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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Freedom is a basic value but its champions and its expression will appear in many different forms. White Rose, understandably, has recently concentrated on the technological developments that may undermine our civil liberties, in conjunction with the connivance of the authorities.
Other freedoms include the capability of fulfilling one’s desire to pursue research in the sciences, whether natural or social, without suffering repression from the state. Abdolkarim Soroush, a noted Iranian intellectual, can claim to be the founder of studies on the history and philosphy of science in Iran. However, as the biography on this website delicately notes,
Soroush’s lectures in this mosque continued smoothly for six years. Then owing to certain sensitivities, the weekly programme was suspended and attempts to resume them have so far proved unsuccessful.
Soroush was one of the moderate supporters of the 1979 revolution who attempted to find an Islamic structure that would support his religious beliefs and the values of academic research that he had learned in the West – a project similar to that professed by President Mohammed Khatami. However, his historical writings stressed the contingent nature of Islamic knowledge and invited attention… → Continue reading: Reaffirming the Freedom to think
Report in today’s Telegraph:
Tony Blair is facing a Cabinet revolt over the introduction of compulsory identity cards as senior ministers press him to tone down his radical agenda in the run-up to the next general election.
Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, and John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, are leading the Cabinet opposition to the cards. They would cost individuals about £40 each and would be required before any of the benefits of the state could be obtained.
You get a Poll Tax feel about this, don’t you? I don’t know if Brown and Prescott really, really object to compulsory ID cards. But they do make a very good stick to beat Blair with just now.
There is a good interview with Bruce Schneier in Businessweek, discussing whether tradeoffs of civil liberties for increased security are effective (generally no) and the problems of overreliance on technology rather than common sense. I have written here about Schneier before. Suffice to say he is a very smart guy – a leading expert on electronic security – and it is worth paying attention to what he says.
Good news, although good news about bad news, from Hong Kong:
Hong Kong’s chief executive, Tung Chee-hwa, did something yesterday that Chinese Communist leaders never do on the mainland. He deferred to the clearly expressed majority will in Hong Kong and withdrew legislation for a repressive new security law he was trying to impose.
That’s paragraph one of the New York Times report. This final paragraph reads very European doesn’t it? …
Mr. Tung says he still thinks that new security legislation is needed but is now prepared to wait until there is clearer public support. His plan may be to defuse the issue until after the legislative elections and then try again. Hong Kong’s people will not be deceived so easily.
…except that Europeans are probably a bit easier to deceive.
Stephen Lewis of the Sterling Times message board sent this link.
Follow it, please. Now would be a good time.
Mr Lewis has found a report on the Radio Nederlands website stating that the BBC, the BBC, is to monitor message boards for hate speech on behalf of the authorities.
Once upon a time the only official way your home could be searched was by a policeman backed by a warrant issued by the courts. OK, as a libertarian I could raise certain objections even to that, but it was the evolved and generally agreed custom of my country and that counts for a lot. Then the privilege of search spread first to customs officers and then to tax-gatherers, until now practically any parasite of a an environmental health officer or social worker can walk in.
Count on it. The same process is happening with restrictions of freedom of speech. Fifty years ago the legal right to impose restrictions was the preserve of the courts. Many of the restrictions were ridiculous: the Lord Chamberlain censored naughty bits out of stage plays until as late as 1968. However, in terms of political speech, freedom fifty years ago was greater than freedom now. Speakers in Hyde Park Corner could and did call for the gutters of Mayfair to run red with the blood of the rich and the copper would just say, “steady on mate, steady on.” Part of the reason for this freedom was that the right to restrict was itself restricted to the justice system.
It’s a sign of a half-way healthy state (half-way being about as good as states get) that it is very clear who is doing the state’s dirty work.
Now, it seems, the job of spying on British citizens has been franchised out to that “much loved” institution, the BBC. As Mr Lewis says, that is not their role. Later on in the post some Radio Nederlands commentary is quoted saying that it might be better to have “trained journalists” doing the monitoring than others. Not surprising, I suppose, that the trained journalists at Radio Nederlands rate their fellow trained journalists at the BBC as the best people to employ for this task. I must disagree: if I had to choose I’d rather be spied on by professional spies. At least they live in the real world, and in particular have the peril of Islamofascism very much in the forefront of their minds. I’d trust them way above the BBC to be able to tell the difference between clear statements warning against Islamofascism and genuine hate speech.*
When it comes to judging others – judging us here, for instance – the BBC is very likely to imply that anyone who says out loud that a kind of death-cult has infected to some degree a disturbingly high proportion of the Muslim world is thereby an Islamophobe.
But when it comes to judging themselves, or judging the groups they have a soft spot for, the standard is very different. You can see the double standard in operation by the BBC’s choice of Jew-hating ranter Mahathir as official BBC “expert” on Islam for an upcoming forum. (See Biased BBC here and passim.) Tell you what, Beeb guys, if you want to monitor “hate speech” why don’t you start with him?
*I do not make this distinction between real and apparent hate speech in order to say we should forbid one and allow the other. I am a free speech absolutist. That means I must support the political right to make truly hateful hate speech, however vile, while also asserting my right to condemn it. This includes hate speech about Muslims and hate speech by Muslims. But the distinction between real and apparent hate speech is crucial in terms of moral assessment and national security.
US News and World Report has an article that is well worth reading on how mobile phones are being used as tracking devices for all sorts of purposes, as well as how other consumer devices are also slowly evolving into tracking devices.
Maria at Crooked Timber writes:
Today, EPIC & Privacy International launch ‘Privacy and Human Rights 2003, an international survey of privacy laws and developments’. It is a meaty tome that summarises developments in privacy law and policy in 55 countries during the past year.
This year’s review “finds increased data sharing among government agencies, the use of anti-terrorism laws to suppress political dissent, and the growing use of new technologies of surveillance.” Familiar themes to readers of my entries …
And to readers here.
Maria adds:
By way of disclosure – I did the chapter on Ireland and bits and pieces on the UK, EU and electronic surveillance.
Sounds like a person White Rose should stay tuned to.
If you use Barclays online banking, beware.
There’s a spam email going round claiming to be from them. It says that due to a systems update you should log in to Barclays and reactivate your account.
The link enclosed looks genuine but will take you to the spammer’s site. The objective is to steal your password.
There’re lots of clues that the email is a fake, including strange headers and bad English. However it’s very easy just to click, hence this warning.
This is not a hoax warning about a non-existent virus! I received this evil email myself this morning. Barclays have been informed.
Why is this White Rose Relevant? Because it shows once again that the weakest part of any security system is the human factor. Over-reliance on technical “solutions” gives people a false sense of security and can make them more vulnerable.
Partly cross-posted from An It Harm None.
News about Italian spam:
Senders of unsolicited junk e-mails in Italy will now face jail sentences of up to three years, according to Italian media reports.
The country’s privacy watchdog issued the ruling in an attempt to limit the huge amount of advertising and promotional material sent online.
Sending e-mails without the permission of the receiver is against the law in Italy.
Offenders now risk fines of up to 90,000 euros and between six months and three years in prison, if it is proved that they did it to make a profit.
The ruling follows estimates by the European Commission that spam e-mails cost EU companies approximately 2.25bn euros in lost productivity last year.
EU legislation banning unwanted e-mail is due to come into force on 31 October, but correspondents say that, given the global nature of the internet, it may have little effect.
Most spam comes from the United States and China, and will be outside its reach.
If that’s so, you wonder what the real point of this is. Expect calls for world government to deal with this. Sorry: “global governance”.
Much of the push towards compulsory ID cards, and, in general, towards huge nationally co-ordinated databases of information of every imaginable sort about individual citizens, is based on the wholly fallacious belief among those with no direct knowledge of how these things work that the information in all these databases is automatically going to be correct. Not even a terrorist with million dollar back-up will be able to diddle his way around, say, a policeman demanding to see his “papers”.
It follows, then, that any newspaper story which reports that any such databases might be repositories not of truth but also of falsehood is, to use a favourite phrase of mine here, “White Rose Relevant”. In fact I may start calling it just “WRR” for short.
This story, then, from the New York Times, is very WRR indeed:
WASHINGTON, Sept. 3 — About 3.3 million American consumers discovered within the last year that their personal information had been used to open fraudulent bank, credit card or utility accounts, or to commit other crimes, according to the Federal Trade Commission’s first national survey on identity theft.
The commission, in a report issued today, said these cases had collectively cost businesses $32.9 billion and consumers $3.8 billion.
In addition, 6.6 million people fell victim to account theft in the last year. Unlike identity theft, in which the criminal uses personal information to open and use accounts that are in the victim’s name, account theft entails using stolen credit or A.T.M. cards, or financial records, to steal from the victim’s existing accounts.
Such account-theft cases, the survey found, caused $14 billion in business losses and $1.1 billion in consumer losses. The vast majority of these cases, almost 80 percent, involved credit card fraud.
Though account theft and identity theft are often lumped together in popular perception, data from the survey showed that the consequences of identity theft were more severe. In identity theft, which accounted for nearly 10 million of the 27 million cases of both types in the last five years, the financial losses were greater, and it took victims longer to resolve the cases.
It is not just the fact of falsehood here. It is the scale of it. (Note the number of uses of the words “million” and “billion” in the above paragraphs.) Clearly, for certain sorts of people with certain sorts of friends, this kind of thing is not hard to do.
According to Sir John Stevens, London’s police commissioner, Britain must introduce personal identity cards for all citizens if it is to combat the threat of terrorism and organised crime:
We are sure they would have a massively beneficial effect for us in fighting organised crime, human trafficking and terrorism.
He insisted that new biometric technology, which allows personal details such as fingerprint or retina identification to be included, made mandatory ID cards “a must”.
ID cards are an absolute essential part of armoury in the fight against terrorism and further organised crime. The excuse people say is that terrorists and organised criminals get round it. They might do. But in getting round it, it will identify who they are.
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What I am totally against is the business whereby we can trace and follow people who have a normal life. But we do need to have the ability to identify those people who are around doing their business lawfully and those other people who want to create mayhem and effectively destroy our way of life.
And how would Sir John Stevens define a ‘normal life’? Such clarification is important since it is only those people who deserve to be left alone and not have their lives ‘traced and followed”….
It’s the desire of the police commissioner to have the ‘ability to identify those people who are around doing their business lawfully’ that keeps me awake at night. It seems the British police, despite their protests, are indeed in favour of the Big Brother or rather the Panopticon approach to crime where none happens because everyone is watched all the time. How about allowing people to defend themselves and their freedom? But that is inconceivable to the police mind since everyone is guilty of something at some time and you certainly should not be doing anything they don’t know about, just in case.
Just your ID card, ma’am.
Here’s the final paragraph of a story about how Amsterdam is getting less permissive in its law enforcement policies:
Soon to be introduced is a compulsory identity card, frowned upon after World War Two when careful registration helped the Nazis hunt down Dutch Jews. The card is now seen as an inevitable aid to keep on top of crime.
Not all the news in the article sounds bad to me, but a lot does, and that really does. Presumably this means for the whole of Holland, and not just for Amsterdam.
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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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