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The necessity of auxiliary precautions

The necessity of auxiliary precautions

by digby

It appears that some important British citizens are starting to push back on the growing police state powers of their government:

The technology used by Britain’s spy agencies to conduct mass surveillance is “out of control”, raising fears about the erosion of civil liberties at a time of diminished trust in the intelligence services, according to the former Liberal Democrat leader Lord Ashdown.

The peer said it was time for a high-level inquiry to address fundamental questions about privacy in the 21st century, and railed against “lazy politicians” who frighten people into thinking “al-Qaida is about to jump out from behind every bush and therefore it is legitimate to forget about civil liberties”. “Well it isn’t,” he added.

Ashdown talks frequently to the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, and is chair of the the Liberal Democrats’ general election team. Though he said he was speaking for himself, his views are understood to be shared by other senior members of the Liberal Democrats in government, who are also keen for some kind of broad inquiry into the subject.

This idea is also supported by Sir David Omand, a former director of GCHQ. He told the Guardian he was in favour of an inquiry and thought it would be wrong to “dismiss the idea of a royal commission out of hand”. It was important to balance the need for the agencies to have powerful capabilities, and the necessity of ensuring they did not use them in a way parliament had not intended, Omand added.

Ashdown is the latest senior politician to demand a review of the powers of Britain’s intelligence agencies – GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 – and the laws and oversight which underpin their activities.

In an interview with the Guardian, Ashdown said surveillance should only be conducted against specific targets when there was evidence against them. Dragnet surveillance was unacceptable, he added.

These high-tech dragnets are very useful to governments, especially if they can store the information forever. That way, they can go back and find other pretexts to charge someone (or to pressure their friends and families) once they have someone in their sites. Apparently, everyone has decided that such a circumvention of the rules is a-ok. But, as we’ve seen with the FBI’s sordid history of high level blackmail and not-so-subtle threats, such power is also extremely convenient for those times when government officials decide to target someone for political or personal reasons. In fact, preventing such intrusions for the purpose of “finding” legal cause to harass or arrest citizens is one of the reasons we have a presumption of privacy in our system in the first place.

There is simply no good reason for the government to collect and store this massive amount of information. If you allow them to have it, they will inevitably use it in ways that are unconstitutional and authoritarian.

People love to cite this James Madison quote:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary.

But it’s the next part that really matters:

If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”

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