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IP: Britain's sad decline of liberty a warning for U.S.: Dan Gillmor on Technology Thu Jul 05 15:15:09 EDT 2001
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Thu, 05 Jul 2001 16:27:04 -0400
I have taken the path of sending this article in full so it will be read by the maximum IP audience. It is right on in my opinion. Dave
Thursday July 5, 2001 Britain's sad decline of liberty a warning for U.S. BY <mailto:dgillmor () sjmercury com>DAN G<mailto:dgillmor () sjmercury com>ILLMOR Mercury News LONDON -- It's always a bit weird to celebrate Independence Day in the nation from which my country rebelled. The British who note it take the occasion in good humor. But I wonder how many think at all about the degree to which they are giving up fundamental rights, some of which they adopted from their former colonies. At the dawn of the Information Age, the nation that gave us the Magna Carta -- one of the seminal documents of liberty -- seems poised to become a surveillance state. I'm a fan of the British people and their culture, but today I'm especially glad to be an American. The Magna Carta's basic principle, that not even the king was above the law, hasn't been repealed. But law in the United Kingdom has become a blunt instrument, a sledgehammer against liberty.From pervasive video cameras in public places to Draconian laws givingauthorities almost unlimited ability to spy on citizens, the British government flouts basic notions of individual privacy. Yet there's surprisingly little outcry as encroachments on liberty grow more pronounced. It doesn't seem to matter which political party is in power. Labor and Conservative governments alike have enacted laws that would send American liberty watchers into apoplectic diatribes. Walk down a street here and cameras follow your moves. At last count, more than 300,000 video cameras were keeping tabs on public places, including streets, housing developments, shopping districts and parking lots. It's all in the name of curbing crime. I was here a year ago, when Parliament was debating the notorious Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, or RIP, proposed by Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labor government. It passed, to the dismay of an array of civil libertarians. RIP gives the government unprecedented power to tap people's communications. Among its worst features, the law threatens the security of encrypted information, with jail time for anyone who refuses to turn over an encryption ``key'' when authorities demand it. Most recently, the Blair government has been leading the charge for a European Union proposal that would allow individual governments to order telecommunications providers to store seven years worth of customer voice and data communications -- and give police access to those records. Again, it's all to reduce crime, say apologists for this over-the-top idea. Fighting crime also is behind the government's plan for a massive expansion of a national database of DNA samples. It would include not only DNA from criminals, but also DNA from people who volunteer to give genetic information during police investigations. One legislator has suggested taking DNA samples from all newborn babies. As the Independent newspaper reported in May, however, half of the police asked to give samples -- to distinguish their DNA from other people's DNA found at crime scenes -- refused on privacy grounds. There's some other dissent, largely from editorial writers and civil-liberties groups, but it doesn't seem to have made much of a dent. The British people seem to have accepted the idea that they will be pervasively spied upon. Sadly, they seem to have happily traded liberty for temporary safety. None of this is to suggest that the United States is a consistent paragon of respect for individual rights. The recently departed Clinton administration was the most hostile to civil liberties since Richard Nixon and his thugs ran the government, and the Bush administration isn't looking appreciably better in most respects. Yet the U.S. Supreme Court, in a decision that will reverberate for years, said last month that police were not entitled to use new technology -- heat-sensing devices in this case -- to effectively spy inside people's homes without court order. Those of us who'd almost given up on the court -- strongly pro-government on almost every other key ``law-and-order'' issue recently -- found new hope that the justices had begun to recognize how far out of balance things had gotten. In coming years, we will need to confront new threats to liberty. Corporations are gaining power over our lives in unprecedented ways, and the traditional remedy -- voting with one's wallet -- has limited value when monopolists and oligopolists rule a cartel economy, sometimes in concert with corrupt governments. Politicians who either fail to recognize this, or who tacitly (or overtly) support such vast corporate authority, are enemies of our rights, too. Defending liberty is not a sometime job. We have to keep at it, because the forces that threaten our rights are well-organized, well-funded and committed. Tonight, I'll join a group of American journalists -- we're here to speak at a conference on new media -- at the Savoy Hotel's American Bar. I plan to raise a glass to liberty. Wherever you are today, please do the same. Dan Gillmor's column appears each Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Visit Dan's online column, eJournal (weblog.mercurycenter.com/ejournal). E-mail <mailto:dgillmor () sjmercury com>dgillmor () sjmercury com; phone (408) 920-5016; fax (408) 920-5917. PGP fingerprint: FE68 46C9 80C9 BC6E 3DD0 BE57 AD49 1487 CEDC 5C14.
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- IP: Britain's sad decline of liberty a warning for U.S.: Dan Gillmor on Technology Thu Jul 05 15:15:09 EDT 2001 David Farber (Jul 05)