brits learn about orwell

[Eugen Leitl]

(how ironic to use a german (swiss) word for a nation that has invented and is living
the Big Brother society)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2212990,00.html

We must not tolerate this putsch against our freedoms


A few journalists and MPs are prepared to fight the government's sinister
anti-libertarianism. More people should join them

Henry Porter

Sunday November 18, 2007

The Observer

Welcome to Fortress Britain, a fortress that will keep people in as well as
out. Welcome to a state that requires you to answer 53 questions before
you're allowed to take a day trip to Calais. Welcome to a country where you
will be stopped, scanned and searched at any of 250 railways stations, filmed
at every turn, barked at by a police force whose behaviour has given rise to
a doubling in complaints concerning abuse and assaults.

Three years ago, this would have seemed hysterical and Home Office ministers
would have been writing letters of complaint. But it is a measure of how fast
and how far things have gone that it does nothing more than describe the
facts as announced last week.

We now accept with apparent equanimity that the state has the right to demand
to know, among other things, how your ticket has been paid for, the billing
address of any card used, your travel itinerary and route, your email
address, details of whether your travel arrangements are flexible, the
history of changes to your travel plans plus any biographical information the
state deems to be of interest or anything the ticket agent considers to be of
interest.

There is no end to Whitehall's information binge. The krill of personal data
is being scooped up in ever-increasing quantities by a state that harbours a
truly bewildering fear of the free, private and self-determined individual,
who may want to take himself off to Paris without someone at home knowing his
movements or his credit card number.

Combined with the ID card information, which comes on stream in a few years'
time, the new travel data means there will be very little the state won't be
able to find out about you. The information will be sifted for patterns of
travel and expenditure. Conclusions will be drawn from missed planes, visits
extended, illness and all the accidents of life, and because this is a
government database, there will be huge numbers of mistakes that will lead to
suspicion and action being taken against innocent people.

Those failing to provide satisfactory answers will not be allowed to travel
and then it will come to us with a leaden regret that we have in practice
entered the era of the exit visa, a time when we must ask permission from a
security bureaucrat who insists on further and better particulars in the
biographical section of the form. Ten, 15 or more years on, we will be
resigned to the idea that the state decides whether we travel or not.

Who pays for the #1.2bn cost over the next decade? You will, with additional
charges made by your travel agent and in a new travel tax designed to recoup
the cost of the data collection. But much of the money will go to Raytheon
Systems, the US company that developed the cruise missile and which, no
coincidence, has embedded itself in Labour's information project by
supporting security research at the party's favourite think-tank, the
Institute for Public Policy Research.

The odour that arises from the Home Office contract with Raytheon is as
nothing compared to that created last week when the Home Secretary and Prime
Minister used the announcement of the 'E-borders' scheme as well as increased
security at shopping centres, airports and railway stations to create an
atmosphere that would push MPs to double the time a terrorist suspect can be
held without trial. It also helped to divert attention from the mess in
another Home Office database concerning upwards of 10,000 security guards who
may be illegal immigrants.

On detention without trial, no new arguments have been produced by Gordon
Brown. He won't say how many days he wants and he won't answer David Davis,
the shadow Home Secretary, who points out that all the necessary powers to
keep people in jail after a large-scale attack are provided in the Civil
Contingencies Act 2004.

To this, Brown replies that declaring a state of emergency would give
terrorists 'the oxygen of publicity'. How does he square this absurd
statement with the high alert being sounded by police, politicians and spies
over the past two weeks, which has given the greatest possible publicity to
the power of the Muslim extremists to change our lives?

The truth is that while his government limps, heaves and splutters with an
incompetence only matched by its unearthly sense of entitlement, the Prime
Minister has become fixated with this issue as though it were a virility
test. So his chief Security Minister, Lord West of Spithead, who had voiced
his doubts about raising detention without trial on Radio 4, was hauled into
Number 10 to have his thoughts rearranged. Less than an hour later, he
appeared like an off-duty ballroom dancing champion and adjusted his
conviction as though it was no more than a troublesome knot in his very
plump, very yellow silk tie. He will not resign of course. What is a mere
principle placed against his recent elevation to the Lords and the thrilling
proximity to power?

How have we allowed this rolling putsch against our freedom? Where are the
principled voices from left and right, the outrage of playwrights and
novelists, the sit-ins, the marches, the swelling public anger? We have
become a nation that tolerates a diabetic patient collapsed in a coma being
tasered by police, the jailing of a silly young woman for writing her
jihadist fantasies in verse and an illegal killing by police that was
prosecuted under health and safety laws.

Is it simply that the fear of terrorism has stunned us? The threat is genuine
and the government is right to step up some security measures, but let us put
it into perspective by reminding ourselves that in the period since 7/7,
about 6,000 people have been killed on our roads. And let's not forget the
bombings, assassinations, sieges, machine-gunning of restaurants and
slaughter that occurred on mainland Britain during the IRA campaign. We
survived these without giving up our freedoms .

Or is there some greater as yet undefined malaise that allows a sinister
American corporation to infiltrate the fabric of government and supply a
system that will monitor everyone going abroad? I cannot say, but I do know
that an awful lot depends on the 40 or so Labour MPs needed to defeat Brown's
proposals on pre-trial detention. They should be given every encouragement to
defy the whips on the vote, which is expected within the next fortnight

It is important that the press has moved to the side of liberty. The Daily
Mail, which I wrongly excluded from the roll of honour last week, attacked
Jacqui Smith for 'her utter contempt for privacy' and warned against the
travel delays and inevitable failure of another expensive government
database. And Timothy Garton Ash, who has so far stayed above the fray, wrote
in the Guardian last week that 'we have probably diminished our own security
by overreacting, alienating some who might not otherwise have been
alienated'. Labour MPs should listen to these voices.

The Prime Minister is found of quoting Churchill, so I will again: 'If you
will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if
you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not costly, you may
come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you
and only precarious chance for survival.'

henry.porter at observer.co.uk