surveillance state

Thankfully, with or without state attempts to prevent it, horrors such as the Soham murders and mercifully very few and far between. Strangers remain a much smaller source of abuse than people who are known to their victims - usually within families or extended family groups. The more recent case of "Baby P" in Haringey just goes to show how, even with the intense scrutiny of the state child protection apparatus, the worst cannot always be prevented.

But the idea of bureaucratically vetting virtually everyone, even in informal arrangements, who will assist in keeping kids activities going through volunteering to drive their own and their friends' kids to clubs and events and so on seems to me to threaten what must, or at least ought, to be the first line of child protection - friends and local communities.

A quick check on a database is not going to get to the source of abuse, it's just going to make people more suspicious of others. It is the mother who, taking their own child to school or the football match calls in to pick up one of their friends who will notice first a child that is showing signs of stress at home - upset when they leave the house, or upset when it's time to go home. Small character changes over time - maybe more sullen or moody or nervous or tired. All that sort of thing. They may pick up on a bit of yelling. Their own child may be more reluctant to travel with someone else's parent because they're always shouting at the kids and so on.

So, if you are at all nervous about something in your past (whether child related or not - a quarter of the adult population are not going to understand the nuances of what appears on a CRB check and may not want to take the risk), perhaps you decide that if you cannot be part of the match-day lift rota the best thing would be to withdraw your kid from that activity. So fewer and fewer people are in your informal support network, your child gets even more under your feet stuck at home all the time or making particular calls on your time because you're not sharing the burden with anyone else. Well, that's when a short temper might tip over into abuse where it would not have done previously.

You see the problem for me is that we have, over time, put far too much trust in the state to carry the responsibilities that we all, as families and communities, should really bear, and, in fact only can bear - for 200 staff at some government agency (even when augmented by stretched and harassed police or social services departments) cannot possibly build that sort of incidental and pervasive knowledge of all the families in informal community networks.

The fact is, that harassed by the state for the best part of half our labour, harassed by the state's protection of landed interests and the banking cartel making the big ticket items in life so much more expensive than they would be otherwise, we are more and more forced to work so long and so hard that we do not have as much time as we once did for these sort of community networking activities. Yet another example of the state taking away with one hand and then having to go to extraordinary, disproportionate, and I predict ineffectual lengths to try to make up for the consequences of their predation on ordinary people.

This pandering to the "something must be done" culture, is not necessarily about child protection as much as about getting more and more information about people and their networks into central databases. That is how the state, especially the "transformational state" works. And it must be resisted. What "must be done" instead then...

How about instead of all this futile bureaucracy, a "Good Samaritan" law that places a duty on people to act when they see or hear indications that a problem may be developing. Not as snitches necessarily, nor accusatory, but as someone who asks questions when they see a child in distress or behaving unusually, who can offer some support and, if problems don't resolve themselves, then an early intervention from more experienced assistance.

Put a bit of responsibility back onto friends, connections and communities, instead of trying to absolve them of all responsibility - and taking more of their money to do so. They are the only ones who really can logistically do the job.

"You know my name. You people gave me the fucking number."

Whether it's John McVicar's prison number, an army number, a tattoo on your forearm or a piece of plastic, there is a tendency of authority to assign some "unique ID" to their "subjects". Sometimes "unique IDs" can be useful - they make database management more efficient - all our students have unique IDs, so do all our staff. Often times people will not know they even have a unique ID on any particular database as it may only be used internally. For example, I have several different account with my bank, each with their own identification features such as sort code, account number or VISA number, but I'll bet the database helps keep them all together under my name by assigning me as an individual an ID that I will never see - probably even the bank staff will not see.

But none of these attempt to define who you are. Except one. The National Identity Register. Most other forms of unique ID are either entirely voluntary - you don't need to use a firm that keeps a database, but your customer experience may be the worse for not doing so; you can choose the convenience or the privacy, say - or operate in only one aspect of your life; you may be in the army, voluntarily of course, and accept that they give you a number, but that only applies to your interactions within the military network.

While we may exist on lots of different databases dealing with many different interactions with others and have many different "unique IDs" from each of them, they are subservient to the individual. But the state proposes to create for us an entry on a database that will expand to cover so many aspects of our lives that it becomes effectively the ID database that will eventually verify our very existence.

We do not exist because the government says so but because we were born, and our continuing existence at any point in time is a function of the networks we operate in - those who can identify us best may be our family, friends, employers work-colleagues, neighbours and so on. We may even call ourselves one thing in one context, amongst our friends for example, and a different thing in a different context, our family or workplace say - and everyone within those networks will recognize us. We may even wish to do this precisely in order to keep those two "identities" apart - especially say if our work is sensitive and so on.

Or we may wish to vary our identity over time - in order perhaps to give us a "new start" after some calamitous event in our lives or just because we don't really like the person we were before any longer. But having one database that brings all our interactions with government, and presumably in time others such as banks or landlords or travel or whatever, together throughout our lives we lose that basic right and ability - your records will be there forever.

Revealing the design of the ID Card the other day, Home Secretary and former postie (who presumably had little difficulty getting letters, and postal Giros, to people without a centralised ID) Alan Johnson, trotted out the old cliche that it will help prevent us having to carry around lots of different pieces of ID when we want to engage in a contract. But there are other ways of achieving that without the government getting involved and storing everything on a single point of failure (and multiple points of corruption) database; without transforming the relationship between state and citizen from occasional protector and safety net to the body that defines your very existence.

A nice idea I quite like is what I call "networked identity". The network is the group of people and organizations you deal with on a day to day or even just an occasional basis. You could have a card, provided by an independent data holder - you could do it mutually as a community or commercially by a firm like Experian or Verisign - and every time someone confirms your identity you get points - it could start with single points for friends verifying who you are, through to hundreds of points perhaps when a bank confirms your identity to their satisfaction in order to open an account; you could get points for making sure you are on the electoral roll, or for voting, or each time you pass through customs and immigration.

The higher the points you have on the card, verified by digital signatures of the verifying contacts, the lower the threshold for proving your identity in future, perhaps even to the point where you could bypass airport security checks and so on. Nobody need know precisely who else has verified you, just that their credentials for verifying anyone can be recognized. Perhaps your bank's fraud insurance might insist on biometrics, but they would not be mandatory and held by the state, just on your card maybe. Over time we would be freer because of our network of verification rather than potentially the more restricted by a state with hundreds of thousands of people able to access aspects of your data. If for some reason we wanted to make a "fresh start" just as with bankrupts now you would start again with your verification network and build up points as the new identity.

When you think about it, the state ID system is also a form of protectionism for private interests. Those companies, like banks, who deal in complex risk based transactions with you have an incentive to minimize those risks - of misidentification and so on. The ID card system saves those companies who can afford to gear up with the technology and set in place procedures to comply with access requirements set by the state and so on get what they will no doubt believe (at first at least) is more definitive identification of potential customers.

So apart from usurping the position of the state vis-a-vis the individual if that wasn't bad enough, it's also a great big piece of corporate welfare, and an unnecessary monopoly, paid for by us!

Well, what an unpleasant surprise I had last night. I was bloody stopped and me and my car searched by the police about midnight as I was returning from my friend's house in a nearby village. They said they were randomly targeting vehicles on these country lanes late at night, asked where I had been and where I was going and whether I had had a drink - I hadn't.

So he started on about whether I used drugs: I don't really know where that one came from, though he had seen my roll up fag and asked how long I had been smoking rollies. He asked me to get out of the car and to go and show my ID to his colleague and he had a quick nose around in the car. Now, I have got to be one of the untidiest person you could ever meet, but one think I do hate is people dropping litter and especially fag butts. So what I do when I am smoking behind the wheel, since my car came with no ashtray and lighter, is to twist the fag out out the window and then put the butts into my driver's side door pocket.

I don't know if I've done a proper clean out of the car since I bought it four years ago or so! I do usually empty out the big stuff in the car and do a general binning of the rubbish every so often but haven't done for a while. As a guide - he was asking about a spade in the back seat - which I put in there during the snow in December or whenever it was as I was driving up to my mothers and wanted to have one with me in case I broke down. Anyway - all this, notwithstanding my explanation that the fag butts were about my civic responsibility not to drop litter, made him decide to conduct a proper search of me and the car.

What a faff - on a pitch black country road in the middle of the night he went rifling through all the junk in my car, rummaged through my pockets and wallet and so on. Then came back and asked me, off the record so to speak, to be honest about whether I ever used cannabis. Well of course I do, but it's such a rare occurrence - basically maybe every couple of months when I go for dinner at a particular group of friends' houses, so I never have any of my own. He said "you have a habit, I notice, from the car, that suggests to me that you are a user". He wouldn't tell me what this habit was; he did say it wasn't the butts in the door pocket or the general mess, and that I'd have to work it out for myself.

Well, I haven't got the faintest idea. Unless perhaps he was referring to the fact that there was a Tesco back in the bag with half a dozen empty energy drink cans in - again the relics of several longer distance journeys over the past six months when I have stopped in service stations and I usually buy that sort of thing. So, is that it? I'd never really think of that as a trait of drug using, and I dare say that Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber wouldn't think so either!

I did notice that he didn't give me his name or number and whilst the female colleague did fill in a search form I was not given a copy - they said it was primarily for the supervisor at the station to record what they had been up to but that I could get a copy from their station (miles away in Bicester) if I wanted.

So much of a reward for going to do a friend a good turn. Do these people get off on stopping and harassing drivers for no observable reason? Jeez!

I've blogged about the future of money and the possibility of virtualizing most of your monetary transactions before. With the current campaign against tax havens it's perhaps worth pointing this one out:

Online game gets banking licence Entropia has regularly mixed real and virtual finances. Online game Entropia Universe has been granted a licence to be a bank. Issued by the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority, the licence means the game can be more closely tied to the real world finances of players. [From BBC NEWS | Technology | Online game gets banking licence]

Now the article goes on to say that the Swedish banking authorities will be regulating the system, able to inspect accounts to ensure it's not being used for money laundering and so on. And that accounts in the online system will be covered by the same depositors' insurance as "real world" banks. But with the technology now quite well established there seems no reason why such systems could not run as virtual financial centres without any regulation at all.

Indeed, in researching software for my own mutual partnership banking project I even discovered that there is an open source "central bank" management system out there. I believe these development are inevitable. Governments that seek to prevent them will have to become extremely intrusive into their citizens' affairs. They had better get used to the idea and find different things to tax (like land, that you can't very easily "disappear" into the ether) or risk becoming ever closer to totalitarian.

It must sometimes be a bit annoying for David Davis, the former shadow Home Secretary who stood down and fought a byelection over the 42 day detention issue and other civil liberties, to have such a common name. For his fellow conservative homonym David Davies is now calling for a further curtailment of civil liberties:

Call for ban on military protests Angry protests greeted returning soldiers in Luton Conservative MP David Davies has called on abusive protests against serving military personnel to be outlawed. The Monmouth MP has tabled an amendment to a bill governing religious hatred that would extend protection to the Armed Forces. It would make it an offence to incite hatred against serving soldiers. [From BBC NEWS | Politics | Call for ban on military protests]

The trouble is Davies is also wrong. These are big boys and girls. They have stared death in the eyes and faced him down. What they really need to know is not that there is some simmering resentment that goes unvoiced, prohibited, but that the vast majority of us, from the reaction to the Luton protestors this week amongst the good people of Britain, are prepared to stick up for them and heap opprobrium on such protestors.

We go down a dangerous route in banning protest. Far better to get angry and shout them down each and every time and make it clear as a bell that they are in the minority. Our men and women on the front lines, whatever we think of the reasons for them being there, are not there to create or enforce the kind of society that will not brook criticism, we should not shield them from it when they return, but make them proud that the majority of us stick up for them freely and genuinely.

Labour MP Denis McShane has quite an extraordinary article on Comment is Free today, reflecting on the Guardian's hypocritical "tax gap" campaign. He moans that:

We may denounce bank accounts in the Alps or Caribbean but who is willing to reveal the details of their own accounts? Journalists beat up on MPs and their expenses, but the BBC will not even reveal what it pays its top broadcasters from the public purse, and the thought of disclosing payments that newspapers make to sources and in expenses would have every editor reaching to abolish the Freedom of Information Act.

No Denis, you just don't get it do you? Those of us who want the use of our tax money to be transparent and accountable don't really care whether it's the BBC or you MPs - we'd like it all to be accounted for. BBC Journalists may not like that, but to be honest they are not leading the campaign. But he goes on to suggest that because we want them to account for our money they spend on themselves we all need to adopt a more transparent approach and be open about how much we have ourselves:

We need a new approach to money to make it a de-sanctified commodity, the ownership of which should be in the public domain, much as we know who owns land or shares. It took centuries after the Domesday Book to make it law to reveal the ownership of land. Market democracy requires transparency about who owns shares. Yet the ownership of money is enclosed in secrecy. Our sexuality, faiths, passions, illnesses, relationships, ownership of homes and cars have lost the aura of secrecy in which they were once shrouded.

But we still expect our ownership of money to be kept secret by banks. Until we have a new philosophy of openness about money we should not be surprised if the great lengths to which people go to hide their money - even from family and friends - is not reproduced by firms. Transforming our thinking about money will require philosophers to make the case more than MPs to propose laws. And we have not even started. Money secrecy remains the last taboo. [From Denis MacShane: Lift the lid on the secrecy of money ownership | Comment is free | The Guardian]

Too bloody right we have a right to keep our wealth private. The big difference is that what we have is ourmoney, or what is left of it when you've taken your share. We take care over where we spend what's left, most of us, and all we want is for you to show you are careful about what you spend the rest of our money on. It's all our money. Government doesn't just magically produce money for you to spend on your homes and travel and so on, it takes it from us.

Only a generation ago each schedule on someone's tax return would be evaluated for its tax by a different tax inspector, so that no one inspector would have a complete picture of anyone's overall worth. Now you want us, what, to emblazon our bank balance across our foreheads for you and everyone else to see?

You forget that money is not itself wealth. It is just the tokens with which we buy real wealth - the things we value. You already have so many ways of poking into our actual wealth as you have enumerated - land, shares and so on. But these are not made public for the benefit of others. They are public because they are conditional property - claims that we have to assert in law. And in cases like shares, interests that have to be disclosed in the cause of market transparency.

But if I spend all of my spare cash (not that I have any sadly) on vintage cars, wines, art, jewelry, or whatever, and keep them to myself for my own enjoyment, you'll never find them. Nor have you the right to find them or expose them. So why should you have the right to know how many of our tokens remain unspent in our accounts? You people are just tinkering around the issues here, probably just trying to obfuscate the trail that leads to your trough. This melt down, and the internationalization of money flows and places to keep it are a fact of modern life. I have long said that this could be a great liberalization, or a journey towards totalitarianism. Your idea of us being expected to show you our money all the time is part of the latter journey, which exists solely in order to maintain the power you think you have.

Too right it's the last taboo. But being taboo does not make something bad!

...that our representatives are involved in some great conspiracy to create an environment in which we are all monitored from birth to death; in which our identities are only what the state declares them to be; in which we cannot "reinvent" ourselves when necessary as we go through our "seven ages" and perhaps regret or just resile from what we used to be, used to do; in which, if the state somehow thinks there's something suspicious about us, our innocent friends and family will be monitored just because they know us; in which hundreds of thousands of state functionaries will be able to access data about us; in which we may be stopped in the street and forced to prove who we are and justify our presence and be subjected to searches of our belongings.

I just don't. Want. To believe it.

I mean I know policemen; know MPs; I know councillors; I know council staff, and they don't appear, the ones I know anyway, to want all this. And they seem genuine when they tell me not to be paranoid; that none of this is on the agenda.

I just. Want. To believe them.

But the alternative is that they are collectively completely incompetent and blind to the fact that that appears to all the world to be what they are creating. And I'm scared. To believe that.

I don't want to believe that Leviathan is consciously controlled by particular maniacal individuals. I want to believe that most of the ideas start with a spark of ingenuity. A way to get the right benefits to the right recipients here. A convenient way for us to do business there. Maybe even an idea to save money, prevent waste, make sure no doctor ever gives us something we're allergic to.

But if our representatives do not understand Leviathan, and certainly cannot control it, then they must destroy it. Look for different ways. And oh, how many different ways there are! We are at the point where our government, the structures they have to create to maintain all the functions they think we find desirable, are bloated, inhuman in scale. And worse, that there are no alternatives. They must have pretty under-developed imaginations. And over-developed egos.

And I look around at the political alternatives, the parties who vie for our support, and I find not one, at least in the mainstream, who really accept this reality. For they all want to control it. They all want the power. They will tell us they want to downsize some of it with one speech and then propose something else as monstrous with the next.  And even if they don't want to control it, if they don't make it their first priority to destroy it, it will not be destroyed.

What a sad vision of humanity such people must have. What pessimism about our ability to do the right things, for ourselves, without being told, or dragged, or pushed at the point of a gun. There can be no prescription for bringing about the "greatest happiness" because each of us has our own idea of our own "greatest happiness". As humans, rather than Borg, we are individuals and no one size fits all. Ever. That's what makes us humans. There can be no database that takes all these variables into account, so they will end up suppressing those variables.

I don't want to believe (this is the end).

...Back in the USSR!

The government is compiling a database to track and store the international travel records of millions of Britons. Computerised records of all 250 million journeys made by individuals in and out of the UK each year will be kept for up to 10 years. The government says the database is essential in the fight against crime, illegal immigration and terrorism. [From BBC NEWS | UK | Government plans travel database]

Oh dear. Yet another database. This time you won't be able to book a plane, international train or ferry ticket without having your details stored for a decade. At least the Soviets were more honest - not letting you out without a minder and a very rare visa. Now they let you go, but track your every movement all the same.

They tell us it's essential in the fight against terrorism, and then go on to say the benignly named "eBorders" (which actually I think they may have to change as that name is copyrighted to a GIS database at the Edinburgh University I think!) has already:

"...screened over 75 million passengers against immigration, customs and police watch-lists, leading to over 2,700 arrests for crimes such as murder, rape and assault."

That's a hit rate of 0.0036 per hundred, just for your information. Probably statistically irrelevant and quite close to the equivalent of randomly arresting people in the street and checking the PNC to find out if they are wanted! Of course neither do they qualify, question or quantify what is meant by "crimes such as murder, rape and assault. Indeed, these are examples of crimes, as is non-payment of a court fine arising from a speeding ticket. How many murders? How many rapes? And how many unpaid speeding tickets? And how many of those having allegedly committed murder or rape would have been being tracked as non-citizens on visas without having to screen every last one of us leaving or arriving in the country.

Now I haven't been out of the country for 18 years I think it is, and even that was only to Dublin, so until I actually go into exile (when I can work out where to go and how) it's unlikely to affect me much, but on the basis that "then they came for the air travelers, but I wasn't an air-traveler" I'm going to stick up for the rest of you.

Couple this with the rumours that there may be restrictions on the number of flights people can take anyway, how long before this surveillance starts to generate letters or visits from the carbon cops telling you you've exceeded your quota for the year and your new ID card will only allow you to travel to the Co-op and back.

WAKE UP PEOPLE! This won't stop until you're obediently taking your Prozium.

I just noticed this on he BBC feed - Suffolk police have been carrying out an operation targeting "illegal activity" on the roads of the county. More than two dozen officers were involved and out of 200 stops they fined a few people for this and that - speeding, not wearing a seatbelt and so on. But they breathalyzed 134 drivers and every test was negative.

I wonder what else they were stopped for? Do we have "random" stops now in the UK? If there was nothing else to charge them with, dangerous driving or whatever, why were they stopped? Just so they could try breathing for a few seconds? Why are innocent people being harrassed in this way?

For those of you highly skeptical of my prediction that the internet will cause the nation state as we know it to be unable to tax fairly incomes or transactions in goods and services and so cease to exist in its current form , here's a slightly different angle on it at Reason...

It seems to have finally dawned on the US government that whatever laws and regulations they pass, they will not be able to ban offshore internet gambling:

In other news this week about the internet and real life colliding, we also had Second Life being cited in a divorce case in the UK and a Japanese woman sued for murdering her husband's online persona.

Which are you going to be - more restrictions, ultimately futile; or building new mutual institutions to help deliver public goods in an era of a reduced ability to collect tax?