Big Brother database a 'terrifying' assault on traditional freedoms
Plans condemned as the greatest threat to civil rights for decades
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Sweeping new powers allowing personal information about every citizen to be handed over to government agencies faced condemnation yesterday amid warnings that Britain is experiencing the greatest threats to civil rights for decades.
Shami Chakrabarti, the director of the pressure group Liberty, warned that the laws, published yesterday, were among a string of measures that amounted to a "terrifying" assault on traditional freedoms.
Proposals in the Coroners and Justice Bill include measures to authorise ministers to move huge amounts of data between government departments and other agencies and public bodies. Bodies that hold personal information include local councils, the DVLA, benefits offices and HM Revenue and Customs.
The Bill will allow ministers to use data-sharing orders to overturn strict rules that require information to be used only for the purpose it was taken. But it places no limit on the information that could eventually be shared between public bodies, potentially allowing vast amounts of personal data to be shared by officials across Whitehall, agencies or other public bodies.
Safeguards in the Bill will ensure that the proposed orders are considered by the Information Commissioner and require them to be formally approved by Parliament.
Ministers insisted there would be a series of safeguards to ensure that data was secure and not misused. But in an interview with The Independent Ms Chakrabarti warned the measure was one of a string of threats to civil liberties that range from attacks on the Human Rights Act, the advent of ID cards, and proposals to retain data on internet and email use. She declared: "The combination amounts to the most authoritarian time in my lifetime. In Britain, we are seeing happening things I would never have dreamt of seeing."
Ms Chakrabarti also condemned plans in the Bill to restrict the use of juries in inquests and hold hearings in secret. She added: "It's the second week of January and we have already seen plans for new gang Asbos and secret coroners as well as very broad data- sharing measures. What will next week bring?"
David Howarth, the Liberal Democrat justice spokesman, condemned the Government for "burying more building blocks of its surveillance state in a bill to reform the coroner service."
Nick Herbert, the shadow Justice Secretary, added: "This government has shown a cavalier attitude to the security of personal data. There must be proper safeguards for any measures which will enable ministers, with minimal parliamentary scrutiny, to allow sensitive information to be exchanged without barriers when it may have been collected for an unrelated purpose."
Speaking as she prepared to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the foundation of the National Council for Civil Liberties this year, Ms Chakrabarti vowed to resist a series of proposals she said would seriously damage personal privacy in Britain. But she predicted that the "worm was turning" with more people concerned about the importance of civil liberties.
Ms Chakrabarti warned about the "intrusion on privacy" created by the growth of the national DNA database, and attacked plans for national ID cards, due to be rolled out to the first British citizens this year, arguing that the developments had the potential to create a huge all-purpose database holding personal details of ever aspect of people's lives.
She said: "If the tide is not turned on communications data, data-sharing, ID cards and the DNA database, if that tide does not turn and if worse still it accelerates we are looking at a very different Britain in a very short time. We are looking at a Britain where there is no such thing as personal privacy at all."
She warned: "There is a creeping contempt for individual liberty and dignity. There is no sense of history."
Yesterday Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, insisted ministers would have to pass a series of hurdles before data-sharing was authorised, including public consultation, a report by the independent Information Commissioner, and the approval of an order in Parliament.
He said: "I think all members of the public, as I am, are in two places on this. Data relating to you and your family should be protected and that is an absolute imperative. But you don't want personally to give the same information again and again if it can be safely held and safely transferred."
Erosion of civil liberties: A call to arms
Senior figures in British public life are launching a "call to arms" to highlight the erosion of historic civil liberties.
These campaigners, who include the former director of public prosecutions Sir Ken MacDonald, the former attorney general Lord Goldsmith, as well as the musician Brian Eno and the author Philip Pullman, are backing a series of events to coincide with a major civil rights convention in London next month, at which they will speak. Organisers expect 1,000 people to attend the Convention on Modern Liberty, at which other speakers will include Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, Dominic Grieve, the shadow Home Secretary, David Davis, the campaigning Tory MP, and Lord Bingham, the former law lord.
Organisers of the event, at the Institute of Education, including the TUC and the rights group Liberty, said Britain could become "a new kind of police state". And yesterday, the journalist Henry Porter, one of the organisers, said: "This is a call to arms," and he warned of "the constant moves to a database state and threats to an individual". He added: "This is thoroughly dangerous." Baroness Helena Kennedy, the human rights lawyer, said: "We are seeing ways in which our system of law and the protections we have as citizens are slowly but surely being undermined. Liberty is being eroded for all of us."
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Comments
Does anybody have any further information about future meetings of this new group? if so can they e-mail me me at ml69@gre.ac.uk
Lloyd Miller
I'm under no illusion regarding the motives of the state. Frankly, the state cannot be trusted and we, the people need to wake up to the fact and go something, like challenge everything which is unjust!
I understand that the NWO (New World Order) is already here and is thinly hidden behind a veil. Looks like this cover is slipping each and every day.
David Icke knows a thing or two about Big Brother. His website makes very interesting reading.
Remember - The power is with the people!
When Shami Chakrabarti says "There is no sense of history" I cannot help thinking that in the golden past she attempts to evoke there were nothing like the opportunities there are now for the selfish and the criminal and the wicked to flourish. We have to deal with them using the tools they use against us - or are we to accept the idea that individuals should be left to use whatever technology and subterfuge they wish while the state is tied up and left to watch?
Yes, but did they manage to say that with a straight face?
Helga Hanson, Germany
What about when the criminals, the selfish and the wicked are our own government?
Things may seem benign now and indeed from a superficial perspective such moves towards a shared database might even appear to make sense, but how can we ensure that we always have a trustworthy government?
The mechanisms necessary for a police state are arguably in place.
Your argument seems to suggest that you believe we need to protect ourselves from the darker sides of human nature, so tell me, Justlistentoyou, how can you be so sure that those in power and those who will come to power will be a benevolent force?
What is very badly needed is for the law to be able to protect individuals from one another and not just from the state. The way we operate now makes it easy for the pushy, aggressive and downright ignorant to get their way while everyone else simply has to put up with them.
A new mindset is what we need - as well of course as safeguards.
Chris
Perhaps now is the time to make good use of our liberty and freedom to shout about keeping it. I suspect however, that it's only when we do (because we will, on mass at some point), we will realise just how badly our rights have been eroded.
Rather than Shami Chakrabati, is it not you who is harking back to a golden past here, or deluding yourself that there will be an age where ignorant people cease to exist. Society has always had to put up with pushy, aggressive and downright ignorant people trying to get their way. To live as free people with rights we have to accept a degree of danger and chaos.
Margot
We have laptops left on public transport, disks lost in transit, papers turning up on landfill sites, etc.
Surely the first thing to do is actually rectify the current weak procedures, before adding to the problem?
By the time they had completed that task, some other worry might make it to the top of their priority list (i.e. the Global Recession) rather than trying to weed out a few fanatics in our midst.
David Young
Gordon Brown and his cronies pay scant attention to civil liberties or human rights in relation to personal information and their excuses about the security needs of our country. The Government has vastly overspent and wasted billions of pounds of TAXPAYER'S money on the NHS computer system with no positive outcome as yet! They will, have no doubt, waste further billions on this latest plan, which will not improve the safety of anyone.
The Devil will make light work of any safety systems that the Government will put in place because it involves human beings within government institutions, who regularly download private information and lose it.
Am I also right in believing that sections of the police and security services feel that this 'initiative' is a step too far?
This scary, control freak, incompetent government, are collecting so much data they will winkle out whether you are a pigeon fancier or always buy a roast to eat on a Sunday - just petty examples of the information overload as all information falls into the net of whatever the state can pin you down with.
Will this put an end to angst? 'The dread caused by man's awareness that his future is not determined but must be freely chosen.' What can be freely chosen when agencies of the state know all about YOU?
Bank details and transactions, credit card useage and credit worthiness checks, mobile phone useage and location, closed circuit surveillance on the street, car driving licence and insurance details on a police screen before they pull you over, emails - private and public, home telephone calls to the second to every number dialed,if you have cable/satelite every television programme watched, every website visited, every program running on your computer by distance snooping online, every key-stroke, every government department both local and national/international having a file on you, doctor's files and NHS interactions, every flight you ever take, all bio-metric details, being swabbed in the mouth for a DNA profile at the whim of any police officer at anytime, special legal procedures on an ad hoc basis on the say so of a cabinet minister, right to an open fair trial only in given circumstances,
if you die in suspicious circumstances perhaps only a high court judge will hear what happened.
WELCOME TO 1984
Awake up . It may not affect you now but it could affect you in future . Big governement is bad government. Only comfort I take is that these bodies are so incompetent they probably will make shambles of it all.
Thus what we have been witnessing in public policy since that time is an attempt to counter the effects of the turmoil and more importantly keep the present corrupt systems of administration intact in the interests of those elite.
Firstly let?s look at the internet effect. Once the genie was out of the bottle as the saying goes and people got used to and liked the new freedoms, taking them away was not going to be easy, that?s why we have seen so much demonizing of it in the main stream media. Now lets go to the bursting bubbles, the deregulation of established systems of protection have been progressively torn away by a power grab of vested interests and allowed the misuse of public procurement on a massive scale, so much so that corruption is now virtually endemic in the system and seen as normal by its participants.
We have also seen a politicisation of the forces of law and order and an adoption of a type of Napoleonic law in our bureaucracy?s, this combined with an out of control political correctness has made being a citizen something of a living nightmare. Sometimes I feel that the politicians follow the works of Niccol Machiavelli and treat them as a guide book rather than a warning and our bureaucrats worship Franz Kafka to the point of taking us all down the road of this 1984ish hell and onto there brave new world.
A big problem is the 'if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear' meme, beloved of the suburban sage. Many Jews had nothing to hide or fear when they voluntarily offered their information to the state in 1930s Germany, but things change when the State expands its borders.
Another issue is the assumption that if you're pro-privacy then you're hiding something nasty. Therefore campaigning for civil liberties is the act of a dodgy character, or a dreadlock'd anti-establishment troublemaker who smokes pot and scrounges off the dole.
The editors of national newspapers must start taking this more seriously, lest in a couple of years time press restrictions and censorship be brought in (I'm assuming they haven't already!).
Papers like the Independent have done great things to raise awareness of environmental issues, civil liberties are just as important. Like with the environment, if things get worse it will be very difficult to get them back to 'normal' again.
As individuals we have a moral duty to take care of society for future generations. I don't want to bring children up in a stifling and suffocating world where they are microchipped and every move and thought is monitored any more than I want them to live in a polluted smoggy hellhole.
To allow this to continue is an abdication of our responsibilities to our children and future generations. We have a duty to oppose these plans and similar measures with all means at our disposal.
Good comment, in part. Except: make no mistake, terrorism itself wasn't "invented (as in "doesn't exist")- it was created (as in "exists as a global threat to freedom, personal safety and national cultures and sovereignties). Or at least, it was encouraged, nurtured and is now protected. Read Melanie Phillips' "Londonistan" for a detailed reality on the incompetence, complicity and cowardice of the British government, and the insane attitudes of the judiciary that have enabled London to become a hotbed of Islamic terrorist organisations.
Contrary to the claims of the "Independent Minds" paradoxical "terms of Service", I explicitly do NOT give my permission for this post to be modified, or republished.
A political system is injust whenever the government tolerates or even approves the violation of human rights, the prosecutor's office and courts systematically prolong and hamper penal and disciplinary sanctions against the perpetrators of human rights violations and parliament bodies (and public media) keep silent about most severe human rights violations and its perpertrators. Meanwhile, the human rights situation in Germany ressembles the situation of an injust political system.
Britain should not allow that its government further restricts traditional civil liberties in order to avoid the violations of civil liberties. Otherwise, the rule of law will be seriously obstructed.