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A reassuring message from Seamus the Irish Setter

7/19/2013

Now I don’t want any of you to panic. I’m here to provide a character reference for my old master Mitt Romney who I hear through a clairvoyant taxidermist in Des Moines has purchased Plasma Resources UK, which provides blood supplies to the UK’s National Health Service. Of course, this lady is not always reliable. It was only a little while ago that she told me UK ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair had become a Middle-East peace envoy which was clearly a by-product of her methamphetamine habit. But she had three crystal balls up and a handful of tarot cards so I guess this time she may not be fooling. Just so you know, there was no foul play and no Mormon ex-Governors of Massachusetts were involved, but I am, ever so slightly, dead. This makes my opinion just as valid as any US senator or semi-recumbent member of the UK House of Lords. More so in fact as I no longer have a drooling problem.

Mr Romney, through his private equity firm Bain Capital can be relied upon to show the same judgement he displayed when he strapped me to the roof of his car for a 12 hour, 650 mile trip to Ontario. That is all.

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The triumphant talent of Paul Bhattacharjee

7/18/2013

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The actor Paul Bhattacharjee who went missing from rehearsals at the Royal Court on 10 July has been found dead at Splash Point cliffs in Seaford. Obituaries have yet to be written and they will be penned by people who knew and loved him well, but headlines will no doubt focus, as they often do, on the sadness that they will presume must have been part of his life. But I want to celebrate his talent.

I met Paul in 1981 when I was 20 and he 21. He came to my house in Kensal Green accompanied by Tara Arts director Jatinder Verma, the founder of the UK’s first Asian theatre company. Jatinder had good cause to feel he should accompany Paul to this meeting. All he knew from my conversation with him on the ‘phone was that we were an independent touring theatre company looking for an Asian actor with a romantic nature to play a ticket collector at Camden Town underground station who is stabbed towards the end of the play by a racist skinhead. The Asian character as a victim. Typical white perspective, he must have thought. We were a large cast of 18, a large number of whom had been asked to shave their heads for the play. I overheard someone asking the box office staff who was rehearsing in the theatre and receiving the response, ‘Oh some bunch of teenage yobs’. The play and its cast made all the characters victims of some sort of prejudice or another.

We were due to debut the production called ‘Tube’ at the Cockpit Arts Theatre in West London. The whole theatre had been dressed as an underground station and climaxed with a riot in which most of the set was broken up by an intimidating and visually aggressive bunch of skinheads. My first play was not a sophisticated piece of work, but it was driven by the murder of an Asian ticket collector in the East End and the scenes I witnessed waiting at Camden Town station for 90 minutes prior to a violent gig at the Music Machine venue (now Koko) nearby. I wanted the audience to get to know all the characters whose lives are smashed by the act of violence at the end. To understand the inner lives even of the disturbed, repressed and abused young man who stabs his victim.

Paul was nervous, quiet and shy, but with Jatinder’s approval and encouragement he agreed to be in the play with this funny bunch of largely white teenagers and musicians. It must have been an intimidating prospect, but he was an absolute revelation. He fleshed out a character with even more charm and romance than I had written, so that when he was attacked, the audience audibly groaned. The play was designed to attract young people who never went to the theatre. It was about something they knew about and it featured people their own age. Punk poet Patrik Fitzgerald played a busker and joyful performance poet and musician Attila the Stockbroker played a set in the play’s interval. The youth of the nearby Lisson Green estate turned out in force and we were packed out most nights. It was a joyful and terrifically bonding experience and Paul became more relaxed and funny as the run progressed.

Over the years I kept up with his career and watched him master his craft. He acquired gravitas and insight always carrying a tremendous authenticity, particularly in the theatre. 50 is a dangerous age for a man. Anxiety and depression are often the ruffians lurking on your stair after this age. I can’t imagine what sadness lurked within him, but watching his amused and playful gaze in ‘Much Ado about Nothing’ accompanied by that thoughtfully modulated deep voice, you can see the wealth of talent and experience he had gained in his career. He shone and we all bathed in the glow. That’s potential realised and a life well-lived. Goodbye Paul.

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How the Database State made me a terrorist.

7/17/2013

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Not long ago, I received, through the post, an invitation to a Nowruz celebration in Golders Green. Nowruz, as any fule kno, is the Persian/Iranian New Year. Now the juxtaposition of Golders Green and Iranian festivities was already surprising; add to this the fact that the event was taking place in a Christian church and that I am a white, atheist, Englishman and you have some idea of my state of confusion. I could not fathom what unconscious connection to Iranian politics had elicited this invitation until, later that same night, after a solitary wine and cheese fiesta; it came to me in a vivid dream.

I was, as usual, appearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee with the moderately dead comic actor, Zero Mostel. I sat calmly beside him sipping Burgundy, occasionally handing him a cracker whilst he defended himself against a series of increasingly absurd questions from the assembled senators and their whey-faced counsel. Joe McCarthy wasn’t present as he was rehearsing for his appearance in another dream I had scheduled, along with popular singing sensation Dana, a Serbian mime troupe and a bucket of whelks.

Suddenly the Committee’s attorney left off baiting Zero and turned his attention to me. Caught in the spotlight, my mouth full of crackers and my wine glass tantalisingly out of reach, I spat a snowstorm of dry shrapnel over the back of Fred Flintstone who was waiting to plead the Fifth against accusations of being socialist and two-dimensional. My accuser’s eyes turned black and right there in the middle of my innocent Fitou-induced dream, he stabbed me with an ugly shard of reality.

‘Mr Shaw, outside of this tawdry little fantasy, in your conscious waking life, didn’t you once give £200 to Mujaheddin el Khalq, a proscribed terrorist organisation?’

I spluttered a denial and quivered before his outstretched inquisitorial finger.

‘Come now, Sheik al Shah, surely you knew when those smart-suited men approached you, mooching around Leicester Square waiting for your chosen movie entertainment to begin, that you were funding oppression and torture?’

‘Doesn’t he do that now, through the Limey tax system?’ asked Zero rushing to my defence. I nudged him and hissed ‘Stop helping me, you fat, Commie putz’.

‘Surely you knew’, counsel continued, ignoring my portly compadre, ‘that these men, purporting to be representatives of a charity, were directly funding Saddam Hussein’s suppression of opposition groups?’

I gulped guiltily and looked to Zero for support, but now his comb-over quivered with disgust. I swallowed hard and squeaked feebly ‘I just wanted to help the little Arab babies.’ I awoke, sweating, just after Zero slammed me with a custard pie and screamed ‘Plead the Fifth you dumb anti-Semite, you’re making me look bad.’

The next morning I fished my invite out of the bin (Please RSVP so that we can make catering arrangements) and smoothed it out on my cracker-stained dressing gown. At once I was taken back by a harp glissando and a wavy dissolve to a warm summer evening over a decade ago. The men seemed so nice and the pictures of frightened children abused and imprisoned by the mullahs, simply because their parents opposed the regime, were heartbreaking, married as they were to an inspiring plan to spirit them away to safe houses in neighbouring countries with the help of my donation.

I am a sucker for a sob story and have funded enough lame ducks to cast my own differently-abled waterfowl version of Swan Lake, so I forked out the cash and forgot all about it, until, some weeks later, a photograph arrived of several smiling Iranian tots, standing in a garden, apparently liberated by the money I’d been saving for a musical cracker barrel.

That would have been the end of it, had an acquaintance with a brother at GCHQ not informed me that the charity was ‘on a little list’ at MI5 and that the Charity Commission were investigating. In fact the Commission concluded that although they were not in a position to tell whether donations were being funnelled to Iran’s internal security thugs, they had determined that the donations, some £5 million per year, were all paid into an individual's account in a country other than Iran, which clearly wasn’t er, kosher. Their concerns also focused on some donors being misled into believing that they were personally sponsoring individual children. The implied feeble-minded wishy-washy liberals weren’t mentioned by name, but I blushed anyway. The Commission consequently wound up the organisation and transferred its assets to a new, independent and genuine, charitable foundation.

Over the years, I periodically received written appeals from a variety of allegedly Iranian committees and charities, no doubt using my details from the database of donors who were snared, like me, in a weak moment on a warm day in the West End. I ignored them all and gradually the begging correspondence dropped off. Until my Nowruz invite, which tells me that my donation has not been forgotten and still sits ‘on a little list’ not only on some Iranian based database, but probably with British Intelligence who were evidently watching the smart-suited men and their fellow travellers. On the face of it, like Kafka’s ‘K’, I have nothing to worry about. As a guileless dupe, I have a clear conscience. But then, I did look up the Mujaheddin el Khalq on this laptop whilst I was researching this article…and I can’t help thinking back to all those currently sitting under control orders who left their browsing history un-deleted… It doesn’t look good, does it? A naked name and address held on a database and a search for a proscribed organisation on your computer doesn’t allow room for an explanation, a justification, a defence. The Database State doesn’t care. Someone just knocked on my door while I wrote that last bit and suddenly the crackers have turned to ashes in my mouth. My all duck paraplegic ballet opens Thursday at Belmarsh Gaol.

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Orwell is Alive and Well and Drowning in Data

7/16/2013

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During World War II, whilst Bletchley Park laboured in the front line of code breaking, the British Government were employing vast numbers of mainly female operatives to monitor and report on telephone, mail and telegraph communications in and out of the country.

The biggest problem, of course, was volume. Without even the most primitive algorithm to detect key phrases that later was to cause such paranoia amongst the sixties and seventies counter culture, causing a whole generation of drug users to use a wholly unnecessary set of telephone synonyms for their desired substance, the army of women stationed in exchanges around the country were driven to report everything and then pass it on up to those whose job it was to analyse the content for significance.

Orwell’s vision of Big Brother’s omniscience was based upon the same model - vast armies of Winston Smiths monitoring data to ensure discipline and control. He saw a culture of betrayal where every citizen was held accountable for their fellow citizens’ political and moral conformity.

In fact, up until the US Government’s Big Data Research and Development Initiative and the NSA’s development of the Prism programme, the fault lines always lay in the technology used to collate or collect and the inefficiency or competing interests of the corporate systems and processes that interpreted the information. Not for the first time, the bureaucracy was the citizen’s best bulwark against intrusion.

Now that the algorithms have become more complex and the technology tilted towards passive surveillance through automation, the volume problem becomes less of an obstacle. True data mining starts with the capacity to completely encompass all data in the cloud repositories and across all means of communication. It ends with the filtering tools that segment that data into areas for human analysis. Ex-NSA whistleblower William Binney confirmed that the algorithms go through the data base looking at everybody.

It seems Western democracy teaches citizens all of their civil rights and how to exercise them in the same way that it teaches first aid. They use them only in the direst circumstances and seldom more than once in a lifetime. Curiously the most rebellious act of a citizen in today’s society is not to storm Parliament or hang the last priest with the entrails of the last banker. It may simply be to never accept credit, never to shop beyond your immediate needs (and then only in cash), never to appear on a database for any product or service, never to use the internet, never pass before a CCTV camera without disguise and most importantly, never register to vote. It seems the greatest threat to a Bureaucratocracy (a horrible term invented by leftist sociologists) is not to participate. This is a deeply unsatisfying method of dissent because it is so passive, although it would be a pleasing phenomenon for a revolution to be achieved purely by indolence. ‘Yes, he was a model revolutionary. He wilfully neglected his admin.’

It is a well-worn cliché that what the NSA have been doing is anti-constitutional and at odds even with its founding fathers. Benjamin Franklin said ‘They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.’

What is more ironic is that this radical encroachment started post-9/11 with a desire to seek out Muslim Jihadists. The word ‘algorithm’ derives from Muhammed in Musa al-Khwarizmi, a 9th Century Muslim mathematician who practically invented algebra - clearly a man ripe for targeting by the NSA where he not ever so slightly dead.

Under the guise of anti-terror measures and efficient delivery of municipal services, more and more information is required on each individual. The technology for obtaining this information, and indeed the administration of it, is handled by corporations. The Government, driven always by a creed that suggests private companies are better administrators than civil servants, has auctioned off the job to a dozen or more favoured corporate giants who are, as always, beholden not only to their shareholders, but to their patrons within the Government itself.

Inevitably, modern capitalism demands more than one method of exploitation and most citizens don’t appear to have actively consented (except implicitly) for their personal details, credit record, purchasing choices, health, wealth, secret perversions, criminal records, DNA, sexual preferences and political beliefs to be hawked amongst the corporations as currency. By this method they are approved or denied insurance, employment, housing, benefits, education, health services, transport, passports and patronage of any kind.

At the same time they are touted by the same corporations or their clients for everything from luxury apartments to pile ointment depending on the ‘profile’ the accumulated data procured on them draws in the ether. It was once a civil liberties shibboleth that the frontier of this battle against intrusion and personal liberty lay in the area of identity cards or passports. In fact, the authorities do not need such things. Everything a citizen does or says, every offence committed, every book purchased, every trip taken, every song composed, every article written, every subscription, every Saturday night observed on camera, tells them all they need to know.

The only problem the state had, was managing the scale of the information gleaned from so many people in so many forms. Not any more. The volume problem has been overcome.

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The Anonymous Citizen

A reassuring message from Seamus the Irish Setter

The triumphant talent of Paul Bhattacharjee

How the Database State made me a terrorist.

Orwell is Alive and Well and Drowning in Data

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