...are classic literal Corrupt Insiders.
Thanks to rumple for pointing me at this one. 'king excellent example of trusted surveillance. Now imagine what it will be like when we routinely turn our mobile phones against them (and record the output direct to web so the footage is safe).
And, of course, it constitutes yet more justification for imposing trusted surveillance on those who, up till now, have held authority over us. Yet more justification for reminding ourselves who is supposed to have the authority in what are supposed to be democracies.
Incidentally, it is also a classic example of what we might have to regard as "terrorism lite" in much the same way we're supposed to regard Waterboarding as "Torture Light" (and could you have imagined 10 years ago that we'd be reading stories like that about an American Government?). My own definition of Terrorism specifies: The lethal targeting of non combatants to promote fear throughout the enemy population. as one of two key defining characteristics of Terrorism.
Provocateurs may not actually kill non combatants, but they clearly have no concern for those who may be killed by the police in the subsequent riot control operation the provos have triggered.
That'll be criminal enough for the average jury when we get around to giving them perfectly fair trials before we hang the bastards.
But the most significant factor in this story? That this is Canada - Not the US of A. Yes, I'm afraid so. Good old civilised liberal Canada. We all thought they were supposed to be one of the good guys. If you weren't shivering before, that should do the trick...
Monday, February 18, 2008
Saturday, February 09, 2008
Police State UK Coming Up To Speed
The Telegraph's revelations about the routine bugging of Lawyers conversations has genuinely shocked the chattering classes. "Is nothing sacred?" They're learning...
One of the Comments on the story reads
"Why not bug prisoners? We might learn something to help prevent yet another crime being commited."
The touching naivete of readers like that (who seems to represent a little under 25% of the responses - but, I suspect, a higher proportion of the wider population) is typical of those who grasp neither the basic concepts of Liberty, Justice and Accountability nor the basic concepts of security.
With regard to the latter, any chance we may have had of gathering intelligence in such circumstances is now completely blown. Not only will no one on government-run premises be stupid enough to continue to act as though they are unmonitored, drying up the sources of information instantly, but, from now on, all lawyers can reasonably insist either on being allowed to "sweep" for bugs, to interview their clients on their own territory, or to take in masking devices to ensure their privacy.
There is one legitimate scenario and one only, in which such breach of privacy while awaiting trial can be justified. It is certainly not with regard to gathering evidence on a crime which has already been committed. That essentially constitutes a breach of the globally recognised human right not to be forced to incriminate ourselves.
Only when a future - and, crucially, lethal - attack is genuinely anticipated can we reasonably argue that the inmate's rights are outweighed by the Social interest in preventing deaths.
However, the real question does not revolve around what is really a "common sense" assessment of whether or not we should keep an eye on poisonous snakes we believe are about to strike, but whether it is reasonable in the circumstances to suspect a particular snake of being that poisonous or being that likely to strike. It is the oversight of that assessment where we have got it badly wrong.
In case it has escaped anyone's attention, the scales have fallen from our eyes. We no longer live in the Edwardian era when it was still unthinkable that Politicians or Policemen could be anything but paragons of virtue. For a raft of entirely legitimate reasons, it is now completely rational NOT to trust politicians, police or even Judges with the kind of authority we need to oversee something as dangerous as spying on our own citizens.
Spying on your own citizens is a major step - probably THE major step - on the road to Totalitarianism. There is only one way to allow such behaviour on the very rare occasions where it may be justified, whilst ensuring that we do not pave the way to such a hell with good intentions.
We must insist that no such serious measures are ever taken without the permission of a Jury of citizens, duly vetted and sworn to secrecy - though entitled to breach that secrecy if they witness abuse of power by the executive or its employees.
We like to believe that we live in a Democracy. We're wrong to believe it, but that's a different issue. One way, however, we can begin to make it true, is to establish Democratic control over our Justice and Security system. Juries of our fellow citizens are the only people we can or should trust with such dangerous authority.
This is the fundamental constitutional basis which lies at the heart of the "Trusted Surveillance" I keep bleating on about. I seem to be a lone voice. You should know the chorus by now, so please feel free to join in...
One of the Comments on the story reads
"Why not bug prisoners? We might learn something to help prevent yet another crime being commited."
The touching naivete of readers like that (who seems to represent a little under 25% of the responses - but, I suspect, a higher proportion of the wider population) is typical of those who grasp neither the basic concepts of Liberty, Justice and Accountability nor the basic concepts of security.
With regard to the latter, any chance we may have had of gathering intelligence in such circumstances is now completely blown. Not only will no one on government-run premises be stupid enough to continue to act as though they are unmonitored, drying up the sources of information instantly, but, from now on, all lawyers can reasonably insist either on being allowed to "sweep" for bugs, to interview their clients on their own territory, or to take in masking devices to ensure their privacy.
There is one legitimate scenario and one only, in which such breach of privacy while awaiting trial can be justified. It is certainly not with regard to gathering evidence on a crime which has already been committed. That essentially constitutes a breach of the globally recognised human right not to be forced to incriminate ourselves.
Only when a future - and, crucially, lethal - attack is genuinely anticipated can we reasonably argue that the inmate's rights are outweighed by the Social interest in preventing deaths.
However, the real question does not revolve around what is really a "common sense" assessment of whether or not we should keep an eye on poisonous snakes we believe are about to strike, but whether it is reasonable in the circumstances to suspect a particular snake of being that poisonous or being that likely to strike. It is the oversight of that assessment where we have got it badly wrong.
In case it has escaped anyone's attention, the scales have fallen from our eyes. We no longer live in the Edwardian era when it was still unthinkable that Politicians or Policemen could be anything but paragons of virtue. For a raft of entirely legitimate reasons, it is now completely rational NOT to trust politicians, police or even Judges with the kind of authority we need to oversee something as dangerous as spying on our own citizens.
Spying on your own citizens is a major step - probably THE major step - on the road to Totalitarianism. There is only one way to allow such behaviour on the very rare occasions where it may be justified, whilst ensuring that we do not pave the way to such a hell with good intentions.
We must insist that no such serious measures are ever taken without the permission of a Jury of citizens, duly vetted and sworn to secrecy - though entitled to breach that secrecy if they witness abuse of power by the executive or its employees.
We like to believe that we live in a Democracy. We're wrong to believe it, but that's a different issue. One way, however, we can begin to make it true, is to establish Democratic control over our Justice and Security system. Juries of our fellow citizens are the only people we can or should trust with such dangerous authority.
This is the fundamental constitutional basis which lies at the heart of the "Trusted Surveillance" I keep bleating on about. I seem to be a lone voice. You should know the chorus by now, so please feel free to join in...
Sunday, February 03, 2008
Banning Juries & Bugging MPs
We need a new word.
What I want to be able to say would be true under a Democratic regime but is not true under the existing constitution. The word needs to mean "legal only in the narrow sense that it has been passed into law by a constitutional authority - but entirely without democratic or moral legitimacy".
"Bad Law" just doesn't cut it. "Evil" get's closer but has too many religious connotations for my taste. Hmmm... how about "Levil" - implying "legal but evil". Yeh, we'll go with that for the time being...
In a Democracy, any attempt to bypass Juries will be a criminal offence and will result in the long term imprisonment of the persons responsible. Unfortunately such meddling, whilst "Levil" is not illegal under an Elective Dictatorship. Elected Dictators are able give themselves the authority to make the rules and any rules they make are, therefore "legal". Which, of course, is why we have to end Elective Dictatorship.
If you're wondering, by the way, what has rattled my cage and caused me to start spouting off, again, about Juries, then read this or listen to this (mp3 10 mb). It's the relevant item on Radio 4's "World This Weekend" earlier today. It describes the proposal, buried within a counter-terrorism bill, to give government the authority to appoint their own Coroners and to exclude Juries in certain "exceptional" cases where the evidence would expose something the government would rather not have exposed.
In a Democracy, there will be some ground rules. One will be that "We The People" remain, at all times, the supreme authority. Occasionally, we will delegate that authority to a Jury who will act on our behalf as a fair sample of The People. There will be occasions when we will trust individuals we pay from the public purse to carry out duties on our behalf. But there will be NO circumstances where such duties include the setting of public policy or the establishment of principles. These are the exclusive domain of the Democratic process.
The idea that there are some matters which cannot be entrusted to The People or our representatives in the form of a Jury is the most offensive political concept it is possible to hold in modern society. It betrays true contempt for We The People. Unfortunately it is a concept and a contempt widely held, mainly by the elites who currently hold power over us - the true "enemy within".
This latest attack, as you will hear in that audio snippet, arises from the government's refusal to reveal, to the family of Azelle Rodney, the background explaining why a policeman murdered him in an attack frighteningly reminiscent of the execution of Jean Charles de Menezes. I use the term murder advisedly. Any execution by the State should be assumed to be murder until or unless they can prove otherwise. Innocent until proven guilty cannot and should not apply to those we licence to kill on our behalf. They must be made to account for every such fatality.
And we must be grown up about such killings. Even when they are tragically wrong, like the Menezes example, it is still possible to argue that the police conduct in the case was reasonable in the circumstances (as I did argue in that case). It is also entirely plausible that intelligence gathered in the case may be of such a sensitive nature that we cannot reasonably expect it to be made available to the public at large or to the family of the victim/s (who are more likely than most to leak it to the wider public in their understandable urge to seek retribution)
What is utterly unacceptable is the notion that such evidence cannot even be placed before a Jury duly sworn to secrecy. What this amounts to is a bunch of jumped up politicians arguing that they cannot trust the people who gave them their jobs. This is completely arse-about-face. It is clearly politicians who cannot and should not be trusted to continue to exercise and abuse their power in the way we have allowed them to do for, well, thousands of years.
Politicians not only have no right or ethical basis for demanding greater trust than the poor suckers who elect them but, by any intelligent analysis should, by virtue of the various priveleges they have awarded themselves, be regarded with considerably less trust than normal citizens.
And in this regard, by strange coincidence, the same news program headlined another fascinating story about the bugging, by Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist gang, of MP Sadiq Khan when talking to his constituent Babar Ahmad in the confines of Woodhill Prison, where Ahmad is being held pending extradition to the PSA
Let us first deal with the serious matter. This case is, I fear, the evidence I've been dreading that the UK is now closing in on becoming a Police State in its own right. I have just written to the authors of the Free Babar Ahmad website seeking clarification of certain points, such as when, if ever, Babar Ahmad's alleged web based fund raising activities on behalf of the Taleban took place.
If, as I suspect, it was in the period prior to the invasion of Afghanistan, there are no conceivable grounds for calling such activity a crime. The Taleban were then the "legitimate" government of a foreign state with whom we were not at war and supporting them was no different to raising funds for the Ethiopian or Indian governments. You might argue that it was unwise, but you cannot argue that it was criminal. Only if his support continued after the invasion could there be any grounds for prosecution (because it could then be "legitimately" argued that he was giving "aid and comfort to the enemy") And it looks extremely unlikely that there are such grounds because we already know that the British Government have made it clear that they have no grounds for prosecuting him.
In any case, even if it turned out that his support did continue after the invasion (which would raise the question of why the British Government isn't prosecuting him) that would present no excuse for his brutal American Police style treatment at the hands of the British Police. And, of course, his detention under the "Levil" Extradition Act of 2003 is a cause for deep national shame for which political heads (not just of ministers but of all the MPs who allowed this Bill to get onto the Statutes) should roll, preferably sooner rather than later.
Be all that as it may, the fuss today is not about the much more serious injustice being perpetrated against Babar Ahmad but about the rather trivial issue of his conversation with his MP being bugged(mp3 6.5mb). It seems that the ganders are not at all keen to suffer the sauce being so regularly dished out to the geese.
It's apparently OK for MPs to vote in powers which subvert Habeas Corpus and allow detention without trial for 28 days (and seeking - in the same counter terrorism bill - to extend it to 42); it's OK for them to let the police bug us in our homes or workplaces or on our phones. OK to demand our encryption keys or web surfing history for the past two years or to track us anywhere we go in our cars and it's OK to watch every citizen in the country about 100 times a day with the largest set of CCTV cameras anywhere in the world.
But heaven help us if somebody bugs an MP! Oh No! They must be Off Limits! Jack Straw has actually said:
Certainly anyone who wants to allow the kind of massive uncontrolled and untrusted surveillance of ordinary citizens that these incompetent charlatans have permitted in recent years had better get used to the idea that the era of Elected Dictators is coming to an end. We're coming to get you. And we're going to start the process by watching you much more closely than you've ever dreamed.
What I want to be able to say would be true under a Democratic regime but is not true under the existing constitution. The word needs to mean "legal only in the narrow sense that it has been passed into law by a constitutional authority - but entirely without democratic or moral legitimacy".
"Bad Law" just doesn't cut it. "Evil" get's closer but has too many religious connotations for my taste. Hmmm... how about "Levil" - implying "legal but evil". Yeh, we'll go with that for the time being...
In a Democracy, any attempt to bypass Juries will be a criminal offence and will result in the long term imprisonment of the persons responsible. Unfortunately such meddling, whilst "Levil" is not illegal under an Elective Dictatorship. Elected Dictators are able give themselves the authority to make the rules and any rules they make are, therefore "legal". Which, of course, is why we have to end Elective Dictatorship.
If you're wondering, by the way, what has rattled my cage and caused me to start spouting off, again, about Juries, then read this or listen to this (mp3 10 mb). It's the relevant item on Radio 4's "World This Weekend" earlier today. It describes the proposal, buried within a counter-terrorism bill, to give government the authority to appoint their own Coroners and to exclude Juries in certain "exceptional" cases where the evidence would expose something the government would rather not have exposed.
In a Democracy, there will be some ground rules. One will be that "We The People" remain, at all times, the supreme authority. Occasionally, we will delegate that authority to a Jury who will act on our behalf as a fair sample of The People. There will be occasions when we will trust individuals we pay from the public purse to carry out duties on our behalf. But there will be NO circumstances where such duties include the setting of public policy or the establishment of principles. These are the exclusive domain of the Democratic process.
The idea that there are some matters which cannot be entrusted to The People or our representatives in the form of a Jury is the most offensive political concept it is possible to hold in modern society. It betrays true contempt for We The People. Unfortunately it is a concept and a contempt widely held, mainly by the elites who currently hold power over us - the true "enemy within".
This latest attack, as you will hear in that audio snippet, arises from the government's refusal to reveal, to the family of Azelle Rodney, the background explaining why a policeman murdered him in an attack frighteningly reminiscent of the execution of Jean Charles de Menezes. I use the term murder advisedly. Any execution by the State should be assumed to be murder until or unless they can prove otherwise. Innocent until proven guilty cannot and should not apply to those we licence to kill on our behalf. They must be made to account for every such fatality.
And we must be grown up about such killings. Even when they are tragically wrong, like the Menezes example, it is still possible to argue that the police conduct in the case was reasonable in the circumstances (as I did argue in that case). It is also entirely plausible that intelligence gathered in the case may be of such a sensitive nature that we cannot reasonably expect it to be made available to the public at large or to the family of the victim/s (who are more likely than most to leak it to the wider public in their understandable urge to seek retribution)
What is utterly unacceptable is the notion that such evidence cannot even be placed before a Jury duly sworn to secrecy. What this amounts to is a bunch of jumped up politicians arguing that they cannot trust the people who gave them their jobs. This is completely arse-about-face. It is clearly politicians who cannot and should not be trusted to continue to exercise and abuse their power in the way we have allowed them to do for, well, thousands of years.
Politicians not only have no right or ethical basis for demanding greater trust than the poor suckers who elect them but, by any intelligent analysis should, by virtue of the various priveleges they have awarded themselves, be regarded with considerably less trust than normal citizens.
And in this regard, by strange coincidence, the same news program headlined another fascinating story about the bugging, by Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist gang, of MP Sadiq Khan when talking to his constituent Babar Ahmad in the confines of Woodhill Prison, where Ahmad is being held pending extradition to the PSA
Let us first deal with the serious matter. This case is, I fear, the evidence I've been dreading that the UK is now closing in on becoming a Police State in its own right. I have just written to the authors of the Free Babar Ahmad website seeking clarification of certain points, such as when, if ever, Babar Ahmad's alleged web based fund raising activities on behalf of the Taleban took place.
If, as I suspect, it was in the period prior to the invasion of Afghanistan, there are no conceivable grounds for calling such activity a crime. The Taleban were then the "legitimate" government of a foreign state with whom we were not at war and supporting them was no different to raising funds for the Ethiopian or Indian governments. You might argue that it was unwise, but you cannot argue that it was criminal. Only if his support continued after the invasion could there be any grounds for prosecution (because it could then be "legitimately" argued that he was giving "aid and comfort to the enemy") And it looks extremely unlikely that there are such grounds because we already know that the British Government have made it clear that they have no grounds for prosecuting him.
In any case, even if it turned out that his support did continue after the invasion (which would raise the question of why the British Government isn't prosecuting him) that would present no excuse for his brutal American Police style treatment at the hands of the British Police. And, of course, his detention under the "Levil" Extradition Act of 2003 is a cause for deep national shame for which political heads (not just of ministers but of all the MPs who allowed this Bill to get onto the Statutes) should roll, preferably sooner rather than later.
Be all that as it may, the fuss today is not about the much more serious injustice being perpetrated against Babar Ahmad but about the rather trivial issue of his conversation with his MP being bugged(mp3 6.5mb). It seems that the ganders are not at all keen to suffer the sauce being so regularly dished out to the geese.
It's apparently OK for MPs to vote in powers which subvert Habeas Corpus and allow detention without trial for 28 days (and seeking - in the same counter terrorism bill - to extend it to 42); it's OK for them to let the police bug us in our homes or workplaces or on our phones. OK to demand our encryption keys or web surfing history for the past two years or to track us anywhere we go in our cars and it's OK to watch every citizen in the country about 100 times a day with the largest set of CCTV cameras anywhere in the world.
But heaven help us if somebody bugs an MP! Oh No! They must be Off Limits! Jack Straw has actually said:
"It is completely unacceptable for an interview to be conducted by a MP on a constituent matter or in any other issue to be recorded."Well Bollocks to that. While I'm entirely in favour of the constituents' privacy, under any kind of civilised system, it is those who place themselves at the top of the tree who must expect to be watched most of all. And whether they are watched should, like the rest of us, be decided not by Police, Politicians or Judges but by Juries of our fellow citizens.
Certainly anyone who wants to allow the kind of massive uncontrolled and untrusted surveillance of ordinary citizens that these incompetent charlatans have permitted in recent years had better get used to the idea that the era of Elected Dictators is coming to an end. We're coming to get you. And we're going to start the process by watching you much more closely than you've ever dreamed.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Would you ask a Paedophile to babysit your children?
Obviously not. So why would you trust a government to look after your private data? Historically and currently they are easily the worst abusers and losers we know about.
Globally, until the recent Datastrophe, the UK government was regarded as one of the best in this field, yet look what they've managed to achieve in just the past few weeks:
Today's embarrassment is this story (Ministry of Defence - our Professional Security Force - loses data on 600,000 potential recruits). But in recent weeks we've had this one (names and addresses of 160,000 children in the "care" of the Hackney Primary Care Trust go missing), not to mention this one (ex DWP employee "forgot" to return data on thousands of claimants, then mislaid it) and this one (hundreds of personal details found on a roundabout in Devon) and this one (Stockport PCT loses details on 4,000 patients) and this one (Oldham PCT loses a mere 100) and this one (Inland Revenue loses details on 6,500 building society members) and this one (DVLA Northern Ireland loses data on 6,000 drivers "in the post") and this one (25,000 Standard Life customers' data lost in the post by HMRC)
I could go on but those are just the REPORTED data breaches, all as you can see, by agencies of the UK government in the last 10 weeks or so. Oh - and all these "one offs" followed hot on the heels of the biggest of them all: a world record in its class. The subject of my previous blog.
Are we spotting a pattern yet? I'm quite sure you, dear reader, get the picture, even if the wankers responsible for this incompetent series of of data disasters haven't quite managed to join the dots. Trusting these imbeciles to protect our private data is itself an act of gross imbecility or even negligence on our part; every bit as stupid as asking a paedophile to babysit our children...
Globally, until the recent Datastrophe, the UK government was regarded as one of the best in this field, yet look what they've managed to achieve in just the past few weeks:
Today's embarrassment is this story (Ministry of Defence - our Professional Security Force - loses data on 600,000 potential recruits). But in recent weeks we've had this one (names and addresses of 160,000 children in the "care" of the Hackney Primary Care Trust go missing), not to mention this one (ex DWP employee "forgot" to return data on thousands of claimants, then mislaid it) and this one (hundreds of personal details found on a roundabout in Devon) and this one (Stockport PCT loses details on 4,000 patients) and this one (Oldham PCT loses a mere 100) and this one (Inland Revenue loses details on 6,500 building society members) and this one (DVLA Northern Ireland loses data on 6,000 drivers "in the post") and this one (25,000 Standard Life customers' data lost in the post by HMRC)
I could go on but those are just the REPORTED data breaches, all as you can see, by agencies of the UK government in the last 10 weeks or so. Oh - and all these "one offs" followed hot on the heels of the biggest of them all: a world record in its class. The subject of my previous blog.
Are we spotting a pattern yet? I'm quite sure you, dear reader, get the picture, even if the wankers responsible for this incompetent series of of data disasters haven't quite managed to join the dots. Trusting these imbeciles to protect our private data is itself an act of gross imbecility or even negligence on our part; every bit as stupid as asking a paedophile to babysit our children...
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Datastrophe!
The sheer scale of this Data Disaster is beyond precedent. I don't think anywhere in the world has there been such a major breach of personal data protection. Britain is now, officially, the most incompetent protector of sensitive personal data on the planet.
Well, it's always good to be number one at something.
The good news of course, is that this has completely skuppered their naive and dangerous plans for massive centralised databases filled with even more sensitive and valuable personal data than that which they have owned up to losing today - their "National Identity Database".
The polls will, no doubt, reflect that immediately. Asked the question: "Do you trust the government to protect the masses of personal data they wish to store about you?" I would now bet that the "Yes" vote would be somewhat less than 10%. And they'll be made up largely of those who don't yet know about the Datastrophe.
Jane Kennedy had the miserable duty of appearing before the Jeremy to defend the indefensible on behalf of the Government. Obviously the mistress of understatement, she accepted that "we need to demonstrate that we can be trusted".
The very first thing they will have to do in order to have even a 1% chance of rebuilding trust is to listen to the 'king experts who have been warning them for YEARS that this kind of disaster is inevitable once you hold massive centralised databases filled with sensitive and valuable personal data to which thousands of people require regular access.
This, as I've said elsewhere, is what (probably) the world's best known expert in this field - Bruce Schneier - tells us about how we can protect massive centralised databases filled with sensitive and valuable personal data to which thousands of people require regular access.
As they obviously didn't hear me last time, you'll pardon me if I shout:
"AS COMPUTER SCIENTISTS, WE DO NOT KNOW HOW TO KEEP A DATABASE OF THIS MAGNITUDE SECURE, WHETHER FROM OUTSIDE HACKERS OR THE THOUSANDS OF INSIDERS AUTHORIZED TO ACCESS IT" (EMPHASIS ADDED - sorry - emphasis added)
Got that? WE DO NOT KNOW
We might think about starting to trust you ever again when you stop pretending you are capable of doing something that the world's leading experts tell us can not be done. It makes you sound as ridiculous as Thabo Mbeki telling his South African AIDS riddled citizens that their illness has nothing to do with HIV
And let me make this plain. The consensus on this issue, amongst those experts who qualify and are taken seriously by the global Crypto and Security community, is much greater than the alleged consensus on Global Warming. It's even greater than the consensus on the link between HIV and AIDS. It is a true consensus. There is zero dissent.
Only those with political or commercial interests claim that such protection is possible.
Got that? Only those with political or commercial interests claim that such protection is possible.
So, if you're genuinely not heading down the American Police State path, and you REALLY want to begin to rebuild our trust, you will have to begin by apologising for your previous intransigence and publicly accepting what the recognised independent experts have been consistently telling us for a very long time. Meanwhile...
You are not Tesco's.
Yes, they can tell us our shopping habits and put them together with our name and address (if we're a card holder, or pay regularly by credit card) and even that relatively trivial level of detail can provide a lot of personal information people probably wouldn't be at all comfortable with if they understood it. For example - Ladies - you do realise that they know when most of you are having your period? You might not care, but if they were inclined, and if they were allowed to, which fortunately, to date, they are not, they could sell that information to the highest bidder. A Tampon manufacturer is likely to win. If and when you start getting relevant monthly SPAM, you might wanna start thinking about that.
Fortunately, though even Tesco's limited dataset is valuable to someone somewhere, it is not, yet at least, so valuable that it is likely to become a magnet to those who know how to exploit data for commercial purposes and are prepared to exercise "unconventional" means to get at it. Do you know what a single "clean" set of bank account details was fetching on the black market yesterday? (Before this disclosure) £400 quid.
Boy are they going to be pissed at you. You assholes have just flooded the market with about £10 BILLION POUNDS WORTH of virginal bank details - which is bound to depress the market price considerably. It might already - given the fuss and high profile - have reduced in value to only a Billion or two. And you really don't think it's going to get into the wrong hands??
If you are thinking like that you still don't get it. There are no right hands for such data to be sitting in. You've just proved - if anyone still doubted it - that this most certainly includes you.
Let me ram the point firmly home. You're stuffed mate. There is no conceivable "happy ending" to this for you. This is your CJD moment. All you can hope for now is that the long term effects are minimal. Even if the disks are found tomorrow morning, and even if they are apparently in a safe place, still on government "controlled" premises, you will still be stuffed, because, like the rest of the world, you cannot prove a negative. You cannot prove that - in the 3 weeks they've already been missing - the disks have not been removed by a skilled attacker, copied, and returned as though innocently mislaid. Your security chappies do this kind of thing all the time. They're not alone.
So even if Darling can rush into the House tomorrow afternoon clutching the disks in his sweaty hands (which would be a bloody stupid thing to do - but within the range of political grandstanding tradition) we will not know for years whether or not this data has been released into the wild. Partly this is because the clever attackers will not try the smash and grab that everybody seems to expect.
Nobody's going to find hundreds or thousands of pounds has gone missing from their accounts. Too obvious. Too traceable. Too easily spotted. Even by the banks. No. They'll set up small random withdrawals from their millions of hijacked accounts to hundreds or thousands of different recipient accounts. These withdrawals will be typical of the account (to whose records they have gained access for computerised analysis). How many victims are ever going to notice £3.72 this month, £2.18 next month and so on? How many are going to do anything about it? (In fact the only evidence we might ever get to see is that fall in the black market price.)
Tesco's data - and even the 25 Million sets of personal data you've just lost - is not a patch on what you bumbling amateurs are storing elsewhere. Tesco's can't connect their information with any other of our personal data because they don't have access to it. This limits, significantly, the risk we run by letting Tesco hold a small amount of our personal data - but it's still non zero as hinted above.
You, on other hand, CAN connect THEIR data to all the other data sets you have access to, because you've recently given yourself the authority to do that kind of thing without, as I recall, the permission of the British People; but then, as the law stands, you don't actually need our permission, do you. So that's alright then.
So if the limited details...
"children's names, addresses, dates of birth, NI numbers and where relevant bank and building society account details"
are worth a few hundred quid per set, what's the market value of a set including tax details, medical history, criminal record, credit records, child benefit records, telephone records, known associations, club memberships, mobile phone records and internet surfing history, to mention but a few? £1,000? £10,000? Pick a number. Now multiply it by the 60 Million sets you retards are talking about storing and you'll realise we're talking figures in excess of American Defence Spending.
Do you understand what that means? It means that it's worth someone spending something close to what the Americans spend on their super inflated military budget in order to get access to data of that quantity and quality. The Americans, of course, will probably be your first customer. And - if you hadn't guessed - we don't trust you to resist the sale.
We may not need to match the attackers budget in full, because, like we do with military defence, we share some of the costs with our allies, but think of it like this: If America ever became our sworn enemy, how much would we have to spend to defend ourselves against them?
Quite.
Neither can we afford what it would cost - in either economic terms or those of civil liberties and privacy - to defend your proposed massive centralised databases filled with sensitive and valuable personal data to which thousands of people will require regular access. It's a non starter. Learn that lesson, and there is a small chance that your citizens might stop laughing in disbelief at your ludicrous posturing.
And, if you still want an ID card after that, you're going to have to adopt one WITHOUT A MASSIVE CENTRALISED DATABASE FILLED WITH SENSITIVE AND VALUABLE PERSONAL DATA TO WHICH THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE REQUIRE REGULAR ACCESS.
Such as the one I've been trying to tell you about, since 2002, here.
Is that clear?
Good. Now don't do it again!
Well, it's always good to be number one at something.
The good news of course, is that this has completely skuppered their naive and dangerous plans for massive centralised databases filled with even more sensitive and valuable personal data than that which they have owned up to losing today - their "National Identity Database".
The polls will, no doubt, reflect that immediately. Asked the question: "Do you trust the government to protect the masses of personal data they wish to store about you?" I would now bet that the "Yes" vote would be somewhat less than 10%. And they'll be made up largely of those who don't yet know about the Datastrophe.
Jane Kennedy had the miserable duty of appearing before the Jeremy to defend the indefensible on behalf of the Government. Obviously the mistress of understatement, she accepted that "we need to demonstrate that we can be trusted".
The very first thing they will have to do in order to have even a 1% chance of rebuilding trust is to listen to the 'king experts who have been warning them for YEARS that this kind of disaster is inevitable once you hold massive centralised databases filled with sensitive and valuable personal data to which thousands of people require regular access.
This, as I've said elsewhere, is what (probably) the world's best known expert in this field - Bruce Schneier - tells us about how we can protect massive centralised databases filled with sensitive and valuable personal data to which thousands of people require regular access.
As they obviously didn't hear me last time, you'll pardon me if I shout:
"AS COMPUTER SCIENTISTS, WE DO NOT KNOW HOW TO KEEP A DATABASE OF THIS MAGNITUDE SECURE, WHETHER FROM OUTSIDE HACKERS OR THE THOUSANDS OF INSIDERS AUTHORIZED TO ACCESS IT" (EMPHASIS ADDED - sorry - emphasis added)
Got that? WE DO NOT KNOW
We might think about starting to trust you ever again when you stop pretending you are capable of doing something that the world's leading experts tell us can not be done. It makes you sound as ridiculous as Thabo Mbeki telling his South African AIDS riddled citizens that their illness has nothing to do with HIV
And let me make this plain. The consensus on this issue, amongst those experts who qualify and are taken seriously by the global Crypto and Security community, is much greater than the alleged consensus on Global Warming. It's even greater than the consensus on the link between HIV and AIDS. It is a true consensus. There is zero dissent.
Only those with political or commercial interests claim that such protection is possible.
Got that? Only those with political or commercial interests claim that such protection is possible.
So, if you're genuinely not heading down the American Police State path, and you REALLY want to begin to rebuild our trust, you will have to begin by apologising for your previous intransigence and publicly accepting what the recognised independent experts have been consistently telling us for a very long time. Meanwhile...
You are not Tesco's.
Yes, they can tell us our shopping habits and put them together with our name and address (if we're a card holder, or pay regularly by credit card) and even that relatively trivial level of detail can provide a lot of personal information people probably wouldn't be at all comfortable with if they understood it. For example - Ladies - you do realise that they know when most of you are having your period? You might not care, but if they were inclined, and if they were allowed to, which fortunately, to date, they are not, they could sell that information to the highest bidder. A Tampon manufacturer is likely to win. If and when you start getting relevant monthly SPAM, you might wanna start thinking about that.
Fortunately, though even Tesco's limited dataset is valuable to someone somewhere, it is not, yet at least, so valuable that it is likely to become a magnet to those who know how to exploit data for commercial purposes and are prepared to exercise "unconventional" means to get at it. Do you know what a single "clean" set of bank account details was fetching on the black market yesterday? (Before this disclosure) £400 quid.
Boy are they going to be pissed at you. You assholes have just flooded the market with about £10 BILLION POUNDS WORTH of virginal bank details - which is bound to depress the market price considerably. It might already - given the fuss and high profile - have reduced in value to only a Billion or two. And you really don't think it's going to get into the wrong hands??
If you are thinking like that you still don't get it. There are no right hands for such data to be sitting in. You've just proved - if anyone still doubted it - that this most certainly includes you.
Let me ram the point firmly home. You're stuffed mate. There is no conceivable "happy ending" to this for you. This is your CJD moment. All you can hope for now is that the long term effects are minimal. Even if the disks are found tomorrow morning, and even if they are apparently in a safe place, still on government "controlled" premises, you will still be stuffed, because, like the rest of the world, you cannot prove a negative. You cannot prove that - in the 3 weeks they've already been missing - the disks have not been removed by a skilled attacker, copied, and returned as though innocently mislaid. Your security chappies do this kind of thing all the time. They're not alone.
So even if Darling can rush into the House tomorrow afternoon clutching the disks in his sweaty hands (which would be a bloody stupid thing to do - but within the range of political grandstanding tradition) we will not know for years whether or not this data has been released into the wild. Partly this is because the clever attackers will not try the smash and grab that everybody seems to expect.
Nobody's going to find hundreds or thousands of pounds has gone missing from their accounts. Too obvious. Too traceable. Too easily spotted. Even by the banks. No. They'll set up small random withdrawals from their millions of hijacked accounts to hundreds or thousands of different recipient accounts. These withdrawals will be typical of the account (to whose records they have gained access for computerised analysis). How many victims are ever going to notice £3.72 this month, £2.18 next month and so on? How many are going to do anything about it? (In fact the only evidence we might ever get to see is that fall in the black market price.)
Tesco's data - and even the 25 Million sets of personal data you've just lost - is not a patch on what you bumbling amateurs are storing elsewhere. Tesco's can't connect their information with any other of our personal data because they don't have access to it. This limits, significantly, the risk we run by letting Tesco hold a small amount of our personal data - but it's still non zero as hinted above.
You, on other hand, CAN connect THEIR data to all the other data sets you have access to, because you've recently given yourself the authority to do that kind of thing without, as I recall, the permission of the British People; but then, as the law stands, you don't actually need our permission, do you. So that's alright then.
So if the limited details...
"children's names, addresses, dates of birth, NI numbers and where relevant bank and building society account details"
are worth a few hundred quid per set, what's the market value of a set including tax details, medical history, criminal record, credit records, child benefit records, telephone records, known associations, club memberships, mobile phone records and internet surfing history, to mention but a few? £1,000? £10,000? Pick a number. Now multiply it by the 60 Million sets you retards are talking about storing and you'll realise we're talking figures in excess of American Defence Spending.
Do you understand what that means? It means that it's worth someone spending something close to what the Americans spend on their super inflated military budget in order to get access to data of that quantity and quality. The Americans, of course, will probably be your first customer. And - if you hadn't guessed - we don't trust you to resist the sale.
We may not need to match the attackers budget in full, because, like we do with military defence, we share some of the costs with our allies, but think of it like this: If America ever became our sworn enemy, how much would we have to spend to defend ourselves against them?
Quite.
Neither can we afford what it would cost - in either economic terms or those of civil liberties and privacy - to defend your proposed massive centralised databases filled with sensitive and valuable personal data to which thousands of people will require regular access. It's a non starter. Learn that lesson, and there is a small chance that your citizens might stop laughing in disbelief at your ludicrous posturing.
And, if you still want an ID card after that, you're going to have to adopt one WITHOUT A MASSIVE CENTRALISED DATABASE FILLED WITH SENSITIVE AND VALUABLE PERSONAL DATA TO WHICH THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE REQUIRE REGULAR ACCESS.
Such as the one I've been trying to tell you about, since 2002, here.
Is that clear?
Good. Now don't do it again!
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Happy Anniversary!
This is a remarkable - and genuinely hopeful - development in the 3rd World War. Maajid Nawaz was - until sometime very recently - a leading figure in Hizb-ut-Tahrir, one of the few radical Islamic movements who explicitly call for the Caliphate and even make it clear that they're after a Global Caliphate. In other words they don't just want Islamic Countries to unite under a common Caliph, they want to bring the rest of us into their Islamic fold as well.
Thanks, but no thanks.
Majiid, it seems, has had time to think. He's been in an Egyptian jail for the past few years and, in that time, got to read some of the more traditional Islamic texts instead of the selective radical sources he's been exposed to since the age of 16. He woke up.
He realised that, for the past 12 years he's been brainwashed and guilty of brainwashing others. And he's come out, pretty damn publicly, to tell the world about it. (if that link dies use my backup of the Newsnight interview - wmv 30mb 17 mins)
This really is amazingly good news. Like, oh I don't know, Congress deciding to hold a real 9-11 inquiry and impeach the President or Duane Gish and Michael Behe telling us that they can suddenly see the point of evolution after all!
Happy Anniversary!
Thanks, but no thanks.
Majiid, it seems, has had time to think. He's been in an Egyptian jail for the past few years and, in that time, got to read some of the more traditional Islamic texts instead of the selective radical sources he's been exposed to since the age of 16. He woke up.
He realised that, for the past 12 years he's been brainwashed and guilty of brainwashing others. And he's come out, pretty damn publicly, to tell the world about it. (if that link dies use my backup of the Newsnight interview - wmv 30mb 17 mins)
This really is amazingly good news. Like, oh I don't know, Congress deciding to hold a real 9-11 inquiry and impeach the President or Duane Gish and Michael Behe telling us that they can suddenly see the point of evolution after all!
Happy Anniversary!
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Children's Fight Club
As moral panics go, this week's isn't yet a patch on last week's (Cannabis increases risk of Psychosis by 41%) but I've dealt with that one here and here.
You've got a week to watch Panorama's latest rant on the BBC site.
If you miss that opportunity, I've uploaded a copy to mediafire which you can download (57Mb wmv file) here.
The rant is - as the patronising title suggests - about the latest "wicked" wheeze being practiced by our younger primates; i.e. the mobile phone footage of violent attacks by teenagers against other teenagers, sometimes staged purely for the purpose of the capturing such footage in order to try to win a ratings battle on Youtube.
As is usual with adolescent primates, the kind of playacting they did as infants has lost its charm and become genuinely aggressive and violent as they vie for status within and between their gangs and cliques. The older primates are troubled and looking for ways to control their offspring.
Back in the days when status came automatically with age or wage, it was enough for an elder primate merely to scold or cuff a junior and the deviant behaviour would be nipped in the bud. But this generation of young primates is too well educated and too intelligent to be bamboozled into believing that any of the elder primates has any moral authority over them in today's world.
After all, they've watched Presidents and Prime Ministers start illegal wars, killing hundreds of thousands of people, including thousands of their own people, and get away with it. After that, what credible objections can we make about a bit of brutal happy slapping where hardly anyone dies? Yeah, it's bullying and nasty and humiliating and gruesome and gross and childish and chimplike. But then, quite a lot of real life is like that. And always has been. We just haven't previously acknowledged it or allowed it to be seen.
The question now arises as to what, if anything we should do about this accelerating phenomenon. What the nanny state - on this occasion represented by one of its senior and more respected publicity agents, the BBC - wants is good old fashioned 20th century censorship. As we know, censorship has an excellent track record of success in modifying a wide variety of social behaviour so it makes eminent good sense to apply it in this situation.
The lawyer in the Panorama piece wants to criminalise the practise of recording such violent acts. This man must have an IQ higher than his shoe size. Has it not occurred to this LAWYER that these videos constitute evidence which can be used against the perpetrator?
Yes, I know that SOME of the violence only happens because it is now possible to share the videos. But if you think that this video game represents even a significant minority of routine teenage violence, you are living on a different planet. In fact the real problem with the videos is that generally, they're of abysmal quality.
This works to the advantage of the victim because most of them can't be recognised from the videos and, thus, the subsequent humiliation is a little reduced. Not much, though, because their peers will still know what happened and, as any adolescent primate will confirm, what your peers know and think is vastly more important than anything else.
However, it also works to the advantage of the perp, in that we can't identify the bastards well enough to sustain a conviction. So we desperately need much better resolution.
We also have the problem that we don't know - to the level of satisfaction required for a criminal conviction - whether the footage has been tampered with. To solve that problem, we need to store a fingerprint of the videos created at the time and recorded to an immutable audit trail.
Providing we can trust the time details recorded in the footage or find witnesses to confirm the time of the recorded events, and we can trust the timestamp of the fingerprint, then we can reliably determine the earliest and latest possible times for creation of the video data. If that "window" is narrow enough, it eliminates the possibility of tampering. Now, unless the apparent victim comes forward, without duress, and convinces us that it wasn't really a crime (it was only a gory scene staged for the camera) we will have good grounds to prosecute and a high probability of conviction.
Used like this, the technology is an example of Trusted Surveillance. But how do we separate footage deliberately taken with a view to sustaining prosecution from that taken "for a bit of a laff". Simple, we build the timestamping and web storage into the phones so that the footage doesn't have to be uploaded to Youtube as a separate operation. Uploading starts, to your own secure webspace, from the moment you start recording. And it costs you nothing.
Unless, that is, you ever want to access the data for purposes other than supporting a criminal prosecution (like posting it as entertainment up onto Youtube). Then it costs whatever the market will sustain. Your video fingerprint and record of ownership, however, can be made available to the authorities if the community votes that your footage represents an offence which should be prosecuted. It may well be that a jury would regard your failure to use the evidence as a crime of ommission on your part. That's a risk you will have to take.
Of course, this means that Youtube and others like it, need to fine tune their "flagging" systems. We need to be able to flag a video specifically as a "Potential Criminal Offence - Poster's details should be passed to the authorities for prosecution". Of course, we can't expect or require Youtube, or anyone else, to react to just one person raising such a flag. There must be genuine democratic support for the condemnation.
Once such a flag is raised, it should, in fact, become impossible for the Poster to remove it. After all, that might constitute "interfering with the course of justice". Instead, a notice should go up alongside the video inviting people to watch it and judge for themselves. Nobody should be allowed to vote unless they've watched it. That is a simple matter of cookie management. Once certain thresholds are passed, the site owners should consider themselves instructed, by the community, to act against the Poster/s of the video.
The thresholds cannot be too low. A persuasive cult or corporate could organise a few thousand drones at the drop of a hat to vote almost anything they disapproved of into purgatory. So your voting authority would have to be linked to your site activity. Another task for cookie management. It would mean that those who spend hundreds of hours on Youtube would have more voting power than someone like me, who spends, perhaps, an hour or two a week on those kind of sites. It would mean that regular community users couldn't be outvoted by voters bussed in for the gig.
So, with that "activity based weighting" in place, we'd then need a minimum of - say - 10,000 votes to be cast for any vote to matter; and a minimum 90% majority must approve of criminal prosecution before the instruction is valid.
Don't even think about trying to justify a simple majority. If 49% of the community approve of a video that is more than enough to justify it's continued presence. But if 90% disapprove, that's a reasonably powerful argument for removing it and - if appropriate - passing on relevant details to the forces of internal repression. (If the 10% desperately want to continue sharing such material, they'll have to go off and create their own site)
This arrangement gives the community democratic "teeth" which we can use to control the more outrageous examples of video nasties. It also defends the service provider. They can honestly say that the site ethics are controlled - as they should be in a democracy - by the site community. Censorship might well be justified, on occasions, but such judgements should never be made other than by We The People. We're the only ones that ought to matter.
As for weaning junior primates off this behaviour, I can think of nothing more effective than revealing, publicly, how similar their behaviour is to chimpanzees. With that in mind I propose that someone with appropriate time, energy and editing skills put together a video compilation interspersing choice examples of chimpanzee violence with teenage gang violence. Volunteers and suggested sources are hereby invited.
Once humans with reasonable intelligence begin to realise how chimplike and unintelligent their behaviour really is, then instead of their self image being boosted by peer approval, they'll all begin to realise what a bunch of pratts they really are. And it's never been cool to be a pratt...
[update 11 Aug 2007 - speaking of using Youtube postings as evidence... (irritatingly, I can't find the actual video)]
You've got a week to watch Panorama's latest rant on the BBC site.
If you miss that opportunity, I've uploaded a copy to mediafire which you can download (57Mb wmv file) here.
The rant is - as the patronising title suggests - about the latest "wicked" wheeze being practiced by our younger primates; i.e. the mobile phone footage of violent attacks by teenagers against other teenagers, sometimes staged purely for the purpose of the capturing such footage in order to try to win a ratings battle on Youtube.
As is usual with adolescent primates, the kind of playacting they did as infants has lost its charm and become genuinely aggressive and violent as they vie for status within and between their gangs and cliques. The older primates are troubled and looking for ways to control their offspring.
Back in the days when status came automatically with age or wage, it was enough for an elder primate merely to scold or cuff a junior and the deviant behaviour would be nipped in the bud. But this generation of young primates is too well educated and too intelligent to be bamboozled into believing that any of the elder primates has any moral authority over them in today's world.
After all, they've watched Presidents and Prime Ministers start illegal wars, killing hundreds of thousands of people, including thousands of their own people, and get away with it. After that, what credible objections can we make about a bit of brutal happy slapping where hardly anyone dies? Yeah, it's bullying and nasty and humiliating and gruesome and gross and childish and chimplike. But then, quite a lot of real life is like that. And always has been. We just haven't previously acknowledged it or allowed it to be seen.
The question now arises as to what, if anything we should do about this accelerating phenomenon. What the nanny state - on this occasion represented by one of its senior and more respected publicity agents, the BBC - wants is good old fashioned 20th century censorship. As we know, censorship has an excellent track record of success in modifying a wide variety of social behaviour so it makes eminent good sense to apply it in this situation.
The lawyer in the Panorama piece wants to criminalise the practise of recording such violent acts. This man must have an IQ higher than his shoe size. Has it not occurred to this LAWYER that these videos constitute evidence which can be used against the perpetrator?
Yes, I know that SOME of the violence only happens because it is now possible to share the videos. But if you think that this video game represents even a significant minority of routine teenage violence, you are living on a different planet. In fact the real problem with the videos is that generally, they're of abysmal quality.
This works to the advantage of the victim because most of them can't be recognised from the videos and, thus, the subsequent humiliation is a little reduced. Not much, though, because their peers will still know what happened and, as any adolescent primate will confirm, what your peers know and think is vastly more important than anything else.
However, it also works to the advantage of the perp, in that we can't identify the bastards well enough to sustain a conviction. So we desperately need much better resolution.
We also have the problem that we don't know - to the level of satisfaction required for a criminal conviction - whether the footage has been tampered with. To solve that problem, we need to store a fingerprint of the videos created at the time and recorded to an immutable audit trail.
Providing we can trust the time details recorded in the footage or find witnesses to confirm the time of the recorded events, and we can trust the timestamp of the fingerprint, then we can reliably determine the earliest and latest possible times for creation of the video data. If that "window" is narrow enough, it eliminates the possibility of tampering. Now, unless the apparent victim comes forward, without duress, and convinces us that it wasn't really a crime (it was only a gory scene staged for the camera) we will have good grounds to prosecute and a high probability of conviction.
Used like this, the technology is an example of Trusted Surveillance. But how do we separate footage deliberately taken with a view to sustaining prosecution from that taken "for a bit of a laff". Simple, we build the timestamping and web storage into the phones so that the footage doesn't have to be uploaded to Youtube as a separate operation. Uploading starts, to your own secure webspace, from the moment you start recording. And it costs you nothing.
Unless, that is, you ever want to access the data for purposes other than supporting a criminal prosecution (like posting it as entertainment up onto Youtube). Then it costs whatever the market will sustain. Your video fingerprint and record of ownership, however, can be made available to the authorities if the community votes that your footage represents an offence which should be prosecuted. It may well be that a jury would regard your failure to use the evidence as a crime of ommission on your part. That's a risk you will have to take.
Of course, this means that Youtube and others like it, need to fine tune their "flagging" systems. We need to be able to flag a video specifically as a "Potential Criminal Offence - Poster's details should be passed to the authorities for prosecution". Of course, we can't expect or require Youtube, or anyone else, to react to just one person raising such a flag. There must be genuine democratic support for the condemnation.
Once such a flag is raised, it should, in fact, become impossible for the Poster to remove it. After all, that might constitute "interfering with the course of justice". Instead, a notice should go up alongside the video inviting people to watch it and judge for themselves. Nobody should be allowed to vote unless they've watched it. That is a simple matter of cookie management. Once certain thresholds are passed, the site owners should consider themselves instructed, by the community, to act against the Poster/s of the video.
The thresholds cannot be too low. A persuasive cult or corporate could organise a few thousand drones at the drop of a hat to vote almost anything they disapproved of into purgatory. So your voting authority would have to be linked to your site activity. Another task for cookie management. It would mean that those who spend hundreds of hours on Youtube would have more voting power than someone like me, who spends, perhaps, an hour or two a week on those kind of sites. It would mean that regular community users couldn't be outvoted by voters bussed in for the gig.
So, with that "activity based weighting" in place, we'd then need a minimum of - say - 10,000 votes to be cast for any vote to matter; and a minimum 90% majority must approve of criminal prosecution before the instruction is valid.
Don't even think about trying to justify a simple majority. If 49% of the community approve of a video that is more than enough to justify it's continued presence. But if 90% disapprove, that's a reasonably powerful argument for removing it and - if appropriate - passing on relevant details to the forces of internal repression. (If the 10% desperately want to continue sharing such material, they'll have to go off and create their own site)
This arrangement gives the community democratic "teeth" which we can use to control the more outrageous examples of video nasties. It also defends the service provider. They can honestly say that the site ethics are controlled - as they should be in a democracy - by the site community. Censorship might well be justified, on occasions, but such judgements should never be made other than by We The People. We're the only ones that ought to matter.
As for weaning junior primates off this behaviour, I can think of nothing more effective than revealing, publicly, how similar their behaviour is to chimpanzees. With that in mind I propose that someone with appropriate time, energy and editing skills put together a video compilation interspersing choice examples of chimpanzee violence with teenage gang violence. Volunteers and suggested sources are hereby invited.
Once humans with reasonable intelligence begin to realise how chimplike and unintelligent their behaviour really is, then instead of their self image being boosted by peer approval, they'll all begin to realise what a bunch of pratts they really are. And it's never been cool to be a pratt...
[update 11 Aug 2007 - speaking of using Youtube postings as evidence... (irritatingly, I can't find the actual video)]
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Open Letter To The Westboro Baptist Church
First, I loved your open letter to the UK. (if that link doesn't work try this backup [pdf]) Any letter which starts "Dear British Bastards & U.K. Insurgents" gets my vote. Brilliant.
I watched both the Louis Theroux program (which you mentioned in your missive) and "Keith Allen will burn in hell". Frankly, you came out of both much more impressively than I anticipated. You won hands down on the Keith Allen encounter. He broke before you did and you maintained your dignity and poise extremely impressively when he struck his deliberate and unjustifiable blow below the belt. And you came out even, in my opinion, in your bout with Louie. You didn't master the subtlety of his approach, but you did much better than most of his other victims. I still think you're a bunch of harmless religious obsessives but I have to respect your determination and sheer commitment as well as your articulate defence of your position.
You, of course, will see me as a tool or disciple of Satan because I'm responsible for stuff like this:
Nevertheless, I'd like to put a hypothetical question to you. You might wish to answer individually or collectively.
You've very kindly warned us that
Clearly if it doesn't happen by this time tomorrow, it wouldn't prove you wrong. Even this time next year doesn't discredit your prediction. But suppose your descendants are still making this prediction, to our descendants, in, say, a hundred years time, does that still fit with "very shortly"? I suppose, in historical terms, one could make the case that a century isn't that long. But suppose he still hasn't arrived in another thousand years, or a million? We'd have to start talking about stretches of time which, though still geologically brief, are way beyond what your own paradigm believes to have been possible so far and thus cannot be what you meant by "very shortly".
So I'd like you to define or put a limit on what constitutes "very shortly". I'd suggest, for example, that a reasonable limit would be the next fifty years or so. I'm not going to quibble if you say twice as long, but more than that and it gets a bit too woolly. And one thing no one can accuse you of is being woolly!
Whatever that limit is, what I then want to know is what your contingency plans are for a no-show.
I've always been fascinated by doom-mongers. The rabid batch we had in the run up to the Millennium were absolutely fascinating. What really irked me, however, was that while the media spent months showing us all the weird beliefs, predictions and preparations these people made to meet the end of the world in their own special ways, the bastards didn't follow any of the stories up after the non-event! I want to know what happened to that guy who booked himself into a bed and breakfast in Brighton on New Years Eve 1999 expecting not to wake up in 2000. Did he? What did he have to say about it? I want to know how all those end of the world mountain-top vigils reconciled themselves to their continued existence.
So, with you guys, I want to know how you're going to deal with it IF you turn out to be wrong. I can answer that question for myself. If I turned out to be wrong and there was a God and he or it was even remotely like you imagine him to be, I know exactly what I would think, do and say (if he gave me the chance). I have actually considered the possibility of my paradigm being wrong. I consider it a very low probability, so it doesn't keep me awake at nights, but I have at least considered it.
Yet unlike many prominent religious leaders who have admitted various levels of doubt, I don't get the impression that any of you have ever allowed yourselves to peer into the abyss of uncertainty. I recommend it. It's the most liberating and enlightening thing you can do for your mind.
Regards
Harry Stottle
I watched both the Louis Theroux program (which you mentioned in your missive) and "Keith Allen will burn in hell". Frankly, you came out of both much more impressively than I anticipated. You won hands down on the Keith Allen encounter. He broke before you did and you maintained your dignity and poise extremely impressively when he struck his deliberate and unjustifiable blow below the belt. And you came out even, in my opinion, in your bout with Louie. You didn't master the subtlety of his approach, but you did much better than most of his other victims. I still think you're a bunch of harmless religious obsessives but I have to respect your determination and sheer commitment as well as your articulate defence of your position.
You, of course, will see me as a tool or disciple of Satan because I'm responsible for stuff like this:
Nevertheless, I'd like to put a hypothetical question to you. You might wish to answer individually or collectively.
You've very kindly warned us that
"Very shortly Christ is going to come through the clouds, in power and glory, with his holy angels, taking vengeance on them who knew not God and obeyed not the gospel"It's the "very shortly" that grabbed my attention.
Clearly if it doesn't happen by this time tomorrow, it wouldn't prove you wrong. Even this time next year doesn't discredit your prediction. But suppose your descendants are still making this prediction, to our descendants, in, say, a hundred years time, does that still fit with "very shortly"? I suppose, in historical terms, one could make the case that a century isn't that long. But suppose he still hasn't arrived in another thousand years, or a million? We'd have to start talking about stretches of time which, though still geologically brief, are way beyond what your own paradigm believes to have been possible so far and thus cannot be what you meant by "very shortly".
So I'd like you to define or put a limit on what constitutes "very shortly". I'd suggest, for example, that a reasonable limit would be the next fifty years or so. I'm not going to quibble if you say twice as long, but more than that and it gets a bit too woolly. And one thing no one can accuse you of is being woolly!
Whatever that limit is, what I then want to know is what your contingency plans are for a no-show.
I've always been fascinated by doom-mongers. The rabid batch we had in the run up to the Millennium were absolutely fascinating. What really irked me, however, was that while the media spent months showing us all the weird beliefs, predictions and preparations these people made to meet the end of the world in their own special ways, the bastards didn't follow any of the stories up after the non-event! I want to know what happened to that guy who booked himself into a bed and breakfast in Brighton on New Years Eve 1999 expecting not to wake up in 2000. Did he? What did he have to say about it? I want to know how all those end of the world mountain-top vigils reconciled themselves to their continued existence.
So, with you guys, I want to know how you're going to deal with it IF you turn out to be wrong. I can answer that question for myself. If I turned out to be wrong and there was a God and he or it was even remotely like you imagine him to be, I know exactly what I would think, do and say (if he gave me the chance). I have actually considered the possibility of my paradigm being wrong. I consider it a very low probability, so it doesn't keep me awake at nights, but I have at least considered it.
Yet unlike many prominent religious leaders who have admitted various levels of doubt, I don't get the impression that any of you have ever allowed yourselves to peer into the abyss of uncertainty. I recommend it. It's the most liberating and enlightening thing you can do for your mind.
Regards
Harry Stottle
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
A Serial Multiverse?
That's what appears to be on offer from Physicists Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok and is beautifully described for the layman right here.
I'm particularly intrigued by this passage:
"One can further show that, as the cycles proceed, the relaxation slows more and more as the cosmological constant gets smaller, so exponentially more time is spent in cycles with a small cosmological constant. In this picture, it is natural to expect the tiny value for the constant we observe today."
Surely this implies that - within the context of their conjecture - we could work out how many cycles we must have gone through already, in order for the cosmological constant to have reached its present minute value. And doesn't that imply a true "beginning" - albeit gazillions of times further back than we thought? A beginning at which the cosmo constant was the current predicted value 10^100 times what it is today. Or not?
It would be interesting to know just how many hundreds of trillions of years or cycles that implies.
It's also important to note that the cyclic nature proposed by this conjecture does not in any sense imply "repetition". If we don't survive the collapse of this Universe, we don't return in the next. The universe which arises in any given cycle will, inevitably, have a slightly different set of physical laws to its predecessor and thus be dramatically different in its history and appearance.
As a consequence, this model also provides an alternative to the "multiverse" as a solution to the anthropic problem. In fact, this conjecture is about a different sort of multiverse. It's a serial multiverse, as opposed to the more widely known parallel multiverse.
I think this idea might have legs...
I'm particularly intrigued by this passage:
"One can further show that, as the cycles proceed, the relaxation slows more and more as the cosmological constant gets smaller, so exponentially more time is spent in cycles with a small cosmological constant. In this picture, it is natural to expect the tiny value for the constant we observe today."
Surely this implies that - within the context of their conjecture - we could work out how many cycles we must have gone through already, in order for the cosmological constant to have reached its present minute value. And doesn't that imply a true "beginning" - albeit gazillions of times further back than we thought? A beginning at which the cosmo constant was the current predicted value 10^100 times what it is today. Or not?
It would be interesting to know just how many hundreds of trillions of years or cycles that implies.
It's also important to note that the cyclic nature proposed by this conjecture does not in any sense imply "repetition". If we don't survive the collapse of this Universe, we don't return in the next. The universe which arises in any given cycle will, inevitably, have a slightly different set of physical laws to its predecessor and thus be dramatically different in its history and appearance.
As a consequence, this model also provides an alternative to the "multiverse" as a solution to the anthropic problem. In fact, this conjecture is about a different sort of multiverse. It's a serial multiverse, as opposed to the more widely known parallel multiverse.
I think this idea might have legs...
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Collegebine
If I told you there was a way to stop - or at least reduce the damage caused by - events like those we've just witnessed at Virginia Tech, would you book me a place at the funny farm?
To the 95% who've just said "Yes" to that, thankyou for coming, don't let me detain you any further. Have a safe trip home.
Now we're alone, I've got a couple of things to talk about. First we'll outline how Trusted Surveillance would NOT have prevented the first killings, but would probably have prevented the second and larger batch. Second, the event has finally crystallized my thoughts on gun ownership.
Essentially, though the TS system would not have known who was involved, it would - first - have detected that two people had been killed. No big deal, you might say, plenty of people must have heard the shots and the killings were certainly phoned in to the campus police at 7.15. The added trick which TS brings to the party is logging who was present when lifesigns terminated and actively - but still anonymously - logging the survivors' movements thereafter.
As an optional extra - which I would expect would be the default in places like a college campus - the lifesign signal could also trigger cctv and alert manual monitors to take notice. As a result, the system would not have made the mistake apparently made by the police - that the perpetrator had left the campus. The system would have known that one of the parties present at the first killings was not only still on campus but - either because he's now being tracked on cctv or because he is still conveniently carrying his own mobile phone - that he was also en route to the scene of the second slaughter. At the very least the police would have been on his tail well within the two hours.
The other trick could have been done yesterday - the system would text a warning to every one of the mobile phones belonging to every student or staff member on - or on their way to - the campus. Presumably they're now going to close that stable door and implement such an alarm system in time for the next time. (I haven't yet found any mention of that obvious use of the mobile network to broadcast alarms - let me know if you find it first)
Of course, even if they had already set up a text based alarm system, they wouldn't have actually used it yesterday because they had already made the mistake of believing that the killer had left the campus. So by avoiding that mistake, TS would have ensured that the alarm was sent out and that too would probably have reduced casualties.
I'll expand on all this some other time but you get the gist. By both raising a warning and tracking parties present at the first killing, Trusted Surveillance would have given the campus police far better real time intelligence and, hence, a far better chance of interdicting the second wave of killings.
Yet it is no more nor less rational than their - or our - continued support for motor transport. Traffic still kills about twice as many Americans as those who die by the gun. If we're all so keen to ban the gun, why on earth are we not seriously considering banning the car?
The answer is obvious. As I say in that chapter - (which is subtitled "Why don't we ban the car?") :
As it happens, I don't disagree with them. The original case for gun ownership - the case spelt out in the arguments for the second amendment - has, in my view, become increasingly valid in recent years. I speak of the reasons for having a "militia":
The gun lobby bases most of its case on arguments like the suggestion that Virginia Tech wouldn't have happened if everybody had been armed. This is another SBO. It ignores the fact that - given the aforementioned underlying disease of excess naked aggression - though you'd probably have less multiple homicides, you'd almost certainly have even more singles. I don't offer that in opposition to their argument, just as a dose of reality.
The plain fact is that the most obvious reason today that Americans need their guns in private hands is not to defend themselves against the occasional random psychotics. They are, of course, as tragic and even (fortunately) more newsworthy (because they happen less often) than a multiple pileup on the freeway. They are an inevitable price the Americans will have to continue to pay for letting 300 million very angry people have the freedom to own guns.
The real reason they need those guns is because, sooner - I suspect - rather than later, they're going to have to start defending themselves against their Police State.
To the 95% who've just said "Yes" to that, thankyou for coming, don't let me detain you any further. Have a safe trip home.
Now we're alone, I've got a couple of things to talk about. First we'll outline how Trusted Surveillance would NOT have prevented the first killings, but would probably have prevented the second and larger batch. Second, the event has finally crystallized my thoughts on gun ownership.
Essentially, though the TS system would not have known who was involved, it would - first - have detected that two people had been killed. No big deal, you might say, plenty of people must have heard the shots and the killings were certainly phoned in to the campus police at 7.15. The added trick which TS brings to the party is logging who was present when lifesigns terminated and actively - but still anonymously - logging the survivors' movements thereafter.
As an optional extra - which I would expect would be the default in places like a college campus - the lifesign signal could also trigger cctv and alert manual monitors to take notice. As a result, the system would not have made the mistake apparently made by the police - that the perpetrator had left the campus. The system would have known that one of the parties present at the first killings was not only still on campus but - either because he's now being tracked on cctv or because he is still conveniently carrying his own mobile phone - that he was also en route to the scene of the second slaughter. At the very least the police would have been on his tail well within the two hours.
The other trick could have been done yesterday - the system would text a warning to every one of the mobile phones belonging to every student or staff member on - or on their way to - the campus. Presumably they're now going to close that stable door and implement such an alarm system in time for the next time. (I haven't yet found any mention of that obvious use of the mobile network to broadcast alarms - let me know if you find it first)
Of course, even if they had already set up a text based alarm system, they wouldn't have actually used it yesterday because they had already made the mistake of believing that the killer had left the campus. So by avoiding that mistake, TS would have ensured that the alarm was sent out and that too would probably have reduced casualties.
I'll expand on all this some other time but you get the gist. By both raising a warning and tracking parties present at the first killing, Trusted Surveillance would have given the campus police far better real time intelligence and, hence, a far better chance of interdicting the second wave of killings.
Moving on...
The issue of Gun ownership/Gun control is one of the most awkward issues for a non American anarchist to address. I’m a hypocrite. I would be delighted to own a gun myself. I went to a military school and had 6 years firearms training. I’m a qualified marksman. I love guns. My natural inclination is to support the liberty to own guns yet I feel considerably safer by virtue of living in a society where we don’t have that liberty and, as a result, suffer significantly less harm than
For me, the most important result to emerge from
What we ought to be asking is why American people with guns kill so many more people than Canadian or Swiss people with guns.
The experience in those other gun owning countries makes it obvious that mere gun ownership is not the problem. The problem with American gun ownership is that it is amplifying a much more serious underlying problem – which is that, in
Actually that chapter does include a discussion which is directly relevant to the argument over tighter controls which the anti-gun lobby are now frothing at the mouth to make.
Yet it is no more nor less rational than their - or our - continued support for motor transport. Traffic still kills about twice as many Americans as those who die by the gun. If we're all so keen to ban the gun, why on earth are we not seriously considering banning the car?
The answer is obvious. As I say in that chapter - (which is subtitled "Why don't we ban the car?") :
For the simple and same reason that we allow those legally damaging activities in the first place. Because we value freedom so highly that we are prepared to die for it, or to allow others to die for it on our behalf.
and the freedom and other benefits we obtain from car ownership clearly outweigh - in the average mind - the annual harm which results from our exercise of that freedom.
As it happens, I don't disagree with them. The original case for gun ownership - the case spelt out in the arguments for the second amendment - has, in my view, become increasingly valid in recent years. I speak of the reasons for having a "militia":
The militia is the natural defence of a free country against sudden foreign invasions, domestic insurrections, and domestic usurpations of power by rulers. It is against sound policy for a free people to keep up large military establishments and standing armies in time of peace, both from the enormous expenses, with which they are attended, and the facile means, which they afford to ambitious and unprincipled rulers, to subvert the government, or trample upon the rights of the people. The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them. (source)Who can doubt that we now in a period of ambitious and unprincipled rulers, who have already subverted the government, and routinely trample upon the rights of the people through the exercise of arbitrary power.
The gun lobby bases most of its case on arguments like the suggestion that Virginia Tech wouldn't have happened if everybody had been armed. This is another SBO. It ignores the fact that - given the aforementioned underlying disease of excess naked aggression - though you'd probably have less multiple homicides, you'd almost certainly have even more singles. I don't offer that in opposition to their argument, just as a dose of reality.
The plain fact is that the most obvious reason today that Americans need their guns in private hands is not to defend themselves against the occasional random psychotics. They are, of course, as tragic and even (fortunately) more newsworthy (because they happen less often) than a multiple pileup on the freeway. They are an inevitable price the Americans will have to continue to pay for letting 300 million very angry people have the freedom to own guns.
The real reason they need those guns is because, sooner - I suspect - rather than later, they're going to have to start defending themselves against their Police State.
Friday, March 30, 2007
The Democratic Cannibals
In a hospital emergency room, five critically ill patients desperately need organ transplants. A healthy man walks in. Should the doctors remove his organs to save the sick five? Most people will respond in milliseconds with a resounding "No way". Now imagine an out-of-control train about to run down five workers standing on the track. There's a fork ahead, and throwing a switch could divert the train to another line on which there is only one worker. It's the same question - should we sacrifice the one to spare the other five? - yet most of us would say "yes" just as quickly. How do we make these lightning moral judgements?
If you can spot the fundamental flaw in that paragraph, chances are you're already a democratic anarchist like myself. Otherwise you're probably asking how can you be a democrat and an anarchist.
Marc Hauser whose interview with New Scientist that piece introduced (cached), went on from that flawed beginning to expand on his entirely spurious and unnecessary conviction that we all have some kind of moral sense biologically built into us like the homing instinct of a pigeon:
What I call the moral faculty has that same aspect: we unconsciously deliver a response to right and wrong - and I use "unconsciously" in the same sense the linguist Noam Chomsky does in his work about language. In other words, there's something about the biology of our brains that has orchestrated a set of tools to build a moral system.
Frankly it was so fatuous and wrongheaded that my initial response was to ignore it. Nobody else would take it seriously. Why should I? It was a letter (see below) about the interview, a couple of weeks later, which changed my mind and made me realise that most people cannot see the flaw and that exposing it might help reconcile the division between the libertarians of right and left. As the libertarians tend to represent the intelligent component of the political spectrum, this exposure might have far reaching consequences.
[Edit August 2007: Rereading this months later I realise it comes across as though I'm deeply hostile to the concept of an inbuilt moral sense. This is not what I meant to imply. I don't buy into his idea, but I'm not hostile to the possibility of a genetic algorithm. I'm agnostic. My hostility is aimed only at the argument that you could reach such a conclusion (that morality is biologically built in) based on Hauser's examples of ethical dilemmas. They fail to support such a model because, as I hope I've described below, it is easy to analyze the dilemmas without recourse to Hauser's biological explanation.]
Confusion caused by an unspecified condition
The flaw in his argument is simple and obvious once it has been pointed out. It is contained in:
It's the same question - should we sacrifice the one to spare the other five?
It is NOT the "same question" at all.
In the "railway game" there is an unspecified but absolutely vital condition. Neither of the potential targets (solo worker or group of 5) are aware of the impending disaster. ONLY the "signalman" has a) the facts and b) the means to act. ONLY the signalman is in a position to make a decision and in those circumstances it is not even a difficult decision. Clearly to do nothing and allow maximum casualties would actually render him ethically liable for the additional deaths he could have prevented.
You wanna make that a difficult decision? Replace the anonymous solo worker with the signalman's eldest child. Now it's still easy for us observers to make the objective judgement that the signalman's daughter must die. But how many of you - in the signalman's shoes - would make that choice? And how many would condemn him if he didn't? But that's by the by. Not part of Hauser's game.
In the "hospital game", there is no implicit equivalent restriction of information. ALL parties who could be affected by the decision are aware of the relevant data.
To make the two games and questions truly equivalent, you'd have to create a highly artificial condition in the railway game. Like having all parties chained to the track but, conveniently, all having accessible mobile phones so they can be informed of the problem and discuss potential solutions.
It is the absence - in the hospital game - of that unspecified condition from the railway game, which makes the questions dramatically different. The real question in the railway game is "what choice should the SIGNALMAN make?"
The real question in the hospital game is "what choice should SOCIETY make?" (where the sick people, the healthy potential donor and all the relevant medical staff constitute a reasonable analog for "society")
Hauser's mistake is to assume that the ethical issues are limited to the resolution of the problem itself. Should we sacrifice the one to spare the other five? But as soon as more than one person is party to the decision making process, a whole new set of ethical issues come into play. Most obviously, the one who might be sacrificed in the railway game has no idea of his impending doom; cannot (within the implied rules of the game) be made aware and, therefore, cannot be part of the decision making process.
In stark contrast, the one who might be sacrificed in the hospital game is fully aware of the situation and is thus entitled not only to participate in the decision but, as most people recognise, also to veto any decision which requires his demise.
Like I said, once it's pointed out, it's obvious. And it doesn't require a mythical genetic algorithm to explain our recognition of its obviousness.
Who takes part in the decision making process?
In general terms it ought also to be obvious that:
in the event of a problem or opportunity which requires a social (shared) choice to be made; anyone who is
a) aware of the existence and nature of the problem or opportunity - or can be made so if necessary
b) believes they have a reasonable probability of being affected by the decision or its outcome and
c) gives a shit
should be entitled to share in the decision making process.
It should also be (but rarely is) bleedin obvious that our share in the decision making process is NOT necessarily EQUAL. That share is determined by where on the spectrum your interests in the decision/outcome lie between involvement and commitment.
The difference? As a friend of mine occasionally reminds me, "When you're having ham and eggs for breakfast, the chicken is involved, the pig is committed"
If you're involved, you get a vote. If you're committed, you need both a vote and a veto.
Why we need the veto as well as the vote
In the hospital game - the medical staff are involved; the patients and potential suicide donor are committed. Even if they all (presumably except the donor) vote in favour of his sacrifice, his veto trumps them all. Similarly, even if the medics were to recommend a somewhat more rational option - that one of the already terminal patients be sacrificed for the benefit of the others - that patient's veto would block any amount of votes in favour. A vote never beats a veto, so even the 5 terminal patients' votes cannot outweigh the donor's veto. Why not? (other than the trivial observation that this is what "veto" means)
Let's not try to avoid or evade the question. Of course we know that - in real life - no 5 terminal patients in such a situation would be selfish enough (despite the jaundiced views of some economists) to demand the sacrifice of the donor. But this is a game we're playing. And the rules of this game include the stipulation that they ARE that selfish.
Why are there some situations in which a veto MUST trump any number of votes?
According to the author of the letter I mentioned above (cached), the reason the decision would have to be in favour of the donor's veto is that there is an implicit contract between all members of the community (regardless of their health status) and all hospitals such that it is understood that we only cross the threshold of the hospital premises on the strict condition that we will NOT be made involuntary donors under any circumstances whatsoever. Breach of that contract, even on a single occasion, would simply ensure that no one would voluntarily visit a hospital ever again. This is the "contractarian" view of ethics which, he argues, is superior to the utilitarian approach
Since contractarian theories predict the correct result, but utilitarian theories do not, this is really an argument against utilitarian theories, not a puzzle about right and wrong.
His "contractarianism" does, on this occasion, indeed predict the correct result, but it still doesn't get close to the heart of the issue. Merely predicting people's expectations does not constitute an ethical argument. But he is also right to point out that mere "majoritarianism" (greatest good for the greatest number) doesn't cut the mustard either. The relevant question is why shouldn't the random healthy visitor expect to be plundered for his spare parts? Why are they entitled to veto their own dismemberment?
Reciprocity - the borderline between Democracy and Anarchism
The ethical answer is one of the simplest, longest established and most widely recognised of all ethical principles. Reciprocity. Do as you would be done by. The Golden Rule.
Would you accept being made an involuntary donor if you were the healthy one in the hospital game? No? Then - even if you swap places and become one of the terminal patients - you can't justify doing it to anyone else. Period.
What we are looking at here are the "buffers" at the end of the decision making process. This the point at which social decisions cannot be allowed to override personal autonomy.
The edge is well defined. The terminal patients, or their representatives, can go so far as to petition the donor, but no further. The donor's decision is final. The donor's autonomy is absolute.
This is the borderline between social decision making - collectivism, democracy - and autonomy or anarchism; the zone in which only the personal writ runs. There is no conflict between democracy and anarchism, provided no-one crosses that border in either direction.
In a real world situation, you might well find that the donor's actual decision was a compromise. S/he may be able and willing to make some contribution short of suicide which helps at least one of the patients. Perhaps s/he can spare some blood; maybe some bone marrow; perhaps even as much as a kidney, all without fatal consequences.
But nobody can "insist" that the donor offers even so much as a toenail clipping, because we would not accept such an imposition on ourselves. It really is that simple. It doesn't require sophisticated rationalisation.
There is a common cliche of which I have been unable to trace the source. It's one of those which people treat as a pearl of wisdom but is, in fact, ethical and tactical bollocks.
"Your right to throw a punch (or "swing a fist") ends " - the cliche begins - after which you can find a variety of formulations which basically boil down to a choice of two. Take your pick:
"where my nose begins" or
"one inch from my nose"
Both are, of course, wrong and tell us that the source led a sheltered life and was never exposed to any level of combat training (or forgot all about it).
I am entitled to take evasive measures from the moment it becomes clear that you have begun to throw the punch. Some would argue that the moment your intent to strike becomes clear is the point from which I can reasonably begin my self-defence - but given that your intent might be to hit me at the end of next month that is clearly too vague. In any event, I certainly do not have to wait until the blow is about to land. Such a ludicrous proposition would imply, for example, that Britain would not have been entitled to go to War against Hitler until the first bombers crossed the territorial boundary of the United Kingdom.
In fact, as that case adequately demonstrates, I may even feel free to react to you throwing a punch at a friend of mine which never threatens me directly at all. Do I have the "right" to step in to help my friends? I don't give a damn, I'm going to do it anyway. You'd better factor that into your calculations before you attack my friends.
The Rules of the Democratic Game
Now, when it comes to making decisions which concern us all, I'm only prepared to play that game if it is accepted by ALL the other players that this boundary exists; beyond which the group cannot tread into my personal domain. The game cannot include a rule which demands my compliance with a decision which directly threatens my interests or wellbeing. No rule, if you like, can oblige me to accept the punch on the nose and forbid me to evade it, to defend myself or to retaliate. If you don't agree to those rules, I'm not going to take part in the game.
This is the essential consensus which must be present BEFORE we can begin any kind of democratic debate. Once we understand that, it becomes reasonably obvious how and why Democracy doesn't actually exist in the modern world. When were you ever given the opportunity to provide informed consent for or even to consider the "rules of the game" before being asked to consider the substantive issue? Come to that, when were you last given the opportunity - regardless of the rules - to decide ANY substantive issue?
Anyway, once we've reached consensus on the rules, we can hold the debate. How would this work in practice?
There are ten of us left in the lifeboat, and we've been adrift for 37 days. To make this game more interesting, we're OK for water but we're out of food and unable to catch any, the problem is obvious: If we don't eat something, we're all going to starve to death.
A proposal is made: If we were to begin eating each other, there is a chance that one or more of us will still be alive when and if salvation is finally at hand. It is proposed, therefore, that we decide, democratically, two issues:
1 In the circumstances, Cannibalism is a necessary and acceptable step to improve the chances that one or more of us will survive this ordeal.
2 If there is a consensus in favour of that proposition, the only fair way to select who is going to be sacrificed is by drawing random lots.
That first question is vital. It establishes the necessary consensus (or not) without which the drawing of lots cannot proceed. If even one person rejects the first proposition - that cannibalism is necessary and acceptable - then we cannot proceed to the second step. At least - we cannot proceed democratically.
But what if nine voted in favour of cannibalism and only one objected. Couldn't the nine over-rule or overpower the tenth? Probably, but the simple fact of their majority wouldn't justify their actions. Their murder of the dissenter wouldn't in any sense be ethical. And, if he was capable of defending himself against such odds, then anything he did in such self-defence WOULD be entirely justified.
Having said that, it does not mean that the dissenter's veto prevents all further action. For example, one thing the nine could still do, while remaining consistent with the golden rule, would be to conduct a further debate amongst themselves as to whether - given that the dissenter has refused to accept the basic premise (the current necessity of cannibalism) - they can or should proceed to select a sacrifice from among the nine who have accepted that premise.
If there is a new consensus in favour of that revised proposition, then not only can they now proceed to the method of selection and make the sacrifice, but they would also be entitled - again, purely on the basis of reciprocity - to withhold the "benefits" from the dissenter (not that s/he's likely to be inclined to accept a slice of the action in this case anyway)
In all the "survival at sea" or similar stories I've come across, I've never read of that initial question being put. They always seem to take that question for granted (that such ends do justify even those means). Or perhaps they have always reached an informal consensus where everybody clearly accepts the necessity and acceptability of cannibalism. It is, of course, difficult to predict your own reaction in such circumstances unless you've been in a similar situation.
Personally, if I ever find myself in that situation, I hope that I would be a dissenter. I would not wish to spend the rest of my life aware that I was only still here because I helped kill and eat a fellow traveller. And I certainly wouldn't permit the other nine to elect or select me. I might, of course, be unable to avoid compliance because I am outnumbered. But I would at least go down fighting.
On a "good" day, I might, perhaps, be inclined, to volunteer for the pot myself (however, given my innate physical cowardice, it would probably be because I misunderstood what sort of pot they were talking about) In fact, I'd have a hard time accepting even a volunteer. At least not one who publicly made such an offer. I could not condone their suicide any more than their murder, for my benefit.
If, on the other hand, we woke up on the 38th morning and found one true altruist had committed suicide overnight and left a note begging us to eat him or her, I would be utterly appalled but almost conscience driven to try to digest a piece of the corpse if only to try to provide some meaning for their noble self sacrifice.
Others may draw their personal line at different points. That's the point of personal autonomy. I can't judge what you will tolerate or where your boundary lies. You have to make that decision for yourself. Similarly I won't let you tell me where my boundary must be.
There is nothing ethically wrong with ANY method of arriving at a decision providing ALL parties give their free and informed consent to the decision making process and ALL indicate similar free and informed consent to be bound by the outcome.
In case I didn't make it clear enough, the key word in that paragraph is ALL. The dissenter cannot be bound by rules s/he did not accept in the first place. The fact that a majority has accepted a) the rules and b) the decision - doesn't provide them with any ethical justification for imposing their decision on the dissenter who didn't agree the rules.
Coercion and Compliance
The only advantage that arises from having a majority in this scenario is a military one. The majority outnumbers the dissenter. They can choose to force the dissenter to comply. But in that case, there is no ethical barrier to the dissenter taking whatever steps s/he can to defend themselves against majority attack. Of course, in practice, the balance of forces might be enough to persuade the dissenter to comply, but that constitutes only a pragmatic reason for compliance, not an ethical one.
Which is not to deny that there will be situations where the majority will, nevertheless, need to exercise that military advantage and force compliance. For example, let's imagine that the dissenter's primary reason for dissent is that he holds private property in the form of a significant hoard of food he has managed to stash away and is refusing to share. In the circumstances, of course, his refusal to share is grossly unethical. More importantly he is breaking the golden rule, or at least exercising it in a way the others are unlikely to accept.
It is unlikely that even the most ardent defenders of "private property" (among the nine who voted for cannibalism) would prefer to starve or to kill and eat a fellow cannibal rather than deprive the dissenter of any part of his stash without his consent. Of course, they would prefer he shared it willingly and they might even agree that, after rescue, they would compensate him for his losses at a fair market rate.
But if he stubbornly refuses to share life giving resources despite all attempts at persuasion and negotiation, then the only rational conclusion the other nine can come to is that the dissenter is now an obstacle to their continued survival. At which point the military option becomes the obvious choice and the dissenter, and his stash, will all be sacrificed to the common good. The wise dissenter will concede well before matters reach that ugly stage, albeit for pragmatic rather than ethical reasons.
Conclusions
So what conclusions can we draw from all this?
That the veto is at least as important as the vote and is required to prevent "Tyranny of the Majority".
That "greatest good for the greatest number" - simple "majoritarianism" might be a good general guide but cannot be universally applicable. It only works where the issue being decided doesn't cross anyone's personal boundary. It isn't ethically valid in any situation where a potential dissenter feels strongly enough to exercise a veto. It implies that a majority can justify harming a minority if such deliberate harm is perpetrated for their own (majority) benefit.
We all implicitly reject such a social decision making structure (if we're awake) because we all recognise that on some issues we may each, one day, be part of the minority rather than the majority and we want to ensure that if we're ever in that position, we too will be treated fairly and reasonably, so we agree to do as we would be done by.
This is how simple reciprocity scales up to the level of democratic society. It establishes the borderline of majority rule. Democracy, as a decision making process, has to begin from the position of universal consensus that it is the way to decide the particular issue under discussion.
Where it achieves that prior consensus, it is probably the best way to make the decision because it will ensure minimum dissent regarding the outcome. Where, however, we cannot achieve the prior consensus that a given issue is appropriate for decision by the democratic process, the imposition of that process and its outcome is no better, no more ethical, than any other form of tyranny.
What also becomes obvious is that when an issue arises, resolution is never a matter of a single question. With the democratic cannibals, there were at least two questions; was the cannibalism necessary and how should we select the victims. We also saw that further questions could arise if one or more of the stranded group exercised veto over the cannibalism.
In more generic terms the process can be outlined in the following questions:
1 Do we agree there's a problem or opportunity?
2 Do we agree on a potential solution (or exploit)?
3 Does the potential solution/exploit cross anyone's personal boundary and, if so, does that person wish to exercise veto?
4 If veto is exercised, can a limited version of the solution/exploit be implemented which achieves the ambitions of those who support it but doesn't breach the boundaries of the veto wielders?
5 If the answer to (4) is "No", and there is a substantial majority in favour of the solution, is there consensus among that majority that the issue is so serious that they need to persuade or even coerce the veto wielders into compliance - and if so how?
6 In the light of a "Yes" answer to (5), does the veto wielder still wish to maintain their veto. Will they compromise or resist? Is the matter negotiable or do we have to go to war?
Those questions summarise almost any potential democratic debate. The first 3 should always be asked. The last 3 only become necessary once vetos are exercised. Whenever we need to address question 5, then what we need to try to find is a "pareto efficient" solution - which is one in which no one loses and at least one party gains. That's a whole new topic which can wait for another day.
Meanwhile, what the anti-democratic Libertarian Right have to acknowledge is that it is equally bleedin obvious that some decisions MUST be collective and require total compliance. (Obvious example: Which side of the public highway should we drive on?) What the Libertarian Left have to acknowledge is existence of the boundary condition which must be protected by the veto, without which Democracy could indeed become tyranny.
So now we've sorted that out, can we please get together and set about removing the real tyrants?
(made front page of K5 same day. See that page for some of the discussion which has already taken place)
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
Now the BBC's Part of The Conspiracy!!!
or, at least, they've already managed to persuade a few tens of thousands of web junkies that they are; by virtue of their utterly incompetent response to this story and their ongoing reaction or lack of reaction looks like bringing more to the fold by the hour. It's such fun to watch!
As you will see, their BBC World "Head of News" Richard Porter has just dowsed himself with the fuel of conspiracy and jumped, apparently of his own free will, into the flames of public ridicule.
His Excuse Number 4 is beyond belief from every conceivable angle.
As this professional archivist from CNN told prisonplanet,
Excuse 5 isn't quite as dumb but it gets close:
I particularly like:
The only thing of real significance about this story is that we now have conclusive evidence that the BBC told the world that WTC7 had collapsed some 26 minutes before it actually did.
What we have to decide is what does that mean? The very fact that that it hadn't happened, for me, confirms that the BBC was NOT part of any conspiracy because, had they been, their information would have been better. They would not have made the "error". The error and the unequivocal delivery of the premature message also reveals that they had considerable trust in the source of the information. This wasn't some punter calling in on their cell phone.
So the interesting question is just that: who or what was the source? I can even imagine an innocent explanation for that. What they got may have been a chinese whisper regarding the much reported (since) "imminent collapse" being discussed with Larry Silverstein and either they or their source overinterpreted it. No biggie, it's what conspiracy theorists do all the time. Why should we expect the BBC to be any more balanced?
What will be interesting to see is whether the BBC - having put itself so stupidly into the middle of its own Conspiracy vortex - will learn any lessons about Conspiracy Theories in general. As I've previously indicated, I am now firmly against the Controlled Demolition hypothesis in respect of the Twin Towers, but I still have to acknowledge that WTC7 is completely underexplained.
BBC's "Conspiracy Files" trivial and partial treatment of the issue merely added further fuel to the flames and must have helped to start people talking seriously about the BBC's possible role as a conspirator or disinfo channel. (Which is a great shame, because I actually share most of the other conclusions they reached)
But what was missing from the BBC's analysis is that even if you can dismiss most of the Conspiracy charges as poorly argued overhyped junk, it's like UFO research. There is a small but significant kernel that will not melt away. In the case of 9/11, WTC7 is the biggest remaining lump of obstinate Kernel. We simply cannot explain how assymetric damage could possibly produce an almost perfectly symetric collapse. Never mind molten metal. Never mind "pulling the building". Never mind 26 minutes advance knowledge. How can a building heavily damaged on one side only, collapse without favouring that weakened side. How on earth did it implode into its own footprint more neatly than the vast majority of professional demolitions of comparable size.
That question MUST be credibly answered if the Political Establishment wishes to retain even the minimal credibility it now has.
There are loads of other fascinating questions, but none are as pertinent as that one. The multiple orgasm that Alex Jones is clearly enjoying revealing all this "new footage" is typical of the overinterpretation by the Conspiracy lobby. Had Porter not attempted to patronise his audience, the premature message would merely have been interesting. But Porter's glib nonsense has actually persuaded a large number of former sceptics who were frightened off by the messianic tones of Jones into believing that the evangelist might actually have a point.
As you will see, their BBC World "Head of News" Richard Porter has just dowsed himself with the fuel of conspiracy and jumped, apparently of his own free will, into the flames of public ridicule.
His Excuse Number 4 is beyond belief from every conceivable angle.
4. We no longer have the original tapes of our 9/11 coverage (for reasons of cock-up, not conspiracy). So if someone has got a recording of our output, I'd love to get hold of it. We do have the tapes for our sister channel News 24, but they don't help clear up the issue one way or another.I couldn't believe what I was reading. I checked that I was on the right page. I checked that it wasn't a spoof, that I hadn't slipped into someone's sarcastic comments. But no, this went out in the name of Richard Porter the BBC World's Head of News.
As this professional archivist from CNN told prisonplanet,
I'm an archivist with the CNN News Library in Atlanta, and I can tell you with absolute certainty, the mere idea that news agencies such as ours would "misplace" any airchecks from 9/11 is preposterous. CNN has these tapes locked away from all the others. People like myself, who normally would have access to any tapes in our library, must ask special permission in order to view airchecks from that day. Multiple tapes would have been recording their broadcast that day, and there are also private agencies that record all broadcasts from all channels - constantly - in the event that a news agency missed something or needs something. They don't just have one copy... they have several. It's standard procedure, and as soon as the second plane hit, they would start recording several copies on other tapes machines all day long.That's how a professional news gathering organisation typically behaves. Is Porter seriously expecting even his own grandmother to believe him when he tells us that the BBC is less competent? Even if it were true, what on earth would make a "Head of News" admit such gross incompetence so publicly? And why couldn't he/they see the obvious stupidity of publishing such a claim? It is literally and utterly incredible.
Excuse 5 isn't quite as dumb but it gets close:
5. If we reported the building had collapsed before it had done so, it would have been an error - no more than that.They're getting a right pasting for it on their own website messageboard
I particularly like:
If i went to the police and reported a crime before it happened i dont think they would take "oops it was a mistake" as an excuse. Not from me anyway. Maybe from you.and
To report that a building had collapsed before it had done so would be an odd sort of error, wouldn't it ? A bit like reporting that the Lord Mayor's trousers had fallen down before they did so.there are some a little more forgiving but still with a nasty sting:
I doubt there are any serious 9/11 investigators that think the BBC is actually part of the 9/11 conspiracy. The only thing you're guilty of is reporting the rubbish that's fed to you by the authorities and not doing any real investigative journalism.and, as a fitting tribute to last week's "9/11 Conspiracy files" we got:
(given that no steel frame buildings prior to that day had ever collapsed due to fire alone)...its absolutelely inconceivable that anyone could have predicted that WTC7 was going to collapse that day...unless they already knew it was going to collapse. And nobody could have known it was going to collapse unless the building was rigged to collapse. And nobody can argue against the fact that the collapse of WTC7 looks EXACTLY like a controlled demolition. So this footage is strong evidence that someone knew that WTC7 was about to collapse by a controlled demolition. Your pathetic and highly misleading 9/11 conspiracy documentary said "Case Closed". I don't think so, and this footage proves it.but the real meat of the story is captured by
BBC being "part of the conspiracy" is clearly a red herring and avoids the real question that this gaffe brings up: WHERE DID THE BBC GET THE INFORMATION THAT 1) BUILDING 7 HAD COLLAPSED, 2) THAT THE PROBABLE CAUSE WAS FIRES AND 3) THAT THERE WERE NO CAUSALTIES. This is highly specific information which renders your explanation dubious to say the least.And, I don't believe, despite all the hysteria, that the BBC IS part of this particular conspiracy. (I can't speak for any others, I haven't studied them in so much detail).
The only thing of real significance about this story is that we now have conclusive evidence that the BBC told the world that WTC7 had collapsed some 26 minutes before it actually did.
What we have to decide is what does that mean? The very fact that that it hadn't happened, for me, confirms that the BBC was NOT part of any conspiracy because, had they been, their information would have been better. They would not have made the "error". The error and the unequivocal delivery of the premature message also reveals that they had considerable trust in the source of the information. This wasn't some punter calling in on their cell phone.
So the interesting question is just that: who or what was the source? I can even imagine an innocent explanation for that. What they got may have been a chinese whisper regarding the much reported (since) "imminent collapse" being discussed with Larry Silverstein and either they or their source overinterpreted it. No biggie, it's what conspiracy theorists do all the time. Why should we expect the BBC to be any more balanced?
What will be interesting to see is whether the BBC - having put itself so stupidly into the middle of its own Conspiracy vortex - will learn any lessons about Conspiracy Theories in general. As I've previously indicated, I am now firmly against the Controlled Demolition hypothesis in respect of the Twin Towers, but I still have to acknowledge that WTC7 is completely underexplained.
BBC's "Conspiracy Files" trivial and partial treatment of the issue merely added further fuel to the flames and must have helped to start people talking seriously about the BBC's possible role as a conspirator or disinfo channel. (Which is a great shame, because I actually share most of the other conclusions they reached)
But what was missing from the BBC's analysis is that even if you can dismiss most of the Conspiracy charges as poorly argued overhyped junk, it's like UFO research. There is a small but significant kernel that will not melt away. In the case of 9/11, WTC7 is the biggest remaining lump of obstinate Kernel. We simply cannot explain how assymetric damage could possibly produce an almost perfectly symetric collapse. Never mind molten metal. Never mind "pulling the building". Never mind 26 minutes advance knowledge. How can a building heavily damaged on one side only, collapse without favouring that weakened side. How on earth did it implode into its own footprint more neatly than the vast majority of professional demolitions of comparable size.
That question MUST be credibly answered if the Political Establishment wishes to retain even the minimal credibility it now has.
There are loads of other fascinating questions, but none are as pertinent as that one. The multiple orgasm that Alex Jones is clearly enjoying revealing all this "new footage" is typical of the overinterpretation by the Conspiracy lobby. Had Porter not attempted to patronise his audience, the premature message would merely have been interesting. But Porter's glib nonsense has actually persuaded a large number of former sceptics who were frightened off by the messianic tones of Jones into believing that the evangelist might actually have a point.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
This is British Democracy
Governments have suffered embarrassing defeats in the past but rarely as comprehensive as the quashing order won by Greenpeace. (here is a copy of Real Video BBC coverage of same) The scale of their victory stunned even them.
I'm not going to address the issue (Nuclear Power Generation) at the centre of the court ruling. Obviously it's important. But everybody else will be talking about that. I want to focus on the implications for the charade that passes for British Democracy. And, if you're not British, ask yourself the question, is my country's "democracy" any better?
The relevant background is short and sweet. In 2003 the present Government told the world that Nuclear Power was an "unattractive option" but didn't rule it out. They did, however, say that if things changed, their policy wouldn't change without full consultation with the British people. Last April they told us that things had indeed changed and, because they'd promised it, they duly launched a so called consultation exercise to debate the idea of building new nuclear power stations. They allowed just 12 weeks and boasted that 5000 people had taken the opportunity to participate.
Greenpeace took them to court because the Government had not provided the relevant information prior to or during the process which would have enabled people to debate the issue properly. Specifically they had not revealed the economics of their proposed Nuclear build nor their plans to deal with Nuclear waste. This, Greenpeace argued, rendered the entire consultation process meaningless. The judge agreed.
These are direct quotations from his judgement:
As Prime Minister Blair put it later that day: (see the video link above)
Littlejohn's comments on democracy are, as you may have spotted elsewhere, fully in line with my own rantings.
Have you any idea what it feels like to admit to agreeing with someone like Richard Littlejohn? For American readers I can only suggest that it's like having to admit agreeing with something that Bill O'Reilly has to say (although Littlejohn is somewhat brighter). Now that's OK if it's on a trivial issue like the weather, but on something as important as "Democracy" it comes a bit of a shock I can tell you.
Be that as it may, what he said accurately describes the sorry state of our so called democracy. Unfortunately, from there on Question Time was all downhill. We had two senior politicians, one from the "rabid right" and then one from the "loony left" BOTH DEFENDING the Government's right to make decisions regardless of public opinion - whether gathered through consultations or any other means.
First Norman "on your bike" Tebbit, legendary right wing attack dog who was pulled from the rubble of the Grand Hotel when the IRA tried to blow up Thatcher in Brighton in 1984. Yes, he's still alive. Takes more than a collapsed Hotel to kill a creature of the night like Norm. This was his contribution:
While we're on the subject, "management's right to manage" is almost defensible within the standard capitalist paradigm. If I own the company and I offer you a job on certain conditions, you are free to agree to the conditions and accept the job or piss off to some other employer. If you accept the job and one of the initial conditions was that I had the right to make decisions and manage my business, then, basically, you haven't got a leg to stand on if I proceed to do just that. Anal Randian's argue that this is an equal and fair contractual relationship because you the employee have a "free choice" as to whether or not to accept my conditions for your employment.
It might indeed be a fair and equal relationship if, and only if, the employer's need for labour was roughly equal to labour's somewhat more urgent need for the basic necessities of life. This can never be true of course because a) although they treat it as such, the need to make profit can never equate to the need to eat and b) there are inevitably fewer entrepeneurs than employees. So the entrepeneurs always have greater choice than the employees which, in turn, means they can always set the conditions in their favour rather than the employees. Rarely in history has this advantage of the owning class ever been overturned.
The "Black Death" in 14th century Britain created one of the exceptions. All of a sudden there weren't enough peasants to run the landowners' farms and demand for their labour exceeded supply. For the first time they were able to demand higher rewards or up sticks and find a new "master" who was prepared to pay the new "rate for the job". The aristocracy were so appalled at this effect of market forces that they passed new laws making it illegal for the peasants to behave this way.
Today the few exceptions are less dramatic. Skilled workers with rare skills can much more easily negotiate terms significantly superior to those conceded to unskilled workers. But even skilled workers make profits for their employers (or they don't keep the job for long), so it's always the employers who come out on top - with one proviso, of course, which is that the business must be successful. Failed businesses can cost their owners considerably more than the cost to ex-employees. They rarely do, of course, because skilled businessmen often know how to protect themselves even from failure.
But back to the origin of "Authority". From exactly where do modern western politicians derive their "right to manage"? On what basis can they argue that they have the right to make business decisions which affect an entire nation as though they owned it?
Historically, of course, their predecessors did own it. Or at least, they "legitimised" their ownership under the terms of the laws they themselves drew up - after the event - to justify the centuries of theft, conquest, intermarriage and other forms of acquisition, fair or foul, which resulted in their sovereign authority over a sizeable territory.
But that era was supposed to have ended when we downgraded Monarchs from absolute to constitutional (or got rid of them altogether) and handed the reins over to "representatives of the people". How is it that today's government still exercises almost the same level of authority over its citizens as it used to do when it was an agent of absolute monarchy. How has "representative government" managed to retain the authority of a dictatorship?
How has the concept of policy being arrived at on the basis of - at least - majority support (the minimum requirement for Democratic "People Power") been so comprehensively excluded from a political process which persists in calling itself democratic??
You might have thought we'd hear answers to such questions together with some stirring opposition to such authoritarian nonsense from a "leftie".
Roy Hattersley was once considered to be on the centre right of the Labour party, but the party having moved so far into Thatcher's territory, he is now seen as left of centre and one of the "Old Labour" diehards. Roy's Spitting Image literally spat. You'll hear why when you listen to him speak. But don't that distract you. Remember that, politically, Hattersley and Tebbit can be said to represent the full spread of the (electable) political spectrum of the British ruling elite. In other words, someone like Hattersley is now about as far to the left as you can vote for with any hope of electoral success, while the Tebbit tendency is about as far right as electable Tories go. They are - in the general naive public view - political opposites. This was Hattersley's take:
You could not ask for a finer illustration of the problem. Hattersley is completely correct. The consultation exercises are pure PR and, as the Prime Minister has so unambiguously confirmed, consultation has no effect on Policy. Politicians are, as Littlejohn reminds us, merely elected dictators and the only sanction we have, as Hattersley says, is to swap dictators at the next election.
Hattersley even clarifies, clearly without a trace of irony, just how futile and limited that sanction is. On the particular issue at the focus of this current consultation charade, he is, again, quite rightly, pointing out that both sides of the two (and a half) party system are determined to impose Nuclear power on the UK, regardless of what the people think. So how, exactly, does an opponent of both sides' policy cast their vote at the next election?
It would be nice to imagine that the Liberal party could benefit - but not realistic. All that will happen, is that participation in the election of our next dictatorship will drop even further than the miserable 59-61% we've managed on the last two occasions. What, after all, is the point of casting one vote every 5 years, if all it does is change the dictatorship and has no serious effect on policy?
As Hattersley says "It's the only way you can run a democracy like ours."
Which is why it's about time we replaced "our democracy" with a real one, where citizens nominate and debate the issues, and then vote on the policy proposals so that We The People make collective decisions and agree on the way forward. Not a difficult concept. The Athenians managed it two and a half thousand years ago and they didn't have the obvious benefit of the web.
Though it's been made completely clear that the new consultation is pointless in terms of policy, I nurture the vague hope that this episode, added to the 1.5 million opponents who signed up against the Road Pricing proposal and the 1 to 2 million who marched against the Iraq war, together with several dozen less high profile examples, will go some way to making the average British citizen start to think about the issue of basic democracy and what it ought to mean. Perhaps some of them will even find material like this on the web and start realising how badly misled they have been and are being. If enough of them start thinking like that, we might actually be able to do something about it.
If that is the outcome of the Greenpeace victory, we'll have to thank the FSM that, with all its flaws, British Justice is, at least, in somewhat better shape than British Democracy.
*****
Update 23 Feb. Yesterday Blair was subjected to 35 minutes of fairly hostile questioning by John Humphrys. I only got round to listening to it in detail today and most of it is predictable drivel such as his standard denial of the link between our presence in Iraq and the unprecedented wave of home grown MIFT But just over half way through he actually said something which woke me up. It could have been designed to support the argument I've made in this Blog. You can download all 33 seconds of it here. But this is how it went:
I'm not going to address the issue (Nuclear Power Generation) at the centre of the court ruling. Obviously it's important. But everybody else will be talking about that. I want to focus on the implications for the charade that passes for British Democracy. And, if you're not British, ask yourself the question, is my country's "democracy" any better?
The relevant background is short and sweet. In 2003 the present Government told the world that Nuclear Power was an "unattractive option" but didn't rule it out. They did, however, say that if things changed, their policy wouldn't change without full consultation with the British people. Last April they told us that things had indeed changed and, because they'd promised it, they duly launched a so called consultation exercise to debate the idea of building new nuclear power stations. They allowed just 12 weeks and boasted that 5000 people had taken the opportunity to participate.
Greenpeace took them to court because the Government had not provided the relevant information prior to or during the process which would have enabled people to debate the issue properly. Specifically they had not revealed the economics of their proposed Nuclear build nor their plans to deal with Nuclear waste. This, Greenpeace argued, rendered the entire consultation process meaningless. The judge agreed.
These are direct quotations from his judgement:
"something has gone clearly and radically wrong"He concluded:
information given on waste had been "not merely inadequate but also misleading"
"There could be no proper consultation, let alone the fullest consultation, if the substance of these two issues was not consulted on before a decision was made,"
the information given to consultees had been "wholly insufficient for them to make an intelligent response"
"There was therefore procedural unfairness and a breach of Greenpeace's legitimate expectation that there would be the fullest consultation before a decision was taken."The Government had the choice to appeal the decision, but they also had the sense not to. Rather than tough it out and make themselves look even more foolish than they already do, they wisely chose damage limitation and made it instantly clear that they were accepting this slap on the wrist and would hold a brand new "consultation exercise". After all, apart from a few months delay, it wouldn't actually affect anything - least of all the decision.
As Prime Minister Blair put it later that day: (see the video link above)
"This won't affect the Policy at all. I mean it will affect the process of consultation but it won't affect the Policy."Which couldn't have been clearer and could have been designed to confirm exactly what Richard Littlejohn said on BBC's Question Time even later the same day. In answer to the question "Why did it need a legal challenge?" (to get the government to acknowledge it had failed properly to consult) he said:(mp3)
I think it needs a legal challenge because we think we live in a representative democracy but what we actually live in is what Lord Hailsham called an elective dictatorship. When the Government says we are going to consult you, it says we're going to consult you until you agree with us and if you don't agree with us, we're going to do it anyway. We've seen that with the road pricing petition this week. A million people signed up and said we don't want it, yet Douglas Alexander, the Secretary of State for Transport says "well we're going to ignore them anyway"(actually it was a little over 1.4 million at the time and when I clicked on the road pricing link just now, it was up to 1.57 million - you've got till the 20th of Feb to add your own "signature")
Littlejohn's comments on democracy are, as you may have spotted elsewhere, fully in line with my own rantings.
Have you any idea what it feels like to admit to agreeing with someone like Richard Littlejohn? For American readers I can only suggest that it's like having to admit agreeing with something that Bill O'Reilly has to say (although Littlejohn is somewhat brighter). Now that's OK if it's on a trivial issue like the weather, but on something as important as "Democracy" it comes a bit of a shock I can tell you.
Be that as it may, what he said accurately describes the sorry state of our so called democracy. Unfortunately, from there on Question Time was all downhill. We had two senior politicians, one from the "rabid right" and then one from the "loony left" BOTH DEFENDING the Government's right to make decisions regardless of public opinion - whether gathered through consultations or any other means.
First Norman "on your bike" Tebbit, legendary right wing attack dog who was pulled from the rubble of the Grand Hotel when the IRA tried to blow up Thatcher in Brighton in 1984. Yes, he's still alive. Takes more than a collapsed Hotel to kill a creature of the night like Norm. This was his contribution:
"I have to say, there are times in Government when you do have to just get on and do things, because you cannot get an agreement right the way across the spectrum. If you try to get an agreement, at the moment, on what we should do on energy policy, by going out to consultation on single proposals, whether we should be nuclear, whether we should do this, whether we should do that, you probably wouldn't get anywhere and sooner or later the lights would be going out."This is "management's right to manage" writ large. There is not the smallest attempt to suggest that Politics is - or should be - a democratic process. Indeed it categorically opposes the democratic notion that policy should at least command majority support. Tebbit doesn't object to agreement. He just doesn't require it. If it can't be agreed, then whoever has sufficient power and authority to make a decision in the absence of agreement is entitled, nay, obliged to make such a decision and implement the resulting policy.
While we're on the subject, "management's right to manage" is almost defensible within the standard capitalist paradigm. If I own the company and I offer you a job on certain conditions, you are free to agree to the conditions and accept the job or piss off to some other employer. If you accept the job and one of the initial conditions was that I had the right to make decisions and manage my business, then, basically, you haven't got a leg to stand on if I proceed to do just that. Anal Randian's argue that this is an equal and fair contractual relationship because you the employee have a "free choice" as to whether or not to accept my conditions for your employment.
It might indeed be a fair and equal relationship if, and only if, the employer's need for labour was roughly equal to labour's somewhat more urgent need for the basic necessities of life. This can never be true of course because a) although they treat it as such, the need to make profit can never equate to the need to eat and b) there are inevitably fewer entrepeneurs than employees. So the entrepeneurs always have greater choice than the employees which, in turn, means they can always set the conditions in their favour rather than the employees. Rarely in history has this advantage of the owning class ever been overturned.
The "Black Death" in 14th century Britain created one of the exceptions. All of a sudden there weren't enough peasants to run the landowners' farms and demand for their labour exceeded supply. For the first time they were able to demand higher rewards or up sticks and find a new "master" who was prepared to pay the new "rate for the job". The aristocracy were so appalled at this effect of market forces that they passed new laws making it illegal for the peasants to behave this way.
Today the few exceptions are less dramatic. Skilled workers with rare skills can much more easily negotiate terms significantly superior to those conceded to unskilled workers. But even skilled workers make profits for their employers (or they don't keep the job for long), so it's always the employers who come out on top - with one proviso, of course, which is that the business must be successful. Failed businesses can cost their owners considerably more than the cost to ex-employees. They rarely do, of course, because skilled businessmen often know how to protect themselves even from failure.
But back to the origin of "Authority". From exactly where do modern western politicians derive their "right to manage"? On what basis can they argue that they have the right to make business decisions which affect an entire nation as though they owned it?
Historically, of course, their predecessors did own it. Or at least, they "legitimised" their ownership under the terms of the laws they themselves drew up - after the event - to justify the centuries of theft, conquest, intermarriage and other forms of acquisition, fair or foul, which resulted in their sovereign authority over a sizeable territory.
But that era was supposed to have ended when we downgraded Monarchs from absolute to constitutional (or got rid of them altogether) and handed the reins over to "representatives of the people". How is it that today's government still exercises almost the same level of authority over its citizens as it used to do when it was an agent of absolute monarchy. How has "representative government" managed to retain the authority of a dictatorship?
How has the concept of policy being arrived at on the basis of - at least - majority support (the minimum requirement for Democratic "People Power") been so comprehensively excluded from a political process which persists in calling itself democratic??
You might have thought we'd hear answers to such questions together with some stirring opposition to such authoritarian nonsense from a "leftie".
Roy Hattersley was once considered to be on the centre right of the Labour party, but the party having moved so far into Thatcher's territory, he is now seen as left of centre and one of the "Old Labour" diehards. Roy's Spitting Image literally spat. You'll hear why when you listen to him speak. But don't that distract you. Remember that, politically, Hattersley and Tebbit can be said to represent the full spread of the (electable) political spectrum of the British ruling elite. In other words, someone like Hattersley is now about as far to the left as you can vote for with any hope of electoral success, while the Tebbit tendency is about as far right as electable Tories go. They are - in the general naive public view - political opposites. This was Hattersley's take:
"Apart from what Norman said about the Poll Tax, which was clearly nonsense, I agree with him entirely and we agree in this area because we both believe in ideological politics. We believe in politicians who believe things and do them and then say we're going to do it because it's right and if you don't like it, kick us out at the next election.Incroyable.
Dimbleby: So you think the consultation process is flawed? We shouldn't do it?
Hattersley: I think much of the idea of Consultation is Public Relations. I don't believe its genuine. I don't think it can be. Again I think Norman is right to say there is no alternative to having a degree of Nuclear Power in this country. Every sensible minister, every sensible spokesman for the opposition knows that has to happen and to go for the consultation process seems to me to be a mistake of how policy should be run. The politician should say "this is what we think is right. You elected us to do what we think is right. If you disagree with us, defeat us at the next election. It's the only way you can run a democracy like ours."
You could not ask for a finer illustration of the problem. Hattersley is completely correct. The consultation exercises are pure PR and, as the Prime Minister has so unambiguously confirmed, consultation has no effect on Policy. Politicians are, as Littlejohn reminds us, merely elected dictators and the only sanction we have, as Hattersley says, is to swap dictators at the next election.
Hattersley even clarifies, clearly without a trace of irony, just how futile and limited that sanction is. On the particular issue at the focus of this current consultation charade, he is, again, quite rightly, pointing out that both sides of the two (and a half) party system are determined to impose Nuclear power on the UK, regardless of what the people think. So how, exactly, does an opponent of both sides' policy cast their vote at the next election?
It would be nice to imagine that the Liberal party could benefit - but not realistic. All that will happen, is that participation in the election of our next dictatorship will drop even further than the miserable 59-61% we've managed on the last two occasions. What, after all, is the point of casting one vote every 5 years, if all it does is change the dictatorship and has no serious effect on policy?
As Hattersley says "It's the only way you can run a democracy like ours."
Which is why it's about time we replaced "our democracy" with a real one, where citizens nominate and debate the issues, and then vote on the policy proposals so that We The People make collective decisions and agree on the way forward. Not a difficult concept. The Athenians managed it two and a half thousand years ago and they didn't have the obvious benefit of the web.
Though it's been made completely clear that the new consultation is pointless in terms of policy, I nurture the vague hope that this episode, added to the 1.5 million opponents who signed up against the Road Pricing proposal and the 1 to 2 million who marched against the Iraq war, together with several dozen less high profile examples, will go some way to making the average British citizen start to think about the issue of basic democracy and what it ought to mean. Perhaps some of them will even find material like this on the web and start realising how badly misled they have been and are being. If enough of them start thinking like that, we might actually be able to do something about it.
If that is the outcome of the Greenpeace victory, we'll have to thank the FSM that, with all its flaws, British Justice is, at least, in somewhat better shape than British Democracy.
*****
Update 23 Feb. Yesterday Blair was subjected to 35 minutes of fairly hostile questioning by John Humphrys. I only got round to listening to it in detail today and most of it is predictable drivel such as his standard denial of the link between our presence in Iraq and the unprecedented wave of home grown MIFT But just over half way through he actually said something which woke me up. It could have been designed to support the argument I've made in this Blog. You can download all 33 seconds of it here. But this is how it went:
BLAIR: I believe, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, across the whole of the region, that what we need is a policy based on democracy, on freedom and on justiceThe prosecution rests
HUMPHRYS: Our idea of democracy...
BLAIR: I don't know that there is another idea of democracy.
HUMPHRYS: Well, if I may say so, that's naive (in the view of many people)
BLAIR: Well surely the only thing about democracy is that you're able to elect your government or not. You may have different forms of democracy. You can have proportional representation. You can have federal systems or not federal systems, but the one basic fact about democracy, surely, is that you can get rid of your government if you don't like them.
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