Reasons to be fearful about surveillance

Ewen MacAskill

The debate over the draft bill in the coming months will set the balance between security and privacy in this country. Here’s how

Do the British public, especially the younger generation, care about privacy? Are they apathetic, or is it that they just regard security in at time of Islamist threats as the overriding concern?

Polls suggest the UK, in contrast with countries such as the US or Germany, tends to be largely apathetic about privacy.

And yet the whistleblower Edward Snowden, sitting in exile in Russia, has attracted 1.6 million followers on Twitter, many of them from the UK. Scepticism about the pervasiveness of government surveillance has seeped into public conscious and culture, with people routinely joking about GCHQ or other agencies listening in on iPhones.

So privacy-v-secrecy has become a staple of in spy thrillers, from Homeland to Spectre. But there are big some big reasons to be concerned about the issue in real life.

How are they watching me?

The widespread use of smartphones, emails and social media over the last decade has given the intelligence agencies access to private data on a scale few in the last century would have imagined possible. Orwell’s Big Brother looks clunky compared with the intelligence agencies now.

Snowden revealed the scale of government surveillance, the way in which the NSA and GCHQ can scoop up vast amounts of data in minutes. They can see phone records, follow people from location to location through their own phones and those round about them, and use phones as microphones, to listen in on conversations. They can look at who you have been emailing and find out what websites you have been looking at. They can turn on the camera on your laptop.

One of the most startling disclosures by Snowden, in an interview, was when he said NSA staff could use those cameras to watch people having sex.

Since the Snowden revelations in 2013, the surveillance agencies have moved on, developing even better tools and tricks, which we do not know about yet.

The younger generation, in particular, should think about this: given the speed of changes in the last decade, just imagine how much more efficient and pervasive will the surveillance agencies be in 2025 or 2035.

But don’t Facebook, Google and other private companies already know all this stuff?

Supporters of intrusive government surveillance powers often say: “What is the problem? You are handing over private data on social media and to internet service providers.”

One answer is that giving private data to internet service providers – however foolish that may be – is voluntary while government surveillance is not.

Until the Snowden revelations, the extent of cooperation between the surveillance agencies and the communications and internet companies was widely unknown; we know now. There has been a customer backlash, and these companies are now much more coy about handing over data.

The UK’s draft surveillance bill, published this week, is aimed at finding a way of getting the big US companies to agree to requests from GCHQ, and that could be tricky.

What about ‘privileged’ conversations?

There was a long-held mistaken assumption that conversations between MPs and constituents, between doctors and patients and between lawyers and clients was privileged. Journalists also acted under the misapprehension that conversations with sources were protected.

We know now that is wrong, and there are no protected areas: that the security agencies will listen in on a lawyer talking to a client in prison or to an MP under suspicion.

The draft bill proposes some protections for all these groups, but they are at this stage extremely vague.

But what if I have nothing to hide?

Another common argument is: if I have nothing to hide, I have nothing to fear. That’s the line adopted by the former cabinet minister William Hague.

Those working in the intelligence agencies on the whole tend to be decent citizens intent on upholding the law and maintaining democracy. One of the risks for privacy campaigners is to overstate the case, portraying the British state as being on the verge of authoritarianism.

But the history of the intelligence agencies over the last 50 years in the US and UK – with the targeting of trade unionists, leftwingers, peace campaigners, civil rights activists and others, as well as the dodgy dossier – shows the need for strong oversight by parliament and the judiciary, neither of which exists at present.

The debate over the draft bill in the coming months will determine the balance between security and privacy in this country. It is a conversation that as many people as possible should be engaged in./Guardian