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The excellent folks at Stand.org.uk, who describe themselves as “a group of volunteers who originally came together in 1998 in a vain attempt to fix the worst aspects of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Act”, are mobilising efforts to oppose the imposition of ID cards in the UK. They enable you to contribute your comments to the ‘consultation’ process, which Downing Street is claiming shows Growing support for entitlement cards… We think you should go to Stand.org.uk website and let them show you how to tell the British government exactly how you feel about this. I did and left comments saying:
To put it bluntly, this is clear evidence, not that any more is needed, that the Labour government is as utterly inimical to civil liberties as the Tory party was. I shall never cooperate with what is clearly just a euphemism for a national ID card which will enhance the state’s ability to monitor and control its subjects. It is clear that any ‘voluntary’ system you offer up will just the thin end of the wedge for a mandatory system that will enable policemen to stop you on the street and demand “your papers”. I will never consent or cooperate with this.
Be polite but tell them what you think. Kudos to Stand.org.uk for their efforts to defend what is left of civil liberties in the United Kingdom.
The state is not your friend
There has been much discussion lately how assorted snooping organizations of assorted governments are creating the infrastructure of the Big Brother state as fast as their evil little hands can do so. Fortuneately for those who love Liberty more than Government, there are ways to defeat them. Long ago I said to some friends: “The hacker giveth and the hacker taketh away”, meaning what one programmer designs for a government or corporation, another programmer can bypass or subvert. It is, after all, nothing but patterns of ones and zeroes.
The advantage of numbers falls to our side. Whatever number of bright people any government collects for some nefarious project, there will be larger numbers of even brighter and perhaps more committed people out to undo the damage. There is a near certainty someone, somewhere on this large hunk of rock and water will find the work around. Minutes later, everyone will have it.
This brings me to the point of this ramble: those who are seriously interested in the technology of privacy may find of interest this talk from the 1999 Ottawa Linux Conference on “Linux and the Freedom Network” by Zero Knowledge of Canada. Right click and download. It’s a largish mp3 but well worth the effort. The sort of thing to drive Statists mad…
And that can’t ever be a bad thing.
It’s final. Instapundit reports DeCSS (a DVD encryption unscrambler) is legal… if you live in the free world.
We send our heartfelt congratulations to the author of DeCSS, Jon Lech Johansen, on his acquittal and total victory over the forces of evil.
The Home Office is to publish a consultation paper to help gauge how much electronic invasion of privacy the public is willing to accept.
This is a second attempt at a code of practice for controversial snooping laws, the first draft code was shelved by the government after causing outrage among privacy advocates who protested against allowing
a broad range of government agencies, including all local authorities, the NHS, the Postal Services Commission and the Food Standards Agency, to demand the communications records of Internet and telephone users.
Home Office officials insist that the new consultantion document to be published early this year will be placed in the public domain and show the totality of how data is accessed. All departments responsible for authorities accessing communications data are being asked for help to make sure the paper properly reflects what is being done and by whom.
I bet you anything that the ‘whom’ will be faceless government departments with names George Orwell would be proud of.
The state is not your friend
Crikey! This news story suggests certain elements in the Chinese police are actually concerned about privacy, so much so that they apologised to a family after busting into a man’s house where the guy was watching porn with his wife.
The world turns. Are we getting close to the point where China, a communist state albeit one hurtling ever faster down the capitalist path, may be becoming more concerned about privacy than Britain?
Whilst looking for something entirely different I stumbled across the public domain slides and script for a talk given by John Poindexter: “Information Awareness Office Overview”. Since there was some discussion about this DARPA research project a few weeks ago, I have acquired copies and placed them on our server.
That way, if a slashdot occurs, instead of causing headaches for some unsuspecting research site administrator, I’ll only annoy the ISP that hosts us.
You will probably want to do “the rightclick download thing” as these are pdf documents.
- Information Awareness Office Overview script
- Information Awareness Office Overview slides
Cheers!
Addendum: If there is sufficient interest, I will acquire and post some of the other talks.
Following up another story about the extermination of some weird garden weed (don’t ask), I came across news from the BBC of a public meeting tomorrow afternoon organised by Privacy International on the subject of those compulsory ID cards that our government is so determined to introduce willy nilly, by hook or by crook, or by any other cliché that will work the trick. Bottom line, at the end of the day, when push comes to shove, they’re probably going to go the final five yards on this and bring home the bacon, but let’s at least put a spoke in their frying pan, eh?
In July, the Government announced a six-month public consultation on proposals to establish a compulsory national Identity Card to establish entitlement to benefits and services, including healthcare, welfare benefits, education and public housing. The consultation period ends in January. This event at the LSE will be the only public meeting during the consultation exercise.
The proposals involve issues of vital importance for everyone living in the UK. The government envisions a compulsory registration of the entire population, backed by a national database of “biometric” identifiers such as digital photographs, fingerprints and retina scans. The scheme will form the basis for the matching of personal information between government and private sector organisations, and will involve a legal requirement to produce the card in a wide variety of circumstances. Failure to disclose your card will result in denial of access to a wide range of essential services such as healthcare and education.
Wednesday 11th December 2002, 2.15 – 5.30, The Old Theatre, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE. Chair and session summariser: Simon Davies, Director of Privacy International. Speakers: Lord Falconer of Thoroton, QC, Minister of State for criminal justice; Baroness Sharples (Conservative); Simon Hughes, MP, Liberal Democrat Shadow Home Secretary; Dr Nick Palmer MP (Labour); Charles Moore, Editor, The Daily Telegraph; Dr Ross Anderson, Computing Laboratory, Cambridge University; Peter Lilley MP, former Secretary of State for Social Security (Conservative); Terri Dowty, Joint national coordinator, Alliance for Childrens Rights for England; Dr Clarence Lusane, Director of Social Research, The 1990 Trust.
Finally, there’ll be a Q&A with Stephen Harrison, Head of the Entitlement Cards Unit, Home Office. (For more information about the Entitlement Card proposal, see the Privacy International UK ID Card Page.)
Admission free. To reserve a seat, please email london2002@privacy.org or call 0207 955 6579. Media enquiries to 07947 778 247.
According to Carlton Vogt unless you have been living in a cave, you’re aware of the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness (TIA) programme. My cave has an internet connection so I can blog about it eventually. Although the news about it has already been round the blogosphere I liked Mr Vogt’s article.
The goal of TIA is to accumulate every bit of transactional online data worldwide and use data mining techniques to provide intelligence information. This means TIA will give the Pentagon access to your credit card data, school records, medical information, travel history, church affiliation, gun ownership, ammunition purchases, library records, video rentals, you name it: “This will all be collected into a database, the purpose of which is ostensibly to fight terrorism, but which will present a massive opportunity for government abuse. There comes a point in almost every science fiction “B” movie where someone suggests that the new invention can be beneficial, but will be dangerous if “it falls into the wrong hands.”
The problem is that this technology has not only fallen into the wrong hands, it was conceived by “the wrong hands.” The chief architect of this new data gathering and mining scheme is none other than John Poindexter: “Those who are old enough will remember him from the arms-for-hostages scandal, in which many of the arms currently threatening us in the Middle East were illegally traded to Iran by the Reagan administration.
Poindexter subsequently was convicted of several felonies, including conspiracy, perjury, and obstruction of justice. The convictions were later overturned on a technicality. The disgraced former admiral re-entered public life this year as a civilian Pentagon employee.”
InfoWorld deals mainly with computer and technology related news or issues. It was most encouraging to read the following analysis by one of the senior editors in his regular column Ethics Matters: “We are in the midst of vast fundamental changes in the body of rights, legal and moral, that we have taken for granted for so long. I am constantly amazed at how passively most people have accepted these changes, which will affect the way we live and work. It is a dangerous path on which false beginnings and missteps along the way can end in disaster.
If we scroll down to the bottom line, we find that the TIA project places too much information on too many people into the hands of too few people with too little oversight. It portends disaster.
…We have the opportunity to put the brakes on here before the situation becomes that grave. Perhaps it’s time for people to shake off their post-9/11 stupor and find out what mischief is being done under the guise of fighting terrorism. You may not like what you see.”
Absolutely. The state is not your friend.
Secretary of Homeland Security to be Tom Ridge commented on domestic spying:
“Ridge said his recent visit to MI5, the British domestic intelligence agency, was “very revealing,” but that the powers the British agency wields would be unacceptable under the U.S. Constitution.”
I can’t really say I find this surprising. (Hi guys, did you get all that?)
I have been decrying the rapid emergence of a British panoptic total surveillance state but do not think this is a purely British problem. A NYTimes article reports Pentagon plans a computer system that would peek at personal data of Americans
(Free registration required to link). Peek is of course a euphemism for ‘spy on’.
Historically, military and intelligence agencies have not been permitted to spy on Americans without extraordinary legal authorization. But Admiral Poindexter, the former national security adviser in the Reagan administration, has argued that the government needs broad new powers to process, store and mine billions of minute details of electronic life in the United States.
Admiral Poindexter, who has described the plan in public documents and speeches but declined to be interviewed, has said that the government needs to “break down the stovepipes” that separate commercial and government databases, allowing teams of intelligence agency analysts to hunt for hidden patterns of activity with powerful computers.
“We must become much more efficient and more clever in the ways we find new sources of data, mine information from the new and old, generate information, make it available for analysis, convert it to knowledge, and create actionable options,” he said in a speech in California earlier this year.
Naturally anyone who values civil liberties and is not blindly trusting of the state is far from enthusiastic about this.
“A lot of my colleagues are uncomfortable about this and worry about the potential uses that this technology might be put, if not by this administration then by a future one,” said Barbara Simon, a computer scientist who is past president of the Association of Computing Machinery. “Once you’ve got it in place you can’t control it.”
[…]
If deployed, civil libertarians argue, the computer system would rapidly bring a surveillance state. They assert that potential terrorists would soon learn how to avoid detection in any case.
Yet of course that is not what the official line. Predictably…
“What we are doing is developing technologies and a prototype system to revolutionize the ability of the United States to detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists, and decipher their plans, and thereby enable the U.S. to take timely action to successfully pre-empt and defeat terrorist acts,” said Jan Walker, the spokeswoman for the defense research agency.
And how will they “detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists”? By spying on the communications of tens of millions of Americans daily without so much as a search warrent of course. This is far from just a British problem.
When looking at the world around us, it is impossible to constantly take everything upon which we must form an opinion back to first principles: life is simply too short for that.
But to decide if a dog might be about to bite you, one must have at least some understanding of the nature of dogs and how they might act differently to cats or parrots or foxes or hippopotamuses (the later being a rare sight in London it must be noted). Whilst the propensity of a Golden Labrador and a Staffordshire Bull Terrier to chomp on you varies considerably, both are nevertheless dogs and thus act within the range of doglike behaviours to which their natures impel them.
And so to understand anything done by a state, the workings of its parts and how they are likely to impact upon your life, one must understand some of the basic underlying truth about the nature of states. All states are not exactly the same just as all dogs are not exactly the same: whilst a libertarian such as myself might lambast the United States or the United Kingdom for many and varied sins, it is clear to all but the ‘rationality impaired’ that the USA and UK are currently significantly less harmful to their subjects than the likes of Iraq or Myanmar or China or Belarus or Zimbabwe.
So when I recently wrote a couple articles about posters by a government body (Transport for London) aimed at garnering public support for increasingly panoptic mass surveillance, some commenters (a minority it must be said) took exception to the idea there might be anything sinister about the vast proliferation of CCTV cameras in Britain to which the state has access. Britain after all, is not Nazi Germany or North Korea, so what is the problem?
Trust us. Constantly. The second you step out of your front door. Nevertheless, all states, like all dogs, do indeed share some common irreducible aspects to their natures. Without getting into the intractable and interminable minarchist versus anarchist inter-libertarian debates of the legitimacy of any form of state, it is fair to say all modern states however democratic and ‘liberal’ suffer from a type of progressive moral cirrhosis. Take the remarks in the Telegraph regarding Britain’s socialist National Health Service:
Rather as in the old Soviet Union, many managers now think it safer to fiddle their returns rather than send bad news back to the centre. This week, for instance, the Department of Health claimed that no one now has to wait more than 24 hours in accident and emergency, a claim that was flatly contradicted by the BMA [British Medical Association]. It has got to the point where we now routinely expect schools to massage their test results and hospital managers to fiddle their waiting lists. No wonder people’s everyday experience of schools and hospitals so rarely seems to accord with the glowing reports presented by the Prime Minister and his colleagues in the House of Commons.
Yet Britain is not the Soviet Union and although it does imprison the most number of people per capita in Europe, there is no network of gulags or mass murders to enforce the governing party’s supremacy. Unlike Saddam Hussain, who holds sham elections in which 100 percent (‘if not more’) vote for him, in the democratic western world, elections are free and fair. Well, sort of. They just gerrymander the way people vote. Of course this is not the same as what Saddam Hussain does but it is certainly the same species of behaviour.
Democracy, Iraqi style: happiness is mandatory
Democracy, American style: representing who exactly?
Democracy, British style: looking after you, like it or not.
(Photo: Mike Scott) So why, given that we are constantly told how superior democratic states are to their benighted totalitarian counterparts, do we see time and time again the same toxic behavioral characteristics, albeit manifested in less homicidal ways?
It is because all modern states exist primarily to do things. By this I mean do more than just guard the boundaries of society (i.e. keep out marauding Turks, put out fires, run law courts). All states have always done things, such as waged wars, built aqueducts or whatever, but not all states have existed to primarily do things beyond aggrandise the King/Tzar/Chief/Khan/Sultan etc… stay out of the state’s way and it tended to leave you alone. That did not mean that such states were not capable of acts of breathtaking tyranny, just that unlike an overtly interventionist state such as we all live under these days, to a large extent the pattern of your life was social rather than political: if your children were schooled, it was because that was the custom and it seemed the thing to do, rather than because the state threatened you with arrest if you did not acquiesce to your children being conscripted for mandatory collective education.
Much like dogs, some states are more vicious than others but ultimately the people who grasp the levers of power do so in the knowledge that they are there to do things and that knowledge alone is the source of their inevitable corruption by the system they are part of. That is why in the long run it does not matter which state wants to envelop their subjects in panoptic surveillance, because in the end no state can be trusted to have such information at its casual disposal because states cannot be trusted to act other than as states, and all states are to a lesser or greater extent corrupt. It is the nature of the beast.
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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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