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Internet Privacy Crackdown

ollie

By ollie
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Birdy Newbie

Birdy

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Time to take it to the streets!

Liberty in the Age of Terror

FIVE years ago, Britain’s newly appointed information commissioner, Richard Thomas, gave warning that the public was in danger of “sleepwalking into a surveillance societyâ€. Last week, as he prepared to leave office, he claimed that although he had not been able to halt the tidal wave of official intrusion into the private lives of citizens, he did believe that people’s eyes were now open and that, consequently, the nation’s rulers had become more aware of the need to balance security with liberty. A.C. Grayling is far less sanguine.

In his latest book, the professor of philosophy at London’s Birkbeck College deploys all his polemical powers to show that there has been no let-up in the erosion of hard-won civil liberties. Governments say that they are only trying to protect people from the criminal and the wicked in an age when global terrorism poses a serious threat to “our way of lifeâ€. Mr Grayling argues that the malign coincidence of the so-called “war on terror†with a raft of invasive new technologies (from ubiquitous 24-hour CCTV cameras to the massive extension of electronic eavesdropping and all-encompassing databases) has provided both the excuse and the means for an assault on individual freedoms by democratically elected governments.

This is by no means a new argument. For much of the past decade, in both Britain and America, liberal lawyers, civil- liberties lobbies and campaigning journalists have been sounding the alarm. But a certain shrillness of tone and an unwillingness to take sufficiently seriously the ever-present danger of terrorist atrocities of appalling brutality has lessened their impact. And besides, even now many supposedly sensible people lazily believe that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about. If a few Koran- toting chaps with beards and funny names get banged up in Guantánamo or have to put up with a “control order†to stay in Britain, so what?

It is this complacency that Mr Grayling, with passion and elegance, takes on. He describes the if-you-have-nothing-to-hide argument as “one of the most seductive betrayals of liberty†imaginable. The assumption behind it is, he says, “that the authorities will always be benign; will always reliably identify and interfere with genuinely bad people only; will never find themselves engaging in ‘mission creep’, with more and more uses to put their new powers and capabilities to; will not redefine crimes, nor redefine various behaviours or views now regarded as acceptable, to extend the range of things for which people can be placed under suspicion—and so considerably on.â€

Mr Grayling accepts that some legislative powers may be necessary to counter specific threats. But these must always be strictly time-limited, in the way that many of the measures were when they were introduced during the second world war (when the dangers really could be described as existential). Nor does he minimise the vileness of Islamist terrorism that seeks to inflict indiscriminate and wanton mass murder. But as freedom without some risk is impossible, it is obvious that people cannot expect politicians to put protecting them from every conceivable danger (something they are anyway powerless to do) before all other duties to society. As Benjamin Franklin observed: “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.â€

Above all, Mr Grayling seeks to uphold the values of the Enlightenment, of which the most important is freedom of speech, the freedom that supports all other freedoms. To that end, he reserves special scorn for the craven willingness of the British government to legislate against causing offence to people with religious sensibilities and the self-censorship of some media organisations in the face of bullying and blackmail. The only thing a tolerant society cannot tolerate is intolerance. Mr Grayling says that people who think differently must either lump it or go and live somewhere else.

This is a timely and invigorating call to arms. But whereas Mr Grayling does not exaggerate the threats to liberty, he makes too little of the growing resistance to them. Nothing could be more satisfying than the furious response of Dick Cheney to Barack Obama’s determination to subject the darkest deeds of the Bush administration to light and scrutiny. In Britain, the law lords have just told the government that the use of secret evidence to obtain control orders on three suspected terrorists breached their human right to a fair trial. A new government is almost certain to scrap the national identity register beloved of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, while Mr Brown’s attempt to secure 42 days’ detention without charge for terror suspects has already ended in ignominious failure. The fightback has begun. Mr Grayling’s book is the latest reminder of why it must not flag.

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Birdy Newbie

Birdy

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:)

When i attack you for saying such things, i only do so because i feel bad for acting exclusionary. And then i'm brought to terms with why sometimes we have to be exclusionary. And then i stop insisting on things and accept what you're saying, because ultimately you're right. I go away... but in my away-ness, i'm closing my eyes and secretly wishing for a way to make us not so intolerant.

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