Learning to live with Big Brother
This week’s Economist has an article about the new technologies for collecting personal information, and the dangers of abuse:
It used to be easy to tell whether you were in a free country or a dictatorship. In an old-time police state, the goons are everywhere, both in person and through a web of informers that penetrates every workplace, community and family. They glean whatever they can about your political views, if you are careless enough to express them in public, and your personal foibles. What they fail to pick up in the café or canteen, they learn by reading your letters or tapping your phone. The knowledge thus amassed is then stored on millions of yellowing pieces of paper, typed or handwritten; from an old-time dictator’s viewpoint, exclusive access to these files is at least as powerful an instrument of fear as any torture chamber. Only when a regime falls will the files either be destroyed, or thrown open so people can see which of their friends was an informer.
These days, data about people’s whereabouts, purchases, behaviour and personal lives are gathered, stored and shared on a scale that no dictator of the old school ever thought possible. Most of the time, there is nothing obviously malign about this. Governments say they need to gather data to ward off terrorism or protect public health; corporations say they do it to deliver goods and services more efficiently. But the ubiquity of electronic data-gathering and processing—and above all, its acceptance by the public—is still astonishing, even compared with a decade ago. Nor is it confined to one region or political system.
The National Identity Register gets a specific mention:
Even more controversial is Britain’s National Identity Register, due to hold up to 49 different items on everyone living in the country. From 2009, everybody is to be issued with a “smart” biometric ID card, linked to the national register, which will be required for access to public services such as doctors’ surgeries, unemployment offices, libraries and the like—leaving a new, readily traceable, electronic data-trail. America plans a similar system, with a string of personal data held on a new “smart” national driver’s licence that would double up as an ID.
