The internet as a police state
(A piece for Spanish newspaper El Mundo)
Spanish newspaper El Mundo asked me to write an opinion piece on the European Court of Justice’s overruling of a directive on data protection, something that I have already commented on. My argument is that forcing companies to hold data on their clients doesn’t help fight crime, and instead creates a police state. Which isn’t to say that anything goes as far as the internet is concerned; simply that the same rules and common sense that apply in the non-virtual world should apply online. The story was published on Friday, April 11, and was called “The internet as police state” (pdf in Spanish).
Below, the piece in full:
The internet as police state
A few days ago, the Europe Court of Justice overruled a directive that required internet service providers and some other companies that offered online services to hold their customers’ data for lengthy periods of time in order to help possible police investigations.
The directive was always controversial. Germany declared it anti-constitutional in 2010 after some 35,000 people signed a petition against it, the largest opposition to any law in the country’s history.
What was the directive about? Hiding behind popular fears that the internet could become a hiding place for pornographers and terrorists, it created a kind of police state in which everything we did online was kept “just in case” it needed to be investigated. This required the help of service providers, telecoms companies, and other businesses, which were required to store all their users’ information: who they talked to, which sites they visited, their IP addresses, etc.
The apocalypse scenario is one that politicians and lobbyists like to conjure up to frighten a public that knows little about the internet into believing that it’s a dangerous place where all kinds of sinister activities go on, and needs to be controlled. It usually proves popular with voters.
Quite how anybody in Brussels thought that people would accept the idea of effectively assigning a police officer to watch what each and everyone of us is doing at all times, just in case we did something wrong, is beyond understanding. There is a term for such a society: police state.
What happens when the authorities have reasonable grounds for believing a crime is going to be committed? The police seek a warrant from a judge, who authorizes surveillance of the suspects involved. The important thing to remember here is that putting somebody under surveillance is an exceptional measure, and applicable only in cases where there is already reasonable suspicion, and that must be supervised at all times by a judge.
In other words, to most right-thinking people, the idea of these kinds of measures being used on a routine basis, just in case somebody might have done something, is completely unacceptable. This is because privacy is what we call a fundamental right.
Furthermore, as experience shows, retaining data about people serves no purpose: it generates a huge amount of information that is very difficult and costly to analyze, as well as imposing expensive storage costs on service providers. Meanwhile, the real criminals have found other ways to carry out their nefarious activities. The end result is the accumulation of a lot of information about people who have done nothing wrong and who should never have been subjected to surveillance in the first place.
Aside from returning a little sanity to the debate about the internet and how it is used, Strasbourg’s decision to overturn this absurd directive sheds a little light on what has now become known as the post-Snowden era. Thanks to this man who risked his life to reveal the extent of Big Brother style snooping, we now know that using the excuse of protecting us, a number of governments around the world have been creating a system that ignored our fundamental rights and were treating us all as suspects despite any evidence to the contrary. In short, systematic surveillance is completely unjustifiable, and Edward Snowden is without doubt the person who has done most to earn the Nobel Peace Prize in recent years.
And simply thinking: “I haven’t done anything, therefore I have nothing to fear” is just sticking one’s head in the sand. This kind of hyper-surveillance exposes us to all kinds of dangers: from the inherent security problems of storing this kind of information to possible mistaken (well-meaning or paranoid) analysis of data. So let’s just get this straight: storing everybody’s data just in case is not going to help stop crimes from being committed, and banning the storage of data is not going to stop crimes from being investigated.
And what happens when the very companies that are holding on to our data break the law? In principle, all those contracts and terms and conditions of use that we tick I agree to are still legal. We tend to be very relaxed about these matters; we should be more vigilant that companies are not demanding things that are now against the law and that could endanger our basic rights. The debate over how long a company can hold onto our data is interesting and relevant, but has little to do with this. Companies that abuse the law are subject to the response of the market, and in the longer term, the law. The directive on data retention was not a corporate abuse; it was the state abusing its position, and a way of putting the internet under suspicion.
Needless to say, this is not an apology for a free-for-all internet. It is quite likely that some online pornography is controlled by organized criminals exploiting women and children; in the same way, a request for information to a company about one of their clients can be based on a reasonable suspicion that they are involved in terrorist activities. All that is needed here is for the same rules and the same logic to be applied to the internet as in the wider world.
No fear, however well-founded or based on popular concerns, can ever justify living in a police state in which everything we do is subject to constant surveillance. As Benjamin Franklin said: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” That applies to the internet and to the wider world. Few things are more potentially harmful to society that unjustified fears. Think about it.
(En español, aquí)
