government interference

Bah! Humbug! Bansturbators of the day...

Jock — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 06:21:47 +0000

Norwich City Council to pursue hairdressers with undercover agents to check they're not giving their customers a glass of complimentary mulled wine while they wait:

You couldn't make it up!

Internet Outlaws

Jock — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 22:57:43 +0000

For those of you highly skeptical of my prediction that the internet will cause the nation state as we know it to be unable to tax fairly incomes or transactions in goods and services and so cease to exist in its current form , here's a slightly different angle on it at Reason...

It seems to have finally dawned on the US government that whatever laws and regulations they pass, they will not be able to ban offshore internet gambling:

The government concedes "there are no reasonably practical steps that a U.S. participant [financial institution] could take to prevent their consumer customers from sending restricted transactions cross-border."

In other news this week about the internet and real life colliding, we also had Second Life being cited in a divorce case in the UK and a Japanese woman sued for murdering her husband's online persona.

Which are you going to be - more restrictions, ultimately futile; or building new mutual institutions to help deliver public goods in an era of a reduced ability to collect tax? read more »

Repent! For the end of the state is nigh!

Jock — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 16:44:27 +0000

The End is Nigh
Originally uploaded by Martin~

Or, why I am really a "geo-mutualist" and why I think you should be too!

The revolution has begun. In fact it's been building for at least twenty years. When history looks back it will not probably be able to identify a particular date, but it could do worse than choose Christmas Day 1990, the day a humble academic computing geek communicated with his server in something nobody had really heard of called "hyper text". Finally there was something useful to do with the "internet" that would eventually draw in users from well outside of the ivory towers and military research facilities that developed it. Users in every corner of the world; users of every age and race; users of every background.

And what will history say about this revolution? Will it be seen as a great leap in human freedoms, capable of finally fulfilling Cobden's vision that "peace will come to earth when the people have more to do with each other and governments less"? Or perhaps that it heralded an era of unprecedented interference in our lives by governments?

Actually, I think it is a one way bet; that eventually it will be a revolution in human freedoms, in co-operation and in innovation. Such are the players in this brave new world; hackers working to bust the Great Firewall of China and liberate a fifth of the world's population for example; Kenyans being the first to be able to make payments quickly and simply by mobile phone; privacy technologists working to keep us one level of information security ahead of the law; game players investing ever more realistic virtual worlds; their individuality and very lack of co-ordination in many cases makes it inevitable.

What politicians can do, however, is either to make the transition long and painful, or to smooth its passage for the "good of mankind" so to speak. We can choose to stick by the state and try and keep it working just as its citizens are less and less tied to it, which will inevitably lead to more and more monitoring and restrictions; or we can choose to look at how to build alternative civic institutions and mechanisms to fulfill our needs in an era when the state has much less power to intervene at least without the force that is endemic in state action becoming more and more obvious to the point of rebellion against it.

So what is the great weapon of mass destruction that is going to bring low the state as we know it? Why, tax, of course. I'll let you into a little secret: in order to function a state needs to be able to tax: in order to tax it needs to have the ability to track transactions or peoples' wealth and changes therein. And from the taxpayer's point of view, there is every incentive to try to minimize their tax liability. Up until now, or very recently, it has been only the global super-rich who have had the means and sufficient incentive to take advantage of loopholes and allowances that enable them to choose the lowest tax jurisdiction in which to crystalize out their tax liability.

But thanks to the global and interpersonal nature of this most recent communications revolution we are on the cusp of mechanisms being easily available to the big majority of people that will enable us to minimize our "financial footsteps". When most of us only ever relate to the majority of our money through pixels on a screen or numbers on a bank statement - a small minority of trade now relies on real metal or crinkly coloured paper currency - what does it matter what those pixels are called; pounds, dollars, euro, yen? What about a completely new, essentially fictitious currency perhaps, like the "Linden Dollars" of "Second Life"?

Add e-Bay and Tesco to Second Life for example and one could imagine a world in which most of your financial transactions are conducted entirely in cyberspace, in virtual worlds that know no territorial boundaries or tax regimes (or at least that could be relocated into a sympathetic tax jurisdiction quickly if necessary), but with delivery of goods and services in the physical world. That's not to say giants like Tesco and e-Bay would necessarily be best, or would necessarily even survive the upheaval.

Those widespread international (and local) interpersonal (and business-to-business) mechanisms for sophisticated modern-day barter are now within reach and threaten the very raison d'etre of many of our longest standing institutions - banking and currency, transnational corporations built in an era when intermediaries were necessary to trade with far off lands, and ultimately the basis on which the state is founded - its monopoly of taxation. At the same time we can form non-geographic communities of genuinely voluntary co-operation in which we can build trust relationships, quasi-legal ways of dealing with disputes and so on that make trade possible with people a few short years ago we would have never had a hope of even communicating with.

So, which side are you going to be on - freedom and co-operation or ever more intrusion, regulation and restriction? And how long have we got?

Some of these technologies fall into the category of "overestimated penetration at 2 years, underestimated at 10 years." I think the state will be lucky if it has another decade of relatively easily collected taxes based on productivity, sales and incomes. If people want the state to be able to function beyond that, without increasingly authoritarian intrusion into our economic lives, we need to be looking now at how to make it pay its way through user fees for any value for money services we want it to provide. And as soon as it does of course it must also open itself to competition - else it's a monopoly again whose only rationale is to use its discretionary power to rip off the very people who both fund and use its services.

Unsurprisingly any of the various forms of land value tax will do to start with and would be especially beneficial implemented soon, near the bottom of the crash in land values currently underway. The present situation in financial markets offers an ideal opportunity for new means of trading without the sort of money so invidiously inflated and deflated by the banking cartels. Again, these alternatives could operate either on a local scale or in an international, or non-geographic trading community. Land has the singular benefit of being immoveable. You can't virtualize land as easily as you can income - for we all still need to have a base somewhere.

There's another major reason for helping this process away from the power of and dependency on nation states rather than fighting it - the state is expensive. The sort of redistributive measures required to ensure that everyone gets a fair crack at opportunity - the level playing field - are getting more and more expensive. Our interventions into the affordable housing market for example, in the form of subsidy, will continue to rise when land values rise, subsidizing the already-haves in the name of assisting the have-nots. Far better to try to ensure the fairest of level playing fields for all than trying to play uphill on a steepening playing field.

So, when you find me criticizing the state and its acolytes, it's less about what has gone on in times past - I would say times of missed opportunity for sure - but more on how we will be able to live in future, a future I think is pretty inevitable, in which the very idea of a state with the power to tax fairly will be severely compromised. The elephant in the room needs to be dealt with, and dealt with soon. Will it be freedom, or more desperate attempts to maintain the ailing state structures? You choose! read more »

geo-libertarian, internet, monetary reform, mutualism, surveillance state, tax

Libertarian Alliance Conference, 2008 (Part II)

Jock — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 02:01:20 +0000

If there were a few comments after dinner on Saturday night at the NLC with new acquaintances, maybe even friends, about how little of the days' talks actually helped some of them understand Libertarianism as an idea (after all, the links between aging and nano-technology and Libertarianism could have been obscure without a primer in Libertarian philosophy first) Sunday began with something that more people would recognize as a Libertarian issue...

Session 5: Ban the Ban: The Human Cost of Prohibition by Dr John Meadowcroft
Session 6: The Idea of a Private Law Society by Prof Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Session 7: The Modern Panopticon State v Freedom: Why State ID Cards are Bad by Guy Herbert of NO2ID
Session 8: Post-modernity and Liberty by Marc-Henri Glendinning

Session 5: Ban the Ban: The Human Cost of Prohibition by Dr John Meadowcroft

Meadowcroft lectures on Public Policy at King's College London and has recently edited a book called "Prohibitions" for the Institute of Economic Affairs examining the effects of the outlawing in various parts of the world of a variety of what may be regarded as "victimless" or "consensual" goods, services and activities such as recreational drugs, boxing, firearms, pornography, prostitution, alcohol and others.

He showed how in every case the outcome for the users, consumers or participants as well as the wider community is almost always worse than the effects of that which is outlawed. These arguments should be familiar to most of my readers, for I have rehearsed them, at least in respect of recreational drugs, often enough. The handing of lucrative markets to organized crime, the lack of knowledge, information and harm minimization facilities to users, the side effects of this crime on others in the community, the corruption of public officials and so on.

It was interesting in particular to see how murder rates seem, possibly coincidentally of course, to have risen and show consistent continuing rises after the banning of guns in most countries including the UK, since this is an area I know even some Libertarians (including myself until recently) find quite difficult to argue.

Consequently, he argues, prohibition is bad public policy. Rather than assisting in preventing harm it always increases harm from things that are essentially, in the classical Liberal sense, none of the state's business - what you do with your own bodies and lives which by and large do not affect others, except with consent.

I notice that, as they apparently do with all their publications, the IEA has sent a copy of "Prohibitions" to every Member of Parliament. I am sure their mailbags are full of this somewhat higher quality of "junk mail" as no doubt some of them see it and one wonders how many of them have read it, or even passed it onto their staff to read it and brief them on it. I shall be asking Lib Dem MP Tom Brake in particular, currently embroiled in an illiberal attempt to further curtail the availability of cannabis seeds against party policy, what he thought of the book and how it affected his decision to press ahead with his ill-advised private member's bill or whatever device he used.

Over the summer, in the run up to party conference in September, a number of us noted that, for a supposedly liberal party in which one might expect prohibitions to be roundly condemned as a matter of course, that we do not have a party group, association, "ginger group" whatever you want to call it, dedicated to fighting the seeming increasing tendency by our own policy makers to join in with orgies of "bansturbation". One thing I am hoping to do is to start a group "Lib Dems Against Prohibition" and perhaps try and get a motion into Harrogate conference on the issue. Watch this space. Maybe we can get Meadowcroft up to speak at a launch event.

Following Meadoowcroft came an eagerly anticipated session by someone regarded by many, it seemed, as something of a high priest of Libertarianism, and judging by the little informal gatherings in coffee afterwards, he certainly had some new acolytes in the room...

Session 6: The Idea of a Private Law Society by Prof Hans-Hermann Hoppe

I had long understood that there was a school of thought, anarchist to the core, that you don't even need to have "law enforcement" handled by the state - for many, particularly the Classical Liberals, the idea of a "minimal state" includes, more or less, only law and order and perhaps national defence as legitimate functions of that state.

Hoppe disagrees. And disagrees compellingly with answers to what might seem the most convincingly argued objections. I will definitely want to blog further about this, so I'll keep it quite brief here. Basically he argues that this Classical Liberal vision of a minimal state is a logical impossibility. Since by its very definition the state has the "territorial monopoly on arbitration" it has no incentive to minimize itself. Since it is enforcement, judge, jury and executioner all rolled into one, it has every incentive to increase the number of things it criminalizes to justify its own existence.

Instead, he posits the idea of a "Private Law" society in which individuals insure themselves against the aggression of others (in the widest possible sense - from breaches of contract to physical violence) in a free market of insurance providers (remember that we will have, effectively, abolished the state and certainly its ability to grant monopoly and protection to such providers). In the purest free market they will always have the incentive to pursue violators of the core maxim of non-aggression on behalf of their clients. And when disputes arise between insurers, counter-claims and the like, competing providers of arbitration (appeal) services also have an incentive to produce objectively fair outcomes. Their clients also have the greatest incentives to be themselves non-aggressors - to abuse a familiar phrase you would lose your no claims bonus if you biffed someone!

It probably needs more explanation than can be given here and as I say I want to blog about this more, because he certainly convinced me. I do, of course, have a certain disagreement with him about rights in landed property in particular that I need to think on and try and reconcile, but it a compelling vision of how a truly free society unencumbered by a monopolistic state could be considerably fairer and lead to much less rather than more confrontation and aggression simply because of the financial incentives involved.

I think it probably leaves me with one area of policy to explore further and understand better before I can call myself an individualist-anarchist - welfare, but this one is a significant step towards that! If I remember this conference for just one thing, it will have been Hoppe's contribution, I am sure. And inspired choice of speaker whom we were extremely lucky to get hold of who explained what will for many be one of the far outer reaches of Libertarianism that even many "hard core" Libertarians will have been challenged by I suspect.

And so, from the most theoretical talk of the weekend to what must be one of the most pressing issues for anyone concerned about our liberty in a very practical sense here in the UK...

Session 7: The Modern Panopticon State v Freedom: Why State ID Cards are Bad by Guy Herbert of NO2ID

Again, this session deserves a blog post of its own, and so I will keep this brief. Most of us in the room were I am sure already pretty united in our opposition to the National ID card program being prosecuted by the Labour government. But for me, however strong that opposition, it has largely been from the heart - the "I am a Liberal and I am against this sort of thing" of Clarence Henry Wilcock in 1950 quoted by Nick Clegg in his leadership campaign and since.

Guy Herbert provided the intellectual ammunition for me argue from the head and not just the heart, to understand the sinister machinations in government, and especially the bureaucracy that have attempted to foist this controlling policy on us for most of the last century. Indeed, I came away with the distinct impression that the Leviathan has been trying this for decades and all that is new is that they have finally found a government stupid or naive enough to swallow its arguments and agree to it!

At its heart, the National Identity Register (the database) is the most important issue (this much I knew, but perhaps not why). The state seeks to create the "single source of truth about the citizen", to fundamentally revolutionize the very definition of personhood, from independent individual, who is known through the various connections and activities they do to one in which it is only possible legitimately to exist with the permission of the state and the possession of its membership card.

The superficially beneficial arguments for having ID cards; that they will make your dealings with the state from which you benefit - welfare, health and so on, more efficient; that you will be better able to prove who you are in a whole range of circumstances; and, the worst, that it will help in the "War on Terror" - we've all heard them, and they do give the idea of a policy intended to help us - are not only superficial, but that the real agenda is not actually understood by most of the politicians charged with selling the idea to us.

That real agenda is about control and knowledge, the most intricate web of knowledge about every one of us. It seems likely, for example, that we will need to present our ID to rent hotel rooms, to buy mobile phones, to get bank accounts, insurance, perhaps even to rent your home, and that every time your ID is checked in one of these situations that will be logged against your entry in the National Identity Register. It will so fundamentally alter the balance between the state and the individual that it can be properly termed totalitarian. And even if implemented y people with benign motives is hugely open to abuse, both now in the sense of incompetence as the government has shown in data loss scandals over the past year and in the future in the hands of who knows what flavour of government with more sinister agendas.

Forget the politicians' assurances that safeguards will be implemented. Even since it was announced the functions the database will fulfill have ballooned more than most of us appreciate, can be extended without reference to parliament and are almost entirely in the hands of bureaucrats who do want to know every last thing about you in their area of responsibility. It is truly scary, sinister stuff, and as I say I will return to it again no doubt. And the worst part of it of course is that many, even most people accept the platitudes of politicians that this will be good for us.

I believe it is no longer acceptable for those political parties and individuals who say they oppose ID Cards and the ID Register to have little blog buttons or mere "oppositional" press releases, or "stunts" like saying we will go to jail rather than register for one, we have to up our arguments and explain more precisely the menacing revolution that the whole project threatens. If you only watch one video from the conference, I urge you to watch this one and like me, hopefully learn about the real agenda in more depth, and be appalled!

And so to the final session....

Session 8: Post-modernity and Liberty by Marc-Henri Glendinning

No disrespect to Marc-Henri Glendinning but I confess after all the excitement of Hoppe and the surge of anger generated by Herbert, it seemed a little surreal to end the day with post-modernist philosophy and, whilst I certainly wasn't switched off by this stage I will need to watch this session again to understand it and be able to comment on it more fully!

I did pick up on the general idea that (at least the vanguard and leadership of) the statist left have metamorphosized from what was at least an intellectually honest and fundamentally well-meaning promotion of socialist redistribution with an image of a fairer society, to one which is superficially much more "cuddly", that seems to provide succour and answers to everyone in a supposedly more free mixed economy and society but which masks a more insidious creeping totalitarianism that is anything but benign, putting the state at the centre and subjugate the individual. Beyond that, though, I will need to revisit the session to tell you any more.

And so ended one of the most intellectually stimulating and varied weekends I have ever had I think. I will need, as I said, one of David Friedman's nano-bot enhanced brains I think to be able to really thoroughly cogitate on the many ideas, some new to me, some just newly explained, I got out of the whole event. And I have material enough to keep my blogging controversial enough till next year's conference!

Everyone who helped arrange the weekend and all the speakers are to be commended, and the rest of the audience helped make it a convivial weekend in all sorts of ways in the formal sessions and in the more informal breaks and dinner. The "broad church" of Libertarianism was there for all to see, and I only wish that we could have had more Lib Dems there, perhaps ones skeptical about Libertarianism, for I am sure they would have had many of their misconceptions - in particular that Libertarianism is some selfish right wing "beggar thy neighbour" creed dispelled. read more »

drugs laws, surveillance state

Nothing to hide, sir? Ooh! Suits you sir...

Jock — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 21:43:52 +0000

I haven't been on a plane for the best part of twenty years now. Thanks to the new weapon in the snooping state's arsenal, it looks like I never will again.

The virtual strip search is here folks. I dare say one day they will have them in Debenhams too. read more »

Politicians: masters, or servants? And of whom?

Jock — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 23:21:43 +0000

Courtesy of the Libertarian Alliance blog, I am drawn to a commentary on the Libertarian Party UK blog about an article by someone called Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. at mises.org (how's all that for being damned by the company I keep, or in this case the blogs I read!) about the relationship between the "state", the politicians who try to make us believe they are "running" it and the people in whose name they are supposed to be doing so.

It introduces me at least to the idea of the "personal" and the "impersonal" state.

The personal state is where the regime in power for the time being is synonymous with the state. Most obviously this is an absolute monarchy for example. The monarch is the state. When the monarch dies the regime dies with them and another replaces it. It may be largely the same but it is still a personal fiefdom if you like of the monarch in charge.

In the impersonal state, the predominant form for the past several centuries (ironically in Britain probably traced to the "Protectorate" or at least the Restoration), the state, its bureaucracy, apparatus and most of its policy direction go rumbling on from one regime to the next. The leader is the manager not the owner, if you will.

He says the political system, of parties, elections and so on, are a chimera, making us believe we are in a personal state. That is we elect a manager who cocks up somehow we just elect another one and everything will be different. But who is really in control?

I'm sure most of us active in politics used to chuckle at "Yes, [Prime] Minister", but we all know there is more than a grain of truth in the message that the bureaucracy just rumbles on, sometimes even deliberately frustrating the will of the current elected managers, knowing that if they hold out for long enough another lot of managers will come along who may be more to their tastes.

And I don't mean that this is a personal thing - that there is some conspiracy between individuals wielding power in smokey rooms and dark corridors. It's just the way the thing works in a big state. Look at the comment the other day by a Labour minister that she thought that by the time of the next General Election the ID card system would be so far down the line that it would be impossible for any new government, even one elected purely on a platform of opposing ID cards, to stop it.

Okay, I think, I hope at least, we can take that example with a large bucket of salt - after all, unless it's been designed by Cyberdine Systems to become "self-aware" on or before 5th May 2010, there will still be an "off switch" on the mainframe! But you get the idea. And if you've been a local councillor, you see it every day in the workings of your council bureaucracy - the same old surly faces, sometimes frustrating the ideas of the politicians and so on. We have come to know some of that as the "can't do" culture.

Rockwell's conclusion is that the political "game" is futile. Ideas can move the world, but they can't shift the bureaucratic apparatus of the state at the same rate. And I have to say, since I combine my party political presence with real action on alternative structures such as Community Land Trusts and social enterprise, that bears out. Indeed, whenever we need the imprimatur of the state, such as in planning issues and so on, the byzantine apparatus seems to do its utmost to frustrate or delay us.

I tend to disagree. Obviously, I suppose, since I remain involved in party politics. But I do recognize that for all the "change" we talk about, Nick Clegg talks about, Obama talks about, whoever talks about, it does seem that most things will just grind on the way they always have. We will complain about them. We may even blame Gordon Brown or someone else for them personally. But if we continue to play that same game we will never really change them.

I am in politics because I believe those big ideas can be introduced through the political system. So did our political forebears like Lloyd-George with his 1909 budget - he at least had the balls also to go head to head with the establishment that rejected his big ideas but still, essentially, lost. I don't advocate violent revolution, though at times it seems that little short of that will actually achieve the change necessary. But I do want us to grow the cojones to be radical, to propose the "ideals" not the "manageables", to aim high and be different. And to demolish this all powerful leviathan and start from the ground up again.

I return again to the idea that we are in an age of epochal change. Of the unprecedented ability for us individually to communicate with others all round the world. We have to begin to ask just how much of that "impersonal state" we need any longer. Cobden had it about right when he said that "peace will come to the earth when people have more to do with each other and governments less." Politicians, let humanity grow up. Realize your limits. Let go and do something productive for a change instead! read more »

Labour at odds over football plan

Jock — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 22:57:35 +0000

Apparently Gordon Brown's plan to micromanage British sport for the next four years is hitting trouble...

BBC NEWS | Scotland | Labour at odds over football plan

Labour at odds over football plan Mr Brown has been talking with football officials about his plan Acting Scottish Labour leader Cathy Jamieson has set out an alternative to the prime minister's plan for a British Olympic football team. Gordon Brown said he was "determined" to have a men's and a women's football team playing in London in 2012. There has been no UK Olympic team since 1960 partly because of fears it could jeopardise individual sides. Ms Jamieson suggested a home nations play-off, with the winner going forward to play as the British team. Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond said the plan was a "massive own goal".

...but I can't see what all the fuss is about personally. After all, the British Lions combined rugby team does not jeopardise the competitiveness of the various home nations' independent rugby international teams does it?

Mind you, if they do keep on tinkering with the sporting bodies themselves don't they stand a chance under IOC rules of getting the entire team GB banned from the next Olympics. Wouldn't that be somewhat embarrassing. On the other hand, if they ban us now, perhaps we can stop spending all that money on a hole in the ground in East London... :-) read more »

The BR Brute Squad

Jock — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 16:19:13 +0000

...remember when policemen were people you felt you could go up to and ask for directions?

No longer it seems. In fact, if you have anything like a map with you, you could find yourself staying at Belmarsh (warning, watching the whole of this may cause you to damage your computer in anger!):

H/T Tristan

I am so glad Terence was filming this. Everyone should get the chance to see this kind of thing and have a real good think about the "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" attitude that is allowing our country to become a fascist state. The ability to stop at random (I was going to say "take to one side", but clearly they're happy to do this in full view of the entire concourse), with no probable cause whatever, and humiliate them in order to show other passengers "look, we're doing something about your security" is utterly obnoxious. I must say, though, I am amazed that he was allowed to continue filming, considering all that has been going on about photography in public places.

Britain, like never before, needs Fourth Amendment rights enshrined in law: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

Why should the state validate your existence?

Jock — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 21:27:02 +0000

Following on the theme from my post this morning about how we could protect data about us held by agencies of the state by using a sort of a personal key and PIN like your bank's call centre has to validate with you before they can access your data, my mind wandered onto other uses for such a key.

It has been a recurring theme in this blog that the internet in particular and modern communications in general represent a great threat to the balance of power between states (and incidentally also global "intermediary" corporations) and their citizens. I say threat, but it's only a threat if you are in a position of power in a state or corporation seeking to continue to exert control over your citizens. Indeed, for the individual, it is the greatest potential opportunity, and the vehicle by which Richard Cobden's quote at the top of this blog's front page may become reality: "Peace will come to earth when the people have more to do with each other and governments less."

Many of our institutions - governments, trans-national corporations, even currency - evolved to deal with issues of trust between people who would likely never have personal contact with each other in ever more remote markets. When trading, you've got to be able to trust that you will be paid for example - one person's "IOU" is not as good a guarantee as piece of paper endorsed collectively by an entire state - a national currency.

But we have an ever increasing range of other innovations to help us trust each other; developments that are increasing quickly with the advance of the internet. We can access our credit files, we can buy digital certificates that help give others confidence to trade with us over the web because they guarantee we are who we say we are and so on. So why not shift these into the "real world".

Why do we actually need, say, a passport to travel across borders, issued by a nation state, when we could have just as secure a guarantee of who we are through some kind of personal digital certificate from an organization bearing the risk, with strong encryption embedded in it? The British government keeps trying to sweeten its totalitarian ID card scheme by telling us, amongst other things, that it will make proving our identity to others in all sorts of transactions much easier. But in fact the history of government involvement in protecting the source data of those identities is appalling, and, as the technology gets more pervasive it seems to be getting worse.

How much confidence can you have in a government issued identity mechanism when so much data has gone missing already? Those identities are, thanks to state incompetence, all but worthless. Of course that's why, partly at least, they want to take biometric data. But in computer security it is generally accepted that being able to produce "something you have" (say a credit card or internet digital certificate) and "something you know" - a password, PIN, or private digital encryption key is far better than ony one or other of these pieces of information on its own. So far as I can see the ID card system, or the passport, with or without a national identity register, does not fulfill both of these - only the former. It is inherently weaker than the commercially available alternatives.

So, why not replace the need for passports issued by a state with identity mechanisms authenticated by trusted corporate or social organizations for whom financial success or failure rests on people being able to trust the people they certify. So you could have a personal account with Thawte as the primary guarantor, for example, and that certificate could be counter-signed by a certificate from other organizations, such as governments, who want to "mark your card" as one of their citizens, granting you the protections normally written on a passport.

It's not easy to get some of these certification authorities to guarantee your bona fides. You need often as much verification as you do to get a passport with other trusted people verifying who you are and so on. But you would not need to give these data to the poroous security mechanisms of the state which has proved beyond any reasonable doubt that they cannot keep the information secure, nor does it offer the other benefit of a private contract - the ability to sue the ass off them if they damage your reputation or security by losing your data - or the corporate incentive of only being able to make a profit if you actually deliver on what people expect of you.

And you also get a choice of how strong you want the certification to be. If it's only guaranteeing small personal trades for example, you may only need to spend a few pounds and fill in a quick web form, validate your address and you're in business. If you want to travel overseas, or deal in bigger sums, or trade with distant counterparties, you may want stronger levels of guarantee and pay accordingly. It's a global standard pretty well too. So you'd have no problems using it to prove your identity in all sorts of applications - travel, trade, opening a bank account, starting a company, getting insurance, benefits, accessing what little data about you the state actually needs and so on - none of which would need to be on any single central database owned by a bunch of data-incontinents like the government is proving to be with the attendant dangers of losing all your data at once.

So, you see, we no longer even need governments to help us prove who we are. And in fact they appear to be singularly bad at doing so. The threat inherent in this is that the currently all powerful state needs to be able to do this, or it loses control of its citizens. And they are shit scared of that. If we are not mindful, in their lust to maintain that power they will get immensely more authoritarian and intrusive. The time is coming when we will no longer need them. We must do all we can to hasten that day before they get their claws in too deep into these emerging trust mechanisms. read more »

How should our details be protected?

Jock — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 12:47:09 +0000

Following the revelation of yet more utter incompetence in government data handling the BBC asks...

How should our details be protected?

A computer memory stick containing the personal information of tens of thousands of criminals has been lost. Who should be responsible for keeping our personal information secure?

Well, I posited a suggestion ten years ago now when I was on the Lib Dems' Civil Liberties Policy Working Group. At the time ID cards were but an evil glint in Liar, Liar, Tony Bliar's eyes but there was a clear feeling that they were pushing in that direction. But it was mainly in response to issues such as Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and government wanting more and more surreptitious access to data already held about us and our activities.

My suggestion was that if government felt the need to keep all this data on us, the very least they could do would be to put us in charge of how and when it was accessed. We could all have an encryption key - it need not even be supplied by government - you could purchase one perhaps from Thawte or someone like that if, when, you decided you could not trust the government.

Two encryption keys would be required any time any bureaucrat or official decided they wanted to take a peek at any data the government held identifying you as the subject. A bit like a "nuclear key" where you need two people to turn the key for anything to work, the official would have their own key which would identify them as the person trying to access the data and check they were authorized to do so, and they would have to be in contact with the data subject, you, and, like a bank call centre does when they phone you would have to authenticate they were dealing with the real you by getting you to enter some of your PIN or similar before they'd get access.

Every government database system that held any data on individuals could have to go through an annual independent audit to ensure there was no inbuilt mechanism for bypassing such a security measure or, for example, copying data en masse with personal identifiers in. The system could be extended, voluntarily, to any organization that holds personal data - such as banks - if they felt it was more effective than creating their own, and the whole principle could be embedded in Data Protection legislation (not that the presence of Data Protection legislation stops the government currently breaking their own laws).

Remember, it's not so very long ago that when you submitted your tax return each part of it, or schedule, would be dealt with by a different official so that no one person could actually gain a picture of what you were worth. We need to return to that culture. Modern technology is great stuff, or it can be. But at the moment the culture seems to be to assume that systems ought to be intrusive rather than actively looking for ways as part of systems specifications to maintain the benefits of fast modern communications and data (for there are many) whilst not being intrusive. Witness the debate about road pricing - "eye in the sky spies" or "black box" systems that don't need to transfer data about your movements, only about your overall journey for the purpose of billing.

Would it grind government to a halt? Perhaps, though in saying that the former tax regime was entirely paper based and so much more troublesome and it didn't exactly collapse then and banks and other large data processing organizations use similar technology and still operate reasonably efficiently. Would government grinding to a halt be a terribly bad thing in any case I wonder?

But, whether the data is about criminals, child benefit recipients or recruits to the armed forces, this current government has proven itself utterly incapable of managing data, or perhaps just contemptuous of our rights. Personally, I doubt any other party's government would be doing much better - contempt for the citizen is embedded in Whitehall and Westminster, but Straw and Smith should resign over this latest data loss immediately. Resign and be tried as any data controller be would with such brazen data losses under their watch. Enough is enough. These bastards need to get out of our lives, or perhaps some day we will collectively decide we need to make them butt out, forcibly.

UPDATE: My boss just pointed me to this article in Computer Weekly about Lib Dems calling for data commissioners to protect data about the public. I'm not sure it's anywhere near adequate. The liberal response should be, of course, to reduce the quantities of data first by being ruthless about who needs to store any data about us, but I can't see a data commissioner, even one for every database, will be any more effective than the current DPA regime of a responsible Data Owner who can be prosecuted for failure to comply with the act. Clealry government departments need to be held responsible in the courts, with individuals answerable, just as they are in other organizations. And at the top of the tree comes the minister concerned. It is not technology that is at fault but a lax attitude to how that technology should be used that matters. We need to change the culture such that databases are designed from the bottom up toassume, essentially, that the data subject is the one who by default has access not the data owners. read more »