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The threat from terrorism does not justify slicing away our freedoms

This article is more than 16 years old
Timothy Garton Ash
Britain is now one of the world's most spied-upon societies, where such ancient rights as habeas corpus are hacked to bits

Smiley swirled the last of the brandy in his balloon glass and muttered: "We've given up far too many freedoms in order to be free. Now we've got to take them back." That legendary spymaster's warning about the over-intrusive, over-mighty national security states that we in the self-styled "free world" built up during the cold war was delivered in John le Carré's novel of 1990, The Secret Pilgrim. But instead of taking those freedoms back, British people have lost more of them. Across the western world, vastly more personal information is held on individuals by states and private companies; ancient liberties are curbed, people detained without trial, free speech stifled.

Shamingly, among the very worst offenders, the most careless with its citizens' liberties, the most profligate in surveillance, is the British state. Once proud to style itself "mother of the free", Britain has the most watched society in Europe. The country that invented habeas corpus now boasts one of the longest periods of detention without charge in the civilised world. And the guardians of national security want to make that even longer. Yet these same guardians cannot detect illegal immigrants working in their own offices (and even, in one case, reportedly helping to repair the prime minister's top-security car), nor detain a terrorist suspect (who turned out to be a wholly innocent Brazilian) without shooting him in the head.

A compulsion to legislate ever more new restrictions is combined with paroxysms of staggering inefficiency. Can anyone think of a better formula for sacrificing liberty without gaining security? Smiley must be turning in his grave. Or if, as is sometimes rumoured, he is still living quietly in Cornwall under another name, then we need to hear his voice again: "We are giving up far too many freedoms in order to be free. We must take them back."

The salami-slicing of Britain's civil liberties, including the right to privacy, has at least two causes. One is the spectacular growth, since Smiley's day, of the technologies of information, communication, observation and data registration. The other is the threat of international terrorism, especially jihadist terrorism, made dramatically visible by the New York, Madrid and London bombings. Even without the atrocities of 9/11 and 7/7, there would have been a vast growth in the personal information stored in computer servers, mobile phone records, credit-rating databanks, CCTV videos and the like. Even without that explosion in the technological possibilities for state and private Big Brothering, such terrorist attacks would have provoked a tightening of security.

It is the combination of the two which makes this so alarming. And Britain has the grisly distinction of leading the democratic world on both fronts. The official information commissioner, Richard Thomas, says the country has already sleepwalked into a surveillance society.

Privacy International, the human rights group which monitors surveillance societies worldwide, says Britain is the worst-performing democracy in this respect. Take a look at the map on their website (privacyinternational.org): Britain is the only country in the whole western world to be coloured black, an "endemic surveillance society", alongside communist China and Putin's Russia. The UK has more than 4 million CCTV cameras. Its national DNA database, the largest in the world, is supposed to have some 4.25 million people on it by the end of next year - or roughly one in every 14 inhabitants. According to the last published report of the interception of communications commissioner, more than 400,000 official requests were made to tap telephone calls and monitor emails in the period from January 2005 to March 2006. A staggering 795 security, police and local authority bodies are entitled to make such requests. Need I go on?

At the same time, bill after bill has chipped away at our ancient rights, in the name of combatting terrorism. For centuries, habeas corpus meant you had to be charged or released after 24 hours. In 2004, that was increased to 48 hours; last year, it went up to 28 days; and the police want to push it up again. Yet, as the civil liberties pressure group Liberty has recently shown in a careful comparative study, most other leading democracies come nowhere close to that figure, despite facing similar threats. In Canada, for instance, the pre-charge detention limit is still one day; in the United States, it's two days; even in Turkey, it's only 7.5 days.

Of course we should not be naive. International and homegrown terrorists do pose a threat that is especially difficult to detect. If the head of MI5 is anywhere near right to say that there may be 2,000 such people in Britain, they need to be watched, and stopped before they act. There is a difficult balance to strike between liberty and security. But over the last decade Britain has erred much too far on the side of security. In fact, that is to understate the error: we have probably diminished our own security by overreacting, alienating some who might otherwise not have been alienated, while at the same time building up the free world's most thick-knit public and private surveillance society.

It's interesting to ask why this historic homeland of freedom has erred so much on the side of restricting freedom. Is it just, as is often said, the "authoritarian reflexes" of New Labour? Or is it precisely because we think of ourselves as a land of old and self-evident liberty that we are so relaxed about letting this and that right or customary freedom (each seemingly small in itself) be sliced away?

The myth - our own myth about ourselves - is so strong that we don't see the changed reality underneath. We go on saying, "It's a free country, isn't it?", and don't recognise that it's less so by the day. I find it suggestive that Britain, probably the freest society in Europe in the last century, is now the most watched society in Europe, while Germany, a country with a unique 20th-century double experience - Nazi and Stasi - of unfreedom, is now, according to Privacy International, the least watched.

Yet more important than wondering how we got into this mess is to work out how we get out of it. What is needed is a change of paradigm: from liberty through security to security through liberty. We have a prime minister who presents liberty as a - perhaps even the - central British value. He invites us to explore how "together we can write a new chapter in our country's story of liberty".

Invitation accepted. Let's start by not extending the period for detention without charge a single day further. Let's continue by cutting back not our rights but our bloated public and private apparatus of surveillance. One candidate for the Liberal Democratic leadership, Nick Clegg, has said he will go to prison rather than surrender the personal data needed for the proposed ID card, and the other, Chris Huhne, has proposed an "anti-Big Brother bill'. Committees of both the Commons and the Lords are to report on the surveillance society in the next few months. Let us become again what we think we are: one of the world's most free countries. Let the fightback begin.

www.timothygartonash.com

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