Samizdata

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 had a bit of trouble to renew my passport before leaving to Britain – which won’t come as a surprise for anybody used to deal with the uncivil servants of the French social-mediocracy – mainly related to “processing time”, and that’s not a surprise either.

Requesting a 35 hours work week from the French functionaires would actually result in increasing their effective work time.

No, the coffee machine meetings don’t count as effective work time, sorry.

Anyway, during this painful and costly process to ensure I would be dully registered and filled as a dependency of the French Republic, I was repeatedly offered to give up on the passport – “It’s not mandatory for a trip to Britain you know. It’s Europe! You just need an ID card.” Yep, it’s Europe, for sure – and switch to the new National and Unfalsifiable ID Card, Wonder of the French Technology and Guarantor of our Nation’s Security.

I was presented, by several obliging agents of the State, with it’s unsurpassable pluses and benefits, comparing to this lousy old passport I inconsiderately wanted to renew: the New National ID card is not only national and somewhat new, but also unfalsifiable and I would be generously granted this little wonder after a fast and simple procedure – basically “Give us a picture, tell us who you are, sign here and, oh, don’t forget to give us your fingerprints thank you” – and last but not least – drum rolls please – absolutely free.

Yes, free.

Knowing the rapacity of the French state as soon as there is a way to rip off money from the taxpayer, that and that only is highly suspect.

Not considering the fact that, just like the French pension by repartition system, the national ID card was established by the Vichy government during the obviously not so distant past of collaboration with National-Socialist Germany.

At one point, and considering that unlike the aforementioned obliging agents of the State, you have other things to do than marvel about the control apparatus of the State, you end up thinking: “All right, time to make us another enemy”.

Excerpt of the conversation:

Now let me fill in that passport renewal form, thank you.

While we’re at it, I hope that you’ll notice, like I do, the fact that among the proposed choices within an imposed principle (since the law makes an obligation for you to prove your identity in many daily situations), the most dangerous system for individual liberties is also the one that’s free and therefore the only one “financially” accessible by the poorest.
Just make your own conclusions out of this, the next time you’ll hear the French social-mediocrats of all tendencies becoming ecstatic about their “Social Justice” paradigm French style, and boast its superiority.

There’s a lot of cameras in London. I do mean a lot, despite Orwell (so to speak) and this, of course, brings the legitimate concern that was already summarized in the ancient Rome: quis custodiet ipses custodies?
There’s no National ID card in Britain nowadays, even if the Socialists are seriously working on it – Yep, I’m not surprised either.

But there are also and hopefully, individuals working against them.

Eventually, judging by Britain’s century old constitutional stability as opposed to the numerous bloodbath that mark out France’s history, I’d serenely trade the Vichy inspired national ID card for the London camera and the opportunity to side with those who work on resolving the overseers’ watch issue.

Anytime.

Cross-posted from the dissident frogman