Dave the Dystopian

Sympathy for ... Occupy LSX?

2012-01-31T22:24:00.002Z

Like Occupy, the UK Suffragette Movement to gain
votes for women was widely criticised for the manner in which
the direct action tactics that they chose.

Why, when it comes to protest, being idealistic, irritating and hard to define isn't really an issue...

In Egypt, they endure thebullets; in Syria, they risk torture and summary execution; in China, they are immolatingthemselves in ever greater numbers, directly giving theirlives for an ounce of equality. In the West, they sit in tents and paint funnysigns. It’s not because they’re uncommitted, but because that’s all they needto do. They endure the taunting of the right, the chilling weather and the riskof arbitrary arrest but they stay … and many of them even smile.

In the early days of mass media, thedisaffected found that peaceful but irritating acts of protest gain theexposure that spread their message and damaged the reputation of those theytargeted. While the Suffragettes were widely scorned for their tactics ofdisrupting public events and chaining themselves to railings, ‘right-thinking’man and woman alike cheering the arrest of each, the freedom fighters earned themselves the reverence of history.

And so it continued throughout the lastcentury, through strikers, hippies, anti-war protesters, miners, Poll Taxrioters, animal welfare and green activists – all were ridiculed, feared andpunished for their disturbing of the public mores. They dressed untidily, madelots of noise, blocked the public highway and failed to engage in asophisticated way with the establishment. Yet, I would argue, the messages ofeach one enlightened the political debate and shifted public opinion in theirfavour.

While not without problems, the movement has been peaceful,
creative and often intelligent, getting its message across in
colourful ways, like this sculpture by the artist Banksy.

Britain remains such a psychologically conservativenation that we have an inherent distrust of radicalism in all its forms.Paradoxically, by allowing a society where free debate and protest are allowed,we open the floodgates to the radical movements that much of the world hasgenerally been able to suppress. Whereas marches and strikes were once met withsabres and rifles, November 30th will be little more than a family day out forthe lower-middle classes.

And now it’s happening again. When it becameclear that the Occupy protesters were not going anywhere, the public’s firstreaction was to get ticked off. They were accused of spoiling St Paul’s for thetourists and wedding parties; of sophistry with their lack of fully considereddemands; and the news that some of the protesters were leaving their tentsabandoned for the odd night at home was met with incredulity as if they weretrying to dupe the public to undeserved sympathy.

More recently, they’re being perceived asengaging in some sort of squatters party, endlessly drinking in public, urinating in alleyways,filling their veins with heroin and infecting one another with AIDS inan orgy of leftie pleasure. It’s become so de rigueur for the chatteringclasses to mock them that even the apolitical millionaire entertainer, ChrisEvans, strongly stated his distaste for them on his otherwise bland Radio 2breakfast show.

It is a common attack the protesters for hypocrisy for enjoying
Starbucks coffee and iPads. The idea that you cannot seek to
reform a system while enjoying what benefits it offers is unfair.

But now their stamina to withstand weather,legal threats and time has been demonstrated, they are starting to get plauditsfrom among the radical edges of the establishment. Celebrity campaigners, theArchbishop of Canterbury, the Opposition Leader and now theBusiness Secretary have all added their sympathy inrecent weeks, each bringing a small drip of credibility to the movement. Thissupport is more powerful than jeers from bores like Boris Johnson and it makesit that much harder for the police to move against them.

What much of the right-wing press isunwilling to admit is that there is something impressive about the creativityand responsible nature of the protesters. Unlike the self-serving public sector workers about to engage in the most disruptive strike action the UK hasseen for a generation, the Occupy movement are not blackmailing the nation;unlike the destructive anarchy that has accompanied recent protest marches,their methods have tiptoed the minefield around the confusing web of criminaloffences that would allow the police to sweep in and arrest them; unlike thepetitioners and rally speakers and public meeting holders, they aren’t just inthe news one day and forgotten the next.

Underneath the war of words, libertarians and Occupy
protesters agree that the current system is broken. To
dismiss Occupy for having no clear solutions mistakes the
mechanics of mass protest movements.

Of course, the ill-conceived and unrealisticdemands of the protesters mean that they will be judged by popular history as afailure. There will be no ending of greed, no destroying of capitalism, noremoving of the profit incentive while simultaneously funding evermore socialwelfare. But their language and their arguments are already sneaking into ourconsciousness and our vocabulary, even in Westminster.They may be young, naive and economically illiterate but even those of us whorealise markets are a mostly reliable force for good tend to agree that thingshave gone badly wrong and the system must be amended.

Unlike those striking for others to pay forthe masses to continue generously funding their pensions, Occupy will winbecause their message resonates: the system is broken, the bankers got awaywith it and the innocent were punished. The next month is key: if they surviveeviction, snowfall and the draw of a family Christmas, then their credibilitywill be assured. They will serve to remind us not to be distracted by theEurozone and the credit agencies and all the foreign things we can do littleabout and they will serve to remind the bankers and politicians that thecountry is still awaiting justice.

Originally published for LiberalVision on 28th November 2011.

Update: The protestersare awaiting to hear if they may appeal against their latest eviction order toleave St Paul's. With a decision due tomorrow (Wednesday 22nd), the pressattention which has dissipated somewhat over the past months may well spring backinto focus.

The resolve of theprotesters seemed not to have waned with a spokesman for the movement sayingprotesters may resist the eviction. This could give the police thejustification to suppress the movement, though there is some hope that this maybe avoided. Firstly, the protesters are saying that they have other sites readyto Occupy if necessary, allowing the potential for a peaceful withdrawal. Moreimportant, the High Court judge who made the most recent ruling declaredprotesters should be allowed to remain for up to 23 hours a day, even if forcedto decamp.

It isa testimony to the finer points of the British justice system thatLord Neuberger and senior judges have been so willing to defend freedom ofprotest against the powerful lobbying power of the City of London and theright-wing press. 21/2/12

So the St Paul's sagahas today come to an end as, in a midnight raid, the police cleared protestersfrom the square. The clearance was mostly peaceful with only twenty arrests,which is better than the police's handling of other peaceful protests of late.

St Paul's Cathedral put out astatement saying, "Inthe past few months, we have all been made to re-examine important issues aboutsocial and economic justice and the role the cathedral can play. We regret thecamp had to be removed by bailiffs."

It will be interesting to see if the protesters continue to gather at St Paul's as the are legally allowed to do and whether this will gain them attention by allowing them to occupy another high profile target. After 137 days, the protesters seem fairly committed. 27/2/12

At War with the Web

2012-01-31T22:22:00.000Z

Barack Obama, in his inaugural speech as president, spoke ofhow those unwilling to unclench their fists were 'on the wrong side ofhistory'. This is true of the monarchists, the imperialists and thetotalitarians whose battles against the tide saw them swept away by humans'resistance to arbitrary control just as soon as there existed the technicalcapability to do so. Cheap printing facilitated the downfall of the kings,cheap firearms the colonialists, and cheap media the communists.

Today, the Internet is in turn doing for the authoritarians, fatallyundermining those willing to resort to the long arm of the law to restrainsocial and political revolution. Old politics, old customs and old businessmodels are being swept aside at a tremendous rate. So much so, in fact, that in2012, the battle to turn back time is even sucking in the political classes of the Less Unfree World.

Swales Tweeted that about 164 million people saw the
Wikipedia blackout page, telling us just a fraction of what
the US Congress passing SOPA could have meant for the
future of free information.

Like any technological revolution, the Digital Revolution ischanging the limits of possibility. It allows us to reach a potential audienceof billions for a price so close to being free, it often is. High quality mediacan be shared at the touch of a button and given the choice of getting it forfree, most humans will opt to do so. Like any technological revolution, itfulfils human desires so well it is impossible to stop; like all good revolutions,it is tremendously empowering; and like most known revolutions, it is leadingto war.

Those who understand the Internet were declaring victory aweek ago as US Congressmen shelved SOPA and PIPA, two bills which would givethe US authorities extraordinary powers to block websites containing piratedmaterial. Wikipedia'sco-founder Jimmy Wales compared the unprecedented Internet campaign to theArab Spring and predicted, somewhat Whiggishly, that the Internet will continueto liberate. It's easy to scare off Congressman with an alliance ofAmerica's biggest tech giants, pro-democracy groups and millions of web-usersthroughout the world and a high profile protestfrom the world's most popular source of learning. A victory on the politicalfront, however, overlooks the severe losses on the legal and diplomatic fronts.

First off, there is MegaUpload, the administrators of whichare currently being prosecuted under criminal law for allowing strangers toupload data to store on their servers. The argument is that by making a profitfrom their website, they have gained from the spoils of crime. By this logic, councilchiefs should face prison every time a shoplifter puts money in a parkingmeter, and shopkeepers should have their premises seized if ever they sell aladder that is later used in a burglary.

While Poland saw a large protest campaign culminating in
politicians posing in Guy Fawkes masks (an act potentially
illegal under ACTA), little media attention was given to it in
the UK.

Then comes ACTA,an international version of the rejected SOPA, which treats copying media alongsidethe potentially fatal act of counterfeiting medicine. While public protestshave seen the more draconian parts of the bill significantly watered down from leakedversions, it has been negotiated in a verysecretive way despite seeking to create a powerful and internationalbinding agreement. Most troubling is that ACTA waters down the legal principle of fair use thatallows individuals to breach copyright in a reasonable way, like taking a photo of someonewithout having to pay money to whoever owns the rights to their t-shirt design.When the EUsigned ACTA into law over the weekend, a leading official resigned in protest.

It is often said that this war is about applying TwentiethCentury rules to the Twenty-First Century, but that would be unfair to ourpredecessors. What's common about all of these provisions is they treat thesharing of intellectual property as a crime, interchangeably counterfeiting andtheft as this EuropeanCommission website chooses to. But counterfeiting requires deception andtheft requires removal of ownership; copying and sharing have traditionally beseen as productive pursuits. Nor is this about 'protecting private property', as those users who had uploaded data to MegaUpload for legal purposes face having their data destroyed.

This is about 'protecting something very Twenty-First Century: enabling wealthy IP owners to by-pass the inconvenience of undergoing the judicial process and all the evidence it requires. Previously, if you drew a picture of Mickey Mouse and showed your friends, Disney would have had to pursue you in the civil courts for any loss of earnings they could reasonably prove. Why do that, when the police will close down the paper mill and bring criminal charges against the mill owners? By treating what the condescending vested interests would like usto call 'piracy' as a serious crime, it also allows the entertainment industry toavoid the kind of expensive innovations that are the stuff of progress.

As things stand, website seizure notices by the US
authorities will become a familiar image to us all.

This idea that a heavy hand can change human desire is a symptom of the same conservative megalomania that gives us the wars against terrorism and drugs, and those who wage them are so overly ambitious as to beblind to the inevitable failure of ignoring the reality that allows the problems to get out of hand in the first place. Evengiants like YouTube lack the resources to effectively control the footage they store,with sixtyhours worth of data being uploaded every second. As file-sharing websitesand streaming websites are closed down, the likely outcome will be directsharing via Internet forums and FTP clients. For the war to succeed, all forums, web pages and emailswill need to be monitored closely, from Yahoo Mail, YouTube and Google Bloggerto Facebook, Twitter and the BBC News website.

The implausibility regulating content in a net beneficial way is increased when you take into account that web-companies are also under pressure to comply with demands made by despotic nations. They will, however,make every effort to be seen to be complying when threatened with a big enough stick, as Twitterhas indeed done in the past week by announcing it will ban differentcontent in different countries. To do so, they will have to deploy the currentbest practice forged by the People's Republic of China: creating logarithms that regionally block controversial words like 'Arab Spring' or'Wikileaks'. This clumsy attempt to make the world more harmonious, meant '#Egypt' itself was blocked at one point.

For smaller companies, the very real threat of criminal prosecution is likelyto make them ban all user entered data from being shared entirely, turning the Internetinto a place where small firms are only safe to provide personal data storage andshopping services. The MegaUpload trial will be the key test case for this, butmany smallfile-sharing firms have already smelt the coffee and are closing this service before their own industry is rewarded with a prison sentence.

Anarchist hacking group Anonymous have been responding
to these recent developments with threatening videos and
acts of cyber-terrorism. Like real wars cause blowback,
cyber-wars could cause a great deal of real world harm.

Most concerning is that SOPA sought tocriminalise the use of tools used to get around web-blocking, such as VPNs,Proxy Servers and FTP clients. These tools are famously used to allow teenagersto access pornography and can be used by organised crime and terrorist cells toavoid detection; on the other hand, they allow for free speech and access to Western learning in countries thatseek to manipulate and control their citizens, playing a major role in the ArabSpring and other such movements. The justification to target these tools toprevent crime is the same justification once used against printing presses, thefreedom of movement and mass literacy; and its equally true of the memorystick, the telephone or the pencil.

Thus the very act of penalising those who inadvertentlycarry prohibited data, the collateral damage can only be huge, sacrificing onlineprivacy, free speech and the ability of the Internet to be a forum forcreativity, learning and innovation. Geeky teenagers, hi-tech businesses andpolitical activists thus find themselves bed-fellows with criminals andterrorists; US legislators, European diplomats and Hollywood are takingmeasures that shore up blasphemy laws, corrupt dictators and genocidal regimes.While the complex, mobile and mostly anonymous nature of the Internet means itis the former group who will always be several steps ahead, this is a war that noone can win.

Let's not exaggerate what's at stake - piracy will not bringdown the entertainment industry. People will always make films and music, therewill always be a market for live performance and merchandise and whereverthere's a want, there's a profit to be made. But let's say for argument's sakethat the choice is between new music and new films, and the ability to be ableto use the Internet to share media with your friends, to be a dynamic spacewhere ideas are shared, adapted and improved, and where your words, youractions and your social circles are not recorded, monitored and punished bythe world's security agencies. Which side of history will you choose to be on?

Update - As today's news breaks a story about FBI and UK police officers being hacked while discussing an operation against hackers, the BBC have this interesting article about hacktivists like Anonymous. Most relevant to this article is a quote from one member of the online group, who says "I see this as becoming a war. Not a conventional war. This is a war of ideas." 3/2/2012

Deutsch TV vs Der Dystopischen

2012-01-23T07:21:00.001Z

During the Feltham and Heston Parliamentary by-election, I found myself chosen to participate in an interview with German TV news, commenting on David Cameron's use of the veto in discussions with other heads of state as to how to solve the euro crisis.

You'll find me 90 seconds in, though if you don't speak German, you'll have to strain to hear what I'm saying, so here's a transcript:

"I think there are definitely some Eurosceptics who will be celebrating today and I think that's very short-sighted. But at the end of the day, there's no love lost between us. We're not particularly fond of the Conservatives and they're not particularly enthusiastic about being in coalition with us. It's a government of needs, not a government of enthusiasm."

The Rt Hon David Laws MP vs the Dystopian

2012-01-17T09:32:00.000Z

Last November, I was lucky enough to attend 'A Conversation with David Laws' at the Institute of Economic Affairs, where the senior Liberal Democrat and former Chief Sectary to the Treasury was interviewed by the ex-Liberal Democrat, Downing Street advisor and libertarian director of the the IEA, Mark Littlewood.

During the fifty minute interview, I was one of three guests to have their question put to Mr Laws. So does the free marketeer and the man behind the economically liberal 'Orange Book' think the Lib Dems' alliance of liberals and social democrats could survive a policy move to liberalise competition in public services?

To see the whole interview, go to http://vimeo.com/32765082.

Keeping Protest Civilised: The Modern Rules

2011-11-20T20:27:00.001Z

It would of course be hopelessly naive to assume there was evera golden age of protest in Britain. In pre-modern times, the insecurity ofkings meant most protests were ended with a swift execution for the ringleadersat the very least, with an unpleasant spell in the Tower of London for those who shouldknow better.

Effective protest movements have always been intimidating
to much of the public, prompting the authorities to respond
in heavy-handed ways. The shooting of American students
peacefully protesting the Vietnam war is just one
of the Western examples in recent decades.

In most places, at most times, the establishment responds inthe same manner. It can take a variety of forms but in their simplest form areknown as 'New Measures'. They are rarely initiated in democratic parliamentsand are prone to being struck down in the impartial courts. They emerge, almostwithout exception, from insecure governments and a bureaucratic police force.

Despite the Coalition government's pledge to restore theright to peaceful protest, the number of these new measures emerging from theHome Office and various police forces seems to have increased in the pasttwelve months, following the fairly insignificant disorder of the student riotslast autumn. So what are the rules that a modern protester need follow?

1. Don't bedisruptive Punishment: Arrest and prosecution

Those shocking scenes of terrifying dissent which lead
to a failed attempt to prosecute 145 protesters.

There was a time when trespass was a civil offence, and arather burdensome process would follow to remove you. First, the landownerwould have to request you leave, then the police would give you a warning and,finally, you would be physically forced from the premises. Any significant lossincurred by the landowner would lead to a lawsuit to determine compensation.

Yet in 1994, 'NewMeasures' were introduced whereby trespassmixed with being irritating could lead to imprisonment. Of course, it neverhas, as the poorly drafted law rarely makes it past the Crown ProsecutionService and judges have never found such punishment to be proportional giventhe good intentions of most protesters. However, as last March's mass arrest ofanti-tax avoidance protesters at Fortnum& Mason demonstrated, it is an excellent way to deter individuals from futureaction. All it takes is a night in the cells, a court appearance and a note onyour record available to any employer you may have the audacity to want a job with.

2. Don't steal thelimelight Punishment:Pre-emptive arrest

Police response to a Whitehall gathering of
nationalist protesters on Remembrance Day.

Before big patriotic occasions like the nationalcelebrations, the Chinese authorities like to focus the efforts onhigh-visibility policing, identity checks and re-arresting known dissidents. Thankfully,this impressive dedication to event planning has not gone beyond notice of ourown authorities, who pre-arrested several individuals planning republicanprotests on the day of the Royal Wedding. Three had actually beengrantedpermission by the police themselves to carry out their protest. This week, the Home Office announcedit had gone so swimmingly well, that New Measures, including raids for political posters, would be used againstprotesters at next year's Olympics in Beij-... er, London.

Of course, this rule doesn't just apply to lefties. Lastweek, some English Defence League demonstrators had gathered near the Cenotaph tomark Remembrance Day. When the Met Police heard a rumour that they planned to counter-protest the Occupy LSX group, they swoopedin to arrest all 170 before they could get within a mile of the camp. Theestablishment doesn't like competition for headlines.

Undercover PC Mark Kennedy with one of his better
protest-related injuries.

3. Do what you'retold, when you're told

Punishment:Arrest/broken bones

It seems every protest these days leads to video footage ofpolice taking actionagainst protesters who answer back or just seem to be in the wrong place at the wrongtime. Sometimes, this includes journalists, observers and the oddundercover policeman. Perhaps the most telling part of Channel 4's Confessions of an Undercover Cop was that PC Mark Kennedy had his spine broken by the policefor trying to protect a female activist from a similar fate.

Britain's protest intelligence go-to-man said of the experience: "I felt embarrassedto be a police officer. ... The solidarity and the love I received from thepeople I was infiltrating brought tears to my eyes. ... It was the stamping onmy back and my hips that broke my spine."

4. Don't get tooclose Punishment: Grievous Bodily Harm/Death

66 year-old German protester Dietrich Wagner blinded for
life by a water cannon for attending a protest in Stutgart.

The saddest thing about thekilling of Ian Tomlinson in 2009 was that he wasn't actually involved inthe protest. The blow that was administered was simply routine as officersmoved back a troublesome crowd. With water-cannon back on the list of governmentapproved New Measures and plasticbullets deployed just in case a recent student march turned ugly, it islikely more deaths of innocent bystanders will make the news in upcoming years.

5.Don't make police look unprepared Punishment: General taxation

Was it the thought of being shot that kept Black Bloctrouble-makers away from last week's student protests or the buddying up schemebetween protesters and uniformed police? 4,000officers may seem a little over the top for 10,000 protesters but at leastthe taxpayer ensured that no senior policeman risked his job.

November's student protest cost hundreds of thousands of
pounds on its own. This is only the fiscal price of
a jittery police force.

And what of the recent mass arrests? Should the taxpayerreally pick up the bill for arresting 140 protesters, prosecuting dozens andconstructing asuccessful case against ten (who got let off with £1,000 in costs)? Giventhat the store lost over £50,000 in lost trade, it seems a civil suit wouldhave been more restorative and cheaper for us all.

This is small change comparedto the £3 million for spying on and failing to prosecute environmental activists for considering demoing a powerstation. Said Mark Kennedy on the Channel 4 documentary: "You're not infiltrating people selling drugs or gunsor selling children to the sex trade. You're infiltrating people who have asocial conscience. ... Paranoia levels in the activist community must be goingthrough the roof."

On all these cases, the centre-ground has responded with a confused grumble. Thereis shameful silence from those elements of the right-wing who usually flare withrage at any sign of the state gagging their contentious opinions or purchasingKit-Kats with taxpayers money. This is the price we pay for punishing theunsophisticated riff-raff who dare to influence politics without discussion luncheonsand wine-reception report launches.

The casual pepper spraying of Occupy protesters in
California shows how little has changed in policing standards
despite the democratic advances Western nations have seen.

This is the price we pay to keep our democracy civilised.

Update 21/11/11: As if to back up my point about plastic bullets, one newspaper reported today that a Egyptian cameraman covering the 'restoration of order'/'clampdown' (delete as per ideology) was blinded by plastic bullets.

Update 25/1/12: Following up for an earlier announcement that the police will prepare for the Olympics by raiding suspected protesters houses to confiscate banners and placards, Theresa May today announced Olympic security will be focusing on confiscating camping materials from those attending Olympic events. It's difficult to see how screening for tents won't leave less resources for screening for weapons and explosives, but tents clearly are apparently a 'threat' according to the Home Secretary.

Freedom, Order & the Conservative Fallacy

2011-11-01T23:35:00.001Z

Compare the following two quotes, if you would be so good:

UK Prime Minister David Cameron

“Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill. ... We are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these Web sites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.”

“It is my passionate conviction that all human rights should carry full force online - not just the right to privacy, but the right to freedom of expression. Cultural differences are not an excuse to water down human rights. We reject the view that government suppression of the internet, phone networks and social media at times of unrest is acceptable.”

The first is from Prime Minister David Cameron, spoken on 11t h August 2011, in the wake of a short period of rioting in cities around the UK; the latter is from Foreign Secretary William Hague, spoken on the 1st November 2011, in the wake of a long period of rioting in cities around the Less Free World. His audience included officials from China, Russia and several Arabic states.

Foreign Secretary William Hague

Accusations that the government has done something of a major U-turn on the legitimacy of web-blocking may seem a little unfair to the less astute reader. Cameron was, of course talking of those who 'we know are plotting violence, disorder and criminality'. Hague, on the other hand, is talking of universal rights that may legitimately be suspended in accordance with international law in order to meet 'the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society' (Article 29 of the UN Charter of Human Rights).

So can the government's positions of last August and today be logically reconciled? The answer is only after a great deal of splitting semantic hairs.

Ever the skilful polemicist, Cameron knows that 'we' invokes the idea of collective action, but the 'we' he's referring to is in fact the bureaucrats of the state-security operatus, not a jury of peers. The suggestion that the plots of the suspected miscreant are 'known' to such organs of state suggests that the intentions of the miscreant are understood to be beyond all doubt or at least beyond all reasonable doubt. Given the former is physiologically, philosophically and metaphysically impossible, we can assume Cameron was referring to the latter.

The problem is, 'reasonable doubt' is highly subjective and so, in the (Comparatively) Free World of which the UK likes to be seen as a member, we have an independent and expert system of due judicial process to consider just this. The process is lengthy even without the necessary appeals by which we measure our society's typical concept of what is 'just'.

For the two statements to be anything but contradictory requires Cameron's original statement to have referred to web-blocking not in the immediacy of a riot, but only when the plotting is ongoing and the legal process has given the suspect a fair trial. If this is what he meant, he made no effort to correct the widespread interpretation in the domestic and international press at the time. Furthermore, why would the Home Secretary have felt the need to hastily organise a meeting with representatives from the social networks to discuss the plans if they were to have no relevance to the immediate threat of spontaneous rioting?

Recent riots in Egypt, China and Britain were strongly different in
nature but all three governments set their sights upon web-blocking.

Cameron and May are both known critics of the application of universal human right laws to the UK and, sadly, it seems our government's willingness to lecture others on the illegitimacy of curtailing human rights is the old evil of cultural relativism. When Syria, China or Zimbabwe desire to clamp down on free expression and dissent, it is done for the same reason that the UK or the USA desire to - for a traditional vision of 'morality, public order and the general welfare'. The difference is we have differing traditions of the whens, whys and hows of our cultures' respective repressions.

Like Assad, Putin and Hu Jintao, Cameron and May identify as conservatives and it is unsurprising they are prone to the reactionary authoritarianism. Inherent to the doctrine is an emotionally charged affirment in the objective superiority of the established moral order and radical dissent is seen as a direct threat to this. When people take to the streets for whatever reason, the risk-averse conservative will despair the suspension of order, no matter the message or root causes at the heart of dissent. A single terror suspect or a small group of protesters becomes for them a harbinger of total social breakdown. This reactionary tendency to act 'in the national interest' makes a short-sighted judgement that overlooks the harm to general welfare that arises from the breach of international treaties or legal fundamentals like habeus corpus or innocence until proven guilty.

Without the certainty that Britain will keep to its human rights treaties and legal principles, no British citizen should feel secure. Furthermore, Britain's international credibility is hindered as those we must cooperate with and influence remember our broken promises and moral hypocrisy. It is unlikely a conservative government like ours can fully comprehend the value of universal rights and the just process of law required to balance them. After all, human rights and due process are both products of liberalism, with its inherent open-mindedness and faith in mankind.

Conservative Justice Secretary Ken Clarke and Home Secretary Theresa May recently
gave embarrassing public exposure to this fallacy, when May's attacks on judicial
interpretations of the 1998 Human Rights Act were dismissed as 'childish' by her colleague.

Update: The furore over radical Islamic cleric and alleged Al-Qaeda, Abu Qatada, is the last incarnation of a belief among conservatives that the ability to control takes precedence over either the protection of human rights or the rule of law.

The cleric was illegally detained by UK authorities in 2002 and, following a court order freeing him in 2005, has been in extra-judicial imprisonment for several years as the authorities battle to deport him. No evidence has been found to charge the cleric with a criminal offence and ECHR judges have declared he cannot be returned to Jordan due to the high risk he will be tortured or imprisoned on the basis of information gained through torture.

Without the support of Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke, the Prime Minister and Home Secretary have made high profiles speeches against the cleric, including a sppech by Theresa May in which she referred to Qatada as a 'terrorist' (though he has never been found guilty of this allegation) and said his place was in a foreign prison cell. Conservative MPs have been demanding the government ignore British and European Law by deporting him anyway.

To breach our binding diplomatic agreements and legal principles is claimed to be 'in the national interest'. All for the sake of a man deemed by the Prime Minister to be dangerous to the British public but of whom after ten years still no compelling evidence has been found in order for him to be prosecuted. 8/2/2012

The Stupid 100%

2011-10-30T15:23:00.000Z

Why both the anti-capitalist Occupy movement and the ideological defenders of the free market are all missing the true fault of capitalism.

99% are angry. Well, actually, we don’t know how they feel but a minuscule percentage of them are giving up their weekends to vent what they claim is the anger of the rest of us. They’re angry about greed – the greed of the bankers and the policy makers they are blaming for this long economic storm. The last time the global economy seemed so dire, it was the greed of the investors and manufacturers that was blamed for it all. So what are the protesters trying to say? 1% of us are greedy and the other 99% aren’t? After all, if self-interest is such a destructive thing, how else could civilisation have taken off?

Protesters have set up camps in the major financial centres of the
Western nations. While some are angry at government bail-outs of
financial institutions, many seem angered by the unfair disparities
between the richest and poorest.

This greed of the few idea seems to be shared by Ed Miliband, who recently used his conference speech to set out a new economic doctrine that will appeal to his innately anti-business supporters while accounting for the clear fact that capitalism has served most of us pretty damn well. Ed intends the new dichotomy in the Labour narrative to be the merits of (benevolent) ‘producers’ against (greedy) ‘predators’ in business practice:

Predators are just interested in the fast buck, taking what they can out of the business. … It’s about different ways of doing business, ways that the rules of our economy can favour or discourage.

This is far more momentous than his detractors are currently giving him credit for as, with such language, the Ed formerly known as ‘Red’ has hit upon language that encapsulates the zeitgeist of the economic crisis; his parlance expresses the popular understanding of business – popular in that it is emotive, widely-held and, regrettably, almost entirely without substance.

I recently attended a talk where Dr Eamonn Butle r of the Adam Smith Institute very succinctly expressed the antithesis to this: that trade in a capitalist system is entered into voluntarily, and neither party would enter into an exchange unless it is of benefit to them both. As an example, he gave an anecdote of overcoming linguistic and cultural barriers to get his trousers repaired in a Chinese market. Perhaps he paid above normal price for the exchange or the seamstress could have asked for more, yet “my trousers were repaired,” he explained, “and she got paid for her time.” Where then is there room for destructive self-interest in a free market system?

The Occupy movement have strong appeal with their
claim to be the representing the poorest 99%, but little
is to be gained from demonising the super-rich.

The problem is that we all enter into transactions we come to regret. We have always experienced hotels less grand than first they appear or the cowboy builders whose services we realise all too late should never have been engaged. Having lived myself in China, I can recount numerous situations where a service or product I purchased turn out to be of substandard quality, with little available recourse in a country where stifling bureaucracy does not extend to consumer rights.

And how did I respond? I learned to rely upon recommendations and previous experiences, or I purchased goods online from reputable Western companies. As time went on, I learned from my mistakes. And oddly enough, those companies I turned to were richer than those who had exploited my naivety.

It is not selflessness that achieves long term success but mutual self-interest; nor is it predatory capitalism that causes economic woes but what I would coin stupid capitalism. All around us are the foolish traders: from the idiots in the financial world whose belief they could profit from bad debt saw their wealth and reputation wiped out, to the morons who lost their homes because they took out mortgages they could ill-afford; from the arrogant slum landlords, recently exposed by Channel Four, who thought they’d never get caught, to the tenants ignorant of tenancy law who never reported the criminal behaviour; from the drug user who buys talcum powder from a stranger in the street, to that same dealer who exposes himself to violence and arrest night after night and misses the repeat custom reputation brings with it.

The sad fact is that free exchange does not occur on the terms most favourable to both parties when either party has insufficient foreknowledge of the benefits and risks of the exchange. Often this takes the form of the consumer having false security over the quality of the goods they wish to buy. Very often it is likely that the trader does not realise that the goods are unsuitable or of unacceptable quality as, over the long-term, a poor reputation and legal challenges are likely to run their business to the ground.

In the above cases, government regulation has not only failed to prevent poor exchange, it has facilitated them, by creating black-markets for drugs, a shortage of truly affordable housing or a false sense of security in the financial world. Instead the solution is, naturally, a liberal one: informing choice.

Many of the protesters are blaming greed for poverty. This forgets that
greed is an indelible quality of all living creatures, while poverty is
universal in the absence of free exchange.

Kite-marks, labelling and ratings are an excellent way of informing the consumer of the quality and negative externalities involved in a trade. From energy efficiency labels on fridges, to the units of alcohol in beer and the sell-by-dates on food, labelling serves to empower consumer decisions and rewards businesses who best fulfil our desires with higher sales. Wherever you are in the world, staying at a hostel branded by non-profit organisation Hostelling International usually avoids the danger of having your travel experience ruined by the slummy accommodation that proliferates the cheap end of the market; so too does Hostel Bookers, whose website allows you to read the ratings and comments of others before you book.

The information given by such media is not always perfect. A mazon’s seller-rating system, for example, allows users to rate only the efficient delivery of the trader and not the quality of the electronic goods many of them sell; while Sushil Mohan’s Fair Trade Without the Froth expose how the Fairtrade Foundation implements a subjective understanding of ‘fairness’, backed up with an expensive regime of demands on its members, which serves to benefit producers in developing countries at the possible expense of subsistence farmers in the Third World.

But whatever the details of its implementation, consumer knowledge is economic power. The narrative that free exchange is always and everywhere mutually beneficial is unlikely to win over many of the 99%. If we are to protect capitalism from popular punitive measures which only make matters worse, a new narrative is needed: it’s not a greedy 1% that must be combated, it’s the ignorance of the 100%.

Originally published on Liberal Vision on October 19th 2011.

Update - For another sensible, centrist solution to create a stable economy without resorting to harmful regulation, check out Dr Tim Leunig's article for Centre:Forum in which he argues that removing anti-competitive barriers to entry and providing better skills training are sufficient to reform the system. 20/1/12

Just Who Do You Think You're Talking to?

2011-10-30T14:29:00.000Z

How the internet's SSL security regime is unravelling in the face of fraudsters, hackers and the security services of despotic regimes.What looks like your email, but may not actually be your email? Possibly a sophisticated fake created by the Iranian government to monitor your communication; so sophisticated in fact that those providing the perfect mock-up of your email are using a valid SSL certificate. This gives your browser the impression that the page is authentic, in the most recent case masquerading as a legitimate Google service, and bypassing any warning that you could normally expect when visiting a fraudulent page.

Message left by Iranian hackers on the DigiNotar website

This is not the first time such a sophisticated ruse has been used to target communications, from emails to instant messenger programs. Such occurrences are known by the sinister name ‘man-in-the-middle’ attacks, where an invisible third-party can eavesdrop sensitive information. This time, the security breach is so serious that Google and Mozilla have taken the unprecedented step of temporarily blocking any websites with certificates issued by DigiNotar, the Dutch Certificate Authority who’s encryption has been used.

Okay, so most of us aren’t being monitored by despotic regimes, in fact even if the UK Security Services were spying on our Skype messaging, they might find out little more than our thoughts on the new Blade Runner movie, right? I mean, MI5 have got their work cut out with hunting terrorists, honey-trapping student protesters and replacing laptops they lost on their morning commute, why would they be interested in me?

Well, the problem is that not all hackers are in the pay of over-officious bureaucracies with more money than sense. More active in their misuse of your data are professional tech-savvy fraudsters, such as those who committed a similar attack on PayPal a few years ago. SSL certification, at the forefront of web security for nearly two decades, is an obvious target for cyber-criminals.

Most websites requiring high-levels of security use SSL validation systems.
The above is from Lloyds bank's internet banking website. The 'https' and the padlock
icon on the address bar identify that the SSL ID checks out.

The most disturbing thing is the lag between the misuse of a certificate and removing the threat it creates. The newly discovered fake certificate is thought to have been created several weeks ago and the PayPal attack took Microsoft months to resolve. One web security expert stated that the only thing notable about the most recent security lapse is “that anyone noticed ."

There is clearly something of a serious market failure here, with concerns about the accountability of many companies like DigiNotar who are entrusted with such a fundamentally essential aspect of web security. That after so many years of use, Certification Authorities [CAs] lack such accountability suggests governments are far from on top of this issue. Others fear government-owned CAs are already exploiting the false sense of security SSL provides by creating their own near-seamless fakes to spy on their citizens. The Chinese authorities are known to issue their own SSL certificates and nothing can stop them issuing ones claiming to be Google+ or Yahoo Mail.

For every legitimate occasion of governments spying on the private
communication of their citizens, how many times are they doing
so against pro-democracy activists?

Given the failures of the UK authorities in dealing with the comparatively prehistoric issue of phone-hacking, it would be very unwise to put faith in state-driven solutions, yet there is hope for a private-sector solution. That some web-browsers are now blocking every website certified by DigiNotar is a drastic measure given so many legitimate websites will also be hit, yet it shows a markedly serious response to security fears. Perhaps they are trying to avoid the harm to market share Microsoft has suffered from security concerns expressed in the old joke that Internet Explorer should not be used in “hostile environments such as the Internet”. The problem is to find a way that web-browsers, CA clientele and you and I can verify the integrity of the CAs themselves.

In the meantime, we are all left insecure in a discredited web security regime which is as deceptively integral as Doctor Who’s psychic paper. The only comfort can be that now CAs are being directly punished for security lapses, accountability may finally emerge from within the market. If you’re a political dissidents targeted by the most recently discovered lapse, however, you are left with an urgent question : who exactly are you talking to?

Original published on DeepBlue and Big Brother Watch on 31st \August 2011.

May's September 'May not March'

2011-08-30T14:56:00.003+01:00

Home Secretary Theresa May has increasingly been
showing an authoritarian side in recent months.

It's not very often I find myself agreeing with the English Defence League - in fact, I pride myself on not agreeing with their crude, petty nationalism and their sensationalist misrepresentation of Islamic theology. Last Friday, however, a number of councillors and MPs from all three main parties, alongside the Metropolitan Police, have successfully persuaded the Home Secretary to ban all protest marches in five London boroughs for a month, in response to the EDL's proposed September demo.

There are two main excuses being given by supporters of the ban that this is not just the tyranny of the majority in action. The most persuasive is the view of the police that, given the recent riots, London is now a tinderbox unable to deal with protests, seemingly uncertain of their ability to do their own job. While security is a valid concern, it seems perverse given that last weekend's Notting Hill Carnival was allowed to go ahead, despite previous events typically being marred with high-levels of street crime and small-scale rioting. In the event, the threat of further rioting looks to have been paranoia on behalf of a police force seemingly uncertain of their ability to do their own job and the record numbers of police deployed over the weekend looks almost certain to have been overkill.

Anti-fascist groups are attempting to silence the EDL, who
they believe are a front for xenophobia and Islamophobia.

A second argument is that the EDL are intent on creating disorder. While the organisation does predictably attract a thuggish element to their protests, the organisation officially distances itself from violence; in fact, arrests at previous demos have been fairly low despite common antagonism from Unite Against Fascism. As the organisation unequivocally states in its response to the ban, "We do not attack mosques, we do not attack businesses, and we do not attack people." Considering the high level of disorder at far-left marches in recent years, from the 2000 May Day riots to the actions of Black Bloc members at this year's TUC rally, it appears the EDL are being unduly targetted.

The far-left Defend the Right to Protest
have criticised the ban, which will also
prevent protests by left-wing groups.

To ban one particular group from protesting would face a legal challenge in human rights courts which it would inevitably lose. Instead, the government has opted to make it a civil liberties issue by banning all protests which will also affect unrelated planned marches against the arms industry and in support of LGBT rights. Theresa May's powers to do so arose from the controversial 1986 Public Order Act which imposed flexible limits on the size, location and duration on individuals meeting together, thereby restricting but not technically violating the human right to freedom of assembly. Despite such powers available to government, an outright ban on protest marches is, however, unprecedented in London and very rare elsewhere.

It is sad that the coalition seemed to have dropped their pledge, stated clearly on page eleven of the Coalition Agreement, to "restore the right to nonviolent protest". It is sadder still that this ban was initiated by elected representatives from Labour when backbench MPs from the party have been the only ones speaking out against other clampdowns on nonviolent protest in the past year.

Though small-scale clashes have occurred between EDL
marchers and their UAF opponents, they majority have
protested in an orderly fashion.

While security should always be of concern, it should not be used to discriminate politically. It is wrong for the government to say one political message warrants 10,000 officers, namely the Carnival's aim of promoting multiculturalism and interracial harmony, no resources whatsoever are warranted by other such messages, here the EDL's belief that in the name of such multiculturalism, insufficient action has been taken to combat sectarian extremism.

If there is strong evidence that some planned to stir disorder at the EDL march on 3rd September, the police should of course arrest them, as they recently did to ensure the Carnival was peaceful. If Theresa May's decision has been made on a whim that violence could occur, how can it be said we have a right to nonviolent protest at all and, without a legal and peaceful option available, how will the far-right chose to vent their frustrations in future?

In Defence of Liberal Policing

2011-08-25T20:00:00.000+01:00

Last February, David Cameron coined 'muscular liberalism' for dealing with extremism without over-stepping the limits of a liberal society. I was an instant fan, believing Cameron was stating an ideological commitment to rehabilitative justice, proportionality and targeting the guilty few, not the innocent many. I anticipated a dual approach to reducing criminality, advancing social justice alongside more effective sentencing; the 'tough on crime, tough of the causes of crime' coined but never realised by Tony Blair.

But like Blair, who joked privately with his aides about how it would be better if we were all born in prison and had to work our way out, Cameron has proven a fair-weather liberal. He has advocated prison sentences for all involved in last week's riots, regardless of age, severity or remorse. More concerningly, he seeks to introduce curfews, communication blackouts and weaponry which maims or kills both assailants and bystanders.

This is the reactionary response of an authoritarian, not the dispassionate thoughtfulness of the liberal he claims to be. After all, rioting is a fairly regular occurrence in all societies so why now introduce emergency measures more commonly associated with despotic regimes and not seen in London since wartime? It seems even stranger when senior police officers are refuting the wisdom of such new measures.

Rather than an alternative to Labour's attacks on civil
liberties and legal rights in the name of security, it now
seems that Cameron's 'muscular liberalism' was more about
promoting British nationalism among Islamic communities.

There is something of a marketing problem for liberalism here, but it's not an existential one. When the Daily Mail heaped wrath upon liberal attitudes in the wake of the riots it made the common and disturbingly unenlightened error of equating popular parlance with political philosophy. For many of the public, 'liberal' means without restraint or a soft touch. A 'liberal' portion of chips or a 'liberal' parenting style. We require a robust response, not a liberal one, we are told, as if they are somehow fundamentally incompatible.

But true liberalism is about rights balanced with responsibility in a state which protects us from each other; no more, no less. It's robust and liberal for the police to be using smart technology and intelligence gathering to catch all those responsible, however small their crime; it's robust to argue CCTV cameras are no substitute for police on the streets; to support tough community sentences over jail when the former is more productive and more effective at reducing re-offending; or to study the circumstances turning so many of our kids feral.

A more genuinely liberal approach to law and order is to
toughen up community sentences, freeing up prisons
and paying back into the victimised community. The
Ministry of Justice announced its intention to do so today.

Authoritarians are also culpable for the law and order breakdown. They drove recreational drugs underground, making the local drug dealer the role-model for getting rich quick; their misguided belief that prison is a cure-all solution to illegality means despite considerable resources, those most requiring jail receive short sentences or escape it altogether; their stop-and-search and dispersal powers are blamed by many within the damaged communities for fuelling resentment of the authorities that provided the initial spark.

Liberals don't listen to public ire, self-righteous tabloids and changeable politicians; they listen to communities, victims, policing experts and criminologists. Cameron may no longer believe liberalism is muscular, but its good, muscular name deserves reclaiming from its authoritarian detractors who believe it 'fluffy'.

Originally published on The Freedom Association website on 18/8/11.

When Law Makers are Law Breakers...

2011-08-25T18:20:00.000+01:00

What should happen to a policeman known to have committed a crime severe enough to warrant imprisonment? Or a sanctimonious priest known to be living in cardinal sin? What sentence would you recommend for a high court judge found guilty of a crime for which they had themselves harshly condemned others?

Mensch (aka Louise Bagshawe) has become something of
a celebrity MP for her trashy novels, TV appearances
and classy glamour.

Well, what if it was a law-maker themselves? Shouldn’t it be all the worse? Apparently not, given the absence over a stir from Louise Mensch MP’s admittance of past drug abuse . The BBC website placed the story seventh in its UK Politics section on a fairly slow news day. Mail Online had nothing in its news or comments on Saturday, despite finding space for a story on a shoplifting seagull. The Telegraph posted the story on page five, complete with glamorous photo of the MP posing outside Westminster in an evening dress.

None had quoted drug campaigners, former addicts or bereaved parents of teenage drug casualties as is typically done when a scientist or police commissioner calls for decriminalisation. None mentioned that 1,400 people were jailed in 2010 simply for possessing illegal drugs. The current maximum penalty for possessing mild drugs like ecstasy is seven years in prison; if the police suspect an individual intended to pass the substance to a friends, that individuals risks life imprisonment. Those lucky enough to receive a mere caution can expect it to follow them around their entire life, hindering their life chances and effectively ruling out a career as a lawyer, teacher or police officer. While the press and police are happy to pursue Chris Huhne for a crime allegedly committed eight years ago, it seems no punishment will befall Mensch.

There are reasons not to care. Firstly, the exposé by an anonymous journalist at a time when the exposed is campaigning hard to bring down law-breaking journalists seems suspicious. Secondly, it is right that private debauchery should be kept in the private sphere unless clearly an issue in the public interest. Finally, despite widespread support to maintain prohibition, much of the public see drugs possession as the indiscretion that Mensch makes it out to be.

Though at the time responding to more trivial tweets, Mensch
did not reply to those challenging the logic of this position.

Within minutes of the news breaking, however, the public interest aspect became clear when the MP stated her support for criminalisation of drug users on Twitter. She then displayed gross misunderstanding of the science behind the drugs debate by responding to one follower that illegal drugs were more harmful than alcohol in moderation, though this is only true for specific drugs. For upstanding citizens like her, it is a mere misdemeanour, but woe betide those not in the nouveau aristocracy.

Unsurprisingly, she’s not the only one to have been in this position. When Ann Widdecombe announced a zero-tolerance policy for cannabis in 2000, eight Shadow Cabinet members admitted they had partaken in its illicit pleasures. Former Home Secretary Charles Clarke presided over the system, despite a similar admittance, and Prime Ministers Blair and Cameron have suspiciously refused to comment on allegations of past drug-taking.

Labour's Eric Isley is currently in prison for fraud following
the expenses scandal. In 2011, a higher proportion of MPs
were sentenced to prison than the general populace.

For English law to have any credibility, it must apply equally to all. Out of respect for all those currently behind bars, every MP for whom there exists evidence of former possession should be interviewed under caution to find the real villains – those involved in the destructive and bloody drugs trade. Mensch should at the very least amend her support for criminalisation.

The most important measure to introduce, however, is for every MP to state under legal oath any crime they have committed that carries severe penalties. This would not only tell us how fit our law-makers are to make judgements which can devastate the lives of those they claim to represent; it would also inspire real debate as to which offences it is indeed right to criminalise. Yes, none of us are without sin, each of us breaking one of the innumerable trivial offences on the British statute book as often as we clean out teeth. But, unlike MPs, who make the law, we do not cast stones at one another for it. What better way to protect the freedom of the powerless by tying it to the opportunities of the powerful?

Originally posted to Liberal Vision on 8/8/11 after being rejected a week earlier by the Liberal Democrats' official members blog LibDemVoice for the following reason:

"Some of the phrases such as "private debauchery" would need considerable clarification and would risk obscuring your main argument".

You can make up your own mind if you feel this is contentious use of language. Perhaps a better job is done by Mark Thompson here.

Target the Rioters, not the Medium

2011-08-24T20:45:00.000+01:00

“I messaged a dozen of my blood on my Blackberry saying ‘flee at once – all is discovered.’ They all left town immediately.”

Sickening, the use of modern technology to help feral youths commit shocking acts of anarchy and escape justice. Well, actually, the above quote has been adapted from the generally law-abiding and revered author Mark Twain, who was in fact speaking of the telegram.

Blackberry Messenger - used by some of the rioters

On Thursday, David Cameron announced he would look at measures to block people using social media and Blackberry Messenger to plan criminality. He wouldn’t be the first to take this approach. During the 2009 ethnic riots by the oppressed Uighur Muslims in Xingjiang, the Chinese authorities blocked all internet access for millions of people and added Twitter to the list of blocked sites. Youtube and Facebook had already been banned from 2008′s Tibet uprising. Countries like Iran and Vietnam have taken similar actions in response to anti-government unrest.

Authoritarian governments have been attempting to restrict the use of effective and popular methods of communication as far back as we can know. Statues, paintings, architecture and tablets were destroyed by the ancients for heresy, vulgarity or sedition. The first copyright laws were introduced in 15th Century England, not to protect intellectual copyright, but to restrict the flow of Renaissance learning which was undermining the authority of clerics and kings. Unlicensed possession of printing press remains unlawful in Malaysia today.

The first recorded official media censorship was
the 3rd Century BC book burning by China's
'Yellow Emperor' Qin Shi Huang who feared
history books would cause civil disorder.

Authoritarians have good reason to fear communicative technology. Widespread access to literature allowed the development of political ideologies like liberalism, anarchism and socialism that inspired the changes which empowered and emancipated the masses. Pamphlets, radio and telecommunications were used to organise and promote dissent against the totalitarians regimes of the 20th Century; television cameras and vinyl turned the world against the atrocities of the Vietnam war; satellite TV broke through the lies of Soviet propaganda; fax machines and cassettes were central to organising the mass protests in Tian'anmen Square which brought the CCP to its knees; and social media and graffiti has facilitated the most effective democracy movement the Arab world has ever seen.

It is hard to take Cameron’s claims seriously. Surely he has been informed that only days before OfCom had advised the government that web-blocking is ineffective? Surely his policy advisors know that Proxy Servers, VPNs and DS changes are simple ways to circumvent ISP-blocking? Surely his legal advisers have warned him of the illegality of taking punitive measures without due process in the courts?

Well, let’s for a moment consider that Cameron responds to a reactionary, fearful and outraged public as Blair did, with some limited success, in introducing post-September 11th a raft of measures which redrew many of our basic legal protections. Without a long-drawn discussion as to the merits of civil liberties and justice, look at the positive things social media has done in the past few days.

§ It has become a voice for the police. Through Twitter, Kent Police has been able to inform me that besides the need to make a small number of arrests, no significant trouble has occurred in my town. They then went on to detail who had been arrested and punished in the area and the sentence received. When I expressed concerns that publishing the addresses of the convicted risked inciting further civil disorder, they even engaged me in a short discussion of the merits of their approach (see below). This level of accountability is to be cherised. (Nb: My concerns were subsequently proved correct - a man accused by Greater Manchester Police had his address published and his house was subsequently burned down; the man was found innocent of the rioting charges)

§ Twitter has provided a much more informative news source than the television news, detailing in greater depth and in real time developments across the country, both warning and reassuring the concerned.

§ Journalists have been directed to cover the fast-moving action and were able to refute allegations that the vigilante groups who organised were racist and violent.

§ Productive debate has occurred as to the proportionality of further measures and the causes of disorder. at a time when senior politicians are unwilling to discuss these things through fear of being seen as soft or excusing serious crime.

§ Large numbers of individuals were able to organise voluntary clean-up measures, reducing the financial burden on the state, reinforcing community spirit and showing the nihilistic youth that there is good in society, if only they were to engage with it.

§ Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are being used to expose acts of violence, looting and arson, aiding the police with their inquiries. A hashtag has been created #tweetalooter to pass on the brags of rioters into the awaiting hands of the police. The police have even been uploading images on social media sites in an attempt to identify suspects.

What caused these riots was not social media or Blackberries. What caused the riot was an extra-judicial killing, social depravation, poor parenting and an increasingly criminal youth who believe they are untouchable by the law. If time is wasted considering the threat posed by the tools, time is lost to consider the underlying causes of the riots.

While there is no denying that communications technology and the Internet have been used to facilitate and incite crime, it is also a great way for criminal elements to be detected and prosecuted within the limits of due process and protecting the rights of the innocent. Thanks to social media arrests are being made of those who incited the disorder and it is right that the administrators of Blackberry Messenger work with the police to catch those involved in the inexcusable disorder. Anything more than this is disproportionate, dangerous and counter-productive. Let’s blame the criminals and the causes, not the bricks and the Blackberries they used.

Originally published on deepblueblog.org, 11/08/2011.

Reading the Riots

2011-08-09T17:58:00.000+01:00

Causation is a very complicated thing. Every action has untold causes and effects. After millennia of trying to make head or tail of the chaotic nature of things, the best general rule we can discern involves butterflies, hurricanes and discredited weathermen.

I find the only hastily written theory that seems to account for the chaos that has befallen recently comes from Nik Darlinton of the Tory Reform Group. The title sums up one of the most important messages of the last few days: ‘We Know Nothing, Except We’re All to Blame for This’.

A more elegant summary comes from Martin Luther King who famously said, “a riot is the voice of the unheard.” Those who passed this hypothesis on Twitter as Saturday’s events unfolded were berated for justifying the arbitrary violence and destruction. To this I found myself quoting back lyrics from an old protest song about inner-city decay by a band suitably named after the Levellers: ‘you don’t even seem to care that it was you who put them there.’ After all, we live in a democracy, are we really so disempowered that we are exempt from the responsibility of shaping our own society?

In that society where the richest 10% own a hundredfold more assets that the poorest, many feel marginalised, believing their hopes of joining that elite are negated by failing schools and struggling parents isolated by broken families and toxic communities. They shrugged off their own security to a demoralised and under-rewarded police force, part-heroes and villains, quietly venting their frustrations as anonymous bloggers like Inspector Gadget. Many left their kids to go feral, hitting out beyond the state by assaulting, looting and burning out those equally disadvantaged.

The hard touch many are advocating is no quick fix to this complex web. Rubber bullets and water-cannons can easily kill, and let’s not forget that martyrdom lit this fire in the first place. Unless limited to defensive use by police, such tactics are unlikely to win the communities’ hearts and minds. Deploying the army, paradoxically, may not escalate the tension; the British army are veterans of civil discord in the harsh realities of Belfast,

Bosnia

and Basra, and are afforded much greater respect than the police.

As scrutiny is deconstructive; self-righteousness is unconstructive. All parties have something to teach us: the local who fearlessly berated the rioters for their lack of application; the Labour MP who despaired even fewer employers will invest in the area; the policeman overheard saying they were damned whatever their tactics; the looter who informed a journalist she was getting her taxes back. And at the end of the process, a liberal must ask, what have I done to make this happen.

To avoid sowing the seeds for the next riot, we must set aside outrage. Interpreting is not justifying, empathising is not sympathising, and resolving is definitely not absolving. And if you’re looking to absolve yourself by dismissing the chaos as mindless, your own mindlessness suggests you’re one of the butterflies who caused it in the first place.

Update - The Guardian and London School of Economics have today published the results of their study into the motivation behind the riots, oddly enough called 'Reading the Riots'. The study agrees with my interpretation that, although the motivations of the rioters were varied, the main themes were anger towards the police and a lack of economic opportunity. Poor education was involved, though the rioters were as likely to be white than an ethnic minority and, while copycat rioting occurred, criminal gangs were a very small part of the disorder. 5/12/11

The Crisis of Confidence in Modern Policing

2011-08-09T02:31:00.000+01:00

In a fast-forgotten past, the ‘boys in blue’ were seen as benevolent

thankless heroes ever ready to aid the public where they could. The image was epitomised in the 1920s song The Laughing Policeman which taught young children the message that a lawman was an approachable friend.

Whether the fault lies with the police or the media, the image of the helpful, admirable plod has been exorcised from public consciousness. At best, the modern plod is portrayed as flawed, such as in shows such as Life on Mars; at worst they are seen as thuggish, menacing and suspicious.

The truth is probably somewhere between the two but the public perception of the police does seem to be deteriorating, particularly over to controversies regarding crowd control methods. In recent weeks alone, we have learned of three legal challenges to the practice of ‘kettling’ non-violent crowds, including young children; a football fan was wrongfully set upon by a police dog and refused medical treatment for the resulting injuries; and an officer is on trial for an unprovoked and fatal act of violence during the G20 protests.

Further questions are being raised about the high number of deaths in police custody for which not a single officer has ever been convicted. In April, over 1,000 people marched in demand of an inquest into the suspicious death of musician Smiley Culture who, police claim, stabbed himself during a botched arrest. Concerns are now shared by the chairman of the British Medical Association who recently condemned police prisoner-care.

The very integrity of the police is now is serious doubt. In this year alone, the failed ‘sex-honey pot’ case of PC Mark Kennedy has brought into question multi-million pound sting operations; two other officers are being investigated after being recorded conspiring against a peaceful protester; and a CI and seven other officers are on trial for framing five innocent men for murder. Now evidence has emerged that the police not only failed to investigate but have been implicit in the deplorable, corrupt and illegal practices of tabloid journalists. Something has to give.

The police-led inquiry cannot be expected to cleanse the force of its significant number of rotten apples. Rather, an Eliot Ness figure is needed to root out the institutional failures inherent in the system. It must consider the welfare of suspects, the proportionality and legality of tactics, the opportunities for corruption and the violent nature of many of the force’s number.

The image of the police must be restored for our own protection. We have not just to fear from the often arbitrary exercise of police power but from the growing distrust itself. If the average Bobby could become the public’s approachable friend once again, victims would be more inclined to report crimes, witnesses more willing to divulge important information and the courts more ready to take them at their word.

As politicians for too long have shown themselves unwilling to take on the police, we should remember that question at the very heart of Western political discourse: who watches the watchmen?

Originally written for The Freedom Association website, 9th July 2011.

Update: HMIC (the police inspectorate) has today released a report on the National Public Order Intelligence Unit which looks at the case of mark Kennedy, concluding that the organisation is not up to standard. The review does not deal with perhaps the most concerning parts of the case, namely the savage beating of PC Mark Kennedy by his fellow officers and his assertion that, during his seven-year undercover operation, he saw many instances of "unjust policing" that made his "appalled to be a police officer".

Taking Back the Internet (without Consent)

2011-07-28T21:34:00.000+01:00

The problem of creating a constitutional contract for the World Wide Web.

Speaking at the TEDGlobal 2011 conference a few weeks ago, digital rights guru Rebecca MacKinnon spoke of how private companies are arbitrarily censoring controversial yet legitimate online content in response to political or moral considerations. In a world where those who MacKinnon calls “Sovereigns of Cyberspace” can opt into your privacy and out of your security without even a passing nod to national civil traditions, she advocates greater political assurances that the Internet will “evolve in a citizen-centric manner”.

Tech guru Rebecca MacKinnon speaking at TEDGlobal 2011

For MacKinnon, “the only legitimate purpose of technology is to improve our lives, not to manipulate or enslave us”. Just as liberal democracies work on the constitutionally-enshrined principle of ‘consent of the governed’, both governments and private interests should be bound by a statutory ‘consent of the networked’. None of this sounds unappealing; therein lies the problem.

MacKinnon explains the development of the democratic consent principle as originating in England in the Magna Carta of 1215. This document then spawned centuries of political innovation, leading to the drafting of the American Constitution. In social science circles, this is known as ‘Whig history’, where history is seen as beating a path towards an eventual utopia of freedom, and is a very naive approach to how political-philosophical progress occurs.

Events like the English Civil War had a larger role in the development of
government by consent than statutes like the Magna Carta.

Philosophically, the consent to rule principle emerged centuries after the Magna Carta, as socio-economic and theological developments increasingly undermined the sovereignty of kings. The English Civil War and the consequential tyranny of Cromwell’s rule provoked Thomas Hobbes and John Locke to consider the first ‘social contract’ theories to explain the contemporary political developments.

In his Nobel-prize winning historiography of Western philosophy, Bertrand Russell notes that the ideal of liberty was revived in Europe as Renaissance intellectuals fetishised the wisdom of Ancient Greece as Catholic power (and with it, dogma) went into decline. In all this, there is little reason to believe the consent principle instigated political change rather than justified the actions of those who changed it. This was appreciated by Jean Jacques Rousseau, who completes the social contract triumvirate, when he warned that princes do not give up power voluntarily.

King John I of England forced to sign the Magna
Carta, pledging to restrict his sovereignty

Consent does play its part in safeguarding freedom, however. Like most major constitutional developments in history, the Magna Carta was brought about by terrific political turmoil; what was unique about it, was that it was signed under the duress of threat only, rather than at the end of a long, bloody campaign to seize power from an entrenched establishment. The document sought to restore an earlier ‘Charter of Liberties’ which successive monarchs had chosen to ignore. The Magna Carta was the former statute plus coercion.

When tacit consent replaces active enforcement, theoretical contracts becomes worthless. By the 19th Century, the document had been almost totally repealed through several hundred years of political contingency and, just as its freedoms proved far from sacred, the past twenty years of political passivity has seen the erosion of other formerly enshrined constitutional protections of habeas corpus, trial by jury, freedom of assembly, open justice and parliamentary privilege by both act of parliament and bureaucratic rule. The consent principle did little to abolish slavery in the States, nor has it dictated US foreign policy over the years.

It is just about plausible that liberal governments may someday bind themselves to a digital Magna Carta, but the Internet is a global phenomenon. Unlike the Barons, the Whigs and the Founding Fathers, MacKinnon seeks the binding consent of the entire world. Without some form of coercion, it would be impossible to assure the compliance of countries such as Iran and China who both refute government by consent and oblige private service providers to constrict digital freedom.

Organisations like these are the solution
to ensuring the Web develops with the
needs of the user put first.

None of this is to say that protecting and even expanding the freedoms of the Internet are not beyond our control. MacKinnon advocates a second, more realistic, goal – organised, political activism. As she made her address, I was attending a science exhibition at the Royal Society where I spoke to a young scientist about the civil liberty implications of his research. He seemed greatly enthused by my enquiries, explaining that they had been approached by interested parties from the government departments, particularly the MoD, yet I was the first to take an interest in the inherent dangers of their work. Clearly, the balance is not yet healthy.

While a ‘consent of the networked’ principle is desirable, the political realities help explain why it has yet to come about. The best way to ensure the Internet remains net positive to humanity is not by seeking globally unachievable, metaphorical contracts but by actively scrutinising and pressuring governments and private companies. To do this, the message must first be spread far and wide that we, the users, must not passively consent to harmful internet restrictions if we are to be the true ‘Sovereigns of Cyberspace’.

(Rebecca MacKinnon’s talk is still well-worth your time and can be found here.)

Originally published on deepblueblog.org on 25th July 2011.

Update: The erosion of the Magna Carta continues today, it seems, as Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke, a man usually seen as a liberal in the media, is putting forward a bill that will extend the use of 'closed material proceedings', a procedure that allows individuals to be tried on evidence they never get to see. 20/1/2012

Cyber-Lady Vs the Dystopian

2011-07-28T20:55:00.000+01:00

Digital freedom advocate and budding technology guru, Dominique Lazanski gave a talk on net regulation. Surely the risks of e-fraud are so great, they require a government response? Well, don't they?

Rounding Up the Rebellious

2011-07-06T22:17:00.000+01:00

The Fortnum & Mason 145 are accused of 'intending'
to disrupt the shop from selling goods despite shoppers

continuing to browse throughout the occupation.

There are two reasons for thinking so. Firstly, there does not seem to have been a single high-profile case of a successfully prosecution under 'aggravated trespass' legislation, given the crime hinges on evidence of an 'intention' to cause unlawful disruption. Given that the store has reported that 'minimal damage took place' and those shoppers interviewed have not alleged intimidation, it will be hard to prove the protesters intentions were anything other than peaceful. This cannot be said for the few dozen outside who I personally witnessed battering police officers and smashing windows, while scores of their colleagues idly looked on.

The second problem is that the CPS' own guidelines state that arrests should only be made once protesters refuse to depart. Video footage has, however, shown a senior police officer informing protesters that they were being detained inside the shop, with the arrests only occurring once the protesters had left. The officer also called the protesters 'sensible' and 'patient'.

Christ Knight is arrested prior to protesting despite
having received police permission for the protest.

This fiasco is just one incident in an ongoing crisis of confidence in police handling of protests. It began when police started suppressing peaceful protest using anti-terror powers Tony Blair had guaranteed would not be used for anything other than fighting terrorism. Chris Atkins' documentation of this development in his film Taking Liberties is strongly recommended viewing.

What's new is that peaceful protesters are now being arrested without warning and prior to attending an actual protest. Recently, a 64-year old university professor and his wife were arrested for planning a theatrical royal execution at a republican street party, despite having already obtained police permission. The arrest, captured by a Channel Four camera crew, used more police than the arrest of the Krays.

PC Mark Kennedy's undercover operation cost

£2.25m and involved possibly illegal entrapment.

Of further concern is the case of police informer Mark Kennedy who actively persuaded environmental activists to occupy a power station. If this wasn't alarming enough, the CPS withheld this information from the courts and the convictions are set to be overturned. Mr Kennedy's case is just one of many which indicate how the police are wasting disproportionately large quantities of money infiltrating protest groups for years at a time despite lacking sufficient evidence of wrongdoing.

Only a handful of parliamentarians and, so far, not a single minister have spoken against these disturbing developments . This despite a clear pledge in the Coalition Agreement to 'restore the right to non-violent protest'. How much money must be squandered, how much duress bullied, distress endured, police officers humiliated and legitimate protesters intimidated before we regain one of our most fundamental democratic rights? And, in these difficult economic times, what lessons will those desperate for their voice to be heard learn from a police force that primarily targets the organised and peaceful? My wager is on a future of increasingly violent protests.

Originally written for The Freedom Association website, 2nd July 2011

The Dynamic Voice of the 'Unchanging' Orient

2011-07-06T20:59:00.000+01:00

A consideration of the grassroots changes occurring in the 'Arab Spring'.

Egypt's Tahrir Square and other symbols of the
military-political regimes have been symbolically
reclaimed as centres of mass protest.

Edward Said famously critiqued a Western tendency to see the peoples of Africa and the Middle East as violent yet passive, lacking the potent politicisation of the Occident. Such a narrative could help explain why professed 'experts' failed to predict the Arab Spring. Had they done so, it is unlikely that they would have predicted an active, dynamic and largely peaceful movement within which the traditional voice of protest, political Islam, has had a negligible role.

Last week, I was fortunate to attend a talk for SOAS university alumni on the popular nature of the uprisings. Chairing the panel was journalist Brian Whitaker, who noted that the Arab word for 'regime' has a largely connotation closer to 'the system'. It is this, he argued, not those charismatic leaders merely sitting atop the groundswell, that protesters target. The focus of the world's media should be a checklist of heads to roll, but the implications of what is, after all, revolution.

In an unprecedented development, Arab women have
been allowed to participate in many of the protests.

The panel's cynic was economist Dr Hassan Hakimian who provided a bleak prognosis. With tourism and industry crushed and critical stagflation, he argued that the new regimes would struggle to achieve the 5% annual growth that the peoples of Libya, Egypt and Tunisia have come to expect. As such, the conditions seem unsuited to stable liberty, with a Chinese-style emphasis on neo-liberal economics more likely.

That's not to say social revolution is not afoot. Professor Nadje Al-Ali noted how women, at least where the protests are largely peaceful, have been involved in surprisingly large numbers and have been largely unharassed by fellow protesters. Their voices in the streets and in online blogs, not to mention their more active roles in spying for and organising the protests, will be difficult to ignore. Region-wide calls for change on this year's International Women's Day were unprecedented.

Political graffiti is just one method by which autocrats
are being undermined.

While this may be less than optimists would hope, we should remember that economic growth brings empowerment. I have mentioned elsewhere how the impetus for change has thus far been greater in the economically liberal dictatorships. It's a truism I hope we can all accept, that money is empowering and that liberalism has only emerged in affluent, literate nations where social mobility has created greater respect for human value.

If strong growth can be restored by the new 'systems', these are likely to be the first of a chain of ever-liberalising convulsions. Either way, one thing seems clear - the Arab world has tipped and neither the West nor its own elites can assume it to be perpetually in statis.

Originally written for The Freedom Association website, 17th June 2011

Mr Civil Liberties vs the Dystopian

2011-06-17T00:28:00.000+01:00

A question to Big Brother Watch's Daniel Hamilton, Brat-packer and seemingly nice guy... What's the best way to build democracy overseas? Shouldn't we engage with the bad guys in order to trade?

The Fallacy of a 'Harmonious' China

2011-06-16T22:07:00.000+01:00

The overlooked instability of the People's Republic of China.

This morning and after several days, a brutal regime finally dispersed rioting protesters sick of a corrupt dictatorship that's been in power too long. This is 'apathetic', 'stable' and 'progressive' China, embarking upon its biggest crackdown in twenty years. While celebrity internees Ai Weiwei and Liu Xiaobo have generated passing interest, Western media is distracted. The barriers to free reporting in China cannot help, especially given the heavy-handed arrest of a BBC reporter in Beijing in March.

The assumed logic of the foreign press is that high growth is achieving the regime's political priority of 'Harmonious Society', with the Party dangling a rather arbitrary 8% per annum as a stability threshold. Yet even when growth hits double-figures, an estimated 90,000 protests and thousands of riots occur each year. I have noticed from my own experiences in China that praise for the Party and its leadership is scarce, yet discussions of national issues and vocal views on Western governments belie the stereotype of political apathy.

An image of this week's riot in the south of China.

Last Friday, the School of Oriental and African Studies put together a panel to discuss China's future prospects. For the panellists, both growth and harmony seemed a much cloudier picture. In particular, Hong Kong politician Anson Chan painted a picture of a disunited China, stirring amid 'systematic persecution', land seizures, laissez faire work practices, environmental degradation and a discredited justice system. For Ms Chan, given the limits imposed by a corrupt legal system and increasing distrust of the citizenry, the party is 'clinging to the myth' of stability through perpetual growth.

There are reasons to assume continued growth is equally mythical. Economist Dr Jan Toporowski noted how China capitalised when the US and Japanese economies unexpectedly faltered and others may do so to China in turn. Whether for cultural or economic reasons, attempts to shift to consumer-led growth have failed and China has returned to the same kind of Keynesian investment-led growth of the disastrous Great Leap Forward. Journalist and sinologist John Gittings perceives China's economy to be fallible while tied to 'dysfunctional global economics' and the narrow spectrum of state-approved knowledge which hinders its grasp of global realities. Furthermore, China must contend with a deepening environmental disaster, especially its unquenchable thirst for finite water resources.

Somewhat concerningly, the most optimistic about China's political and economic stability was Lord Stephen Green, Minister for Trade & Investment, who believes this is still an ideal time for British firms to enter the Chinese market, despite many companies leaving China due to rising costs and others concerned about increasingly unfavourable investment conditions.

With inflation rampant and an unsustainable property bubble, there's no reason to believe the 'Harmonious Society' myth. The building post-Olympic repression should demonstrate just how nervous the party is. It presides over a gargantuan ethnically/culturally diverse nation built upon contentious territorial claims that are barely antique, let alone as ancient as the state-sponsored nationalism professes. Equally antique is the claim that China is not yet ready for revolution, yet the experiences of 1911, 1919 and 1989 tell us that mass protest in China can flare up fast. We may yet see a Jade Revolution before the decade is out.

Originally written for The Freedom Association website, 15th June 2011.

Amnesty Despotica

2011-06-16T21:33:00.000+01:00

Lessons from history against granting impunity to outgoing dictators.

President Saleh of Yemen prior to being
injured in a rebel rocket attack.

How do you solve a problem like Ali Abdullah Saleh, the Yemeni president currently undergoing medical treatment in Saudi Arabia after his palace was attacked? He isn’t by any means the worst kind of despot, though recently he’s resorted to massacring protesters. Early into the Arab Spring, Saleh offered to step down, with immunity from prosecution as his price. With Britain and America urging his tiring Saudi overlords to support the move, he may get it within the next few days.

A similar deal for Muammar Gaddafi has also been floated, somewhat ironically given the dictator’s diplomatic immunity was stripped by the UK only last February. The International Criminal Court was expected to issue an arrest warrant at the end of last month which would have made impunity untenable, yet the world still awaits this. It could be that the option is being deliberately left open as the air campaign against him falters.

Given that shrewdness is a fundamental requirement for dictators, it seems odd that any would take the concept seriously, in view of the precedents. Augusto Pinochet’s links with the UK government failed to stop his eventual arrest, allowing Chile to revoke the legal immunity he had negotiated. Only death saved him from punishment. So too Indonesian President Suharto avoided justice not through immunity but due to ill-health.

The popular but brutal President Juan Peron of Argentina.

In the real world, politics trumps promises and deals made to despots rarely hold water. Nor does exile guarantee an end to political engagement. Decades of exile didn’t stop V.I. Lenin or Sun Yat-sen from taking power, nor did it stop Juan Perón returning to win 62% of the vote.

The argument for amnesty is that it prevents long drawn-out civil wars, such as the twenty year guerrilla struggle of the ousted Pol Pot which further scarred Cambodia and allowed Brother Number One to escape official justice. Given that the attempts of most dictators to return to power end it failure, such as with Idi Amin or the recently arrested ‘Baby Duc’, the security argument is a strong one. Yet even with caveats that impunity is conditional on total cessation of political actions, their supporters may continue to fight in their name. The continuing chaos over Thailand's deposed premier Thaksin Shinawatra is a point in hand.

After thirty years, Duch, the butcher of Cambodia,
is finally accounting for his crimes.

A point that shouldn’t be missed is that victims deserve closure. In Cambodia, people were reluctant to talk of the horrors of the past, especially when the perpetrators walked at large amongst them. But reports into the public reception of the trial of Pol Pot’s top butcher, Duch, suggest that at last people feel safe to openly discuss the past. Criminal trials delegitimise the brutality of politics by making it an issue of justice.

More importantly, just as we don’t negotiate with terrorists or hostage-takers, we cannot afford to negotiate with mass murderers. For those whose crime sheets are milder, such as Saleh, exceptions may be justifiable, but for Gaddafi and his ilk, lessons must be sent to future dictators. Regardless of whether justice takes moments or a generation, tyrants must know that there is no freedom for those who over-step humanity’s red lines.

Originally written for The Freedom Association page, 8th June 2011.

Update: Following the granting of immunity to the outgoing President Saleh on 21st January 2012, Human Rights Watch are calling on the US and the EU to declare that amnesty should be revoked by the Yemeni parliament as international law does not recognise amnesty for war crimes. 10/2/12.

Sarkozy's Web Unwinds

2011-06-16T21:18:00.000+01:00

Why the Internet is currently safe from the whims of authoritarians like French President Sarkozy.

In yet another disastrous attempt to discuss in hours issues which have been pondered for a generation (remember the Copenhagen Conference anyone?), France held the ‘e-G8’ forum last week - a prelude to the G8 summit. Here, it was lost between the dual excitement of Obama and Giggs; in fact, internationally, it made very few headlines. Nonetheless, the discussion was of paramount importance to safeguarding tomorrow’s liberty.

Entitled ‘The Internet: Accelerating Growth’, the forum ironically focused more on Internet restrictions. The views of Sarkozy, the debate’s instigator, are well known; he recently introduced the controversial ‘three strikes and you’re disconnected’ laws which seek to swim back upstream by enforcing the intellectual property laws of the digital age. Similar to our own Digital Economy Act, it is a victory of entertainment industry lobbying over the interests of internet users, smaller companies and reality.

Sarkozy went further, however, in his demands for a more strongly-regulated ‘civilised Internet’ - a term borrowed from the propaganda department of the Chinese Communist Party. For those in doubt as to how this concept works there, this article gives an idea of the resulting banality and moralistic tyranny of the Chinese blogosphere.

With new innovations like this, even the multi-billion
dollar Great Firewall cannot keep up.

His new vision is that “we [sic.] can know what you are doing . . . and you can know our limits and red lines . . . Governments are the legitimate guardians of our societies and do not forget this."

This may be so in France and China but thankfully a semblance of liberalism remains in the United Kingdom. Government’s role here is to govern, while the ‘legitimate guardians of society’ are Parliament-made law, the independent judiciary and the people themselves. To his credit, David Cameron believes such regulation would be premature for an Internet still in infancy.

Most of the attending experts also resisted inter-governmental regulation. Google C.E.O. Eric Schmidt warned it would be both problematic and pointless; advising that the technology is moving much faster than governments and that the only solutions to problems like copyright theft should come from them.

The French President uses the bogeymen of cyber-terrorism, paedophilia and a world without art to instil in us his paranoid world-view. Ten years ago, his arguments may have been more convincing but in recent years international co-operation has brought major successes against child abuse, improvements in software have reduced the threat of viruses and other security risks and the creative industries have begun evolving - creative innovations to turn-around falling revenues.

I have written elsewhere of how the Internet is too big for China, let alone Sarkozy. If centralised regulation of the web occurs, it will be in a way that pleases not France but the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) block, where even India is making puritanical attempts to control content. Other than being a nice networking event for those who could afford the $100,000 ticket, the e-G8 was little more than an opportunity for Sarkozy to posture as tough to win back Front National voters. It is unsurprising that representatives of Wikipedia, Facebook and Google rejected centralised regulation – they know from experience that the real Internet pioneers are a million-fold untamed minds breaking the conventions of both the unfree and less unfree world.

Originally written for The Freedom Association page, June 2nd 2011.

Putting the 'P(olice)' in Politics

2011-06-03T16:12:00.000+01:00

The disturbing implications of the mandatory police registration of party conference attendees.

Should the police have the right to vet you and to deny your opportunity to vote? Should they record your political affiliation, storing it for an unlimited amount of time and passing it to other constabularies at will? Should they prevent you from speaking to your organisation's own stakeholders because of a mark on your criminal record or because you refuse to provide them with identification?

Well, that is the reality for anyone wishing to attend a party conference this year. For Conservative and Labour supporters, it is nothing new but a change of city sees Liberal Democrat members falling into line with the authorities' excessive security procedures. This is all the worse for a party which has regularly opposed the indefinite holding and sharing of private information by state bodies due to concerns regarding the use and security of such information.

In the forums of party discussion site Lib Dem Voice, many members are accusing the Federal Conference Committee of betraying key party values. One member states he doesn't have any of the required identification and would therefore be excluded from attending; others fear that delegates elected by their constituency party to vote on Lib Dem policy may be banned from attendance; yet another cleverly noted that police decisions to exclude members for juvenile crime, assaulting a party member, attending a protest which turned violent or being under suspicion of criminality may seem reasonable at first but would in fact prevent Nick Clegg, Adrian Sanders or Chris Huhne from attending.

Deputy Prime Minister and Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg
is a known critic of such policing measures.

The sad reality is that the boys in blue are not beyond political policing. In 2005, police used Terrorism Act powers to prevent 82 year-old Walter Wolfgang re-attending the Labour conference after he heckled Jack Straw; in 2009, police provoked a minor constitutional crisis by arresting Damian Green MP under pressure from the Cabinet Office, an investigation of which declared the police actions to be disproportionate and ill-advised; more recently, London Metropolitan Police adopted the Chinese authorities' approach to security on days of political importance by pre-arresting potential protesters prior to the Royal Wedding. One young lady was arrested for 'suspicion to make a disturbance of the peace'. The justification? She was dressed as a zombie.

The Chairman of the party's conference committee responded to concerns today, denying the police would have the final say over attendance. Yet judging members by police information puts enormous faith in its accuracy and impartiality, forgetting that the Criminal Record Check system is prone to error. Clegg himself has attacked the "messy criminal records regime that developed piecemeal and defies common sense", preferring instead to "protect millions of people from state intrusion in their private lives and return to common sense government."

Labour veteran Walter Wolfgang manhandled prior
to his arrest after heckling former foreign
secretary Jack Straw at a previous conference.

The Chairman also claims that police accreditation and information storage is to expose anyone "intent on causing serious harm". Disturbed party members, however, note that airport-style security measures and a host of ministerial bodyguards, plain-clothed police and agents of the security forces ought to be enough to do so without prejudicial vetting procedures best suited to undemocratic states.

Update: None of the 4,473 applicants to attend have yet failed the police security checks. How much has that cost in police hours and resulting crime, I wonder? With a few weeks to go, 891 still don't know if they'll be allowed to attend meaning their time off work, travel plans and hotel reservations have either been left to suffer last minute complications or risk unrefundable costs. 5th September 2011. Source: http://www.libdemvoice.org/liberal-democrat-conference-and-security-checks-25139.html

Update: The future of police screening at Lib Dem conferences, and by association those of other political parties, could well come down to motion F9, to be debated at the party conference on Saturday afternoon. The motion, mostly intended to improve the diversity of Liberal Democrat MPs, currently includes a firm rejection of the security measures noted above. Two amendments have been made, one further strengthening this rejection, the other effectively derailing it, as detailed on Chris Mills' excellent blog. 12th September 2011.

Update: BBC article on the upcoming vote, featuring several quotes from voting delegates:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-14587528 16th September 2011

Update: 'A clear majority' has voted to condemn the security measures. 18th September 2011.

Originally written for The Freedom Association website.

To Those Who Would Kick a Hornets' Nest

2011-05-31T19:18:00.000+01:00

The unpleasant reality of 'nation building'.

Within BBC2's ...Machines of Loving Grace last night came an interesting, though tenuous, analogy. The 2003-04 revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia and elsewhere were compared with the egalitarian hippy communes of the 1960s in that all failed because of a key sociological factor - that the state of nature is a chaotic struggle for power of a Hobbesian mould. When a system is brought down, a power vacuum is left which is quickly filled by those best placed to fill it. Alas, to paraphrase Plato, he who desires power is not fit to hold it.

A sinister salute from a young pro-Mladic supporter.

The implication for freedom is obvious - that development of a system in which individuals are largely protected from one another's power-lust is greatly problematic. Indeed, it took thousands of years to acquire even the ideology of doing so in the Occident.

Besides socialists, one group who would do well to bear this in mind are the neo-conservatives. Buoyed by their perceived part in the collapse of the USSR, neo-conservatism has not been without successes, most notably the removal of the tyrannical Saddam Hussein. Yet the failures of many post-1989 revolutions in the former Soviet states require caution.

Protests over the arrest of the genocidal Ratko Mladic highlight the continuing complexities of the Balkans which flamed the horrors of the 1990s. Despite the close nurturing of Kosovo , the free state is neither a democratic nor economic success a decade on. Zhou Enlai once told Richard Nixon that it was too soon to know the impact of the French Revolution. This ongoing struggle for freedom and prosperity in the former-Soviet bloc is equally inconclusive.

So too, the neo-con pet projects of the Bush years, despite the estimated trillions set to be spent on rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan. The UN Refugee Agency earlier this year predominantly blamed the 2003 Iraq invasion for the ongoing humanitarian crises, sectarian violence and political instability while one in ten Iraqis remain refugees. Even the status of women has deteriorated since the Saddam years. If this is freedom, it is more the freedom of Hobbes' nightmarish state of nature than that envisaged by Jefferson or J.S. Mill.

Some of the millions of Iraqi refugees.

The mistake of 'liberal' interventionists is that they forget how liberalism came about. The tyrannies of Oliver Cromwell, the French Terror and the American 'Wild West' vindicated Hobbes' fear of freedom in its purest form. When political and economic liberties finally came to the West, they followed the emergence of a large, affluent middle class empowered by education, wealth and a scepticism of traditional mores and religious dogma. The comparatively pluralistic societies of today emerged from three centuries or more of permanent (r)evolution.

With elementary and directionless upheavals going on throughout the world today, it will be decades, perhaps centuries, before true freedom will be achieved. While it is right to provide the political and economic support to help nurture budding democracies, liberals and libertarians should remember our innate scepticism that governments have the power to foster major political and economic achievements, let alone the social engineering required for the security and values of a free society.

Originally written for The Freedom Association website, 31st May 2011

Update: A leaked report by NATO, intended by the organisation to be confidential, paints a picture of a failed campaign in Afghanistan. After 10 years of fighting, it noes that "Afghan civilians frequently prefer Taliban governance over the Afghan government" due to high levels of corruption. 31/1/2012

Blue Labour, New Danger

2011-05-31T19:08:00.000+01:00

The political regression within Labour's 'Blue' movement.

The Labour party has been struggling with it’s identity since at least the time of Callaghan. With their working class base voting BNP in ever larger numbers and the middle ground currently swamped, many are searching for the essential answer to the politically killer question: what and who exactly are Labour for?

The starting premise of Blue Labour is a noble one: neo-liberalism has broken social bonds and devalued the individual by turning him into a commodity; simultaneously, the centralised state has mirrored this by turning the individual into a statistic. Two of their remedies are to be welcomed: firstly, voluntary co-operation benefits the individual's needs much more fluidly than the soulless corporatism that has given us destructive trade unionism and unscrupulous big business; secondly, decentralising power and public services could empower choice and accountability.

What cannot be welcomed is Blue Labour's redefinition of freedom. It claims to love the individual, liberty and the "free born Englishman" while scorning liberalism and individualism. Though the authors recognise the party's existential struggle between liberalism and communitarianism, they refuse to fall on either side. To justify this, John Rawls is dragged into the debate with his belief that "rights draw the line but the good makes the point".

Blue Labour seeks inspiration from the solidarity and concept of English freedom
as understood by the English Defence League.

It is, however, very unlikely that Rawls would have embraced Blue Labour. More than anyone, he made clear that maximum utility is the bête noire of freedom; Rawls' common good was an equality of opportunity, shrouded in a chain-mail of uninfringeable universal rights to protect us from the ultimate injustice of any pure calculation of a 'common good'. The common good of liberalism is to advance the individual for the sake of society; the common good of communitarianism is to advance society, often at the expense of the individual.

Far-right associated EDL shows the thin-line
between solidarity and fascism.

If genuine in their attacks on cosmopolitan pluralism and their desire to woo the BNP vote, then this will be a cultural as well as economic cost. Defence of alternative lifestyles has been the one area where Labour has traditionally been committed to freedom and, while Blair may have condemned the liberalising 1960s, such lifestyles prospered under New Labour. While seeking the antithesis of Blair's empty populism, Blue Labour is advocating the populism of cultural prejudice.

'Liberty' without liberalism is nothing new. It can be found in the writings of Rousseau, Marx and Mao. Romanticising the retrospection, prejudice and solidarity of the anti-cosmopolitans belongs to Mosley, Mussolini and Hitler. By eschewing pluralism and liberalism as petite-bourgeois and embracing the little Englander mentality of the EDL, Blue Labour offers the radical conservatism of the fascist with the window-dressing of the socialist.

Originally written for The Freedom Association website, 24th May 2011.

Torture Through Intepretation

2011-05-31T18:52:00.000+01:00

US President Obama and the US Military undermine human rights law by their redefinition of torture'.

Private Bradley Manning, still awaiting trial, is accusing
the US Army of cruel and unusual punishment.

Tonight, a man with British citizenship rights, a man many call a hero, will sleep in a prison cell. He has been made to sleep naked and remain so for a ‘humiliating’ morning inspection. His alleged crime is passing on classified information to be published in the public domain, most famously footage of a jingoistic military attack where two journalists were killed, two children wounded and a good Samaritan deliberately targeted. He is kept alone and claims to be subject to ‘unduly harsh conditions’ including bullying by guards, confiscation of his much-needed eye-glasses, prevention of free exercise and a prohibition of private property.

Groups from Amnesty International to the British government are vocally concerned. Requests by the UN torture envoy to speak to him in confidence about his treatment have been blocked at the highest level in the last few days. He has yet to be proven guilty.

Of course, none of this would be unusual in China, Burma, Iran or Saudi Arabia. ... But it’s not. This is all happening in the United States to a former soldier named Bradley Manning. President Obama, the man who famously opposed ‘tortuous’ practices at Guantanamo Bay, supports the Pentagon’s treatment of Manning as ‘meeting [the USA’s] basic standards’. The Pentagon has not so far denied the specific charges, merely debated the definition of solitary confinement and used words like ‘fair’ and ‘appropriate’ to dismiss criticism.

The ‘basic standards in question’ were set by Obama’s own executive order to ban all “enhanced interrogation” techniques not approved in Army Field Manual 2 22.3. Here he may technically be correct. The regulations do not explicitly ban ‘pride and ego’ techniques from ‘crossing the line into humiliating and degrading treatment’, merely that a supervisor should approve them.

However, the field manual itself does include the relevant Geneva Convention Article 3 prohibition of committing ‘outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment’ to military detainees. Article 8 of the US Constitution also states that ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ is generally prohibited.

How can Obama, a man usually regarded for his strong principles and who claims to oppose torture, defend the treatment of Manning? The problem is semantics. Regulations against torture and similar practices depend upon subjective words like ‘severe’, ‘unusual’ and ‘outrages’. Legal protection against such techniques thus requires judicial interpretation. Human beings have been and always will be very inventive in their cruelty and debating whether such acts breach regulations will be arduously slow and influenced by the particular case to which they refer. If you believe Manning a hero, you may well be outraged by his treatment; if you think him a traitor, you may well think such treatment is justified in the interests of national security.

The fundamental principles of liberty are abstract and thus dangerously vulnerable to misguided interpretations – unless each interrogation technique is publically scrutinised and objectified in law before their application, the state will always be able to move the goalposts of liberty to suit whatever it believes at any given time.

Originally written for The Freedom Association website, 15th April 2011.

UK Drug Policy: Closed to Consideration

2011-05-19T20:15:00.000+01:00

At 6:30am last Thursday morning, the body of a young man was found in Bradford a short distance from where two others were found on Tuesday. One local is quoted as saying “I bet it’s drugs-related, that’s a real issue round here.” Though police are yet to confirm this, it’s no secret that drug wars claim many lives in British cities and are destabilising entire regions in countries such as Mexico. The website of the US organisation Students for Sensible Drug Policy details this international tragedy.

Even in the US, home of the all-powerful Drug Enforcement Agency, attitudes have changed. The Republican presidential-nominee Ron Paul has been speaking out against the prohibition of drugs which he believes is oppressive and prevents medicinal usage. About a dozen states have reduced the penalties for marijuana possession, most notably California where it is currently permitted for medical usage.

Further evidence has emerged in the last few days that the Home Office do not share the open mind of our foreign counterparts. Thanks to Bob Ainsworth MP’s questions to the Secretary of State for the Home Department regarding 2010’s annual review, we know that not only was there no consideration of the results of Portugal’s decriminalisation approach but no consideration of a regulatory alternative had even been considered.

I wrote previously about the liberal views of the Liberal Democrats on this issue. Many within Parliament are hopeful that action on this issue will be taken by the government before the next election. A recent article in the Spectator has reminded us that on several occasions in the past, Cameron has spoken in favour of a regulatory approach. Yet, as mentioned in my previous article, Cameron has somewhat backtracked since arriving at Number 10.

While it’s right to be angry at the killers and their drug wars, it doesn’t really get us anywhere. Despite the billion of dollars spent internationally and the incalculable devastation that such warfare brings, drug use hasn’t abated. J.S. Mill[1] prophesised this, arguing prohibition is never effectual, no matter what ‘tyrannical powers’ are used to combat vices. The solution to Mill was regulation – an approach that would reduce costs, lower crime, raise revenue, increase safety and decrease the number of youths criminalised for an act committed upon themselves only. Unless the media and the public are willing to consider drug reform in such a holistic and non-reactionary way, politicians like Bob Ainsworth will be a brave but isolated few.

[1] J.S. Mill, On Liberty, 1859. Mill’s comments referred primarily to gambling dens, yet given his similar views for ‘poisons’ and other vices, it is likely he would extend this to modern illegal drugs.

Originally posted on the Freedom Association website.

Update: Lib Dem conference has now debated the current drug system and have voted to make a review of UK drug law a party policy. The motion noted that current laws were "not only ineffective and not cost-effective but actually harmful, impacting particularly severely on the poor and marginalised". 18/9/11

Update: Of the many officious voices adding to the debate in favour of deregulation is Baroness Manningham-Buller, the former chief of the UK's MI5 security agency, who called for the government to decriminalise cannabis, calling the war on drugs 'fruitless', reform a 'taboo' and expressed exasperation that the Portugal model was not being considered. 17/11/11