Fight racists and racism, but taking away their civil and human rights is no solution.
A number of instances have come to light in which people in private online conversations have had their comments used to justify public sanctions against them. The illicit remarks have become public because a bone fide recipient has betrayed the privacy - or in a few cases the user’s device or account has been hacked
The bulk of existing cases involve instances of racism.
I am in two minds about this. On the one hand, I don’t want racists in positions of power in society - and certainly not as members of the Labour Party and other progressive organisations. Yet, I feel that participants in private conversations have the right to privacy, however vile their opinions and comments, and that right is something that the Left would do well to protect, if only in its own interests. In addition, while we rightly struggle to prevent racists wielding social influence, I would not deny them the right to make a living merely on account of their private opinions (or ‘jokes’).
Showing posts with label civil liberties in Britain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label civil liberties in Britain. Show all posts
28 August 2016
Social Media: Rope for your own neck
Believing that your comments online were just off-the cuff and for a couple of friends is sometimes wrong. You might just be giving your adversaries the rope for your own neck.
In the last couple of decades, the growth of the Internet, both in terms of availability and functionality, has enabled progressive people to communicate and organise on a scale which in an earlier age would have been unimaginable. The victory of Jeremy Corbyn in his campaign for the leadership of the Labour Party in September 2015 could not have occurred without social media platforms. Yet the Internet, as a means of communication and organisation, is at the same time a powerful tool for surveilling progressive people and groups.
It is helpful to distinguish between two types of surveillance. The first is the kind which the former CIA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed in 2013. This is an attempt by state agencies to gain access to all electronic communication, using methods, which if attempted by private citizens would constitute serious crimes. We cannot know whether the state agencies who gather information about left-wing people make that information available to our political opponents. But it would be foolish to dismiss the possibility that this happens.
The second form of surveillance is perfectly legal: our political adversaries comb the net for our comments. Richer adversaries may employ professionals to do this: and of course various grey methods are deployed such as joining our “private” discussion groups with pseudonyms to find out what particular people are saying. Fishing the net for dirt and using it against us goes on all the time.
Of course, holding left-wing views and discussing them with others is not illegal in Britain, except in a small number of cases where the affair is covered by a court injunction. And there is a strong current of opinion which argues along the lines:
Dare to be a Daniel,
Dare to stand alone,
Dare to have a purpose,
And dare to make it known.
Whether “to publish and be damned” by broadcasting every opinion and every action to police, other state agencies and our political adversaries is a matter of debate. There is certainly something in the argument for openness, because constant vigilance, excessive secrecy and perennial distrust and paranoia can suffocate the left. So, yes, there is a case for openness, but not one that necessarily trumps everything. Here, though I want to focus on comments on social media can undermine the left in the struggle to support Jeremy Corbyn.
The rise in support for Jeremy Corbyn, and his election as leader of the Labour Party, has provoked a furious response from the Parliamentary Labour Party and the Party bureaucracy. The latter has done everything it can to suspend left-wing members of the party, and to disqualify members and supporters from voting. The most typical line of attack against socialist members is to find some half (or badly) articulated comment on Facebook, which is alleged (nearly always untruthfully) to be antisemitic or otherwise abusive. These out-of-context Facebook comments are then misinterpreted and paraded in the media as evidence of wrongdoing. In a similar vein, voters in the leadership election are subject to disqualification because they have commented favourably on Facebook, often months previously, about the Green Party, Left Unity or similar progressive groups.
The fact is that unguarded discussions on social media among friends, and making comments not designed as polished prose for the whole world, is seriously unwise. The commentator, even if he or she doesn't realise it at the time, is often making the rope for his or her own neck. Again and again, though, this mistake is made. To resolve this problem I will make a couple of suggestions for people who send email or post in social media.
If you are sending a message to particular people, whether it is an opinion or information, you should ensure, as far as possible, that only the intended recipients have access to it, not the Internet searching public, and not the Internet Giants like Google and Facebook. Send your message end-to-end encrypted. Today, that is technically straightforward, if both or all of the parties use, for instance, the email provider Tutanota. Of course Tutanota is not a panacea, but it goes a very long way to solving this problem.
But if you really are intending to post to the big wide world, then think long and hard before you post, and consider using a pseudonym.
In the last couple of decades, the growth of the Internet, both in terms of availability and functionality, has enabled progressive people to communicate and organise on a scale which in an earlier age would have been unimaginable. The victory of Jeremy Corbyn in his campaign for the leadership of the Labour Party in September 2015 could not have occurred without social media platforms. Yet the Internet, as a means of communication and organisation, is at the same time a powerful tool for surveilling progressive people and groups.
It is helpful to distinguish between two types of surveillance. The first is the kind which the former CIA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed in 2013. This is an attempt by state agencies to gain access to all electronic communication, using methods, which if attempted by private citizens would constitute serious crimes. We cannot know whether the state agencies who gather information about left-wing people make that information available to our political opponents. But it would be foolish to dismiss the possibility that this happens.
The second form of surveillance is perfectly legal: our political adversaries comb the net for our comments. Richer adversaries may employ professionals to do this: and of course various grey methods are deployed such as joining our “private” discussion groups with pseudonyms to find out what particular people are saying. Fishing the net for dirt and using it against us goes on all the time.
Of course, holding left-wing views and discussing them with others is not illegal in Britain, except in a small number of cases where the affair is covered by a court injunction. And there is a strong current of opinion which argues along the lines:
Dare to be a Daniel,
Dare to stand alone,
Dare to have a purpose,
And dare to make it known.
Whether “to publish and be damned” by broadcasting every opinion and every action to police, other state agencies and our political adversaries is a matter of debate. There is certainly something in the argument for openness, because constant vigilance, excessive secrecy and perennial distrust and paranoia can suffocate the left. So, yes, there is a case for openness, but not one that necessarily trumps everything. Here, though I want to focus on comments on social media can undermine the left in the struggle to support Jeremy Corbyn.
The rise in support for Jeremy Corbyn, and his election as leader of the Labour Party, has provoked a furious response from the Parliamentary Labour Party and the Party bureaucracy. The latter has done everything it can to suspend left-wing members of the party, and to disqualify members and supporters from voting. The most typical line of attack against socialist members is to find some half (or badly) articulated comment on Facebook, which is alleged (nearly always untruthfully) to be antisemitic or otherwise abusive. These out-of-context Facebook comments are then misinterpreted and paraded in the media as evidence of wrongdoing. In a similar vein, voters in the leadership election are subject to disqualification because they have commented favourably on Facebook, often months previously, about the Green Party, Left Unity or similar progressive groups.
The fact is that unguarded discussions on social media among friends, and making comments not designed as polished prose for the whole world, is seriously unwise. The commentator, even if he or she doesn't realise it at the time, is often making the rope for his or her own neck. Again and again, though, this mistake is made. To resolve this problem I will make a couple of suggestions for people who send email or post in social media.
If you are sending a message to particular people, whether it is an opinion or information, you should ensure, as far as possible, that only the intended recipients have access to it, not the Internet searching public, and not the Internet Giants like Google and Facebook. Send your message end-to-end encrypted. Today, that is technically straightforward, if both or all of the parties use, for instance, the email provider Tutanota. Of course Tutanota is not a panacea, but it goes a very long way to solving this problem.
But if you really are intending to post to the big wide world, then think long and hard before you post, and consider using a pseudonym.
3 October 2015
Surviving under ubiquitous surveillance
To protect their psychological health and to be free citizens, people need to encrypt their electronic communication.
“Once we know there’s a reasonable chance that we are being watched in one fashion or another it’s hard for that not to have a ‘panopticon effect' where we think and behave differently based on the assumption that people may be watching and paying attention to what we are doing.”
The mass of electronic surveillance details revealed by the CIA analyst and private contractor Edward Snowden in 2013 establish one indubitable fact: the NSA in the US, and GCHQ in Britain, want access to all diplomatic, commercial and private electronic data from their own countries and from the rest of the world. To that end, they have built facilities that hoover up electronic data in transit; they have hacked into telephone networks and in some cases have planted spyware into computers. If the correspondence of the average citizen - the recipes, shopping lists and notes to granny - are not sorted and stored, it is only because the spooks have decided not to retain it. Yet the mere fact that what one expects to be private is not private at all has deep psychological implications for the average citizen. We browse the net for private information and stimulation, and we communicate electronically for a myriad of purposes: writing love letters, talking honestly with friends about our workplaces, neighbours and teachers. Our surveilled data, even if of no interest to the spooks, lies copied on several servers with the danger of it falling victim to malicious hacking multiplied.
However, for people who are, were, or might wish in the future to be active politically, the damage is more immediately felt. If we take the now established fact that British police have over the last few decades embedded over 1200 long term double-life spies in civic organisations at a cost of millions of pounds each year, it would be absurd to assume that the much cheaper practice of collecting, sorting and storing the electronic communication of those who engage in politics is not endemic.
The law governing surveillance offers little protection. The fact is that by one means or another our data can become available to the institutions of the state. Only when the state needs to make public that it has our data (e.g. for a prosecution) does the issue of the legality of the state possessing it in the first place arise. It is thus reasonable to believe that the annual two and half million requests by police to access our data legally is only the tip of the iceberg - or the icing on the cake - of surveillance.
And who is targeted, legally or otherwise? Today, it is reasonable to think that at the very least the members of the Green Party and now Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters in the Labour Party, as well as host of other campaigning groups, are under active surveillance - along with all those who campaigned for Scottish independence. Indeed, there are documented cases of police surveillance of people in these legal and democratic organisations.
Yet citizens do not stand completely naked before the state. And if one wants privacy, be it a matter of principle, for psychological health, or to campaign for political goals with as little state surveillance and impediment as possible, then people need to encrypt their data and communication. David Cameron has gone on record saying he wants to outlaw encryption for which the state does not have a backdoor, but without the help of the US, that is a non-starter.
When Alice sends an email to Bob the email travels through cables and is then stored in servers at Google, Yahoo or wherever. Scanning it at any point takes a microsecond, so the content is simply there for the taking. And until recently that was all the spooks had to do, but with the rise of https (the green text and the padlock icon), used by Google, Facebook and others, the content is encrypted between the user's browser and the service provider. But we can’t be sure that the spooks don’t have a backdoor to the encryption, that the service provider doesn’t hand over content, maybe unwillingly, or that the storage facilities have not been hacked or corrupted in some way.
But if Alice encrypts her email before it even leaves her computer with open-source algorithms and keys which are under the control of her and the recipient, the spooks are stymied. Hence Cameron’s concern. What is intercepted or stored on the service provider’s server is indecipherable. Alice and Bob can do this by using encryption software on their computers, such as PGP - or they can use web-based end-to-end encryption services, such as ProtonMail or Tutanota - or, of course, both in conjunction.
All that leaves the spooks with only one option: to hack your computer. Unless you take several complicated precautions they can probably do this, but they must want to target you personally as an important person because they will need to devote time an effort to the job. In other words the cost to the spooks of surveillance increases exponentially and the number of people (if they use encryption) that they can monitor falls dramatically. And even then their surveillance is not fully effective because you might be using several devices. So unless the state is really after you, the encryption of your communication and stored data is probably enough to maintain your privacy.
So fight for your privacy and encrypt.
“Once we know there’s a reasonable chance that we are being watched in one fashion or another it’s hard for that not to have a ‘panopticon effect' where we think and behave differently based on the assumption that people may be watching and paying attention to what we are doing.”
The mass of electronic surveillance details revealed by the CIA analyst and private contractor Edward Snowden in 2013 establish one indubitable fact: the NSA in the US, and GCHQ in Britain, want access to all diplomatic, commercial and private electronic data from their own countries and from the rest of the world. To that end, they have built facilities that hoover up electronic data in transit; they have hacked into telephone networks and in some cases have planted spyware into computers. If the correspondence of the average citizen - the recipes, shopping lists and notes to granny - are not sorted and stored, it is only because the spooks have decided not to retain it. Yet the mere fact that what one expects to be private is not private at all has deep psychological implications for the average citizen. We browse the net for private information and stimulation, and we communicate electronically for a myriad of purposes: writing love letters, talking honestly with friends about our workplaces, neighbours and teachers. Our surveilled data, even if of no interest to the spooks, lies copied on several servers with the danger of it falling victim to malicious hacking multiplied.
However, for people who are, were, or might wish in the future to be active politically, the damage is more immediately felt. If we take the now established fact that British police have over the last few decades embedded over 1200 long term double-life spies in civic organisations at a cost of millions of pounds each year, it would be absurd to assume that the much cheaper practice of collecting, sorting and storing the electronic communication of those who engage in politics is not endemic.
The law governing surveillance offers little protection. The fact is that by one means or another our data can become available to the institutions of the state. Only when the state needs to make public that it has our data (e.g. for a prosecution) does the issue of the legality of the state possessing it in the first place arise. It is thus reasonable to believe that the annual two and half million requests by police to access our data legally is only the tip of the iceberg - or the icing on the cake - of surveillance.
And who is targeted, legally or otherwise? Today, it is reasonable to think that at the very least the members of the Green Party and now Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters in the Labour Party, as well as host of other campaigning groups, are under active surveillance - along with all those who campaigned for Scottish independence. Indeed, there are documented cases of police surveillance of people in these legal and democratic organisations.
Yet citizens do not stand completely naked before the state. And if one wants privacy, be it a matter of principle, for psychological health, or to campaign for political goals with as little state surveillance and impediment as possible, then people need to encrypt their data and communication. David Cameron has gone on record saying he wants to outlaw encryption for which the state does not have a backdoor, but without the help of the US, that is a non-starter.
When Alice sends an email to Bob the email travels through cables and is then stored in servers at Google, Yahoo or wherever. Scanning it at any point takes a microsecond, so the content is simply there for the taking. And until recently that was all the spooks had to do, but with the rise of https (the green text and the padlock icon), used by Google, Facebook and others, the content is encrypted between the user's browser and the service provider. But we can’t be sure that the spooks don’t have a backdoor to the encryption, that the service provider doesn’t hand over content, maybe unwillingly, or that the storage facilities have not been hacked or corrupted in some way.
But if Alice encrypts her email before it even leaves her computer with open-source algorithms and keys which are under the control of her and the recipient, the spooks are stymied. Hence Cameron’s concern. What is intercepted or stored on the service provider’s server is indecipherable. Alice and Bob can do this by using encryption software on their computers, such as PGP - or they can use web-based end-to-end encryption services, such as ProtonMail or Tutanota - or, of course, both in conjunction.
All that leaves the spooks with only one option: to hack your computer. Unless you take several complicated precautions they can probably do this, but they must want to target you personally as an important person because they will need to devote time an effort to the job. In other words the cost to the spooks of surveillance increases exponentially and the number of people (if they use encryption) that they can monitor falls dramatically. And even then their surveillance is not fully effective because you might be using several devices. So unless the state is really after you, the encryption of your communication and stored data is probably enough to maintain your privacy.
So fight for your privacy and encrypt.
13 February 2015
Police surveillance of Charlie Hebdo magazine purchasers
Police collected the names of those ordering the special edition of the Charlie Hebdo magazine, in all probability to include on a national database of people politically active in the UK.
On 7 January 2015 two marginalised and alienated French nationals - armed with guns and a Muslim-inspired fascist ideology - went on a rampage of murder in the editorial offices of the satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine. People in France and across the world were rightly outraged that journalists should be murdered for ridiculing religion. In defence of free speech and in solidarity people sought to purchase the special edition of the magazine which was published after the murders.
Nevertheless, in the Britain in 2015 people interested in controversial magazines from abroad - however understandable the motive - is not something which the police will ignore.
Four people ordered the magazine from a newsagent in Corsham in Wiltshire. Police visited the newsagent and demanded the names of the customers. When the police action came to light on 10 February, it was deemed a mistake and an isolated event. Names were to be deleted from police computers.
But the following day, it emerged that the same police enquires had been made in Presteigne in Wales and, by telephone, in Warrington in Cheshire. Two things became almost certain. First, that there were many investigations across the country into Charlie Hebdo readers, in addition to those we already know about. And secondly, the investigations were no isolated incidents, but a policy instructed from the top.
Police say that they were making “an assessment of community tensions.” Utter bilge! What community tensions involving militant Islam is there in rural Wales and in the countryside of Wiltshire. The idea that these police enquiries contribute to combating Islamic terrorism doesn't hold water, either: the Charlie Hebdo magazine is among the last things devout Muslims would purchase.
What this snooping is about, it would seem, is nothing more than the police and the security services building a database of all those who are in any way politically active in the UK. If they are prepared to go to such lengths, deploying police time in rural England and Wales to pick up a couple of names, then one can only imagine what effort is probably put into monitoring political activity on the internet.
On 7 January 2015 two marginalised and alienated French nationals - armed with guns and a Muslim-inspired fascist ideology - went on a rampage of murder in the editorial offices of the satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine. People in France and across the world were rightly outraged that journalists should be murdered for ridiculing religion. In defence of free speech and in solidarity people sought to purchase the special edition of the magazine which was published after the murders.
Nevertheless, in the Britain in 2015 people interested in controversial magazines from abroad - however understandable the motive - is not something which the police will ignore.
Four people ordered the magazine from a newsagent in Corsham in Wiltshire. Police visited the newsagent and demanded the names of the customers. When the police action came to light on 10 February, it was deemed a mistake and an isolated event. Names were to be deleted from police computers.
But the following day, it emerged that the same police enquires had been made in Presteigne in Wales and, by telephone, in Warrington in Cheshire. Two things became almost certain. First, that there were many investigations across the country into Charlie Hebdo readers, in addition to those we already know about. And secondly, the investigations were no isolated incidents, but a policy instructed from the top.
Police say that they were making “an assessment of community tensions.” Utter bilge! What community tensions involving militant Islam is there in rural Wales and in the countryside of Wiltshire. The idea that these police enquiries contribute to combating Islamic terrorism doesn't hold water, either: the Charlie Hebdo magazine is among the last things devout Muslims would purchase.
What this snooping is about, it would seem, is nothing more than the police and the security services building a database of all those who are in any way politically active in the UK. If they are prepared to go to such lengths, deploying police time in rural England and Wales to pick up a couple of names, then one can only imagine what effort is probably put into monitoring political activity on the internet.
7 February 2015
Cameron wants to outlaw encrypted messaging
David Cameron’s desire, however impractical, to outlaw the citizen’s use of end-to end encryption to enable the security services to view every private communication is a an assault on freedom.
Events in Paris on 7 January 2015 were truly horrific. Two marginalised and alienated people - armed with guns and a Muslim-inspired fascist ideology - went on a rampage of murder in the offices of the Charlie Hebdo magazine. France and the world were rightly outraged.
In Britain, cashing in the terror, David Cameron took his chance to push for a ban on end-to-end encryption, even though the terrorists in France never used encryption. End-to-end encryption is the means by which you encrypt a message on your own computer and send the message to someone else who decrypts it on his or hers. GCHQ and the NSA can’t read the data either in transit or from the internet giants’ servers. Apple’s new iphone and several messaging apps do the same thing.
In fact, you can get a small file which enables end-to-end text encryption here.
In his speech Cameron asked, “...in our country, do we want to allow a means of communication between people which we cannot read?” Well, yes we do. It is not just a matter of a fundamental right of people to be able to talk and write to one another without the security services reading and listening, but we know full well that state snooping of private correspondence is used to impede legitimate political activity by ordinary people.
Cameron and his government are a far greater threat to freedom than a handful of fanatical killers in Paris.
Events in Paris on 7 January 2015 were truly horrific. Two marginalised and alienated people - armed with guns and a Muslim-inspired fascist ideology - went on a rampage of murder in the offices of the Charlie Hebdo magazine. France and the world were rightly outraged.
In Britain, cashing in the terror, David Cameron took his chance to push for a ban on end-to-end encryption, even though the terrorists in France never used encryption. End-to-end encryption is the means by which you encrypt a message on your own computer and send the message to someone else who decrypts it on his or hers. GCHQ and the NSA can’t read the data either in transit or from the internet giants’ servers. Apple’s new iphone and several messaging apps do the same thing.
In fact, you can get a small file which enables end-to-end text encryption here.
In his speech Cameron asked, “...in our country, do we want to allow a means of communication between people which we cannot read?” Well, yes we do. It is not just a matter of a fundamental right of people to be able to talk and write to one another without the security services reading and listening, but we know full well that state snooping of private correspondence is used to impede legitimate political activity by ordinary people.
Cameron and his government are a far greater threat to freedom than a handful of fanatical killers in Paris.
1 February 2015
Britain's war on investigative journalism
Free journalism is the last remaining source of opposition in Britain. That is why the state ranks journalists alongside terrorists as a threat.
With the demise of mass progressive organisations in the last few decades, one of the few remaining sources of critique of the existing political order is the writing of journalists. So today, it is the likes of Glenn Greenwald and George Monbiot who carry the torch of political opposition, rather than politicians.
It is hardly surprising that, according to documents from the Snowden cache, GCHQ in Britain ranks investigative journalists alongside terrorists and hackers as targets worthy of surveillance. In a single trawl in 2008 GCHQ harvested around 70 000 emails from journalists working for the BBC, Reuters, the Guardian, the New York Times, Le Monde, the Sun, NBC and the Washington Post. The results were placed on the GCHQ intranet for analysis by agents.
The mass hoovering up of electronic communication by the security agencies is now an established fact. The legality of doing so only comes into a play when some of these ill-gotten fruits of mass surveillance need to be brought into the public domain, such as for a court case. To this end, in Britain the state uses RIPA, Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, which inter alia empowers police to access journalists’ electronic communication without a court order with only the approval of senior officers. Just to take two instances: In the so-called Plebgate affair, police used RIPA powers to access the phone records of a journalist working for the Sun; and the records of a Mail on Sunday journalist were similarly acquired in the Chris Huhne speeding affair. Neither case involved terrorism or serious crime.
Investigative journalism remains one the last means of critiquing political power in Britain. It is under attack, and one small step of resistance is to achieve secure communication by encrypting phone speech and email, end-to-end. Of course that does nothing to hide the metadata - who’s contacting whom, when and for how long - but it shuts GCHQ and the police out of the content. David Cameron doesn’t like that, and that’s why he would like to ban it.
With the demise of mass progressive organisations in the last few decades, one of the few remaining sources of critique of the existing political order is the writing of journalists. So today, it is the likes of Glenn Greenwald and George Monbiot who carry the torch of political opposition, rather than politicians.
It is hardly surprising that, according to documents from the Snowden cache, GCHQ in Britain ranks investigative journalists alongside terrorists and hackers as targets worthy of surveillance. In a single trawl in 2008 GCHQ harvested around 70 000 emails from journalists working for the BBC, Reuters, the Guardian, the New York Times, Le Monde, the Sun, NBC and the Washington Post. The results were placed on the GCHQ intranet for analysis by agents.
The mass hoovering up of electronic communication by the security agencies is now an established fact. The legality of doing so only comes into a play when some of these ill-gotten fruits of mass surveillance need to be brought into the public domain, such as for a court case. To this end, in Britain the state uses RIPA, Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, which inter alia empowers police to access journalists’ electronic communication without a court order with only the approval of senior officers. Just to take two instances: In the so-called Plebgate affair, police used RIPA powers to access the phone records of a journalist working for the Sun; and the records of a Mail on Sunday journalist were similarly acquired in the Chris Huhne speeding affair. Neither case involved terrorism or serious crime.
Investigative journalism remains one the last means of critiquing political power in Britain. It is under attack, and one small step of resistance is to achieve secure communication by encrypting phone speech and email, end-to-end. Of course that does nothing to hide the metadata - who’s contacting whom, when and for how long - but it shuts GCHQ and the police out of the content. David Cameron doesn’t like that, and that’s why he would like to ban it.
1 November 2014
Riots in England: Summer 2011
Britain’s urban rioting of August 2011 strengthened the hand of the state, the police and the political right.
The riots were not the work of a single social group with one cause. The spark for the initial Tottenham riot was the police shooting a young black man sitting in the back of a taxi. Matters were made worse when the authorities claimed that he had fired at them when in fact he hadn’t. The situation was further inflamed by the police refusing to discuss the death with the dead man’s family, who were peacefully assembled outside the police station in a small demonstration made up of relatives, friends and community leaders.
A local ethnic riot of rage in Tottenham could not have spread across the land, engulfing several English cities, particularly London, if the country hadn’t been a tinderbox waiting to go up in flames.
In parts of London and then some other British cities (Birmingham, Manchester, Nottingham), the young unemployed - impoverished, and alienated, but brought up in a society in which consumer possessions were elevated to the purpose of life - revolted and sought to steal electronic goods, designer clothing and much else from High Street stores. An orgy of rioting and looting ensued.
In the mayhem criminals and criminal gangs entered the fray engaging in systematic looting, arson and mugging of passers-by – and in a couple of cases, murder. The situation was further compounded by the creation in many parts of London of a macabre carnival atmosphere as shop after shop was looted and burnt; and funseekers from all social backgrounds joined in.
Some on the political left might even feel an element of Schadenfreude in seeing the poor and the excluded taking to the streets to vent their anger. But the rioters, save for a few small contingents of anarchists, lacked any kind of conscious political purpose. The rioters and looters’ target was not just large commercial property, but also that of private individuals and small traders. The hooded youths were smashing up their own communities in which they obviously felt they had no stake.
Inevitably, the target of much of the violence was the police; for it is the police whose job it is to physically bend bodies so they cooperate with the social order, a social order which is so unfair to so many. But no society can tolerate rampant criminality; so the police with widespread public backing suppressed the riots. By the end, armoured vehicles appeared on the streets of London and permission had been given for discharge of plastic bullets, though these were not used.
After the 1981 riots – the only riots comparable in modern British history - the left still existed as a political force and Tory “wets” still present in the government were apprehensive about a full-scale junking of the post-war consensus. None of that applies today and the reaction of the state has been one of enhancing repression and eschewing any form in social understanding in favour of punishment.
The riots restored the empathy between that "moral majority" and the police. The G20 demonstrations in April 2009 and the killing of Ian Tomlinson had seriously weakened people’s perception of the police, but that has now been forgotten. Opinion polls showed overwhelming support for the police, much more so than they did for the governments handing of the crisis. The future for civil liberties is bleak. When in the future peaceful demonstrators are beaten by police, sympathy beyond small liberal circles will be slight.
Popular punophilia: public lust for punishment
The state reaction to the rioting was swift and brutal, symbolised by the police battering-ram used in dawn raids to smash in the front doors of alleged looters, all eagerly filmed by TV film crews. The police adopted a policy of arrest, detention and the denial of bail to anyone allegedly guilty of any riot-related offence, however trivial.
Magistrates’ courts sat in twenty-four hour sessions dispensing rushed summary justice for the thousand or so people (mostly young, unemployed men) who were arrested during or after the riots. The charges are various: theft, burglary, possession of stolen goods, violent disorder, assault, resisting arrest, etc.
The law was perverted in two ways in its dealing with people arrested during the riots. First, those defendants who pleaded guilty to even minor offences received custodial sentences of around six months when normally such misdoings would incur fines or community service. A penalty supplement was added for crimes committed during the riots. Below is one typical case reported by The Guardian:
At Camberwell Green magistrates, Nicholas Robinson, 23, an electrical engineering student with no previous convictions, was jailed for the maximum permitted six months after pleading guilty to stealing bottles of water worth £3.50 from Lidl in Brixton. He had been walking back from his girlfriend's house in the early hours of Monday morning when he saw the store being looted, his lawyer said, and had taken the opportunity to go in and help himself to a case of water because he was thirsty
The severity of sentences for offences committed during the riots was later approved by senior judges. Thus opportunist theft against commercial retailers during civil disorder was regarded as more serious than the burglary of residential property. The pro-business bias is obvious.
The severity of sentencing led to some interesting contrasts. Shortly after Nicolas Robinson was jailed for six moths for stealing a bottle of water, Rebecca Balira was jailed for the same length of time for keeping a Tanzanian woman as a slave and assaulting her.
Second, some 60% of those pleading not guilty in court were remanded in custody rather than being given bail. In normal circumstances only around 10% would be remanded. The accused were incarcerated before trial, not because they might abscond, interfere with witnesses, etc, but simply to punish them. This is contrary to to the basic rule: innocent until proved guilty.
The scenes of rioting have engendered fear and anger among ordinary people, so there is a popular demand among the public to crack down rioters and looters with 70% of the population supporting harsher sentence for offences committed during the riots. However, the behaviour of the government and magistrates is itself undermining the the independence of the judiciary as judges respond to political pressure from the state and the government. One judicial official even went as far to describe emails from civil servants requesting exemplary punishments as “directives” to impose stiffer penalties on riot-related offences.
But this kind of arbitrary severity is unlikely to be effective. In the next six months a thousand young men will emerge from prison, angry, unemployed and in many cases homeless. So the fuel is being made for yet more disorder.
Children and the riots
Among those arrested and charged during and after the riots were 269 children. Over 40 percent of these children had been held in pre-trial detention: a majority (some 60 percent) had no previous criminal record. According to Britain’s obligation under international law, the imprisonment of children should only be considered as a last resource. Instead children were used as pawns in Cameron’s law-and-order populism.
Britain has the highest rate of juvenile incarceration in Europe.
Welfare and social housing
The lust for punishment of riot-related offenders is not satisfied by long prison sentences. Government is promoting two further measures with much popular backing. Local councils are being encouraged to evict the whole family of the offender from their social or council provided housing. Thus not only is the offender to be made homeless, but his (or her) whole family. Such collective punishment (i.e. of the innocent with the perpetrator) is contrary to every principle of justice. At the time of writing, several evictions are under way, but none has so far been endorsed by the courts. The second policy is to withdraw unemployment and other social security support from offenders. To date, legislation to do this has not yet been passed.
England is thus currently caught up in a hysterical loss of proportion. Opportunist thieves who picked up looted goods from the street or entered already broken into shops face many months of imprisonment and loss of social security entitlements on their release. If they live in social housing, they and their families risk being thrown into homelessness. It is pure folly to think that such measures will improve the social fabric of so-called “broken Britain.”
Gangs
Since the riots the Cameron government has declared war on gangs and gang culture. It is true that a minority of those involved in the rioting were members of criminal gangs, but the majority were not. They were opportunistic thieves.
Suppressing gangsterism in Britain’s poverty ghetto estates is no easy task. Yet every step that has been taken so far has or will strengthen the gangs. Two thirds of those imprisoned as a result of the riots have been incarcerated for the first time in their lives. Evidence is already emerging that many young men in prison are joining gangs for their protection, a practice likely to continue after they leave jail.
On release from jail, nearly all the former prisoners will be unemployed; and if the government fulfils its plans to remove public housing and welfare benefits, many will be destitute. The only source of support for these miserable people will be by way of association with criminal gangs.
Is the Cameron government aware of these rather obvious points? They probably are, but they also know, if they want to win populist recognition for being tough on crime, there is no need to worry about rising crime rates.
And the future?
Apart from strengthening the hand of state repression, what the riots have done is to confirm the process of the Americanisation of the under-class. They become utterly impoverished; its youth violent and totally excluded from society. The “moral majority” demands and justifies ever increasing punishment against them. The idea of a “working class” as a class “for itself” has gone. The political right wins.
4 October 2014
The repression of student activism in Britain
Since the demonstrations protesting tuition fee increases in 2010-11, student political activists in Britain have been subject to unprecedented levels of repression.
The coalition government which came to office in May 2010 had as its overriding objective, the bolstering of capitalism in Britain following the near financial collapse in 2008. Central to that project was slashing state expenditure and holding down wages through facilitating high levels of unemployment and promoting the extensive use of zero-hour contract work among the employed. Real incomes and the economic security for working people declined markedly.
In the face of this, aside from a couple of TUC sponsored lacklustre marches, the British working class remained passive in the face of the onslaught. Opposition instead sprung up from Britain’s students in response to the trebling of university tuition fees. The waves of street demonstrations in 2010-11 were met by heavy police repression, which involved inter alia the so-called kettling of demonstrators as a form of collective punishment. Kettling means, rather than disperse demonstrators, people are confined to street holding pens, which are then gradually constricted until the density of the sardine can is achieved. Masses of people - and passers-by as well can be ensnared in the kettle - are held without access to food, water, toilets or medical care for several hours before release. The borders of the kettled area and maintained by temporary iron fencing, baton-wielding police, dog handlers and mounted police.
In facing their collective punishment, demonstrators, however innocent of any wrongdoing, had to remain utterly passive. Even meagre attempts at resisting - eg. throwing empty plastic water bottles - earned the perpetrators several months in jail. In this political environment only highly committed activists could sustain such a repressive onslaught, and the demonstrations quickly petered out.
The intention of government and police was to rapidly crush and punish student protest and, by doing so, to send a clear message to anybody else (e.g. Uncut and the Occupy Movement) who might wish to politically oppose government. Yet, having succeeded so convincingly, and facing no more than a tiny minority of students involved in discussion and direct action groups, the state nonetheless has stepped up its surveillance and suppression of student political activity.
In periods of social calm, police action against against political activism has two strands: first, a comprehensive range of surveillance is deployed. Following the Snowden revelations, we know that British GCHQ monitoring of the internet and other electronic communication is ubiquitous - even if we are not sure exactly how information is filtered to police on the ground. Electronic surveillance is accompanied by the recruitment of hundreds of police informants in civic organisations by means of payment, blackmail and intimidation of activists. And on top of that, the British state has embedded over a thousand long-term spies, masquerading as political activists, in civic organisations.
Not all surveillance is covert. Police have resorted to a form of intimidation called overt surveillance in which they call selected political activists and journalists by name on the street, follow them conspicuously and make unsolicited “friendly” visits to people in their homes.
The second strand, in addition to surveillance, is the heavy and oppressive policing of protests and protesters. In November 2013, student leader, Michael Chessum, was arrested for not informing the police about an on campus demonstration, and only released on condition that he did not "engage in protest on any University Campus and not within half a mile boundary of any university." And even small protests are met with vans of police arriving with riot gear and dogs. Even though protest and political activity in public places is for the most part legal, the police attempt to portray and label it illegitimate and suppress it.
What is the reason for the excessive surveillance and repression of student political activity in Britain? One factor is that police everywhere tend to expand their remit unless or until they are checked by the government and courts, and that restraining hand has been lacking, simply because the government has invariably sought to side with police. A second factor is an government led ideological assault on civil liberties: political activity has been redefined as a social nuisance, free speech is categorised as “causing offence.” Thus political activity becomes something that police legitimately monitor and clamp down on.
The reason for this illiberalism - whether sponsored by New Labour, or now the Tories and Liberal Democrats - originates in a state and establishment fear of ordinary people. Today, Britain is, and is ever more becoming, a massively unequal society, with any talk of a single citizenry a mere ideological puff. At the top multi-billionaires float off into the stratosphere of wealth, while a million poverty-stricken people at the bottom seek food from food banks or starve. Increasingly, large sections of middle England are slipping downwards into insecurity and relative poverty.
That being the case, it is not hard to see from the establishment point of view the danger of Britain falling apart - or at least the potential for widespread social strife. Seen in those terms, watching, and if possible crushing, effective opposition makes a great deal of sense.
The coalition government which came to office in May 2010 had as its overriding objective, the bolstering of capitalism in Britain following the near financial collapse in 2008. Central to that project was slashing state expenditure and holding down wages through facilitating high levels of unemployment and promoting the extensive use of zero-hour contract work among the employed. Real incomes and the economic security for working people declined markedly.
In the face of this, aside from a couple of TUC sponsored lacklustre marches, the British working class remained passive in the face of the onslaught. Opposition instead sprung up from Britain’s students in response to the trebling of university tuition fees. The waves of street demonstrations in 2010-11 were met by heavy police repression, which involved inter alia the so-called kettling of demonstrators as a form of collective punishment. Kettling means, rather than disperse demonstrators, people are confined to street holding pens, which are then gradually constricted until the density of the sardine can is achieved. Masses of people - and passers-by as well can be ensnared in the kettle - are held without access to food, water, toilets or medical care for several hours before release. The borders of the kettled area and maintained by temporary iron fencing, baton-wielding police, dog handlers and mounted police.
In facing their collective punishment, demonstrators, however innocent of any wrongdoing, had to remain utterly passive. Even meagre attempts at resisting - eg. throwing empty plastic water bottles - earned the perpetrators several months in jail. In this political environment only highly committed activists could sustain such a repressive onslaught, and the demonstrations quickly petered out.
The intention of government and police was to rapidly crush and punish student protest and, by doing so, to send a clear message to anybody else (e.g. Uncut and the Occupy Movement) who might wish to politically oppose government. Yet, having succeeded so convincingly, and facing no more than a tiny minority of students involved in discussion and direct action groups, the state nonetheless has stepped up its surveillance and suppression of student political activity.
In periods of social calm, police action against against political activism has two strands: first, a comprehensive range of surveillance is deployed. Following the Snowden revelations, we know that British GCHQ monitoring of the internet and other electronic communication is ubiquitous - even if we are not sure exactly how information is filtered to police on the ground. Electronic surveillance is accompanied by the recruitment of hundreds of police informants in civic organisations by means of payment, blackmail and intimidation of activists. And on top of that, the British state has embedded over a thousand long-term spies, masquerading as political activists, in civic organisations.
Not all surveillance is covert. Police have resorted to a form of intimidation called overt surveillance in which they call selected political activists and journalists by name on the street, follow them conspicuously and make unsolicited “friendly” visits to people in their homes.
The second strand, in addition to surveillance, is the heavy and oppressive policing of protests and protesters. In November 2013, student leader, Michael Chessum, was arrested for not informing the police about an on campus demonstration, and only released on condition that he did not "engage in protest on any University Campus and not within half a mile boundary of any university." And even small protests are met with vans of police arriving with riot gear and dogs. Even though protest and political activity in public places is for the most part legal, the police attempt to portray and label it illegitimate and suppress it.
What is the reason for the excessive surveillance and repression of student political activity in Britain? One factor is that police everywhere tend to expand their remit unless or until they are checked by the government and courts, and that restraining hand has been lacking, simply because the government has invariably sought to side with police. A second factor is an government led ideological assault on civil liberties: political activity has been redefined as a social nuisance, free speech is categorised as “causing offence.” Thus political activity becomes something that police legitimately monitor and clamp down on.
The reason for this illiberalism - whether sponsored by New Labour, or now the Tories and Liberal Democrats - originates in a state and establishment fear of ordinary people. Today, Britain is, and is ever more becoming, a massively unequal society, with any talk of a single citizenry a mere ideological puff. At the top multi-billionaires float off into the stratosphere of wealth, while a million poverty-stricken people at the bottom seek food from food banks or starve. Increasingly, large sections of middle England are slipping downwards into insecurity and relative poverty.
That being the case, it is not hard to see from the establishment point of view the danger of Britain falling apart - or at least the potential for widespread social strife. Seen in those terms, watching, and if possible crushing, effective opposition makes a great deal of sense.
5 April 2014
A police spy in Exeter in the late 1980s
In the second half of the 1980s, the people involved in Devon Labour Briefing met regularly in our house in Exeter. There was plenty of planning to do preparing for Labour Party meetings; attempts to expel me and two of my colleagues from the Labour Party had required court action; and there was a perennial need to discuss politics. Into one such meeting came a new alleged supporter of Briefing, a young man in his late twenties, fit but prematurely balding and overflowing with enthusiasm. My clearest memory of him was his squatting under the window in our front room and trying to chat with everybody present.
Before the start of the meeting, I had a short chat with him. Where had he heard of Devon Labour Briefing? Well, he had bought our magazine in a town bookshop, had become overwhelmed with interest, and so had decided to come along. Great! No, he was not a member of the Labour Party yet, but was very interested in joining. How exactly he had got hold of my address was left unsaid, but of course he was welcome to come in and meet the group.
I did not denounce him to the meeting because, although I thought he was a police spy, I couldn’t be one hundred percent sure at that point. I went out into the kitchen with a senior Briefing colleague and I discovered that we both had the same opinion. The last thing we wanted to do was insult someone wrongly who might go on to join us and boost the strength of the group. My knowing that he was probably a police spy allowed the tables to be turned at least half way: we could observe him, too.
I can’t now recall the flow of discussion in the meeting, but I do remember thinking about him during the meeting. In fact there was very little reason for concern: nothing that we did was illegal and most of our actions and pronouncements were in the public domain anyway. He could report what he liked to his superiors; and I supposed that he had only been sent along because there was little worthwhile undercover work to do in the south-west of England. How long would his infiltration last? What would happen if he were denounced? The danger, it seemed to me, was not what he would do in the group, but how to handle the fact that he was there. Should we state publicly the fact that Briefing had been infiltrated. What were the dangers involved in doing so?
If we published the information in Briefing, the news would spread immediately to Exeter Labour Party. For the right-wing Labourites who were tryring to expel Briefing supporters from the party the fact that the police were interested in Briefing would be a publicity coup. “Ah,” they would say, “Look, these Briefing people don’t just cause us problems, but they are criminals. Why else would the police worry about them?” I didn't see any advantage in letting that happen. The news would hardly help Briefing internally, either. By the mid 1980s Briefing had recruited supporters among Exeter University staff and other professionals, mostly in the education sector. I had always detected in many of them a desire for respectability, and telling them about police infiltrators might give them grounds for moving away from Briefing.
But there was another reason, too, for keeping all this quiet. Discussion of police infiltration, spying and surveillance in small close-knit groups often becomes a fascinating topic for its members and can lead to all types of paranoia and silliness. The focus of Briefing had to be our own survival in the Labour Party and our continued promotion of the issues that mattered. Getting excited about spying and police infiltration was a distraction.
A few years earlier a supporter of Briefing, who was not in Exeter Labour Party on the grounds that he was a member of the Party elsewhere, had offered to arrange to put one particular right-wing Labour opponent of ours in hospital “if it was useful.” I had heard first-hand accounts of his work with violence and disapproved strongly. We stuck firmly to the view that in the struggle inside Exeter Labour Party, we would not be the first to use violence.
Now it occurred to me that if anyone associated with Briefing in the past had been a police agent, it would have been that practitioner of violence himself. Had we accepted his poisoned ‘invitation,’ we might well have been entrapped. Additionally, if we had possessed a department which concerned itself with violence and other forms of illegality, this current infiltration by police would have caused a problem. The end result would have been that everything we did became concerned with undercover activities with the result that our political purposes would have suffered under the weight of such distractions.
At the end of the meeting the police spy expressed his continued interest in Briefing and asked whether we had any political literature for him to read. Genuine new recruits need it pushed down their throats. I had duplicates of nearly everything we had published and I handed them to him. He offered to pay for them, but I refused the money, telling him he could return them at a future meeting. Surely, he saw the importance of saving trees! Quite obviously, he had been told to pay for anything he took away, so was quite put out by my refusal to accept money.
A few days later the postman delivered a large A4 envelope containing all the propaganda material I had given him. Everything was in order and neatly clipped together. Inside the envelope was a scribbled note saying that he was no longer interested in Briefing. I have to admit that I felt a little let down because we hadn't warranted a more serious police investigation.
A week or so afterwards, I was walking down Exeter High Street when coming towards me was the young police spy. I put on my friendliest smile and greeted in him the warmest terms, giving every indication that I wanted to speak to him. He abruptly told me that he was in a hurry and almost ran away.
The 1980s were a time when the Thatcher government were interested in curtailing the rights of trades unions and restricting the powers of left-leaning local councils. They had little interest in attempting to control and repress the rest of civil society; that had to wait for the arrival of New Labour. No doubt, had that meeting in my house taken place twenty years later, FIT police officers would be openly filming everybody attending. But in those days we didn't see ahead to what our right-wing opponents in the Labour Party would do when in office.
2 March 2014
Religious censorship in British public examinations
The British government endorses the religious censorship of public examinations
One disturbing development in Britain today is the collusion of the government (now the Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition, but previously New Labour as well) in permitting religious bigotry to trump equality and universal standards.
It is bad enough that children, at state expense, can be channelled into schools which propagate religious bigotry, but worse that examination boards, with government consent, allow public examinations in religious schools to be censored on religious grounds. What happens is simply that some questions - the answers to which conflict with religious dogma - are blacked out. Such religious censorship (1) restricts examinee choice and makes what purports to be a public examination different for candidates in religious schools, and (2) acts as an utterly indefensible form of censorship for teenagers, cutting them off from public knowledge.
In lending its weight to religious censorship, the British government is yet again turning its back on universal secular values. Fear of confronting organised religion is obviously one factor, but much more important is the alliance both New Labour and the Coalition have forged with organised conservative religion in deny young people knowledge and psychologically imprisoning them in ethnically divided so-called communities run by traditional authority. The divided, ignorant and unfree are easier to oppress.
One disturbing development in Britain today is the collusion of the government (now the Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition, but previously New Labour as well) in permitting religious bigotry to trump equality and universal standards.
It is bad enough that children, at state expense, can be channelled into schools which propagate religious bigotry, but worse that examination boards, with government consent, allow public examinations in religious schools to be censored on religious grounds. What happens is simply that some questions - the answers to which conflict with religious dogma - are blacked out. Such religious censorship (1) restricts examinee choice and makes what purports to be a public examination different for candidates in religious schools, and (2) acts as an utterly indefensible form of censorship for teenagers, cutting them off from public knowledge.
In lending its weight to religious censorship, the British government is yet again turning its back on universal secular values. Fear of confronting organised religion is obviously one factor, but much more important is the alliance both New Labour and the Coalition have forged with organised conservative religion in deny young people knowledge and psychologically imprisoning them in ethnically divided so-called communities run by traditional authority. The divided, ignorant and unfree are easier to oppress.
1 December 2013
Some truisms regarding the police
Here are a couple of points about the police which tend never change.
The police, even in the most liberal state, are the means by which the state physically forces its will onto human bodies. They may carry out subsidiary functions, such as helping children cross the road, but that does not contradict their main role in society.
Police forces everywhere attract authoritarian personality types and attempt to expand their remit. Everywhere and always the police ask for more powers.
In a healthy liberal democracy (which currently Britain is not), government, legislatures, the courts and public opinion together prevent the otherwise inevitable slide into an authoritarian state riddled with police excesses and corruption.
The police can and should have their institutional say although it is widely known in advance what the police will say. They always want more powers, and if they get them they want more. It is up to the people to say no.
The police, even in the most liberal state, are the means by which the state physically forces its will onto human bodies. They may carry out subsidiary functions, such as helping children cross the road, but that does not contradict their main role in society.
Police forces everywhere attract authoritarian personality types and attempt to expand their remit. Everywhere and always the police ask for more powers.
In a healthy liberal democracy (which currently Britain is not), government, legislatures, the courts and public opinion together prevent the otherwise inevitable slide into an authoritarian state riddled with police excesses and corruption.
The police can and should have their institutional say although it is widely known in advance what the police will say. They always want more powers, and if they get them they want more. It is up to the people to say no.
2 October 2013
Electronic Spying: its meaning in Britain
The electronic communications of every political activist and commentator in Britain are probably monitored by the state.
The documents made available to the world in the summer of 2013 by the whistleblower, Philip Snowden, have provided proof that the American NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ, have in tandem attempted to harvest every single morsel of electronic communication that they can. To that end, they have inter alia tapped into undersea cables, compelled internet providers to hand over the content of their servers and worked with the commercial providers of encryption to insert so-called backdoors into their software.
Many claim that we knew all this already. I do not believe this is so: we might have believed that the surveillance state had access to our electronic communication, but we did not know the ubiquity of the surveillance, nor the extent to which the US corporations were partners in the programme.
Apologists claim that, even if multiple petabytes of information are seized and stored, over 99.9 percent is of no interest to the security apparatus and is thus as confidential in practice as it would have been if it had never been seized. Yet while it is indeed true that the vast majority of electronic communication is of no interest, the point needs to be made that the state has access to a great deal of information which it should not have access to and in which it is highly interested.
If in the the 1980s I had got up and said that the Metropolitan police had planted over one hundred spies into political and other civil organisations in Britain, spies who would embed themselves into the community with false identities for decades, I would have been described as paranoiac. Yet this kind of infiltration - outdoing the Stasi of the former East Germany - is now a proven fact, with each deployed officer costing around a quarter of million pounds a year.
Let me take another example of the extent of state surveillance of people. Today, everyone who attends a political demonstration or meeting in Britain risks being photographed by so-called Forward Intelligence police and having their names entered into a database of what are termed “domestic political extremists.” No doubt, the thousands of people on these lists are divided into categories: those who merely criticise the regime in Britain in words, those who organise, those who engage in nonviolent direct action of various kinds, and so on.
Philip Snowden, a technician, has been able to tell us what and how electronic communication is intercepted and harvested. We still don’t know how it is processed and what is done with it. But it is more than highly likely that, as the state spends billions on monitoring political activists and commentators, police and security agents will select, identify, categorise and keep all electronic communications among those who are involved in, or comment on, political affairs.
Largely, the political left have resigned themselves to surveillance. We use Facebook and other social media sites and we don’t encrypt our email. Even if the security officers have access to all we say, our online searches, etc. we just shrug our shoulders. Should we?
The documents made available to the world in the summer of 2013 by the whistleblower, Philip Snowden, have provided proof that the American NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ, have in tandem attempted to harvest every single morsel of electronic communication that they can. To that end, they have inter alia tapped into undersea cables, compelled internet providers to hand over the content of their servers and worked with the commercial providers of encryption to insert so-called backdoors into their software.
Many claim that we knew all this already. I do not believe this is so: we might have believed that the surveillance state had access to our electronic communication, but we did not know the ubiquity of the surveillance, nor the extent to which the US corporations were partners in the programme.
Apologists claim that, even if multiple petabytes of information are seized and stored, over 99.9 percent is of no interest to the security apparatus and is thus as confidential in practice as it would have been if it had never been seized. Yet while it is indeed true that the vast majority of electronic communication is of no interest, the point needs to be made that the state has access to a great deal of information which it should not have access to and in which it is highly interested.
If in the the 1980s I had got up and said that the Metropolitan police had planted over one hundred spies into political and other civil organisations in Britain, spies who would embed themselves into the community with false identities for decades, I would have been described as paranoiac. Yet this kind of infiltration - outdoing the Stasi of the former East Germany - is now a proven fact, with each deployed officer costing around a quarter of million pounds a year.
Let me take another example of the extent of state surveillance of people. Today, everyone who attends a political demonstration or meeting in Britain risks being photographed by so-called Forward Intelligence police and having their names entered into a database of what are termed “domestic political extremists.” No doubt, the thousands of people on these lists are divided into categories: those who merely criticise the regime in Britain in words, those who organise, those who engage in nonviolent direct action of various kinds, and so on.
Philip Snowden, a technician, has been able to tell us what and how electronic communication is intercepted and harvested. We still don’t know how it is processed and what is done with it. But it is more than highly likely that, as the state spends billions on monitoring political activists and commentators, police and security agents will select, identify, categorise and keep all electronic communications among those who are involved in, or comment on, political affairs.
Largely, the political left have resigned themselves to surveillance. We use Facebook and other social media sites and we don’t encrypt our email. Even if the security officers have access to all we say, our online searches, etc. we just shrug our shoulders. Should we?
13 November 2012
Free Comment Criminalised in Britain
In the accelerating attack on free speech in Britain, a Facebook user has been arrested for displaying a captioned image of a burning poppy.
In the twentieth century comment was outlawed because it was subversive or indecent. Free speech finally won against those arguments. But today, there is a new threat: increasingly comment on the internet is threatened and prosecuted because it is allegedly offensive to someone.
Expanding the notion of offence is a great ruse for the state: government is not saying we are banning comment because it threatens us, but because it threatens “you the people” and to prove its point a lynch mob of people, spurred on by the gutter press, can always be found to demand judicial sanctions against the commentator. Yet the end result is the same as in the previous century: people fined or imprisoned for expressing their opinions.
In the twentieth century comment was outlawed because it was subversive or indecent. Free speech finally won against those arguments. But today, there is a new threat: increasingly comment on the internet is threatened and prosecuted because it is allegedly offensive to someone.
Expanding the notion of offence is a great ruse for the state: government is not saying we are banning comment because it threatens us, but because it threatens “you the people” and to prove its point a lynch mob of people, spurred on by the gutter press, can always be found to demand judicial sanctions against the commentator. Yet the end result is the same as in the previous century: people fined or imprisoned for expressing their opinions.
21 September 2012
Being offensive on the net
In Britain there are an increasing number of arrests and convictions of people who have expressed “offensive” opinions on the net.
At a moral level it is utterly impossible to defend people who gratuitously insult others on-line. For that reason many otherwise right-thinking people will remain silent in Britain when idiots who scribble illiterate insults end up in police stations, courts and prisons.
Yet we should stop and raise two issues: one a matter of principle, the other of policy.
As a matter of principle, no-one should face legal sanction merely because s/he has said something offensive. If you harass people, threaten them, blackmail them etc., then, yes, you do something everybody would recognise as a crime. But merely expressing an opinion, however obnoxious, should not in itself be a crime. That is an essential ingredient of free speech.
Let us ask a question about state policy. Why is the state so pro-active in clamping down on Twitter insults, when it cares so little about the economic well-being or political liberties of ordinary people in general? The answer seems to be that what motivates these prosecutions and the consequent imposition of disproportionate punishment is a state strategy of intimidating free expression on the net.
Twitter and similar technologies are highly effective means of communication for ordinary people, but they are also excellently tailored for state surveillance and state intimidation of all who use them.
.
At a moral level it is utterly impossible to defend people who gratuitously insult others on-line. For that reason many otherwise right-thinking people will remain silent in Britain when idiots who scribble illiterate insults end up in police stations, courts and prisons.
Yet we should stop and raise two issues: one a matter of principle, the other of policy.
As a matter of principle, no-one should face legal sanction merely because s/he has said something offensive. If you harass people, threaten them, blackmail them etc., then, yes, you do something everybody would recognise as a crime. But merely expressing an opinion, however obnoxious, should not in itself be a crime. That is an essential ingredient of free speech.
Let us ask a question about state policy. Why is the state so pro-active in clamping down on Twitter insults, when it cares so little about the economic well-being or political liberties of ordinary people in general? The answer seems to be that what motivates these prosecutions and the consequent imposition of disproportionate punishment is a state strategy of intimidating free expression on the net.
Twitter and similar technologies are highly effective means of communication for ordinary people, but they are also excellently tailored for state surveillance and state intimidation of all who use them.
.
15 June 2012
Supressing more than protest in Britain
Civic and political freedom in Britain is declining. More and more political activity is considered a nuisance or a threat and something to be controlled.
Many have argued that the state is attempting to suffocate dissent and protest, but what is worse, the suppression political activity.
Police, government and state action is indeed directed at suppressing protest (i.e. people who shout or hold placards to emphasise their point), but state surveillance is also more widely deployed against people who engage in political activity more generally.
For instance, people fall victims to police FIT photographing, not only because they demonstrate, but because they attend meetings. Police informers infiltrate not only street protests, but attend the most sedate of meetings to gather information. Teachers and youth workers are encouraged to report ‘anything of interest’ said by their students or charges to the police.
Little comes to light of the probably extensive police surveillance of the internet and telephone communication, because, unlike the monitoring of demonstrations and meetings, the victims have no means of finding out about it. For the most part, people-on-line are merely exchanging opinions; yet many of them will now have police records.
Almost certainly the vast majority of people on police records, not only have never committed a crime, but have never or have rarely engaged in street protest. What they have done, like me now, is sought to communicate politically and so have been branded as domestic extremists worthy of police surveillance.
Sadly the only protection people have is that the large numbers of people now on record as domestic extremists make the active surveillance of everyone a logistic impossibility.
.
Many have argued that the state is attempting to suffocate dissent and protest, but what is worse, the suppression political activity.
Police, government and state action is indeed directed at suppressing protest (i.e. people who shout or hold placards to emphasise their point), but state surveillance is also more widely deployed against people who engage in political activity more generally.
For instance, people fall victims to police FIT photographing, not only because they demonstrate, but because they attend meetings. Police informers infiltrate not only street protests, but attend the most sedate of meetings to gather information. Teachers and youth workers are encouraged to report ‘anything of interest’ said by their students or charges to the police.
Little comes to light of the probably extensive police surveillance of the internet and telephone communication, because, unlike the monitoring of demonstrations and meetings, the victims have no means of finding out about it. For the most part, people-on-line are merely exchanging opinions; yet many of them will now have police records.
Almost certainly the vast majority of people on police records, not only have never committed a crime, but have never or have rarely engaged in street protest. What they have done, like me now, is sought to communicate politically and so have been branded as domestic extremists worthy of police surveillance.
Sadly the only protection people have is that the large numbers of people now on record as domestic extremists make the active surveillance of everyone a logistic impossibility.
.
1 April 2012
A Police State?
Britain has a vast and growing web of laws to restrict individual freedom and action by civic organisations. State surveillance is mushrooming. Police and other law enforcement agencies are inadequately held to account by political and judicial authorities, and within limits enjoy almost a free hand. Imprisonment and other sanctions are often unduly severe.
While Britain falls short of the standards expected in a liberal democracy, it is not a police state. First, it is still possible to form organisations and ‘speak out’ as my posting of this comment shows; and neither are the courts or political authorities under police control.
It’s better to use language carefully because when we actually live in a police state we will have cried wolf. Using the expression "police state" to describe what exists today devalues language. That may be no comfort to the increasing list of victims of state repression. Yet facts and emotions are separate things.
.
27 March 2012
Twitter criminals: useful idiots
The prosecution of writers of racial and gratuitously offensive comments is a cover for the British state in its attempt to stiffle free expression on the web.
At a moral level it is utterly impossible to defend people who gratuitously insult others – and make matters worse by adding racist abuse. For that reason many progressive people will remain silent when idiots like Liam Stacey are jailed for doing just that.
Yet we should stop and raise two issues: one a matter of principle, the other of policy.
As a matter of principle, no-one should face legal sanction merely because s/he has said something offensive. If you harass somebody, threaten them, blackmail them etc., then, yes, you commit a legitimate crime. But merely expressing an opinion, however obnoxious, should not in itself be a crime. That is an essential ingredient of free speech.
Let us ask a question about state policy. Why is the state so pro-active in clamping down on Twitter insults, when it cares so little about the economic well-being or political liberties of ordinary people in general?
It is far more credible to think that what motivates this kind of prosecution and the imposition of disproportionate punishment is a state strategy of intimidating free expression on the net. The claim to be fighting racism is the pretext.
Nothing makes that point more clearly than a case which came to light just as Stacey began his prison sentence; London police officers were recorded racially abusing a black suspect, yet the IPCC and CPS have dragged their feet and have so far declined to prosecute. The contrast with Stacey’s case could not be starker.(see details)
Twitter and similar technologies are highly effective means of communication for ordinary people, but they are also excellently tailored for state surveillance and manipulation of all who use them.
19 January 2012
Kettling: mass arrest for collective punishment
Mass arrest is now regularly used in Britain to punish political dissent.
Traditionally, when police faced large congregations of people whose actions they wished to impede, they resorted to the selective arrest of a minority and the dispersal of the majority. However, particularly since the G20 demonstrations in April 2009, police have changed tactics and sought the mass arrest of demonstrators in an action known as kettling.
Kettling is a euphemism for the indiscriminate detention of large numbers of people in temporally-created street holding pens. Those rounded up include, of course, the demonstrators, but also journalists and unlucky bystanders who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. All these unfortunate souls are detained for several hours in these street enclosures without medical facilities, food, water or access to toilets, while denied any form of meaningful contact with those who are detaining them. The boundaries of the kettle are controlled by baton-wielding police, aided on occasion by dogs, horses and temporarily erected steel fences. Demonstrators facing the police lines, often suffer kicks and punches, supplemented by blows from police batons and riot shields.
The student demonstrations in the final months of 2010 saw the development of so-called “hyper-kettling,” a further torment inflicted on the incarcerated. The amount of space available to people inside the kettle is progressively constricted until the detained are packed in like sardines in a can. In one case, demonstrators were compressed on Westminster bridge with police lines sealing both bridgeheads.
Kettling was first used in Britain in 1999 to detain anti-WTO demonstrators in London. Initially justified as an extreme measure to deal with extreme situations, the technique has now become standard police practice, particularly in London. In one notorious case on 24 November 2010, teenage children demonstrating in London were kettled. The kettle was only opened after midnight, leaving many teenagers stranded in London on a freezing night.
As a means of causing pain and discomfort to those engaged in political protest, kettling is highly effective. Those beaten at the edge of the kettle, particularly when the incarceration area is being constricted, come off worst, as one journalist covering the student demonstration on 9 December 2010 points out:
“The police started to push back then they started using their batons on protesters. I was caught then and pushed up towards the front. I ducked, my glasses were knocked off my face so I was trying to hold them. Then, basically, a baton strike came to the side of my face and then onto the top of my head. Directly onto the crown of my head. I felt a big whacking thud and I heard it reverberating inside my head….blood was streaming down the back of my head and back of my neck and matting my hair.”
Yet even for those not injured by the police, the effects of street arrest can be severe. Physically, many will suffer from exposure, dehydration and inability to use toilets, leading to people needing to defecate and urinate in their clothes. Psychological suffering centres on the inability of the incarcerated to know when they will be freed; and hence the pitiful chants of “Let Us Out.” The anxiety may be practical, for instance not being able to make an appointment to pick up a child, or it may stem from the claustrophobia of being crushed in a crowd.
Kettling is also used as a propaganda tool.Television pictures show lines of police confronting a mass of demonstrators. The impression is invariably given that it is the police who are defending a line against aggressive street protesters, when the reality is that the demonstrators are being pushed into an ever decreasing amount of space.
The police and conservative authoritarians excuse kettling by arguing that among the demonstrators there are hooligans, who cause damage; therefore the police are justified in kettling hundreds of innocent people in extremely unpleasant conditions for hours as a means of dealing of dealing with the problem. Yet In confronting other crimes the police do not have recourse to mass arrest of the innocent for their own convenience. Additionally, the practical benefits of kettling are short-lived. Some demonstrators may fear to protest in the future, but others, angered by the experience of kettling, will abandon the traditional protest march in favour of more disruptive forms of protest, which do not lend themselves to kettling.
Under closer examination, therefore, ketttling can be seen as the collective punishment of political protest and is clearly intended as a deterrent against those thinking of exercising their democratic right to demonstrate. Its use does nothing to help public policing in the long run and explodes the myth that British police are operating merely to uphold the law rather than to deter and punish political protest.
Such mass and indiscriminate arrest simultaneously violates the civil right to demonstrate and the personal right against arbitrary arrest.
Kettling and police violence against demonstrators has now become common currency; and that which is a regular, normal and an every-day occurrence ceases to be newsworthy. Yet sometimes it is precisely that which is normal which requires moral and political focus. Why can police beat demonstrators, journalists and by-standers, at least without causing serious injury, with impunity? Why can these same people be detained in kettles for hours without redress?
How long will it be before police are explaining away stampedes in a kettle in which people die and are seriously injured? How long will it be before the kettle of today becomes the concentration camp of tomorrow?
Note
In January 2012, the Court of Appeal overturned an earlier surprise decision of the High Court, which had held police action during the April 2009 G20 demonstrations to be excessive and unlawful. The Appeal Court judges in overturning the ruling exonerated the police and endorsed the violent police kettling operations deployed during the largely peaceful demonstrations.
The effect of the Appeal Court decision was to legitimise the forcible detention in street holding pens of thousands of legal non-violent protesters simply because senior police officers "honestly" believed that a “breach of the peace” by some of the demonstrators was possible. Flowing from this judgement is the precedent that any protest consisting of more than a handful of people can be lawfully kettled as a means of dealing with a possible future breach of the peace by a few demonstrators.
The decision leaves the right to demonstrate unmolested in tatters, handing the police the virtually unlimited power to incarcerate and punish demonstrators. In practice, this power will be used with discrimination: not so often that it become blatant that there is no right to protest in Britain, but sufficiently often to deter political protest on the streets.
Of course, the ruling can be challenged in the Supreme Court and in the European Court of Human Rights, but in the meantime the ruling stands.
1 January 2012
Britain is no longer a free society
By the end of 2007 there was a growing realisation that civil liberties in Britain were draining away. (Written December 2007)
Britain is now a society, which has departed from any normal understanding of civil liberties and personal freedom. People can be held by police for a month (and soon longer it would seem) without being subject to any charge. They may also be sent to prison and suffer other deprivations of liberty for what amounts to ‘thought crimes.’
Last month, for instance, a twenty-three year old woman, Samina Malik, received a nine month suspended prison sentence plus a community service order for writing jihad poetry on a cash till receipt and for having visited jihad websites. This was even though the jury found no intention on her part to aid or commit terrorist offences.
The current acceleration in authoritarianism consists of three interrelated process. First is the ever growing surveillance society with the ubiquitous CCTV cameras - soon to be augmented by electronic identity cards – which increase the power of the state vis-à-vis its citizenry. Second is the widening raft of illiberal legislation ranging from the banning of demonstrations outside parliament to the criminalisation of free speech and free browsing on the internet. Third is the increasing resort to prison and control orders. Britain has become the most watched state in Europe and has the highest proportion of its population in jail.
All of this has happened, of course, against a background of a genuine terrorist threat, but one that has been exaggerated and abused by government. Yet we live in an age of political passivity, sustained by a slow but real increase in the living standards of so-called "Middle England" and for many better-off workers too. Thus suverying the situation from a position of relative comfort, Mr and Mrs average are so used to believing that they live in a mostly free and tolerant society – and that any restrictions are reasonable and serve the general good – that they are not noticing that the structures that sustain that freedom, gained over centuries of struggle, have now cracked and are coming apart.
20 October 2011
Ethnic Cleansing at Dale Farm
The liquidation of the Dale Farm gypsy settlement is a case of localised ethnic cleansing camouflaged with the language of protecting the Green Belt.
On Wednesday 19 October 2011 after several appeals and much dithering in the courts – in which Britain’s judges prioritised planning law over human rights – the forceful eviction of gypsies from the Dale Farm settlement began.
On the first day, the settlement, weakly defended by residents and non-violent direct action activists, was attacked at day break by columns of riot police. Electric stun guns (tasers) were offensively deployed on two occasions. Once the residents and their supporters had been subdued, the bailiffs moved in to do their dirty work of demolishing homes.
The gypsies were evicted from their ten-year-old settlement, consisting of land which the settlers either owned or had been leased to them. There were no issues of trespass.
The gypsies themselves were dispersed and driven from the municipality of Basildon. Their pain is every bit as strong as that of people ethnically cleansed in Palestine or elsewhere. Eighty-six families and around one hundred children were rendered destitute, left to inhabit car parks and road lay-bys.
To carry out this piece of micro-ethnic cleansing, Basildon’s Conservative-led council and the Home office spent around twenty million pounds to make hundreds of people homeless. That amounts to some 230 000 pounds per gypsy family. Obviously Cameron and the Basildon Council leader, Tony Ball, think this is money well spent to pander to racist sentiment in Britain.
Those who say this is merely about upholding the laws of urban planning are either using this pretext to cover their racism or to absolve their consciousnesses. There is simply no meaningful parallel in preventing a property developer building for profit or a homeowner building an extension with the bulldozing of a decade old settlement. Why should planning law trump all other considerations? When the London orbital M25 motorway was built thousands of square kilometres of Green Belt land were concreted. Of course, a derogation for the M25 motorway was permitted because the road was deemed important. But why was there no derogation for the largest gypsy settlement in England?
The Dale Farm settlement is to be bulldozed in an attempt to create the pretence that it never existed.
On Wednesday 19 October 2011 after several appeals and much dithering in the courts – in which Britain’s judges prioritised planning law over human rights – the forceful eviction of gypsies from the Dale Farm settlement began.
On the first day, the settlement, weakly defended by residents and non-violent direct action activists, was attacked at day break by columns of riot police. Electric stun guns (tasers) were offensively deployed on two occasions. Once the residents and their supporters had been subdued, the bailiffs moved in to do their dirty work of demolishing homes.
The gypsies were evicted from their ten-year-old settlement, consisting of land which the settlers either owned or had been leased to them. There were no issues of trespass.
The gypsies themselves were dispersed and driven from the municipality of Basildon. Their pain is every bit as strong as that of people ethnically cleansed in Palestine or elsewhere. Eighty-six families and around one hundred children were rendered destitute, left to inhabit car parks and road lay-bys.
To carry out this piece of micro-ethnic cleansing, Basildon’s Conservative-led council and the Home office spent around twenty million pounds to make hundreds of people homeless. That amounts to some 230 000 pounds per gypsy family. Obviously Cameron and the Basildon Council leader, Tony Ball, think this is money well spent to pander to racist sentiment in Britain.
Those who say this is merely about upholding the laws of urban planning are either using this pretext to cover their racism or to absolve their consciousnesses. There is simply no meaningful parallel in preventing a property developer building for profit or a homeowner building an extension with the bulldozing of a decade old settlement. Why should planning law trump all other considerations? When the London orbital M25 motorway was built thousands of square kilometres of Green Belt land were concreted. Of course, a derogation for the M25 motorway was permitted because the road was deemed important. But why was there no derogation for the largest gypsy settlement in England?
The Dale Farm settlement is to be bulldozed in an attempt to create the pretence that it never existed.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)