Chris Barton: Champions of privacy keeping an eye out for us

COMMENT

Who is New Zealand's number one guardian of privacy - Bruce Slane, Phil Goff, Paul Swain or Nicky Hager? All four featured at the inaugural Big Brother Awards hosted by the Civil Liberties Union.

Bruce Slane, the former privacy commissioner, and Blair Stewart, the assistant privacy commissioner, were joint winners of an award recognising long-term service to the protection of privacy.

Minister of Justice Phil Goff also won an award - "for the elected representative who has most neglected or abused their responsibilities to protect privacy". That was for his part in promoting counter-terrorism legislation. "In his honour, following true Orwellian precedent, the office should perhaps be renamed Minister for Injustice." Minister for Telecommunications Paul Swain came a close second to Goff because he "uncritically pushed through new surveillance powers" for the police and the government security agencies SIS and Government Communications Security Bureau to tap internet communications.

Hager, described as the " author of the acclaimed work Secret Power", was the guest speaker. He warned all to be vigilant - especially in post September 11 times - of an accelerated erosion of privacy rights under the guise of national security.

There were two examples. An unfortunate animal rights protester unjustly charged and harassed under new "home invasion" laws - apparently for handing a protest pamphlet to a chicken company executive. And the "fact" that telcos in New Zealand now have staff doing the bidding of police and government spooks by secretly tracking New Zealand citizens by their mobile phones. More details coming soon, promises Hager, who really does know how to work a paranoid crowd.

But he did ask a good rhetorical question. Why are leftish Labour governments quicker than National governments to take us closer to a Big Brother state?

Look at Tony Blair's Britain. It has just announced plans for a compulsory identity card scheme that will give police powers to stop and check people against a biometric database. People will be scanned on the spot and the results compared with national fingerprint or iris records.

Hager argues that the current climate of fear, plus New Zealand's unquestioning willingness to follow the security moves of the United States and Britain, means we will be seeing many more stories about passport scares and other "threats" to national security - all designed to soften us up for more intrusion into our daily lives.

But, as he points out, unless you count what happened to the Rainbow Warrior, we don't have terrorism in New Zealand.

Nor do we have an epidemic of e-crime or e-zealots - certainly not at the level to allow government-sanctioned hacking of citizens' computers.

But a national ID card couldn't happen here, could it?

Don't be so sure.

A December e-government report which analyses a proposed identity authentication scheme to access government services online points out the "scheme unavoidably lays the foundation for a national population register".

It notes, too, that the proposed use of digitally encoded photographs and face recognition analysis (biometrics) "moves the scheme significantly towards an intrusive high-tech solution".

Not good. But at least we're not like Britain where the number of closed-circuit television cameras (CCTV) has quadrupled in the past three years to four million.

What's worse is that the Brits seem to like them. Preliminary findings of the European Commission's Urbaneye project indicate that more than 90 per cent of Britons think high street CCTV cameras are a good thing. That's apparently because they live in greater fear of crime than any other European nation.

Urbaneye itself asks if this means we are on the threshold of an "urban panopticon" - a circular prison with cells arranged around a central well and tower from which prisoners can at all times be observed.

But as French philosopher Michel Foucault highlighted in Discipline and Punish the unseen but all-seeing gaze of the panopticon has a more chilling purpose: "to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power."

Which is not unlike the controlling effect of the gaze of CCTVs and shadowy spooks tapping our phones and email - except that we have become the inmates.

* Email Chris Barton