Will it ever stop? Great Britain may build a database of all telephone and e-mail traffic in the country, The New York Times reported in October. The objective is to fight terrorism.
The database will be of traffic only — phone numbers dialed, Web sites visited and e-mail addresses, the Times wrote. But civil liberties groups are against the idea, and I'm with them.
Yes, it's important to fight evildoers. But ask yourself this: Would you trust any government with that information?
For starters, there's simple human incompetence. “The United Kingdom is careless with citizens' data,” said FEDMA director general Alastair Tempest at DMA08. “It keeps on losing it.”
It also has lost laptops with atomic secrets on them. “The Iranians were very appreciative,” he joked.
Tempest added that most privacy laws are not properly enforced because “government bodies are some of the worst offenders when it comes to breaking them.”
But there's a bigger issue — the propensity of governments to misuse information on citizens.
U.K. officials told the Times that the database would not include the content of messages. But how difficult would it be to add that?
Read Solzhenitsyn's “The First Circle” if you want to learn how technology can be put to evil use. In this novel, Stalin-era scientists are sent to a special prison camp and put to work creating a telephone voice-recognition system that could identify any citizen.
Or check out “IBM and the Holocaust,” by Edwin Black. According to Black, the Nazis used IBM's punch-card sorting system to find Jews, then meticulously code their deaths.
No wonder Europe has been more aggressive than the United States in protecting personal data. But it's been tougher on businesses than on governments.
The United Kingdom should stop right now. There's no need for what Lord Carlile, an independent reviewer of British terrorism laws, has called a vast “data warehouse.”
