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I’ve no time (but someone here should definitely try to make the time) for a longer response to this article by Stephen Robinson in the Telegraph. Its title – “Identity cards won’t stop the terrorists: they’re only a fig leaf ” – will do for starters. July 24th, 2003 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
 A fascinating story. John Gilmore is incensed about the requirement of showing identification to fly. And he is furious about something that happened to him recently, when a lapel button landed him and his travelling companion on the tarmac.
The narrative is good and the point made brilliantly. You can just picture the Station Manager who had to deal with the ‘unruly’ individuals, we all met her type at one time or another. The truth is that it is people at the ground level, so to speak, that help to impose the rules of a potential police state in the name of convenience and other peoples’ well-being. Without them even the most oppressive government would not last long… July 23rd, 2003 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
A Telegraph reader from Brussels writes:
July 23rd, 2003 | Comments are closed
Here’s a link to an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about the War on Terror.
There’s an important principle involved here. Well, plenty of principles, but one in particular that strikes me. It’s the combination of individuals being allowed – and I’m guessing: encouraged – to inform the authorities of their suspicions, and the obligation – that’s the word FBI man Paris uses: obligation – to investigate the matter. This means that person X who has, for some reason of his own, taken a dislike to person Y can invent some plausible suspicions about Y and phone them in, and the powers that be have to be all over Y with their investigations. Practised political stirrers aren’t going to be too bothered, and may even rather enjoy it. Either way they will exploit it all for the publicity and the fifteen minutes of fame, the way this Marc Shultz guy seems to be doing, and good for him. But for other less public souls, this could surely be very bad. I mustn’t exaggerate, but this is the sort of thing that happened in Stalin’s Russia, in logical structure even if not remotely as bad in scale or intensity. In place of a decade in an arctic camp ending in premature death, substitute a week or two of anxieties at the hands of the government, and maybe a rather scary legal bill because you figured, best let my lawyer keep track of all this. The point is the authorities not having any power to drop the matter, but being obligated to go through the motions demanded. To begin with, the policemen doing this are only doing it because they have to. But what we are liable to end up with is an altogether different kind of policeman, the kind of policeman who really likes these scenarios, who truly believes that scaring regular citizens half to death is the heart and soul of good government. July 23rd, 2003 | Comments are closed
Here’s an interesting BBC story about internet usage in China. White Rose relevant paragraphs:
July 22nd, 2003 | Comments are closed
There was an Interesting article by former CIA Director James Woolsey in the Guardian over the weekend, about “World War 4”. The White Rose relevant paragraphs, so to speak, are these ones, I think:
This is the X is important BUT argument. The “but” turns everything before it upside down. So look out X, which in this case means look out liberty. I’m not saying that this man is totally wrong. I’m just saying: he’s saying it. July 22nd, 2003 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
When one objects to something, it is important to have a clear idea exactly what you are objecting to and why. Fleet Online is a company offering an inexpensive way to track the location of someone else’s mobile phone to within 50 yards in an urban area. The system has built in safeguards that prevent someone tracking someone else without their permission (a text message is sent to the target phone notifying them of the ping and asking if they are content to be located. Also certain times in which being located is acceptable can be set up as a preference). I have no problem with companies keeping track of their employees whilst they are on-the-job… for example the advantages to a courier company and their clients are too obvious to need elaboration. I don’t even have much of a problem with parents keeping track of their children. Like so much in the world, this ability to track one of the increasingly ubiquitous tools of modern life is not intrinsically good or bad in and of itself. The problems I foresee spring from the Regulation of Investigative Powers Act in Britain and the various equivalent powers of state found in many other nations. Almost certainly there will be a requirement for services like Fleet Online to allow the state to locate people without their permission and under the various provisions of the aptly names RIP Act, notifying the target they are subject to state scrutiny will itself be a crime. When the RIP Act was first imposed, it was with assurances that access to private information like e-mail, ISP activity records and even decryption keys1 would be tightly controlled and limited to only a few essential key government agencies. Of course it did not take long for the state to try and expand the list of people who can get access to your private internet traffic details to essential key government agencies like local town councils, the Department of Health, the Environment Agency, the Food Standards Agency, the Postal Services Commission, and Fire Authorities. Previous assurances as to who would have access proved to be worthless and the people who uttered them straightforward liars. No real surprises there to any but the credulous. So does anyone seriously want to trust the same people with the ability to track not just your online life but your physical movements in the real world at the click of a mouse? Technology is not the problem… the problem is a state with takes such power to itself with little more than an imperious demand to its subjects to ‘just trust us’ and ‘if you are not guilty, you have nothing to fear’.
July 22nd, 2003 | Comments are closed
The war against Canadian drugs has caused the RCMP in Newfoundland to want to make the purchasers of cellphones present ID, including a photo, when they buy them.
Whatever next? Buying a phone without being anyone in particular. It has to stop.
Funny how tradesmen threatened with a change in the law just announce that the existing law is whatever it is, as if that is, in and of itself, an argument for it to stay like that. They point out that as the law stands they’re not breaking it, so they’re law abiding, so … well, so, they ought to be able to carry on doing like they always have, what with them being so law abiding and all. It’s almost as if they think that no one’s allowed to change a law until the existing one is being universally broken. Idiots. July 22nd, 2003 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Since September 11, 2001, travellers to the United States have readily accepted that a few more checks and questions are the price they have to pay for safety. But is security turning into surveillance? Michael Kerr reports.
July 21st, 2003 | Comments are closed
The Telegraph reports how the ease with which Britain’s asylum system can be abused has been revealed by an undercover investigation showing the scale on which immigrants are cheating the state. The investigation found that identity checks supposed to prevent fraud are not working. Instead, illegal immigrants can easily obtain fake identities that allow them to work or claim benefits illegally. In one instance, a reporter from the BBC Panorama programme secretly filmed an asylum seeker who was making hundreds of pounds a month renting out the three-bedroom house he has been given by his local council in Birmingham. The undercover reporter for the BBC Panorama, Claudia Murg, found that the finger-printing system introduced in an attempt to prevent multiple applications for asylum appeared not to work. It did not pick up the fact that, shortly after her first asylum application had been rejected, she made a second in a different name – even though her fingerprints were on file under both identities. We, at White Rose, have maintained that measures proposed by the Home Office such as fingerprinting, ID cards and other biometrics technology for recording individuals’ identity are only as effective as the ‘human infrastructure’ surrounding them. The government’s attempts to introduce ID cards are nothing more than evidence of the state’s propensity to control the lives of the ‘honest citizens’ since they are incapable of stopping those who abuse of the system. July 20th, 2003 | Comments are closed
Often, we expect curbs on civil liberties to be the desired goal of our own left-wing authoritarians or the unfortunate consequence of some EU directive. It is rare that the demands of the United States may result in one more step towards the “surveillance state”. EU passports will soon have to incorporate a radio frequency identification (RFID) chip, including biometric data, that would be machine-readable for entering the US. This is a consequence of the US Enhanced Border Security and Visa Reform Act of 2002 that demands all visa-free entrants incorporate biometric information on their passports from October 2004. (Hint: you may want to change your passport if you wish to visit the United States after this date). In the tension between liberty and security, the demands of this Act appear a prudent measure to curb the use of false passports for perpetrating acts of terrorism. However, the biometric identifiers used will be standardised according to workgroups meeting for the International Civil Aviation Organisation and International Organization for Standardisation. Their work will be co-opted by the European Union. A European biometric identification strategy was announced in June at the summit in Greece. The European Biometric Forum was established, with major players and strong links to their counterparts in the United States, to ensure that there would a single standard for applications of this technology, pursued by all member states of the EU. The EBF will be launched on the 21st July in Dublin and the technology is being promoted as an additional protection for the privacy of individuals, although the growth is driven by state institutions and telecom/security companies. July 19th, 2003 | Comments are closed
The BBC reports that in a surprisingly positive move, the US Senate has voted to withdraw funding from the proposed Terrorism Information Awareness programme (TIA). The TIA (previously called by the much more chilling name “Total Information Awareness”) was to have been the largest snooping system in the world. Its objective was to centrally co-ordinate and cross-reference every single piece of data available on every single person in America. The justification for this appalling idea was the phoney “war on terror”. As usual, supporters used the lie that “the innocent have nothing to fear”. It now seems that with funding removed the TIA will be scrapped – publicly at least. Now if only this country could remove funding from then scrap Big Blunkett. July 18th, 2003 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
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