On the 8th June, it was exactly 60 years since the publication of George Orwell's 1984. He spent the grim winter of 1948, the year of my birth and the Nakba among other remarkable events, polishing the work before reversing the numbers to get the title.
Given the great loss of liberties and the policies being followed to catch the so-called 'Fifth Columnists',(a totally fictional threat created by Churchill's government to justify the invasive policies and imprisonments without trial during the six years of war with the Nazies), Orwell's saga was not so remote; merely a few years in the past. His future was created in the image of the recent years, the projected crumbling, rusting infrastructure of imagined future society growing from the bombsites all over Britain.
The former head of GCHQ, Sir David Pepper, chose the occasion of this anniversary to come out of the shadows and tell the BBC ('Who's Watching You') that it has become necessary for the government to record all data from phone and internet traffic in the war on fright. 'Fight against terror' was the phrase he used.
"There are plenty of people who will do all they can to make themselves difficult to find," he said. "The thing you worry about most is the attack that you haven't seen coming."
His answer? Mass surveillance. It's here already, in the streets, and too many citizens have been fooled into voting for more, rather than less, CCTV, in the belief that it (A) works and (B) only spies on 'Them'.
In the programme, Pepper also explained the challenges that face his former colleagues at GCHQ with a diagram that shows how information is shifted in little pieces over the internet, a development which he implied must be met by granting the agency total access to all our communications. Including this one.
Mass surveillance in any form is bound to be subject to mission creep. Local councils already overstep the mark when it comes to snooping. (see: http://hanleyexpress.blogspot.com/2009/06/ripa-council-snooping-is-growth.html)
And allowing the government and its agents such powers over us, given the inescapable evidence of their incompetence, immorality, brutality and self-interest, would be the greatest folly; but Pepper tried to make the case for arrogating such powers. A Home Office Memo leaked while the airheaded former home secretary, Jacqui Smith, was losing her sense of proportion over GCHQ's megalomaniac plans held them to be "impractical, disproportionate, politically unattractive and possibly unlawful". The plans have since been modified so that data collection would be 'outsourced' to internet service providers, whoever they may be, but the key measure of mass surveillance remains and so does the function and ultimate use of that machinery by an anonymous official.
The late Ben Pimlott wrote: “Orwell offers a political choice between the protections of truth and the slide into expedient falsehood for the benefit of rulers and the exploitation of the ruled. Thus the novel is above all subversive, a protest against the tricks played by government. It is a volley against the authoritarian in every personality, a polemic against every orthodoxy, an anarchistic blast against every unquestioning conformist.”
I couldn't put it better, and neither could Henry Porter, whose blog alerted us all to this timely anniversary.
No comments:
Post a Comment