Bruce Schneier has a weblog - Schneier on Security - that aims to cover security and security technology, and more importantly their misuse.
The Identity Cards Bill is not being discussed as much as it should be. You may find No2ID's summary of the Idenity Cards Bill interesting, although it may well be partial... See also the Home Office's official stance, and also the FIPR response to the UK Entitlement Card consultation.
An old, old post by Kevin Drum on his CalPundit blog: surveillance technology of the future. It is a truisim of government that you should not give powers to your friends that you would not also feel safe giving to your enemies. Regardless of the possible benefits of ubiquitous surveillance, and regardless of soothing words that it will be used only for good, never for ill, we should fear it.
(MSN Slate 08-09-03) Dahlia Lithwick, Julia Turner: A Guide to the Patriot Act, Part 1: Should you be scared of the Patriot Act?
The closure of SBBS prompted some interesting comments from detractors of the site, who were nevertheless angered to see freedom of speech curtailed. See the comments to this post at Crooked Timber, for example.
I can only think of one solution to all this. We're going to have to lock all the BNP/National Front types in a room with all the Al Mahajaroun/Hizb-ut-Tahrir types until they either (a) recognise each other as human beings and accept the common humanity of people from all faiths and races or (b) kill each other.
Either way, the result would be beneficial to society, and this course of action should be done, preferably on pay-per-view TV.
A bit of perspective needed, I think - but that's about all I'm prepared to concede to the outrage at these cartoons. I don't like the weird idea that it is somehow one's civic duty to offend the religious as an end in itself, and one would hope that people would remember their duties as neighbours as well as their rights as citizens. But no society can legally proscribe the profanation of the sacred and call itself completely free.
.... it was multiply overdetermined that Dave would choose to write about Those Wretched Cartoons, but a glance at his recent columns on adjacent topics, as well as his recent short blogpost, pointed towards the likelihood that he wouldn't go mad and start foaming, as have so many.
I thought I knew exactly where I stood on freedom of speech. But the furore over the depiction of Muhammad raises issues even passionate rationalists must reconsider.
If all religions were companies, Islam would be the one with the worst public relations department. The original moral high-ground has been lost to the noise made by the gunmen, rampaging mobs and hysterical nutters.
Sacking Dr Frank Ellis is only a pyrrhic victory for ethnic minorities.
Then Lord Tebbit got up. He spoke softly, almost sibilantly. His vote, he said, was up for grabs.
He was disturbed to think that the clause was directed only at Muslim terrorism, whose victims in this country were "mercifully few, compared to our own home-grown Northern Ireland terrorism". He recalled Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness firing rifles into the air at IRA funerals - "and if that is not glorifying terrorism, I'd like to know what is!"
He asked about the murals on the walls of Belfast and Derry. "Would the creators of these murals be found guilty of glorifying terrorism?"
What everyone listening knew was that 20 years ago his wife was forced to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair thanks to an IRA bomb. What others probably don't know - even those who watched on television as Norman Tebbit was dragged in his pyjamas, his face twisted with pain, out of the rubble of the Grand Hotel, Brighton - is he has never quite recovered. The pain persists but he doesn't talk about it, because his injuries were much less than his wife's. It is hard to argue against such an experience, but even he voted against the glorification clause.
Locke, Mill and Paine should be the major sources for anyone wishing to find eloquent expressions of precisely why what Blair is doing is wrong. Possibly even Burke.
Let's hope that it all turns out to have been worth it. In exchange for all this, let's hope that we really are very safe indeed. In fact we'd better be invulnerable to any harm. Because otherwise we'll be no better off than the Syrians, and at least they have good weather and can have a cigarette where they choose.
The scale of the backbench revolt was utterly predictable: what astounded MPs was that more than 40 of their colleagues were absent from the vote - with the permission of the whips.
The Behzti controversy was a hot topic within and outside the British Asian community in late 2004. Now one of the actors has penned his thoughts in Catalyst Magazine about what being in the play was like and how the protests affected him.
The worst you can say of Hizb and its 3,000 or so members is that they are part of a conveyor belt... But, equally, you can say the BNP is a conveyor belt which takes white men part of the way to racist violence... Similarly, there are animal rights groups that provide the mental atmosphere in which violent ideas develop without specifically saying that farmers' graves should be dug up and scientists' homes attacked.
Unless the Home Office knows something I don't, I can't see an intellectually coherent case for banning Hizb, but leaving animal rights and neo-fascist groups alone. As Harman might have said, this is Britain and we don't use emergency powers unless we have to, even against people who see themselves as guests rather than citizens.
Emily Finch, of the University of East Anglia, will tell the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Dublin that she and a colleague interviewed credit card criminals, and saw for themselves the routine lapses at cash registers, which are often the front line in fighting fraud.
Mr McNulty also revealed a fundamental flaw exists in the current ID cards legislation and acknowledged that a likely battle over whether the cards become compulsory between the Commons and the Lords will end in deadlock. The government will not be able to use the Parliament Act to overturn the Lords opposition as the move to compulsion will be through secondary legislation.
Unison, Britain's biggest union with 1.3 million members, used its annual conference to attack the proposals in a move likely to set alarm bells ringing in government. The scheme cannot work without the full backing of the public sector workers who will administer and maintain the system.
The acquittal of four suspects this week - and the dropping of charges against another four - in the "ricin" terrorist plot raises wider issues than just the effectiveness of our current terrorist investigating processes.
Things look a little less complicated in Washington, where supporters of national ID cards have solved the problems posed by debate, arguments and a case by packaging up the legislation with a bill on an entirely different matter.
If you are planning to create legislation to with the intention of making an ethnic group into second class citizens, and you know that this ethnic group has historically been the victim of extremely serious persecution, and you are doing so in order to jump onto a newspaper bandwagon which is stirring up hatred of this group, then you are planning to do something which is a) very wrong indeed and b) really quite similar to what the government of Germany did between 1934 and 1945. Nazi comparisons are overdone, but some policies actually are "quite like the Nazis", and denying civil rights to Gypsies is one of them.
There's a difference between a race, which you don't choose, and religious ideas which you do. If you are going to pretend that hatred of religious ideas is the same as racism, you might as well go the whole hog and ban the incitement of hatred of political ideas, such as Blairism. At the very least, you have to confront the problem that the sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam all contain incitements to religious hatred and should presumably be banned.
In the wake of Hezbollah's demonstration of political strength yesterday in Lebanon, and President Bush's confident speech declaring that, ``[the] best antidote to radicalism and terror is the tolerance and hope kindled in free societies," let's take a look at another part of the world where concerted efforts have been made to extinguish terrorism -- Northern Ireland.
The hundreds Stevens and Blair talk about seem to be based on the number of people in Britain who are known to have gone to Afghanistan or Chechnya to fight or be trained in "al-Qaida" camps. But, as one senior anti-terrorist official says: "Just because they have been to training camps does not mean to say they are going to be a suicide bomber." Most of them have been back in Britain for more than three years. If they are being watched by the security services and police, and have not been arrested, they do not present the threat Stevens and others imply.
Peers have defeated the government over its anti-terror bill, voting by 249 to 119 to ensure all control orders will be made by courts and not ministers.
Charging that the old right-left divide was being superseded by a liberal-illiberal one, Kennedy unveiled five measures to strengthen parliamentary efforts to prevent the executive from abusing its powers.
The e-commerce site wants me to establish an account because it increases the chances that I'll use them again. But I want a way to terminate the business relationship, a way to say: "I am no longer taking responsibility for items purchased using that username and password." Near as I can tell, the username and password I typed into that e-commerce site puts my credit card at risk until it expires. If the e-commerce site uses a system that debits amounts from my checking account whenever I place an order, I could be at risk forever.
In today's article, which must have been penned before last night's vote, Mr Blair writes: "I reject completely the allegation that this is a fundamental attack on long-standing civil liberties. There is no greater civil liberty than to live free from terrorist attack. The main duty of any prime minister is to do everything possible to protect the security of our nation and its citizens."
However, the Telegraph quotes Mr Blair in 1994, when he was shadow home secretary, as saying: "The liberty of the subject should be taken away not by the act of a politician, but by a court of law." In his defence, Mr Blair says that the nature of terrorism has changed.
Thirty-two Labour MPs voted with the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and nationalists against what successive speakers dubbed draconian infringements of personal liberty. With Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary, one of Labour's abstainers, threatening to table his own amendment for Monday's committee stage, Mr Clarke is certain to buckle.
As he and Tony Blair repeatedly attacked the Tories, they took Lib Dem complaints seriously in an effort to prevent Charles Kennedy's troops combining successfully against the bill with the Tories in the Lords
At America's insistence, passports are about to get their biggest overhaul since they were introduced. They are to be fitted with computer chips that have been loaded with digital photographs of the bearer... digitised fingerprints and even scans of the bearer's irises, which are as unique to people as their fingerprints.
... the data on these chips will be readable remotely, without the bearer knowing. And--again at America's insistence--those data will not be encrypted, so anybody with a suitable reader, be they official, commercial, criminal or terrorist, will be able to check a passport holder's details.
In a curious anachronism, the British legislation on incitement to racial hatred protects Jews and Sikhs, but not Muslims... Unfortunately, the government's proposed solution to this real problem will only make things worse.
There is clearly ignorance and fear of Islam in this country. Muslims do get harassed and attacked because of their faith. Yet I believe that the hatred and abuse of Muslims is being exaggerated to suit politicians' needs and silence the critics of Islam.
The Bush administration is deliberately choosing a less secure technology without justification. If there were a good offsetting reason to choose that technology over a contact chip, then the choice might make sense. Unfortunately, there is only one possible reason: The administration wants surreptitious access themselves.
George W. Bush has torn up his country's Bill of Rights and the Geneva Convention. Nevertheless he said the idea that Americans should be forced to carry a national ID card wasn't worth considering. A dismissal from such a source would appear to settle the matter. But this week Blunkett will haul ID cards out of their grave and insist we must carry them, not to fight crime or Islamic fundamentalism, but as a weapon in the war against the menace of asylum-seekers.
Law Lords' ruling on detainees at Belmarsh: