EYE SPY

SHE WAS A SPY

The new UK Spy bill being mooted - see here - is unacceptable, and yes, will out people's private browsing habits, which are more personal and potentially embarrassing or damaging than we might care to admit, as a society.

Simply put, a large percentage of the British public uses the Internet to do one or more of the following: a) cheat on a spouse or partner; b) look at (legal) porn; c) look at (illegal) porn; d) read up about suicide or mental illness or some other illness they may wish hidden; e) illegally pirate/ download American TV shows; f) pirate music, books, movies; g) explore other odd, eccentric or very personal hobbies or obsessions.

If the government is able to collect the data exhibiting this behaviour, and if it is gathered, and then perhaps hacked, or simply used by their own unscrupulous intelligence agencies, mass harm to the society would ensue.

This is because you could easily blackmail anyone in politics or any position of authority to make them do your bidding in exchange for suppressing a-f above.  Given that almost EVERY young British male between the age of 15-25 does at least b) as do may women, you would quickly be able to embarrass or blackmail many persons in Britain once they reached a position of power - until such time as looking at porn was no longer a social taboo.

If this seems far-fetched, consider the life and story of J. Edgar Hoover, who compiled dossiers on tens of thousands of Americans, via wire-tapping and then blackmailed them for over 40 years, becoming the most powerful man in America, able to make and break Presidents even. This is because of human nature.  Humans sin, and the Internet encourages a variety of legal sins, some of which are socially unacceptable.

Grown married persons who are, say, politicians, priests, generals, doctors, educators, CEOs, and so on, might not want their partners to know they look at legal porn sites that feature young-looking women dressed as schoolgirls, or whatever their particular kink was.  Newspapers would and could topple leaders. We are in a new Victorian Age - but instead of the brothels of Marylebone (that serviced thousands of men every night 130 years ago in London) - we now have the Net.

The question becomes, what are the threats such blanket spying on us all would defeat? Terror attacks - however terrible - usually only kill a few hundred people at a time.  Their impact is awful but containable

Allowing a home-grown spy agency to possess information rendering all our online behaviour transparent is not containable, and would damage the lives not of hundreds of people, but tens of millions. If it stifled expression, exploration, and creative expansion of the Internet, it would also ruin the economy.

It is a Police State charter.

The State can always find an enemy to justify taking our rights away.

It is our duty, as citizens, to oppose this, even if it means putting our lives at some risk by risking we will leave some of our enemies able to communicate without our knowing about it.

So we must oppose this plan, even if it leaves some questionable, even unethical, human behaviour in the shadows.

A society with all its vices exposed at once to public inspection would collapse.