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This BBC story could have come straight out of a comic novel:
A man in Australia tipped off police in Devon after seeing a suspected burglary on a webcam based in Exmouth.
Andrew Pritchard, 52, from Boorowa, New South Wales, saw two men run from a car to a beach-front kiosk.
After searching for the number of Devon and Cornwall police he was able to direct them to the scene of the crime.
However it turned out not to be a crime:
It transpired the pair were a man and a woman having an argument, not conducting a burglary, but the police praised Mr Pritchard for his actions.
I actually believe them. They were able to bustle about and investigate, but it turned out they had no actual criminals to deal with, so no horrid fighting and no horrid paperwork. Instead, they had a nice little story to trade with their local media.
As for the idea of people in Australia looking at pictures from our spycams, it has often puzzled me who on earth is supposed to keep track of all our spycam pictures, what with there now being about ten times as many spycams in Britain as there are people. I seem to recall that in this Libertarian Alliance publication, in the bit where I discuss how to exploit old people and thus keep them feeling important for longer, I suggest that oldies might like to do this. Let them earn their pensions. And now that we all have broadband connections, there is no need for these oldies to be in Britain. In fact, given what our criminals like to do to witnesses who grass them up, Australia is probably the ideal spot for them.
Airport security gets ever more surreal. Yesterday, I set off with my fiancee for the lovely island of Malta to spend the Easter break. At London’s Gatwick airport I had my first real experience of the wonderful charm for which security staff are famed, having never really had a glitch before. My hand luggage was seized by a woman who asked that I opened the bag. I was happy to do so. She fished out three novels from the bag, and after loudly making some rude comments about them and sniggering to a colleague (which was thoroughly unprofessional on her part) she picked up a small hair brush, and put it through an X-ray machine. She handed it back and with a grim expression pronounced that a hairbrush, at a certain angle, looked like a gun. Yes, a gun.
In future it is definitely going in my heavy luggage. It really makes me wonder about what your average security guard thinks a gun is actually supposed to look like, let alone as to whether any of them have used a gun. Or maybe they comb their hair with an automatic.
Oh, and the next time I fly down I’ll take a couple of porn magazines to really give some security jobsworth the vapours. Heh.
Although I knew this day was coming, it is profoundly depressing nevertheless. It is now the law that ID cards will be imposed by force in Britain, with the support of the Leaders of the Conservative Party and the Labour Party. They have won and as far as I am concerned, the guttering flame of the culture of liberty in Britain just blew out.
I do not expect a truly repressive state to be implemented for many years yet (hopefully), but the infrastructure of tyranny is now well and truly in place, all of which came to pass with a soundtrack of a faint bleating sound of an indifferent public in the background. You might as well flip a coin to figure out which party will usher it in but a authoritarian panoptic state is coming. If this is what the majority of British people want, then may they get exactly what they deserve, but I am out of here. For those of you who will be happy to see me go, trust me, the feeling is mutual.
I realise most people will just shrug their ovine shoulders and find my worries inexplicable, crazy even, as it is not like Blair and Howard are setting up Gulags, right? No, of course not. Who needs those when there is a camera on every corner and your every purchase and phone call will eventually be logged on a central government database? As far as I concerned, the war is over and my side lost.
I have to try and speed up my business ventures and get out as soon as I can afford to do so. I shall try to be out of Britain and have my primary residence in the USA by 2007 at the latest to avoid being forced to submit to this intolerable imposition… and I shall be taking my wealth generating assets with me. I cannot say I am looking forward to winters in New Hampshire but I do not really see that I have much choice anymore. I do not see the United States as a paragon of civil liberties (to put it mildly), but at least it is a place in which the battle can be fought within the last bastion of the Anglosphere’s culture of liberty.
Damn it.
Yes, I am glad a few people in the Conservative party have the backbone to stand against Michael Howard and refuse to back the imposition of mandatory ID cards. Yet the truth is than they are outnumbered both by those in the party’s authoritarian faction and in the others who say they opposed ID cards, such as possible future leader David Davies, but place their political careers above both their principles and what they presumably think would be best for the nation. Still, I suppose we should thank Michael Howard for making it clear to all but the most blinkered that they offer no alternative to Labour in any substantive way over an issue that offers much downside and no clearly explained upside.
If you ever want to see an effective opposition in this country, vote for the one party who can deliver that by destroying the Conservative party once and for all by making it permanently unelectable, thereby showing the true cost of Conservative ‘moderation’ on the EU and civil liberties. Only once the last bitter hope that the Tories might ever form a new government has been removed by 10 to 15% of their vote defecting for the foreseeable future can something better emerge from their ashes. Vote UKIP.
Hard to believe! That Tory leader Michael Howard, the second most repressive Home Secretary in living memory, should support mandatory ID cards is hardly a revelation, but that up to 40 Tory MP’s, including some on the front bench, might vote against or abstain regardless of the demands of the whips, well that is quite a pleasant surprise.
Mr Howard has come down in favour of the Government scheme because he was preparing to introduce an ID card Bill himself when he was Home Secretary in 1997 and fears charges of hypocrisy if he does not support it now. Some MPs complained that he has been heavy handed in whipping the issue. One said: “I think it is disgraceful. I don’t know where our leadership is heading.”
I know exactly where it is heading…
The No2ID campaign has established an e-petition aimed at 10 Downing Street demanding the end to plans for imposing mandatory ID cards and pervasive state databases recording a vast range of what you do in your life.
The No2ID campaigners have taken the line of principled objection, given that the government seem to have decided that there is no longer any room for public debate and refuses to engage with serious – and growing – civil liberty and privacy concerns with the scheme. The Home Office have not met once with civil liberties organisations yet say their concerns have been addressed whilst at the same time avoiding public meetings but at the same time having private briefing with technology partners for introducing the schemes.
Take a stand and make your voice heard while you still can at www.no2id-petition.net. Time is fast running out.
The state is not your friend.
As US legislators act to make covertly installing spyware on computers illegal, I would be curious to know why Ron Paul thinks otherwise?
Surely installing unrequested spyware is no different than any other unauthorised intrusion onto private property? Is it any different from inviting a travelling salesman into your house only to later discover he covertly installed bugs and hidden cameras when you were not looking so that he could monitor your behaviour for his own benefit?
Something tells me that HMG does not expect their proposed fox-hunting ban to be awfully popular with the country folk:
Police are planning to use spy cameras in the countryside to enforce a ban on fox hunting.
Chief constables intend to site CCTV cameras on hedgerows, fences and trees along known hunting routes to enable them to photograph hunt members who break the law after hunting with hounds is outlawed.
They used to warn that ‘walls have ears’. Now walls will have eyes as well. I suppose the panopticon countryside is nothing more than a logical extension of our panoptican cities. It is merely a matter of time before every workplace and every home is wired up to the Big Eye of Big Brother. Then the nightmare really begins.
There exist all manner of varying justifications for this surveillance-fever but there is only one reason that our political masters are deploying it with such alacrity: because they can.
The same technology that enables us to chatter with each other across national boundaries is being used to create a tightly-wrapped police state.
What a very, very grim future we face.
It was with something akin to delight that I saw the Times, not a newspaper overly concerned with civil liberties, have on its front page 1 an article about objections to Britain’s developing surveillance state.
This is modern Britain If we cannot get these issues out in the open, we will indeed see Britain ‘sleepwalking’ into what may some time in the future be a panoptic nightmare. Blair or Howard are not going to be having the security services doing ‘midnight knocks’ on the doors of those they disfavour (well, maybe for a few people in the Finsbury Park area) but make no mistake about it, the infrastructure of repression is being put in place at an astonishing rate and someday (hopefully long after I have decamped to New Hampshire) this information is going to be used by statists of both left and right with fewer qualms than Tony Blair to order every single aspect of people’s lives in Britain in ways that places the state at the centre of everything you do in ways earlier totalitarianisms could only dream of… for your own good, of course.
We have a serious battle to win and the more these issues are out of the committee rooms and in the more general public arena, the better we can argue the case for resisting the emerging Panopticon State.
When the state watches you, dare to stare back
1 = Readers outside the UK may have difficulties accessing this link once it is archived due to the benighted policies of the Times newspaper.
(Cross posted from White Rose)
Last night many Samizdatistas heading for Aldwych as the 2004 Big Brother Awards were held at the London School of Economics. The list of winners, who are in fact losers, can be found here1.
Simon Davies of Privacy International is the driving force behind the Big Brother Awards…
The stout lads from No2ID were out in force…
About 450 people turned up to heckle cheer…
This was probably the best propaganda shirt I saw!
The left has always been good at that sort of thing
1 = Update: The link to the Big Brother Award details has been changed, which is not very clever. Link updated to a somewhat less informative page.
In what may one day give people a way to keep even GCHQ and the NSA out of their private affairs without them makes a huge effort, quantum cryptography is starting to finally emerge as a useable technology.
I look forward to the day the entire global communications network is a less friendly place for systems like Echelon and Carnivore.
The pseudonymous ‘Slowjoe’ sends in this article to ponder on the subject of ID cards. Incidentally, anyone with articles on that subject would do well to consider submitting them to our sister site White Rose, which really specialises in civil liberties issues such as this.
The Register has the story of a man jailed because of a flaw in a fingerprint identification program which appears to have been chosen as the basis of the UK ID card scheme.
A number of disturbing points:
- The victim in this case didn’t realise that the software was flawed until 4 years after he’d been jailed.
- There have been at least 97 cases where mistaken identification took place that the state of Oregon was aware of. Since these involved fingerprints, it’s likely that this means “97 cases of wrongful arrest”.
- This story appeared in the Register on May 11th. No mainstream news site has considered it worth covering. (My basis for this is are two searches at new.google.com, a search of the UK site and of the US site. For the lazy, these links show that no mainstream news organisation has gone beyond printing Mr. Benson’s press release. A couple of finance websites and trial lawyers sites seem have also run it.)
- The defendants are crass enough to ask for the suit to be dismissed because the victim didn’t know about their software bug in time.
Next time someone suggests that “fingerprints are flawless”, the kicker is, the chosen system apparently cannot distinguish between men with 10 fingers, and those with only 9. How anyone can trust such a system is beyond me.
Is anyone still in favour of ID cards?
Slowjoe
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