By Simon Chesterman
The ongoing police investigation into phone-hacking in Britain by the tabloid News of the World has revealed the widespread use of surveillance techniques by private actors, with predictable outrage expressed at the violations of privacy. Yet the recent inquiries only began in earnest after a major story in the New York Times.
This is the paradox of today’s media: investigative journalism is often key to revealing abuses of surveillance powers, yet the commercial reality of today’s market drives unscrupulous journalists themselves towards ever more dubious methods.
That market has been radically altered by the “new media”, with WikiLeaks as its poster-child — ably exploiting the Internet’s capacity for widespread dissemination of data, but at the expense of credible efforts at analysis or minimizing the potential harm to named individuals. It is “journalism” by quantity rather than quality.
These two trends — muck-raking and unfiltered dissemination — become all the more serious when linked to the extraordinary tools of surveillance available to government and, increasingly, private actors.
The spread of surveillance powers through Britain has long puzzled outside observers. On the one hand, Britain is a rare example of a country that developed a comprehensive identity card regime during the Second World War and then dismantled it after the conclusion of hostilities — apparently to the dismay of many in law enforcement circles. Later in the century, however, the absence of constitutional protections of rights, a general belief in the benevolence of government, and episodes like the 1993 James Bulger murder encouraged the growth of a sophisticated surveillance state.
Britain now enjoys the highest concentration of CCTV cameras in the world, manages the London Congestion Charge by recording details of every car entering and leaving the capital, and stores DNA samples from an ever growing proportion of the population.
In the 2010 general election, Britain’s Conservative Party campaigned on a platform of scrapping plans for an identity card that would have been linked to a National Identity Register. Interestingly, the arguments that resonated with the public had less to do with privacy concerns than the expense involved, doubts about government competence to manage the data, and a general wariness that the whole enterprise looked a little too “European”.
Does this mean that Britons do not care about privacy? Certainly not. But as in many other countries it is hard to reconcile the apparent sincerity of individuals claiming to be concerned about their privacy with the nonchalant behaviour of those same individuals in revealing personal information voluntarily or engaging in activities where there is manifestly no reasonable expectation to privacy.
This is not limited to teenagers. The current head of MI6, Sir John Sawers, was embarrassed by photos that his wife posted on Facebook in 2009 revealing the location of their London flat and the whereabouts of their three adult children. Last October his daughter uploaded a suggestive photograph of herself holding a golden Kalashnikov — quickly cut and pasted from Facebook to the Mirror.
There is, however, a generational element to attit