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Waiting for the Knock
Andrew G. Feinberg writes "in this LinuxToday story, Richard Stallman talks about some upcoming laws that could be disasterous for British citizens." Guilty until you prove you're innocent, no right to remain silent, no right to a jury trial, produce your encryption keys or go to jail... At least in the U.S. we have some time off while Congress takes a break.
Although the tories were blamed for introducing this reprehensible legislation, the current Home Secretary Jack Straw looks like he's trying to out-bastard the tories. And he seems to be succeeding.
The Brits seem to be facing the same problems as the Americans in that there's no way a Tory (or Republican) government could get away with this sort of shit, but under Labour (or the Democrats), it becomes acceptable.
I was happy to see Blair get in -- and there's no doubt that he's done wonders in Northern Ireland -- but the laws just keep getting worse and worse. Given the closeness of Britain and Ireland, and the (slight) tendency to follow the lead of neighbours, I fear for the laws of Ireland.
Unfortunately, RMS repeats a few myths about the PTA in this otherwise excellent essay.
1. IIRC, the PTA was passed by a Labour government, not a Conservative one.
2. In fact, the PTA would not necessarily linger on after peace in Northern Ireland. It was only passed for the current year, and must be debated, voted on and passed by the Houses of Parliament, or it lapses. Unlikely, I know, but the potential is there.
3. The attack on the right to silence comes from the Criminal Justice Act, which was passed by the last Conservative Government. In effect, it says that if you choose to rely in court on information which you refused (as in, were asked, but refused) to speak to the police about, they can mention this fact. Any infringement of liberty is bad, but this one is quite mild.
4. However, the CJA does not have any sunset provision like the PTA. WOrryingly, nor will the Electronic Communications Act.
jsm
After a lot of complaints from pro-liberty and pro-cryptography groups (CyberLiberties, for example) it was finally removed from that bill and slotted into the RoIP bill - unchanged. The official slant was that the RoIP bill was a "better vehicle" for this.
The basic problems with it are these:
- You do not need to be even SUSPECTED of a crime - you just need a police officer to be OF THE OPINION that a given file is encrypted.
- If you can't hand over a key (because you don't have it, or the file isn't encrypted) then you are liable to a jail sentence
- If you tell anyone about having been served the warrant, you are liable to a larger jail sentence
- if you tell your solicitor about the warrant for purposes of your defence (and the only defence is to PROVE you don't have the key - an impossible task) HE is also bound by the clause not to tell anyone
- There is only one appeal to the warrant - not to a criminal court, but to a closed panel, not accountable to any judicial body and not required to give an explaination of their decision.
- You are not entitled to compensation unless the warrant was signed personally by the head of the Home Office (a government department). A warrant signed by a police inspector is just as legal, but doesn't carry any compensation.
If anyone has looked at my homepage in the last few months, now they know what my profile means--
-=DaveHowe=-
Guilty until you prove you're innocent, no right to remain silent, no right to a jury trial, produce your encryption keys or go to jail... At least in the U.S. we have some time off while Congress takes a break.
Congress ain't asleep at the wheel. Brilliant law coming out that lets the government claim that an encrypted message says anything they want it to, and they have no requirement to disclose how they decoded that message. Their decoding becomes presumptive fact.
Steganography isn't the cure for this; quite the opposite! Under this legal system, you could provide all the keys you've ever touched in your life, you'd be unable to prove that the government didn't actually find incriminating evidence hidden under an alternate passphrase channel.
The general idea being bandied around both legal systems is to insert as much nervousness as possible, taking advantage of people's natural laziness and trustfulness to make them avoid encryption technologies. Then, anyone who isn't lazy and trustful can be selected and monitored--go check out the NSA drowning with info story. Imagine cracking a SSH session only to find some teen chat!
The big stick on both sides is as follows: "You try to hide your messages from us, and we'll manipulate the legal system to give us unlimited power to ruin your life and the lives of those you love."
But I must be fair. Power abhors a vacuum. Data Mining is quickly building comprehensive profiles of many more people much more efficiently than any CoIntelPro could have hoped, but the knowledge is not going into any organization with a mandate to the people.
I have to wonder. Which to prefer? A constitution? Or a stock certificate?
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Someone else already posted the link to http://www.stand.org.uk, but I thought it deserved some emphasis. Their latest bit of campaigning was to send Jack Straw a letter which, if the legislation were to pass as proposed, would leave him liable for a two year jail sentence.
"Dear Mr Straw,
Please find at the end of the letter a confession to a crime, which has been affirmed by Statutory Declaration. The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police has been informed that you are in possession of this information.
You will not be able to understand the confession, because the words have been scrambled using a strong cryptographic key. This key was created in your name and has been registered on international public key servers..."
STAND is the main campaigning organisation in the UK tackling the issues raised by this bill, and it's a very well done website by some very clueful people. Visit it, everyone!
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Xenu loves you!
This sort of bad legislation doesn't infringe on our rights because we don't, in principle, have any. We are not merely subjects of a monarch, but are in fact her property - as are all our posessions. The monarch does not currently excercise her power, but instead lets it vest in a bloated civil service and an unprepresentative parliament. Any connection between what is decided at Westminster and the "will of the people" is purely tangential.
There is no assumption in Britain that government is "by the consent of the governed". Instead there is a political class which regards the common people as peasants, there to be taxed to death (approx 48% of GNP goes to tax), but not really good for much else. There is no mechanism in the British constitution for balancing power between different parts of government. There is no mechanism for ensuring that basic rights are upheld. There is no meangful local government. There is basically no way for the average, reasonable person to make a difference to the world of government - unless of course they're prepared to become a part of the machine themselves.
And yet, we are smug. We are intolerably smug. We look with disdain across the Atlantic to the USA, and we sneer at your drive-through churches and yourlow-brow TV. We deride what must be the most free society on Earth, and all the while we don't have the right to go pee except by the consent of the Queen.
Americans reading this - you know you have problems in your government and society. And you rightly complain about them, and work to change things. But you know what? Your politicians have to listen, eventually. And you have a strong judiciary who aren't afraid to say "This law is against the constitution - so I'm striking it out".
Sure, laws are made which go against the constitution every year. But at least you have a written statement of rights and principles - so you know when it is being infringed. And eventually, it is put right.
We have no rights. But hey, who needs rights when you've got that nice Mr Blair and a shedload of apathy?
Secondly, all these measures were originally mooted by the last (conservative) government. New Labour is not so much attempting to turn England into a police state as it is continuing policies established by Thatcher and her successors.
Why they're doing this is a strange question. It seems to me that the whole of English culture is in the grip of a wave of security-related hysteria that has nothing to do with terrorism (we put up with the IRA for thirty years, after all) and everything to do with accelerating social change. People feel insecure and worried, and respond by looking for some group to blame. New age travellers, gun owners, paedophiles -- they're all identifiable targets who stand out from the herd and give the herd reason to dislike (or hate) them. So it's no surprise that they come in for attack.
What's new and frightening is the introduction of "zero tolerance" measures in law, in a country that doesn't have a strong constitutional foundation. (There's a bill of rights, and there is an unwritten constitution, but it's hard to attack bad laws on the grounds that they violate constitutional rights.) Add half a million CCTV cameras in public places and a willingness to install another sixty thousand cameras a month and you can see why the UK is now the nation to visit if you want to buy neural-network based face-recognition software. Big Brother is alive and well and living in London.
Digging a bit deeper, we may also be seeing a once-in-a-century re-alignment of British politics. Traditionally, the Westminster parliament has been a two-and-a-half party system. Until 1923, it was Conservative/Liberal with a minor Labour presence. Labour replaced the Liberals, ushering in a period of Conservative dominance -- the Tories ran the UK for 40 out of the 60 years leading up to 1996 and Tony Blair's historic landslide victory. But they blew it, the same way the Liberals blew it in the 1920's; corruption scandals cost them the election and are still haunting them, while the Liberal presence in parliament is the highest it's been since the 1920's. Meanwhile, New Labour has lurched so far in the direction of the authoritarian right that they're staking out a claim to be the true right-wing party in British politics!
There's a general consensus in UK politics about the need for broadly free-market economics, but the traditional proponents of the market in the UK are strongly associated with the authoritarian right. The Liberal Democrats are beginning to reassert liberal values -- civil libertarianism mixed with moderate economics -- and may be staking out a claim to be the new party of the left in the UK, but for now neither of the main parties has any truck with civil liberties.Worse, the current right-wing authoritarian party of government is dominated by ex-Trotskyites. If there's one thing more zealously conservative than a hard-core Tory, it's an ex-Trot who has repented, seen the light, and bought an Armani suit and a BMW. (They're born control-freaks with no sense of humour, and you can't trust 'em either -- they know they've gone over to the Dark Side, and they just don't are about anything other than Power any more.)
Me, I'm just glad that after the last Conservative election victory I resolved to move to another country! (I made good on that promise -- and came to Scotland.)
Labour have always had a tradition of making *really* bad laws like this (not just with the PTA). It's usually something like this that ends up getting an otherwise useful government voted out of office.
The sad thing is that the government will keep trying until this gets passed. This is the second attempt at this. It will probably get thrown out, but it will surface again under a different name in 6 months or so. They may end up passing it very quietly, and not telling anyone about it.
This law is the prevention of terrorism act revised. They seem to have fixed all the things that the courts found flaws with, eg letting solictors have publicity (those nasty terrorists would have never been found innocent if Gareth Pierce had been gagged), giving people appeals, and the right to a trial.
The law even allows the minister responsible to alter the legislation later if something isn't working.
When they passed the Prevention of Terrorism Act, a South African minister was said to have retorted "I wish we had laws like that". This law is something from the text book of a dictator, "give us what we want or else we lock you away and there is nothing you can do." I'm sure there are a few people in Chinese government looking at this saying "Oooh... Thats nice. Think we can get away with do that to our people?"
I think I'll start renaming the various ministers as characters from "Animal Farm".
The PM, as I understand it, has very limited powers when it comes to executive decisions. For a start, the PM must persuade his own party that his plan is a good idea (the proposed reform of disability benefits was much weakened by opposition from within the Labour party). If a bill can be passed by majority vote in the House of Commons, the bill is passed to the House of Lords for acceptance or revision. The Lords have a history of sending back for revision bills that take things a little too far, and the upper chamber is (IMHO) a pretty reasonable one, since the members are not elected, and therefore tend to vote with their heads, not with the party line. The term "checks and balances", BTW, was coined by Walter Bagehot in 1867 to describe the British parliamentary system. The status of the reforms discussed here is that they were read in the Queen's Speech. The QS is a list of bills that the government intends to put before Parliament in the coming year. They have the same weight and likelihood of seeing the light as a manifesto pledge ;-) Cambrensis.
I would think that juries can be in the best interests of either the crown (or the state, if you're an american) or the defendant, but in either case do not best serve justice as an abstract.
Juries can be corrupted by the crown by exploiting popular prejudice against the defendant. The defendant, on the other hand, can attempt what's known as jury nullification: seeking a mistrial by finding at least one juror sympathetic enough to disregard the letter of the judge's charge. If there are enough sympathetic jurors, you may even get an acquittal.
On the other hand, juries keep the court in touch with the local population. Most of the world, unlike the US, has an appointed, independent, and professional judiciary. This can let a judge drift into the clouds, knowing his job is secure; on the other hand the judge is not necessarily subject to mob appeal.
I would not be overly secure in the competence of trial judges. A recent review by the law society of upper canada revealed that of 100 warrants, 60-odd contained some kind of technical error but only 7 of those were rejected.
The existence of appellate courts, on the other hand, at least allows judicial errors to be put right. A trial judge can set aside a wrongful conviction (or a wrongful civil decision) by jury in some jurisdictions; that, at least, allows errors in the favour of the crown to be put right.
Which, although unpopular, is how it should be.
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There is no premature anti-fascism. -Ernest Hemingway
I think the important thing to note is: :(
"The controversial Part III, which dealt with police seizure powers for encryption keys, has been shifted into a separate Home Office bill "
its not been scrapped - just delayed a little - It will return
I wasn't aware at the time it had been deferred but we came to the conclusion (myself and others preent) that it would not be written into law as that assumption of guilt would set a legal precedent which all judges from then on would be forced to consider.
Reversing the Burden of Proof isn't unknown - for example, you are forced to PROVE you have car insurance / a licence if stopped by a policeman, or are liable for not doing so (the crimes you are guilty until proven innocent for here are driving without a licence, and driving without insurance)
That isn't the problem. what IS the problem is that it is impossible to prove that you don't have a key - or, worse yet, that you HAD the key, but have forgotten the secret password you used to access it. Normally, reversing the Burden of Proof is reserved for cases where producing such proof is easy for the accused (if you HAVE a driving licence and / or insurance, even if you have lost your original documents you can obtain at least a letter proving you had them) and awkward / impossible for the government (imagine if the Police had to contact every insurance company in the uk after a road accident, to ask "is person xxx insured to drive with you, or covered by anyone you DO insure?" - now imagine what hoops the insurance company would have to go through to handle several dozen calls per office per day of this nature, and who would end up paying for it).
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-=DaveHowe=-
Although, I disagree with the proposal, it is incredibly hypocrtical of Americans to attack them, as they have always had this system - the vast majority of offences in the US are not and cannot be tried by juries.
Nick
-- "It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park" - Jim Moran
...The Lords have a history of sending back for revision bills that take things a little too far, and the upper chamber is (IMHO) a pretty reasonable one, since the members are not elected, ...
Maybe this explains why so many hereditary peerages (those that aren't gifts from the government currently in power) seem to be losing their right to vote.....
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-=DaveHowe=-
The unfortunate problem is that I do not see the US as a democratic nation in its current form - it's far more socialist then it ever has been.
Democracy and socialism are not mutually exculsive. You can have a democratic socialist country (like Sweden) or a totalitarian socialist country (like Red China). The US is a democratic republic where we vote for representatives to govern us. If our representatives have socialist tendencies then we end up with socialist public policy initatives. Of course, if the people did not want socialistic governmental policies they can always defeat the incumbents who voted in those policies.
While you may decry socialism there have been some positive results because of it. For example, take social security. Isn't it better to that old people have shelter and health care made available to them or would you rather have a bunch of homeless elderly people dying of illnesses that can be easily treated by doctors? Or take welfare. Is it truly better to feed the poor or to have a lot of hungry indigent people running about? That sounds like a recipe for revolution to me.
Another example is the interstate highway system. Isn't it better that you can hop on a freeway and travel unimpeded all the way from the east to the west coast? Or would you rather have to go a couple of miles on a private toll road, stop, pay a toll, go a few more miles, stop, pay another toll, start moving again, repeating the cycle for the next 2000 miles?
I suggest you study up more on political and economic theory. The solution to most problems is not unbridled capitalism, as that is what causes a lot of the problems in the first place. The best way seems to be the system we have currently -- a relatively open market where capitalism can flourish to the benefit of those on the upper end of the economic spectrum mixed with socialist policies that can ameliorate the negative effects pure capitalism can have on those on the bottom.
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A man who wants nothing is invincible
For instance I was recently in Annapolis at a conference, and I decided to walk from my hotel to the nearby mall. I was stopped by the police on the way, someone had phoned 911 about someone walking along the pavement (sorry, sidewalk) for heaven's sake!
It's certainly not against the law to walk in the U.S. However, it is against the law to walk while thinking about physics. This is for your own safety. Next time you visit the States, be safe and legal and use one of the designated Physics Contemplation Areas.
Well basically, as I see it, the 2nd amendment (with help from the 1st, 10th, 5th and 4th) is the ultimate check and balance in the foundation of the government.
The government is required to be subservient to the people. It's power derives solely from us. When this is no longer the case, the government needs to be overthrown by the people and a new one installed instead.
While I agree that your examples were hardly members of a well-regulated militia, the power of the militia derives from the people and not from the government. Ergo, it has to be self-regulating, so as to not give the government a loophole (e.g. all militiamen must be supporters of the present government). This basically requires people to not be crazies who go around shooting other people, and is all a part of members of society generally acting in a moral fashion.
However, this is a very tricky thing to get into writing in a way that will still make clear that the right to bear arms is an inalienable right and cannot be taken away at all. That's what the Bill of Rights is, you know: a list of natural rights, not a list of rights granted by the government. We're lost if we start to think that the government grants us those rights.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Yes, implementation is broken, but the basic idea is sound.
Welfare should have incentives to get people back to work. One incentive would be to pay much less cash, and issue the rent money directly to landlords (in the form of a check) and crack down on landlords who split these checks with the welfare client, who doesn't actually live there.
And incentives to get a job by adding the wages to the welfare for a few months. Switching jobs is a costly process and it's often impractical to buy a bus pass, work clothes, etc, out of what's barely enough money to live on in a normal month.
I'm always disgusted at how in Canada (dunno about the USA) it's easier to apply for welfare (one form, instant check) than UI (unemployment relief) which is multiple forms, a dismissal notice from your work, and three to five weeks...
The system is insane. But, if you reward people for paying out less benefits, you can't be suprised when they complicate the system to make it harder to collect.
A lot of the problems come from rewarding the wrong behaviour.
I see no reason why a government run agency can't be as efficient as a private one, if you're allowed to be as ruthless as a corporation would in cutting out useless jobs and firing people for incompotence.
But, I don't see much happening as long as we live in a representative democracy where we have to pick the least corrupt person to 'represent' us. When electronic voting becomes possible, if used right, it could remove a lot of corruption simply by removing the politicians who hire incompotent relatives, etc.