Big Brother is watching you
I'll go back to the manga stuff next week. This week's journal is me whining about my government.

So the government wants to have access to all our e-mails and facebook conversations and phonecalls and browsing history and god knows what else. They promise they won't look at them though unless they really need to, so we can all rest easy so long as we're not up to anything. Nothing to hide? Nothing to fear. Simple.

Except that it doesn't quite work like that, because they aren't proposing to tell us exactly what sets off those flags. What indicators will make them think they 'really need to'? They'll never tell us that, because then the terrorists t...

Big Brother is watching you
I'll go back to the manga stuff next week. This week's journal is me whining about my government.

So the government wants to have access to all our e-mails and facebook conversations and phonecalls and browsing history and god knows what else. They promise they won't look at them though unless they really need to, so we can all rest easy so long as we're not up to anything. Nothing to hide? Nothing to fear. Simple.

Except that it doesn't quite work like that, because they aren't proposing to tell us exactly what sets off those flags. What indicators will make them think they 'really need to'? They'll never tell us that, because then the terrorists this is supposed to help them catch will know what to avoid. So that means we can only guess what they might decide makes us worth investigating. For example I like to write, and recently I wrote something Sci-fi. A scene came up that involved a nuclear explosion, and so I spent a bit of time researching nukes, without really thinking about it. Is that a flag? Probably. The government only sees what sites I'm going to after all, not my reasons for doing so. Suppose they think that justifies looking over my conversations? Well, they'll probably find from that that I'm not so bad, except...

Except I've had so many conversations with my friends on the 'net that I can't be entirely sure there's not something that sounds incriminating in there, in fact I'm fairly sure I remember having a conversation with a friend in which we planned to murder a third mutual friend. The hypothetical murder would have been carried out because the third friend had refused to buy me a pint on my birthday. We never explicitly said that the murder plot was a joke, but both me and my friend knew it was, and we were the only two people in the conversation, so that's fine right?

I guess not anymore? We have to assume that there's an third participant in all our internet conversations now, one who's reading a book and not really paying attention, but might stand up and hurl the book at us if we say a key phrase like 'bomb threat'. Mr. G. C. Headquarters won't know of context or humour, he'll just hear the words we say. I find the idea very worrying.

And even supposing there's some common sense at work, and someone looks over my conversations and decides I'm not actually a terrorist, just a bloke with an occasionally morbid sense of humour, and don't need arresting, should I be happy about that? Someone still read what was supposed to be a private conversation. It might be one I don't mind them reading, but it could just as easily have been one I'd rather they didn't; after all this would give them access to all of them. I'm not happy about that at all, and given the rate at which information seems to leak out of our government these days I really can't say I'm comfortable with them having it even if they never do read it. It's still there, ripe for the stealing or selling or whatever.

You see, the thing is, I know I've never done anything that might warrant my arrest. I don't have anything to hide, and yet here I am, afraid of the possibility that this move will put me in danger of being arrested. So clearly 'nothing to hide, nothing to fear' is bollocks. And it's not even as if there's no precedent for my fears either; Paul Chambers is still awaiting the decision on his appeal, having already been convicted and having his first appeal overturned based on a joke he made on Twitter. It all boils down to me being far more afraid of the government than I am of terrorists, and it makes me feel not a whit safer.