The Instincts Of The Authoritarian Left
Ruth Dudley Edwards writes an empassioned plea for her fellow British citizens to wake up from their sleepwalking. They are, Edwards writes, heading into an Orwellian authoritarian dystopia with hardly a single voice raised in protest. Four year old children are having their DNA recorded in a national database if they misbehave at school. Cameras are everywhere, watching everyone. All being done with the very best of intentions, mind you. (And no, this is not the same as the US government monitoring phone calls that originate from terror suspects overseas.)
Our ministers are not bad people. Their intentions are honourable. They wish to make us safer. But their instincts are those of the authoritarian Left. They have no sense of our history and are also incompetent.
In their complete inability to grasp the law of unintended consequences, and in their technological and administrative ignorance and hopelessness, we have ended up with the worst of all possible worlds.
New Labour, in its idiotic submission to the human rights industry and political correctness, has hamstrung the police and the security services and made the judiciary over-mighty.
Terrified by the consequent rise in crime and the menace of murderous Islamist terrorism, they proceeded to overreact by treating every man, woman and child in this country as a potential danger to society.
Is there any sane person who, if forced to think about it, would believe it right that children accused of playground misbehaviour should have their DNA samples placed permanently on a police computer along with rapists and murderers?
To those of you who indignantly reply that you are sane and see no problem with recording the entire population on a database; and, what's more, you're in favour of ID cards, since the innocent have nothing to fear; and that in these days of globalised threats we must mobilise technology to protect ourselves, I say two things.
First, that you are almost certainly and sadly a product of the debased educational system that taught you nothing about this country's magnificent history and the traditional liberties for which your forefathers fought.
And second, that even if you were right in principle, you would be wrong in practice.
This government has a long and discreditable history of botching major computer projects. Not only do they not work properly, they are susceptible to hackers and frauds and the national DNA database is proving no exception.
Already, the Home Office has admitted that almost 6,000 of the 4.5million names on the database are false, misspelled or incorrect. Computer experts always point out that the bigger the database, the less reliable the system and the more vulnerable it is to abuse.
A few months ago, a House of Lords select committee issued a stern warning about a government project called Contact-Point - another folly that so far has cost £225million and will register public and private information about all children under 18.
The committee said the "enormous size of the database and the huge number of probable users" would inevitably "increase the risks of accidental or inadvertent breaches of security, and of deliberate misuse of the data (e.g. disclosure of an address with malign intent) which would be likely to bring the whole scheme into disrepute".
In fact, the children of certain, favored politicians and celebrities are being excluded from the database because of security concerns. That says rather a lot about what the government itself thinks of the possibility that the data may be misused.
World news | Gaius Monday, 5 November , 2007
By feeblemind, Tuesday, 6 November , 2007 @ 7:41 am
I fear we are headed the same direction as the UK. We are just a few years behind them.