The people define democracy

UNDER ATTACK: Triple suicide bombers hit a pair of mosques in Yemen last week.PHOTO/AP

THE debate over mass surveillance has been framed as a false choice. It's as if the government, which has practised what once was unthinkable except in dystopian novels - mass surveillance - is saying to us: you can have safety from terrorism or you can have your privacy, but not both. False. Citizens of a democracy deserve safety and privacy. Indeed, safety without the freedoms inherent in privacy is either hollow or in service to repression and, ultimately, to tyranny.

The Prime Minister is fond of minimising the intrusiveness and serious loss of liberty of mass surveillance with this mantra: "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to worry about." That's the opposite of the thinking behind democracy. That very language should give us all a lot to worry about, because it turns the relationship between the government and the citizens completely on its head.

A democratic government is one derived from the consent of the people. In plain terms, the relationship of citizens and government in democracy is a contract. The implementing of that contract requires, as in any contract, mutual trust. What can erode that trust more quickly than the knowledge that the government is spying on its citizens? If the government doesn't trust its citizens, how can those same citizens trust their government?

It's almost self-evident that the major purposes of government must include keeping us all safe. But safe to do what? Safe to have a private life, one free from intrusion even by government, unless, through judicial means, it is determined there's probable cause to suspect us of some wrongdoing.

If the history of the Cold War and its unravelling taught us anything, it is that authoritarian regimes, like that in East Germany, operated with everyone under suspicion as the apparatus of surveillance became the basis for control and suppression of dissent. We also saw how that lack of freedom led to a dull conformity and an absence of independent thought and creativity.

Our democratic edifice rests on our freedom, freedom inherent in a right to privacy. The right to privacy is the paramount expression of all the rights of a democratic citizenry. We tend to take our liberty for granted, to our peril. The rights we enjoy, those specifically enumerated in the NZ Bill of Rights Act (1990), and remarkably similar in language to those in the first 10 amendments to the US Constitution, are the product of struggle of nearly 400 years.

New technologies bring challenges to the power of government over its citizens. In 1637, that technology was printing and the monopoly rested with the English government. In that year, John Lilburne, a 23-year-old apprentice, was charged with importing printed matter.

Facing possible execution as an "intellectual property pirate", Lilburne claimed that, as a right of citizenry, he could refuse to testify against himself. In that defiant assertion of right was the beginning of the modern history of democracy, a history of struggle to wrest from the established powers the rights of man to govern himself and to create the safeguards necessary to ensure the ordinary citizen's freedom from government's arbitrary exercise of power to restrain his liberty.

Now this government is using the occasion of isolated instances of terrorist violence and the outrages of an Islamist army in distant lands to turn back the clock on those hard-won rights, offering the excuse of a forced choice.

A forced dichotomy is the subject of a famous comedy sketch. American comedian Jack Benny's character, notorious for his penny-pinching, is held up. "Your money or your life," says the robber. After a long silence the gunman makes the same demand. Finally Benny says, "I'm thinking it over." When it comes to surveillance and privacy we all need to take the time to think it over.

-Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.