How much further is the authoritarianism of New Labour going to be allowed to go before it’s put a stop to, and who is going to do it?
We hear this morning that now they propose to allow police to stop and question anybody, anywhere, anytime, about anything at all, with no probable cause and no need for any crime having been committed – and those who refuse are to be charged with obstruction of the police.
And now Whitehall even wants to put litter=droppers on the DNA database.
Are they crazy? Yes. Crazy like a bunch of technofascists. It’s not just the sweeping powers being given to police that we need to worry about, either:
Civil liberties groups are warning that the details of every Briton could soon be on the national DNA database, raising fresh concerns of a ‘surveillance society’. Controversial plans being studied by the government would see the DNA of people convicted of even the most minor, non-imprisonable offences, such as dropping litter, entered on the national database.
That rather puts the lie to those New Labour supporters insisting that all is for the best in the best of all possiible worlds – people like well-padded journo and ‘cultural critic’ Mark Lawson, whose asinine assertion in the Guardian on Friday that datamining is nothing to worry about, really, is one of the reasons we’re in this mess.
A commenter put it better than I ever could:
Markson
May 25, 2007 8:08 AM
Wow, the writer is exceptionally naive, especially in a world that has witnessed what the Bush administration has done with data mining. No one is paranoid to fear that governments may use Google’s vast search database to turn it on its citizens, just as Bush used AT&T to spy on Americans (w/o warrants mind you) and the Chinese government has used Yahoo to arrest a dissident.
This Pollyanna belief that because there are laws against such behavior in democracies that mortals won’t break those laws or the public will rise up is foolishly dangerous. There is no greater example of that folly than the United States where Bush has succeeded on destroying constitutionally protected rights in an unprecedented fashion and the public is apathetic (either being ignorant of the scale or believing that it’s scope is limited and accurate).
Exactly.
Mark Lawson and media figures like him are overprivileged, overfed over-insulated tossers who need to get out of North London or Bow or wherever the latest middle-aged trendoid meedja hangout is now and then. Lawson’s horribly representative of a technologically and politically illiterate cadre of journalists who were in bed with Tony (and now with Gordon) and who just flat out don’t see what’s happening. By minimising the threat Lawson and his ilk are actually enabling it.
When government authoritarianism is combined with ID cards and a DNA database and supplemented by commercial datamining, any remaining civil liberties, any claim to being private individuals that we have, is gone. Forever.
The information may be all about us, but it isn’t ours any more: even our thoughts are regularly monitored and sold.
What’s not sold is seized: in the UK the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act allows the government to seize and sweep broad swathes of information about us from companies and data providers, basically on spec (and it’s about to get worse). In the US the Patriot Act and National Security Letters serve the same purpose.
The wall between commercial and governmental data mining is now so flimsy all it will take is a enough hot air from a determined politician to blow it down completely.
Now they want our DNA too.
Soon we will all cease to be private individuals and become the property of the state, with no aspect of our lives left unmonitored, unsurveilled or uncontrolled, not even our genes. By 2010 every UK ‘citizen’ is to have a biometric ID card, the information on which is to be collated with what’s already held by government.
Liberty claims that, per head of population, the UK has five times as many people on the DNA database as any other country. The government estimates that even if the database is not expanded to include the details of minor offenders, some 4.5 million people will still be on it by 2010.
The expansion of the database is prompting fears that people from ethnic minorities are being stigmatised. According to research by the Liberal Democrats, under the existing system within three years the details of more than half of all black men will be on the DNA database
Almost 40% of the male black population, many of them children, have their DNA on criminal file, despite their having never been charged or convicted of any crime.
Oh, and just in case you though this apparent discrimination was accidental, the biometric ID cards are being brought in for foreigners first.
Guess who’ll be constantly asked to produce their ‘foreigners’ ID papers? You can bet that they sure as hell won’t be white and they won’t be foreign either.
Not content with seizing our DNA, the New Labour government’s latest wheeze is that children – even in the womb – are to be identified by social services departments as being ‘at risk of future criminal behaviour’.No only that, they’re proposing that not just hard data but gossip and speculation about us should be shared amongst government departments:
UK Proposes Department of Precrime
It seems the Blair government’s attacks on civil liberties will continue even during the PM’s farewell tour. The Times today has printed a leaked plan from the Home Office violent crime unit which if true is almost beyond belief.
The proposal is to force frontline public sector workers to report people they merely think might one day commit a violent offence. This speculation will then be collated by a national agency and shared amongst a range of bodies such as local authorites and the police.
The proposal includes terms like “sufficiently concerned” which sound good. However if staff have a statutory duty to make such reports then they will obviously cover themselves by reporting more rather than less. Remember that we’re not just talking about specially trained personnel. We’re talking about anyone in the public services who comes into contact with us.
If this monstrous scheme goes ahead it will in effect create a national database of gossip, hearsay and uninformed speculation – some of which will undoubtedly be malicious. Once on the database you’ll probably never get off. An unfounded accusation could follow you for the rest of your life.
And of course data, like that from Sure Start and other arms-length, semi-privatised or outsourced agencies, goes right into the ‘caring services’ pool.
It’s called the multi-agency approach, but it’s authoritarianism by stealth. Cemtral government is leeching off public service workers’ best efforts to help people. The people on the ground may have the best will in the world, but when a government is hell-bent on social control and has the means to do it, good people get crushed.
But it’s going to take principled people in the public services like that to fight this: only if the public and civil service unions refuse to play ball with New Labour, refuse to go along with and to implement these mad dictatorial schemes, do we have any chance of escaping a future that’s very scary indeed.
If civil servants decide to use their power they could bring the country to a standstill – and they could easily put a spoke in any scheme the government thinks up to oppress the populace, because after all they’re the ones who have to implement it.
But Will thay? How likely is that to happen? I don’t know. I wish I did.
