Watching Us

22 Nov 2007 As the recent Discgate fiasco has shown, incompetence, laziness and stupidity will always outflank sly intelligence when it comes to government data collection. This is what makes me think that the paranoid types who fret about ID cards, CCTV, and the plans to make us answer 53 questions before being allowed to leave the country, are worried for the wrong reasons.

The reason they should be worried is this. Governments gather information as a legitimating exercise for arbitrary acts of brutality. This is evident, for instance in the sham trials conducted before imprisoning and deporting asylum seekers, or in the dodgy dossier used to support the Iraq war. Needless information gathering also, of course, acts as a constant reminder both of the government's power over us and of the supposed terror threat surrounding us. They'll never be able to do anything with all that information – they haven't got the capacity to process it (or even store it securely), and generally don't need to, when they can spin whatever information they have into a justification for whatever they feel like doing.