Technologically clueless

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Once more our glorious leaders have demonstrated to the world that they are what was once known as cluebait. Sadly this is an all to common occurrence, which is a problem given how much they bang on about wanting the UK to be a technological power house.

Just last month our glorious leader wanted to ban WhatsApp and SnapChat because it’s difficult for spooks to spy on them. Obviously no one had bothered to tell him that unless you also ban the technology that makes online banking, shopping, b2b and the entire internet secure it would take about 30 seconds for someone to work round this. Way back in the day the US also tried to ban encryption and that didn’t work so well for them, so trying to visit that again does make you look a bit thick, mind you that doesn’t stop the puritans hankering after prohibition. So assuming that you don’t ban encryption, vital for all of the actually useful and taxable bits of the internet, setting up a spook proof chat system merely requires some cheap server hosting, free software, a free security certificate and to turn off logging. Of course if the spooks hack your system then they can spy on you, but the same is true of things like WhatsApp and such. Alternatively if you ban encryption (really not going to happen) then you’ve killed all online commerce, so maybe you just need to license it and keep a list of all the sites that are allowed it and block any import of such naughty technology which can be in digital or printed form. If somehow you manage that people might have to revert to using pen and paper to set up the initial security and there are loads of historically proven ways of doing that. So really to suggest that you might want to ban such things merely serves to demonstrate that you are a clueless maroon of the first water.

That though was last month and even a week they tell me is a short time in politics. Not wanting to be left out of the clueless cabaret an all party group of MP’s want’s to ban internet trolls. The politicians do at least on this occasion note “that such policing will be tricky, both for law enforcement and the social media websites in question.”. This is as they say an understatement. Let us for the moment assume that the ability to block and ignore people isn’t enough and that some additional powers are needed beyond all of the existing laws against hate speech and the like. If that’s the case are we talking about actually tracking down the individual who’s trolling/doing nasty things? If so I believe we already have the laws needed and of course then you can monitor the person concerned, but if we’re talking about short circuiting that process what can we actually do?

Consider our hypothetical troll, someone has made a complaint about them and suitable people in authority have considered this report and found it valid; then what? Well tell the people who control the social media site (Twitter, Facebook, whatever) that they must block the person, and ban them for so many months obviously. Hold your horses though even assuming that the site is happy to cooperate – is the user subject to your jurisdiction, or are we now all subject to every jurisdiction in the world? If our troll has set up an account where they say they are in the right jurisdiction we can maybe do something, and the troll will go away and create a new account, only this time they may lie! They may say they’re in some other jurisdiction and carry on largely inconvenienced. Not a problem we can say to the site, is this person connecting from somewhere in our jurisdiction (the site might need a bit more persuasion to tell us this), if yes then hoorah we block our troll again. If not well then on they troll. So we’ve blocked our troll again, how many minutes do you think it will take them to create a new account? How much more complex do you think it would be for them to this time not only lie about their location but to also maybe hide where they connect from? None of this is rocket science, though our lazy troll may be quite happy to just go through numerous throw away accounts, it worked for Old Holborn. Ultimately we may block the most idle and uncommitted of trolls and haters, but for the ones that are a real problem we’ve just been a minor inconvenience. The price of causing this minor inconvenience could be that we’re all subject to the jurisdiction of every country in the world, or simply that we can all be taken off-line at the merest hint of a complaint as companies decide that blocking first and asking questions later (if at all) is a lot less risky than waiting to be told. Oh and it may just have the tiniest barely perceptible bit of a chilling effect on free speech and open debate – but hey who cares about that?

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I want to have EVEL

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Mr Hague has joined the ranks of people who have tried to solve the West Lothian question and predictable upset quite a few people. As bits of the United Kingdom get more and more devolved powers the question that gets harder to ignore is if English MP’s have less and less say in the regions why do the regions continue to have a say about what happens in England? A fairly reasonable question but one that always seems to cause a huge amount of kerfuffle, mainly because none of the large parties want to lose power and solving the problem inevitably seems to involve that.

Mr Hagues current suggestion is for an English MP veto. This has led to lots of people complaining that this would create a two-tier house with different classes of MPs, or that it wouldn’t work as England isn’t a homogenous entity to be represented by a single house. Daniel Hannan looks at several options for addressing the problem, and considers the pro’s and con’s of them. The problem of a two-tier house could be easily solved by only allowing MP’s from the “regions” that also sit in the devolved parliaments, that way everyone sitting on the national parliament also has a say in the regional parliaments. This would of course result in the big parties having less of a say (particularly Labour) so that’s not going to happen. For those that complain that England isn’t homogenous and the needs of the various areas vary, I can but compare that to the uniformity of needs between the lowlands, highlands and isles in Scotland which so blatantly have no variation in needs or culture which would otherwise prevent Holyrood representing them fairly.

However I don’t want to be negative, so I’d like to propose what I think might be a simple suggestion. We could divide the entire United Kingdom into small roughly equal sized regions which have local representatives that consider everything that doesn’t have a national impact, then we could have a central body that only considered matters that had national or international impact. To avoid problems we could “devolve” as much as possible down to those regional bodies. To avoid confusion between the two decision-making bodies we could maybe call the ones for the smaller areas “councils” or maybe even “county councils” and the people who looked after those local issues could be maybe called “councilors”. The national body is trickier but how about we call it “Parliament” and the people who represent us in this “parliament” we could call “Members of Parliament” and they could represent areas known as “constituencies” to make sure this national body knows what the various areas think. To make the transition easier and cheaper I believe that there may all ready be buildings in place scattered around the country that have been, for some odd reason, already built to hold bodies such as the ones I suggest. Perhaps we could even have some sort of ballot or election on a regular basis to determine who should set in these “councils” and “parliament”?

I know that’s all crazy talk, and radical untested ideas but I’m sure there are people much smarter than me that could work out how we might suitably divide up the country and manage these various bodies. Whilst they’re at it perhaps they could also solve the puzzle as to why we seem to have all these “council chambers” and old “county council” buildings lying around the place already?

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A question for Green Party supporters

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As the Green Party seem to be gaining in popularity many people have taken a look at the parties policies and in the past some people have questioned if the parties more high-profile members are really practicing what they preach. Today though neither of those things really concerns me, instead I want to ask those that support the green party or are thinking of joining the party a question. I’ve already asked this question of the Green supporters amongst my friends and not really got much of an answer. The question I have is are you comfortable with the Green Parties really quite shoddy track record on anti-Semitism?

Now if you’re like my friends you may not be aware that there was anything to be concerned about on that front, even though you’ve obviously researched the party and it’s policies thoroughly before deciding to support them. That’s ok it hasn’t got much press coverage and was news to me as well – after all it’s not really the sort of thing they’re going to want to advertise. I would suggest you do your own research, Google “Green party antisemitism” as a start. To save you a bit of time here’s a few things you’re going to come across (but do check for yourself):

Finally to apply what appears to be the standard test for most radical parties these days – given that they have a long list of Responsibilities & Rights covering racism and all sorts of other things why do they need a seperate policy tackling anti-Semitism explicitly? I believe the received wisdom is that a political party only needs such explicit statements if they have a problem.

Green party antisemitism

So I ask again if you currently support the Green party or are thinking of doing so – what’s your take on the apparent anti-Semitism within the party? Is it a non-issue? Are you happy with what the party leaders have done? Are the policies they support so important that the problem of antisemitism doesn’t matter?

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