Civil libertarians had noticed that the Blair administration is impatient with conviction rates. We have seen real attempts to reduce the availability of jury trials and to lower the burden of proof. And we have had strong hints from the Prime Minister that he doesn't regard the principle of innocent until proven guilty as applicable in the modern world.

Astonishingly, however, none of those is enough. A guilty plea may in future permit prosecutors to operate without court process. Idiotically the BBC captions this as "Petty criminals could avoid court": but a better headline would be "criminal convictions without courts". People will be convicted and punished by prosecutors and police if prosecutors or police can persuade them to confess. This is a recipe for abuse.

Magistrate's courts may not be the most reliable finders of fact or interpreters of law, but they have no direct interest in the guilt of the defendant or in clearing up unsolved crimes. They can and do hear defenses and pleas in mitigation. They can, and very occasionally do, insist on entering a not-guilty plea if the defendant appears to be have been browbeaten or to be incapable of understanding his position.

The inevitable consequence of introducing summary police punishment will be an assertion on behalf of the authorities that those who are convicted at trial instead of submitting to official processing ought to be more heavily punished because they have somehow wasted the court's time. Which will place the accused under more pressure to make admissions regardless of guilt, regardless of whether prosecutors abuse their position.

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]

Perhaps you think I am talking about Venezuela under the thuggish Chavez?

Nope. I am talking about Britain.

Gustave Le Bon would have something to say about this. He'd point to the sugestibility of the emotionally aroused crowd:

Almost three-quarters of the public believe that it is right to give up civil liberties to improve our security against terrorist attacks.

A Guardian/ICM poll published today shows that 73% of respondents back the trade-off, with only 17% rejecting it outright. The results provide evidence of public support for Tony Blair's anti-terrorist reforms which he unveiled before leaving on his summer holiday earlier this month.

Full article here.

I simply do not accept there is a trade-off to be had. Our liberty is our safety.

The world is replete with counterexamples to the trade-off twitch. (One cannot call it a theory.)

Take Saudi Arabia. Civil liberty does not exist there. It is an alien concept, and, in common with other alien concepts, banned. There is no protection of citizen from state, and no limit to the actions that can be taken.

Yet terrorism is in robust health. The Kingdom's official figures for the last two years (which one would expect to paint the rosiest picture) are 129 dead and 720 injured among civilians and security forces. More than twice Britain's casualties among a population that may be around a third of ours--reliable figures on anything Saudi being hard to come by. (They probably have significantly more police, too.)

Tim Worstall asks: "Are We Still a Free People?":

We have a Home Secretary who has been told by the courts that locking foreigners up and denying them their right to trial is illegal. The basic presumption is that one must either be tried and convicted, or be being held on remand while that process is put in train, for it to be allowable for the State to lock you up. His reaction on being told that foreigners have the same rights as natives was, quite amazingly, to remove that right for natives. Quite.

The most basic foundation of the relationship between citizen and state, that of the right to trial, Habeus Corpus and all the rest, has been altered. It is seriously proposed that the Home Secretary should be allowed to intern anyone at all, on no evidence that he has to reveal (and thus can be argued against), for as long as he wishes. We all know that miscarriages of justice happen, the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four being examples, even when there is an open system with judges, juries and the like. We'll never know under the new system as no one will ever have to tell us.

Quite. The illiberal moves by this government are rather worrying.

The Civil Contingencies Act became law last Thursday in what can only be described as a blaze on non-publicity. This legislation, which represents perhaps the most serious threat to liberty in Britain since World War II, has put in place the legal tools for some future government to impose rule-by-edict.

It would be hard to overstate how grave this situation is.

If your political antennae have been sensitive to the undercurrents shimmering across the blogosphere, then you will have picked up the few postings alerting readers to the implications of the Civil Contingencies Bill. The dangers of this giant step towards authoritarianism have been publicised far more effectively both by David Carr and on Iain Murray's personal weblog, The Edge of Englands Sword:

Lord Lucas has described the Civil Contingencies Bill as comparable to Hitler's Enabling Act of 1933 which enabled him to transform Germany's Weimar Republic into his own personal tyranny. I have now read it, and I have to say that he is not exaggerating.

Readers could argue that this is an invocation of Godwin's Law and that, by quoting this passage, I have lost the argument. However, this opinion is that of Torquil Dirk-Erikson, "a noted Eurosceptic writer and learned silk". However, in considering the passage of this Act, it should also be noted that the European Constitution has a section on 'civil protection' as one of the coordinating powers for the European authorities.

The Government wishes to push through an updated Civil Contingencies Bill in 2004. It does not mention the EU, but the draft EU Constitution includes 'civil protection' as an area for 'coordinating action' and the current Treaty mentions the topic vaguely. The Bill also enables the creation of arbitrary imprisonable criminal offences. It enables regulations that can delegate powers to anyone or confer jurisdiction on any court or tribunal. This could be an EU body, unaccountable to government or the people.

Although the draft Constitution gives us a veto on a European Public Prosecutor (the Government says it 'currently' sees no reason for one) Blair has said that he opposes permanent 'opt-outs' or being isolated in Europe. Although the amended Bill states that it will not change criminal procedure, the Government is happy for the EU to have over-riding powers to do this via the EU Constitution.

These developments happen at a time when the Government is trying to introduce universal ID cards and a 'population register', and has just announced a national database to carry information on all children, not merely those 'at risk' (Sunday Times, 25.7.04). Again there are worrying parallels with European developments. Amazingly, MI5's website, which is listed in Preparing For Emergencies assures us that "the subversive threat to parliamentary democracy is now negligible".

One giant step along 'Chavez' Blair's road to a 'managed democracy'.

Cross-posted to Samizdata.

The British government is advocating the vaccination of children against particular behaviours using the forthcoming array of pharmacotherapy vaccines. These would innoculate children against a host of behaviours that the government defines as anti-social: drinking, smoking, drugs, blogging and so on.

The article explains that "Doctors would immunize children at risk of becoming smokers or drug users with an injection" and that the program would operate in a way similar to the "current nationwide measles, mumps and rubella vaccination programme." Further the authors reveal that "such vaccinations are being developed by pharmaceutical companies and are due to hit the market within two years."

Developments like this are monitored by the Centre for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, whose response was clear:

Richard Glen Boire, a legal scholar at the CCLE, believes that vaccinating children with "anti-drug" drugs would be "alarming and unlawful, and would signal the first time that neuropharmaceuticals were overtly used to enforce government policy."

Aside from the human rights concerns, the UK plan raises serious health questions regarding the long-term effects of these drugs on the complex neurochemistry of the brain.

The CCLE warns that advances in the neurosciences will challenge the ability of individuals to maintain their cognitive freedom. Governments will redefine mental health to use drugs and other neurotechnologies in order to police and channel people's behaviours.

(My thanks to Alex Ramonsky of the Entelechy Institute for alerting me to this issue).

If you are arrested, and the police take your DNA to run tests on it, and if the outcome of your arrest is either that no charges were brought against you or you were brought to trial and found innocent, it has been ruled that the state can retain your DNA records indefinitely regardless.

The moral of the story is, of course, that if you do not want the state to take your DNA and hold it on record forever because you simply do not trust the state or because you have the quaint notion that your body is your own property, then do whatever it takes to not get arrested, regardless of how confident you are that you can establish your innocence subsequently.

Lord Brown said the benefits of this procedure were so manifest and the objections so threadbare that the cause of human rights would be better served by expanding the police database rather than by reducing it.

Just as it has often been said that modern fascism is most likely to appear in the guise of anti-fascism, when some establishment figure like Lord Brown start taking about 'human rights' it is a fair bet that 'human rights' about to get trampled underfoot.

My guess is that it is only a matter of time before the police in some nations start taking samples of DNA from everyone, probably starting with all children under a programme with a name like 'The Safe Children Act' or something similar, probably with the ostensible reason of 'protecting your child from kidnap by Paedophiles' or some such drivel. I mean, after all, who could possibly object to that?

The state is not your friend.

A loyal reader sends in this 'gem' of a story... someone was arrested for sketching on the South Bank:

I spent four hours (having already been detained for three and a half) in a cell in Kennington police station wondering whether I might not be joining those in Belmarsh where Mr Blunkett could detain me without explanation and, in the interest of public security, refuse to divulge the alleged evidence. If the majority in this country need protecting, they had better ask who the enemies of democracy currently are.

Read the whole thing... Incredible but not surprising.

The Home Secretary has instructed the Humberside Police Authority to suspend the chief constable of Humberside, David Westwood. I have no views on the actual issue of David Westwood's competence and whether or not he actually deserves to be suspended and ultimately sacked, but what is alarming is how Downing Street is centralising more and more decisions on local matters that have a huge baring on civil liberties.

Lawyers for Mr Blunkett are expected to ask the High Court, possibly on Tuesday, for an injunction forcing the authority to carry out his instruction to suspend the officer. This will be the first test of powers under the Police Reform Act 2002 and the Home Secretary will argue that suspension is necessary "for the maintenance of public confidence" in the force.

[..]

Colin Inglis, the chairman of the authority and the Labour leader of Kingston-upon-Hull told BBC1's Look North: "The police authority is not a rubber stamp and if the Home Secretary expected a rubber stamp then that, I'm afraid, is not what he has got.

"The Home Secretary is not David Westwood's line manager. David Westwood works for the police authority.

The issue is not "is David Westwood a good copper" but "do you want David Blunkett making those decisions?". No prizes for guessing where I stand on that.

It is a long time since I have contributed anything to White Rose. And it is a long time since this article by journalist and novelist Alexandra Campbell appeared, in the Telegraph, on May 14th. Apologies on both counts, but better occasional contributions and late reports of White Rose relevant material than never, I hope you agree.

This article did not just appear in the Telegraph. It was also reproduced in full, in the "last word" slot, towards the end of the "all you need to know about everything that matters" magazine (i.e. lots of good bits from all the different British newspapers) The Week, of May 29th, Issue 462. That was where and (approximately) when I first read the piece.

Ms. Campbell, on the basis of vague CCTV "evidence", was falsely accused of a crime, and it took a scarily long time for the system to stop persecuting her.

Concluding paragraphs:

"In theory," said Mark, "it's innocent until proved guilty. In practice, whoever makes the allegation first is believed."

Now that we are all picked up on CCTVs up to 300 times a day, and can also easily be identified electronically through swipe cards (health clubs, the office, season tickets, etc), there is a real risk of someone linking you to a passing resemblance on a fuzzy CCTV image and making an allegation against you.

It had taken about eight months to get to this point of the inquiry and I was terrified of enduring months' more worry before I was cleared, but the police followed up my brother's statement quickly and dropped the charges. However, they told me that current policy is to leave fingerprints, pictures and allegations permanently on file.

Checking subsequently with the police press office, I find that "fingerprints may not be held for more than 42 days", but I find it scary that nobody really seems to know. I suspect our civil rights are being chipped away all the time in the name of crime and terrorism prevention.

The whole thing, I discovered, was based on a breach of the Data Protection Act. Companies using CCTV are supposed to show images only to authorised people, such as the police. The supermarket involved should never have allowed the receptionist and the credit card victim to see footage on demand. The receptionist, himself in charge of CCTV, should have known this. He wasn't even following his own company's code of practice, which asks staff who are suspicious of members to take the matter to a manager first. But he has done nothing illegal.

And neither have I. But while I struggle to have my records deleted from police files, he has drifted on and cannot, so far, be contacted. Nobody knows if he made the allegation out of boredom, spite, or genuine, if misplaced, civic-mindedness. It's Kafkaesque, said friends. It's a joke, said others. But it wasn't fiction and it wasn't funny. I was actually very lucky.

I might not have been able to prove where I was. If I'd been a lawyer, police officer, accountant or worked in financial services, my career and livelihood would also have been on the line, and if I'd been a celebrity, the story would have been splashed all over the papers before it was disproved. If the allegation had been connected to terrorism, I would have been jailed immediately.

I used to think that if you didn't break the law, you had nothing to fear from it. Now I know that if this can happen to me, it can happen to anyone.

Unpersons alerted us to the news that from today British police may legally and against the will of any law-abiding subject, take DNA samples and fingerprints from any arrested person without that person having even been charged with committing a criminal act.

We can but echo the good Unpersons concerns:

The law now leaves British police officers free to help Blunkett establish one of the most ambitious and truly disturbing elements of the British police state that he has slowly but surely been working to create over the last few years. In a country where the state can take over half of your income, charge you expenses when it wrongly imprisons you - yet fail to defend you after it has crushed the right to self-defence, send parents to jail for not sending their children to state day-care centres schools, steal your property because 'you couldn't possibly have earned that much money without selling illegal drugs' whilst slowly handing over control to a foreign power, attempt to dictate what you eat 'for your own good' and generally treat its citizens as its troublesome children one has to wonder to what extent we already live in a police state.

This has not been a good week.

Blair is a liar. But of course the notion any politician does not utter more than the occasional porkie pie is a very uncontroversial one. But as I said in the wellspring of lies yesterday, one can but marvel at the bare faced effrontery of it when our political masters stand up and state something is true when any person not wilfully blind (or David Blunkett) can see it is patently untrue just by reading a few newspapers or one of several thousand blogs and websites.

Mr Blair said political objections had been removed and the only obstacle now was technical. He made clear he wanted the project to "move forward" as soon as it was feasible.

He risked antagonising civil rights campaigners by claiming they no longer objected to the idea, which would see each citizen required to buy a computer-readable card that would record personal details.

Risks antagonising? Civil rights campaigners no longer object to the idea? Excuse the French, but, what the fuck? Blair is a bare faced liar. The only other alternative to that is that he is so ignorant of goings on outside the cloistered world of 10 Downing Street as to be completely deluded.

I will try my damnedest to refuse to get an ID card and I will openly declare that I do not have one when the sun rises on that evil day. I urge as many people as possible to not just resist but to do so openly when the time comes. They will try to make it very difficult to live without one so we must make the system unworkable by using whatever civil disobedience and intelligent resistance is needed. Do not cooperate with your own repression. Time to get creative, people. Time to get angry.

Cross-posted from Samizdata.net

A new nationwide police agency, the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) has been created in Britain.

The creation of a new "British FBI" to combat organised crime, with informants being offered reduced sentences to snitch on their gangland bosses, was given unanimous support in the Commons today - despite a controversial raft of new powers.

The home secretary, David Blunkett, told MPs he was in favour of allowing intercept material - bugged phone calls and emails - to be used as evidence, pending a review which would report back in June.

And he would also, for the first time, force professionals such as lawyers and solicitors to cooperate with police enquiries into organised crime, even if it meant betraying client confidentiality.

And thus people will simply stop asking for legal opinions just in case their shyster runs off to the police in order to cover their rear ends and thereby ensuring a steadily increasing climate of fear, distrust and uncertainty. The Blair-Blunkett government are nothing less that populist authoritarians.

It takes a lot to amaze me, but Blunkett has done just that.

WHAT do you give someone who’s been proved innocent after spending the best part of their life behind bars, wrongfully convicted of a crime they didn’t commit?

An apology, maybe? Counselling? Champagne? Compensation? Well, if you’re David Blunkett, the Labour Home Secretary, the choice is simple: you give them a big, fat bill for the cost of board and lodgings for the time they spent freeloading at Her Majesty's Pleasure in British prisons.

On Tuesday, Blunkett will fight in the Royal Courts of Justice in London for the right to charge victims of miscarriages of justice more than £3000 for every year they spent in jail while wrongly convicted. The logic is that the innocent man shouldn't have been in prison eating free porridge and sleeping for nothing under regulation grey blankets.

This is insane. The state locks someone up unjustly and then demands payment for room and board? This is the true face of the people who have power over us. It is actually evil.

If this astonishing development does not cause the mother of all political storms both in Westminster and society at large, then Britain as a society has clearly become so inured to authoritarianism and arrogance by its rulers that we must be past the point of no return. Blunkett must go. Now!

Following last week's atrocity in Madrid, the media are reporting London Underground's plans to increase security. These plans include more plain clothes police patrolling the network and encouraging passengers to be vigilant.

There's another aspect to the plans not mentioned in most reports. According to the BBC:

British Transport Police have also said more people using the Tube will be randomly stopped and searched

Do we really want to live in a country where being randomly stopped and searched is considered an acceptable part of everyday life?

Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe

Amongst the announcement of the new Serious Organised Crime Agency one comment seems to have been largely overlooked. Tony Blair said, concerning serious crime:

My impression sometimes is that the system is struggling against a presumption that you treat these crimes like every other type of crime, and that you build up cases beyond reasonable doubt. I think we have got to look at this.

Reproduced below is the text of yesterday's press release from the Libertarian Alliance:

"Any Excuse for a Police State: Blunkett Secret Trial Plans as Bad as Foreign Conquest", Says Free Market and Civil Liberties Think Tank

Home Secretary David Blunkett wants to bring in laws allowing pre-emptive arrest of suspects, secret trials without juries, with state-chosen defence lawyers, on undisclosed evidence provided by the security services, and a lower burden of proof. He says this is to protect the country from "terrorism".

"Nonsense", says Dr Sean Gabb, Director of Communications for the Libertarian Alliance. "We did none of this in the second world war, when the enemy was poised to invade from across the Channel, and killing 60,000 British civilians in bombing raids. We did none of this when Irish terrorists were killing thousands of state and civilian victims within the United Kingdom.

"The truth is, this government wants a police state and will use any excuse to get one. We are told these new laws will only apply in terrorism cases. That is a lie. We were once told that confiscation orders would only be used for drug dealing cases, and after normal conviction: now we have a Confiscation Agency trying to seize assets from suspected criminals without the need for criminal charges. This legislation would soon become the normal mode of trial of all offences.

"Do you want a criminal justice system where you can be tried in secret by another Lord Hutton, on the basis of secret evidence supplied by the same security services that did such a good job at proving Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction? I don't. Looking at these proposals, anyone who fell asleep in 1940 and woke today might almost think the Germans had won the war. I wonder if all those who fought to prevent that ever suspected our own government would behave like an army of occupation?"

Perhaps that is now how they think of themselves.

The Big Blunkett's draconian measures to 'fight terrorists' would not be necessary if the British justice system was functioning. When this and this can happen with increasing frequency, no wonder that terrorists have a ball in the British courts and Mr Blunkett can continue warping British laws with self-righteous indignation of a politician.

Telegraph reports that civil liberties groups and Muslim community leaders lined up yesterday to denounce plans from David Blunkett to conduct secret trials of suspected terrorists.

He said the threat from extremists was now so great that the burden of proof in criminal trials should be reduced from "beyond reasonable doubt" to "the balance of probabilities".

He also wants a debate over whether intelligence information against suspects should be given in camera to avoid compromising security. Mr Blunkett's ideas - to be proposed formally in a Home Office paper later this month - are intended to address what the Government sees as a serious threat from Islamist fundamentalists.

We need to debate how we deal with these delicate issues of proportionality and human rights on the one hand and evidential base and the threshold of evidence on the other.

That is quite a challenge because we are having to say that the nature of what people obtain through the security and intelligence route is different to the evidence gained through the policing route. It needs to be presented in a way that doesn't allow disclosure by any of the parties involved which would destroy your security services.

Lady Kennedy, QC, a Labour peer, compared Mr Blunkett to Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe and described the proposals as "a classic Blunkett tactic".

He really is a shameless authoritarian. We can be confident that many of his colleagues in the Cabinet, including particularly the Attorney General, will sit on this, because it really is an affront to the rule of law.

You suggest all kinds of outrageous and awful things because then you get away with half of them.

Mark Littlewood, the campaigns director of Liberty, said:

Simply introducing more laws, greater powers and stiffer penalties will go a long way to undermining British justice and will not make our country any safer.

Michael Howard, the Tory leader, said:

You have to try and strike the balance between giving the British people the proper protection against terrorism and not depriving innocent people of their liberty.

Massoud Shadjareh, the chairman of the Islam Human Rights Commission, said:

This sort of legislation in Germany led to concentration camps.

Let's hear it for the sharia law solution to terrorism.

The BBC reports that Big Blunkett is proposing to introduce yet more draconian powers to lock up suspected terrorists without a fair trial.

The new proposals are an extension of the current anti-terrorism laws rushed into being after September 11th. Those have already been condemned as creating "Guantanamo Bay in our own back yard".

The new proposals would see British citizens tried partly in secret and denied access to the evidence against them. They would also reduce the burden of proof from "beyond reasonable doubt" to "on the balance of probabilities".

Speaking on the Today programme, Senior lawyer Baroness Kennedy described the proposals as "a disgrace". She went on to say:

"It is as if David Blunkett takes his lessons on jurisprudence from Robert Mugabe"

Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe

I've just done a posting at Samizdata about the phenomenon of excessive regulation, so excessive that even if an organisation wants to obey it, it can't. It's just too voluminous, too complicated, sometimes even too contradictory. (One of the Samizdata commenters told of how his encryption duties seemed to require some sort of infinite regress and were un-obeyable.)

The White Rose Relevance of this is, Cicero apparently said:

Excessive law is no law at all.

Which means that in practice the law becomes whatever those in charge decide to make it. And that is the point at which White Rosers should sit up and notice, because that is when people who make trouble for the authorities by saying things that the authorities disapprove of, get prosecuted not for their wicked sayings (which might be a rather hard charge to make stick and would anyway draw attention to the sayings) but for non-compliance with plumbing regulations, for failure to fill out the proper forms concerning employee sick-leave, for baking bread of the wrong size and shape, etc. The completely we are all likely to be breaking this or that law, the more completely they have us by the proverbials.

T. M. Lucas also commented as Samizdata, drawing the attention of its readers to a series of posts his blog has on these themes.

I went from her to him to this.

Quote of beyond America interest:

The Bush administration’s anti-protester bias proved embarrassing for two American allies with long traditions of raucous free speech, resulting in some of the most repressive restrictions in memory in free countries. When Bush visited Australia in October, Sydney Morning Herald columnist Mark Riley observed, “The basic right of freedom of speech will adopt a new interpretation during the Canberra visits this week by the US President, George Bush, and his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao. Protesters will be free to speak as much as they like just as long as they can’t be heard.” Demonstrators were shunted to an area away from the Federal Parliament building and prohibited from using any public address system in the area.

For Bush’s recent visit to London, the White House demanded that British police ban all protest marches, close down the center of the city, and impose a "virtual three day shutdown of central London in a bid to foil disruption of the visit by anti-war protesters," according to Britain’s Evening Standard. But instead of a "free speech zone" – as such areas are labeled in the U.S. – the Bush administration demanded an "exclusion zone" to protect Bush from protesters’ messages.

And the concluding paragraph:

Is the administration seeking to stifle domestic criticism? Absolutely. Is it carrying out a war on dissent? Probably not – yet. But the trend lines in federal attacks on freedom of speech should raise grave concerns to anyone worried about the First Amendment or about how a future liberal Democratic president such as Hillary Clinton might exploit the precedents that Bush is setting.

Precedents hell. I agree with Kim Du Toit. This is already bullshit. Never mind all the bullshit it brings on in the future.

The BBC reports that planned new powers for dealing with a major terrorist attack and other big emergencies are unveiled today. Ministers have already published drafts of the new laws, which were criticised by an influential committee of MPs and peers for putting human rights at risk.

They fear that unless the Civil Contingencies Bill contains suitable constraints its powers could be abused by a future government. Civil rights campaigners want the new powers to be more strictly defined.

Summary of key power in draft bill:

1. Ministers will be able to bypass Parliament to make emergency regulations
   
2. Police will be able to ban public gatherings, impose curfews, seize property
   
3. The Human Rights Act could be suspended

A parliamentary committee set up to look at the plans said they had "potentially dangerous flaws". The Committee chairman Lewis Moonie said his main concern was over human liberty and rights because the terms used in the bill were "too vague".

The basis under which the government could take these powers to itself - the way in which government defines an emergency - I think is the first concern. If they listen to us, as I'm pretty sure they will, they should have changed the terms on which this is done and made it much more explicit how they take these powers in the first place.

Dr Moonie, a former defence minister warns:

We should not put such power into the hands of anybody without suitable constraints.

Truer words are rarely spoken by politicians.

Full text of the civil contingencies bill here (pdf). Via the Guardian.

Here is Liberty's response to the government's civil contingencies bill.

Whenever the authorities try and vote themselves greater powers, there is a need to be cautious and sceptical. By reinstating the courts' powers to consider human right abuses under these laws, the government has made an important concession.

And Statewatch has a detailed commentary on the issue:

The concessions made by the government in no way change the fundamental objections to this Bill. The powers available to the government and state agencies would be truly draconian. Cities could be sealed off, travel bans introduced, all phones cut off, and websites shut down. Demonstrations could be banned and the news media be made subject to censorship. New offences against the state could be "created" by government decree. This is Britain's Patriot Act, at a stroke democracy could be replaced by totalitarianism.

A reader alerted us to an interesting vote happening on the Radio 4 today programme: vote for a law to be submitted to the House of Commons. So far there are five 'Law Ideas' and at No.5 is a bill to allow homeowners to defend their property with any force, by deleting "reasonable" from the phrase "reasonable force".

You can vote by phone or online, if you are registered with BBCi.

Guy Herbert finds this is a bit worrying.

The BBC reports that six people suspected of terror activities have been re-arrested on lesser charges. All six were originally arrested under section 41 of the Terrorism Act, on suspicion of involvement in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism. They were released under terror laws but re-arrested on other matters such as bank fraud and immigration offences.

What's wrong with this picture? Under the Terrorism Act reasonable suspicion is not required to arrest or search. Therefore it has potential to be used for fishing expeditions - police arrest you and search your property without proper cause. Of course, they'll have an actual cause, such as being uncooperative with officials or some such pretext, and give themselves a week to find something on you. Once they have found something on you, their actions are justified in the eyes of the Lawn Order brigade.

Given the state of the criminal law and bureaucratic reach, I sincerely doubt there is anyone in the country who could not be charged with some crime after a week of interrogation and search, even among those whose lawns are in perfect order and believe they have nothing to hide.

ASIO stands for Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, and the ASIO is in the news, here, and here:

An international law expert believes the Federal Government's proposed changes to its ASIO laws to extend the questioning time allowed for non-English speakers would be a "clear contravention" of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Associate Professor Donald Rothwell, from the University of Sydney, said amendments expected to be introduced today into Parliament, which would extend the period ASIO could question people who needed interpreters from 24 hours to 48 over a week, would breach Article 26 of the covenant.

… and here:

Labor is expected to agree to key legislative amendments that will provide stiff penalties for unauthorised disclosure of information relating to ASIO's new special questioning and detention powers.

Attorney-General Philip Ruddock will introduce the amendments today, with an expectation they will be passed by both chambers before the parliament rises next week for Christmas.

The most contentious aspect of the legislation relates to the disclosure provisions by which the subject of an ASIO warrant or his lawyer or other persons convey information about the course of ASIO's investigations.

Sunday Herald reports that UK wants similar powers to controversial US Patriot Act.

Sweeping new emergency legal powers to deal with the aftermath of a large terrorist attack in Britain are being considered by the government. The measures could potentially outlaw participation in a protest march, such as last week's demonstrations during President Bush's state visit, making it, in effect, a criminal offence to criticise government policy.

In an attempt to give the UK government similar powers to those rushed through in the US after the 9/11 attack on New York in 2001, it is understood that a beefed-up version of current civil contingencies law is being considered. It will allow the government to bypass or suspend key parts of the UK's human rights laws without the authority of parliament.

...

Aware of the current level of scare-mongering following the Istanbul bombing and the threats made by al-Qaeda-linked groups that further suicide attacks were being planned on targets both in the UK and abroad, a source close to the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, last night denied his department were seeking a massive and immediate injection of cash from the Treasury. This would be needed to foot the bill if Britain's streets were to be flooded with armed police in an almost constant level of red alert.

Despite Blunkett saying he was "sick and tired" of people pretending there was not a threat from terrorists and insisting only "very, very good intelligence would save us", the Home Office seems to have no plan to boost security spending this or next year.

If "Fortress Britain" were to be achieved, with countrywide security checks, increased police surveillance and widespread detention of any suspect group or individual, the Home Office's annual budget would rocket.

Hm.

From an unlikely source comes this analysis of the US Patriot Act in the editorial column:

Explaining the reasons why the USA Patriot Act runs counter to the traditional American concept of liberty is a daunting task. Most people - including the members of Congress who voted for it - haven't even read the Act in its entirety, if at all. Those are the uninformed. Then there are the misguided - those who are somewhat familiar with the legislation, but who accept it under the notion that some loss of freedom is inevitable if we're to protect ourselves from the scourge of terrorists.

The article ends with a famous quote attributed to Rev. Martin Neimoller:

First, they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up, because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.

Read the whole thing. Simple and effective.

RFID coverage from ZDNet UK:

A global alliance of opponents to the rollout of radio frequency identification tagging systems are demanding that companies stop deploying them until crucial issues such as privacy are addressed.

Over 30 civil liberties and privacy groups have demanded a suspension to the deployment of radio frequency identification (RFID) tagging systems until a number of issues surrounding the controversial technology have been addressed.

These organisations, including Britain's Foundation for Information Policy Reseach and Privacy International, have backed a position statement on the use of RFID on consumer products that was issued on Thursday.

It claims that RFID, if used improperly, represents a major threat to consumer privacy and civil liberties. This follows earlier protests against RFID by campaigners, and is thought to be the first formal global alliance against the technology.

Despite Michael Howard's reported U-turn, peers have once again thrown out Big Blunkett's discredited Criminal "Justice" Bill. They were particularly concerned by Blunkett's plans to restrict the right to trial by jury, to allow people to be tried twice for the same crime and to allow evidence of "bad character" (i.e. gossip) to be used in trials.

Today is the last day of the parliamentary session, so if the Lords continue to stand up for civil liberties the whole Bill could be lost. The only way for it now to pass would appear to be significant concessions by the Government, a move that would further undermine Blunkett's position.

Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe

The Independent reports that lawyers and civil liberties groups yesterday urged the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, to back down over proposals to limit the right to trial by jury as he prepared for a bitter parliamentary battle to force the proposals into law.

In a letter to The Independent, the Law Society and the Bar Council joined civil liberties groups in urging Mr Blunkett to accept a string of Lords amendments toning down the Criminal Justice Bill.

Ministers will attempt to revive the plans in the Commons today after they were thrown out by a coalition of Conservative and Liberal Democrat peers. They will also try to reverse defeats over proposals to allow juries to be given details of defendants' previous convictions.

The Times reports that the Tories are to drop their opposition to Big Blunkett's plans to limit trial by jury.

As a result the discredited Criminal "Justice" Bill is expected to pass through both Houses next week.

The reason given for this change of heart is that new Tory leader Michael Howard apparently sees "liberal" policies as electorally damaging. Any hope that the Tories might be the party to stand up for civil liberties seems to have disappeared

Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe

White Rose is run by people in London, so they won't be going, but maybe we have a few readers in Chicago. It's organised by the Century Foundation, and they also publish this, which all of us can get hold of and read.

What does the government have to say about "human rights": the collective term for its concerns about civil liberties and the rights of the individual. The answer can be found in three departments: the Human Rights Department in the Lord Chancellor's Officeand the Human Rights Policy Department at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The administrative distinction between these two departments lies in their location: the former is dedicated to the implementation in law of the European Charter on Human Rights and the latter is focused upon human rights as a strand within British foreign policy.

The latest Audit Committee Report on the implementation of the Human Rights Act for managers within local government is a good place to start examining how the law has become a byword for bureaucratisation and regulation. It also has a useful list of further governmental links. Although the traditional freedoms are all recognised in checklists and tickboxes, they are surrounded by a disciplinary atmosphere that has the potential to prohibit any actions considered offensive. Instead of applying common sense and guidance, this Report promotes a stifling conformity in the form of a "human rights culture" in order to avoid liabilities for not applying the law correctly.

By viewing human rights as a possible liability, institutions and the individuals who work within them will come to see civil liberties as a liability and a hindrance to their primary objective. Thus, the Human Rights Act will have the opposite effect to that intended: engendering a culture of compliance that observes the letter, not the spirit of the law, and bringing the actual purpose of the act, increasing the rights of individuals, into contempt.

The Guardian reports that the Conservatives have drawn up detailed plans to defeat some of the worst parts of Big Blunkett's discredited Criminal "Justice" Bill.

In particular the Tory peers plan to prevent Blunkett from removing the right to trial by jury in certain cases and allowing gossip to be accepted as evidence.

Since the government doesn't have an automatic majority in the Lords they will have to compromise, risk losing the entire Bill or invoke the rarely used Parliament Act.

Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe

One of the depressing trends in modern life is the way in which political figures use the politics of fear to garner support for legislation which degrades our rights and our liberties.

I live in South Australia, and here the Premier (equivalent to a US state governor, although he models his government on New Labour), one Mike Rann, has ordered his ministers to come up with new legislation to curb the rights of bikie gang members to work in certain industries.

In South Australia a couple of small groups of motorcycle gangs have become noted for their involvement in drug dealing and other forms of organised crime. You'd have to look hard to notice them, though. Although South Australians love their motorcycles, I can't recall seeing anyone from these "bikie gangs".

Be that as it may, the powers that be have determined that they are a threat to the good folk of South Australia. And, as the powers that be are wont to do, they are arming themselves with legal clubs. The gist of the legislation is:

the aim is to ensure that people associated with bikie gangs and organised crime can be prevented from holding a security firm licence.

The term 'bikie gang' is used loosely. I would be concerned if I was a motorcycle enthusiast to know whether or not innocent social gatherings with fellow devotees were to make one a member of these dreaded 'bikie gangs'.

Mr Rann gives no comfort:

I've made it clear that if it means the new laws must be radical and draconian in nature, then so be it.

So presumably, the civil liberties of people will go by the wayside if that is what it takes. South Australians are going to have their freedom of association challenged, as well as their right to seek employment where they wish, in order to deal with a piddling problem. South Australia's crime rate is hardly alarming, and what we have here is a politician playing up people's fears to drive through legislation that is iniquitous.

An awful lot of people don't like smoking. Given the passion a number of my friends show for putting themselves into early graves, I put up with the practice for social reasons. And I certainly believe that businessmen and women should be free to have establishments where their customers can escape from the risk of fumigation.

However, things are never that simple. People want to ban smoking simpliciter. Depriving businessmen and women of the choice of letting smokers in, or perhaps having a business at all. And this is precisely the reason 400 publicans in County Kerry say they're willing to go to jail rather than enforce a ban on smoking in pubs proposed by the Irish Government (coming soon to a European Community near you!).

Nowadays we need to celebrate every victory, however small.

Management at the Trelleborg chemical company in Leicester have agreed to stop tagging their employees.

Under the recently imposed scheme workers had to request and wear a red tag whenever they took a break. Not surprisingly they complained that this was demeaning. Following ACAS intervention the company agreed to scrap the system.

The fact that such a repulsive scheme has been scrapped is encouraging. The fact that the company thought they could get away with it in the first place is worrying.

BBC report here

Ministers are preparing legislation for the next session of parliament to make local authorities create files on every child in England, including intimate personal information about parents' relationships with other partners and any criminal record, alcohol or drug abuse in the extended family. The files will be available to teachers, social workers, NHS staff and other professionals dealing with children to help them piece together symptoms of neglect or abuse that might require intervention by the authorities.

The green paper produced as a response to the murder of Victoria Climbié, an eight-year-old who died in London in 2000 after months of torture and neglect, said the need to protect children had to be balanced against preserving the privacy of parents. But Charles Clarke, the education secretary, said yesterday that the interests of children "absolutely" took precedence over the civil liberties of adults.

Mark Littlewood, the campaigns director of Liberty, said Mr Clarke's remarks were even more disturbing than the green paper.

We have to make sure social workers are sharper, smarter and better focused. That's done by better training, not by casting the net so wide that every child in the country will be in it. That creates the danger that investigations will be triggered by supposition, guesswork, gossip and rumour. Our concern is that there will be witchhunts rather than protection of the relatively small number of children in real danger.

The Adam Smith Institute Weblog seems to have hit the ground running, and Jonny Fraser's piece about harassment in the USA by cops and bureaucrats and stupid laws is provoking a fine old comment fest. Quote:

On entering the country, with no matter what passport, you are treated like a criminal or socio-economic migrant. Several forms need to be filled in, many of their requirements duplicated, unnecessary and arbitrary. This practice does not stop at international boundaries. There are occasional police checks on interstate roads, and even occasionally at state borders. Post 9/11 fear is all encompassing.

Rights are being eroded and regulations piled on like cheese and freedom fries at a burger joint. It seems that obesity and laughable laws have a bizarre relationship. In America, you can die for your country at 18, but you cannot buy a beer until you are 21. In America you can kill on the roads with reckless driving at 15 in some states, but experienced drivers usually have to stay below 55 miles per hour or risk a ludicrously overpriced speeding ticket.

California is the worst state for this sort of thing. Their claim to liberalism extends as far as a blanket ban on smoking in public places, …

I particularly liked Kevin Carson's comment, responding to American critics of American critics. Final paragraph:

Well guess what? I DO have a bad attitude. It's because of people with "bad attitudes" that we're not still working on chain gangs to build a pyramid, or eating our lunches standing up during a sixteen hour shift on an assembly line. For every liberty that sets us above the level of a slave, you can thank somebody with a bad attitude. Rights are not granted by government; they are forced on it from below.

It is good that the ASI blog is not confining itself to municipal bus privatisation and such like. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

According PR Newswire press release Tim Lord, chief executive of the Tobacco Manufacturers' Association, responded today to the news that EU Health Commissioner David Byrne proposes to use EU Health and Safety Law to impose a blanket ban on public smoking all across Europe.

Everyone, smokers and non-smokers, employees and the rest of us, should have access to clean air. We all agree with that - the issue is how do you deliver it? Commissioner Byrne wants a draconian solution - to ban smoking wherever people may work - and do so via a Brussels directive to all of Europe. The Commissioner should leave health issues to individual countries as envisaged under EU protocol and let them handle their own affairs. He should also note the impact of blanket smoking bans in other countries.

Each year a group called Project Censored releases a list it calls "The Top 25 Censored Media Stories". The title is a misnomer, however; the articles weren't censored at all, but "underreported" - meaning that, in the eyes of the judges, the article didn't receive sufficient attention. All of the articles on this year's list were widely reported, many in the mainstream media. The #1 item on the list, for example, was published in the Sunday Times, Harper's Magazine, Mother Jones and Atlantic Journal Constitution, and reportedly "drew more traffic to [the Mother Jones] web site than any other article."

As a reminder that actual media censorship is still a significant problem around the world, I'd like to propose an alternative list:

The Top 25 Acts of Media Censorship, 2002-2003

#1 - The Cuban government jails 75 pro-democracy activists, including 30 journalists, for writing articles that appeared in the foreign press. They receive sentences between 14 and 27 years for "undermining the state's independence."

#2 - Nigeria's Zamfara State issues a fatwa calling for the death of fashion writer Isioma Daniel, after she published an article suggesting the Prophet Muhammed would have approved of the Miss World pageant. The local office of the newspaper This Day, which initially published the article, was subsequently destroyed in riots that left more than 200 dead.

#3 - The Tongan government declares the Times of Tonga newspaper, which is published in New Zealand, to be a prohibited import, for campaigning against the government. Officials claim that allowing the newspaper to be imported would be a human rights violation. King Taufa'ahau Tupou IV later bans possession of the newspaper, and finally even prohibits discussion of the ban.

#4 - The Australian High Court rules that Barron's magazine may be sued in Victoria over an article published in New Jersey. Other Commonwealth nations subsequently consider adopting the decision.

#5 - The Chinese government orders journalists to undergo Communist Party propaganda tests in order to obtain licenses. Unlicensed journalists are not tolerated - for example the 10 photographers beaten by police while attempting to cover an education bureau meeting.

This Associated Press article discusses how the US Department of Justice has been using its increased powers granted under the Patriot Act just after September 11. Suffice to say that the DOJ and state prosecutors managed to get many items that had nothing to do with terrorism but which had been on its wish list for years into the bill, and it is now being used to tap phones, seize assets, and intrude on people's liberties in ways that weren't possible before.

Civil liberties and legal defense groups are bothered by the string of cases, and say the government soon will be routinely using harsh anti-terrorism laws against run-of-the-mill lawbreakers.

"Within six months of passing the Patriot Act, the Justice Department was conducting seminars on how to stretch the new wiretapping provisions to extend them beyond terror cases," said Dan Dodson, a spokesman for the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys. "They say they want the Patriot Act to fight terrorism, then, within six months, they are teaching their people how to use it on ordinary citizens."

This from the New York Times speaks for itself:

WASHINGTON, Sept. 13 – For months, President Bush's advisers have assured a skittish public that law-abiding Americans have no reason to fear the long reach of the antiterrorism law known as the Patriot Act because its most intrusive measures would require a judge's sign-off.

But in a plan announced this week to expand counterterrorism powers, President Bush adopted a very different tack. In a three-point presidential plan that critics are already dubbing Patriot Act II, Mr. Bush is seeking broad new authority to allow federal agents – without the approval of a judge or even a federal prosecutor – to demand private records and compel testimony.

This may not be quite so central to the White Rose agenda. I don’t know. Are more severe punishments part of our beat?

Mr. Bush also wants to expand the use of the death penalty in crimes like terrorist financing, and he wants to make it tougher for defendants in such cases to be freed on bail before trial. These proposals are also sure to prompt sharp debate, even among Republicans.

But this is definitely for us:

Opponents say that the proposal to allow federal agents to issue subpoenas without the approval of a judge or grand jury will significantly expand the law enforcement powers granted by Congress after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. And they say it will also allow the Justice Department – after months of growing friction with some judges – to limit the role of the judiciary still further in terrorism cases.

Indeed, Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, who is sponsoring the measure to broaden the death penalty, said in an interview that he was troubled by the other elements of Mr. Bush's plan. He said he wanted to hold hearings on the president's call for strengthening the Justice Department's subpoena power "because I'm concerned that it may be too sweeping." The no-bail proposal concerns him too, the senator said, because "the Justice Department has gone too far. You have to have a reason to detain."

There's a lot more. My thanks to David Sucher for the email that made sure we noticed this, and which definitely got us noticing it quicker than otherwise.

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.]

White Rose readers might be interested in a few pages I've just put up on my web site:

UK Civil Liberties - New Labour's Record

Typing it up depressed me even more than I expected.

I've tried to double-check everything, if you find any errors of fact please email me and let me know.

There is a good interview with Bruce Schneier in Businessweek, discussing whether tradeoffs of civil liberties for increased security are effective (generally no) and the problems of overreliance on technology rather than common sense. I have written here about Schneier before. Suffice to say he is a very smart guy - a leading expert on electronic security - and it is worth paying attention to what he says.

Good news, although good news about bad news, from Hong Kong:

Hong Kong's chief executive, Tung Chee-hwa, did something yesterday that Chinese Communist leaders never do on the mainland. He deferred to the clearly expressed majority will in Hong Kong and withdrew legislation for a repressive new security law he was trying to impose.

That's paragraph one of the New York Times report. This final paragraph reads very European doesn't it? …

Mr. Tung says he still thinks that new security legislation is needed but is now prepared to wait until there is clearer public support. His plan may be to defuse the issue until after the legislative elections and then try again. Hong Kong's people will not be deceived so easily.

…except that Europeans are probably a bit easier to deceive.

Shami Chakrabarti, the new director of Liberty, is planning a monitoring operation on Britain’s giant retailers. Chakrabarti, formerly a high-flying legal advisor to two home secretaries, takes up her new post today.

Liberty is to set up a unit to monitor the experiments being carried out by various retailers with radio frequency identification technology. M&S and Tesco are pioneering the use of tiny microchips, the size of a grain of sand, which are inserted into the packaging of goods or sown into the labels of clothes.

Chakrabarti believes Britain, already the world leader in the use of CCTV cameras, is set to become the ‘surveillance capital of Europe.’

As from today Liberty will be monitoring the supermarkets and big chain stores. If we think a legal challenge can be mounted to stop their experimentation then we will make it. We will certainly be in touch with the company executives and we will do all in our power to let customers know what is happening. It is up to consumers to decide whether or not they want to boycott a particular store or chain but the companies must be made aware that this is the risk.

There was a White Rose relevant piece by Alasdair Palmer about the DC Stevens case in yesterday's Sunday Telegraph.

The more repulsive the crime, the greater the temptation to weaken the burden on the prosecution to prove its case beyond reasonable doubt. Child abuse - and child pornography cannot be produced without child abuse - is a very repulsive crime. Yet the result of giving in to the temptation to lower the standard of evidence required to convict someone suspected of child abuse is inevitably that innocent people are convicted.

That's good, but I recommend all of it.

For an attack on many of the articles that get cited here, arguing that the US Government's War on Terror is dangerous for civil liberties, see Straight Talk on Homeland Security by Heather Mac Donald in City Journal (lLink from Iain Murray). Penultimate paragraph:

When the War on Terror’s opponents intone, “We need not trade liberty for security,” they are right – but not in the way they think. Contrary to their slogan’s assumption, there is no zero-sum relationship between liberty and security. The government may expand its powers to detect terrorism without diminishing civil liberties one iota, as long as those powers remain subject to traditional restraints: statutory prerequisites for investigative action, judicial review, and political accountability. So far, these conditions have been met.

We here are mostly not opponents of the War on Terror, but we are opponents of it being used as an excuse to expand government power in ways that will then be available to government officials to use across the board.

We agree here that it isn't a zero sum thing between liberty and security, but that's because we believe security is best protected by free people protecting themselves and each other. Some of us might even agree that the government "may" expand is powers with no harm done, but that's hardly the point, is it? "So far, these conditions have been met." And there the disagreement really begins. But that "So far" suggests that we and Heather Mac Donald might in due course all be re-united.

In more traditional police-states, citizens may be blissfully unaware that they have done wrong until they are woken in the wee small hours by an ominous rapping on their front doors. In modern police-state Britain, the knock on the door is to be replaced by the thud on the doormat.

If this report from the UK Times is accurate (and it is just about creepy enough to be true) then it may be time to think about buying a bicycle:

EVEN George Orwell would have choked. Government officials are drawing up plans to fit all cars in Britain with a personalised microchip so that rule-breaking motorists can be prosecuted by computer.

Dubbed the “Spy in the Dashboard” and “the Informer” the chip will automatically report a wide range of offences including speeding, road tax evasion and illegal parking. The first you will know about it is when a summons or a fine lands on your doormat.

The plan, which is being devised by the government, police and other enforcement agencies, would see all private cars monitored by roadside sensors wherever they travelled.

Who the bloody hell are the 'other enforcement agencies'? And the very notion of an informer in every vehicle! Saddam Hussein could only dream about that level of control.

Police working on the “car-tagging” scheme say it would also help to slash car theft and even drug smuggling.

The same old, same old. Every accursed and intrusive state abuse is sold to the public as a cure for crime and 'drug-dealing'. The fact that it still works is proof that we live in the Age of Bovine Stupidity. A media advertising campaign showing seedy drug-dealers and leering child-molesters being rounded up as a result of this technology will have the public begging for a 'spy in the dashboard'.

Having already expressed my doubts about the viability of new government schemes here I should add that the fact that this relies on technology rather than human agency means it just might.

The next step is an electronic device in your car which will immediately detetct any infringement of any regulation, then lock the doors, drive you to a football stadium and shoot you. HMG is reported to be very interested and is launching a feasibility study.

[This item has been cross-posted on Samizdata.]

This has obvious White Rose relevance:

Tony Blair is to announce plans to put up to half a million children deemed at risk of becoming criminals or getting into other trouble on a new computer register.

Teachers, family doctors and other professionals working with youngsters will be asked to name potential troublemakers whose personal details will then be placed on the database.

The new "identification, tracking and referral" system will allow the authorities to share information on vulnerable children, including their potential for criminal activity.

It will be an extension of the child protection register which, at present, is restricted to listing the names and addresses of children who are vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse.

Professionals will be encouraged to include other factors, such as the likelihood of teenage pregnancy or the risk of "social exclusion", in deciding which children should be monitored.

I think the scary thing about this is the combination of the precision and reach of a computer database with the subjectivity of some of the judgements concerning "potential" that are stored on it. Plus: Who gets to look at this database, and what decisions do they make in the light of the opinions collected in it?

The criminal law, in contrast, is (or ought to be) about what you have done, not about what someone merely thinks you might do.

But as so often here, I report, but can only speculate about those implications that we all need to think about. Perhaps others can be more definite.

The BBC reports that US Attorney General John Ashcroft has launched a strident defence of the controversial Patriot Act, saying it was the government's responsibility to defend Americans in any way it could.

Mr Ashcroft highlighted support for the Patriot Act given earlier by members of Congress and the website lists quotations from members of both parties supporting the legislation, almost wholly dating back to October 2001 when it was introduced.

But since then dozens of cities and counties across the country have approved resolutions criticising the Patriot Act and various lawsuits have been brought to declare it unconstitutional.

Even the Republican-led House of Representatives has become involved in recent weeks, striking down "sneak-and-peek" rules which allowed government agents to search private property without telling the owner.

Other controversial areas - such as agents being allowed to scrutinise people's library records without showing what crime they believe could be being committed - still stand despite challenges.

I've just done a posting here using this BBC report, about the Prince William 21st Birthday break-in at Windsor Castle, concerning the matter of who is supposed to watch all the surveillance cameras that the world is now being flooded with.

But another point about that report struck me as also worth commenting on, and in a separate posting. One thing at a time, and all that.

Here's the bit that particularly caught my attention, concerning the report on the incident that has just been published:

The report - by Commander Frank Armstrong of the City of London force – gives 28 recommendations for changes to the way the Royal Family is protected in future.

Among them, it calls for legislation to create a new offence of trespassing on royal or government property.

Now is it just me, or is this not a rather odd thing to recommend? Surely the problem that this "comedian" posed to police that night was not that they didn't have the law on their side to enable them to stop something bad. It was simply that they didn't do the job that the law already gave them ample entitlement to do.

It's extremely common among silly people who know no better, such as voters and politicians, to want to solve every problem that ever happens by suggesting a new law to stop it. I once took part in a vox-pop studio debate of the sort one agrees to be on but would never dream of watching, in which one of my fellow debaters on the subject of bank robbery came within about a quarter of a second of saying, on national television, that there ought to be a law against it. Okay, from the mere public you can maybe expect no better. But when a senior police officer, invited to comment on a security cock-up and suggest lessons to be learned, also reaches for the law, we really are in trouble, it seems to me.

It may be that in this particular case, there really is good reason to think that a "new offence" should indeed be created. But me, I choose to doubt it.

So what? A policeman thinks a new crime should be invented. Why does that matter?

It matters because there is already a Himalayan mountain range of legislation, with tons more pouring forth from Parliaments everywhere, every day, week, month, year.

And a world in which there is so much law that nobody – not even lawyers, let alone policemen, politicians, and certainly not the general public – can possibly be aware of what it all consists of is not a good world to live in. It actually has quite a lot in common with a world with no law at all.

I don't know when it happened, but some years ago I came to two conclusions about my own personal law-abidingness. (1) At any particular moment I am probably always breaking some damn law or other. (2) To hell with it. I still try to be good. But I have given up trying to obey the law.

The trouble starts for me if the powers-that-be, or more likely a power-that-is decide(s) that they (it) want(s) to get me. Suppose I surprise all of us and say something here which really angers the government, or, more likely, some particular powerful individual towards the top end of it. In a world of infinite law, this person can be absolutely confident that a search for a law that I am breaking will turn up something, and maybe a great deal. He may never take it as far as me having to talk my way out of it in a court of law, but he may be able to make a deal of trouble for me nevertheless, just by going through the legal motions and stopping them just before they go public, but not letting me know about that until the last minute.

Remember all those poets and academics who used to annoy the government of the old USSR? What did the government of the USSR do to them? Did it complain about their poems, or have complicated arguments with them about the nuances of how to interpret the Soviet "Constitution"? Did it hell? It just found some law that the poor wretch had been breaking (because everyone broke the law in the old USSR – just to stay alive) and set the legal wheels in motion. I mean, we can't have currency smuggling, now can we? Course not.

That's the world we may find ourselves in quite soon, and I dare say that the experience of not a few persons is that we are already there. It may seem a long argument from a policeman trying to avoid blaming idiot fellow policemen for some policing fiasco and instead blaming the law, to Soviet dissidents, but I hope I have explained that there is a genuine connection here. Discuss.

The government has enthusiastically taken up the cause of introducing more 'flexible' voting methods in order to increase electoral turnout. The fragility of their new experimental systems was brought home to me when my father asked me to witness his postal vote (a requirement that is now being dropped). I wasn't too concerned because he was voting for the Residents Association rather than a political party.

I am not the only one. The e-voting systems have been criticised. Dr Ben Fairweather, Research Fellow at De Montford University, has analysed the local elections and found some disturbing results. These involved eighteen elections and 1.5 million voters.

He said the system used in Shrewsbury and Kerrier, Cornwall adopted a CESG security model that called for candidate codes to be sent to voters by post, as a security precaution. But people could request this information online on the day in violation of this security policy.

In Sheffield matters were worse. Many polling stations were without an Internet connection on polling day. As a result voters could get a vote at a poling station while still being able to vote again online from home.

The good fellow is also concerned about inappropriate influences within the home, and one could point to our more tight-knit communities where vulnerable members could be forced to vote for particular candidates. These changes encourage communalism in voting patterns.

"For one thing how do you know who's in the room with someone when they vote and how can you be sure they are not trying to influence someone's vote?" he asked.

Dr Fairweather's work is here. The Foundation for Information Policy Research made similar criticisms.

So far, none of these elections have been rerun, even though their flaws have been documented.

In an amazingly petty act of vengeful spite, the US Treasury Department is fining a peace protestor $10,000. Faith Fippinger was one of many who went to Iraq to act as a "human shield". She has now been told that her action was in breach of trade sanctions because whilst in Iraq she spent around $200, mainly on food and water. She has also been accused of "providing services" to the Iraqi regime by her presence.

If she can't or won't pay she could face 12 years in jail.

Whether or not you supported the war, the right to protest against it was supposedly one of the things that US citizens had and Iraqi citizens were denied. Now a minor technical breach of sanctions legislation is being used to punish a citizen who dared exercise her civil liberties.

The message from King George's regime is clear: defy us at your peril.

BBC report here

Cross-posted from An It Harm None

An international coalition of 47 civil liberties groups and consumer rights campaigns sent a letter to the European Union today urging rejection of the proposed Intellectual property Enforcement Directive .

The coalition warns that the proposed Directive is overbroad and threatens civil liberties, innovation, and competition policy. It requires EU Member States to criminalize all violations of any intellectual property right that can be tied to any commercial purpose, with penalties to include imprisonment. Andy Müller-Maguhn, a board member of European Digital Rights and speaker for the Chaos Computer Club explains:

If this proposal becomes a reality, major companies from abroad can use 'intellectual property' regulations to gain control over the lives of ordinary European citizens and threaten digital freedoms. Under this proposal, a person's individual liberty to use his own property is replaced with a limited license that can be revoked or its terms changed at any time and for any reason.

Ville Oksanen, a lawyer and Vice Chairman of Electronic Frontier Finland (EFFi) who signed the letter, points out:

Currently EU-Member states are implementing the EU Copyright Directive and the EU Software Patent Directive is next in the line. We should really wait and see what effect these new laws have before adding any new legislation organizational letter. Contrary to what the Enforcement Directive claims, Member States are already obliged by international treaties like TRIPS to protect intellectual property rights.

The letter marked the launch of the Campaign for an Open Digital Environment (CODE) to raise awareness about the IP Enforcement proposal’s threat to consumer rights and market competition.

The attitude of most people like me, who live in London, is that civil liberties are only of interest at present if they will blow very cold air at you. Nevertheless, I can just about sit long enough next my computer (equals fan heater) to tell you that these people ("Unpersons - a British group-blog focusing primarily on UK, EU and Anglosphere affairs from a free-market laissez faire perspective" – they got started last month) seem like they are going to be good and of interest on the civil liberties front. They have a "civil liberties" category, and if you click on that you get good stuff, although of course everything they say won't suit everyone here (e.g. guns etc.).

Their latest is a discussion of how a DNA database of spit spat at British Railway staff is being talked about.

"Ashcroft is on a binge", says South Knox Bubba.

This "Victory Act" (who comes up with this stuff? is it induced by copious applications of Crisco to the brain?) slipped through the media's All Kobe All Arnold All The Time cracks, as did Herr Ashcroft's new sentencing guidelines directives for prosecutors.

Crisco? Kobe? Arnold I've heard of. And Ashcroft, of course. The links, both to TalkLeft, are both worth following.

I'm telling you, this chipping away at the Constitution and civil liberties is going to cost the GOP some votes.

And then there's another link to this guy (a blogspotter) and you have to scroll down to the bits that matter, both called "Will it ever stop?" and dated Wed Aug 6 and Fri Aug 8.

"Iain Murray has more on an on-going natural justice train-wreck: basically, the government has found it can't define abuse precisely enough for legislative purposes, so, in the words of the head of the Family Planning association, they're going to criminalise

"behaviour [ defined so broadly that it] could include common petting activities such as kissing and touching, through to full sexual intercourse.... This kind of sexual exploration is completely normal and an important part of adolescent development. If the bill is passed without any amendments, such activity could carry a prison sentence of up to five years."". I.e. any "sexual activity" by anyone under 16, even with their peers, is illegal.

""The criminal law has a very poor record for influencing consenting sexual behaviour," she said. "The bill devalues true abuse from desired sexual activity by failing to distinguish the two."

The Home Office accepted Ms Weyman's interpretation of the bill, but said there was no plan to change it."

Now, as I say, I'm not normally paranoid. But this strikes me as a gift to a regime, sorry, government ("regime" came automatically, I'm not sure why) that wants to suppress dissent. A law that would automatically criminalise the normal behaviour of a government's opponents (as well, of course, of its own offspring) is an open invitation to abuse.

Perhaps jury nullification (a refusal to convict) might save kids maliciously prosecuted because of who their parents were, but any offenses sent to judge-only courts (coming to a mistrial near you soon....) would presumably lead to convictions, even with minimal sentences. And then a life-sentence of a "sex offender" registration.

Who'd oppose a government when they have a perfectly legal means to destroy your children's lives? What an incredibly stupid (and pernicious) idea.

This post by The Philosophical Cowboy isn't exactly on the standard issues of White Rose, but does have a civil liberties fringe - basically, it appears we might be in for a resurgance of arguments for high taxes, based on alleged "negative externalities" of earning more money.

The solution? A 30% marginal tax rate to penalise the "pollution" involved, and a 30% additional tax to, well, just encourage people to take time off.

It's worth reading for more background, and (a lot more objections), but I think this is the key objection that can be raised, and should be if this idea gets more circulation:

"But the main issue is a moral one. Let us stipulate that there are negative externalities from me working an extra 10 hours a week - I make X number of people feel bad, and I also substitute some leisure time I'd probably have rather not given up. So what?

Lots of rights have the potential for negative externalities. Without even being nasty, my use of my right to free speech can see myriads of your pleasing illusions shattered, destroying your happiness. I can act in innumberable ways that can make you uncomfortable or unhappy - I have a moral obligation to be a good neighbour, but the right not to (within obvious limits); I can drive you out of business by building a better mousetrap; my less reputable mates can date your daughter or woo away your significant other; I can advocate political positions you consider reprehensible (just ask me). And whilst I probably wouldn't do most of those, I pretty much have the right to, and the government doesn't get to stop me just because it would make you sad.

So why do you get to take 30% of my income just because me exercising my right to work as and where I can find useful things to do, just because it makes you want to work harder? There are certain "negative externalities" that shouldn't be compared to things like pumping oil into a river, noise next door, etc - they're not even the same ball game.

I think it's fair to say (correct me if I'm wrong) you get to complain about a negative externality if it reduces the value of your property or that you extract from some right of yours. But just because me working harder can cause you to value your leisure less, doesn't mean you should tax me - after all, on that rational, Martin Luther should have been hit with a 90% tax to pay for the Protestant work ethic..."

Steven Chapman is the sort of blogger whom White Rose readers ought to keep on their list of haunts. He has White-Rose-relevant material here about how war erodes civil liberties, even in the face of the strongest written constitutions, and here about car surveillance via road pricing, with a link to this Observer story.

SFGate.com reports on a legal challenge to the Patriot Act:

Civil rights lawyers filed a challenge Tuesday to a section of the federal Patriot Act that makes it illegal to provide "expert advice and assistance" to groups with alleged links to terrorists.

The ban is unconstitutionally vague and should be struck down, the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights argued in a motion filed in federal court.

I found this on Gay.com UK, so the language may be a bit distorted (e.g the phrase 'the Pope's anti-gay document...) but still worth a post:

The Irish Council for Civil Liberties says it will prosecute any priests found distributing or quoting the Pope’s anti-gay document for hate crimes.

Any clergy found handling the 12-page document, released last week as a statement of the Catholic Church’s response to gay marriages, will face charges under the country’s hatred legislation reports suggest.

Although the document itself is not illegal, it could lead to an increase in hatred, the Council said, and by stirring up hatred in the parish, the clergy could face jail terms of six months.

According to their website the Irish Council for Civil Liberties is an independent governmental organisation promoting and defending human rights and civil liberties.

Update: Here is the same news from Irish Times quoting Ms Aisling Reidy, director of the ICCL:

The document itself may not violate the Act, but if you were to use the document to say that gays are evil, it is likely to give rise to hatred, which is against the Act. The wording is very strong and certainly goes against the spirit of the legislation.

Just following up on what I was saying this morning on the dangers of anti-terrorism laws being applied to situations that do not involve terrorism, Eugene Volokh provides an example of the way in which too broadly worded anti-terrorism laws can be misused. A prosecuter in North Carolina has charged someone who has been manufacturing methamphetamine with two counts of "manufacturing a nuclear or chemical weapon", because the definition of chemical weapons under the law is

any substance that is designed or has the capability to cause death or serious injury and . . . is or contains toxic or poisonous chemicals or their immediate precursors

I suppose we can observe that this is another example of the general way in which people's rights and liberties tend to get brushed aside as part of the war on drugs, too.

Instapundit links to this story, and quotes a fellow lawyer who alerted him to it that it shows you shouldn't automatically disbelieve a client who says he doesn't know how some porn found its way onto his hard drive.

A man accused of storing child pornography on his computer has been cleared after it emerged that his computer had been infected by a Trojan horse, which was responsible for transferring the images onto his PC.

[XXXX XXXX] … was taken into custody last October after police with a search warrant raided his house. He then spent a night in a police cell, nine days in Exeter prison and three months in a bail hostel. During this time, his ex-wife won custody of his seven year old daughter and possession of his house.

In a world where simply being charged with a crime causes millions to presume some degree of guilt, and gives personal enemies their chance straight away to move in for the kill by making use of other bits of the legal system, then the decision merely to prosecute becomes a sentence in its own right.

Virginia Postrel has a small piece on her blog about the civil liberties implications of the war on terror. (She also links to this Reason article by Jacob Sullum). Essentially her point is that if you give the authorities arbitrary and unaccountable powers of arrest (or to violate civil liberties in other ways) in order to fight terrorism, then eventually these powers are going to be used on other people as well, particularly the opponents of whoever is in power. Therefore, accountability and openness is crucial.

This Telegraph piece by John Mortimer is a characteristic mixture of good ideas and bad ideas, of humbug and whatever is the opposite of humbug. I'm sure that all White Rose readers would (a) agree with that characterisation, but (b) argue fiercely about which bit is humbug and which not. Which is the whole idea of this blog. Nevertheless I'd file it under White-Rose-relevant, so here are a few sample paragraphs to make that point:

So, through much of my life, I have witnessed what seemed to be a slow but measurable improvement in the administration of the law. That improvement was to continue, strangely enough, only until the advent of a Labour Government that seemed to have been born without a single civil libertarian instinct.

So now jury trials are to be diminished, previous convictions will be allowed in evidence so defendants will be convicted on what they did in the past, the presumption of innocence has been severely dented and the great principle that a guilty act must contain a guilty intention will be held not to apply in rape cases.

The right to habeas corpus has been denied in certain cases, where suspects may now be held in prison without the hope of trial or charges levelled against them. Just as shamefully, Tony Blair seems about to agree that British subjects should be subjected to what is a parody of a fair trial in Guantánamo Bay. Our great constitutional liberties, struggled for down the centuries, are now being denied.

The righteous wrath of Rumpole will be raised by the intention of the Home Secretary to remove sentencing from judges and hand it over to the vote-hungry hands of politicians anxious, as judges are not, to score political points and please the newspapers.

And so on and so forth. Read at will. Agree, and disagree.

The US Justice Department's internal watchdog said on Monday that it had demanded investigations into nearly three dozen credible complaints of abuses committed in the implementation of the controversial USA Patriot Act.

The alleged abuses, committed mostly against Muslim suspects rounded up as part of the war on terrorism, ranged from beatings to threats, as well as one allegation that FBI agents planted evidence. The inspector-general's office said that it had received more than 1,000 complaints of civil rights violations under the Patriot Act in the six months ending June 15; 34 cases were deemed serious and credible enough to warrant investigations.

34 out of 1000. That's not bad. But that's only the complaints. How many other cases has the Patriot Act played a part in? Regardless, we are left with 34 cases of abuse of civil rights. It is easy to say that 1 case is too many, but that only leads to anarchy. Mistakes will be made because humans are involved, so we must accept 1 case or abandon laws all together. I'm not ready to do that just yet.

So the question becomes, are 34 cases worth it? To answer that, we must determine the benefits. What are we getting out of the Patriot act? 34 cases worth of protection? I don't know. It is the inherent flaw of laws. When they're working, we don't see the benefits. Is terrorism down? It seems like it. Is it because of the Patriot Act? I somehow doubt it.

So what benefits have we gotten from the Patriot Act? It would seem very few. So are the 34 cases worth it? If the benefits are small, it would seem not. However, the fact that we have an watchdog groups aimed directy at this gives some hope. The fact that this report was issued proves that things aren't nearly as bad as some would have us believe. We need to keep an eye on the Patriot Act and push to end it when it expires, but remember that we do need laws. Finding the balance between safety and liberty is a never ending task but the Patriot Act is on the wrong side of it.

Here's a link to an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about the War on Terror.

So you think there's no chance that you'd be quizzed by FBI agents about what you read or who you pal around with?

Well, just ask Atlantan Marc Shultz, who works in an Atlanta bookstore. According to an account Shultz wrote in Creative Loafing, he was interrogated by two FBI agents because he'd been reported as reading something suspicious in a coffee shop.

That suspicious something was an article by Hal Crowther, "Weapons of Mass Stupidity," in a Tampa alternative newsweekly. The Crowther piece is a scathing criticism of corporate media, such as Fox News, in the post-Sept. 11 environment.

Atlanta FBI spokesman Joe Paris wouldn't comment on the Shultz story or even confirm it. He merely said, "We have an obligation to follow up on any information we get of a terrorist-type nature."
A terrorist-type nature?

There's an important principle involved here. Well, plenty of principles, but one in particular that strikes me. It's the combination of individuals being allowed – and I'm guessing: encouraged – to inform the authorities of their suspicions, and the obligation – that's the word FBI man Paris uses: obligation – to investigate the matter. This means that person X who has, for some reason of his own, taken a dislike to person Y can invent some plausible suspicions about Y and phone them in, and the powers that be have to be all over Y with their investigations.

Practised political stirrers aren't going to be too bothered, and may even rather enjoy it. Either way they will exploit it all for the publicity and the fifteen minutes of fame, the way this Marc Shultz guy seems to be doing, and good for him. But for other less public souls, this could surely be very bad.

I mustn't exaggerate, but this is the sort of thing that happened in Stalin's Russia, in logical structure even if not remotely as bad in scale or intensity. In place of a decade in an arctic camp ending in premature death, substitute a week or two of anxieties at the hands of the government, and maybe a rather scary legal bill because you figured, best let my lawyer keep track of all this.

The point is the authorities not having any power to drop the matter, but being obligated to go through the motions demanded. To begin with, the policemen doing this are only doing it because they have to. But what we are liable to end up with is an altogether different kind of policeman, the kind of policeman who really likes these scenarios, who truly believes that scaring regular citizens half to death is the heart and soul of good government.

The war against Canadian drugs has caused the RCMP in Newfoundland to want to make the purchasers of cellphones present ID, including a photo, when they buy them.

Sgt. Greg Smith says officers have a hard time investigating some drug dealers because they can buy many phones and remain anonymous.

Whatever next? Buying a phone without being anyone in particular. It has to stop.

One recent investigation lasted more than five months and cost more than $100,000. Police say it was because the suspect used 11 different phones, none of which was in his name.

The police want to be able to monitor the calls and find out who's on them. That's easier when people are using regular telephones that have known owners and fixed addresses.

Stores don't require the name of a cellphone purchaser.

Retailers say they have no reason not to sell phones to anyone who can afford one, and they're under no obligation to ask for identification.

Funny how tradesmen threatened with a change in the law just announce that the existing law is whatever it is, as if that is, in and of itself, an argument for it to stay like that. They point out that as the law stands they're not breaking it, so they're law abiding, so … well, so, they ought to be able to carry on doing like they always have, what with them being so law abiding and all. It's almost as if they think that no one's allowed to change a law until the existing one is being universally broken. Idiots.

White Rose seems to have missed this (from the BBC on Wednesday):

A group of peace protesters has launched legal proceedings against Gloucestershire police, claiming they used anti-terrorism laws to prevent demonstrations against the war in Iraq.

The complaints centre on RAF Fairford, where American B-52 bombers were based during the conflict.

None of the protesters who demonstrated at the airbase were charged with terrorism offences but they say their human rights were breached.

The pressure group Liberty is calling for an inquiry into the use of section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 at the base.

Officers were granted powers under the legislation to stop and search vehicles and pedestrians in the area near the base between 7 March and 27 April.

But they were obviously all really dangerous people, yes? Absolutely.

One of the people the group says was stopped under the Terrorism act was 11-year-old Isabelle Ellis-Cockcroft, whose father David Cockcroft is taking legal action claiming a breach of human rights.

Isabelle told the BBC: "We were just walking along the road and they stopped us. I did not have a full body search because there was no woman officer there.

"They asked what was in our pockets, wrote down our descriptions and checked a backpack and a bike we had with us.

"They said they were stopping us under the Terrorism Act, but I'm not a terrorist."

I guess you just can't be too careful.

Don't get me wrong. I personally don't care at all for peaceniks, and I especially dislike them when they have hyphenated surnames. Isabelle Ellis-Cockcroft should be swooning over plasticated pop musicians in preparation for doing It-Girl Studies at Roedean, not demo-ing outside an airbase.

But I will defend the right of hyphenated peaceniks to demonstrate without being arrested as terrorists to the point of putting up a posting about it on White Rose.

Thanks to Chris R. Tame and the Libertarian Alliance Forum for flagging up the story.

This New York Times story is worth a look. It deals with activities of something called the Temporary State Commission on Lobbying, who have been, so the New York Civil Liberties Union says, overdoing it in their investigation of those wanting to soften the state's current drug laws.

In a letter sent today to the Temporary State Commission on Lobbying, the civil liberties group said the commission had been overly aggressive in its inquiry into the activists' public rallies and broadcasts. It called them core First Amendment activities that were not subject to lobbying regulation.

In addition, civil liberties officials said the commission had been confrontational in its inquiry and needed to distinguish between the scrutiny of citizens who came forward to speak their minds and paid, professional lobbyists, or those who spent at least $2,000 to directly communicate with legislators.

Yes, well, they pass a law, and then distinctions of that sort – which were, you know, merely intended, but not actually spelt out in the law – have a way of getting lost.

I wonder what "Temporary" means in this connection.

Tomorrow is apparently ID-Day. Big Blunkett is expected to announce plans for compulsory National Identity Cards that will turn the civil liberties clock back fifty years.

To those who say "the innocent have nothing to fear", look at this Liberty report .

It tells how during the Iraq conflict the Terrorism Act 2000 was systematically used to harass protestors at RAF Fairford, Gloucestershire and deny them their civil liberties including freedom of movement and the right to peaceful protest. Police even served an anti-terrorism order on an eleven year old girl!

How much worse will it get once everyone is neatly filed, stamped and indexed?

Cross-posted from An It Harm None

I second Brian's post on the same topic. The Evening Standard reports that one in 30 Britons now has their DNA stored on a national database of genetic fingerprints. The database reached the two million mark today, and is one of the world's largest. It is used to help solve an average of 15 murders and 31 rapes each month.

The government is trying to make it easier to add DNA entries to the database. A law before Parliament would allow samples to be stored from people when they are arrested and retained regardless of whether they are convicted or not... Have a brush with the law and you are on file for life. Currently a sample can be stored only if a person is charged.

The move is expected to dramatically increase the number of samples stored but has led to claims from civil liberties groups and the Liberal Democrats that the system is being abused by the government.

Home Office Minister Hazel Blears said that only criminals should be worried by the scale of the database.

Law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear from the retention of DNA samples.

Yes, we do.

The State is not your friend

The House of Lords has thrown out Big Blunkett's proposals to limit the right to trial by jury. They voted 210 to 136 to reject the proposals in the government's Criminal Justice Bill.

The government now has to decide whether to try and force their plans through, accept the Lords' amendment or drop the entire Bill.

Downing Street had suggested earlier that the entire Bill might be dropped.

We can but hope.

Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe

MPs are planning to introduce a new law specifically to allow them to remove a protester who has been living outside the House of Commons for more than two years. With all previous attempts to remove Mr Haw having failed - a High Court judge last year ruled that his protest was an expression of freedom of speech as defined by the European convention on human rights - the MPs are now recommending passing a special law which would ban protesters from permanently demonstrating outside Parliament without permission. The move has, however, been labelled "draconian" by civil rights groups.

Some good news for once:

The House of Lords has supported repeal of Clause 28 of the local Government Act. An amendment seen by many as an attempt to preserve Clause 28 was defeated by 50 votes.

In theory Clause 28 doesn't discriminate against homosexuals, merely against using public money to "promote" homosexuality. In practice this wide ranging and ill-defined prohibition has resulted in a climate where low-level institutional discrimination has become commonplace. Decent people have been forced to discriminate through fear of breaching Clause 28.

Clause 28 was introduced by the Thatcher government in 1988. It was a massive attack on the civil liberties of a significant minority of British citizens and has been the jewel in the crown of British homophobes. The fact that a single group was specifically targeted in this way meant that apart from anything else it was simply bad legislation.

Good riddance.

Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe

Ian Boys of Dissident UK points out that essential civil liberties are collateral damage in the war against terrorism

For better or for worse the war against terrorism is Britain's war too: we sent a few thousand soldiers to Afghanistan and made our political support for President Bush quite clear. Now it has come back to haunt us: nine of our citizens are held incommunicado in Guantanamo Bay, together with several more from the Commonwealth. We do at least know who and where they are, even if we do not know why they are being held. Their families cannot visit them and they cannot speak to outside lawyers. Their status has been determined by the US Secretary of Defence and the only lawyers they will be allowed are US military officers: it has been suggested that their conversations even with these will be overheard. The same camp holds children as young as 13, while 16-year olds are mixed in with the adult detainees.

Imagine that Argentina's Junta of the 1980's or today's Iran were holding these 680-odd detainees, including nine Britons. The outcry would be phenomenal. There would be talk of sanctions at the very least.

Yet these are actually the 'lucky few' among the hundreds detained by the USA. Many many more have disappeared. Let's look at that word - reminiscent of the dictatorships of the 1960's and 70's. Do I mean that they have been murdered? No, probably not. Do I mean that they have been tortured? Yes - whether outright physical pressure or just being held in a steel container at Bagram airbase in the blazing sun. Do I mean that they have vanished, held in some solitary hell-hole? Most certainly.

Sir John Stevens, head of the Metropolitan Police, has supported removing the automatic right to trial by jury in some serious cases.

In a speech he argued that the move was necessary to fight organised crime by preventing "jury nobbling". BBC report here.

If juries are in danger then it is the job of the police to protect them - not throw out a fundamental part of our constitution because it is inconvenient and expensive.

To be fair Stevens did say that the restriction to trial by jury - proposed in Big Blunkett's discredited Criminal "Justice" Act - should be limited to special cases and determined by a judge. However any erosion of this basic Magna Carta right is unacceptable. This proposal is akin to saying "we already know you're guilty so we won't give you the same rights as anyone else."

Remember how door-to-door DNA testing was initially introduced for "special cases" only? Now any time there is a serious crime police roam the neighbourhood asking innocent citizens to "volunteer" a DNA sample.

Special cases have a tendency to become commonplace.

Partially cross-posted to The Chestnut Tree Cafe.

Jason and stuff has a brief but relevant pointer to the draft bill on Civil Contingencies:

The definition of emergency is, it seems, quite broad. It doesn’t appear to define what scale of emergency is “major” enough to require emergency powers, nor allow for less extreme emergencies to trigger less extreme powers.

The measures that introduce those emergency powers are not subject to being suspended or struck down by the courts under the Human Rights Act. Parliament “has no role in confirming or approving” a state of emergency - it can be proclaimed by the Queen, or ordered by a Secretary of State, and then Parliament just has to be told about it. And those emergency powers, incidentally, appear to be a little scary - they may “make any provision of any kind that could be made by Act of Parliament or by the exercise of Royal Prerogative”, with a few restrictions (no conscription, no banning strikes, no creating of offences punishable by more than 3 months in jail or without trail).

Jason hopes that things will improve from the draft version, especially if we pester them...

I'm no China hand, but this (Headline: "Bill to Curb Hong Kong Civil Liberties Is Shelved – Experts: Move may be a signal the territory's leader is in trouble") sounds like good news:

Hong Kong - One week after half a millon people marched through this city's sweltering streets to protest the government's efforts to impose sweeping anti-subversion legislation widely seen as a threat to civil liberties, the territory's leader abruptly decided to shelve the bill.

An opinion piece about the identity cards news in Telegraph is yet again explaining what is wrong with Blunkett's argument. Basically, each of the claims made by the Home Secretary in support of his pet scheme is wrong.

1. First, Mr Blunkett says that there is strong public support for the idea. In fact, the Home Office's recent consultation exercise focused on the concept of an entitlement card, a very different prospect. (Also, according to this Out-law article, the goverment has admited that the public opposes the ID card scheme.)

2. The Home Secretary goes on to argue ID cards will help fight crime. This is one of those assertions that is forever being made, but hardly ever substantiated... The public mood is said to have changed since September 11, 2001, but no one has explained - or even seriously tried to explain - how ID cards would have thwarted those bombers, many of whom died in possession of forged papers.

3. Nor, by the way, are ID cards a solution to illegal immigration. The root of the asylum problem is not that we cannot find clandestine entrants, but that we never enforce their deportation.

4. More faulty still is Mr Blunkett's central proposition, as set out in a letter to his Cabinet colleagues: "The argument that identity cards will inhibit our freedom is wrong. We are strengthened in our liberty if our identity is protected from theft; if we are able to access the services we are entitled to; and if our community is better protected from terrorists." In an appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell describes how a concept can be traduced if the words used to express it lose their meaning. The example he gives, uncannily, is the word "free". Now here is Mr Blunkett using "freedom" to mean more state control.

5. Any doubts as to the wisdom of the scheme must surely be removed by the Home Secretary's final argument in its favour: that we are "out of kilter with Europe". Indeed we are, thank heaven. Policemen in Britain are seen as citizens in uniform, not agents of the government.

The most worrying is Blunkett's spin on the concept of freedom. In his view we are strengthened in our liberty if our identity is protected from theft; if we are able to access the services we are entitled to; and if our community is better protected from terrorists. This is vaguely based on the distinction between negative and positive liberty, which are not merely two distinct kinds of liberty; they can be seen as rival, incompatible interpretations of a single political ideal.

Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints. One has negative liberty to the extent that actions are available to one in this negative sense. Positive liberty is the possibility of acting - or the fact of acting - in such a way as to take control of one's life and realize one's fundamental purposes. While negative liberty is usually attributed to individual agents, positive liberty is sometimes attributed to collectivities, or to individuals considered primarily as members of given collectivities.

Blunkett and his New Labour chums are classic and rather unexceptional anti-liberals. I use the term liberal in its original meaning, based on negative definition of liberty and claiming that in order to protect individual liberty one should place strong limitations on the activities of the state. In Blunkett's mind, the pursuit of liberty (whether of the individual or of the collectivity) requires state intervention, which, by definition, is not contradictory with limitations on personal freedom. As a result, the protests of civil liberties groups do not make sense to him.

The concept of freedom as being unprevented from doing whatever one might desire to do is alien to him. According to Isaiah Berlin the defender of positive freedom will take an additional step that consists in conceiving of the self as wider than the individual and as represented by an organic social whole - “a tribe, a race, a church, a state, the great society of the living and the dead and the yet unborn”. The true interests of the individual are to be identified with the interests of this whole, and individuals can and should be coerced into fulfilling these interests, for they would not resist coercion if they were as rational and wise as their coercers.

I will not grant Blunkett's social and political philosophy such level of 'sophistication'. I will say that his are the simple and toxic insticts of a collectivist and a statist and that those protesting policies based on them will have their words muffled by the Big Blunkett.

Having been published last month, this article, in blogosphere terms, is verging on the archaeological but it is well worth a delve into the archives for a sobering illustration of just how despotic and deranged our ruling classes have become.

Not content with having turned our justice system into a playground for victimologists, parasites and professional race-baiters, the Home Office is now preparing the ground for an arbitrary police-state:

The government’s war against men is now plumbing ever more astonishing depths. On Radio Four’s Today programme yesterday, the Home Secretary David Blunkett could scarcely wait to boast of new proposals to deal with domestic violence.

Anyone truly concerned with civil liberties could not fail to have been appalled by Mr Blunkett’s comments. The problem was, he enthusiastically explained, that at present ‘you have to get someone through court’ before a domestic violence suspect can be restrained.

So his solution is to restrain them before they even get to court. In other words, he wants action taken against a man on the basis of an unproven allegation by a woman– made under the protection of anonymity, to boot. So much for this Home Secretary’s understanding of the presumption of innocence, the meaning of justice and the necessity for a trial of the facts.

The article deserves to be read in it entirety in order to understand the extent to which the Home Office has deliberately ignored or manipulated statistical data in order to justify their insistence that male violence in the home is far worse and far more common than it actually is. Another case of tailoring the data to fit the political agenda.

These wicked and spiteful proposals are not on the books yet but they are clearly on the drawing board and, as per usual, it is only a matter of time before they are enacted thus ending the protection of the law for every man in this country.

The scope for abuse of powers like this is simply enormous and any case of abuse will lead to a man losing his home, access to his children and possibly even his livelihood all on the basis of an unproven and unanswerable allegation.

The damage this will cause to families and the fabric of society remains to be seen but, tragically, it will be seen thanks to a regime which is deeply in thrall to dangerously extremist femininst ideologues and which has now run out of easy targets.

Andy Duncan may take up smoking again...

The UK government's chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, has claimed that outlawing smoking in bars, pubs, clubs, restaurants and at work would dramatically reduce levels of lung cancer, and other lung diseases, caused by passive smoking. It seems the push is on, by the UK do-gooding society, to follow the example recently set by Michael Bloomberg, in New York.

Significantly, Sir Liam cited a recent government report, which claimed that 88% of people were in favour of smoking restrictions in restaurants. He obviously knows where to hit a government hard, especially one with no other principles than those dictated to it by opinion poll.

No doubt the UK government's response will be to say, at first, that it has no plans to impose a public area smoking ban. Then it will say if private businesses fail to co-operate with a 'voluntary' ban, it will be 'forced' to take the necessary action to impose one, and then eventually, it will 'regretfully' impose the ban, if the appropriate opinion polls tell it to.

I am non-smoker myself, having taken seven New Year Eves to finally give the filthy weed up, but I am with South Oxfordshire's very own TV celebrity chef on this one; Antony Worrall Thompson said on Channel 4 News last night:

I believe in smoking and non-smoking areas. If you don't like a place because people are smoking don't go in.

No doubt one day smoking will be banned completely in the UK, if these do-gooders keep up their do-gooding work, even in the privacy of your own home. The fact that people have to die of something, eventually, seems to have fully escaped them.

On the day they do successfully get smoking fully banned, thereby creating an enormous black market and making it even more sexually attractive to teenagers causing them to start up in the first place, is the day I will light up again. I am not looking forward to smoking Golden Virginia roll-ups again, but if it is in the cause of freedom, and helps the US economy to boot, so be it!

Cross-posted from Samizdata.net

UK Chief Medical Officer Sir Liam Donaldson has called for smoking to be banned in public places including bars and restaurants. The Department of Health has said that there are no plans to implement this but are considering the proposal.

Smoking is unpleasant and dangerous, it is sensible to encourage people to give up. However the proposed ban goes too far. The individual should retain the right to choose.

It would be acceptable to ban smoking in genuinely public places such as railway waiting rooms. However bars, clubs and restaurants are simply private leisure businesses which the public can choose whether or not to enter. Many of these would undoubtedly gain customers through choosing to provide non-smoking areas or choosing to ban smoking on their premises whilst others allow it. That would provide customers with increased choice.

This proposal would set a dangerous precedent. In a free society the role of government should be education and regulation, not prohibition.

Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe

This site, MagnaCartaPlus, looks like it could be very useful to the sort of people who read this, and for that matter who write for this.

Mission statement

The purpose of this site is to promote civil liberties and to provide information in pursuit of that objective. It is a watch on any attempts by governments to reduce or interfere with civil liberties and freedoms.

Objectives

1. To make British citizens and the international community aware factually of the content of recent repressive legislation passed by the British Parliament and the effect it is having or will have on the lives, businesses and rights of British citizens and those of their descendents using every legally available means of publicity, including, inter alia, the Internet, international, national and local newspapers and periodicals, television networks and radio stations.

2. To illustrate through the use of history and the identification of patterns the effect that repressive legislation developed in Britain (and other pioneering countries) is having or could have globally and to welcome and publish comments and observations from interested people worldwide.

I'm one of life's intellectual butterflies; not one of its worker ants. So I'm not going to trawl chew through this site and then tell you whether I think it is really as good as it says it is trying to be. Suffice it to say that this page, entitled An overview of Civil Liberties legislation since 1900, which was the page I first got to (by typing "UK" "Civil Liberties" into Google) certainly seems to live up to the promises. Students of British civil-liberties-hostile legislation will find a blow-by-blow account of all the recent legislation, together with links to more detailed analysis of each Act. It's not a blog. Sorry. This man is not chattering away three times a day, he's carving his truths into stone tablets.

The only criticism of Matthew Robb I can come up with in twenty minutes – he seems to be the guy doing most of this – is that despite his best efforts he sometimes muddles the subject of "Civil Liberties" with that of "Civil Liberties in the UK". That trifling complaint aside, this looks like an excellent resource.

But as I said, I'm only a butterfly, and if some of our worker ant contributors and/or commenters were to take a look … If it looks the part, then maybe a permanent mention of and link to it could be put here, somewhere.

When Hong Kong was handed over to Communist China by the British state, to much joy and acclamation by credulous Chinese and Gweilos alike, the totalitarian gerontocracy in Peking pronounced soothingly that Hong Hong would retain its relatively liberal order under a doctrine 'One nation, two systems'.

Tens of thousands of people have marched in protest at a planned anti-subversion law aimed at an EU style 'harmonizing' of Hong Kong law with that of the rest of Communist China. One nation, one system it would seem.

...the government is pushing through the national-security legislation, known as the "Article 23" measures, too quickly, and without enough public debate. The proposal is in many ways an attempt to bring Hong Kong's laws regarding subversion, treason, sedition and the theft of "state secrets" in line with China's.

Well it comes as no surprise to me that these patent lies only took six years to be revealed. I look forward to hearing the people who rejoiced at the surrender of Hong Kong's people to China recanting their folly. I am not holding my breath however.

The Chinese way of dealing with effective protests

(WSJ link via Combustable Boy)

The Guardian has reported on the latest developments in Money Laundering. This is the process whereby you have to prove your identity in order to open a bank account and shows that your money has not been received from an illicit source. Under the Money Laundering rules, enthusiastically expanded by the Financial Services Authority, this process is named as "know your customer".

This is an example of where the rules provide authority for a particular group, cashiers, who proceed, in certain cases, to abuse it without any form of accountability. It would appear that bank staff have been demanding loudly for proof of identity and where the customer received their cash or cheque. Understandably, the customer finds this distasteful and intrusive.
However, the FSA states that it is only implementing the rules set by Her Majesty's Government and the European Union.

The other intrusion into the financial privacy of the citizen involves the notification of any transaction above £10,700 in a suspicious activity report to the National Criminal Intelligence Service. There are an expected 100,000 SARs anticipated this year "from banks, financial advisers, estate agents, lawyers, accountants, jewellers and high value car dealers". New rules on house purchase have resulted in deposits above £10,700, paid in cash, being sent for investigation as a SAR. Most of these SARs will not be examined because the reporting system is overwhelmed and understaffed. There are perverse consequences:

Fraud experts such as Liesel Annible of accountants Bentley Jennison, who is UK president of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, believes the system can actually help criminals.

"What does NCIS do with all these reports? Firms are now disclosing so much because of the fear of prosecution that there is a danger of serious infringements being hidden by and lost under the noise of all the minor problems and unfounded suspicions. All these SARs just gum up the works - the vast majority are just stored", she says.

One enters a strange world where the Royal Bank of Scotland can be fined £750,000 for breaching these strict rules even though no evidence of money laundering was ever found; and where rules for identity are enforced whilst money laundering often takes place elsewhere. The final consequence of these rules is that those who are unable to provide proof, especially the poor, find that they have an additional hurdle to overcome if they wish to use the financial infrastructure within the United Kingdom.

There are a number of indications from this article that the process of subcontracting the enforcement of regulation to private sector bodies results in unaccountable staff intruding upon the financial privacy of the ordinary citizen. A more positive note is that, where the citizen finds that his expectations of certain freedoms are abrogated, the response is anger rather than apathy.

The money laundering rules have perverse consequences and demonstrate that the financial privacy enjoyed by the British has been sacrificed to observe a set of regulations that have not worked.

Another opinion piece by Stephen Robinson in the Telegraph, this time about John Wadham who resigned this week as director of the human rights group Liberty. He salutes him for his efforts at Liberty:

Mr Wadham argues that the threat posed by the state to individual liberty transcends political allegiance, so he worked hard to make Liberty less of a sectarian pressure group of the Left since his appointment as director eight years ago. He has been a good friend to the Telegraph's Free Country campaign, dismissing the protests of some of his allies on the Left, who would prefer to exclude any conservative voice from the debate about the state and individual liberty. Thanks to him, the Telegraph has been welcomed at Liberty conferences to speak out on issues such as foxhunting and gun ownership.

This is a good sign. White Rose has been set in recognition of the need to address civil liberties across the widest political spectrum. As long as the common ground is the concern about the state and its impact on invidual liberty, we welcome those with different political opinions. We also add our voice to that of Stephen Robinson:

It would be much better if an independent or conservative figure could emerge and to make the point that individual liberty cannot be protected so long as it is popularly understood to be a concern only of the Left.

A dispiriting reading by Stephen Robinson in yesterday's Telegraph:

To mark Orwell's birthday, I rang around some of the people who have featured in The Daily Telegraph's Free Country campaign since we launched it two years ago. It seemed a good moment to conduct a sort of "freedom audit" and gauge if those who seek to stem the tide of government encroachment on our liberties are managing to hold the line. It was a depressing experience.

[...]

At the beginning of last year, letters and e-mails began pouring in from unpaid parish councillors around England, enraged at being required to sign up to a new Whitehall Code of Conduct and declare all their business dealings. It is when considering the "best practices" aspects of New Labour's "modernising agenda" that you pass through the looking glass into a world far weirder than anything Orwell could have imagined.

For the list of individual cases the Telegraph Free Country campaign has publicised or was involved in read the whole article.

Australia has a federal form of government, and there is a division of power between the Federal Government and the various state governments. As in the US, security issues are dealt with federally, while day to day matters of law and order are dealt with at a state level.

The agency which the Australian government uses for internal security in Australia is the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO).

In the wake of the Bali bombing, which deeply affected Australia, the government has been trying to broaden ASIO's powers. However, they have not demonstrated how these new laws will actually make Australia safer, nor has there been any demonstrated inadequacies with the already ample powers that ASIO has.

The new law gives the government the right to hold someone for a week. This is not suspects we are talking about, it is dealing with people that might know something about terrorism. They ask you questions, you answer them, we all live happily ever after but they still have the power to detain you for a week.

Moreover, if there is new information that you reveal under questioning, the government have the power to apply for another warrant. There goes another week. And there is no limit to the number of warrants that the government can apply for. This can lead to indefinant confinement.

The provisions of the act are by no means hypothetical; the media is pointing out that journalists can be forced to reveal their sources. Either that, or face a five year jail term.

The key point is that this reform is not aimed solely at those who have committed a terrorism offence. The ASIO plan allows for people to be detained solely because they have information about a terrorism offence - a power even police officers do not have when questioning a suspected murderer.

The police are not given powers to detain people solely to gain information. As a society which respects human rights, this is seen as a power that is just too intrusive.

The issue is dealt with through criminal offences for concealing a major offence. There is no reason to think those laws will not apply to terrorism offences.

Moreover, the powers that the government now enjoy are pretty much unaccountable. The government say that there are sufficient accountability mechanisms in place already, but there's actually no watchdog for ASIO.

The Australian government has acted very poorly throughout it’s long efforts to get this legislation passed. They haven’t demonstrated why there is such a pressing need for such an oppressive statute. The existing powers at their disposal remain quite adequate to deal with terrorism.

One can’t help but get the suspicion that this bill is a power-grab to take advantage of the troubled times that we live in.

Semi-cross posted from The Eye of the Beholder

The head of civil rights group Liberty, John Wadham, is to take a top job in the new organisation investigating complaints against police. He is to be a deputy chairman of the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC).

The IPCC, which will replace the existing Police Complaints Authority next April, is designed to improve transparency because for the first time civilians will investigate allegations made against the police, rather than inquiries being conducted by other officers.

BBC reports that Home Secretary David Blunkett is to give details on how two million people are about to be listed on a national DNA crime database. The government originally said in 2000 that it wanted to have three million personal profiles on the system by 2004. This was thought to be the whole of the "criminal class".

The arguments for such a national database are new figures that suggest it is increasingly obvious DNA evidence can be a potent weapon against all categories of crime. The last three years have seen a 50% increase in the crimes solved using DNA samples.

At the moment, only those charged with an offence have their samples taken, but the government's Criminal Justice Bill plans to give police powers to take samples from anybody who has been arrested.

Both civil liberties campaigners and some scientists warn that with a potentially vast database, the possibility of somebody being wrongly linked to a crime would grow. DNA evidence is not infallible, with forensic experts evidence referring to the probability of match rather than a definite match.

Guardian has an interview with Beverley Hughes, Home Office minister for immigration, about asylum centres, entitlement cards, and the future for refugees in the UK. Here is the section about entitlement cards, the New Labour pseudonym for identity cards. (Well, the Tories seem to be pushing them also...):

TH: What about entitlement cards?

BH: The home secretary is quite keen that the government proceeds down this route, and that's because there's only so much you can do towards certain kinds of issues - like illegal working, to some extent illegal immigration itself - towards knowing who's going in and out of the country at any one time. The decision has got to be made by cabinet, which will be when we've actually published the results of the consultation, which we're still considering. Cabinet will make a decision, and that will probably be by the end of the summer. But we've yet to publish our consultation results, and we hope to do that as soon as possible.

If White Rose is all about how little bits of bad news add up to a bigger, badder picture, then my experience today of some things that were said during a BBC4 Radio programme to be broadcast in the autumn is, I think, relevant.

The programme is to be about organ donation, organ selling, etc. I was arguing for the right of individuals to sell their body parts, but the dominant attitude was that donation for free would be quite sufficient, provided that presumed consent replaces the rule of presumed non-consent. This was what Dr Michael Wilks, the Chairman of the Ethics Committee of the British Medical Association, said, and as you can see from this 1998 BBC report, he has been arguing for this switch for some time.

At present, if you want it to be known that your bodily organs are available for transplant in the event of your death, you are urged to carry a card to this effect. What Wilks wants is that if you do not want your organs used thus, you must carry a card to that effect. Or maybe, by way of an alternative, that you must put your name on a national computerised register of the unwilling, so to speak.

I don't know exactly how huge a change this would be. As infringements of civil liberties go, this one is quite subtle, quite deft, quite gentle. But as with so many proposed new arrangements, much depends upon the people running the system being both highly competent and highly trustworthy.

Wilks said something else rather creepy, which explains a lot about the way the law is increasingly being misused in Britain to impose new arrangements of questionable value. He said that in practice, reversing the principle of presumed consent wouldn't make that much difference, because what really mattered was for the NHS to spend more (i.e. be given more to spend) on transplant surgery. The reason we do less transplant surgery than certain other countries (Spain in particular was held up for our admiration) is not that we still presume non-consent, but that we spend less on transplant surgery. So, in other words, this national donor card system or this national computerised register, which you must carry or register on if you do not want your organs being transplanted after you've finished with them, would, in Britain, be somewhat superfluous.

So why bother with it? Well, the nearest to an answer we got was that switching the law around like this would stir up some good publicity for the general cause of transplant surgery, and thus indirectly make it more likely that those "increased resources" of which he spoke would in years to come be forthcoming from the aroused taxpayers of Britain – it being easier to change the law than get all the money he wanted. But I got the distinct impression that if offered either the law change or the money, but not both, he'd take the money in a blink and leave the law untouched. This is our old friend "law as sending a message", law as the way to scare up a "national debate" which lots of people take part in because the law is threatening to mess them about, law change as the answer to "apathy" (a word that was much used in this particular debate).

Wilks is not the only one to think like this about the law. Indeed, proposing legal change simply to get attention for one's particular enthusiasm is a national mental disease right now, I would say. It's one of the many reasons why we have so many laws, and so many more laws than we should have. And having lots of laws means that the idea of only the guilty needing to fear increased state surveillance doesn't work, because all of us are bound to be guilty of something.

But I digress. Personally, face to face, Wilks was civility and sanity itself. He was just the sort of GP that you'd want, and in fact used to be a GP. That he thinks like this is not, I should guess, because he is in any way a wicked person, but merely because he breathes the same intellectual air that the rest of us do.

It's somewhat off the message of this blog, but I can't resist adding that after Wilks had gone, a rather more down-market contributor to the programme – a lady Jehovah's Witness no less – pointed out that part of the reason that Spain excels in transplant surgery, more so than Britain, is that they are worse drivers than us, and thus have a greater supply of nice fresh young organs, of the sort that the transplant surgeons prefer. Hah!