This editorial board traditionally has argued that, in the post-9/11 age, law-enforcement and security services should enjoy broad powers to investigate and apprehend terrorists. But even we are appalled by a British proposal, revealed over the weekend, to monitor the telephone, cellphone, text message, e-mail and Web surfing activity of every citizen in the U. K. in the name of homeland security. The damage such a scheme would do to the personal privacy and liberty of law-abiding Britons far outweighs the benefits that might -- theoretically --accrue to those charged with safeguarding the country.
What the British internal spy agency, MI5, and others are proposing is nothing short of a surveillance society, in which nearly all electronic activity by every person is monitored 24/7/365. All the communications activity of every citizen would be recorded in giant government computers that would churn over the information, searching for patterns that suggest an individual or group might be plotting a bombing, assassination or hijacking.
Currently, British police and spies must apply to a judge or the Home Secretary for a warrant to scrutinize an individual or group in this manner. But the new proposal -- which includes $23-billion in spending for huge databases and the personnel to man them -- would do away with the need to obtain a warrant. That would mark an enormous and troubling shift of power within British society.
Warrants do not exist to protect criminals from justice. They exist to ensure the rights of the innocent are not unduly infringed upon. Since 9/11, all West-ern nations have made it easier to obtain warrants to monitor extremists, and rightly so. But this U. K. proposal would take the trend far too far. It would reflect the assumption that everyone is a potential terrorist.
It would thereby turn on its head the idea that the individual is the sovereign; and that the state has no right to poke its nose into the affairs of law-abiding individuals who give no probable cause. Everyone, including the tens of millions of ordinary Britons who have never engaged in criminal or terrorist activity, would be subject to police scrutiny with or without a warrant.
This is the first step toward a presumption that one is guilty, at least until the security services have run a virtual fine-tooth comb through one's private affairs.
Already, governments have unprecedented access to the British public's financial, employment, banking and investment records, their mortgages, charitable contributions and declared medical expenses. In most cases, that is a gross and unjustifiable invasion of privacy. The current proposal would make this bad situation worse.
The irony is that Britain, not America, is the birthplace of the modern Western notion of liberty. Early defenders of freedom such as the authors of the Magna Carta and William Blackstone, John Locke and John Stuart Mill must be rolling over in their graves at what has happened to Britain in the last decade.
There are more closed-circuit surveillance cameras in Britain than in the rest of Europe combined. As a result, there are few places other than private homes where an ordinary Briton may go without being watched over by electronic eyes. Police use face-recognition technology to match closed-circuit images to photos of suspects. They have proposed stitching together licence plate number "captures" on video monitors into records of cars' and trucks' (and their owners') every move. They have also suggested fitting every vehicle with a GPS chip that police could use to track them, and even slow speeders automatically, when computers detect they are going too fast.
British police even employ cameras mounted on remote-controlled mini-drones to fly above crowds and look for suspicious activity -- a technology that most of us properly associate with military battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The potential for abuse of the information collected in the proposed databases is simply far too great. No one, not even government, can promise to safeguard such files from hackers and data thieves. Does anyone really want the government to have a record of every Web site they have ever visited, or trust government to keep that information from never falling into the wrong hands?
Just because a type of surveillance is technically possible does not make it justifiable. As Benjamin Franklin once wrote, "Those that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."