The Growing Surveillance State

'The Terrorism Act was introduced by Tony Blair with the promise that it would be used only in the gravest of cases. Less than five years later it was used to bar an elderly man [Walter Wolfgang, pictured above] from the Labour party conference for heckling.' Photograph: Dan Chung for the Guardian


Growing Under A Coalition That Pledged To Reverse It

Proposals for real-time monitoring of email and social media show the government has caved in to the security services.

By James Ball
Monday 2 April 2012 11.15 EDT
Courtesy Of "The Guardian"

If the government were to suggest monitoring every building that each person in the UK visits, and making a note of every conversation they had, the policy would be seen as electoral suicide. Assurances that the actual content of conversations wouldn't be recorded would be unlikely to help.

It's a telling sign of how many real-world freedoms have been sacrificed online, then, that a government that just two years ago pledged to"reverse the rise of the surveillance state" feels able to propose real-time monitoring of all email and social media communications.

The information stored would include the sender and recipient of an email, the time it was sent, and details of the computer it was sent from. This would build a profile of who contacts whom, with what frequency, and from where.

The government says such measures are essential to counter organised crime and terrorism, citing that 95% of organised crime investigations and "every" major counter-terrorism investigation use communications data. However, this statistic does not show if such information was essential or even useful to these investigations – merely that investigators chose to get hold of communications records on almost every occasion, usually via warrant or use of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa).

This kind of surveillance is nothing new: it's been gradually expanding in the UK over the past decade, from measures that make it easier to obtain permission to monitor communications, to requiring internet service providers to store information on email communications to all their users. Under Ripa, state employees as junior as Royal Mail officersare allowed to "ping" mobile phones for location information on the basis of a simple, unrecorded, verbal request.

Information about each email sent – the data that would be covered by the new proposals – already has to be stored by providers for at least a year under UK law. The change would make it accessible to intelligence services in real time, presumably to allow for patterns or unusual activity to be spotted.

Such efforts sound impressive, but whether adding to the huge pile of data at the disposal of the UK's intelligence agencies will make us safer is questionable. Trawling big data for suspicious activity is the 21st-century version of finding needles in a haystack. Terrorists are thankfully very rare relative to the size of the population. As such, attempts to identify suspicious patterns of activity may generate many "false positives": examples of innocent behaviour that also raise flags.

Adding a vast swath of unfocused surveillance data to the pile – more than a trillion emails a year are sent from the UK – increases the size of the haystack many times over, while the number of needles stays unchanged. Our security services may drown themselves in data. Worse still, some users can hide their traffic, and avoid email entirely, by use of encryption or anonymising technology.

It's not as if the innocent have nothing to fear; time and again data from official government databases has been lost, stolen, or mishandled. Only last week Channel 4 News uncovered details of data on the police national database being accessed or altered by criminal gangs. Hundreds of civil servants have been found to have committed "gross misconduct" when handling jobseekers' data – and inquiries into the extent to which media organisations "blagged" records from public databases are ongoing.

Even these concerns are minor relative to the broader "mission creep" of new police and intelligence powers. The Terrorism Act was introduced by Tony Blair with the promise that it would be used only in the gravest of cases. Less than five years later it was used to bar an elderly man from the Labour party conference for heckling.

Such has been the path with surveillance. First, it was simply a matter of allowing legislation so that email and social media information could be collected with a warrant. Then powers were added to make sure such information is stored on everyone, in case it is needed later. Now the case is made that: given the information is collected anyway, why not use it in real time?

Given that the contents of these emails can be collected from Google, Yahoo, MSN and others with a warrant, it is not hard to imagine the state going still further.

It is the role of the security services to lobby for any power that can make their difficult task any easier. Such lobbying is legitimate and, in all probability, inevitable. It is equally the role of a democratic government to question, or refuse, such measures when they encroach on the private lives of millions. This is a responsibility the Labour government abdicated for more than a decade. With the coalition's sudden conversion to the pro-surveillance cause, civil libertarians have gone from notionally having the support of two of the big three parties to none.

Far from being reversed, the journey towards a surveillance state – begun under Labour – continues as before.