| English term or phrase: biter | Ministers who justify state snooping might now learn that biters can be bit
The News of the World phone-hacking scandal lays bare the chaos that surrounds our privacy and data security
ds our privacy and data security
Simon Jenkins
Simon Jenkins
The Guardian, Thursday 9 July 2009
Every journalist knows that breaking the law is inexcusable – except, of course, where there is an excuse. As a general rule, what I write, however obtained, is in the public interest. What you write is money-grubbing prurience. Now what was the juicy story you told me the other day?
The News of the World scandal is in danger of submerging the body politic in a wave of hypocrisy. The paper did what some newspapers have long done, which is scrape the dustbin of gossip in which lurks the fame of all public figures. Aided by electronic surveillance, journalists use private detectives, hackers, oddballs and dodgy policemen to dig the dirt on behalf of their readers and shareholders. They usually pay money, even if this is not allowed.
Sometimes, as with the Daily Telegraph on MPs' expenses, we are served copper-bottomed sensation. Although the scoop was allegedly based on payment for theft, the world cheered the "public interest". Other times, as with the Dianagate tapes, salacious material is uncovered with no shred of public interest but which no amount of self-restraint could keep from the public eye. In the case of the News of the World, the ease with which mobile phones can be eavesdropped on supplied a mountain of celebrity gossip.
Human rights law may offer "a right to respect for private and family life, home and conversation", but this is merely a pious hope. When a cloud of secret range-finders can hover over the mobile phones of the stars, policing is near impossible. Hackers can squat in caravans or attics, equipped from any backstreet store. The News of the World gained access to thousands of phone messages. These could as easily have been posted on the web.
Although the police have decided to take no further action, the case raises intriguing but tangential issues. It is implausible for the former News of the World editor Andy Coulson to plead that he did not know what was going on. No editor would be left in the dark about the costly source of such scoops. Even a remark that "I would rather not know" admits responsibility.
When a member of the paper's staff, Clive Goodman, went to jail in 2007 for the hacking offence, a parliamentary committee was told that he was a "rotten apple" and an isolated case. We now learn that Coulson's staff had access to thousands of mobile phone records, all illegally obtained and currently in the hands of the police.
The paper then lavishly paid off some of its victims on condition of confidentiality, while the police (and Crown Prosecution Service) agreed to turn a blind eye. They neither pursued other offences by News of the World reporters nor informed those whose private lives they knew to have been compromised. The police appeared to collude in a massive breach of privacy.
The much-vaunted framework of parliamentary oversight and media self-regulation was also left looking idiotic. We have been told for 18 years that the presence of working editors on the voluntary Press Complaints Commission brings a weight of expertise and judgment to its decisions. This is self-serving rubbish, trotted out by successive PCC chairmen who enjoy cavorting with the barons of media power.
The case for non-statutory regulation of the press remains strong, but depends heavily on that regulation being scrupulous and outspoken, as it largely was under the old Press Council with its vigorous chairmen. The present Press Complaints Commission claims to work its magic "behind the scenes". It works no magic. It is dead.
None of this impinges on the central issue of the News of the World case, that chaos now surrounds the confidentiality of electronic data in Britain. That law-breaking now depends wholly on the robustness of an "excuse" is hopeless. Most people accepted that the Telegraph was justified in using stolen information to reveal the details of MPs' expenses. But the argument was tested neither in the courts nor before the PCC. It was granted by acclamation.
Public interest is ambiguous. The 1989 Calcutt committee on press privacy, on which I served, spent hours seeking to define that interest and failed, abandoning the term as near useless. A piece of information might be of interest to the public yet in no way impinge on public policy, while a vast grey area covered the lives of public figures. Virtually nothing to do with the private life of Princess Diana was in the public interest – but pull the other one.
Clearly the News of the World would have difficulty proving that its phone-hacking of Gordon Taylor was confined to sporting economics, of Gwyneth Paltrow to debt relief, or of Nigella Lawson to kitchen health and safety. But what if the paper had uncovered evidence that John Prescott was up to no good? Public interest often emerges in the course of an otherwise prurient fishing trip. The Telegraph's details of the family food eaten by MPs were highly intrusive, yet considered great fun by one and all.
Meanwhile ministers outraged at press misbehaviour should examine their own. They have passed some 14 measures intruding on the privacy of British citizens in the past decade, powers that outstrip those in any other democratic state. The notorious 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act authorises the home secretary to collect information without limit on any citizen, not just for national security but for "public health and national economic wellbeing".
The national identity register allows all phone and internet browsing to be collected, possibly by private companies, and passed to the state. Under an amendment to the 1998 Data Protection Act, information gathered by one branch of government can be shared with others for "policy purposes". The 2008 children's computer record is accessible to 400,000 officials, yet not to parents.
Some MPs may bridle at the extent of public surveillance, but parliament has shown not the slightest desire to defend personal freedom from state surveillance. The bland claim is made by home secretaries that intrusion is required for "national security", the excuse for absolute power down the ages. Nor is data remotely safe in state hands. When the government tells us its national identity register is wholly secure, it is lying: witness the high-security laptops and CDs discarded by the week. There is no such thing as secure electronics.
Technology gives to those in power, whether in government or the media, immense scope for intrusion. The snooper will always be one step ahead of the defenders of personal freedom. In the case of the government, ministers might at least learn from the Telegraph and News of the World that biters can be bit. If they find ways of gathering absurd amounts of information about private citizens, citizens will gather absurd amounts of information about them.
The press too dices with disaster. However feeble self-regulation has become, common law is increasingly being deployed against intrusion, as the News of the World itself recently found in the Max Mosley case. Privacy laws targeted at the press would be bad because hard to define, as the "public interest" defence shows. But if liberty is to be championed against government, the champions cannot keep shooting themselves in the foot. |
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