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You know its something of a rum-do when you see an arch-capitalist like me denouncing a proposed privatisation:
The national DNA database containing more than two million samples could end up in the private sector under Government plans to sell off the Home Office Forensic Science Service (FSS).
And denounce it I most certainly do though I am obliged to add the important qualification that this is not really a ‘privatisation’ it is just a state licensing operation. The company that ends up running the database will have its ‘stock’ provided for it by the government who will also be its only (or most valuable) customer.
Still that won’t stop the owners and shareholders of the company from lobbying the government to extend police powers to extract DNA samples from anyone unfortunate enough to cross their path (and probably even those who do not).
It also raises the infuriating possibility of the police not just demanding a DNA sample from you but subsequently charging you £40 for the privilege of taking it.
This is one of those stories that Richard Littlejohn would classify under “You Couldn’t Make It Up”. I’m sure White Rose will have more to say about it than this one posting. For now I hardly have time to do more than flag it up before going to bed.
The national DNA database containing more than two million samples could end up in the private sector under Government plans to sell off the Home Office Forensic Science Service (FSS).
This is toxic. You gather information about people without any consent (because being arrested isn’t that kind of deal) and then you turn the management of the resulting database into a business. Objections? Where do you start? How long do we have?
Call this whatever other names you want, but don’t you dare call it “pure” capitalism, or the “extreme” free market.
Last night, the proposed sale threatened to become the most controversial since the privatisation of the air traffic control system.
I’ll say.
White Rose seems to have missed this (from the BBC on Wednesday):
A group of peace protesters has launched legal proceedings against Gloucestershire police, claiming they used anti-terrorism laws to prevent demonstrations against the war in Iraq.
The complaints centre on RAF Fairford, where American B-52 bombers were based during the conflict.
None of the protesters who demonstrated at the airbase were charged with terrorism offences but they say their human rights were breached.
The pressure group Liberty is calling for an inquiry into the use of section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 at the base.
Officers were granted powers under the legislation to stop and search vehicles and pedestrians in the area near the base between 7 March and 27 April.
But they were obviously all really dangerous people, yes? Absolutely.
One of the people the group says was stopped under the Terrorism act was 11-year-old Isabelle Ellis-Cockcroft, whose father David Cockcroft is taking legal action claiming a breach of human rights.
Isabelle told the BBC: “We were just walking along the road and they stopped us. I did not have a full body search because there was no woman officer there.
“They asked what was in our pockets, wrote down our descriptions and checked a backpack and a bike we had with us.
“They said they were stopping us under the Terrorism Act, but I’m not a terrorist.”
I guess you just can’t be too careful.
Don’t get me wrong. I personally don’t care at all for peaceniks, and I especially dislike them when they have hyphenated surnames. Isabelle Ellis-Cockcroft should be swooning over plasticated pop musicians in preparation for doing It-Girl Studies at Roedean, not demo-ing outside an airbase.
But I will defend the right of hyphenated peaceniks to demonstrate without being arrested as terrorists to the point of putting up a posting about it on White Rose.
Thanks to Chris R. Tame and the Libertarian Alliance Forum for flagging up the story.
This New York Times story is worth a look. It deals with activities of something called the Temporary State Commission on Lobbying, who have been, so the New York Civil Liberties Union says, overdoing it in their investigation of those wanting to soften the state’s current drug laws.
In a letter sent today to the Temporary State Commission on Lobbying, the civil liberties group said the commission had been overly aggressive in its inquiry into the activists’ public rallies and broadcasts. It called them core First Amendment activities that were not subject to lobbying regulation.
In addition, civil liberties officials said the commission had been confrontational in its inquiry and needed to distinguish between the scrutiny of citizens who came forward to speak their minds and paid, professional lobbyists, or those who spent at least $2,000 to directly communicate with legislators.
Yes, well, they pass a law, and then distinctions of that sort – which were, you know, merely intended, but not actually spelt out in the law – have a way of getting lost.
I wonder what “Temporary” means in this connection.
Bruce Schneier is an expert on technical aspects of electronic security. His book Applied Cryptography is considered the “bible” for people implementing cryptography based security, privacy, and authentication systems.
Having written this book in 1995, the subtext of which was that technical solutions could solve many or all of our privacy and security issues, Schneier slowly became more and more conscious of the fact that the weaknesses in security or privacy systems were the result of human rather than technology failure. It wasn’t so much the systems themselves as the way the systems were used and relied upon that determined the quality of security and privacy. In particular, blind faith in technology was extremely dangerous, both in terms of making people overconfident that systems would always work correctly, and in terms of adding additional layers of unnecessary inflexibility and bureacracy. Schneier then wrote another book Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World discussing essentially how security systems should be established so as to be actually secure. Probably the most important point was that human systems have to be flexible and intelligent. Simply requiring ID of everybody is not especially useful without human beings constantly asking the question of why ID is being asked for. Plus this type of system is predictable, and holes in it are easily found. And it needlessly invades people’s privacy.
In any event, Mr Schneier writes a monthly newsletter discussing these types of issues, which is at least partly aimed at publicising his consultancy business. This month’s issue has some very interesting thoughts on just how we should deal with organisations – government and non government – that needlessly invade our privacy for asking for identification and recording excessive information about their customers. An extract
I had to travel to Japan last year, and found a company that rented local cell phones to travelers. The form required either a Social Security number or a passport number. When I asked the clerk why, he said the absence of either sent up red flags. I asked how he could tell a real-looking fake number from an actual number. He said that if I didn’t care to provide the number as requested, I could rent my cell phone elsewhere, and hung up on me. I went through another company to rent, but it turned out that they contracted through this same company, and the man declined to deal with me, even at a remove. I eventually got the cell phone by going back to the first company and giving a different name (my wife’s), a different credit card, and a made-up passport number. Honor satisfied all around, I guess.
It’s stupid security season. If you’ve flown on an airplane, entered a government building, or done any one of dozens of other things, you’ve encountered security systems that are invasive, counterproductive, egregious, or just plain annoying. You’ve met people — guards, officials, minimum-wage workers — who blindly force you to follow the most inane security rules imaginable.
Is there anything you can do?
In the end, all security is a negotiation among affected players: governments, industries, companies, organizations, individuals, etc. The players get to decide what security they want, and what they’re willing to trade off in order to get it. But it sometimes seems that we as individuals are not part of that negotiation. Security is more something that is done to us.
Our security largely depends on the actions of others and the environment we’re in. For example, the tamper resistance of food packaging depends more on government packaging regulations than on our purchasing choices. The security of a letter mailed to a friend depends more on the ethics of the workers who handle it than on the brand of envelope we choose to use. How safe an airplane is from being blown up has little to do with our actions at the airport and while on the plane. (Shoe-bomber Richard Reid provided the rare exception to this.) The security of the money in our bank accounts, the crime rate in our neighborhoods, and the honesty and integrity of our police departments are out of our direct control. We simply don’t have enough power in the negotiations to make a difference.
…
It would be different if the pharmacist were the owner of the pharmacy, or if the person behind the registration desk owned the hotel. Or even if the policeman were a neighborhood beat cop. In those cases, there’s more parity. I can negotiate my security, and he can decide whether or not to modify the rules for me. But modern society is more often faceless corporations and mindless governments. It’s implemented by people and machines that have enormous power, but only power to implement what they’re told to implement. And they have no real interest in negotiating. They don’t need to. They don’t care.
But there’s a paradox. We’re not only individuals; we’re also consumers, citizens, taxpayers, voters, and — if things get bad enough — protestors and sometimes even angry mobs. Only in the aggregate do we have power, and the more we organize, the more power we have.
The whole thing is well worth reading, as are the back issues of the newsletter.
I had a bit of trouble to renew my passport before leaving to Britain – which won’t come as a surprise for anybody used to deal with the uncivil servants of the French social-mediocracy – mainly related to “processing time”, and that’s not a surprise either.
Requesting a 35 hours work week from the French functionaires would actually result in increasing their effective work time.
No, the coffee machine meetings don’t count as effective work time, sorry.
Anyway, during this painful and costly process to ensure I would be dully registered and filled as a dependency of the French Republic, I was repeatedly offered to give up on the passport – “It’s not mandatory for a trip to Britain you know. It’s Europe! You just need an ID card.” Yep, it’s Europe, for sure – and switch to the new National and Unfalsifiable ID Card, Wonder of the French Technology and Guarantor of our Nation’s Security.
I was presented, by several obliging agents of the State, with it’s unsurpassable pluses and benefits, comparing to this lousy old passport I inconsiderately wanted to renew: the New National ID card is not only national and somewhat new, but also unfalsifiable and I would be generously granted this little wonder after a fast and simple procedure – basically “Give us a picture, tell us who you are, sign here and, oh, don’t forget to give us your fingerprints thank you” – and last but not least – drum rolls please – absolutely free.
Yes, free.
Knowing the rapacity of the French state as soon as there is a way to rip off money from the taxpayer, that and that only is highly suspect.
Not considering the fact that, just like the French pension by repartition system, the national ID card was established by the Vichy government during the obviously not so distant past of collaboration with National-Socialist Germany.
At one point, and considering that unlike the aforementioned obliging agents of the State, you have other things to do than marvel about the control apparatus of the State, you end up thinking: “All right, time to make us another enemy”.
Excerpt of the conversation:
the dissident frogman:
“Hello, I want to renew my passport.”
Obliging Agent of the State:
“Well Monsieur that will be long and costly you know.”
the dissident frogman:
“How long? How expensive?”
Obliging Agent of the State:
“Well Monsieur that can be up to one month, sometimes more. It will cost you 60 Euros and is valid 5 years.”
the dissident frogman:
“Oh. Bugger.”
Obliging Agent of the State:
“Yes Monsieur. Monsieur should apply for a National ID card, it’s unfalsifiable and valid 10 years.”
the dissident frogman:
“Nope. Don’t care.”
Obliging Agent of the State:
“Well Monsieur unlike the passport, it’s free!”
the dissident frogman:
” ‘Course. So was the one way ticket Drancy-Auschwitz 60 years ago.”
Now let me fill in that passport renewal form, thank you.
While we’re at it, I hope that you’ll notice, like I do, the fact that among the proposed choices within an imposed principle (since the law makes an obligation for you to prove your identity in many daily situations), the most dangerous system for individual liberties is also the one that’s free and therefore the only one “financially” accessible by the poorest.
Just make your own conclusions out of this, the next time you’ll hear the French social-mediocrats of all tendencies becoming ecstatic about their “Social Justice” paradigm French style, and boast its superiority.
There’s a lot of cameras in London. I do mean a lot, despite Orwell (so to speak) and this, of course, brings the legitimate concern that was already summarized in the ancient Rome: quis custodiet ipses custodies?
There’s no National ID card in Britain nowadays, even if the Socialists are seriously working on it – Yep, I’m not surprised either.
But there are also and hopefully, individuals working against them.
Eventually, judging by Britain’s century old constitutional stability as opposed to the numerous bloodbath that mark out France’s history, I’d serenely trade the Vichy inspired national ID card for the London camera and the opportunity to side with those who work on resolving the overseers’ watch issue.
Anytime.
Cross-posted from the dissident frogman
Privacy conscious operators now use shredders. So welcome to the world of the unshredder.
As Instapundit often says, the New York Times may be a bit bonkers at the front, but the science and technology coverage can be excellent.
The Telegraph reports that the Conservatives yesterday joined civil rights groups in voicing opposition to the Government’s proposals to introduce compulsory identity cards and criticised David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, for masking his true intentions behind “spin and obscurity”.
Plans to announce the scheme in the Commons before Parliament rises today have been shelved – officially because of pressure on parliamentary time – but the Home Office said yesterday that the proposals for the ID card were “progressing well”, with an announcement expected in the autumn.
Oliver Letwin, the shadow Home Secretary, said he remained “highly dubious” about any move towards a compulsory ID card.
The issue of an identity card is too important a one, with too far-ranging implications for our liberties, for the Home Secretary to resort to spin and obscurity.
Home Office estimates of the cost of the scheme range from £1.6 to £3.14 billion but Simon Davies, of Privacy International, says the true cost will be very much higher. Mr Davies led a campaign against an Australian ID card in the 1980s. Initially the plan was popular but opposition grew strongly when the scheme was finally unveiled and the government was forced to abandon it.
We know from industry estimates that a ‘smart’ card with biometric information such as the one proposed will cost well over £100 per head, so the final cost will be more like £5.5 billion.
This is a high risk political gamble for David Blunkett. He knows that popular opposition will mushroom once people understand the implications of the card, so he is being meticulous in concealing his ultimate ambitions.
Tomorrow is apparently ID-Day. Big Blunkett is expected to announce plans for compulsory National Identity Cards that will turn the civil liberties clock back fifty years.
To those who say “the innocent have nothing to fear”, look at this Liberty report .
It tells how during the Iraq conflict the Terrorism Act 2000 was systematically used to harass protestors at RAF Fairford, Gloucestershire and deny them their civil liberties including freedom of movement and the right to peaceful protest. Police even served an anti-terrorism order on an eleven year old girl!
How much worse will it get once everyone is neatly filed, stamped and indexed?
Cross-posted from An It Harm None
ComputerWorld paints a wonderfully gloomy picture of an IT security meltdown and a complete redirection of current security practises (or lack of them):
Predictions: A Web services security breach will wreck the supply chain. And stolen fingerprints or eye scans will thwart biometric systems.
Bye-Bye Incompetents
The fakers, charlatans and incompetents will be purged from the IT security industry. In three years, 40% of the current gaggle of alleged security professionals will leave the industry—some to other professions, many to prison for egregious misrepresentation of their skills.
XML Catastrophe
In the next two years, there will be a major XML Web services security breach. The consequences will be much more severe than the defaced Web sites and stolen credit cards that caused mostly embarrassment in the early days of e-commerce. Instead, automated production lines will grind to a halt, company bank accounts will be emptied, 100-company-long supply chains will break, and the most proprietary corporate data may be disclosed.
Surgical Strikes
Three or four years ago, hackers were taking a haphazard, shotgun approach to Internet attacks, but now they’re using their tools to penetrate very specific and lucrative targets, especially enterprise networks containing valuable intellectual property. These highly targeted attacks are on the rise, each one more intelligent and harmful than the last. By 2005, targeted attacks will account for more than 75% of corporate financial losses from IT security breaches.
Stolen Fingerprints
Biometrics is perceived as the ultimate in security, but what does somebody do once their bioprint is stolen? Within three years, hackers will have all sorts of scanned fingerprints, retinal patterns, etc., and these will be used to bypass biometric network security. When your credit card is stolen, you phone Visa and have a new card issued. When your bioprint is stolen, do you call God and ask for a new set of fingerprints or eyes?
Firing the Clueless
P.T. Barnum knew that a sucker was born every minute. Since most cyber risk is directly attributable to insider activity, including the social engineering of digital dullards, a renewed focus on background checks is necessary. The chief security officer of the future, working with the HR chief, is going to find and fire digital “suckers” before their dimness puts the enterprise at risk.
There is more. Go and get scared… I am.
When you type “Surveillance” into google, some of the more interesting stuff is the adverts on the right. The top one in the list today was this. The one with the creepiest name was this.
A commenter (“Grace”) on a previous surveillance related post of mine here said that governments will always be more powerful users of this stuff than the general run of surveillance-inclined people:
We’re deluding ourselves if we think there’s ever going to be any degree of equality in information collection between the government and the (no-longer) private citizen. 1) The government has the money, the power, the inclination and – increasingly – the ability to carpet the nation with surveillance. 2) Forms of counter-surveillance proving to be effective will be declared illegal – in the interest of public security, of course – and forced underground. (That’ll be interesting.)
We’re fighting a rear-guard action.
And then she recommends a book.
But she’s missing my point. I’m not saying that all these regular punters are going to try to spy only on the government and thereby to hold it at bay, although no doubt that will be part of the story, in the form of spying on lesser government officials and the like. My point is that people concerned about surveillance don’t just have the government to worry about. They’ll also have the amateurs spying and spooking all over them. These amateurs may not have mainframe computers and super-intelligent software, but they are awfully numerous, compared to the government.
And the kit that the amateurs need is now getting very cheap, and very easy to use, and to hide. As these adverts prove.
I second Brian’s post on the same topic. The Evening Standard reports that one in 30 Britons now has their DNA stored on a national database of genetic fingerprints. The database reached the two million mark today, and is one of the world’s largest. It is used to help solve an average of 15 murders and 31 rapes each month.
The government is trying to make it easier to add DNA entries to the database. A law before Parliament would allow samples to be stored from people when they are arrested and retained regardless of whether they are convicted or not… Have a brush with the law and you are on file for life. Currently a sample can be stored only if a person is charged.
The move is expected to dramatically increase the number of samples stored but has led to claims from civil liberties groups and the Liberal Democrats that the system is being abused by the government.
Home Office Minister Hazel Blears said that only criminals should be worried by the scale of the database.
Law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear from the retention of DNA samples.
Yes, we do.
The State is not your friend
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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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