In the case of digital rights, replace “Knowledge is power” with “Power is ignorance”.

This begs the question of ‘why do politicians so willingly align themselves with legacy business models?’. The answer is obvious – they’re the people who have the money, right now (and can make party contributions, bringing us back to the right to be corrupt); but is nobody in this for the long haul? Must we have overreaction then (oft too late) repeal rather than consideration and appropriate action?

Re ‘equality’. Nice idea but thereby hangs centuries of moral philosophy debate:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative

Treating people equally is fine except when they are not equal in fact, requiring an analysis of essential vs other forms of equality, which may lead one into an infinite pararational loop. But +1 to the Reg. article’s suggestion which at least beats about the right bush. It’s your assymmetry problem again. Innit.

Picking on this thread a little makes me wonder if s44 is our modern day equivalent of writs of assistance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writ_of_assistance). Since history has that habit of repeating itself I wonder what happened in 1819 to stop this in the UK?

Any new law should only ever be allowed to be passed if it fills the criteria that MPs would also allow it to effect them equally and hence agree to the counter that effects them also. Here’s some examples:

Proposed law: The government should be able to monitor every citizen’s e-mails, texts and phones
Check of validity: The government should allow citizens to monitor all MPs e-mails, texts and phone calls.

Proposed law: All citizens should have their data stored on a government held DNA database
Check of validity: All MPs should have their data stored on a publicly accessible DNA database

Proposed law: The government should be able to define what citizens can and can’t do in the bedroom in private
Check of validity: Citizens should be able to define what MPs can and can’t do in the bedroom in private

You see how that works? It’s called fairness. Any MP that can’t accept the counter should also not vote for the former. Any MP that votes for the former but wont accept the counter should be removed from office due to the fact it means they are unable to do their job objectively.

Many thanks for a thoughtful and thought provoking comment, which I think does a great job of recentering the debate. It looks like it was a shame you missed the event.

You’re right that this is about values, though I’m not sure that the focus on ‘privacy’ is altogether a distraction. The values that you’re concerned about are embodied into the social contract, and should be encoded into policy. What we’re seeing however is too much encoding error between that social contract and policy. Policy in the last decade has been obsessively focussed on low probability, high risk events – the types of things that make the news, and also the types of things that the mushy stuff between our ears is terrible at dealing with rationally. One of my favourite Charlie comments of the evening was ‘if the US government really cared about civilian deaths post 9/11 then we would have had the “war on traffic”‘.

Another key point that I should have done a better job of capturing is the problem of asymmetry, which I think is often closely coupled with a sense of injustice. Perhaps the main asymmetry here is the ‘right not to get caught’ versus the ‘right to be corrupt’.

A fitting example is the abuse of stop and search powers. Recent news revealing statistics (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/may/01/stop-and-search-terror-law or http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/05/incredible_coin.html) would indicate that the powers are being used disproportionately, so where’s the comeback? Sadly I haven’t even seen a decent analysis of this. The mainstream media shot straight for the headline grabbing big numbers, and the blogs I read put their own twist on it; but lets try scratching the surface of this one. Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs aka ‘plastic policemen’) have no stop and search powers EXCEPT under anti terrorism law – to a man who only has a hammer… How many of those 117,000 were PCSOs rather than regular PCs? Who thought that it wasn’t OK for PCSO’s to stop and search regular citizens, but that it was OK for them to take on ‘suspected terrorists’? Surely common sense here should say that anybody with limited powers and training should be calling in the heavy mob if they think they’ve come across a ‘suspected terrorist’ rather than getting on with things themselves. If I’m a regular citizen who thinks they have been abused by a PCSO by being recategorized as a ‘suspected terrorist’ then what right of recourse do I have? None – then that’s a painful asymmetry. I could write much the same about RIPA – a law brought in to protect us from the demons of terrorism and paedophilia, and now in use to police litter offenses and potentially fraudulent school applications. Again the real problem is that nobody is held to account for the abuse, cultivating the sense of injustice.

So, what are we regular citizens to do about getting the asymmetries rebalanced? Taking to the streets in protest looks like an increasingly bad idea (http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/04/the_field_of_pe.html). Perhaps we need our own party, like the Pirate party in Sweden (http://www.piratpartiet.se/international/english). Only it would get nowhere in the UK as we have see-saw politics (and all the playground paraphernalia that goes along with it) rather than proportional representation.

It’s tempting to construct a ‘value free’ notion of privacy, e.g. “every thing is private, until it is public”. This is problematic when a *thing* means a ‘thing in the world’ (eg a digital asset), as opposed to for example ‘an idea in my head’. Being ‘a thing in the world’ is kind of necessary for us to care about it, and requires the thing to persist, which means it has to have an existence independent of the person to whom it is allegedly private. For example it might be stored on disk. But as soon as we accept that things have a persistent existence independent of persons, then we have to make value judgements such as: who owns a photograph with a policeman in the background. Recent debate only provides evidence for the open ended nature of these judgements and the tendency of the judgements to favour those in power. The other examples that you provide above e.g. DNA, further corroborate this point.

If we cannot then provide a definition of privacy without bringing in value judgements, then the debate has to focus on the values themselves.

- the right to not be harassed and scrutinised
- habeas corpus
- the right to assembly
- the right to a fair trial
- no detention without trial
- freedom of movement
- the obligation of a public employee to the taxpayer

These principles appear to be under threat and the focus on ‘privacy’ seems to me to be a complete distraction from this threat, which is comprehensive.

alexis