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UK Government To Back Off Plans To Share Private Data
Richard Rothwell writes with news that Jack Straw, Britain's Justice Secretary, has made public plans to drop provisions from the Coroners and Justice Bill which would have allowed the government to take information gathered for one purpose and use it for any other purpose. "A spokesman for Mr Straw said the 'strength of feeling' against the plans had persuaded him to rethink. The proposals will be dropped entirely from the Coroners and Justice Bill, and a new attempt will be made to reach a consensus on introducing a scaled-back version at an unspecified stage in the future." After defending the government's intentions, Straw bowed to pressure from a variety of groups and individuals who presented objections to the bill.
Out of curiosity, is Orwell's "1984" being used as a policy guide in the UK by her politicians?
No, of course not. It's decades behind the times...
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Glad to hear it. The bill sounds like government data mining, and the earlier /. article made it clear that the data could make it to the public sector.
Nice to know that public outcry can still make a difference.
...who finds it slightly depressing to read about a representative government choosing to "bow to pressure from [their constituents]"?
It reminds me of an XKCD punchline: "Strictly speaking, it's better than the alternative—But someone is clearly doing their job horribly wrong."
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
The UK Labour party may have backed off this appaling legislation, but they've made it more than clear from this and other legislation - explicit even - that it is their INTENTION to increase the power of the State over ordinary citizens and to conduct pervasive surveillance upon those citizens wherever and whenever thay are able to.
It is their game plan for the UK.
All the while, they hide themselves from any light that is shone on their own activities, meetings and discussions - crying 'state security' or 'commercial sensitivity' (where their corporate freinds are complicit) as they scurry back into the darkness.
These bills and laws make explicit their aims. The citizenry of the UK seems uninterested, held perhaps in the grip of a belief that the State generally means well.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
No, but Franz Kafka's The Trial is. :)
The people comparing today's Britain to Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four are not taking everything into account. For a start the government isn't trying to insert cameras in everyone's bedrooms, they're not that cynical. They actually believe what they're doing is for the benefit of the people.
Also, many of these awful laws are driven by tabloid newspapers (Rupert Murdoch and The Sun). Part of Tony Blair's success was thanks to his schmoozing with Murdoch's and other tabloids, Brown has continued this trend. Now, despite crime rates decreasing, tabloids have been screeching about youth and 'knife-crime' for a while. Now the government are desperate to be seen to be doing something about it (since their popularity is at an all-time low).
So the source of these laws is public hysteria over knife-crime (generated by The Sun et al), pressuring an unpopular government into doing something, anything so they will be seen to be trying to fix a problem that only exists to sell newspapers.
The reason British tabloids have become so sensationalist is they're losing market share to Internet sites. The government are, as are the tabloids, stuck in a pre-Internet mindset where newspapers have more power than they actually do.
This is not Orwellian. The British government have not set out to control the populace, that will just be a purely unintentional side-effect. What they are doing is creating Kafka-esque bureaucracies -- particularly at local level, see: local authorities using anti-terror laws to check whether kids actually live within the catchment area of their schools, for example -- with the power to decide a persons guilt without giving that person an opportunity to defend themselves. Indeed, without that person even realising they're being investigated, or that they're committing a crime. They may not be using The Trial as a reference when doing this, but they certainly seem to think government should be able to determine guilt without any interference from annoying things like defence lawyers and juries. :)
There are many other dissimilarities with Nineteen Eighty Four, but that's the primary one.
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
You really think so? So the politicians are just a bunch of bumbling golly-gee-how'd-THAT-happen idiots who somehow always manage to try to increase state power. Their intentions are great and all of this is just an accident hmm? Incompetence and malice can be hard to distinguish, not that the difference is very important, for the only difference that makes is in the timetable. Otherwise, they are both equally dangerous.
Again you really believe that this doesn't quite naturally go together with a desire for increased state power and a desire for further control and subjugation of the people? Politicians are a bunch of good-hearted, good-natured people who really care about us, yet the world over they just accidentally coincidentally happen to always have this same effect? They're not professional students of statecraft with thousands of years of history of what worked and what didn't work who know how to tell us exactly what we want to hear? The people aren't just trying to live their lives and aren't largely ignorant of such things as propaganda techniques, thesis antithesis synthesis, bread-and-circus, and divide-and-conquer? This doesn't create a gross imbalance of the sophisticated and entrenched versus the naive and under-represented? Really?
I'm sure their intentions are pure *cough*. The only thing worse than abuses of power are the apologists and useful idiots who defend and promote them. If not for them, the power grabs would easily be recognized for what they are and swiftly dealt with, probably in the form of public pressure. I think that happened here only because of the UK's record of the protection of private data, certainly they handle this much better than the USA does. The people of the UK who opposed this measure have enjoyed something like real privacy during a time when it's become more important than ever and they now appreciate it and don't want to have it taken away. They have an advantage also, in that "data privacy" is more of an intellectual debate that doesn't have the sort of thought-killing fear-mongering that surrounds other issues.
What it seems you are not handling better than the USA is the "terrorism threat" and the realization that your reaction to it can be much worse than the initial threat. If the Western nations lose their traditions of individual liberty because a few evil men blow up a few buildings, then we are only showing those evil men that we are better at causing our destruction than they are. That's an odd way to win a contest against them.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Our public libraries have moved "1984" to the Non-Fiction shelves, on the basis that it's a User's Manual, not a novel.
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
Compared to most government projects it's ahead of schedule.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Introduce something awful
Withdraw it
Re-introduce watered down version
See Poll-Tax -> Council Tax
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
They don't seem to realize what this many mean 5 or 10 years from now. The current government might not be planning to (mis)use these powers, but a future one might.
Another terrorist attack could get a fanatical nutter elected into government, and we are handing them a ready made police state. All the tools for complete control of the population installed and ready for (mis)use, all they would need to do is find an appropriate justification ... and once you start (mis)using it, it is very hard to stop.