If you’ve done nothing wrong, you still have something to fear

The argument made by William Hague that “If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear” is typical of those who see George Orwell’s 1984 not as prophecy or warning, but as an instruction manual. The whole line is, to pardon my French, bullshit.

As John D Cook expains, no system is perfect, and the false positives that will inevitably happen can seriously mess up your life.

Suppose the probability of a correctly analyzing an email or phone call is not 100% but 99.99%. In other words, there’s one chance in 10,000 of an innocent message being incriminating. Imagine authorities analyzing one message each from 300,000,000 people, roughly the population of the United States. Then around 30,000 innocent people will have some ‘splaining to do. They will have to interrupt their dinner to answer questions from an agent knocking on their door, or maybe they’ll spend a few weeks in custody. If the legal system is 99.99% reliable, then three of them will go to prison.

But it’s not the knock at the door in the middle of the night that’s to be feared. The real danger is more subtle, as Ian Brown explains in The Guardian .

Data mining tools have developed quickly over the past decade, and a detailed picture can now be painted of people’s lives with even small amounts of such information. This picture can ultimately have real-world consequences. Ever had problems getting an electronic visa to travel to countries such as the US and Australia, who pre-screen foreign visitors, or had to go through lengthy additional security at the airport? Thought about getting a job with a government agency or contractor that will do background checks first? Or perhaps you’ve had difficulty getting medical insurance or credit despite a healthy lifestyle and prompt payment of your bills?

Have people forgotten the Secret Service raid on Steve Jackson Games? How much do you trust security bureaucrats to be able to tell the different between, say, PBeM postings and genuine terrorist plots? And just as significantly, how much do you trust them never to power-trip by messing up your life just because they can get away with it?

And that’s before we ever look at the possibilty that Prism and other similar privacy-invading data mining is purely to going to be used to stop terrorism, and isn’t going to expand in scope to snoop on any purely legal political activity that might threaten the percieved economic interests of the elites.