Bill Thompson (Cambridge, BBC freelance): There has been a lot of fuss in the British press following revelations that conversations between MP and human rights lawyer Sadiq Khan and his constituent and childhood friend Babar Ahmad (who OurKingdom has written about in the past) were recorded in the prison where Mr Ahmad is being held while awating deportation to the USA.
Justice Secretary Jack Straw has announced the inevitable internal inquiry, headed by the trustworthy – as far as the government is concerened - Chief Surveillance Commissioner Sir Christopher Rose, the police officer who did the deed has gone public with a tale of political pressure, and no doubt other stories will emerge over the next few days to demonstrate that the ‘Wilson doctrine’ under which MPs are exempt from surveillance is well and truly finished.
This is all very entertaining, and the arguments over how far MPs should be excluded from the attentions of the massively enhanced state surveillance apparatus are worth having.
However it ignores the reality of modern life, because the real issue is not whether or not a microphone is placed in a specially-prepared prison table in order to capture the conversation between two men, one of whom is an MP, but just how much information is being captured, stored, processed, sieved and used against us on a daily basis.
I’d have more sympathy for Sadiq Khan’s plight if he wasn’t a member of the administration that has massively enhanced state surveillance for the rest of us.
And I wonder if he’s considered that his emails are being tracked, his text message contacts are being recorded and the websites he visits from his Westminster office are being logged? After all, it’s unlikely that there’s a filter for ‘parliament.uk’ in the log files collected by ISPs under data retention regulations.
Read Bill's take in more depth in his BBC column here.
