Orwell’s vision of a Big Brother state that knew everything about everyone had, over the past five years, finally borne fruit. And it was a strange fruit, fertilised largely by computer scientists’ urge to do things the Right Way. At last, they had managed to get government to adopt universal standards that allowed the free exchange of data between official computers. And thus they had overcome the bureaucratic friction that had always been freedom’s invisible friend.
According to an article by Mike Holderness in New Scientist (May 25, subscription necessary, home page link only) it is compatibility of government databases that will destroy privacy, not surveillance. A standard definition of privacy, by Alan Westin, professor of public law at Columbia university, is ‘the right to control how much information other know about you’. The existence of a unified database, linking let’s say the Inland Revenue, Social Services, the County Court Service, the Passport Office, airline booking computers, Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency and the National Criminal Intelligence Service, oh, and health information database, would mean that few people could keep any important secrets from the British government. For decades it had collected a great deal of information. Each time it gave itself powers to collect more – the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Act 2000 and the Anti-terrorism Crime and Security Act 2001 – civil libertarians had warned about the disappearance of privacy. But it was the gathering together of all this data, not its existence or deficiencies in the technology limiting access to it, that threw the whole notion of privacy into question.
Mike Holderness points out that the unification had been made possible by the development of XML, the Extensible Markup Language, described as ‘ the universal format for structured documents and data’. In November 2001, E-envoy, part of the British government’s Cabinet Office, mandated XML as the key standard for data integration.
“The best defence of our privacy until now has been that government departments are fed up with paying contractors oodles of money to produce custom-built links between databases that are five year late. XML solves that technological problem, because it allows a simple ‘wrapper’ to be built around each database to a standard specification.”
Although the Information Society Forum, which is charged with advising the European Commission on such matters, has recommended in January 2000
“Privacy and anonymity are human and citizen’s rights. They are vital to citizens’ and consumers’ trust in the working of the information society. People must have control over the use of their personal data. They must feel free to communicate without being subject to permanent surveillance.”
I wonder how much more it will take for the public concern for privacy and anonymity to rise… I think our only hope is that bureaucratic inefficiency will not let us down. Let’s hope that as various blunders such as coincidental misidentifications cause misery to individuals with increasing frequency, the public realisation of how much and who exactly is watching them will increase too.
The New Scientist article is laced with a narrative, which is a brilliant illustration of the point. Given the restricted access to the original article I reproduce the story below:
Wednesday 2 May 2007 will always stick in Professor Max Buttle’s memory. He was about to leave for a conference in Berlin, but was detained by the arrival of the US secret service. Three debt collectors, a social worker and a court bailiff were also anxious to talk to him. The arrival on Buttle’s doorstep of a district nurse with urgent news about his cervical smear test saved the day. Clearly he wasn’t the woman they were all after.
He could see why the secret service agents were jumpy, though. The previous day had been dubbed “Weird Tuesday”. Terrorists calling themselves the Atheist Revolutionary Fundamentalist Front had laced Wall Street’s water supply with hallucinogens. The dollar’s exchange rate against the euro had briefly been an imaginary number. And that evening, a suspected atheist had been seen getting into a friend’s car outside a derelict house in North London. A police-woman’s helmet-cam fed its image to the DVLA computer. It recognised the number plate as Buttle’s. The computer instantly cross-checked with other government agencies, which contacted the American authorities.
What Buttle would never discover – because it was officially secret – was the conclusion of the internal inquiry into the disappearance of Ms Max Tuttle, suspected atheist. The helmet-cam pictures clearly showed a moth alighting on the number plate at the crucial moment.
In the end, Buttle got off fairly lightly. Once he’d come to official attention, however, he faced a tax audit in the course of which his wife learned of an expenses claim for a stay in Bonn when he was supposed to have been in Barcelona.
He is now single.
