Hang The Jury

let’s hope this attack on the War on Drugs has more success than my own feeble efforts, which included my attempt to promote the same tactic back in 1999.

The novel angle here is the focus – inspired, apparently, by Michelle Alexander’s “New Jim Crow” – on the Black American community, whose males are, on average, over 600% more likely to end up in prison than their white compatriots. The vast majority of the difference is made up for by imprisonment for the victimless political “crime” of drug possession which, incidentally, they are “guilty” of at about the same rate as their white male counterparts. Who said Justice was colour-blind?

I have long wondered why this overt judicial racism hasn’t already led to a massive insurgency from within the black community. Even today the causes of the next American civil war look far more likely to emerge from the lunatic right-wing Tea Party than the genuinely oppressed black community. But perhaps web sites like this show that, at last, the worm may be beginning to turn…

Heather Brooke’s Successful battle to expose political corruption

I concur…

Heather Brooke’s Homepage

Why We Fight (Eugene Jarecki)

depressing to find that this has just 5 “likes” on Stumbleupon and has only been viewed 80,125 times on youtube despite having been available, free, for over a year. This degree of apathy explains how they continue to get away with it. They are immune because “We The People” are indifferent. Sad, sad, sad…

The History Of Digital Telepathy

I know this won’t be the first time you’ve heard it, but on this day, of all days, we are entitled to remind ourselves, with a certain amount of mutual back slapping, that we are living in the first period in recorded history in which there has been no verifiable armed conflict between nation states anywhere on planet Earth, for more than a decade. In some quarters there are even nervous whispers that it might, at last, be safe to come out from under the bed. John Lennon’s dream may have come true. War – as “diplomacy by other means” – may finally be consigned to human history.

It is easily the most far-reaching and widely accepted benefit of the digital telepathy we now take for granted so perhaps it’s worth briefly reviewing the history of how we got where we are today.

Step 1 – The Smart-Phone
Scholars argue that the demand-driver for DT were the antique smart-phones we see proudly displayed in p-resin as antiques in many modern homes today. They were the first platform which made ubiquitous conversation possible. The ease with which they integrated into the emerging online infrastructure of social networking and video sharing made it trivial, in turn, for the ubiquitous conversation to become the universal conversation, where we could all, for the first time in our history, begin to share in real-time, events happening to ordinary citizens around the world. The appetite for this connectivity had never been anticipated, not even by the world’s most imaginative science fiction writers. Smart-phones and the early web not only generated that appetite but, given the limits of early 21st Century technology, made a pretty good stab at satisfying it. But what those prototypes really did was to illustrate the desire for something much more complete.

Historically we recognise that the transition from a global economy based on profit, to one based on utility was well under way by the early 21st century. As Sarah Klein puts it in her award-winning “From Money to Merit”:

“While we can clearly see that commercial organisations continued to dominate innovation in (capital-intensive) hardware, the clear majority of important innovations in software, even before the inception of the Web, came from the Open Source movement, which made most of their product available at no cost to the consumer. The most important, of course, being the effective cryptography, on which modern society depends” (GooLit, 2053)

Credit must be given, however grudgingly, to the late capitalist compulsion to pursue profits, if necessary even by generating new markets – with their knack for “creating the solution to no known problem”. Selfish though such motivation usually was, there can be no denying the effect it had on technological innovation. Although we now recognise software to be the more important component of our socio-economic infrastructure, that software needed the hardware to run on. Like it or not, the greedy capitalists did far more than socially focussed collectivists to make that happen. Without the combination, however, today’s prosperous, healthy, peaceful and money-free society simply wouldn’t have been possible. So despite their overall brutality, we have a lot to thank the Capitalists for. They got things done. And when their time was over, unlike the Authoritarians who depended on their support, they had the good grace to sink relatively peaceably back into society with no hard feelings between us.

Some argue that the vital step towards DT was the first smart-phone implant (remember the “Mind-Phone”? – you won’t find many of those hanging on living room walls!) and there is no denying that it had enormous consequences. On the road to DT, it was, for a start, the first time you could make contact with someone just by thinking their tag. But it was the effect it had on social control which scores much higher in my analysis.

Step 2 – Citizen Surveillance v Privacy
To begin with, even though it was now simpler than ever to communicate, privately or publicly, with any other similarly connected individual, that first generation of mind-phone users were no more likely to communicate with their fellow early adopters, than they had been as smart-phone users. What had much more dramatic impact was the routine and effortless ability to record, privately and securely, anything and everything they did or witnessed. Being able just to think “store that” rather than dig a phone out of a pocket, unlock it and press a few buttons, made recording so easy that it became the default. Combined with pre-capture and growing memory capacity, it became easier to record virtually every waking moment – and perhaps discard the mundane or unwanted – than try to anticipate what might be worth recording and run the risk of missing it. With trusted time-stamps and hash-indexing against secure auditing databases it became trivial to retrieve forensic quality evidence of any arbitrary event from your own past with verifiable accuracy – provided only that you’d bothered to store it. And it being so effortless, why wouldn’t you?

Initially no one perceived its significance. It merely expanded the opportunities for egocentric adolescents to make fools or heroes of themselves and publicise their antics on the early attempts at digital sharing (remember “Facebook” and “YouTube”? Those were the days!) Scandalous headlines arose fairly quickly, when one or two (thousand) “minders” abused the technology to record and then playback intimate sexual encounters or other sensitive private moments without the informed consent of the other parties. That kind of abuse encouraged the widespread adoption of privacy locks, so that any such recording could only be shared if it was unlocked with keys belonging to all parties present at the original recording. Indeed, until the invention of the mindlock, locked data couldn’t even be replayed internally by the record holder unless the relevant parties pooled their keys.

Then came the question of how to deal with either tragic or sinister situations. Democratic random key distribution and trusted key escrow systems took care of those issues. In the tragic scenario, the individual’s own nominated trusted key holders could recreate the missing keys if death or serious incapacity was medically certified and at least 75% of them agreed that key assembly was necessary and appropriate. In the sinister scenario, like suspected rape or murder, where a suspect perpetrator chose to with-hold their keys and their trusted key-holders also refused to co-operate, the keys were constructed so that any 750, out of a thousand randomly selected citizens could – if persuaded that there was a strong enough case – reassemble the missing keys from their own copies of the distributed key store. Today, of course, we require 900, but, for its day, that degree of democratic control was almost revolutionary.

On its own, though, it was not enough to produce the legal and social revolution which knocked away a major pillar of the Authoritarianism that still ruled humankind in the 3rd decade of this century.

Step 3 – The Legal Victories
The first few successful prosecutions of corrupt or bullying police officers and politicians – made possible by evidence gathered beyond their control and beyond reasonable dispute – didn’t have as much impact as you might have expected. Again, it seemed like only a small step from the same kind of exposures produced by the already widespread digital sharing that had kicked off “citizen journalism” at the tail-end of the previous century. But as the numbers of such incidents began to grow in the typical “successful market” exponential manner, the consciousness began to rise – simultaneously within the citizenry and the authoritarians – that, largely due to the massively improved verifiability of the stored content, it was becoming increasingly difficult for the bullies to hold sway.

What the authorities hadn’t anticipated was that the same cryptographic protections which were essential to protecting individuals from illicit access to their thoughts (which were, of course, accessible by the implants) would prove so valuable in validating any claims made by those individuals in respect of evidence gathered in the routine recording of their daily lives. The crypto protocols didn’t just protect, they forensically validated every transaction and recording that they protected. Their audit trail was bullet proof and beyond reasonable challenge.

By the time some of the more extreme authoritarians woke up to the threat and tried to outlaw the technology in a belated attempt to hold back the tide, it was already becoming almost impossible to detect that an individual even had an implant; particularly after the introduction of the first generation of biological implants genetically configured to operate within the brainstem. And it became increasingly implausible, in the light of all the obvious crime it was detecting – and thus deterring – to argue that citizens shouldn’t avail themselves of this growing benefit. Many authorities pointlessly tried shielding their own contacts with the citizens, which only affected the ability to stream data in real-time – which nobody with their head screwed on ever attempted because it immediately made the implant eminently detectable. It had no impact, however, on our ability to record, with trusted timestamps and hash-chains, at either end of a shielded session, and thus to verify our account of the session, to the rest of the world on demand.

If they knew you had an implant, the more corrupt authorities even tried to use the privacy locks to their own advantage. In the guise of offering the victim their own trusted record, they insisted that all mutual sessions be recorded but privacy locked. If the victim subsequently complained, the authority would routinely try to hide behind its own absolute right to privacy. They would, occasionally, even attempt denial that any contact had taken place. It took them a while to understand that although they do not reveal content, time-stamped and shared privacy locks can easily be used to prove that contact had taken place between the sharers, and the routine authoritarian refusal to unlock audit trails covering disputed events made it increasingly obvious they were lying or abusing their authority. Of course, once the victim was arrested and able to prove the privacy lock times and locations, such authorities then found themselves bound by the rules of disclosure and though they often managed to persuade a judge that executive privilege was justified, they also often failed. And the more often they failed, the more likely it became that some other judge or jury would see through their naive pretences. Eventually it became abnormal for their pleas to succeed.

It was very entertaining to witness the Authoritarians’ own long time mantra coming back to bite them: “If you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear” had been their excuse for the authoritarian surveillance they had increasingly imposed, without consent, on a pliant society. How could they possibly argue against our recording what went on when they dealt with us? And how could they defend not revealing the content of those recordings?

Step 4 – The State Found Guilty of Murder
But what really mobilised the masses was when it became widely understood that citizens with implants could not just win any “your word against mine” argument over trivial disputes with friends, colleagues and family, but could fairly easily prove themselves innocent against even the most the malicious charges of a corrupt authority, however much tax-funded effort they put in to framing their victim.

The infamous case of Wilson v the United States is the pivotal case every student learns about and which exposed the levels of corruption endemic in the so-called Justice system. The police, under the direct instructions of a political aide (Adrian White) to the then Vice President (Joanne Schwarzewild), and with the explicit knowledge of the Attorney General (Carlos Martinez), were shown conclusively to have planted evidence and commissioned witness testimony with the corrupt and direct intent to convict an innocent student – David Wilson – in order to conceal the part played by the FBI in the assassination of the wife (Carole) of a Republican Senator (Alan Liebowitz) who had inconveniently caught said Senator cheating on her in an election year. Unfortunate timing on both sides.

Not only was the student able to prove his own alibi by giving a comprehensive and indisputable record of his movements and location during a critical 14 hour period, but, following his arrest, he endured the routine “legal” blackmail session known as “plea bargaining”. They didn’t know he was implanted and he captured virtual admissions by the police interrogators and prosecutors that he was being set up as a Patsy, that he had “no chance of beating the State machine that you’re up against and your own best interests would be served by admitting guilt even though we all know you didn’t do it”.

The political clincher was the testimony provided by a White House secretary, Marion Downey, present during a conversation in which the Vice President casually made it clear to the Chief of Staff (Sydney Walden) that the suitable target had been found. The VP informed the Chief of Staff that David Wilson regularly earned a bit of extra cash tending the extensive gardens of the Senator’s New England Mansion on Saturday mornings. He could be put in the right place at the right time.

Downey didn’t take much notice at the time because she misunderstood it as a trivial domestic arrangement for the Senator’s gardening requirements. It was only when the Senator’s murdered wife popped up on all the News feeds a couple of weeks later, followed by a startled looking David Wilson being arrested for the murder that she realised she was in possession of incriminating evidence. And for reasons which have been replayed since in a dozen dramatisations of the story, she didn’t much like the VP at the time.

Downey swore testimony and offered to reveal her data to the court but both the Vice President and Chief of Staff pleaded the Fifth and refused to share their privacy-locking keys, citing grounds of “National Security” and “Executive Privilege”; which, for the first time, the entire planet understood to be an inescapable admission of guilt.

The judge (Justice Steven Warren) – clearly part of the conspiracy – tried to rule her testimony invalid and even tried to block the expert testimony of the mathematicians and forensic software consultants who could explain how and why Wilson’s alibi was incontrovertible. Famously the Jury went on strike – together with elements of the local police – who had caught the mood of the masses and refused to make any arrests. The media storm and widespread public protests eventually forced the Government to concede a retrial under the famously incorruptible Justice Mary Elizabeth Sterning.

The technical evidence demonstrated to the court how Wilson’s evidence could not have been spoofed.

The assassin hired by the FBI had killed the Senator’s wife 15 minutes before Wilson was due to report for duty on Saturday morning, expecting him to show up just before the Police snatch squad sent to arrest him with the smoking gun. But he had consumed rather too much alcohol at a Frat party the previous evening and didn’t make it to the Mansion. His ability to prove his movements sunk the prosecution case and under the judge’s direction, the jury gladly, and unanimously, found him not guilty and made their now famous declaration finding “Agents and Agencies of the Government guilty of murder in the first degree, conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and perjury to a degree amounting to Treason against the people of the United States”.

As well as the huge and inevitable political storm this provoked, overnight the American “successful prosecution” rate, always considered as infeasibly high, plummeted as it quickly became clear that a significant percentage of prosecutions were without verifiable foundation and resulted from virtual blackmail in the form of the corrupt plea bargaining system. Outside America the corruption of its judicial system was widely recognised, not least as a result of the direct inverse correlation between the wealth of the defendant and their probability of conviction. But getting Americans to see it with their own eyes was absolutely crucial. Once their authoritarian domino began to wobble, all the others realised the peril that was upon them.

Step 5 – Changing the Game and the Players
Once the chances of successful prosecution against provably innocent victims fell to near zero, the entire plea bargaining system crashed and burned. One after another, juries refused to follow the edicts of obviously corrupt judges and made it impossible to convict the innocent. Honest judges, who fortunately still formed a majority within the judicial system, began rejecting Police evidence routinely unless it was digitally recorded, with trusted time-stamps, on a protected audit trail. The crunch came when the still largely Authoritarian Congress tried to pass new laws, dramatically reducing opportunities for – and the powers reserved for – Trial By Jury. Simultaneously, they tried to mandate trust in Police evidence even when not digitally preserved. Nearly one and a quarter million American Citizens surrounded the Capitol and refused to move until the vote was taken. The Sacking of Congress, which followed the infamous vote is, of course, the day we now all celebrate as the birthdate of our real democracy.

In the famous words (*) of Supreme Court Justice Stephen Pilliakov – the only sitting Supreme to try to fight the State’s attempt at resisting the revolution (and one of the first into the Capitol on that famous Tuesday):

“Yes, it is still necessary, in some circumstances, for society to delegate Authority to public employees but on this historical day we have finally come to terms with Lord Acton’s axiom: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” And at last we have found the solution…

From this day forth, the rule of Law shall be modified thus:

Citizen: Innocent until proved Guilty

Authority: Guilty until proved innocent.”

Beyond the criminals in Authority, it became effectively impossible for criminals in the wider world to know – in advance of their attack – whether or not someone was capable of recording their attacks, so once the adoption rate passed the critical mass of about 25%, it rapidly became too dangerous for most attackers to take the risk. Of course, if you actually intended to kill the target, it was still relatively simple to arrange a murder before the victim’s sensors could identify the attacker, for example using a sniper rifle at distance, but almost all other attacks became too costly to the attacker. And once the technology adoption rate achieved the 95% level, the ability to track down attackers purely by a process of elimination became feasible and crime fell to the levels it still sits at today where Murder and Rape are now so rare that each one becomes a sensation for a few weeks after it is uncovered.

Step 6 – Making Public Lies Impossible
The next major enhancement was AAI – Augmented Artificial Intelligence. Some of us are old enough to remember its humble beginnings as a simple audio-visual prompt which would remind users of the name of that acquaintance you’d bumped into in the street. You’d only met them once, and that was a few months back. It was so damn useful to have that name and bio prompt and be able to greet each other, convincingly, like old friends!

But then AAI’s language and context recognition skills began to be turned in another direction. RTFM – Real Time Fact Monitoring – was the killer app that did for Authoritarianism what that prehistoric asteroid collision did for the Dinosaurs. Their use of covert and overt violence to control the population had already been made untenable by the citizen surveillance arraigned against them. Now it became increasingly impossible for them to control any part of the political messaging system unless it genuinely fitted the facts.

At first it was a tool for the satirists. They’d replay a political speech but with the AAI analysis showing up as subtitles. We all smirked as politician after politician was shown to be misinformed, prejudiced, selective, manipulative, superstitious or lying. Bigoted journalists, exaggerating CEOs, Evangelist millionaire ministers and a host of other routine social parasites were all publicly exposed in the same way.

It quickly became obvious that the game was up. No public statement, nor even a private one – if if was based on facts in the public domain – could be made without the increasingly infallible RTFM flagging up all attempts at deceit and manipulation. Dishonest politicians, in particular, found it impossible to continue their centuries old tactics and quickly became unelectable. And although it took a full fifteen more years for the effects of RTFM to sweep the planet, and one or two regimes fought to the literal bitter death, Authoritarianism died, not so peacefully, on January 5 2058, with the public hanging of Iran’s “Guardian Council”.

And as we all know, we’ve seen massive drops in crime against the person, mirrored around the world, and despite the on-going genuine conflicts which continue to exist between citizen and citizen, between State and citizen and between State and State, since that date there hasn’t been a single day of armed conflict between any two or more member States of the United Nations. It seems that once it became impossible to lie to each other about anything which could be instantly fact-checked or, if necessary, remotely or citizen surveilled, wars become essentially impossible to create.

This year, as multiple celebrations are regularly reminding us, is the centenary of the recognised starting point of the digital age – January 1 1970. And today is specifically the 50th anniversary of that first smart-phone implant on April 1 2020 – the birthdate of Digital Telepathy.

I give you “Happy D Day”

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*Pilliakov’s speech in Context:

“Yes, it is still necessary, in some circumstances, for society to delegate Authority to public employees but on this historical day we have finally come to terms with Lord Acton’s axiom: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” And at last we have found the solution.

From this day forward, let it be known to anyone aspiring to the exercise of Authority in this land: if ever you are delegated powers to act on our behalf, you shall be assumed fully accountable for every second of your life while you remain in office and, if appropriate, for a number of years before and after you leave office.

What this means in practice is very simple. Should you be accused of any crime or misdemeanour, in contrast to the Citizen, whose innocence will continue to be assumed until a Jury can be persuaded otherwise, the starting point for anyone in Authority is the exact opposite. Your guilt shall be assumed unless a Jury can be persuaded otherwise.

For some years, a growing number of ordinary citizens, now constituting a large majority of the population, have, for a wide variety of their own purposes, voluntarily and routinely captured comprehensive detail about own their lives; so comprehensive, that some innocent citizens have famously defeated the infamous attempts by a corrupt State and corrupt judicial system to continue their embedded practice of widespread judicial blackmail and tens of thousands of false imprisonments.

That same technology shall, in future, be deployed to further protect the Citizen from rogue Authority. Unlike ordinary citizens, for whom the adoption and precise use of such technology will always remain optional, if you are appointed to a position of Authority, it is, hereafter, a condition of your employment in such a post, not only that you be monitored by the technology, but for that monitoring to be provably continuous.

You shall record your every move, your every conversation, your every heartbeat. They shall remain just as private and secure as the data stored voluntarily by private citizens. But unlike the private citizen, about whom there can never be certainty about what data they have captured and chosen to archive, the world will know that you are legally obliged to possess your own digital record of any disputed event.

The world will thus know that, if you are innocent, you will be able prove it, just as thousands of innocent citizens have managed to do themselves, even under direct attack by the Authorities and Rules which were supposed to exist to protect them. Under these circumstances, it is, of course, reasonable, should you be accused of anything untoward, that you are given the opportunity to prove yourself innocent. But should you choose not to present such evidence, even if you claim that the evidence has been destroyed, or that a system failure prevented storage, your guilt shall be formally confirmed.

From this day forth, the rule of Law shall be modified thus:

Citizen: Innocent until proved Guilty

Authority: Guilty until proved innocent.”

The Growing Wealth Gap in America and Around the World

Like me, I suspect most of you were already aware of the facts presented in this video, but I doubt you’ve ever seen such a devastatingly simple and effective presentation of those facts. I certainly haven’t. The only thing I would add is that viewers should remember that this picture of America is broadly true of the world at large. Over the last few decades, the global ruling class have ALL massively increased their wealth while those they rule have all suffered significant reductions in their own standard of living

Congratulations! You’re This Week’s Lucky Winner…

The first major breach in the Police State?

The American Judicial System might be about to demonstrate that it isn’t completely broken. A Federal Judge has just had the balls to speak Truth to Power. A major plank of the USA PATRIOT Act has just been struck down and ruled unconstitutional. Which bit? The totalitarian rule they made to protect themselves from public scrutiny; the bit which gives the FBI and other security related organs of the State, the right to issue “National Security Letters” (NSLs). Yeah, that bit.

(In passing, why did I spot this first on The Register? This is historic news the mainstream media should be bleating from the rooftops. Just did a google for ["national security letters" unconstitutional] and the only “mainstream” entity on the first result page was this Fox News coverage! Who said the Americans don’t do irony?)

You tend to get one or more of these letters if you run any decent sized organisation in the United States. They are unethical, illicit and intrusive demands for information about a citizen; ostensibly on the grounds that there is good reason to believe that the citizen may be pursuing some kind of activity of which We disapprove. Oh, and if you ever get one of these letters, you’re not allowed to tell the “target” citizen, or anyone else, ever.

“We”, they would like us to believe, being “We The People”.

And if the relevant activities being enquired about were exclusively those which aided or abetted military attacks (from any source) on civilians (in any location) there is no doubt that We The People would approve of such well targeted surveillance and would expect to see evidence for this focussed diligence on our behalf in the form of steadily diminishing military attack on civilians. At the risk of stating the bleedin’ obvious, we do not see any such evidence.

What we see are increasingly widespread brutal paranoia among governments. You can create your own league table but China and the USA are both Premier League teams, converging on the same level of pseudo-liberty. We are all gradually being pulled back towards Roman Law.

Wot that?

Roman Law is the historical precedent and basis of so-called “Civil Law” under which it is held that Laws don’t exist unless explicitly created by the Civil Authority. In contrast, UKUSA law is based on the “Common Law” tradition where we make it up as we go along. Neither is perfect, obviously. But the notion that Law doesn’t exist until a properly constituted authority creates it might look eminently sensible. But its real meaning, or at least interpretation by the relevant Civil Authorities, has always been sinisterly nuanced.

Rule One was that, as a citizen, you are obliged to act, at all times, within the law. The absence of a law did not, as you might naively expect, confer liberty. By definition, if you were acting in some way not already described by the law, you could not possibly be acting within it and were, therefore, in breach of Rule One.

This elegant totalitarian concept – that ALL action is forbidden unless I Caesar permit it – is beautifully efficient as a control mechanism. It means you can arrest and prosecute citizens on a whim. Virtually every second of the day you are bound to be doing something I Caesar have not explicitly permitted. For example, I didn’t give you permission to think what you just thought.

Roman Law hasn’t died out. It’s been kind of absorbed and blended with the less authoritarian, but often equally arbitrary, Common Law tradition that we “enjoy” in UKUSA. That’s supposed to mean that unless behaviour is explicitly forbidden by the Civil Authority, then it’s permitted.

Problem with that – if you’re a Civil Authoritarian with Totalitarian tendencies – is that too many damn citizens want to do too many things that I Caesar (elect) disapprove. They want to enjoy themselves, for example, in all sorts of ways that we can’t possibly permit. Buggers want sex all the time. Not to mention Drugs and Rock And Roll. Some of them even want to undermine our right to rule! Which is why we’ve been obliged to create this massive list of prohibited behaviours.

How they get away with it is the interesting bit. Chances are you wouldn’t be reading this if you weren’t already familiar with much of the explanation for that so I’m not going to teach you to suck eggs. But on the off-chance that these thoughts are new to you, you could do worse that starting with the Manufacturing of Consent.
No, I’m afraid it’s not an exciting video, just informative.

We The People will, of course, endorse a certain number of Prohibitions. Who doesn’t agree with the prohibition of Murder? Rape? Violence against the Person? Theft? Fraud? and a few other obviously antisocial activities we all wish to abolish. Deliberate or negligent harm to a third-party, without their informed and freely given consent, is universally recognised as criminal.

All other prohibitions are steps towards Roman Law. The more they can get away with forbidding, the greater their chances of arresting you on a whim. The greater the chance that you will have been doing something explicitly illegal sometime in the immediate past or present.

This will become especially relevant when they start including Thought Crime – which they are increasingly nudging towards both here in the UK and, of course, over there in the USA. It is, of course, long-established tradition in China and a few other places.

After all, what human has never contemplated an illegal act? Most admit to having at least wanted to murder at least one other person at least once in their lives. Reckon I’m up to a couple of hundred myself. Including a large number of senior American and one or two senior British Politicians.

I guarantee there are people employed to look out for sentences like the two previous; and to make some kind of judgement as to whether such sentiments constitute a “Terrorist Threat”. And I guarantee some of them will conclude that it does. They’re the sort of people who send out NSL letters. (or spend four weeks looking for the author of a Facebook quip about wanting to “Egg Cameron” [added 25/3/2013])

They, at least, will see this legal judgement as marking a very sad day for their cause.

For the rest of us, it’s high fives all round…

Motes, Beams, Rape n stuff…

This may be the first time I’ve quoted something from the bible in support of one of my own arguments but it is particularly apt:

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? (Matthew 7:3)

The author of this strange Alternet piece tries to argue that the current Indian “rage against women” – as evidenced by the sudden rash of rape stories – is a result of their social evolution gradually changing the gender roles and balance of power, to the benefit of women, which, consequently represents a threat to the male ego and their sense of god given authority.

Their argument would be somewhat more plausible if the actual rate of rape in India was spectacularly above the global norm. In fact, as anyone can find out for themselves just by googling “rape rates statistics” , the Indian rape rate (1.8 per 10,000 population) is considerably lower (one fourteenth ish) of the USA or UK rape rates (27.3 and 28.8 respectively)

The statistic I found most surprising, however, was the rate for that bastion of gender equality, Sweden, where, apparently women are raped at more that twice the rate of either the UK or USA, which means something over 30 (three zero) times as often as their oppressed sisters in India.

Of course, the Swedish statistics might be somewhat skewed by the fact that they treat failure to use a condom as rape, even if the sex was consensual (hence Julian Assange’s present difficulties). Clearly the rape story is somewhat more complex than the author’s kneejerk analysis. But the real scandal is that the vastly greater prevalence of rape in our “civilised” countries attracts far less attention than we are seeing over a couple of gory stories and politically incorrect comments from India…

“Anonymous” Takes Aim At The Wrong Target

I’ve only just stumbled across it but a few months back, Anonymous issued some bizarre guidance on avoiding face recognition technology:

For a bunch of skilled hackers, they’re being oddly naive. Every single countermeasure they suggest will be defeated by the authoritarians within a few months or, at most, a few years. Tilting your head more than fifteen degrees is one of the more ludicrous examples. First off, although the software might currently have a little difficulty spotting a face at that angle, to a human observer, such behaviour would stick out like a sore thumb and prompt much more detailed attention. But, in any case, it’s not going to take them a huge amount of time to improve the software to the point where it’ll easily recognise a face even if it’s carried under your arm and upside down!

And “so what?” if they have difficulty spotting your face? They’re already working on things like gait recognition (even from satellites ferchissake!) and earlobe recognition not to mention the FBI’s well advanced research into the use of voice recognition for both surveillance and forensic purposes, which, given their already illegal but ongoing (and ignored by congress) practice of warrantless wiretapping, and the medieval law they’ve passed which allows them to detain citizens indefinitely without trial (habeas corpus? habeas bollocks!). Or the recent acknowledgement of the growing use of Drones to watch their own citizens. Or the (previously) secret Trapwire program itself – which raised the face recognition issue in the first place but goes much deeper and wider than that – and so on and so on…

Are we smelling the coffee yet? Do you really think that pulling a few ridiculous stunts to make face recognition a little more awkward is any part of the solution? If so, I fear you don’t yet understand the true scale of the problem.

What we’re up against here is the most powerfully equipped authoritarian menace in human history. These people make the STASI look like well-meaning amateurs. They are enthusiastically creating the infrastructure required to police a Totalitarian State in which your every movement, contact and, ultimately every belief and even thought can be logged, analysed and risk assessed with a view to “mitigation”.

One of the few things we’ve still got going for us is that they haven’t yet figured out a way to hide the consequences of (some of) their actions or their involvement. As a result they still feel a trifle constrained to operate within some kind of limitations which would pass, at least, the rigorous investigative probing of the “Journalists” at Fox News. That gives them a fair amount of leeway but god help us if they ever turn nasty.

The solution to this problem is not to confront the enemy in the battlefield of their own choosing. This war requires the classic strategy of the martial artist. We need to use the enemy’s energy against them. For example, at least 1% of those in sensitive posts will be as horrified as we are about the increasing tyrannical nature and potential of the activities they are engaged in. We need to ensure they have secure channels through which to leak the crucial evidence. And if and when we ever win this war, we need to reward and honour those who had the courage to blow the whistles when it most mattered.

I’ve been blathering on for some years now about the (increasing) need for a Trusted Surveillance program which will wrest control from the Authoritarians by making them genuinely and unavoidably accountable. Here, for example, is part 1 (all 8 parts are on youtube) of my 2007 attempt to explain how it might work in the context of the prescient movie “Enemy Of The State” (the movie was made back in 1998 – so this isn’t just a post 9-11 problem)

Implementing Trusted Surveillance will be partly technical and partly political. It requires the abolition of many existing laws and the implementation of new ones. Some of the new laws are genuinely revolutionary and we can expect major resistance from all parts of all establishments as they fight to maintain their hold on power. But, as I hint in various places, the battle we are now engaged in is the final battle for the human soul. It will determine whether, in the coming centuries, our species consists of largely free individuals or regimented hordes required to conform to and service the demands of their rulers.

A battle on this scale requires much more than brute force (which, in any case, the enemy has a near monopoly on, despite the relaxed gun laws in the USA). It requires creative intelligence, in which weapons such as subversion, satire and sedition will play a much greater role than bombs and bullets. We need to make the enemy a laughing-stock. We need to get to the point where even the most ignorant sheep-like citizens are too embarrassed to support their patronizing shepherds. In this regard, the likes of Jon Stuart and Stephen Colbert are every bit as important as, say, Wikileaks and whistleblowing.

I may, of course, be wrong in every detail of my proposals but I am utterly certain that I am at least focussed on the right target and that the problem is every bit as far-reaching as I describe in my various rantings. So if you don’t agree with my solution, fine, but you’d better start coming up with an alternative while we’ve still got the freedom and scope to implement it. Meanwhile remember:

Citizen – Innocent Until Proved Guilty
Authority – Guilty Until Proved Innocent

Recording Police is a Dangerous but Necessary Thing to Do – Viral Video

The commentary in the video includes a demand for police to be obliged to video all their interactions. I first tried to promote that idea back in 2007 and it’s taken this long for me to find someone else arguing for it. Unlike my feeble effort, however, this one has already gone viral. Oh, and apologies for the pointless noise pollution of uninvited background music. I think they must have intended to do a rap commentary but Cam’ron was double booked or something…

Oh yeah; Happy New Year to all my readers. May you both live long and prosper.

Remember:
Citizen – Innocent Until Proved Guilty
Authority – Guilty Until Proved Innocent

One Law For The Rich

The sheer brazen effrontery of this corruption is breathtaking. Not just the banks’ corruption (15 years – in the case of HSBC – of criminal money laundering for drug cartels and terrorist groups) but the State corruption in the form of the decision that banks like HSBC are “too big to prosecute”. Oh, and don’t forget to ask yourself the routine question: why are you having to watch this on The Real News rather than mainstream media?

Few, if any, events in recorded history have so clearly illustrated not just the gap between the elite rich and the rest of us, but even the illegitimate means by which they are permitted and even helped to maintain their illicit advantages over civil society.

ANY criminal prosecuted, from now on, in any country where trial by jury is the norm, should now argue – direct to the jury – that whatever crime they are accused of cannot possibly be as serious as what the banks have been allowed to get away with for decades and that, if the banks can be let off with a token fine (less than a day’s profit), there can be no ethical case for any lesser prosecutions. Judges and prosecutors will, of course, try to resist that argument, but let’s see what the Juries decide…

I Was a Teen Conservative: How I Learned That Life Is Too Complex for Right-Wing Ideology | Alternet

I didn’t expect to get much from this Alternet article. but I was pleasantly surprised. Like some critics are saying about the new Hobbit movie, the slow start might put you off, but it's worth sticking with.

It is the "confession" of a one time freedom-loving Republican "conservative" who, as a teenager in the 60s, worshipped Barry Goldwater (whose attitudes then were close to Ron Paul's today) and thought he represented mainstream Republican ideals. Gradually, over the ensuing decades he realised that if that ever had been true, it was becoming less and less valid as time marched on.

Even as a 14 year old he had to swallow hard to accept Goldwater's opposition to the Civil Rights bill that finally made racial discrimination illegal. But the first major game-changer was the infamous Kent State massacre where students were gunned down by the National Guard while protesting, peacefully, against the Vietnam War:

To a Jeffersonian, the brandishing of state power in order to conscript people to fight in a faithless conflagration and then to oppress the right of assembly stipulated by the First Amendment was repellent.

He watched with growing alarm as the definition of “leftist insurrection” became protest against the war or in support of civil rights and, crucially (for students of the rise of American Authoritarianism) how the previous Republican focus on Liberty switched to Control:

…while the Jeffersonian conservatism that I signed up for gave the benefit of the doubt to freedom, a new conservatism now chose order.

Reagan’s 1980 election set the new trend in concrete and the Police State put down firm roots:

Under Reagan… the Justice Department paid a purposely ominous attention to what adults read and watched; the war on drugs grew more ruthless; cynicism about science, particularly as it had to do with the environment, grew more pronounced; antagonism to the freedom of women to make choices about their bodies grew more vehement.

He charts how the Republicans overtly sold their soul to Money and made explicit their religiously based control-freakery:

…three impulses distinguished the new right. The first was how the right’s enmity toward centralized state power was matched by an adoration of centralized corporate power. This constituted an abandonment of the principle of a truly free marketplace—with entrepreneurship and the flourishing of small business becoming more constrained and difficult — and the overarching principle of decentralization. The second impulse was the displacement of liberty as conservatism’s core priority by a new priority, “values,” by which the right invariably meant sexual behavior, predominantly the sexual behavior of women and homosexuals. The third new impulse was most profound. This was a reconceptualization of the republic as one in which citizens are bound not by a Constitution in which God isn’t once mentioned, euphemized, or alluded to but by an unwritten Christian covenant that implicitly subjects free will to an organizing ethos that’s unmistakably theocratic. What was a freedom movement became an authority/wealth/religious movement.

And he gained important insights into the poison of “ideology”:

The extent to which ideology hijacks independent thought, refracting an issue through the lens of an already-settled bias, was all the more disturbing for how long it took me to see it. Ideology is pathological: It provides a psychological structure posing as a theoretical one.

Which led to some puzzlement on my own behalf when I read the only thing I could take issue with:

I honestly believe my children are best served by a free politics that needs two wings to stay airborne and a push-me/pull-you tension between what is a right and what is a privilege, what is entitled and what is not, what reasonably progresses and what responsibly conserves

which seems to me to be supporting the very ideological division which he laments in the rest of the article.

Be that as it may, his transition is very similar to my own journey here in the UK. Born into a Daily Mail family where the Labour Party and other potential Socialists were painted as the devil incarnate while the Tories wore the badge as the party of “individual liberty” I dedicated my adolescent political years to the struggle against the march of totalitarianism which, so I had been conditioned to believe, was the inevitable consequence of Communism or Socialism. This was helpfully illustrated by the plainly authoritarian Soviet and Chinese states, together with their slave states in Eastern Europe and their puerile satellites such as Romania, Albania and North Korea. No one with an ounce of libertarianism in their body was going to be following that path in a hurry.

I resolved to become a more effective enemy of Communism by studying it and exposing its philosophical flaws. I got lucky. I bumped into a proper Socialist who educated me more completely than I’d ever anticipated. I still have a soft spot for the Socialist Party of Great Britain as a result. What I learned was “proper” communists were just as outraged as I was by the obvious authoritarianism in the so-called communist states. If anything they were more angry because their true ideology was being so badly tainted by what the totalitarians were doing in their name. The SPGB and a few other genuine socialist parties are as genuinely libertarian as I am. The only reason that I didn’t end up calling myself a socialist was that, when the chips are down, they’re still committed to an “ideology” and have an almost religious faith in the Marxist analysis of Capitalism and its inevitable self-destruction.

While I was still absorbing these new insights, Britain’s own Reaganite came to power in the shape of Margaret Thatcher and Britain started overtly aping the authoritarian progress of our American cousins, at least in economic terms and, of course, the war on drugs.

Fortunately, they’ve never had the constituency to support the development towards Theocracy and though they’ve made occasional attempts to squeeze the homosexual or abortion genies back inside their bottles and dallied with the “values” question, all such attempts have been thwarted, usually as the result of one or more of them being found guilty of some hypocritical breach of such values. The inevitable public ridicule usually forces them to scuttle back underneath their stones and keep stumm. But their attacks on working class organisation, arguably inspired, or at least encouraged, by Reagan’s defeat of the Air Traffic controllers, were hugely successful and their massive increases in Police powers were a sign of things to come.

The biggest difficulty “free thinkers” now face is that the rest of the world still prefers to believe in black and white, right or wrong answers to the complex questions facing humanity. Those of us who have confronted and overcome our childhood conditioning – whether right or left-wing – usually recognise that all the other forms of conditioning are similarly flawed, to the extent that if you still think the answer to any significant political question is even partially provided by a political party, you almost certainly do not understand the question and have little or no chance of arriving at a real answer.

Assassination Politics recruits new high level supporter

this delightfully sinister US Government page doesn’t actually state that they will assassinate any of the high-profile targets named there, but it’s bleedin’ obvious that, should any “tips” they receive lead to locations in the middle of Pakistani, Yemeni or other middle eastern hinterlands conveniently far enough away from journalistic surveillance, they’ll be saying farewell to a few more drones.

I doubt they appreciate the irony of how much their technique resembles Jim Bell’s infamous proposal for controlling the world’s authoritarians and other bullies. The major difference is that the money isn’t put up anonymously by a peeved public but blatantly offered by a State that thinks it can make its own laws whenever appropriate.

And they certainly won’t appreciate or even comprehend why they’re both wrong for exactly the same reasons. And both right.

Assassination is certainly a more humane way to fight war than carpet or chemical bombing. And if the Islamist’s 9-11 attack had merely put bullets through the brains of the leading neo-cons and money-men who had already decided they needed a war, the “terrorists” would have won a lot more respect and a lot less hostility from a grateful world.

I wonder if they’ll pay out on a drone strike…

Conrad Black and The Rule Of Law

Until I watched this interview, I was utterly indifferent to the fate of Conrad Black. Just another rich bastard caught with his hand in the till. Who gives a shit?

Check it out. I promise you will not be disappointed. And then we’ll have a bit of a chat about it…
(Newsnight – 2012-10-22)
Let me say, up front, I have no idea whether Conrad Black is guilty or innocent.

But given this confident and spirited performance, and given that absolutely everything he has to say about the corrupt Prison State of America is pretty easy to validate, I am forced to concede that he is more plausible, by far, than his accusers and moralistic interrogators such as Jeremy Paxman.

As you’ll have noticed if you followed the link, I stopped updating that page in 2007, when it became clear that Obama was about to replace Bush and I foolishly allowed myself to believe that he would – if not sweep away the Police State – at least reverse some of it’s worst excesses. He hasn’t even slowed its progress. Reluctantly I’m going to have to fire it back up one day and add another couple of hundred examples.

Be that as it may, Conrad Black produced such a barnstorming performance that I feel obliged to hedge my bets. ONLY two kinds of individual could have performed like that. Both of them would believe with utter sincerity absolutely everything they are saying. The first would be a complete Sociopath who has no concept of rational ethical analysis and sincerely believes he is right and entitled to behave as he did. The second is genuinely innocent. I leave you to judge which category Black belongs in.

But the vastly more important point is what Paxman appeared to believe was a killer question:

“Do you not think a man who has been found guilty by due process of law ought to be slightly penitent?”

If nothing else, it demonstrates that Paxman himself is a fine actor; probably a key requirement for someone who has to try to pretend to be interested in “balance”.

It was like watching someone to whom it had never occurred that innocent people can EVER (let alone frequently) be found guilty by “due process of Law”. Such innocence is not remotely plausible on the part of a premier league political interviewer. Especially not one who has – for decades – professionally interviewed so many of the participants in so many of the high-profile cases of wrongful conviction and abuse of process that we’ve suffered here in the UK.

He obviously isn’t that naive, but he had to ask the question. Why?

Because, as I wrote only recently in reply to a question on my forum:

Moral Obligation to Obey The Law?
First, most of the laws we all still live under fail the Reciprocity test and thus, to this ethicist at least, remain entirely illicit. Instead of challenging the validity of such laws, moral philosophers have often been the keenest apologists for them. If you need a clearer example of the failure of Moral Philosophy, I can’t think of one.

But second, secular authority has taken its lead from the success of the religious model and routinely frames its edicts as though they are solutions to moral dilemmas. The over-arching meme is the one that tries to portray Obedience To The Law as a moral virtue in its own right. The mere fact that something is a Law is supposed to be enough to give it moral weight. [emphasis added]

It is rare that something happens in the real world (so soon after I’ve written something like that) which illustrates my point so clearly and so powerfully.

I’ll be coming back to this theme from time to time but the question I urge you to consider is this:
We all know that when a dictator wins an “election” with 99% of the vote, that the vote was rigged and the system is corrupt and unfair. But what about the Law? What success rate (for prosecutors) would you expect in a genuinely fair and honest legal system?

Israel Lobbyist in US: We Need a False Flag to Start War with Iran (youtube)

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We’ve seen extraditions to the US for less than this. So how is this legal? Thanks to ScrabbleEddie for sending me to this blogger who provides a bit of background…