History is littered with classification systems, whether Dewey's way of sorting library books, or the Linnaeus classification for biological science. However well meant, category systems are always skewed towards the creators world view. Without these systems it's hard to work out where a book belongs, or how to uniquely name a species. David Weinberger's book Everything is Miscellaneous, follows many brave but faulty attempts to categorize.
In the digital world, where meta data takes no space, you can describe one thing in as many ways as you like. Most of us have applied tags to blog posts or Flickr uploads. Thus a tourist picture of Tower bridge can be tagged "London", "Bridge", and "My Holiday". In the physical world, it would require a committee of experts to carefully categorize a library of photos by hand. Would the picture of Tower Bridge go in the section marked "famous city tourist sites" or "civil engineering"?
If I search for "terrorist" on Flickr, I get a list of photos that include: people putting balaclavas on their heads; guys posing in pretend pre-suicide videos; President Bush, isolated camper vans, even a pigeon. These are the tag makers sarcastic views on what a terrorist is. Almost none of the pictures actually show factual "terrorism" - whatever that may be. This compares with most of the pictures tagged "rainbows", which clearly show rainbows. So its a bit worrying to hear that the government knows what terrorists look like, given that most of us do not.
Proposals to allow police to "stop and question" anyone in the UK under new anti-terror laws look designed to be combined with identity cards. The idea that an individual should be allowed anonymity (not to be confused with privacy) unless they chose to lose it is blown away. If you look like someone involved in terrorism, don't expect to have the same rights as everyone else.
A few decades back, "Stop and search" was used primarily to detain Afro Caribbeans who acted "suspiciously". As more blacks languished in holding cells, the police felt that arresting dodgy looking rastas was some form of public duty. Indeed being black was in itself suspicious. Eventually the courts became exasperated with the large number of meaningless cases brought before them by Constable Savage and his colleagues, and the practice ebbed away.
Ironically, stop and search was not designed to reveal identity. If you carried no form of ID with you, and you didn't cooperate with questions, your anonymity could be maintained (maybe with a few bruises). But with the new anti-terrorism law in place, any Muslim looking person can be fined if they don't submit to interrogation.
The outgoing Mr Blair bemoans how hard it is for the authorities to fight terrorism and maintain civil liberties. That to me seems a reasonable balance. Terrorism and road accidents are comparable; they are bad and sometimes preventable, but are a result of modern urban life. If you want high speed transport, or an army that occupies far off lands illegally in the name of peace, there may be a price. Traffic accidents cannot destroy a normal society (though I suspect the Victorians thought otherwise) and neither can isolated terrorist incidents.
Civil liberties on the other hand are the glue that allows trust between those who govern and everybody else. Without that trust, modern life is impossible. There is little point in being protected from one set of arbitrary beliefs only to be subject to another. Everyone needs freedom from rogue categorizations.
Monday, May 28, 2007
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3 comments:
Interesting.
What you're saying, in effect, is that if you want cars then you must accept inevitable jams and accidents; and if you want to be part of the global village then there is a degree of terrorism that comes with the package that should be regarded as 'acceptable' - at least in as much as there is an amount of terrorism that we would take without taking meaningful steps towards totalitarianism in order to prevent it.
That sounds reasonable.
But under what circumstances might you consider the meaningful degradation of liberties to be correct and proper?
Hi Gary. I have touched on this before and will probably again.
I think increased surveillance, does degrade pure liberty but should be acceptable when it isn't used in a highly connected fashion. That there is a record of which station I used last Tuesday is acceptable; stating that the two people that came in with me must be part of a conspiracy isn't.
Keeping open information on civilians is also something that we should now expect. As long as it can be challenged, its better to collect a lot of information about someone than a thin partial slice. By definition, some of that information will not be accurate.
It doesn't make sense to completely ignore what people carry from place to place - then take extreme interest when people get on a plane. Its reasonable that certain objects should be tracked by interested parties, in a disconnected fashion. This is coming with RFID tags anyway. If you aren't working in a construction company, you should expect to be tracked if you handle high explosives. More accurately the explosives may be tracked.
Its necessary to feel the pain when liberties are lost - but its the outcome of more connected information that is the problem.
Having commenced my academic career as a plant taxonomist I have studied the nature of classification systems with care and for several decades.
Taxonomies are only as good and as useful as the inentions / assumptions of their designer - the real problems come when they are used for purposes for which they were not designed.
e.g The UK Standard Industrial Classification , a decimal system, like Dewey has had to be continually and with difficulty be adapted (and distorted) to deal with change - SIT - new forms of industry and Dewey new areas of academic disciplines.
Failure to understand this results in the confusions and complexities that result. e.g in the late 60's and eartly 70's the Gubment introduced (to , it was claimed support) a variable rebate / subsidy for exporters - Export £1,000 of product and chemical Mfrs would receive 1.25% from the Treasury, but textile mfrs only 0.5% etc., (I cannot now remember the precise figures) - naturalluy this led to all sorts of rows, tribunals, disagreements ( not to mention fraud) and eventually fudging and the scheme was dropped as impractical.
This sort of nonsense carries on to this day - look at the mess over the CAP.
Probably one of the finest ways that these things are distorted is what were initially called Hospital Acquired Infections (HAI's) - too damned specific so after the NAO reported they became MRSA - shift the blame for multiple resistance to drugs to oversubscribing GP's - now we split up the diseases by type Staph. Clostridium etc., all the time attempting to minimise / reduce the figures.
re naming and re classifying has removed many a blot from the record of public service.
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