Albion sur la route de la servitude?

[Taranne]

Is Britain on the slippery slope to dictatorship?

The democracy-loving British public would never put up with dictatorship - or would they?

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* Phil Hall

An 82-year-old former bomber pilot I met in the street the other day said: "Supermen. Ha! If Hitler had come over here we would have given him a proper kick up the jackside." As Michael White suggests, British people are fond of the myth that they won't tolerate dictatorships, despite the fact that there were many fascist sympathisers in Britain in the 1930s.

Yes, we do live in a relatively free and secular country - just ask any young Afghani woman studying at a college here for her opinion. But there is also evidence around us that the British government is engaging in repression. And not just in Iraq or Afghanistan, but here in Britain. Perhaps those of us who have lived for a time under dictatorships can spot some of the warning signs:

• Inconvenient elections are avoided in the name of getting on with the job.

• Leaders of the opposition are character-assassinated by the state media.

• Institutions like the legislature begin to lose their independence and traditional role.

• Citizens are increasingly afraid to speak openly on certain issues.

• Citizens are observed and monitored on cameras and the government can tap into their conversations at will.

• Governments can snatch anyone from their homes or off the street and detain them without trial on charges of treason or terrorism.

• Ethnic and religious minorities are persecuted and are made into scapegoats.

• The state increasingly intervenes in family and community life in an attempt to control citizens' behaviour.

• The focus of discussion moves away from the issues and into a narrative of political rivalries and gossip spreads.

• Governments use bread and circuses to shut people up and distract attention away from their increasing political impotence.

• Public spaces for demonstrations are closed down and restricted.

• Large and ridiculous monuments are built to impress the citizens.

• Individuals have to carry ID with them at all times and the government holds large amounts of information on every citizen.

How does the British government rate on the dictatorship scale? How close are we to Zimbabwe under Zanu? How far away are we from, say, Norway?

I suppose we must trust the security services when they say there are dangerous Islamist extremists on the loose who want to do our society harm: we saw the proof on the July 7, 2005. But the measures the British state is taking "to protect us" are beginning to give a tangibly different feel to our society. Britain is slowly creeping up the pH scale from democracy to autocracy.

Aesthetically, at any rate, it does feel as if some of our science fiction dystopias are gradually coming true. In an estate near me, George Orwell's CCTV cameras are actually trained on the residents' doors and driveways. Ray Bradbury's wall-sized TVs flicker in small living rooms. Aldous Huxley's Brave New Labour government pushes through a bill allowing experimentation on embryos and all British citizens will have to carry an expensive ID card with biometric information on it linked in to humming computer databases in anonymous buildings.

There was something extremely familiar to me about this week's events. The way they closed down the whole of Whitehall for George Bush's visit reminded me of how, in Havana, they close the main highway every time Fidel Castro crosses from one side of town to the other.

There was also something unpleasant about the way many in the BBC turned the discussion away from the loss of civil liberties in Britain and instead began to present David Davis as an egotistical oddball, pulling a clever stunt simply to spite the leader of his party. Soviet TV attacked dissidents in the same way. This kind of media character assassination is even more reprehensible because once you destroy a politician's reputation, you might as well put him down - like a racehorse with a broken leg.

And then, while Labour berates African nations for not adopting Tony Blair's gold standard for liberal interventionism, Labour itself avoids holding the referendum on Europe it promised.

One gets the feeling that the current crop of neo-monetarist technocrats in power in Britain regard see the whole democratic processes as an irritating stunt, not just David Davis's upcoming by-election. Certainly Labour politicians show very little respect for the electorate. Any appeal over their heads to the willful and ignorant population probably feels like insufferable interference to them.

So this is the thing. If I, as a citizen, and people like me, don't agree with the way we are being governed, where do we go to withdraw our consent to be governed? I don't want to simply switch to the Tories or Liberal Democrats, I want a new contract with my state as a citizen, one that respects my civil liberties.

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This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Sunday June 22 2008. It was last updated at 13:00 on June 22 2008.

[0100011]

Ca me déprime les posts comme celui là

[Taranne]

Zero privacy

The British government is taking extraordinary new powers to monitor everyone's emailing, internet browsing and phone calls

Guy Herbert guardian.co.uk, Wednesday August 13 2008 21:30 BST

The recent report by the Interception of Communications commissioner, Sir Paul Kennedy notes that 519,260 requisitions of communications data from telephone companies and internet service providers were made in Britain last year. It is very mysterious who is doing the bulk of this spying, since no statistical breakdown is offered. But Sir Paul suggests the procedures may be a bit much for local authorities and things ought to be made easier for them.

The Home Office is busy doing just that. It is shortly to compel telecoms companies and internet service providers to keep details of all your emailing, browsing and phonecalls for up to 24 months. And it will specify in what form the information is to be kept. It is heartening that press and public have woken up to this snoopers' charter just as the final piece of the picture is hammered into place. It is being introduced in the form of a Statutory Instrument enforcing an EU directive - which means it is unlikely to be even debated in parliament and cannot be amended by our elected representatives. Perhaps that is why this is being released while MPs are on holiday. They don't matter to the process.

The Home Office is taking the maximum powers allowed under the directive - which shouldn't be a surprise, as the directive itself was inspired by lobbying from Charles Clarke in the council of ministers when he was home secretary. The minimum six months' retention is probably what we will see in Germany, which resisted the exercise; the Home Office is taking powers for four times as long.

All this is the logical pursuit of the path set out in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, and most of the debate is founded on the false premise that this was a special anti-terrorist power that somehow got out of hand when councils started using it to pursue litterers. It just isn't true. RIPA was always a snooper's charter, as the Guardian noted at the time. Its function is to provide a bureaucratic mechanism by which hundreds of different official bodies from MI5 to Ofcom can authorise their staff to use surveillance. It is purposely obscure and hard to challenge.

The Interception Commissioner doesn't exercise direct oversight of individual cases. He could hardly do so for half a million of them.

Read his report and you'll see he is only interested in how well the relevant bodies are maintaining procedural propriety by following official Codes of Practice. He's not the only one who thinks surveillance should be easier. The Telegraph reports:

To free up police time the Conservatives would axe the requirement for RIPA clearance for CCTV surveillance, using automatic number plate recognition software and public surveillance of a building. RIPA authorisations would also not be required for commissioning covert recording or bugging of a house or car, or using thermal or x-ray surveillance of a building.

Dominic Grieve, the shadow home secretary - who I thought was a man of liberal principle - is quoted as saying: "It is not right that we charge our police with combating crime and disorder and then tie their hands behind their backs in the name of Whitehall bureaucracy."

This is embarrassing claptrap from a man who knows better. The answer to the over-bureaucratic control of surveillance is not to scrap control, but to give it to the courts. If a policeman wants to look in your desk drawer without your knowledge he needs a good excuse, and probably a warrant. Looking at your browsing or your phone records reveals at least as much private information. Doing it secretly is not very different from burgling your house. It is a personal violation that needs strong justification and strong oversight. To me that means a judicial warrant.

Rather than "continued discharge of the functions of any public authority whose activities include activities that are subject to review", a system is needed that would serve a real public interest in liberty and privacy. Not some broad-brush review of bureaucratic activities, not qualified and approved in-house assessors of procedure and proportionality, but a court to decide on the merits of each investigation before surveillance was authorised. Given fair warrants we need not rely on the telecoms providers appealing to surveillance tribunals behind closed doors, nor would there be such a good excuse for mass surveillance on the pretext of making life easier for everyone involved. It would be clear that this is a serious matter and only permitted for good reason.

In 1999 the president of Sun Microsystems, Scott McNealy, famously said: "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." That caused outrage. But the context was technological capacity and consumerism. It wasn't a moral statement about how to run the world. A decade on, UK legislators and officials apparently see zero privacy as a legitimate aspiration of government. They are wrong.

About this articleClose Guy Herbert: Zero privacy on the internet

This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Wednesday August 13 2008. It was last updated at 21:30 on August 13 2008.

[Blueglasnost]

Que ce soit un travailliste qui fasse cette réflexion m'épate, mais le fait est que c'est assez vrai, je suis d'ailleurs impressionné de voir que The Guardian, d'habitude très pro-Labour, parle autant de David Cameron comme une victime descendue en flamme par les médias… Réveil au Labour?