To mandate that an automated inspector must jot down the fact of every exchange is to shrivel the domain of privacy
Trust us. It's for your own safety. Besides, it's not all that different from what we already do. Plans to monitor and log every form of electronic communication are heading towards the legislative slipway, and – as with many a dangerous idea – it is perfectly possible to pitch the case for them in a tone of sweet reason.
For as long as anyone can remember, the police have been able to interrogate the telephone bills of suspects to find out who they have been talking to. Valuable intelligence was often gleaned this way, and sometimes convictions for serious crimes. As the pattern of billing began to change in an evolving telecoms market, therefore, the previous government deemed it commonsensical to require operators to log calls in the traditional way, and persuaded Europe to agree. The claim now is that it is time for another incremental tweak, by adopting a new general presumption to monitor the myriad ways in which people nowadays get in touch with one another without recourse to the phone. There is no departure in principle, runs the argument, it is merely a case of the law catching up with the ways of a world in which the Twitter bird has long since knocked BT's Buzby off his perch.
This incremental logic masks the enormity of the change it is used to advance. In a society where people pursue their friendships, their interests and their romances online, to mandate that an automated inspector must jot down the fact of every exchange in a great cyber-notebook is to shrivel the domain of privacy. There are technical objections – experts say that to log a Skype call one might have to be in a position to eavesdrop on its content, potentially taking us from the well-trodden terrain of probing bills and towards the realm of tapping. The old distinction between glancing over a record of calls and listening in to their contents is in any case blurred where the records include web searches. An individual who had been Googling Gaydar or Alcoholics Anonymous could be as blackmailable as someone else whose bedroom was bugged. There are procedural alarms too. Why is the government rushing towards a bill without having set out and tested its plans in a green paper?
But the deepest challenge to the emerging official line flows from a difference in worldview. Whitehall starts out by observing that it is now possible to collate more information that it would be convenient to have, and then seeks to ensure that this gets collected. Very often the motive will be benign, but no outsider who recalls the steady stream of leaks from supposedly secure databases will be reassured. Knowledge is power, and power corrupts. Handing state servants privileged access to the lives of others will not end happily. The US supreme court understands that power derived from technology needs checking just like any other, ruling recently that it was unlawful to fit a suspect's car with a GPS, in a judgment which raises wider questions about prying through similar devices becoming ubiquitous in mobile phones. A coalition that once claimed liberty as its animating spirit ought to understand that the fact that a new form of surveillance is possible does not make it permissible.
During its first flush in power, this administration recognised that the undoubted utility of a vast DNA database was not sufficient reason for keeping intimate tabs on ever more innocent people. It talked about regulating CCTV, and – with both the Lib Dems and the Conservatives having set their face against Labour plans to snoop on internet use in opposition – the coalition agreement was explicit: "We will end the storage of internet and email records without good reason." Good reason, it appears, could now be deemed to apply wherever such records might potentially come in handy for the state, which is to say in every case.
Tomorrow the secret justice proposals will be in the spotlight – another case where the agencies put in an audacious opening bid for more powers, which ministers swallowed whole. The coalition once talked of a new reign of freedom, but the Empire is striking back.