In the middle of this year the substantially discredited political class in Westminster huddled together to push through a most illiberal piece of legislation. Its official title is Data Retention Investigatory Powers Act 2014. This legislation was rushed through at short notice just prior to the Summer recess despite the fact that the issues it attempts to rectify (a decision of the European Court of Justice in relation to privacy of the citizen) arose many months earlier. In brief, and of concern here, the legislation provides for the retention of all electronic communication data - in common parlance mass surveillance. Moreover the process by which this will be achieved is: Security Services/Police report to Home/Foreign Secretary who decides whether to proceed for more detail, i.e. peruse the details of particular communications. There is no involvement of the legal system prior to this further action!
Supporters of the Act usually deploy a number of arguments for the Act. Let's deal with some of them:
a) any action will be lawful - not necessarily because if a mistake is made but nothing happens as a result the injured party is not going to be told. See particularly the provisions of Article 8 European Convention on Human Rights where clearly in such a case as outlined there will have been a breach. However alleged national security will prevent disclosure. Yes its where Kafka meets Catch 22.
b) if you have nothing to hide what have you to worry about? - as a patriotic English man and British Citizen I don't have anything to hide but I do want the State to have the ability to peruse my communications with my family and friends nor my legitimate business correspondence especially out of touch Westminster apparatchiks.
c) all the staff in the Security Services/Police are honest and above board and politicians will always act within the law. I am sure we have all had that excuse in business, "That person no longer works for the company - it was a rogue employee". Without going into detail as to a variety of motivations such as money, promotion, principle or just plain voyeurism we only have to recall Weapons of Mass Destruction, telephone hacking, Birmingham 6 and just recently disclosures about Guantanamo. It is simply not plausible to believe what is claimed.
d) we have prevented many terrorist attacks and crimes and have brought many to justice. There is, of course, no independent verification of these claims. So it it is a question of trust?? mmmm!
e) the loss of privacy is worth saving lives - Hazel Blears admits that this is emotive language (progressonline 11th July 2014). This is not the whole equation and certainly there has to be intensive debate before a conclusion may be reached. So the only good thing about the Act is that it has a sunset clause i.e. it lapses in December 2016.
On the technical side the whole project is problematic. In effect unbreakable passwords and encryption exist - some so strong that with today's computing power it could take in excess of one million years to crack them. Take a case where the encryption is breakable it doesn't take a genius to go for multiple layers of encryption enclosing a coded message which may appear meaningless e.g. "The mallard has a green back" with meaning only to the sender and the recipient! How long before an ISP is hacked by a criminal or terrorist or "piggy backing" off some corporate site. I do not know how to but have been told you can spoof MAC addresses (its a security flaw in WPS and I am not aware of the answer). Probably not far off spoofing IP addresses. What about "use once and discard technology", spoof GPS on mobile phones? The point I am making here is that the really serious terrorists and criminals will know all this and will be acting accordingly. Getting involved in a technological arms race is at best never ending and enormously expensive (think how much NSA's Prism and GCHQ are costing)! An example is High Frequency Trading in various stock and financial markets - think also of the mistakes and manipulation.
So my plea is that all these factors have to be discussed in detail before December 2016 and can we all be treated as adults who have much greater experience of life and the foibles of people than most of those in the Westminster village.
