Reversing the rise of the surveillance state

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With badly formed and unprincipled policy forming the majority of what leaks from politicians' pens it was with trepidation that I picked up a copy of Reversing the Rise of the Surveillance State. Much to my surprise though, it was clear, practical and thoroughly principled. Provided this paper is acted upon – assuming the Conservatives win the next election – we would see a significant shift of power from the state back to the individual.

Dominic Grieve QC MP and Eleanor Laing MP have set out clear policies:

1. Scrapping the National Identity Register and ContactPoint database
2. Establishing clear principles for the use and retention of DNA on the National DNA Database, including ending the permanent or prolonged retention of innocent people's DNA
3. Restricting and restraining local council access to personal communications data
4. Reviewing protection of personal privacy from the surveillance state as part of a British Bill of Rights.
5. Strengthening the audit powers and independence of the Information Commissioner
6. Requiring Privacy Impact Assessments on any proposals for new legislation or other measures that involve data collection or sharing at the earliest opportunity. Require government to consult the Information Commissioner on the PIA and publish his findings
7. Immediately submitting the Home Office's plans for the retention of, and access to, communications data to the Information Commissioner for pre-legislative scrutiny
8. Requiring new powers of data-sharing to be introduced into law by primary legislation, not by order.
9. Appointing a Minister and senior civil servant (at Director General level) in each Government ministry with responsibility for departmental operational data security
10. Tasking the Information Commissioner to publish guidelines on best practice in data security in the public sector
11. Tasking the Information Commissioner to carry out a consultation with the private sector, with a view to establishing guidance on data security, including examining the viability of introducing an industry-wide kite mark system of best practice

There are of course aspects of this that they would be better off ignoring, such as the suggestion that government push for the introduction of an industry-wide kite mark system. And more worryingly is the fact that “A limited exception should be made for those charged with certain crimes of violence and sexual offences. In these cases, DNA on the National DNA Database or the Counter-Terrorism DNA Database may be retained for a period of 3 years, which could be extended to a maximum of 5 years, if approved by a Crown Court Judge", despite the claim that innocent people will no longer have their DNA retained. These people are innocent, until proven guilty.

Yet overall a promising policy paper: a chink of light is visible beneath the smog of oppression.

RIOTT

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The Randomised Injecting Opioid Treatment Trial (RIOTT) programme has just released its findings of a 4-year scheme in which heroin addicts were given free access to drugs in supervised, clinical conditions. Unsurprisingly, the scheme led to significant reductions in the crimes committed and street drugs taken by addicts, particularly when it was heroin, not methadone, given to them.

127 heroin users for whom conventional treatment had failed took part in the scheme, and the results clearly show that prohibiting an action is not the best method to make it go away. At the start of the trial addicts reported carrying out 1731 offences a month, but after six months this had fallen by 2/3 to 547. While participants spent on average £300 a week on street drugs at the start of the trial, by the end this had decreased to about £50. With pilot schemes taking place in London, Brighton and Darlington, the independent National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse concluded that the successes of the trial warranted the creation of further pilots.

Nearly two thirds of crime is drug-related, and the legalisation of heroin and other drugs will eradicate entire black markets and cause levels of petty crime to plummet. By legalising narcotics, the cost to society that their abuse causes is reduced. Transform Drug Policy’s latest report shows that if heroin was regulated the cost to society could drop by nearly 14bn due to a fall in the costs of crime, health and social care.

Heroin users are addicts that deserve treatment, just in the same way that alcoholics and those with mental health issues are given help and respect. When hooked on an illegal substance addicts are driven underground as they are treated as criminals, not patients. All evidence suggests that the UK should follow Portugal’s example by decriminalizing narcotics and bring addicts within the law to be treated as human beings, not scum on the bottom of our shoes that we wish wasn’t there.

Nudge off

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"Persuading Us to be Good" is a new programme on BBC Radio 4 broadcast last night and previewed here. The question the article opens with is, "Are you a good citizen?" If you are bad, and you aren't recycling your grandmother in the name of Gaia, then how does the government get you to act? They may ultimately be investigating the use of advice from behavioural economists who have developed the idea of influencing human behaviour via gentle prodding and goading.

"Let us do your thinking for you. We know you are busy and don't have time to find out about the issues that matter to us. We know that you hold completely different, yet, irrelevant issues, dear to yourself which we will gloss over. We will provide you with all the government sourced information you require for us to make a decision for you. But just so that we can alleviate the guilt of telling you what we want you to do, we're going to let you do a little for us via us moralising at you." That's pretty much what paternalism is. How do you get large swathes of the informed populace to take up crass public policy initiatives that have little or no benefit to the broader scheme of things? Especially when there is zero incentive to the persons undertaking the sacrifice. (The warm fuzzy feeling that the bureaucrats feel inside does not count as an incentive).

The question should not be whether politicians can shape our behaviour but can information put forward by either side of an argument persuade us. Imagine if there was no imposed cost upon our liberty with regard to our paying of taxation. What would the outcome be if we were allowed to offer up our own sums of what we thought fair. It would not be what the government thought fair. It would not be what the moral minority thought it should be either. There is little difference between nudging someone or standing over them with a gun. Both impose upon liberty and both subjugate the individual to a will that is not their own.

The ISA: These children aren't yours

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The greatest abuser of children is the left. They use them to push through any legislation that grants them more power and intrude more into our lives. From climate change, to healthcare, to (the obvious) education, all of our actions should be undertaken thinking of the next generation and protecting them from harm. When all else fails, the way to drive policy through is to fall back and drag the children into the argument. How does this government create a database that will ecentually cover the whole population: by proclaiming that children would come to harm without it.

Their latest ploy is to ensure that parents that come into any type of contact with children (paid or voluntary, public or privately) have to be vetted by the Independent Safeguarding Authority*. Be it taking your neighbours child to school with your own children, assisting reading in classes or even serving food to them in a canteen, all would mean you are in need of being vetted. The children are not ours anymore. The left have made them wards of state and finally politicized them by attempting to ensure that no harm is done to them. Soon all adults will be vetted before they can have children, currently only those who wish to adopt or undertake IVF, via the NHS, are checked.

Our natural interactions as independent adults/parents have been made irrelevant. The grand firewall that now stands in the way of normalised conversation is the left's third way. We will now only interact with the government, they will be the one to pass our messages along to others about what we can and can't do. And the message the government passes on will be one that is suffused with political correctness and directives on how to live according to what they hold dear. The destruction of society is complete: it has been nationalized.

*ISA a soft reassuring name that hides the government's true involvement in trawling for all our data. (Although the url is a give away.)

Cruel and unusual punishments

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There seems to be no limit to the cruel and unusual punishments that Britain's government can dream up. Now the Business Secretary Lord Mandelson wants to disconnect internet users who download copyrighted material. The interesting thing about this current proposal is that those it is supposed to protect, such as musicians, are universally opposed to it, and have written to the Times to say so.

Of course, there's s a law of copyright, and as long as any law stays around, people should face penalties for breaking it. Traditionally we have used fines, or imprisonment in the more serious cases. And the principle has been that the punishment should be proportional to the transgression. The punishment should indeed fit the crime – but not in the style of the Mikado, which ministers don't seem to have realized was a joke.

In the last decade, however, all sorts of unrelated punishments have been dreamed up – withdrawing welfare benefits, scrapping people's cars, and 1001 (or more) different proscriptions under Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (which can land you in jail without trial if you break one of them).

The mechanics of cutting people off – when innocent people might use the same internet connection – seems about as impractical as Tony Blair's idea of marching young troublemakers off to cashpoints to extract on-the-spot fines. And about as just.

Here's another Mikado-style punishment plan for Lord Mandelson. People who cheat on their mortgages should have their houses demolished. I know one person who would be out on the street, for sure.

Don't ask

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Never give a bureaucrat the opportunity to say no. (See here for the other 44 points in Blackwell's guide). Unfortunately for the parents of a Dutch girl they failed to understand that by seeking to play by the rules they would lose their decision making powers over their own daughter for two months. Laura Dekker is a keen sailor, and has been sailing since she was born (she was born on a yacht) she's so competent that at 13 she wants to sail the world. However it's not the seas or the winds, her boat or even her lack of courage that is stopping her from going. It is the Dutch authorities who after denying a request from Laura's parents that she be allowed to take two years of school to complete this challenge then found in favour of the Dutch Child Protection Agency that she become a ward of court.

Of course, I'm sure Miss Dekker has been followed everyday since birth by this agency and they, and the child psychologist who will assess, her, must know her far better than her parents do. In fact, I imagine that Miss Dekker expressed a fear that she was in fact possessed by the spirit of Willem Janszoon and he was controlling her every action! Therefore the safest course must have been to take was this, she needs to be protected. It is such a pity that her parents did not pay any regard to their child when she was growing up as they would then know whether she is capable and mature enough to sail around the world. She has been saved and she will now spend the next two years of her life in school. She might of course ignore everything and learn very little, but it's where the state says she is supposed to be.

Her parents should have pushed her off at the quayside and told her to write rather than doing things by the book. Perhaps others will learn from this and disregard the state as being nothing other than a service for idiots run by idiots. The Dutch should celebrate as another child's life is successfully destroyed.

CCTV cameras don't cut crime

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It's official! CCTV cameras do not cut crime. Except possibly theft from cars left in car parks. I said as much in my book The Rotten State of Britain, published a year ago (watch out for the paperback, coming soon).

But now a major (and expensive) study by the Metropolitan Police has come to the same conclusion. There are about a million CCTV cameras in London, and – industry experts estimate – about 3.8 million in the country as a whole. But only one crime is solved for every 1,000 CCTV cameras. The Met figures show that each case helped by the use of CCTV costs about £20,000 to solve.

The rapid spread of CCTV cameras has gone hand in hand with a massive increase in crime, particularly violent crime. People demand CCTV because it makes them feel safer. Unfortunately it doesn't actually make them safer. All it does is subject them to snooping and abuse. Local councils had to be told to cut back their snooping on people they suspected of leaving their wheelie-bin lids open, or letting their dogs foul the pavement. Other officials have used cameras to ogle female airport passengers. Given the number of people with access to CCTV images, it can't be long before we find people being blackmailed over them, as has happened in the US. Maybe it's already happened here too.

While CCTV images may give officials a thrill, the Met study confirms that they are utterly useless in prosecuting cases. Often, the images are not clear enough to make an identification that would stand up beyond reasonable doubt. More often still, the images are not securely stored – so the courts throw them out, on the grounds that they might have been tampered with.

So why do we have CCTV at all? I suspect it's mostly officials covering their backs. If crime occurs and they have done nothing, they will get criticized. If they put up CCTV, at least they can say they made an effort, even though it didn't work out, as it (almost) never does. And for that, we are compromising our privacy and passing more potential power on to the authorities. Not worth it, I would say – if we ever got so much as a national debate on the subject, which of course we won't.

Fabricated evidence

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Tory MP Damien Green has claimed a ‘small but significant victory for freedom’ as he has successfully campaigned to have his DNA records deleted from the national Police database. Damien Green is correct, this is a ‘small’ victory, but it’s hardly significant – the deletion of one DNA record, for entirely political reasons, is nowhere near far enough.

The Home Office seem very proud of their national DNA database, which isn’t surprising considering they have spent £300million (the equivalent of 10,000 police salaries) of our money developing it. This is probably why senior policemen have been told to continue logging the DNA of innocent people, despite a Human Rights ruling from the European Court. Their website boasts that our database is the largest in the world, holding the records of 5.2% of the population – Maybe this is a reflection of our governments inability to prevent crime, rather than their data collecting prowess.

The most fundamental problem with the DNA database as it stands is that there are around 850,000 records which should be deleted. These belong to people who were never convicted or tried and should therefore be considered innocent. It seems wholly against freedom and liberty for somebody’s DNA to be held on a database, accessible to many public servants just because a policeman considered them the ‘type of person’ that might one day commit a crime.

Not only is this expansion of this database an unnatural infliction upon our freedom, it is also an increasing security risk. This government’s track record of ensuring the security of individuals personal data is pathetic at best. Recent evidence suggests that DNA within blood and saliva can now be fabricated and cloned. This scientific advancement could eventually destroy the utility and reliability of DNA evidence in criminal investigations. Although this could prove to be a step backwards for policing, at least it may signal the end of the dreaded DNA database.

Are you being watched?

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The latest report by the Interception of Communications Commissioner reveals that government authorities monitored citizens’ telephone calls and emails more than 500,000 times last year.

This “Use of Communications Data" is permitted under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, which has introduced a system of governmental surveillance on a scale unprecedented in Britain, and internationally unrivalled.

Of course, the police and the security services need the means to investigate serious crimes and prevent acts of terrorism, but these demands must always be balanced against the protection of privacy; both because our privacy is inherently valuable, and because a system of surveillance inevitably risks abuse by rogue employees or government itself. A just policy must be based on two principles: proportionality and supervision.

The current arrangement is far from proportional. The Act (together with subsequent statutory instruments) allows almost 800 government bodies, from the Charity Commission to Wiltshire County Council, many with no obvious law enforcement responsibilities, to view our telephone and email records, and to send employees to follow us covertly. These powers have notoriously been used to pursue infringements as trivial as allowing a dog to foul on the street. The power to listen in on our telephone calls, surely among the greatest possible intrusions into our privacy, can be justified under the dangerously imprecise purpose of “safeguarding the economic well-being of the United Kingdom." We must recognise that these surveillance measures should only be used in the most serious circumstances, and (given past events) we should not trust the authorities to exercise restraint in their use of the legislation. The measures must be restricted by statute to be employed only by the police and security services, and only in cases of national security or serious criminal behaviour.

The RIPA act is even weaker in ensuring adequate supervision. All the surveillance measures covered in the Act can be authorized by an officer of appropriate seniority within the investigating organisation itself, with the exception of intercepting the contents of telephone calls and emails, which requires a warrant be signed by the Home Secretary. These are hopeless safeguards: the executive has no incentive to restrain itself. Authorisation of surveillance must be put in the hands of the judiciary (as the Lib Dems suggest), who can provide genuinely independent supervision with adequate concern for citizens’ privacy. Unless a court decides to the contrary, details of any surveillance should be released to the suspect if a conviction does not result.

Privatized policing

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Residents in a leafy suburb of Southampton have clubbed together to purchase security from a private firm. The 'local' police force have failed to protect the community and left people feeling unsafe. Thus, with an opening in the market place a private company is now giving the residents peace of mind by protecting them from crime. Atraks offers a 'first response' to crime and is independent of the police and local councils, and is cheap at just £3.15 per week.

This country has reached the point where the police force has become a centralized, uniformed arm of the state, directed by government not for the people's benefit but for their own. They are no longer protecting us as a visible deterrent on the streets, they are little more than a criminal investigation bureau. The modern police force offers little value for money, the cost per capita is the highest among OECD countries and yet despite this crime and the 'fear' of crime remains stubbornly high. If the approach of financially saturating the oversized police forces isn't working perhaps a different approach is needed.

This private service is the reproach that government needs, as they may realize that their current meddling in how the police operate has achieved little. What people demand is that the police patrol the streets, protect property and handle any crime that does occur swiftly, backed fully by a strong judicial system. The shift to private police forces will undoubtedly grow as the state continually identifies only national strategies towards policing. The people require local approaches as this is the only way they can ensure that their demands are sufficiently met. If the police forces of Britain had any sense they would be calling for themselves to be privatized, if only to cut down on the demandingly wasteful paperwork they have to complete.