in a hole » 21stCenturyFix.org.uk

#PRISM: not an acronym, not a Google lie, just a next-door neighbour I once had

a con, democracy, in a hole, secrecy, security No Responses »

Jun 152013

I once had a next-door neighbour who was clever enough to know how, and stupid enough to go ahead. This individual split the cable that came out of another neighbour’s Sky dish and hogged half of the service for free for probably a year. They caught him in the end.

Nothing came of it though.

I’d like you to watch a podcast before we continue, which eventually – in its studied and careful way – takes us back to basic physics. Remember what that beautiful object we called a prism actually did? Split a pure white light into a rainbow of illuminating colours. And that is just about what this video from last Wednesday invokes both figuratively and literally. If you’ve not too much time on your hands, start from a little after twenty minutes in. You might also want to read this EFF document (.pdf format) which describes a highly relevant legal deposition from way back in 2006. It gets mentioned in the podcast; it’s a crucial part of the audit trail.

http://twit.tv/show/security-now/408

Worth every damn minute, right? As I said, that next-door neighbour of mine.

So really, if they’re right in their analysis, what’s happening here is permanent wire-tapping, possibly legal (the Internet after all is a public space), on a hugely infrastructured scale. Maybe a bit like (then again, who am I to say?) those episodes of CSI where they gain DNA by getting someone to drink a cup of coffee and then throw away the cup.

You discard something into that public domain and we’ll hoover it up by splitting the signal as close to its node as we can, without even telling the companies which harvest it in the first place what we’ve decided to do.

So where do people congregate? What do people use? The services of – and routers closest to – Google & Co’s massively centralising communication facilities. All that careful language in their denials of any possible server back-doors, when the issue – semantically – wasn’t the servers. Direct access to the data the servers contained, yes; but not direct access to the servers themselves.

So it is our society has trodden a long path from once being “economical with the truth” to saying “the least untruthful thing” a politicised figure could think of.

But I’d like to take the issue one step further. What if Prism doesn’t only allow the light to be split off? What if it also allows the data to be manipulated?

Last week, just a day before the podcast linked to above, the Greek broadcaster ERT – described to me by Greek citizens recently as the Greek equivalent of the British BBC – was suddenly taken off-air. News, current affairs, history, culture – all gone at the drop of a hat. The shock, if replicated here in Britain with our own organisation, would be powerful and lasting for sure. Yet I argued, for only a moment it is true, that perhaps the Greek way was better: at least someone was taking ownership for obfuscation by clearly closing down its outlet.

The BBC, in the meantime, has been accused of multiple acts of perfidious journalism – an institutionally implemented censorship, in fact, of considerable consequences; a censorship never admitted nor answered by anyone in charge; a censorship, for the majority of its viewers, never even perceived.

Under such circumstances, wouldn’t a manifest – even where shockingly sudden – absence be a cleaner and more hygienic way forward than this grubby messing-about with the parameters of our perceptions and realities?

Except that, of course, for those who use it as a tool to transmit on-message content, keeping it all going is going to be far more productive and in keeping with their overarching objectives than any honest admitting of the truth.

The aforementioned opportunities for manipulation being far more useful than simple tracking and observance.

Don’t just be a spectator is what I’m suggesting here; far more proactively, actually become an actor.

This brings me back, then, to Prism. If the NSA is accessing everyone’s data, and has allowed in some indirect way for our knowledge of this information to finally hit the public domain, it will surely – now – have the parallel capacity to intervene, interrupt, modify and falsify almost anything which flows around the Internet.

I’m not saying it would, mind you; just suggesting that it’s impossible that the facility wouldn’t have been included.

That is to say, it would include not only the ability to split out of the Internet a perfect copy of everything that hit Google & Co’s servers just before it actually did but also the ability to replace a digitally manipulated alternative of what was originally on the point of being there, just before it actually ended up being so.

There could be many desperate reasons why someone might wish to reserve the right to do this: not least, in times of awful war or some other ongoing conflict, the desire to short-cut legal niceties and thus allow the summary removal from circulation of people who otherwise might be far too clever by half.

And I’m not saying even in this case I’d agree with such a position; all I’m saying is that it wouldn’t surprise me if someone thought engineering such a feature into the infrastructure might be a natty thing to do.

Whatever the substantive reality of the situation, I’m pretty sure one of the drivers of all these repressive instincts is that maybe, just maybe, the Internet as constructed has, at least in the eyes of those who would continue governing, given us far too many freedoms: far too many freedoms for governments to treat their peoples with justice; far too many freedoms for the establishments across the world to feel safe; perhaps, I wonder, even far too many freedoms for even the most sensible and stable of the planet’s citizens to know how to choose consistently reasonable ways of using them.

I’m not saying they’re right; I’m just trying to understand their fears and behaviours – as well as their downright illegalities.

I’m trying to understand how rational human beings can justify using “the least untruthful” way of answering questions from political representatives speaking in permanently-recorded public forums.

Let’s finish on a pertinent piece of legalese. Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says the following:

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Now that’s pretty sweeping – correspondence for example, at least these days, may cover everything from the more analogous emails to tweets and Facebook “likes”.

And remembering Doctorow’s intelligent separation of the words “privacy” and “secrecy” this morning, I do wonder if anyone who’s fighting the good fight still recalls why they went into the business in the first place.

Stop Watching Us? Well, quite. It’s an important thought.

Though when 60 percent of Americans say they just don’t care any more, perhaps the good fight has already been lost.

Cory Doctorow on privacy – and why you really should care

government, in a hole, privacy, secrecy, security 2 Responses »

Jun 152013

This needed to be said, and I’ve never seen it said better:

You should care about privacy because privacy isn’t secrecy. I know what you do in the toilet, but that doesn’t mean you don’t want to close the door when you go in the stall.

Read the rest of this brilliantly pointed post. It sets up the market-stall for those of us who find attacks on privacy disturbing and resistable – even as that government argument of “If you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear” both resonates weightily and sees rebuttal as a complex process.

Privacy is a human right. The flipside of the coin of integrity.

We mustn’t allow government discourse to interfere with that right, nor dirty it with broad-brushed arguments which attempt to criminalise us or make of all our activities suspicious indicators they must feel obliged to track for ever and always.

In truth, whilst governments becomes evermore disagreeably secretive, they avoid all constructive debate on the matter by shifting the onus onto the voters and represented who must – often with a sense of overriding guilt these days – pledge themselves to fight for the few remaining freedoms out there.

Our desire to be private has been corrupted by their need to maintain their own secrecy. And so they confuse and conflate their desire to hide stuff from democratic oversight by arguing our human requirements for privacy equal their hierarchical and corporatising thirst for permanent obfuscation.

But when we righteously, rightly, demand our privacy, we are not asking for secrecy. And when they refuse to concede our privacy democratically, arguing that it is little more than the anteroom to criminal secrecy, they curiously, perhaps revealingly, do not choose to give up on their own secretive games.

We ask for little. They reject this little. And, what’s more, they assume oversight over so much more.

This, and so much more, is why we must separate the words “privacy” and “secrecy”. The battleground is so much clearer for me today. I hope it is also clearer for you.

Edward Snowden’s crime: leaking what undemocratic foreign powers already know?

democracy, in a hole 1 Response »

Jun 102013

This, from Daniel Ellsberg in the Guardian today, makes for interesting reading. He’s clear Edward Snowden is a whistleblower – that is to say, someone who reveals wrongs which need righting. Right now, I’d be inclined to agree. Even though my own country doesn’t have to always be inextricably linked with the curious destiny of the US, a land of the admirably free where – nevertheless – violent people are free to be violent, I’m pretty clear there are enough politicians on both sides who would prefer that both countries remained inextricably linked.

And thus, I suppose, it will always be so.

Anyhow, I think I’ve said in my previous blog what I needed to say for now on the pros and cons of the NSA’s surveillance state itself, so I won’t pursue further any of the points already covered.

At least for now.

Instead, here are a couple of idle thoughts which I’ve had on the back of all this. Three, in fact; and kind of tangential, too.

Firstly, imagine Snowden hadn’t voluntarily given up the information which was in his power to release. Imagine, say, a truly unpleasant regime like Iran had captured him and proceeded to make propaganda hay out of his revelations. How would we have then interpreted the situation? How would we have reacted to the revelations? Would we have rejected their possible veracity out of hand? Would we have been able to deal with the challenge of accepting such propaganda might be true? Would we have been able to square the tremendous circle of doubt and shame thus generated? Would, in fact, he be a martyr to freedom for everyone rather than, as now would seem to be the case, a severely fallen angel of the world of secrets for at least some of us?

Secondly, Snowden has revealed to us something we surely all suspected for a long time – even, in the absence of any real certainty, resignedly decided to accept: that our communications were accessed, channelled and controlled by security organisations in real time, via freemium services and economics provided by the large American social-media and social-network corporations. Now I’m sure that unelected representatives and individuals in disagreeably undemocratic foreign powers have known – for certain – for a long time what Snowden has recently decided to confirm to us ordinary voters. What then, really, gives organisations like the NSA the right to hide from citizens of its own democracy truths which foreigners of other societies are perfectly cognisant of? In the grand hierarchy of things, why should someone from the aforementioned Iran know more about the workings of those who would protect us from terrorist attack and conspiracy than we ourselves do? What, in heaven’s name, is the reasoning behind hiding the truth about those organisations which are out there to keep us healthily democratic, when our undemocratic enemies already know far more about them than we ever can?

Thirdly, humans are, of course, the weak link in the whole security thang. In the air, of late, drones have been the talk of the town. Pilot-free aircraft with astonishing capacities now do stuff robotically in such a way that not only do we find human error is removed step-by-inevitable-step but also the terrible temptation to jump ship. So let’s, for this final thought, take a huge leap into this future I now lay out in front of you. Imagine, one day, the Snowdens of this world are no longer the unpredictably weak (or morally strong, depending on your point of view) flesh-and-blood creatures they currently demonstrate themselves to be. No chance of emotions which might lead to whistleblowing-like revelations. No chance that any abuse might filter its way out to those voters, citizens and families the abusers should be protecting. Rather, an utterly closed system where behaviours were literally programmed to protect the hierarchies. In such a closed container where outside inspection, democratic oversight and access became effectively impossible, surely it’s not beyond the realms of reasonable thought to assume the few human beings who would remain might not be able to resist being corrupted in some way or another.

As Ellsberg observes rather terrifyingly in his piece:

[...] given the extent of this invasion of people’s privacy, we do have the full electronic and legislative infrastructure of such a state. If, for instance, there was now a war that led to a large-scale anti-war movement – like the one we had against the war in Vietnam – or, more likely, if we suffered one more attack on the scale of 9/11, I fear for our democracy. These powers are extremely dangerous.

So although we are not yet a police state, although democracy still keeps the blood mostly off our streets, it would appear that some in the security services believe Edward Snowden’s biggest crime is confirming to his fellow citizens what is essentially an open secret elsewhere. Elsewhere, and not necessarily a democratic elsewhere.

And if that’s a crime, I do wonder exactly where our Western justice systems – and wider civilisations – are headed.

Google? Facebook? Obama’s USA? Why, oh why, be so unambitious?

democracy, in a hole 1 Response »

Jun 082013

The Guardian is live-blogging events I’ve already posted about twice on these pages. As always in relation to matters of media abuse, the aforementioned newspaper does it thoroughly. First, it headlines today’s revelations thus (the bold is mine):

NSA Prism program: more details revealed in new slide – live updates

Google and Facebook issue strong denials of participation

It then goes on to describe President Obama’s spinning of the matter in the following way (again, the bold is mine):

[...] The Guardian’s Paul Lewis and Dominic Rushe report:

However in comments that appeared more emollient than his remarks earlier in the day, when he criticised “leaks” and “hype” in the media, Obama tried to deflect criticism, saying internet privacy posed “broad implications for our society”. He said privacy concerns also related to private corporations, which he said collect more data than the federal government. [...]

This latter comment, unguardedly I guess, simply goes to underline why the Prism project might choose to plug directly into the servers of such companies as Google and Facebook, instead of building a separate infrastructure to efficiently intervene content as it flowed over the open Internet. After all, if private industry has already achieved such goals, what really is the point of doing it all over again?

Not that this latter approach isn’t also being effected in some way, mind. From the very same Guardian last year, we get this story:

America’s largest eavesdropping centre in Britain, Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire, is being expanded in a multimillion-pound programme as it becomes increasingly vital to US intelligence and military operations, according to a study of the controversial base released on Thursday.

The article goes on to say:

The study describes the programme, called Project Phoenix, as “one of the largest and most sophisticated high technology programmes carried out anywhere in the UK over the last 10 years”. Work on it has been reserved for US-based arms corporations including Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, and their personnel with high-level security clearance, it notes.

In fact, what this all simply goes to show is that everyone – but everyone – is playing the same game. Whether Google and Facebook knew about Prism or not, they’ve been doing precisely the same with their own users (you and me) as the American government and others round the world want to do with the citizens they supposedly serve (coincidentally, also you and me). Both private and public sectors see their very similar constituencies – consumers on the one hand, voters and potential terrorists/paedophiles/agitators of the establishment galore on the other – as content generators to be mined aggressively for an allegedly greater good. That Google and Facebook do it in order to fill the pockets of their shareholders is surely no less moral (to borrow Milton Friedman’s language) than the battle governments now appear to be waging against fearful threats to our democracy.

And I really wouldn’t mind any of this Prism bollocks – what will sooner or later serve to define Obama’s presidency and legacy for historical good or ill – if it honestly and sincerely helped to guarantee our democracy.

The problem is that the accumulation of all these very discrete acts of invasion – discrete and, to date, also fairly discreet – into our personal, political and psychological spaces can only lead me to want to suggest the following:

look to guarantee our democracy through occasionally greying means by all means;
fight to guarantee our safety and physical security with some uncertain steps of course;

but leave – please leave, please please leave – some of this democracy, which you clearly cherish, love and covet so very sincerely, intact for the rest of us to enjoy in the meantime.

That’s what’s really crushing my own belief in the future. By allowing both public and private sectors to invade our privacies so violently, one in the interests of defending civilisation, the other in the interests of shareholder value, we are putting for the rest of us, the law-abiding us, the good us, this whole massive democratic construct on humongous hold.

For if this huge battle against terrorism/paedophilia/agitators galore goes on for much longer, one day – not so long in the future – there’ll be people who’ll have lived in democratic countries like ours who truly won’t ever have enjoyed the democratic experience we once so considerably took for granted.

OK. So right now, they’re not slaughtering us in the streets. Democracy, even the damaged one we’re living in, still achieves a lot of good. But if we can build whole political belief systems on the importance of encouraging citizens to aspire to better economic activity, why can’t we do the same with our democratic integrity?

Why do we have to be so unaspirational when it comes to fundamental human rights?

Am I being too cynical here when I suggest that perhaps those in charge don’t care for anything but economics? That liberal democracy has only been allowed to flourish whilst it served the needs of the moneymakers? And when this is no longer the case, so it can be carelessly discarded. Maybe this is cynicism speaking after all. Maybe I’m just joining too many silly dots. But as one final set of thoughts, just ponder this:

we knew we had an economy where private industry aimed to track and know everything about us, from family photos to favourite porn to any and every personal like and dislike;
we now realise we have a democracy where public servants aim to track and know everything about us, from political inclinations to social activity to how far we can be pushed before we fracture;

So what happens when in order to find out the latter, the number-crunchers understand all they really need is the former? What happens when the data and the uses to which it can be put overlap?

Prism, that’s what.

The result of a socioeconomic framework where business and government fuse in one – and democracy becomes no more than the collateral damage of a much broader failure of democratic ambition.

Lobbyists clogging up Parliament? Then high time your MP became a Magnum!

democracy, in a hole, lobbyists, unclassifiable No Responses »

Jun 042013

Lobbying is getting a terrible – perhaps I should say an even worse – name for itself. The latest here from the Guardian; meanwhile, background here from the BBC.

I suppose, as the latter article underlines, lobbying in theory is a conduit for democratic debate:

Lobbying in order to influence political decisions is widely regarded as a legitimate part of the democratic process. Lobbyists are firms or individuals that are paid to influence such decisions.

They are often former politicians or ex-civil servants who have developed personal contacts with those in power.

Alternatively, individuals. firms, charities and other groups can lobby on their own, without paying professional lobbyists.

The problem, of course, is the rank professionalisation of the activity. That people and firms can earn livings on the back of all this is clearly a vector for the infection of our body politic.

So why does it need to happen in the first place? I suppose, in the first instance, it has something to do with the trafficking of information. From the hundreds of thousands of press releases which attempt to churnalise good journalists into moral submission to the ready-made pre-digested outputs of the higher-powered lobbyists, we basically have an information industry giving up self-interested executive overviews to MPs and others who often have very little time on their hands.

Do we really believe all MPs and Lords religiously read every word of every parliamentary proposal? Or, indeed, are able in relatively short timeframes to accurately judge the implications of every clause? In such a circumstance, it surely ought to be both beneficial and inevitable that outside specialists interact with and inform our representatives in both Houses.

Surely it should. Surely it must:

206 parliamentarians have recent or present financial private healthcare connections

145 Lords have recent or present financial connections to companies involved in healthcare

124 Peers benefit from the financial services sector

1 in 4 Conservative Peers have recent or present financial connections to companies involved in healthcare

1 in 6 Labour Peers have recent or present financial connections to companies involved in healthcare

1 in 6 Crossbench Peers have recent or present financial connections to companies involved in healthcare

1 in 10 Liberal Democrat Peers have recent or present financial connections to companies involved in healthcare

71 MPs have recent or present financial links to companies involved in private healthcare

81% of these are Conservative

And so it goes on.

So how can we resolve the corrupting nature of money in our democratic process? I think it would be relatively simple. As follows: how about we throw even more money at our MPs and Lords? “More money?” I hear you screech. “Well, yes,” I reply hurriedly. Let me explain.

Just as churnalism is the bane of modern mainstream media, as overworked communicators rely more and more on the PR industry for the sources of their stories and points of view on reality, so the spin and angles professionalised lobbyists place on our perceptions of the world don’t half taint these perceptions to a considerable degree. Yet if each and every MP and Lord had their own properly resourced research machine, resourced to the extent any half-decent lobbying firm is currently resourced for example, and which allowed them to investigate from scratch the whole world and its mother, wouldn’t the impact on and need for our representatives to engage with such democratically debilitating creatures fall dramatically?

If every one of our representatives was in essence the centre of a mini think-tank all on its lonesome, wouldn’t the information flow and the unhappy dependence on external mediation become far less necessary? In such a way, then, we could recover some of the alleged former glories of our constituency system where individuals used to vote with their own properly informed – and relatively independent – minds on matters their own understandings served to broaden.

Once this was so; the world, quite naturally, has since become far more complicated. Hardly surprising many cannot keep up, and therefore feel the need for the supporting hand of intellectual bribery. (Sometimes literal bribery too.)

But if MPs and Lords could revert to being those disinterested specialists of other times whose careers were designed to consistently enable representative democracy, instead of the helicopter-viewing extensions of PR merchants they’ve latterly and frequently turned into, we could perhaps begin to reconstruct a recognition that not all in our democracy has to stink so unlimitedly.

What I am finally suggesting? I suppose nothing more nor less than this: that our MPs and other representatives became not just private but, more significantly, very public investigators.

Not easily swayed recipients of pre-digested wisdoms but – actually – generators of original and very evidence-based thought.

A Magnum anyone?

No. Not those summer thoughts of lazy indulgence. This one I mean, of course! (In a way …)

http://youtu.be/3CquMO3vJvo

E-petitions: tools to identify and profile committed citizens?

e-petitions, in a hole No Responses »

Jun 022013

Here’s a narrative I don’t really want to construct. Here’s an example of the shield becoming a sword. Here’s an example of how a tool to defend and bring us together can so easily become a shocking vector towards our innermost thoughts, commitments and – most importantly – ultimate sticking-points.

So many e-petitions. So many audit trails of committed citizens tying their emails, their post codes, their addresses, their phone numbers, their speedily-thought sequences of immediate political reactions, into so many tendentious topics. Gut reactions; deep reactions; the reactions that will define how far we are prepared to go.

So it is we talk about how the government wants to snoop on all our electronic communications.

We talk about how Google & Co harvest our every click.

But have you ever thought in all that multifarious data, all that cumbersomely trawled information, how very much worth its weight in intelligence gold the cross-referencing of all those e-petition results – which we’ve so handily, freely and generously completed out of the goodness of our most profound political souls – would actually be?

Now all that – in the hands of governments, local councils, security forces and other interested parties – would truly become something we could usefully investigate.

People sounding off … well, that’s practically everyone I suppose – especially in times such as these. Sounding off, after all, is excellent for our mental and physical wellbeing – probably entirely positive for our civilisations.

On the other hand, in a hacktivist age the problem is countering and managing the ever-growing impacts of those who’ve become the suddenly massively coordinating; not the sounders-off but, rather, those who would take the next steps.

Those who would dip their toes in what the status quo and establishment bods might term the radicalisation (even where lukewarm) of the beloved chattering-classes. (And just so we are clear about this: I include myself in the latter description. I too am of the growingly irritated chattering-classes.)

So. The really useful intelligence out there isn’t to be found in having a right to access the billions of irrelevant emails we send trivially to each other. No. The really useful intelligence out there is what flags we finally decide to nail to our standards. As I mentioned above, those ideals which firm up and become our sticking-points; our markers in the sand; those places beyond which we will not budge another inch.

And you know what? The really funny thing about so many of these e-petition sites is that the data is already owned and administered by the governments in the first place. No need to pass laws which give our governors more rights to inspect us; no need to impress upon us all with horror stories about terrorism and paedophilia the importance of keeping the lid on awful cauldrons through evermore draconian Internet legislation. All you need to do to get a sense of where the populace as a whole is heading – as well as concrete individuals as society’s parts – is set up an e-petition site and wait for the data to roll on in.

And then, just in case, just on the off-chance of a useful result, number-crunch and cross-reference the opinions.

Oh, what a temptation that might be!

Yes! Yes! Yes! Your data is safe with us. Of course.

But whose data will ever really be safe from those who have the technology to examine with prying eyes? Whose data – online – is ever going to be permanently private?

What am I suggesting? That we no longer complete e-petitions? No. Of course that is not where I would like us to go. But I would like to say that I’d prefer it if we were all aware – consciously, consistently and sentiently so – that there is data and data. Whilst the stuff we – even now – happily give up to the Facebooks of this world already tells those who analyse it plenty about what we might be, especially from an advertiser’s point of view, telling people and recording for people and grouping conveniently for people where you refuse to lie down and be bullied is quite the most valuable of all the datasets the world may hold.

Especially if controlling such populaces is what floats your boat.

Especially if keeping the lid on the chattering-classes’ cauldrons is your ultimate goal.

The Snoopers’ Charter, Google & Co and being ever-so-economical with our privacy

advertising, communication, data protection, data trafficking, European Union, Google, in a hole, information economy, information firehose, privacy, TalkTalk No Responses »

May 312013

The Guardian offers us the following exclusive (the bold is mine):

The five biggest internet companies in the world, including Google and Facebook, have privately delivered a thinly veiled warning to the home secretary, Theresa May, that they will not voluntarily co-operate with the “snooper’s charter”.

In a leaked letter to the home secretary that is also signed by Twitter, Microsoft and Yahoo!, the web’s “big five” say that May’s rewritten proposals to track everybody’s email, internet and social media use remain “expensive to implement and highly contentious”.

Yeah. Right. As if Facebook, Google+, Microsoft et al weren’t already doing their utmost to achieve precisely that.

Don’t believe me? Google, privacy and the European Union; advertising and online activities; and this from TalkTalk in 2010. No. It’s clear that when there is a business imperative to invade our privacy, both the big boys and even the smaller fry will be motivated to go to extraordinary lengths to do precisely what the government allegedly wants to do in the fight against terrorism.

And even as I am against the Snoopers’ Charter, I wonder whether there isn’t a longer-term dynamic at work here. Take the example of Google search. When you log in to Google, your search phrases are tied into your login but are not available for webmasters whose sites you visit. However, when you do not log in to Google, your search phrases – whilst no longer tied into your Google login – became available for all and sundry to examine. This is a clear example of the mentality at hand: you want a degree of privacy from the outside world, entrust it to Google & Co (for the moment). You don’t want to entrust your privacy exclusively to us, then lose it altogether with everyone else.

Multiply this mindset up a thousandfold, and we can see that the Big Five’s thinking may go way beyond a disinterested stand on behalf of our privacy: if the government does require, by law, Google & Co to voluntarily give up the data they’re currently harvesting on their users, we’re talking about a massive writedown in the value of what is essentially the intellectual property – certainly the “raw materials” – of these companies.

When Google & Co talk about protecting our privacy, they’re actually talking about protecting their IP. For if the Snoopers’ Charter – and their like elsewhere – are not eventually passed, government will presumably – at some point in the future – end up being crudely “blackmailed” by these rapacious organisations in exchange for getting access to their treasure troves of information. After all, he or she who owns the data is always going to have the biggest say in determining its price when at the negotiating table.

One final thought, and just to underline again: I’m neither in favour of the Snoopers’ Charter nor in favour of transnational corporations collecting so much data on our habits, ways of seeing and ways of doing.

If truth be told, I’d much prefer a world where neither existed.

Wouldn’t you?

Google Play, Gmail and reporting spam

emails, Gmail, Google, in a hole, spam No Responses »

May 292013

I’ve suddenly started receiving Google Play emails. I suppose this is some permission I checked as part of a recent upgrade, without, that is to say, realising I’d checked it.

My email provider is Gmail, one of Google’s best products (about to be wrecked by changes already in hand to its composition interface – but that’s a story for another post). Its spam filters are excellent – easily taught, though (it has to be said) a tad free and easy with competitors’ emails: Twitter notifications in particular got a recent battering from its systems.

Today, then, I received another Google Play email. I thought: excellent opportunity to teach a Google product (Gmail) that another Google product (Play) was behaving in a rather underhand manner. So I clicked on the spam button in the expectation that the offending email would simply disappear from my screen. To my surprise, instead, the dialogue box below popped up.

Now as far as I know, this service isn’t offered to others. As I pointed out above, I was never asked if I wanted to unsubscribe to Twitter notifications before I discovered they were ending up in my spambox. Nor, indeed, as a general rule, do I unsubscribe to unwanted email anyway: I have been led to believe this simply tells unscrupulous senders that the email is valid and can continue to be usefully pursued.

It’s not even the only case of wanted email being filtered out by Gmail’s spam-detection systems. I wrote a while ago about this unusual case. Essentially, a small organisation in favour of debt-relief was, according to Google, having its emails marked by Gmail users as spam. Crowdsourcing such filters is, as I pointed out, clearly open to abuse:

So let me see. We have a small organisation supporting a medium-sized organisation against the alleged injustices of humungous organisations – and yet Google allows its users to flock together and keep such messages out of our inboxes.

Isn’t it conceivable that a network of evil-minded users (or indeed certain political parties – or maybe even governments) – thus alerted to the way these things now appear to work – might organise their behaviours in such a way as to push our major email providers into automatically blacklisting the communications of certain institutions, simply by marking any such emails as spam?

Didn’t you use to require about thirty separate website links to massage your blog to the top of a particular Google ranking? I wonder how many email users are now required to remotely send a properly signed-up-for email into the black holes that are our supposedly automated spam filters.

In the case that occupies us today, of course, Google simply prioritises and protects its own services from being reported as spam – even as it automatically (or otherwise) defines other organisations’ stuff as being unwanted content.

If it were an automatic service offered to all and sundry, on a level playing-field we could be confident about, any email with an “unsubscribe” link would generate the same dialogue box. That this doesn’t happen does really beg the question: why should I choose to behave with Google in one way – and in quite another way with everyone else?

And more importantly: why does Google reserve the right – in what was always an exemplary standalone product such as Gmail – to begin to blur the lines so self-interestedly against the content and advertising actions of others?

For me, just one more sad reason – beginning to stack up on the side of a number of others – to seriously search for alternative ways of receiving and delivering my email.

The Telegraph tomorrow: that Berlin Wall which didn’t fall

Berlin Wall, Communism, Croatia, End of History, England, English, in a hole, Telegraph, Yugoslavia No Responses »

May 272013

These are the three ideas which dominate the front page of the Daily Telegraph tomorrow. You couldn’t make it up. A case of fact fiercely outgunning fiction really. Let me explain.

A short digression first – a digression the above reminds me of for reasons which shall shortly become self-evident.

My mother escaped Communist Yugoslavia in the early 1960s. After a long period of readjustment, she came to love the country that accepted her. She spent her early years in a small village near Witney and could only receive news from the family she left behind via blue airmailed letters which took weeks to arrive from her homeland.

She always suspected the slow and heavy hand of censorship.

The police state the Yugoslavs operated was real enough though. I remember the rampant paranoia cousins of mine exhibited when we visited them during the summers of my youth. My Croatian family had grown up on the wrong side of the political spectrum. My grandfather apparently owed his life, on one occasion at least, to a friend who also happened to be in the Party – though the Party was never any friend of his.

Even in repressive regimes, human kindnesses were still able occasionally to shine through.

Back to the matters that occupy us tonight, however. The three items you can see on the above front page would not have been out of place in my mother’s Communist Yugoslavia. In their juxtapositioning, in their clever advantage-taking of the recent backdrop of cultural fracture, in the cunning story they weave, they are all beautifully cruel examples of propaganda discourse at its very finest. No matter that reducing welfare will increase the pressure on the police and the armed forces; no matter that spying on neighbours will create more unreasonable suspicion and fear of difference; no matter that the defacing of national symbols is easily performed and most certainly does not deserve the careless oxygen of publicity … the principle goal is to get the message across that the country is under threat from unspokenly wicked but not intangible strangenesses.

In truth, tomorrow’s Daily Telegraph shows us only one thing: when the Berlin Wall fell, it was not the East Germans who found themselves liberated so much as the West (on a very long-burn fuse) which found itself contaminated. No longer able to fight a common enemy which bound us together in joint enterprise, we thrashed about over the next twenty years looking for constancy and focus for our huge infrastructures of counter-surveillance.

No. I’m not saying the threats aren’t now very real.

All I’m saying is there was no real industrial incentive to reduce their presence in time.

In fact, we could even argue that in some curious way the Berlin Wall hasn’t fallen at all: rather, it’s mutated and grown to include the rest of us in a dangerous embrace, an embrace which serves only to normalise the evil instincts – once turned outwards and now focussing inwards – that we had previously managed to contain so effectively elsewhere.

The Wall which was at one time a Petri Dish of a defence – and is now shattered unavoidably on the laboratory floors of recent history.

Society and pissing people off: a case history in cowardice?

civilisation, cowardice, in a hole No Responses »

May 262013

Russell Brand has said it very well. Here, of the establishment:

The establishment too is relatively happy when different groups of desperate people point the finger at each other because it prevents blame being correctly directed at them. Whenever we are looking for the solution to a problem we must identify who has power. By power I mean influence and money. The answer is not for us to move further from one another, crouched in opposing fortresses constructed from vindictive words. We need now to move closer to one another, to understand one another. If we can take anything heartening from this dreadful attack it is of course the actions of the three women, it’s always women, that boldly guarded Lee Rigby’s body as he lay needlessly murdered. These women looked beyond the fear and chaos and desperation and attuned instead to a higher code. One of virtue, integrity and strength.

And this, in broader conclusion (the bold is mine):

To truly demonstrate defiance in the face of this sad violence, we must be loving and compassionate to one another. Let’s look beyond our superficial and fleeting differences. The murderers want angry patriots to desecrate mosques and perpetuate violence. How futile their actions seem if we instead leave flowers at each other’s places of worship. Let’s reach out in the spirit of love and humanity and connect to one another, perhaps we will then see what is really behind this conflict, this division, this hatred and make that our focus.

And yet, even so, I ask the following question: why – instead of being loving and compassionate to one another – does society’s overriding discourse seem to exclusively involve pissing people perpetually off?

This, for example (on the back of a whole host of other health, social care and legal changes), most recently:

A cap on the number of times patients can visit their GP in a year is being considered by the Conservative Party, it emerged yesterday.

The article reports that those responsible for the suggestion understand it to be “controversial”, but this doesn’t mean they felt it controversial enough not to make it in the first place. That such a disgraceful and mechanistic idea can be seriously floated by a governing party is clearly a sign of the times – as it is clearly a sign that Brand is quite singular in suggesting we need more love and compassion. (For I presume that such restrictions would not apply to those with the wherewithal to pay their way through their vulnerabilities and medical misfortunes. As with the wealthy obese, for those who can afford infirmity and constant attention, the sky is bound to be the limit.)

Now it is true, quite rightly of course, that in cases like the Woolwich murder there is no room for excepting the horror – nor, indeed, accepting it. Yet, separately, quite separately of course, we are brought back to the truths of lives lived: the impact that experience has on how one behaves. I remember, from my own experience of psychosis, what it was like to see the world through a slightly off-beam prism. It was caused, I am certain, by my poverty at the time; by my inability to feed my family; by my crass attempts to find work in London; and, finally, by the realisation that I had reached the end of some impassable road or another. When Brand argues that …

In my view that man [who committed the Woolwich crime] is severely mentally ill and has found a convenient conduit for his insanity, in this case the Quran.

… he is not excusing the crime but, rather, finding reasons not to apply it to everyone with a similar profile. I do not know what mental infirmity the man in question might have suffered from at the time of the crime in question, but I do know that sometimes, when these things happen, I do think: “There but for the grace of God, go I.” There, in fact, but for the grace of God, goes anyone.

And when Brand also makes clear …

[...] I lack the other necessary ingredients for extreme anti social behaviour; mental illness and isolation; either economic, social or both.

… he is simply reiterating a common truth about action and reaction; about cause and effect. The levers that connect us, the butterflies whose wings do break and implicate fierce thunderstorms somewhere else on this closed system we call our planet … all these interconnections cannot be assumed – a priori – non-existent. Even as the individual act is a personal responsibility which cannot be absolved, the societal act is a shared responsibility which means we must re-examine our environment in times of fracture – not to blame it but to understand better where it might be made better for all our purposes.

So can you honestly put your hand on your heart and swear you have never ever been at the boundary of sensible behaviour? OK. Nothing approaching anywhere near the same scale as Woolwich – but nevertheless, a dark moment when despair controlled your every fibre; when what you thought to do could have damaged yourself although no one else; when a step in the wrong direction would change the direction of your life forever.

Of course you can’t swear that you never have been there. For that is the essence of life. The essence of life is that every moment leads to a future one; that every decision has its consequence somewhere down the line. If not the reality, then the mere fear of consequential connections creates its own heavy environment of pregnant meaning.

That the absolute moralists – those who would damn any kind of relativism – have to be right obviously goes without saying: we must be absolutely moral about these horrendous events – and for the good of humanity, try and separate these behaviours from what the rest of us can sensibly contemplate. But it’s the behaviours we must separate, not the people.

And too often, those who shake and make choose to use such terrible behaviours as levers to separate not the good people from the bad acts but – rather – the naturally dissimilar people from the naturally dissimilar people.

There is, after all, a difference between the two processes.

In accepting, then, that the absolute moralists are right to be absolute, I would – even so – pose a question for them to consider: outside horrific events which make us stop in our tracks, and in sustaining an incessantly questioning society where power uses its machinery to consistently put people at a disadvantage, are we really just carrying on as we have always done so – or, alternatively, is something substantially changing?

As they are today, where politics and society are so very bad-tempered, has nothing really changed from the past?

Or is there any chance that the horrible things some of us now fear inside every day of our lives – never mind experience outside in certain terrifying moments – are:

worse and more prevalent now than they should be;
worse and more prevalent now than they have been historically;
worse and more prevalent now precisely because those who move and make in society are deliberately looking to specialise in pissing people off?

It’d be far easier for me to simply say “Cruel bastards need to be crushed”. But I am conscious that at certain moments in my life I maybe could have tipped over into being one of the cruel bastards myself. Those moments have passed; those instincts have grown out of me; those feelings of anguish, societal injustice and cultural rejection have been overcome by sense, sensibility and a process of mature reflection.

Does that make me lucky and willing enough to misunderstand those others who have not been half as lucky as my path has allowed me to be? I don’t know.

I suppose I could write a blogpost which would be clear, condemnatory and popular. And morally unequivocal.

But I would not be bearing witness to – not being honest with – my own experiences.

In that sense, I’m unlucky.

Or, maybe, it’s just a case history in cowardice?

On the establishment’s growing fear of payback

establishment, in a hole, payback No Responses »

May 262013

Life is full of complex combinations of reality, perception and fear. The three matters slip and slide amongst each other in often difficult-to-appreciate ways.

The reactions to the Woolwich tragedy, where a soldier was horribly hacked to death in full view of a powerfully humane response, have been many. Some have attempted to explain it; some have attempted to draw markers in the sand around it; some, even, have attempted to use it to further their own violent and racist agendas.

And even as I write, the confusion grows.

A couple of days afterwards, initially without contextualisation, it was reported that a French soldier was stabbed. Then there was the case of a Pakistan aeroplane being escorted by RAF fighters to Britain’s Stansted airport and the charging this weekend of two individuals with endangering an aircraft.

These must be terrible times for those with consciences who attempt to fulfil the role of running nation-states. In the full knowledge that their austerity politics and their technocratic managerialism have led towards a very individual rack and ruin of the masses, they must now contemplate keeping the lid on the cauldron that Western society is becoming.

Or is it?

If I log onto Twitter, it most definitely is.

Yet if I walk the privileged streets of my own surroundings, nothing – really nothing – has changed over the past three years or so. Nature continues as per always; the birds tweet beautifully where I do so virtually to little effect; the sunshine has finally arrived – though will, I am told, disappear very shortly. The world is as it must be; the world continues to be as it should be.

And in many places I am sure this is so.

But the centralising way of seeing which control-freakery engenders surely shows us that bubbles like Twitter – and to a lesser extent Facebook (in its rather more faked environment, I mean) – replicate the terrifying information streams which the establishment must currently be in possession of.

When I talk about reality, perception and fear, I talk mainly about our leaders’ realities, perceptions and fears. So much bad stuff is done in the name of maintaining power: the near future I am sure will be little different. Because even the bad ones will have guilty consciences, so that permeating sense of culpability will drive them to justify evermore unjustly the acts of almost criminal negligence they are now applying to their peoples.

I’m not going to list them here. I’m going to imagine you already do enough reading. To list them here would be too depressing.

Suffice it to say that if the establishment fears payback, it’s hardly surprising in the circumstances.

Even as the people in general are so much better and more reasonable than the establishment, its leaders and makers and shakers will ever – from their awful ivory towers of expedience – be able to give them due and proper credit for.

The surveillance state: now time?

God, in a hole, state, surveillance, terrorism law No Responses »

May 232013

This happened yesterday:

The brutal murder of a serving soldier in Woolwich in broad daylight has shocked the country.

The prime minister has flown back early from France to lead the government’s response to the suspected terrorist attack and security across London barracks has been stepped up.

I’m sure there will, on the back of this awful event, be plenty of calls for the surveillance state to be reinforced. I say reinforced for two reasons. Firstly, way back in 2006 the BBC was minded to report in the following manner:

The report’s co-writer Dr David Murakami-Wood told BBC News that, compared to other industrialised Western states, the UK was “the most surveilled country”.

“We have more CCTV cameras and we have looser laws on privacy and data protection,” he said.

“We really do have a society which is premised both on state secrecy and the state not giving up its supposed right to keep information under control while, at the same time, wanting to know as much as it can about us.”

The BBC then added:

The report coincides with the publication by the human rights group Privacy International of figures that suggest Britain is the worst Western democracy at protecting individual privacy.

The two worst countries in the 36-nation survey are Malaysia and China, and Britain is one of the bottom five with “endemic surveillance”.

Referring to the same 2006 marker-in-the-sand, Wikipedia underlines the history:

Examples of fully realised surveillance states are the Soviet Union, and the former East Germany, which had a large network of informers and an advanced technology base in computing & spy-camera technology. (Castells, M. The Rise of the Network Society, 2000)

But they did not have today’s technologies for mass surveillance, such as the use of databases and pattern recognition software to cross-correlate information obtained by wire tapping, including speech recognition and telecommunications traffic analysis, monitoring of financial transactions, automatic number plate recognition, the tracking of the position of mobile telephones, and facial recognition systems and the like which recognise people by their appearance, gait, etc.

More recently, the United Kingdom is seen as a pioneer of mass surveillance. At the end of 2006 it was described by the Surveillance Studies Network as being ‘the most surveilled country’ among the industrialized Western states.^[1]

If that was the situation in 2006, just imagine where we might be seven years later. And yet a surveillance state of the characteristics Britain already clearly has didn’t serve to stop yesterday’s terrible act from being carried out.

Of course, we can’t know either how many other terrible acts have been foiled by the surveillance state I allude to – we do, however, have a pretty good idea of how unliberal the country has become. Compare and contrast with recent US pronouncements, for example, in the aftermath of the Boston marathon bombings (the bold is mine):

[...] surveillance cameras don’t necessarily deter serious crimes. Boston’s numerous cameras didn’t stop the crime at the Boston Marathon, nor did London’s more extensive network of cameras deter the 2005 subway bombings. Boston’s talented police commissioner, Edward Davis, put it best right after last Monday’s events when he said that despite the city’s extensive security preparations, little short of a “police state” could have stopped the attacks. It is to Davis’ great credit that as police commissioner he didn’t want a police state.

And if you find it in yourself to agree with Davis, it’s not just because we prefer to be liberal – it’s also, simply, because it apparently doesn’t work.

Which brings me to my final point today: is our persistent hankering after precisely what our position during the Cold War fought to bring down something to do with a far deeper – maybe darker – instinct which possesses us?

Is our manifest desire to invest in the devices and apparatuses of surveillance states – even when we are talking about administering democracies – a result of our need to believe everything can be (even must be) controlled in some way or other?

If not by us, then by something at least …

Let’s rewind to Wikipedia’s own pithy definition of the beast:

The surveillance state is a government’s surveillance of large numbers of citizens and visitors. Such widespread surveillance is most usually justified as being necessary to prevent crime or terrorism. [...]

Now let’s look at its initial definition of God:

God is often conceived as the supreme being and principal object of faith.^[1] In theism, God is the creator and sustainer of the universe. In deism, God is the creator (but not the sustainer) of the universe. In pantheism, God is the universe itself. Theologians have ascribed a variety of attributes to the many different conceptions of God. Common among these are omniscience (infinite knowledge), omnipotence (unlimited power), omnipresence (present everywhere), omnibenevolence (perfect goodness), divine simplicity, and eternal and necessary existence.

It doesn’t half seem to me that, in our secular desire to recover and perpetuate the concept of the surveillance state from the Stasi-like infrastructures of times supposedly long gone, we are actually looking to recreate the benefits of God for a non-believing age. The features and attributes do coincide quite dramatically, after all.

Except for one sad difference perhaps: in few ways could we realistically describe that what we are aspiring to is – in any way – even distantly “omnibenevolent”.

The return of what is often understood to be an Old Testament God perhaps?

Is that where we are being driven?

If so, it’s hardly a surveillance state we’re needing to implement, surely: rather, far more urgently, a deity of sorely-missed kindnesses.

On an Internet of Things … whither a democracy of people?

democracy, in a hole, Internet, Paul Birch No Responses »

May 212013

Via Paul Birch on Twitter today, a project he’s set up with other founding partners came my way. It’s called Help Me Write – and looks to be a fascinating combination of brainstorming anteroom, blogging front-end/signposter and – potentially – a return of that much maligned figure the content-aggregator (though edited perhaps exclusively by humans).

My first attempt at trying out the beast is already on my list of things I would like to write:

Will a web/Internet democracy become even less representative?

There is a perception that representative democracy now bats on behalf of the direct interests of the few. If such a democracy is to use the web to function – from daily interaction with government agencies to voting – it will depend on infrastructures which the few already own and will benefit financially from in the future. What does this mean for democracy itself – in particular its ability to act in a neutral way when its “means of production” are not?

The thoughts that have led up to this proposal are as follows. Firstly, this study which shows us how political parties no longer represent the direct interests of more than the top six percent of the population:

Present social movements, as “Occupy Wall Street” or the Spanish “Indignados”, claim that politicians work for an economic elite, the 1%, that drives the world economic policies. In this paper we show through econometric analysis that these movements are accurate: politicians in OECD countries maximize the happiness of the economic elite. In 2009 center-right parties maximized the happiness of the 100th-98th richest percentile and center-left parties the 100th-95th richest percentile. The situation has evolved from the seventies when politicians represented, approximately, the median voter.

Secondly, the move towards an utterly connected “Internet of Things” – note the language used: things not people – as per this post of mine on an introduction to the subject from the European Commission:

[...] If you thought mixing the real and virtual worlds was already getting messy, you’ve seen absolutely nothing yet. I reproduce their preamble below (the bold is mine):

The Internet of today offers access to content and information through connectivity to web pages and to multiple terminals (e.g., mobiles, TV). The next evolution will make it possible to access information related to our physical environment, through a generalised connectivity of everyday objects. A car may be able to report the status of its various subsystems using communicating embedded sensors for remote diagnosis and maintenance; home information about the status of the doors, shutters, and content of the fridge may be delivered to distant smart phones; personal devices may deliver to a central location the latest status of healthcare information of remotely cared patients; environmental data may be collected and processed globally for real time decision making.

Access to information relating to our surrounding environment is made possible through communicating objects able to interact with that environment and react to events. This makes possible new classes of applications such as smart homes with automated systems to monitor many aspects of daily living, smart grids and intelligent energy management, smart mobility with better control of traffic, or smart logistics with the integrated control of all processes in the entire distribution chain. There are endless examples of this evolution of networked devices, also known as the Internet of Things (IoT).

Finally, there’s this definition in thirty all-too-sorry words of the creature that is modern corporate capitalism:

[...] here’s the text of the poster below:

People were created to be loved. Things were created to be used. The reason the world is in chaos is because things are being loved and people are being used.

This is, then, why I wonder if on an Internet of Things any kind of a democracy of people will be at all possible. Not just because the “means of production” will be owned by those who own us anyway. No. After all, this has been generally the case throughout our often sad and unhappy histories – and, even so, the human spirit has still managed to break free.

No. If truth be told, it’s much more because any society which chooses to define the future in terms of what it can do with objects is giving up on all the options it could have had to define the future in terms of what those objects could do for people.

Just imagine if we’d been sensible enough to call it an Internet of People instead of an Internet of Things. Yes. I know what you’re going to say. An Internet of Things is simply a tool at the beck and call of humans. But remember the definition of modern corporate capitalism – it’s a warning if there ever was one of a future far more trying than this present.

As John Naughton reminds us, and Larry Elliott before him, the dominant mode of business is a business not of people but of things. It’s hardly surprising that someone should have defined the next wave of connectedness thus. What’s most worrying about it, however, is not the way such organisations repeat their behaviours. What’s most worrying about it is that democracy itself – currently beholden only to ballot boxes, paper-based procedures and other remnants of quite ancient times – will shortly migrate to this still undefined Internet of Things; will shortly be defined from top-to-tail by corporate capitalism.

And then where will people be able to find even a niche? Then where will people even exist?

Capitalism’s ultimate revenge: Coalition Britain

capitalism, Coalition, Coalition capitalism, Coalition cuts, Coalition economics, democracy, in a hole, politicians, specialisation, specialisations No Responses »

May 182013

If we believe in a history of the masses – not just in one of heroes and heroines – there has to be more to what is going on between Cameron & Co and the rest of civil society than simply the bald intention to fill corporate pockets with even more dosh than they already possess. There must be bigger movements at play here than simply stupid incompetents being stupidly incompetent.

Firstly, it would appear there is a massive battle being fought between a society of professionals on the one hand and a society of the unprofessionalised on the other. So it is we have doctors, nurses, teachers and lawyers fighting painfully disagreeable rearguard actions with people who have few actual qualifications to be what they end up acting out: in the main, alpha businessmen and women and politicians of all colours and levels. These latter two “professions”, if the label can (or should) be usefully applied, currently have few training paths to prepare them for the roles they carry out – supposedly on our behalf but more generally on their own.

Secondly, there does seem to be a recognition out there that specialisation – the very stuff of both charlatans and experts – may in some insidious way itself be destroying society.

In another universe then, quite parallel to Cameron & Co’s, we might appreciate the attempts of what we could charitably describe as Wannabe Renaissance Men (WRM) (there would appear to be few women, thankfully, of the same mettle) to break through the Chinese Walls of self-interested sectors.

The problem, of course, is that these WRMs I describe really aren’t. They’re not doing what they do in order to break down barriers that divide society but, instead, in order to re-establish – using the most unpleasant methods possible – those barriers which most benefit them at a quite individual level. It would seem they have so convinced themselves their might is right that anything can be justified – precisely and simply because of who or what originates the acts in question. And we are so taken aback by the astonishingly unexpected nature of these acts – so massively and confusingly outside our moral scope – that we find ourselves mainly giving in:

Govt using practices we instinctively know are wrong but our inexperience of such immoral behaviour is restraining our outrage. #Disabled

Yes. It’s possible that Cameron & Co are able to sleep at night because they truly believe themselves on a crusade against evil and interested parties. They see themselves as cavaliers – as latterday buccaneers of magnificent breaking-the-rules ambitions – in much the same way as top-flight businesspeople often feel themselves hard-done-to by a comfort-seeking society which fails to appreciate the real emotional hardships they run the gauntlet of in their uncertain rise to the top.

No wonder these creatures all become self-seeking and selfish.

No wonder they believe we must become like them.

But, in reality, Cameron & Co are anything but Wannabe Renaissance Men – anything but the far-sighted finally able to shrug off a lazy society’s shackles and liberate a democracy of the dreadfully slumbering.

They sense something that perhaps all of us should sense, it is true, but they are utterly incapable of performing the service civilisation requires of them. As Pope Francis mentioned the other day, their money is ruling the vast majority instead of serving the same. And unable to reconfigure it, they have given up at the first hurdle; they have given in and become its hugely detrimental servant rather than its master.

Renaissance Men? They wouldn’t know a flying machine if it hit them on the noggin. They’d assume it was a brutal and violent attack by dangerously trained beings on their self-taught, unqualified and intuitive impulses. Out of such inferiority complexes are born the actions of the essentially brutish.

So who’s lost their moral compass? Is it ourselves – lost in a sea of society-defining media? Is it the journalists themselves – as yet another suspiciously discrete body of professionals too? Or is this actually a case of the pyramid so taking over everything we do, think, say and believe that a 21st century of gloriously compulsory education has only prepared us properly for outright submission?

Maybe, even, Cameron, Gove and their cohort of evil politicos are right in some of what they say – even as they wrong in most of what they do. Specialisations are destroying society; sectors which know so much about their own workings are never going to be entirely direct about the changes which might prejudice them.

Maybe we are all Wannabe Renaissance Men (and Women, of course).

Maybe that’s the problem.

Capitalism’s ultimate revenge: the diarrhoea of an amateur democracy.

Coalition Britain, in fact – multiplied, now, a thousandfold. And controlled by those with the biggest chips on their shoulders history has seen.

From a society of supposedly meritorious conduct, those who least deserve to be in charge are those who have most benefited from a social democracy that urged us to value citizens in terms of what they were instead of what they did.

And so it is that the moral black hole this Coalition of half-baked humans inhabits is bound to fail, time and again, to properly impact on our sense of right and wrong.

We’ve been taught for far too long that what you do isn’t what you are.

To such an extent that what they are is affected in no significant way by what they do.

And even as they lambast us for our relativistic ways, they continue to ruthlessly take full advantage of the room for manoeuvre such generous morals do allow.

The frontline the police really struggle with

frontline services, in a hole, Left Foot Forward, police, police force, police service, police state, policed state, Theresa May No Responses »

May 152013

Theresa May clearly likes getting brownie points. This story from Left Foot Forward today makes it all too plain:

The home secretary Theresa May announced today that under the Conservatives those convicted of killing a police officer will have their sentences raised to the ‘whole life’ category, usually reserved for the very worst types of murderer.

As the article goes on to remind us, there have been 376 people killed as a result of contact with the police since 2005. But whilst in the same period seven police officers were killed, I wouldn’t like to get into a numbers game here. The police clearly face an awful frontline every day of their working week – and, perhaps, outside work too – and it must be almost impossible to quantify how the stress and strain of that frontline affects the quality of those lives.

What I would like in this post to better understand, however, is exactly what frontline we are talking about. In response to this article, and some time later in the day, I tweeted the following thought:

The police don’t only need protecting from those who would kill them. They also need protecting from politicians who would misuse them.

I was thinking in particular of Hillsborough, Orgreave, the life and times of Margaret Thatcher and the covert actions on left-wing activists. Especially when I added in exchange with Mark, a Twitter friend of mine:

@MILivesey Yes but politicians seem to have used the police where that option, for us as simple subjects, doesn’t exist.

Mark then responded interestingly in this way:

@eiohel The Police are they’re to serve and enforce the Law. The problem is politicians use Law to enact policy.

This, for me, in my generally self-taught self and situation, is an astonishing revelation. And it leads me to wonder if it isn’t time we developed the potential for separating the law and policy-making more profoundly. Is it at all possible, in fact, to contemplate processes of national and local policy-making which don’t use as a tool for their implementation the law?

That don’t sully such a law with their political notions …

What if politicians were able to enact policy without using the courts, the police or legal processes at all? What if the courts, the police and the law were only there to defend the people from abuse from their politicians, business leaders and other concentrations of power and wealth? What if we could create a circumstance whereby the police were always on our side? What if the police simply operated to sustain a sensible and sensitive raft of inalienable rights?

For this does seem to me to be the nature of the problem. Although unproven, I think it hardly tendentious to suggest some police forces became politicised under Thatcher’s rule; some police officers covertly stepped over the line between protecting and oppressing; some of the machinery of law and order became the machinery of political control.

New Labour barely did much better: CCTV mushroomed under Blair; ID-card schemes were proposed and very nearly introduced; laws to manage and control people’s behaviours were passed hand over fist.

So in the middle of all of this, the real frontline for our police clearly becomes much more one of abuse at the hands of elected government officials than one of getting voluntarily involved in a delegitimising process of rather underhand social organisation and reorganisation.

At the mercy, that is, of entirely politicising forces.

Can, as Mark seems to indicate, we ever get to a place where the police and the law are there to primarily defend the rights of ordinary flesh-and-blood people over almost anything else that makes waves in our civilisation?

Where ordinary flesh-and-blood people come way before politicians, their prejudices, their party structures, business leaders, globalising forces and corporate entities?

Where the sole and specific purpose of the police is to defend the voters and their families from any attempt at repression – instead of ending up flailing tools of those who would use their elected positions to repress?

It seems to me, if you really want me to say what’s on my mind, that we need the police on our side much more than we need to denigrate them. But in order to make that connection, we must work out why we are fed – so systematically – with stories and tales of their bad behaviours. Theresa May’s bald attempt to cuddle up to the police, even as Coalition cuts savage their structures, is about as highly political as anyone could ever get. That “life” should mean the “whole of one’s life” when the servant of the people is killed by the people but that the same relationship should not exist when the people are killed by the servant is so manifestly repressive in its dynamics and shape to make it almost laughable. Except that this is no joke.

The real reason for May’s curious statement then? Perhaps a) to ensure the police remain on the side of the politicians despite the dreadful environment of austerity; and b) to ensure the people continue to fear the former as keepers of both general order and the law politicians so love to pervert.

Who’d be a police officer in such a landscape? Not me.

But then, right now, as austerity bites deep, you could ask any Western citizen pretty much the same question.

Given a free choice, who’d be on that frontline which ordinary police officers must so clearly struggle with – that real frontline between political perversion and civil society so obviously corrupting everything?

Is humanity as a species suicidal?

in a hole, people No Responses »

May 102013

This news is, indeed, pretty sobering:

For the first time in human history, the concentration of climate-warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has passed the milestone level of 400 parts per million (ppm). The last time so much greenhouse gas was in the air was several million years ago, when the Arctic was ice-free, savannah spread across the Sahara desert and sea level was up to 40 metres higher than today.

This morning I wondered if the society we live in leads us inevitably to immoral outcomes, even where every one of our individual acts is never any more than amoral. And so I’m beginning to think that we as a species are perhaps also engineered to be suicidal. This could explain the ferocious battle currently being waged between those on the right who believe in the glory of individual agency and those on the left who believe in the sacrifice of collective action.

In some deep dark way, both sides have already sensed that the battle is far more profound than simply ideological.

Curiously enough, whilst we accuse the individualists of denying climate change and creating the very selfish circumstances now leading to encroaching disaster, it is the sacrificial left who may actually be part of the process that leads us to such destruction. A small tale to enlighten you.

I remember when I was at university a story a good friend told me. It was around the time that the horrendously unknown “gay plague” of AIDS was exerting its fearsome grip on our imaginations. This friend went back home one Christmas to a most uncertain welcome from his father. Toothbrushes which had shared a whole lifetime in the same cup now occupied very separate places of safety. Even hand towels were no longer shared. The fear was palpable and self-evident: who could trust what students at uni might get up to and catch these days? Or, more importantly, transmit?

This sad father was responding, of course, to the individualist instinct for survival I mention above. No sense of collective sacrifice dawned on his psyche. He was looking, in potentially desperate circumstances, to save himself above all.

Yet many of us at the time said: “Hell to all of this!” And maybe this was no right answer either. Loving love more than life is no better sign of a healthy soul than loving life over love, after all.

And this is why I believe that maybe humanity is bound to be hard-wired as suicidal. Or, at least, ultimately so. Whether we act in an individualist way, maximising our personal outcomes; whether we act in a collective way, maximising our social outcomes … either way surely leads to end-of-the-world outcomes, whatever we assume we are doing otherwise.

I may be quite wrong. In fact, I do hope I am. But I really can’t help the feeling that something quite serious here has been fundamentally contained within strict evolutionary rails – and now finds itself steaming ahead quite irreversibly.

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