Parliament Bound by Contract?

If I really cared about whether our democratic government was truly representative, I think I would be outraged by this story about the government locking in payments to suppliers for ID card contracts against a possible cancellation by the next government.

Ultimately, the next government could, I presume, pass a law saying that payments promised for ID card work were cancelled, and even that payments previously made could be reclaimed. Traditionally, parliamentary sovereignty meant that was possible.

Would that be a good thing? While I suspect that the contracts in question are being written as a kind of “poison pill” to sabotage Tory policy, it is legitimate that a business could seek up-front payments or guarantees to cover the setup costs of the work they are undertaking to do. A company that was faced with the loss of payment for work it had already done because an election had changed the government’s policy would have a very legitimate cause of complaint.

The opposition could mitigate the injustice by giving good notice – now – of what they intended. That is made more difficult by the claim of “commercial confidentiality” made regarding the terms of the contract.

My line on this is that when a government signs a significant contract with a business, then it is not a matter of commerce, it is a matter of politics. It is, if not nationalisation, then at least something which is of the same kind as a nationalisation, but of different degree.

Therefore the ongoing dealings between the government and the supplier are a matter of politics not of commerce. If nullifying the contract is good politics but bad commerce, then it is what should happen. If the supplier doesn’t like it, they shouldn’t have got involved in politics. Furthermore, hiding the details of the contract on grounds of “commercial confidentiality” makes a mockery of democracy even by my loose standards.

I would also add that this sort of thing: Public Private Partnership and use of contractors in general, is a prime example, probably the best example on this side of the pond, of what Giles Bowkett was talking about. It’s the kind of policy which looks, if not exactly libertarian, at least sort of halfway libertarian. It was supported, at least at the beginning, by the likes of the ASI and the IEA. And because it’s a compromise, and because the nature of the political landscape means inevitably that what it was a compromise with was corporate interests – in this case the corporate interests of the consultancies that get paid for work like the ID card project – then as a result it’s the sort of policy where half-way is much worse than nowhere.

If we were back in the 1970s when the only way to do this sort of system was to hire thousands of civil servants to develop it, we would be better off. Outsourcing gives us none of the benefits of the private sector, but a whole lot of extra cost in corruption and obscuring of the truth.

Finally, I suspect that the Tories, even if they had the balls, could not void the contracts as I have described. The suppliers would be straight off to the EU to cry foul. The brief alliance of Thatcherites and Eurocrats in the 1980s that gave us the single market have stripped the voters and their representatives in parliament of the power to do that.

Obama's Honeymoon

When I started here, my first point was that the tension between the US and Europe was not about Islam, and not about George W Bush, but was a deeper conflict of vision that was surfacing after being hidden by the cold war.

As Bush Derangement Syndrome took hold, it became even easier to misunderestimate the nature of the disagreement.  The new president has a style very much more to the taste of European elites, and so the concrete basis of the divergence in outlook is going to become more obvious.

I think Barack Obama’s honeymoon in the European media is going to last for weeks, not months.  What I didn’t expect, however, is that Bush would be rehabilitated.  But see this piece in the BBC, explaining (quite reasonably) that the financial crisis cannot be blamed on Bush.

The falling-out with Obama will be quite different from any disillusionment that Obama’s supporters in the US may suffer as expectation meets reality.  The European media are enamoured by Obama’s personality, and had a particular antipathy to Bush, but they have no concrete policy expectations for the new administration to be disappointed by.  The material disagreement between the US and Europe will carry on exactly unchanged.

Email Security

Apparently as of March the government will be requiring ISP’s  to keep email traffic for a year for use by police and security services.

Yes, it’s another of those cases where we have to work out whether we’re more appalled by the government’s viciousness or by its stupidity.

Here’s a little primer in email for novices and government ministers:

The Internet, the Web, and email are three different things.  The internet is a network that can carry data.  The Web is a lot of servers which provide hypertext and media over the internet in response to requests.  Email is an addressing system and message format by which messages can be sent between users over the internet.

ISPs provide internet service.  Sometimes they also provide web or email services over the internet as an add-on, and sometimes they don’t.

It is quite possible to send and receive email messages without one’s ISP even being aware of the fact.  Indeed, most people do.  If you have a large site, you probably run your own email servers.  You emails go over your ISP’s internet service, but do not use your ISP’s email service, even if it has one.

Conversely, if you use webmail, your email does not reach your network in the form of messages – only web pages.  Your messages originate or terminate with your webmail provider, who may well not even be in this country.

Only if you use the old-fashioned POP3+SMTP setup, or  your ISP’s  webmail service, will your ISP see your email as email.  In some cases it might be possible for them, by searching your entire network traffic, to identify and extract  email from your network flow.  That involves a whole lot of processing that they would otherwise not need to do.

If you use an offshore webmail provider, they can’t even do that, because the traffic between you and the webmail provider is encrypted.

I don’t actually know whether Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, the biggest webmail providers, have mail servers in this country.  I suspect not.

Note that if you use email encryption, as I recently recommended, you are still leaving a trail of who you sent mail to and when.

Attempts to get email out around inspection (without using webmail) are handicapped by measures taken to prevent spam.  It is quite possible to send mail in the same way a large site does – your mail software uses DNS to locate the recipients’ mail servers, and then sends them the mail directly.  However, many ISPs for residential users filter out direct email of this sort, and many recipients spam filters refuse it if it has come from a residential ISP network.  This compromise of the end-to-end principle came in some years ago, and did little harm at the time, but as governments become more nosy, the requirement to pass all emails to your ISP’s SMTP server is more of a problem.  It just goes to show how compromising important principles usually has a cost in the long run.

I don’t know how well-provided the world is these days with anonymous remailers – they were all the rage fifteen years ago.  It might be possible to use TOR to get email out of the local ISP network securely – I will be investigating both these avenues over the next few days.

None of this is because I have anything to hide in my email traffic.  As I explained previously, the problem is that if in a year or ten years I do, it will be too late.  These channels are awkward to set up, and they have to be done ahead of time.

GPG key is linked to from the sidebar.  Ideally you should get me to confirm the fingerprint in person.  I carry it around with me, so if you meet me it’s easy to do.

Giles Bowkett

I’ve been reading Giles Bowkett’s blog a long time because he’s doing some interesting things programming in ruby, which is a language I like but haven’t done anything serious in.

He throws in some other good stuff – this piece on the potential demise of record labels echoed almost exactly what I thought when I read the same NYT article.

But then he started producing what seemed like random insults aimed at libertarianism. And I got rather pissed off with that. I mean, I’m all in favour of hearing diverse opinions and all that (in theory, of course, not in practice), but there wasn’t even any content.

On Wednesday, he got around to actually explaining his position. And, in keeping with his normal output, he made some very good points.

Things he says which are true:

  • US libertarian think-tanks end up advocating policies which advance corporate interests at the expense of the general interest.
  • The libertarian movement has been royally screwed by the Republican party
  • This was in principle predictable
  • If you intervene in politics, good intentions are trumped by bad strategy
  • ‘If politics were chess, Libertarians would be trying to win by holding up the pawn, saying “my pawn has a machine gun!”, and making little pew-pew noises. It just doesn’t work that way.’

I couldn’t have put that last one better myself. I know that because I’ve tried.

What I gather from all that is that Bowkett is in fact a libertarian. He’s just one of the substantial number who are hostile to the “think tanks all over Washington”. In fact, despite his generally outspoken tone, he’s a lot gentler on them than many of his fellow libertarians are. The phrase “Orange Line Mafia” does not appear in his posts.

The other quibble I have with him (and my real point here is that I mostly agree with him about concrete issues, as opposed to what labels to use for things), is that even the Washington Libertarian establishment has its good points. Look at what Radley Balko has achieved, and may yet achieve, in the sphere of police and judicial abuses. Look at the fact that the op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today says things like “The more incompetent you are in business, the more handouts the politicians will bestow on you”. That in a piece that opens with the writer’s account of his days at Cato. Would we be better off if the WSJ wasn’t saying that? In November Bowkett admiringly quoted Roderick Long’s article about the pro-corporate bias in much libertarian activism. But, you know, Roderick Long is certainly included in what I think of as “libertarianism”, and that article was published by Cato.

The issues Bowkett raises aren’t immediately relevant to me, because I’m British and the libertarian movement in the UK isn’t even powerful enough to do any damage, let alone to do any good. But, taking a longer view, they’re the exact same issues I’ve been writing about in connection with the recent pieces by Jacob Lyles on Distributed Republic, they’re the same issues I was talking about in the pub last night with the LPUK. And I’m going to be writing a lot more about them.

But even if it’s true that Libertarian activism is counterproductive, doesn’t it matter whether libertarian theory – that government would be better if it did very much less – is actually true or not? If it’s true, it’s worth spreading, even if there’s currently nothing useful we can do about it.

Apple Sells Unencrypted Music

It’s a good thing, certainly.   To my mind, the bigger change is that downloads are starting to appear at substantial discounts to CDs – I bought a new-release big-name album as an MP3 download from Amazon last month for only three pounds – the first time it’s been cheaper for me to download than to buy the disc.  Of course, competition from Amazon is one of the main reasons for this new development from Apple.

So ends the music shop.  I suspect that retailing will never recover from the current downturn.  The proportion of economic activity devoted to retailing seems vastly excessive.

Remote Searching

There’s been fuss the last couple of days about police powers to hack into suspects’ computers.  Apparently under RIPA they do not need any kind of warrant, just approval from a chief constable.

As some bloggers have pointed out, the power doesn’t imply the ability.  If your system is secure against hackers, it’s secure against the police.  Provided you don’t do anything reckless, like run an open wireless network, or run Windows, you should be safe.

Having said that, it is worth noting that the police have resources that private hackers do not.  In particular, they may get cooperation from ISP staff, or other service providers.  Even if that theoretically requires further authorization, if they are given, for example, a password, informally and without authorization, they would then be legally allowed to use that password to access your system.  In practice, they are unlikely to have to account for how they managed to get the password.  When I worked in telecoms, the authorities were given traffic data (billing itemizations) on informal request on a regular basis.

I’m not actually sure what the law is.  I’ve been looking at the text of the 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, but it’s hard to puzzle out.  So I’m relying on press reports.

If you want to keep the police out of your PC, follow normal IT security (use WPA2 or IPsec on wireless, don’t use Windows, don’t run code of unknown origin), and also assume that any passwords you use on external systems are known to attackers, so use different passwords for logging into your box, for remote access, and for wireless.  Don’t expose these passwords over unencrypted email.  Set good passwords on routers.

There’s another reason for making a fuss about this.  Even if your system is safe, most people’s won’t be.  That means that over time, it will become accepted that police have access to everyone’s computers.  Eventually, the “loophole” that some people actually have secure systems will be “exposed” as compromising the ability of the police to protect us (or to protect THE CHILDREN), and secure systems will be simply banned.  This is despite the fact that there is already law allowing the police to demand encryption keys etc. with a warrant.

That sounds far-fetched, but is there any reason why one would assume that a mobile phone was something too dangerous to allow an anonymous person to own?  No –  only that, for business reasons, it happened to be impossible to anonymously own one until the technology for pay-as-you-go was released, and everyone got used to the idea that phones could be traced.   When people are used to the idea that computers can be searched by the police on a whim, they will not mind making it illegal to prevent it.

And just because you have nothing illegal, doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.  Once someone hacks into your computer, they are likely to damage things by accident.  That’s always been recognised by the law, which (rightly) considers it a crime even if no damage is done, because of the cost of going over the system and making sure everything is OK.  If police plant a backdoor on your system for their own use, it may be found and exploited by criminals. (This was one of the major issues with the Sony CD rootkits a year or two back.)  Civil damages are also assessed on the same basis.  As well as that, information which is gathered may be misused.   A police officer was convicted of using private information for blackmail purposes just recently.

I may come back to this issue tomorrow if I can figure out what RIPA actually says.

Bob Quick

Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick ordered the arrest of Damian Green in November.

After that, it emerged that his wife was running a luxury car firm from their home, which may have been offering services it wasn’t licensed for.

I’m not directly concerned with the car business, and the Damian Green case has been well covered already. What is interesting here is the pattern: Person makes enemies, enemies dig up dirt. How many people have some irregularity in their personal or business life that they will certainly get away with for ever, provided they don’t attract the attention of someone powerful and hostile?

The product of this situation is that those with power to dig into everyday irregularities end up with arbitrary power. You keep them sweet if you know what’s good for you. You don’t criticize them publicly, you don’t cross them in their personal capacity. The only people who can stand up to them are those that are prepared to “clear the decks” of their private lives for the sake of activism. Admirable as such people are, their very determination makes them seem extreme, weird, or unreliable.

This situation is very unhealthy for public life, as I’ve said here before. The solution is to look around for rules which people routinely break, generally get away with, and don’t do much harm. And get rid of them. Keeping a low profile should not give someone a large advantage in everyday life.

Fernández-Armesto on farming, or, Neolithic Public-Choice theory

My lunchtime reading is currently “Civilizations” by Filipe Fernández-Armesto.

He makes an interesting point, which I’d seen before, which is that hunter-gatherers appear to have better lives than arable farmers. What is significant historically, he argues, is not at what point farming is “discovered”, but at what point, and for what reasons, a society chooses to give up its easy gathering lifestyle in exchange for hard work in the fields.

My assumption was always that farming is inevitable because a farming society, with its high population density, will defeat any low-density gatherer society it comes into conflict with. But this can be seen as analogous to the erroneous group-selection arguments in evolutionary biology; a particular behaviour may be beneficial to a group, but if is detrimental to the individual, individuals without it will take over groups faster than groups with it will out-compete groups without. It is not enough for a farming society to defeat a non-farming one, if farmers can have a better lifestyle by abandoning their fields. My explanation needs a few gaps filled in.

What Fernández-Armesto doesn’t quite say, but suggests strongly, is that the change from gathering to farming particularly benefits leaders. By making underlings absolutely dependent on central infrastructure (cleared land, irrigation), the leader increases his control over them. Public choice theory, neolithic edition. (That sounds so good I’m putting it in the title).

Fernández-Armesto makes an analogy with 19th-century industrialisation. Landowners benefited, but workers didn’t. (Of course, in the long run we all benefited from both farming and industrialisation, but as Fernández-Armesto correctly points out, that could hardly justify them at the time if they made most peoples’ lives worse).

The point here is that central control is the mechanism for preventing “defection” back to more pleasant lifestyles.

(Someone may point out if Marx said something similar – I don’t know whether he did, but his lot were generally quite good on this kind of historical speculation, for what it’s worth. Quite a lot of the history of hitherto existing societies is, to a significant degree, the history of class struggle).

There is a second explanation, which is randomness plus a ratchet – even if going from gathering to farming is unpleasant, going back, once population has increased, is likely to be much worse. So for whatever freakish reason agriculture starts, it’s likely to stay, and spread.

There’s no immediate practical point to all this, but if we’re looking at changing the structure of society, as I have been of late, anything to do with the mechanisms and reasons for major change is a good thing to have rattling around our toolbox.

Using the Aspire One

The last post, on political structures, was the first one which wouldn’t have been written without my new netbook to write it on.

In fact my train home was more crowded than usual, so I was short of elbow room and had to type most of it one-handed. Nonetheless I was able to get my ideas down, and when I got home I looked up the links I needed and posted it.

I’m using scribefire to blog offline; I’m having one or two problems with it but it’s too early to make any judgment.

Politics and Metapolitics

Jacob Lyles at Distributed Republic is concerned about the contradiction between advocating policies of individual freedom, at the same time as political structures such as federalism which are likely, in some instances, to produce outcomes which are extremely hostile to freedom.

The problem is not new – since Lenin arrived at the Finland Station, politicians have announced simultaneously policies that should be followed, and structures by which other people should determine what policies are to be adopted.

If I was absolute ruler of the world, all I would have to decide would be policies. As it stands, any practical proposals any of us make are conditional on getting sufficient agreement to practically implement them. That is true whether we acquiesce in the current political structure, or whether we seek to change it.

When we evaluate a proposed political structure, we have three things to consider:

Is it achievable?

Is it stable?

Is it good?

A total autocracy ruled by me has a lot to recommend it, policy-wise, but fails on achievability. We might be aiming at the long term, but there has to be some possibility of bringing our structure about for it to be worth discussing.

Stability is the other side of that. Even if we have established our new order, others will seek to change it. If it was worth creating, it is worth protecting, but protecting the political structure without doing severe damage to freedom is always very difficult. This is where I think our current, deeply unsatisfactory, political systems score. Bad as their policies are, they are cheaper to protect than most alternatives – cheaper both in material and in human freedom. I think that is true even when you count most of the bad policies as part of the cost, in that they consist of building up blocs of society who are tied to maintaining the system. I am hoping to be convinced otherwise on this point, however.

The third question is whether the structure tends to produce good policies. Some would want other things from the political structure, such as fair or just allocation of power, but I am indifferent to that provided the structure can stably produce good policies. That is not to deny that there are arguments that a “just” political order is quite likely to be more achievable and stable than an “unjust” one.

As to what constitutes good policies, that is the other half of the question – politics as opposed to metapolitics. They may be separate domains, but as Lyles’ previous article demonstrated, it is hard to talk about radical political ideas without straying into the issue of what structures might be more likely to allow them than the status quo. Policies also must meet an achievablility criterion, and they may be more achievable within an alternative political structure than in the currently dominant one.

Addressing the original post in this context, what federalism has going for it, arguably, is that (a) while allowing bad policies in some localities, it will allow good ones in others, possibly better overall, and (b) it may be more stable, in terms of not evolving into an overlarge megastate, than a central political authority. The point that oppressive government is harder to prevent where everyone actually wants it is not a justification of the oppression, but a recognition of the achievability and stability constraints on any political structure.

In fact, both federalism and Patri Friedman’s seasteading are in a sense meta-meta-political ideas, since they have the advantage that by exposing multiple different political structures, they may cause better political structures to come about.