Arthur St Hugh
Maybe our greatest fear of the surveillance of emails and website visits should be that it will reveal that we are all boring and mundane and show more interest in celebrities rather than in overthrowing the government?
The government is merely recognising our changing behaviour; they used to open the mail of certain political activists and tap their phones but now such people are online.
Perhaps the drive for this new surveillance is –
1) It allows the creation of profiles, which means behaviour can be predicted. We are all already used to this from advert preference on websites . The websites you visit (non-political as well) form a pattern which allows you to be identified – labelled – as a likely adherent of this or that political belief. The more times you comply with that pattern the more likely you are to be definitely of that persuasion.
However, the only secret police benefit from this would seem to be if you try to pretend to be something other than you are not then they will be able to guess from your preferences what you really are. Though saying that David Cameron pretends to be a conservative and no one seems too bothered.
It could be argued that there is a political benefit in that if the government knows which websites are actually popular – the real trends not those invented by the media – then they could change what they say to reflect that and maintain popularity. However, that might not always give an accurate indication. The BNP website was regularly touted as one of the more popular political websites but that did not translate into corresponding political representation. Of course, it could be that the majority of people visiting were from government agencies or were left-wing activists – either way the government will soon be able to know for sure.
2) Monitoring the content of email might pick up on phrases from websites, and links to them, and give an indication of what information is being shared. Even if the content is made innocuous, as presumably it is by terrorists, who they are passing between and their frequency could in itself be taken as indicative and possible predictive.
It could be argued that the real political benefit is that the government will know in advance what the political opposition is going to say or planning to do, it would be Watergate every single day. Though as we have little genuine political opposition it seems superfluous.
However, irrespective of the justification for surveillance, what will the government do with this information? The government already has tons of information on paedophiles and their networks, yet the government is happy for those paedophiles to continue to live near your children. The government already has tons of information on Muslims extremists and their networks, but there never is any mass detention of them.
Undoubtedly this surveillance could be added to the existing weaponry of Britain’s ‘fear society’. Recently Anonymous released information on KKK members. That sort of thing will become much easier. It might not necessarily become more often, because ultimately the majority of members of such groups are not going to be deterred by public exposure – most people who knew them could probably guess their political views anyway, and everyone else in the world is never going to meet them – and because the majority of members of such groups will not be doing anything anyway. What it could be used for is to blackmail or coerce potential undeclared leaders and hidden ‘opinion formers’ – the communists used camps for ‘re-education’ but they take up space and the government needs that space for housing.
The only other beneficiary of government surveillance will be statisticians. They should ask for a pay rise now.
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There may be unexpected consequences: political movements may be all the more effective by being forced to remain within the law; they may be given impetus by the need to belong to a constituency; those doing the surveillance may come under the influence of those they are watching.
The reason for fearing the surveillance state is that it has arisen due to the failure of our collective western governments to destroy the terrorist threat at its base. We should have used overwhelming force-nuclear-on Iran instead of attacking countries which had largely given up secularism.
Now we are all guilty by default and our government is spending billions on internal security infrastructure and demanding that commercial companies comply with laws and spend on additional storage capacity which will land on the head of the consumer and tax payer.
It should be remembered that this form of internal spying is the preserve of authoritarian states and not those which value freedom-a central tenet of libertarianism. It leads to the possibility that at some point, a far more tyrannical regime could take the reigns of power and could ensure that no one was able to remove them from power. It is a Police state and is no different to having a policeman looking over your shoulder at all times. Just like the panopticon you do not know who or why they are watching.
The problem is that “building a profile” is pretty much useless. Data mining is vastly overrated as a knowledge tool in this Age Of Google. It creates predominantly false associations. Amazon currently think for some reason I am interested in buying a toilet, for instance.
If Amazon make an error in their advertising, it may at best be a trivial annoyance. If the State does so in the belief it can identify miscreants, the results for the individual can be catastrophic. Due to the wealth of associations Data Mining will produce, there are two options. The first is to arrest everyone who sets off a red flag, which is basically what Communist and Fascist tyrannies did, filling their jails and concentration camps and Gulags with people who were innocent.
The other option is to filter the results by guesswork. The result is that inevitably, when one person does turn terrorist, it will be found that they were “known to the authorities” and that said authorities had done nothing- because they were one of tens of thousands of “possibles”.
The myth that at some level of data collection and analysis some kind of understanding will emerge from the statistical soup is widely believed, despite being complete nonsense.