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.

Published by William Heath on 01/02/08 at 11:06am

Comments

I don’t have a mobile phone, because I don’t need one. Now I know I’m in a tiny minority, but could you precis David’s preferred method of achieving universality, or alternative provision (it’s not clear to me in his letter).
Someone rang me up recently trying to get me to upgrade my mobile. When I explained I hadn’t got one and didn’t want one he asked, in a not very customer centric manner, “why, don’t you ever go out?”
“Yes,often”, I replied, “to get away from ***** like you ringing at all hours trying to get me to buy your tat.”

Reply by on 02/01/08 at 2:27 pm
Mr Heath, I have only just spotted that you mentioned my open letter, for which thank you, so only now, a bit late, can I respond to Paul’s 1 February question.

I am not aiming for a universal solution. I cannot and I do not insist that everyone have a mobile phone. Universal solutions soon fall into the trap of being single solutions. They create honeytraps for villains and reduce security instead of increasing it.

I prefer loose-leaf, overlapping, independent solutions which, between them, tend towards universality. Rather like what we have at the moment.

The NIS is not even theoretically a universal system. It excludes UK citizens under the age of 16. It excludes EEA citizens who are not UK citizens. It excludes non-EEA citizens who are staying in the country for less than three months (or possibly six months or 12 months, it’s not always clear).

And what’s more, the NIS doesn’t even exist yet. It may start in earnest in 2012. If it is geared to the issue of passports, it will take 10 years to achieve 80%+ coverage and only then will ID cards be made compulsory, if parliament decides that that is what it wants.

Compare that with mobile phones. We already have 80%+ coverage. Today. Now. HMRC, the police and goodness knows who else, in the UK and abroad, already use mobile phone data, among other things, to support their investigations and have done for years.

The NIS is a waste of money. Your money and mine.

We already have an ID card equivalent more effective than what we are promised for 2022. So let’s cancel the NIS project. Crime and terrorism are real problems. They need real solutions now, not in 14 years time.

Reply by David Moss on 02/08/08 at 12:49 pm

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