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This release is just in from Michael Babka at Downsize DC:
We knew that the state of Montana was resisting the REAL ID Act, but we just learned some of the details of that resistance. The story is so good we had to share it, in case you hadn’t heard . . .
Brian Schweitzer, the governor of Montana, wrote a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. The letter informed Chertoff that Montana would not be complying with the REAL ID Act. Our quote of the day supplies one of the reasons for Governor Schweitzer’s rebellion. In response to the letter . . .
Secretary Chertoff called Governor Schweitzer and threatened him. Chertoff told Schweitzer that Montana residents would be banned from airplanes, or subjected to severe, time-consuming inspections at airports.
The Governor countered with his own threat, “How about we both go on 60 Minutes a few days after the DHS starts patting down Montana driver’s license-holders who are trying to get on the planes and both of us can tell our side of the story.”
Chertoff didn’t like that suggestion. He said, “I see the problem. We need to get this fixed.”
So far, the “fix” involves granting Montana and all other rebellious states an extension of the deadline for complying with the REAL ID Act. But the real fix is to repeal REAL ID.
Have you protested to your elected representatives that the Secretary of Homeland Security has been threatening the citizens of states that don’t comply with REAL ID? If not, please do so. You can mention the Chertoff-Schweitzer exchange in your personal comments. Ask Congress
to repeal the REAL ID Act. You can send your message here.
If you’ve sent a REAL ID Act message recently, consider sending another “I am not afraid” message. We have a lot of new people who probably aren’t familiar with our “I am not afraid” campaign. You can check it out here.
Please also consider making a donation to further our work. You can do so here.
Thank you for being a part of the growing Downsize DC army.
Jim Babka, President
DownsizeDC.org, Inc.
I would also suggest that if you are a Montana resident you write your governor a hearty thank you for standing up to the power hungry DC bureaucracy. If you do not live in Montana, find out if your governor is one of the ones rebelling against DC and thank them if they are and ask them to join with the others if they are not.
Liberte! Fraternite! Up the Revolution! May the fleas of ten thousand camels reside in Michael Chertoffs armpits!
When I made my last post about the small piece of incompetence I had encountered from the Home Office upon attempting to apply for a passport immediately upon becoming a naturalised British citizen, I wrote the sentence
Theoretically, when I became a citizen, one thing I gained was the right not to suffer the petty humiliations and bureaucratic hassles and incompetence from the Home Office that a non-citizen goes through just to live here.
One commenter left a response that more or less translated as “You poor deluded fool”. I concluded the post on a surprisingly upbeat note, however
My passport will hopefully still come in a couple of weeks…
It is now two and a half weeks later, and all I can conclude is that yes, I was a poor deluded fool. However, the situation is somewhat more sinister than this.
The general layout of passport application forms has not changed particularly since the Home Office started setting up its apparatus for ID cards and databases. Essentially you are asked to prove that you are a British citizen and also prove your identity. If your claim to citizenship is based upon being born to parents of particular nationality and/or in particular places at particular times, the combination of supporting documents required can be very complex, as the unravelling of the British Empire and the creation of many different kinds of citizenship in the former empire when there used to be only one has led to British nationality law being extremely complex. However, if your claim to citizenship is a simple one, the supporting documents requested are quite simple. There are (at least so I thought) fewer simpler and less controversial proofs of citizenship than an obviously genuine naturalisation certificate dated the previous Wednesday. In addition to this, I was also requested to send my Australian passport as proof of identity. The Home Office probably at least partly wants this to record its details and index them with my British passport in its database so that my movements and actions become clearer to then, but this is a reasonable thing to ask for. Checking that my place of birth and date of birth on my Australian passport are the same as those on my naturalisation certificate, and that the photograph and signature in my Australian passport and the new British one are obviously of the same person.
In any event, these documents were all that the form and its supporting notes asked me to send. They proved pretty unambiguously that I was a British citizen and that the new passport was being issued to the same person who had been naturalised. I was not expecting any problems. The form had sated that people applying for their first British passport might be required to attend an interview, so I thought this was a possibility. Although the Home Office have set up “passport interview offices” as part of the infrastructure for issuing ID cards in the future, this is again something I don’t find inherently wrong. Asking the person who is applying for a passport to appear in person to confirm that he is indeed the person in the photograph doesn’t strike me as particularly unreasonable, and when I had to replace a stolen Australian passport the Australian officials did precisely this.
However this is not what happened. Instead, a few days after I had sorted out the payment issue (and after I had passed that “Your application cannot be processed further until….” roadblock, I received another letter. This one rather sadly needs fisking.
→ Continue reading: More action from the Home Office
It may be disgustingly authoritarian, but it is risibly incompetent too. It appears the Home Office has just spent a very large amount of UK readers’ money making a vast online advertisement for NO2ID. We’d despaired of reaching ‘the youth’ ourselves, too expensive. I’m very glad they decided to do it for us.
With audience participation. Which embarrassingly for the Home Office shows ‘kids’ not to be quite the suckers they’d hoped. Enjoy.
Pretty gruesome stuff happening. This is old news:
The ongoing Google/YouTube-Viacom litigation has now officially spilled over to users with a court order requiring Google to turn over massive amounts of user data to Viacom. If the data is actually released, the consequences could be far more serious than the 2006 AOL Search debacle.
But this not so. And happening via backdoor of telecoms regulation.
The Telecoms Package (Paquet Telecom) is a review of European telecoms law. […] buried within it, deep in the detail, are important legal changes that relate to enforcement of copyright. These changes are a threat to civil liberties and risk undermining the entire structure of Internet, jeopardising businesses and cultural diversity.
The bottom line is that changes to telecoms regulations are needed before EU member states can bring in the so-called “3 strikes” measures – also known as “graduated response” – of which France is leading the way, but other governments, notably the UK, are considering whether to follow. A swathe of amendments have been incorporated at the instigation of entertainment industry lobbying. These amendments are aimed at bringing an end to free downloading. They also bring with them the risk of an unchecked corporate censorship of the Internet, with a host of unanswered questions relating to the legal oversight and administration.
The Telecoms Package is currently in the committee stages of the European Parliament, with a plenary vote due on 1st or 2nd September. This does not leave much time for public debate, and it reminds me of the rushed passage of the data retention directive (see Data Retention on this site). It is, if you like, regulation by stealth.
These two items have in common the attempt to undermine the infrastructure of the net/web by controlling those who provide or maintain it. Not good.
That invaluable organisation, the Taxpayer’s Alliance, has worked out that the total cost of the various surveillance and data-gathering services favoured by the UK government is just under £20 billion, or about £800 per household. The figure is a total, not an annual sum. £20 billion is a huge figure, even in these times of inflated financial sums.
Now the question arises whether, if we really do face serious security threats – and I think we do – what else could that £20 billion have purchased that might actually have made us safer?
Of course, £20 billion could also enable quite a few tax cuts, but that is obviously hark heresy these days (sarcasm alert).
At my education blog late last night, I found myself putting, in connection with this (which is a story about how two French science students were brutally murdered in London yesterday), this:
It’s somewhat off topic for this blog, but I say: allow non-crims be be armed!
It may yet happen. London, full of disarmed non-crims and armed crims, is rapidly becoming like New York used to be but is now so conspicuously not, a “crime capital”. Any decade now, something might just give. Or, to use the language of this blog, the lesson might be learned.
Something about the extreme savagery of that double murder yesterday made me think that now was the exact time to be saying such a thing, not just to those few of my devoted libertarian friends so devoted that they read that education blog of mine, but also to any eco-friendly home-schoolers or weary school teachers who happen to drop by there. Suddenly, the anti-gun-control message felt very right, like an idea whose time, finally, might have come. → Continue reading: Is gun control about to be rolled back in Britain?
Some splendid person, writing pseudonymously in the obscurity of an open thread on the Guardian’s Comment is Free semiblog, has provided a parallel text translation of the Report of the Independent Scheme Assurance Panel. His discussion begins here. It deserves a wider audience. Excerpt:
DAMN, I really must get back to work, but this is just so wonderful…
3.3 Identity management within Government
Early on, the Panel challenged the assumption that existing sources of identity data should be ignored in favour of a new set.
Like a lot of people, we couldn’t understand why the NI number and its related data wouldn’t do.
However, safe and reliable maintenance and use of a shared asset across multiple parties is a challenge for any organisation, not least Government with its many departments, each with its own priorities, objectives and challenges.
Then somebody showed us the figures that with a total population of 60M people in this country, maybe a sixth of them under 16, there are over 75M currently-issued NI numbers, and we finally started to understand that the entire current system is a complete balls-up.
People say to me, “Don’t worry, it won’t work.” I would like to remind them that grand government schemes that are not working tend to be adopted anyway, and all the suffering they cause is declared a good thing, necessary for the progress of the nation. Lysenko’s ‘winterizeation’ of wheat, did not work. Protectionism does not work. Most of the world’s ‘development’ projects do not work. It did not stop governments implementing them at the expense of humanity. It does not stop massive numbers of politically influential people still believing in the grand reconstruction of deep natural systems and human institutions by government power, and devoting their working lives to promoting it. The National Identity Scheme still has every prospect of being Britain’s ‘Great Leap Forward’.
(Hat-tip: Wendy M. Grossman)
We are marvelling at the multiple possibilities of Oyster, but come back here in 10 years’ time and we will have chips inserted under our skin or inside our heads
– Ken Livingstone, mayor of London, quoted by Computing
[Those foreign readers who are unfamiliar with Oyster should maybe start here. Those unfamiliar with our dear leader, the mayor, can read his official bio here, but Red Ken is a massive subject, and if you can understand his career then you know more about British politics than I do. Here is a recent friendly (!) blog post. Now if you’ll excuse me, it is 6.43am and I am off to vote.]
Laban Tall, blogging at Biased BBC, has posted the latest BBC public service advertisement warning citizens not to fail to pay for a TV licence.
I thought it might be of interest to Samizdata readers.
You should trust us, because we’re trustworthy people who would never do anything wrong (please ignore all we’ve done wrong over the past few years). So, now that that’s settled, let’s get this baby rolling…
-Mike Masnick interprets Department of Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff’s response to critics of the planned expansion of the US spy satellite program
“The background to this method of policing is that NuLab became increasingly irritated with the police detecting crime. This tended to militate against the working classes (few question the link between poverty and crime). Being so unutterably incompetent, NuLab were were unable to tackle poverty (unless by increasing it, they can claim to be tackling poverty). One solution to this was to make crime detection a more egalitarian process. By criminalising “anti-social” behavior that was more likely to committed by the middle classes (speeding, hunting etc), then issuing directives for police to ramp up their response to such infractions, the thinking was that this would highlight how criminality was not the preserve of the put upon working classes.
On top of this, there existed a situation whereby the number crunchers claimed that the fear of being a victim of crime far outweighed the reality of being a victim of crime. Hence the emphasis shifted away from tackling crime i.e oppressing the working classes, to tackling the fear of crime. This had a cheap solution: high visibility policing. It is this thinking that lead to the introduction of those decaffeinated police officers known as “PCSOs”, along with the requirement for high visibility vests worn with officers. This type of thinking also results in situations such as the Forest Gate incident, whereby the number of officers present seems to far outweigh the threat and the inclusion of the press in high profile operations. All of these things are designed to tackle the FEAR of crime, not crime itself.”
From one of our readers, “Fed_Up”, commenting on my recent encounter with the police. Thanks for the comments. The one here raises the issue of class. It is sometimes said that these days, the cops, or at least some of them, are the “paramilitary wing of the Guardian newspaper”. This represents a significant shift in the cultural/political standing of the police over my lifetime.
Consider this: there is no doubt that during the 1980s, when the Conservatives were in power, some of the police powers used at the time got on to the statute books with relatively little complaint from what I might loosely call “the right”. Not everyone was complacent, of course. Libertarian Alliance Director Sean Gabb and the LA’s founder, the late Chris R. Tame, were early in pointing out at the time that no consistent defence of liberty makes sense if it is confined purely to economics, a point that some Tories to this day don’t seem to grasp. While coppers were pinching Rastafarians in Brixton and hitting coalminers on the head in Yorkshire, a lot of the middle classes were happy to look the other way. As an unashamed middle class Brit with mortgage, happy marriage and decent job, I am the sort of person, I suppose, that has in a certain way been radicalised by the CCTV state, or “parking warden culture”, as one might call it. It is important to understand, however, that the sort of petty exercise of power has been going on, sometimes unremarked, for years. So I certainly don’t feel sorry for myself. I am, more than anything else, depressed at the fatuity of “security theatre” policing. It must, at one level surely, gnaw away at the morale and self respect of decent coppers. But there is no doubt that the role and status of the police has changed and so has the type of person that might be attracted to making a career in it.
I must say I am still stunned by the open admission of one commenter on my earlier posting that random searches are good for “fishing expeditions”. We were not very kind to him on the previous thread. Justifiably.
For a good take on what has been going on with policing in the US, Gene Healy of the CATO Institute think tank has a sharp analysis. Several US readers expressed their horror at what is happening here in Britain; I am afraid that things are not so great in parts of the US, either. And as for France, etc…..
Random searches of Britons going about their business are now established features of life in this country. The old refrain – “It could not happen here”, no longer applies. On Saturday, while driving along the side of the Thames towards Westminster, passing by the Tate Gallery, I was flagged down by a policeman.
Officer: “Could you show me your driving licence? This is a section 41 search” (at least I think that is what he said).
Me: “Section 41 or whatever of what?”
Officer: “The Terrorism Act”
Me: “Why have you pulled me and my wife over?”
Officer: “We are doing searches of vehicles in the area.”
Me: “Well obviously you are. Is this a random thing?”
Officer: “Yes. Please hand over your driving licence and we want to search the car.”
They searched the car, called up the driving licence authority, and were able to their enormous satisfaction confirm that I was whom I said I was. I was then asked to sign a document stating that the search had been carried out as it should have been. The officer gave me his name, rank and police station number and address. When I signed the form, he asked me how I wanted to classify myself as there were about 15 options, including “White British”. He was polite. My treatment was fine. The officer and his colleagues told me they were on duty, searching vehicles, for the rest of the day and into the evening.
Now I will spare you a rant about the impertinence of this. You can, gentle reader, assume as a matter of course that I regard such random searches of members of the public as impertinent. What makes me wonder, though, is what on earth the supporters of such searches expect? Do they honestly, really believe that would-be terrorists will be deterred, frightened off or caught? Unless the police put up roadblocks across London, at god-knows what disruption and cost, I do not see how doing this on one of many major roads will cause a blind bit of difference.
This is what has been called “security theatre”: lots of action signifying little. Even the copper who carried out the search had the good grace to look slightly embarrassed.
Update: One commenter has complained that I am getting all upset for no good reason and has used the argument that this sort of behaviour is okay as it can act as a “fishing” expedition to unearth potentially other crimes. It is hard to summon breath to deal with such a brazen argument in favour of abolishing the idea that one is presumed innocent until otherwise.
Update 2: a reader asked for further details on the search. From the time I was pulled over to being let on my way, the process lasted 15 minutes. The police officer’s colleague called up the driving licence authority to give them my licence registration number and the authority took about 10 minutes to get back. An officer opened the car boot, rummaged around some bags and luggage – I was travelling up to Cambridge with my wife – and had a look inside the car. They also inspected my clothes and checked my footwear. They did not ask me to open the glove compartment of the car. They also did not look under the car with a mirror or anything similar, or look under the bonnet.
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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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