We are already at the gates of the surveillance society

Parliament must act to halt the spread of powers of intrusion and control in the hands of the state and private corporations

The Guardian
Nov. 03, 2006

Up until now the best ally of governments and big corporations who wish to place every individual under total and unwavering surveillance has always been ignorance. People have simply failed to grasp the threat posed by individual surveillance systems and the way a range of technologies can reach out to each other almost of their own accord to create new pathways of exchange.

But with the publication of three important reports this week - one in this newspaper about the NHS database - there can be no excuse for saying "I have done nothing wrong so I have nothing to fear". Surveillance and its potential for diminishing the human experience and robbing individuals of political power is one of the most pressing issues of our time. We stand on the boundary between two societies - one where freedom and privacy are the norm; the other in which our movements, habits and transactions are monitored for signs of aberrant behaviour. Let there be no misunderstanding: the surveillance society is one that necessarily reduces us all from citizens to subjects.

Of the three reports, the information commissioner Richard Thomas's is by far the most comprehensive. "It is pointless to talk about surveillance society in the future tense," says the introduction. "It is not just that CCTV may capture our image several hundred times a day or that checkout clerks want to see our loyalty cards in the supermarket. It is that these systems represent a basic, complex infrastructure which assumes that gathering and processing personal data is vital to contemporary living."

The sciences of biometrics, intelligent photography and data processing have all come together at great speed and now have a kind of momentum of their own. The refinements of information handling mean that every habit can be targeted and analysed, that the simplest actions may be pored over by distant authorities and corporations without us ever being aware. This is the modern world, we tell ourselves, and we must move with the times. The principles and values that we once regarded as certainties of a free society are swept aside with minimal consideration.

If there was ever a case for calling a halt it is the mass collection of DNA by the police. Since the introduction of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, anyone can be arrested on suspicion of committing the slightest offence. Police will then remove a DNA sample, which stays on a database, regardless of whether the person is charged or not. Tens of thousands of innocent people's DNA is retained as standard procedure.

By next April there will be some 3 million profiles on the police database, a fifth of which happen to belong to people of African-Caribbean origin. According to the report by the Nuffield Bioethics Committee, the database is increasing by 40,000 samples every month. The chairman of the committee, Sir Bob Hepple, says with astonishment that I share: "We didn't have any legislation to establish the DNA database and it has not been debated in parliament."

Quite apart from blurring the important distinction between those who have and those who have not committed a crime in the eyes of the law, the police DNA database represents a future menace. Genetic science is at an early stage and there is no way we can predict who will one day use this database and what conclusions future scientists will be able to draw from these profiles.

Once a database like this is established, the authority concerned tends to regard the information as being in its ownership, to be exchanged without reference to the subjects. As the Liberal Democrats recently revealed, the government has passed more than 500 samples of DNA to foreign agencies. When it was asked which countries now possessed these samples, no one seemed to know.

A more important example of this arrogance was revealed in a Guardian report by David Leigh and Rob Evans, concerning the NHS database. That millions of patients records are to be uploaded, regardless of individual wishes, and made available to security services, is an outrage. It constitutes the most severe case of mass invasion of privacy in western Europe since the days of the Stasi. And yet it almost went unnoticed. No action taken by this government could more effectively underline the warnings in the information commissioner's report, nor the dangers represented by the National Identity Register.

What is both fascinating and horrifying is the complete absence of parliamentary scrutiny in these matters. The police DNA database wasn't debated in parliament and nor was the introduction of a network of automatic number-recognition cameras which now watch every motorway and town centre, retrieving information from billions of journeys which is retained for two years.

While this government has been exceptionally deft in avoiding serious public debate on the issues of surveillance, the Conservatives have failed to find the principled outrage with which to challenge such actions as making every adult's personal health record available to the police and the security services. Undoubtedly the Conservatives have been mesmerised by the need to appear on the side of law and order, but this doesn't quite explain their failure to stand against the tide of authoritarian measures.

Parliament has not only been sidelined by a presidential prime minister who believes that there should be a national database containing everyone's DNA, and who regards the ID card as a symbol of modernity rather than state intrusion, but MPs have absented themselves from the debate because they do not always understand the power and reach of the technology.

After the Criminal Records Bureau managed to describe some 2,000 people wrongly as having convictions, you would think that MPs might consider the wider implications of such mistakes. With privacy laws being watered down to allow 400,000 civil servants access to the ID-card National Identity Register and 250,000 civil servants to poke around in our health records, it might occur to MPs to look at the security issues surrounding government databases. But no. On these matters, there is silence in Westminster.

Richard Thomas is right to call for a national debate before things go too far, but where is that debate going to crystallise into policy that protects us and future generations, if not in parliament?
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· Henry Porter is the London editor of Vanity Fair