a-cubed.info

I’ve definitely been here too long. I got my first piece of “junk mail” today.

OK, so it should have been expected. When I first arrived I bought a digital camera from Yodobashi camera. At the time, I signed up for one of their “loyalty cards” which give a ten percent bonus from each purchase which can be used on future purchases. Since I’ve bought a moderate amount of stuff from them, this has been a decent deal. But, to sign up I had to give them an address. Their summer catalogue arrived today, my first piece of junk mail in Japan.

Suggestions that the UK government is to introduce a new police power, that of questioning without concrete suspicion has been called a move towards a police state by some, and likened to the US’ illegitimate permanent detention centre at Guantanamo Bay on Cuba. While I think the latter is hyperbole, the former is a more reasonable statement. What, after all, is a Police State? It is a state in which the police have arbitrary power, which they may exercise without reason, without explanation and without significant oversight. The over-use of anti-terrorist stop-and-search powers by some forces shows that unrestrained powers supposedly aimed at anti-terrorist operations can easily be overused (abused?) by officers.

Police already have the power to stop and question individuals, where they can show a reason to do so. So this is not about giving the police a new power of questioning, it is about removing the requirement for reasonable explanation of their actions. It is the requirement that police be able to explain their activity that prevents this being an arbitrary power.

Even worse is the suggesstion that refusing to answer the questions posed by a policeman would be classed as interfering with police business and in itself constituting an offence. The current government has already reduced the right not to incriminate oneself. This would be a further blow to that. Either you answer the police’s questions, or you are guilty of an offence by that refusal. This is a further erosion of human rights. All the rhetoric by government officials here, suggesting that anyone opposing these powers is “more concerned with the rights of terrorists than those of their potential victims” ignores the fact that the subjects of these powers will, in the vast majority of cases, be ordinary citizens, not terrorists.

Finally, imagine the world if Labour is re-elected in 2009 or 2010. In 2013 ID cards are planned to become compulsory. It is no surprise that these proposed new powers include the idea of “questioning as to identity”. It will likely become, effectively, an arrestable offence not to be able to prove one’s identity, i.e. to have an ID card with one at all times. “Ihre Papiren, bitte!” indeed.

The UK ID Card and Database

There are many objectionable aspects to the UK government’s ID Cards bill. Some of them are philosophical and fundamental, some are political and some are practical. Both the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties in the UK have policy commitments against the ID card policy and have stated that if they come to power after the next general election (due by mid-2009 at the latest) that they will repeal the act and scrap the cards and the underlying database. Here are some of the arguments against the UK ID card system and database:

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I’ve just spoken to BBC Online researcher Joe Campbell about the effectiveness of CCTV systems in crime prevention and detection. This was as background for material regarding the Woolmer case, where the hotel had CCTV cameras trained on nearby corridors but, as is often the case, the analogue tapes used to record the images had been so heavily used that they were “fragile”.

Despite the rush to deploy CCTV cameras all over the UK in the late 80s and 90s, there was almost no significant research into their effectiveness. Indeed, Norris and Armstrong (The Maximum Surveillance Society: The Rise of CCTV) suggest that politicians did not want to know whether it was effective or not.Since finding the money centrally to promote jointly funded local schemes to deploy CCTV was relatively simple and the public believed that they helped to reduce crime, politicians would rather spend the money and be seen to be doing something rather than find out if what they were doing was effective (and exactly what is effective out of the various options) and be held properly to account for their efforts in tackling crime. In particular, no cost/benefit evaluations were done which considered the use of the money spent in other ways to reduce crime, either by providing other law enforcement measures or simply providing better street-lighting, or more facilities for young people (since much of the crime that CCTV has targetted is public order and low-value thefts).

Only recently have some studies suggested that CCTV has been effective:

Crime Prevention and Community Safety: An International Journal (2004) 6, 21–33: Evidence-based Crime Prevention: The Effectiveness of CCTV by Brandon C Welsh and David P Farrington.

I will be presenting a paper at EthiComp 2007 in March. This will be hosted by Meiji University in Tokyo, which will be very convenient for me. My paper, on the need for proper regulation of CCTV in the UK, was covered by online newspaper The Register today.

There have been a number of pieces I’ve read about the way English people behave on trains and the underground. The most detailed was Kate Fox’s “Watching the English”. The main rules for the English are:

• Don’t talk to anyone.
• You may ask for information about what stop it is, or may grumble (preferably in an ironic manner) about delays or maybe the weather, to each other.
• If you have travelled regularly (i.e. most days for years) with a particular traveller, then you might nod to them each day.
• Newspapers are for hiding behind.
• Never meet the gaze of someone else or if you do, break the eye contact as soon as possible.
• When using a mobile phone always shout, preferably starting the call with “I’m on the train!” or “I’m on the train! Yes, on the train! Can you hear me?”. Whenever possible make highly private phone calls and laugh often, loudly and annoyingly whenever feasible.
• Ignore the “quiet carriage” signs or even walk the entire length of the platform at Paddington to get on to the quiet carriage with a small child and a cat.
  OK, so I made this one up after the second time in a week in December finding people in the quiet carriage with a sub-5 yo child. The first family that did this had the mother tell the child to be quiet because it was the quiet carriage very early on in the trip and then herself became much louder than the child in a card game she instigated. It was the second family who had the cat, who was much quieter than the homo insapiens.
• When people ignore the quiet carriage signs sigh, tut quietly and look pointedly at the “quiet carriage” signs but under no circumstances verbally point out to people that it is the quiet carriage.

The Japanese clearly share some of these rules: (more…)