criminal justice – mil's page

aside, definition, design philosophy, rationale

“On people called #melians who have no regrets”

In truth, whilst change IS inevitable — just as #siliconvalley and its dreadful hangers-on have universally, dogmatically and terrifyingly proclaimed for over half a century — its NATURE never automagically was. It’s just a fact, this: just a fact, too. For #bigtech is an only “half-the-story #tech”. And only ever has been.

Mil Williams, 27th April 2025, Arlanda Airport, Stockholm, Sweden,

It’s what I said a while ago.

There’s no courage involved in not feeling fear. And therefore no virtue whatsoever in being fearless.

There’s only virtue in doing something despite the need to overcome.

And one other thing I’ve learnt:

Not everyone should like you. If they did, you’d probably be doing something wrong.

Not wrong in itself. Wrong because in the first instance, in my experience, when you have an idea and are NOT stubborn enough not to have your course changed, it’s an error of crass proportions if and when you ultimately fail to persist in transforming the world, particularly when you ideas manifestly deserved to.

And sometimes, maybe often, we do fail to transform what’s around us with our thoughts and imagination precisely because, equally, we want to be liked: I mean, that is, that we tend to prefer to think not being liked is a sign we’re on the incorrect path.

But I now think the reverse. This is what I think. In two parts:

1. It’s always the bad guys who first see the dangers and implications — for them and their easy business models — of different and obstinately held ideas to their preferred future-present: the one they considered, out of their absolute sense of entitlement, absolutely theirs forever. Ideas like the ones, never necessarily originally but for sure always firmly, I’ve continued to propound over the years.

2. It’s always the good guys who last see the virtues and positives — for them and their terribly oppressed democratic communities — of different and obstinately held ideas to their assumed future-present: the one they were told was a result of inevitable change I mean, and absolutely NOT theirs forever.

In truth, whilst change IS inevitable — just as #siliconvalley and its dreadful hangers-on have universally, dogmatically and terrifyingly proclaimed for over half a century — its NATURE never automagically was. It’s just a fact, this: just a fact, too. For #bigtech is an only “half-the-story #tech”. And only ever has been.

This is why, when you want to deliver transformation, you have to accept you won’t be liked.

Firstly, the bad guys won’t ever do anything but hate you with their casually polite, practised and breezily easy business smiles.

And this will happen for perhaps the first five years.

And their goal is to break you, and make you stumble, and then dispirit you to the extent, perhaps, you kill yourself.

But then they have a problem. If they sense there will, after all, be a “next five years”, they realise the sword they wanted all that time for you to fall on no longer usefully, or at least reliably, exists.

So they will try to get closer to you and maybe even persuade you that all the while the smiles they sent your way with minimal financial breadcrumbs attached were actually, all the time in question, offerings of real dough.

And some of us out here give in at this point and take the money and run. And then the bad guys close down the ideas, and life continues to get worse for everyone else. Despite our ideas. Despite their coming originally into being. Despite what might have been.

The thing is … this is the thing. If you are stubborn … not original at all … just irreversibly firm in your preferred outcomes, even as fabulously flexible in your means and ways of getting there … well … you may end up concluding what I did when I got to the second and third and fourth and fifth “five years”: you only need to be liked by one group of people.

That’s all it ever takes.

Just one group is needed.

This group being?

The good guys who one day will realise that the #meliandialogue can be upturned: the islands of the world can beat — hands-down — the totalitarians.

Islands?

Places where we continue to understand that once in our histories we built fortresses in order to expand outwards with security and safety first and foremost. And that this was a good idea. And that this was the best idea. And that this is our next best step now.

And then we shall be … NOT #athens, ever … no. Not that. Not the #valley that causes so many tears. Never that. We never could be.

Rather, people called #melians who no longer shall have any regrets.

definition, design philosophy, rationale

NUESTRA huída hacia delante

I lived in Spain for around sixteen years. My Spanish is quite good; but I’m not a native in the language and never learnt it formally.

But the poem below, for some reason today, I felt obliged to write in Spanish: that is, castellano. Because there are a number of sometimes quite different languages the Spanish state and peoples communicate in. I know only castellano.

Mainly, in the street — and then receiving correction via an assiduous daily reading over the years of a linguistically ferocious Spanish newspaper called El País.

I wrote the poem below in response to a post that came my way an hour or so ago on LinkedIn. So the poem is dedicated to the man who posted that post, and made me want to write the poem.

Comments, as always, welcome always.

NUESTRA huída hacia delante 

sí lo es 
una huída 
hacia delante 
sin querer en absoluto 
y sin preocuparse por nada 

porque es hora de ver 
si tienes razones 
por pensar 
si hay personas e instituciones 
que te quieren 

y que quedan -como debieran- 
para que quererles 
a su vez y de vuelta 
sea sensato 
o no

porque he llegado 
a la conclusión 
que necesito
estar sólo 
con gente de buena fe

NO las que te hacen reír ...
pero entonces nada más que desde sus estupideces 
y desde sus más profundas idioteces
donde crecen sólo sus mentiras
cuando no las tetas de sus nenas

por arte 
del instagram
o del tiktok 
de las narices 
y de los gobernantes chinos que sólo te miran 

porque sólo quiero estar ya
con personas buenas
quienes saben ya de mi mundo
desde su interior:
para que otras explicaciones ya no son necesarias 

y porque ellos también
lo han experimentado y sufrido 
en el presente
igual 
que en el pasado 

y entonces si eso significa 
que a la gran mayoría
(que solo parece 
que sea la mayoría y -desde luego-
constituida en nada de "gran") 

me veo obligado a dar mi espalda
es porque tengo ganas
no de dar la espalda a nadie 
pero en su lugar 
mirar con firmeza de frente 

a caras como la tuya:
es decir 
a otra clase 
completamente 
de gente 

gente que sólo cree en un mundo
donde el jugo que se derrita 
no son las sangres 
de la población mundial entera 
ni de sus cuerpos frágiles 

llenos de las bondades 
por encima 
de cualquier abuso 
cometido por vicio 
y por medio de la violencia corporal 

de todos los hombres 
y mujeres 
autoritarios ...
pero para que -de otro modo 
bien distinto y precioso-

lo que echamos 
no es nada de menos 
a nada que hemos valorado
desde hace siempre 
como lo mejor de todo ser humano 

ni que hayamos querido derretir   
los jugos de nuestras vidas 
en campos de guerra 
y en apartamentos donde bombas
despiertan al bebé recién nacido  

para que pueda morir en el acto 
en charcos de su propia sangre 
con los cuerpos de sus hermanos enfrente
proclamando el adiós cruel 
de los violentos tan poderosos ... 

pues NO: 
no ... 
no ...  
no ... 
no paso más tiempo con gente así 

no es ésta la vida que elijo consentir:
y estar con la gentuza 
que sí prefieren consentirla
con las sábanas rojas de esos niños
todos los días de las semanas tan agredidas 

NO es donde voy a quedarme:
porque ya pido más a la vida 
y no me quedo con el lujo
de beber el mejor vino por un lado  
y derretir la humanidad por el otro 

como HAMAS nunca JAMÁS 
debiera haber concebido 
y ya no digo lo que pudo llevar a cabo
porque ellos sí han sabido siempre 
todo lo que han hecho y han querido hacer 

y así -en profundo recuerdo 
de ukraine y de 9/11-
damos la vuelta al verso anterior:
bebemos todos YA 
de las humanidades que más nos hacen nobles  

y derretimos únicamente 
a partir de ahora 
os ruego -por favor-
sólo los vinos 
de mas esplendor 

de los viñedos con más sabiduría  
y que nos sean capaces de bendecir BIEN
con sus alegrías 
de amores bien vividos 
y de muchos ciudadanos y ciudadanas viviendo ahora 

que deben luchar con una ferocidad 
que corresponde SÓLO 
a los que han intentado por todos los medios 
buscar otros caminos por esos medios 
e incluso cuando no queremos pelear así en absoluto 

porque cuando la guerra te toca a ti
tienes sólo dos opciones:
ninguna es fácil 
pero sólo una conduce 
a una muestra de lo que es firmemente mantenerse humano

y puedes ceder en todo por supuesto 
y quedar con lo que te dan si eso
o puedes luchar 
para otro futuro 
bien distinto 

y aunque yo sé lo que es para mí
y -ciertamente siempre será así-
no puedo ni debo definirlo para ti ya
porque ser un humano es eso:
la elección de cada uno ... elección bien propia 

pero lo que sí reservo -sin sentirme mal-
es el derecho a decir a la fecha de hoy 
y la de mañana 
y el año que viene
y desde mis escritos 

que quizás durante cientos de años 
pueda que perduren 
o -a lo mejor- solamente 
en las mentes de muy poco gente 
y a lo mejor ni eso ... ni eso mi amor 

pero a decir la verdad
me da igual ya
porque lo único que quiero 
de la vida que me queda 
en los años venideros (y espero llenos de amor)

es encontrarme con mis gentes
y NO con sangres encharcándose
y ni de hombres ahorcándose ...
pero sí -y eso sin duda- 
con mujeres y hombres tiernos 

capaces de vivir la vida 
correctamente y de manera noble 
incluso cuando 
nos han tocado los campos 
de la inhumanidad más espeluznante

definition, design philosophy, rationale

An open letter to all UK politicians, past and present

My message, then, to all UK politicians past and present? DON’T use your politics to obviate your HUMAN duty to be prudent emotionally; purposeful societally; and compassionate humanely. Because if that’s your game — that is, your politics is more an invisibility cloak than a badge of courage — you’re also, on top of not being all that, not redeemable either.

And if so, you don’t deserve to lead a dog, never mind a country.
Mil Willliams, 27th August 2023, Ellesmere Port UK

The difference between feeling secure and feeling safe.
With gratitude to my eldest son, Guillermo, who narrates this short.

This is my position:

I will fight, always now, in favour of a state #surveillance and citizen #sousveillance that hand-in-hand serve to be each other’s keeper, where this becomes us and is at all possible.

That is to say, a process of permanent democratic observation — the million eyes of #opensource translated to societal re-engineering — which then exists to support and serve … never intrude and control.

Because this is why I have been condemned since 2017 at least — maybe before, too — to a life of vibrantly incessant failure. I realised then, in that year of Criminal Justice, that there was an alternative to #totalsurveillance and secular #originalsin. And what was more dangerous for the establishment in all of that was that I began to acquire the critical apparatus and appetite to deliver to the academic and technological satisfactions of the vast majority the alternative I had begun to shape:

Download a PDF of my 2017 MA dissertation on Secular Original Sin and #totalsurveillance

But I realised this year I am not the only one any more. And actually I never was. After the past year’s events, I have been able to satisfactorily evidence, to myself at least, that I am not the only soul in the world who believes — not just in theory but in goddamn real-life practice — that #surveillance can serve to serve and enhance both the citizen experience and ENJOYMENT of life: not only re its securities, then; also, its deepest and kindliest safeties.

My most important experiences in my life, this year:

In the country I have been visiting since just before Christmas — Sweden — I found a society that had already legislated and implemented regulations in premises that ensured a certain distance between CCTV camera and the citizenry below; that already required private-sector street CCTV to watch only that square metre or so which ensures due and reasonable coverage of entry points; and that, above all, when travelling on public transport all footage thus gathered has public sell-by dates of tens of hours not tens of weeks, is only viewed by the police themselves, and is stationed so it FEELS, ffs, like something you can embrace wholeheartedly as part of a vigorous democracy, not something you must reject out-of-hand as signs of an all-too-evident encroaching authoritarianism.

And with all this, I am actually convinced, without knowing for sure, that they will have as much CCTV as we do in the UK. The difference there being that it’s designed to make citizens feel free and open in their sense of how these securities are intended to function, not imposed on by the overbearing and censorious guardians of the state as many here might feel.

Surveillance as an extension of the citizen then, not the state:

No. Sweden is not perfect. We are not perfect. We have virtues, it is true. So do they. What we can do perfectly, meantime, is learn the best of each other to integrate these things, encountered and assessed judiciously, into the best of our own.

Right now, the UK political system disables this purposeful approach to society-building and their sustaining. The current Swedish government is as right-wing as ours. But it’s not right-wing or left- that has to matter. It’s whether we choose to be questioning, querying, learning beings or not. Whatever are the politics we wish to espouse.

My message, then, to all UK politicians past and present? DON’T use your politics to obviate your HUMAN duty to be prudent emotionally; purposeful societally; and compassionate humanely. Because if that’s your game — that is, your politics is more an invisibility cloak than a badge of courage — you’re also, on top of not being all that, not redeemable either.

And if so, you don’t deserve to lead a dog, never mind a country.

Now do you?

Two directions

If total surveillance and omnisciently intrusive CCTV serve only to inhibit us and not Putin et al, the new swords we must begin to develop must have radically new philosophies, much more than just beefier technologies.
On why we need radically new secrecy-positive architectures | Mil Williams, 24th August 2023, Manchester UK

I think I’m being offered two directions to move forwards definitively on my projects. And I think in my mind it’s clarifying my view on what to do next, where, and how.

I think the two directions can both happen, too.

But for many reasons, only one can happen here in the UK, in Ireland and most other places we consider.

If my thinking isn’t mistaken, the security version must only happen in Sweden and countries which share the philosophy that is embedded firmly in a wider Scandinavian way of foregrounding the citizen and their rights when constructing and rebuilding democracies.

So.

What I think is being suggested:

IVP1

1. My #neurodiverse #complexproblem-solutioning proposals may sit in many and perhaps all cultures eventually. If you like, the B2C product and service, where the “C” of B2C equals “Culture”, and which the Swedish intuition corporation I am proposing we build as per The Guardian newspaper group’s Scott Trust would deliver, mostly, indirectly.

Here, in the wider field of using arts-based thinking for solving real-world problems, therefore, practically anything and anyone gets a hearing:

• complexify.me

• complexifylab.com

Meantime, the Swedish corporation I would like us to create would not, as alluded to, be involved directly in even a tenth of all the activities that might arise through this Intuition Validation Project 1 (IVP1), alongside its set of related workstreams.

• www.sverige2.earth/unified

We would only need to license the rights for using the core technologies and philosophies I’ve been thought-leading since 2016. That’s as far as we would go. No need, for example, to shape how any of this was to be implemented. No longer would there exist roadblocks on any side to arise.

It would, therefore, even be possible to make these platforms and architectures available from the starting-blocks for countries with whose security policies I, and a wider Swedish society quite separately and much before me, fundamentally find ourselves disagreeing on: for example, oppressive manifestations of total surveillance & CCTV, and the complete removal of public access to encryption and so forth, even in banking applications, being the approach the UK has been advocating and wishing to put into practice for decades.

Equally, the Swedish and similar, where total surveillance is employed, use it to enable the citizenry and make them feel safer and more empowered: never to make them sense, as we do get to suspect in the UK, that they are permanently being inspected and tracked in order to bulldoze voters and similar into good behaviours out of tools, primarily, aimed at inducing fear.

Seen in Vällingby tunnelbana station, Stockholm Sweden, 2023

And that’s a philosophical difference of import: in the UK, we trust that people will be bad: that is, secular Original Sin. In other countries, we trust that enabling the help of the citizenry is paramount; we trust that what we might call “good trust” needs to be promoted strategically. Here, then, it’s not enough to be secure at all; we need to be safe, too. We shouldn’t have to be looking over our shoulders all the time. And our policies should reflect this.

One Swedish example to underline: street CCTV on private and state buildings must look down only on the entrance itself to the building being surveilled. No dragnet across all passers-by.

So. If we think like this — IVP1 I mean — there’s no need to negotiate these matters any more, before we may begin, because IVP1 will be in the hands of creators of different kinds, even where what they create may deliver tangible and utilitarian real-world solutions.

And then again, just the one condition too: periodic licence fees, but ourselves, as an intuition-validation corporation, being utterly hands-off.

IVP2

2. Security — the project we might now call IVP2 — is a quite different matter, however.

My Criminal Justice Master dissertation (linked to here), from 2017, on the subject of secular Original Sin*, laid it out really clearly: in an ever more complex world there will be no edge obtained by law enforcement and security if we ensure citizens feel as pursued as the real criminals. The only way we can be collectively more than the bad guys and gals is if we get citizens deeply onside: enabling them to act out their proactive roles as joint defenders of the law. It’s not enough that they just nod their acquiescence to what we claim to be doing when faced by the horrors of modern criminality.

Until countries like the UK accept that our total surveillance-friendly software architectures (admins who see all; users who see nothing but even so are aware, all too aware, how they are being permanently surveilled) have fatally inhibited — impaled, even — our own capacity to think creatively in security, crimefighting and law-enforcement contexts, we cannot develop my ideas in respect of security where such acceptance is not forthcoming.

• www.secrecy.plus/fire

Because criminals like the Putins of this world do continue to enjoy their own deepest secrecy-positive spaces whilst they longitudinally plan our destruction, despite our own ongoing total surveillance strategies:

• www.secrecy.plus/why

You get now, I hope, then, where my objections really lie; where they are firmly seated? If total surveillance and omnisciently intrusive CCTV serve only to inhibit us and not Putin et al, the new swords we must begin to develop must have radically new philosophies, much more than just beefier technologies.

Security for me, therefore, sits where the right philosophies existed prior to my own arrival. And my travails when writing the dissertation in question back in 2017, clearly caused me by British security, indicate, even post-Ukraine, that for quite a while they will not be enabled here in the UK.

To summarise:

IVP1 — just about everywhere

IVP2 — the kind of places and states where new swords may come into being from a prior and existent embedded instinct and impulse to openness and invention in the fields of tech philosophy and architectures

Yeah?

____________________

* Footnote: under total surveillance philosophies we are no longer innocent until proven guilty but incessantly, and permanently, considered guilty, whilst never to be proven innocent again.

definition, design philosophy, rationale

“astrids trädgård”: the swedish-located bletchley park

I’ve been note-taking again; yesterday on the tunnelbana (Stockholm’s metro) and today in one particular Joe & the Juice I love because of the jazz playlist you often get in the mornings. The one near Hötorget.

I’ve taken a liberty, too. It may not be the right thing to do: but if it’s not, we can amend and choose something else. What follows I have headed as “Astrid’s Garden”, in its English translation. Because, just as Alan Turing was a man of good genius, and yet had to fight for his right to be himself, so Astrid Lindgren, in a different time, place and culture, chose to fight what she believed in. And like Turing, it was for and behalf of a society which one day might become of the good.

Here is the stream of thought I’ve had over last night through to just after this midday …

mission:

fight fire with water wherever possible; only fight it with fire when utterly unavoidable

1. all the participating organisations achieve representation in terms of the potential and promise of individuals who belong to each.

to achieve this:

we create a bespoke evaluation process which allows us to identify this individual potential and promise in ways no one dreamed of.

the basis of the project is neuro-diverse complex problems-solutioning tech architectures: hardware, wearables and software all.

• https://www.sverige2.earth/unified

stepped in stages from the first privacy-sensitive structures through privacy-positive and secrecy-sensitive to the final goal: secrecy-positive.

• https://www.sverige2.earth/complexify-roadmap

we should spend as much money on people and their brains as we ever will on tech.

why does this feel uncomfortable? when did we ever feel spending massive amounts of money on tech was wrong? isn’t that the purpose of tech — to have money spent on it? ok. well. lots of virtues in that, for sure. but why not feel comfortable with doing the opposite? spending money on people: on our strengths and our capabilities.

• https://www.secrecy.plus/hmagi | hmagi.com

why not?

what could it mean?

spending directly, with salaries that allow for correct, humane, and moral conditions and sustenance; and then supportively, re technologies that upskill, expand and enhance the capacity for — ultimately — a wholly secrecy-positive “pure thought” that each person chosen will be chosen for because they already bring it – in more or less raw state — to the table at the start.

the projects and workstreams will then be enabled to first drive with efficiency (that is, leading to hyper-nonconformist hyper-performing person-focussed inside-out tech always) but along the way also creating regularly and inclusively (that is, what i have already conceptualised as hyperteam-delivering tech) as the programme progresses.

• https://thephilosopher.space

2. the goal is, however, also unremitting. completely so. as completely as the uk’s bletchley park during the second world war.

the targets as twofold:

a) bad actors; and b) preferred outcomes

a) the first target will focus on russia and china, and others who have, equally, allowed the criminality of the aforementioned to embed itself longitudinally throughout these years: from the russian wealth and war-focussed revenue streams in the uk alongside the collaboration at, and of, all levels of the conservative party to the chinese “police stations” spreading across supposedly sovereign britain and europe, with huawei and others as pure extensions of the chinese government’s aims to install surveillance within our internet backbones, never mind on phones, devices multiple, and so forth … all these are all examples of what i have called neocrime:

• https://crimehunch.com/neocrime

things we don’t see or even imagine until usually their creators have moved on to something else, at which point they lose interest in ongoing concealment. because whilst concealment exists, it happens for one reason: those committing such criminality are clever enough not to need to show anyone, ever, exactly how clever they are.

so we simply remain unaware, thinking “random” or “life” or … whatever.

3. astrids trädgård must therefore exist to anticipate, scope, identify, protect, and serve the interests of a real, good western democracy.

there is more we need to focus on …

b) in the best traditions of the united nations, we don’t only focus on detail, which is often passing. we focus also on the overarching and inalienable: the universal; the unchanging … literally and figuratively.

this is why i would add to the word “unremitting” already introduced one other word:

4. when we are able to fight fire with water, the word already mentioned. but when fire is our only alternative, then perhaps from a related org not open to astrids trädgård personnel themselves (for everyone’s mental wellbeing and sense of proportion and focus) we must fight this awful longitudinal fire that led to ukraine in the first place, and is sustained by the joint authoritarianism of russia and the chinese since much longer than we care to realise, with an equally merciless fire of our own.

so … proportionality always:

proportionate always, i repeat: but more than what “unremitting” tells us. and you may disagree, too; we may need to refine; we might have to finesse.

but in all cases, peter levine, the american civic thinker, and one of the most humane humans who ever lived, was right: good democracy demands we be inclusive, yes, but equally … we must be efficient.

• https://peterlevine.ws/?p=6359

so if covert spending exists to fund the fire with fire side, then it must have another name and mission quite different from astrids trädgård.

5 however, one thing must remain sharply clear: the final goal of both organisations will thankfully be shared.

it must be thus:

the objectives of both fire with water and fire with fire are to preserve, expand, deliver, share, and educate everyone globally — facilitating, also, that everyone become completely versed re these arts of learner and teacher — in the virtues of what i have seen in sweden these months:

a community spirit built on the absolute sovereignty of what we all hope are ultimately the nation’s most thinking citizens. and with this i mean … everyone in their absolute diversity and dignity to be enabled to express themselves of this diversity.

we MUST, similarly, trust that human beings will prefer their innate humanity over what we see in ukraine, in london’s richest money-laundering centres, in china, in places of similar authoritarianism across the globe — just so many, too many, far too many.

but in order for a human being to prefer humanity over inhumanity when the choice presents itself, we also MUST give the humanity we want to flower the tools to make it possible for all people to FEEL that it’s SAFE TO BE GOOD.

which is why i say: nation-building and citizen-building have to be accompanied by fighting crime and ensuring global security in the ways i will never stop advocating. ways which, to date, we have absolutely never pursued.

i hope this is ok. i hope for many reasons.

and i am always open to debate, to new ideas, to restructuring it all, if the evidence says it must be so.

but i also hold true to the reality that no one believed anything i said for twenty, and maybe more, years … but twenty at least.

and so i cry now not for me, but for the hundreds of thousands, maybe millions too, of other human beings who still aren’t believed in just the same way because we knowingly, negligently, make it possible for criminals (and all similar — including those who advantage themselves of loopholes and zemiological processes multiple) to be far more creative and nonconformist in their criminality than we have dared — ever CARED! — to be in our battle against the same.

one final thought:

just reconsider this.

just one more time.

why are criminals the strongest link in their criminality whilst the security industry consistently sustains the rest of us humans must be the weakest link in security?

• https://www.secrecy.plus/fire

it wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that it’s easier to monetise a widely imposed, machine-based counterforce to criminality than it is to integrate machines closely and sympathetically with the actual needs of the most competent, existent crimefighters we already have.

finding themselves, it’s true, not only having to fight the rampant criminality that leads directly to authoritarian russia and ukraine but also the #it- and #ai-#tech which their manufacturers utterly refuse, even today, especially today, to make supportive of humans as we actually are.

would it?

definition, rationale

Why is it so hard for good people to stay good?

It’s clear that #criminaljustice isn’t working. The fact of #putin’s #russia and its invasion of #ukraine — just one example of how malevolent experts in #loopholes are able to act in the very worst of bad faith — absolutely demonstrates that #criminaljustice manifestly can’t pursue and being to book the most serious #societalharm before it harms in the most serious ways.

Because #ukraine didn’t start the year of the invasion. It started a long time ago when the #kgb man #putin has always been firmly decided that any vestiges of #european hopes that a joint way forwards which might have been found between one side of the ex-#ironcurtain and the other needed to be longitudinally strategised out of existence forever. But also stealthily so: you don’t tell the enemy there’s a knife getting ready to be twisted deeply right in their back.

And so #ukraine was also enabled long-term by the richest centres of power on the planet: transnational corporations which had implemented the original way-back-when command & control #sovieteconomics — top-heavy and hyper-integrated economic structures — which in the age of supercomputers and their capacity to number-crunch in ways the #soviets never even dreamed possible made it possible for these companies to calendarise entire societies over periods as long as decades, never mind the crusty Lada-ridden 1984-style five-year plans.

What exactly am I getting at here?

Some of these corporations have more power than ANY country. Maybe not in the sense of the country GDP versus corporate revenue numbers themselves: but definitely in the almost authoritarian capability they have to make rapid decisions about billions of whatevers; and when I judge rapid I mean virtually from one day to the next.

And, therefore, in this sense in much more immediately impactful ways than any mere democracy will ever be able to engineer.

So this is power: and if knowing you have it you do choose to act, and you prevent #ukraines with your perspicacious even where secretive research data — even if only for bottom-line reasons, forget for the moment the rag-doll babies lying in pools of red at the end of a parent’s counterpane — it’s a massive power indeed exerted for the wider good.

But if conversely you don’t act; if you limit yourself to the role of spectator; if you trim and tack your humongous dinghy so any possibility of encroaching waves remains distant to your ship of shareholder stock … then effectively, when all those immense command & control buttons of the brightest are simply NOT being pressed, you actually are proactively enabling the #putins of the world.

Why is so hard for good people to do good? Really … why?

Well. There’s a thing, for sure.

I read a George Monbiot article in the Guardian a long while ago: it described a survey which said that most of us think most of us are bad people but, equally, most of us simultaneously see ourselves as good people.

Curious, huh?

Some weird disconnect, there.

For me it’s a question of access: the potential whistleblower needs to know their digital notes won’t be read by #badtech people (as mine almost certainly were on the metro this evening); equally, the #abusedspouse must know not only that her husband’s #mafia-behaving business colleague won’t be able to touch a friendly police office for a favour that needs to be called in, but that when it ends up in court and the husband’s word against hers, some kind of fair #tech platform for validating such assertions will also have been invented in the first place, so the pillar of the community he is won’t be able to sway the jury with his mere presence.

This is mostly why I want The Philosopher Space: so people – ALL of us, citizens and professionals, both — can recover our right to the secrecy of pencil and paper but with the 21st century advantages of digital.

That is, when we’re obliged to use digital, we aren’t forced by the system to strip ourselves naked in front of the #tech experts — as I might accurately observe, 70 percent men — who NEVER themselves have to perform the same humiliating acts of self-discovery.

• spt-it.com | www.secrecy.plus/spt-it

definition, design philosophy, rationale

if you must, make sure you’re legal, you take care of your own, and above all you know your enemy

in #stockhom #sweden #sverige, what was broached in #dublin #ireland in 2016 is now possible here.

and i feel like it is new; not returning to an awful toxic past and having to pay every day for it, as it remains close and clammy to the touch.

no.

not that.

solving the putin problem

i was asked on the train today what the keys are to solving the #putinproblem.

the #putinproblem includes #trump, and #brexit, and #facebook escaping with virtual murder as #cambridgeanalytica became the fall guy for the inevitable outcome of #zuckerberg’s choice of business model: this outcome being the savage and unremitting dismantling of citizen agency in modern western and associated democracies.

it includes everything that means even professionals will think, when they take a life-changing decision on someone in their life-changing nominal charge, they do so with this agency i mention: no one else is furtively intervening. and god forbid that those intervening might be criminals on the scale of #putin’s #russia.

so the keys to solving these #complexproblems longitudinally and long-term are …?

first: accepting how we’ve been part of the problem

first, everyone who wants to join me in this battle in favour of a new democracy and against the #tech-driven #gaslighting that has been designed, developed and implemented over decades must accept they both tolerated and in some senses embraced #neoterrorismontheindividual because they used it themselves to shape their societies. they must take it firmly on the chin, as i do, that we are still part of the problem.

and whilst they/we were better at it than the enemy — #russia, a #badmoney without sovereign frontiers, #bigtech in practically all its manifestations — all was kinda ok. people like myself did get improperly incarcerated by proficient users of symbolic communication such as the #british, and by extension the #irish, but those of us who had to suffer such indignities and injustices were relatively small in number. i suppose.

second: how we’ve enabled the enemy

the problem is when the enemy gets better than you could ever imagine at this #neoterrorismontheindividual i uncover. and an even bigger challenge: when you simply have no inkling that they have got so much better than you, nor indeed for how long … nor when it all started to go belly-up.

• crimehunch.com/neocrime

this is what i say has happened already. i was saying it somehow in my #criminaljustice dissertation back in 2017. i realise in hindsight now that both the #british and #irish agreed and were as one: i had to be scoped out of academic circulation. symbolic language is a mark of the #british security state’s capacity to control a society without ever taking ownership. (the #irish — suffering the colonising #english — had to compete against this: and we know the #tech adage about being careful who you compete against because, one fine terrible day, you’ll become just like them.)

and so see how cozying up to these #espionage ways and means enabled deep #russian interests close to #putin to embed themselves in #uk football clubs, financial institutions and other channels where money flows freely and conveniently.

third: symbolism as a cancer to democracy

wherever a country prefers to use #symbolism to rule we have a cancer: a cancer on democracy; on the opportunities for democracy to flourish; on the chances that democracy might sustain and renew itself where needs be.

‘question is: are the upsides of using #symbolic systems worth the downsides? maybe they are: #espionage is a common thread throughout #human #history. so maybe all ok in this sense (despite the occasional collateral damage such as myself back in 2002-2003 and then again in 2004, and in 2017 … and many more times i guess even i haven’t yet sussed).

but it’s NOT ok when the genie whose bottle we uncorked centuries ago becomes owned by the enemy under our noses.

so to answer, finally, the question i was posed on the train this morning: if #zuckerberg and the illegitimate influencing of democratic discourse … if #brexit … if #trump and insurrection … and ultimately if #putin’s three wars in fifteen years culminating in his unforgivable invasion of #ukraine … if all this doesn’t provide the evidence we need in order to say we’ve currently, deeply, awfully lost the war of #espionage; that our enemies far outplay us; and that tolerating and even embracing the tools described in my slide-deck below are something we can continue to do … you really really do, sadly so too, have zero self-awareness.

fourth: solutions and caveats

and i’m not saying don’t use the tricks i define in the slide-deck. i’m saying:

1. if you do sanction their use, do so legally.

2. if you do sanction their use, then do not do so against your own, just because they’re inconvenient voices and thinkers. (that leads to a dismantled democracy from within, and thus supports the enemy even more profoundly than they could hope for.)

3. and last but not least, if you do end up seeing no alternative, never never never show by default or inaction that you underestimate the enemy because #bigtech #corporations tell you that you have all the tools you need. and all the tools the enemy might have.

• crimehunch.com/terror

aside, definition, design philosophy, rationale

smotherland? how DARE you …

i have been racking my brains: what’s so different here in stockholm? why does the concrete feel so human? why do the humans feel so different? why is there such a sense of purpose — even when the purpose is not to be all that purposeful?

what does make it happen, after all? something tangible, i ask myself. something i can point to and show you how.

and so i realise, just now, two things which become quite clear for me. one i experienced one summer, decades ago in the northern spanish city of burgos: a continental climate and hot even 800 metres up. at least during the day. so everyone left the city in summer: to climes where you didn’t survive the weather but could thrive instead. the seaside, maybe. yep. there for example.

but i had to stay behind for work that july. and suddenly i had this sense of being at one with my environment. what was it? what was different? what had changed?

it was easy once i tumbled to it: everyone had taken their cars with them. not just that they weren’t there to drive them around: the cars themselves weren’t there to intervene in the visual landscape, and distract and divert and impact on your psyche, even when only subliminally; and then again, even hurt some of us because of a still undiscussed neurodiversity … and all as a result of their deliberately engineered capacity to attract our attention inescapably with covert ingenuity.

here, today, then, in central stockholm, there are two things which tangibly make me feel at home. the first is an absence; the second being a presence.

the absence, first:

no cars. very few anyways. no need for cars. just people using their legs. do you remember legs? remember what that was about? no. not the clutch and the accelerator. the pavement and the kerb and walking the line … and the dance.

the presence, second:

so many young people and children and elderly and other. and a young man with a boom-box, and then the coffee-drinkers on the terrace across the road smiling in recognition of their own youth, perhaps; and smiling, all the same.
and then bikes galore and bio-diesel buses, and trams and stuff, and within five minutes walk an underground and a commuter-train network.

so: this is purposeful living which liberates not suffocates. and don’t believe the anglo-saxon right-wing when they say sweden equals “smotherland”. what they say when they do … it’s utter bollocks.

more than any country i’ve been to, this is an intellectually, emotionally and socioeconomically free society. even today. even after everything we’ve all been through. even after what they think they have lost to a better past.

imperfections? for sure.

on the scale of other countries flaws and injustices? no way, josé.

just one example from the uk to illustrate. many years ago, foodbanks arrived to ameliorate real pain. a conservative minister even praised the fact: community coming together. she (i think she was a she but she only voiced what all her party, mainly men, also preferred to assert) … well … she could’ve said how terrible that they were needed in the first place. but she didn’t.

last year in the uk of johnson & co, it was warm-banks for those who couldn’t afford both food and central-heating.

and so this year, gordon brown, the ex-british prime minister, informs us of hygiene-banks: for those in the uk who already share toothbrushes, can’t buy toothpaste, and who find that sanitary products for women just ain’t something they can contemplate:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/24/jeremy-hunt-uk-poverty-hygiene-banks-gordon-brown?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

so DON’T tell me “smotherland” EVER again, when you discuss the fact of sweden and its ways of seeing and doing stuff. because if you do, if you dare to, you just really have no idea what you’re saying … no idea whatsoever.

and that’s a tangible fact for sure.

as tangible as the weekly death tolls that add up year after year, at the hands of the gun-holders who terrorise good american citizens in the name of spurious constitutional rights.

design philosophy, rationale

like the magdalena’s memory #911

i tasted cold coffee with soya drink just now
and the memories of a campsite somewhere in austria maybe 
high up in the mountains where summer green was all around 
and showers stopped automatically 
and buttons had to be repeatedly pressed
and the early morning drifted smells of bacon grill and more 
and the milk was uht
'cos it had to be it just had ...

so all this came drifting back to me
and all this was sharp as nines 
and all this was in my head just how
and right now is when i remembered with fondness
the trials and tribulations and real pain 
of being my mother and father's son

because mostly it was pain:
slashing tongues which fast cut me to the quick 
nailing me to the spot like hammer hitting out 
and lashing me with criticisms of everything i tried 
to make emerge from me

and so only this minute 
do i begin very slowly 
to do the things i always wished to do
and be the man i never was 
and grin to love
not grin to bear 
and find at last 
in human relations 
the right to enjoy myself full fair 
without recrimination or disapprobation 
or disapproval of some religious scriptures:
what hurt me so all those years ago 
and still on occasions serves to actually destroy my soul 

and so now i don't care
what he might think
because now he's passed and is in his clink 
and she meanwhile reveals herself 
as authoritarian body
of dictatorial mouse:
scampering around and making all silent 
and then patting down the violences of them both

for the passive-aggression he imposed on my child 
was fully enabled by her actions of default
and whilst i was younger
and felt myself deeply
the blame of just being there and occupying a space 
which was never to be mine 
in the end it's true i've had this life of falsehood 
and in the end it will be TRUER
you and me
or me and another 
or whomsoever i shall finally meet 
in joy and daily grandeur 
when heads hit pillows 
and the mellowness of affection 
turns into 
for a moment 
no longer the passions of terrible and bloody rejection 
for my brain is a magdalena 
and my memories are beginning to heal

aside, design philosophy, rationale

Why a data-driven world isn’t everything in life … and why it’s important we understand this much much better

The real nub of the issue is this: in the absence of data, we can only use data that is present. Here, it’s clear when someone commits a crime and we catch them after the event with a certain number of mobile train security personnel on our payroll. That’s measurable: the ratio of events to arrests, for example. What’s not measurable by automated data science and analytics half so easily is when something doesn’t happen because a permanent guard is present to act as deterrent.
Mil Williams, Stockholm Sweden, 21st April 2023

Introduction:

There are strikes on the commuter trains — the otherwise fabulous pendeltågs — here in Sweden: even the occasional wildcat ones. The frustration is patent: more so, because the strikers are right.

This is why:

An aside:

As a brief by the by before I continue, I think the train companies are able to claim the numbers of security and safety staff would remain the same, and yet still want to go ahead with it all, because they’re changing the type of workforce: you still need to go through with rightful and rigorous measures to vet and upskill non-train guards of all sorts it’s true, but with a train guard it’s less easy to change and chop their working locations, conditions and so forth. Or outsource the workforce, even. Change overnight who employs them and how.

No?

So …

How a data-driven world can deceive:

The thing is, here we have a perfect example of when a “data-driven world” actually needs academia more than it needs an automated data analytics and data science as we usually understand them.

The train companies in Liverpool and Sweden both I am sure will have had long-term strategies to re-engineer the structures of their employees and related re in-house and outsourcing options, and whilst taking guards off the trains in the circumstances described wouldn’t deliver immediate economic advantage, as indeed they underlined in Liverpool for sure, long-term if I’m right it definitely would.

The real nub of the issue is this: in the absence of data, we can only use data that is present. Here, it’s clear when someone commits a crime and we catch them after the event with a certain number of mobile train security personnel on our payroll. That’s measurable: the ratio of events to arrests, for example. What’s not measurable by automated data science and analytics half so easily is when something doesn’t happen because a permanent guard is present to act as deterrent.

And this is the challenge here. It really is a challenge around what we do when the evidence base is incomplete: that is, how it leads us to take quite the wrong decisions.

To the solution:

There is a solution too; I alluded to it above. Straightforward academia gives us tools to codify absences, in for example qualitative data such as an interview transcript or video, so that what isn’t said is as significant as what is.

If we could create an equal set of tools for strategic decision-making when deciding if to take train guards off trains or no, perhaps we would avoid the strikes we’re having everywhere: and at the very least, we could validate, in a less conflictive way, the common sense most users of public services have that a “bobby on the beat” engenders an incomparable feeling of safety even where a car in the neighbourhood can be evidenced to deliver on objective data relating to quantitative crime events.

Summarising:

In crime and public safety, what doesn’t happen is as important as what does: and the “why” of both these matters, too.

So.

Let’s do something after the evidence bases for both aspects of the truth: that which has a visible side and the invisible events as well.

And then let’s achieve delivery of these aspirations sooner rather than later.

Tag: criminal justice

“On people called #melians who have no regrets”

NUESTRA huída hacia delante

An open letter to all UK politicians, past and present

This is my position:

My most important experiences in my life, this year:

Surveillance as an extension of the citizen then, not the state:

Two directions

What I think is being suggested:

IVP1

IVP2

To summarise:

“astrids trädgård”: the swedish-located bletchley park

Here is the stream of thought I’ve had over last night through to just after this midday …

mission:

to achieve this:

the targets as twofold:

a) bad actors; and b) preferred outcomes

there is more we need to focus on …

so … proportionality always:

it must be thus:

one final thought:

Why is it so hard for good people to stay good?

if you must, make sure you’re legal, you take care of your own, and above all you know your enemy

solving the putin problem

first: accepting how we’ve been part of the problem

second: how we’ve enabled the enemy

third: symbolism as a cancer to democracy

fourth: solutions and caveats

smotherland? how DARE you …

like the magdalena’s memory #911

Why a data-driven world isn’t everything in life … and why it’s important we understand this much much better

Introduction:

An aside:

How a data-driven world can deceive:

To the solution:

Summarising:

Further reading: