As the report stage of the Identity Cards Bill approaches in the Lords, a reminder of one highlight from the first day of the committee stage Hansard, 15 Nov 2005, Col.1012:

Lord Gould of Brookwood: Both the previous speakers—the latter with great emotion—were arguing for freedom. We have to ask what greater freedom is there than the freedom to place a vote for a political party in a ballot box upon the basis of a mandate and a manifesto. That is the crux of it: the people have supported this measure. That is what the noble Earl's father fought for. But that is too trivial an answer. I know that. The fundamental argument is that the truth is that people believe that these identity cards will affirm their identity. The noble Lord opposite said that he likes to be in this House and how he is recognised in this House because it is a community that recognises him. That is how the people of this nation feel. They feel that they are part of communities, and they want recognition. For them, recognition comes in the form of this identity card. Noble Lords may think that that is strange, but it is what they feel. This is their kind of freedom. They want their good, hard work and determination to be recognised, rewarded and respected. That is what this does.

Of course it is right and honourable for noble Lords to have their views, but I say there is another view, and it is the view of the majority of this country. They want to have the respect, recognition and freedom that this card will give them. Times have changed. Politics have changed. What would not work 50 years ago, works now. It is not just me. I have the words of the leader of your party:

"I have listened to the police and security service chiefs. They have told me that ID cards can and will help their efforts to protect the lives of British citizens against terrorist acts. How can I disregard that?".

This is not some silly idea of the phoney left. It is a mainstream idea of modern times. It is a new kind of identity and a new kind of freedom. I respect the noble Lords' views, but it would help if they respected the fact that the Bill and the identity cards represent the future: a new kind of freedom and a new kind of identity.

This is the sort of rhetoric that makes my blood run cold. Here's a prefiguring example:

In our state the individual is not deprived of freedom. In fact, he has greater liberty than an isolated man, because the state protects him and he is part of the State. Isolated man is without defence.

Terry Eagleton (from a review of Paxton's Anatomy of Fascism in the New Statesman) elucidates the connection:

Conservatives disdain the popular masses, while fascists mobilise and manipulate them. Some conservatives believe in ideas, but fascists have a marked preference for myths. If they think at all, they think through their blood, not their brain. Fascists regard themselves as a youthful, revolutionary avant-garde out to erase the botched past and create an unimaginably new future.

All supporters of the old-fashioned conception of individual liberty, whether they think of themselves as left or right, conservative or progressive, must do what can be done. Resist. We should not expect any quarter for outdated ideas under a new kind of freedom.

[cross-posted to Samizdata]

Compare this:

By 2050 earlier, probably -- all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron -- they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like "freedom is slavery" when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking -- not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

Syme {no relation} in 1984

with this:

People's names are already on a large number of databases. Most of us have dozens of cards in our wallets with our identities on. We already have a Big Brother society. ID cards mean identity fraud can be dealt with and stopped. ID cards are a means of controlling the Big Brother society rather than creating it. Big Brother society is already here.

Charles Clarke, quoted in the Eastern Daily Press today.

Controlling the Big Brother society might sound like preventing it, restraining it. But your expectations deceive you. Forget literary allusion. "Big Brother society" means whatever the establishment defines it to mean.

Now consider only the words, how they literally fit together. Big Brother society = our society. ID cards are a means of controlling society.

The land of the free is imposing privacy-busting requirementson its visitors.

At America's insistence, passports are about to get their biggest overhaul since they were introduced. They are to be fitted with computer chips that have been loaded with digital photographs of the bearer (so that the process of comparing the face on the passport with the face on the person can be automated), digitised fingerprints and even scans of the bearer's irises, which are as unique to people as their fingerprints.

There are so many concerns that one does not know where to start:

For one thing, the data on these chips will be readable remotely, without the bearer knowing. And—again at America's insistence—those data will not be encrypted, so anybody with a suitable reader, be they official, commercial, criminal or terrorist, will be able to check a passport holder's details.

So we have unencrypted details about an individual, recorded in by an unreliable manner (biometrics). That's what I call the worst of both worlds...

A second difficulty is the reliability of biometric technology. Facial-recognition systems work only if the photograph is taken with proper lighting and an especially bland expression on the face. Even then, the error rate for facial-recognition software has proved to be as high as 10% in tests. If that were translated into reality, one person in ten would need to be pulled aside for extra screening. Fingerprint and iris-recognition technology have significant error rates, too. So, despite the belief that biometrics will make crossing a border more efficient and secure, it could well have the opposite effect, as false alarms become the norm.

And far more unpleasant as you already be 'guilty' of not having your non-papers in order.

The scariest problem of all is the remote-readability of the chip, which combined with unencrypted data on it, make is designed for clandestine remote reading. Deliberately.

The ICAO specification refers quite openly to the idea of a “walk-through” inspection with the person concerned “possibly being unaware of the operation”.

Privacy and liberty implications of this are enourmous... and it gets worse. Identity theft will become a matter of setting up such clandestine remote readings. Terrorists will be able to know the nationality of those they attack.

Even the authorities realised that this would be double-plus-ungood and are looking for ways to 'protect' the chip either by blocking radio waves with a Faraday cage or an electronic lock. As a result, some countries may need special equipment or software to read an EU passport, which undermines the ideal of a global, interoperable standard. And so we come the full joyous circle of government 'compentence'...

Cross-posted from Samizdata.net

The Guardian reports:

Residents of Croydon, south London, have been told that the microchips being inserted into their new wheely bins may well be adapted so that the council can judge whether they are producing too much rubbish.

If the technology suggests that they are, errant residents may be visited by officials bearing advice on how they might "manage their rubbish more effectively".

In the shorter term the microchips will be used to tell council officers how many of the borough's 100,000 bins the refuse collectors have emptied and how many have been missed.

Andrew Pelling, the Conservative who represents the area on the London assembly has tagged the microchips the "spy in your bin":

The Stasi or the KGB could never have dreamed of getting a spying device in every household.

If, for example, computer hackers broke in to the system, they could see sudden reductions in waste in specific households, suggesting the owners were on holiday and the house vacant.

But a spokesman for Croydon council said the fears were unjustified.

What we don't want is people putting into their wheely bins tins and glass and paper and textiles, all of which could go into recycling bins. It is the way forward for waste management. We are not the only council thinking about it.

So, the council, does not want people to do something that it has imposed on them, such as recycling. Well, some people do not feel like doing it and they should have the choice. Just because the council/government/anybody considers that x is good, they have no right to impose that on others. This is social totalitarianism and the sad thing is that so few see it for what it is.

Sensible blog Spyblog, does an excellent job of pointing out how the state likes to keep an eye on us via CCTV systems, ID cards and by collecting our DNA. As a servant of the state it worries me, and if it worries me then it really ought to worry you.
- Dave of The Policeman's blog

The No2ID campaign has established an e-petition aimed at 10 Downing Street demanding the end to plans for imposing mandatory ID cards and pervasive state databases recording a vast range of what you do in your life.

The No2ID campaigners have taken the line of principled objection, given that the government seem to have decided that there is no longer any room for public debate and refuses to engage with serious - and growing - civil liberty and privacy concerns with the scheme. The Home Office have not met once with civil liberties organisations yet say their concerns have been addressed whilst at the same time avoiding public meetings but at the same time having private briefing with technology partners for introducing the schemes.

Take a stand and make your voice heard while you still can at www.no2id-petition.net. Time is fast running out.

The state is not your friend.

During the 2003 fiscal year, the federal government spent more than $6.5 billion securing classified information, according to a new "Secrecy Report Card" from OpenTheGovernment.org, a coalition of government watchdog and civil liberties groups. That's an increase of more than $800 million from the previous year, according to the group, and a nearly $2 billion jump since 2001. But it's only a best guess, really; the report card's accounting doesn't include a penny from the Central Intelligence Agency, which keeps even its overall budget classified.

The big problem with having too many secrets isn't that it's a waste of money; it's that it jeopardizes security, according to William Leonard. He's the director of the ISOO, and, essentially, the man in charge of the government's classification policies.

By keeping knowledgeable parties from sharing what they know, "secrecy guarantees a less-than-optimal outcome," Leonard told Wired News. "In analyzing intelligence, in developing military plans, there's a price that gets paid."

That's a view echoed by both the 9/11 Commission, in its final report (PDF), and several of the Defense Department's top current and former spies.

Mark Ellott has a thing or two to say about the Norwich Union's pilot scheme for pay-as-you-drive motor insurance.

While we are sleepwalking into a surveillance society, the Norwich Union is egging us on… They are trialling a system of in-car monitoring (a black box by any other name) that records details of the vehicle's journey. Where it went, how fast it travelled etc.

The box records real-time vehicle usage and sends the data to Norwich Union securely using mobile technology.

Each month or quarter, the motorist will receive a document similar to their mobile phone bill advising them of their journey details. Pay as you go insurance – sounds innocuous enough. During the BBC piece it was suggested that the monthly or quarterly bill may provide advice for improving the cost effectiveness of one's driving (from an insurance point of view) by providing alternatives to the routes taken.

Even more worrying, perhaps is the quote from the Norwich Union director of the pay-as-you-drive scheme, Robert Ledger:

The interest in the pilot scheme has been phenomenal. We could have filled the pilot twice over with the amount of requests we've had from interested motorists, not just within the UK but from drivers around the world.

Sleepwalking indeed…

According to the BBC’s Breakfast programme, there is no clear indication yet about how the data will be stored, used and accessed – will the Norwich Union sell it? Will the police or other agencies have access to it? So far these are unanswered questions.

One motorist volunteer thinks this will give her control over her insurance costs. For a low mileage user, this may be so. For the rest of us? It is always worth remembering that insurance companies are not charities – they are investing in this because they see a revenue opportunity. Oh, how simple it all could be - analysing a driver’s record and declaring his insurance void due to, say driving several hours without a break or breaking the speed limit – or, just hiking the premium.

Personally, I prefer to control my insurance costs by playing them off against each other come renewal time.

New Scientist has an article looking at the US$312 million surveillance system installed for the 2004 Olympics in Athens. The eyes and ears consist of 1,000 high-res and infrared videocameras peppering the city. Cell and landline telephone calls are being recorded, converted into text, and "scanned for phrases that could be linked to terrorist activity." The software's developers say it speaks Greek, English, Arabic, Farsi, and other major languages.

John Pike [a defence analyst] believes other undisclosed measures are undoubtedly in place, such as face recognition from video footage. He says such surveillance technology has already proven its worth in intelligence gathering. "They're basically the sort of stuff the National Security Agency has been using for some time," he told New Scientist. "And they seem to place great faith in it."

via Boing Boing

It was with something akin to delight that I saw the Times, not a newspaper overly concerned with civil liberties, have on its front page* an article about objections to Britain's developing surveillance state.

This is modern Britain

If we cannot get these issues out in the open, we will indeed see Britain 'sleepwalking' into what may some time in the future be a panoptic nightmare. Blair or Howard are not going to be having the security services doing 'midnight knocks' on the doors of those they disfavour (well, maybe for a few people in the Finsbury Park area) but make no mistake about it, the infrastructure of repression is being put in place at an astonishing rate and someday (hopefully long after I have decamped to New Hampshire) this information is going to be used by statists of both left and right with fewer qualms than Tony Blair to order every single aspect of people's lives in Britain in ways that places the state at the centre of everything you do in ways earlier totalitarianisms could only dream of... for your own good, of course.

We have a serious battle to win and the more these issues are out of the committee rooms and in the more general public arena, the better we can argue the case for resisting the emerging Panopticon State.

When the state watches you, dare to stare back

* = Readers outside the UK may have difficulties accessing this link once it is archived due to the benighted policies of the Times newspaper.

The Times reports that Britain's information watchdog gives warning today that the country risks “sleepwalking into a surveillance society” because of government plans for identity cards and a population register.

Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, says that there is a growing danger of East German Stasi-style snooping if the State gathers too much information about individual citizens.

He singles out three projects that he believes are of particular concern. They are David Blunkett’s identity card scheme; a separate population register planned by the Office for National Statistics; and proposals for a database of every child from birth to the age of 18:

My anxiety is that we don’t sleepwalk into a surveillance society where much more information is collected about people, accessible to far more people shared across many more boundaries than British society would feel comfortable with.

Downing Street responded to warnings issued by Richard Thomas,
saying there would be a watchdog to prevent situations in which personal information gathered by one Whitehall department was made indiscriminately available to other civil servants without the individual's knowledge.

We have made it clear that there are going to be guarantees about function creep. That is not what is going to happen. There is going to be proper oversight.

Oversight. Hm, so anyone trying to access the national database will be carefully monitored by CCTV and any other available surveillance technology. Phew, that really puts my mind to rest.

Also on BBC:
Watchdog's Big Brother UK warning

Computing is sceptical about about the government's ID card proposals and its lurch to national database.

There is, however, a reason to be even more gloomy about government technology than the committee's collection of mid-term backbenchers imply. The government - and particularly Home Secretary David Blunkett - have become dangerously obsessive about data-centric solutions to any social issue.

In the old days, political reaction to crime scares tended to be tough-sounding but often half-baked responses like boot camps. Now it's to build a new database.

Computing deserves full marks for asking the right question:

Does the UK have the culture, the legislation or the infrastructure for such dramatic change? We think not.

Perhaps more importantly, there has been almost no debate about privacy, civil liberties, safeguards or security. Those who have been doing most of the shouting about IT government reform are obsessive techies.

The issue is not just whether the technology works - it's why we are using it.

via Adam Smith Institute blog

The Montreal Gazette has a comprehensive article about how cutting-edge technologies work as tattle-tales for a surveillance-minded state containing warnings by Canadian privacy advocates. Stephanie Perrin, president of Digital Discretion in Montreal says:

There is a widening and yawning gap between the surveillance that is actually happening and people's understanding for the capacity for surveillance. People just have no clue, and I'm describing intelligent people. At the very broad level, we have a society that thinks it's democratic and absolutely has no concept of what the technology does.

Personal information often lies dormant in huge data banks that people contribute to constantly - through use of everyday items such as credit cards and telephones. Increasingly, corporate, government and law enforcement entities sift through that material with sophisticated data-mining programs, looking for relationships between individuals and whatever interests them.

Cellular telephones and vehicles can be tracked, too. The term telematics refers to any marriage of location-tracking technologies, such as global positioning systems, with wireless communications, such as cellphones. Applications include General Motors' OnStar program. The Telematics Research Group estimates that by 2008, more than 40 per cent of new vehicles in the United States will have some form of telematics.

There is no question that law enforcement agencies have used tracking technology to solve crimes, possibly save lives. It's all relative. Knowing exactly where employees are may be reasonable in a hazardous chemical plant but less reasonable in an insurance office.

Even though I'm a screaming privacy advocate, there is an argument on the other side for this stuff. That's what makes it so difficult and so easy to give everything away.

There is more interesting (and frightening) stuff in the article such as Privacy Timeline: The Data Trail, read the whole thing.

There is a dilemma, I agree. But I disagree about it being a straightforward trade-off between security and privacy. When it comes to everyday technologies, one way to decide how to use a particular technology is what effect it has on the individual and how much power it gives to the state over that individual.

Bjarni Ólafsson of Great Auk draws our attention to an onslought on civil liberties by the Minister for Transportation, the Chief of Police in Reykjavík and the state "Traffic authority" have launched in the last two days. Böðvar Bragason, Chief of Police in Reykjavík muses:

New ways to cut the number of road accidents have to be found, and one possible way is to install computer chips in every car and thereby increase the amount of government monitoring of driving.

I want to propose an increase in the number of surveilance cameras on intersections in the city, but I also want a task force to inspect wether technology can be used in the cars themselves. I have the idea, which can easily be implemented, to put a computer chip in every single car. The Police then could stop a given car, connect with the chip and see the way the car has been driven that day, and even before that day.

Aarrrgh. We share your frustration, Bjarni.

The statist can never be happy as long as individuals have some modicum of freedom of action and travel, hence these proposals. This kind of surveilance system, coupled with a court system which allows for any and all evidence to be submitted in a criminal trial - without regard to how it was obtained (f.ex. illegal wiretaps are admissable), is a brutal attack on the personal liberties of Icelanders.

The Department of Homeland Security is on the verge of awarding the biggest contract in its young history for an elaborate system that could cost as much as $15 billion and employ a network of databases to track visitors to the United States long before they arrive.

The program, known as US-Visit and rooted partly in a Pentagon concept developed after the terrorist attacks of 2001, seeks to supplant the nation's physical borders with what officials call virtual borders. Such borders employ networks of computer databases and biometric sensors for identification at sites abroad where people seek visas to the United States.

With a virtual border in place, the actual border guard will become the last point of defense, rather than the first, because each visitor will have already been screened using a global web of databases.

Visitors arriving at checkpoints, including those at the Mexican and Canadian borders, will face "real-time identification" — instantaneous authentication to confirm that they are who they say they are. American officials will, at least in theory, be able to track them inside the United States and determine if they leave the country on time.

Whoever wins the contract will be asked to develop a standard for identifying visitors using a variety of possible tools — from photographs and fingerprints, already used at some airports on a limited basis since January, to techniques like iris scanning, facial recognition and radio-frequency chips for reading passports or identifying vehicles.

Let's hope that such a 'high-concept' plan will be above the ability of governments to organise such monumental projects. After all they say, hope springs eternal...

One of the problems with governments collecting and controlling data on individuals is their failure to secure this information. As a recent article in The Register demonstrated, the number of incidents involving computer systems in the civil service is high.

There are a number of serious concerns including inappropriate access of personal records, inappropriate alteration of personal records and their appropriation by a third party. This has been a problem for some time with Inland Revenue staff noted for "celebrity browsing" tax returns. These concerns are hidden within general figures for computer misuse that number up to two thousand. As these are the cases where such changes were noted and disciplinary action brought against the civil servant involved, it is impossible to gauge the seriousness if this problem.

Even after the data has been collected by the civil service agency, it is difficult to ensure that the information is accurate, secure and used only for the purposes required. This could be a minor problem or the tip of the iceberg.

U.S. government agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are being pitched many new technologies, but government technologists have an obligation to consider ethical and moral issues such as privacy when embracing new applications, concluded a panel of technology experts speaking at the FOSE government computing trade show.

AFFIRM (the Association for Federal Information Resources Management) plans to launch a Web site addressing technology and ethics within weeks and eventually issue a white paper on related topics.

Hastings and Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute, questioned whether IT vendors can be expected to present the ethical issues when they pitch their products to government buyers. Sales people are not generally trained to address difficult ethical issues while trying to make a sale; they're trained to tell potential customers what the customers want to hear, Paller said.

The panel also addressed several questions from the audience, largely of government employees. One question was:

What's wrong with the statement, 'If someone has nothing to hide, why shouldn't we be able to take their biometric data?'

Reeder answered:

I would submit to you that none of you would tolerate routine invasion of your homes and searching of your personal possessions by a police force because you had nothing to hide.

Mentioned en passant in another alarming article in which David Blunkett threatens yet further abridgements of civil liberties under the guise of 'fighting terrorism', it is noted he and the European Commission advocated the idea of...

Joining forces with the Commission, Mr Blunkett backed proposals for a fingerprint data base of all EU citizens and tougher measures to tackle terrorist funding.

Oh wonderful.

This is a great piece. Since I have no idea whether it will remain internet-readable, and since I think it should for all eternity, here is all of it:

RFID Tags in New US Notes Explode When You Try to Microwave Them

Adapted from a letter sent to Henry Makow Ph.D.

Want to share an event with you, that we experienced this evening.. Dave had over $1000 dollars in his back pocket (in his wallet). New twenties were the lion share of the bills in his wallet. We walked into a truck stop/travel plaza and they have those new electronic monitors that are supposed to say if you are stealing something. But through every monitor, Dave set it off. He did not have anything to purchase in his hands or pockets. After numerous times of setting off these monitors, a person approached Dave with a 'wand' to swipe why he was setting off the monitors.

Believe it or not, it was his 'wallet'. That is according to the minimum wage employees working at the truck stop! We then walked across the street to a store and purchased aluminum foil. We then wrapped our cash in foil and went thru the same monitors. No monitor went off.

We could have left it at that, but we have also paid attention to the European Union and the 'rfid' tracking devices placed in their money, and the blatant bragging of Walmart and many corporations of using 'rfid' electronics on every marketable item by the year 2005.

Dave and I have brainstormed the fact that most items can be 'microwaved' to fry the 'rfid' chip, thus elimination of tracking by our government.

So we chose to 'microwave' our cash, over $1000 in twenties in a stack, not spread out on a carasoul. Do you know what exploded on American money?? The right eye of Andrew Jackson on the new twenty, every bill was uniform in it's burning... Isnt that interesting?

Now we have to take all of our bills to the bank and have them replaced, cause they are now 'burnt'.

We will now be wrapping all of our larger bills in foil on a regular basis.

What we resent is the fact that the government or a corporation can track our 'cash'. Credit purchases and check purchases have been tracked for years, but cash was not traceble until now ...

Dave and Denise

Well said Dave and Denise, and well done. And dont you listen to all tho's other people, your great at grammar and spelln and punctuationising. And thank you Dave Barry for the link to the story. Well, I think it must have been him, but I can find no mention of this story there. So how did I find out about this? (Update Wed 4: I remember now. All is explained here. So the link was via Dave Barry, but only via something else.)

Anyway, apologies if this has already been covered here. I've just realised that I haven't checked. Also, I have no idea at all when this originally got written. It could have been years ago for all I know. I did a posting on Ubersportingpundit about a rugby player who was tackling people by sticking his hand up his opponents' bottoms (true), and it turned out the story was about three years old. Imagine how embarrassed I was about that.

90% crud has an excellent post about government, security and privacy. He includes a quote by Bruce Schnier about central databases and data mining programmes from his article How we are fighting the war on terrorism/IDs and the illusion of security.

But any such system will create a third, and very dangerous, category: evildoers who don't fit the profile. Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, Washington-area sniper John Allen Muhammed and many of the Sept. 11 terrorists had no previous links to terrorism. The Unabomber taught mathematics at UC Berkeley. The Palestinians have demonstrated that they can recruit suicide bombers with no previous record of anti-Israeli activities. Even the Sept. 11 hijackers went out of their way to establish a normal-looking profile; frequent-flier numbers, a history of first-class travel and so on. Evildoers can also engage in identity theft, and steal the identity -- and profile -- of an honest person. Profiling can result in less security by giving certain people an easy way to skirt security.

There's another, even more dangerous, failure mode for these systems: honest people who fit the evildoer profile. Because evildoers are so rare, almost everyone who fits the profile will turn out to be a false alarm. This not only wastes investigative resources that might be better spent elsewhere, but it causes grave harm to those innocents who fit the profile. Whether it's something as simple as "driving while black" or "flying while Arab," or something more complicated such as taking scuba lessons or protesting the Bush administration, profiling harms society because it causes us all to live in fear...not from the evildoers, but from the police.

The rest of the post is equally sound:

The problem with these data mining programs is that they don't work. There simply isn't enough data to build a good terrorist model. Let's take two recent American terrorists: John Allen Muhammad and Timothy McVeigh. What did their records have in common before they acted? The only common data point between the two is that they both served in the military. If we had a system that could spot these two men, it would also falsely identify every single male who served in the US Military.

That of course assumes that the data is properly mined and analyzed. But let's go back to the initial story, where we find out that the TSA sucks at analyzing data. Where does that leave us?

Some might say finding an evil-doer among regular people is akin to finding a needle in a haystack. I say that since there's no way to tell the bad from the good it's closer to finding a specific needle in a needlestack. Is that really worth giving up our privacy for an illusion of security?

There are a substantial number of toll roads and bridges in the north-east of the United States. There are very few in the west. The difference largely stems from the fact that the east built a large portion of its road infrastructure prior to the federal government getting into road building in a big way subsequently to the second world war, and in the east roads and bridges were built and belong to a wide assortment of state governments, city and county governments, peculiar specially constituted government authorities, and the like, which often charge tolls, whereas most roads in the west were built with federal government money and tolls are not collected.

Traditionally, the toll roads in the east have collected tolls using the low tech method of collecting cash at toll gates. As well as being expensive to operate, this method negates many of the benefits of having modern, fast moving highways, because motorists must stop to pay the toll, and at peak hours must often queue for some time in order to pay the toll. For this reason, there has been considerable pressure to introduce electronic methods for toll payment. If a motorist has an electronic tag in the front of his car that can be detected electronically even if he is driving at speed, then it is not necessary to stop. The driver can drive straight through and gain the full benefits of the road, and the toll collection agency does not have to employ people to collect the toll or deal with large amounts of cash. (It also allows the toll to be easily varied depending on time of day or day of the week, which allows intelligent traffic management on the road).

It is obviously best if a single tag will operate all toll roads that a motorist is likely to want to drive on, so in recent years fifteen toll collecting agencies in the US North East have standardised on a single system, called E-ZPass. Normally some lanes of the road going through the tollgates will continue to allow cash tolls to be paid, whereas others will be reserved for electronic E-ZPass users.

Now, the benefits to both motorists and the road owners of such a system are considerable. But there are also privacy implications. If you use such a system, records exist of where you drove to and when. Security of these records was not been considered to be of paramount importance when the system was invented, and data is shared between 15 different governments and agencies even before the possibility of data going to other organisations is considered. But, if data exists, people will try to use it for other purposes, and this is what is happening.

This article describes how in a considerable number of cases police have managed to sepoena E-ZPass records to help in solving crimes, often in cases where people have claimed to be in one place but the records have revealed their car to be in another.

The Telegraph has an article about a roadside watch by local volunteers under fire.

Volunteers from villages, known as "speed watchers", will use the devices at the roadside to identify speeding motorists before passing the information to the police. A senior police officer said the three-month pilot scheme at Milton of Campsie, near Glasgow, was a "local solution to a local problem".

But motoring organisations, civil liberties groups and lawyers have criticised the idea on the grounds that there could be difficulties in providing acceptable evidence in court and that the system could be abused by people involved in disputes.

Well, it is a busybodies' license to interefere further in people's lives. When someone with attitudes such as Patrick Friel, the first person to be offered a speed camera, volunteers to 'police local community', I know the police are pandering to those with worst social instincts.

Everyone I've spoken to supports the use of the camera because something has to be done about speeding drivers.

Yes, and the way to do this is to help government impose more constraints on our daily lives.

From last Friday's Guardian:

Charles Clarke, the education secretary, is fighting for a short bill in the Queen's speech next month which would give every child an identity number and allow local authorities in England to share information about any suspicion of neglect or abuse in the family.

The bill would be the first instalment of the government's plans to reform child protection after a public inquiry into the murder of Victoria Climbié.

Which nicely illustrates the connection between state "protection" and state numbering of its human possessions.

What is objectionable, I think, is the idea that all children, the overwhelming majority of whom are not suspected of being abused, will nevertheless get numbered. Is that really necessary?

Plus, you can't help wondering if, after a brief interval while we all get used to this process, children who have got their numbers will start not to shed them, even when they've stopped being children. After all, it isn't only children who need protecting, is it?

Every now and then somebody writes a piece (such as the one Brian referred to the other day) which talks about "Some pestilential scientist has invented a device that allows parents to trace their child's location via his mobile telephone" or similar.

Now it actually isn't actually scientific or technical issues that are the issue here, for mobile phones are tracking devices by their very nature, and have been since their invention. You see, if you call a mobile phone, then the phone has to be made to ring. In order to be able to make it ring, the network as to know where it is. And in order that this be so, your mobile phone network is tracking you at all times. It isn't tracking you that precisely, but with sharing of information between networks (which they do, in order to track down mobile phones and sometimes to cooperate with the police) it is possible to track the location of anyone with a mobile phone to within a couple of street blocks. In terms of tracking the person with the phone, although the technology can be improved to track movements more accurately - particularly by putting GPS devices or similar into phones, in some sense it is good enough already. In this case the issues are not so much technological - the technology is already there - but regulatory and legal. Just how much of this information will be logged and stored. Having a database recording everywhere I have been in the last five years is different from being able to record where I am now on demand. How much of this information may or must be shared with government and law enforcement. And how much of this information may be used commercially and in what ways. Is it appropriate to provide a service to parents that allows them to track the movements of their children? (Certainly if I was a teenager, I would find it pretty rough if my mother was tracking me at all times).

But, of course, technology is advancing. Reading this article suggests that things are going to get far worse. Before too long we may have so called "passive radar". Essentially the point of this is that our mobile phones are throwing lots and lots of radio signals around all the time. These signals are bouncing off things, being partially absorbed by other objects, and similar. If our phones and base-stations record signal strength, signal direction, gaps in the signal, doppler effects, and other such pieces of information, it may be possible to essentially construct an electronic map of the terrain that the signals are travelling through. Essentially if you are walking down the street not carrying a mobile phone or any form of electronic tag, it may be possible to track you using the mobile phones of other people in the street. Unlike conventional radar systems, this type of tracking cannot easily be detected, as it uses radio signals that have other purposes and are there already. The privacy implications of this are, of course, worrying.

Even if this particular means of ubiquitous tracking does not come into being, or at least not quickly, some technology that achieves essentially the same thing is going to come into being at some point, like it or not. If we want to attempt to establish rights to not be tracked, or clear laws as to how such information can and cannot be used, we need to do so now, when tracking is possible but not ubiquitous. Trying to do so so after it becomes ubiquitous is going to be too late.

There are several disturbing features of this panoptican state in which we will soon be living not the least of which is the sheer breakneck pace of its assembly.

It seems like only yesterday that speed cameras suddenly appeared on every lamppost but even they are so much old hat now:

Automatic Number Plate Recognition systems are set to be deployed by police forces throughout the UK as a major plank of a campaign of "denying criminals the use of the roads." The system will link up to the DVLA, Police National Computer and a National Insurance Database, with these links alone giving it the capability of identifying untaxed, unroadworthy and uninsured vehicles, but they'll also facilitate police surveillance operations, the swapping of data on "prolific offenders" between forces and, well, other stuff... Take this, for instance:

"Eventually the database will link to most CCTV systems in town centres, meaning that all vehicles filmed on one of the many cameras protecting Bedford High Street, for instance, can be checked against the database and the movements of wanted cars traced to help with serious crime investigations."

As far as the drivers are concerned, well, that just about wraps it up, folks.

But truly one hardly has time to digest one horror before the next one comes galloping over the horizon. Dr.Sean Gabb has suggested that our rulers our 'drunk with the technology' but I am not so sure. More like they are stone-cold sober and determined to get the whole country locked down before the public realises exactly what has been done to them.

What does the government know about you? – that's the title of a piece that starts with this:

WASHINGTON, DC and DALLAS,TX -- (MARKET WIRE) -- Carl Caldwell, the president of Right-to-Know, released a statement explaining the depth of information that the government collects about its citizens. Right- to-Know helps its clients uncover what the government knows about them.

Here's the rest of it.

It's like a cancer that we can battle against but never truly defeat. As it creeps purposefully through our national lymph system some of us can summon up the courage to fight it back and, for a while, it can appear as if we are in remission. But then comes the hoping and the praying for the final 'all clear' that signals a rebirth and a new lease of disease-free life.

It never comes. The cells are corrupted again and the cancer returns to devour us:

Sweeping powers for Government agencies to carry out covert surveillance, run agents and gather the telephone data of private citizens were contained in legislation published yesterday.

State bodies ranging from the police, intelligence services and Whitehall departments to local councils, the Postal Services Commission and the chief inspector of schools will be able to authorise undercover operations.

The measures were activated by David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, under the controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which became law three years ago. They need to be approved again by both Houses of Parliament before they can be used.

These horrors first made their appearance about a year ago and set off a call-to-arms that, in turn, caused the Home Office to drop the proposals. Or, at least, they made an appearance of dropping them because, like that lurking cancer, they never really went away. They were merely stacked neatly in the pending trays until an another opportune moment presented itself. Seems that the moment is now.

Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said the British people were "the most spied upon in the Western world".

I reckon that's a pretty fair prognosis. But why? Why are our political elites so determined to construct this panopticon? Why are they so single-minded about this project that they appear immune to sweet reason, protest or appeals to decency? What exactly is driving them? Are they so riddled with paranoia and insecurity that they see monsters and assassins lurking behind every curtain? Is that how they see us? I cannot think of any other reason why a democratically elected government would come to think of themselves as colonial occupiers of their own country.

What has led to this calamitous collapse of trust? Is it repairable? I rather fear that it is not.

Questions, questions. Answers may come in due course but I suspect none will be satisfactory or stop the cancer from spreading. Time for palliative surgery?

[This has been cross-posted from Samizdata.]

This is just what we need.

The European Space Agency (ESA) is funding Irish provider of location technology products Mapflow to undertake a feasibility study to look into the possibility of implementing a pan-European road tolling system. The research aims to establish whether satellite technology can be used to calculate the cost of motoring. A plan exists to complement this activity with a real demonstration of the virtual tolling concept in the greater area of Lisbon. Also under ESA funding, the project is being conducted by the Portuguese company Skysoft in close cooperation with the Portuguese motorway authority. The demonstration is planned for the end of 2004.

In April this year the European Commission published a proposal that all vehicles should pay road tolls electronically, with full implementation foreseen for 2010. Under the proposal, all vehicles will carry a 'black box', which will be tracked by satellites relaying information on the distance travelled by the vehicle, the class of road travelled and the time at which the journey was made.

...

Germany recently received EU approval to implement a new tolling system for goods vehicles. The system – currently being tested – uses the US-operated Global Positioning System (GPS). The government hopes to raise 650 million euros a year through the new charges.

Satellite-assisted tolling would make use of Galileo, Europe's planned satellite navigation system. Galileo is a joint initiative between the European Commission and ESA to develop a global navigation system, scheduled to be operational by 2008.

I am actually in favour of charging for road use on a per kilometre basis. Inevitably this means using electronic tolling devices of some sort (and from a traffic management point of view this is desirable, as people do not have to stop to pay tolls, and also it is possible to manage congestion better by being able to vary tolls depending on time of day and traffic conditions). Equally inevitably this has privacy consequences.

However, having a top down approach in which a centralised EU agency moniters the movement of every car in Europe strikes me as terrifying. (Also, the further you remove the charging scheme from the people who are building and operating the roads, the less it becomes a charge for road use and the more it becomes a simple tax, too. A Europe wide charging scheme is about the worst way of doing it I can think of. What is much more desirable is a bottom up approach in which the individual owners of the roads implement their own systems, and from which they negotiate technology compatibility and a clearing house for sharing charges between themselves. Governments may still get their hands on the data, but a situation where it starts out in the private sectory and possibly works its way up is far better than a situation where everything starts in the hands of the EU and then works its way down.

This trial is perhaps partly a consequence of the fact that the EU has decided that Europe will build "Galileo": its own alternative to the American GPS system. Having decided this, it needs to find uses for it. And if you are the EU, tracking Europeans at all times is the sort of thing that comes to mind.

(Link via slashdot)

Crossposted from Transport Blog

Stephen Lewis of the Sterling Times message board sent this link.

Follow it, please. Now would be a good time.

Mr Lewis has found a report on the Radio Nederlands website stating that the BBC, the BBC, is to monitor message boards for hate speech on behalf of the authorities.

Once upon a time the only official way your home could be searched was by a policeman backed by a warrant issued by the courts. OK, as a libertarian I could raise certain objections even to that, but it was the evolved and generally agreed custom of my country and that counts for a lot. Then the privilege of search spread first to customs officers and then to tax-gatherers, until now practically any parasite of a an environmental health officer or social worker can walk in.

Count on it. The same process is happening with restrictions of freedom of speech. Fifty years ago the legal right to impose restrictions was the preserve of the courts. Many of the restrictions were ridiculous: the Lord Chamberlain censored naughty bits out of stage plays until as late as 1968. However, in terms of political speech, freedom fifty years ago was greater than freedom now. Speakers in Hyde Park Corner could and did call for the gutters of Mayfair to run red with the blood of the rich and the copper would just say, "steady on mate, steady on." Part of the reason for this freedom was that the right to restrict was itself restricted to the justice system.

It's a sign of a half-way healthy state (half-way being about as good as states get) that it is very clear who is doing the state's dirty work.

Now, it seems, the job of spying on British citizens has been franchised out to that "much loved" institution, the BBC. As Mr Lewis says, that is not their role. Later on in the post some Radio Nederlands commentary is quoted saying that it might be better to have "trained journalists" doing the monitoring than others. Not surprising, I suppose, that the trained journalists at Radio Nederlands rate their fellow trained journalists at the BBC as the best people to employ for this task. I must disagree: if I had to choose I'd rather be spied on by professional spies. At least they live in the real world, and in particular have the peril of Islamofascism very much in the forefront of their minds. I'd trust them way above the BBC to be able to tell the difference between clear statements warning against Islamofascism and genuine hate speech.*

When it comes to judging others - judging us here, for instance - the BBC is very likely to imply that anyone who says out loud that a kind of death-cult has infected to some degree a disturbingly high proportion of the Muslim world is thereby an Islamophobe.

But when it comes to judging themselves, or judging the groups they have a soft spot for, the standard is very different. You can see the double standard in operation by the BBC's choice of Jew-hating ranter Mahathir as official BBC "expert" on Islam for an upcoming forum. (See Biased BBC here and passim.) Tell you what, Beeb guys, if you want to monitor "hate speech" why don't you start with him?

*I do not make this distinction between real and apparent hate speech in order to say we should forbid one and allow the other. I am a free speech absolutist. That means I must support the political right to make truly hateful hate speech, however vile, while also asserting my right to condemn it. This includes hate speech about Muslims and hate speech by Muslims. But the distinction between real and apparent hate speech is crucial in terms of moral assessment and national security.