Safe in our cages

Proposals to monitor all our communications are an intolerable assault on liberty in the name of security

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• • AC Grayling
  • guardian.co.uk,
  • Tuesday August 26 2008 10:00 BST
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In the Queen's speech this autumn Gordon Brown's government will announce a scheme to institute a database of every telephone call, email, and act of online usage by every resident of the UK. It will propose that this information will be gathered, stored, and "made accessible" to the security and law enforcement agencies, local councils, and "other public bodies".

This fact should be in equal parts incredible and nauseating. It is certainly enraging and despicable. Not even George Orwell in his most febrile moments could have envisaged a world in which every citizen could be so thoroughly monitored every moment of the day, spied upon, eavesdropped, watched, tracked, followed by CCTV cameras, recorded and scrutinised. Our words and web searches, our messages and intimacies, are to be stored and made available to the police, the spooks, the local council – the local council! – and "other public bodies".

This Orwellian nightmare, additionally, is proposed for a world in which leading soi-disant liberal democracies run, and/or permit rendition flights to, Guantanamo Bay. How many steps separate an innocent British citizen from some misinterpretation or interference or error in the collected and 'made accessible' data of text messages and emails, and a forthcoming home-grown version of Guantanamo Bay for people whose pattern of phone calls does not fit the police definition of acceptable?

Two things have made this ghastly development possible: the technology, and politicians. The technology is way ahead of the game: Siemens of Germany are already supplying 60 countries with a device that monitors and integrates data from phone, email and internet activity; its software establishes patterns of uses and alerts monitoring staff to deviations from the patterns. As New Scientist reports, the system is already known to throw up huge numbers of false positives; that could have been predicted by a rudimentary acquaintance with human nature and human life. But it is a fact that has to be added to the brilliance and reliability of government and law enforcement agencies in keeping data secure, unhackable and unlosable.

The second point concerns the quality of our politicians. They say they are putting us all under suspicion for our own good. They wish to protect us against terrorists and criminals, and to make bureaucracy more efficient. The efficiency of bureaucracy has one of its finest moments in the neat and sorted piles of false teeth, hair and spectacles at the gas chamber doors. Oh no: better the milling crowd than the police-disciplined queues of bureaucratic efficiency; better the irritation of dealing with human fallibility than the fear of dealing with jack-booted gendarmes whose grip on one's arms follows stepping out of the queue.

But as to the first matter: protecting us – by making us all suspects, all potential criminals and terrorists – from terrorism and criminality. Well: the first duty of our politicians should be to protect our liberties, and to encourage us to see that liberty carries risks, which we should be trusted to understand and accept so that we can make our own lives our own way. But no:

these politicians – Brown and Labour, once the party of the people – are going to keep us safe by not keeping our liberties safe; they are going to keep us safe by making us unfree.

Yet the putative benefit of protecting us from terrorism and crime is unattainable. They themselves say 'there is no 100% guarantee of safety': but they are going to spy on us all anyway! In fact they are going to create crime: a huge new criminal industry awaits for stealing, copying, falsely creating and manipulating that newly-created precious commodity, "identity". A huge new impetus awaits for techno-crime to disrupt the monitoring and data storage systems on which the government intends to spend billions of our tax money, creating its unblinking eye in our bedrooms. As surely as night follows day, the new surveillance society will do more harm than good.

The potential for profoundly negative uses of technology has escaped us. It is with despair that I conclude that we have to start all over again with the demos and resistance, the campaigns and arguments, to roll back this huge and ultimately destructive assault on our civil liberties. Once upon a time the authorities worked at frightening everyone into thinking that the unblinking eye of a deity exercised surveillance and data-gathering over them. Now we have Gordon Brown and Siemens, the real thing, not a myth: the unblinking eye of the security services, the local council, "other public bodies", in our bedrooms, our text messages, our emails, our internet searches. Torquemada and Stalin would have given their right arms for what Gordon Brown will tell us in this autumn's Queen's speech he is intending to introduce. Brown has not even thought of that comparison, shame and double shame upon him. Might it help to read the glutinous websites of the Home Office on surveillance and protection of our liberties? Enjoy, if you can: or weep.

Is this adequate to today, before the new universal surveillance comes on stream? Is it adequate to future developments in surveillance technology, to future even less benign governments, to increased "security" powers in actual or alleged future states of emergency? What new crimes, new criminals, new threats to society, will need to be plucked from the watched masses? Smokers? Readers of unauthorised books? Will old crimes return - homosexuality, Catholicism, Jewishness, atheism, adultery, pre-marital sex?

Will every individual have to be a tight-lipped, right-thinking, timid, dutiful, obedient, queue-forming clone to escape the censure of the unblinking eye now being opened by the state upon us?

We need to stop this assault on civil liberies going further, we need to roll back the attritions they have already suffered, and we need a rock solid written consitution to protect us from those who aim to make us all suspects in the gaze of the unblinking universal eye.

The state is not public enemy number one by Polly Toynbee

reposted from: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/polly_toynbee/2007/12/polly_toynbee.html
Chris Street comments are in bright green;

highlights in yellow blockquotes.

Liberty and the state: A 'my-rights' culture must not overshadow the needs of those most urgently deserving of the protection of the state

Polly Toynbee

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December 14, 2007 6:00 AM

Monday was Human Rights day and all this week the Guardian comment pages and Comment is free online have carried articles about Labour's human rights record. Some stories burn into the memory, such as Natasha Walter writing about 13-year-old Meltem Avcil, the Turkish Kurdish girl snatched from her school after living in the UK for six years, to be locked up as a failed asylum seeker.

Jack Straw, the justice secretary, wrote a robust defence of the party's record, rightly proud of some civil liberties gains. Labour's Human Rights Act is under constant attack from the right, who threaten to repeal it. The Freedom of Information Act shifted the terms of engagement between citizen and state. Ending Section 28 was a milestone: no future government will dare pass homophobic laws. Anti-discrimination laws were tightened, Westminster power was devolved, police are independently investigated - all these are welcome freedoms.

Henry Porter, doyen defender of the individual against Big Brother state, retaliated with a list of Labour's infractions of personal liberties. This, too, makes convincing reading: start with locking up suspects without trial for 28 days - let alone extending it to 42 days, when even the director of public prosecutions sees no reason why. Porter lists ending the right to silence in court and permitting bailiffs to break into homes. He adds Labour's mad restrictions on the right to protest, with spectacular own-goal anti-terror laws that had Walter Wolfgang ejected from the Labour conference and Maya Anne Evans arrested for reading out the names of those killed in Iraq.

But Porter's list is contentious. For instance, anti-discrimination laws on grounds of disability, religion and sexual orientation appear both in Straw's list of freedoms and in Porter's list of infringements. As both list the new laws against discrimination on grounds of disability, religion or sexual orientation, here is the clash of the right to free speech with the right not to be abused. From here on, we plunge into thickets of conflict, between individual rights and the duties of the state to all. One citizen's protection easily becomes another citizen's infringement.

What really matters? There are blurred lines between security for all and freedom for each, with only a shifting balance of probabilities. My argument with Jack Straw is against the number of despotic gestures made purely to appease public opinion. First 28 days, now 42 days' detention without trial is incomprehensible when viewed through the lens of recent history. The Northern Ireland conflict killed 3,524 people: the IRA almost succeeded in assassinating the prime minister and the entire British cabinet, and did kill MPs and a member of the royal family. So is the threat worse now? Fifty-two were killed by Islamist terror in the London attacks of July 2005, and worse may be to come. But have we lost that sang-froid we used to boast of, now abandoning civil liberties for what may be no greater threat?

On the other side, my argument with Henry Porter concerns his paranoia about the state and the disproportion of his indignation over things of minor importance. Given the sheer volume of human suffering and social injustice all around us, he encourages undue obsession with CCTV, the DNA database, ID cards, the children's database, or indeed the silly anti-protest laws that make rather happy (Turner prize-winning) martyrs out of mild protesters.

On the worst estates, CCTV helps clear out drug dealers. DNA data uncovers wrongful convictions. The children's database could prevent Victoria Climbié horrors, tracking children at risk when they are moved. The main danger of ID cards is that they will be an expensive failure (see Ben Goldacre's devastating Bad Science column on biometrics).

The Porter view has become fashionable because it allows the middle classes to pretend to be victims, too. But it is decadence for mainly privileged people to obsess over imaginary Big Brother attacks on themselves, when others all around them are suffering badly from neglect by the state - or sometimes from real aggression by government. Indignation is precious, not to be squandered on illusory threats, but saved for real injustices.

Let's list some of the worst things that happen people in Britain - things rather worse than being filmed by a CCTV camera no one will bother to check unless you are mugged. Worst is the twilight life of maybe a million illegal immigrants exploited in unregulated jobs or enslaved in the sex trade. Failed asylum seekers who can't return are deliberately starved with nothing but a £35 voucher to be cashed in one shop, with no change, never mind the price of a bus fare. Meltem Avcil is just one girl caught in periodic sweeps, which at the present rate of removal would take 25 years and £4.5bn to clear the backlog. For real suffering, the treatment of these migrants beats all else - and it's time for a controlled amnesty after, say, four years. But here is a clash between the citizens' right to control the borders that define their citizenship versus the human rights of the helpless and destitute living here anyway.

How do you rank the liberties of other extreme sufferers? The frail and lonely are badly neglected with ever less care as councils tighten their criteria. Young children all alone caring for sick parents have their childhood and their future destroyed. Prison suicides, and now prisoners shamefully locked in for 23 hours a day. Abused children suffer silently in direct proportion to social workers' overburdened caseloads. Thousands dying slowly in agony are denied by parliament the right to go at a time of their choosing. Evidence recently from the Sutton Trust report yet again shows that birth is destiny: poor children stand virtually no chance of escaping poor lives. Meanwhile, exhausted families of disabled children and adolescents struggle to get even the most basic help. Add here all those whose acute suffering can only be alleviated by a kindlier, more generous state. For them a better funded "nanny state" is the solution, not the threat.

But the Porter view turns the state into public enemy number one. That is the traditional rightwing view, but many on the left are buying into this creed of individualism against the collective. The left can't resist also being victims: oh, to be arrested for a cause! Labour has played into their hands with cavalier curtailments of civil liberties for illusory political gains. But the left should beware the old rightwing wolf dressed in civil liberties sheep's clothing that pursues individual freedoms for the powerful at the expense of collective freedoms for all.

This is the same mindset that sees taxes as an infringement of liberty and an Englishmen's property as his inalienable untaxed castle to hand down, untaxed, to his children. It is the mindset in which the right to choose "personalised" services trumps everyone else's fair chance for best schools and hospitals. Liberty and equality will always rub along together awkwardly. But social democrats should guard against the individualistic my-rights culture of our times that simply ignores the rights of those whose needs are most urgent, in favour of often relatively frivolous paranoia about an overmighty state.

For more blogs in the Liberty and the state series, click here.

Freedom of speech by AC Grayling

reposted from: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ac_grayling/2007/12/freedom_of_speech.html
Chris Street comments are in bright green;

highlights in yellow blockquotes.

Liberty and the state: An assault on free speech is under way: now is the time to defend it

AC Grayling

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December 13, 2007 3:00 PM

Liberty is not divisible; a society's members do not have it if they have only some of it in some spheres. That is why incremental reductions of aspects of civil liberty regimes are a danger; there quickly comes a point when the claim begins to ring hollow that members of a society have secure margins of freedom in their lives.

The too-true cliché says that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, which is why it is mandatory to resist, and resist vigorously, the early stages of assaults on liberty, not least those made by well-meaning politicians who earnestly, eagerly, sincerely desire to protect us from bad people and from ourselves, for these are the most insidious.

Yet though liberty is indivisible, regimes of liberties have a structure. The keystone of the arch is free speech. Without free speech one cannot claim other liberties, or defend them when they are attacked.

Without free speech one cannot have a democratic process which requires the statement and testing of policy proposals and party platforms. Without free speech one cannot have a due process at law in which one can defend oneself, accuse, collect and examine evidence, make a case or refute one. Without free speech there cannot be genuine education and research, enquiry, debate, exchange of information, challenges to falsehood, questioning of governments, proposal and examination of opinion. Without free speech there cannot be a free press, which although it always abuses its freedoms in the hunt for profit, is necessary with all its warts, as one of the two essential estates of a free society (the other being an independent judiciary). Without free speech there cannot be a flourishing literature and theatre. Without free speech there are limits to innovation and experiment in any walk of life. In short and in sum, without free speech there is no freedom worth the name in other respects where freedom matters.

All this said, it is also true that there have to be limits to free speech at times. But it is absolutely vital that this be understood scrupulously and carefully, given what has just been said. The standard example of a case where limits to free speech are justified is crying "fire!" in a crowded cinema. What is wrong with doing this, obviously, is gratuitously causing harm (to say "gratuitously" or "irresponsibly" in fact adds nothing because there is no such thing as responsibly causing harm, as such; if harm is caused in achieving a greater good, as when one shouts "fire!" in a crowded cinema when there really is a fire, it is the undesired by-product of intending to achieve good). Allowed too wide a reading, the "fire!" example can justify all manner of unjustifiable restrictions on free speech, as have occurred in our country in recent years ("glorification of terrorism", "incitement to religious hatred"). Restrictions on free speech have to be extremely narrow, extremely specific, case by case, one-off, and only very rarely, on the best justification, prior to the speech itself.

Of course, the principle of freedom of speech promiscuously allows bad free speech, ranging from the stupid to the malicious and dangerous. If it is genuinely dangerous to life, as for example in direct incitement to murder, it invites a case-specific limitation. But generally the remedy for bad free speech is better free speech in response. In the case of libel and slander there is, as an instance of this, the post facto remedy of the courts. True, malicious mud-slinging is damaging even if a libel action is won, but free speech does not come free, and in a mature society we have to recognise that benefits carry costs, and this is one of them.

So vital is free speech to the health and liberty of a society that the plea of "feeling offended" by what people say about one's choices and beliefs is not and can never be a reason for limiting free speech.

Taking offence, followed by infantile demonstrations and infinitely more offensive threats of mayhem and death, has become a stock-in-trade of Muslim activists. This is unacceptable anywhere, but in western liberal democracies especially so, for it strikes at the heart of what makes them both liberal and democracies.

Censorship by coercion and special pleading is as big a threat to liberty in the west today as the actions by our own governments in diminishing our freedoms in the supposed interests of security.

All who choose to come to live in a western liberal democracy should be told that discrimination or insult directed at their age, ethnicity, disability if they have one, and sexuality - the things they cannot choose but to have or be - will not be tolerated; but their opinions and beliefs, the matters over which they have choice, are open season for cartoonists, satirists, and all those who disagree: and they must like it or lump it, or if they are too immature or insecure, or both, to do neither, they are free to leave.

All the above is directed mainly at the restrictions imposed on freedom of speech by our own government in the last few years, in security measures and anti-terrorism laws. That stupid and disgusting girl misnamed the "lyrical terrorist" is an unfortunate example of the wrong-headedness of restrictions on speech; how it sticks in the craw to defend someone who glorifies murderers in a "poem", and yet consistency and principle demands it.

How far we have come from a time, worse in many ways than our own, when one of our judges could resoundingly say, as the 18th-century Lord Mansfield did, "so long as an act remains in bare intention alone it is not punishable by our law". That has changed, for example with conspiracy and allied laws (some introduced in another period of panic, the late 18th and early 19th century scare caused by the French revolution), and now with the proscription of "glorification" of such inglorious things as terrorism; and

our government has even sought to criminalise criticism of religion. The assault on free speech is well under way: it is the time for defence of it to get well under way too.

For more blogs in the Liberty and the state series, click here.