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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It’s like a cancer that we can battle against but never truly defeat. As it creeps purposefully through our national lymph system some of us can summon up the courage to fight it back and, for a while, it can appear as if we are in remission. But then comes the hoping and the praying for the final ‘all clear’ that signals a rebirth and a new lease of disease-free life.
It never comes. The cells are corrupted again and the cancer returns to devour us:
Sweeping powers for Government agencies to carry out covert surveillance, run agents and gather the telephone data of private citizens were contained in legislation published yesterday.
State bodies ranging from the police, intelligence services and Whitehall departments to local councils, the Postal Services Commission and the chief inspector of schools will be able to authorise undercover operations.
The measures were activated by David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, under the controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which became law three years ago. They need to be approved again by both Houses of Parliament before they can be used.
These horrors first made their appearance about a year ago and set off a call-to-arms that, in turn, caused the Home Office to drop the proposals. Or, at least, they made an appearance of dropping them because, like that lurking cancer, they never really went away. They were merely stacked neatly in the pending trays until an another opportune moment presented itself. Seems that the moment is now.
Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said the British people were “the most spied upon in the Western world”.
I reckon that’s a pretty fair prognosis. But why? Why are our political elites so determined to construct this panopticon? Why are they so single-minded about this project that they appear immune to sweet reason, protest or appeals to decency? What exactly is driving them? Are they so riddled with paranoia and insecurity that they see monsters and assassins lurking behind every curtain? Is that how they see us? I cannot think of any other reason why a democratically elected government would come to think of themselves as colonial occupiers of their own country.
What has led to this calamitous collapse of trust? Is it repairable? I rather fear that it is not.
Questions, questions. Answers may come in due course but I suspect none will be satisfactory or stop the cancer from spreading. Time for palliative surgery?
[This has been cross-posted from Samizdata.]
Does any of this sound familiar?
Government agencies will be able to access e-mail and phone data, under measures unveiled by ministers.
Local councils will be among the bodies able to use surveillance to investigate crimes, protect national security and protect public safety.
They will be able to use the powers to collect taxes.
It should.
Initial plans to revise legislation were dubbed the “snooper’s charter” when announced by home secretary David Blunkett last summer.
Yes, I remember that.
In a separate development phone companies and internet service providers will be told by the government to keep records of phone calls and internet visits for a year.
Is anyone complaining?
The civil rights campaigners Liberty have denounced the latest plans which give agencies such as fire authorities, jobcentres, the Postal Services Commission, the Gaming Board and the Charity Commission the power to use surveillance to investigate crime.
Liberty director Shami Chakrabati said: “This underlines the uncomfortable fact that the British public are the most spied upon people in the Western world.”
“The government has failed to learn from its mistakes.
“After the original “snoopers’ charter” was published last year, the government was forced to retreat after enormous public outcry. We hope the same happens again”.
What the government seems to have learned is: if at first you don’t get your snoopers’ charter, try, try and try again.
This Guardian article, which basically starts out as an extremely optimistic take on the domestic possibilities of new computer and camera and screen technology, has White Rose Relevance.
Nanotechnology – science at a billionth of a metre – and mobile technology could together turn the house of the future into something out of science fiction, according to scientists at the British Association science festival yesterday.
Which is not very White Rose Relevant at all. But gradually this changes.
“There are all sorts of things that can happen, from simple lighting through computing, security labelling, getting rid of bar codes and checkouts in supermarkets – just wheel your trolley through a gate, it will be scanned and the cost will be deducted from your bank account – electronic noses, maybe, sitting in your fridge and telling you if anything is off, and so on.
Getting a bit nearer to our territory.
Long before the walls of the house became sentient, the objects within it would be in touch through mobile technology. Nigel Linge of the University of Salford told the conference that he and colleagues were already working with the Greater Manchester police on a potential project called Crimespot.
Crimespot. Now it’s getting a bit creepier.
“We are therefore creating a future in which your mobile device knows everything about you, including your current location to within a few metres, and what you are presently doing,” he went on.
“Does this bring back memories of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where Big Brother kept careful watch over everyone and, if you stepped out of line, whisked you off to room 101?”
Room 101. Bloody hell.
In fact, the watchful house could keep an eye on people who needed extra care.
Extra care. That’s how it spreads. What makes all this potentially so scary is that it is potentially so helpful. If it was nothing but scary, it wouldn’t be scary, because it would never catch on. As it is, you can see the genuinely security-driven private sector setting all this stuff up, and then the government moving in and demanding to have access to everyone’s mega hard drive. So that it can care for us all even better.
This is just what we need.
The European Space Agency (ESA) is funding Irish provider of location technology products Mapflow to undertake a feasibility study to look into the possibility of implementing a pan-European road tolling system. The research aims to establish whether satellite technology can be used to calculate the cost of motoring.
A plan exists to complement this activity with a real demonstration of the virtual tolling concept in the greater area of Lisbon. Also under ESA funding, the project is being conducted by the Portuguese company Skysoft in close cooperation with the Portuguese motorway authority. The demonstration is planned for the end of 2004.
In April this year the European Commission published a proposal that all vehicles should pay road tolls electronically, with full implementation foreseen for 2010. Under the proposal, all vehicles will carry a ‘black box’, which will be tracked by satellites relaying information on the distance travelled by the vehicle, the class of road travelled and the time at which the journey was made.
…
Germany recently received EU approval to implement a new tolling system for goods vehicles. The system – currently being tested – uses the US-operated Global Positioning System (GPS). The government hopes to raise 650 million euros a year through the new charges.
Satellite-assisted tolling would make use of Galileo, Europe’s planned satellite navigation system. Galileo is a joint initiative between the European Commission and ESA to develop a global navigation system, scheduled to be operational by 2008.
I am actually in favour of charging for road use on a per kilometre basis. Inevitably this means using electronic tolling devices of some sort (and from a traffic management point of view this is desirable, as people do not have to stop to pay tolls, and also it is possible to manage congestion better by being able to vary tolls depending on time of day and traffic conditions). Equally inevitably this has privacy consequences.
However, having a top down approach in which a centralised EU agency moniters the movement of every car in Europe strikes me as terrifying. (Also, the further you remove the charging scheme from the people who are building and operating the roads, the less it becomes a charge for road use and the more it becomes a simple tax, too. A Europe wide charging scheme is about the worst way of doing it I can think of. What is much more desirable is a bottom up approach in which the individual owners of the roads implement their own systems, and from which they negotiate technology compatibility and a clearing house for sharing charges between themselves. Governments may still get their hands on the data, but a situation where it starts out in the private sectory and possibly works its way up is far better than a situation where everything starts in the hands of the EU and then works its way down.
This trial is perhaps partly a consequence of the fact that the EU has decided that Europe will build “Galileo”: its own alternative to the American GPS system. Having decided this, it needs to find uses for it. And if you are the EU, tracking Europeans at all times is the sort of thing that comes to mind.
(Link via slashdot)
Crossposted from Transport Blog
White Rose readers might be interested in a few pages I’ve just put up on my web site:
UK Civil Liberties – New Labour’s Record
Typing it up depressed me even more than I expected.
I’ve tried to double-check everything, if you find any errors of fact please email me and let me know.
What do you call a country which is run by the police for the benefit of the police? Is that a ‘police state’? Yes, I think that qualifies. Surely it does?
SENIOR police officers will call this week for the DNA of everyone in Britain to be put on a national database from the moment they are born.
They believe that this would be a vital weapon in the drive to curb crime and help to solve hundreds of murders.
[From the UK Times]
Some nerve those plods have got! Assuming that nothing has been lost in the media translation, I detect not even a hint of humility. After all, they are supposed to be public servants. And what next, I wonder? ‘Police demand increase in income tax to help fight crime’? ‘Police demand greater integration with the European Union to help fight crime? ‘Police demand greater regulation of world trade in order to fight crime’?
What disturbs me here is not so much the idea of a national DNA database. Okay, that does disturb me but HMG hasn’t got the money to fund such a grand scheme so it isn’t going to happen (yet). No, the ugliness is more immediate than that; it lies in the casual assumption by police chiefs that they can simply demand such a thing and expect their will to be done without even paying lip service to the principle of democracy that most people in this country set great store by. Who died and left them boss?
The crime-solving canard has worn so thin that it is almost beyond mockery. Solving crimes is something that the UK police are not much interested in doing anymore. Population control is now their job (‘Social Management’ in NuSpeak). And as they now regard themselves to be a uniformed wing of the ruling elite, I suppose we’re going to get much more of this kind of thing from them in future.
So now we are the servants and they are the masters. How did that happen?
Cross-posted from Samizdata.net
In the category of “better late than never”, I don’t think White Rose noticed this CNN story from Aug 13 first time around:
JACKSON, Mississippi (AP) – Students in Biloxi public schools started classes this week under the watchful eye of Webcams that will keep track of every classroom and hallway.
I glanced through the WR archives from around then and couldn’t find anything. Presumably these webcams are still operating.
Car tracking news from New Zealand:
Motorists face being taxed on how far they travel under government plans to generate cash.
Transport Minister Paul Swain said with vehicles becoming more fuel efficient, revenue from petrol tax would drop and alternative charges needed to be considered.
It is one of a number of transport schemes being looked at by officials, including a Big Brother-style project to equip every car with a personalised microchip so law-breaking motorists can be prosecuted by computer.
And Declan McCullagh offers a different angle on the same technology.
Our government is determined that we shall be numbered and identity carded no matter how long it takes or how much opposition has to be ground down, and if they can’t do it by persuading adults, they’ll do it by habituating (and I can think of ruder words than that) children.
Every child in England is to be given a credit card-style ID number in reforms aimed at preventing a repeat of the murder of Victoria Climbie, the Government has announced.
The long-awaited Green Paper on children’s services also included a proposal to create a Children’s Commissioner for England, whose job it will be to speak up for under-18s and ensure their views are “fed into” Government policy.
It set out a large number of changes to the structure of children’s services, which will see education, health and social care combined and dispensed from neighbourhood schools.
Tony Blair said the proposals were a “significant step” towards ensuring there was no repeat of the Climbie case.
One thing is very certain about this new ID numbered world which they are determined to create. It will still contain outbursts of evil like Victoria Climbie’s murder. ID numbers won’t stop that. → Continue reading: ID numbers and Hidden Europe
The public wants compulsory ID cards, but doesn’t like their cost, says Stephen Robinson of the Telegraph:
The public overwhelmingly supports the idea of compulsory identity cards, says a YouGov opinion poll published today in The Telegraph. But it strongly objects to having to pay £40 for them.
Seven per cent of those asked were so opposed to the cards that they said they would refuse to acquire or carry one. This suggests that if the Government introduces legislation for cards this year, as expected, the police would have to act against some three million “refuseniks”.
In other words, the costs of compulsion could be a lot greater than the public now realises. When the public realises a few years down the line that the benefits of it aren’t that great either, how will they feel then? Let’s hope we can explain the meagreness of those benefits to them now, soon enough to stop this thing.
A report in The Times suggests that the Police Superintendents’ Association (PSA) will this week call for a compulsory national DNA database. Kevin Morris, chairman of the PSA, insisted that “people were not as fearful as politicians believed”.
He’s wrong.
The article also stated that Big Blunkett hopes to announce this month that he is to go ahead with his plan for compulsory National Identity Cards for innocent British citizens.
Call me cynical but I suspect a smokescreen. The row over a compulsory DNA database could obscure the arguments over Identity Cards. The tactic appears to be to set up the DNA database as a bogeyman so that compulsory ID Cards don’t seem as bad.
Now is the time to write to your MP about Identity cards. Next month could be too late.
Partly cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe
That’s RFID as in Radio Frequency Identification for Business.
News.com’s Eric Peters explains the point which RFID has now reached:
Earlier this summer, Wal-Mart announced that by January 1, 2005, radio frequency identification technology would become a requirement for doing business with the world’s largest retailer. A line was drawn in the sand: RFID was going to happen.
More recently, Wal-Mart said it would not put RFID technology in retail stores, and a flurry of “not ready for prime time” RFID responses followed. But Wal-Mart’s retreat from shelf RFID tags neither suggests a retreat on its earlier commitment to RFID nor a signal for the halt of adoption.
Product level RFID tagging may be years away, but a technology inflection point has been reached. Many companies are now extremely interested in the technology, and the potential is just too attractive to ignore. Globally, RFID will not sell more razors or bars of soap. What it can do, however, is redistribute the market share of the different companies that sell razors and bars of soap.
The costs of not making your supply chain RFID-compliant far outweigh the costs and obstacles of implementation. As with other high-impact technologies, the early adopters will get a disproportionate share of the wealth, and the laggards will be the companies who suffer lost market share.
So RFID (like surveillance cameras) is (are) here to stay, and will have to be lived with.
My thanks to David Sucher of City Comforts Blog for emailing me about this piece.
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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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