships therefore were not acceptable either. Some people were offended by this “homophobia” and complained to the police.
I do not care for what Sir Iqbal thinks about gays. But he does think it. I do care that he should be allowed to say what he thinks. And it does worry me that offending people by your mere opinion expressed publicly in a public forum can now be a police matter. I have always opposed the Public Order Act 1986 as too widely drawn, and likely to inhibit all sorts of activities in public places that pose no threat to others – but I had no clue that it might be used like this. You can always find someone who will be offended by anything.
But more disturbing than the law – the existing law, before Tony Blair gets to work on arbitrary extension of summary powers – being used to interdict opinion, is the certainty that it will not be open to anyone to have those expressing opinions that offend them investigated. I am alarmed harrassed and distressed by everything that issues from the Prime Minister’s mouth and the ruthless mendacious actions of his government in promoting those views, will police investigate? Had Sir Iqbal, who, like a lot of other conventional religious people, plainly is distressed by the thought of gay sex, heard a lewd interlude by Julian Clary on a Radio 4 panel game, and complained, would police investigate?
This adumbrates a world in which officially approved opinions may be expressed freely, but those that are not officially approved will be deemed offensive, and suppressed therefore. Whatever it is, it is not freedom of expression.
I look forward to Blair apologists spinning this unsurprising revelation.
Town hall bureaucrats are to be given sweeping new powers to investigate homes for identity card evasion and to impose heavy fines on occupants found without one. The revelation, in an obscure Whitehall consultation paper, calls into serious doubt the Government’s repeated promises that planned ID cards, already hugely controversial, will be voluntary and that no one will be forced to carry one.
But we should trust the government because… well, just because.
At least the Telegraph is putting out bloggy articles like this one in opposition. I wonder, is the rest of the Fourth Estate going to sleep through this?
As the report stage of the Identity Cards Bill approaches in the Lords, a reminder of one highlight from the first day of the committee stage Hansard, 15 Nov 2005, Col.1012:
Lord Gould of Brookwood: Both the previous speakers—the latter with great emotion—were arguing for freedom. We have to ask what greater freedom is there than the freedom to place a vote for a political party in a ballot box upon the basis of a mandate and a manifesto. That is the crux of it: the people have supported this measure. That is what the noble Earl’s father fought for. But that is too trivial an answer. I know that. The fundamental argument is that the truth is that people believe that these identity cards will affirm their identity. The noble Lord opposite said that he likes to be in this House and how he is recognised in this House because it is a community that recognises him. That is how the people of this nation feel. They feel that they are part of communities, and they want recognition. For them, recognition comes in the form of this identity card. Noble Lords may think that that is strange, but it is what they feel. This is their kind of freedom. They want their good, hard work and determination to be recognised, rewarded and respected. That is what this does.
Of course it is right and honourable for noble Lords to have their views, but I say there is another view, and it is the view of the majority of this country. They want to have the respect, recognition and freedom that this card will give them. Times have changed. Politics have changed. What would not work 50 years ago, works now. It is not just me. I have the words of the leader of your party:
“I have listened to the police and security service chiefs. They have told me that ID cards can and will help their efforts to protect the lives of British citizens against terrorist acts. How can I disregard that?”.
This is not some silly idea of the phoney left. It is a mainstream idea of modern times. It is a new kind of identity and a new kind of freedom. I respect the noble Lords’ views, but it would help if they respected the fact that the Bill and the identity cards represent the future: a new kind of freedom and a new kind of identity.
This is the sort of rhetoric that makes my blood run cold. Here’s a prefiguring example:
In our state the individual is not deprived of freedom. In fact, he has greater liberty than an isolated man, because the state protects him and he is part of the State. Isolated man is without defence
– Benito Mussolini
Terry Eagleton (from a review of Paxton’s Anatomy of Fascism in the New Statesman) elucidates the connection:
Conservatives disdain the popular masses, while fascists mobilise and manipulate them. Some conservatives believe in ideas, but fascists have a marked preference for myths. If they think at all, they think through their blood, not their brain. Fascists regard themselves as a youthful, revolutionary avant-garde out to erase the botched past and create an unimaginably new future.
All supporters of the old-fashioned conception of individual liberty, whether they think of themselves as left or right, conservative or progressive, must do what can be done. Resist. We should not expect any quarter for outdated ideas under a new kind of freedom.
[cross-posted from White Rose]
A letter to The Independent:
Sir: In the article “Terror suspects describe alleged torture ‘in front of MI6 agents’ ” (4 January) Elinda Labropoulou claimed “The British Government has issued a gagging order to prevent the publication of the alleged British agent’s name”. It has not.
The advice given to editors on this issue was not offered by the Government, but by me on behalf of the Defence Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee. The five standing Defence Advisory Notices on the publication and broadcasting of national security information agreed by this independent Committee (see www.dnotice.org.uk) constitute a purely voluntary code, one without any form of legal sanction. Any suggestion that the media has been “gagged” on this issue is plain wrong.
ANDREW VALLANCE
AIR VICE-MARSHAL, SECRETARY, DEFENCE PRESS AND BROADCASTING ADVISORY COMMITTEE, LONDON SW1
Which rather begs some questions. If the D-notice DPBAC has no legal sanction, what extra-legal sanctions are available to it? Is there an implicit distinction here between “the Government” and government? I’m sure you can think of others.
I have been a bit more tolerant than my Samizdatista comrades about the populist postures adopted by nice Mr Cameron. And being a Conservative Party member, it is me that has to be tolerant, after all. A certain sainted editor has been consistent in urging people not to vote for a long, long time, so a Tory leader really need not care what Perry thinks…
But this has brought me up short. OK, it is speculative bluster about what might be considered by a working party. But how are the ‘liberal values’, that Cameron has made so much of, served by forced labour?
Do not count on it but there is a much belated push on in Westminster to undermine the ID cards legislation that, if successful, would in effect make them voluntary. The Tories and LibDems peers (the later of which have at least been consistent in their opposition to ID cards) are at least going through the motion of blocking this monstrous intrusion by the state but I will believe it when I see it.
So… will David Cameron make the immediate scrapping of ID cards and abolition of the national register a manifesto pledge? If not then clearly it is still very much the party of Michael ‘a touch of the night’ Howard. Even if the move to prevent back-door compulsion succeeds, as long as the infrastructure of surveillance and branding us like cattle remains in place, Britain will remain nothing more than a Police State being held in abeyance.
I have written a couple of times before about the very useful cultural confrontation with intolerant Muslims that occurred when Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten published some less than flattering cartoons featuring the Prophet Mohammed.
Well in case you are curious what those cartoons actually looked like, here they are (sorry, but I do not have a larger version and the original link no longer works):
If Salman Rushdie wrote the ‘Satanic Verses’ and incurred the ire of the moonbat faction of Islam, I guess the Jyllands Posten publication must be the ‘Satanic Cartoons’.
Here is a link that shows the cartoons more clearly so you can see what all the fuss is about.
Britain’s Law Lords, the nearest thing this nation has to the U.S. Supreme Court, has ruled that evidence obtained by torture is inadmissable in a criminal court. I’ll state right off that this surely has to be the right decision for cases including those of terrorism. Torture is a sort of “canary in the mineshaft” issue in a civilisation. The willingness to admit evidence obtained by torture is a no-go zone for me. Even on practical, consequentialist grounds, the use of torture cannot be expected necessarily to give valuable, credible evidence for those trying to prevent terrorist attacks.
The broader point for me is that there is not much point trying to defend civilisation if we use barbaric methods.
The rule of law has had a good day today.
Update: so far 117 responses! By my rough calculation, about 70 percent think torture is a legitimate practice in certain cases. I honestly don’t know whether the comments are representative of Samizdata readers overall. What I do find odd is that so many of you fellows, normally so hostile to abuse of state power and suspicious of things like ID cards, are prepared to let state agents use torture. That cannot be right.
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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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