Category Archives: Current Affairs

FBI seizes Indymedia server

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I spotted this story last Thursday on Boing Boing, and meant at the time to blog it here as my small contribution to the hue and cry, but didn’t. What finally made me pull out the old finger was spotting the BBC’s coverage of the story which appeared today.

In case you’re not au fait with the story, the basics. Indymedia, an alternative media collective, had a large number of their sites hosted in the UK by a US owned company called Rackspace. Last thursday, Rackspace responded to a court order issued by the FBI and handed over hardware containing the Indymedia sites – obviously removing them from the internet in the process. The exact reasons for this are still unclear but appear to involve the Swiss and Italian authorities and may have something to do with pictures of policemen filming protesters that were posted on one of the sites; the exact legal procedure which enabled it is also somewhat fuzzy. Analysis and speculation can be found at the Register and at Statewatch.

I’m glad to see the story being run by major news organisations like the BBC and the Guardian, even if it did take them a few days to pick it up. The fact the independent news and comment sites can be removed from the web without warning in a western country which supposedly supports freedom of speech and the press is alarming to say the least, even if you’re not overly sympathetic with the general ideological slant on most Indymedia sites. The Reg says it better than I can:

…the procedure ought to send shivers down the spine of every publishing organisation on the Internet. It is clearly perfectly possible for their operations to be crippled without warning, without their being told what it is they’ve done, and without explanation.

Let’s hope this one gets a good airing. It needs it, becasue it smells pretty bad right now, even four days on.

Update 2004-10-14

Electronic Frontier Foundation press release.

Servers are returned by the FBI: BBC, EFF.

Update 2004-10-15

The Register: “Indymedia seizures: a trawl for Genoa G8 trial cover-up?”

Universal healthcare

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Over the last week, the BBC have been making a great deal (press releases: 1, 2, 3, 4) of the results of a poll they comissioned from ICM, the Healthy Britain survey (no direct link to results, at time of writing it hasn’t appeared on the ICM Latest Polls list).

Aside from the fact that I think a lot of this is filler to help pad out a rather slim news agenda at the moment (rather like all the fuss over Alan Milburn’s appointment and the Cabinet reshuffle), and that many of the responses seem to be rather ambiguous, there are some interesting issues raised.

The one that particularly engages me is the renewal of the perennial debate over whether or not people should qualify for free healthcare when they knowingly participate in activities that are detrimental to their health. Two high profile examples cited this week have been smoking and poor diet. My take on this is fairly straitforward and involves asking yourself a couple of simple questions and thinking carefully about the answers.

The NHS is a system of universal healthcare. All citizens pay into the system, and all can call upon it. It goes without saying that some people will take more from the system than others for a huge variety of reasons. The first question you have to ask is whether you want the NHS to continue to be a system that provides care for all our citizens when they need it, or whether you want to start to introduce exceptions.

The UK is a (comparatively) free society. For the most part, lifestyle choices are left up to the individual. The State does interfere in some ways, but fortunately they have not yet begun to dictate our dinner menus. The second question to ask yourself is whether you believe that lifestyle choices should in the main be left up to the individual.

My answers: I want to live in a society where healthcare is a given for all citizens. I instinctively feel that this is a key trait of any truly civilised society – nobody should be left to suffer needlessly. I also want to live in a society that allows it’s citizens as much individual freedom as possible, for similar instinctive reasons (as well as a certain anti-authoritarian streak). One consequence of holding these views is that I have to accept that some people will make choices that mean they place greater demands upon our system of universal healthcare.

Now, I contribute to that system and I’m happy to accept that some people might absorb a bit more of that contribution than others – it’s a consequence of living in a free society. If additional revenue is required to compensate for the impact these behaviours have, then I would argue that taxation on the problem activities is a more acceptable solution that denying people access to healthcare or restricting the people’s freedom.

Fortunately, it seems that the numbers in favour of limiting access to the NHS on this basis were comparatively low, I just thought that I’d add my tuppence anyway. I suppose that I’d better state in public that I am a former smoker, so some might argue that I’m biased. They might be right, but then there’s always the argument that smokers contribute more through taxation than they ever take back to answer (see this BBC report for some figures (admittedly a little out of date): smokers cost the NHS something in the region of £1.4 – 1.7 billion while the Treasury gets somewhere in the region of £8.9 billion in tax revenue from them).

Keep off the grass

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From the BBC:

Political activists opposed to US President George W Bush have been told they will not be allowed to stage a huge rally in New York this weekend.

…

A judge at New York’s state Supreme Court has ruled that the rally, which was expected to attract a quarter of a million demonstrators, cannot be held in Central Park because of the damage which may be caused to the grass.

It appears that a protest march will be allowed past the convention centre on Sunday, so the cries of foul play from the organisers have been somewhat blunted. Still, I thought the reason provided for the ban was in itself a good enough reason for a post – quite surreal.

Update 2004-08-31

It appears that the park ban had little effect on the anti-Bush protests, as evidenced by (among other reports) the BBC’s photographic record of the events.

Elsewhere on the net, the evidence of nerdy influence at the demo is noted, and more evidence of geekish, techie and arty contributions to antiBushistas are logged at Boing Boing.

Kidnapped cows and stolen screams

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It’s been a bad week for art lovers in Scandinavia. Last week, a gang of “Militant Graffiti Artists” in Sweden stole a fibreglass cow from the international CowParade exhibition and threatened to sacrifice it unless the cows were declared “non-art”. According to Reuters, the organisers of the Stockholm exhibition have until noon today to meet their demands… (also seen at Lycos news).

And over the weekend news broke across the world that one of Norwegian artist Edvard Munch‘s famous Scream paintings was stolen in a daring raid from the Munch Museum in Norway. Experts wonder at the idiocy of the thieves, who will have real problems getting rid of such a recognisable piece of art, as well as expressing concern over the fragile state of the painting and the likely damage caused during the rather amauteurish (albeit highly successful) theft.

Preparing for Emergencies

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For those of you in hiding (or from overseas), this is the title of a UK Government leaflet on, well, preparing for emergencies. I know this ain’t exactly fresh news, but since this received such a derisive response initially I mostly ignored it. Today a hardcopy was waiting on the doormat when I got in from work, so I felt duty-bound as a responsible citizen to give it a read. (Not to mention being slightly concerned as a tax-payer over what my hard-earned cash is spent on.)

Well, those who responded with incredulous howls of derision were for the most part right. It’s a load of patronising toss and an utter waste of time and money. Seeing as so many others have expertly deconstructed and ridiculed it already, I won’t go on at length but will point at a couple of the better online commentaries – Chris Lightfoot’s comments and, of course, the excellent parody website over at the Department of Vague Paranoia. Oh, and of course the official site, too.

They Work For You

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TheyWorkForYou.com is a new website which aims to provide an easy, user-friendly way for British citizens to keep track of what their elected representatives are up to. It’s been put together by the same people who brought us websites like FaxYourMP.com, which I’ve found useful myself in the past. Here’s what they have to say about the new project:

We are a dozen or so volunteers who think it should be really easy for people to keep tabs on their elected MP, and comment on what goes on in Parliament. We’ve done this sort of thing before, but never on this scale.

For all its faults and foibles, our democracy is a profound gift from previous generations. Yet most people don’t know the name of their MP, nor their constituency, let alone what their MP does or says in their name.

We aim to help bridge this growing democratic disconnect, in the belief that there is little wrong with Parliament that a healthy mixture of transparency and public engagement won’t fix.

Hence this website.

I’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of the site myself, but you can quickly identify your MP and call up information on things like their voting record, their registered interests, the speeches they’ve made – the list just goes on, and since the site is still in beta, we can no doubt expect refinements and improvements over the coming weeks and months.

This is the sort of tool you would expect from a government with accountability and openness high on it’s priority list. Funnily enough, this one was produced by a team of volunteers and some funding from a charity called the UK Citizens Online Democracy.

Total respect to these people – what a brilliant idea.

Tories threaten BBC digital services

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I missed this yesterday – but it seems that the Tory party would like to get rid of the BBC website along with various other aspects of it’s digital endeavours because, essentially, they are not ideologically correct.

The party’s culture spokesman, John Whittingdale, told Guardian Unlimited Politics he was “not persuaded” of the case for a public service website and that he was “not convinced the BBC needs to do all the things it is doing at the present”, including providing “more and more channels”.

“As a free-market Conservative, I will only support a nationalised industry if I’m persuaded that that is the only way to do it and if it were not nationalised it would not happen.”

(Source: The Guardian)

I know the BBC has it’s detractors, and I have had problems with it from time to time as well, but as a sometime license-fee payer and UK citizen, I feel quite strongly that the BBC should carry on expanding it’s services, particularly online. I can’t comment on the digital channels, but the website is generally an excellent resource – a point conceded by Whittingdale.

He goes on to say that this is because it has had “a lot of money thrown at it”. So? It’s worth it, Mr. Whittingdale. The market introduces it’s own biases into the media, and despite the odd problem the BBC might have, or be seen to have, it is at least subject to a different set of constraints and can provide us with a view from a different angle.

On a related note, anyone seen any Conservative response to Dyke’s speech on the archives yet? I had a brief look throught the Conservative Party website, but couldn’t see anything. Or any of the parties, for that matter.

ID Card, redux (ad nauseum)

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According the Guardian, Blunkett is going to piggy-back trials for his proposed ID card on trials for the new Passports due to the fact that trials for the ID card cannot go ahead without legislation, while trials for the passport can and the tech is largely the same. Home Office denials don’t sound too convincing:

A Home Office spokesman last night denied that the trial was a pilot for identity cards, but acknowledged that “its results will feed into the debate” on the project. The pilot scheme was “a testing process for facial recognition for one-to-one verification using iris and fingerprint biometrics”, he said. That would involve an immigration or police officer using a scanner to check the identity of a cardholder.

(Source: The Guardian)

So despite opposition to the idea, Blunkett wants to press on regardless. It’s also worth remembering that there isn’t a lot of evidence to support claims that the ID card will help prevent terrorism, or benefit fraud, or even help us to curb the rising tide of swarthy foreigners that so threaten to overwhelm our green and pleasant land, which seem to be the three big issues that come up in association with the scheme.

Liberty has highlighted the fact that other Western European countries with ID cards do not seem to have solved any of these complex social and economic problems. Identity cards may be a handy PR gimmick for the Government to try and show it is “doing something”, but it has not been shown to be a useful policy tool on the continent. Indeed, much of the evidence seems to point to national identity card schemes worsening community and race relations, fuelling a criminal industry in the production of forgeries, and causing administrative problems for the authorities.

(Source: Liberty)

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