Safety = Liberty? Hmm…
The latest big brother initiative is upon us – the government is about to take charge of a huge database which will store records of phone and email conversations, websites visited and so forth. The argument that’s being tossed around is the old “if you’ve got nothing to hide, why are you worried about being monitored?” chestnut, to which I would respond: “why don’t I live in a glass house?” What’s forgotten in this argument is the value that people place on privacy and anonymity, not because they are up to something dodgy, just that the fact of being scrutinised is inherently unpleasant, and bound to alter the way you behave. Try going about your daily life with a camera perpetually pointed at you face, recording and analysing your every move.
Of course we should sacrifice the luxury of our privacy if we’re scared shitless about something – or so goes the argument of the mighty Geoff Hoon. “The greatest civil liberty is not to be killed by a terrorist,” he says. Not, you might note, a car. Odd really, because cars kill thousands of people in Britain every year whereas terrorism has killed less than 40 in the past four years. The reason we don’t ban cars is because the risks associated with them are seen as an acceptable trade off for the freedom they confer on us. The government, in relation to terrorism, seems to equate “liberty” with a life totally free from risk which is a perversion of the concept; in order to have freedom, you must have risks. Just allowing people to move freely and without supervision carries risks with it, yet no society which places wide restrictions on movement would be seen as a free society.
Is it really so absurd, as the government would claim, that people see an ulterior motive in this conflation of “safety” and “liberty”, when it is applied to terrorism but not to transport or, say, economics? Gordon Brown used to praise the risk takers of the free market, and said that the country’s economic policies should be based on such risk taking. The argument for this approach was that taking risks can lead to great benefits; and it can. Freedom is one of those benefits. For me freedom means being able to satisfy one’s desires without obstruction – if our desire for life was stronger than other desires none of us would ever cross a road, none of us would ever leave our homes. If we were in that state then yes, I suppose we’d agree to these extreme measures being taken over terrorism, but I don’t think that anyone is in that state. Isn’t the whole reason we cherish freedom that simply existing is not enough?
Anyway – no matter what the government say to reassure us we should resist any mass surveillance initiative. Not because the government is a totalitarian state, or has totalitarian ambitions, just because if, at some time in the future a government arises which does have sinister motives (consider the rising popularity of the BNP) it would be better if they didn’t already have the apparatus of a totalitarian state ready and waiting for them.
