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The Guardian reports that ID cards are to be pilot tested in ‘a small market town’ by the home office. Biometrics will be tested – facial, iris and fingerprint recognition systems.
I am horrifiied that the government is inching towards making us instantly identifiable and knowing too much. Once they have ID cards they will be that much nearer to integrating tax and passport systems, no doubt under the cover of anti-terrorist rhetoric. “To be controlled in our economic pursuits means to be…controlled in everything” said Hayek. To control us they need to know us, this is a fight we must not lose.
Paul Staines
Ed. update: White Rose has more on the subject as it keeps a closer eye on issues of ID cards, privacy, surveillance and other vagaries of state…
In more traditional police-states, citizens may be blissfully unaware that they have done wrong until they are woken in the wee small hours by an ominous rapping on their front doors. In modern police-state Britain, the knock on the door is to be replaced by the thud on the doormat.
If this report from the UK Times is accurate (and it is just about creepy enough to be true) then it may be time to think about buying a bicycle:
EVEN George Orwell would have choked. Government officials are drawing up plans to fit all cars in Britain with a personalised microchip so that rule-breaking motorists can be prosecuted by computer.
Dubbed the “Spy in the Dashboard” and “the Informer” the chip will automatically report a wide range of offences including speeding, road tax evasion and illegal parking. The first you will know about it is when a summons or a fine lands on your doormat.
The plan, which is being devised by the government, police and other enforcement agencies, would see all private cars monitored by roadside sensors wherever they travelled.
Who the bloody hell are the ‘other enforcement agencies’? And the very notion of an informer in every vehicle! Saddam Hussein could only dream about that level of control.
Police working on the “car-tagging” scheme say it would also help to slash car theft and even drug smuggling.
The same old, same old. Every accursed and intrusive state abuse is sold to the public as a cure for crime and ‘drug-dealing’. The fact that it still works is proof that we live in the Age of Bovine Stupidity. A media advertising campaign showing seedy drug-dealers and leering child-molesters being rounded up as a result of this technology will have the public begging for a ‘spy in the dashboard’.
Having already expressed my doubts about the viability of new government schemes (see below) I should just add that the fact that this relies on technology rather than human agency means it just might work.
The next step is an electronic device in your car which will immediately detetct any infringement of any regulation, then lock the doors, drive you to a football stadium and shoot you. HMG is reported to be very interested and is launching a feasibility study.
[This article has been cross-posted to White Rose.]
I wonder how many of our readers went to see the film ‘Minority Report’ and came away thinking, ‘Hey, what a great film’?
Contrast this with one of HMG’s advisers who went to see the film and cam away thinking, ‘Hey, what a great idea!:
Tony Blair is to announce plans to put up to half a million children deemed at risk of becoming criminals or getting into other trouble on a new computer register.
Teachers, family doctors and other professionals working with youngsters will be asked to name potential troublemakers whose personal details will then be placed on the database.
The new “identification, tracking and referral” system will allow the authorities to share information on vulnerable children, including their potential for criminal activity.
Alright, let’s get the obvious question out of the way, such as, exactly what does ‘at risk’ mean? What constitutes a ‘potential troublemaker’? Who decides these things and on what basis? Who guards the guardians?
Oh I daresay that there are answers (or, rather, great globs of state-management gobbledekook that purport to be answers) but they will almost certainly remain occluded behind the volumes of policy documents that filter through the ziggurat of state agencies charged with enforcing it all.
For the record, I denounce this but I do so merely as a matter of form. My stores of furious indignation have all but dried up leaving a residue of doleful resignation. And, to be fair, we’ve always had mechanisms for controlling the poor; this is merely the latest manifestation, albeit dressed up in the fashionable terminology of ‘caring and concern’.
The chink of light (well, a fissure really) is that this grand plan may not get off the ground at all and, even if it does, it will probably be a shambles. HMG already has far more laws, regulations, rules, plans, initiatives, schemes and regimes that it can possible see through or enforce and nothing they announce nowadays is likely to work as intended or at all.
Still, it will keep a few state bureaucrats busy for a few more years and that is probably enough.
There are times when I compare 2003 with the Orwellian world of 1984. In one respect at least, the fictional Airstrip One was far better than present day Britain: kids could have more fun!
Consider this report, that children are being harrassed by intolerant adults into staying locked indoors. Of course we live in an age where most children are treated at best as designer lap dogs or fashion accessories and at worst like punchbags or sex toys. So that actually letting children run around parks, fall in streams, get muddy and avoid obesity and truancy by burning off their excess energy in creative or harmless pursuits are not an option. The streets where I grew up have too many cars parked in them to play football, never mind the traffic.
The contrast with the Orwellian child utopia of Airstrip One is amazing: kids can run around as they wish, there is no shortage of activities for them to enjoy, from attending public executions, to outings in the countryside. But the real fun is in the “spies”. Children are actively encouraged to look through keyholes, snoop into the affairs of adults and they can earn plaudits for exposing corrupt and treasonable behaviour. So when that nasty Mrs B. at the corner of A***** Rd and M****** Rd would should at my friends and I for kicking a football outside her house, we could pick up the phone and denounce her to the Party as an agent of Emmanuel Goldstein!
I wonder if there are any equivalent means for children today to get even with bossy and intolerant adults? They could try this phone number: 0800 11 11 (Airstrip One only).
Over wide areas of the urban first world, the Panopticon State is already very much a reality. Folks like us, the contributors to Samizdata.net, White Rose and the grizzled veterans over at Privacy International cry out warning pretty much daily alerting people not so much about the simple fact of surveillance per se but rather surveillance plus data-pooling.
Yet it is important to draw people attention to the basic facts and encourage them to notice the evidence right in front of their eyes, peering down at them like menacing mechanical crows perched on metal branches jutting from walls everywhere, that we are increasing under surveillance by the state directly…
…and by companies whose surveillance footage states are increasingly reserving themselves the right to gain access to on demand…
But the people who would like our every move recorded and subject to analysis are not fools. They would rather you did not actually notice what is before your very eyes and so we are seeing the second age of CCTV: more aesthetically pleasing and less intrusive cameras, rather than the stark utilitarian carrion crows which currently predominate…
…rounder, blending in with the background…
…looking more like the lighting fixtures than the all-seeing-eye.
The second age of security cameras is at hand…still quite literally staring you in the face, but increasingly hiding in plain sight, counting on a mixture of clever design and the fact that familiarity breeds contempt. But Big Brother is still watching, only with a little more style and taste now. That just makes it more dangerous.
(Cross-posted from White Rose)
When one objects to something, it is important to have a clear idea exactly what you are objecting to and why. Fleet Online is a company offering an inexpensive way to track the location of someone else’s mobile phone to within 50 yards in an urban area. The system has built in safeguards that prevent someone tracking someone else without their permission (a text message is sent to the target phone notifying them of the ping and asking if they are content to be located. Also certain times in which being located is acceptable can be set up as a preference).
I have no problem with companies keeping track of their employees whilst they are on-the-job… for example the advantages to a courier company and their clients are too obvious to need elaboration. I don’t even have much of a problem with parents keeping track of their children. Like so much in the world, this ability to track one of the increasingly ubiquitous tools of modern life is not intrinsically good or bad in and of itself. The problems I foresee spring from the Regulation of Investigative Powers Act in Britain and the various equivalent powers of state found in many other nations. Almost certainly there will be a requirement for services like Fleet Online to allow the state to locate people without their permission and under the various provisions of the aptly names RIP Act, notifying the target they are subject to state scrutiny will itself be a crime.
When the RIP Act was first imposed, it was with assurances that access to private information like e-mail, ISP activity records and even decryption keys1 would be tightly controlled and limited to only a few essential key government agencies. Of course it did not take long for the state to try and expand the list of people who can get access to your private internet traffic details to essential key government agencies like local town councils, the Department of Health, the Environment Agency, the Food Standards Agency, the Postal Services Commission, and Fire Authorities. Previous assurances as to who would have access proved to be worthless and the people who uttered them straightforward liars. No real surprises there to any but the credulous. So does anyone seriously want to trust the same people with the ability to track not just your online life but your physical movements in the real world at the click of a mouse?
Technology is not the problem… the problem is a state with takes such power to itself with little more than an imperious demand to its subjects to ‘just trust us’ and ‘if you are not guilty, you have nothing to fear’.
1 = or more accurately the decryption keys of those ‘criminals’ who did not have a completely corrupted floppy disc to surrender on demand ‘on which their key codes are stored’. Corrupted you say? No! Really? Well I never. I guess I’ll never be able to access those files again… and nor will you.
I have heard of ‘co-operating with the police’ before but never with quite this degree of enthusiasm:
Speaking at a conference this winter on Internet crime, eBay.com’s director of law enforcement and compliance, Joseph Sullivan…
They actually have one of those?
Brags Sullivan, “If you are a law-enforcement officer, all you have to do is send us a fax with a request for information, and ask about the person behind the seller’s identity number, and we will provide you with his name, address, sales history and other details–all without having to produce a court order.”
And Mr.Sullivan went further:
“Why if you’re a law enforcement officer we will also do your laundry, collect your shopping, pick up your kids from school, tidy up your house, make your bed, weed your garden, fix your dinner, fetch your slippers, repair your leaky guttering, pay all your household bills, walk your dog and even clear the snow from your front path. You don’t even have to ask.”
But if all that is not enough to leave a queasy feeling in your innards, try this:
eBay itself goes further than this, employing six investigators who are charged with tracking down “suspicious people” and “suspicious behavior.”
Perhaps they’re expecting to find something like this:
For sale: Nuclear centrifuge. One exceedingly careful owner. Contact s.hussein@ba’athist.com
Or perhaps they are just keeping a beady eye open for those suspicious antique Staffordshire teapots.
[My thanks to Dr.Chris Tame of the Libertarian Alliance for the link.]
The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and except in darkness, every movement scrutinised.
– George Orwell, from 1984
Today is George Orwell’s birthday. Happy birthday George, you were right… just a few years too early. And now we have thermal imagers which means even darkness is no shield from the Panopticon State.
Nah! You must be paranoid! It’ll never happen here!
To be honest I have never understood what the fascination people have with so-call ‘reality TV’ programmes like Big Brother. I have forced myself to watch a couple times and ended up despairing for the future of western civilization. Suddenly my taste for explosion filled action movies and lycra clad starlets with guns does not seem so low-brow after all.
Oooo! Very exciting!
No doubt some of our faithful commenters will put me right on this area of complete disconnection between me and an entire baffling area of popular culture.
But maybe this Disneyfication of the entirely unfunny term ‘Big Brother’ that George Orwell coined will soon be coming to an end.
Then maybe we can start getting more people frowning with concern rather than smiling vacuously at the sound of the words ‘Big Brother’. Why bother watching the TV to see a bunch of self-absorbed cretins in a room back-stabbing each other when you can be in your very own rolling endless episode of ‘Big Brother’ by just walking down almost any CCTV filled high street in Britain?
Here is some real reality TV, staring… you.
A new speed camera installed at the urging of Robert Marshall, a Conservative on South Staffordshire district council has caught its first few victims, one of whom was… Robert Marshall.
The Tory speed demon was nailed doing a whopping 43mph in a 30mph limit.
Gotcha, you Tory bastard!!!
Miceal O’Ronain spotted a new item in the Times of London yesterday. He has also looked between the lines and seen where this will eventually go
The issue is, at least for now, congestion on the roads:
“…Satellite equipment to monitor every car journey will be ready only in a decade or more.”
[…]
“Satellite tracking and charging will be tried out on the lorries that use Britain’s roads under a scheme that will begin in 2006. If the experiment is successful, the system could be extended to cars as well.”
Here are the technical specifications for the system:
- EU network is preferred system
- A nationwide system would be likely to use the EU’s Galileo global-positioning network, an array of 30 satellites scheduled for launch in 2006 and 2007.
- The alternative, the US military GPS network, used by the current generation of satellite navigation and tracking devices, does not guarantee access to civilian clients. Galileo is designed for civil use and guarantees an uninterrupted service.
- Galileo will be accurate to 1 metre, GPS to only 30m. The lower accuracy of the US model could cause disputes on whether vehicles had actually entered charging zones.
But why stop with cars? Just surgically implant a transponder into each citizen of the UK. If you can do it for cars and wild life, you can do it to people.
Miceal O’Ronain
Sadly none of Britain’s mainstream political parties are, they just vary (slightly) in who they want to benefit from their regulation of civil society. When it comes from choosing amongst which tribal faction of statists will regulate your life, we are spoilt for choice.
So next time you have an earnest young Tory hopeful turn up on your doorstep asking for your vote and pledging to save you from those beastly Labour socialists, ask him where his party stands on the issue of ID cards, which will naturally start off as ‘National Health Benefit Cards’ and then very quickly become mandatory for pretty much anything you try to do, such as open a bank account or rent an apartment.
And then look ‘earnest young Tory’ in the eye, explain why his party is part of the problem rather than part of the solution and then tell him to fuck off. A choice between a party which brought us Michael ‘a touch of the night’ Howard and one which has brought us David ‘RIP’ Blunket is no choice at all. But if you cannot bring yourself to resist the syren call to the ballot box, vote UKIP.
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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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