crime and freedom – Anomaly UK

Yes2ID

There’s a specifically English tradition that the government doesn’t concern itself with the identities of the ordinary men and women of the country. Prior to the twentieth century, births and deaths were registered by the church, taxes were collected on land or trading of particular goods. There was never a national bureaucracy keeping records of individuals.

(There’s a famous quote about how prior to 1914 Britons would hardly have any routine contact with any officials of the government. Orwell? Keynes? I can’t find it and I’m quite annoyed).

A census was introduced in 1801 to guide recruitment strategy for the Napoleonic wars, and National Registration was brought in in 1939 for the Second World War, and abolished later. Measures such as National Registration smacked of Napoleonic totalitarianism. The government exists to serve the people, not the people for the government. My life is no business of the government until I bring myself to its notice, by committing a crime, or travelling abroad, or handling large amounts of money, etc.

I was firmly aligned with that tradition, supporting No2ID, opposing Voter ID, even grumbling incoherently about CCTV cameras.

I still really like the idea of such a light-touch, minimalist state that has no reason to know how many people live in a town or what that bloke’s name is who is sitting on the bench outside Costa. Warm feelings of free Anglo-Saxons and the Wintagemot, and all that (although of course in pre-modern societies nobody had anonymity, so that’s a kind of fantasy).

But we don’t live in such a state, or anything remotely resembling one. Today we live in a state which relies on at least a quarter of the money earned by each member of the working population for its survival, which provides an array of services from traffic direction to heart surgery to everyone, and also in which a dozen private companies already know how many people live in each street and what the bloke on the bench outside Costa watched on TV last week.

As I mentioned at the weekend, the state also has a register of births, a passport database, a register of electors, a driver licensing database, a National Insurance database.

We are not talking in 2024 about whether or not identity details are a concern of government, we are only talking about whether the government should manage its identity database efficiently or inefficiently.

People who are of any positive value to society are massively visible to the state. Citizens of the nation of car drivers, taxpayers, glow in .gov.uk cyberspace like planes approaching an airport. The only people moving in darkness are illegal immigrants, gypsies and underclass, flashing on just once a fortnight to collect their cheques.

Totalitarian is a strong word, but it is obviously the case today that to the extent that a government of an advanced country leaves any area of its citizens’ lives alone today, that is a policy choice, and not either a result of any limit of capability or of tradition. For better or worse, limitation on government today comes from government, and there’s no sense pretending otherwise.

I’ve written a few times before that Feudalism cannot exist today because it was caused by the technological incapability of central government to supervise regions. It seems equally true that the individualism of classical liberalism cannot exist in a world of £20 CCTV cameras and 4TB SSDs. It depends not on limited government but hogtied government.

Of course surveillance does not directly impact our freedom of action. It doesn’t necessarily mean we will become much more tightly limited in our actions. But of course, in practice we already are. We can’t say what we like, we can’t burn what we like, we can’t buy or sell what we like —not those of us with regular jobs and fixed addresses and cars, anyway. Why weep over the hostile underclass facing the same supervision?

Is growing totalitarianism the only future? Yes, probably; as I say, it’s a matter of technology. I would prefer otherwise, but if you’re going to act politically as if the world were other than it is, you might just as well be an anarcho-communist.

Ineffective government is bad government. Effective government is often bad government too, but at least there’s a chance. My view is that the intense stupidity of politics is to a large extent an effect of the practical impotence of politicians. Make those with responsibility less impotent, and at least there’s an incentive for them to become less stupid. (The aligning of power with responsibility is the other requirement, the central NRx principle, but doing that is a separate question. Today it’s the case that nobody has power).

I feel bad writing this. I am betraying what I once stood for. Give me a programme for achieving personal freedom that starts with keeping government databases more incomplete and inaccurate than Amazon’s, and I’ll recant.

Mini: Voter ID

This is the first general election with a requirement for ID documentation to vote. I’m opposed to elections, so this is not a concern of mine either way. However, I used to argue against voter ID. There are other arguments though, and it’s quite an interesting subject.

My old argument was that the government does not and should not run elections, and relying on government issued documents gives them too much control. Of course, postal voting makes this argument irrelevant, but I opposed that too for the same reasons.

The safeguard on elections was always transparency. Polling stations are public, you identify yourself in public and are given a paper in public, ballot boxes are visible and collected and counted locally in public. To commit electoral fraud you have to do it in public.

I recently discussed some of this in Holland with an assortment of Europeans. Their attitude was different —they have always had official government ID used routinely for many purposes. I always sneered a bit at that; our government does not need to track us all individually.

Today though I recognise that that model is just not appropriate in an era of mass income taxation, welfare state, and mass immigration. The British govt has never tracked and identified every person. But it is unfortunately past time it did.

So on voter ID, I still don’t care, but the government’s half-arsed attempts to cobble national identity management out of birth registration, national insurance registration, driver licensing and passports do actually need to be rationalised into true national ID. I hate it.

(Originally a tweet thread, 4 July 2024)

Cars or Police?

Cars as transport

It’s a long time since I wrote about cars.

For most of the history of this blog, I didn’t drive a car. I studied or worked in London for twenty-five years, and London has very comprehensive public transport and not much parking space. I also love walking.

So, when it comes to transport, I am by no means a car fanatic. It’s true that I wrote in 2013 that the advantages of rail travel would come to an end, but that is based on future technological changes that have yet to occur. For the time being, there is still much to be said for rail, and other alternatives to cars have a longer future. So to those who see car usage as a problem to be reduced, I am not really hostile

The thing is that arguments about cars as transport are only addressing part of the story. There is another significant aspect to cars in our society today — a practical aspect, not any psychological mumbo-jumbo about fetishism.

Virtual nations

Particularly in libertarian circles, there is an idea that there could be “Virtual Nations”. Instead of belonging to a country filled with the horrible people who just happen to live near you, you can form a virtual nation along with people like you. You spend all day on the internet anyway, so these people are your real neighbours. You can pay taxes to your virtual nation, vote for its government, invest in online common infrastructure, and make up a really cool flag. It’s been a while since I came across any of these manifestos, but these days blockchains would definitely be involved.

Obviously this is really stupid¹ even without blockchains. As Russia has just reminded us, nation states are fundamentally about force. If you don’t have a border you can defend, you ain’t a country. Your relationship with your horrible neighbours is the problem, and a nation-state is the solution. Additional features of nation-states, such as flags, football teams and welfare states, are secondary.

Your country is tied to your geography. It is, however, possible to make a mini-country within a country. Devolution, federalism, subsidiarity are formal mechanisms, but there is an informal kind of partial seccession that goes down to the level of gated communities, office parks, and so on. These are not quite virtual nations, but, being based on physical separation, it is something real.

In the last few decades in our societies it has become something highly prized by the rich. It is a definite social shift, triggered by the rhetoric of equality and enabled by technology, that the rich have much less contact with the rest of the population than ever before. The rich no longer have servants in significant numbers, whereas as I’ve mentioned before, it used to be that 25% of the population worked as servants. Where the rich still rely on service work by humans, huge effort has gone into depersonalising the relationship. This allows us to pretend that we are all equal, that we all do our different jobs. I might be working for you right now, but then you might be working for me later on – there is no relationship of superior to inferior. There is some truth to this, but only some. There are plenty of people who have the practical status of masters over people with the practical status of servants, but they are all theoretically equal and we maintain that illusion by minimising any personal contact that would either dispel it or break the economic relationship.

More importantly, we now live in a society of pervasive violent crime. I have written much about this over the years, because it is controversial, but I think it is possibly the most important single fact about the modern world. My summary is here, and this whole piece is a restatement and elaboration of that one. There are vastly more people in our societies today whose behaviour is dangerously criminal than there were when our civilisation was at its peak, which I would put very vaguely as 1800-1939. To the extent that this isn’t overwhelmingly obvious through crime statistics, it is because of the phenomenon I describe here — people are protecting themselves from crime by physically separating themselves from the criminals.

The polity of drivers

And this is why discussing car usage solely in terms of transport is so pointless. Virtual Nations are in general stupid, but “people with cars” actually do effectively make a virtual nation. To be a citizen of Great Britain you don’t need much paperwork, but to be a citizen of the nation of car drivers you have to register yourself with the bureaucracy and keep your information with them up to date. Because you own an expensive piece of equipment that the state knows all about, you have something that they can easily take from you as a punishment. In fact, they can take it even without going through the endless palaver of a court case. In the last few years, you are even required to constantly display your identification which can be recognised and logged by cameras and computers, so the state for much of the time knows exactly where you are.

I used to find this outrageous, and it is still not my preferred way for a government to govern a country effectively. But it is a way to govern a country, and, unlike Great Britain, the country of British car-drivers is actually governed.

But what about the objection to virtual nations? The virtual nation of car-drivers is not a true province, like Wales or Texas, but it is physically separated from the rest of the nation. That is the point of suburbia, of the windy housing estates full of dead ends, with no amenities and no through roads. If you drive a car, you can quite easily have a home that is not accessible to anyone without a car. When you do have to venture among the savages, you do so in a metal box with a lockable door.

The above image is taken from a 2020 twitter thread by @JonnyAnstead. It is an excellently written thread, and makes perfect sense if you ignore the question of crime. In the absence of that key item, he is left to think that all these car-centric features are either a mistake, or some weird conspiracy of car manufacturers or road builders. In reality there is massive demand for housing in this form, because it permits the buyers to immigrate into the virtual nation of car drivers. As I tweeted at the time, “The cars vs people question is just another aspect of the central issue: the biggest value of a car is that it enables you to stay away from the people who don’t have cars.”

The alternative to cars

There are reasonable alternatives to cars for transport (in a lot of cases, anyway), but we need an alternative to cars as a safe virtual nation to live in.

If you want a society that is not centred on the car, for everyone who can afford one, then put the criminals in prison. That’s it, end of tweet.

OK, this isn’t a tweet I suppose. How exactly to put the criminals in prison is a somewhat bigger question, but it has to be done. I have written about it many times, but, aside from the post linked already, there is this one, where I mention how it should be, and this one, where I describe how it is today. The police and court system is just too inefficient to function. Issues like antiracism, sentimentality, checklist culture have all have their impact, but I don’t think there is any one cause. It has just got steadily less efficient because it was allowed to, and it probably has to be scrapped and rebuilt from scratch. “Tough on crime” politics is totally useless, because no politician inside the system can actually admit how bad things are, so they always rely on showy but incremental items that have negligible practical effect.

Update: Did a little editing that I should have done before posting. Also, the discussions of town planning that this post arose from were referring to Britain; I didn’t generalise to the US. But Candide tweeted: Uhm. What do you think white flight was if not mass emigration to the nation of America-with-cars? — which seems pretty persuasive to me.

Post-Liberalism

This is another of these posts written to be a reference point for something that’s been talked about quite a bit.

There was once this political philosophy called Liberalism. It was based on the idea that a person shouldn’t be under the authority of another more than was absolutely necessary.

(For the purposes of this post, I am referring to advocates of this philosophy as liberals — do not confuse that with later users of the same label.)

Codified by twentieth-century autists, this became the Non-Aggression Principle — that the only justifiable reason to interfere with anyone else’s actions is because those actions harm someone else.

In its less rigid form, from the 18th century on, the idea that individuals should have wide latitude over their own behaviour, subject to protection of other people, and also subject to various unprincipled exceptions that I’ll get to in a moment, was the foundation of the modern world. Industry and science flourished in conditions of freedom.

Successful and beneficial as liberalism was, it was never entirely logically coherent. First, there were many restrictions on freedom that didn’t have to be justified because they were too obvious to question. Most early liberals were Christian. Even those that weren’t had all been raised in Christian society, and absorbed some degree of Christian morality, often weakened but still present. The few who managed to overcome any trace were far from the mainstream. (Thomas Paine comes to mind).

Second, not every form of liberalism respected private property, but all the ones that worked did. There are theoretical arguments for why liberalism necessarily implies private property, but as I wrote once before, they aren’t very convincing.

Third, and most crucially, the limits of what constitutes harm from one person’s actions on another person are entirely arbitrary. Every action has an expanding and diminishing wave of effects. Every fire has smoke, every building has a shadow, every animal produces waste. Harms such as slander or distress can be caused simply by speaking, even by speaking the truth.

(In the twitter thread that this started from, I linked this excellent piece by Ed West, on just how much outcomes on people’s lives depends on the behaviour of their neighours)

Liberalism worked because there were fairly common understanding of what harms were “de minimis” and what were not, that had been inherited from former much less liberal societies. This common understanding wasn’t rational, it was only traditional. Now those traditions have been lost, there is no way to get them back.

The chief harm that is recognised today, that makes liberalism a dead letter, is not a new one. It is the one that opponents of liberalism always advanced as its chief cost, and which has a history going all the way back to the trial of Socrates.

In the twenty-first century, any public action at all can be seen by one group or another as corrupting the minds of the youth.

So be it. I quite like the results of old-school liberalism, but as a philosophy it is bunk. Since everyone now acts in accordance with the idea that the minds of the youth should be protected from corruption, it is defeatist to be half-hearted about it. Twitter today is full of two controversies: a mild joke about women, and drag shows for children. If the war is to be fought over what corrupts the minds of the youth more, let battle begin.

Some new theoretical justification for freedom would be nice, but it can wait until the cult of universal queerdom has been, if not defeated, then at least fought to a truce to the extent of being one religion among many, not the compulsory True Faith.

Crime and CCTV

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Aleph asked a really good question on Twitter:

What are examples of highly influential things that are not thought of that way? My go to example is birth control pills, which are one of the most influential inventions of the last century.
https://twitter.com/woke8yearold/status/1416028831098474498

His example is a little bit off — it was generally understood in the 70s and 80s that we were living in a world that The Pill had created. That that understanding has been lost to the younger generations is notable, but it’s natural that the impacts of major changes in the past get gradually forgotten.

It’s still a great question. My suggestion for a more recent instance is CCTV. Obviously the spread of CCTV has been very much noticed and commented on, particularly here in Britain which has been in the forefront. However I think the impact has been greatly underestimated, because while it has been making the detection of crime much easier, police and the criminal justice system have simultaneously become much less effective and efficient in every other area, and criminality has been spreading and increasing. CCTV doesn’t show in crime statistics, because it has been cancelled out by everything that would otherwise have been causing crime to skyrocket. CCTV hasn’t eliminated crime, instead it has just masked how bad society has got.

If I’m right (this is a casual impression, not a researched thesis), then in Britain today we are actually totally dependent on CCTV for society to continue to function. Take it away, put us where we would have been with the last 30 years of social trends and policing changes, and our cities would become unliveable.

It’s got a lot further to go, too. IP-networked wired or wireless night-vision HD cameras are about £20 and falling. Tiny rechargable cameras recording to flash memory cost less than the Micro-SD cards you put in them. There’s no way these cameras don’t become ubiquitous.

Contempt of Court

Here’s the background. None of this is even controversial, it’s all covered in official government reports.

In a number of towns around England, organised child prostitution has been happening on a large scale. The gangs organising this have been made up overwhelmingly of British Pakistanis, and the girls abused have been mainly white, mostly from the care system.

Protecting children in the care system is the job of local government, but the local government bodies have been slow to act on the problem. People in those bodies and outside who tried to act were accused of being racist, and publicity relating to the problem was avoided on the grounds that it would encourage extremism in the country.

The Times published a large feature on the situation in 2011. Even then, action was not taken; local government officials in the towns named maintaining that the article was “racist propaganda” from the “Murdoch press”.

Eventually the responsible bodies, including the police, were pushed into action. Over the last few years, a number of child prostitution gangs have been prosecuted around the country, and dozens of men convicted and imprisoned.

One such case finished last week in Leeds. ….

This is the case that resulted in Tommy Robinson’s imprisonment for Contempt of Court. While the case was going on, he livestreamed his opinion on the case on his facebook page, from outside the court. The judge saw his stream and ruled that the content was prejudicial to the case: that if any jurors saw what he had been saying, it would have prejudiced their verdict. Juries are supposed to be given information on the case only within the court, according to the procedural rules of the court. The common-law principle of Sub Judice has for many years restricted what can be published relating to an active legal proceeding, but in Britain it was replaced in 1981 by statute.

These statutory rules are consistently and firmly applied to media organisations. Reporting of a jury trial that is still going on is limited to the bare facts of what has happened in court, without commentary or implication. In practice, the media generally does not publish any report at all on a jury trial until it ends, at which point they can say whatever they like. Though aimed in 1981 at media, the law applies to any publication of information that might reach a juror, including websites and social media.

Tommy Robinson was convicted of Contempt of Court for streaming information about a case in Bath in 2017, and given a suspended sentence. On his second conviction in Leeds in 2018, he was sentenced to 13 months. He is now awaiting a retrial: the original conviction was quashed as being overly hasty.

He claimed in his stream that the case was being covered up, as it was not reported in the media. This is an idiotic claim: trials are not usually reported in the media until they finish, because of the law on prejudicing juries. The other trials of child prostitution gangs had been prominently reported as soon as they finished, just as this one is now. Even the left-leaning media such as the BBC and the Guardian give them heavy coverage, and the more populist media can surely be counted on to do so. Of course, if anyone with a web site or a facebook account feels that detail or emphasis is missing in the media reports, they are totally free, now the case is over, to add to it.

That would be a good thing to do. While the trials themselves are heavily reported, the background and context of the events is still seriously underreported. In a piece that repeated a lot of the errors that were going around about Contempt of Court, Mark Steyn made one extremely good argument:

Tracking down the victims of Rotherham required a bit of elementary detective work on my part, but it’s not that difficult. What struck me, as my time in town proceeded, was how few members of the British media had been sufficiently interested to make the effort: The young ladies were unstoppably garrulous in part because, with a few honorable exceptions, so few of their countrymen have ever sought them out to hear their stories.

It is not hard to guess why this is: reporting a court case is clearly something the media is expected to do, but going out and finding stories that, once again, will get you accused of being racist for writing, probably isn’t worth the effort. This in-depth reporting of the issue is missing, and needs to happen.

But that is not what Robinson was doing. He was standing outside the court whose verdict is now front-page news, and falsely claiming it was being covered up. Nobody who understands the court process in Britain would take such a claim seriously, and those who he deceived will look less credible in future. It was for that reason that I tried to push back at the time on people who were repeating the false claims.

Aside from this specifc incident, it’s not unreasonable to say that Robinson is unduly harassed by the authorities. This is partly because they object to his politics, and partly because it’s just easier to get him out of the way to calm down the situation than to face the other side. It is standard police tactics in the case of a disturbance to arrest the weaker party for breach of the peace, and then let them go once things have calmed down.

On the other hand, he does tend to make it easy for them. His style is still that of the football hooligan looking for a punch-up. I’m not sure exactly what would have happened if he had streamed his comments on the Leeds case from his house, instead of going to the court and parading outside it. Legally, his offence would have been exactly the same, but at any rate someone would have to have seen his broadcast, identified it as prejudicial, obtained a warrant for his arrest for contempt of court, and then gone and arrested him. That probably would have all happened, but it would have taken a while. By seeking out confrontation, he made it as easy as grabbing him off the street and convicting him straight away, which is the question on which his conviction was quashed (there are strong echoes of this case: the authorities needing to play a bit loose with the rules to keep the peace. That said, I will be a bit surprised if he isn’t found guilty — the unusual rapidity of his conviction was, I assume, driven by the need to protect the ongoing case, but given the outcry the high court presumably felt a more careful proceeding was needed. Note, by the way, that my speculations here are not contempt because the Robinson case does not involve a jury — otherwise I would still be keeping my views to myself a bit longer. Note I wrote most of the rest of this post months ago, with the intention of publishing after the Huddersfield case).

@Outsideness, when I pointed out that the cases weren’t being covered up and that he was repeating blatantly false claims, took refuge in the opinion that protecting juries from prejudicial information, and for that matter the concept of jury trials themselves, are probably doomed. In the long run, I agree. Information wants to be free, and all that. If someone wants to broadcast information about a trial anonymously or from overseas, there’s not much the court can do about it. Further, the concept of the jury is that there’s such a thing as a “typical citizen” who can be represented by a juror, which is less and less true. But I’d say the current system has a good few years left yet. One of the reasons many people were so confused by what happened is that the question of discussing an ongoing trial generally doesn’t come up. Because the media saves its reporting for the end of the trial where they can report freely, as a rule when a trial is happening nobody who isn’t involved even knows that it’s going on. Anyone who wants to can turn up at the court and view the lists and sit in the gallery, but that’s work. So the vast new amateur publishing ecosystem doesn’t comment on trials because they are still reliant on mainstream media to find out that they’re happening. And, ultimately, there’s nothing to gain by breaking the Contempt of Court law. If you want to have your say in a public debate, it’s better to have it when the debate is actually happening, which is when it’s legal. It’s so rare for someone to be done for prejudicing a jury that a lot of people didn’t understand it — and it’s rare not because the law isn’t enforced, but because it’s almost never broken.

The actual drawbacks of the restricted reporting came up shortly afterwards. I saw in my twitter feed a photo of a demonstration from a few years back: muslim protestors with signs like “As muslims we unite & we are prepared to fight”, “behead those who insult Islam” and “massacre those who insult Islam”. The twitter caption was “Thinking of Tommy Robinson being jailed for standing in the street talking into a microphone, how many of these fine upstanding citizens were arrested?”

OK, Robinson was bound to get jailed, but aside from that, this is just the thing I was complaining about before: by tolerating this sort of thing, our society is effectively pushing Islam to become more radical, more detached from the society it’s located in.

But hang on, that tweet was quote-tweeted. What was the comment?

“At least 5 immediately and several more later. I then charged the most serious offenders with Soliciting Murder rather than just Public Order offences. They went to prison for between 4 and 6 years. You don’t see those placards anymore on UK streets. Next?”

Well, that changes the story a bit. Who is this guy who claimed to have personally rid Britain of open calls for Muslim terrorist violence?

That would be @nazir_afzal. Former chief public prosecutor for North-West England.

Back to him in a moment. First the protesters. This is where the problems caused by reporting restrictions on trials really kick in. I saw reports of that demonstration and those signs. A bunch of the protesters were arrested, and some of them charged with serious crimes, but I didn’t know that. If the media reported it at all, it would quite likely be in such vague terms that I wouldn’t know whether those arrested were the Muslims with the signs or other people getting into fights with them. When they were convicted, that would, I’m sure, have been reported, but that would have been months later, and I might easily have missed it. Because there was no contemporaneous reporting of their trial, there would have just been that gap, destroying a continuity of context that might possibly (and to be fair, it is a stretch) have caused me to remember the original demo as something that people got imprisoned for. So that’s a motive for finding some other way of ensuring jury independence. (I’m not going to get into possibilities, that would require a lot more expertise and interest).

So, Nazir Afzal. I’m a bit embarrassed I hadn’t heard of him. For one thing, our knowledge of the background that this posts opens with is partly down to him: he made the decision to prosecute the Rochdale child prostitution gang after a previous decision elsewhere not to.

It kind of jumps to one’s attention that Afzal is a Muslim of Pakistani ancestry himself. I wouldn’t want to belittle his personal achievement in doing the good things mentioned here, but where his colleagues would have been intimidated by the threat of being labelled as racist from taking the necessary firm line against criminality by British Muslims, he had a freer hand to act.

The liberal line at this point would surely be that our problem is that we don’t have enough Muslim senior lawyers like Afzal. Promote more brown people, and everything will be fine. That is wrong, because what is significant about Afzal (again, aside from his individual personal qualities which I don’t want to play down) is that his background is different from that of the Pakistani Muslims that are involved in the problem. The subcontinent is big and complicated. The large Pakistani communities in Britain are overwhelmingly those who were resettled from Azad Kashmir when the region was flooded, their families who have come later, and their children born here. Afzal is something else: “his father’s family worked for generations in catering for the British Army”. So while the “normal” British Pakistanis are resettled intact clans, and he is basically on his own and consequently, though he retains his religion, much more assimilated to British society. Numbers matter. The child prostitution problem is basically an organised crime problem, and organised crime works better for an ethnic group with links that are strong and opaque to outsiders. The teachings of Islam maybe have a part to play, but the American Mafia were Catholics, and they still ran whores. (The fact that the leader of the Huddersfield gang appears to be a Sikh is rather odd, but, I suppose, consistent with the theory that what matters is that the ethnic gang produces a cohesive group, that trusted outsiders can be brought into if they have something to contribute. Again, this isn’t fundamentally about religion or culture; it’s fundamentally about organised crime).

The thing that we can conclude from Afzal’s efforts is that the system works better when people in authority aren’t terrified of being called racist.

If we could fix that one thing — well, the large resettled clans are never going to be easy given the numbers, but we would be in with a chance.

But we can’t fix that. Anti-racism is the religion, and we can no more wipe it out than we could convert the Pakistanis to Mormonism. So this is all a bit academic.

An interesting view of our decline.

Democracy and Hacking

The New York Times has published a long analysis of the effects of the hacking of Democratic Party organisations and operatives in the 2016 election campaign.

The article is obviously trying to appear a balanced view, eschewing the “OMG we are at war with Russia” hyperbole and questioning the value of different pieces of evidence. It does slip here and there, for instance jumping from the involvement of “a team linked to the Russian government” (for which there is considerable evidence) to “directed from the Kremlin” without justification.

The evidence that the hackers who penetrated the DNC systems and John Podesta’s email account are linked to the Russian Government is that the same tools were used as have been used in other pro-Russian actions in the past.

*Update 4th Jan 2017: that is a bit vague: infosec regular @pwnallthethings goes into very clear detail in a twitter thread)

One important consideration is the sort of people who do this kind of thing. Being able to hack systems requires some talent, but not any weird Hollywood-esque genius. It also takes a lot of experience, which goes out of date quite quickly. Mostly, the people who have the talent and experience are the people who have done it for fun.

Those people are difficult to recruit into military or intelligence organisations. They tend not to get on well with concepts such as wearing uniforms, turning up on time, or passing drug tests.

It is possible in theory to bypass the enthusiasts and have more professional people learn the techniques. One problem is that becoming skilled requires practice, and that generally means practice on innocent victims. More significantly, the first step in any action is to work through cut-out computers to avoid being traced, and those cut-outs are also hacked computers belonging to random victims. That’s the way casual hackers, spammers and other computer criminals work, and espionage hackers have to use the same techniques. They have to be doing it all the time, to keep a base of operations, and to keep their techniques up to date.

For all these reasons, it makes much more sense for state agencies to stay arms-length from the actual hackers. The agencies will know about the hackers, maybe fund them indirectly, cover for them, and make suggestions, but there won’t be any official chain of command.

So the hackers who got the data from the DNC were probably somewhat associated with the Russian Government (though a comprehensive multi-year deception by another organisation deliberately appearing to be Russian is not completely out of the question).

They may have had explicit (albeit off-the-record) instructions, but that’s not necessary. As the New York Times itself observed, Russia has generally been very alarmed by Hillary Clinton for years. The group would have known to oppose her candidacy without being told.

“It was conventional wisdom… that Mrs. Clinton considered her husband’s efforts to reform Russia in the 1990s an unfinished project, and that she would seek to finish it by encouraging grass-roots efforts that would culminate with regime change.”

Dealing with the product is another matter. It might well have gone to a Russian intelligence agency, either under an agreement with the hackers or ad-hoc from a “concerned citizen”: you would assume they would want to see anything and everything of this kind that they could get. While hacking is best treated as deniable criminal activity, it would be much more valuable to agencies to have close control over the timing and content of releases of data.

So I actually agree with the legacy media that the extraction and publication of Democratic emails was probably a Russian intelligence operation. There is a significant possibility it was not, but was done by some Russians independent of government, and a remote possibility it was someone completely unrelated who has a practice of deliberately leaving false clues implicating Russia.

I’ve often said that the real power of the media is not the events that they report but the context to the events that they imply. Governments spying on each other is completely normal. Governments spying on foreign political movements is completely normal. Governments attempting to influence foreign elections by leaking intelligence is completely normal. Points to Nydwracu for finding this by William Safire:

“The shrewd Khrushchev came away from his personal duel of words with Nixon persuaded that the advocate of capitalism was not just tough-minded but strong-willed; he later said that he did all he could to bring about Nixon’s defeat in his 1960 presidential campaign.”

The major restraint on interference in foreign elections is generally the danger that if the candidate you back loses then you’ve substantially damaged your own relations with the winner. The really newsworthy aspect of all this is that the Russians had such a negative view of Clinton that they thought this wouldn’t make things any worse. It’s been reported that the Duma broke into applause when the election result was announced.

The other thing that isn’t normal is a complete public dump of an organisation’s emails. That’s not normal because it’s a new possibility, one that people generally haven’t begun to get their heads around. I was immediately struck by the immense power of such an attack the first time I saw it, in early 2011. No organisation can survive it: this is an outstanding item that has to be solved. I wouldn’t rule out a new recommended practice to destroy all email after a number of weeks, forcing conversation histories to be boiled down to more sterile and formal documents that are far less potentially damaging if leaked.

It is just about possible for an organisation to be able to adequately secure their corporate data, but that’s both a technical problem and a management problem. However, the first impression you get is of the DNC is one of amateurism. That of course is not a surprise. As I’ve observed before, if you consider political parties to be an important part of the system of government, their lack of funding and resources is amazing, even if American politics is better-funded than British. That the DNC were told they had been hacked and didn’t do anything about it is still shocking. Since 2011, this is something that any organisation sensitive to image should be living in fear of.

This is basically evidence-free speculation, but it seems possible that the Democratic side is deficient in actual organisation builders: the kind of person who will set up systems, make rules, and get a team of people to work together. A combination of fixation on principles rather than practical action, and on diversity and “representativeness” over extraordinary competence meant that the campaign didn’t have the equivalent of a Jared Kushner to move in, set up an effective organisation and get it working.

Or possibly the problem is more one of history: the DNC is not a political campaign set up to achieve a task, but a permanent bureaucracy bogged down by inferior personnel and a history of institutional compromises. Organisations become inefficient naturally.

Possibly Trump in contrast benefited from his estrangement from the Republican party establishment, since it meant he did not have legacy organisations to leak his secrets and undermine his campaign’s efficiency. He had a Manhattan Project, not an ITER.

The task of building–or rebuilding–an organisation is one that few people are suited to. Slotting into an existing structure is very much easier. Clinton’s supporters particularly are liable to have the attitude that a job is something you are given, rather than something you make. Kushner and Brad Parscale seem to stand out as people who have the capability of making a path rather than following one. As an aside, Obama seems to have had such people also, but Clinton may have lacked them. Peter Thiel described Kushner as “the Chief Operating Officer” of Trump’s campaign. Maybe the real estate business that Trump and Kushner are in, which consists more of separate from-scratch projects than most other businesses, orients them particularly to that style.

The Crime Rates thing

One of the problems reactionaries draw attention to, as an example of the ineffectiveness of the modern state, is the threat of crime.
To this, progressives respond with statistics showing that incidences of crime per capita have been on a general downward trend for the last few centuries. Stephen Pinker recently published a book on this point, and anti-reactionaries are, understandably, making a big deal of it.
There are various measurement difficulties with crime rates, but Pinker isn’t a climate scientist, and so it’s not likely that all the measurement errors are going in the same direction.
Are perceptions of increased danger just wrong, then? They could very plausibly be the product of media sensationalism and heightened expectations. But I have doubts that frequency of crime, particularly frequency of crime per thousand of population, are really the right measure.
After all, fear of crime isn’t a passive, background thing. You don’t sit and worry that you’re going to be mugged before your next birthday. You worry when you walk home from the railway station at night. Fundamentally, you worry when you go out of a highly protected area.
So the intensity of your worry depends on what the risk is of going out of a protected area for a time. If people are doing that much less often than they used to, then it might have got more dangerous to do so, yet incidence of crime will be down.
There are a few reasons why people might be doing dangerous things less often. Many people have cars, which are mobile fortresses with lockable doors. That’s our old friend, advances in technology masking other problems. It might be that some areas that were dangerous are now safe. That would be a genuine improvement, a real diminution of crime and the threat of crime. It might be that some unsafe areas are now so unsafe that people rarely go there at all, which would actually be an increase in the threat of crime, without showing in the statistics. Then there’s the scale question:
Fleet Street in London is still Fleet Street. It’s the same length it was when Pepys walked down it, from Ludgate Circus to Chancery Lane.
If crime rates are the same as they were a hundred years ago, does that mean there should be the same number of crimes on it, or a higher number in proportion to the change of population? Or in proportion to the change of population divided by the change in the total length of road? But should that be all road, or important town-centre type street? Society does not scale linearly.
It would be interesting to see a town that stayed approximately the same size over decades, and look at its crime statistics, to eliminate these difficult scaling factors. But a town that stayed the same size would almost certainly have changed its role, relative to other towns. Not so helpful.
One thing that occurred to me is a football match. A big match is like a temporary town — in population, it’s the size of a small town. Is a football “town” the same size as a hundred years ago, and is it more or less violent?
Oh. The answer is that it’s smaller, because the level of violence had grown so much by the 1980s that the government forced reductions in stadium capacity, along with other measures.
That’s one indication that, isolated from scale effects and technology, violence has become worse.
Of course, history goes on: football stadiums are now less violent than they were in the 1980s, and for all I know less violent than they were in the 1930s, because they have become highly-policed zones.
The simple summary: there is no simple summary. Waving the hand and talking about “more crime” is wrong, at least relative to population. Some areas of life have become less policed, while some have become extremely heavily policed, and much safer. The things we do that expose us to risk of crime have changed, partly due to technology, partly due to bigger towns and cities, and partly due to social changes. If you want to show that some particular activity has become more dangerous today than in the past, concentrate on that — specific evidence is somewhat clearer than aggregate statistics. Moldbug’s “Map of areas a person can walk alone in confidence” is the right general approach (thanks to @lexcorvus for the link).
Update. I still don’t feel that I’m hitting the nail on the head. I feel that crime is something that should be at the edge of society. We have expanded — scaled — society, but we are measuring crime rate relative to the volume, not the size of the edge. A sort of square/cube law error.

Payday Lending and the Justice System

The Office of Fair Trading has identified poor practice by payday lenders. It seems they “fail to work out whether people can pay” the loans they make to them, and therefore people unwisely take on loans they cannot pay back.

The theory, presumably, is that even though the customers know they will have to pay substantial fees and interest some weeks in the future, they still sign up, because they think the future problems won’t be as bad as the current problems which are solved by getting the money up front. The OFT is claiming that it is irresponsible to put people in that position.

They may well have a point. Many people do seem to dismiss from consideration adverse consequences that are a long way off: even if they are told that a debt will double in size over six months if they don’t pay it back promptly, they either don’t care, or assume something will come up, or assume they can somehow get away without paying.

But if the Office of Fair Trading takes this view, which I think is a reasonable one, I wonder what they think about the way the criminal justice system works in this country?

Let’s say you feel a taxi-driver has disrespected you in some way. Beating him unconscious might be one way to resolve the situation. However, if you do that, you could be tried and sentenced to some kind of punishment.

Given the OFT’s assessment of the capabilities of Wonga’s clientèle to judge whether they should take on a debt payable in a month or so, how much difference does it make whether you are sentenced for GBH next week or in twelve months’ time? If the prospect of having to pay £2,000 in a year isn’t putting people off borrowing £250 for a new phone today, is it going to put them off grabbing the same phone off a passer-by?

I found the taxi-driver story because it got slightly more reporting than usual, the culprit being a player on the local football team. I don’t think a new signing to Luton Town is actually a celebrity in any way that would have made his treatment different, but I needed the extra reporting, because when the local press report convictions and sentences, they don’t generally say when the offence was committed. And while the papers do contain a handful of reports of crimes committed, I have not been able to match up any crime reports with any court reports, outside of major crimes like murders. It’s the treatment of the routine minor violent crimes that I am interested in.

Levenson

My twitter stream tells me that three hundred odd years of a free press are at an end, that blogs like this one are going to be regulated by the government.

It might even be true. The establishment is quite capable of riding a popular wave and then doing something completely unrelated when they actually get around to acting. After the Dunblane massacre, the government banned crossbows. After the World Trade Centre bombing, the government passed a law giving itself the power to seize the assets of Icelandic banks. It is perfectly plausible that the government would respond to the News of the World accessing Milly Dowler’s voicemail by silencing bloggers.

On the other hand, the cross-party negotiations that produced the agreement yesterday appear to be the usual symbolic battle about nothing at all, this time in the form of a pointless distinction between “statutory” and “non-statutory” regulatory frameworks. Some some of the commentary takes that argument seriously, making me doubt whether the commentators concerned are actually paying attention.

I don’t know. I’m perfectly fine with not knowing. If this new thing really is going to restrict my blogging, I’ll find out soon enough. The only case in which I would need to know now would be if I could actually do something useful about it. It is that illusion that causes all the ignorant flapping speculation about something that will be perfectly obvious within a few months.

In any case I can’t get too worked up because, while I believe that basic freedom of communication is an important freedom which governments should respect if they want the society and economy to function smoothly, I don’t believe in the “political right” of free speech as a way of opposing the government. I don’t believe in any political rights, and if the government tries to shut me up, it is making my own argument for me.

Effectively, my ignorance is doubled. As well as not knowing whether the government is or isn’t going to seriously clamp down on the press and/or blogs, I do not know, in the full context, whether that would be a bad thing or a good thing. I might be fairly sure that, other things being equal, it would be a bad thing, but other things are not equal. The end of press freedom might cause a major reactionary swing, which might hasten the downfall of the democratic regime and the restoration of Royalism, which might be a good thing. It might cause a major liberal swing, which might preserve the democratic regime longer than otherwise, which might cause a better successor regime to replace it than would otherwise be the case, which might be a good thing. Not only can I not judge how likely these outcomes are, I can’t imagine the depth and breadth of knowledge that would make it possible to judge how likely those outcomes are. It’s preposterous for me to sit here and claim to know whether this is good or bad.

Finally, of course, and looking only at the short term effects that it is actually possible to estimate, the government is far too incompetent to actually be able to suppress opposition media. Not only that, Western governments have gone to great lengths to provide mechanisms for dissidents in non-democratic countries to publish electronically without effective control. Either we can use those, or the non-democratic governments themselves will provide a mirror-image in order to show up the incoherence of the West. Imagine the UK trying to lean on China to shut down websites used by British dissidents — they would laugh their arses off.

The real suppression we face is by society refusing employment or otherwise acting informally against those who hold unfashionable opinion. That is the reason I write anonymously. But that exists already, and we are coping with that — I don’t think the law will produce nearly as much oppression as exists already in the form of unwritten liberal blasphemy law.