Surveiling the Innocent...

"Wacky" Jacqui Smith, the UK's Home Secretary, has written a letter to The Guardian defending our country's growing surveillance culture.

She says that CCTV has "helped to reclaim our town centres and public spaces for the law-abiding majority." In fact, with CCTV so ubiquitous, few consider it. Go to any town centre at closing time to see what stupid crimes are committed right in front of CCTV cameras. Indeed, some councils have started equipping them with loudspeakers to remind people they're being watched and that they face prosecution. So, what CCTV has actually done is made it easier to convict people after a crime has been committed.

Smith also defends the DNA database. "Each year," she writes, "literally hundreds of homicides and rapes are resolved with the use of DNA matches." Again, this detection is a marvel of modern technology, but it is always used after the fact. There are no statistics for crimes not committed because of CCTV or DNA matching, and so for the Home Secretary to imply that there's a quantifiable figure is, well, it's bogus.

In the same way that people don't think about CCTV, they don't think about the DNA they leave everywhere they go. After all, would there be any vicious rapes or murders of strangers if it were foremost in their minds? There's no doubt that DNA evidence and CCTV have caught thousands of dangerous criminals, but I don't understand why Smith can't understand that the opportunistic way genetic identities are also collected from the innocent who happen to come into contact with the police as part of their investigations is deeply odious to a society whose traditions include a strong sense of personal privacy.

CCTV and DNA databases are detection devices. Their ubiquity means that they're "invisible" and are therefore useless as crime prevention measures. Insisting to the contrary doesn't make it so. However, there's some good news. "In December I announced immediate steps to remove the DNA of children under 10 from the database, and set out the case for greater flexibility and fairness in the system," wrote Smith.

That's a good start, but if you've done nothing, why should the state keep tabs on your genetic identity "just in case"? To me, as a reasonable, law-abiding Englishman, and even though I'm not on this database, such arbitrary recording feels genuinely and deeply wrong. You should be free to go about your business without such a record. After all, the presumption of innocence has no statute of limitations, which is something that records in the DNA pertaining to the innocent must have in a decent, fair society.

Begging to differ...

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith says that people "can't wait" for ID cards to come in. Whoever is coming up to tell her this is, I'd like to suggest, not representative of the entire nation. Frankly, I don't believe it happens all that much.

Can anyone actually say what ID cards are for? Originally, we were told that they'll combat terrorism, but no one could explain how. Next, they were to confirm our identities when we need to do so (getting a passport, etc.) but we can already do that. Then they were to confirm our identities when making a purchase (chip & pin, anyone?) Now they're asserted as being simply a Good Thing. But, seeing as we will not be compelled to carry them, for whom are they a Good Thing?

Well, consider this: The total cost of implementing the ID card scheme now stands at £5.1 billion and the projected compulsory cost to every adult in the UK looks like being £60. Smith claims that the market for issuing passports and ID cards is set to be around to £200 million a year. Would I be cynical in thinking that this is about generating cash, not national security or to "help" us in some indefinable way?

Now, the serious point: ID cards are supposed to be uncrackable. That's fair enough, but as anyone who's ever thought about it for a short while may have noticed, the forms of ID we'll have to provide to get one of these super-duper cards are all less secure. It's like locking a safe inside another safe like a series of Russian Dolls. You still have to hide the key or combination to the outer safe somewhere. This is the eponymous weakest link. And, because security is only as strong as its weakest link, it's open to abuse - as Ms Smith found out this week when a group calling itself No2ID took a glass she'd been drinking from at a conference. This glass apparently has her fingerprints all over it.

So, do we, as Ms Smith asserts, really want to be forced to pay £60 for something that will languish in the back of the bits drawer at home? I think not. Maybe it's time I started a petition: The Campaign for Real Big Brother, calling on the government to either implement a proper, competent police state or to forget the whole idea. No bumbling about in the middle ground promising it will provide indefinable "benefits". It'd be a satirical campaign, of course, but like all satire it has a serious point. Stop wasting our time and money, Ms Smith. The people the terrorists want to blow up is the likes of you, not us, the poor sods they can and do get to. And yet, we're the ones being eyed suspiciously, 24/7.