The riots in England continue. What is the reaction of the police, the state, the democracy?

Cameron considers to ban people from social media websites to “stop them communicating” (see also here).
China (!) applauds (see also: here).

“You know your internet censorship plans are too strict when China praises you for it.”
– zeropaid.com

Two young males (20 and 22) without criminal record are going to prison for four years. What did they do?

Jordan Blackshaw, 20, set up an “event” called Smash Down in Northwich Town for the night of 8 August on the social networking site but no one apart from the police, who were monitoring the page, turned up at the pre-arranged meeting point outside a McDonalds restaurant.
[...]
Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan [...] used his Facebook account in the early hours of 9 August to design a web page entitled The Warrington Riots. The court was told it caused a wave of panic in the town. When he woke up the following morning with a hangover, he removed the page and apologised, saying it had been a joke. His message was distributed to 400 Facebook contacts, but no rioting broke out as a result.
– The Guardian

Four years? Really?

There are considerations to introduce a curfew; in Birmingham pictures of rioters are being displayed on vans and driven around by police (“Dou you know this person?”).

Deputy Foreign Minister Khaled Kaaim, Libya, stated:

“Cameron and his government must leave after the popular uprising against them and the violent repression of peaceful demonstrations by police [...]. Cameron and his government have lost all legitimacy. These demonstrations show that the British people reject this government which is trying to impose itself through force.”

Mugabe and several politicians in Iran made similar statements:

“A member of Iran’s parliament, Hossein Ebrahimi, told the semi-official Fars news agency that Britain should allow a delegation of human rights monitors to examine the situation.”

Rioting and stealing and looting is wrong. But there are reasons why you have thousands of people in the streets in England. Acting like China or Libya now will not solve problems, only create more.

EDIT: added the tag “dystopia” to this blog.

The foundation “Bureau of Investigative Journalism” in London has evaluated over 2.000 sources (newspaper stories, leaked embassy documents, statements by lawyers, eye-witnesses and members of NGOs) regarding the usage of unmanned drones by the CIA in Afghanistan and Pakistan between 2004 and 2011.

They come to the conclusion that within this period of time, at least 291 attacks took place, and at least 2.500 people were killed by these drones (and I don’t have to educate you about the concept of assassination in a modern, democratic state). To make things worse, at least 385 of the victims are proven to be civilians, at least 168 of them children. Furthermore. at least 1.100 people have been injured.

Most of these attacks actually took place under the presidency of Barack Obama – 236 out of 291. That is, on average, one each four days.
Welcome to the future.

CIA officials obviously criticised the study. Unspecifically (you are a bad, bad study!), and more importantly, before it was finished/published.

I regularly criticize demonstrators in Western countries rioting instead of protesting peacefully. I tend to say that you will achieve less with violence than with a proper, democratic debate. Therefore, I am not very happy when I see what is happening in England currently.

However, today Fefe just quoted Martin Fletcher, a NBC News correspondent:

[...] here’s a sad truth, expressed by a Londoner when asked by a television reporter: Is rioting the correct way to express your discontent?
“Yes,” said the young man. “You wouldn’t be talking to me now if we didn’t riot, would you?”
The TV reporter from Britain’s ITV had no response. So the young man pressed his advantage. “Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you.”

That made me think. But actually not for very long, if you take a look at how things are being reported in the news now: there might have not been any news about the peaceful demonstration (which is bad, and I think many people agree on this), but now people are being portrayed as “mindless criminals”. I’m not sure if this helps to get the (political?) message across (in case it is not being mindlessly criminal).

And talking about violence … I took this screenshot a minute ago on amazon.co.uk:

Auf Netzpolitik.org ist ein interessantes Interview mit Siegfried Kauder (CDU) und Hans-Peter Uhl (CSU) zum Thema Netzneutralität zu finden, dass gleich mal wieder einen shitstorm ausgelöst hat.

“Es ist Mode geworden, die Freiheitsrechte des Bürgers in den Vordergrund zu stellen.”
(Siegfried Kauder, CDU, Vorsitzender des Rechtsausschusses des Deutschen Bundestages)

Kauder gehört im übrigen zu den neun Bundestagsabgeordneten, die gegen die zwangsweise Veröffentlichung ihrer Nebeneinkünfte durch das 2005 verabschiedete Transparenzgesetz vor dem Bundesverfassungsgericht klagten und dort scheiterten. Ende November 2010 forderte Kauder, aufgrund von Terrorwarnungen in Deutschland eine Einschränkung der Pressefreiheit durch gesetzliche Regelungen (Wikipedia).

Update, 02.09.2011:

“Die Pressefreiheit ist ein hohes Gut, aber auch für sie gibt es Grenzen”

Und man kann das gar nicht genug betonen:
CDU Vorsitzender des Rechtsausschusses des Deutschen Bundestages.

People elect other people and entrust them with the power to manage state affairs for them. Trust is the key.

Rasmussenreports conducts political polls on a regular basis. These are the results of the latest study:

[...] 46% of Likely U.S. Voters now view most members of Congress as corrupt. Just 29% think most members are not corrupt, and another 25% are not sure.

Similarly, [...] 85% of voters think most members of Congress are more interested in helping their own careers than in helping other people. [...] Only seven percent (7%) believe most of the legislators are more interested in helping others.

[...] Just six percent (6%) of voters now rate Congress’ performance as good or excellent. Sixty-one percent (61%) think the national legislators are doing a poor job.

52% of voters said most members of Congress get reelected not because they do a good job representing the folks at home but because election rules are rigged to their benefit. Only 17% felt incumbents get reelected because they do a good job representing their constituents, while 31% were undecided.

I’m not a person for revolutions. But do people actually realize what this means?

(N = 1.000, the margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence)

Daniel Suarez, an American information technology consultant, followed up his first book “Daemon” (selfpublished 2006, published 2009 by Dutton; I wrote about it two weeks ago) with “FreedomTM”.

The first book is brilliant fiction in the sense that Suarez takes several things that exist in our world and puts them together in a way nobody else seems to have thought about before.
The second book “FreedomTM” continues with his ideas, but gains a new quality because Suarez’ ideas for a modern and truely democratic civilization are stated much more explicitly now.

Content
The Daemon, a computer program Matthew Sobol released when he died to take over the corporate world, has infested many companies. Whereas the fight between the Daemon and our world and the way the Daemon functions were portrayed in “Daemon”, now the US secret services decide to abuse the daemon for their own good, try to hack their way into it and manipulate it. One of the protagonists on this side is The Major:

“Bastards like me serve a purpose. People need order. They need to be told what to think, what to do, what to believe, or everything will fall apart. This miracle of modern civilization doesn’t just happen. It requires careful management by professionals willing to do whatever is necessary to keep things running smoothly …”

On the other side, we have farmers, hackers, our old friend Pete Sebeck and many others – members of the so-called “darknet”, a community that is hosted by the daemon. What was written between the lines in the first book is now written very explicitly in statements of characters. Suarez’ critique of the modern, globalised world starts before the book starts, with a quotation from Theodore Roosevelt (1906):

“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befout the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statemanship of the day.”

The critique continues.
Read the rest of this entry »

We have very little information so far, but it is enough to put together a picture:

Osama bin Laden was killed by US special forces. In Pakistan. Bin Laden was unarmed, and assassinated with a headshot. We know by now that it was a so-called “mission to kill” (Reuters released a report about this yesterday). Furthermore, the CIA director said that the Pakistani government was not informed on purpose in order to secure the safety of the mission. They responded sourly that the behavior of the United States military will not be tolerated in the future. Apparently they don’t dare to say their opinion because they are afraid the US will point fingers at them for having been unable to locate bin Laden themselves.
Bin Laden – so the US military says – received an immediate burial in the sea.

Ok. Now imagine US special forces illegally invading Germany, or France, and assassinating someone with a headshot, without so much as informing the responsible government.

As a reminder: the US broke international law. In Europe, and hopefully in some other parts of the world as well, we don’t believe in killing people, no matter under which circumstances. We believe that everybody has the same rights, even terrible people. Yes, people get shot in a war, and some people might even deserve it. And if there would have been a gunfight in which bin Laden would have been killed, I would have probably even felt relief. But assassinating him like that will simply not do.

I was shocked to hear that thousands of American citizens spontaneously gathered at the White House for a party (this is Washington, not Texas), and even moreso when I saw many American celebrities commenting on how awesome this is etc.

Have you lost your minds? Do you realize that this is exactly what your “enemies” do when they manage to kill an American soldier – running through the streets, celebrating? That this is exactly the behavior you consider so inhumane and terrible when you see it on the news? You cannot impose freedom and democracy onto other nations when you don’t live up to your own premises!

Please understand that killing people never ever helps, because it will always cause retaliation. Yes, horrible things have been done to the American people with 9/11, but that does not excuse or legitimate these actions. As you know, you have killed thousands of innocent people in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last years (“collateral damage”), giving people from the Middle East the same “rights” for retaliation as you have. This will go on and on if you don’t stop it.

Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize last year. Many people were critical about this, and the disaster of Guantanamo (there are still innocent people imprisoned, some of them for over 8 years!) and the assassination of bin Laden will not contribute to the American president as a president of peace.

And what about you, Europeans?
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“Benford’s law, also called the first-digit law, states that in lists of numbers from many (but not all) real-life sources of data, the leading digit is distributed in a specific, non-uniform way. According to this law, the first digit is 1 about 30% of the time, and larger digits occur as the leading digit with lower and lower frequency, to the point where 9 as a first digit occurs less than 5% of the time. This distribution of first digits is the same as the widths of gridlines on the logarithmic scale.”

Bendord’s Law is very well known, I simply quote it here again to remind you of this as a great tool if you want to check whether data is obviously faked. Two scientists looked at the results from the elections in Germany 2005 and found problems with the data because they don’t quite fit with what Benford’ Law would predict.

(I didn’t read up on the statistical details due to lack of time, I cannot assure that the analyses were conducted properly)

Signals play a particularly important role within organisms and among individuals of highly cooperative species. Because in both these cases there is little or no conflict of interest, signals should be as cheap as possible while still maintaining reliability. Cheap signaling systems enhance the efficiency of the organism or cooperative system but they are also more easily subverted by exploitative agents (Markl 1985), such as pathogens or politicians.

( Peter Hammerstein et al. (2006). Robustness: A Key to Evolutionary Design. Biological Theory. )