I was at the Nick Clegg speech earlier today. He took aim at Labour’s pretty poor record on civil liberties, suggesting that the previous governments were more systematic and less casual than prominent ex-Ministers would have us believe. (Full text of the speech is here).
Although there were some fine words on Libel Reform and some interesting proposals on Freedom of Information, most of the discussion in the speech itself, and in questions afterwards, was on control orders and curfews. Clegg refused to outline how these might change, but did say that those who want to see them abolished completely “will be disappointed”.
There was one phrase that Clegg used which is particularly grating on the ears. This was when he said that there were people who ‘we know’ are planning atrocities, but we do not have the evidence to convict them. It stood out, because David Blunket had used precisely the same formulation during his pre-emptive retort on The Today Programme this morning, and I am sure the current and previous Home Secretaries have taken a similar line.
This line of argument sounds tough, plausible and savvy. The speaker gets to burnish his or her credentials as a realist. However, it is a stance that rests on very shaky moral ground. Control orders are a form of pre-emptive detention, and the argument which justifies them is exactly the same as those used by authoritarian governments around the world, when they detain their political opponents.
Moreover, it is a rude and obvious short-circuit of the very basic legal principles. If a Minister ‘knows’ that someone is a danger, then they should be charged and convicted. If there is not enough evidence to convict, then neither politicians, the police nor the general public get to use the word ‘know’ in their rhetoric. There simply is not the epistemological certainty for that kind of claim, especially not in the context of political arguments. A control order is an extreme form of accusation, and Deputy Prime Ministers and Home Secretaries must not be allowed to make such ‘accusations’ and leave them hanging.
As the Home Secretary conducts her review of control orders in the coming months, look out for examples of this rhetoric, “we know, but we cannot convict.” It is a half-formed argument, a question not an answer. It is a cowardly fudge for those who do not want to make the tough decision: do we let these suspects go, or do we allow phone-tapping evidence to be admissable in court? This is the issue at stake, and the phenomenon of control orders is simply a clever device for punting the decision. If Nick Clegg is really serious about restoring civil liberties to British citizens, then he and his Prime Minister need to stop using bad rhetoric, and start making tough choices.
Category: Diary (Page 141 of 300)
Things that happen to me, or things I do
International departures at Gardermoen Airport, Oslo. Photo by Yrstrly.
And now for some semantics. David at Minority Report muses the problem of net nuetrality, and highlights a post over at Confused of Calcutta on the ‘un-national’, a word borrowed from a William Stafford poem. JP contrasts concepts like ‘global’ with apparent synonyms like ‘international’ and its derivatives. The former has an implied statelessness, the absence of a nation, whereas the latter implies that the thing we are describing (a person, or an organisation) does have one or more nations of origin, a liable jurisdiction that can control and curtail their activities.
This chimes with Jay Rosen’s description of Wikileaks as the first ‘Stateless’ news organisation, an idea he expanded on in a recent edition of his Rebooting the News podcast (#76, I think), making the same point that ‘global’ and ‘international’ are not necessarily the same thing. In the context of net neutrality and cyber-dissidence, a ‘global’ organisation, with no final country of origin, is better protected against interference and attack, than an ‘international’ organisation which nevertheless has a home nation. Rosen recommends that Wikileaks adopts a similar model to Greenpeace, Amnesty, and PEN, with national organisations/chapters in many countries.
My thoughts naturally turn to multi-culture and how these terms might be applied in that area. When cultural phenomenons, and pieces of art and cultural expression, become popular in many countries, are they international or global (in the senses described above). I would say that musicians like Elvis Presley, The Beatles (bigger, for a time, than Jesus) and Michael Jackson are all international. In each case, their music is a product of a particular time and place – regardless of where their fans are located, or where they play their concerts.
However, I think cultural phenomenons like Islam or Football are clearly global. As they exist now, they seem to be a product of the human race as a whole, even if their origins can be pin-pointed accurately to a single country. You could even include things like World of Warcraft, and the graffiti aesthetic in that list, but not Les Misérables. What about LOLcats?
Governor of the Punjab Salmaan Taseer visits Aasia Bibi, Christian woman condemned to death under the Blasphemy Law. (Creative Commons Licenced photo from salmaantaseer on Flickr)
A depressing story to kick-off the New Year: The governor of the Pakistani province of Punjab, Salman Taseer, has been assasinated. The perpetrator cited Taseer’s support for the repeal of Pakistan’s blasphemy law as the motive for the murder.
Human Rights campaigners often spend their time lobbying for the formal abolition of laws. For example, at the end of 2009 I was involved in a free speech campaign to repeal the archaic law of seditious libel. Some argued that there was little point in wasting time abolishing laws that have fallen into disuse. They are de facto abolished anyway: Couldn’t parliamentary time be better spent?
Certainly not. There is always the chance that the law might be used by some future, illiberal government. And in the case of blasphemy in Pakistan, we see how an oppressive law (for that is what the offence of blasphemy is, and must always be) can be used as an excuse for violence. Supporters of Mr Taseer’s killer now cite the existence of these little-used as their excuse for righteous murder. You don’t actually need to charge someone under a particular law, for that law to have a horrible chilling effect.
Check out this stunning animation by Ryan Woodward:
I was delighted to see this, because it takes to a perfect, polished conclusion a visual style I messed about with briefly, a few years ago:
For the avoidance of doubt, I do not claim that my sketches had any influence on Ryan! ‘Construction’ type sketches are a common enough aesthetic, and I’m not even sure that it was an original style when I created my own animation.
Rather, I just say that there is a certain pleasure in seeing such an idea realised. When I was messing about with tracing paper, I knew I did not have the artistic training, nor the resources, nor the talent, to actually realise what I saw in my head – a depressing realisation one learns to accept. But watching Woodward’s piece, I see he has incorporated everything I would wish, especially a sense of the transient, the fleeting, and the whiff of faeries.
See also: Fifty Nine Productions animations for Jónsi.
The popular Gawker/Lifehacker network was hacked this week, compromising tens of thousands of passwords. This news provides an excuse for a couple of paragraphs of boastful geekery in the fascinating area of password management.
I spend a lot of my day roaming the Internet and the various services it has to offer, both for work and personal matters. In many cases, I operate an organisational and personal account (for example, @englishpen and @robertsharp59 on Twitter). Logging in and out of the various accounts can be a drag, but I’ve recently started using the Sxipper password management tool for Firefox. Browsers already have the capacity to remember your passwrods of course, but usually only one-per-site. Sxipper stores all the possible options and let’s me choose. A Godsend.
This transition has allowed me to become a little more rigourous in managing personal privacy. Prompted by this salutary tale from Cory Doctorow, I decided that I would create unique passwords for new websites I sign-up for.
I carefully tapped in my password, clicked the login button, and then felt my stomach do a slow flip-flop as I saw the URL that my browser was contacting with the login info: http://twitter.scamsite.com … And that’s when I realized that I’d been phished. And it was bad. Because I’d signed up for Twitter years ago, when Ev Williams, Twitter’s co-founder sent me an invite to the initial beta. I’d used a password that I used for all kinds of sites, back before I started strictly using long, random strings that I couldn’t remember for passwords. … What’s more, Twitter isn’t the only place where I used my “low-security” password that has turned into a high-security context, which means that hijackers could conceivably break into lots of interesting places with that information.
The recent Gawker breach only reinforces Cory’s advice to use a different password for each site. Back in the day, before my laptop was stolen, I would use the same password for all websites, as (I guess) most people continue to do. It was only after the theft that I began to diversify, and only in recent months I have gone the whole random hog and started to use opaque strings. To do this with ease, I have bookmarked PC Tools Random Password Generator.
JR Rapael at the PC World blog has an interesting article on all this: Gawker Hack Exposes Ridiculous Password Habits. Apparently “12345” is the most common password, followed closely by “password”, obviously. If those combinations feel a little too close to home, it would be wise to make some changes to your own online life, ASAP.