GETTYAll our behaviours are increasingly monitored and analyzed in the face of terror attack threats
Like kamikaze pilots, human life means nothing to them. Gleefully they carry out suicide attacks, bombings, spree killings, hijackings, kidnappings and beheadings.
Such rabid irrationality can strike anywhere. So it is easy to understand calls to give the state virtually unlimited powers to snoop on potential culprits and take them out of circulation.
After all, in wartime we locked people up just because of their opinions, mail was censored and phones routinely tapped.
When George W Bush announced a war on terror after 9/11 Western governments vastly expanded the state’s power to intrude into our lives. The danger is, governments sacrifice the very freedoms Islamists want to destroy.
In 1933 Hitler’s Enabling Act granted him arbitrary powers to deal with a supposed threat to law and order. The result was plenty of order but precious little law. We must always be alert not to find ourselves inadvertently being driven down the same road.
Take RIPA, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, which Tony Blair’s Labour government justified as essential to fight terrorism and crime.
It allows monitoring of phone calls, internet use and post. It also authorises the use of agents, informants, undercover officers, surveillance and accessing encrypted data. Big Brother really may be watching you.
Give governments an inch and they will take a mile. Predictably RIPA’s snooping powers have been covertly extended and abused, undermining the free society fundamentals it was supposed to protect.
These powers are used a staggering 500,000 times a year, not just by MI5 and MI6 but by the police and even low-level town hall bureaucrats spying on peoplefor relatively trivial reasons.
For example, wrongly suspecting Jenny Paton of lying about her address to get her daughter into a particular school, Poole Borough Council accessed her phone bills and its officers followed her for three weeks, logging movements of the “target vehicle” (her car) and the “female and three children” (Jenny and her family).
Bromley Council spied on a charity shop to identify people “fly tipping” donations at their door.
Others have spied on people suspected of putting dustbins out on the wrong day or of breaking the smoking ban.
Worst of all phone and email records of journalists have been mined to unmask whistleblowers who have embarrassed councils and police.
In the Plebgate case police secretly examined reporters’ contacts to identify officers who leaked information and in the case of former MP Chris Huhne’s speeding points to get round a judge’s order to protect a source.
Draconian powers should be granted very sparingly to public officials and only for vital reasons
These are tactics reminiscent of the East German Stasi. Following growing public concern the Government pledged last October to end “entirely inappropriate” abuses and reform RIPA.
Lib Dem Justice Minister Simon Hughes promised that police would need a judge’s permission to access journalists’ phone records and the person to be spied on would have the right to be told of an application.
However under new codes of practice being proposed, the need to apply to a judge has disappeared, as has the right to be told a snooping order is being sought and to challenge it.
Officers will still be able to seize records without considering the public interest or the rights everyone has under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees freedom of expression.
A middle-ranking authorising officer will need only a subjective belief that a crime has been committed.
Everyone accepts the need for powers to fight terrorism and organised crime but not to punish whistleblowers.
It was not a lack of powers that allowed the attacks in Paris and elsewhere to occur but a lack of resources which forced agents to stop watching the suspected terrorists.
Draconian powers should be granted very sparingly to public officials and only for vital reasons.
As William Pitt the Younger warned after the American War of Independence: “Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants, it is the creed of slaves.
0 comments:
Post a Comment