“For five years I have avoided using the phrase ‘police state’. But the sort of things going on here is what you expect in a police state, a banana state. This is the most extraordinary event of my parliamentary career.” (David Davis)
I find the items on this list extremely disturbing, particularly those which relate to his offices, phone and computer.
Yes Prime Minister: The Nuclear Deterrent and Salami Tactics
I invite you to consider this very funny but very poignant clip with reference to a “government going bad” type scenario. We’re hearing an increasing amount of discussion these days here in the UK about what we should do, and at what point we should do it, should our current government’s authoritarian direction continue unabated.
Among the problems potential rebels would face (in addition to the small matters of pervasive surveillance, an increasingly aggressive and well-armed police force, and the likely invocation of “anti-terrorist” measures to swat down any politically undesirable behaviour), is the process brilliantly parodied in the Yes Prime Minister clip above. No single slice of salami will ever seem serious enough to get the average bod to go and wave banners in Parliament Square. Well obviously, that’s not likely because they’ve already banned banner-waving there, but somewhere else where democratic protest it is still allowed, like in the middle of a multitude corralled into Oxford Circus and controlled at the point of a taser, for example.
Unless by some means we can arrive at some broad consensus regarding a line or lines that must not be crossed by government (and this, IMO, is where not having a written constitution is a serious disadvantage), we’ll be doomed to experience frog-in-pot syndrome. We’ll all just sit here waiting for some big call-to-action event that never comes, and inevitably, our liberty will end up boiled.
I write this as someone who grew up surrounded by adults who would regularly ask that classic rhetorical question about German citizens in the 1930s “But how could they have let it happen?”. Even as a young child I knew that the smugness was unwarranted. As for the question about how authoritarian government develops without the general public doing much to prevent it, I suspect we’re on our way to finding out.
“The arrest of Damian Green for doing his job of opposing the executive is a step too far in rolling back centuries of democratic achievement. The pretext is the excessive desire of this government to keep all public information secret, and prevent the taxpayer from finding out what has been done in their name and at their expense. This is the most secretive, as well as the most authoritarian, government of the modern era.”
In case you’re wondering, the author is not exactly a natural political ally of the Conservatives:
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2008/11/the_jackboots_a.html
(Link seen on Glyn Moody’s blog)
Updates:
Cross-party fury over MP’s arrest
Damien Green arrest ‘like Mugabe’s Zimbabwe’
Damian Green arrest: PM accused of contempt for parliament
The six facts causing Tories alarm about Damian Green
Wow!
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/55/S126e006925.jpg
I wonder what caused the damage to the silver panel?
This is pretty interesting too, shots of the space station taken from the ground using a telescope and DSLR:
http://www.martin-wagner.org/raumstation_durch_das_teleskop_mit_WebCam.htm
To get some sense of the scale of this thing, here’s a page on which it is placed side by side with a Boeing 747:
Government prosecuters in the USA allege that Gary McKinnon caused $700,000 worth of damage to the computer systems of the US Army, Navy, Air Force, Department of Defense and NASA during his “hacking spree” between February 2001 and March 2002.
Given this, the mind boggles at the likely cost of the damage caused by the alleged activity described here. The costs incurred by this activity, if indeed it has really occurred, must go far beyond any damage to the systems and networks themselves for it must also involve incalculable costs both to US national security and in terms of illicit technology transfer. If these claims are true they presumably render the effects of Gary McKinnon’s activity a drop in the ocean in comparison.
China’s hackers stealing US defence secrets, says congressional panel
The fuss over Gary McKinnon is like the TSA tazering and hauling away a mother for smuggling a bottle of milk onto an aircraft for her baby, while each day thousands of unchecked containers pass into the US through its sea ports.
Absolutely hilarious. Cal Henderson (head of engineering at flickr.com and author of O’Reilly’s “Building Scalable Web Sites”) gave a talk at DjangoCon 2008, titled, provocatively enough, “Why I hate Django”. I saw the slides shortly after the talk and even without the accompanying narrative I was laughing out loud. I made a mental note to check YouTube at regular intervals in order to watch for a video of the talk, and sure enough here it is: Why I hate Django
Cal is the chief architect for a site that is built primarily using PHP and that during peak hours serves up to 35,000 photos per second, really, over 2 million per minute! It’s probably reasonable to conclude that he knows a thing or two about scalability. Prior to his talk Cal had apparently been “building a blog in Django” (you’ll understand the quote marks when you watch the video 
and the talk is based upon his experiences doing that, as well as his involvement with Django-powered Pownce.
It’s good natured stuff, and very funny.
EDIT: I meant to add that I think it’s very cool the Django folks got Cal to do this talk. It seems to be a sign that they don’t take themselves or their framework *too* seriously, which can only be a good thing, IMO. On a more serious note, the talk also serves as a pretty good introduction to advanced web database issues.
“French record labels sue, um, SourceForge”
From the article:
“TorrentFreaks, which flagged the story, notes enforcing a ban on platforms that can be used to distribute unauthorized content is certainly ripe for abuse. What else can be used to distribute content illegally? Oh, say, FTP, web browsers, and email. Hell, the entire Internet itself could be banned in France.”
… and perhaps Linux as well?