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David Davis: We are losing the liberties that define this great country
FOUR years ago, Britain's privacy watchdog Richard Thomas warned we were "sleepwalking" towards a "surveillance society". The Government contemptuously brushed aside that warning.
At the time, having been Shadow Home Secretary for a year, I started to focus more seriously on the growth of the database state, the increased use of surveillance by neighbourhood spies and the intrusions into innocent, ordinary people's lives. The state is supposed to be held to account by its citizens. Yet, bit by bit, decent and honest citizens are increasingly having to account to the state in every aspect of their daily lives. What went wrong?
The Government may not have a dark plan to turn Britain into some Orwellian society. But the relentless erosion of our liberty and privacy is the result of a reversal in the natural relationship between the Government and its citizens, coupled with basic – and serial – incompetence by ministers administering the increasingly bloated apparatus of state.
Take the Government's track record with IT and database projects. When HM Revenue and Customs lost 25 million child benefit records in the post, it was not an isolated instance – it was the latest in 2,110 security breaches at the department in a single year, and the Government ignored direct advice not to send sensitive data unprotected.
Elsewhere the picture is the same. Last year, security failings on an NHS website put personal details of hundreds of junior doctors into the public domain, and the Department for Transport lost three million driving licence applications. There has also been a recent spate of laptops and files containing classified security information being lost by intelligence and military officials.
That is why I do not trust the Government to safeguard the 50 separate personal details, on each and every citizen, that will be held centrally under the imminent ID card scheme. The Government is not just ignoring the lessons from its own past mistakes, it is dismissing the advice of experts.
Microsoft's UK technology officer warns that ID cards risk a "honeypot" effect, by clustering masses of personal data on a single – highly vulnerable – database, which will present what one chief constable has called a "gold standard" target for criminals. Biometric passports can be cloned with a gadget costing as little as 100, and the black market in stolen identities is flourishing. Far from making us safer, the real risk is that ID cards will expose us to hackers, fraudsters and even terrorists.
Then there is CCTV. Contrary to Gordon Brown's spineless attempt to misrepresent my position, I do not oppose CCTV. But his approach is the worst of all worlds – intrusive, ineffective and expensive. The Government spent half a billion pounds on CCTV – more cameras than any other country, one for every 14 citizens.
Yet a Home Office evaluation report in 2005 found that 80 per cent of CCTV footage is poor quality, particularly when it comes to identifying criminals. It concluded that botched deployments meant CCTV has "little overall effect on crime levels" and "played no part in reducing fear of crime"'. At the same time, CCTV is prone to abuse. In one case, a camera was pointed at a young woman undressing and displayed by operators on a plasma screen at the control centre. I have called for a much more effective deployment of CCTV, coupled with stronger controls and penalties to protect the privacy of the innocent.
The Government has also massively over-promised – and under-delivered – when it comes to the DNA database. Gordon Brown has the largest DNA database in the world. But his approach is haphazard and arbitrary, swabbing DNA samples on one million innocent citizens in the last five years, but leaving off serious criminals from earlier years.
Putting innocent people on the DNA database has made precious little difference to the police's ability to investigate crime – with the rate of crimes involving DNA matches sticking stubbornly below 0.4 per cent. It makes much more sense to put on the database all those guilty of serious crimes, and remove the private details of innocent people.
On top of central government, neighbourhood snoopers now increasingly peer into every aspect of our daily lives. Quangos and councils – as well as the police – have amassed 266 separate powers to forcibly
enter the home. There are now 1,000 bugging operations (and other forms of interception of email and post) in Britain every day.
Bugging is no longer the preserve of MI5 – hundreds of councils are now entitled to exercise these powers. And it is not just bugging. Local councils increasingly hire neighbourhood spies to investigate petty misdemeanours, including dog-fouling, rubbish regulation and parking entitlements. In one case, snoopers spied for weeks on parents taking their children to school to check the catchment area – leaving one of the young girls suffering sleepless nights.
I resigned as an MP to fight a by-election on this whole range of issues. We are slowly but surely bleeding away the liberties, including personal privacy, that define this great country and protect our way of life.
This arrogant, arbitrary and overbearing Government needs to be put back in its proper place. Its first duty ought to be in service – not surveillance – of its law-abiding citizens.
David Davis is the former Shadow Home Secretary and resigned as the Haltemprice and Howden MP to trigger a by-election which will be held on Thursday.
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Saturday 11 February 2012
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