I picked up a copy of Kar Wai Wong’s film Chungking Express on DVD the other day. The commonly used summary of ‘a story about two lovelorn cops’ does not do the film nearly enough justice – its is so much more than just a story. The cinematography is second to known, with over saturated shots creating an intense visual experiance which, although I’ve never been there, seems to fit one’s impressions of Hong Kong. The soundtrack rocking along in the background complements the visuals perfectly. The film is split into two distinct stories, each dealing with life of a different cop, with a fairly abrupt switch from one story to the other just under halfway into the running time. The stylistic continuity, however, ensures that the flow of the film doesn’t feel in the least bit disjointed as one might assume it would. The development & interaction of the characters from each story is a pleasure of watch, and often quite entertaining – ok outright funny. Don’t pass up an opportunity to watch this film – its certainly one of Kar Wai Wong’s most accessible & entralling films.
Just over two weeks on from the bombings and the legacy is somewhat more disturbing than could have been anticipated / hoped for. In the immediate aftermath, there were a number of theories people were talking & thinking about; Were they manually/remotely detonated as in Madrid ?
Were there timing devices, as favoured by the IRA ? Or were they the work of suicide bombers ?
With each scenario there were both disturbing & partially reassuring consequences – ie, would the bombers still be alive to strike again? would greater vigilance for unattended bags stop future attacks?
Early this week, it became clear we’d suffered under the latter, & arguably worst, scenario. When first hearing it was the work of suicide bombers, all of whom died in the attacks, the first reaction is thank god they’re all dead & can’t do it again. But that thought is quickly replaced by a more disturbing realization – no level of vigilance targetted at identifying unattended baggage will spot a suicide bomber with explosive in his backpack. With their aim being maximum casualties, no place where there is a large concentration of people can ever be made safe. If you have compulsory baggage checks on entering the tube, at the busiest stations you’ll end up with huge queues/density of people waiting to be checked – an equally attractive target for the bombers. Imagining somehow the tube where made secure enough to cease to be an attractive target, then attention would surely switch to bars, clubs, cinemas, theatres. There’s no way to secure an entire city against a determined suicide bomber, as one can see only too plainly from examining the huge level of security in Israel, and still all too frequent bombings. And finally, the worst aspect of all, they’d managed to brainwash well educated, middle class people born & raised in Britain. If that proved possible once, it could surely be done again.
So, given that traditional anti-terror precautions used in Britain are useless against suicide bombers, how could we prevent such attacks in the future ? Given, that even the highly experianced Israeli security forces are unable to completely prevent these kind of attacks, the ultimate answer surely has to involve working to resolve the social & political circumstances that motivate people to carry out attacks. Unfortunately, they are not easily resolved issues, many of the problems having been initiated long ago in the height of the cold war, eg, the repeated destabalization of Afghanistan by British, Russians, Taliban & Americans over more than 50 years. Others are more recent problems, such as the tremendous fuck up in securing Iraq in the aftermath of the war, primarily through deploying far too few troops to cope with situations on the ground. Resolve them we must though, for alternative future of living in a world scarred by suicide bombers is too horrific to even contemplate. Jonathan Freedland sums its up perfectly in his comments early this week.
We can congratulate ourselves on our phlegmatic cool so far. But we should start to wonder what would happen to us if these attacks became a fact of life, as they have long been in Israel (and are now in Baghdad). Would we find restraint as easy a policy to follow if there was a bomb on the tube or the bus every other day?
I hope never to know the answer to that question. I want it to stay hypothetical for ever. But a menace we have until now seen only from a distance has stepped right up to face us. The ground is still trembling beneath our feet.
After the election earlier this year, ID cards once again came back onto the political agenda with the government re-introducing a bill; This despite no changes having been made since the damming report by the LSE. There is alot of misinformation being put about – one particularly common piece being the suggestion, that “other EU countries have ID cards already, so they can’t be all that bad an idea”. This simplistic viewpoint may easily sway the uninformed, but fortunately Liberty trivially dismissed this argument in testimony to a Commons Select Committee:
(1) Not comparing like with like:
- No other common law countries have them. The only other common law country in the EU (Ireland) opposes them.
- ID card schemes across Europe differ wildly in function and form.
- Cherry-picking selective aspects of policy in other European countries is nonsensical. For example, Germany has a fully compulsory ID card scheme but some of the strongest privacy laws in Europe (a constitutional right and the equivalent of a privacy “tort”). If we are to emulate their card, why not their safeguards?
- Differences of history and culture lie behind the fact that other EU countries have ID card schemes of some sort. There are two separate issues raised by the Committee’s question: (i) why did they bring them in the first place? (ii) why do they still have them?
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(i) Origin of ID card schemes in Europe
The majority of EU countries with ID card schemes have had them in place for a long period of time (France have had them in some form since 19th century; Belgium since 1919; Greece since the 1940s; Portugal, Spain, Germany and Italy since they were ruled by fascist governments). The timing means that there hasn’t been any real, modern public debate in these countries?it’s wrong to imply they have positively endorsed ID cards when they just haven’t abolished them.
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(ii) Retention of those schemes
The schemes have been retained for various reasons, although primarily they have been retained in the absence of a “positive” reason to abolish them (this was acknowledged by the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, in his evidence to the Home Office?the long-standing existence of ID cards means they’ve become a largely unquestioned aspect of society in many of these countries). Another key reason for their retention is the fact that military service is compulsory in many continental European countries and so the relationship between the citizen and state reflects this duty.
In the aftermath of the London bombings, the subject ID cards may well receive renewed attention. Although Charles Clarke has admitted they would have done nothing to prevent the attacks, telling he said he would still on balance like to have them, the implication being ‘just in case they were useful’.
We should not let ourselves be conned into accepting ID cards on the flimsy grounds they’re currently based. Ensure you’re informed by reading the ID cards FAQ and keep abreast of everything going on through Privacy International
London has been no stranger to terrorism over the years, with the IRA targetting the city many, many times over the years of its campaign. Travelling home as a teenager, I narrowly missed their bombing at Paddington, fortuitously having changed to an earlier train. Thursday was different, however, with the bombings being designed for maximum human impact & casulties, rather than the collaterol/symbolic damage characteristic of the IRA.
I’m not going to recount the events again, since WikiPedia has a comprehensive account, not to mention the coverage on the BBC News. What was remarkable about the whole day, was just how well everyone coped with the events unfolding around them. I was just at Waterloo shortly after 9, when the tube was being evacuated, with not a hint of panic showing. Of course, this was no doubt helped by it being reported initially as a ‘power surge’. Whether this was intentional or not, it certainly kept everyone (not directly affected) calm, as they continued our journeys into work, by bus or foot.
Having switched to the bus myself, it was rather sobering once in work to hear of the No. 30 bus having been blown up. Most of the day was spent inside, with the building security recommending us not to leave – in some of our client’s offices nearer to Liverpool St, there was a mandatory lockin of all staff. With the mobile networks severely overloaded (O2 apparently implemented the Access Overload contingency plans to restrict access to emergency services only), I had no access to e-mail, so just spent the day reading web news, and trying to call the few people for whom I had landline numbers.
Looking back on major events over the past 10-15 years, its interesting to see the new milestones in news reporting. The first Gulf War it was perhaps the first to see major near realtime TV reporting from right in the warzone. With 9/11, came the first real test of the Internet as a major media / news source – sadly it crumbled under the load with most news sites having to severely curtail their output, with most spending many hours effectively offline. The BBC has clearly done a fantastic job preparing their news site for traffic spikes, able to sustain a data rate of 1.7 Gb per second!!. The second Gulf War, was the first to see the use of blogs to provide eyewitness reports of events. Now, with the London bombings we see the first major use of camera phones to provide frontline pictures and even videos of events, to which traditional news reporters could not gain access. Although I must say, I didn’t much want to see the videos of the evacuation of the Picadilly line & was glad to read that news sites were pixellating the videos to tone down the graphic scenes.
Oh for it to be Wednesday again, with London rejoicing the after winning the 2012 Olympics, and the Open Source community rejoicing the dismissal of the bill which sought to introduce software patents to the EU.
So, the election over and done with, the government has got back to the business in hand, which in this particular case is ID cards. Now as a general idea the concept of ID cards doesn’t particularly bother me, but the the proposal in this bill, and the way its portrayed most certainly does. It seems rather unlikely it’ll do anything significant to combat terrorism or organized crime, since they’ll either just not bother with using ID cards at all, or more likely just counterfeit cards from Joe Public. Of course since this is intended to be the ‘authoratative’ ID source, Joe Public will have that much harder a time with this identity theft. Oh, ordinary citizens will not be compelled to use ID cards anyway
Q. What if I simply refused to use the card?
A. From Mr Blunket… You will not be required to use a card unless you wish to work, use the banking or health system, travel or receive benefits.
Hmm, so basically it may not be compulsory, but unless you are in fact a terrorist, there’s no way you’ll be able to live practically without one. Government-0, Terrorists-1, Civil Liberties-0. Read the FAQ for all the details, and just be thankful for the government track record (incompetance) at succesfully implementing these kind of large scale IT projects.