Big brother is watching

People in the UK spend nearly half of their waking life watching TV, on the phone or online.

So it’s inevitable we're giving away more and more information about ourselves, either by updating our Facebook status or ordering our weekly food shop online.

Like most people I accept this as an unsettling but inevitable trade-off for the world of freedom and possibility opened up by 21^st century technology.

But a proposed new law allowing the Government to monitor all phone and online communication is a price I’m not willing to pay.

The plans will call on internet service providers to gather information about the public – namely who is talking to who, and when – and allow security services to access it.

It may sound like a policy more at home in China or within the pages of 1984 but the UK coalition wants to make it a reality, in order to; you guessed it, “protect the public”.

When will the Government realise the public rarely feels more threatened than when its civil liberties are at risk?

Collecting information from the general public is not only an affront to privacy, it’s open to widespread abuse and negligence by authorities which have all too often proved themselves incompetent when it comes to handling sensitive information.

In Dominic Raab’s 2009 book ‘The Assault on Liberty’, in which he relays the steady creep of anti-terrorism legislation brought in by the last Government, he makes this point.

‘A broad brush approach is open to abuse. It was disclosed that during one month in 2007 police at Gatwick airport conducted hundreds of random searches outside the (already wide) rules, without the required ministerial authorization. And the wider the powers, the greater the risk that innocent people will be caught in a net so widely cast.’

Now in government MP Raab is sticking to his guns, leaking an Information Commissioner report that warned strict safeguards must be put in place if the plan goes ahead.

In response to it he told the BBC it “fundamentally changes the nature of the relationship between the state and the citizen”, turning every individual “into a suspect”.
The popular argument in favour of such ‘security measures’ is that if you have nothing to hide you shouldn’t mind the authorities gaining access to your private data.

But what is the point in using this in our supposed fight against terrorism, if by doing so we are wearing away the very thing that makes the UK worth protecting?

Snooping on our own people is not the answer to Britain’s security problems and it never will be.

In the words of Benjamin Franklin, “Those who would give up essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither.”