Surveillance State: Select Committee catches on ten years too late?

The Home Affairs Select Committee has apparently published a report suggesting that we may be wandering unaware into a Surveillance State. Just where have these people been for the last decade and more?

When I was on Oxford City Council we used to receive applications for new CCTV cameras and we were often cautious about permitting them. To be fair to the Greens on the council at the time it was usually they who made most noise about the civil liberties connotations (maybe they were on the wrong side of the "If you have nothing to hide" argument!).

I also tried to have put into the council's constitution a condition to make any surveillance under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (the one that the newspapers are now braying that councils are using to snoop on dogs shitting not terrorist catching - for which it was never explicitly intended) subject to scrutiny and approval of elected councillors and not just officers, at whatever level.

Around the time the News of the Screws started campaigning for "Sarah's Law" in 2000 already there were academics implanting their daughters with chips to find out where they were all the time and already there were people, including me, questioning this as an invention that ought to be lost because of the implcations for civil liberties.

It is not just astonishing, but a dereliction of their duties in my opinion, that those who purport to represent and lead us at the highest level of government to have taken till summer of 2008 to come up with a similar suggestion, that we are sleepwalking into an all pervasive surveillance state. Absolutely amazing.

This need not be a case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted though. Much of the technology is, at least superficially, comforting, with its claims to be able to prevent crime or find our loved ones in trouble, and much of it has benign application as well as potential for abuse. More importantly it's not a good reason to get all neo-Luddite about technology.

Surveillance can and is used to protect public safety for instance that need not be able to identify individuals at all. You can monitor the flow of crowds, such as might have prevented the Hillborough disaster, through thermal imaging (indeed it's easier for a computer to pick up just body temperature hotspots in order to be able to enforce, say, a safe numerical capacity in a building or trace someone missing in an emergency, than it is for them to pick up visible light images with less contrast in the image).

Databases can and are used to enhance our experience of all sorts of services without being linked to any super database providing nefarious users access to all data anyone holds on a person. And modern communications can and are used to ensure timely delivery of information that will help us, even save our lives, without needing to be centralized.

Even tracking systems can and are used to help us find our way around, or even to help others find us if we are in trouble, without actually tracking our every move when we don't need them.

So why is it that when this technology is touched by the heavy hand of government it nearly always seems that it is being used against us?

Well first of course, Lord Acton's dictum applies. And information is power. Those who seek power over us, seek information by which to maintain that power. Because even with the best will in the world, they think they know best, and what's best of all is if they manage to stick around to implement it. There can be no other explanation for o'erleaping political ambition.

Second, they are easily corruptible in this search for power, whether it be over individuals or power over whole markets and systems - which "progressives" at least seem to feel they require in order to enable their interventionist policies of "robbery" and "redistribution". With nearly half of the nation's income to spend, government is a huge target for someone to sell their "stuff". If some of the comments about it are true, the Lib Dems, with their latest road pricing policy, on which more in another post , have fallen victim to this. Companies who invest in technology want to make money out of that technology. If they can use it to land a great big fat government contract they have hit the jackpot.

Third, I always reckon that the people who "integrate" the individual technologies of others, mostly morally neutral and benign, don't much care about the outcomes beyond their own "problem domain". They too are after making a bit of money by finding innovative ways of putting others' work to use. And that means being "first to market" with the ideas. Corners are cut. In the process of producing something useful first to get that sale, they don't have to think too much about consequences outside of their own field. They are only selling a database system. It's the uses it is put to or what it is mixed with, out of their control, that can make it intrusive or benign, and that is for the future to boot.

Now don't get me wrong. I am an optimist about most modern technology. Because of modern communications methods and the sharing of certain data, I do believe we are entering an epoch in which discovery of all sorts will be speeded up. Cures for diseases will be discovered in double time. Technology that will enable the poorest third of the world at last to access some of the benefits of the past couple of hundred years, or education, health care, industry and the growth of material wealth, even to ensure they have enough to eat. That our ability to communicate, and trade with, individuals and enterprises right around the planet has the ability to spread wealth and peace more widely than ever before. That it is about to unleash a truly "giant leap for mankind".

But that threatens government. It threatens those who, having attained power, need to justify their own existence, and expense accounts. But the good news is that the market, the producers and integrators of those technologies still have to make money. So they continue developing, and this is where our influence can come in. Our pressure, our reaction to their previous attempts, can shape the factors that will go into their next research. At some point, perhaps when they understand that the technology has only made a minute difference, opinion will swing against the untrammelled benefits of CCTV and the manufacturers will look for ways of delivering the benefits without the snooping.

And it's up to those of us with half an interest in the technology, amateur or professional, to think for ourselves and propose possible solutions that resolve the problems we ourselves have with the systems currently on offer. Those whose job it is to scrutinise and hold government to account cannot be trusted to do so if it has taken them all this time to state what has been bloody obvious to anyone with all synapses firing.

Most of all, it is government itself that is the problem. To roll back the surveillance state, we need to roll back the state itself. Never before have governments had so much power over us. Yet they continually fail to make the differences they promise at election time. It's time we woke up to this and stopped listening to their spin, excuses and lies and stopped putting our trust in them.