‘The innocent have nothing to fear’. How often have I heard that
response at public meetings when the state is criticised for over-comprehensive
surveillance? A journalist has now described that as ‘the police state defence’.
Just imagine the following scenarios:
Your cousin is a member of an extremist nationalist group. Because
of your relationship with him, the security services put you under total
surveillance as a suspected sympathiser.
You go on a blind date arranged via an internet dating site.
The person you meet is a spy for an unfriendly country. You are now suspected
of being a spy.
You download a copy an Al Qaeda training manual for a friend who is a post graduate student studying
the literature of terrorist groups. You lose your job and cannot find work in
any other university
You are employed by a university and were charged with terrorism
in the past but the charges were dropped for lack of evidence. This is leaked
by the security services and becomes public knowledge. You are sacked from your
job
Some of these examples are real. The innocent do have reason
to fear if the state is prepared to misuse this information.
Nobody in Germany
thought too much of having their religion identified on their identity card -
until the state started rounding up Jews. Nobody worried too much at being identified
as a member of the Communist Party – until the state started rounding up
Communists, gays and gipsies.
See also
So please don’t claim that it doesn’t matter that we have the
highest density of CCTV cameras in Europe, that we are using meta data from
intrusive US surveillance, that our own security services can bug and film at
will because ministers won’t stand up to them. It did matter in Germany in the
1930s, it matters in the UK now.
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