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The House of Lords has thrown out Big Blunkett’s proposals to limit the right to trial by jury. They voted 210 to 136 to reject the proposals in the government’s Criminal Justice Bill. The government now has to decide whether to try and force their plans through, accept the Lords’ amendment or drop the entire Bill. Downing Street had suggested earlier that the entire Bill might be dropped. We can but hope. Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe July 15th, 2003 | Comments are closed
 White Rose readers will surely appreciate being told, if they don’t know it already, that a short posting by Gabriel Syme about compulsory ID cards, and about White Rose’s campaigning against them, was put up at Samizdata.net last Sunday. The point is the comments, of which there have been 22 so far (Tuesday evening). The worst of the comments about anything on Samizdata are the usual abusive or incomprehensible nonsense (and the worst of them of all get deleted), but the average is good, and the best are often outstandingly interesting and informative, fully worthy to be postings in their own right on the average blog. The ID card debate can get subtle, and lots of these subtleties are teased out in these particular comments. July 15th, 2003 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
News yesterday of the steady expansion of Britain’s national DNA database. From the Guardian:
Ah yes, law abiding citizens have nothing to fear. But that is assuming that there are only a reasonable number of laws, and that most of us never break them. But what if there are tons of new laws being passed every year, and most of us, including Ms Blears, have no idea what they all consist of, and most of us are breaking some of them every day of our lives? What, in short, if none of us are “law abiding” any more? July 15th, 2003 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
Telegraph reports that David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, obtained political backing at a meeting of the Cabinet’s domestic affairs committee and a statement has been pencilled in for next Thursday, the last day of the current Commons session. Whitehall officials said final details had still to be agreed but no meeting of the full Cabinet is considered necessary to endorse what will be one of the most controversial decisions of Labour’s six years in power. The ID card will be required by everyone over 16 – more than 40 million people – and cost around £40, though with concessions for the elderly and the poor. Each card will contain biometric data, such as an image of a person’s iris or fingerprint, so police and other authorities can confirm the holder’s identity. So this is it then? Tagged, finger-printed, iris-scanned, data about us stored on a ‘central database’, at the mercy of government bureaucrats. I suppose the only thing left is the way of the late Mr Willcock who was the last person prosecuted in Britain for refusing to produce his wartime ID card and he spearheaded a public campaign that led to their abolition 50 years ago.
I am not sure this would work nowadays, after many years of Labour rampaging through the justice system. However, it may be worth a try… July 13th, 2003 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
Stand have written a letter to Guardian regarding the news a Cabinet memo from Home Secretary leaked over the weekend about the introduction of an ID card scheme:
July 13th, 2003 | Comments are closed
MPs are planning to introduce a new law specifically to allow them to remove a protester who has been living outside the House of Commons for more than two years. With all previous attempts to remove Mr Haw having failed – a High Court judge last year ruled that his protest was an expression of freedom of speech as defined by the European convention on human rights – the MPs are now recommending passing a special law which would ban protesters from permanently demonstrating outside Parliament without permission. The move has, however, been labelled “draconian” by civil rights groups. July 13th, 2003 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Here’s news of a portable phone that can view through your home webcam. Now that REALLY sounds like the democratisation of surveillance to me. Who says your “home” webcam has to be at home? What happens when webcams get REALLY small? They’ll be everywhere, accessed by who the hell knows who?, is what. Via boingboing. “Self-surveillance”, Xeni Jardin calls it. Xeni Jardin is missing the bigger picture. July 12th, 2003 | Comments are closed
Some good news for once: The House of Lords has supported repeal of Clause 28 of the local Government Act. An amendment seen by many as an attempt to preserve Clause 28 was defeated by 50 votes. In theory Clause 28 doesn’t discriminate against homosexuals, merely against using public money to “promote” homosexuality. In practice this wide ranging and ill-defined prohibition has resulted in a climate where low-level institutional discrimination has become commonplace. Decent people have been forced to discriminate through fear of breaching Clause 28. Clause 28 was introduced by the Thatcher government in 1988. It was a massive attack on the civil liberties of a significant minority of British citizens and has been the jewel in the crown of British homophobes. The fact that a single group was specifically targeted in this way meant that apart from anything else it was simply bad legislation. Good riddance. Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe July 11th, 2003 | Comments are closed
For better or for worse the war against terrorism is Britain’s war too: we sent a few thousand soldiers to Afghanistan and made our political support for President Bush quite clear. Now it has come back to haunt us: nine of our citizens are held incommunicado in Guantanamo Bay, together with several more from the Commonwealth. We do at least know who and where they are, even if we do not know why they are being held. Their families cannot visit them and they cannot speak to outside lawyers. Their status has been determined by the US Secretary of Defence and the only lawyers they will be allowed are US military officers: it has been suggested that their conversations even with these will be overheard. The same camp holds children as young as 13, while 16-year olds are mixed in with the adult detainees. Imagine that Argentina’s Junta of the 1980’s or today’s Iran were holding these 680-odd detainees, including nine Britons. The outcry would be phenomenal. There would be talk of sanctions at the very least. Yet these are actually the ‘lucky few’ among the hundreds detained by the USA. Many many more have disappeared. Let’s look at that word – reminiscent of the dictatorships of the 1960’s and 70’s. Do I mean that they have been murdered? No, probably not. Do I mean that they have been tortured? Yes – whether outright physical pressure or just being held in a steel container at Bagram airbase in the blazing sun. Do I mean that they have vanished, held in some solitary hell-hole? Most certainly. → Continue reading: The disappeared July 11th, 2003 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
At present I am not in the market for a longer penis, or for more energy when my mind turns to the sexual as opposed to urinary use of the penis that I already have, so most junk emails are for me just that: junk. Delete. However, I got one this morning, and I’m sure millions of others did too, which interested me, White Rose wise, and (although in the years to come I will probably mark this moment as the one when my life stopped working and went to hell, my identity stolen, my bank account emptied, my hard disc and that of all my friends virused, etc.) I pressed this link. For the benefit of those wiser or more cautious or more internet savvy than me, the link leads to a website devoted to a computer programme which enables you to learn everything there is to learn about all of your friends and all of your enemies.
The democratisation of joined-up government, you might say. Everyone can be a member of the surveilling class. (And by the way I think “surveilling class” or maybe “surveilling classes” is a meme with a future.) As with current strength surveillance cameras, the actual effectiveness of this particular programme as of now – it sounds to me a lot like an old fashioned search engine (but what do I know?) – is not really the big point here, or not the point that interests me. What I think is the big point is that, sooner or later, such programmes surely will do what this one promises to do. Not surprisingly, the same web site also pushes another programme called “Privacy Protector”, which, I guess, enables you to defend yourself against Internet Investigator. Maybe Privacy Protector is the real product, and Internet Investigator only exists to scare up business for Privacy Protector. Whatever. It all has the smell of the new battles that people are going to be fighting in this brave new twenty first century. And they won’t just be government-people or people-government battles, they’ll be people-people battles. July 11th, 2003 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Evidence, if you ever needed it, that surveillance cameras are getting smarter:
And evidence too of why surveillance cameras are widely believed to be a good thing, not just by the surveilling classes, but by the surveilled also. July 10th, 2003 | Comments are closed
Sir John Stevens, head of the Metropolitan Police, has supported removing the automatic right to trial by jury in some serious cases. In a speech he argued that the move was necessary to fight organised crime by preventing “jury nobbling”. BBC report here. If juries are in danger then it is the job of the police to protect them – not throw out a fundamental part of our constitution because it is inconvenient and expensive. To be fair Stevens did say that the restriction to trial by jury – proposed in Big Blunkett’s discredited Criminal “Justice” Act – should be limited to special cases and determined by a judge. However any erosion of this basic Magna Carta right is unacceptable. This proposal is akin to saying “we already know you’re guilty so we won’t give you the same rights as anyone else.” Remember how door-to-door DNA testing was initially introduced for “special cases” only? Now any time there is a serious crime police roam the neighbourhood asking innocent citizens to “volunteer” a DNA sample. Special cases have a tendency to become commonplace. Partially cross-posted to The Chestnut Tree Cafe. July 9th, 2003 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
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