We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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If White Rose is all about how little bits of bad news add up to a bigger, badder picture, then my experience today of some things that were said during a BBC4 Radio programme to be broadcast in the autumn is, I think, relevant.
The programme is to be about organ donation, organ selling, etc. I was arguing for the right of individuals to sell their body parts, but the dominant attitude was that donation for free would be quite sufficient, provided that presumed consent replaces the rule of presumed non-consent. This was what Dr Michael Wilks, the Chairman of the Ethics Committee of the British Medical Association, said, and as you can see from this 1998 BBC report, he has been arguing for this switch for some time.
At present, if you want it to be known that your bodily organs are available for transplant in the event of your death, you are urged to carry a card to this effect. What Wilks wants is that if you do not want your organs used thus, you must carry a card to that effect. Or maybe, by way of an alternative, that you must put your name on a national computerised register of the unwilling, so to speak.
I don’t know exactly how huge a change this would be. As infringements of civil liberties go, this one is quite subtle, quite deft, quite gentle. But as with so many proposed new arrangements, much depends upon the people running the system being both highly competent and highly trustworthy.
Wilks said something else rather creepy, which explains a lot about the way the law is increasingly being misused in Britain to impose new arrangements of questionable value. He said that in practice, reversing the principle of presumed consent wouldn’t make that much difference, because what really mattered was for the NHS to spend more (i.e. be given more to spend) on transplant surgery. The reason we do less transplant surgery than certain other countries (Spain in particular was held up for our admiration) is not that we still presume non-consent, but that we spend less on transplant surgery. So, in other words, this national donor card system or this national computerised register, which you must carry or register on if you do not want your organs being transplanted after you’ve finished with them, would, in Britain, be somewhat superfluous.
So why bother with it? Well, the nearest to an answer we got was that switching the law around like this would stir up some good publicity for the general cause of transplant surgery, and thus indirectly make it more likely that those “increased resources” of which he spoke would in years to come be forthcoming from the aroused taxpayers of Britain – it being easier to change the law than get all the money he wanted. But I got the distinct impression that if offered either the law change or the money, but not both, he’d take the money in a blink and leave the law untouched. This is our old friend “law as sending a message”, law as the way to scare up a “national debate” which lots of people take part in because the law is threatening to mess them about, law change as the answer to “apathy” (a word that was much used in this particular debate).
Wilks is not the only one to think like this about the law. Indeed, proposing legal change simply to get attention for one’s particular enthusiasm is a national mental disease right now, I would say. It’s one of the many reasons why we have so many laws, and so many more laws than we should have. And having lots of laws means that the idea of only the guilty needing to fear increased state surveillance doesn’t work, because all of us are bound to be guilty of something.
But I digress. Personally, face to face, Wilks was civility and sanity itself. He was just the sort of GP that you’d want, and in fact used to be a GP. That he thinks like this is not, I should guess, because he is in any way a wicked person, but merely because he breathes the same intellectual air that the rest of us do.
It’s somewhat off the message of this blog, but I can’t resist adding that after Wilks had gone, a rather more down-market contributor to the programme – a lady Jehovah’s Witness no less – pointed out that part of the reason that Spain excels in transplant surgery, more so than Britain, is that they are worse drivers than us, and thus have a greater supply of nice fresh young organs, of the sort that the transplant surgeons prefer. Hah!
A year ago, Simon Davies of Privacy International had an opinion piece in the Telegraph pointing out how vulnerable ID systems are. His arguments are as valid now as they were a year ago, however, the government has recently intensified its call for compulsory ID cards.
Corruption […] besets most official ID schemes from Australia to Thailand. High black-market demand and huge investment by criminals entices officials to bend or break the rules of eligibility. An ID card system is a gift for corrupt civil servants or contract staff in search of extra cash.
[…] the technology gap between governments and organised crime has now narrowed so much that within weeks of their introduction even the most secure ID cards can be available in the form of blanks onto which individual identity information can be incorporated.
What a gift this would be for criminals. Whereas before they might have carried a copy of a dead person’s birth certificate, and maybe a driver’s licence and a savings bank number – all of which could be checked – they would now possess the ultimate no-questions-asked ID. They would have penetrated the plastic wall of security. Once inside they are safe.
On the positive side, Simon Davies points out, this would keep the Home Secretary busy, as in due course he will be able to announce yet another one of his crackdowns – on ID card fraud.
Criminals carrying fake or stolen documents — such as passports and driving licences — will face up two years in jail under the new law. Home Office Minister Beverley Hughes will tell a conference in London entitled Combating Identity Fraud today:
This new offence will enable the police to crack down hard on criminals involved in identity fraud. False identities are commonly used by those engaged in organised crime and terrorism. The new offence would provide the police with the means to disrupt the activities of organised criminals and terrorists in the early stages of their crimes.
The Home Office Minister added the legislation was not solely targeted at organised crime and terrorism.
In a Free Country update Telegraph shows how security imposed by the state, crowds out not only its citizens security awareness but that of its police force.
Would identity cards help police in Bradford, who are having difficulty finding a one-armed, hunchbacked dwarf with a limp and an Irish accent, in connection with a £10,000 jewellery raid?
If this useful combination of aural and visual clues is not enough to track him down, you might have thought a card would help. The history of ID cards shows the opposite – that police start to depend on them, as they have on security cameras, and give up on more traditional sleuthing tools such as, say, eyes and ears.
[…]
Police end up turning a blind eye to criminals, who develop an expertise for card fraud, and come down hard on absent-minded old ladies who leave them on the Tube. And one-armed, hunchbacked dwarves with limps and Irish accents find it easier and easier to blend into the crowd.
The Times (which we do not link to) has reported that Home Secretary, David Blunkett believes the public will back the introduction of identity cards if reassured that their privacy would not be violated.
Mr Blunkett indicated that, in conjunction with Cabinet colleagues, he will assess the desirability of introducing an ID card system by the end of the summer. Apparently, the Home Office has been conducting a consultation exercise on such schemes.
Any idea as to when, where and with whom?
Phil Zimmermann, the man who in the early 90s developed the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption product, believes that Moore’s Law and surveillance cameras make for a particularly dangerous cocktail, as reported by ZDNet.
Moore’s Law represents a “blind force” that is fuelling an undirected technology escalation, referring to what he sees as the threat to privacy from the increased use of surveillance cameras.
The human population does not double every 18 months but its ability to use computers to keep track of us does. You can’t encrypt your face.
Zimmerman sees surveillance as the biggest threat to civil liberties and nowhere, he believes, is this more egregious than in the UK.
You have millions of CCTV cameras here. Every citizen is monitored, and this creates pressure to adhere to conformist behaviour. The original purpose of cameras was to catch terrorists, but to my knowledge they haven’t caught many terrorists using cameras.
Another problem with using technology for surveillance according to Zimmermann is that while laws that are brought in during times of a perceived increase in threats to national security, they can be relatively easily repealed. I find it hard to believe that anything can be more inert and irrepealable than laws but his point about technology still holds:
The technology market doesn’t work that way. It has more inertia, and is more insidious. When you put computer technology behind surveillance apparatus, the problem gets worse.
Letter to editor (from Blunkett)
Re: Blunkett’s biometrics
Date: 12 May 2003
Sir – I was entertained by Wednesday’s leading article (leader, May 7), which managed to cobble together critical comment about secure passports using biometric technology with laments about state bureaucracy.
Here is a “free country”, “free enterprise” newspaper failing to address the consequences of what free-thinking America is about to do, namely introduce biometric-based entry requirements that will make free entry to that country very difficult for people whose countries do not follow suit.
Robert Matthews, a regular writer for QED column in the Sunday Telegraph, looks at the “wonders of technology” David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, decided it was time we should all benefit from.
Mr Blunkett appears to have fallen under the spell of biometric methods, which use characteristics ranging from fingerprints to handwriting to verify the identity of people. He seems to favour a particularly sophisticated version of the technology, which uses the unique iris patterns of the eye to check ID.
…there is still a stunning lack of awareness of a basic mathematical result that shows why we should all be very wary of any type of screening, biometric or otherwise.
In the case of screening – whether for breast cancer or membership of al-Qaeda – the [Bayes’s] theorem shows that the technology does not do what everyone from doctors to Home Secretaries seems to think it does.
To take a concrete example, suppose a biometric screening method is 99.9 per cent accurate: that is, it spots 99.9 per cent of imposters, and incorrectly accuses one in 1,000 bona fide people (in reality, these are very optimistic figures). Now suppose that every year a horde of 1,000 terrorists passes through Heathrow airport. What are the chances of the biometric system detecting any of them?
The obvious answer is 99.9 per cent. But, in fact, Bayes’s Theorem shows that the correct answer is about two per cent. That is, when the alarms go off and the armed response team turns up at passport control, it is 98 per cent likely to be a false alarm.
Why? Because not even the amazing accuracy of the biometric test can cope with the very low prior probability that any one of the 60 million passengers using Heathrow each year is a terrorist. Sure, it boosts the weight of evidence in favour of guilt 1,000-fold, but that is still not enough to overcome the initially very low probability of guilt.
So there you have it. You just need to calculate your probability of being one of the incorrectly accused one in 1,000 bona fide people and books your ticket accordingly.
Everyone in Britain will have to pay around £25 for a compulsory identity card under proposals being put to the cabinet by David Blunkett, the Home Secretary.
The “smart” card will identify the holder using iris-recognition technology. Failure to carry the card will not be an offence but police will be able to order people to present it at a police station.
So, you won’t need to carry the card with you at all time. How is that going to help the ‘fightagainstterrorism’? Ah, the terrorists will just report to a police station to show off their hi-tech faked ID cards…
The charge is aimed at overcoming resistance to the scheme from the Treasury. Until now Cabinet support for a national compulsory identity card has been outweighed by the Treasury, which has objected to footing the estimated £1.6 billion bill.
Notice how the main reason that ID cards have not been introduced is that the Treasury opposed the £1.6 billion bill. Concerns for privacy or individual rights? Blank stares around the Cabinet meeting table…
While forcing people to pay for the card could add to the anticipated objections from human rights campaigners, Mr Blunkett believes that concern about national security is sufficient to ensure that individuals will be prepared to bear the cost.
Damn, the one time Mr Blunkett uses the word individual is to charge him the cost of extending governments reach over the individual.
Senior figures in the Cabinet strongly support the plan for the card, which would use a microchip to hold details including age, place of birth, home address and a personal number to identify the holder. It is also hoped that the card could be used to entitle the holder to a range of state benefits, thereby cutting benefit fraud.
Mr Blunkett discussed his plan for a national ID card with Tom Ridge, the head of the US Department of Homeland Security, at a meeting in Washington earlier this month. Mr Blunkett agreed to develop a joint programme, using the same technology, with the US, which has already agreed a similar protocol with Canada.
US and Canada?! Anglosphere, help!
The European Central Bank (ECB) is in talks with Hitachi Ltd. about embedding radio tags in euro bank notes to prevent counterfeiting of euros.
The ECB is deeply concerned about counterfeiting and money laundering and is said to be looking at radio tag technology. Last year, Greek authorities were confronted with of 2,411 counterfeiting cases and seized 4,776 counterfeit bank notes while authorities in Poland nabbed a gang suspected of making and putting over a million fake euros into circulation.
To add to the problem, businesses also find it hard to judge a note’s authenticity as current equipment cannot tell between bogus currency and old notes with worn-out security marks. Among the security features in current euros are threads visible under ultraviolet light.
According to Prianka Chopra, an analyst with market research firm Frost and Sullivan the main objective is to determine the authenticity of money and to
stop counterfeits.
RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags also have the ability of recording information such as details of the transactions the paper note has been involved in. It would, therefore, also prevent money-laundering, make it possible to track illegal transactions and even prevent kidnappers demanding unmarked bills.
Besides acting as a digital watermark, the use of radio chips could speed up routine bank processes such as counting. With such tags, a stack of notes can be passed through a reader with the sum added in a split-second, similar to how inventory is tracked in an RFID-based system.
Hitachi is developing noncontact chips for use in bank notes and other paper documents, Kantaro Tanii, confirmed the company’s corporate communications manager for Europe. Hitachi’s Web site describes a 0.4-mm by 0.4-mm by 60-micron radio frequency identification chip, called the Mu Chip, that works in the 2.45-GHz frequency band and has a 128-bit ROM for storing its identity number. It was originally conceived as a bank-note-tracking device but could also be used in passports, driver’s licenses and other official documents.
A Telegraph opinion piece sums up the Home Office’s attempts to introduce compulsory ID cards in the UK:
Benefit fraud, illegal migration, the terrorist threat since September 11: all have been pulled out of the Government’s hat as reasons for introducing compulsory identity cards. The Home Office, which has long favoured them, is aware of the political charge they carry. It has, therefore, tried to deter accusations of seeking to curtail basic freedoms by the euphemism “a universal entitlement card scheme”, and by using whatever emotive issue is to hand as an argument for their introduction.
It is more than half a century since the wartime national registration card was abolished. An illiberal Home Secretary is now trying to use the age of terror and his failure to adopt sensible immigration and asylum policies as a means of setting up a system of national surveillance. The Cabinet should rebuff him without further ado.
Hear, hear… If you stay tuned, you will.
Note: Everyone over 16 would be required to register with a national citizens’ database and would be issued with a personal number. The card is expected to carry core information about the holder, and biometric details such as fingerprints or iris patterns. The cost would be met by adding about £25 to the fee for a driving licence and passport.
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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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