We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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An awful lot of people don’t like smoking. Given the passion a number of my friends show for putting themselves into early graves, I put up with the practice for social reasons. And I certainly believe that businessmen and women should be free to have establishments where their customers can escape from the risk of fumigation.
However, things are never that simple. People want to ban smoking simpliciter. Depriving businessmen and women of the choice of letting smokers in, or perhaps having a business at all. And this is precisely the reason 400 publicans in County Kerry say they’re willing to go to jail rather than enforce a ban on smoking in pubs proposed by the Irish Government (coming soon to a European Community near you!).
Every now and then somebody writes a piece (such as the one Brian referred to the other day) which talks about “Some pestilential scientist has invented a device that allows parents to trace their child’s location via his mobile telephone” or similar.
Now it actually isn’t actually scientific or technical issues that are the issue here, for mobile phones are tracking devices by their very nature, and have been since their invention. You see, if you call a mobile phone, then the phone has to be made to ring. In order to be able to make it ring, the network as to know where it is. And in order that this be so, your mobile phone network is tracking you at all times. It isn’t tracking you that precisely, but with sharing of information between networks (which they do, in order to track down mobile phones and sometimes to cooperate with the police) it is possible to track the location of anyone with a mobile phone to within a couple of street blocks. In terms of tracking the person with the phone, although the technology can be improved to track movements more accurately – particularly by putting GPS devices or similar into phones, in some sense it is good enough already. In this case the issues are not so much technological – the technology is already there – but regulatory and legal. Just how much of this information will be logged and stored. Having a database recording everywhere I have been in the last five years is different from being able to record where I am now on demand. How much of this information may or must be shared with government and law enforcement. And how much of this information may be used commercially and in what ways. Is it appropriate to provide a service to parents that allows them to track the movements of their children? (Certainly if I was a teenager, I would find it pretty rough if my mother was tracking me at all times).
But, of course, technology is advancing. Reading this article suggests that things are going to get far worse. Before too long we may have so called “passive radar”. Essentially the point of this is that our mobile phones are throwing lots and lots of radio signals around all the time. These signals are bouncing off things, being partially absorbed by other objects, and similar. If our phones and base-stations record signal strength, signal direction, gaps in the signal, doppler effects, and other such pieces of information, it may be possible to essentially construct an electronic map of the terrain that the signals are travelling through. Essentially if you are walking down the street not carrying a mobile phone or any form of electronic tag, it may be possible to track you using the mobile phones of other people in the street. Unlike conventional radar systems, this type of tracking cannot easily be detected, as it uses radio signals that have other purposes and are there already. The privacy implications of this are, of course, worrying.
Even if this particular means of ubiquitous tracking does not come into being, or at least not quickly, some technology that achieves essentially the same thing is going to come into being at some point, like it or not. If we want to attempt to establish rights to not be tracked, or clear laws as to how such information can and cannot be used, we need to do so now, when tracking is possible but not ubiquitous. Trying to do so so after it becomes ubiquitous is going to be too late.
This minute is my contribution but I should re-emphasise that I remain unconvinced by the overall policy. I believe the proposed plan is flawed, and that no tinkering with particular issues will be able to resolve what is a fundamental political matter. We remain as far apart as ever on the acceptability of charging. How will we get people to accept a fee when asylum seekers get the card free? What about the practicality of ensuring every citizen provides a biometric sample while no effective procedures are in place for those who refuse? The potential for a large-scale debacle which harms the Government is great, and any further decisions on the next steps must be made collectively. I will continue to urge strongly that this issue be shelved.
–Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, asking David Blunkett some very good questions in a leaked Cabinet document, as revealed in the Sunday Times.
Big Mother
Here’s another of those Has This Person Been Reading White Rose? pieces, this time by Jemima Lewis in today’s Telegraph:
Some pestilential scientist has invented a device that allows parents to trace their child’s location via his mobile telephone. This is the latest in a rash of new gadgets designed to make sure children never get a moment’s privacy. There is the tracker watch, which uses Global Positioning System satellites to pinpoint a child’s whereabouts (and which, once affixed around the poor blighter’s wrist, cannot be removed without alerting the police). There are similar devices that can be sewn into the child’s clothing or school bag, or – creepiest of all – surgically implanted under the skin. And last month we saw the unveiling of a gadget which, when installed in the family car, reports back to parents where, and how, their child is driving.
It seems extraordinary that, at a time when children’s rights are more loudly invoked than ever before, there is not an uproar over this invasion of their civil liberties. There is no statistical justification for it: children in Britain are no more likely to be abducted by a stranger now than in 1975. It can serve only to foster parental paranoia and make children feel more hounded than ever.
Who would want to be young in the reign of Big Mother?
Often one says at this point: read it all. But that’s all of it. It’s just a diary bit in a longer piece which is about lots of other things as well. So, no need.
The Observer reports that it is now “highly unlikely” that Big Blunkett’s plan to introduce compulsory National Identity Cards for innocent British citizens will be included in the next Queen’s speech.
Apparently the decision follows new evidence that ID Cards would be “close to useless” in fighting terrorism – something those of us opposed to the idea have been saying for ages.
Another problem is the “foundation documents” required to gain an ID card. If ID Cards are issued on the basis of (for example) birth certificates and birth certificates are easily forged then ID Cards are worthless.
If this report is accurate then it is good news for UK civil liberties. However it doesn’t mean the threat is over, we need to remain vigilant. There is every likelihood that Big Blunkett will try to resurrect his pet project.
Cross posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe
Nowadays we need to celebrate every victory, however small.
Management at the Trelleborg chemical company in Leicester have agreed to stop tagging their employees.
Under the recently imposed scheme workers had to request and wear a red tag whenever they took a break. Not surprisingly they complained that this was demeaning. Following ACAS intervention the company agreed to scrap the system.
The fact that such a repulsive scheme has been scrapped is encouraging. The fact that the company thought they could get away with it in the first place is worrying.
BBC report here
I don’t believe we picked up on this, from from silicon.com on the 1st of this month.
A “perfectly secure” electronic identity card will be in use in France by 2006, French Home Secretary Nicolas Sarkozy has announced. The card will carry a chip which will combine “the standard type of personal data you get in this type of document and an electronic certification system”. A digital authentication system with a public key infrastructure (PKI) will be used to guarantee the authenticity of the holder and ensure confidentiality.
But when it comes to whether the card will contain biometrics, Sarkozy said it is still too early to tell but underlined that the card is still in the project stage. For Sarkozy, the potential applications for the card are far clearer, however. Citizens will be able to use the card with central government, local authorities as well as businesses, he said.
This next paragraph makes this sound particularly nasty:
The minister also announced that “a strategic blueprint for electronic public services from 2003 to 2007” will be published in the coming weeks. “It’s no longer up to the citizens to come to e-government, it’s up to e-government go to them”, he said.
They’re coming to get you.
But the question of the protection of personal data hasn’t gone away …
No indeed.
Speaking of medical privacy, time for a little light relief. The BBC reports that Philips has invented underwear that can monitor your vital signs and dial 999 in the event of a problem.
Apparently the hi-tech spy underwear can be washed and ironed as normal. Just be sure to take it off first.
Here’s a White Rose Relevant speech in the House of Representatives, from April 16th of this year, by Representative Ron Paul of Texas. Apologies if it’s already been flagged up here, but I don’t believe it has. Paul is not the kind of man who gets to decide the law, but his opinions still count for something.
First two paragraphs:
Mr. Speaker, I rise to introduce the Patient Privacy Act. This bill repeals the misnamed Medical Privacy regulation, which went into effect on April 14 and actually destroys individual medical privacy. The Patient Privacy Act also repeals those sections of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 authorizing the establishment of a “standard unique health care identifier” for all Americans, as well as prohibiting the use of federal funds to develop or implement a database containing personal health information. Both of these threats to medical freedom grew out of the Clinton-era craze to nationalize health care as much as politically possible.
Establishment of a uniform medical identifier would allow federal bureaucrats to track every citizen’s medical history from cradle to grave. Furthermore, as explained in more detail below, it is possible that every medical professional, hospital, and Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) in the country would be able to access an individual citizen’s records simply by entering an identifier into a health care database.
Cards on the table. The bosses of this blog are out of town, and although they may be able to stick stuff up here from time to time, they may be distracted. I’m one of the people they hope will keep things buzzing in their absence. So I googled a few obvious things like “surveillance” and “privacy” and got little that was new, and then I tried “Freedom versus Security”, and got to this piece at Mr Blog, from way back in August.
Mr Blog has this to say on the matter:
Defining the debate as “freedom versus security” circumvents the question of whether the various proposals, in fact, improve security. Where is the evidence for this assumption that any of these measures can help ensure security?
He then attacks various supposed US security measures on cost effectiveness grounds. This critique is good as far as it goes. Indeed we do not want to hand on to our grandchildren a society bankrupted by a million futile security measures which weren’t. That’s true.
But I think Mr Blog is making a fundamental error of omission here. The really big consequence of framing things as “freedom versus security” is to smuggle past you the notion that “freedom” can never ever be any good for “security”. Yet plainly it can.
If the populus is numbed into a state of brainless inertia by laws that take away their freedom, and which simultaneously promise to create security, then a major source of security, in the form of individuals protecting themselves and each other, may be switched off, and by the very measures which were supposedly going to make us all more secure. The “cost” of “security” measures isn’t only that they cost us a ton of money, or even that they cost us freedom. What if, by costing us freedom, they also reduce security? That’s the biggest problem with framing this argument as “freedom versus security”.
As I have probably said here before, this debate reminds me of the Economic Calculation debate of a hundred years ago, and Mr Blog is just like one of those anti-economic-planning grumblers of days gone by who complained that planning would be more of a muddle and less of a spur to prosperity than pro-planners fancied, and that it would eat up our freedoms to insufficiently good effect. But that was to miss the vital point about prosperity, which was that in order to get it, you had to have freedom. No freedom, no prosperity.
What if security is the same? No freedom, no security. I think it is, and I think that’s true. And I want some latter day Von Mises to write a huge book which proves it.
Mr Blog’s error is all the more distressing because he frames the question so clearly.
The problem with using technology to look after children is that it is liable also, in due course, to be used to look after adults.
As part of writing for this, I occasionally buy the Times Educational Supplement, and on page 5 of the most recent issue (October 3 2003) it says this (paper only):
Pupils will soon be asked for a thumb-print instead of a password to enter internet chat-rooms.
A firm in the north-east of England has spent three years developing a scanner that will make it harder for paedophiles to prey on youngsters via the internet.
Think2gether, which is based in Gateshead, says the scanner is the first secure access system for chatroom users.
For about £30 schools will be able to buy the thumb-print scanner, which is already being used at the South Tyneside city learning centre and in Leicester education action zone.
Alan Wareham, director of Think2gether, said the system had attracted interest from as far away as Singapore.
“The problem is that children often tell other people their password, which is something adults tend not to do,” he said.
“A child can pass on this information in all innocence and the adult can then lon on as that child and pretend it is them using the chat-rooms.
“The scanner removes this possibility by scanning the child’s thumb-print three times before letting them in. We are also developing hardware which will monitor and record conversations in chatrooms, as additional protection.”
As so often when someone is quoted, the last bit is the scariest.
STL today.com reports that Charter Communications Inc., third largest cable provider in the United States, filed a suit on Friday seeking to block the recording industry from obtaining the identities of Charter customers who allegedly shared copyrighted music over the Internet. Charter filed papers in U.S. District Court in St. Louis in a bid to quash subpoenas that the Recording Industry Association of America issued seeking the identities of about 150 Charter customers.
“We are the only major cable company that has not as yet provided the RIAA a single datum of information,” said Tom Hearity, vice president and associate general counsel for Charter.
Via Slashdot
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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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