Here comes the nudge

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Organ Repo

Coming to the NHS soon

I muttered yesterday about how the Welsh assembly had decided we no longer owned our own bodies (at least not once dead) and that they could just help themselves to our organs, unless they somehow knew we’d said that they couldn’t. Well here comes the “nudge” for the rest of. If you’re not a registered donor, on a database not just carrying a card then to the back of the queue for you if you need a transplant yourself. The telegraph is reporting that the NHS would like to push non-donors to the back of the transplant queue to encourage more people to donate organs. They also want more organs from smokers and drinkers which is odd given what terrible state of health even looking at a drink or a cigarette will leave you in. I do wonder how they’ll prioritize a donating drinking smoker, seeing as they have in the past also mooted the idea of putting smokers and drinkers to the back of the queue. Of course if you drink smoke and don’t donate I guess under the proposed rules you’re screwed if you need a transplant.

Some groups such as patients are objecting to this idea, but I expect we’ll have a consultation along in the minute which “proves” that the majority of stake holders (those in favour of the idea) think it’s a jolly good plan. Not quite sure how it fits with universal health care and I’d prefer that private medicine just took cash rather than a promise of my organs – far too much like gene co and Repo! that. Still another step along the path to state control of everything.

As a final thought if the NHS is the new state religion, would this make it a blood cult?

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Taxation and organ snatching

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George Carlin getting it wrong I’m not going to say anything new at all in this post, which won’t come as much of a shock to anyone who’s read much of what I write here. But recent news has given me an excuse to pull a few things together and to rant about the picture you can see at the top of this post. Mar Carlin is/was a popular comedian and commentator or so I’m informed, certainly quotes attributed to him appear all over the internet attached to random pictures (often of a very similar looking man who I assume is Mr Carlin). This particular quote really annoys me as it only works if you accept the assumption that everything you own and earn is in fact the property of the state, which an awful lot of occupy types and the left and other right on political types seem to do. The problem arises because it equates tax breaks/lower tax rates as giving something to people rather than just taking less from them, which only makes sense if (as previously observed) you assume that everything belongs to the state. Letting people keep more of what they earn surely encourages them to earn more, no matter how much or little they earn – I’d note that none of our recent governments have been terribly keen on letting the less well off just keep more of their money (apparently according to some people would feel disenfranchised and insulted if not taxed). If you happen to think that the state doesn’t own everything then you might restate the above quote as something like:
“Conservatives say if you stop taking money off people they invest more, but if you give people too much money they’ll have no incentive to work”
Not quite as catchy I’ll admit but this confusion is what leads us to having people demanding that individuals and companies acting perfectly legally and using the system as it was designed are somehow doing something wrong and should “pay their fair share”. No one has yet decided what that fair share is that I’ve seen neither as an absolute sum nor as a percentage, it just seems to be “I don’t like company/person X, they have money they should pay more” which isn’t really a good basis for law or running anything (Except a protection racket maybe). Ignoring for the moment, that the idea of companies paying tax is a bit of a fallacy if we want them to pay more we should change the laws so that they do (which we can’t do whilst part of the EU). Personally I’d have thought that flat taxes would mean everyone was paying their share (assuming they were implemented such that everyone actually paid them).

I think this underlying assumption that everything actually belongs to the state, may in part explain why there has been such a muted reaction to the NSA/PRISM/GCHQ revelations. For obvious reasons most of the establishment will have statist tendencies as they do rather well from their being a large state, and we’ve all been sold the lie that the state is there to protect us for so long that shaking it off is an effort – but that’s for another day.

This presumed state ownership of everything is in clear evidence in the recent welsh decision to make organ donation opt out. Apart from a few blogs this decision that we no longer own our own bodies seems to have garnered scant coverage. The practical problems are obvious, but when has that stopped a politician? In many ways it is just an extension of the apparently widely accepted idea that our children aren’t our responsibility, but it’s still really quite a significant extension.

It would seem that for sound economic reasons we’re moving away from owning property opting instead to rent what we need, paying the state as well as the renting company for the privilege (which to my mind makes it quite different from borrowing from friends and neighbors). Even the stuff we think we’ve bought it turns out we frequently don’t actually own and again this lack of ownership is being facilitated by the state.

So if the state and corporations lay claim to:
1) Most of what we think we own
2) An increasing amount of what we use
3) Everything we earn
4) Our privacy (PRISM)
5) Our children
6) Our bodies

What is there left? And how does this significantly differ from either slavery or communism (as practiced in Soviet Russia and other such regimes) both of which I’d rather got the impression were ever so out dated ideas that had widely been abandoned and declared to have been bad things(tm)? I’m sure I must have missed something crucial and we’re not actually heading towards such a state of affairs by slow and sleepy steps.

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Son of Echelon

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Breaking what’s becoming far too frequent radio silence, and I do apologise for that but life keeps happening, to mutter about John Snowdons revelations. I’m going to try and do the tricky thing and not talk about Mr Snowdon or his plight but concentrate on what he revealed.

The revelations about operation Prism remind me of a long time ago in the earlier days of the internet and the rumours abounding about something called “Echelon”. This was a supposed system whereby the US government collected and snooped on everyone’s emails and everything else they did. This led to people adopting spook attractor blocks as a easier alternative to encryption. The idea being that if we all littered our e-mails and news articles with words likely to trigger pattern recognition the system would be rendered unusable. There wasn’t as much e-mail back then, but on the other hand computers, bandwidth and storage where also a lot more expensive. Fast forward mumble years and we have leaks about Prism where it seems that with the collusion of some of the biggest names in IT the US government has in fact been doing just what they were rumoured to have been up to all those years ago. The most impressive thing about this whole affair to me is that it’s been kept quiet so long. Now it may be that my experiences haven’t been typical but IT types quite like to talk about their project and new toys to other IT types especially over a few beers, and getting as much equipment in place as would seem to be needed and having so many people processing all that data without serious leeks is really quite an accomplishment. Now of course it turns out that mainly they’re grabbing traffic logs which makes for smaller data requirements but even so it’s quite an accomplishment.

What’s also quite an accomplishment is to get most of the world to react to being told that their every communication is being spied on with a global Gallic shrug and a sigh of “meh”. Just think about that we’ve all just been told that (for most of us) a foreign government has been tracking who we talk with, what web sites we visit and most of our papers haven’t seen fit to mention it (thank you D-notice) and most people just aren’t fussed. Yet still we wonder how atrocities can happen with the population turning a blind eye. The US government has excelled itself in double think by claiming both that it isn’t news and that everyone does it whilst also demand Mr Snowdons head on a spike for revealing such crucial secrets (that aren’t a big deal because everyone does it) – really that’s quite a feat.

So anyway back to the technology, it seems we can’t trust Facbook which isn’t surprising (yes I still use it). But also we can’t trust Microsoft (no surprise), Yahoo, Google (No surprise again), PalTalk (who they?), YouTube (see Google), Skype (see Microsoft), AOL (Never did I remember the September without end) nor Apple (No surprise).
When we got sold out

All this surveillance that we’re told is vital to track serious threats is really only actually useful to tracks the like of you and me. Look at that list above, would you plan any serious terrorist event using services from those companies (assuming that the spooks don’t actually have back doors into windows and MacOS – and that you’re not clever enough to use OpenSource)? Might it not be the harmless but politically active sorts like occupy that are far more likely to get monitored via those sources? Might it not be people trying to organise public and popular protests that would use such open platforms and wouldn’t encrypt their communications? But even if all they track is who talks to who and not what’s said it’s quite impressive as to just what that reveals just look at what just the call records and public data revealed about a German politician, or consider the case of Paul Revere. If you’re in any doubt as to the value of being able to track phones, try and buy a pay-as-you-go phone with cash -it’s a fun challenge.
So what can we do? Actually quite a lot
we can take care of what data we give to the likes of Facebook (via all sources). I won’t suggest we stop using them altogether the convenience is at the moment hard to escape, but we could start moving to the likes of Disapora, we can deploy tools like Disconnect me, change search engine to the likes of Duck duck go or IXQuick even if not all the time the more we use them the more it interrupts the surveillance. As I’ve muttered before it’s not difficult to run your own services and retake control of your own e-mail and much else of your on-line life. It’s much harder for the spooks to secretly get data direct from your mail server if you run it yourself, unlike it seems from the likes of the big companies who give near real time access when required. Of course they can still spy on the fibre to know where traffic is going but that can be seamlessly and securely encrypted with little effort. I would note that the companies listed in that article as implementing this security already it seems hand data directly over to the US government so our communications with them being secure isn’t much of a comfort. That snooping on fibre also explains why the US are happy to work with the UK government an awful lot of European traffic goes through the UK. Fortunately the number of tools available to us to move away from such government friendly companies grows every day, and really needn’t be that painful to adopt.

All of the companies that we know to be colluding with the spies are very keen to lockdown the web by abandoning open API’s and constantly changing the API’s they use and the hoops you have to jump through to use them. Not to mention Googles frequent practice of adopting a technology (e.g. RSS) getting to a dominant position so there’s scant competition and then dropping it. We sadly have an appalling track record of falling for such bait and switch ploys.

Ultimately if we get spied on is up to us the spooks are out of control, the big companies have no incentive (and possibly not much choice) to not roll over and do as they’re told. We can ignore this scandal and play more angry birds or we can take action both by talking to our politicians but also by changing how we use the web so that not protecting user privacy starts making poor economic sense. The revelations regarding the level of collaboration are already causing major ripples in the world of cloud computing (as a non-US company would you want your data on a US controlled cloud*). A consumer move away from companies that collaborate with covert and illegal data gathering could easily upset the cosey arrangements, or we can swap privacy and democracy for an easy way to exchange pictures of cats with captions on them. To coincide with July the 4th the Internet defense league are taking action – see banner at the top of the page (unless it’s past that date in which it may be gone).

* I must admit to feeling smug about this, as I’ve been playing Cassandra every time the idea of using the cloud has come up ever since it was invented – almost entirely based on the impossibility of ensuring data confidentiality.

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