Online privacy

"It’s pretty hard to do anything these days without someone knowing what you’re up to. The minutiae of our lives can be pieced together by hundreds of different agencies tracking our health, spending habits, travel, requests for credit checks, presence at work—the list is extensive. So why is it that the current proposals for government monitoring of e-mail and web use are causing such a fuss?

The answer to that lies in the vagueness of the proposal. If it goes through, GCHQ will be able to have access to everything, when it wants it, in order to assist in tackling crime and terrorism. Somewhere in the rationale the term “national security” no doubt appears, completing the treble of terms which government habitually tosses about as justification for circumscribing personal freedoms. That is clear enough in one sense—the “why”—but the potential objection is just as much to the “how”.

Voices are loud in opposition to the proposals using, with equal dogmatism, such phrases as “invasion of privacy”, “police state” and when all others are exhausted, “Orwellian”, as if nothing more need be said. But more does need to be said, and without bluster. The powerful point, that terrible things can be prevented, needs to be answered on its merits. A distinction needs to be drawn between this proposal and the many ways in which we are already tracked, or the objection may be empty.

The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 is in the news; prosecutors and investigators are bemoaning the limitations on the use to which they can put the results of covert surveillance. The material point here is that there are already powers under which our communications can be intercepted, but they are specific powers, not a blanket permission. And that, too, is the difference between these proposals and the kinds of activity mentioned at the top of these remarks…”

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