01 Feb 2008

Britain: “a dark outrider among liberal democracies”

Tim Garton-Ash (aka Bwezhnev) adds his considerable voice to the urgent national concern about the database state. In a Guardian CommentisFree piece he writes

This has got to stop. Britain’s snooper state is getting completely out of hand. We are sleepwalking into a surveillance society, and we must wake up. When the Stasi started spying on me, as I moved around East Germany 30 years ago, I travelled on the assumption that I was coming from one of the freest countries in the world to one of the least free. I don’t think I was wrong then, but I would certainly be wrong now. Today, the people of East Germany are much less spied upon than the people of Britain...An over-mighty executive, authoritarian busybody instincts at all levels of government, a political culture of “commonsense” bureaucratic judgments, rather than codified rights protected by supreme courts and, until recently, a gung-ho press forever calling for “something to be done”: this fateful combination has made Britain a dark outrider among liberal democracies. The birthplace of laissez-faire liberalism has morphed into the database state. We have more CCTV cameras than anyone. We have the largest DNA database anywhere. Plans are far advanced to centralise all our medical records and introduce the most elaborate biometric ID cards in the world. All this from a government which, having collected so much data on us, goes around losing it like a late-night drunk spreading the contents of his pockets down the street…

. It’s compact, powerful stuff - worth a full read.

He attracts a lot deal of comment, mostly less abusive than other CommentisFree pieces. David Moss asks what the IPS actually does all day:

In any normal business, if you tried to convince the board to market a product you can’t describe to people you cannot name for reasons which, after six years, you still can’t list, you would be ignored. Imagine what the Dragons in the Den would do to IPS if they turned up to make a presentation.

David has done an open letter to get Gordon Brown off the hook arguing that mobile phones already provide the functionality we need from ID cards. He concludes:

The government cannot disregard reality. Reality is daily attracting ridicule to the NIS and daily destroying confidence in the government. The NIS cannot achieve its objectives. It cannot help to fight crime and terrorism or to deliver more efficient public services. Meanwhile, thanks to the global mobile phone network, we already have a superior ID card scheme anyway, so we don’t need the NIS – that is the government’s escape route from mirage and back to reality.

Posted by William Heath on 01/02/08 at 11:06am
Categories · "What do we want?" · Foundation of Trust · Identity · Data nitwittery · Political engagement · "Transformational Government"
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Ideal Government

Let's say what we want from e-enabled government. Let's observe government first-hand. Let's say "Wouldn't It Be Better If" (WIBBI). Become an ethnographer of bureaucracy today! It beats getting frustrated with public services.

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01 Feb 2008

Britain: “a dark outrider among liberal democracies”

Ideal Government

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01 Feb 2008

Britain: “a dark outrider among liberal democracies”

Ideal Government

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