Big Brother is hypocritical on the issue of privacy

Our right to privacy is interpreted with disturbing flexibility by the Government of late.

Our right to privacy is interpreted with disturbing flexibility by the Government of late.

I read Minister for Justice Mr McDowell's latest outpourings on this subject in the context of his pet proposals to fine or imprison gardaí who are caught giving information to journalists with some disbelief.

In this case, he was complaining about the privacy considerations for two women whose medical records were obtained by an Irish Times journalist from a garda. At the time, the gardaí were investigating a doctor charged with performing illegal abortions in the State.

The women were contacted and asked if they wished to speak to a journalist about their experiences; they both declined and complained about such information being leaked in the first place.

READ MORE

Mr McDowell has suggested the journalist had to "induce" and "procure" the garda to obtain the file; the journalist said it was handed over to him voluntarily.

You can come to your own conclusions. My point is not to dissect the details of this particular situation but to question the hypocritical level of indignation summoned by the Minister over a case that he insists is all about personal privacy.

Personal privacy? Give me a break. This is a Minister who represents a Government that has gone wholesale after our right to privacy, while hiding what it does behind ever more secretive processes.

This Government has gutted the one tool that citizens can use to see what Government is doing - the Freedom of Information Act - taking information that was previously supposed to be available back behind closed doors. It then instituted charges for making queries, and some Government Departments have started the extraordinary policy of posting on the internet the names, addresses and the full content of the queries from people and businesses making Freedom of Information requests.

Is it any wonder that figures this week show that such requests have fallen sharply? And this is a Minister who is busily preparing a Bill that will subject some of the most revealing information about us - who we made phone calls to and received them from; exactly where we were when we received or made them; who we sent emails to and received them from; where we have been on the internet - to a national retention policy.

The information gathered will be protected by - yes, you guessed it - the phone companies and internet service providers. There, it will be watched over by whomever the company has hired to monitor and store customer information - not, please note, the gardaí who are somewhat more accountable than a 20-year- old recent IT graduate.

Every single citizen generating such information, whether a seven-year-old child or a corporate chief executive, will have every detail stored for a period of three years under the pending Data Retention Bill, the heads of which are now long overdue from the Department of Justice.

So long, indeed, that it is half a year past the final deadline for such legislation, issued by the State's Data Protection Commissioner, Mr Joe Meade, who threatened three times to force the matter to a High Court review (that's information obtained under an Freedom of Information request by the way).

And his reason for demanding the High Court review - perhaps the only time one branch of Government has threatened another with such a thing, say constitutional lawyers? The Cabinet had already instituted a secretive three-year retention scheme on landline and mobile calls, out of any overview by Irish citizens or the Oireachtas.

Yes, in other words, the Government decided to place a level of surveillance on its own citizens in a way not dreamt up by any other western democracy in a way that interprets existing law in, at best, highly questionable ways, according to several constitutional lawyers to whom I have spoken. It was also done in ways that violate international privacy and human rights law, according to the international legal counsel for the largest and most respected international digital privacy rights organisation, the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, DC.

Even the United States, under the paranoia of its post-September 11th Patriot Act, did not allow for this type of blanket surveillance.

The one programme that wanted to bring in this sort of retention and then pair it with all the national and business-sector databases of personal information, the discredited Total Information Awareness programme, was strongly attacked and then demolished by the US Congress.

When the FBI tried to revive it as the laughably renamed Terrorist Information Awareness programme, politicians weren't fooled. They were told the information would be retained and the databases would be compiled only to help capture terrorists and other hardcore nasties (which is just what Mr McDowell is saying about his proposed Data Retention Bill). Congress responded by stripping the programme of all its funding.

But we still have our forthcoming Data Retention Bill to look forward to.

And the Cabinet of the time has not yet offered any remotely reasonable excuse on why it twisted existing legislation - ironically, laws put in place to prevent such body blows to citizen privacy - in order to disguise the fact that it was, alone amongst western nations, secretly imposing mandatory data retention on Irish people.

Then, there's the vast body of evidence that everywhere in the world where the police have compiled databases of citizen information, they are regularly abused, sometimes in life-threatening ways, but always in ways that violate personal privacy. For example, Detroit's main newspaper, the Free Press, revealed that more than 90 Michigan police officers, dispatchers, federal agents and security guards misused the Law Enforcement Information Network, a crime database.

It was used to get information to intimidate and harass individuals, to produce details for officers' child custody battles and to get personal information on women whom male officers found attractive. One Michigan officer is accused of planning his wife's murder using the network. If you want more, I've documented these and other instances here: http://tinyurl.com/q2kx.

If Mr McDowell is as passionate about protecting privacy as he claims in defence of his controversial Garda Siochána Bill, he has plenty to tackle within his own Government and his own Department. Investigate the legality of the secret Cabinet direction, bring forward legislation on data privacy and data retention that can be properly debated in the Oireachtas, get Freedom of Information requests off the internet, put the guts back into the Freedom of Information Act, and realise that data retention has been internationally condemned as a threat to personal and business privacy.

klillington@irish-times.ie weblog: http://weblog.techno-culture.com