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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Only a complete ass would make the cost of ID cards, rather than principle behind them, the main thrust of their opposition to such an imposition. And it would appear that Tory Blair David Cameron is exactly such as ass.
So presumably Cameron, who does nothing not somehow calculated to help return the Tories to power, thinks that such a stance will play well with people who actually care about civil liberties? Well if that really is his objective, does he really think that the NO2ID crew and the LibDems (the two main anti-ID card groups) are really just worried about another small tax? In short, is he really that stupid? And if he is trying to curry favour with ‘Middle England’, is this not the group we are told do not really care one way or the other on the issue?
All he needs to do to get the serious civil libertarians to cheer him to the rafters is stand up and say “regardless of what it costs, we oppose them because they are wrong and any government that tries to impose them is not just wrong, it is wicked. And if they are imposed, we will scrap them the moment we take power, again regardless of what was spent to impose them.”
There is of course no chance whatsoever he will ever say that because clearly the idea of that ID cards are all about civil liberties does not really resonate with a Blairite like Cameron… but of course I would love to be proven wrong.
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.
This was the text of what I submitted for inclusion as an ‘icon of Britain’ via the Department of Culture, Media & Sport website mentioned by Guy Herbert yesterday:
The CCTV camera is the perfect icon for Britain today, summing up the nature of the changing relationship between civil society and political state. They are an innovation in which Britain leads the world both technologically and in usage and are the visible manifestation of so many things which happen out of sight. It is almost impossible to avoid their gaze for an entire day and sitting like steel crows on their perches above us, truly they are emblematic of modern Britain.
The thing is, I am not taking the piss, this really is modern Britain…
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?
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.
The Independent has a terrifying story, if there is no public outcry over which, I have no hope for the short-term survival of liberty in Britain. Perhaps it is just our turn to live under totalitarianism, and our children’s and grandchildren’s too (assuming liberati and other anti-social types are permitted to breed in the well-ordered society) …
Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.
Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years.
Read the whole thing here. Then answer me this question: by what right is this power assumed? It is no doubt being done in the name of ‘public safety’, in which case where’s the democratic mandate, and when was parliament asked?
Cross-posted to White Rose
The U.S. Senate has blocked a vote to extend the Patriot Act, about which Perry de Havilland wrote the other day. Maybe some sanity is breaking out. Many of the Act’s provisions are tenuously linked to protecting the public from terrorism, to put it mildly, and violate parts of the U.S. Constitution. Let’s hope Congress reflects more before passing such laws at such high speed in the future. And the same applies to our own benighted Parliament and the wretched UK Civil Contigencies Act.
The only people who object to ID cards and CCTV are ‘bad people’, right? I mean after all, everyone knows that the people who work for the State are of a more incorruptable and moral nature than us mere private people.
Yeah, right. The State is not your friend.
This is a remarkable story, concerning the DVLA. It is yet another case of the evil way in which the mixed economy is often mixed these days. What happens is that a government agency is compelled by some idiot law or other to pretend that it is a business, and to sell its “product”, to businesses who then stop being proper businesses and become crypto-state parasites.
And something like this happens:
What is happening is this: requests come in from businesses that have relevance to parking – clampers, car park managers, even a financial services company that happens to have a car park in which, notionally, people might leave their cars without permission. The DVLA charges a few thousand pounds for a link to its database, and thereafter the commercial company has only to tap in any registration number to be sent the owner’s name and address. If crooked, it could collect car numbers from anywhere in the country, enter them and thereafter know when you are away from home. Or it could send you threatening letters, of extortion or blackmail, citing your car details and claiming a violation.
But the DVLA wouldn’t deal with such people, would it? Yep. It does. It has been forced to hand over its list of the 157 companies registered to buy personal information about drivers – the list includes bailiffs, debt collection agencies and financial services companies. DVLA bleats that it is obliged – under an undebated Statutory Instrument of 2002 – to sell the information to anyone with “reasonable cause”.
As Libby Purves goes on to say:
. . . this piece of roughshod arrogance, done in the interests of tackling only the moderate nuisance of bad parking, throws a lurid light on what could happen to our privacy if we get ID cards to boost the “war on terror”. So far I have been lukewarm on the issue, only doubting that the cards would be good value (every atrocity so far has been committed by people whose papers were in order). But now I am not lukewarm. I am almost prepared to join Simon Hughes, the fiery Lib Dem, who has just pledged to go to prison over the issue. Given the casual attitude of the DVLA, willing to turn a penny by selling our addresses to any old crook, what would happen with information-rich ID cards and bureaucrats of similar calibre?
Indeed.
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.
– Lord Gould of Brookwood (most decidedly New Labour) speaking at yesterday’s Committee of the Whole House on the Identity Cards Bill.
Chilling, eh?
I file this under “Self ownership” because the Bill (do read it) seeks to end all that sort of thing. No more of the messy business of people deciding for themselves who they are and how much to involve the government in their lives.
It seems a Japanese company has invented a human steering device. It is external, harmless and affects the sense of balance.
The article suggests uses in gaming where tweaking the balance system helps make immersive gaming more realistic. One must wonder: how much time will pass before the porn industry picks up on this?
There are darker uses I am sure you can easily imagine. A company is already studying the use of the ideas for crowd control by affecting their sense of balance. One can imagine implants to control gulag prisoners of future Stalin’s.
My dark crystal gets darker still from there.
Prepare yourself for a mega-dose of bitter irony. Please take a look at this link to a splendid 100% Che-free site, kindly sent to me by Toni.
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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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