Visual Security

The story of Bob Quick’s exposure of secret anti-terrorist documents to photographers outside Number Ten, and his subsequent resignation, is of course highly amusing. It does also highlight some significant issues.

The changes that information technology make to privacy and secrecy are changes what can be done with information that was always available. Most obviously, information once captured can be stored, searched and shared. But also, what was a glimpse can now easily be turned into something that can be analysed at leisure. The implications are not immediately obvious.

In the current case, new technology doesn’t really come into it. People have been taking pictures outside 10 Downing Street with good-quality cameras for a long time. Nonetheless, we now need to be aware that anything exposed to public view is potentially public property.

One example is the “Fake ATM” fraud, where criminals fit an extra magnetic strip reader onto an existing ATM, and also add a video camera to record the user entering their PIN. They then can clone the cards and use the PINs.

A possibility I’ve not heard of, but which occurred to me when I worked in a large shared office building, involves barcodes. The building issued temporary passes to guests which opened the security gates with a barcode. It should not be difficult to take a picture of somebody wearing such a badge, read the barcode from the image, and print a fake temporary pass with the same barcode which would then open the gate. I never got round to trying it, because I couldn’t find free software for reading and printing the barcodes.

This is just the beginning. The ubiquitous security video cameras do not, these days, produce images of sufficient quality to resolve text, barcodes etc. (except of course in CSI and the like, where they can resolve even minute off-screen detail via incidental reflections). But they are getting better. The same goes for cameras in phones, and “toy” concealable cameras. But the high end today of both security video and cellphones are probably about at the level where exposed text can be captured, and it is a matter of only a few years before such image quality becomes the norm.

Confidential documents are often exposed by people reading them while in transit, on trains and planes as well as getting in and out of official cars. Bob Quick got caught out because he was in a place where it was natural for him to be photographed directly with proper cameras. But someone hanging around Canary Wharf underground with a T929 could quite likely grab a fair bit of confidential information surreptitiously.

So if your documents are worth shredding rather than dropping in the bin, they’re worth keeping inside an opaque folder when in any public place.

Update: Via a commenter at Bruce Schneier’s, this has happened before

New powers are different

This, via Radley Balko strikes me as a hugely insightful point.

It was easier for Obama to fire the CEO of a private company than it is to fire most federal employees.

Corporatism doesn’t just lead to massive inefficiency in the economy and cause a dangerous increase in state power. On top of those problems, it also changes the balance of power within the government. As observed, the president has more personal power over a newly semi-nationalised company than he does over a government agency.

Existing state powers get fossilised into the permanent (civil service) structure, largely out of the control of the executive. When new powers are acquired, they are normally under much more direct “democratic” control than old powers. Over time, as the consequence of the powers being used “politically” or even (gasp!) by a “populist”, they are taken over by the permanent establishment.

In this country, we have seen it most clearly in relation to the E.U. Something that would be very difficult for a politician to do directly is much easier for the same politician to do by proposing it to the European Commission and running it through as a directive.

This could be a major reason for the steady drive for more state power. It is not that politicians think the government doesn’t have enough power, it is that they need the government to have new power that they can actually control.

Propertarianism

There’s been fuss in the US, which I alluded to before, about whether Libertarians should seek some kind of working relationship with “liberals”, meaning the mainstream centre-left.

To me, this article sums up the possibilities there – there’s no possible basis for libertarians to work on the basis of “good things the state does”

Does that mean the libertarian movement should continue as it has been – as a de facto ally and “mad cousin” of the mainstream right wing? Not necessarily.

The fact is, even if most of us fractionally prefer the mainstream centre-right to the mainstream centre-left, that’s hardly defining of our politics. Most of the key aims of libertarians are opposed equally by both halves of the ruling political class.

A lot depends on our aims. If we want to maximise our chance of having some beneficial short-term political effect, at whatever cost in terms of compromise, we have to work directly with mainstream parties. That is the path taken in Britain by the ASI and the IEA. Even then, it is a mistake to assume that any compromise must be with the Conservative party. Apart from anything else, it would strengthen the bargaining position to be able to credibly threaten aligning with Labour.

Either way, the weakness is the one identified by Giles Bowkett (and many others, I’m sure, but I was particularly impressed by the way he put it). There are many marginal changes to policy we would like to make as libertarians. Some of them directly enhance the freedom of ordinary people. Some of them cut down the corruption and waste of government, and beneficially affect almost everyone in a very small way. Some of them improve the bargaining position of consumers in the market. Some of them improve the profitability of businesses.

They are all good policies, but to have an effect, the good people in the ASI and IEA need to recruit heavyweight support to advance some of the policies. Guess which one of the groups of policies I mentioned is the one which has a powerful constituency that can be recruited?

The pro-business policies are good policies, in principle, and are justified by sound theory. Very often they’re good in practice too. Occasionally, because politics is not easy, we screw up, and they turn out to be bad policies (see: PFI). The result, judged not by the state of government policy, but by the advance of the movement, is catastrophic. We are seen as nothing more than a tool of big business. We deny it, and point to all the things we oppose that big business wants – all the protections and subsidies. But our opponents simply say that everything we actually achieve is pro-business, and they’re generally right.

Indeed, it’s worse than that. It’s not only our opponents who see us as automatic allies of business. Libertarians are humans (occasional evidence to the contrary notwithstanding) and a particular malfunction that occurs in humans is that people they cooperate with on a regular basis get labelled as “friends”, and attitudes to what they say and do, and also attitudes to those who criticise what they say and do, are shaped by this labelling.

(Of course, I’m being slightly obtuse calling this a “malfunction” – I have explained here why there’s more to it than that).

What to do? We could split into two movements. One continues to work with the right, and tries to cut bureaucracy, and trade restrictions, and damaging interference in markets. The other tries to work with the left to oppose corporate welfare, and to protect basic freedoms of ordinary people against the police state.

Very little is actually accomplished by any of this. The “big achievement” of the libertarian movement was the economic liberalisation of the 1980s, but I am now of the view that the major reforms were so obviously necessary that they would have happened anyway. The movement to end drug prohibition is growing, but it is growing mostly from centrists gradually falling under the influence of reality, in the same way as reality impinged on economic policy in the 1980s, and if the anti-prohibition movement succeeds it will not be because of us. Our influence on the debate has been very minor.

Is there a way of advancing ideas that’s better than hanging out with a bunch of scumbag MPs? LPUK plans to run its own candidates and get in the public eye that way. It’s worth a try – at least it gives us a chance to put forward a platform which truly represents our views, not one sanitized sufficiently to be tolerable to the Conservative Party.

An aside: the right doesn’t object to its tame libertarians advocating policies that the mainstream would never support – for example, ending the state issue of currency. But it’s hard for a right-oriented libertarian grouping to advocate policies that appear distinctly left-wing.

But if we are to align ourselves effectively, we need to recognise what the key axis of modern politics is. I’ve said my piece on that: the ruling class in our society is not landowners, or merchants – it’s politicians. Most of the worst things coming out of our governments are directly advancing the interests of politicians as against non-politicians.

We are against politicians. So who are our allies on this most important issue?

The only other people who are against politicians are the anarchist left. But we’ve always known about them, enough to be polite, and in any case they’re too insignificant a force in their own right to be even talking about.

Anarchists are few, because anarchism has difficulties. We have people “on our side” who call themselves anarchists, and while we recognise that we want the same benefits of freedom as them, the majority of us advocate, on practical grounds, some kind of minimal state. The anarchist movement also has “near neighbours” who they argue with about practical details. Who are those neighbours? They are the whole of the revolutionary left.

We are not of the revolutionary left because we advocate private property. Is that really the vital issue, compared to being for or against the political class? I claim not. I think that when I am with the revolutionary left I am among people I need to persuade, not people I need to defeat.

I’m not saying that private property isn’t important. It’s utterly necessary. But many things are necessary – politics is really difficult, and one mistake can wreck it. My argument here is that being against the ruling (politician) class and in favour of private property makes us propertarian leftists, not libertarian rightists. We will struggle to work with anti-propertarian leftists, because of our disagreement, but we disagree with conservatives about more central issues, and yet have still managed to work with them from time to time.

One great advantage in working with the revolutionary left is that a lot of them are, at this point in history, genuinely open to new ideas. Anarchism has never had much practical success. Soviet communism ruled a chunk of the world, but has now failed utterly, and most of the left now claim, with varying degrees of honesty, to have opposed it long before its demise. All sorts of concepts are now up for grabs when leftists debate each other openly. Private property generally isn’t one of them, but is that because leftists don’t consider it admissible, or because those who advocate it don’t consider themselves leftists?

This programme is perhaps a non-starter for some libertarians – particularly those for whom private property is a fundamental philosophical principle rather than the most effective basis for efficien
t large-scale cooperation. Good luck to them. I welcome that such people support good policies, but I have no more common basis on which to discuss issues with them than I have with other religious fundamentalists.

The sticking point when it comes to working with the left is not concrete politics, it is the friend/enemy attitude. Here is my programme:

1. Humility. We are aware that the revolutionary left doesn’t have much of a track record of actually improving anything in the last century. But is our record any better? In as much as we separate ourselves from the mainstream, I would say not. (That is to say, mixed-economy capitalism has produced economic growth and better lives for most where it has been employed, but that is not our system, and we cannot claim the credit while at the same time urging radical reform). We have excuses for that, but if we’re going to make them, then in fairness we ought to listen to theirs. On the same note, while the left encompasses some pretty obnoxious sects, such as those that appear to be more in favour of dictatorship for its own sake than anything else, that doesn’t necessarily make the left worse than us, taking into consideration some of our less savoury fellow-travellers. The nature of mainstream politics has been such that the least ideologically pure on each side have been the most prominent outside of their own movement.

2. Ideals. Sure, if we reran the 1983 general election, I would probably vote for Thatcher. But that’s a lesser-of-two-evils judgement, it doesn’t come close to defining my politics. If someone thinks that the creation of a national paramilitary police force outweighed the benefits of denationalising the coal industry, well, maybe they’re right. It’s not the most important question today. (sensible article on the 1980s)

3. Sources. Let’s get into the habit of understanding the leftist arguments. I frequently link here to Chris Dillow. The Weekly Worker is worth looking at.

4. The Welfare State. None of us want to see the poor starve on the streets. The welfare state is not the only way to prevent that, but it is one way. We might have a better way, but we have to show that (a) it would work, and (b) there is sufficient wrong with the current way that we need to do it. We can make that case. That’s not an opening gambit, though, it’s an endgame – an aspiration that we can improve the economy, individual responsibility, initiative and cooperation to the point that we no longer need a coercive central state to be able to feed the poor.

This isn’t original – I’m following groups like Center for a Stateless Society, and I’ve been influenced by commentators like Chris Dillow. The important point is that I’m not revising my actual political views, just reassessing who it is worth talking about these political views with.

Goodbye scribefire

I gradually noticed that some of the extensions I’m using in firefox are not actually free software. Oh well, I thought, it doesn’t matter much. I put looking for free alternatives on my list of things to do, somewhere near the bottom.

I just now noticed that my last two blog posts have transparent tracking images at the bottom.

I posted them with scribefire.

I feel like the tough-guy in one of the Elmore Leonards I’ve been reading recently.

You have to kidding me. You put tracking images on my blog posts and you expect me to just accept it. What are you, nuts?

Scribefire will be uninstalled shortly. And I will never install a non-free firefox extension again.

Broadsheet Rag on Iran

Challenging post at TBR, criticizing British comedians for coming out in favour of the rights of Baha’is in Iran.

I’ve made similar arguments in parallel cases, but I don’t deny it’s a difficult question.

This instance is a particularly good example, because Baha’is are so terribly, terribly nice.  At least in my experience, they are so ridiculously inoffensive they seem like a parody.  They make Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor look like Torquemada (OMG he said Ecclesial Community!)

Almost anyone can have sympathy with their position in The Islamic Republic of Iran.  I can’t deny it would be nice if they had full equality there.  Hell, it would be nicer still if they ran the place. That’s my opinion, and after all, everyone’s entitled to one.  Including Bill Bailey.

But just as it’s hard, as a practical matter, to criticise some private domestic activity without, ultimately, threatening to ban it, it’s also difficult to criticise the internal policy of another country without, ultimately, threatening that country’s sovereignty.  The questions “should Bahai’s have equality in Iran” and “should we take action against Iran, including military action if it would work, isn’t too expensive, and nothing else will succeed” are, logically, quite separate.  The assumptions of political debate are such, however, that they inevitably become one.  The correct view, that the Baha’is should be better treated but it is not my job, even as a voter and citizen, to rule the entire world according to my infallible whim, is so unfamiliar as to be incomprehensible to the average “Question Time” viewer.

Peace and Justice are generally good things.  Sometimes it is necessary to create justice in order to achieve peace.  But at other times it is better to accept an unjust peace than to fight.  It is not always easy to tell which situation you are in, but sovereignty is a rule of thumb which set a default assumption – that injustice in foreign countries is not my fight.

Government Default

Brian Micklethwait says that the UK should default on government debt.

He also, as a sort of parallel, suggests that in the event of Islamist terrorism getting much worse,  it is possible that the outcome could be extermination of Islam.  He seems to be advocating such (in the hypothetical situation), which I cannot agree with.  A more charitable reading of his piece would be that he is emphasizing that it could happen, which is a reasonable point – one I made myself at the beginning of time (November 2004):

At the end of the day, like any other immigrant group, Muslims in Europe live on the sufferance of the majority population. The Muslims would trigger genocidal violence against themselves long before they could become a serious threat to the host populations.

If I’m reading him right, he’s saying that if everyone understood that, there would be less hysteria on both sides of the argument.  However, if that is what he meant, he expressed himself quite poorly.

On the question of sovereign default, it is true that there is no moral neccessity for any government to pay it’s debts.  If lenders wanted their money back, they shouldn’t have lent to a body that can properly change its mind by popular vote.  I’ve said that before.

Gaza

I haven’t written about Operation Cast Lead – my main principled position on this sort of question is that we shouldn’t get too involved, although Britain has always been somewhat involved in this case, so I really don’t have anything useful to suggest.

I was particularly struck, however, by this report from the WSJ Europe, (via Neil Craig). The central claim being made is that the problem is not that Arabs and Jews are eternal enemies, or that Gaza is the front line between Civilization and Islamofascism, or that the Injustice of the creation of Israel is a wound that can never heal. The problem is that Gaza is one giant sink estate, a culture of benefit dependents who have nothing else to do with their lives than to cause trouble.

That’s a narrative that seems intrinsically more plausible to me than the others. Not that I have any, you know, evidence or anything, but it seems worth looking into.

If it’s true, I still don’t know what to do about it. This is the problem a welfare state causes. But nobody wants to cut off the aid money and watch people starve. The only palatable solution would involve turning Gaza from a sink estate into a functioning productive economy, without ethnically cleansing the Palestinians. If we knew how to do that, there would be a lot few problems all over the world.

Private Fostering

The British Association for Adoption and Fostering has its knickers in a twist because maybe 10,000 children in Britain are being looked after by people who are doing it voluntarily without properly informing the authorities.

Can you imagine why anyone would want to avoid involving the authorities?  They’re obviously all up to no good.

When listing the many bad effects of authoritarian and nanny-state policies, we usually remember to include “alienating the public from the police”.  But I’m not sure it gets the attention it deserves.  The all-providing, all-protecting state really is becoming a parent to its citizens.  And the citizens become the sullen teenager, not involving Mum and Dad in anything he doesn’t need them to be involved in.

I went to the IEA yesterday for the launch of Dominic Raab’s book “The Assault on Liberty”.  I won’t go into detail about the book until I’ve finished reading it, but  again, I’m wondering how much of the retooling of the police and justice systems has been made necessary by the collapse in public trust.  When the state’s scope was limited, it commanded trust within that scope.  As its scope grows, the number of reasons for not getting involved with it in any way mount up.   Most people have something to hide, and that’s always been the case.  But today, most people have something to hide from the police.

Too Much Bling

People are urged to report their suspicions about apparently wealthy people with no legitimate income.

While this immediately raises my hackles, it’s perhaps not so outrageous to ask people to try to spot suspicious activity in their neighbourhood.

The real problem is that enforcement of victimless crimes – and one assumes that drug dealing is the main target of all this – is always going to intrusive and limiting of freedom and privacy, because, duh, it doesn’t get reported by the victim.

Cross-border Crimes

The current Freeman reminds us in an article of a story from 2008 which I never covered here – the German government’s aquisition of customer data from a Luxembourg bank.  An employee of the bank sold the list to the Germans for over 4 million Euros

What I wonder is what could happen if any of the officials, or even politicians, with managerial responsibility for that action, happened to visit Luxembourg.  Because they, surely, were involved in the commission of a crime in Luxembourg.  Think how lovely it would be to see them jailed.

Not that that would be an unqualified good thing.  Because to the Germans, the bank itself was, arguably deliberately, assisting the Germans on the list in committing a crime in Germany – of evading taxes.

If either government took the approach of the US to the scope of its jurisdiction, both German tax officers and Luxembourg bankers would have to be very cautious with their travel plans.

Probably how it stands is that each holds the power in reserve, to retaliate if the other starts by arresting important people.  That would be for the best, attractive as the idea of German tax-collectors in a Luxembourg jail is.