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Who's watching the watchers?
11-02-2009
by Ralph Averbuch
There is little doubt that there's a school of thought which argues we shouldn't be worried about our government monitoring our phone and internet activity because we ought only to be concerned if we have something to hide. To this blogger's mind, at least, this seems dangerously complacent. Why should governments have any de facto right to monitor what we do, who we talk to, what we say? Certainly if someone commits a crime they ought to be appropriately punished. But do we want to move towards a state where we assume everyone is potentially a criminal and must therefore be watched for signs of inappropriate activity? It seems disturbingly reminiscent of George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984. Fortunately there are groups who are fighting every attempt government takes to impose yet more monitoring on its citizens' activities. One such, which we've mentioned before, is Digital Rights Ireland. It is actively challenging laws which will allow government to track the 'movements and communications of the entire population'. At the moment the European Court of Justice is yet to rule on whether planned laws will violate human rights. Meanwhile the same group is still challenging the government in the Irish High Court over 'data retention on fundamental rights grounds as surveillance of the entire population can never be reasonable or proportionate.' So let's not get too fussed about new and voluntary services such as Google Latitude when there's a far more insidious threat of being involuntarily stalked by our own elected representatives.
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