That the intelligence and security services are making demands of this kind is hardly disturbing in itself. If they could put cameras in everyone's bedrooms, they would. They'd open your post, tap your phone and monitor your excretions, if the option was open to them, just for the hell of it. They are snoops by vocation. They want to know, not just because it might be useful to them but because behaving like peeping toms comes naturally to their ilk. What is disturbing, however, is the thought that their demands are more likely to be met with a compliant response from the British government than at any time over the past thirty years.
It's a phenomenon of the times, and you can see it here in Ireland too. Everywhere you turn there are cameras, monitoring people's movements, and nobody raises a murmur of protest. There is a gradual push towards a regime where people will have to carry identity cards and the opposition is too scattered to mount an effective response. The powers of arrest and detention given to the police are extended, and it sails through the Dail. Similar powers are afforded to immigration officers and nobody seems to notice or care. The securocrats are in control. So just how far are we prepared to let them go?
On the face of it, the information society, and the technological advances that underpin it, should be a liberating thing. Mobile phones have captured the public imagination to the extent that they have, essentially because they make it so much easier for people to communicate. The same applies to email, and to the internet. But the fact is that everything that happens in either sphere has to be routed through some central channel or system of channels. And the level of sophistication in the tracing and recording of information about what happens in the domain of electronics and telecommunications is now such that there is very little about you or your life or your business that cannot be deduced from records of various kinds that exist about you.
It would be untrue to suggest that this is always, automatically and unequivocally, a bad thing. A programme on BBC recently about the Omagh bomb attack gave detailed information about the way in which the movements of people suspected of being responsible for the atrocity could be traced from the calls made on the mobile phones that the police believe were used in the operation. It was eerie stuff. They could tell that the mobile phones had travelled north, from the Dundalk area, and that they had received calls from other mobile phones that were heading in the same direction. And they could tell that, within a time-frame that clearly seemed to link the phones to what happened in Omagh, the phones travelled back across the border.
It would be a good thing in every respect if those who were responsible for that appalling massacre were to be brought to justice, and if the use of this data assists in that process, well, then that's the kind of thing that most people would gladly endorse. But of course this is how those who are pushing, constantly and insidiously, for increased powers for the police, and for other agencies of the State, sell the idea to the public.
In the wake of the murder of Veronica Guerin, legislation went through the Dail that never should have, affecting the rights of people who have been arrested, for whatever reason. In a judgement that will forever leave a stain on the record of the Irish judiciary, Patrick Holland was jailed for 20 years for importing cannabis - the conviction secured on the uncorroborated evidence of a police accomplice, Charles Bowden.
If you're not breaking the law you have nothing to fear, they tell us. But of course this is not true, not true at all.
We already know that there are very serious questions to be answered in relation to the activities of the Gardam in Donegal. One man who ran a nightclub in the area has just been released from prison, having had his conviction overturned. Reading the reports of the activities engaged in by the police in the run-up to his arrest and trial for allowing his premises to be used for the sale of drugs, you wonder how such a travesty of justice was allowed to happen. The word on the grapevine is that there are more terrible and frightening things yet to emerge in Donegal, that will set the hair standing. The point is that the powers that are available to the police and to the State must be strictly limited and defined. Safeguards are required that go as far as it is possible to go to protect the autonomy and the privacy of citizens and preserve their right to freedom of movement and freedom of action, unmolested by the prying attentions of the police and the State. If anything, we have gone too far in giving draconian powers to the State. It's time to turn the wheel in the other direction.
And as for giving the State the right to keep records of and to monitor people's mobile phone calls and emails a brief memo to the Department of Justice here: don't even mention it!