technology

"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!

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.

When some of us heard David Friedman at the Libertarian Alliance Conference a few months ago talking about his new book "Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World" he wowed us with the possibility that nano-machines capable of fixing significant internal illnesses would be available within a few years. I wonder if this is quicker than even he expected:

Tiny submarines which can be injected into the blood to deliver cancer drugs straight to tumours have been developed by scientists. [From Tiny submarines 'can deliver cancer drugs straight to tumours' - Telegraph]

Apparently they use all natural materials that occur in the human body so that the immune system will not reject them and are a hundred times smaller than body cells themselves. Fantastic stuff. Presumably the possibility of things like routine cleaning out of the vascular system and so on come into play too.

Publications referred to in this story, which if you buy them via this link will earn me some money:

"Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World" (David D. Friedman)

Nick Clegg has a piece in the Independent this morning repeating his suggestion of last week that we should consider joining the Euro. Not, it has to be said, now and in a hurry - he does not see it as a way out of the mess the financial markets are in - but in recognition that the world after this crisis will be a different economic landscape in which ganging up together with Europe may outweigh the loss of credibility the City of London will have wrought on itself. He concludes:

But given the gravity of the economic crisis in Britain, and our unique exposure to international financial markets, silence about the euro must end. The future has never been more uncertain. People are increasingly desperate for stability in our economic affairs. We must be ready to think anew. [From Nick Clegg: We should consider joining the euro - Commentators, Opinion - The Independent]

Indeed, we must think anew, but alas the Euro is still part of the old world not the new. It is the system itself that is broken. It is true that one could argue that the Euro is slightly different from the rest of the system in that its central bank is not controlled by a single government with spending plans it would like to get that central bank to finance. At the moment that is; and God forbid that it ever should - we don't want these people to have any control over our lives, as liberals, do we?

If the Euro is able to survive the current crisis, with the pressures of Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland at least threatening to break all the rules, it will be a stronger currency I am sure if it emerges out the other side, but how long would it take for it to be ready to absorb an economy the size of the UK's?

Then also I notice talk that the BRIC countries, and at least China and India, as global creditor nations, will hold a lot of sway when the G20 meets in a few weeks time, are resurrecting something similar to Keynes' idea of the Bancor as a sort of a supra-national reserve currency. I doubt that they will readily accept a switch from one "national" reserve currency to another. The very notion of a reserve currency linked to one particular geopolitical grouping skews the system against all the other nations by effectively ensuring they have to buy that reserve currency in order to trade. In the new world where these economies are nipping at our heels it is economic imperialism, and protectionist, to believe we have a right to be some global super-currency.

I really think we have to begin to look beyond the era of "central banking" - it's not like it's been around that long - less than a century in reality. It has proven time and again to be a hostage of markets owing to the moral hazard inherent in the private banking system knowing they will be baled out in a crisis and has been a constant source of inflation. Not even our most monetarist governments have been able to control the money supply. It is one of the great monopolies that our liberal predecessors knew were a great cause of inequity.

As well as establishing this group to look at the electoral use of technology, the party needs to establish a group of, if you like, futurologists, to look at how the technological advances, especially in communications, over the past couple of decades can facilitate even more wide ranging changes right down to the institutions we have accepted till now as the very life-blood of the economy. The genie is out of the bottle, we are in a new epoch, and it seems to me that the opportunity this financial crisis affords us to do away with some of the old and facilitate the new is unmissable.

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?

I've just spent a fantastic weekend in the hallowed halls of the National Liberal Club at the annual Libertarian Alliance conference. If, like me, you see yourself as more of a theoretical policy wonk doing the background stuff of coming up with ideas, rather than the rather more practical work of debating actual proposals and then selling them on the doorstep, this was the perfect sort of a conference. A little like spending an entire party conference in the various fringe events where hand picked speakers with great ideas to sell challenge the little gray cells rather than in the sort of "win or lose" arguments over specific policy proposals of the main conference debates.

Yes, since going to Lib Dem conferences over the past few years, I have found the latter enjoyable, I don't think I've been on the winning side of a controversial debate yet, but this sort of event is where, I think, policies are incubated and born out of ideas presented by people with brains the size of several planets each or you gain the intellectual ammunition with which to turn that losing streak in policy debates into winning arguments.

I've come away from it with both many new acquaintances, a reading list that will probably take me till doomsday to get through and enough controversial ideas to keep my many sceptical Lib Dem friends arguing till, oh, next year's LA conference. I shall work up several ideas into blog posts of their own in the forthcoming weeks and months but to start with I thought I'd give a quick overview of the sessions and speakers. All the sessions were being filmed and will eventually appear on the LA website to refer to so if I fail miserably to pass the essential detail on, you'll be able to watch the originals should you wish...

Session 1 - The Defeat of of Aging: Our Ultimate Freedom? by Dr Aubrey de Gray
Session 2 - Future Shock: Three Perspectives on Freedom in the Twenty First Century with James Panton, Sean Gabb and Martin Summers
Session 3 - "The Global Rise of Private Education for the Poor: A Libertarian Perspective" by James Stansfield
Session 4 - Future Imperfect: Tech Revolutions That Might Happen and Their Consequences by David Friedman

Session 1 - The Defeat of of Aging: Our Ultimate Freedom? by Dr Aubrey de Gray

Aubrey is a fun, and at times controversial, biologist at Cambridge University working on the science of "fixing" the aging process. There are, apparently, two conventional approaches to dealing with the problems of aging. Basically, at the moment, from the moment we are created we start storing up the means of our own death. The very processes that keep us alive, metabolism, causes damage in our cells and throughout our bodies. That damage builds up until the body can no longer prevent it becoming one of the many illnesses associated with aging and that eventually, if we are not killed first by an external event, it will kill us. Globally, 100,000 out of the 150,000 people who die each day die of these conditions, which can be and usually are extremely unpleasant, often very painful and upsetting both for the sufferers and those who witness it - loved ones and carers.

One "school" of dealing with aging, "geriatrics" focuses on trying to prevent that damage becoming pathology ie developing the illnesses that will kill us. But it is ultimately futile. It is not repairing or removing the damage, just holding back the time it takes to become dangerous to us. And we cannot do that indefinitely.

The other traditional approach, "gerontology", focusses on trying to stop metabolism creating the damage in the first place. It sounds more promising, until you realise how little we actually know about metabolism. There is just so much that we cannot yet understand enough to prevent it causing damage, and therefore eventually pathology.

But there is a third, emerging approach that focuses on maintenance. De Gray made the analogy of a car - if you maintain it rigourously you can make it last more or less forever. And so this approach to aging focuses on repairing and eradicating the damage and maintaining cells. Repairing the damage means it does not build up enough to become pathology. As science, mostly microbiology, is constantly evolving, the types of damage we can repair increase. And because we are acting on the observable damage, there are a finite number of types of damage to focus on. We can see the damage metabolism creates much better than we understand the processes that lead to the damage.

De Gray and his team believe that at a very conservative estimate of the rate of development of the techniques required to repair various types of damage (some are easier, some still distant dreams of course) within 42 years we could have the ability to extend life by thirty years by repairing half of the types of damage we observe. So the current assumption is that the first person who will be able to live to 150 years old is already alive today and people currently in their thirties may be in time to have their lives extended by about thirty years over heir current life expectancy.

But as we move forward and discover mechanisms to deal with more types of damage, so we can repeat the "full body service" and begin to extend life out beyond the 150 years, indeed almost indefinitely. Again, given the rate of discovery, De Gray calculates that the first person to be able to live to 1,000 years will only be twenty years younger than the first person that will live to 150.

Such a prospect of course raises all sorts of issues, ethical, cost, policy and so on. But De Gray's conclusion was that given the amount of suffering that aging causes, and the costs to society of dealing with that suffering, we should not be put off from pursuing it. If, eventually, we have to answer some of the more difficult questions - what will the world's population look like if we can live effectively forever, and should we create ways in which someone can choose to end their otherwise perfectly healthy lives, that's something for the future.

And the cost of developing these techniques would appear to be minimal compared with even the cost of health care currently just in the UK. You can find out more, and importantly about how to help, financially and otherwise, at the "Methuselah Foundation" website.

Session 2 - Future Shock: Three Perspectives on Freedom in the Twenty First Century with James Panton, Sean Gabb and Martin Summers

I'm rather afraid that my relying on memory rather than taking copious notes will not do this session justice and it will be best to get the full picture from the recording of the session when it comes online. The speakers focussed on the many new ways in which our freedoms are being attacked and compromised, but more importantly on our apparent willingness to allow it to happen and unwillingness to protest against it. Even though theoretically, in a democracy, we are, sheep like in most cases, simply obeying and finding reasons to excuse the actions of those who would curtail our freedoms.

As I say, watch the video when it comes out.

After a very pleasant lunch with Tristan in the fascinating Ship & Shovell Pub just up the road in Craven Passage I'm afraid I was a few minutes late for the start of the session after lunch, "The Global Rise of Private Education for the Poor: A Libertarian Perspective" by James Stansfield , and decided to sit it out rather than disturb the room clattering in late, so both you and I will need to wait for the video! Or, there's a very good synopsis courtesy of the Oxford Libertarian Society blog .

Session 4 - Future Imperfect: Tech Revolutions That Might Happen and Their Consequences by David Friedman

Then came one of the great highlights of the whole weekend, a hugely entertaining session of futurology and technological ideas by David Friedman, son of Milton and Rose, and professor of Law at Santa Clara University. I just cannot do this fast paced entertaining session the justice it deserves in a few lines. It was based on the ideas in his new book, Future Imperfect, which you can get at Amazon, or if you are too mean, or just plain penurious, he has put it all online.

He covered areas I will probably blog about individually (when I have read the book), including privacy technology, law enforcement technology and how to get around it, reproductive technology (think Gattaca) and, most indelibly etched in my mind, nano technology. The main thought I came away with out of a myriad of interesting possibilities was "should we actually be worried about climate change if, within a few decades, we will have produced nanobots and artificial intelligence such that we will have obsoleted the human race!" - as Friedman put it, turned us into gerbils in the laboratories or even the Matrix, of self-aware super intelligent 'droids.

I chose to miss out the final, additional session of the day to meet up with Lib Dem activist from Ealing Toran Shaw for a drink before we all went into the dinner, but I will definately want to watch the video of the session and the Libertarian Alliance DVD on the subject of "The Great British Road Pricing Debate: Free Market Incrementalism or Just More State Control?" which is obviously currently a hugely important policy issue that has caused a lot of debate within the Lib Dems.

And so ended the main business of day one. I shall return to cover the very sociable dinner and day two, including such controversial issues as Hans-Hermann Hoppe on the idea of the "Private Law society" and Guy Herbert from NO2ID soon.

I haven't been on a plane for the best part of twenty years now. Thanks to the new weapon in the snooping state's arsenal, it looks like I never will again.

The virtual strip search is here folks. I dare say one day they will have them in Debenhams too.

...for a few days. As will responding to peoples' comments.

A couple of months ago I bought myself a new great big server and shamefully I have not set it up yet. Since it is priced in dollars and the pound is falling I suppose I ought to get on with it so I can cancel the existing one before it next needs paying!

For anyone interested it will be Debian Etch, running Xen virtualization, to give me a Zimbra virtual server for email and collaboration, a web server for my various projects and then back end servers for databases and user data.

I really need to redesign the blog, and in the process move it to my new domain jockcoats.me and upgrade to Drupal 6.

Additionally, a number of projects have been languishing waiting for this shift to the new bigger server:

OX3Online - a project to produce a community portal for the Headington area of Oxford

LiberalALTERnative.org to accompany the book on economic liberalism I am co-editing with members of the Lib Dems ALTER executive

OxfordBloggers.net - an aggregator a little like LibDemBlogs to link together as many bloggers writing in or about Oxford

OSEF.org.uk - a new site for Oxfordshire Social Enterprise Forum which we intend to relaunch in November's enterprise week

...and my latest wheeze...

f5c.org - "Freedom's Fifth Column" to provide a space in which libertarians (especially those hiding within existing non-libertarian parties) can write, pseudonymously if necessary, to try and show how libertarian and anarchist ideology can work through most existing parties to achieve our freedoms.

Lots to do! But don't worry, the suspension of blogging is only in order to give me a few days while I am off work this week to get the server up and running - these other projects have to work alongside my own writing...:)

Following on the theme from my post this morning about how we could protect data about us held by agencies of the state by using a sort of a personal key and PIN like your bank's call centre has to validate with you before they can access your data, my mind wandered onto other uses for such a key.

It has been a recurring theme in this blog that the internet in particular and modern communications in general represent a great threat to the balance of power between states (and incidentally also global "intermediary" corporations) and their citizens. I say threat, but it's only a threat if you are in a position of power in a state or corporation seeking to continue to exert control over your citizens. Indeed, for the individual, it is the greatest potential opportunity, and the vehicle by which Richard Cobden's quote at the top of this blog's front page may become reality: "Peace will come to earth when the people have more to do with each other and governments less."

Many of our institutions - governments, trans-national corporations, even currency - evolved to deal with issues of trust between people who would likely never have personal contact with each other in ever more remote markets. When trading, you've got to be able to trust that you will be paid for example - one person's "IOU" is not as good a guarantee as piece of paper endorsed collectively by an entire state - a national currency.

But we have an ever increasing range of other innovations to help us trust each other; developments that are increasing quickly with the advance of the internet. We can access our credit files, we can buy digital certificates that help give others confidence to trade with us over the web because they guarantee we are who we say we are and so on. So why not shift these into the "real world".

Why do we actually need, say, a passport to travel across borders, issued by a nation state, when we could have just as secure a guarantee of who we are through some kind of personal digital certificate from an organization bearing the risk, with strong encryption embedded in it? The British government keeps trying to sweeten its totalitarian ID card scheme by telling us, amongst other things, that it will make proving our identity to others in all sorts of transactions much easier. But in fact the history of government involvement in protecting the source data of those identities is appalling, and, as the technology gets more pervasive it seems to be getting worse.

How much confidence can you have in a government issued identity mechanism when so much data has gone missing already? Those identities are, thanks to state incompetence, all but worthless. Of course that's why, partly at least, they want to take biometric data. But in computer security it is generally accepted that being able to produce "something you have" (say a credit card or internet digital certificate) and "something you know" - a password, PIN, or private digital encryption key is far better than ony one or other of these pieces of information on its own. So far as I can see the ID card system, or the passport, with or without a national identity register, does not fulfill both of these - only the former. It is inherently weaker than the commercially available alternatives.

So, why not replace the need for passports issued by a state with identity mechanisms authenticated by trusted corporate or social organizations for whom financial success or failure rests on people being able to trust the people they certify. So you could have a personal account with Thawte as the primary guarantor, for example, and that certificate could be counter-signed by a certificate from other organizations, such as governments, who want to "mark your card" as one of their citizens, granting you the protections normally written on a passport.

It's not easy to get some of these certification authorities to guarantee your bona fides. You need often as much verification as you do to get a passport with other trusted people verifying who you are and so on. But you would not need to give these data to the poroous security mechanisms of the state which has proved beyond any reasonable doubt that they cannot keep the information secure, nor does it offer the other benefit of a private contract - the ability to sue the ass off them if they damage your reputation or security by losing your data - or the corporate incentive of only being able to make a profit if you actually deliver on what people expect of you.

And you also get a choice of how strong you want the certification to be. If it's only guaranteeing small personal trades for example, you may only need to spend a few pounds and fill in a quick web form, validate your address and you're in business. If you want to travel overseas, or deal in bigger sums, or trade with distant counterparties, you may want stronger levels of guarantee and pay accordingly. It's a global standard pretty well too. So you'd have no problems using it to prove your identity in all sorts of applications - travel, trade, opening a bank account, starting a company, getting insurance, benefits, accessing what little data about you the state actually needs and so on - none of which would need to be on any single central database owned by a bunch of data-incontinents like the government is proving to be with the attendant dangers of losing all your data at once.

So, you see, we no longer even need governments to help us prove who we are. And in fact they appear to be singularly bad at doing so. The threat inherent in this is that the currently all powerful state needs to be able to do this, or it loses control of its citizens. And they are shit scared of that. If we are not mindful, in their lust to maintain that power they will get immensely more authoritarian and intrusive. The time is coming when we will no longer need them. We must do all we can to hasten that day before they get their claws in too deep into these emerging trust mechanisms.

Thales, the successor to Thomson CSF, has won the first contract to start the design process for the National Identity Register which will be the more sinister side of the whole ID card system. For those of us committed to opposing ID cards and the NIR at every opportunity and wanting a way to boycott suppliers this presents a challenge. Many of the possible suppliers of course are not ones with big "brand names" you can easily boycott. Thales itself is mostly a government contractor, making war machines. And they are nearly a quarter owned by the French state. Both of these in my opinion make their appointment even worse (not because it is French, per se, but because it is partly controlled by a foreign state, however currently friendly that state may be).

But they do make, through their Thomson media subsidiary, a few things we can target. They are, for example the largest or perhaps sole supplier of the BT Homehub kit (and its equivalent from Orange). They also do an awful lot of facilities stuff for film, advertising and television (they own the Thorn EMI filming facilities firm), but it will always be quite difficult to find out which programs, films or advertisers are using them.

So the main real consumer product they can be identified with is Homehub. So, if you happen to be a BT subscriber and use one of those sexy boxes, maybe it's time to switch your communications provider?

(They also make set-top digital TV boxes and DVD equipment if you want to do some more digging around).