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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.
Recent internet ructions involving … “viruspam”? – is that the word, do you think? – have prompted understandable calls for greater government oversite of the internet:
The teenager accused of creating a version of the Blaster worm that infected computer systems across the world last week has been arrested. SoBig.F, an e-mail virus unleashed on the Internet just as Blaster was being stamped out, is expected to expire next week.
But all is far from quiet on the electronic frontier. Security experts are already preparing for SoBig.G. Another worm may already be squirming through newly discovered flaws in computer operating systems. And in the moments between epidemics, the Internet’s more run-of-the-mill annoyances — spam, scams and spyware — can be counted on to keep users on edge.
The Internet has become a vital part of commerce and culture, but it is still a free-for-all when it comes to facing computer meltdowns. As America’s 156 million Internet users brace for the next round of digital vandalism, some experts say that it is time for the government to bolster a basic sense of stability in cyberspace that societies expect from their critical public resources.
The problem being, of course, that catching the miscreants who do these dirty internet deeds is the devil of a job and could, once the effort is put firmly in place with a huge George W. Bush type mega-budget, result in a whole new raft of excuses for spying on all of us, because how else do you catch these damn people?
The basic problem of “viruspam” is that you do, after a fashion, consent to accept it, same as you agree to accept junk mail of the old-fashioned sort. That makes it damn near impossible to detect – detect in the policeman sense of catching the bastards. Detectable crime usually involves an unwilling victim, and often an unwilling victim who registers the fact of the crime having been committed pretty much at the moment it happens. “Cybercrime”, if crime it be, is not like that. Not only is it infuriating and destructive in and of itself, it is doubly destructive because of the measures “needed” to put a stop to it.
Reading the motoring section of the Sunday Times on the weekend, I found the following extraordinary letter to the editor from a Maurice Hyman of London
We recently booked a Volkswagen Golf hire car for a four-day break in Norfolk and arrived at the depot in London to pick it up, expecting to sign the papers and leave on our holiday.
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However, the supervisor asked that we wait a moment for a few formalities.
Suddenly, and without asking, he pointed a camera at us, linked to a computer, explaining that the picture would be transferred to the database at head office, making future dealings easier. We were then required to give our fingerprints for appending to the agreement.
He explained that because there was so much identity theft these days insurance companies were insisting on these procedures.
But according to the new laws it is merely necessary to verify that the name and address are genuine — no mention is made of photographs and fingerprinting. I had difficulty believing I was in Britain!
There are a couple of issues here. The first is simply that I find these procedures to be unbelievably heavy handed. In my life, nobody has ever needed to take my fingerprints. I like it that way. I believe that rental car companies do have the right to impose conditions like this on their customers. However, if they do, I also have the right to rent my car from another company, or to not rent a car at all. Therefore, if I book a car or pay in advance, then I must be informed in advance of any such conditions. Springing them on me at the last minute when cancelling the booking and going to another car company has been made difficult and when I haven’t been informed in advance is wrong. Taking someone’s photograph for this kind of purpose without clearly informing them and giving them a chance to object is also wrong. (Of course the reason they present it to you at the last moment is to increase the hassle to you of objecting. If they mentioned it up front, they would lose business).
Finally, the strategy of blaming somebody else (often the government, but here the insurance companies) for having to take away people’s liberties seems to be becoming more and more common. It very likely is the policy of the rental company, but saying “It is all the fault of the insurance company” is a way of shifting the blame and avoiding responsibility. Probably if you ask the insurance company they will blame the car rental agency.
Presumably, if the car goes missing the rental company will share this information with the police. Even if it doesn’t, one can see lots of ways in which your fingerprints could end up in all sorts of databases. And once such databases exist, it is hard to imagine the police not ending up with access to them.
The final point is a positive one. Being photographed without being asked first and being asked to give fingerprints is something that annoys people like Maurice Hyman, sufficiently to cause him write a letter to the Sunday Times about it. (I don’t know whether he agreed to be fingerprinted. He didn’t say). Whatever may be said for that newspaper, its editors care sufficiently about such things to print the letter. My Hyman’s words were that it made him feel like he was not in Britain. Traditionally, the British people have had more civil liberties than people in many other countries, and they are proud of this and they think Britain is a better country because of this. They notice and are bothered when people try to take them away. If the government fails to take note of this, it will likely learn it the hard way.
Microchips buried inside your vehicle could soon be tipping off the authorities about your driving misdeamenors, says Jason Barlow in the Telegraph.
Reports this week indicate that the Government is working on a scheme that will lead to every car in the country being fitted with a personalised microchip, enabling the powers-that-be to identify and prosecute motorists who break the law.
Electronic vehicle identification (EVI) allows the chip buried within your car to collude with the existing network of roadside sensors to provide a host of information about the individual behind the wheel, as well as monitoring exactly how vigorous their progress is on any given journey. An in-car informer, in other words, to go with the mobile phone, the Switch and credit cards, and the army of CCTV cameras already tracking our every move.
The police and the DVLA claim there are obvious benefits. Stolen cars could be traced more effectively, and uninsured vehicles more efficiently identified, reducing premiums among middle England’s most law-abiding citizens. EVI could also eliminate potentially dangerous cars without valid MoTs. The Treasury stands to recoup an estimated £185 million in unpaid vehicle excise duty.
But the truth of the matter is that it is merely another way – the most pernicious yet – of squeezing revenue out of the poor, beleaguered motorist. Motorists already supply a tenth of all government revenue – that’s £38 billion – and because we value our freedom so highly, a freedom typified by our desire to travel by car, we reluctantly continue to stump up even in the face of over-regulation and exorbitant fuel prices.
It could be worse. And, in five years, it will be – you’ll be fined for doing an illegal U-turn in the middle of nowhere at three in the morning, while someone burgles your house and gets away with it. Cue calls for everyone on the planet to be fitted with a microchip. After all, the innocent will have nothing to fear.
Truer words have rarely been spoken…
Shami Chakrabarti, the new director of Liberty, is planning a monitoring operation on Britain’s giant retailers. Chakrabarti, formerly a high-flying legal advisor to two home secretaries, takes up her new post today.
Liberty is to set up a unit to monitor the experiments being carried out by various retailers with radio frequency identification technology. M&S and Tesco are pioneering the use of tiny microchips, the size of a grain of sand, which are inserted into the packaging of goods or sown into the labels of clothes.
Chakrabarti believes Britain, already the world leader in the use of CCTV cameras, is set to become the ‘surveillance capital of Europe.’
As from today Liberty will be monitoring the supermarkets and big chain stores. If we think a legal challenge can be mounted to stop their experimentation then we will make it. We will certainly be in touch with the company executives and we will do all in our power to let customers know what is happening. It is up to consumers to decide whether or not they want to boycott a particular store or chain but the companies must be made aware that this is the risk.
Florida police have scrapped a security camera system that scanned city streets for criminals, saying it had failed to recognise anyone wanted by authorities since its introduction two years ago. The system was intended to recognise the facial characteristics of criminals and runaway children by matching passers-by in the Ybor City district of Tampa with a database of 30,000 mugshots.
“It’s just proven not to have any benefit to us,” Captain Bob Guidara, a department spokesman, said. The cameras have led only to arrests for such crimes as drug deals.
Tesco has ended a trial of new technology that tracked customers buying Gillette razor blades. The retailer denied that the technology was being used for security reasons, but shoppers considered it to be an invasion of their privacy.
After Tesco’s use of radio frequency identification (RFID) chips was revealed, protests were held outside the store and consumers wrote to Gillette demanding that plans to use the chips be shelved.
Gillette has reportedly backed away from introducing RFID chips into individual products on a wider scale, despite being an enthusiastic supporter of the technology. The company is heavily involved in the Auto-ID consortium, which is looking at ways of developing RFID for shops, but it says that chips may not be used to monitor individual products for at least 10 years.
Tesco said its Cambridge trial had finished as planned; it was only meant to be in place for six months from January, and decisions had not been affected by the protests. The company has now moved to its next phase in testing RFID, by placing chips in DVDs at its store in Sandhurst, Berkshire.
Barry Hugill, of the civil rights group Liberty, was concerned at “function creep”, in other words, information recorded for one purpose being used for another.
We want clear legal guidelines as to what information companies, government agencies, local authorities are allowed to glean [and] what they can do with it.
The Guardian reports that a “watch list” drawn up by Mexican security forces of 80 anti-globalisation activists who are believed to be headed for Cancun for the World Trade Organisation gathering next month has provoked an angry response – from those whose names are missing. Ten days ago, the Mexican daily La Reforma ran a story on a “watch list” that has been compiled by the security forces concerned about possible trouble at the September 10-14 event. The list named 60 international and 20 Mexican anti-globalisation activists.
A letter addressed to “Government Agents Bent on Re stricting Civil Liberties”, which is currently being circulated for signatures, reads:
Despite hefty expenditures of tax money on intelligence gathering … we are concerned that you were only able to find 60 internationals and 20 Mexicans who are opposed to the World Trade Organisation. Haven’t you noticed that the tide of public opinion is turning decidedly against the WTO? …Please add my name to your ‘watch list’ immediately!
If you are unwilling to add my name to the list, then I must insist that you remove those singled out for special attention. I can assure you that we have similar views – we are all opposed to the WTO and a ‘free’ trade agenda that impoverish the majority of us while enriching a few corporations.
Heh.
Maybe White Rose should have an additional category entitled “Better Late Than Never”. I’ve certainly done several such WR postings.
Here’s another, from the Independent on August 25th:
The case of Stephen Kelly, who was found guilty in February 2001 of culpable and reckless behaviour, exemplifies the way the police and courts can access medical details collected as part of a research project.
That establishes that we’re dealing with a different Kelly. The guts of the story is that supposedly anonymous research data ended up being used to prosecute somebody, which is just the kind of thing we are constantly promised isn’t going to happen, can’t happen, must never happen, etc.
During the investigation of Kelly, police obtained the anonymised codes from patient medical records and used them to seize the scientific evidence that established the genetic similarity between the Aids viruses Kelly and his girlfriend had.
So much for “anonymised”.
Professor Leigh Brown was angry at the information being used. “These databases will have an important role to play in developing our understanding of genetic variation and disease, but what will protect them from seizure by legal authorities?”
Indeed.
Another good excuse for infringing our privacy that governments are wont to provide is efficiency. In such cases, the best bet is to challenge the government agency in question to spell out exactly how these efficiencies are going to be achieved.
The latest gambit in Australia is to provide an electronic health records database. The government claims that this will improve the safety and quality of health care delivery. How, the newspapers do not say.
In another gambit to get this through, the government says there will be no electronic identification numbers, and that patient involvement was voluntary.
Both these gambits need to be challenged. If there are no numbers, one wonders how they propose to deal with the many people known as “Smith” in our country. Not everyone has a unique surname like Wickstein.
And one wonders how ‘voluntary’ this scheme will be in five years time. No doubt, after the scheme has been up and running for a few years, we will be told that to be more ‘efficient’ the scheme needs to be made universal (read, compulsory).
Privacy Commissioner Mal Crompton noted that people might be reluctant to reveal details about themselves if they had doubts about the privacy of their medical records.
There are of course sound medical reasons for the sharing of medical records with, for example, hospitals. But electronic records can stray far and wide.
I don’t think I’d have any real objections to this scheme as it stands now. However, we’ve seen in the past how one government agency likes to dig in the files of another, and frankly, I don’t trust the Australian health system to keep my details private.
How does this matter? Well, how would you like the Tax office auditing you and having access to your medical history? I wouldn’t like the creep auditing me and giving my financial records the third degree knowing my medical details.
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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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