International

Isn't this just a little bit scary?

Jock — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 18:23:13 +0000

...but strangely intensely exciting at the same time?

I'm just watching the news on Channel 4 and they've got all this coverage of the squirming going on in Washington and Wall Street.

Is it just me or am I right in the impression that Privilege and Power is absolutely terrified at the moment? That "they" really believe things are on the edge of a precipice which threatens systemic melt-down or revolution?

And also that there is a real massive popular movement going on to get the message across to "the Hill" that "they" will not be forgiven for allowing "our" money to pay Goldman Sachs bonuses. read more »

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 »

Sarkozy's scheme two years behind Jock's!

Jock — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 23:01:14 +0000

Would someone give me a job developing ideas for the future. Here's another one I prepared earlier:

Saharan sun could power European supergrid | Environment | guardian.co.uk

Vast farms of solar panels in the Sahara desert could provide clean electricity for the whole of Europe, according to EU scientists working on a plan to pool the region's renewable energy.

It seems that the transmission loss problem is a little less daunting using High Voltage Direct Current - I work out that southern Morocco to London would involve about a 7% transmission loss in a more or less straight line over land. Sounds like it has potential to me. read more »

Beginning of the end for VAT?

Jock — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 17:33:53 +0000

...well, perhaps not quite but this is interesting, if blindingly obvious in a sort of a "why didn't we think of that" way:

HMV customers to exploit tax loophole at digital terminals - Telegraph

Customers at HMV stores will be able to avoid paying VAT by ordering CDs and DVDs through digital terminals. The "HMV Delivers" kiosks are being installed across the chain's 240 UK branches over the next two years. Their initial role will be to allow customers to order products that are out of stock in their shops. The merchandise will then be sent from HMV's offshore site in Guernsey.

I've been writing for a while now about how the globalization of communication (and delivery) technology is set to make it ever harder for states to quantify and collect taxes based on trade and incomes and make it imperative, if they want to have any revenue stream into the future, to switch taxation to more fixed sources like ("economic") land - ground rents, airspace, electromagnetic spectrum and so on, or face the prospect of ever increasingly authoritarian measures to force people to repatriate income and assets for tax purposes.

I hadn't counted on VAT being amongst the first to be threatened, but here it is. It's not going to help buying cakes from Tesco yet because it will only work if it is actually imported, I suspect (no getting away with simply operating from a warehouse in every town that happens to be owned by a Channel Island company I would think).

But people, liberal minded political types especially, need to wake up to this double threat - to recognize that revenue collection will be more difficult in future if based on moveable assets, incomes and trade, and to recognize that addressing that means going one of two ways - the more equitable land tax, or the more authoritarian crackdown on trade and "cross-border" earnings. The ability to move money and income and so on overseas is moving fast and getting ever easier for the ordinary person - you no longer need to be super-rich to go offshore. We need to act fast to counteract its effects on future tax revenues. read more »

Fannie, Freddie, Africa and Europe in context

Jock — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 16:29:26 +0000

It has been estimated that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac between them underwrite debt of some $5,000,000,000,000 and that US losses from the current credit crunch could amount to $1,600,000,000,000.

The entire external debt obligations of the world's 40 odd Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPCs) is some $300,000,000,000 - that's about 6% of Fannie and Freddie's problems. So any bailout of the US mortgage system is going to amount almost certainly to more money than would write off all that, mainly African, debt (were that the best way to proceed, which I believe it is, with conditions).

By contrast the EU has today decided to support the idea of giving the surplus it has made on the Common Agricultural Policy as a result of rising food crop prices (so it has been subsidising less) to "African farmers". That's about €1,000,000,000 - or one three-thousandth of Fannie and Freddie's problems and two hundredths of Africa's problems.

But where did they get that money from, how did it arise? Robbing those very African farmers by denying them access to our markets and subsidising dumping on theirs. Tariffs are pure evil, aren't they?

So, whenever anyone says to you that it's difficult to find the finance for debt relief in the poorest countries, you'll now know that is total bollocks. Just think of the scale of the US mortgage debt and what such sums could do for the 600 million or so poorest on the planet. read more »

debt money

Y I H8 G8

Jock — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 09:02:01 +0000

I hate the G8, there's no doubt. I find the whole idea a nauseating display of mankind's folly that a few people with power can do more or less anything, from manipulating the world's climate to holding in their grasp the lives of billions whose lot in life those leaders of the industrialised nations can barely comprehend, let alone decree how to change.

It epitomizes to me why nation states are vile, unnatural divisions of humanity and the planet which, frankly, seem to have more to do with protecting the wealth of the few and patronizing the poverty of the many on this earth. Their leaders pose, Atlas-like, for photo-calls after their vacuous pronouncements, like some cabal of gallactic princelings in some dystopian Sci-Fi vision of a future inter-stellar imperial court.

Yet I'm no crusty protester you'll find scaling fences at Gleneagles or taking a bullet in Genoa complaining that these neo-cons and neo-liberals want to sell our world to the most hated capitalist profiteer. Oh no. Business, amongst other examples of voluntary human co-operation, has a huge part to play in addressing the needs of everyone on the planet. If only it could all be carried out on a billiard-table-level playing field.

And this is the greatest power these eight chattering onanists have - they could, if they chose, level that playing field tomorrow, or at least leave Japan this week having agreed to do so. But they don't want that, do they. because they also represent the businesses already raping the planet and its people by dint of playing on a skewed field.

They make me puke when I think of them, quite literally. I am nauseous writing this to be honest. I do not believe there are eight people on the planet, in fact not 2008 nor yet even 200,000,008 endowed with the wisdom of gods and strength of titans who could do any better at securing the future of this planet than the possibility oif billions of us being able to communicate and co-operate directly among ourselves.

At the top of my front page you will find what must be one of my favourite quotes from any politician, in this case the truly radical, Richard Cobden:

"Peace will come to earth when the people have more to do with each other and governments less." 150 years later, like infants only learning to crawl, we still rely on those protectionist, egotistical, smugly self-important governments despite the evidence that they cannot and will not deliver on their promises.

Whilst I certainly do not agree with all their policies, I find the idea of SimPol, in which we use modern communications technology to get ordinary people throughout the world, in diverse and distant countries, to voice together our aspirations and make those same sort of global changes on a consensual and co-operative basis.

Y I H8 G8. read more »

Is there a point at which Liberal Democrats should want to leave the European Union?

Jock — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 00:26:40 +0000

I used to take it more or less as an article of faith that the EU is good for us. Somehow. And that the Liberal Democrat position of being avowedly critical of some of the ways it operates was a good one - we were the first, I believe, in calling for CAP reform way back just after we joined, for example.

Like so many lofty political projects it has or perhaps could have beneficial aims. I was even rather enthusiastic about the idea of a "United States of Europe", if only it could be constructed as a genuinely liberal federation in which sovereignty rests as much as possible with the individual. I'd even like to have seen it replacing national governments, mainly because I can't think of anything that national governments are good for in a world where the individual is sovereign that would not be better done perhaps with a "light touch" overarching supra-national body.

The current line indeed is that there are some things we just can't handle on our own - issues that naturally do not respect national borders - pollution, global warming, terrorism. Some, I noted during the campaign for the European parliamentary candidates, take a more controversial line (for me at least) that the "fight" against "excesses" by transnational corporations can only be handled at a supranational level. And that the EU is such a model supranational body capable of meeting all these challenges.

All the time of course there have been nay-sayers - on the left by people who see it as a free market capitalist conspiracy (actually I think they mean protectionist but I don't think they understand that any longer on the left) and on the right that it is meddlesome, protectionist (and they mean it correctly) and no longer, if it ever was, centered on freeing trade to make individuals better off. And there is evidence that both have a point - in fact the same point - especially about protectionism.

But for me the reason I'd quite like it to slow down is that we have lost control of our own, national politics - even without Europe interfering, though it certainly helps when they claim things are out of their hands. And, despite the chimera of representation that is the European Parliament if we have no control over our national politicians we have no control over what they do in our name in the other courts of the European project.

So, can anyone sell the whole idea to me again; explain to me how we can possibly make it work for the sovereign individual if we have a great barrier at our national government level not interested in that sovereign individual even in their own countries? It probably goes without saying, as I've done so before, but all the brilliant arguments in the world will do nothing for me if Blair ends up as president. I have not left this sceptered isle now for nearly twenty years, and even then it was just to go to the emerald one, but I will seriously have to consider emigrating to Norway if that happens. read more »

Free Burma!

Jock — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 03:07:28 +0000

Tories create "nice little number" for Tony?

Jock — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 04:12:26 +0000

How gallant of them!

Tories advocate watchdog to monitor aid impact

Larry Elliott
Monday June 4, 2007
The Guardian

The Conservatives last night called for this week's G8 summit in Germany to create a new international body to measure the effectiveness of aid spending as they warned that much of the west's development budget was being badly used. read more »

Internet futurology

Jock — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 11:24:18 +0000

My two connections with Ditchley Park amount to having had to liaise with the estate in a former life about whether the Christ Church Beagles could roam over their land and "starring" as an extra in the Peter Cook version of Black Beauty, some of whose outdoor scenes were filmed in front of the house itself. And yes, the great man did cadge a cigarette off me - but I don't think I actually made it into any scenes!

But I have never been invited along, as Jonathan Fryer has, for a high powered Ditchley Foundation event such as on The Long-term Impact of the Internet. read more »