The wee small hours

[altariel]

mraltariel went away to the US with our alarm clock yesterday, so I was fretting last night about whether I'd oversleep or not. Which meant I woke up about an hour before I needed to.

Waking up early, I'm still processing the previous day, so that meant I woke up frothing about the Great Leader's proposed new security measures for big railway stations. I'd pretty much decided - after the year's experiences at Gatwick - that air travel is simply too much faff these days (not to mention the ethics of it). But now rail as well? Is the idea to make everyone stay at home? Or sit in traffic? Certainly that way it'll be easier to keep track of us all.

There's also something about combining police and intelligence functions that in some way troubles me, simple sociologist that I am, but then I woke up completely and I couldn't follow my own train of thought any longer. Am I crazy? Am I dreaming?

Comments

GDR (as in grinning, ducking, and running too)

[executrix.livejournal.com]

'Cos in Heaven, the engineers are German, the police are British, the chefs are French and the lovers are Italian, and in Hell, the engineers are Italian, the police are German, the chefs are British, and the lovers are French?

Re: GDR (as in grinning, ducking, and running too)

[altariel.livejournal.com]

in Hell [...] the chefs are British

On the blessed names of Gordon Ramsay and Heston Blumenthal, take that back, madam!

Re: GDR (as in grinning, ducking, and running too)

[executrix.livejournal.com]

Gordon Ramsay gets to be the police, too.

Re: GDR (as in grinning, ducking, and running too)

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Kitchen Nightmare!

Re: GDR (as in grinning, ducking, and running too)

[gfk88.livejournal.com]

Ah - finally the community-based policing which Middle Engalnd has been demanding for years:

"Get your f****** bike off the pavement, sonny."

Re: GDR (as in grinning, ducking, and running too)

[executrix.livejournal.com]

Cuisine on Mars!

Re: GDR (as in grinning, ducking, and running too)

[gfk88.livejournal.com]

Oh yes.

Re: GDR (as in grinning, ducking, and running too)

[executrix.livejournal.com]

BTW, do you think, if altariel is crazy and dreaming, she is also marrying a demon and really raising the beam on making marriage a hell? And WHY WEREN'T WE TOLD?

Re: GDR (as in grinning, ducking, and running too)

[gfk88.livejournal.com]

She'll never tell.

Thank God.

Re: GDR (as in grinning, ducking, and running too)

[ex-lark-asc.livejournal.com]

Chick fight! *lends you a sword*

Re: GDR (as in grinning, ducking, and running too)

[toft-froggy.livejournal.com]

I think actually it would be worse if the lovers were German and the police were French.

And what did they invent? The cuckoo clock!

[executrix.livejournal.com]

Even better!

[gair.livejournal.com]

No, I think you're on to something about the combination of police and intelligence. Tell me more about it, though, if you figure it out.

I'm still - not frothing, but terrified and in shock - about Samina Malik being convicted of writing poetry. (Am I missing something here? I haven't seen any reports on this case that suggest she did anything other than download a bunch of Muslim extremist literature and write down a bunch of violent fantasies. I just... it's such a Niemoller moment for me, because really, at this rate, it's not long before they'll be coming for me.)

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I'm still feeling my way around this issue of joined-up intelligence/policing, but I think it's to do with my impression of the quality of the information that comes out of the intelligence-gathering process (poor). I wonder: do I want this process to have warrant cards attached to it? And I think: No.

I think it also pulls the security services further to the centre of the policing of our society, rather than keeping it on the edge where it should more properly be. Normalizing its presence. But I need to do more reading on this subject.

I hope the judge in the Samina Malik case has the good sense to impose a token sentence. I'm glad nobody went rootling around the alienation fantasies I was producing in my early twenties.

[iainjcoleman.livejournal.com]

The poor quality of intelligence is certainly an important point. There's a fallacy, to which many politicians and security officials are prone, of assuming that because a piece of information has been obtained by clandestine means, it is necessarily more reliable than information that is openly available. In fact, the reverse is more often the case.

There's a good example from the run-up to the Iraq war. While everyone was arguing abut intelligence reports on weapons of mass destruction (and please don't get me started on that phrase), a Cambridge researcher published an analysis based only on information in the public domain with the conclusion that Iraq had no significant stockpiles of chemical weapons, and certainly no biological or nuclear weapons.

That's not to say covert intelligence gathering is worthless. But it is vital to have a firm understanding of the sources of error, and to always remain open to alternative interpretations. There are powerful psychological factors, such as confirmation bias, that can lead us into all kinds of fallacies, and this is nowhere more in evidence than in the realm of covert intelligence.

[the-wild-iris.livejournal.com]

I'm still - not frothing, but terrified and in shock - about Samina Malik being convicted of writing poetry.

Goodness, yes. I felt that bad literary biography, having perpetuated the error that poems can be read uncritcally as autobiography, and that the 'I' in a poem is the same as the 'I' of the author, deserves some of the blame for that. E.g. Ronald Hayman read Sylvia Plath's 'Edge' as evidence that the writer planned to kill her children. Using it as evidence in court is only one step further...

[katlinel.livejournal.com]

I'm hacked off with air travel too, because of all the nonsense, and I really don't want train travel to go the same way.

Hope that waking early hasn't thrown you off-balance for today.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I'm starting to wonder when we'll all have to take our shoes off for getting on the bus.

It didn't throw me off-balance, thanks :-) I had quite an early night, and I think I may well have simply had enough sleep. (If such a thing is possible.)

[executrix.livejournal.com]

Srsly, I agree that allowing Inspector Closeau to kidnap and summarily execute people is a poor idea.

Today's New York Times has a deadpan little item "Airport Screeners Missed Explosives, Report Says" about GAO investigators who, using information from the Internet* built an incendiary device and smuggled liquid explosives and detonators through security. The report "described an episode on March 23, when a security screener would not let one investigator through a checkpoint with a small unalbeled bottle of shampoo, even though it was a legitimate carry-on item. But the same investigator was able to bring through a liquid component of a bomb that would start a fire."

A RL counterpart of the scene in Dave Barry's novel "Big Trouble" where Russian terrorists were able to smuggle an atom bomb onto a plane because of the security guard's fixation on having the hapless hero re-start his laptop over and over.


*Which rather compromises the risk that they could have blown up the plane if they'd wanted to

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Hah. I think I'll use these examples for teaching unintended consequences.

I always get pulled out and frisked, I must have a threatening kind of face.

[iainjcoleman.livejournal.com]

No, it's because I grassed you up. Sorry.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

You rascal!

[iainjcoleman.livejournal.com]

It was my patriotic duty.

[iainjcoleman.livejournal.com]

Come to think of it, how much of our political consciousness comes from spending our early years watching drama written by the likes of Terry Nation and Chris Boucher, in which phrases like "It was my patriotic duty" inevitably carry a sinister connotation?

[altariel.livejournal.com]

They saved us. Saved us, I tell you! And made us hopeless pessimists. Do you think it's getting more and more like the Seventies, or am I watching too many episodes of The Sweeney?

[iainjcoleman.livejournal.com]

Well, in the 1970s we stayed out of America's damn fool military adventure, and such outrages as internment without trial and extralegal executions were confined to Northern Ireland. So no, not much like the 70s at all.

[toft-froggy.livejournal.com]

It's probably your blend of determination, fatalism and misanthropy. It's in the eyes.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Really that mad staring look is because I need new specs.

[sugoll.livejournal.com]

Then there's Dave Langford's The Leaky Establishment, wherein Our Hero accidentally smuggles a nuclear warhead home from work, and then has to smuggle it back in.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Happens all the time in this game.

[toft-froggy.livejournal.com]

WHERE ARE YOU? WHAT'S YOUR NAME? AND WHERE IS YOUR ALARM CLOCK?!

[altariel.livejournal.com]

IT WASN'T ME!! I DIDN'T BURN THEM!

[mraltariel.livejournal.com]

Technically, I went away with my mobile phone, which happens to double as the alarm clock!

:-)

xxx

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Picky picky!

COME HOME! *flails* This Week is No Good without you.

[mraltariel.livejournal.com]

I KNOW! I'm coming home just as fast as I possibly can.

M
xxx

[sugoll.livejournal.com]

> I couldn't follow my own train of thought

Naturally, because of the security systems.

Actually, whacky as this all is, what bothers me most is that this applies to big stations. Um, what about the others? As David Gunsen says, it's hard to hide airports, but there are considerably more stations.

If you're not going to secure the whole link, why even bother?

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I suppose the intention is to protect small places through which a lot of people are passing. But - at Gatwick, at least - this was giving rise to the ludicrous situation where several hundred of us were milling around on this side of the security checks. All that some mad bugger needed to do was walk into the airport.

Loving that icon.

[sugoll.livejournal.com]

There is also the fact that planes are, it turns out, whopping great self-guiding explosive devices, so some security at airports make sense. While trains might have a lot of mass and momentum, emergency services can usually be relatively confident about the number of buildings a suicidal terrorist might drive one into.

[ithilwen.livejournal.com]

Well, if everyone has to stay home because air travel and train travel have become too onerous to bear and the freeways are too jammed to get anywhere, the terrorists won't be able to get out to bomb anything, and total security will have been achieved!

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Victory!

[ithilwen.livejournal.com]

Almost. There's still one niggling problem to deal with: enemy spies with cameras walking around on foot in our fair neighborhoods, photographing such top-secret high-security sites as Paddington Station, the Eiffel Tower, and the Empire State Building. You see, the eeeevil Islamofascists, although possessed of a certain low cunning sufficient to allow them to learn how to fly huge passenger jets into skyscrapers and to assemble hydrogen bombs out of chewing gum and duct tape, are fundamentally a primitive, ignorant group of people. Mastery of such sophisticated technology as a Flickr keyword search or Google StreetView is far beyond their meager abilities - and of course, no one has ever before in the 150 year history of photography taken a snapshot of these highly sensitive installations. Thus, we will not achieve total victory in the Global War on Sanity Terror until our governments can declare victory in the War on Photography!

(Am I the only person who thinks that from now on, anyone running for elected office should be asked how many adult diapers they wet each day? The sheer level of wussiness we're seeing in Our Brave and Fearless Leaders has got to be unprecedented. They're frightened of their own shadows!)

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Too depressing. I was reading a novel written and set in Berlin in the early 1980s: there's a bit about security measures going into East Berlin. The West Berliner is shocked by them - but they're nothing compared to what we are routinely subjected to these days.

[ex-lark-asc.livejournal.com]

You are neither crazy nor dreaming, nor indeed marrying a demon. Britain is turning into a police state, and most of its people have no idea it's going on. There is some very disturbing legal groundwork already laid which undermines the individual right to basic things like privacy and fair trial. This is the stuff I rant about in the infrequent public entries on my LJ.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I spent an grim hour or two the other morning reading about the identity card interrogation centres. Horrible to watch this infrastructure being constructed. So much esaier to put up than take down again.

[ex-lark-asc.livejournal.com]

It makes me very glad someone made a film of V for Vendetta, and inclined to write something similar myself, but without assuming a nuclear holocaust as the trigger for fascism. Along the lines of Jo Walton's Farthing (http://sawyl.livejournal.com/299196.html), but more near-future dystopian. I don't really have the political savvy to pull it off though :/

And I tell you, if this country goes much further to the dogs I might well go and join Jo Walton in Canada. It makes me shiver to think where we'll be in fifty years' time.

[manna]

There's also something about combining police and intelligence functions that in some way troubles me

Maybe because it's the operational method of choice in all the most fashionable totalitarian dictatorships?

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Aye, there's certainly that.