Month: April 2006

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Our only ally is incompetence

Now that the House of Lords have stopped their opposition to the National Identity Card having forced the Government to make some meaningless concessions it looks like nothing can prevent the bill being passed. Chicken Yoghurt asserts that our list of allies has grown very thin and our only hope is that this massive IT project goes as badly wrong as all previous huge government IT projects.

As Longrider says over at Europhobia: “incompetence is now our most valuable ally“. We must now hope that the procurement and implementation of the National Identity Register is as cack-handed, expensive and late as the rest of the technocratic turds this Government has to seen fit to foist on us in its rudderless quest for a subjugated Utopia.

In that, at least, the odds are in our favour. We democrats grudgingly placed our faith in the hands of the unelected Lords. We must now, reluctantly yet with hope, put it in the hands of big business.

Can a Home Office that apparently cannot do their accounts properly be trusted with the massive funds needed for procurment and implementation of a National Identity Card System.

Tom of Blairwatch and Charlie Stross have done the maths on the time needed for the registration of the entire adult population of Britain and have calculated given the number of people divided by the number of regional registration centres each registration needs to completed in an unworkably short 72 seconds.

Given the technical problems people are predicting perhaps Perfect.co.uk is truly prescient with these two pieces of news from the future, more news from the future.

I forsee the biggest practical problem will be the failures due to the use of biometric data as a way of preventing a person getting multiple cards for different fake identities. I wrote about this a couple of years ago in my analysis of the national identity card scheme in the subsection Is biometrics a silver bullet?

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Movies Reviews Security Terrorism

Review: V for Vendetta

Just got back from watching the movie adaptation of V for Vendetta. I have mixed feelings but it was enjoyable and a lot better than I had feared it might be especially given my feelings for the previous adaptation of a comic that was close to my heart Hellblazer which became the painful Constantine.

I thought that Hugo Weaving was very powerful as V and Stephen Rea did a great job as Inspector Finch. Natalie Portman was merely adequate as Evey and her accent was not as awful as some have written but she was a little wooden in her performance. I thought Stephen Fry was remarkably good also, other characters such as Chancellor Sutler were too poorly written to allow much from the other actors in the cast.

The movie lasted two hours and yet it felt like a lot had been edited out. There was very little characterisation outside of the central few main characters all the others seemed like stereotypes painted in broad strokes. Some events such as what happened that night at Larkhill which enabled V to escape were glossed over as was Finch’s visit to the derelict Larkhill.

I think the general mood of the film was established well, it was visually stunning and there were a number of very powerful scenes especially the fingerman’s shooting of the girl and the subsequent uprising of the townspeople.

In many ways the movie felt like it was set in some parallel universe version of Britain rather than a dystopic near future of our own Britain, possibly due to it being an American production. The Britain of the movie was very twee and a little off, Rupert Graves as a copper using the word “chummy” when apprehending V, eggy in a basket and the Benny Hillesque TV satirical attack on the Chancellor.

A number of things in the movie make me feel like the points of the original graphic novel were lost or misunderstood by the writers. V was too overly made to be identified with Guy Fawkes who in the introductory scene is portrayed as a freedom fighter rather than the religious nutcase that he actually was. I thought that the Guy Fawkes mask in the graphic novel was a useful disguise which was merely appropriate given the date of key events in the story and a shared interest in blowing up public buildings. But the motivations of V and Guy Fawkes are in no way the same.

In fact Guy Fawkes has more in common with the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists our society is being made to fear at the moment. The character of V is different but is no hero either really he is a force for change through destruction, rebirthing society by destroying it’s institutions so something better can be born out of the ashes.

The surveillance aspects were altered and there was no sight of surveillance cameras in the movie odd given their ubiquitousness in modern Britain and given the totalitarianism surely there should be even more in evidence. Plus the populace do not seem cowed by the authorities, living in constant fear of speaking out of turn. Certainly this so called dystopia is to my eyes a lot deal better than we can really hope to expect several years down the line from now once we have a National Identity Register, cameras that can scan our faces to identify us and track our movements and legislation that gives the ruling party pretty much free reign to do whatever it wishes.