Porn, cash and the slippery slope to the National Security State

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One of the most unsettling experiences of the last decade has been watching Western democracies sleepwalking into a national security nightmare. Each incremental step towards total surveillance follows the same script. It goes like this: first, a new security ‘threat’ is uncovered, revealed or hypothesised; then a technical ‘solution’ to the new threat is proposed, trialled (sometimes) and then implemented — usually at formidable cost to the public; finally, the new ‘solution’ proves inadequate. But instead of investigating whether it might have been misguided in the first place, a new, even more intrusive, ‘solution’ is proposed and implemented.

In this way we went from verbal questioning to pat-down searches at airports, and thence to x-ray scanning of cabin-baggage, to having to submit laptops to separate scanning (including, I gather, examination of hard-disk files in some cases), to having to take off our shoes, to having all cosmetic fluids (including toothpaste) inspected, and — most recently — to back-scatter x-ray scanning which reveals the shape of passengers’ breasts and genitals. It may be that we will get to the point where only passengers willing to stip naked are allowed to board a plane. The result: a mode of travel that was sometimes pleasant and usually convenient has been transformed into a deeply time-consuming, stressful and unpleasant ordeal

The rationale in all cases is the same; these measures are necessary to thwart a threat that is self-evidently awful and in that sense the measures are for the public good. We are all agreed, are we not, that suicidal terrorism is a bad things and so any measure deemed necessary to prevent it must be good? Likewise, we all agree that street crime and disorder is an evil, so CCTV cameras must be a good thing, mustn’t they? So we now have countries like Britain where no resident of an urban area is ever out of sight of a camera. And of course we all abhor child pornography and paedophilia, so we couldn’t possibly object to the Web filtering and packet-sniffing needed to detect and block it, right? A similar argument is used in relation to file-sharing and copyright infringement: this is asserted to be ‘theft’ and since we’re all against theft then any legislative measures forced on ISPs to ‘stop theft’ must be justified. And so on.

So each security initiative has a local justification which is held to be self-evidently obvious. But the aggregate of all these localised ‘solutions’ has a terrifying direction of travel — towards a total surveillance society, a real national security state. And anyone who expresses reservations or objections is invariably rebuffed with the trope that people who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear from these measures.

In the UK, a novel variation on this philosophy has just surfaced in Conservative (capital C) political circles. A right-wing Tory MP who is obsessed with the threat of Internet pornography has been touting the idea that broadband customers who do not want their ISPs to block access to pornography sites should have to register that fact with the ISP. (This is to ‘protect’ children, of course, in case the poor dears should mistype a search term and see images of unspeakable acts in progress.) Last Sunday a British newspaper reported that the communications minister, Ed Vaizey, is concerned about the availability of pornography and says he would quite like ISPs to do something about it for him. According to The Register, “he plans to call the major players to a meeting next month to discuss measures, including the potential for filters that would require those who do want XXX material to opt their connection out”.

The Register doesn’t take this terribly seriously, because it’s convinced that Vaizey is too shrewd to get dragged into the filtering mess that afflicted the Australian government. Maybe he is, but suppose he finds himself unable to hold back the tide of backbench wrath towards the evil Internet, with its WikiLeaks and porn and all. The implicit logic of the approach would fit neatly with everything we’ve seen so far. First of all, the objective is self-evidently ‘good’ — to protect children from pornography. Secondly, we’re not being illiberal — if you want to allow porn all you have to do is to register that fact with your ISP. What could be fairer than that?

But then consider the direction of travel. What if some future government decides that children should not be exposed to, say, the political propaganda of the British National Party? After all, they’re a nasty pack of xenophobic racists. And then there are the animal rights activists — nasty fanatics who put superglue in butchers’ shop doors on Christmas eve. Why should thay enjoy “the oxygen of publicity”? And then there are… Well, you get the point.

Stowe Boyd has an interesting post about another bright security wheeze which has really sinister long-term implications. Since terrrists and drug barons use cash, why not do away with the stuff and switch over to electronic money instead?

In a cashless economy, insurgents’ and terrorists’ electronic payments would generate audit trails that could be screened by data mining software; every payment and transfer would yield a treasure trove of information about their agents, their locations and their intentions. This would pose similar challenges for criminals.

Who would such a system benefit, asks Boyd?

Not the part-time sex worker, trying to make ends meet in a down economy. Not the bellman at the airport, whose tips might disappear after the transition to cards. Not the homeless guy I gave $2 to the other day, or the busker playing guitar in the train station. Or the Green Peace folks collecting coins at the park.

The ones that benefit are the those selling the cards and the readers. And the policy-makers who want to see the flow of cash to find — supposedly — drug lords and terrorists, but secretly want to know everything about everybody.

But this is the argument for pervasive surveillance again. In the name of security and safety, they say we should all accept the intrusion of the government into our private lives so that the state can be protected from its enemies. After all, they say, if we aren’t doing anything illegal, why should we care? What have we got to hide?

But we have the right to privacy in our doings. We don’t have to say why we want privacy: it is our right.

And the shadowy doings at the margins of people’s lives are exactly the point of privacy. The man funneling money to a child born to his mistress without his wife’s knowledge, or a woman loaning money to her brother without her husband knowing: they want anonymous cash.

Boyd thinks that cash is a prerequisite of a free society, and he’s right.

“Cash”, he says,

is not a metaphor for freedom, it is a requirement of freedom. A strong society that accepts human nature without moralizing will always have anonymous cash. Only totalitarian governments — where everything not expressly required is illegal — would want to monitor the flow of every cent.

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Triumph of the Zombies

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Good NYT column by Paul Krugman. Opens thus:

When historians look back at 2008-10, what will puzzle them most, I believe, is the strange triumph of failed ideas. Free-market fundamentalists have been wrong about everything — yet they now dominate the political scene more thoroughly than ever.

How did that happen? How, after runaway banks brought the economy to its knees, did we end up with Ron Paul, who says “I don’t think we need regulators,” about to take over a key House panel overseeing the Fed? How, after the experiences of the Clinton and Bush administrations — the first raised taxes and presided over spectacular job growth; the second cut taxes and presided over anemic growth even before the crisis — did we end up with bipartisan agreement on even more tax cuts?

This is not just about the US, either, Krugman says.

The free-market fundamentalists have been as wrong about events abroad as they have about events in America — and suffered equally few consequences. “Ireland,” declared George Osborne in 2006, “stands as a shining example of the art of the possible in long-term economic policymaking.” Whoops. But Mr. Osborne is now Britain’s top economic official.

And in his new position, he’s setting out to emulate the austerity policies Ireland implemented after its bubble burst. After all, conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic spent much of the past year hailing Irish austerity as a resounding success. “The Irish approach worked in 1987-89 — and it’s working now,” declared Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute last June. Whoops, again.

But such failures don’t seem to matter. To borrow the title of a recent book by the Australian economist John Quiggin on doctrines that the crisis should have killed but didn’t, we’re still — perhaps more than ever — ruled by “zombie economics.” Why?

Part of the answer, surely, is that people who should have been trying to slay zombie ideas have tried to compromise with them instead. And this is especially, though not only, true of the president.

The thing about zombies, though (as every schoolboy knows) is that they eat your brains.

The neutering of the Net: what the FCC ruling means

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Dan Gillmor’s not impressed by the FCC’s pusillanimity. Neither am I.

The neutering of the Internet is now the unofficial policy of the Federal Communications Commission. Contrary to the happy talk from FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski at a rule-making announcement today in Washington, the move is well underway to turn the Internet into a regulated playground for corporate giants.

Dan writes that:

Tuesday’s FCC vote on rules purportedly designed to ensure open and free networks was a 3-2 partisan charade, with Genachowski and the other two Democratic commissioners in favor and the two Republicans against. It did nothing of the sort. The short-term result will be confusion and jockeying for position. Genachowski’s claim that the rules bring “a level of certainty” to the landscape was laughable unless he was talking about lobbyists and lawyers; their futures are certainly looking prosperous. The longer-range result will be to solidify the power of the incumbent powerhouses — especially telecommunications providers and the entertainment industry — to take much more control over what we do online.

As I understand it (from the Wired report), the Commission has approved ‘compromise’ net neutrality rules that would forbid the nation’s largest cable and DSL internet service providers from blocking or slowing online services, while leaving wireless companies with much more latitude.

In other words, the Commission is imposing neutrality on the past (the old world of wired, cable connections) while leaving the wireless future open for all kinds of anti-competitive behaviour by corporations.

Net Neutrality is a concept like ‘transparency’ — something that most people are vaguely in favour of without realising what it really means. One consequence of this is that they are not motivated to defend it when it’s threatened: it’s hard to fight for something that you only vaguely understand. And yet, in principle, it’s not that complicated. Dan Gillmor articulates net neutrality as “the notion that end users (you and me) should decide what content and services we want without interference from the ISPs”. In other words, they provide the pipes (for which they get paid) and leave us free to choose what we want to pull down through them.

Neutrality is important because it’s the reason why the Internet has been such an enabler of innovation up to now. If you have a good idea and it can be realised with data-packets, then the Net will do it for you, no questions asked. But for that to work, all packets have to be treated as equals, unless there’s a good technical reason not to do so. What mustn’t happen is that some packets get preferential treatment simply because the outfit that creates them pays the provider of the pipes an extra fee because then the barrier to entry suddenly becomes a lot higher and disruptive innovation gets choked off. Which of course is exactly what the big multimedia companies and Telcos want to happen.

Given that in the future people will increasingly get their Internet connections wirelessly rather than through land-based connections, relaxing the rules for neutrality in the wireless arena is really worrying — as Tim Wu explained in this terrific interview that I blogged a few weeks ago.

Tim’s new book — The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires — provides the sombre context for all this. In it, he looks back at the history of information industries and concludes that they all go through a cycle (what he calls “The Cycle”) in which they start open and wind up closed. “History shows”, he writes,

a typical progression of information technologies: from somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely-accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel — from open to closed system.

Wu argues that this historical cycle is not just an academic concern. For if the Cycle is

not merely a pattern but an inevitability, the fact that the Internet, more than any technological wonder before it, has truly become the fabric of our lives means we are sooner or later in for a very jarring turn of history’s wheel. Though it’s a cliche to say so, we do have have an information-based economy and society. Our past is one of far less reliance on information than we experience today, and that lesser reliance was served by several information industries at once. Our future, however, is almost certain to be an intensification of our present reality: greater and greater information dependence in every matter of life and work, and all that needed information increasingly traveling a single network we call the Internet. If the Internet, whose present openness has become a way of life, should prove as much subject to the Cycle as every other information network before it, the practical consequences will be staggering. And already there are signs that the good old days of a completely open network are ending.

Spot on. Today’s FCC ruling represents a significant step down that road.

Wot — no ‘personals’?

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Here’s an example of an organisation ignoring the ancient rule that if something isn’t broken then don’t fix it. It seems that the London Review of Books, to which I am a devout subscriber, is dropping its personal ads. John Sutherland is not impressed.

High seriousness is due to get higher. The editor of the London Review of Books, Mary-Kay Wilmers, has decided to drop the paper’s ‘personals’. For 10 years now these cheeky afterwords have raised naughtiness to new levels of wit. Even highbrows, they reminded us, have low desires; the difference is, the highbrows do it cleverer.

The LRB personals will be sorely missed. I think fondly of those days, in 2002, when I was stalked personally in the personals by such ads as: “Mr Loverman. Shabba Ranks of the English concourse. Terry Eagleton is my gold tooth – John Sutherland is my Spandex pants. Come join me in my Essex ghetto for hot nights of suburban lurve . . . Bitchin.”Blissful times for “sixtysomethingpointyheadedprof”.

Hmmm… Does this have anything to do with the publication of David Rose’s book, I wonder?

iCannibal, you laptop

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From John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD.

During its last earnings call, Apple noted that over 65 percent of the Fortune 100 have deployed or are piloting the iPad. With that in mind, some analysts have begun reasses the cannibalization rate of tablets on the notebook industry and the number that Goldman Sachs analyst Bill Shope has come up with is pretty interesting.

He figures tablet unit shipments will jump 54.7 million in 2011 with 35 percent PC unit cannibalization and to 79.2 million in 2012 with 33 percent cannibalization. Overall, he expects 19.1 million notebook units to be lost to tablets in 2011 and 26.1 million to be lost in 2012.

That squares not just with my own experience, but that of many other iPad users I’ve spoken to. They’re using their laptops less. And I hear that some companies (e.g. big law firms) are buying iPads in lots of several hundred at a time.