Digital surveillance - The end of privacy as we know it

IF YOU participate in the modern world you are adding to your digital profile each and every waking hour, a profile that is automatically stored somewhere.

It may be held by a government, friendly or otherwise. It may even be held by our own government. Information about your communications are held by a telecommunications company for three years at the insistence of a secret ministerial order made in 2002.

Your profile is held by a bank that might, if you seem a good bet, offer you credit you don’t really need.

It may be held by an entity planning to sell profiles identifying, say, orchid growers, or online poker players, to businesses curious about your interests and susceptibilities. Each and every day, each and every electronic transaction — even using an electronic tag at a toll booth — you tell someone you never even heard of something about how you live your life.

That 2002 ministerial order, the one never seen on an election manifesto, orders phone companies to track all users via their mobiles, to log details (but not content) of every call made and every text message sent, and to store that information for three years. But that’s not enough. The Department of Justice wants to extend this to the internet, by requiring service providers to monitor internet use and to store that data for a year.

Anticipating the opposition any healthy democracy would muster against these proposals, our government plans to do this by a statutory instrument rather than a bill which would have to pass through parliament.

Unlike valid security surveillance, the order involves the gathering of information about everyone without any need for judicial authorisation or police suspicion.

Assurances that access to this information would be controlled are not convincing, especially as Department of Social Welfare staff have already been convicted of selling information from government databases.

Already gardaí can access any information about you on databases without a warrant, in respect of any crime (committed or anticipated), and in respect of any person, suspect or otherwise. The result, according to Data Protection Commissioner Billy Hawkes is that more than 10,000 requests are made for this information every year — more than 300 each and every day.

Earlier this week an American court ordered Google to turn over YouTube user data as part of a $1 billion lawsuit. A district court in New York ordered Google to turn over names of YouTube viewers, what they watched and when, and the users’ computer addresses. If you, or your children, use YouTube or Google you should give that ruling serious consideration.

Recently our Data Protection Commissioner opposed plans to retain travel details of every person travelling in and out of the EU for 13 years.

Earlier this year America’s airline industry and the EU asked the US to drop a plan to collect digital fingerprints of all foreigners leaving the US. President George W Bush has said that he hopes this plan will become law before he quits the White House

Officialdom’s enthusiasm for gathering information is in stark contrast to their visceral reluctance to share it. This can be seen quite clearly in this morning’s story about Cork County Council’s refusal to release files dealing with the old Irish Steel plant in Cork Harbour.

The slightest consideration of these issues gives rise to great concern and maybe even paranoia, but it’s time we tried to understand what is happening all around us and how little it has to do with proper governance and the democracy we all believe we live in.

That is if it’s not too late already.