What is it like to be recognised everywhere you go? You’re about to find out

We may sometimes regret the anonymity of modern life, but would we really have it any other way? To be able to conduct our private business in public spaces is a privilege that most people throughout most of history could not have imagined.

In our own day, it is only the famous – or infamous – who are unable to lose themselves in a crowd. Even in the age of ubiquitous CCTV, being caught on camera is not the same thing as being recognised.

That however may be about to change. According to Charlie Savage of the New York Times, the US government is working on a facial recognition technology that has serious implications for privacy:

• “The federal government is making progress on developing a surveillance system that would pair computers with video cameras to scan crowds and automatically identify people by their faces, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with researchers working on the project.
• “The Department of Homeland Security tested a crowd-scanning project called the Biometric Optical Surveillance System — or BOSS — last fall after two years of government-financed development. Although the system is not ready for use, researchers say they are making significant advances. That alarms privacy advocates, who say that now is the time for the government to establish oversight rules and limits on how it will someday be used.”

It sounds like the Department of Homeland Security could do with a little PR advice. If you’re developing a technology that will have every civil libertarian in the western world fearing for our basic freedoms, then calling it ‘BOSS’ isn’t really going to help, is it? They should try a less sinister name, such as ‘Hi-Tech Homeland Emergency Recognition Electronics’ – or ‘Hi-THERE’ for short. Sounds much friendlier.

Whatever you call it, this is how it’s meant to work:

• “The system consists of two towers bearing ‘robotic camera structures’ with infrared and distance sensors. They take pictures of the same subject from slightly different angles. A computer then processes the images into a ‘3-D signature’ built from data like the ratios between various points on someone’s face to be compared against data about faces stored in a watch-list database, the documents show.”

If successfully deployed, the technology will be of huge help to the police in locating and identifying terrorists, criminals or missing persons:

• “...BOSS research began as an effort to help the military detect potential suicide bombers and other terrorists overseas at 'outdoor polling places in Afghanistan and Iraq,' among other sites, the documents show. But in 2010, the effort was transferred to the Department of Homeland Security to be developed for use instead by the police in the United States.”

And yet, by the same token, BOSS would allow the state to track the movements of ordinary citizens:

• Ginger McCall, a privacy advocate who obtained the documents under the Freedom of Information Act and provided them to The New York Times, said the time was now — while such technology is still maturing and not yet deployed — to build in rules for how it may be used...
• “In particular, she said, there should be limits on whose faces are loaded into them when they are ready for deployment. Ms. McCall said it would be acceptable to use it for terrorism watch lists, but she feared any effort to systematically track everyone’s public movements by using a comprehensive database of driver’s license photographs.”

If you recall, the last Labour government wanted us all to carry ID cards. It was only a public backlash and Conservative opposition that frustrated their plans. However, if something like BOSS is deployed in Britain, ID cards will become irrelevant – because as long as your photo is on file, the state will always know who you are and where you are.

How the police could turn themselves into human CCTV cameras

Back in June, the Deep End featured an article about Google 'Glass' – a lightweight computer which you wear like a pair of glasses. Among various other features, Glass enables you to covertly record everything you can see and hear as you go about your business (or as stick your nose into somebody else’s). 

In a fascinating piece for the Kernel, Greg Stevens explores the implications of a police force kitted out with Google Glass or a similar device. 

In effect, it would mean turning every officer on patrol into a walking, talking CCTV camera – and surely we’ve got enough electronic eyes watching us as it is.  But Stevens’ argument is that the prime target of such surveillance would be the person wearing the device:

• “A recent year-long study has shown that when police officers are required to wear cameras, they are less likely to behave badly. Specifically, over the course of the year, members of the Rialto Police Department [in California] were asked to sometimes wear cameras during their shifts, and sometimes not wear the cameras.
• “Shifts without cameras experienced twice as many incidents of use of force as shifts with cameras. During the entire year when the experiment was being conducted, the total number of citizens’ complaints against the department was nearly one-tenth the number of complaints that were filed the year before.”

The key difference between CCTV and police-worn cameras is that the latter create a public record of what law enforcement officials do and say while on duty: 

• “Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, has said: ‘We don’t like the networks of police-run video cameras that are being set up in an increasing number of cities. We don’t think the Government should be watching over the population en masse.’ But requiring police officers to wear video cameras is different, he said: ‘When it comes to the citizenry watching the Government, we like that.’”

This brings to mind the case of the former Chief Whip Andrew Mitchell who was accused of verbally abusing a police officer on duty in Downing Street. If the officer in question had been wearing Google Glass, then the truth about who said what to whom could have been easily verified. 

Stevens makes a further interesting point on the issue of privacy:

• “Privacy is almost always treated as something that is inherently ‘good’, even though we universally reject the idea that a police officer has a ‘right to privacy’ while on duty.”

Because a uniformed police officer is regarded as a public figure, most people would also regard their face-to-face interactions with the police as taking place ‘in public’. This stands in contrast to the existing situation in which conventional CCTV cameras record us as we go about our private business (albeit out on the street). In any case, the direct encounters that we have with the police will often be recorded in some fashion as a matter of procedure, and it would be better for us if the record was a complete and objective one, unfiltered by the memory of the officer(s) in question.

There are exceptions, of course. When dealing with witnesses to – and victims of – crime, privacy  and confidentiality can be of crucial importance. Clear guidelines for the use of Google Glass and similar devices by the police are therefore required.

Just for once, it would be good if the political response to these possibilities stayed one step ahead of the technology.  So, this time, let’s have the public debate before the operational decisions are made.

Germany’s unpleasant experiment with legalised prostitution

Warning to readers – today’s post is about the sordid reality of prostitution, not the airbrushed fantasy depicted in some parts of the media.

When a new brothel opened near the German city of Stuttgart in 2009, this – according Spiegel Online – is how the management advertised the venue:

• “‘Sex with all women as long as you want, as often as you want and the way you want. Sex. Anal sex. Oral sex without a condom. Three-ways. Group sex. Gang bangs.’ The price: €70 during the day and €100 in the evening.
• "According to the police, about 1,700 customers took advantage of the offer on the opening weekend. Buses arrived from far away and local newspapers reported that up to 700 men stood in line outside the brothel. Afterwards, customers wrote in Internet chat rooms about the supposedly unsatisfactory service, complaining that the women were no longer as fit for use after a few hours.”

In Germany this is legal – and has been since 2001, when the Greens and the Social Democrats voted for a new prostitution law, meant to improve working conditions:

• “Today ‘a high percentage of prostitutes don't go home after work, but rather remain at their place of work around the clock,’ a former prostitute using the pseudonym Doris Winter wrote in a contribution to the academic series The Prostitution Law. ‘The women usually live in the rooms where they work,’ she added.
• “In Nuremberg, such rooms cost between €50 and €80 a day, says social worker [Andrea] Weppert, and the price can go up to €160 in brothels with a lot of customers. Working conditions for prostitutes have ‘worsened in recent years,’ says Weppert. In Germany on the whole, she adds, ‘significantly more services are provided under riskier conditions and for less money than 10 years ago.’”

One of the reasons for the decline in pay and conditions is the influx of women from eastern Europe. Official German statistics show that that there is less “human trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation” than a decade ago, but not everyone thinks that this reflects reality:

• “Munich Police Chief Wilhelm Schmidbauer deplores the ‘explosive increase in human trafficking from Romania and Bulgaria,’ but adds that he lacks access to the necessary tools to investigate. He is often prohibited from using telephone surveillance. The result, says Schmidbauer, ‘is that we have practically no cases involving human trafficking. We can't prove anything.’
• “...the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law concluded that official figures on human trafficking say ‘little about the actual scope of the offence.’”

So, what’s the solution? To go back to the days when the authorities hounded women off the streets, into police cells and back again? There is another way. In Sweden, they hound the clients, the pimps and the traffickers, not the prostitutes. 

The Swedish approach, so very different from that of countries like Germany and the Netherlands, seems to be having some success, with prostitution now in decline.

Sweden still has a long way to go, of course. But as Pierrette Pape, of the Europe Women’s Lobby, points out, some attitudes can only be changed over the long-term:

• "Nowadays, a little boy in Sweden grows up with the fact that buying sex is a crime. A little boy in the Netherlands grows up with the knowledge that women sit in display windows and can be ordered like mass-produced goods." 

What’s the difference between a high street banker and a back street fraudster?

Has the backlash against the bankers gone too far? Perhaps, but given the sheer number and variety of banking scandals, it’s a wonder they’ve got off so lightly.

In an essay for the London Review of Books, John Lancaster’s theory is that because the scandals have come so thick and fast, we haven’t been able to focus on what really should be making us angry:

• “In the midst of this cacophony of largely justified accusations, the banks have had a strange kind of good fortune: the noise is now so loud that it’s become hard to hear specific complaints of wrongdoing. That’s lucky for them, because there’s one particular scandal which really deserves to stand out. The scandal I have in mind is that of mis-sold payment protection insurance (PPI). ”

The mis-selling of PPI will certainly cost the banks dear:

• “The first mentions of PPI as a potential liability for the banks had the then astonishing, then unprecedented amount of £1 billion mentioned as a possible upper limit to the damage. When the crucial court case against the claims was lost by the banks in April 2011, the FSA knew it was going to be expensive: their estimate of the cost to the industry was £3 billion. But that turned out to be a huge underestimate… the latest estimates for the total cost of the PPI scandal have kept going up, and then up again, and then up a bit more... The most recent guesstimate for the total cost is £16 billion. That, as near as dammit, is twice the bill for the London Olympics.”

Nevertheless, the public reaction is muted. We’re probably more annoyed by the constant cold calling from companies trying to handle compensation claims on our behalf than by the scandal itself.

But, as John Lancaster argues, we ought to be furious:

• “…The other scandals and crises are bad, and involve behaviour that is variously unethical-to-criminal, but they also belong to a type that a very broadminded cynic would file in the already bulging category of boys-will-be-boys, subsection ’twas-ever-thus… The story of PPI is different because it involves a more basic breach of what banking is supposed to be about: looking after other people’s money. That’s the first thing that is qualitatively different about PPI; the second is that the misdeeds happened not inside rogue units of these huge global institutions but at the centre of their retail operations. This was an industry-wide, systematic cheating of the banks’ own customers.”

It goes even further. The PPI scandal represents a fundamental attack on the very spirit of capitalism:

• “In a capitalist economy, companies make money by supplying needs or wants: we pay for things knowing that some of that money is profit for the businesses involved, and are in general content to do so, because we know that’s how the system works. Companies align themselves with our interests and make money in the process.”

Lancaster mentions Apple as the supreme example of this arrangement. The profit margins on the company’s products are famously huge, but in return for our cash what Apple gives us is beautifully designed, high quality tech that simply wouldn’t exist otherwise. Apple makes lots of money by pushing the boundaries of innovation and is rightly proud on both counts.

The contrast with the banks couldn't be clearer:

• “...the PPI scandal showed a fundamental breach in that alignment between them and us… PPI was about banks breaking trust by exploiting their customers, not accidentally, but as a matter of deliberate and sustained policy. They sold policies which they knew did not serve the ends they were supposed to serve and in doing so treated their customers purely as an extractive resource.” 

Not much to proud of there.

So, having posed the question, what is the difference between a high street banker and a back street fraudster? The answer, of course, is that the latter is open on a Saturday afternoon.

Bitcoin and the privatisation of currency

You might think that only governments can legally print money (or, these days, create it electronically), but you’d be wrong. Anyone with the technical know-how can do it – as long as they do it in a currency of their own invention.

Several such private currencies are already in circulation – the best known of which is Bitcoin.

In a feature for the Financial Times, Stephen Foley and Jane Wild describe the currency’s rather mysterious origins:

• “Bitcoin was created four years ago by an unknown computer scientist with the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, who conceived it as an alternative to government-controlled currencies and a means to transfer money quickly, cheaply and anonymously outside the slow, expensive and highly regulated international banking system. Transactions are recorded in the ‘blockchain’, a massive block of code stored across a peer-to-peer network of computers. These computers are called miners because their owners are rewarded for their service with occasional payment in new Bitcoins.”

This isn’t a mere experiment – something like $30 million of Bitcoins are traded every day, which is a rough estimate because the Dollar value of each Bitcoin can vary dramatically in a short space of time:

• “The price for a single Bitcoin, less than $14 at the start of the year, spiked to $266 before crashing. It now hovers at about $110. The volatility may have set back the currency’s utility as a reliable means of exchange but, as with a previous price spike in 2011, it only appears to have piqued more interest.”

Judging by its past performance, Bitcoin could make you a fortune, but it could lose you one too. In fact, it’s not just crashing exchange rates you have to watch out for. Because Bitcoins exist as data stored on your computer, they can be stolen by hackers – or wiped out by technological mishaps:

• “Such disasters are legion, with digital wallets failing and exchanges shutting down unexpectedly.”

So, who believes in Bitcoin?

• “The strongest evangelisers of Bitcoins have always been libertarians. This is broadly the political hue of the Bitcoin Foundation, set up by some of the earliest users and entrepreneurs of the currency to steward its development. But an increasing majority of the people interested in Bitcoin are only ‘libertarianish’, despairing of government rather than opposed to it.”

Britain’s “most prominent Bitcoin evangelist” is Amir Taaki:

• “A former professional poker player from Kent, Taaki was expelled from school for hacking, and with his quirkily styled hair he cuts an unconventional figure as a spokesman. There is respect for his achievements… But his unapologetic support for using the currency to subvert government controls makes some people uneasy.
• “‘...it’s very important we try not to look up to the old hierarchy, and build our own system independently. Bitcoin is a decentralised, black market economy where you can buy drugs online and avoid tax and that undermines so much power. Anyone who tries to deny Bitcoin is revolutionary is living in fantasy,’ he says.”

Governments around the world are beginning to pay attention. In particular, they are worried that currencies like Bitcoin could be used by criminals for money laundering:

• “This is a particular problem with so-called distributed currencies… transactions are processed and recorded across a network of users’ computers and balances are stored on a user’s hard drive rather than in a seizable bank account.”

The authorities are right to be concerned if they can no longer stop criminals (and especially terrorists) moving money around. But perhaps what Governments fear most of all is something else that private currencies could make impossible: Taxation.

Heresy of the week: There is zero evidence for zero tolerance policing

City Journal has a fantastic profile by John Buntin of Bill Bratton, whose inspired leadership of the New York Police Department famously restored law and order to America’s largest city.

Bratton’s police career began in Boston, where he first developed the ideas that would characterise his approach to law enforcement:

• “At first, Bratton focused on what he saw as serious crime… But at the community meetings, Bratton kept hearing about different concerns: prostitution, after-hours clubs, loud parties, and public drinking. The sore spot in the South End was dirty streets: street sweepers couldn’t clean them because of illegally parked cars, and though the scofflaws got tickets, they rarely got towed. So after one complaint-filled meeting, Bratton decided to do what the community wanted. For days, police officers wrote tickets and towed cars.
• “In the process, something unexpected happened. While out writing tickets, one of the cops started chatting with a resident about the South End burglaries. It turned out that the resident had seen someone suspicious around the time of a recent break-in. The officer handed the tip to detectives, who arrested the offender and ended the burglary spree. Bratton had learned an important lesson: addressing public concerns about disorder could prevent more serious crimes.”

This phenomenon was studied by sociologists James Q Wilson and George Kelling and formalised as the ‘Broken Windows’ theory.

After moving to New York, Bratton would become the first police chief to test the theory on a large scale:

• “The transit cops who, following his orders, started arresting turnstile jumpers made a surprising discovery: one in seven was wanted on an outstanding warrant, and one in 21 was carrying a weapon. In short, enforcing the law was also an excellent way to arrest felons and fugitives, which in turn drove down crime rates and public fear.”

However, Broken Windows is not the same thing as so-called zero tolerance policing. And it’s interesting that a conservative US publication like City Journal should take the trouble to identity the UK as being especially prone to this misconception: 

• “The British press has been particularly zealous about describing the NYPD’s approach as ‘zero tolerance.’ It isn’t. ‘Broken Windows has always been a negotiated sense of order in a community, in which you negotiate with residents about what is appropriate behavior in an area,’ says Kelling. ‘If you tell your cops, ‘We are going to go in and practice zero tolerance for all minor crimes,’ you are inviting a mess of trouble.’ The idea that authorities alone, without community involvement, should implement a zero-tolerance policy toward anything more than the most limited problems of crime or disorder disturbs Kelling greatly. Both he and Bratton view it as the single most misunderstood legacy of their time in New York.”

As it happens, real zero tolerance policing has been tried in America – and it was a disaster:

• “Their concern isn’t academic or theoretical: there was a place where observers could have watched the effect of zero-tolerance policing, had they cared to look for it. That place was South Los Angeles, where Daryl Gates’s Operation Hammer was shattering relations between the police and minority communities.”

It was an episode that culminated in the Rodney King Riots of 1992. Following the violence, various unsuccessful attempts were made to reform the LAPD, improve community relations and turn the tide of crime in Los Angeles. They failed.

But, then in 2002, a new police chief was appointed – hot from New York, guy by the name of Bratton. Once again, his brand of effectively-led, evidence-based, community-rooted policing delivered real improvement.

So, the next time you hear someone advocate zero tolerance policing, ask them where they think its already been tried. And if they say New York or Los Angeles, do put them right.

Heresy of the week: Russell Brand is right about drugs (but so is Peter Hitchens)

Russell Brand is not someone you’d expect to find writing for the Spectator, but here he is on the subject of drug abuse:

• “I cannot accurately convey the efficiency of heroin in neutralising pain. It transforms a tight white fist into a gentle brown wave, and from my first inhalation 15 years ago it fumigated my private hell. A bathroom floor in Hackney embraced me like a womb, and now whenever I am dislodged from comfort my focus falls there.
• “It is ten years since I used drugs or drank alcohol and my life has immeasurably improved. I have a job, a house, a cat, good friendships and generally a bright outlook.
• “But the price of this is constant vigilance, because the disease of addiction is not rational.”

Ah, “the disease of addiction.” These words lie at the heart of a three-way rolling argument between Russell Brand who sees addiction as a disease, the Telegraph’s Damian Thompson who says that addiction is not a disease and the Mail on Sunday’s Peter Hitchens who claims that addiction doesn’t even exist.

Those not of a sensitive disposition can hear Thompson and Hitchens failing to settle their differences in a stormy Spectator podcast. 

Hitchens sees the language of addiction as a denial of human free will. Furthermore, there’s no diagnosable medical condition that makes someone an addict, he says. In other words: drugs don’t abuse people, people abuse drugs.

Thompson agrees about the medical evidence, which is why he defines addiction as a “behaviour” rather than a disease. It would, perhaps, be better if he defined it as an appetite. Common sense would suggest that some people have stronger appetites for certain things than other people. This in no way denies moral agency, it simply recognises that not all temptations are equal.

Furthermore, it has been scientifically demonstrated that the consumption of certain substances increases your appetite for them. This doesn’t just apply to illegal drugs, but also to sugar or caffeine, for instance. That our brains should be wired like this isn’t the result of a disease, but rather an evolutionary adaptation to making the most of a good (or, at least, pleasurable) thing when we come across it. 

With this view of addiction, we can begin to untangle some unfortunate disagreements, such as the following from Russell Brand:

• “Peter Hitchens is a vocal adversary of mine on this matter. He sees this condition as a matter of choice and the culprits as criminals who should go to prison. I know how he feels. I bet I have to deal with a lot more drug addicts than he does, let’s face it, I share my brain with one, and I can tell you first-hand they are total nightmares. Where I differ from Peter is in my belief that, if we regard alcoholics and drug addicts not as bad people but as sick people, then we can help them to get better.”

For a start, we should reject the Manichean idea of ‘good people’ and ‘bad people’, and replace it with the Christian idea of free-willed individuals capable of both good and bad. Next, we should realise that there is nothing incompatible between this conception of the individual and the idea that society should help individuals to overcome their temptations. From this it follows that the stronger and more dangerous the temptation the more help that should be provided.

Finally, given that what strengthens temptation to a drug is exposure to it, the appropriate response is to remove that exposure – in other words, through abstinence-based treatment and the maximum possible restriction of supply.

The irony is that, on the issue of treatment, Russell Brand, Damian Thompson and Peter Hitchens are all in agreement. They should, therefore, unite against the real enemy, which is the ‘harm reduction’ approach to drug treatment, that maintains people in a state of addiction while attempting to minimise the consequences. Methadone prescription is the best-known manifestation of this philosophy, but not the only one – and together they tie-up resources that could be used for abstinence-based treatment instead.

Time to hold peace talks, chaps.

Legalising prostitution hasn’t worked and nor would legalising drugs

Last year, the Deep End featured a Julie Bindel article on prostitution. In a more recent article for the Spectator, she covers the same issue – in particular the failure of legalisation in the Netherlands – but makes some useful additional points.

Advocates of liberalisation – whether of the law on prostitution, drug dealing or some other undesirable activity – like to argue that criminalisation only drives the problem ‘underground’. This rather ignores the possibility that ‘underground’ might be the best place for it.

For instance, Amsterdam’s red light district was internationally infamous long before the legalisation of the brothel trade – but at least it was contained:

• “Twelve years on, and we can now see the results of this experiment. Rather than afford better protection for the women, it has simply increased the market. Rather than confine the brothels to a discrete (and avoidable) part of the city, the sex industry has spilt out all over Amsterdam — including on-street.”
• “...nowhere else in the world is street prostitution legal, because people do not want it in plain sight. Where there is a street sex trade, women are accosted on their way home by punters, and often condoms, drugs paraphernalia and pimps are visible.”

On the hand, bringing a problem out into the open does allow a degree of regulation and drives out the criminal element – doesn’t it? 

That’s not what happened in Amsterdam:

• “Rather than be given rights in the ‘workplace’, the prostitutes have found the pimps are as brutal as ever. The government-funded union set up to protect them has been shunned by the vast majority of prostitutes, who remain too scared to complain.
• “...the pimps remained but became legit — violence was still prevalent but part of the job, and trafficking increased. Support for the women to leave prostitution became almost nonexistent. The innate murkiness of the job has not been washed away by legal benediction.”

Liberals seem to imagine that, upon a change in the law, thousands of decent, upright citizens will suddenly come forward to serve the community as caring, responsible pimps and drug dealers who pay their taxes, recognise unions and recycle their rubbish. After all, why become a teacher or a doctor when you could be persuading vulnerable young people to sell their bodies or buy your crystal meth?

Then again, isn’t it possible that the criminals who currently control these trades will decide to stay put, adapting both to the challenges and to the opportunities of the new situation? 

As Julie Bindel makes clear, the main impact of legalisation in Holland has been to provide criminals with cover:

• “Illegality has simply taken a new form, with an increase in trafficking, unlicensed brothels and pimping; with policing completely out of the picture, it was easier to break the laws that remained. To pimp out women from non-EU countries, desperate for a new life, remains illegal. But it’s never been easier.”

Gun control: Barack Obama should follow in John Howard’s footsteps

In the wake of the murder of twenty children and six adults at a primary school in Newtown, Connecticut, Barack Obama has pledged to do something about gun control in America.

Despite his deification by the centre-left, Obama doesn’t always deliver on his lofty promises. But if he is serious about this one, then he could do worse than to follow the example of John Howard, the former Australian Prime Minister and one the greatest conservative leaders of recent times.

Howard was elected Prime Minister in 1996, six weeks after taking office, a disturbed individual by the name of Martin Bryant used two semiautomatic weapons to kill 35 people in Port Arthur, Tasmania.

In a sensitively-pitched op-ed for the New York Times, John Howard recounts the story of how he secured a complete ban on the “ownership, possession and sale of all automatic and semiautomatic weapons.” He begins by acknowledging  the differences between the Australian and American situations:

• “I wouldn’t presume to lecture Americans on the subject… Our challenges were different from America’s… Our gun lobby isn’t as powerful or well-financed as the National Rifle Association… our legislatures have more say than America’s over many issues of individual rights, and our courts have less control… Also, we have no constitutional right to bear arms. (After all, the British granted us nationhood peacefully; the United States had to fight for it.)”

However, in many ways Howard’s job was more difficult than Obama’s. Not only did the new laws have to be independently, but consistently, passed through each state legislature – he also had to act as the leader of a coalition government with a strong rural constituency:

• “Passing gun-control laws was a major challenge for my coalition partner: the rural, conservative National Party. All of its members held seats in nonurban areas. It was also very hard for the state government of Queensland, in Australia’s northeast, where the National Party was dominant, and where the majority of the population was rural.
• “The leaders of the National Party, as well as the premier of Queensland, courageously supported my government’s decision, despite the electoral pain it caused them.”

Indeed, there was political price to pay in the shape of the populist One Nation Party that promised to reverse the gun laws. And, yet he kept his nerve and pressed on – also overcoming the practical challenges of the prohibition:

• “To make this plan work, there had to be a federally financed gun buyback scheme. Ultimately, the cost of the buyback was met by a special one-off tax imposed on all Australians. This required new legislation and was widely accepted across the political spectrum. Almost 700,000 guns were bought back and destroyed — the equivalent of 40 million guns in the United States.”

But did it work?

• “...today, there is a wide consensus that our 1996 reforms not only reduced the gun-related homicide rate, but also the suicide rate… The American Law and Economics Review found that our gun buyback scheme cut firearm suicides by 74 percent. In the 18 years before the 1996 reforms, Australia suffered 13 gun massacres — each with more than four victims — causing a total of 102 deaths. There has not been a single massacre in that category since 1996.”

Why gun control is about to get a whole lot harder

Do you remember desktop publishing? It was all the rage in the 1980s and 1990s when people realised that with a home computer and a printer they could produce their own leaflets and newsletters.

DTP hasn’t gone away, of course. It’s just gone to the internet, in fact to a very large extent it is the internet (think Facebook, Twitter, blogging and all the rest of it). Certainly, you wouldn’t be reading this now if it wasn’t for desktop publishing.

Now just think what desktop manufacturing could achieve. At a price, you can already purchase 3D printers for the home – capable of printing a small solid object in plastic or some other medium. Though not capable of anything like high volume production, 3D printers are allowing innovators to prototype products and components in ways that have never been possible before.

But there is a downside. As Devin Coldewey points out on the TechCrunch website, some 3D printers are already capable of fabricating guns:

• “If we as a country, and indeed we as a global community, are going to seriously address the question of gun control, we need to address the issue of fabricated weapons and weapon plans, or else the discussion will be moot. This is because the proliferation of 3D printed weaponry changes both the definition of ‘gun’ and of what it means to ‘control’ it.”
• “What is a gun? A barrel is not a gun, nor is a stock, or a sight, or a trigger. But at some point you put these and a few other objects together and you have a gun...”

Coldewey is writing from an American perspective, where, for obvious and tragic reasons, gun control is a burning issue. But it may be that the issue of 3D-printed weaponry is of greater relevance to us in Britain. 

After all, we take gun control for granted. Not complete control, of course; but, unlike America, we don’t expect guns to be easily and routinely accessible to any petty criminal or random nutcase. 3D printers could change all of that. It’s not just that the specifications of a gun – or a bomb – could be downloaded from the internet and fabricated just about anywhere, but also that modifications and 'improvements' could be made just as easily.

There’s no need for immediate panic. The current technology is pretty rudimentary. But having said that, developments are only heading in one direction: 

• “Like the digitization of music, the digitization of objects, guns or otherwise, is a one-way street. Every step forward is ineffaceable. Once you can make an MP3 and share it online, that’s it, there’s no going back — the industry is changed, just like that. Why should it be different when you reduce a spoon, a replacement part, a patented tool, or a gun to a compact file that can be reproduced using widely-available hardware? There’s no going back. So what is ‘control’ now?”

It’s a good question and one we should start thinking about:

• “We have had to come to grips with other transformative technologies, destructive and constructive. The telegraph, the atomic bomb, the computer. We can deal with this development, and that’s good because we are going to have to one way or the other.”