There’s a big hole in the coalition’s controversial internet surveillance plans, and it comes in the shape of the point. Right now, you see, everybody is making a fuss about civil liberties. This is because making a fuss about civil liberties is a blast. Once you work up a decent head of steam, any fool can do it. It’s sixth-form debating society stuff. This House Believes That Freedom Is More Important Than Security, sort of thing. This is the sound of intellectually lazy people returning to their comfort zones.
Look, I understand civil liberties. A leader in the Times put it best, the other week, when it said, ‘Civil liberties are the rights of individuals in the free world to not have to trust in the good intentions or the competence of authorities.’ (Brilliant! Who writes these things?) But civil liberties are not, in fact, yet the point. You start having the civil liberties debate when somebody has made a convincing case to curb them. And nobody yet has.
There is a civil liberties argument to be had, for example, on Ripa — the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which was these proposals’ antecedent. That allows various sorts of snooping and phone tapping, and it does, very clearly, reduce crime and anti-social behaviour. Does it, though, perform a valuable enough service to be worth the reduction in freedoms it entails? On balance, I’d say probably. It’s moot, though.
At a most crass and utilitarian interpretation, what these new powers would do is to allow the real-time monitoring of internet traffic. Without a warrant, spooks will be able to see who emails or otherwise messages whom (although not what) and what websites they go to. But why?
Ripa already allows interception of messages, with a warrant. It seems to me that, if you’re genuinely worried that terrorists and criminals are chatting on Twitter, Blackberry Messenger or Skype, then your best bet for keeping tabs on them is to talk nicely to Twitter, Blackberry or Skype. Using this as a justification for monitoring all internet traffic anywhere makes about as much sense as trying to solve a single case of stalking by putting literally everybody in jail. Plus, it won’t work. Ten years ago, I remember reading that terrorists were communicating by logging into Hotmail in, say, Karachi, writing a draft message, and then waiting for somebody else to log into the same account and read it in, say, Texas. Nothing is sent, so there’s nothing to intercept.
Monitoring all internet traffic could help you see who is visiting vile or criminal websites, such as those enabling terrorism, paedophilia, or donations to political parties. But only if the visitor in question is a moron. You know the way the Great Firewall of China doesn’t work, at all? You’ve heard about that? It’s pathetically simple to browse in a manner which is effectively encrypted or anonymous; Google it and you’ll be up and running in half an hour. Give it five years, and there will be an app for that, simple enough for your mum to use.
I’m not saying this isn’t a problem, both in terms of security or crime. But you read about this stuff, and you hear politicians speak, and the language all seems a bit 20 years ago, redolent of a time when governments were the best people at computers in the country, rather than the very worst. I simply don’t believe they’re capable of doing this stuff. We’re talking about freedom, when we should be talking about IT. You want to monitor my internet use? First, prove it to me that it will help. If you can.
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I did enjoy the inter-generational spat on these pages between Daniel Knowles and Carol Sarler the other week, but I couldn’t help but think that the latter missed the point quite crashingly. She wrote, roughly, that baby-boomers have deserved their comfortable lives, because they ‘worked harder’.
I’m 35, young enough for Sarler to probably consider my perspective indistinguishable from the 24-year-old Knowles, but old enough for him to spot immediately that I’ll have paid nothing for my university education, and to have entered the property market at a time when prices were merely absurd, rather than insane.
From this balanced vantage point I would thus like to say: like, Carol? Duh. Of course you worked harder. You worked harder because working hard used to be a rewarding life strategy. Do the maths on how long it would today take even a top-rate taxpayer to afford the deposit on the sort of ‘normal family home’ you lot so resent the prospect of being taxed on. With half a post-tax salary saved, it’s still over a decade. For those who don’t inherit and inherit big, it’s not even a plausible pipe-dream.
Those who do, meanwhile, may have to ask themselves what the point was of 30 years of grind, when the gains are dwarfed by getting the deeds to their parents’ crumbling suburban semi. An earlier generation worked harder because there was a clearer link between how hard they worked and what they might get. It’s not that today’s youth lack the willpower to work as hard as their forebears did. It’s that they’ve been robbed of the rationale.
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
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