All your privacy are belong to US

New anti-terrorism rules 'allow US to spy on British motorists'

Routine journeys carried out by millions of British motorists can be monitored by authorities in the United States and other enforcement agencies across the world under anti-terrorism rules introduced discreetly by Jacqui Smith.

The discovery that images of cars captured on road-side cameras, and "personal data" derived from them, including number plates, can be sent overseas, has angered MPs and civil liberties groups concerned by the increasing use of "Big Brother" surveillance tactics.

This is depressingly familiar, and I'm sorry to say, totally expected. That the British government allows its citizens to be arbitrarily spied upon by foreign authorities on the streets of London is nothing new. The American eavesdropping agency, the NSA, has at least one listening post on British soil, at Menwith Hill, Yorkshire. It is claimed that their ECHELON system intercepts nearly every electronic communication in the world. It's more than a little disturbing that they can use our baby monitors, or our mobile phones (even when they're 'off' see also: this) to record the daily, offline conversations of any person. It's a pet peeve of mine that, not only does the US monitor my communications, the British government helps them do it. I'm a British citizen. Is it quaint that I expect my government to be on my side?

Last year I wrote about the police being given blanket, real-time surveillance power over every vehicle in London, and their assurances about its limited scope:

But they will only be able to use the data for national security purposes and not to fight ordinary crime, the Home Office stressed.

I replied:

Yes, I trust them on that score, because it's so believable. Obvious prediction: In a year or two, the system will be hailed as a great success in stopping terrorism, and the government will be pushing a 'scheme' to have the cameras used fight "ordinary crime".

Well, it's been less than a year since then. They haven't admitted to using the cameras to investigate petty crime yet, but in some ways, this is even worse. At the time of writing, last year, the government had already, secretly, given authorization for foreign governments to use the system. They used their usual tactic of 'selling' it to us one way, whilst planning to use it in another.

Whenever the government tells us that some new invasion of privacy is strictly for one thing (usually, protecting us from terrorist bogeymen), remember that they have their fingers crossed behind their backs, OK?

If a capability exists, it will be abused. You can take that to the bank. Just don't deviate from your usual route -- it might look suspicious.

[ Edit: the post title may require some explanation for those who aren't familiar with the "all your base are belong to us" joke: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base ]

In CCTV we trust

Poole council spies on family over school claim

A council has used powers intended for anti-terrorism surveillance to spy on a family who were wrongly accused of lying on a school application form.

Poole borough council disclosed that it had legitimately used the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) to spy on the family.

The Act was pushed through by the Government in 2000 to allow police and other security agencies to carry out surveillance on serious organised crime and terrorists. It has since been taken up by councils to catch those carrying out any "criminal activity".

I bleat on and on about the emerging British 'surveillance society', so this kind of story brings a mixture of feelings -- both outrage, and also vindication: Who is surprised by this? Not me. Talk about a good example of sliding down the proverbial slippery slope. When I discuss this subject with Brits, they tend to dismiss the potential pitfalls, because they trust their government not to abuse the new powers it regularly gives itself. Will this story give them pause to reconsider? Probably not, even though a followup story reveals that the abuse is already rampant:

More than 1,000 covert surveillance operations are being launched every month to investigate petty offences such as dog fouling, under-age smoking and breaches of planning regulations.

Councils and other public bodies are using legislation designed to combat terrorism in order to spy on people, obtain their telephone records and find out who they are emailing.

Councils are increasingly using the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (Ripa) to investigate anything that can be classed as a criminal offence. The Home Office website describes the legislation as a tool for "preventing crime, including terrorism".

But it is used to spy on otherwise law-abiding people committing minor offences such as fly-tipping and failing to pick up dog mess and to gather evidence that can be used to instigate fines.

"including terrorism", eh? In a post-9/11 world, every single invasion of privacy and abuse of government power will be hidden behind a smokescreen of fighting terrorism. Police here rarely bother to investigate nonviolent crimes. But what the government really want to do, and what they're really good at, is coming down hard on ordinary citizens for speeding. Or not paying the TV tax. Or [not] fibbing on a school application. Or protesting climate change at Heathrow.

They film our activities hundreds of times per day using CCTV. They log all of our phone calls and text messages. They want to collect DNA samples from every Briton. They record every car journey. They record most public transportation journeys. They track our personal whereabouts using our mobile phones. They can stop us and search our pockets without cause. They want the right to interrogate us on the street. They want the right to fingerprint us on the street. They want to lock up terrorism suspects indefinitely, without charges.

They keep all of this detailed information on ordinary citizens, whilst government ministers make ludicrous claims about their databases being "unhackable", meanwhile losing the bank account details of every parent in Britain. In recent decades, British governments and institutions have not excelled in displays of basic competence. At least when someone screws up, bank account numbers can be changed. DNA and fingerprints are for life.

Still, at least we can trust them not to abuse all this information and power. Can't we?:

Professor Jeffrey Rosen wrote an article in The New York Times in 2001 showing that surveillance cameras in London, which were put up to combat the threat of terrorism from the Irish Republican Army, are actually used to intimidate vagrants and punks -- and, predictably, to ogle women.

-- and, predictably, increasingly, to track and monitor everyone all the time, for any reason at all. Just in case they're terrorists, or in case they 'forget' to pick up their dogs' poops. Ah well, take heart, for as long as you have nothing to hide...

Shameful

...And no, I'm not referring to putting Madonna on the cover.

If you missed this Vanity Fair article earlier in the month, and you care at all about the issue of torturing prisoners, be sure to give it a read. It is a detailed storyline of how the Bush administration's torture regime came to its shameful fruition:

The fingerprints of the most senior lawyers in the administration were all over the design and implementation of the abusive interrogation policies. Addington, Bybee, Gonzales, Haynes, and Yoo became, in effect, a torture team of lawyers, freeing the administration from the constraints of all international rules prohibiting abuse.

Nazi lawyers were executed as war criminals following WWII, for exactly the same sort of behaviour. Was it victor's justice? Or do the same standards apply to Americans? War crimes trials are the only just resolution in this case. But as I predicted here, I'll say it again: it'll never happen. Welcome to the new world order.

Iraq the place: everyone's loss

Just wanted to link to this excellent piece by George Packer, author of "The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq" which I also highly recommend. Key quotes:

The American invasion of Iraq was, above all else, a revolution in the lives of Iraqis. Their institutions, their everyday routines, their futures, their sense of order were all turned upside down. This revolution, which is still ongoing and will play out for years to come, was the opening of a prison. When they staggered out into the light, most Iraqis didn’t know where they were, what they wanted, even who they were, and the Americans who had so quickly and casually broken down the gate were standing around as if they had never even considered what to do next.

And:

“I can never blame the Americans alone,” an Iraqi refugee named Firas told me in early 2007. “It’s the Iraqis who destroyed their country, with the help of the Americans, under the American eye.” To gain this wisdom, Firas had to lose almost everything. What would it take for Americans to understand what Firas already does? A recognition that Iraq was everyone’s loss, whichever side you were on.

Amen.

Failing the test of democracy

S Africa joins Zimbabwe vote call:

South Africa has joined international calls for Zimbabwe's electoral commission to release the results of last month's presidential election.

The call came a day after the head of the UN warned that the credibility of democracy in Africa could be at stake.

Correction: The credibility of Zimbabwe's democracy is at stake. It's becoming pretty clear that Mugabe has no intention of allowing himself to be declared the loser -- the election results were due, by law, within one week of the poll -- at least not in any meaningful way. Since the only real test of a democracy is whether a government will allow itself to be voted out of office, I guess we have to conclude that Zimbabwe is not a democracy, Mugabe is a dictator, and that elections in that country are purely for show -- a la Saddam.

I suppose I'm stating the obvious here, but I think more people need to start saying it out loud, and stop taking this 'election' seriously. The end result looks as though it has been a foregone conclusion all along.

Stanley cup: 2008 edition

It's Stanley Cup playoff time, and it's wreaking havoc on my sleeping patterns; the games start at 3:00am UK time. My Calgary Flames managed to back into the playoffs again this year, and they're now in the middle of a best-of-7, first round series against the hated San Jose Sharks.

Last game, the Flames had the lead, and with 5 minutes remaining they seemed like they were about to put a 3-games-to-1 stranglehold on the series. Being the Flames, however, they never like to do things the easy way: they collapsed, gave up 2 goals (including one in the last 10 seconds), and lost the game. Series tied 2-2.

Being a Flames fan is never boring, that's for sure. So tonight I'll be sitting in front of the telly, into the wee hours of the morning. Go Flames go.

Mi casa no es su casa

Just catching up here on a couple of things I'd wanted to blog about. This is several days old:

Kenya warned by U.S. over Cabinet row

(CNN) -- U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has urged Kenya's government and opposition party to agree on the composition of their coalition Cabinet after the two sides suspended talks on power-sharing.

"Should the accord not be implemented, however, the United States will form its own judgments regarding responsibility for lack of implementation of the accord, and act accordingly."

Am I reading this correctly? Is the US threatening another sovereign country over an internal political matter? Can you imagine if China or Russia had made such ominous statements during America's last electoral crisis in 2000? What howls of outrage there would have been, and rightly so. America's moments of internal political turmoil are America's business, and no one else's. So should the same standard not apply to other nations? If Kenyan politicians want to haggle over the composition of the cabinet, is that not their own concern?

I know that I'm being slightly obtuse here, in that the US seems to merely be seeking to help stabilize Kenya in the wake of the post-election violence. That's a fine, laudable, and even noble thing. In what remains a mostly uni-polar world, perhaps the lone superpower needs to be able to push other nations in the right direction, on occasion. What bothers me is the (what spin-meisters refer to as) 'optics' of the situation. This is rather indelicate diplomacy -- unfortunately a hallmark of the Bush II administration.

If the US is, at times, resented by people in other countries, look no further than this sort of exceptionalism for an explanation. America would never stand for overt foreign meddling in its political affairs, or intrusions on its borders. For that matter, the US would not look kindly on, say, overt Russian meddling in the Ukraine's internal politics. However, the American government doesn't seem to apply the same standard to itself when it unilaterally sends drones flying into Pakistan or Yemen to fire missiles at its enemies, or threaten Kenyans to form a cabinet. America's sovereignty is sacrosanct. Others' -- not so much.

Can you imagine what would happen if China sent a drone to the coast of California to shoot a missile at Richard Gere?

Free what?

Just in case anyone was under the impression that we have free speech and the right of peaceful protest in Britain, read this about the Beijing olympics torch relay in London today:

Before the torch arrived police circulated among Tibetan demonstrators ordering them to remove T-shirts and confiscating Tibetan flags in an apparent breach of a promise from Met commanders that police would not intervene to prevent embarrassment to Beijing.

Yonten Ngama, a Tibetan who has been resident in the UK for four years, was ordered to remove a T-shirt scrawled with three slogans, 'China Stop the Killing', 'No Torch in Tibet' and 'Talk to the Dalai Lama'. "They didn't tell me why, they just said I couldn't wear it," he said. Police on the ground declined to comment on the reasons for confiscating the T-shirt.

Oh, well that's okay then: we wouldn't want to embarass the Chinese by allowing democratic-style demonstrations during their big day. Not only can the police in London order you not wear a T-shirt with the wrong slogan on it, or wave the wrong flag, they won't even bother to tell you why. We did the Chinese proud today.

In the photo above, 10 British police and "Chinese security guards" tackle a woman with a placard.

Elephants don't draw

This has been doing the rounds online, and it makes my skin crawl. It is an elephant "painting a self-portrait".

Though I am amazed by the dexterity of the elephant, I am at the same time horrified by the fact that it's being forced to do this. The video appears to be shot in Thailand or somewhere similar. Elephants in Thailand are terribly abused for the entertainment value they provide to tourists. My friend Jen has a good post about that here.

This is not an example of an elephant expressing itself artistically -- the drawing is of a side-view of an elephant, holding a giant flower, of all things. This is an example of an elephant trained (i.e. shouted at, frightened, and hit with sticks) until it could reproduce a sketch made by a human. Other elephants in the video appear to be trained to draw various other things on command. How natural.

Here's a very credulous article from the Daily Mail about the elephant painting phenomenon:

The elephants are taught to paint by a special trainer, who teaches them to hold a brush with their trunks and copy certain objects, including flowers, trees, and even the Thai flag.

Experts believe that the elephants memorize the image which they can then 'paint by rote' over and over again.

Again, it's only natural that an elephant would have an urge to draw the Thai flag, isn't it? And that their "special trainer" just helps them do it? Why do you think the elephants memorize the image and do it "over and over again"? Because they want to, for goodness' sake?

What makes the video even worse, for me, is the cooing of tourists in the background, saying things like "isn't that amazing" and "I wonder how much they [the paintings] cost?". Tourism can have many positive effects, but this is one huge negative. Tourists: use your heads. The reason this seems incredible is because it is not credible. Elephants are not people. Though they are very intelligent, elephants are not known to have artistic impulses. Elephants don't draw.

Sure, we've all seen the paintings made by primates in captivity, and they are entertaining -- but they are roughly what you'd expect from a toddler or Jackson Pollock or, for that matter, an animal with opposable thumbs and a few pots of paint; they are abstract splatterings of random colour. Notice that they are not self-portraits, in profile, with flowers. The savannah is not festooned with ancient elephant paintings because, I repeat, elephants don't draw.

Not unless people beat them into doing it.