Mr. Hague - this is why we need a constitution
Dear Mr. Hague
You just don't get it... what you want is the "absolute right to surveil - absolutely"... and woe-betide anyone that gets in your way...
The problem here is that the government wants to take away our right to privacy and we want to claim it back - the two are, of course, diametrically opposed.
Before computers and the internet, surveillance was tapping phone lines and steaming open letters - both of which required a warrant from the Home Secretary.
Now we have computers and the Internet it appears that because it exists it is - somehow - we have automatically become "fair game"... and the politicians, people that work at GCHQ and contractors like Detica use the political dogma that "if you've got nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about" - thanks at lot - that means I can sleep at night... not!
The fact is that many of us do have something to hide... illicit affair, caught the clap, had an abortion, shagged the boss, smoked a joint, nicked your mate's car ... it doesn't really matter but probably more than half the population has something to hide. I can hear it now "think of the children" - the paedophiles, the terrorists, etc. etc.
Hoovering up vast quantities of the internet on the chance of finding something is akin to searching for "hay in a haystack" ... ultimately this will become self-defeating and pointless because either (a) the bandwidth of the internet will grow to the point where its arriving faster that you can store it and analyse it, or (b) the encryption tipping-point will be reached where too much is encrypted and you haven't got enough silicon atoms in the universe to build enough CPUs to break it all... either way - you loose.
Certain contractors to GCHQ already measure storage by the metric tonne. What happens when the Concrete Doughnut has filled up with hard disks? What next? Concrete Doughnut #2? Concrete Doughnut #3?
What happened to "going after the bad guys"? You know, that thing called "intelligence lead policing" and "profiling" along with lots of "shoe leather"... rather than attempt to tap the whole of the internet - or have we reached a point where we have to tap the whole of the internet out of political correctness for fear of offending some race/religion/political group.
The problem here is that the government wants to take away something precious to us - our privacy - in the name of the common good. Moreover it wants to do it "at any cost" and without proper justification.
This is perverse and fundamentally wrong, moreover it's "not British" - why? Because the argument put forward to justify this is that the ends justify the means - they do not. Furthermore and just as it has always been - those that really seek security in their communications (COMSEC) will always remain one step ahead of those in signals intelligence (SIGINT).
Perversely, one of the most secure forms of communications these days is a typewriter, paper, an envelope and a first class stamp.
Fundamentally, we must reach a point where "Blackstone's formulation" applies to this too - at some point (I'm not sure exactly where, yet) it must some to pass that it is better to let one terrorist [bank robber; paedophile; tax evader; drugs dealer; "substitute your baddie here"] go through lack of surveillance than attempt to capture an infinite amount of information about all of us?
Mr. Hague - we need protection FROM the government and NOT more surveillance BY the government - this is why we need a constitution.
G.
PS. I'm off to print out some very large one-time-pads from www.random.org and post them (via Royal Mail) to my friends along with a five line BASIC program that employs an XOR function so I can communicate with them securely over the interweb ;-)