Michael Geist reported on the BBC news site about Chertoff’s presentation at this year’s global privacy conference, where the theme was “Terra Incognita”, the latin term for unknown lands:
In a room full of privacy advocates, Chertoff came not with a peace offering, but rather a confrontational challenge.
He unapologetically made the case for greater surveillance in which governments collect an ever-increasing amount of data about their citizens in the name of security.
For example, in support of his security agenda, he noted that US forces in Iraq once gathered a single fingerprint from a steering wheel of a vehicle that was used in a bombing attack and matched it to one obtained years earlier at a US border crossing.
He added that there was a similar instance in England, where one fingerprint in a London home linked to a bombing was matched to a fingerprint gathered at a US airport (the identified person was actually innocent of wrongdoing, however).
Chertoff explained that in the autumn the US intends to expand its fingerprinting collection program by requiring all non-Canadians entering his country to provide prints of all ten fingers (it currently requires two fingerprints).
In the process, his vision of a broad surveillance society - supported by massive databases of biometric data collected from hundreds of millions of people - presented a chilling future. Rather than terra incognita, Chertoff seemed to say there is a known reality about our future course and there is little that the privacy community can do about it.
The Information Commissioner’s Office has once again made a link between the Home Office ID card system and the threat of a surveillance society. The Sunday Herald reports comments by Dr Ken Macdonald, the assistant information commissioner for Scotland:
The ICO says its business is “not about pleasing government”; that’s why it commissioned the disturbing report into the future of surveillance in the UK. Macdonald said: “We do have real concerns about where we are going as a surveillance society. We recognise that the more information that is held - from CCTV to store cards - the greater the potential risk for individuals.”
Macdonald said the commission was “concerned about the breadth of proposals for ID cards”. He also added that European nations, which had experience of Nazism and communism, were finely attuned to the need to make sure the most sensitive personal information - such as sexual orientation, political affiliation, trade union membership and religion - were closely protected from scrutiny.
The same edition of the paper carries an extended article by Neil Mackay entitled “UK 2017: under surveillance”:
HatTip ID in the NewsIt is a chilling, dystopian account of what Britain will look like 10 years from now: a world in which Fortress Britain uses fleets of tiny spy-planes to watch its citizens, of Minority Report-style pre-emptive justice, of an underclass trapped in sink-estate ghettos under constant state surveillance, of worker drones forced to take on the lifestyle and values of the mega-corporation they work for, and of the super-rich hiding out in gated communities constantly monitored by cameras and private security guards.
This Orwellian vision of the future was compiled on the orders of the UK’s information commissioner - the independent watchdog meant to guard against government and private companies invading the privacy of British citizens and exploiting the masses of information currently held on each and every one of us - by the Surveillance Studies Network, a group of academics.
The Information Commissioners reports.
These reports make chilling reading. Now you have a choice. Is this the way you want to live.?
I must make clear here that I, like most Libertarians are not Luddite. We see the clear need for technology in our lives, our businesses and even in our government, but it is the extent that the information gathered, and the use to which it is put that is up for debate.
Yes, having everyone on the DNA register would certainly help speed up police enquiries, but it creates 2 initial problems by way of unintended consequence (I am sure there are many more).
The first is the accuracy, with 400,000 out of the existing 4 million records already admitted to be incorrect, to extrapolate that out to the entire population of 60 million gives some idea of the chances of being falsely accused of a crime.
The second is our basic premise of Innocent until proven Guilty. Such a system would make everyone a suspect, until the police had confirmed their innocence.
Insurance companies having access to your medical records, banks having access to your criminal records. Lets face it, no-one on the planet is totally free from jinks, pranks, mistakes, buying something cheap in the pub from a mate. When the computer says that all these errors of life are now criminal, your record will follow you about forever.
Would half the Government be in the jobs they are today if their past lives were imprinted into databases. How many government ministers have admitted to drug taking in their youth, or having smashed up a restaurant, been convicted of dangerous driving or speeding, or been involved in alcohol fuelled brawls or other stupid actions.
Yet it is these same people who want to tell us that this will be on our record forever, it will stop us getting credit, and jobs and living normal lives, whilst those same people will exempt themselves from the controls they wish to impose on the population at large.
The largest and major concern is the political use of such information. History teaches us that those in power who hold information in any detail, will use that information for their own benefit. It is after human nature, and whilst we are not saying that the current government has direct plans for a dictatorship, that is not to say that some government of the future will not have other ideas.
The use of these uncontrolled and unfettered systems will be the imposition of political ideology, social conditioning and perhaps in the future much worse.
Government is sweeping away our safeguards as individuals and citizens on a daily basis, and it is those safeguards, limits on the data collected, limits on the use of that data, and stringent controls of the use of that data by 3rd parties over which no-one has control.
If for instance I give permission for a book catalogue to collect certain information about me for the purposes of credit checking, I do not expect that information to end up in the hands of 3rd parties or government who may want to use that information to control what materials I may read.
Social conditioning is a form of totalitarianism, back that up with draconian laws that make virtually everything we do in everyday life a criminal action and you have pure totalitarianism. It may not be backed up with armed police, but it is total control, and that is totalitarianism.
So again, I ask you. IS THIS THE WAY YOU WANT TO LIVE.
Because for me, this is not living, this is existing. Existing in a world over which we as individuals have no control over our own lives, our own decisions.
No matter what Brown and his government say, this is NOT THE BRITISH WAY, and really has little to do with catching terrorists.
The way forward as I see it is to stop these programmes now. Stop them until we as a society have agreed what those limits are, where the safeguards are and agree the way forward. We do not want to stop progress, but progress must never be against the greater good of the people.
But there is something that everyone should always remember
Extreme reform and change that is undertaken without the explicit consent of the people, can only be maintained through force and repression.
The real politics is now between the Authoritarian and the Libertarian.
It is time for you to make your choice.
Authority of the state over everything you do, or the Liberty to make your own choices, and mistakes, in your life.
