Information Commissioner warns of surveillance culture

The Times from 27/2/08:

"Laws that allow officials to monitor the behaviour of millions of Britons risk “hardwiring surveillance” into the British way of life, the country's privacy watchdog has warned.

Richard Thomas told The Times that “creeping surveillance” in the public and private sectors had gone “too far, too fast” and risked undermining democracy.

The Information Commissioner warned that proposals to allow widespread data sharing between Whitehall and the private sector were too far-reaching and that plans to create a giant database of every telephone call, e-mail and text message risked turning everyone into a suspect. “In the last 10 or 15 years a great deal of surveillance in public and private places has been extended without sufficient thought to the risks and consequences,” said Mr Thomas, 59. “Our society is based on liberty and democracy. I do not want to see excessive surveillance hardwired into British society.”

He criticised proposals going through Parliament to allow mass data sharing between government departments and the private sector. Campaigners have claimed that Section 152 of the Coroners and Justice Bill would enable the transfer of health and tax records to private companies such as insurance firms and medical researchers.

Last year Mr Thomas — who became head of the independent body charged with safeguarding privacy and freedom of information in 2002 — recommended to ministers that data sharing be allowed only in carefully defined circumstances such as law enforcement, improving public services and for research. They ignored his advice. The Bill “needs to be narrowed”, Mr Thomas said. He called on Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, to write into it that “anything to justify a data-sharing order has to come explicitly under one of those headings”.

Whitehall sources told The Times yesterday that Mr Straw would amend the Bill in the next few weeks to meet Mr Thomas's criticisms. Previously Mr Straw's department had maintained that there were sufficient safeguards, including a requirement for parliamentary approval for each data transfer.

The Bill also gives the Information Commissioner the power to investigate public bodies without their consent where there has been a suspected breach of data protection law. Mr Thomas complained that the powers did not extend to private companies.

Other government plans also risked undermining people's right to privacy, Mr Thomas said. Of the Home Secretary's proposal to build a database to store information currently held by internet service providers and telephone companies, Mr Thomas said: “A government-run database of the communications of all citizens, every phone call, every e-mail, every text, every internet use; a database of all those activities held by the Government would be a step too far for the British way of life.”

He dismissed Jacqui Smith's assurances that officials would have access only to data on who had contacted whom, rather than the content of the communication. “That A has telephoned B on a particular date from a particular location is actually quite intrusive,” he said. “If an MP logged on to a site selling Viagra, that tells you quite a lot. If a 16-year-old girl goes on to a website about abortion that tells you an awful lot about her too. I don't think there's a black-and-white distinction between traffic data and content.”

Mr Thomas made clear that he did not object to the monitoring of those suspected of involvement in terrorism and serious crime. “But I think that's a very different situation from monitoring the communications of the entire population,” he said. “We've got to have a much clearer distinction between those who are suspects and everybody else and I think we're at risk of making everybody a suspect if we go too far down this road.”

Security services have insisted that modernising the capacity to store and search telephone and internet information is crucial if Britain's ability to combat terrorists and serious organised crime is to be maintained.

Mr Thomas said that forcing government officials to make specific requests every time they needed information — as they currently have to do - provided a crucial safeguard. “If you have a security service or a policeman making an application [to an internet service provider for records], at least each of those applications has to go through a process and is scrutinised by the ISP. That's very different from it all being done behind the closed doors of a governmental agency.”

His concern about the erosion of the right to privacy extends to social networking sites. People did not realise that information put on sites such as Facebook and MySpace could come “back to haunt them”, he said.

Another area of concern for Mr Thomas is the use of surveillance cameras: he criticised the police for pressing to have closed-circuit television cameras installed in pubs. “We've come out against the requirement for pub licensees to fit CCTV as a condition of their licence,” he said. “This is hardwiring surveillance into British pubs. It is unacceptable.”

He also expressed concern that even some schools were now installing cameras in the classroom. He said that it might be acceptable in the case of a particularly unruly class, “but to roll out cameras in all classrooms is unacceptable”.

The Information Commissioner added his voice to criticism of ContactPoint, a computer database containing details on every child in the country.

“I can see the benefits of a national database of children at risk ... I'm less convinced that you need to have a database of every child in the country. Is it not better to have fuller details of children known to be at risk and make sure that information is used properly?”

Other key government surveillance measures had been “pushed through” without proper scrutiny or parliamentary debate. Of a database of DNA gathered from crime suspects, he said: “Clearly, the DNA database was set up with insufficient public debate. Part of the problem was that such debate took place on the assumption that it would be expensive to run DNA tests. The costs have absolutely fallen and it has become a matter of routine. We have to re-examine the issue in the light of current technology.”

He also lamented the lack of debate over the creation of a North London database that records details of car numberplates for up to five years. Mr Thomas questioned whether the Government had the legal authority for this and asked whether the public recognised that millions of their daily journeys were now being monitored. “We have to scrutinise every proposal very closely indeed to ensure that none involves a step too far.”

Labour's communist police state again

You've probably seen the front page of yesterday's Mail on Sunday

"Officials from the top of Government to lowly council officers will be given unprecedented powers to access details of every phone call in Britain under laws coming into force tomorrow. The new rules compel phone companies to retain information, however private, about all landline and mobile calls, and make them available to some 795 public bodies and quangos. The move, enacted by the personal decree of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, will give police and security services a right they have long demanded: to delve at will into the phone records of British citizens and businesses"

As usual the Daily Mail are permitted to complain about all this stuff, but within the acceptable boundaries of plebdom. So it goes, "what if it falls into the wrong hands ?". But of course, one struggles to think what is the 'right hands' in this circumstance. We've talked about all this stuff before on here.

Council workers asking permission from a nominated person ? Various other agencies, quangos ?

You have to think about it. What possible means do they have to interpret or act on such information ? Presumably it will be possible to phone up any government agency and arbitrarily 'grass' on someone you don't like and get their phone call and internet web surfing use put into the hands directly of council, government workers ?

I remember when all this was being concocted, one of the 'selling points' about the phone snooping side of things was that it will only be a small amount of data, ie it couldn't show the subject of the phone call itself (obviously), but that's not the case with internet data retention (which council leaders and quangos will have access to next) , the subject of intent is very much known from the URL requested, and can be much much more intimate. And I don't think people really understand the implications of this.

And where are the powerful voices against all this ? Where is business ? What are they afraid of ? Are they afraid the Labour spin machine of doting commissars obsessed with hideous ideology will turn against them and start looking at their phone calls and internet records ?

Naturally all this itself is just one small part of the the regime's ongoing plans.

This sounds a like a communist police state to me, hidden behind the crap about 'shared values, security, terrorism, a new 'modern' crime' and so on. As such I think it's only fair to treat the country as that as I've said before. How else exactly are you supposed to treat it ?

And there is another factor to all this too. Those civil servants and council workers compliant in the destruction of basic human dignity with this are also damaging themselves as well as sadly becoming a becoming a real legitimate target in their own right.

Worryingly, as pointed out by Colonel Turner in the interview I posted recently, is that while you have a collection of just career junior ministers and council employees, you have people in government who know exactly what they are doing too, and this has to be a source of enormous concern.

As Colonel Turner also points out, one would imagine there is a gradual 'process of persuasion' but there has been none really, and the Iraq War has wrongly become the focus of sin, isolated out by both Labour, and people in the media supportive of them, as some lone anomaly where it can be cautiously conceded that 'mistakes have been made'.

This is of course obscene, and again, a way of moving the debate away from the war crime of Iraq itself, and the kind of thinking, the kind of judgments and zeal to sell that crime in the first place along with all of Labour's other crimes.

If anything about Iraq, it seems that a number of people in the Labour project were quite happy with it if only to ensure there is then a resulting security concern at home that can then be used to implement their own re-writing of society into an Orwellian socialist nightmare.

But as I've said here before here, I believe responsible council workers or employees of government agencies should be ready to blow the whistle on all this, and resign and disrupt these activities as necessary. I also feel strongly that at least people should not acknowledge the legitimacy of this at all, in any case where it may pertain to them and refuse to co-operate with any results leading from it.