When the Liberals and Conservatives delivered the first coalition government since the war, they bound themselves together in the language of civil liberties.
Early signs were encouraging: Labour's controversial ID card scheme was scrapped and the enticingly titled protection of freedoms bill was conceived. But the romance was rocky. Unsafe and unfair control orders remained (albeit perfumed as terrorism prevention and investigation measures) and seductive promises of extradition reform failed to materialise.
Now the honeymoon appears well and truly over, thanks no doubt to some "spooky" extramarital intervention. Hot on the heels of the secret justice green paper – which seeks to shut claimants out of their own cases against the state to defend the "public interest" – comes a major expansion of powers to monitor the phone calls, emails and website visits of every person in the UK.
Next month's Queen's speech is expected to include legislation instructing internet service providers to install hardware that would give the government's electronic listening agency, GCHQ, increased access to communications data.
The ask is greedier than ever before, and the proposed data collection vast. Everyone will be affected, irrespective of any suspicion, just in case the information might prove useful one day. This is the blanket surveillance of an entire population. Such industrial-scale snooping will inevitably lead to discrimination. Remember ethnic minorities' experience of stop-and-search without suspicion? There will be nothing to prevent the creation of "mining databases": fishing expeditions based on certain keywords linked solely to clumsy stereotypes rather than genuine and reasonable suspicion of individual wrongdoing.
Any argument that it's only "communications data" as opposed to actual content that will be collected is deeply flawed. With such all-encompassing information, it's very easy to build the most intimate picture of someone's personal life – both off and online. Which websites you browse regularly, or who you call and where and when you do so, for example. Imagine the potential for blackmailing politicians and others in the public eye. Remember just how many agencies have access to this data – including every local authority in the country and hundreds of other public bodies.
There's also a real argument that the only way to achieve this kind of access is by physically intercepting the data involved through "black box" Deep Packet Inspection. So this legislation wouldn't just pave a legal path for mass intrusion and abuse – it would also allow the building of a technical infrastructure for the blanket interception of all of our communications as well.
We've been here before, of course. An attempt to introduce a similar system by the last Labour government was abandoned in the face of fierce opposition – including ironically from the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats themselves. Sadly, it would seem whoever is in government the grandiose ambition of the security state doesn't change. Wherever you put your cross at the ballot box, the empire strikes back and there would seem to be a hidden and increasingly vocal third party in this marriage.
If there is to be such a coalition U-turn on core values, why no statement in parliament? Both parties opposed this in opposition and pledged to "end the storage of internet and email records without good reason" upon taking office. Should there not at the very least be public consultation instead of a secret press briefing and a rush to the statute book?
This debate touches at the very heart of the type of society in which we wish to live. No one doubts the importance of proportionate surveillance in preventing and detecting serious crime and terrorism, but the terrifying aspirations of a group of Whitehall technocrats cannot be allowed to trump the personal privacy of law-abiding Britons.
Isabella Sankey, The Guardian
