Simon Carr: It's going to be a long, hard road to defend our liberties
Never mind what it does to us, what does it do to our political class?
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Independent Minds
We were sitting in the afterglow of a Saturday night dinner when the subject of liberty came up. British liberty and the liberties taken with it by government over the past decade. Our hostess was knitting. Her guest on the other side of the candlelight laid out the propositions that we (I say "we") take for granted. The hostess carried one and purled one and said, "I never much cared for civil liberties."
It was rather a brilliant thing to say, one of those unthinkable sentences like "I hate art."Was she amusing herself with us? She was calmly in favour of CCTV cameras, ID cards, remote surveillance, 42 days possibly.
"But what's wrong with it?" she asked, as a general question about that body of measures that so offend us. And from our answers I deduced that we didn't yet have an entirely knock-down argument against the whole appalling proliferation of state surveillance.
"There are 63 different pieces of information on your ID card," we said, but the knitting needles didn't falter. She made a little face. "Remind me what's wrong with being able to prove you are who you say you are?"
"It's what they do with it later. Without wanting a police state they've laid down the infrastructure of one ..." Hmm, yes but whether or not that's far-fetched, the result is a generation away. And it's contentious. It's arguable. It can be waved away by those who want to do so. It's no reason to stop knitting. "Changing the relationship between the state and the individual"? Does that really make a neutral observer flinch away from these wretched cards?
No, I don't think the argument's been won yet; we've gathered our evidence and rallied our faithful. Those of us who are instinctively against the general increase in the political class, of commissars in classrooms, hospitals, town halls - we're all on board. But most social democrats have the opposite instincts. They enjoy an active state. They feel it's essentially benign, constructive and protective.
Not just for that reason, it's going to be much more difficult than we think to roll it all back. Firstly: Most people aren't disadvantaged by the ramp-up of aggressive nannying, surveillance and administrative power. Even when it goes obviously wrong the damage isn't apocalyptic. When all those records were lost, for instance, did anyone on the list suffer any discernible harm?
Second: No election or party programme will call a halt to it or rein the thing in. It's about culture. It's about the unconnected behaviour of dozens, or hundreds of different interest groups, undirected by any central authority. For instance, the system of car number plate recognition was driven, as Henry Porter has revealed, by administrators and managers without any democratic input or approval.
Third. It all appeals to something deep in the British national character. Liberty is one strand of our inheritance – but modernity is another. For the last thousand years, England (and then Britain) has been on the progressive side of the question. The Nation State. Democracy. Industry. Enlightenment (50 years before the French, incidentally). And now, the modern thing is how to control or monitor the masses.
Of course we are in the vanguard, we always are. And for those who think the Database State is a self-evident abomination, the Domesday Book was one of England's founding documents. In these days of massive state spending and unlimited demand, they say, we have to restrict health care and education to those who are eligible. There are our borders to consider, and those terrorists. These are immediate issues of money and not having our legs blown off – not abstractions of liberty and ancestral values.
What do we say to that? I had one practical thought. Never mind what it does to us, what does this surveillance and remote monitoring do to our political class? I bet it has a negative effect on their energy and humanity. According to the state, Arthur Koestler said, the definition of an individual is a million people divided by a million. If we, the subjects, become a screen experience, numbers to be crunched, that surely diminishes our masters' capacity to think of us in personal terms.
These vast schemes increase their credulity, arrogance and appetite for autocratic, unworkable solutions. The databases they sign up for at the cost of billions are not only vanity projects, they dehumanise the people who work in them. They reinforce the separateness of the political class from the rest of us.
Is that worth putting forward? Maybe. But it's still a bit airy. I can hear those knitting needles. It needs more thought.
The Convention on Modern Libertytakes place on 28 February http://www.modernliberty.net
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Comments
Thankyou Simon Carr for this article, outlining so beautifully the reason why the rollback of civil liberties needs to be fought tooth and nail. The ruling class already think of the masses in terms of depersonalized numbers. But now they may get 63 pieces of information and a face to put to the number.
I am sure the innocent men and women in prison or under house arrest share your sentiments.
Yes. Very airy. On both sides of the argument.
Let us agree with the tricoteuses that we want the state to detect and prevent crime, we want the state to counter terrorism, and we want the state to deliver public services efficiently. Nothing wrong with that. You'd have to be very odd to disagree.
The question is whether the measures now being adopted by the state can achieve those objectives. The calm of the tricoteuses comes from the certainty that they can -- of course these measures will help in the fight against crime, etc ...
The knitting needles falter when you question that certainty.
How will the Home Office's proposed ID cards help? After all, we are already knee-deep in ID cards -- passports, driving licences, credit cards, utility bills, mobile phones, birth certificates, degree certificates, ... And yet we have all sorts of crime, some terrorism and the efficiency of our public services is questionable. Why should these new ID cards be any more efficacious?
Because they will be linked to a National Identity Register. But we are already knee-deep in national identity registers. Every department of state has at least one and in the private sector the banks and the insurance companies also have great lists of accountholders and policyholders. Why should this new register help?
Because it will identify people on the basis of their biometrics. One-for-one correspondence, based on verifiable biological fact. People become countable, as in a stocktake, one person is a millionth of a million people.
That is the impression given by politicians and the vendors of mass consumer biometric equipment. The impression is false. This equipment is laughably unreliable. Whenever tested, it fails. Far from being scientifically verifiable, the identity it assigns to you is discretionary. Please see http://dematerialisedid.com/BCSL/Geneal
Les tricoteuses are the victims of a confidence trick. To pour money into initiatives like the Home Office's ID cards scheme is to starve the police and the security services and the welfare state of the resources they need for effective measures. It is ineffective and unpatriotic.
Unless the tricoteuses can absorb the accusation of being patsies with equanimity, dupes, fools easily parted from their money, believers in gods with feet of clay, the knitting needles may now at last fall silent.
The heuristics of our civil liberties are based on the firm experience of what is effective.
Yes. Very airy. On both sides of the argument.
Let us agree with the tricoteuses that we want the state to detect and prevent crime, we want the state to counter terrorism, and we want the state to deliver public services efficiently. Nothing wrong with that. You'd have to be very odd to disagree.
The question is whether the measures now being adopted by the state can achieve those objectives. The calm of the tricoteuses comes from the certainty that they can -- of course these measures will help in the fight against crime, etc ...
The knitting needles falter when you question that certainty.
How will the Home Office's proposed Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP) help? That is the plan whereby details of all our phone calls, emails and web browsing will be stored in a giant database. Why should this new database be any more efficacious than the information already available to the police and the security services?
Because the data will all be available in one place, on the IMP database, it can be mined for suspicious behaviour. Hidden away in that mass of data, invisible to the naked eye, the patterns of criminality and terror can be revealed by the relentless scrutiny of computerised algorithms trawling day and night in a bid to protect us all.
So this is a geometrical solution to crime-fighting and counter-terrorism. How good is your geometry, Mesdames les tricoteuses? What, precisely, is the shape of suspicious behaviour? How do the police and the security services know what pattern to look for? Suspiciousness could have an infinite number of shapes. In which case looking for it could take an infinite length of time.
Having once established the pattern or patterns of suspicious behaviour, how to the police and the security services match that pattern to the data on IMP? By performing some sort of a transformation on the data which makes it congruent with the pattern being sought. It's like knitting, it's like following a pattern.
No, it's not. There are an infinite number of possible transformations. You can check that with your niece doing GCSE maths. Some will yield congruence, some won't. There is always a transformation which makes suspicious data look innocent. And there is always a transformation which makes innocent data look suspicious.
How do the police and the security services know which is the right transformation? They don't.
Les tricoteuses are the victims of a confidence trick. To pour money into initiatives like the Home Office's Interception Modernisation Programme is to starve the police and the security services and the welfare state of the resources they need for effective measures. It is ineffective and unpatriotic.
Unless the tricoteuses can absorb with equanimity the accusation of being patsies, dupes, fools easily parted from their money, believers in gods with feet of clay, the knitting needles may now at last fall silent.
It may surprise les tricoteuses but the heuristics of our civil liberties are based on the firm experience of what is effective. And what is ineffective, like ID cards and IMPish geometry.
Yes. Very airy. On both sides of the argument.
Let us agree with the tricoteuses that we want the state to detect and prevent crime, we want the state to counter terrorism, and we want the state to deliver public services efficiently. Nothing wrong with that. You'd have to be very odd to disagree.
The question is whether the measures now being adopted by the state can achieve those objectives. The calm of the tricoteuses comes from the certainty that they can -- of course these measures will help in the fight against crime, etc ...
The knitting needles falter when you question that certainty.
It is already against the law for some people to work in this country. Some people are not entitled to state education for their children. Some people are not entitled to non-emergency state healthcare. These laws are presumably not being enforced at the moment. Why would a sensible tricoteuse expect new laws to be enforced any better?
Because there is a new sense of seriousness abroad.
Is there?
Consider: the Home Office were advised to set up a national network of 2,000 registration centres to collect people's biometrics, store them on the National Identity Register and issue us with ID cards. 2,000. Please see para.105, http://dematerialisedid.com/PDFs/feasib
2,000 is a surprisingly low number with our population of 60 million or so.
Italy are serious about ID cards. With a similar population to ours, they have 8,000 registration centres, http://www.guidacomuni.it/
The Netherlands are serious about ID cards and yet, with a population of less than 20 million, they have (or plan to have) 4,000 registration centres.
So 2,000 is surprising for the UK, but nothing like as surprising as the number the Home Office came up with in the end ... 69. The Home Office have established a national network of just 69 registration centres, http://dematerialisedid.com/PDFs/costre
Where is this new-found seriousness now, Mme la tricoteuse?
On 25 November 2008, the Home Office announced that they would invite the private sector to bid for work, registering people's biometrics in high street retail outlets.
How many retailers, having spent years building their brands, want to risk all that effort by being associated with the National Identity Scheme?
We do not know. Perhaps the Home Secretary will tell us, when the statistics have been properly vetted.
We do know that the banks want nothing to do with it. Sir James Crosby told us, http://dematerialisedid.com/BCSL/Cr
And we do know that, even with 800 large high street outlets, the opportunity offered by the Home Office wasn't attractive enough to keep Woolworths afloat.
Les tricoteuses are the victims of a confidence trick. To pour money into initiatives like the Home Office's ID cards scheme and their Interception Modernisation Programme is to starve the police and the security services and the welfare state of the resources they need for effective measures. It is ineffective and unpatriotic.
Unless the tricoteuses can absorb with equanimity the accusation of being patsies, dupes, fools easily parted from their money, believers in gods with feet of clay, the knitting needles may now at last fall silent.
It may surprise les tricoteuses but the heuristics of our civil liberties are based on the firm experience of what is effective. And what is ineffective.
Yes. Very airy. On both sides of the argument.
Let us agree with the tricoteuses that we want the state to detect and prevent crime, we want the state to counter terrorism, and we want the state to deliver public services efficiently. Nothing wrong with that. You'd have to be very odd to disagree.
The question is whether the measures now being adopted by the state can achieve those objectives. The calm of the tricoteuses comes from the certainty that they can -- of course these measures will help in the fight against crime, etc ...
The knitting needles falter when you question that certainty.
We already have a large welfare state staffed by hundreds of thousands of experienced people who have the same interest in doing their job properly as the average tricoteuse. Which among the new measures proposed by the government is likely to improve their efficiency?
"Transformational government", says the tricoteuse, without dropping a stitch, "the public services will be improved beyond measure by the application of modern marketing and management techniques. It's all in the Cabinet Office's November 2005 position paper, Transformational Government -- Enabled by Technology".
Is it?
Certainly, at para.26 it says:
"To lead the transformation of groups of services to customers, especially for those which cut across organisational boundaries, the Government will appoint Customer Group Directors, each reporting to one Minister responsible for that customer group. Key responsibilities of a Customer Group Director will be to sponsor customer insight and research into the needs of that customer group; to lead the design of services including overall channel planning, joining-up of presentation and delivery, branding and communication, and service improvements; to track and communicate performance against customer related targets; and to represent the interests of their customers as necessary in existing inter-departmental governance and in the governance of this strategy."
But what does it mean when you're talking to a pregnant teenager? Possibly, this:
"So, you branded, pregnant teenager, please communicate with your Customer Group Director if you think there is a gap between presentation and delivery, and don't come running to me with your whinging about performance and overall channel planning."
And certainly, at the final paragraph it says:
"It is likely therefore that the planning for this era [sic] will be based upon a vision that sees citizens and businesses increasingly serving themselves -- at home, in work and public places and on the move; public servants truly dependent on technology to discharge their professional roles; policy makers regarding technology as crucial to designing policy and achieving policy outcomes ..."
But how is a public servant professional if he or she is "truly dependent on technology"?
The transformational government initiative (please see http://dematerialisedid.com/PDFs/transg
Do the tricoteuses really believe that? Why? And, if so, do they really believe that the situation will change with the introduction of more computers? Why?
The onus is on the tricoteuses to answer convincingly before we consign the experience and dedication of our public servants to the dustbin and replace them with customer group directors and channel planners wielding computers. People's lives depend on the correct answer.
Les tricoteuses are the victims of a confidence trick. To pour money into initiatives like the Home Office's ID cards scheme and their Interception Modernisation Programme is to starve the police and the security services and the welfare state of the resources they need for effective measures. It is ineffective and unpatriotic.
Unless the tricoteuses can absorb with equanimity the accusation of being patsies, dupes, fools easily parted from their money and believers in gods with feet of clay, the knitting needles may now at last fall silent.
It may surprise les tricoteuses but the heuristics of our civil liberties are based on the firm experience of what is effective. And what is ineffective.
OK lets focus on the concrete.
PURPOSE
What is the stated purpose of schemes such as ID cards, and what is the evidence that they work.
Why does the government feel it needs to spy, even more, on us.
COST/BENEFIT
What will the cost (setup and running) be and who will benefit.
Anything that can be abused will be abused.