My privacy or your death

This is the tenor of the choice outlined by Bob Carr the other day. He was arguing for rights for Police to randomly check bags and for more video cameras in public places. Of course, I expect we’d all agree that, if the choice really was one inspection of one bag vs one death by terrorism, that the bag checking would be the preferred option. But that’s not really what’s meant here. We are really talking of vastly increased rights to invade privacy on one side, and a possibility that we prevent (or perhaps only more easily investigate and prosecute) terrorism or other crimes.

I’m not clear where I stand on this. We are talking of setting up an infrastructure which will limit privacy. We can protect against it, to some degree, by legislation. But legislation can change, or can be evaded or even ignored. I’m wary, even fearful, given the battled-hardened approach of modern politics. I don’t put it past modern machine politics to sacrifice individuals for success in political battles. You just need to recall children-overboard or Siev-X or David Hicks to show how hard politics is now played.

Here’s my personal story to add to this debate. I recently spoke to someone from the Police IT Office (PITO) in the UK. He told me of the use of speed cameras to record, OCR and store records of passing number plates. Apparently they are now doing this routinely in the UK, and it has helped in the solving of various crimes. I thought back to a recent visit to the UK when I had been amazed by the numbers of speed cameras. I had driven around Coventry regularly for a few weeks, and there must have been cameras (or at least the boxes containing them) located every few hundred metres along some major roads. So our movements were being automatically recorded and stored, and presumably could have been searched. It’s a scary concept.

On the other hand, I have often joked that we have no privacy, at least on the Internet, so we may as well get used to it. And I’m not alone in saying that.

Plenty of people argue that you needn’t worry if you have nothing to hide. But that’s putting a lot of faith in a state apparatus. I prefer mechanisms that don’t lend themselves to abuse, rather than infrastructures which can support abuse, but require trust. A set of Yankee check & balances; and eternal vigilance.

On top of it all, I see that Ruddock is arguing that the UN Convention on Human Rights supports greater security measures. “Federal Attorney-General says there are provisions within the United Nations' Human Rights Convention, which justify tougher security measures against terrorism” (ABC News Online, http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200507/s1422621.htm 26 July 2005). Apparently “Mr Ruddock says Article 3 of the UN Human Rights Convention specifies that governments have an obligation to protect human life, and that may come at the expense of civil liberties” (ibid).

Well, I checked this reference, and this is what Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights actually says: “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person” (http://www.unhchr.ch/udhr/lang/eng.htm 26 July 2005). I read this to mean a country must protect all of the above – right to life, liberty and security of person. It is a balancing act, but the Declaration does not specify how to achieve this balance. I dare say he’s reading into the Convention.