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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I was just thinking up a few scenarios in answer to the assertion that “a law abiding person has nothing to fear from ID cards, in-car tracking systems or surveillance cameras”. These are some wholly or mostly law-abiding persons who do have something to fear:
- A person who has unpopular political beliefs of left or right that might lose them their job or promotion.
- A person who is homosexual but their family does not know.
- A teenage girl secretly visiting her boyfriend. He is of a different race to her family, and they have forbidden her to see him.
- A man who is seeking to change his job needs to attend interviews with other companies. He doesn’t want his present employer to know for fear that if the interviews don’t work out he might end up worse off than before, having lost the confidence of his boss.
- A woman scouting out places to go to get away from her violent partner.
- Someone going to Alcoholics Anonymous or drugs rehabilitation sessions.
- Someone going to church, synagogue or mosque who fears the scorn of their secular friends, colleagues or family.
- Someone attending classes of religious instruction prior to converting to another religion who fears the vengeance of their family if their apostasy becomes known.
- A son or daughter visiting an estranged parent without the knowledge of the parent they live with.
- An ex-criminal seeking to go straight who must meet his probation officer or register with the police.
- An adulterer. (I think adultery is very wrong, but I don’t want the government involved in exposing it – besides the intrinsic nastiness of state intervention in such matters, you can bet they would expose the adulteries of their opponents and pass over the adulteries of their friends.)
That example takes us to a more general point: there are so many laws that nearly all of us are breaking some of them all the time. This fact gives local and national authorities enormous scope for quiet blackmail. You think it’s unlikely that they would be so wicked? Well, the blackmailers themselves might scarcely see it as blackmail. Imagine this scenario: they get to know that X, an irritating serial complainer, writer of letters to the editor, and general thorn in the side of several local councillors, is attending an adult education class for more than the number of hours permitted to an unemployed person who is meant to be actively seeking work. How satisfactory to take action against this pest! Meanwhile Y, who sat next to X in the class and is equally unemployed and equally breaking the rules (or equally unaware of them), is ignored because he is not a troublemaker.
Cross-posted from Samizdata.net
In an attempt to marshal my thoughts and arguments on the subject I’ve added some pages to my web site:
UK Compulsory National Identity Cards – The Case Against
Hopefully this’ll be of some use to those opposing Big Blunkett. There’s a load more that could be added (for example I haven’t even mentioned the problems with biometrics) but at least it’s a start.
It’s one thing to promise not to pass on data to other organisations, and it’s another thing again not to pass on data to other organisations:
JetBlue Airways passengers, more than a million of them, have been unsuspecting guinea pigs in a Defense Department contractor’s experiment in mining commercial databases to assess the risk of a person turning out to be a terrorist. The airline admits it violated its own privacy policy when it acceded to the Pentagon’s request to give passenger records to Torch Concepts, a private technology business that was ostensibly creating a program to enhance security at military bases.
That’s paragraph one of a New York Times story today. This is the final para:
This misstep only feeds legitimate consumer fears that companies and governments are too quick to use private data in unauthorized ways. It is worrisome, in this regard, that the Homeland Security Department has already backtracked from its original vow to use its passenger-profiling program only to fight terrorism. There is now talk of turning it into an all-purpose law-enforcement tool. For its part, in addition to ascertaining what actually took place, Congress may also need to consider new legal protections for consumers’ privacy.
Mission creep, in other words.
I really don’t know how all these so-called ‘civil libertarians’ can possibly live with themselves. Don’t they care about the children?
Children are frightened of speeding traffic and want more measures to make roads safer, a survey has suggested.
Three-quarters of children questioned said they wanted more speed cameras.
About 70% thought drivers should go slower near their school, with almost as many wanting drivers to slow down near their house.
Half of the 1,500 children surveyed wanted safer places to cross the road.
The findings of the survey of children aged 7-14 in city schools by road safety charity Brake were released to coincide with the annual Road Safety Week.
A good friend of mine who has been professionaly engaged in market research has provided me with chapter and verse on just how ludicrously easy it is to get the answers that the researcher wants. Quadruple the easiness when the views being solicited are those of children.
A ‘road safety charity’?
David Sucher has news of a conference, and reckons that White Rose ought to be monitoring what was being talked about.
Says David:
“Ubiquitous Computing” means “computing technology that migrates beyond our desktops onto our hands, heads and clothing, and becomes increasingly embedded in a wide variety of other objects, such as walls, cars and appliances.”
Following his Radio 5 Live spot about ID cards last night (see the post below for links and email info), another email from Sean Gabb arrived, to the effect that the programme went well:
… All I had to do this evening was state the main heads of opposition to compulsory identity cards, and then sit back and listen to the callers as they made their own points.
All but one of the callers was against the idea. I spoke to one of the production people, who told me about a flood of e-mails and text messages that ran 20-1 against. …
Sean says he was particularly grateful to the lady who …
… gave me the point about perfect copies of ID cards on sale in Lagos weeks before the real ones had begun dropping through letter boxes.
He continued:
Quite plainly, the speakers for the scheme were drunk on technology that they didn’t understand. None of them could answer the often fierce questioning from the callers about how retina eye scans could be made secure against forgery.
I said less than I normally do. I didn’t get properly on to the civil liberties aspects. But it was the callers who made all those points, and with impressive fluency and conviction.
I was unable to hear this programme myself, but it sounds like it went well, doesn’t it? Sean is working on a system to have all such broadcasts up at the Libertarian Alliance website.
Good show.
Email from Sean Gabb:
I have just been contacted by BBC Radio 5, to go on air tonight (Sunday 21st September, 10-11 pm BST) on “Late Night Live”, to discuss the principle of compulsory identity cards. I am not sure yet if the discussion will go ahead, or with me taking part. However, people often complain that I do not give enough notice, so I am sending this out as soon as I can.
You can find Radio 5 at 693 and 909 Khz on the AM band. Otherwise, it is available as streaming audio from this this website.
If you want to contribute with moral support – and this is one reason I am sending this message out! –you can telephone the studio on: 0500 909 693
You can text messages to: 85058 (search me what these digits mean)
Or you can e-mail questions and comments via this web page.
Needless to say, I do welcome support. I shall probably be faced with dozens of the usual sheeple, insisting that they have nothing to hide and nothing to fear. You may not be able to get on air, but if you can send supportive e-mails, the weight of these will be measured.
I will make a recording of the debate, and in due course make this available as a sound file from my web site and that of the Libertarian Alliance.
By the way, the Tony Martin broadcast will go up, I hope, in the next five days.
Many regards,
Sean Gabb
Director of Communications
The Libertarian Alliance
Sunday 21st September 2003
sean@libertarian.co.uk
Despite recent cabinet setbacks, Big Blunkett is determined to introduce compulsory National Identity Cards for innocent British citizens.
The BBC Reports that he intends the legislation to be announced in the next Queen’s speech.
When pressed about whether they would be compulsory he said: “my own view is that the minimum is you can’t actually work, or draw on services unless you have the card”
That sounds compulsory to me.
Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe
Madsen Pirie at the newly launched Adam Smith Insitute Weblog, and Andy Duncan at Samizdata both comment unfavourably on the retrospective nature of the law that has been crafted to strip Lord Archer of the Lord bit of his name. Both link to this Telegraph piece. And I’d like to think that there are many other bloggers who have commented in a similar manner, to whom apologies for the neglect.
Dr Pirie also links to his own year 2000 Guardian piece, entitled Sweeping Away Our Liberties, which is well worth a complete read. He lists all the important elements of what is meant by the phrase “rule of law”, and notes that all of them are (i.e. they already were three years ago) being eroded in various ways.
Last two paragraphs:
The pattern emerges quite clearly: government is making laws out of particular cases and eroding the general principles in order to secure a particular aim. It wants to bring to justice the people none of us have any time for: financial swindlers, racist thugs, paedophiles, war criminals, drug dealers and terrorists. Others might include rapists, petty professional criminals who are “obviously guilty”, and multiple offenders whose record will be known to magistrates, but not to juries.
In the interest of bringing these low lifes to justice, the principles which protect the liberties of all of us are swept away. The precepts which have guarded society are destroyed to target particular groups of offenders. After all, we do not want them getting off, do we? In some cases, though, we might accept that, preferring a few unsavoury individuals to walk free rather than compromise the foundations on which our liberties depend. We give the devil himself the benefit of our laws, for how could we otherwise claim it ourselves?
The Publican reports that the British Institute of Innkeeping (BII) is calling on the trade to show support for the national ID card scheme, despite reports that the Cabinet has rejected the plan.
Home secretary David Blunkett is looking to introduce the scheme, which would see the introduction of a compulsory ID card for everyone in the UK aged over 16. This will effectively give the pub industry the single proof-of-age card that many licensees and pub operators have been calling for.
Reports this week suggest that Mr Blunkett’s project has failed to gain full Cabinet support and that the plans have been referred back to a government sub-committee, a sign that there are serious doubts. However, Caroline Nodder, spokesperson for the BII, said most of its members fully back the scheme.
Given the number of local proof-of-age schemes it is hard for licensees to spot fake IDs. So we strongly support plans for a single, national ID card. We need to keep pushing this because from the trade’s perspective it is a very good idea.
Ms Nodder also said the very fact that ministers were sitting down and discussing a concrete plan represented a huge degree of progress.
Up until 18 months ago, ministers made it clear they wouldn’t even talk about an ID card scheme. We hope good sense will prevail. The introduction of ID cards will be a significant way forward for the government because it will help crack down on under-age drinking and has made it clear that is a key priority.
Yes, it’s true, there are people who live on an entirely different planet…
Silicon.com reports that police and Internet service providers (ISP) in the UK have started working together to combat crime on the Internet. Private seminars held behind closed doors later this month aim to identify which electronic evidence could – and should – be made available to police investigating a crime. Detective chief superintendent Keith Akerman, chair of the Computer Crime Group set up by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), said:
We aim to cover all crimes. We will publish working guidelines on how evidence is gathered, its integrity, and its presentation in court
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The actual content of emails is expected to remain private, in all circumstances, in line with Akerman’s statement that the new guidelines will follow the Data Protection Act’s existing laws for telephone operators. Those laws state that police may access details of the timing of a phone call, and who participated, but not the content of the call. “Content is not at issue here,” Akerman added.
The emotive issue of child pornography and internet ‘grooming’ represented the biggest headache for ISPs. While they would never wish to be seen to be condoning such crimes, they risked a serious backlash if they were to implement the more wide-ranging surveillance and monitoring measures which would have been required.
According PR Newswire press release Tim Lord, chief executive of the Tobacco Manufacturers’ Association, responded today to the news that EU Health Commissioner David Byrne proposes to use EU Health and Safety Law to impose a blanket ban on public smoking all across Europe.
Everyone, smokers and non-smokers, employees and the rest of us, should have access to clean air. We all agree with that – the issue is how do you deliver it? Commissioner Byrne wants a draconian solution – to ban smoking wherever people may work – and do so via a Brussels directive to all of Europe. The Commissioner should leave health issues to individual countries as envisaged under EU protocol and let them handle their own affairs. He should also note the impact of blanket smoking bans in other countries.
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