Revelations that GCHQ and the NSA have tapped into the internet on a huge scale have
rightly provoked outrage. But intelligence analysts aren't the only ones likely
to be tempted by the captured information.
The internet has transformed our relationship with
information – and with the world – in ways that continue to surprise us. That
may appear to many readers, especially those below the age of thirty, as a
statement of the blindingly obvious but I think it can bear repetition.
The latest evidence for the transformative
power of the web comes from the explosion of outrage detonated by Edward Snowden's revelations that the NSA and
GCHQ have been tapping into online activity on an unprecedented scale and with
little apparent legal, congressional or parliamentary oversight.
The extent of the snooping, which has targeted friend and
foe alike, has upset many. Our allies in Germany and France are furious; Noam
Chomsky is alarmed; the founding fathers of the "land of the free"
are reportedly spinning in their graves; and John Kampfner has sounded a grim
warning about the further erosion of the West's moral authority over more
draconian regimes. Even senior staff at MI5 think that GCHQ may have gone too
far.
Among the general population the reaction appears more
mixed. There is disquiet certainly but a significant fraction of the population
- almost half in the US – has shrugged off the snooping. Perhaps primed by
powerful fictional accounts of electronic espionage in TV shows such as Spooks
or Homeland or the Bourne films, many of us have long presumed that we are under
surveillance and so were unsurprised at the news. I suspect also that a
generation happy to splurge the minutiae of their lives over Facebook and
Twitter is less likely to be concerned that personal information is up for
grabs by the government.
We should not be so blasé. Privacy is a precious commodity.
Its commercial value emerged clearly, if grubbily, from the accounts of
intrusive journalism unearthed by the Leveson Inquiry. But how far does the
state have the right to track our private lives, even if it is in the pursuit
of our rather ill-defined national and economic interests? Most would agree
that the state has some business monitoring internet traffic, to sniff out
trails of criminal or terrorist activity, and there are plausible sounding
reassurances that valuable intelligence has been obtained in this way (though
it is hard to test such claims).
However, we still need to be wary of our guardians. Our
police forces have shown a cavalier disregard for the law when it comes to
gathering information on environmentalists, or the families of murder victims
or when cosying up to the press for cash. How can we ensure that our
intelligence analysts operate to higher standards, now that we have discovered
them to be siphoning enormous torrents of information from our computers into
theirs?
The admission by GCHQ lawyers that the UK has a "light
oversight regime compared to the US" is hardly reassuring. Given the pace
of technological change, the state's ability to capture and process information
from the web will only increase. It is too early to tell this internet-altered
world how we are going to find the proper balance between the invasion of
privacy and the rights of the individual, but if we are to maintain any
semblance of democracy these questions need to be weighed in public and in
parliament.
And yet, amid all the brouhaha, the thought did occur to me
that there could be an upside to the discovery of unprecedented levels of
state-sponsored snooping. There is one group that might privately be wishing
they had access to the information flows being sucked into GCHQ: biographers.
The authors of biographies have, I suspect, very mixed
feelings about the perturbing effect of the internet on their profession.
Online digital archives – such as the amassed material on the history of DNA at
the Wellcome collection – are certainly a boon to biographers (and historians
in general). But at the same time, email has almost completely extinguished the
art of letter writing, a quintessentially private medium that has traditionally
provided access to those incautious remarks that can be crucial to unmasking
character and motivation. Such letters (or copies) were commonly preserved by
the recipient or sender until after their death – so that the boundaries of
privacy were preserved – and bequeathed to families as treasured mementos or to
libraries as valuable archives.
I have been reading scientific biographies of late, tracking
the development of x-ray crystallography during the 20th century through the
lives of figures including Desmond Bernal, Dorothy Hodgkin, Rosalind Franklin
and Maurice Wilkins. In each case the text is coloured and enlivened by
snippets from private letters that were written long before the web enveloped
the globe.
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