One life. Live it.

A serious breach of etiquette from The Prisoner:

In your heads must still be the remnant of a brain! In your hearts must still be the desire to be a human being again!

Shocking. I think I will just go and watch it to make sure.

Further reading

• The Abolition of Man
• David Cameron, The Big Society

Plans to impose pay as you drive charges on every motorist in the country have been killed off by Lord Adonis, the new Transport Secretary.

The proposals, which would have seen drivers paying up to £1.30 a mile during the rush hour, will not now be included in the next Labour manifesto.

His decision represents a major volte face by the Government which had once regarded national road pricing as a flagship policy.

via Road pricing killed off by Transport Secretary, Lord Adonis – Telegraph.

Via BBC NEWS | Technology | Net firms start storing user data:

Details of user e-mails and net phone calls will be stored by internet service providers (ISPs) from Monday under an EU directive.

Feel safer?

Via Right to privacy broken by a quarter of UK’s public databases, says report | The Guardian, we learn that “Britain is now the most invasive surveillance state and the worst at protecting privacy of any western democracy”:

A quarter of all the largest public-sector database projects, including the ID cards register, are fundamentally flawed and clearly breach European data protection and rights laws, according to a report published today.

Claiming to be the most comprehensive map so far of Britain’s “database state”, the report says that 11 of the 46 biggest schemes, including the national DNA database and the Contactpoint index of all children in England, should be given a “red light” and immediately scrapped or redesigned.

The full report is available here. It uses somewhat stronger language:

Of the 46 databases assessed in this report only six are given the green light. That is, only six are found to have a proper legal basis for any privacy intrusions and are proportionate and necessary in a democratic society.

After working around government as a software consultant for several years, I particularly endorse this recommendation:

There should never again be a government IT project – merely projects for business change that may be supported by IT. Computer companies must never again drive policy.

Examining the arguments for the ID Card scheme and the National Identity Register provides a case in point.

Liberty Human Rights maintain a short leaflet, “ID Cards, Fiction and Fact” which explains:

• The ID Card and National Identity Register schemes will cost us privacy and cash.
• The government’s claims about the benefits of the program are fiction.
• ID Cards will not protect us from terrorism.
• ID Cards will not cut crime.
• ID Cards will increase discrimination.
• The Government will not keep our data private.
• The scheme is expensive and of no use.

You can join Liberty here.

The Conservatives go further in their criticism of the scheme here, pledging to abolish it. You can join the Conservatives here.

THE government is to cut the national speed limit from 60mph to 50mph on most of Britain’s roads, enforced by a new generation of average speed cameras.

The reduction , to be imposed as early as next year, will affect two thirds of the country’s road network. Drivers will still be able to reach 70mph on motorways and dual carriageways and 60mph on the safest A roads.

via Road speed limit cut to 50mph . But the safest speed for a road is the 85th percentile. More to follow…

Toby Stevens, of the Enterprise Privacy Group, believes a shortage of fingerprint scanners could lead to an explosion in “flash and dash” fraud.

And that, he says, could scupper the scheme before it gets off the ground.

The Home Office has said it will set up a hotline for traders concerned about the authenticity of ID cards.

via BBC NEWS | Politics | ID card ‘flash and dash’ warning.

From the Convention’s “Abolition of Freedom Act 2009″:

One of the problems with the erosion of liberty in Britain over the last decade was that the public failed to pay attention to what was happening in Parliament. Laws that fundamentally challenged our traditions of rights and liberty and flew in the face of the Human Rights Act (“HRA”) were passed with relatively little debate. Few grasped the impact they would have on our society and Ministers were able to brush aside protests with assurances that their desire to protect us was equal to their respect for civil liberties.

The difficulty campaigners faced was to press home the argument about the scale of the loss. An account was needed to show that the legislative programme, which swept away centuries old rights and transferred so much power from the individual to the state, actually existed. Now we have that evidence and the Convention on Modern Liberty can demonstrate with confidence what Britain has lost and discuss how this crisis of liberty took root in one of the world’s oldest democracies and what to do about it.

David Davis is contributing to the campaign, asking, “When was the last time liberty collapsed in Europe?”:

And from The Guardian (and others) today:

The government has admitted that British troops in Iraq handed over terror suspects to the US, which then secretly rendered them to a prison in Afghanistan.

After a year of allegations and repeated ministerial assurances to the contrary, the admission was made in the Commons by John Hutton, the defence secretary, who apologised to MPs for inaccurate information ministers had previously given them.

Please read the report and talk about it. Please let people know what they have lost and encourage them to write to their MP.

Via Spy chief: We risk a police state – Telegraph:

Dame Stella [Rimington, ex-head of MI5,] accused ministers of interfering with people’s privacy and playing straight into the hands of terrorists.

“Since I have retired I feel more at liberty to be against certain decisions of the Government, especially the attempt to pass laws which interfere with people’s privacy,” Dame Stella said in an interview with a Spanish newspaper.

“It would be better that the Government recognised that there are risks, rather than frightening people in order to be able to pass laws which restrict civil liberties, precisely one of the objects of terrorism: that we live in fear and under a police state,” she said.

Dame Stella, 73, added: “The US has gone too far with Guantánamo and the tortures. MI5 does not do that. Furthermore it has achieved the opposite effect: there are more and more suicide terrorists finding a greater justification.” She said the British secret services were “no angels” but insisted they did not kill people.

And:

In a further blow to ministers, an international study by lawyers and judges accused countries such as Britain and America of “actively undermining” the law through the measures they have introduced to counter terrorism.

Via Henry Porter: Calling the police to account | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk :

Although I write as someone who has no particular axe to grind about the police, I am beginning to wonder whether we have a serious problem with a police force that believes it is entitled to monitor political activity. Set against the new law banning photographs of the police – which surely will be used by every policeman parked on a double yellow line or meting out the rough justice – there is increasing tendency of the police to photograph people in an aggressive fashion. It shows an innate lack of respect for the innocent citizen and the conventions of our free society, which is extremely disturbing.

I will be attending The Convention on Modern Liberty in London. Speakers include Douglas Carswell MP, Shami Chakrabarti, Nick Clegg MP, David Davis MP, Andrew Dismore MP, Edward Garnier QC MP, Dominic Grieve QC MP and Lord Goldsmith.

If you think the debate is insufficiently measured, I suggest watching this:

There may be a regional convention in your area: check here.

Following comments on the immediate astronomical human cost of the Great War:

Yet this essay has to do less with numbers of ended lives than it has to do with altered lives, or rather, with changes in the status of the private life of the modern individual, the modern family, the modern community. This essay is about private property, about the autonomy of the individual, and the disastrous trend, accelerated by World War I, of the state claiming the right to take at whim everything within its territory.

A secondary theme is that this great change in private life was already in process before 1914. The real agent of change was not the war, but the state and its backers and minions. Yet war as an accelerator of change was bad enough. Political and intellectual leaders in all countries welcomed the war for the collectivist changes it would inevitably bring. In the United States, one of the more important figures welcoming the war was John Dewey, a veritable god in the pantheon of our modern civil religion. Dewey saw the war, rightly, as the accelerator of the coming industrial society—a managed positivist society, which he thought of as democracy itself.

via Some Costs of the Great War: Nationalizing Private Life – T. Hunt Tooley – Mises Institute .

The steady expansion of the “surveillance society” risks undermining fundamental freedoms including the right to privacy, according to a House of Lords report published today.

The peers say Britain has constructed one of the most extensive and technologically advanced surveillance systems in the world in the name of combating terrorism and crime and improving administrative efficiency.

via House of Lords: rise of CCTV is threat to freedom | UK news | The Guardian. Also:

The House of Lords report on Britain’s surveillance society is a devastating analysis of the systems that have been installed by the authoritarian Labour government and the controlling forces emerging in local government. There is no question now that Britain’s free society is under threat, and it is time for the public and opposition parties to declare an end to this regime of intrusion.

via Henry Porter: Reaction to the House of Lords report on surveillance society | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk .