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The Pearce household is getting a paper shredder to cut up all those documents: old bills, etc, that can be used by thieves to steal a person’s identity. It is, as this BBC report shows, a major problem. I do not imagine for a second that identify cards will significantly reduce this problem. In fact they may merely open up a whole new avenue for fraud. So, I am getting a shredder.
This looks like a decent website on where to get these machines.
(Those more fortunately blessed with space can of course just chuck this stuff on the bonfire.)
The EU and the US have failed to reach an agreement on airline passenger data sharing. This is a euphemism. The US is demanding information on all travellers that the European Court of Justice says violates our privacy, and the EU countries have been trying to square the circle. They have failed so far.
Let us be clear. The member states want to do it. All 25 of them, despite Germany’s constitutional data protections. They would love to give the FBI your travel plans, bank account details and dietary preferences. UKgov is particularly keen, and makes sure such information is always sent ahead from UK flights to such friendly, peaceful and enlightened regimes as the People’s Republic of China (it bullied the other EU states into accepting the principle of requiring carriers to retain all communications data for state inspection). What is stopping this becoming an universal convention is not European states but the independent, supra-national institutions of the Union.
Brendon O’Neill reports:
Throughout the country are an estimated five million CCTV cameras; that’s one for every 12 citizens. We have more than 20 per cent of the world’s CCTV cameras, which, considering that Britain occupies a tiny 0.2 per cent of the world’s inhab itable land mass, is quite an achievement. The average Londoner going about his or her business may be monitored by 300 CCTV cameras a day. Roughly 1,800 cameras watch over London’s railway stations and another 6,000 permanently peer at commuters on the Underground and London buses. In other major city centres, including Manchester and Edinburgh, residents can expect to be sighted on between roughly 50 and 100 cameras a day.
So if these cameras are so good, why is there any crime at all in the United Kingdom?
Those Samizdata readers who like to see Blair attacked, but do not read The Guardian paper edition – which I guess includes most of you – are missing a treat this Monday morning. Have a look at the NO2ID website, and enjoy a very crisp piece of advertising created for the campaign pro bono*. I am glad to say that the Guardian is distributed in bulk to Labour Conference delegates.
* PS – But not, unfortunately, inserted by the Grauniad pro bono. If you want to see more of this sort of thing, then you know the words of St Bob.
PPS – I did not put in any picture for copyright reasons. Perry put in the version from the Mail, which is a crude mock-up. So I have changed it back to the original version, by linking to the properly licensed copy on the NO2ID website. The Daily Mail’s crop and bland retouching destroys the entire intention and subtlety of the adveritisement.
It seems the NO2ID campaign is starting to build up some momentum. We are not just nerds and rabble-rousers any more. We are nerds, rabble-rousers and comedians.
Yes, it is time for a comedy benefit. When 10 of the sharpest acts from the London stand-up circuit turn out on a Sunday night to support a two-year-old pressure-group, you feel we might just be getting somewhere…
By numbering everybody and everything, the world is going to be a better place? Unless you’re a bureaucrat, that’s a laughable idea. So why not laugh at it? That’s what we intend to do at the Hackney Empire on the evening of October 1st.
Those of you in other parts of the world will just have to content yourselves with sending money to help save what remains of British liberty… but if you are handy for London, please come along. You can even book online (£12.50 a seat) by clicking the jolly banner:
I was distracted this morning by Mr Blair’s predictable difficulties with the TUC, and nearly everyone else seems to have missed it too. There was nothing in The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Daily Telegraph or the early edition of The Evening Standard about this. But this is the important UK story today. Congratulations to the Financial Times on actually reporting the plan to abolish privacy.
It was trailed a little way back by a selective leak to The Guardian, but now seems forgotten. The Information Commissioner is playing dead. Or perhaps he has been reduced to a depressive paralysis by the tedious presentation and appalling implications of HM Government’s Data sharing vision statement [pdf].
This Government wants to deliver the best possible support to people in need. We can only do this with the right information about people’s circumstances […] That is why Government is committed to more information sharing between public sector organisations and service providers. […] We recognise that he more we share information, the more important it is that people are confident that their personal data is kept safe and secure. The Data Protection and Human Rights Acts offer a robust statutory framework to maintain those rights whilst sharing information to deliver better services.”
I’m really not much reassured by assurances about “proper respect for the individual’s privacy […] supported by ensuring the security and integrity of personal information both before and after it has been shared”. How about not sharing it?
If you actually have privacy, you don’t need government Codes of Practice to tell bureaucrats how to ‘respect’ it. If you actually have privacy, then the private sphere is beyond regulatory intervention and ‘support’. If you actually have privacy, you actually have freedom.
Pre-empting the failure of the national ID scheme to deliver total surveillance soon enough, HMG is opening the other portals to its totalitarian hell.
When even former cheerleaders for centralised government by technology and datasharing get scared, you have to wonder can it be stopped after all? Michael Cross of The Guardian, now gets it, it seems:
Ministers are preparing to overturn a fundamental principle of data protection in government, the Guardian has learned. They will announce next month that public bodies can assume they are free to share citizens’ personal data with other arms of the state, so long as it is in the public interest.
The policy was agreed upon by a cabinet committee set up by the prime minister, and reverses the current default position – which requires public bodies to find a legal justification each time they want to share data about individuals.
This is straight reporting, there is none of the sneering at privacy advocates we are used to from Cross.
But extended government data-sharing is already happening. This, for example, was unwelcome news to me.
I’ve remarked here before on how the paedo-craze leads to possession of ordinary images of children being deemed indecent, and hence their possession a serious crime, depending on who has them. Now comes an example where there were no children (nor, as the facts suggest, any young adults) involved at all, except in the imagination of the court speculating about the imagination of the defendant.
The Times reported yesterday:-
A COMPUTER expert who altered indecent images of naked women to make them look like children has been warned that he faces a prison sentence.
Stafford Sven Tudor-Miles scanned photographs of adult porn stars into his computer and used sophisticated digital equipment to reduce the size of their breasts.
The images, which Tudor-Miles also manipulated with graphics software so that the women were partially dressed in school uniforms, appeared to be of girls aged under 18.
For those who have not been keeping up with the intricacies of UK sexual offences legislation: Possession of, or (more seriously) making, indecent (not defined) photographs of children (defined as being or appearing to be under 16) became illegal a while ago. But it was extended to pseudo-photographs, i.e. digitally edited images, in 1994. And the age criterion was raised to 18 just a couple of years ago. And the courts have in their wisdom decided that copying an image to or within a computer counts as ‘making’ it.
So photoshopping or downloading a picture (which also counts as ‘making’ it) that appears (to the court) to represent someone under 18 and is indecent (as it appears to the court after hearing the evidence of prosecution experts that may relate as much to the nature of the defendant and the context in which it was found as that of the picture itself) is a crime bearing a prison sentence and registration as a sex offender – even if the defendant made absolutely certain that no-one under 18 was in any way involved.
You can screw your sixteen-year old girlfriend or boyfriend however you both like*, but snap them with their top off, or even leering suggestively, and use it as a screensaver, and you are a manufacturer of child pornography who could easily, given bad luck and a zealous prosecution, end up unemployable and/or be locked up to be tortured by career criminals. I don’t know how unlucky Mr Tudor-Miles was, but The Times also quotes Ray Savage, one of the professional experts involved in the case:
“I’ve seen it in only two previous cases,” he said. “To create an image of a child by altering an image of an adult is just as serious as downloading child porn, and probably more worrying in terms of the time taken and work involved to produce such images.
“In general terms, these images can be as crude as someone having pasted a cut-out of a child’s head on to an adult’s photo.
“At the other end of the scale, someone will use sophisticated computer image manipulation equipment to alter the size of the breasts and genitalia to make a very realistic image.”
More worrying? Mr Savage worries me more than Mr Tudor-Miles.
If our protectors wish to stamp out people having sexual fantasies about schoolgirls, then police raids and mass arrests here and here are clearly called for. Better still, lets deal with the problem at source and stop women going to school. It worked for the Taliban. I have it on good authority that you still can not buy a stripy tie or a navy-blue mini-skirt in Kabul.
[* But not, under the new Sexual Offences Act, wherever you like.]
I’ve been re-reading the report of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee – Identity Cards Technologies: Scientific Advice, Risk and Evidence in preparation for an interview this evening. It is full of wonderful sarcasm couched in parliamentary politeness, and I recommend it to you, if you care to understand how Britain is governed and/or have a taste for black comedy. MPs are as much bemused spectators as the rest of us.
Nobody knows what the Home Office is up to, because it refuses to tell anyone – even select committees – any more than it can get away with. It does have 180-odd people now working on its Identity Cards programme. But I begin to wonder if they themselves know what they are about…
In case you think I am exaggerating, this is from section 30 of the report:
In written evidence, Microsoft said that “the current phase of public consultation by the Home Office has primarily focused on issues of procurement”. Jerry Fishenden [NTO for the UK] from Microsoft elaborated that “every time we came close to wanting to talk about the architecture, we were told it was not really up for discussion because there was an internal reference model that the Home Office team had developed themselves, and that they did not feel they wanted to discuss their views of the architecture”.
The Specter-Cheney ‘Warrantless Surveillance Bill’ will leave a gaping hole in American civil rights by providing a tissue thin excuse for warrantless surveillance of Americans in America. Anyone who has any dealing with foreigners, as long as the state claims the surveillance is ‘aimed at foreigners’, will now be subject to surveillance at the pleasure of some faceless government employee…”in other words, if you call or do business with someone overseas, the government may be watching you”.
Do something about that.
In whatever shape England emerges from the war […] The intellectuals who hope to see it Russianized or Germanized will be disappointed. The gentleness, the hypocrisy, the thoughtlessness, the reverence for law and the hatred of uniforms will remain, along with the suet puddings and the misty skies. It needs some very great disaster, such as prolonged subjugation by a foreign enemy, to destroy a national culture
– George Orwell in The Lion and the Unicorn
But we live further from Orwell than Orwell from Bismarck. The current rulers of England are keen on uniforms, inspectors, permits and controls. (In 48 hours: “Ports and airports to get to discipline young offenders: Home secretary considers community work uniform.” The replacement for the Child Support Agency [not authoritarian enough], “will wield extra powers to punish parents who fail to pay, including evening curfews to prevent fathers going out after work, and having their passports confiscated to stop them taking foreign holidays, and even the threat of prosecution and prison”.) Law is treated with contempt if it gets in the way of the state’s priorities. (Last week the Home Office revealed its ideas for Serious Crime Prevention Orders, to be used to control the activities – such as telephone, travel, banking or internet use – of “known criminals” without the evidence necessary for an actual criminal prosecution.) The prohibition of suet puddings has yet to be ‘put out to public consultation’ (which is how we would know the matter had been determined). But it can only be a matter of time.
I saw Terry Gilliam’s Brazil again last night. I had not for a long while. Seen just now, its aptness to New Britain is shocking. More surprising, I think than the utter submergence of Orwell’s gentle, un-Prussian England. We knew, in petto, we had lost that.
How long before we see official signs pronouncing “Suspicion breeds confidence” and “Help the Ministry of Information help you”? Eh?
All politicians are collectivists. They don’t care about privacy.
– Professor Ian Angell, quoted on ZDNet
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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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