The late twentieth century is a far away country and the world before the computer beyond sight or meaning. In Britain the 1994 Intelligence Services Act, which gave legal underpinning to the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) for the first time, and the 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), have been overtaken by the rise of search engines and the social media and accompanying developments in digital systems and software. Edward Snowden’s revelations about the extent of state interception exposed the obsolescence of current legal safeguards. In the surveillance of private communication almost everything is history. The lack of change in people's communications behaviour in the 1840s suggests privacy crises today may not alter the massive flow of digital messaging between individuals.This form of counting provides objective and challenging evidence of the actual impact of privacy crises. 'The statistical measurement of communication behaviour' from postal flows to Facebook traffic began with the introduction of the Penny Post in 1840.The more recent past suggests that the conditions for explosions of public concern over systems of state surveillance are widely present, and that the intervals between panics are shortening.Secrecy about secrecy in the conduct of state surveillance can only be defended by an appeal to 'honourable secrecy', which no longer has the credibility it assumed in the nineteenth century.The Government needs to generate a response which engages with both the conduct of espionage and the rapidly changing practices of digital communication. It cannot be treated merely as a problem for the Foreign Office. The current controversy is generated by the collision between security and privacy expectations.Now there is growing tension between the rights of British citizens and transnational processes of communication and surveillance. The narratives of national liberty coincided with structures of national power in the nineteenth century. The postal espionage crisis of 1844 sparked the first panic over the privacy of citizens, and offers lessons from history for those grappling with the Edward Snowden revelations about the surveillance of digital communication.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |