Hacking the home

Christina Zaba (London, NO2ID): Since 4th January we’ve known it:  the UK police will soon be able to hack into people’s personal computers without a search warrant, in line with “EU initiatives against cybercrime”.

I know: it’s almost unbelievable. It makes a nonsense of the provisions within the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, whose own Codes of Practice state: “All [surveillance] activity should be carefully managed...and must not be arbitrary or unfair. Measures should be taken to avoid or minimise unnecessary intrusion into the lives of those not directly connected with the investigation.”

Back to the year 2000, when RIPA was new.  Email had hardly been invented then. Websurfing was in its infancy. Social networking didn’t exist. Are we really saying that these days, officers, with delicate care, will look only at documents and pictures on our computers, and not at our correspondence - or contacts?

Over in the US they’re finding it hard to understand.  “I’m pretty nonplussed that the British would authorise this kind of thing,” admitted law professor Susan Brenner. “The right of officers to thrust themselves into a home is … a grave concern, not only to the individual but to a society which chooses to dwell in reasonable security and freedom from surveillance. ...Maybe the assumption is that intrusions into digital space are less egregious than comparable intrusions into physical space. I, for one, do not see the difference.”

Increasingly, there is vanishingly little difference. Your electronic identity, nurtured by every online connection you make, is becoming more solid daily. So is mine, and hers. Our computers are our private spaces, containing up to two decades’ worth of lived thoughts and decisions. Who would want all that stuff in the hands of the police and their mates?

The authorities, it seems. This opens the door to more than just bobbies on the beat.  In line with the Computer Misuse Act 1990, s. 10, which in its amended form took effect from 3 February 1995 (“In this section ‘enforcement officer’ means a constable or other person charged with the duty of investigating offences”), it appears that your computer could soon be similarly invaded by a council worker enforcing council tax arrears, HMRC, other government departments, even the RSPCA. All they would need, under the proposed legislation, is the go-ahead from a chief constable.

But never mind. Anything for a quiet life. We don’t mind the thought of the police being allowed to break into someone’s home or office to install a keystroke logger. It won’t happen to us, I suppose, not you and me, because we have nothing to hide, thus nothing to fear. Perhaps, if they come, we will put the kettle on, Wallace and Gromit style, and make them a nice cup of tea while they get on with it.

Sadly, even in the Plasticene world of one stupid man and his clever dog, dodgy characters can and do come to call, dressed in every elegance but with scary secret agendas. Remember that sinister penguin? The message is clear. Best not to make those cups of tea. If you really want a quiet life, you’d better keep your door shut instead.

Increasingly, though, there is no door to shut. Cyberspace leads straight in to our most private real spaces, and covert intrusion there can cause catastrophe at every level.

This is why, as early as 1928, a US Supreme Court judge commented that “invasions of individual security”, enhanced by the “progress of science”, which was “not likely to stop with wire tapping”, could, if allowed to proceed, “expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home...and place the liberty of every man in the hands of every petty officer.” Justice Brandeis saw it coming, all the way back in the Jazz Age and Prohibition. This thing is not new.

So why here, and why now? Two reasons. One, people are generally muddled by technology, whose development is swifter than almost anyone can follow, certainly anyone in government. Using computers without understanding them, we assume they are what they appear to be - private. We neither behave in a guarded way, nor know how to guard ourselves.

And two, we’ve had the right to protest against increasing intrusion systematically stripped from us by ten years of the most draconian anti-civil liberties legislation ever known in Britain.

The two go hand in glove, and they are accelerating. It is a toxic combination which has the British res publica increasingly firmly by the throat. Now it’s the turn of the res privata (to take a felicitous term from Thoreau) - people’s “character and moral being”. Now, our very electronic selves can be invaded.

It’ll all be down to a Police Constable to judge. And we are letting this happen.