Avoiding Responsibility

Well, it's been fun. Well, kinda. It's been an interesting learning experience. I've learnt quite a bit over the past two years, and more than anything, about the way humans under stress react in difficult situations. Practicing as a solicitor gives you a unique opportunity to peek under the veneer that people portray to the outside world, and it has been interesting.

But now is the time for it to finish. I leave the firm I am working for at the end of this month (June) and then begin a month of work experience at somewhere I've always wanted to work - a brewery! (Yes, I know, its very cool). The brewery in question is the Swanney Brewery here in Orkney, run by The Highland Brewing Company (link here). The owner is a friend, and I will be learning all about brewing beer on a commercial scale. I'm really very excited about it. After that, I'll probably be heading back to Ireland to get some work. Lisa will not be joining me at this time however, she'll be staying here in Orkney for at least another year, so we'll be back to doing the long-distance thing. Which is nothing unusual for us!

So why the change? Well, partly because I'm ready to move on to a new challenge. After two years in practice, I'm happy to acknowledge that I'm not a small practice solicitor. I've had a great time, and my colleagues have been wonderful, but I'm ready for something new.

However my decision to leave is mostly to do with this: the UK National ID Card Scheme. For the privilege of remaining in the UK, I have to give the UK government a copy of every one of my fingerprints, and a high-resolution digital image of my face. Both of which will be stored indefinitely (even after I leave the country) and used for god-knows-what, and made available to countless numbers of people, including anyone who wants to steal it, for eternity.

Now many people say to me 'What does it matter - if you've got nothing to hide, then you should be prepared to support the .' But I disagree. Absolutely.

The problem isn't that I've got anything to hide, it's that the State, whether that be the UK, the Australian, or any other government for that matter, has no right to know whether I have anything to hide. If I have something to hide, let them prove it in a court of law following due process. Our legal system once was based on the presumption of innocence - that is that before someone, whether it be a police officer, or the person sitting behind the desk at the social welfare office, could bring the enormous power of the State to bear against you, they had to show, in most cases, reasonable suspicion that you had committed a crime before being able to persecute you.

For anyone that has been the subject of persecution by the State, you will know how difficult it is fight. They have virtually unlimited resources to fuck about with your life, and there is very little you can do about it, particularly after the fact. It would appear that people in the past were wiser than us, because they recognised this, and they instigated processes that placed a fairly hefty burden on the State to prevent it from acting against you in the first place, because they realised that once the State had begun acting against you, you were pretty much screwed.

The problem is today that the citizenry has been scared into believing that there are vicious hordes of criminals/terrorists/paedophiles etc etc ad nauseum running freely throughout our society and that the only way to stop them is to give the State more and more power. To make it easier for them to bring their resources to bare against an individual. All the while, we are supposed to trust the State not to misuse the enhanced powers we the citizenry have granted it over us.

And that's my problem. I don't trust the State. Any of them. Why? Because 'the State' is not the government of the day, nor it's ministers. It is not an ideology. It is a vast body of human beings called the public service, who all suffer from the same faults that the rest of the human beings on this planet suffer from. Guilt, carelessness, distractedness, greed - all the things that break down even the most stringent security measures. Don't get me wrong, I'm not having a go at the public service or the people who work for it. What I'm saying is that I don't trust the State to be able to keep my information safe because there are so many people that suffer from the above frailties that will have access to it. Seriously, if you were earning £12,000 a year working 35 hours a week would you say no to someone offering you £10,000 cash-in-hand just to give them a copy of the fingerprint from some random person's lefty pinky? I mean, what could they really do with that anyway?

Well, plant it at the scene of a crime maybe? Whilst the police spend the first three days of the case trying to interrogate someone who was 500 miles away from the scene because that is who the computer has identified as the suspect, the real criminal has skipped off to the continent, safe in the knowledge that it will be weeks before they start looking for a new suspect. Think it can't happen? Well here is the how-to guide, thanks to the Chaos Computer Club from Germany. To illustrate the point, they gave away copies of the German Secretary of the Interiors fingerprints with their recent edition of their magazine. If it can happen to him, it can happen to you. With even greater consequences for you.

The problem with ID cards, and DNA databases, and all the other "silver bullet's" for solving crimes / preventing terrorism / winning the war on drugs / catching paedophiles etc etc is that they make people lazy. They take away the need to think - as so eloquently illustrated in Little Britain, "Computer says no." And we all know that the computer is never wrong! The person standing on the other side of the immigration desk/welfare office counter/public hospital registration desk must be wrong. Either that, or they are trying to commit fraud!

Systems like this are great when its other people getting screwed by them. Trouble is, your turn is coming. As the number of such systems increase, it's only a matter of time till the State that you so trusted screws you. You will not have my sympathy.