Dear Ken,

I’m fucking proud you were the last politician of the Thatcher era to survive into our own

I’m fucking proud you beat Mandelson to the NEC elections in 1997

I’m fucking proud you’re the only Labour politician to feature on a Blur track

I’m fucking proud you stood up to the a rigged mayoral candidate selection process in 2000 and then won

I’m fucking proud at how gallant you were in victory and your kind words for Frank Dobson, the man with the most thankless task in London that year

I’m fucking proud you pushed through the congestion charge for London and it actually fucking worked on the day it started

I’m fucking proud you got back into the Labour party, got Blair to grovel, and fought to a second term as London’s mayor

I’m fucking proud of the humanitarian and open-minded spirit you envisaged the 2012 London Olympics being

I’m really fucking proud of the solemn, defiant and above all non-judgemental speech you made after the July 7th bombings, the day after we won the Games, far better than a thousand words from Blair or anyone else

I’m fucking proud that despite a limited brief, under your watch you’ve got improvements on the Tube, miles more buses at affordable prices, Crossrail and the London Overground, and Trafalgar Square as a clean & amenable civic plaza. Not to mention the encouragement of art & music to London’s streets

I’m not fucking proud that you got chummy with gay-hating fuckwit Yusuf al-Qaradawi

I’m not fucking proud you got yourself in that stupid row with Oliver Finegold when a simple apology and admitting you made an error would have solved it in no time at all

I’m not fucking proud you and Ian Blair are such good mates, either

I’m totally fucking proud that tonight, despite how New Labour fell to third place and 24% of the national vote, you got a bigger percentage of the first ballot vote than you did in 2004

You had your flaws, and a multiplicity of enemies, and you could have done better in acknowledging & confronting both. But your bloody-mindedness worked for you as well when in office, and over the eight years, you did a good job overall. It’s why I voted for you. And yet you still lost. But as upset as I am at the fuckwit they got to replace you, I’m still fucking proud of the job you did. And so are many of us in London.

Don’t let defeat deter you - do stick around, and please find a job where you do what you do best - be competently effective doing important shit and annoying your opponents who obsess over the inconsequential. London will be all the poorer if you don’t.

A press release rehashed as a news article on the BBC website today - “Lie detector software saves £500k” states:

Lie detector software has saved a south London council almost £500,000 it was losing through benefit fraud.

During a phone call Voice Risk Analysis (VRA) software analyses minute changes in the voices of those claiming benefits to see if they are lying.
[…]
During the pilot, almost 1,700 people were assessed, of which 377 had their benefits stopped or decreased.

For starters, VRA isn’t a lie detector - there is no such thing. Even the polygraph isn’t really a lie detector, and in any case evidence from either machine cannot be used in court. The success rate of VRA itself is not particularly encouraging:

What we see here is that 198 true statements were coreectly determined to be true but 118 true statements were incorrectly determined to be false. We also see that 127 false statements were correctly determined to be false but 73 false statements were incorrectly determined to be true. In short, 37.3 per cent of the true statements were adjudged to be false and 36.5 per cent of the false statements were adjudged to be true.

While a strong case can be made for using them as one of many tools in an assessment process, with due care and attention taken as regards their fallibility and the risks involved, there’s nothing to suggest this is the case here, particularly given how the council is trumpeting it. Processing 1,700 cases in five months (17 or so per working day) is pretty swift work, to boot.

This is further exacerbated by the numbers - the false positive and false negative rates are similar, but assuming the vast majority of claims are genuine, then there are going to be more genuine claimants are going to be denied benefits they deserve, than bogus ones who get away scot-free.

The only remaining thing in their favour is they can be a deterrent - albeit a fairly expensive one - and that their ongoing usefulness as a deterrent depends on how they are used. Used carefully and judiciously these are a good idea; used as a quick fix to plough through thousands of claims and they quickly become ineffective and even oppressive.

What’s creepier in this TV Licensing advert - the authoritarian insistence of the message that we’re all being watched for our own good, or its soft underbelly - the complete and unremitting faith in “the database”, in yielding awe of its panopticon abilities?

Addendum: And I say this as someone who is quite fond of public service broadcasting, just not how it’s enforced…

You know, this is the first weekend in forever where I’m able to relax. I’ve been spending most of today catching up on some RSS feeds, resetting unread ones and starting afresh, and trying to get through an enormous pile of unread copies of Private Eye. None of this has anything to do with the following post.

Twitter appears to be flavour of the month - it got on the front page of the Guardian and it’s being used by both Downing Street and skin cancer awareness (leading to a somewhat disconcerting email alerts). It even has genuinely useful purposes - i.e. keeping up with the latest Arsenal scores. The tipping point isn’t just being covered in the mainstream press - lately I’ve noticed a huge spike in people following me, some who look like interesting human beings and others who look like spammers (I now have the “x is following you on Twitter” turned off, so if you’re genuinely think you have something interesting for me use the @qwghlm feature instead).

I’ve been on Twitter for aaages (since December 2006, which puts me around the 80,000th user mark - ooh get me), more than long enough to get a feel for the place. The BBC gets it half-right in the secret of its success:

The appeal of Twitter - and the thing that has persuaded me to spend more time there than on other social networks - is that it distills the essence of Facebook and chucks away most of the annoying stuff. I’d long tired of all the poking, vampires, SuperWalls and countless applications which cluttered up what was once a clean interface. What I still value is the status updates which allow me to see at a glance what my friends - and distant acquaintances - are up to, and that is what I get on Twitter.

It’s not just simplicity of reading and navigation though - it’s about simplicity of expression. My sixteen months on Twitter has covered a torrid breakup, various bouts of sadness and happiness that followed it, a Glastonbury festival and two holidays and trips down the pub too numerous to contemplate. It’s so simple I can use it to talk about these and more - every little jokes, puns, moans, observation, venting of steam etc. without the fiddly complicatedness of Facebook’s status system (even after they dropped the “is” last year, it’s still rubbish) and by a variety of means (web, IM, phone, special apps such as Twhirl).

The BBC article has missed out on this crucial element - Twitter would be nothing if people didn’t make stuff on it. It’s the fact it’s useful (and a little bit fun) that’s the key to success. People actually reading your Tweets - that’s an extra bonus as far as I’m concerned. Just like the vast majority of the blogs out there, most Twitter streams are read by handfuls of people (and mine is no exception). This makes it difficult to make money out of the entire operation - as the Beeb also points out:

Apparently Twitter’s managers are indeed wary about antagonising users with advertising, and are talking instead of marketing premium accounts to businesses who would use it to communicate with Twitterers like me. I don’t think that is going to be any more attractive to the community. I shared a communal cold shiver with a fellow technology journalist the other day when a PR firm started “following” both of us on Twitter. It’s the eternal problem for social networking entrepreneurs. The minute they start to try to “monetise” their users, they risk eroding the very thing that this community values - clean, noise-free communication.

I am currently entertaining the view that Twitter’s creators didn’t design to make money - at least, that is, they didn’t do it to make money on an ongoing basis. They would instead build it up & flog it to someone (ad network, mobile services provider, publishing service or Google) and leave the how-to-make-money problem for them to solve.

As for how to make regular money from Twitter - if such a thing is really necessary - the premium model idea isn’t a bad starting point. Some blogs carry ads & a few are entirely funded by them or sponsored placement; why not the same with Twitter streams? Charging Twitter subscribers for the capability to monetise their own streams by including ads, sponsored & branded posts etc. means the balance between keeping things genuine and being entirely commercial becomes a problem for the content provider, not Twitter as a whole. Ad-filled or plain lousy commercial Twitter streams will probably be ignored, the ones that get it right subscribed to & read. A far better solution than mindlessly dispensing ads to all.

This should really be on the firm’s blog rather than my own but fuck it, I thought of this in my own time on a Saturday so here it goes instead. :)

I love del.icio.us. I’ve been using it since, er, February 2005 and in that time I’ve built up (at latest count) 2,256 bookmarks. Only problem is that I tag a lot and have eclectic taste, so I have built up a stonking huge number of tags. So many so that that when I load my bookmarks page, there is a huge lag as it builds the list of tags in the sidebar (especially as it uses some JavaScript which knackers Firefox on my elderly laptop).

You can reduce the minimum number of posts a tag needs to have been on to be displayed, to 2 or 5, but even this isn’t that helpful - with the vast number of tags I have, it still takes too long. But then idly just now, I was looking at the URL that tells del.icio.us to set this number, and realised it’s just:

http://del.icio.us/Qwghlm?setminposts=5

Can I just hack the URL to make whatever threshold I like then? It turns out I can, so:

http://del.icio.us/Qwghlm?setminposts=20

now displays only the tags I (and anyone else) have used, on 20+ posts. Which is much more manageable and quick to load. Hurrah!

Upgraded to Wordpress 2.5. Looks fine so far. Anything broken? Do tell.

I had seen these batshit-insane adverts for a couple of weeks already, but hadn’t got a decent shot of them to provide. Now I’ve found that the Met Police have kindly provided copies on their own website all along. Have a butcher’s below:

If you take a photograph of something you “shouldn’t”, or so something “odd” with more than one mobile phone, you’re a suspect. What counts as “suspicious” or “odd” behaviour, they don’t say. In fact, the message from these adverts appears to be: We haven’t got a fucking clue who the terrorists are - so we’ll leave it to your internal prejudices to decide instead. The message of this campaign is so vague, they’re even saying be vigiliant of anyone who lives in a house in an “unusual” manner:

The endless calls for heightened vigilance and suspicion of your fellow citizens, in the absence of evidence of a specific threat may be in the name of security, but they lead to a form of mass insecurity. The police’s reliance on the wisdom of crowds ends up utterly failing, as there is no correcting mechanism for the level-headed to compensate for the paranoid; even if 99% of us are not taken in by a false alarm all it takes is one panicky idiot to call in what they think is a threat and the police have to act - even if it’s just a tape dispenser, chilli sauce or a nesting box for bats.

Aside - ironically, the police themselves are no strangers to this, with one errant officer having this week circulated a well-known urban legend about drugs being sold to children. You’d think they’d be aware the damage a single loose cannon can cause.

Anyway, back to the terrorist alerts. It’s what Bruce Schneier has referred to as the “war on the unexpected“. Of course, the ones I’ve just listed are just the bonkers false alarms that make the news; there must be many more mundane incidents that never get reported in the news. Just what is the cost of all these false alarms? Not just the drain on police resources (especially while we are constantly reminded of the cost of hoax 999 calls), nor the cost of all the inconvenience every time a street or train station is evacuated, or even the health costs of the additional stress of living in fear. There’s also the cost in lost social cohesion, trust in each other and faith in the authorities to be able to do the job, intangibles it’s impossible to put a price on.

So what next? Apart from taking the piss with remixes of the posters on BoingBoing (not that there’s anything wrong with that). And I don’t just mean wearing Keep Calm and Carry On T-shirts, whilst continuing to take photographs, using your multiple mobile phones and, er, living in your house without fear of intimidation (though of course we should). What I mean is something further - is it going to take before there’s a backlash, from more than the usual suspects, and some sanity is restored to anti-terrorist policy?

Step 1: Go ad hominem from the very start and label your opponents as being part of some mythical self-styled intellectual commentariat (while ignoring just how eminently qualified you are yourself to belong to that same cadre):

It has become an intelligentsia default position, or IDP for short, that we in Britain are - as one of my favourite intellectuals put it the other day - “sleepwalking into a surveillance society”

Step 2: Posit a false dichotomy and put your opponent at one extreme end of it:

So would Garton Ash really rather be freer and less safe to the extent of having less chance of catching a rapist or murderer?

Step 3: RePush the boat out even more - emphasise how the bad men will get you if you don’t do what they say. Go for the heart-tugging “as a father” line if need be:

How do we measure my right not to feel discomfited by CCTV or DNA testing, against that of, say, Justine Kelly, who was 18 - one year older than my oldest daughter - when she was raped by Lloyd

Step 4: When all else fails, wring your hands and play the race card. You racists!

A database of existing offenders in particular categories also means that certain ethnic groups are far more likely to be recorded than others, and therefore are far more likely to be successfully prosecuted in future.

Ask a sub-editor to top it off by giving it the headline “Ignore the paranoid fantasists” and voila! Instant column!

Of course, everything Aaronovitch bases his argument, for a universal DNA database of everyone in this country, is disingeuous. Having your personal data in state hands doesn’t make you more secure, and I’m not just talking about your bank records and NI numbers - all it takes is one dodgy copper and you can have an innocent man hounded to death in their home by a mob. Of course, measures such as a DNA database can be enormously useful in solving individual crimes, but only when targeted correctly and with care, and as one component of an investigation. Taking DNA indiscriminately makes suspects of us all and in turn weakens further the trust the citizen holds in the state.

The central tenet of Aaronovitch’s argument - that there is dichotomy between security and privacy - is a false one, both intellectually and empirically. A strong defence of human rights and civil liberties does not make us less safe - where you would rather live, the Netherlands or North Korea? What’s oddest about this dichotomy is how those that use it are so happy to pick & choose where they are. The current government and many of its cheerleaders (such as Aaronovitch) have long insisted on a more intrusive state, whether it be via a national identity register, DNA fingerprinting of all or monitoring of our phone calls and emails, all in the name of preserving our security at no cost, while scoffing at what they regard as out-of-date ideas of “liberty” and “rights”. Yet on the other hand they support the invasion of other countries in the name of liberty, all the while making ominous comparisons to Hitler and other historical events. The result is that the deaths of thousands of civilians in a foreign land can be justified by the emergence of a nascent democracy (no matter how flawed or chaotic) yet a few high-profile criminal cases on our own shores mean suddenly principles are cleanly forgotten. A question of mere distance clouding judgement, or just simple hypocrisy?