Anthony Barnett (London, OK): There was a short, strong overview of the threat of an authoritarian, corporate cash cow database state by A.C. Grayling in yesterday's CiF. It reinforced the alarm set off by No2ID's Phil Booth in his excellent OK post. I particular liked Grayling's raised eyebrow over Seimens of Germany who are "already supplying 60 countries with a device that monitors and integrates data from phone, email and internet activity". Apparently its system is notorious for throwing up "huge numbers of false positives". I like that phrase "false positives". I suspect it will run and run, as in "We are all false positives now!"
My only objection was to Grayling's stirring conclusion,
We need to stop this assault on civil liberies going further, we need to roll back the attritions they have already suffered, and we need a rock solid written consitution to protect us from those who aim to make us all suspects in the gaze of the unblinking universal eye.
He should know better than that. No constitution, written or unwritten is "rock solid", nor is ever meant to be. Of course he is spot on to see that to roll back the surveillance state we need to constitutionalise our governing settlement. But this is in order for it to be lived in a democratic fashion, not to be set rock solid. Simply to change the governing culture we have to show everyone that our values are rooted in popular sovereignty encoded in a democratic constitition. This is the precondition for stopping the mandarins treating us as colonialised natives. But the constitition that results will be flexible as well as principled, an aid for us to better govern ourselves, a step on the road to emacipation and freedom, not a rock-like fixed point that we will have to bow down to.
