Steven Chapman is the sort of blogger whom White Rose readers ought to keep on their list of haunts. He has White-Rose-relevant material here about how war erodes civil liberties, even in the face of the strongest written constitutions, and here about car surveillance via road pricing, with a link to this Observer story.
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There’s a White Rose angle to the Pfizer drugs story, and of course Pfizer aren’t the only drugs company involved. They just seem to have a higher profile. The present situation is that the Canadian government is making it a condition of sale for the drugs companies that in Canada they must charge less for their drugs than they would like to. In the USA no such rule applies, and the prices charged for their drugs are higher. So, some Canadian retailers of drugs are, as predicted, making money by selling on some of the drugs they buy at the cheap rate, back to the USA. This has caused the drug companies to intensify their already elaborate product tracking efforts so that they can spot Canadian retailers who are doing this.
The general point: when an economy is working without state interference, a seller is glad to sell to anybody, so long as the seller is willing to pay the asked-for price. Once he has, great. The buyer can then do with the product anything he likes, including resell it to someone else. The seller, in other words, will have no motive to spy on buyers to see what they do with the product. But in an interfered-with market, sellers do have a motive for such tracking. Well, correction. Sellers often do want to know what buyers do with products. It’s called market research. But if a customer wants to buy a product, but doesn’t want to cooperate in such market research, the seller usually takes the money and does the business, and lays off with the market research. Not so, with these errant Canadian drugs retailers. They definitely don’t want to tell the drugs companies how they are using their products, if they are using them by reselling back to the USA. But the drugs companies really want to know about this. If that makes for a fight, too bad. The drugs companies still want to know. The retailers are playing dirty if they resell to the USA. The drugs companies will also want to play rather dirty, to find out, the way they never would to do mere market research. It all makes for bad vibes, and creates a drugs-companies-lead demand for further intrusive and creepy product tracking systems which normally they might shun, on the grounds that regular customers might not like such arrangements. August 7th, 2003 | Comments are closed
 Who makes the crucial decision about whether to prosecute in the first place? And who picks the person who does this? And who have they picked? From today’s Independent:
Doesn’t sound good, put like that, does it?
I suppose that could be true. August 6th, 2003 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
SFGate.com reports on a legal challenge to the Patriot Act:
August 6th, 2003 | Comments are closed
John Lettice of The Register writes:
That’s paragraph one of his piece. It’s worth continuing. Whatever you think of Lettice’s judgements and fears about all this, you will probably learn something. August 6th, 2003 | Comments are closed
FT.com reports that the UK government’s proposal to genetically screen all newborn babies and store the information in a database is likely to be rejected by the Human Genetics Commission, the watchdog set up by Labour in 1999 to monitor advances in biotechnology, on the grounds of being unworkable, expensive and potentially threatening to civil liberties. Baroness Helena Kennedy QC, the head of the HGC, said the medical benefits of the Human Genome had been over-hyped, leading to unrealistic expectations and the threat of discrimination against people who carried certain genes.
The proposal to test all babies was announced in a White Paper published in June. It promised £50m ($80.4m) to expand the ability of the National Health Service to cope with the rapid advance in genetic testing. August 5th, 2003 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
I found this on Gay.com UK, so the language may be a bit distorted (e.g the phrase ‘the Pope’s anti-gay document…) but still worth a post:
According to their website the Irish Council for Civil Liberties is an independent governmental organisation promoting and defending human rights and civil liberties. Update: Here is the same news from Irish Times quoting Ms Aisling Reidy, director of the ICCL:
August 5th, 2003 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
Just following up on what I was saying this morning on the dangers of anti-terrorism laws being applied to situations that do not involve terrorism, Eugene Volokh provides an example of the way in which too broadly worded anti-terrorism laws can be misused. A prosecuter in North Carolina has charged someone who has been manufacturing methamphetamine with two counts of “manufacturing a nuclear or chemical weapon”, because the definition of chemical weapons under the law is
and methamphetamines can clearly be described that way. Because the accused is being prosecuted under the anti-terrorism law, the penalties are harsher (and he may have less legal protection – I am not sure of the details of that particular law) than he would have if he were charged with a normal drugs offence. I suppose we can observe that this is another example of the general way in which people’s rights and liberties tend to get brushed aside as part of the war on drugs, too. August 4th, 2003 | Comments are closed
David Farrer comments here on the case of a someone who may be sent to jail for using a mobile telephone to record and transmit proceedings in the Perth Sheriff Court. Apparently they don’t like it so much when we use technology to keep tabs on them. August 4th, 2003 | Comments are closed
Instapundit links to this story, and quotes a fellow lawyer who alerted him to it that it shows you shouldn’t automatically disbelieve a client who says he doesn’t know how some porn found its way onto his hard drive.
In a world where simply being charged with a crime causes millions to presume some degree of guilt, and gives personal enemies their chance straight away to move in for the kill by making use of other bits of the legal system, then the decision merely to prosecute becomes a sentence in its own right. August 4th, 2003 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Virginia Postrel has a small piece on her blog about the civil liberties implications of the war on terror. (She also links to this Reason article by Jacob Sullum). Essentially her point is that if you give the authorities arbitrary and unaccountable powers of arrest (or to violate civil liberties in other ways) in order to fight terrorism, then eventually these powers are going to be used on other people as well, particularly the opponents of whoever is in power. Therefore, accountability and openness is crucial. August 4th, 2003 | Comments are closed
From the Telegraph yesterday:
This last is to counter the fear among the teachers that the cameras will also be used to spy on them.
Not for the first time, my reaction to being told the cost of some surveillance kit is: that’s cheap. Soon, if they want it to be everywhere, and they do, it will be. August 4th, 2003 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
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