Reading about John Reid’s visit to Waltham Forest, and it’s ‘critical reception’ I couldn’t help but think of other authoritarian scum, ahem, political figures who have gone to ‘immigrant areas’ in East London.

The Battle of Cable Street or Cable Street Riot took place on Sunday October 4, 1936 in Cable Street in the East End of London. It was a clash between the police, overseeing a lawful march by the British Union of Fascists, on one side and anti-fascists including local Jewish, socialist, and communist groups on the other. The majority of both marchers and counter-protesters travelled into the area for this purpose.

In spite of the East End at that time having a large Jewish population, and the anti-Semitic nature of the B.U.F., the government refused to ban the march.

The anti-fascist groups erected roadblocks in an attempt to prevent the march from taking place. Although the police attempted to clear the road to permit the march to proceed, after a series of running battles between the police and anti-fascist demonstrators, the march did not take place, and the B.U.F. marchers were dispersed towards Hyde Park instead.

(Wikipedia)

Some memories:

Solley Kaye

[…]

The fascists had their strongholds in places like Bethnal Green, Shoreditch, South Hackney, parts of Poplar, all of which were on the edge of Stepney where the large Jewish population lived. So that they could involve people on the basis of envy fear, or whatever, by saying “OVER THERE the Jews, they’ve got your houses, OVER THERE the Jews, they’ve got your jobs.” Even though we were living in bloody poverty with bugs crawling all over us in the night.

[…]

Charlie Goodman

Charlie Goodman’s arrest on 4 October 1936 was notable for two things – the sheer brutality of the police and the guts of this 16 year-old kid who faced up to them.

At one point in the battle at Gardiner’s Corner, when after literally hours of police charges the crowd retreated a bit, Charlie climbed up a lamp post and shouted at the top of his voice: “Don’t be yellow bellies, forward, we are winning”. The police eventually caught up with him in Commercial Road and he was clubbed, punched and kicked all the way to Leman Street police station. (Things have not changed much. How many Asians have suffered similarly at that police station in the last 15 years?)

[…]

“The names change, the streets are the Same, and so are the problems. The glorious struggle of 1936 must be remembered today.”

There will be the 70th anniversary events on the 8th October. What would be an appropriate way to remember it?

Violent protests at UK’s ‘lying PM’
(Filed: 19/09/2006)

Caught on tape, prime minister who admitted lying

Protesters have clashed with police and stormed the headquarters of the BBC in West London after a leaked recording caught the UK’s prime minister admitting the government “lied morning, evening and night” about ‘security’.

Rescue services said at least 50 demonstrators and 102 policemen were injured as police fired tear gas and water cannons at rock-throwing protesters, who have been demanding the government resign.

The calls for Mr Blair to step down follow the leak on Monday of a recording in which he could be heard admitting that his government, which became the first in post-cThatcherist Britain to win re-election, had lied about the terrorist threat — keeping it afloat through “hundreds of tricks” and thanks to “divine providence.”

Several thousand police reinforcements were called to the capital from across the country at the height of the violence, which peaked when protesters set fire to the BBC television studios.

Police succeeded in retaking the TV building and driving out protesters only after 3 a.m., more than five hours after the unrest started.

By 7:45 a.m, London was in flames and there was no sign of ministers inside parliament.

The protests were sparked when a recording made in May was leaked to local media. On it, ‘Ex-communist’ Home Secretary John Reid admitted officials lied about terrorist threats to impose legislation.

According to a snap poll of 500 people yesterday, 43 per cent of people thought Mr Blair should be shot immediately, while 47 per cent said he should hang and 10 per cent wanted him electrocuted.

But despite the surge in violence and low approval ratings, Mr Blair said that he had no plans to resign.

“The street is not a solution, but instead causes conflict and crisis,” the prime minister told BBC News 24, the state news service. “Our job is to resolve the conflict and prevent a crisis.”

Smaller anti-government protests were also held in other cities around England, but violence was minimal.

Socialist members of Labour voted unanimously to install Gordon Brown and the government called for an emergency session of the cabinet on this morning.

“Sausages” – As Punch said to Judy

There are so many ways to slice the story that on one hand schools outsourced catering suppliers are still trying to wriggle out of providing decent meals for schoolchildren and that on the other that children and parents are doing their utmost do gorge themselves on ‘junk’ food – as the ‘Rotherham sausage’ (Hattersly) demonstrates.

But basically it boils down to this, when schools act in loco parentis it means that the staff should be endeavouring to provide the child with the best form of pedagogy they can – as they would their own children. In regard of school meals the care of duty dictates the default meal should be nutrtious and balanced – and those of you who cook know this includes oily and fatty foods . If this means not being able to waste effort on fingerprint databases and generally treating the pupils as if they were criminals then so much the better.

Quite frankly if the people peddling the stuff that is being served to children go bankrupt then we will have all gained something, a removal of one of the loops that take (possibly) bright young minds and turn them into docile mush.

Which brings us to the children who go out of their way to sustain their bad diet – I’m inclined to say let nature/evolution take its course, however that assumes that the NHS isn’t going to assist any obesity problems later on in life. If the parents have failed in their role of dissuading/educating away the instilled desire for these non-food products then the school should be providing classes to do that which the parents should have done (giving knowledge about the food chain, food production, how to cook/assemble meals).

And this is important because study after study is showing that a good diet assists children in becoming brighter and healthier, which means they can become more self-sufficient/less dependent on the State and hence occupy a more powerful position when it comes to questioning the decisions of politicians and bureaucrats.

The Register reports:

The headmaster of Porth County Comprehensive School in South Wales has defended fingerprinting all 1,400 of his pupils days after their parents were told about the scheme last Wednesday.

[…]

Porth County Comprehensive headmaster Stephen Bowden told El Reg: “As far as we were concerned, it wasn’t necessary for us to seek parental consent in this. It’s a system that has been approved by the DfES and it’s supported by Capita SIMS.”

[…]

The system, called Vericool, was developed by Anteon, a subsidiary of General Dynamics, a firm that specialises in developing systems for the military and intelligence services.

It will register children for lessons by scanning their fingers when they enter a classroom at the start of a lesson.

Bowden said it would give the school a means of “effective administration” and help in “reducing the bureaucratic burden” of staff taking registrations themselves. It had cost the school £25,000.

“By the time I’ve put this together, I can assure any parent that their child is safely in school and on the premises…or we can purely or simply track students to see if attendance affects their progress,” he said.

But Bowden said he would not know how much more efficient the system would be than a manual register until after its installation was complete in January.

[…]

What a despicable creature this Stephen Bowden is. How utterly repugnant that someone in charge of educating a rolling total of 1400 children believes they should learn to be treated like unthinking livestock. What sort of example does it show to overrule or blatently disregard viewpoints of these children’s parents.

What a dangerous man he is to institutionally abuse so many children?

Now, of course the parents who have complained about this should remove their children from this school until this system is withdrawn, with a bit of luck they will have the sense to link this nonsense with the daily impositions that the National Identity Register will cause and they will be motivated to resist that also.

An Iraqi asylum seeker who was cleared yesterday of making a video identifying potential terrorist targets in London faces being issued with a government control order, the Guardian has learned.

Rauf Abdullah Mohammad, 26, sunk his head into his hands as he was found not guilty at Woolwich crown court of four terrorism charges related to making the tape. The crown had alleged the video was a film of “high-profile targets” made to help Islamist terrorists plot and commit an attack on the capital.

But the jury, with their not guilty verdicts, appeared to accept Mr Mohammad’s case that the hour-long film was a souvenir of his time in London […]

So let’s get this straight. The Home Office isn’t even bothering with an appeal but the opinion is that the Home Secretary will be able to dish out ‘punishment’ simply because of government suspicions.

If anyone from the “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” camp can argue their case after this I’d be amazed. Because they are essentially arguing that the whole basis of UK law is worthless and can be bypassed by a politician. Traitors that they are.

You may be thinking, okay this time MM has really lost it, but that isn’t my sentiment, rather it is that of ‘New Rpublic’ magazine (which says a lot) and some guy who appeared on the Toady programme’s regular 08:48(ish) F.E.A.R. slot. It was reported (yet again) that trrrrrrrrrrrrsts are exploiting the UK’s freedoms to plot terror antics against the US and may exploit the Visa Waiver Programme to board planes and blow up your family into bite sized bits of fish food whilst their dead souls cavort with pretty maidens (I’m paraphrasing). In any case this is clearly as softening of the ground for either removal of the Visa Waiver Programme AFTER insisting on access to PNR and biometrics in PURELY order to maintain the VWP, or to veal crate the population into giving over more information to prime the NIR database, or more likely BOTH.

btw Murdoch approves

If you want a preview of how ‘helpful’ the trails of information gained by NIR trawling will be take a look at this article at nth position. It goes into detail about an active project in Bedfordshire which agregates information about crime levels, ambulance reports et al. in house-to-house detail. As you will see these records are rather simple to access and there are plans to allow public access via the internet to a range of data gathered:

Surely, I thought, in the name of all that is most sensible, those cannot really be emergency service logs? Later that day, Bedfordshire County Council’s press office kindly supplied me with a CD-ROM of the presentation. Yes, the spreadsheets glimpsed in the presentation really were pages from emergency service logs.

The level of detail included:
* X and Y co-ordinates allowing pinpointing of crimes and accidents on Ordnance Survey maps
* Details of crime victims including address, age and sex
* Ambulance data including patient problems
CDRP: Ambulance data, redacted for patient data privacyIn this last category, the medically confidential information had been shaded over for presentation to the council. However on examination it was easily readable, allowing me to zero in on the locations of the following incidents, all from October 1, 2005
* 12 cases of ‘assault/rape’
* One case each of ‘overdose/poisoning’ and ‘stab/gunshot wound’
* 16 cases of ‘specific traumatic injuries’ [nthposition has redacted the personally identifiable data.]
Information from the fire and rescue service also give OS grid references, street addresses and notes on whether fires are considered accidental or deliberate.
Information from the council’s environmental services includes unprocessed reports pinpointing complainants’ addresses.
From information on council trading standards ‘enforcement visits’, it could be seen that four specific shops in nearby towns had provided drink and/or tobacco to underage children. In the council’s words: “Data on crime and anti-social behaviour incidents is extracted from the partner systems and replicated into a central data store and a common application has been created to provide user access.”

Such is the CDRP’s belief in data protection that they lifted pages of this data store for a slide show, and then simply handed it out to the public on request. And this is the sort of information that is going to be pinged back and forth between the CDR partners. Bedfordshire’s CDRP also plans to show reported incidents of anti-social behaviour on a website map giving house-to-house detail. These maps will be available online to the public.

You will notice that enthusiasm for the project already means ‘institutional ignorance’ of data protection concerns is in place.
The ‘Geographical Information System’ in Bedfordshire is by no means alone. see this Home Office report (pdf) for introduction to the scope of another few (via crimereduction.gov). Interestingly at least one of the Systems (COSMOS – covering the Birmingham area) has a vanilla http login page the insecurity of which should be obvious. This doesn’t exactly make one feel comfortable.

So that is where we are now. The fundamental question to pose with these systems is are they necessary? That question is not actually about whether they will aid the authorities which they almost certainly will but whether the information they gather is any more useful than limited research projects. It is the question of what amounts to ongoing mass surveillance is actually more beneficial than spending money on a research programme and then acting in advance of crime and antisocial behaviour – because whatever these systems do they are absolutely useless if no one actually learns from the data gathered. It should be pretty clear to most people that sink estates and higher crime areas share certain characteristics and the findings of research in one location can be applied with a bit of critical thinking to another area. The idea that ongoing mass surveillance is in any way more responsive or accurate than limited research is fallacious, moreover ‘unguided’ systems such as these may obscure potential solutions to problems that ‘guided’ research may uncover – indeed it is like finding a cure for ‘the common cold’ by counting how many people buy cough medicine.

Secondly we have the issues of security and privacy, as the writer from the nth position found, the regard towards data protection aspects is minimal, and has been sidelined in the interests of interoperability, with this approach the underlying assumptions are that everyone has a legitimate use for information gathered and that it is being requseted ‘innocently’.
Additionally in these systems it is unclear how accurate these databases will become once opened up to the public, as the nth position discusses:

Using a special page on the CDRP sites, members of the public will be able report instances of alleged anti-social behaviour. At present, Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (Asbos) can be made by local courts. They are yet another of Labour’s quick fixes: where prosecution might otherwise fail, or even where no specific crime has been committed, Asbos can be slapped on instead. The bald truth about Asbos is unpalatable enough: they can be (and in fact, are designed specifically to be) applied to anyone magistrates consider to have behaved legally, but badly enough to warrant legal restraint. Now, in a sort of post-modern nightmare, Orwell’s Big Brother has been ousted by Bazalgette’s Big Brother.

The public will be the ones doing the state’s spying, and ‘voting off’ fellow citizens.

You shouldn’t worry unduly about this, because (as one CDRP officer put it): “These reports will be sanity-checked.” What might ‘sanity-checking’ entail? On the face of it, emailed reports of pink elephants leaping over office blocks might not make it on to the map. Then again, you may remember the case of Caroline Shepherd, a woman from East Kilbride served with an Asbo in 2005 for answering her own front door while wearing a nightdress. Or perhaps the luckless would-be suicide who repeatedly jumped in to the River Avon and was hit with an Asbo preventing her from going near any body of water in the vicinity – her name is public knowledge, but I can’t see any benefit in repeating it. (Then there are the cases of Michael Donockley, David Gaylor and David Boag… but I fear that no-one will believe those actually happened: stick their names plus ‘asbo’ into a search engine and find out for yourself).

So on to the future.
If the NIR is implemented ‘successfully’ it will be possible for people/companies with access to GIS technology, and who have bought government database access to overlay ‘public’ and commercial information to create a ‘live profile’ of anyone registered on the NIR database. A criminal will be able to identify high crime areas, perhaps with poor police response times and correlate the data with people recently buying a new car/financial services with PNR flight data they could check if occupants are on holiday etc, etc. Obviously the converse data matching could be employed by the government for their own reasons (we shan’t be handing out any more ideas here I’m afraid). Even if access to this sort of information is more secure (https? phut!) it won’t prevent the internal compromises such as those reported this week at the Identity and Passport Service (the future gateway to NIR informtaion no less).

Naturally an ‘I told you so’ when the NIR fails will be a response that won’t address the problem of its creation. Much like using mass surveillance technology to respond to crime.

Ministers are to announce next month that they have overturned a key data protection principle which prevents information on individual citizens held by one government department from being passed to another public agency, the Guardian has learned.

It is believed that a cabinet committee, MISC 31, set up by Tony Blair to examine data sharing and chaired by Hilary Armstrong, the chief whip, decided last month to overturn the principle that personal information provided to a government department for one purpose should in general not be used for another.

Last month? WTF on whose authority (I’m sure that this question doesn’t ‘matter’ anyway). In any case this is a key decision in allowing the NIR to be used as a hub for government busybodying, snooping and before you can say ‘Salamitaktik’ Aleikum – Control over day to day activity. This is exactly the way the government can say $PRIVATE_DATA will not be stored on the National Identity Register even though anyone with NIR information will be able to access a government database with that information on it.

The current policy means that public bodies and departments must provide a legal justification each time they want to share data about individuals and specify the purpose. The new policy will reverse this and allow officials to assume that personal data can be shared unless there are pressing reasons not to disclose it.

This basically means no one is going to bother checking why a DEFRA official is so interested in your Driving License or why someone from the MOD is checking your tax returns. This is also the the attitude towards data sharing in the US and what makes their Social security Numbers so valued for fraud using information gathered by the state.

Mr Suffolk has denied there will be free trade across Whitehall in personal information: “Not all information will be shared,” he said. “This is not about sharing your health record or criminal record. It is about basic data sharing to ensure that services to citizens are seamless.”

Not YET. You wouldn’t have imagined a backroom committee would be able to overturn data protection policy would you? And, again, at whose bequest/with what safeguards? Who is this Mr Suffolk, without legislative responsibilities, that we are supposed to trust with this statement?

(John Suffolk, the former Director General of Criminal Justice, is the new government CIO…An IT veteran with a CV stretching back over 25 years including a stint as IT director at the Britannia Building Society, Suffolk will report in to Ian Watmore, the previous holder of the post and now Head of the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit…In his spare time, Suffolk helps run a farm for rare breeds.)

It is expected that the change of policy on data sharing will be presented as a consumer-friendly move.

To call the public consumers in relation to government services is still a distortion of the relationship.

Officials say that when a family move home, they could register their new address online with their local authority, which would then update the records of the new local authority and pass the information to the driving licence authorities, the tax authorities and the electoral registrar.

At least half of this does not concern central government in its current role (and in the utopian future none of this would need to be handled by central government).

…Critics claim that an unpaid parking ticket for someone on benefits could lead to that information being passed to the Benefits Agency and the fine deducted directly.

Or perhaps you will be denied medical care unless you top up your NI contribution, more likely, overpaid tax credits will be automagically deducted from your pay packet. Give with one hand, take with the other and pay ‘commission’ on both that’s the reality of Brown’s top down economic view – I digress.

So the need to shed the state from your life becomes even greater. The gap between rich and poor expands, between those who can afford privacy and those who are bullied into justifying their lives to all and sundry. Unless unless…

Via the Guardian who are also doing some good exposing of the massively over budget NHS IT coordination project (you can feel the wasted billions in NIR implementation in your veins – furring them up like cholesterol)

Not since the Social Democrat Party collapsed after a false start has a major political party in this country fallen from grace so shamefully. 1997’s ‘love in’ between England and New Labour began in good spirit, with the prospect of a justifiable Blair victory to balance out two decades that had already seen two long Conservative leaderships. A full house at Westminster enjoyed ‘spin politics’ at its best, skewed, indulgent and controlled – but nothing in the Chamber was as extraordinary as the way the trust ended outside it.

When one Minister, Peter Hain, applauded Blair’s first five years after admitting that the agenda had been tampered with, an upset and angry UK population worked on until tea. Even then their failure to refuse to pay taxes promptly allowed a chaotic display of aggression, in which first the US and then the UK governments appeared to order air strikes in Iraq. A country that prides itself on the spirit of fair play was plunged into a sad and resentful disharmony. This may have bitter consequences for both politics and international relations in this country.

Last year the black clouds gathering over The Oval Office mirrored the mood of the 20 UK and 22 US politicians inside it. The bewildered faces were not sure whether there would be a Middle East to exploit today – only later was it confirmed that the oil was secure and had been awarded to ‘The Coalition’. Past bad blood between Iran and the US sides had boiled over to produce an inexplicable stand-off: no evidence had been produced to support the suspicion of nuclear weapons.

The Police Complaints Commission remained silent on the policing issues last night. Labour insist that their protest at judges’ leniency was intended to be a brief and token one, but a dispute that began within the Cabinet ended with Mr Blair and his colleague, John Reid, refusing to rescind bad legislation. This turned an incident that could have been resolved into a childish and destructive stand-off. The dispute was not between the police and muslims, which should allow the forthcoming one day melas to continue. But it can only fuel the alienation felt by some British Muslims at a time of great strain.

Today all flights should have continued, with the lost time being made up – it is now clear that is not going to happen. In due course Mr Reid and his fellow officials should be asked to present their evidence to the public.

Today, Brown is predicted for the leadership and the man might in any case prove to be a washout. However, it is a shame that Blair’s pride, rather than necessity has brought the party to unnatural legislation.

Not the Guardian leader

A system for the “positive profiling” of European airline passengers is to be urgently explored in response to last week’s alleged airline terror plot, European interior ministers meeting in London agreed yesterday.

The home secretary, John Reid, insisted that the new system, which would affect all domestic and international flights in and out of Europe, would not involve screening by religion or ethnic background but would be carried out well in advance of flights based on biometric checks – electronic eye or facial scans.

[…]

NO

This would not address anything – you can no more identify a potential terrorist through ‘biometric information’ than you can by what brand of breakfast cereal they eat. This sort of data rape serves only one purpose and that is for the (EU) State(s) to aggregate information on individuals in any/every manner possible. It would be a sickening and wicked deception that would have nothing to do with amending the UK’s foreign policy (nor the interim measure of improving targeted investigations against suspected terrorists) and would simply be an outrageous use of tax payers money that subsidises the Government favourite lobbying companies.

We have been through the arguments so many times that they practically never leave the front page.

For this sort of thing to stop the people of the UK must STOP.

(So where is the rebuttal of Reid’s tripe in the Guardian story? And I’m not talking about the easy option of reporting ‘potential’ racial discrimination)

An article in the Grauniad about missing baggage has some interesting bits aside from the reason for the article:

British Airways passengers today faced more flight cancellations as the airline revealed that up to 20,000 bags had gone missing at Heathrow over recent days.

[…]

The home secretary, John Reid, today urged his European counterparts for consistency in anti-terror measures across the continent.

“It’s very important that the measures that are taken in one country are reflected in other countries, because we want equal security for all our countries,” Mr Reid said.

Why would other European countries need to burden themselves with the farce that is being enacted in the UK? It is costly to airlines, is not targeted at actual trrrrrrrrrrrrrsts and finally they don’t seem to have the groundswell of dissaffected persons willing to engage in trrrrrrrrrrrrsm. Obviously it should be the government that should be reflecting the world view of other European countries rather than that of the US, the only EU country to have previously suffered ‘islamic trrrrrrrrrrrrrsm’ is Spain, the government was ousted and we hear of no more problems. With Reid touting himself as an Occam’s razor wielding hardball he should appreciate the simplicity of the argument and pass it onto the other Cabinet lunatics.

And below we see that companies are revolting at the costly smoke and mirrors that the government is toying passengers with:

The budget airline Ryanair, which was today hoping to run a cancellation-free programme for the first time since last Thursday, has been highly critical of the new security arrangements, describing the new hand luggage regulations as “nonsensical”.

The airline’s chief executive, Michael O’Leary, said it had seen a 10% drop in group bookings over the last couple of days as a result of the travel disruption.

“We’re seriously considering taking legal action against the government to force them to get the airports back to normal,” Mr O’Leary added.

[…]

And even the police are unimpressed by calls for passenger profiling:

However, the Metropolitan police chief superintendent Ali Dizaei has warned that singling out some passengers considered to be more of a security threat would create a new offence of “travelling whilst Asian”.

Stumbled across this speech from 1950 that contains a few things to think about and a few things you may disagree with (Controversy? We need controversy!):

The constitutions of former American slave states generally specified that the masters must provide their slaves with adequate housing, food, medical care, and old-age benefits. The Mississippi constitution contained this following additional sentence: “The legislature shall have no power to pass laws for the emancipation of slaves . . . [except] where the slave shall have rendered the State some distinguished service.”

The highest honor that Mississippi could offer a man for distinguished service to his country was personal responsibility for his own welfare! His reward was freedom to find his own job and to have his own earnings, freedom to be responsible for his own housing, freedom to arrange for his own medical care, freedom to save for his own old age. In short, his reward was the individual opportunities-and the personal responsibilities-that have always distinguished a free man from a dependent.

What higher honor can any government offer?

But many present-day Americans are trying to avoid this personal responsibility that is freedom. They are voting for men who promise to install a system of compulsory, government-guaranteed “security”-a partial return to the old slave laws of Georgia that guaranteed to all slaves “the right to food and raiment, to kind attention when sick, to maintenance in old age. . . .” And the arguments used to defend this present-day trend toward the bondage of a welfare state are essentially the same arguments that were formerly used to defend the bondage of outright slavery.

For example, many of the slave-holders claimed that they knew what was “best for the slaves.” After all, hadn’t the masters “rescued” the slaves from a life of savagery? The advocates of government-guaranteed “security” also claim that they know what is best for the people. Many of them argue in this fashion: “After all, haven’t the American people conclusively shown that they are incapable of handling the responsibility for their own welfare?”

Many of the slave-holders sincerely believed that the “dumb, ignorant slaves” would starve to death unless their welfare was guaranteed by the masters.

And the advocates of compulsory “security” frequently say: “Are you in favor of letting people starve?”

But as proof of the fact that personal responsibility for one’s own welfare brings increased material well-being, consider the emancipated slaves. Among them, there were old and crippled and sick people. They had no homes, no jobs, and little education. But-most precious of all-the former slaves were responsible for their own welfare. They were free . They had the privilege of finding their own security. . . .

The advocates of this compulsory “security” honestly seem to believe that most Americans . . . are too ignorant, or lazy, or worthless to be trusted with their own destiny; that they will literally starve in the streets unless their welfare is guaranteed by a “benevolent” government. However good their intentions may be, these disciples of a relief state are demanding that they be given the power to force mankind to follow their plans. In the name of liberty they advocate bondage!

This is true because the persons who receive support from the state are thereby led to expect-and then to demand-more support from the state. They become dependents. Thus they enter into a form of bondage. They lose their individual freedom of choice to whatever extent the state assumes responsibility for their personal welfare. In time, as is now the case in the welfare state of Russia, the people become completely subservient to the state. In effect, they become slaves of the “benevolent” government that has promised to solve all of their personal problems for them!

Admittedly, this is not the intent of the planners. Apparently, most of the advocates of government paternalism really believe that they are able to know and to do what is “best” for all of the people. Most of them may honestly desire to help the people. But their efforts always result in some form of bondage. . . .

In Russia we find another example of the fact that good intentions are no guarantee of freedom. For instance, in the beginning Lenin and Stalin probably had no desire whatever to bring slavery to Russia. Their announced plan was to free the Russian people from the slavery of an all-powerful government. But look what happened!

[…]

[The American Revoltionaries] knew that the main purpose of government should be to protect whatever security the people were able to attain individually or in voluntary cooperation. They knew that electing or appointing a man to public office cannot endow him with wisdom; it can endow him only with power . Thus they took no chances on this power of government being used to encroach upon their individual liberties and their personal responsibilities. In advance, they put positive restrictions on all officeholders. And as a final guarantee of freedom, they specified that any powers not expressly given to the federal officials were to remain with the individual citizens and their local governments.

[…]

And just as the Russians are enslaved to a welfare state, so this country is being carried into bondage by accepting the same false principle. Just as force is used in Russia to make the people conform to the security laws designed “for their own good,” so we also are now forced to submit to American security laws designed “for our own good.” And just as the Russian state punishes any objector, so the American state will now imprison us if we refuse to conform.

If you doubt that compulsory socialism has gone to that extreme in this country, just test it, for instance, by refusing to pay the social security tax that is taken from your salary. The government will do the same thing to you that it did to the owner of a small battery shop in Pennsylvania who balked at the idea of compulsory social security. First, the state confiscated his property. Still he refused to obey. Then the state preferred criminal charges against him. And in January of 1943, the government gave him the choice of conforming or going to prison as a criminal-an enemy of the state because he refused to pay social security! He paid. And his six-months prison sentence was suspended. . . .

[…]

Before choosing, however, consider this: When one chooses freedom-that is, personal responsibility-he should understand that his decision will not meet with popular approval. It is almost certain that he will be called vile names when he tries to explain that compulsory government “security”-jobs, medicine, housing, and all the rest-is bad in principle and in its total effect; it saps character and strength by encouraging greed and weakness; it destroys the individual’s God-given responsibility for self-help, respect, compassion, and charity; in some degree, it automatically turns all who accept it into wards of the government; it will eventually turn a proud and responsible people into cringing dependence upon the whims of an all-powerful state; it is the primrose path to serfdom.

No, the choice is not an easy one. But then, the choice of freedom never has been easy. It never will be easy. Since this capacity for personal responsibility-freedom-is God’s most precious gift to mankind, it requires the highest form of understanding and courage.

Dean Russell was a member of the staff at The Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, when he delivered this speech in 1950.

Interesting, especially if you update the meaning of security to cover what our governments are legislating against and consider the shifting of the focus of personal responsibility from empowering the individual to informing the State that the National Identity Register, Automatic Number Plate Recognition schemes (etc.) embody.

Confidential bank details scavenged from computers dumped in British rubbish tips and recycling points are being traded for cash in Africa, according to a new investigation.

Personal data, including passwords, sort codes, account numbers and even family names and birth dates, are being offered for sale by fraudsters in Nigeria for less than £20.

The information is being taken from the hard disks of PC’s abandoned at waste tips and local authority recycling points which are then shipped to Africa for repair.

Although the owners believe that they have deleted any confidential information before throwing away the computers, the data can usually be retrieved easily and quickly.

Telegraph

Banks will be among the many institutions that will be able to access NIR related information, qed we shall see this story repeated with far more sensitive & personal information if the NIR database goes ahead and people register on it. Of course the increased usage of computer records in the NHS and other State agencies means a potential agglomeration of personal data from recycled/waste PCs.

I was working in a studio in Canada recently. They had a Fender Rhodes piano there, a standard studio instrument I almost always ignore. I thought, “I’ll use that for a change. How can I use this to do something surprising?” I looked around and found an old amplifier with a rattly speaker. I took the speaker and sat it on the sustain pedal of a grand piano so the strings were all open. The sound from the Fender Rhodes would make the piano resonate in sympathy with it. Then I set up a microphone with a long plastic tube on it, one of those tubes you spin to get a note. The tube resonates at that frequency, so it was selective. (I did this with my engineer, Danny Lanois, who always helps me very much.) I sat down and checked out various notes on the Rhodes. One note – just one note – made the whole system come to life. It made the speaker shake with a beautiful purring sound, like a huge foghorn. The piano was ringing away, and the pick-up through the tube particularly resonated around that frequency and all the harmonics.

This was a case of having a technological idea and then seeing if anything could be made of it. It would have stopped there if that sound hadn’t appeared. The avant-garde technique would be to go ahead with it anyway, because the process is supposed to be interesting in itself. I don’t go for that. I think if something doesn’t jolt your senses, forget it. It’s got to be seductive.

Of course, when I got that sound, I was back in the seed position of the other way of working. It immediately suggested a direction I still haven’t resolved. I didn’t find anything more interesting than just the sound on its own. Everything I put on covered up parts of the sound.

And a second one:

I walked past an enormous rubber plantation in Malaysia. It was a chaos of trees, thousands of them. I thought it strange they should be planted so randomly. Then I reached a point where I realized they were in absolutely straight rows. Only at one point could I see that.

(Brian Eno)

I think Blogdial is a place where you can see trees in straight lines, and when you see a straight line you know you can accelerate.

If you read this blog you’re no doubt aware of the AOL search history debacle. Now that we learn at least one person has been identified as a result of their search history we can see the unfortunate consequences of accruing information about a person’s ‘habits’. Of course I refer to the audit trail the NIR and attendant databases will create (and this will happen despite government protestations to the contrary – police officers will be required to fill in a form every time they request to see an ID card and will this information will have to be stored for quality control and verification – companies will be able to buy NIR information and cross reference it with their own credit/loyalty card databases; most supermarkets/companies sell financial services these days and will request ‘identification’ before selling these products so don’t think ticking a little data protection box will help you much).

You know very well that NIR information will be extrapolated to form an ‘aura’, of course as we stand an individual’s argument holds sway until sufficient evidence can be brought to bear and tsuch an ‘aura’ could be refuted easily but the whole basis of the NIR twists this relationship so the individual has to bear the burden of providing the State with accurate information (i.e. the computer is right unless notified otherwise).

Whoever is put on the NIR will have ‘their’ data routinely accessed and this will eventually be accessed by corrupt individuals who will be able to use such information for blackmail, stalking and fraud amongst other crimes. Of course for AOL the writing has been on the wall for a while and certain people are saying “FFS it’s AOL what do people expect?” in a respect they are right and people should be using a different ISP, however with the NIR there is only one guarantee of not having your life ruined in a similar way and that is to not register.

Incidentally anyone who has had access to their bank account suspended for a couple of weeks for ‘security reasons’ will know how much of a PITA it is to carry out things with whatever small change you happen to have. If you are dependent on a form of identification that controls access to State services and becomes a requirement for a number of financial transactions and can be revoked at will (as NIR records will be) you will feel the pain 3bn-fold (as an example consider this story but with your medical history requiring a suspended NIR number).

And we didn’t even mention Echelon!

These + manga ?!?!? (+ sunlight + French prices).

Indeed it is a very nice substitute – with the same wallet draining potential, ooh la la!

—

Tibor Fischerspooner

Guardian reports:

Opposition MPs have condemned a serious computer system failure that affected 80 NHS hospital trusts.

Some health staff in the North West and West Midlands were left unable to check appointments and access patient administration details on-screen.

NHS Connecting for Health, which runs the Government’s controversial IT programme, said there had been “serious interruption” to computer systems since Sunday morning. A spokesman stressed that the problem – caused by equipment failure – had not put patients at risk and no data had been lost.

He said: “The issues are administrative, such as dealing with admissions, patient tracking, the transfer of in-patient waiting lists and out-patient appointments. It is not about clinical information.”

But Liberal Democrat health spokesman Steve Webb said: “It is very alarming that trusts are reporting practical problems with a multi-billion-pound IT system.

“The NHS cannot rely on a computer system that is only right most of the time. If medical information is not available or supplied in error, then the effect on patients can be fatal. Serious questions must be asked about whether the proper safeguards were put in place before this system went online.”

[…]

Now apply this to when the NIR system is interrupted – 80 NHS trusts becomes alll health trusts (because the Government will eventually require NIR checks for NHS care in order to leverage underwhelming NIR registration), add in policing, DVLA, TV licensing, income support, financial services, buying alcohol or medicines and you see that when the NIR system goes down the entire portion of the country that has surrendered its freedoms to the State will grind to a halt.

And the NIR system will go down. Sooner rather than later – and more than once.