The Musings of Harry

I doubt that one could find three other words that so provoke my ire as these*.

The assumption which is inherent in those that ascribe to this view is that our rights as citizens are accorded to us by the state, at its discretion. That in the absence of its approval, we have no rights. The appropriate situation is precisely the reverse.

Our responsibilities are not currency; they are not some instrument by which we prove to the state that we are deserving of liberty. Our rights, as citizens in a liberal democracy, are innate: it is our rights that are sacrosanct and is is the state’s responsibility to ensure that, in all of its actions, the sovereignty of the law-abiding individual is not compromised.

This is why ID cards are bad. Why must a citizen be forced to submit themselves to the State for interrogation in the absence of due cause?

This is why rampant deployment of CCTV is unacceptable. Why should the authorities be permitted to observe me, without my knowledge, and without any indication that I have committed some wrong?

This is why ANPR systems are bad. Why should the police maintain two years’ worth of data about my journeys by car, when I have committed no crime?

The individual has innate rights and adopted responsibilities; the state has adopted rights and innate responsibilities. Its rights exist only so long as its legitimacy is maintained, and its legitimacy depends on the consent of the individual: government, by the consent of the governed. Citizens cannot consent to be governed by a body which, at its discretion, gives them the right to make such consent in the first place. That is a nonsense.

Henry Porter made this point, among others, in his recent evidence to the Joint Committee on Human Rights last week. It’s a great essay, absolutely worth reading. Go!

*Ok: that’s not true. We could start with “Gillian McKeith Rules” and move swiftly on to “nothing to hide…”

You know how sometimes you see a news story and your brain just revolts? When the sheer, cretinous absurdity of something just wells up and overcomes the faculties?

This initiative, to protect those who cannot concurrently walk and chew gum, exists to erect padding on lamposts, so that people walking into them don’t get a bump.

If this were an actual problem, which Harry doubts, his solution would be far simpler. He would erect signs in the affected areas:

The capacity of this government to come up with ideas so bad, so damaging to personal liberty that you just want to scream, is astonishing.

The latest idea to emanate from the Home Office is that drug dealers’ assets should be seized on arrest, rather than on prosecution. Presumably, this suggestion is motivated by the realisation that the ARA’s total lack of success can largely be placed at the feet of due process and equality before the law. Having spent £65m recovering £23m of criminal assets, it’s understandable that they’re a little ticked off.

It’s easy to see the next bit of the story. Rich criminals with lots of money can afford to hire rich lawyers and accountants to hide their assets and generally screw up the government’s plans. It’s clearly better simply to steal money from people who are arrested, most of whom will not be wealthy and will thus be considerably less likely to be able to defend themselves. Excellent: this will make the job of our friends the ARA much easier. No more need for lawyers and courts, we can simply take the gains of suspects, presumed without evidence to be ill-gotten, and bank them for the common good. Huzzah!

The real agenda here is clear:

The new strategy will widen what can be seized and scrap the 12-year limit within which recovery proceedings must be taken.

The government aims to recover £250m a year from criminals by 2010.

Given that they’re currently running at a £43m deficit, they have to get more money somehow, and robbing the poor is a time-tested way to do it. Smith assures us, graciously, that they will give assets back to anyone found to be “completely innocent”.

Well that’s OK then.

Over the last few months I’ve been working on a site to index government consultations and present them centrally, so that you can search them, subscribe to email alerts for new consultations, and get juicy feeds for your reader.

The site went live a couple of weeks ago and has been attracting an unexpected, but entirely welcome, amount of attention!

If you’re interested in consultations — or if you think you could be — have a peep at TellThemWhatYouThink.org, and let me know your thoughts.

Charlie McCreevy, the EU’s Internal Market Commissioner, has announced that he will push for the commission to extend the term of copyright afforded to musical performances from 50 to 95 years. This is even more fuckwitted than such proposals generally are, given that his own directorate says that term extension doesn’t make sense.

More locally, the Gowers Review also recommended against term extension. In fact, no one really thinks term extension is a good idea except Cliff Richard and his ilk, who should resume rolling in the piles of cash that they already have, and stop trying to rob the public domain.

To make clear his bulging fuckwittedness, I present his argument verbatim:

I have not seen a convincing reason why a composer of music should benefit from a term of copyright which extends to the composer’s life and 70 years beyond, while the performer should only enjoy 50 years, often not even covering his lifetime. It is the performer who gives life to the composition and while most of us have no idea who wrote our favourite song – we can usually name the performer.

This is classic argument from ignorance. He’d have to be blinkered or stupid not to notice the convincing reasons all about him, not to mention the ones produced by his own organisation. To claim that the term of protection for recordings should be ridiculously long merely because the term for literary works is also ridiculously long is asinine.

A petition has been set up to ask the prime minister to oppose any changes.

This story in the Telegraph reports that the police were banned, during their recent demonstration, from marching through Parliament Square:

Although they have been banned from marching through Parliament Square, they will vent their spleen by walking past the Marsham Street offices of Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary.

Harry wonders why this condition was imposed. It can’t have been SOCPA, before anyone says that, because, although the act requires potential malcontents to request authorisation to demonstrate, it does not permit the police to refuse permission. This, then, must have been a restriction imposed under the Public Order Act 1986. Unfortunately, the POA does not require the police to give reasons for imposing conditions upon protests. It merely requires that they have a “reasonable belief” that conditions are necessary.

This system does not provide enough protection against abuse. It is not transparent or accountable. It should be changed: it is one of the things I included in my response to the consultation on protest around Parliament that concluded last month.

If they won’t let thousands of Police officers near Parliament, what hope is there for the rest of us?

Harding, a long time supporter of Proportional Representation, reports that Labour have finally reneged completely on their ‘97 manifesto commitment to hold a general referendum on election reform, calling it “the last nail in British democracy”. Frankly, this strikes me as a confirmation of the obvious: in reality, they reneged long ago, making it one of the first nails that Labour have driven, wilfully, blindly and without remorse, into the coffin of British democracy.

In any event, this is an unsurprising development. Harding has claimed that PR would lock out Tory MPs forever, giving Labour more control, and that it is therefore in their own interest. It seems to me that the best way for Labour to stay in power is to clean up its act: stop bashing civil liberties, stop treating “database” and “solution” as synonyms, stop stripping professionals of their discretion, stop nanny statism: essentially, stop being authoritarian control freaks. It is these things that erode their majority, and adopting PR will not stop the rot. They need to change their ways, and as Barak Obama said recently, and rousingly, change happens from the bottom up: not the top down. That is a lesson that Westminster would do well to learn.

For the record, I’m not sure what I think of PR. I’m quite certain that FPTP is terrible, but what to replace it with is a difficult question.

Geeklawyer picked up the excellent news that Court of Appeal has overturned the convictions of several young men who downloaded extremist material from the internet.

The ruling means that the prosecution will now have to prove intent as well as proving that illicit material was downloaded. This, frankly, is just so obvious that it beggars belief that it wasn’t in the 2000 Act.

The CPS, in their wisdom, are considering whether to appeal: one hopes that they are flogging a dead horse, but unfortunately one can never be sure.

This story is a perfect illustration of the stupidity of the Police’s current DNA retention policy.

The story is pretty simple: someone mistook a man’s MP3 player for a pistol (I’ll leave aside that that’s probably really stupid…) and called the police. Armed police then arrested the man, placed him in custody and took his DNA and fingerprints. As soon as the mistake was uncovered, the man was released and the police apologised.

So far, so good. These things happen; it’s unfortunate but unavoidable. His DNA and fingerprints, however, will be retained, along with a file noting that he was arrested on suspicion of a firearms offence. This is not good at all.

It is, in fact, really bad. It’s manifestly illiberal, but also bad on entirely practical grounds: it clutters their database with useless records. A clean database full of the DNA of criminals is clearly a useful resource; a messy database full of the DNA of everyone you happen to meet is much less useful. It increases the chances of obtaining false positives and creates additional, spurious leads that must then be followed up by officers. This is all the more true when techniques with errors rates known to be high, like low copy number testing, are used.

Civil liberties concerns aside, there might an argument in favour of adding the DNA of people you strongly suspect but cannot prove to have committed an offence — but adding the DNA of those who are clearly innocent is just eye-rollingly stupid.

Fucking stupid.

End of post.