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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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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
Remember that scene in that dreadful movie The Phantom Menace where Anakin’s mother explains that slaves have tracking devices implanted to prevent them escaping?
An American company has developed such technology, and they have more then just slaves in mind.
The process is oh so easy:
Once implanted just under the skin, via a quick, simple and painless outpatient procedure (much like getting a shot), the VeriChip can be scanned when necessary with a proprietary VeriChip scanner. A small amount of radio frequency energy passes from the scanner energizing the dormant VeriChip, which then emits a radio frequency signal transmitting the individual’s unique personal verification (VeriChip ID) number. The VeriChip Subscriber Number then provides instant access to the Global VeriChip Subscriber (GVS) Registry – through secure, password-protected web access to subscriber-supplied information. This data is maintained by state-of-the-art GVS Registry operations centers in Riverside, California and Owings, Maryland.
And the implications are oh so scary….
How the Soviets would have loved this kind of technological capability:
A US requirement for visitors to be fingerprinted and photographed is being expanded to include citizens from America’s closest allies.
The move will affect visitors from 27 countries – including the UK, Japan and Australia – whose nationals are able to visit the US without a visa.
Though even if the technology had been available to the Soviets they would not have been to afford it. But Western democracies can afford it so these fingerprint-reading machines will be coming soon not just to an airport near you but, in due course, a bank, a supermarket, a sports stadium and just about everywhere else.
I was so impressed with all those books written in the 1990’s that confidently predicted that the new age of digital technology would empower the individual and neuter the state. The implementation is having exactly the reverse affect.
Here is a new hack that has been making the rounds of the computer security community. It seems bluetooth lays many very common mobile phones wide open to one or more attacks. On at least one Nokia (the very one I have in fact), someone walking past you on the street can lift your entire address book and calendar even if your Bluetooth setting is HIDDEN. There are other sorts of possible abuse as well: read the article.
No, I did not get caught out. I spend too much time in bad company to trust any system which hasn’t been source-code audited by people I trust. Since mobile phones are all based on proprietary code, I have always taken the precaution of only enabling such features (on mobiles or other systems) during time of use.
For those of you who religiously follow slashdot, this is probably not news. Most of our readers are not engineers so this may be news to them.
If you have bluetooth, turn the bloody thing OFF!!!!
Did you know your twenty dollar bills have RFID tags in them? That is what these people think… and they have the burned bills to prove it.
A year or so ago I suggested microwaving as a way to de-louse items with RFID tags in them. From the state of the bills in the picture, I think we will need a gentler method of disinfection.
It is apparent to me that the chips are just soaking up too much energy from the rather high intensity inside an oven. It doesn’t really take all that much to waste a chip so a much milder power source is called for. Suggestions and experimental results are welcome.
All you need is some engineering creativity and money to burn.
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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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