War on liberties escalates

Someone please explain to me why, in the name of freedom and liberty and an open democracy, we should have to watch the superpowers whittle away at all these things in the name of President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair's "war against terrorism", writes Karlin Lillington

Not that these attempts are anything new. Well before September 11th, the governments of the United States and Great Britain had attempted to seize ever-greater power to put their citizens under various types of generalised surveillance.

The era of digitised data has made this a much easier task, so much so that the courts have frequently stepped in to keep overzealous American and European lawmakers from infringing on the privacy and human rights of citizens.

For example, in the US in the early 1990s, the government tried to introduce specialised surveillance computer chips into phone and data systems that would have allowed federal agents to listen in on any conversations, or access any e-mail or other data communications, during an investigation. The US government has also attempted to require the insertion of "back doors" into encryption products that consumers and businesses use to keep correspondence and data files private.

It has wanted to create giant databases of information gathered by various branches of surveillance and police agencies. And overall, the government has argued for years that it needs greater surveillance rights to better carry out various investigations. These attempts have been rebuffed, mostly by privacy and civil rights groups filing suit on behalf of US citizens, and creating awareness campaigns among lawmakers that have caused such programmes to be questioned and, until now, mostly quashed.

In Britain, the situation is much the same. Britain already has more surveillance cameras watching its citizens than any other nation in the world, all in the name of preventing crime (interestingly, CCTV cameras are not seen as positive, crime-fighting additions to US neighbourhoods, but spying machines, and are considered highly controversial).

Britain has also tried repeatedly to require users of cryptographic products to make available some kind of back door to let law enforcement decode data. And, like the US, Britain has sought greater powers to keep electronic tabs on its citizens. To a shocking extent, Britain got its way when it passed the 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIP), which allows for unprecedented levels of surveillance of personal data and communications, often without a warrant.

This Act basically allows a company's faxes, e-mail traffic data, mobile phone call data and internet traffic data to be scrutinised by police if they so desire. Warrants are unnecessary or can be obtained from low-level officials rather than judges in many cases. And this is a watered down version of what the government actually wanted to be able to do.

After the events of September 11th - indeed, within hours of the planes hitting their targets in the US - the surveillance agencies in the US were demanding new powers, and so were their British counterparts. Encryption should be shown the door and law enforcement should have the right to gather data from any and all internet users, and from any and all mobile phone users, if they were deemed suspicious, they argued.

The US rushed through, with almost no debate whatsoever, the draconian USA Patriot Act, denting 15 different existing privacy laws. Britain tried to bring in new amendments to RIP, but these, at least for now, have been successfully deflected.

But the erosion of rights continues. A sheeplike European Parliament - including nearly every Irish member - obediently accepted arguments it had rejected many times before from surveillance agencies and decided last spring to approve plans to retain massive amounts of personal data from its citizens, for as long as seven years.

Now, a US federal appeals court panel of judges - which meets in secret - has overturned a lower court judgment and decided to allow the Bush administration broad authority to monitor people's activity on the internet, including recording their keystrokes, and to collate all that data with other surveillance agency data into one enormous database.

US Attorney General Mr John Ashcroft was delighted, noting the ruling was "a victory for liberty, safety and the security of the American people". His colleague Mr John Poindexter in the US Defence Department has similar ambitions for a surveillance programme called - with no apparent irony - "Total Information Awareness".

Even an arch-conservative like New York Times columnist Mr William Safire is outraged by this proposal, which he lambasted last week in a Times opinion piece entitled "You Are A Suspect".

And remember, the governments that are trying to introduce these heavy-handed surveillance measures are the ones whose surveillance agencies couldn't detect a low-tech plot to crash planes into vulnerable targets.

Why should my freedom and liberty and right to live in an open democracy be trampled by secretive agencies - and worse, national governments and the EU - which want to view us all as potential suspects? I thought that kind of surreptitious activity, and those levels of surveillance, were what we were all fighting against.

klillington@irish-times.ie

Karlin's weblog:http://radio.weblogs.com /0103966/