Living in Surveillance Britain
David Cameron says that the state has always been able to get a court to order a business to turn over customer information, and all he’s doing is keeping this principle intact. But Whatsapp isn’t like a insurance agency with our applications in its file-drawers – it’s like a cafe where we pop in for a chat. Cafes have never been required install hidden microphones in the salt-cellars that could be activated with a court order. The state has never had the power to listen in on all our conversations.
Cory Doctorow, David Cameron, the ‘snooper’s charter’ will not make us safer, The Guardian
Doctorow is absolutely right.
Earlier I wrote how the British government’s justification of new powers as a way to merely “maintain capability” is doublespeak for “gaining new powers the government has never held”. Thanks to technology, secrecy and a disturbing lack of morals, the UK now has capabilities that totalitarian Cold War police states could not even have dreamed of.
In fact, Doctorow may even be understating the issue.
Surveillance Britain
In February 2014, Britain’s GCHQ was caught recording images from private Yahoo Messenger video chat worldwide. The system indiscriminately targeted innocent people, UK citizens and foreign alike, spying on 1.8 million accounts in six months. Between 3% and 11% contained nudity.
Anyone who engages in private chat has a natural expectation of privacy. Traditionally in the UK, that right has been taken very seriously and may only be broken by lawful authorities upon a warrant signed by a judge and based on reasonable suspicion.
Yet a senior government MP signed off on a general warrant for a system that not only records mostly innocent people, it records people in the nude.
As of February 2015, there are 19 such warrants in place, allowing similar wiretaps on all web traffic, phone, e-mail and more, on the signature of an MP and with no judicial oversight. Broad general warrants like this were made illegal in the United States under the Fourth Amendment, specifically to protect against unreasonable search and seizure by British agents.
Unlike the United States, the United Kingdom has no written Constitution that would invalidate bad laws. Britain as a country kind of grew organically over hundreds of years, and at no point in time saw it necessary to officially codify the moral standards of its people. This is perhaps for the better, given Britain’s history, and considering that several countries originally wrote their Constitution specifically to rebel against the British Empire.
The result is that while US law is forced to comply with a strict code of moral standards, the UK has no such system. The closest thing is the European Convention on Human Rights, a treaty which the UK signed after World War II, but a considerable number of British politicians want to leave the EU and abandon this treaty altogether. So while the USA PATRIOT Act was shut down after being ruled illegal, the UK has no equivalent domestic court with the same power.
Spy cafe
In Doctorow’s dystopia, he considers it unimaginable that a cafe would be compelled to hide microphones in salt cellars to be activated upon court order. He fears that Britain may one day apply such an egregious measure to the realm of digital communications.
Britain has already long passed that point.
It has not hidden microphones, but hidden video cameras. It places them not only in the public cafes, but in private bedrooms. And it activates them not on a court order, but continuously and indefinitely, to the fullest extent that technology allows, and without our consent.