Nowhere to hide | 13 September 2012

Ever since the millennium, I have wondered how long the utopian faith in the emancipatory potential of the web will last. Of course, we know the new technologies give the citizen new powers to communicate and connect. We hear this praised so loudly and so often, how could we not know? But what benefits the individual also benefits the powerful, and gives states and corporations surveillance powers the secret police forces of the 20th century could only dream of.

If you doubt me, consider how today’s scandals are technologically enabled. The Telegraph’s publication of MPs’ expenses would have been impossible 30 years ago. The source would have had to photocopy hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper. Even if he could do it without his colleagues noticing, he would need a truck to move them past security guards. Now he can just put them on a memory stick and walk out of the office. The Leveson inquiry released embarrassingly intimate text messages between Rebekah Brooks and David Cameron that both must have assumed were for their eyes only. Meanwhile, the Murdoch newspapers that Brooks once ran have handed the police emails and expense claims that detectives can use in evidence against stunned reporters who never imagined that electronic records of their past could return to destroy their careers.

Moore’s Law holds that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years. One day Moore’s Law will run into the laws of physics, and the expansion will stall. Until it does, the costs of storing and retrieving data will remain trivial and what I will call Nelson’s Law will apply. Fraser Nelson, editor of this journal, noticed recently that when politicians want to say something private, they invariably write notes or whisper rather than email or text. ‘The delete button lies,’ the editor concluded.