When you accept that terrorism trumps privacy
You may as well give up; the terrorists have already won.
I've argued recently - here - that even recognising terrorism is both unnecessary and self-defeating. It converts a vague threat into a permanent state of paranoia, and allows politicians to allow liberties with *my* life that they wouldn't even consider with their own.
Yes, there are arguments that without the powers already used, the security services would not have been able to save us from ever-so-many violent and potentially fatal terrorist attacks... yet strangely, we are unable for 'operational reasons' ever to find out what these putative attacks were; nor do we see people in jail or exported from the country as a result except on very rare occasions.
When someone tells me that I must make all my personal details searchable at the whim of the state and without due process, I am being treated in the same way I might treat a three-year-old child. Worse, in that while both I and the child may have secrets we wish to keep, mine could be perfectly legal but socially or professionally embarassing - and the only person who knows which is me.
There's something repellent about a government agency which is emphatically *not* a government agency; an agency that is effectively grabbing data because it can; which operates on a 'daddy knows best' approach and which actively refuses to reveal its extent, its resources, or its results except in the vaguest terms. Secrecy is apparently approved for the powers that be.
And while I'm ranting: what is the basis for all this? According to David Anderson, QC, the UK's Independent Reviewer of Terrorist Legislation, in his 2011 report on the terrorism acts, an average of five people a year over the previous decade died in terrorist acts (most on July 7th 2005). An average of five people a year die from bee and wasp stings... an average of three thousand a year died in traffic incidents over the same time in the UK.
Could it be that we are looking at the wrong thing? There seems little doubt that there have been and probably still are people who are sufficiently irritated by what they see as the injustices of life that they will strike out against anything and anyone; who will travel half-way around the world to places where they can fight and see themselves as martyrs; who believe the fake promises of politically minded people who can persuade them to kill and die and suicide on the grounds of free entry to paradise; who will take arms against an innocent for the publicity effect. And yet, and yet...
We hear that what appears to be the work of one or two deranged people is just part of a huge global conspiracy against our freedom, our country, our work, our life - but we never hear details. We never see the court cases wherein these hidden conspirators are jailed or deported; where those responsible for attacks that never happened are jailed or deported; where... basically, we never hear anything.
But it's all right.
Daddy knows best.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
