Topic: Surviellance Society
I Always Feel Like Somebody's Watchin Me... The UK's Surveillance Society gets an upgrade, but who's watching the watchers?by RS Davis
(libertarian)
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
I'm a big fan of the UK - a total anglophile. I mean, so much cool has come out of America's alma mater - the Beatles, The Sex Pistols, the Magna Carta, The Clash, X-Ray Spex, human rights, The Specials, The UK Subs, and George Orwell, who in 1948 predicted the society upon whose doorstep they now stand.
A full seventy-nine percent of UK citizens consider their country to be a surveillance society. It's no surprise, as according to a 2006 study, there is one government camera for every fourteen citizens. Human rights group Privacy International calls the UK the "worst Western democracy at protecting individual privacy."
Richard Thomas, Britain's Information Commissioner, was so concerned, he called for an assessment of English privacy, saying, "We've got to say where do we want the lines to be drawn? How much do we want to have surveillance changing the nature of society in a democratic nation?"
In response, the Home Office did a study on national surveillance, and like most government pokenoses, didn't see a problem, pronouncing that "the UK is not becoming a surveillance society."
Apparently, to them, that was a bad thing. I reported earlier this week of a leaked government document, showing that the UK is planning to "monitor every British citizen's emails, internet browsing records, and telephone conversations," having already invested £1 billion and planning for another £12 billion for a huge government database to hold it all. The National DNA Database already holds the DNA and fingerprint records of over four million people, and adds another 30,000 a month.
Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, is expected to announce today that the government - under the auspice of fighting terrorism - will go ahead with plans to include in the controvercial measure into the Data Communications Bill, which would be a drastic departure from long-accepted standards of jurisprudence requiring a warrant for intercepting private communications.
Thomas is apoplectic, calling it "a step too far for the British way of life." Lord Carlile, independent reviewer of anti-terrorism laws, said, "As a raw idea it is awful, and Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, a human rights group in the UK, complained that "this is another example of the Government's obsession with gathering as much information on each of us as possible in case it might prove useful in the future. Like the discredited ID card scheme this will have a massive impact on our privacy but will do nothing to make us safer."
How does a country get to this place? Fear and ignorance - the idea that if you are not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide, but if you are up to no good, there is no cost too great in stopping you. In the same poll that concluded 79% of the population consider the UK a surveillance society, only a small majority - 51% - were unhappy with that prospect, and clearly not unhappy enough to put pressure on the government to change it.
That's what Thomas was fearing when he warned in 2006, "My anxiety is that we don't sleepwalk into a surveillance society."
The government says they need this additional power because of the new and disparate technologies that criminals and terrorists are using in hatching their nefarious plots, that it is "harder to trace links between
conspirators whose records are held by different companies."
They refer to the controvercial practice of data mining, where you collect vast amounts of data and cull it for patterns that indicate criminal behaviors. The US government has had some of its own data mining operations - Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS II), Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE), Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange (MATRIX), and the Secure Flight program Security-MSNBC - but all were discontinued due to 4th Amendment concerns.
But privacy rights in the UK just aren't as sacrosanct, so their data mining plans will probably go through easily, even though studies are indicating that this kind of massive invasion of privacy isn't really effective, puts the personal information of citizens at great risk, and wastes precious crime prevention resources on useless pursuits.
A years-long study was done by The National Research Council, and they have concluded that data mining to detect criminal activity "is neither feasible as an objective nor desirable as a goal of technology development efforts." They further warned that "history demonstrates that measures taken in the name of improving national security, especially in response to new threats or crises, have often proven to be both ineffective and offensive to the nation's values and traditions of liberty and justice,"
And yet the UK plans to go on wasting precious crime-fighting resources trying to kick water uphill. While they're off chasing sci-fi precog visions, what real life dangers are slipping through their fingers?
So, my British readers really have to ask themselves, at the end of the day, is it worth sacrificing their privacy and endangering their private information on harebrained government schemes that will actually make them less safe in the long run?
Are they finally gonna stand up and say, "Enough is enough?"
If they cherish the distinction of being the birthplace of liberty and the rule of law - if they cherish the ideals of freedom and individual rights - they better.
The views expressed in this
article are those of RS Davis only and do not represent
the views of Nolan Chart, LLC or its affiliates. RS Davis is
solely responsible for the contents of this article and is not an
employee or otherwise affiliated with Nolan Chart, LLC in his/her role as a columnist.
The average American knows very little about the constitution. My guess is that W could say: we're going to take the bill of rights away but we're going to send you a box of Twinkies instead. And most Americans would say; OK! Send those Twinkies!! YUM!
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