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http://www.heraldscotland.com/comment/c ... e.17250271 Why the Tories are wrong on electronic surveillanceMONDAY 9 APRIL 2012 Andrew McKie Columnist 'Knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful." This sentiment, one of many fine observations in Samuel Johnson's Rasselas, remains as excellent and true as it was on its publication.
So sensible and of such continued relevance, in fact, that it was used 250 years later to introduce a policy paper from the Conservative Party.
Admirably entitled "Reversing the Rise of the Surveillance State", this short paper by Dominic Grieve and Eleanor Laing, then respectively the Shadow Justice Secretary and Shadow Justice Minister, is full of good sense about the dangers of governments maintaining huge databases on the population.
It argues convincingly against such surveillance on three principal grounds: it is an offence against privacy and an assault on civil liberties; it is incredibly expensive and excessively bureaucratic; it is unlikely to work, and even if it did, would not achieve its stated aims.
The empirical truth of these observations is as plain as the nose on your face. Indeed, I will go further – they are as plain as the nose on my face. Even though this paper was produced by the Tory party, everyone could see that it had hit the target whang in the gold. Nobody could possibly disagree with its findings except David Blunkett, Charles Clarke, John Reid, Jacqui Smith and Alan Johnson.
Until now, unfortunately. Theresa May, currently Home Secretary in succession to that ignominious roll call of would-be Stasi impersonators, seems to have performed a volte-face on the one area of Conservative policy which everyone with an interest in, on the one hand, civil liberties, or on the other, proportionate, cost-effective governance, applauded.
It's one of those moments when we may have cause to be grateful that it's a Coalition Government, since the Liberal Democrats are loudly, and correctly, pointing out that the proposals to maintain a record of everyone's emails, webpage visits and other internet traffic are fundamentally illiberal and undemocratic. Before they rush to take the credit for the fact that the Government has backed off a bit and says these will now be only draft proposals, it's worth noting that many Conservative backbenchers are also very strongly opposed to such measures – because they are, of course, fundamentally unconservative as well.
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