Looking at #batshit in the wider context…

On Thursday I waxed somewhat wrathful over the government’s plans for the creation of a #Batshit Tsar and Lord Voldemort’s Mandelson’s plans for copyright in the digital age. It was, if you’re interested, my most widely and rapidly read article on this blog, ever.

Since then, more informed heads than mine have written extensively about why the proposed plans are neither helpful for what they propose to do nor rational, reasonable, nor proportionate in the context of the internet industries.  British Telecom estimated at one stage that monitoring, warning, and restricting bandwidth for file-sharing would cost them $1.6m per day, without direct benefit to the creative industries. Moreover, despite cries of pain from music industry, they seem to be doing just fine: 2009 was a record-breaking year for the sale of singles – a market which is dominated by digital sales.

But never mind all that.

Mandelson’s #batshit plan has a context. I’m not suggesting this is a deliberate masterplan of evil, by the way, just saying that this is part and parcel of the batshitness of the whole thing. And the context is civil liberties, people, and specifically yours.

The security service, MI5, already monitors internet activity [more]. Your ISP likely already retains a certain amount of data about your online activities in line with voluntary guidelines sent out a while back. These new proposals go a step further and require your ISP to wade through what you do online to make sure it isn’t naughty.

I can’t help but feel that’s like making your local bookshop keep a list of what books you look at to make sure you aren’t a bad person, but if it were only the security service, one might – might – make an argument for it. It’s not an argument I’d be very receptive to, but still.

But here’s the context:

the government continues to fight to retain DNA from people never convicted of a crime in spite of legal judgments against the practice;

anti-terror laws now make it a crime to take a picture of a policeman or a member of the armed forces;

anti-terror powers are also routinely used outside the context of terrorism investigations to root out such wickedness as noisy children and crimes involving waste disposal (I have no idea) and, always a grave threat to civilisation, dog-fouling;

the House of Lords constitution committee said we were approaching a ’surveillance state’ in February, and the former head of MI5 warned that the government was using the fear of terror to bring in oppressive legislation;

the UK’s CCTV network will also be used to track car journeys, and if we get pay-per-mile road pricing, it seems likely that law enforcement and security services will want access to the data…

And all this is before we discuss the various other bits of data – health, credit reports and so on – which can be shared between even low-level local government bodies without your consent or approval, and in fact without telling you at all.

(For extra funny, by the way: MI5 actually doesn’t want the three strikes rule, because it will increase the amount of encrypted traffic on the net, making eavesdropping harder…)

This bill is the latest example of an utterly inexcusable and alarming piecemeal assault on the notion and actuality of civil liberty. It may be commercial in its inception. It has far broader and more significant consequences than that – and of course, it won’t do what it’s supposed to.

So tell Lord Voldemort Mandelson to stick it in his ear.

[More information - everywhere, basically, but especially here.]