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Perspective

Yasin Omar will be forgotten. Al-Zawahiri will be a footnote. The July bombings will be a detail of history, but people will still talk about the 2005 Edgbaston Ashes Test.

When my children are grown up, the names of Flintoff and Warne will trip off the tongues of commentators like those of Laker or Sobers. The last-wicket heroics of Simon Jones, Lee and Kasprowicz will be flashed up as benchmarks when unlikely batsmen struggle on. Warne’s unbelievable leg-break to Strauss, Flintoff’s first-ball perfect yorker to Kasprovicz, and Harmison’s ingenious disposal of Clarke deserve to be held up as exemplars of bowling’s arts, while Flintoff’s nine sixes will inspire a generation. And the two-run margin of victory, after twenty hours of unique cricket, will be remembered by all of us that sat through those nail-biting final minutes (I actually threw up) for the rest of our lives.

All that, and there are still three matches to go in the series.

The War on Housing

Today sees the 50th anniversary of Britain’s biggest problem – the Green Belt.

Almost everything that is deeply wrong with Britain – the low birth rate, transport, even the poor Test performance – can be traced at least in part back to this piece of authoritarian stupidity. Whereas for centuries the bulk of the population suffered in inadequate housing because of the cost of building, now technology has made building cheaper than ever, and the cost of housing is higher than ever because an alliance of the powerful and the environmental primitivists cannot tolerate the thought of the plebs having comfortable and spacious accomodation. Remember
the report that showed that more than two-thirds of those Americans officialy in poverty had more than two rooms per person?

To rehash an earlier posting, the great illusion that the Green Belt policy was based on is that a large proportion of Britain is already built up. If you examine the land use statistics, something like 90-95% of the land area is undeveloped. While countries like the USA or Australia have, on paper, much lower average population density, that in practice includes vast useless deserts or grazing land – the presence or absence of such are not really relevant to the urban or suburban masses.

There are obvious reasons why the War on Housing has been so much more successful than, say, the War on Some Drugs, but the contrast is striking. Articles about record low street prices for recreational drugs are almost as common as articles about record high prices for houses. Meanwhile, Prescott struts around, appointing one spot or another as the site for a few new houses – mostly, the vast tracts of land being industrially and unprofitably farmed to produce unwanted food being too valuable, unvalued sites such as school playing fields or inner-city “brownfield” meadows which are the only bits of greenery some inner-city children ever see.

War on Squirrels

Two views from my blogroll: Eric Raymond says

The choice between “support the war” and “allow the pressure off of enemies who want to kill us all” is not a difficult one. As a libertarian, I’m deeply sorry we live in a world where governments are doing the fighting for us, and I fear the consequences of the power they will amass while doing so. But I don’t see an alternative.

While Nick Seddon says

… it is wrong to treat this as a war. Or rather, it is possible to prevent this becoming a war. Much as evangelicals (the kind who read the metaphor of the armour of God at the end of Ephesians in literal terms) and neocons (Mark Steyn’s article in The Spectator this week concludes, “If it’s a war, you can win it. Anything less is unlikely to end in victory.”) are keen on their gung-ho adrenaline, it will only make things worse to react as if this is a war of simple opposites, a clash of civilisations …

I set out to agree with Nick Seddon. But whenever I tried to form an argument of the form, “it’s wrong to say this is a war, because if it was a war then ….” I had nothing to complete the sentence with. Not “nothing that supported my argument”, nothing at all. To me, deciding whether the situation is or is not a war leads to no policy conclusions at all. No measure I can think of would automatically be appropriate “because we are in a war”. Wars come in all shapes and sizes, even leaving aside questionable entrants like the “War on Drugs” or the “Cold War”.

It’s like the the old story of the squirrel, the hunter and the tree.

Now here’s an odd thing. Having written the above, I thought I’d show off my erudition, or “ability to use google”, by giving a better reference to the squirrel. In fact it’s from William James. But check out the page that came up when I looked it up. Maybe one day I’ll come up with something original.

Filesharing cases

The BPI (British Phonographic Institute) is suing five users of filesharing software for unauthorised distribution of copyrighted music. (The Register)

I support them in this action. A case can be made for abolishing or severely curtailing traditional copyright protections, and I am sympathetic to some of the arguments, but I do not see the issue as nearly clear-cut enough to justify ignoring or defying the law as it stands.

The copyright industries have made a lot of enemies by seeking (with considerable success) to vastly expand the scope and power of copyright law (and, in the case of software patent law). I am proud to count myself among those enemies. I strongly oppose:

Legal restriction on the production, distribution or use of tools or techniques that can be used to infringe copyrights.
Special police powers for investigating copyright infringements, over and above those that apply to other kinds of civil-law actions.
Expansion of the scope of intellectual property, for example extension of terms or application of patent law to computer software.
Ignoring or brushing aside the moral, legal and practical differences between “Intellectual Property” and actual property.

The suits under discussion involve of none of those – they are an entirely legitimate application of traditional copyright principles. It is by no means certain that traditional copyright law will be sufficient to preserve the plaintiffs’ business model in the face of technological and economic change, but that is their problem, and they are fully entitled to try.

Humanitarian Intervention

Chrenkoff asks, since there are 250,000 Iraqis living in Britain, how come none of them are doing suicide bombings?

Separately, Judith Klinghoffer points out that two of the suspects are from Somalia, where the invasion by Westerners was carried out at the urging of the U.N., but was abandoned in the face of strong resistance.

At the same time, the anti-war Neil Craig reminds us of some of the uncomfortable facts about Western intervention in Yugoslavia.

Now my gut feeling has always been against sending armies overseas. It may come as a surprise to my (literally several) readers, and I tend to forget it myself, but if asked outright whether it was the right policy to invade Iraq in 2003, I would say I think it was probably wrong.

There are several reasons why, believing this, I still am generally much closer to the “Pro-war” side than the “Anti-war” side.

I think the policy, mistaken as it may have been, was nevertheless an improvement on the policy it replaced, as I discussed here.

I felt that the previous attack on Yugoslavia was so outrageous and unjustifiable, that to make a big fuss about the much more finely balanced question of Iraq was to show a lack of sense of proportion.
I had expected the operation in Afghanistan to be a failure, and, seeing it now as largely a success, I entertain the possibility that George Bush knows something I don’t.
Whatever the right answer to the difficult question in 2003, I am convinced that to cut and run from Iraq now would be a catastrophe. It would reinforce the most damaging belief held by Islamist terrorists — the illusion that they can beat us.
And at least there was a plausible national interest proposed for intervening in Iraq, unlike Yugoslavia or Somalia, and Bush was clear and explicit about it. I didn’t agree with Bush’s conclusions, but I liked his style.

Why are “humanitarian” military interventions so much worse in their effects than self-interested ones? I think partly it is related to the tragedy of plentiful raw materials.

It has often been observed that some of the richest countries are the ones with the least raw materials — Japan, the Netherlands, etc. At the same time some of the countries with the richest raw materials — much of Africa, Russia, South America, are among the poorest countries.

The most likely explanation is that, where things of value are easily available, either diamonds in Sierra Leone, or plentiful wild food crops, power will all go to those that can most easily dominate the available resources – bandits and warlords. Where survival requires actually making things, banditry will still exist, but there must be a structure in society that leaves some power to the people who make or grow stuff. It is that societal structure that enables further development.

Likewise, when a “humanitarian” force gets involved in a conflict the incentives for the factions change. It becomes most important to influence the “humanitarians” I remember a British officer on U.N. duty in Sarajevo, in a press conference, saying that he had proof that both sides had deliberately shelled their own civilians, in an attempt to win sympathy from the other end of the TV cameras. I thought this was one of the most astonishing and major pieces of newsof the whole conflict, but I have never heard any mention of it again from that day to this.

Influencing the humanitarians is, in general, easy, because those who sent them are mainly concerned with “doing something to help”, and not with the nasty details of the situation. One of the reasons that I find Neil Craig‘s conspiracy theories about Yugoslavia far more believable than, for instance those of about the London bombs, is that fundamentally, nobody here really cared what was actually happening in Yugoslavia. We heard some sob stories, we said “something must be done”, we did something, the details of context and consequence are of only idle or passing interest. Conversely, we care deeply about what happens on the Piccadilly Line and why, and it will be very difficult to pull the wool over our eyes for more than a very short time. (Another consequence of the “fire-and-forget” nature of humanitarian interventions is the opportunity of private exploitation of the situation by the personnel involved, as I discussed here.)

Freedom and Photography

Further to my earlier piece, I’d like to point out what the “opposite” of having cameras everywhere is:

It’s having people follow you around to make sure you don’t take photographs.

That sounds silly, but it’s not hypothetical, it’s real, now.

Where’s the principle here? Am I more free if I can take a photograph in a public place, or if I can’t. And if I can, why can’t a shop-owner or a bus company or the police? And if I can’t, how intrusive to privacy is it going to be to stop me?

I admit that just because it is legal for someone to do something, that doesn’t make it good public policy for the Government to do it, too – that has to be argued separately.

But I do think the freedom to take photographs in public is more fundamental than any right not to be photographed in public.

Related: Kinds of Privacy

Crime and Terrorism

From time to time we hear criticism of the “crime-fighting” approach to counter-terrorism: the line is that the terrorists aren’t restrained by law, and we cannot afford to disadvantage ourselves against them.

As I mentioned previously, the flaw is that I as a civilian am at least as concerned not to be wrongly convicted of terrorism as of crime – removing the protection of the law for any action removes my certainty of not being punished without a chance to defend myself in court.

In any case, criminals aren’t restrained by law either, so what’s the difference?

Well, terrorism is a much bigger problem than crime, isn’t it? Um, isn’t it?

No, it isn’t. Check this out:

Violent death rate in Baghdad, from March 2003 to March 2005, from Iraq Body Count: 20.1 per 10,000 population. That’s 100 per 100,000 per year, and it includes the invasion itself. I can’t get accurate figures for the period after the invasion, but from the feel of the report, I would knock about a third off for “peacetime” Baghdad: say 70 per 100,000 per year

Murder rate in Washington, D.C. 69.3 per 100,000 per year.

That’s it – the capital of Iraq, the epicentre of world terrorist activity, has, as close as I can measure it, the same violent death rate as the capital of the USA with no terrorists.

OK, admittedly, Washington D.C has by far the worst murder rate of any “peaceful” city in the entire world, but compare any other city in the world to Baghdad, and terrorism is negligible.

Maybe, since car drivers kill more people than terrorists, we should suspend basic freedoms for drivers, as well.

Oh yeah, we did that.

Update: Apparently Scrivener discovered this back in January

Kinds of Privacy

Our ability to keep our private business private has been declining steadily for decades, but it’s not often recognised that the decline takes two quite separate forms.

One is that information that was available to the public, but only easily available to a relatively small number, is now very easily available to anyone who wants it. That is a simple result of information technology that makes the communicating of all information easier. It ranges from simply inverting the index of a telephone directory to make it easy to identify a person from their telephone number, to businesses compiling and trading details of their customers’ shopping habits.

The other, quite different phenomenon is that the government is demanding, with legal force, information that by previous standards would have been totally private. They demand to be informed of every transaction of various types, even if all parties would rather keep them private.

Read the rest…

Policing Terrorism

The normally reliable Bruce Schneier weighed in on security camers on 12 July

Surveillance cameras didn’t deter the terrorist attacks in London. They didn’t stop the courthouse killing spree in Atlanta. But they’re prone to abuse. And at the end of they day they don’t reduce crime.

In New York, the authorities are doing random searches to look for explosives.

Yesterday, the London transport system was flooded with police, many of them armed.

All these policing measures are controversial – how to evaluate them?

The exceptional density of CCTV in Britain, and especially London, is a legacy of previous terrorist campaigns. I am surprised to see Schneier dismiss them so totally, as they are a cheap way of getting substantial benefit. Cheap both in money and in “social cost” – when you are out in public you can be seen, but with cameras you can be seen by people who weren’t actually there at the time. You can disguise or hide yourself, at the price of looking a bit suspicious. The images (unlike, say, number plate recognition cameras on motorways) can’t be used for broad sweeps to track people over months or check everyone for a particular behaviour. (note also many of them are in private hands – the police have to ask for them, and they need support from the public to get them). I’m absolutely opposed to compulsory ID, large-scale telecoms interception, etc., but not CCTV.

From where I sit, it looks like CCTV has been the key tool in breaking up the terrorist organisation behind the London bombings; tracing the 7th July team back to Luton and Leeds, identifying the 21st July team, and following both leads back to contacts and resources.

To be fair to Schneier, all these developments happened after he made the quotes above, but they are consistent with previous terrorist campaigns. Possibly we in Britain see counter-terrorism differently — Schneier, like Arnold Kling, is thinking in terms of preventing a one-off attack like 9/11 (which is almost impossible), while we naturally think in terms of winning an extended campaign, in which we take hits but use intelligence gathered to disrupt the enemy organisation. Even a suicide bomber, who is very hard to deter and who can’t be captured afterwards, is part of an organisation – large or small – which is more vulnerable if he is identified and traced.

Random bag-searches, on the other hand, score very badly on price-performance. The expense and social cost of searching commuters’ bags are very high, and the likelihood of them having any effect at all is quite low.

The large police presence yesterday was expensive (I would guess it cost on the order of a million pounds), and slightly unnerving.

Both of the last two are not cost-effective over a longer period, but each might make sense as a one-off or very occasional measure when the threat is judged to be high. I don’t know whether that is the plan in NY, but it probably was the plan yesterday; if two of the 21st July bombers were arrested today, then yesterday was the day they were most dangerous. It’s easy to imagine a suicide bomber succeeding in a mission under the noses of all those police, but there’s a distinct chance that they would have been able to interfere with the mission. Estimate say 2% chance of an attack on that day, 20% chance of foiling it, a million pounds is fairly reasonable.

Ian Blair – disagreeing with me among others – says the 21st July team were not the B-team or amateurs. This is a relative question, and I would not expect or wish those with the job of catching them to be as blase about them as I am, but I stick to my guns:

Any fool can kill people; the chief attribute of these guys is not skill but bloodthirstiness – but even killing a few hundred people a year would only really affect our way of life if we let it.

This lot are much less sophisticated and professional than the IRA, and most importantly, don’t have the community support the IRA had (how may IRA bombers were ever grassed up by their mothers?)

Sir Ian needs to take this as seriously as a football manager facing a lower-league team in a cup game, but for the rest of us we ought to be confident that we can beat these scum, without losing our sense of perspective.

Related entries:

John Kay on global warming

In today’s FT (and his own site)

Many of the people who express concern about climate change do not want a technological solution. Their concern is really an expression of guilt about materialism, distaste for capitalism and fear of technology. It is because Mr Bush does not experience any of these feelings that he is right on this issue.

Spot on.

Update: I’ve spent hours reading articles on his site – I’d forgotten how good he is. Here‘s an article on copyright.