Privacy's about more than the paparazzi

The kind of protection the HRA offers is largely of use only to the rich. The law should tackle everyday intrusions head on

The Queen's demand that press photographers abide by their own professional code of conduct and not stake out Sandringham over the Christmas holiday carries with it an implied threat of legal action under the ad hoc privacy laws that are being formed in the courts.

Article 8 of the Human Rights Act (HRA) guarantees the right to privacy and family life, which has been used by a number of well-known people to give them a private space away from long-range cameras – today's Guardian editorial mentioned Fabio Capello and Princess Caroline of Monaco.

Although it seems right to give people what the editorial calls "a zone of privacy", this of course is privacy for the few who can afford to go to court, or threaten legal action. It does not seem to occur to our legislators that it is thoroughly inequitable, not to say illogical, to protect the head of state from the media, but not the public from a much greater intrusion by the state and its agencies.

Privacy is not an unqualified right, but it certainly must be held to mean the same for high and low, that is to say it is a quality that each one of us can aspire to and which is guaranteed by the law if we need. It is easy to argue that Capello and the royal family live under intolerable intrusion and that their experiences are nothing like the ordinary members of the public but to me the comparison seems invalid.

Celebrities and the public suffer different forms of intrusion. If we are to allow the construction of a body of law that protects the rich and famous, it is surely wrong not consider the huge expansion of CCTV systems, the use of automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras to track journeys and store the data, and the plans for accessing data from all communications. The total effect of these systems will in the long run be much more serious than anything Capello has suffered on holiday, however much he is owed our sympathy.

This is a very delicate area, but my feeling is that the privacy laws being made on the back of the HRA underline problems with the act because it guarantees nothing upfront but instead requires people to go to law to establish their rights. It would be much more effective to create a proper body of privacy legislation that specifies acts that illegally damage or compromise a person's privacy, and this would apply to the state, the press and the big corporations that gather and store personal details.

When I argue with lawyers about the effectiveness of the HRA they always say that its beauty lies in its vagueness, which allows for much more flexibility in protecting people's rights. I can see their point but surely law that only protects the rich from one type of intrusion is hardly working in the favour of the common good, or indeed universal rights.

Source: The Guardian

The Criminal Gossip Bureau can ruin your job prospects

It's been a big week for databases, although nobody has managed to make them sexy. On Monday, the pressure group Liberty underlined the failings of the Criminal Records Bureau – more precisely its enhanced check – for the Today programme. It was quite a story: a woman had been turned down for voluntary work, having been "spoken to" (as opposed to "reprimanded" or "warned") by police for leaving her children in the park while she went to the shops. It's one of those stories you can imagine Basil Fawlty popping an eyeball over. And then you think, hang on – I'm popping an eyeball. This is outrageous. She only went to the shops.

This evening Damian Green, the shadow immigration minister, gave a speech to the Centre for Policy Studies, asking if Britain is a free country. He identifies 28 agencies that hold personal data about individuals. In the light of his very credible starting position – that politicians have a duty to create an environment in which "the citizen has some personal space in which the state has no power, interest, or influence" – many of these agencies and their purview do seem … well, bogus is a strong word. Let's start with "a bit much".

The Tories have seized this ground – they are tighter with Liberty than is Labour; and there is no telling whose manifesto will promise the most in terms of individual privacy.

It's not a bad time, therefore, to look at database management as practised by the Criminal Records Bureau, which is as uncontroversial and hi-tech as any similar initiative of the past three terms of government. It is also a massive undertaking – the 1.5m people checked in 2002 had gone up to 4m in 2008-09.

Now, this park lady (who wishes to remain anonymous) was the victim of the enhanced criminal records check – the standard check, everybody agrees, is almost totally unproblematic. It passes on only current and spent convictions, cautions, reprimands, and warnings – which proceed from an admission of guilt (to be cautioned you have to accept a caution). A standard CRB check can also access List 99, a register of people who have been barred from working with children – but basically this check is not open to tittle-tattle. Furthermore, and I believe more important, the CRB is on target to process 95% of its standard-check applicants within 10 days.

The enhanced check, conversely, has come to the attention of Liberty – and not just on behalf of the park lady – because it can include, above and beyond that raft of convictions and warnings, "relevant and proportional information held on that individual", as decided by the chief officer of police. This really could be anything. People are warned when they put in for an enhanced check that it could even flag up other people living at their address.

As another for-instance (if you are of a mind that one shouldn't go to the shops while one's children are in the park), say you have a very loud argument with your partner, and a neighbour calls the police: this information will be logged even if you personally don't make a complaint, and rightly so, because the police are thereby alerted to respond maybe fractionally faster if you were to make a 999 call.

But say this isn't domestic violence, and it's just a very loud argument – it will still end up on your CRB check. This has now entered the realm of gossip: it will be passed on to a prospective employer with no warning to you. When you do find out, you have no right to get it struck from your record; and if your application was for a job in a domestic violence refuge, for instance, you might well find yourself considered unsuitable to work there.

Worse to my mind, however, is the sheer bureaucracy of the enhanced check – the bureau has targets of 90% of applications being processed within 28 days. That sounds good, but it is missed in 10% of cases. And in the Metropolitan police area applicants are quoted six to eight weeks. Moreover you have to re-apply every time you change jobs; or every three years, and after maternity leave, if you stay in the same job. In summer the system is slower because teachers are all being vetted.

This is no victimless matter – people in these "caring professions" are left without income, or even the means to bring in a temporary income, for weeks at a time. Bear in mind that working with children or vulnerable people is rarely well paid in the first place, and you have a system with unjust financial penalties built into the very bureaucracy.

The gossip element will, I believe, be ironed out in time, especially as a new vetting and barring process will be introduced in October that should in the long run obviate the enhanced check. But the way people are treated by government agencies – this high-handed, "well, we do most of you in a month, what are you complaining about?" attitude – is astonishing to people who work outside these altruistic sectors. The Conservatives might have a much bigger vote-winner with their anti-surveillance crusade than it initially appears.

Source: The Guardian

The dangers of policing risk

The great threat to liberty comes from the habits of a risk-averse, market-led society

The pursuit of liberty is worth it because it is essential for the health of society. It sounds like a simple aspiration, but it is not one we hear articulated much these days. At a time when values

are constantly invoked by politicians, the sense of what these values might be becomes harder to grasp. The idea that liberty – and all the laws, institutions and commitments which go with it – are a sacred value, against which the claims of safety, security and utility must strain to justify themselves, sounds quaint these days.

A new idea has come to prominence. We live in an age in which risk management [pdf] is at the heart of politics. Long before it came to power, New Labour was mesmerised by the private sector's use of data to assess risk and allocate resources. Reading through a splurge of government reports from a decade ago, it is quite clear the ardour for risk management was intense and the vision was utopian. The government's lingering faith in ID cards demonstrates the power this kind of thinking has.

Risk management developed by the private sector produced a range of pre-emptive measures, such as defensive space architecture, smart products which could be immobilised if stolen, surveillance techniques and other things which individuals and companies could do to "design out" crime by manipulating the physical environment. This is known as situational crime prevention and, in the words of one of its proponents, it creates a "fortress society" in which crime becomes harder to commit. And indeed, in a shopping centre or street dedicated to the war against crime and antisocial behaviour the innocent and guilty are treated the same – as potential miscreants. It is an egalitarian theory.

The private sector had become better than the state at shaping habits. It was a subtle form of discipline conducted by market forces which could modify behaviour and penalise the costly. Of course, I do not by this mean the market wanted to make the world better; it was aimed at maximising profits. Databases revealed who was blameless and who entailed a cost on others through risky or unhealthy behaviour. The ability to monitor the world revealed risks which no one realised existed before and pinpointed where accountability lay. Risk, once it becomes apparent, has to be policed: it is an economic necessity. The risk economy could, supposedly, predict the future and pre-empt danger. It was hungry for information, personal information; no amount could ever satisfy it.

Politicians of all hues found this deeply attractive. For the right the behaviour-shaping influences of the market satisfied on many conceptual levels. For New Labour it seemed to offer a solution to what it saw as the unacceptably high social cost of economic individualism without reviving a large state or traditional social disciplines. Data could change society, therefore giving up data was no longer an imposition but a selfless act, a duty to society.

And so society changes. When risk management is trumpeted so loudly it is logical for consumers and voters to lay blame on authorities if something goes wrong: why wasn't everything done? And in turn service providers are encouraged to imagine the worst and hunt down dangers: there is never enough you can do to eliminate risks. There is also a tendency to put expert opinion over principles. Hence we see politicians justifying everything from health and safety rules to anti-terror laws on the grounds that officials demand them. What chance do civil liberties stand?

The language of politics has become suffused with the jargon of business. And the mentality. It becomes a duty of government, to provide "consumer-focused services (pdf)" . Increasingly civil liberties are subject to a cost/benefit analysis. In an age when a small band of terrorists can wreak havoc on a vast scale, it is said, civil liberties entail a "marginal cost": better to wrongly imprison a suspect than let one go if the risk is adjudged to be sufficiently high. Civil liberties do indeed come to be seen as hindrances to the technocrat as he or she goes about the business of battening down the hatches. In his or her risk-obsessed mind everyone is a potential danger – which is another way of concluding that everyone is guilty in advance.

The introduction of market-led thinking into government has changed the relationship between the state and citizen. The behaviour of individuals, when it is at odds with the consensus, comes to be seen as not just selfishness but dangerously antisocial. In rebalancing the criminal justice system towards victims (at the expense of ancient civil liberties such as jury trials, double jeopardy rules and other constraints) it was openly responding to consumer (sorry, voter) demand and shifted the emphasis towards the safety of the community and away from the protection of individuals from miscarriages of justice. The worst of our anti-terror laws are an example of a state run along the principles of risk aversion. Privacy – which is at the heart of any concept of liberty – comes to be seen as selfishness. This is the utilitarianism of management, not the principles of a free society.

An economy supposedly based on the efficient policing of risk collapsed around us. Humans are spectacularly bad at predicting and shaping the future – and the very attempt in an age of doom-saying is bound to mean suppression of freedom. What it means is subservience to an imagined future.

But such thinking should be resisted for other reasons. There are plenty of signs that issues of liberty will be important in the next election. We should be wary of platitudes. The great threat to liberty comes from the habits of a risk-averse society. We should remember that there is more to pubic life than technocratic management. At the end of the road marked 'risk-aversion' is the fortress society. Safety, not liberty, first.

To pretend that the delivery of services, justice and security are ideologically neutral is to conceal the truth. They are laden with ideology. We need more politics, not less. Asserting values over the powerful (but delusive) promises of total safety and fear of the future takes courage. It is the same courage which brought about liberty in the first place. Cowards die many times before their deaths.

Source: The Guardian

The increase of the surveillance society

Following the 9/11 and 7/7 terrorist attacks, there has been an exponential increase in Britain’s surveillance: currently, Britain has a quarter of the world’s security surveillance cameras with around four million cameras in use and we are currently the world’s most watched nation – something which is very unnerving and reflective of the surveillance dystopia envisaged by George Orwell in his fictional work “Nineteen Eighty Four”.

The steady expansion and the overuse of the surveillance in Britain risks undermining the right to privacy; it poses a huge risk to individual liberty; and one more step towards a police state in the United Kingdom. Currently, there are few laws in place to limit the use of CCTV, brought about to “protect national security”: this has lead to a “mission creep” in the use and abuse of surveillance. Local councils have been accused of severely abusing the surveillance in the United Kingdom by using CCTV to prevent fly tipping, dog fouling and, recently, CCTV was used by Poole Borough Council to monitor the actions and whereabouts of a family who were wrongly accused of lying about where they live on a school application form.

Britain’s surveillance society can be closely linked to the works of Jeremy Bentham and Michel Foucault. In 1785, Jeremy Bentham proposed the idea of the Panopticon: the Panopticon is a conceptual prison design that allows the prison guard to watch the prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell when they are being watched, in order to gain significant psychological control. Bentham described the Panopticon as “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example”. The French philosopher, Michel Foucault, took up this theme in his 1975 work “Discipline and Punish”, where he pursued the link between surveillance and social control. Thus, comparing the effects of surveillance to the effects of the Panopticon.

Although the use of surveillance clearly has its advantages in terms of fighting crime, its overuse can prove counter-productive and can ultimately be viewed as a challenge to Britain’s liberal democratic status.

Daniel Button

Source: RINF News

City requires Facebook passwords from job applicants

By AMANDA RICKER Chronicle Staff Writer

If you’re planning to apply for a job with the city of Bozeman, prepare to clean up your Facebook page.

As part of routine background checks, the city asks job applicants to provide their usernames and passwords for their social-networking sites. And it has been doing it for years, city officials said.

“Please list any and all, current personal or business Web sites, Web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.,” states a city waiver form applicants are asked to sign. Three lines are provided for applicants to list log-in information for each site.

City officials maintain the policy is necessary to ensure employees’ integrity and protect the public’s trust, but the American Civil Liberties Union of Montana says they may be crossing the line.

“I would guess that they’re on some shaky legal ground with this and we would certainly welcome (the opportunity) to look at something specific from somebody who’s impacted,” Executive Director Scott Crichton said Thursday.

He said Bozeman’s policy is unprecedented as far as he knows. ACLU’s legal counsel in Washington, D.C., had never heard of another city asking for log-in information for social networking sites as part of a job application.

“It’s like saying, ‘Let me look through your e-mails,’” Crichton said.

“The city certainly has access to publicly accessible information, but it gets pretty questionable when they start asking for password-protected things that are created to create privacy for communications between your friends and family,” he said. “That seems to be going too far.”

City Manager Chris Kukulski said the city checks the sites in order to ensure that employees who might be handling taxpayer money, working with children in recreation programs or entering residents’ homes as an emergency services worker are reputable and honest.

“It’s just one of the tools, like all the other tools, that we’ve used to do a thorough background check,” Kukulski said.

The city also checks credit reports, criminal history, references and past employment, among other things.

“We have to do some due diligence,” Kukulski said.

News of the city’s policy went ‘round the world via the Internet Thursday, triggering outrage and prompting comments by media outlets and bloggers. Celebrity gossip columnist Perez Hilton even weighed in on the news.

“Big Brother much?” he wrote. “We’ve heard of employers looking up potential employees on Facebook, but this seems a bit extreme.”

The Guardian, a major daily newspaper in London, named the city of Bozeman its “civil liberties villain of the week” on its Web site.

City Attorney Greg Sullivan said in light of concerns being expressed by the public, officials are looking at ways to alter the policy so that they might view an applicant’s online information without asking for log-in codes.

“We’ve already begun that discussion,” Sullivan said Thursday afternoon.

For example, city officials said they could ask applicants to log into their Facebook page and show it to a city official during the application process, or add the city as a “friend” so the officials could view the applicant’s page.

Bozeman has checked job applicants’ social networking sites for about three years, said Human Resources Director Pattie Berg. HR staff or supervisors in the department in which the job is sought are charged with reviewing the sites.

However, Bozeman’s city commissioners are exempt from the policy because elected officials aren’t subjected to the same background check as city employees, said Chuck Winn, assistant city manager.

City administrators first enacted the policy for police and fire department job applicants, said Mark Lachapelle, deputy chief of investigations for the Bozeman Police Department. The policy wasn’t presented to the Bozeman City Commission because the commission typically isn’t charged with setting personnel policies.

Winn said that in his former position as fire chief, he was sometimes responsible for looking at potential firefighters’ social-networking sites. He said he primarily looked for illegal activity.

“It’s not about taste or anything,” Winn said.

In at least one instance, an applicant’s social-networking site figured into disqualifying the person for a job, Winn and Lachapelle said. Lachapelle said information from the site was one of several components that contributed to the decision. He declined to discuss the case more specifically, citing privacy concerns.

Source: Bozeman Daily Chronicle