There are many things being said at the Conservative Party Conference that should be worrying people – from the idea that we should be sending foreign doctors home and ‘naming and shaming’ companies that have the temerity and lack of patriotism to dare to employ foreigners onwards. Military in schools just sends one extra shiver down the spine – these things, when looked at together, do not paint a pretty picture at all. The direction our government is headed is one that is ringing alarm bells for many. Even if you don’t believe the current government is ‘extreme’, the idea that it could become extreme should be taken very seriously indeed.
That, in turn, should raise even louder alarm bells at the current plans for surveillance. The powers that are being granted to the authorities under the Investigatory Powers Bill that is currently making its final steps through parliament are extremely potent and worrying even in the hands of a trustworthy, ‘moderate’ government – but in the hands of an extreme government they become something far, far worse. Tools such as Internet Connection Records, though very poorly suited to the purpose for which they are being put forward, are very good at the kind of profile-based politically-motivated population control that totalitarian regimes thrive upon. The same for many of the ‘bulk powers’ built into the Investigatory Powers Bill. It is bad enough – dangerous enough – to give these kinds of powers to a government that can be trusted, but by putting them into law and building the ‘necessary’ systems to implement them, we are giving them to subsequent governments, governments that may be far less trustworthy, and far more worrying. Governments like those that we have seen more than glimpses of at the Conservative Party conference over the last few days.
When the recent revelation that Yahoo! secretly scanned all of its customers incoming emails on behalf of the US intelligence agencies is added to the equation – with the added twist that Yahoo! had been subject to a massive hack – the picture gets still worse. As I point out in my new academic piece on surveillance, it is a mistake to think of commercial and governmental surveillance as separate and entirely different: they are intimately connected and inextricably linked. If we accept, unthinking, corporate surveillance as harmless, innovative and just about a bit more annoying advertising, we miss the bigger picture. By accepting that, we accept government use of the same techniques, government ‘forcing’ corporations to work with and for them and so on – and not just our current, relatively benign (!) governments but future, more extreme, more alarming, more dangerous governments. If Amber Rudd wants to know whether a company is employing too many foreigners, why not scan all that company’s emails, monitor all the web-browsing from that company’s computers and use profiling to work out which of the employees are probably ‘foreign’, then target them accordingly. Naming and shaming. Labelling. Deporting.
“It’s bad civic hygiene to build an infrastructure that can be used to facilitate a police state.”
The combination of the level of corporate surveillance, the interaction between corporates and governments, and the disturbing political developments all over the world – from the Conservative Party conference to Donald Trump (and Hillary Clinton is no saint in surveillance terms!) to extremism in Hungary and Poland and more – is making his warning too important to ignore.
It is not too late to change direction – at least we had better hope it is – and we should do everything we can to do so. In the UK, all the opposition parties should fight much harder to limit and amend the Investigatory Powers Bill, for example – as should those within the Conservative Party who have any sense of the traditions of liberty that they purport to hold as important. Whether they will is another matter. This Conservative Party conference should be a warning sign for all.
Paul Bernal's Blog 
I would like to include the recent and far reaching propaganda (government or whatever) that daily assaults our ears and eyes in the press and on BBC and ITV news. We are encouraged almost subliminally to accept that the war in Syria is down to an evil plan hatched by Assad and Putin. Assad has apparently contrived an alliance with Russia to devastate and destroy his own country and by default his own political career. Every hospital and school destroyed, according to the news, is the work of Russian or Syrian murderers and scant mention of the real enemy. This is the same Bashar al-Assad who challenged the Saudi’s and is considered a hero by his own people. It is also an indisputable fact that the Russians are the only ones who have lifted a finger to attempt to stop the Syrian conflict. I begin to wonder if the British population is blind and deaf to a world awash with information? Or are we so brainwashed that we don’t care that our freedoms are removed? Freedom includes freedom of information.
cadxx