Big brother is always watching
DaarkSyde
02mar04
CAN you keep a secret? Not if you're running the UN. Members of your
Security Council, feeling insecure about your behaviour, will bug your
offices. But you mustn't laugh and you mustn't cry. The best you can
do is ask them, very nicely, to stop.
Clare Short caught Tony Blair short by revealing that No.10 was
bugging Kofi Annan who was bugging Blair over the UN's opposition to
George W. Bush's plan to bomb Baghdad. Serves Blair right for
promoting Short to a ministry in the first place.
After all, Short had been extremely idealistic when handling Northern
Ireland, earning herself respect as an honest broker. But the run-up
to Iraq was too much for her and she joined former foreign secretary
Robin Cook in exile. Since then their whistleblowing has been as
deafening as air-raid sirens.
Now Blair attacks Short for the serious sin of telling the truth.
While the PM has faced many political crises over Iraq, this seems to
have ripped off the mask. There was none of his usual attempts at
charm or blarney at the press conference. His eyes were gimlet-like
and his lips as thin as razor blades as he all but accused Short of
treason.
Stamping a foot, he described her conduct as unforgivable. But others
might think that if anyone's behaviour has been unforgivable, it has
been his. Blair will need a half-dozen user-friendly Hutton inquiries
to wriggle out of this one.
Of course, the bugging would have gone further. How many other
opponents of the war were MI5ed? CIAed? ASIOed? It's London to a brick
that Bush's other buddy, Silvio Berlusconi, was having the Vatican's
phones tapped and confidential conversations between the Pope and God
– all those anti-war prayers – secretly taped.
So join the club, Kofi. It became apparent during the Charles-Di
scandals that even the royal family was being surveilled. You'll
recall embarrassing transcripts from intimate phone conversations
finding their way to Wapping – and even Her Majesty was heard to
mutter imprecations about dark forces associated with government. So
perhaps my joke about the Pope isn't funny either. Best to assume, to
concede, that we are all being watched, listened to, suspected,
monitored.
Those of us on the political Left are used to it. They've been bugging
us since the early '60s. It hardly compares with what the Stasi was
doing in East Germany during the Cold War, but you got used to hearing
all sorts of odd clicks on your phone line. Decades later, I'm still
trying to get my ASIO files. At first there was a blanket denial that
they existed. More recently, ASIO admitted that they couldn't be
handed over – for fear of revealing the identity of their dobbers. As
Labor icon Jim Cairns once warned me, some of our best friends were
enemies.
So one hopes that the surveillance of the Secretary-General and other
upper echelon UN figures won't be hastily erased by Bush and Blair.
Let's demand the right to hear this material, to be taken backstage in
this mightiest of power plays.
Few, if any, can escape the electronic net. It's not just that you're
under surveillance from cameras that watch you misbehaving on railway
stations or shoplifting in department stores. It was revealed years
ago that the US has an immense filtering system – a technology that
screens and sifts every electronic communication on the planet.
Scores of satellites, with a little help from ground stations such as
Pine Gap, check out the billions of emails, trying to separate spam
from terrorist traffic. But can we be sure that all those offers of
penis enlargement and discounted Viagra aren't, in fact, coded
messages from al-Qa'ida operatives?
So make no mistake. Your personal emails are being read before you can
open them. Can you keep a secret? I don't suppose you can.
I recently attended an international conference of privacy
commissioners, hundreds of them, from across the world. Although some
of them were still urging their respective governments to pass privacy
laws, most conceded that the battle is lost.
Just as sexual censorship is impotent in the face of all-at-once,
show-and-tell technologies, the notion of secrecy is becoming
anachronistic. Like it or not, transparency applies to your life. Only
the machinations of our governments remain opaque.