“There seems to be a strange authoritarianism running through this administration like the writing in seaside rock”
Helena Kennedy, Just Law (p126)
“To ensure your future, some freedoms must be sacrificed. (…) My logic is undeniable”
V.I.K.I. in I Robot
“The voice from the telescreen was still pouring forth its tale of prisoners and booty and slaughter, but the shouting outside had died down a little. The waiters were turning back to their work. One of them approached wit the gin bottle. Winston, sitting in a blissful dream, paid no attention as his glass was filled up. He was not running or cheering any longer. He was back in the Ministry of Love, with everything forgiven, his soul white as snow. He was in the public dock, confessing everything, implicating everybody. He was walking down the white-tiled corridor, with the feeling of walking in sunlight, and an armed guard at his back. The long-hoped-for bullet was entering his brain.
He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother”
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
“Our society is not one of spectacle, but of surveillance; under the surface of images, one invests bodies in depth; behind the great abstraction of exchange, there continues the meticulous, concrete training of useful forces; the circuits of communication are the supports of an accumulation and a centralization of knowledge; the play of signs defines the anchorages of power; it is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies”
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (p217)
“I believe that some critics of our proposals are guilty of liberal woolly thinking and spreading false fears when they wrongly claim that ID cards will erode our civil liberties, will revisit 1984, usher in the ‘Big Brother’ society, or establish some kind of totalitarian police state. Those kinds of nightmare will be no more true of ID cards, when they are produced, than they have been for the spread of cash and credit cards, driving licences, passports, work security passes and any number of the other current forms of ID that most of us now carry.
In order to reinforce this point, the Bill does not make it compulsory to carry a card, nor does it give powers to the police to stop individuals and demand to see their card. Neither will the database which accompanies the card hold information such as medical records, religion or political beliefs”
Charles Clarke, Home Secretary, in The Times, December 20th, 2004
Foucault discerned in Bentham’s Panopticon the ultimate concentration of disciplinary power:
“The crowd, a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect, is abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individualities. From the point of view of the guardian, it is replaced by a multiplicity that can be numbered and supervised; from the point of view of the inmates, by a sequestered and observed solitude.
Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they themselves are the bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable [which speed cameras actually contain film?]. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so. In order to make the presence or absence of the inspector unverifiable, so that the prisoners, in their cells, cannot even see a shadow, Bentham envisaged not only Venetian blinds on the windows of the central observation hall, but, on the inside, partitions that intersected the hall at right angles and, in order to pass from one quarter to the other, not doors but zig-zag openings; for the slightest noise, a gleam of light, a brightness in a half-opened door would betray the presence of the guardian. The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen.
It is an important mechanism, for it automatizes and disindividualizes power. Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up. (…) There is a machinery that assures dissymmetry, disequilibrium, difference. Consequently, it does not matter who exercises power. Any individual, taken almost at random, can operate the machine: in the absence of the director, his family, his friends, his visitors, even his servants. Similarly, it does not matter what motive animates him: the curiosity of the indiscreet, the malice of a child, the thirst for knowledge of a philosopher who wishes to visit this museum of human nature, or the perversity of those who take pleasure in spying and punishing. The more numerous those anonymous and temporary observers are, the greater the risk for the inmate of being surprised and the greater his anxious awareness of being observed. The Panopticon is a marvellous machine which, whatever use one may wish to put it to, produces homogenous effects of power.
(…) He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. By this very fact, the external power may throw off its physical weight; it tends to be the non-corporal; and, the more it approaches this limit, the more constant, profound and permanent are its effects: it is a perpetual victory that avoids any physical confrontation and which is always decided in advance” (Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1991 (1977), pp201-3).
It must be understood as “a generalizable model of functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men” (op.cit, p205) and: “it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use” (op.cit, p205).
Ominously: “The panoptic schema, without disappearing as such or losing any of its properties, was destined to spread throughout the social body; its vocation was to become a generalized function. (…) The Panopticon (…) has a role of amplification; although it arranges power, although it is intended to make it more economic and more effective, it does so not for power itself, nor for the immediate salvation of a threatened society: its aim is to strengthen the social forces – to increase production, to develop the economy, spread education, raise the level of public morality; to increase and multiply” (op.cit, pp207-8).
The image of the austere brick institutions, their damp, forbidding walls topped with fierce shards of broken glass broken glass fades before the glittering display window, brightly lit to enhance its sensual appeal. Instead of the prisoners in their tattered uniforms trudging in silence round the exercise yard under the vigilant eye of the guard, crowds of shoppers throng the high streets, jostling over the bargain bins. Our economy, the economy of temptation and gratification, has no use for rigid conformity and precision movements. There is no virtue in postponing pleasure. As Bauman elucidates: “Ideally, the consumer’s satisfaction ought to be instant, and this in a double sense. Consumed goods should bring satisfaction immediately, requiring no delay, no protracted learning of skills and no lengthy groundwork; but the satisfaction should end the moment the time needed for their consumption is up, and that time ought to be reduced to a bare minimum. This reduction is best achieved if the consumers cannot hold their attention nor focus their desire on any object for long; if they are impatient, impetuous and restive, and above all easily excitable and susceptible to losing interest.
When waiting is taken out of wanting and wanting out of waiting, the consumptive capacity of consumers may be stretched far beyond the limits set by any natural or acquired needs or determined by the physical endurability of the objects of desire. The traditional relationship between needs and their satisfaction will then be reversed: the promise and hope of satisfaction will precede the need and will always be greater than the extant need, yet not too great to preclude the desire for the goods which carry that promise. As a matter of fact, the promise is all the more attractive the less the need in question is familiar, there is a lot of fun in living through an experience one did not even know existed and was available. The excitement of the new and unprecedented sensation is the name of the consumer game” (Zygmunt Bauman, Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, Open University Press, Buckingham, 2001 (1998), p25).
Moreover: “To increase their capacity for consumption, consumers must never be given rest. They need to be constantly exposed to new temptations in order to be kept in a state of constantly seething, never wilting excitation and, indeed, in a state of suspicion and disaffection. The baits commanding them to shift attention need to confirm such suspicion while offering a way out of disaffection: ‘You reckon you’ve seen it all? You ain’t seen nothing yet!’
It is often said that the consumer market seduces its customers. But in order to do so, it needs customers who are ready and keen to be seduced (just as, in order to command his labourers, the factory boss needed a crew with the habits of discipline and command-following firmly entrenched). In a properly working consumer society consumers seek actively to be seduced. They live from attraction to attraction, from temptation to temptation, from swallowing one bait to fishing for another, each new attraction, temptation and bait being somewhat different and perhaps stronger than those that preceded them; just as their ancestors, the producers, lived from one turn of the conveyor belt to an identical next.
To act like this, for the fully-fledged, mature consumer, a compulsion, a must; yet that ‘must’, that internalized pressure, that impossibility of living one’s life in any other way, reveals itself to them in the form of a free exercise of will. The market might have already picked them up and groomed them as consumers, and so deprived them of their freedom to ignore its temptations, but on every successive visit to a market place consumers have every reason to feel in command. They are the judges, the critics, and the choosers. They can, after all, refuse their allegiance to any one of the infinite choices on display – except the choice of choosing between them, that is. The roads to self-identity, to a place in society, to life lived in a form recognizable as that of meaningful living, all require daily visits to the market place” (op.cit, p26).
Against this backdrop, Bauman, emphasises the anachronistic nature of Panopticism: “The passage from producer to consumer society has entailed many profound changes; arguably the most decisive among them is, however, the fashion in which people are groomed and trained to meet the demands of their social identities (that is, the fashion in which men and women are ‘integrated’ into the social order and given a place in it). Panoptical institutions, once crucial in that respect, have fallen progressively out of use. With mass industrial employment fast shrinking and universal military duty replaced with small, voluntary and professional armies, the bulk of the population is unlikely ever to come under their direct influence. Technological progress has reached the point where productivity grows together with the tapering of employment; factory crews get leaner and slimmer; ‘downsizing’ is the new principle of modernization. (…)
The kind of drill in which the panoptical institutions excelled is hardly suitable for the training of consumers. Those institutions were good at training people in routine, monotonous behaviour, and reached that effect through the limitation or complete elimination of choice; but it is precisely the absence of routine and the state of constant choice that are the virtues (indeed, the ‘role prerequisites’) of a consumer. And so, in addition to being much reduced in the post-industrial and post-conscription world, the panoptical drill is also irreconcilable with the needs of a consumer society. The qualities of temperament and life attitudes which the panoptical drill excels in cultivating are counter-productive in the production of ideal consumers” (op.cit, pp24-5).
Elsewhere he reiterates this insight concerning the redundancy of the Panopticon: “Power can move with the speed of the electronic signal – and so the time required for the movement of its essential ingredients has been reduced to instantaneity. For all practical purposes, power has become truly extraterritorial, no longer bound, not even slowed down, by the resistance of space (the advent of cellular telephones may well serve as a symbolic ‘last blow’ delivered to the dependency on space: even the access to a telephone socket is unnecessary for a command to be given and seen through to its effect. It does not matter any more where the giver of the command is – the difference between ‘close by’ and ‘far away’, or for that matter between the wilderness and the civilized, orderly space, has been all but cancelled. (…) Whatever else the present stage in the history of modernity is, it is also, perhaps above all, post-Panoptical. What mattered in Panopticon was that the people in charge were assumed always to ‘be there’, nearby, in the controlling tower. What matters in post-Panoptical power-relations is that the people operating the levers of power on which the fate of the less volatile partners in the relationship depends can at any moment escape beyond reach – into sheer inaccessibility.
The end of Panopticon augurs the end of the era of mutual engagement: between the supervisors and the supervised, capital and labour, leaders and their followers, armies at war. The prime technique of power is now escape, slippage, elision and avoidance, the effective rejection of any territorial confinement with its cumbersome corollaries of order-building, order-maintenance and the responsibility for the consequences of it all as well as of the necessity to bear the costs” (in Liquid Modernity, Polity, Cambridge, 2000, p11).
And again: “As Thomas Mathiesen recently observed [in The viewer society: Michel Foucault’s ‘Panopticon’ revisited, in Theoretical Criminology, 1/2, 1997, pp215-34], Bentham’s and Foucault’s powerful metaphor of Panopticon no longer grasps the ways power is working. We have moved now, so Mathiesen suggests, from a Panopticon-style to a Synopticon-style society: the tables have been reversed, and it is now the many who watch the few. Spectacles take the place of surveillance without losing any of the disciplining powers of their predecessor. Obedience to standards (…) tends to be achieved nowadays through enticement and seduction rather than by coercion – and it appears in the disguise of the exercise of free will, rather than revealing itself as an external force” (Liquid Modernity, pp85-6).
Nevertheless, schools, mental institutions, armies and other disciplinary institutions continue to operate, putting us all through the grinder (the Pink Floyd video Another Brick in the Wall, Part One provides the perfect illustration). Discipline has never entirely lost its allure in the eyes of our political masters and our educational establishments continue to process reluctant, untamed satchel-wearers into model citizens. Gone are the days when the hapless pupil was expected to regurgitate the catechism without stumbling over a single word, gone is the sting of the strap on the outstretched palm or bare calves, gone the threat of the ruler rapped across the knuckles of the unfortunates unable to drag pencil over paper quickly enough for the teacher’s liking. Discipline is instilled, just not with the same degree of severity or harshness. It has not vanished, nor is it ever likely to do so. We may very well be docile consumers, already conditioned by our drives and desires, our salivating anticipation, but let us not delude ourselves that governments are willing to leave us to our hypermarket aisles, our trolleys with the one dodgy wheel and our striped and carrier bags unsupervised. Confronted with our apathy, our indifference and cynicism towards it, our government has merely been biding its time, waiting for a pretext to reassert its flagging authority. The availability of new technology in itself proved seductive, excuse enough to devise new forms of monitoring and surveillance. The support of the populace at large, the rubber stamp of democracy, could be invoked to endorse ever more invasive techniques. From the vantage point of the authorities, September 11th constituted a veritable godsend. Over the years we have witnessed the insidious spread of the blank, greedy lenses, the turning cameras, which subject us to a dual discipline, a double conformity. In the wake of a loathsome atrocity, absolute obedience extracted on the basis of unprecedented, society-wide Panopticism with ceaseless scrutiny even of those outside the specific confines of corrective (and “therapeutic”) institutions. We have all been branded suspects. This entails a reversal of the burden of proof since we are all potentially guilty. At the very least a blurring, at most an erasure of the distinction between guilty and innocent has occurred – we are no longer presumed innocent, but inscribed in the rationale of surveillance itself is the assumption that we are all capable of lapsing into culpability. The germs of guilt may multiply unseen within us at any time, triggered by trauma, ideological conviction (such as religious conversion) or simple disaffection.
On a Saturday morning, we would occasionally go on an excursion to the shopping centre in the neighbouring city of D. No such edifice dedicated to the thrill of parting with hard earned cash existed in the semi-rural gentility of P and we were hardly able to contain our excitement on the back seat of the car as we sped along the dual carriageway. Even the multi-storey car park with its winding ramps and ticket dispensers was a novelty. The stench of urine in the lifts down was overpowering, but it could not put a damper on our enthusiasm. Emerging into the watery sunlight to a chorus of gull cries, we impatiently accompanied our parents to What Every Man/Woman Wants (gender-segregated halves of same retail outlet), Mr. Beaujangles and Burtons for a new pair of trousers for Dad’s work. Half way along the concrete walkway the Lite Bite beckoned with its iced cakes (sponge covered in bright pink coating), single serving trifles and pots of tea. If we were lucky, we would be allowed to indulge in the biggest treat of all, a visit to the Woolies cafeteria, for a plate of half-cremated strips of bacon, soggy chips and anaemic beans in tomato sauce. The trip would culminate in a walk around C&A’s where I had my first encounter with surveillance technology. Before skilfully concealed tags and alarmed gateways took up their position as the preferred anti-theft device, there was the globe-shaped camera that hung down from the ceiling like a malignant, black undersea mine, its lenses protruding in all directions like the spikes that trigger the explosion, its very visibility a deterrent to the would-be shoplifter – or, as we innocently incorporated it into our games, a Dalek. Clothes were boring and having trailed around behind our Mother all afternoon we had to let off steam. We would dodge between the regimented racks of dresses and winter coats in an attempt to evade its all-encompassing, soulless gaze, much to the consternation of our Mother who never knew where to find us. Having demonstrated their effectiveness in protecting commercial interests, the cameras spread into the streets before we knew it, recording every trivial incident in the orange arc of alleyway lamps. CCTV was shown to cut crime (the real solutions to social malaise, namely proper education and community facilities, motivation and investment in both human beings and real estate to lift them out of the mire of graffiti-scrawled despair never truly had a look in given the massive increases in tax bills they would call for). Like every technological advance before it, CCTV was hailed as a magic bullet.
Helena Kennedy QC, one of our foremost human rights lawyers, recently described plans for the introduction of an identity card in Britain in the following terms: “The identity card is the ultimate bureaucratic tool that creates a highly monitored society” (in Just Law, Chatto and Windus, London, 2004, p278). The origins of the proposal (as set out in the Explanatory Notes to the Bill) date back to 2002 when the government launched a consultation exercise on Entitlement Cards and Identity Fraud. A draft Bill was published on 26th April 2004. In parallel, the Home Affairs Select Committee carried out an inquiry into all aspects of identity cards, including pre-legislative scrutiny of the aforementioned draft, reporting on 30th July 2004. The government subsequently published its reply to the paper and a Summary of Findings on 27th October 2004.
Gareth Crossman’s lucid analysis in Liberty’s briefing for the second reading of the Identity Cards Bill in the House of Commons from December 2004, immediately sets out the organisation’s chief concerns, which are that the scheme will fundamentally alter the relationship between individual and state; it will encroach on privacy; the government’s poor record on IT projects will make it a huge financial risk; it will adversely affect the most vulnerable groups in society and that the amount of information held on the database and the uses made of it will increase dramatically. The Bill’s fundamental flaws include too much detail being retained for regulation; the melting away of the so-called safeguards once the ID cards become compulsory; the excessive nature of the criminal and civil penalties; the lack of an audit procedure to guarantee the accuracy of information stored; the sheer breadth of information-sharing powers and the relative weakness of the Identity Card Commissioner. Much of the debate has focused on the ID card issue, but the real substance of the Bill is to be found in the establishment of the Register (the whole exercise of sounding out opinion on the card as opposed to the compilation and long-term storage of data smacks of a diversionary tactic, a ritual genuflection to democratic process): “Although the Bill is called the ‘Identity Card Bill’ its primary purpose (and the subject of the bulk of its clauses) is to create a National Identity Register. An identity card itself is a consequence of entry onto the Register. Provisions about data sharing powers and the level of detail recorded relate to the Register. This underlines the distinction between the previous wartime identity scheme and the current proposal which is much more intrusive. It also means that the identity card itself is less relevant to the debate. All provisions relating to identity cards could effectively be removed from the Bill without undermining the principal purpose”.
Crossman contends: “It is a peculiarity of the identity card debate that those who express concerns have been required to justify their opposition rather than requiring the Government to justify their introduction. Popular support for identity cards has been cited as reason enough. While polls do show a majority in favour, the commonly used figure of 80% support was based on proposals for a voluntary identity card. Polls that factor in financial implications of the scheme show greatly diminished enthusiasm. Similarly, support falls when people realise the lack of evidence to support claims that identity cards will help tackle terrorism, crime and illegal immigration”.
The latter objection effectively covers the entire set of reasons stated for the tabling of the measures to be enacted under the Bill, since necessity in the public interest is defined in subparagraph (4) of Article (1) as being:
“(a) in the interests of national security;
(b) for the purposes of the prevention or detection of crime;
(c) for the purposes of the enforcement of immigration controls;
(d) for the purposes of the enforcement of prohibitions on unauthorised working or employment; or
(e) for the purpose of securing the efficient and effective provision of public services”.
Crossman addresses each alleged benefit in turn: “We have been told that the scheme will help fight terrorism. It is a sad truth that a compulsory ID scheme in Spain did not prevent an attack and think it sensible the Government has not claimed that identity cards would offer absolute protection. Given that a sophisticated terrorist network is likely to recruit those with no criminal convictions or history with the authorities it is difficult to see how the introduction of an identity card will have any real impact. It is safe to assume that British intelligence agencies already have gathered intelligence on anyone that they believe could constitute a risk to national security. We cannot imagine what information held on a massive identity register would add to that possessed by the Security Services. For the vast majority of people who are not involved in terrorist activity, their entry is irrelevant in combating terrorism”.
On cutting crime (a subject on which Clarke waxed lyrical: “I claim that the ID Cards Bill that I am introducing today is a profoundly civil libertarian measure because it promotes the most fundamental civil liberty in our society, which is the right to live free from crime and fear”), Crossman ripostes: “However, identity is rarely an issue in criminal cases. The vast majority of crimes never lead to arrest. This is nothing to do with identity but simply down to policing resources. Even where there is a suspect, the issue is rarely identity but whether sufficient evidence of culpability can be obtained. As it will not be compulsory to carry a card we imagine that anyone asked by the police to confirm their identity will be given a number of days to go to a police station and do this. Law abiding citizens will do this at inconvenience to themselves and at cost to police resources. If it were to become compulsory to carry a card then much police time would be wasted dealing with innocent people who forget to carry them. If money is to be spent on fighting crime we would prefer to see it being targeted at providing adequate policing resources”.
On combating benefit fraud: “The Government’s figures show that around five per cent of fraud relates to identity. The vast majority of cases of benefit fraud involve lying about circumstance by, for example, claiming state benefit and working cash in hand”.
On facilitating a crack down on illegal immigration: “Those seeking asylum have been required to carry identity cards since 2000. Employers are required to inform the authorities if they suspect the immigration status of workers, but unfortunately they rarely do. The tragic events in Morecambe Bay demonstrated not only that people are being exploited, but also that the immigration services would not have to look hard if they wished to pick up significant numbers of illegal workers”. The contrast with Clarke’s belligerent stance is striking: “It will make it far easier to address the vile trafficking in vulnerable human beings that ends in the tragedies of Morecambe Bay, exploitative near-slave labour or vile forced prostitution”. The example of Waffleland amply demonstrates that ID cards fail miserably in stopping illegal immigration or grey market labour. They serve only to worsen the already miserable lot of the illegals, whose status banishes them from the view of the authorities, but also excludes them from all forms of protection (the benefit scroungers slated so mercilessly by the self-appointed moral(ising) crusaders of the Daily Mail are not on to a cushy number, as Kennedy corroborates: “The life of illegals is thoroughly wretched: waiting constantly for the knock at the door, unable to seek police help if they are the victims of crime (which many are), unable to obtain proper medical help through the NHS because they have no health number, desperate about becoming pregnant because they will be unable to receive the support needed at the birth”, op.cit, p203).
Kennedy echoes these criticisms: “Gulling the public into believing that ID cards prevent benefit fraud is disingenuous since most benefit frauds are not about identity but claiming for more than the entitlement or being dishonest about circumstances. The question of illegal immigration is even more complex because of the variety of different immigration statuses held by non-nationals, from asylum-seekers, visitors, work permit holders, etc. For the scheme to work it would involve holding the often-changing immigration status of every person in the UK on a register and assiduously updating it.
And then of course there is the additional complex question of who is entitled to what benefits depending on their immigration status: as with benefit frauds the process of checking eligibility for a service is probably even more complex than establishing identity in many other cases. The other point is whether a scheme will achieve its purpose is the issue of compulsion. As a means of detecting crime or illegal immigration, the level of checking would necessarily be in direct proportion to its effectiveness. As well as being compulsory in terms of participation there would be an obligation to produce. This is my objection. I would be prepared to have additional biometric information included on my passport in order to police our borders more effectively but I do not want there to be an internal passport, a licence to live” (op.cit, p277).
And: “The government wins support for the entitlement card on the back of asylum scares, maintaining that it stops illegal working, but there is already a legal requirement on employers, introduced by Michael Howard, the previous Conservative Home Secretary, to ensure that people have an insurance number. Employers who want to pay below the minimum wage will be just as uninterested in identity cards” (op.cit, p278).
How does an ID card scheme operate in practice? The Waffelian system places the burden of responsibility for monitoring its application on the police force. Initially upon arrival (I have been working here since 1991) I was not a civil servant. This meant that I had to have my ID card renewed every three months. A crowd would congregate in front of the local commune’s magnificent Art Nouveau palace well over an hour before it was due to open its doors in the hope of securing a place near the head of the queue, chatting animatedly in a variety of tongues, swathed in ankle-length gowns and headscarves. Sullen bureaucrats sat behind their guichets, refusing to respond to any query in a language other than French (in flagrant breach of the laws on the bilingualism of the capital), directing hapless applicants from one window to the next. I had no option but to fork out fees on every occasion for a flimsy piece of paper adorned with a photograph, which (I liked to flatter myself) barely resembled me and the all-important official stamp. A few days later the buzzer would shrilly announce the arrival of the representative of law and order, armed with his file, a dumpy little man, sour with stale garlic and armpit odours, mumbling through his nicotine-stained moustache, somehow managing to convey an impression of scruffiness in spite of his uniform with its crumpled blue shirt. He would grill me concerning my means of subsistence, ensure that I was not giving refuge to an undeclared appendage and inspect my furniture, an intensely humiliating experience against which I had no defence (had I shown the slightest trace of insubordination he could have set in motion even more unpleasant procedures). I once plucked up the courage to ask the officer why my self-assembled Ikea shelves should occasion such inordinate curiosity. His explanation was that the criterion employed to determine whether someone was evading second residence tax was the quantity and quality of furnishings. He had initially decided to include me in the très peu meublé category (an indication that he believed the flat did not represent my main domicile), but relented when I protested that as a former student with debts to pay off and single mother I simply did not have the resources at my disposal to cram the available space with designer sofas. What I regarded as an intolerable indignity was all in a day’s work for him. As a fonctionnaire, I am mercifully spared this routine prying. One of the few remaining perks of the job is that the administration submits the relevant form on my behalf, obviating the time-consuming inconvenience of queuing. The cost of the card itself is met by the institution. My address is not display on my card (a further privilege reserved for EU and NATO officials) and I have noticed that it is mostly British colleagues who avail themselves of this minor nod to freedom. Although consternation, head-scratching and mutterings on the part of shop assistants and the like is caused by this (for them) peculiar waiver, it is but a small price to pay for a token of resistance, however modest.
Crossman cautions: “No other common law country in the world has an identity card scheme. A common law country is one where an individual’s actions are lawful unless positively prohibited by law and where courts are responsible for interpreting law. This contrasts with civil law countries (most European countries) which have codified legal systems. This is not in itself an argument against identity cards. However, it is worth noting that all civil law countries have written constitutions and nearly all have far stronger privacy laws than the UK, which act as a balance against state intrusion into individual privacy”. In a sense, therefore, in quoting examples of my everyday experience in Waffleland, I am not comparing like with like. In spite of this, I feel that it is valuable to address the issue of practicalities, which the draft legislation sidesteps at the present juncture, particularly as the systems operating in other EU Member States may serve as examples to be emulated.
Clarke’s dismissive comments on the objections reproduced above merely deflect attention from the likelihood of far-reaching developments in the future. As Crossman points out, the Bill is intended as “enabling” legislation, which means that it provides nothing more than a framework. In order to implement its provisions, an array of secondary legislation will have to be put in place. There is nothing to prevent these later rules from extending the original law. Affirmative resolution must be granted by both Houses of Parliament for orders drawn up by the Secretary of State to enter into force, but again, as Crossman astutely observes, this procedure “is a blunt tool for legislative scrutiny, as it does not allow amendment of a proposed regulation. To take an example: a regulation that proposes extending the data sharing ability to a wide range of public bodies will either stand or fall as a whole. Parlementarians may agree with some, but not all, aspects of proposed regulation, but they will be unable to amend it. To enable full legislative scrutiny and parliamentary debate the power to amend regulations should be written onto the face of the Bill, whenever regulations deal with categories of persons or bodies”.
As Crossman makes clear, the Explanatory Notes published separately (which have no legal force and therefore cannot be deployed by way of an obstacle to the formulation of new measures going far beyond what was initially envisaged) state that “registrable facts could not be extended by regulation to cover categories not relating to identification, such as criminal or medical records” (or, in the less digestible wording of the original document: “this power to amend Schedule 1 could not be used to include criminal records in that Schedule without further primary legislation as recording previous criminal convictions is not covered by the definition of registrable facts”). The list of registrable facts includes – under 1 (5) (g) – “information about numbers allocated to him for identification purposes and about the documents to which they relate”. The significance of this seemingly innocuous sub-clause is not lost on Crossman: “As identification numbers of the Police National Computer and National DNA database, for example, are used to establish links to identifying information they could arguably be included”. As Crossman goes on to elucidate, 1 (5) (f) talks of “residential statuses previously held by him”, of negligible value as an identifier. I would add 1 (5) (c), “where he has previously resided in the United Kingdom and elsewhere” as an instance of extraneous and abusive storage of information. What possible utility could it have except as a means of tracking an individual’s every movement? The Bill remains eloquently silent on the question of how far back in time the obligation to furnish information on previous whereabouts stretches. One our tolerance threshold has increased (or, to put it in slightly different terms, our resistance has been worn down) it will inevitably be far more difficult to envisage incorporating constraints on what may or may not be included on the card at a later stage once the precedent has become entrenched. In Crossman’s words: “Even if such information could not be added by regulation it is misleading to imply some sort of bar preventing addition to the list by subsequent primary legislation. We have recently seen provisions for data retention contained in anti-terrorism legislation and powers relating to detention of terrorism suspects contained in an asylum act. It is easy to envisage extension proposals arising in a future criminal justice bill. During the recent investigation into the Soham murders, the Bichard enquiry looked into ways of ensuring that those who were unsuitable were not able to work with children or vulnerable people. Liberty agrees with Sir Michael Bichard’s recommendation, that there be a positive vetting process and a register of those suitable to work with children. However, had an identity card been in place at the time it is likely that there would have been suggestions for ‘soft’ non-conviction information to be held on the Register. We make this point not to consider the desirability of doing this, but to demonstrate how once a card is put in place it is inevitable that uses develop beyond the initial parameters. Similarly, if there were a terrorist attack on mainland Britain it is likely that there would be a consequent pressure to greatly increase the information held on the card to include information such as criminal convictions”. Clarke’s vehement disavowals do not preclude the possibility that at some later date the addition of information about religious faith, sexual orientation or membership of organisations and associations from political parties, through Trade Unions to Amnesty International and Save the Whale might be deemed relevant in the public interest. Once the system is up and running it would be a relatively simple matter to supplement the gathered intelligence and the technology does exist to keep it on record indefinitely.
The cardholder is bound by law to notify the Secretary of State of all changes of circumstance, the card updated accordingly and a fee paid. Turning to Crossman once again: “Whilst some details will remain relatively static, others, such as address, can change quite frequently. This could place a considerable burden on those who live in insecure, or simply frequently changing, accommodation. As the Secretary of State can also require a fee to be paid for any modification to an entry on the Register the potential cost of the identity card to those who move house frequently (and who may be least able to afford such cost) is considerable”.
The severity of the penalties to be imposed where an individual transgresses the Bill’s provisions is in certain instances out of all proportion to the “offence” committed: “If someone thinks their card may be damaged they will have all the incentive needed to replace it as the consequence of no card will be disentitlement to services. We do not believe the criminal law is appropriate, yet the Government seems to wish to rely on criminal sanction wherever possible. At the heart of the criminal law should be the element of commission rather than omission. The state should criminalise people for acts they have done, rather than things they have forgotten to do. While there are examples of criminalisation for omission (failing to tax or insure a vehicle for example) these are in response to a specific social need, such as reducing road traffic deaths. There is no such social need justifying criminalisation here”. As the Hungarian informed me, even in the darkest days of Communist rule the police did not make arrests for failing to carry the ID card (személyigazolvány). He was once stopped after an evening’s drinking with a group of friends and politely requested to produce it. Having made a great show of searching through his pockets, he announced that he had inadvertently left it at home. The officers in question requested politely that he be more careful next time and left them to stagger along the pavement in peace. I am open to the accusation of jumping the gun, as the police are not granted such powers under the Bill. However, once we have become accustomed to the cards it will seem a very small step to merge existing stop and search powers with on the spot fines for loutish behaviour in the cause of cleaning up our public spaces. The sales pitch could be that of falling into line with the rest of our European partners as well as the positive revenue impact (and what resource-starved force would not leap at the chance of improving the health of its budget with such a money-spinner?).
Liberty’s thoughtful paper also broaches the issue of “function creep”: “Liberty is deeply concerned about the inevitable increase in types of information collected and stored on the register, and the potential for ‘function creep’. In 1950 a Parliamentary Committee looked at the use of the existing identity card and discovered that the original three purposes (conscription, rationing and national security) had mushroomed to 39 different functions. We can assume that whatever the initial proposal, this system would experience similar expansion of function and that the information held on the database will increase”. In Waffleland you must be in possession of at least a temporary ID card in order to have the electricity, gas or telephone connected (some employees are occasionally willing to show some latitude towards their clients, although it helps to be white and on the payroll of one of the EU institutions and you are expected to return the generous favour with obsequious gratitude).
We are routinely subjected to unprecedented levels of scrutiny as well as an unprecedented intensity of scrutiny. In the past (usually in times of war – the war on terrorism is without antecedent in that it is constructed as war during peacetime with all citizens as potential casualties or perpetrators, a never-ending conflict legitimising governments in their efforts to restore flagging credibility and to keep permanent tight control over their citizens, all previous wars have been of limited duration and the combatants clearly marked by their dress, although the spectre of the fifth column justified mass internments of completely innocent individuals stigmatised due to their extraction- or in the iron grip of totalitarianism), limited manpower resources restricted the effectiveness of surveillance (random checks, reliance on informants). Nowadays, technology permits more people to be kept under continuous observation at a minimum cost in terms of human resources. Detectives may well only sift through camera footage once a crime has been committed, but the important fact is the very availability of the pictures. As Kennedy argues: “Police surveillance used to be based on the targeting of specific individuals or groups, but, although that continues, we are also seeing the emergence of mass surveillance, with systems in a growing number of fields profiling millions of people at a time. The ever-present eye of closed-circuit TV on every building is now a regular source of evidence in criminal cases and it has huge public support. Britain has more CCTV cameras per head of population than any other country in the world. (…) According to a House of Lords report, when private systems are taken into account, there are more than 1.5 million lenses covering public spaces in the UK. The launch of congestion charging in London, using a scheme which logs car numberplates with cameras, will have added to that number” (op.cit, p260). The relative lack of corruption amongst representatives of the police and judiciary may lull us into a false sense of security concerning the erosion of our rights. Kennedy reminds us of technology’s propensity to penetrate even our most mundane transactions: “There are now machines which can test banknotes for the presence of drugs, and sniffer machines which can sense the presence of explosives. A whole range of technologies formerly only used by the military or intelligence community are now becoming available to police. We have computer identification through facial mapping, iris identification, voice identification from telephones – all of which could take us straight to culprits. We have infrared surveillance so that the presence of persons in buildings or hiding in container lorries is established from outside, and tiny ‘up and under’ magnetic tracking devices which when popped on to a car disclose its every move.
Convergence is leading to the elimination of technological barriers so that different systems can mutually exchange and process different forms of data. Through data-sharing and data-matching between government databases, through access to our telephone bills, shopping loyalty cards and other accounts, we can all be kept under
covert surveillance” (op.cit, p262).
A brief aside on loyalty cards: the comparison between the ID card and store loyalty and other types of card issued by private companies drawn by the former Home Secretary is both specious and simple-minded: credit card companies, however much they might impinge on privacy, do not have the power to deprive us of our liberty. They cannot be compared either in function or repressive capacity to governments. Commercial enterprises cannot compel you to hold a loyalty card on penalty of the security guard turning you away at the door. True, some retailers, such as Matelan make you fill in a form for one before you can make a purchase, but logic dictates that the information logged will only be utilised for the purposes of boosting sales/profitability. The firms concerned provide incentives to entice the cardholder back and they do not possess a legally stipulated entitlement to your data.
The “dazzle effect” of technology is not new. We are more willing to place out trust in the non-human, giving priority to machine-based (on the surface incontrovertible) evidence in preference to the testimony of flawed beings. This attitude is revealed in an episode (Court Martial) of Star Trek in which Captain Kirk is put on trial for the perjury and culpable negligence leading to the death of one of his crewmen, Lieutenant Commander Benjamin Finney. The visual extract from the ship’s computer log shows that the Captain indeed jettisoned the pod in which Finney was sitting during an ion storm prior to Red Alert, an act, which Kirk strenuously denies, thereby breaking with standard procedure. Although the faith placed in the veracity of the computer transcript might appear quaint (in the 60s hackers were not quite as commonplace as they are now), we should not be so complacent as to convince ourselves that we could never be so naïve: how are we to gauge whether a photograph has been digitally manipulated, for example? The blinding effect is a constant. Interestingly, Kirk’s defence lawyer, Samuel T. Cogley, not the most enamoured computer user, fights for the Captain’s exoneration by appealing to inalienable human rights: “The most devastating witness against my client is not a human being; it’s a machine, an information system (…). I speak of rights. A machine has none, a man must. My client has the right to face his accuser and if you do not grant him that right you have brought us down to the level of the machine. Indeed, you have elevated that machine above us”. In the end, it emerges that Finney faked his death, having nursed a grudge against Kirk for many years. The charges against the Captain are dropped, his reputation restored. The advocates of new technologies lapse into the rhetoric of the impossibility of counterfeiting, of absolute reliability and infallibility (the ID card no exception). We congratulate ourselves that we are aware no technology is error-free, that we could never be so gullible, that we are immune to its spell. Yet substantiating your innocence when you are on the receiving end is another matter altogether (Kennedy beautifully encapsulates the power imbalance faced by anyone who has fallen foul of the law, whether innocent or not: “The state is like a supercharged juggernaut bearing down on a man with a bike. The protections and safeguards are just the provision of a crash helmet”, Just Law, p26).
We are all the while undergoing a process of incremental desensitization. Big Brother, which purveys surveillance as entertainment and exults in its own vulgarity, contributes to our becoming inured. Bauman regards such spectacles as a symptom of the postmodern condition: “A place in the limelight is a modality of being in its own right, in which film stars, football high-scorers and ministers of government share in equal measure. One of the requirements that apply to them all is that they are expected – ‘have a public duty’ – to confess for public consumption and put their private lives on public display, and not to grumble if others do it for them. Once disclosed, such private lives may prove to be unilluminating or downright unattractive: not all private secrets contain lessons which other people may find useful. Disappointments, however numerous, are unlikely to change confessional habits or dispel the appetite for confessions: after all (…) the way individual people define individually their individual problems and try to tackle them deploying individual skills and resources is the sole remaining ‘public issue’ and the sole object of ‘public interest’” (Liquid Modernity, pp71-2). Big Brother’s attraction in part consists of the promise of instant (if short-lived) fame and a share in celebrity for all, irrespective of talent or intelligence (the housemates vying with each other to win viewer favour through excess).
In my undergraduate year abroad I would travel home and back via the Hamburg-Hoek of Holland train, spending the night, or the best part thereof in the station. The waiting room environment was always too intimidating for me not only because of the drunks slumped across the moulded plastic seats, the incoherently cursing down and outs and other hovering lone males, but also because the sight of armed police with bullet proof vests and machine guns (or what my untrained eye classified as such). How shocking, brutal and unnecessary, I shuddered, huddling on a bench in the cold semi-seclusion of the platform. A couple of weeks ago at Cardiff International, I scarcely batted an eyelid at the officers patrolling in pairs around one of the smallest airports I have ever flown from. Even such a tiny place, surrounded by drizzle-drenched fields had been contaminated by fear.
Similarly in the air-conditioned corridors of the Stalin-baroque palace in which I work, security has been tightened up relentlessly. When we were first ordered to wear our staff badges visibly at all times when inside the building, HP attached a sugar sachet with a green background (the correct colour code for freelancers) to his lapel and not a single guard challenged him in spite of the fact that the photograph was of a black French rugby player. He would never make it through the entrance without standard-issue ID now. Turning up for another stint in the office is like entering an airport. Until we kicked up a fuss via the appropriate channels, we were made to put our handbags and briefcases through a scanner and our bodies through metal-detecting portal even under “White Alert” (as members of staff with permanent contracts our positions are more secure than those of our superiors, whose status is dependent upon the whims of the electorate, although the latter, some of whom belong to the political wing of organisations condoning violence are exempted from such impositions).
The distinction between the public and private sphere is being systematically worn away. Bauman does not perceive this as necessarily sinister: “What is currently happening is not just another renegotiation of the notoriously mobile boundary between the private and the public. What seems to be at stake is a redefinition of the public sphere, as a scene on which private dramas are staged, put on public display and publicly watched” (Liquid Modernity, p70). And: “The ‘public’ is colonized by the ‘private’; ‘public’ interest is reduced to curiosity about the private lives of public figures, tapering the art of public life down to a public display of private affairs and public confessions of private sentiments (the more intimate the better)” (The Individualized Society, Polity, Cambridge, 2001, pp49-50). As a result “(…) the task of critical theory has been reversed. It used to be the defence of private autonomy from the advancing troops of the public domain, almost wholly subsumed under the rule of the all-powerful, impersonal State and its many bureaucratic tentacles or smaller-scale replicas. It is now the defence of the vanishing public realm, or rather the refurnishing of the public space fast emptying due to desertion on both sides: the exit of the ‘interested citizen’ and the escape of real power into a territory which, for all the extant democratic institutions are capable of doing, can only be described as outer space” (The Individualized Society, p107).
I do not agree entirely with his assessment. The state now has the means at its disposal to monitor our every activity, demanding access to our computers and the contents of our e-mails in the name of security (if you believe my concerns are exaggerated, consult the Electronic Communications and Regulatory Powers Acts). Our final retreat will soon be behind the skin in the recesses of the unhinged mind, as in the shattering conclusion of Terry Gilliam’s masterpiece Brazil where the (anti-)hero Sam Lowry sits in the interrogator’s chair, blood dripping from his hands, having escaped into a consoling fantasy world into which his tormentors could not follow him. In the borderless economic space (Roos Pijpers) of the EU, checks on individuals in a despecialised context assume greater significance. These can be carried out anywhere, not just at the traditional frontiers. The appeal of ID cards to governments worried about the porosity of their borders is obvious.
All systems can be subverted, however, provided you have an accomplice. As the film Gattaca brings home, even genetic data can be falsified. Vincent Freeman meticulously peels off extraneous epidermal tissue and deposits the skin cells of Jerome Eugene Morrow on to the keyboard of his computer at his workplace in order to avoid his true identity as the product of a natural birth being revealed in a society, which discriminates against its citizens on the basis of their genetic heritage. Nothing is forge-proof if the price is right. Networks of shared interest or compassion by definition conspire against control, as Foucault noted in his discussion of horizontal compartmentalisation/segregation to prevent communication between isolated individuals (“coercive individualization, by the elimination of any relation that is not supervised by authority or arranged according to hierarchy”, op.cit, p239).
There is nothing new in the regulation of bodies: all societies have prescribed rules of appropriate conduct, due deference to social superiors, dress codes, adornments, edible foods and so on. It is Foucault who expresses the relationship between the body and power most cogently: “(…) the body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs. This political investment of the body is bound up, in accordance with complex reciprocal relations, with its economic use; it is largely as a force of production that the body is invested with relations of power and domination; but, on the other hand, its constitution as labour power is possible only if it is caught up in a system of subjection (in which need is also a political instrument meticulously prepared, calculated and used); the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body” (op.cit, pp25-6). Our knowledge of the genetic sequences that govern our sickness and health represents a qualitative leap in terms of the legibility of bodies. The unique makeup of each individual is ideally suited for the purposes of administrative classification. In pursuit of error-free identification, biometric data (encoded bodily information) will be included in the ID card. The symbolism of the fingerprint, forever associated in my mind with criminality, speaks volumes. How much longer will it be before we have a bar code tattooed on our forearms or a chip implanted in our skulls (after all, our pet dogs, man’s best friend and closest companion already carry them)?
Context is of the utmost significance and the context in which the ID card is to be phased in is undeniably worrying. It forms part of a package and must, as Helena Kennedy warns, be seen as one element in a full-scale assault on our civil liberties: “It is, however, vital that any process of modernisation or reform must take place against a backdrop of principle: a retreat from the rule of law, human rights and civil liberties is short-sighted and unthinkable. Yet such a retreat is precisely what is taking place. A quiet and relentless war is being waged on our rights. One individual encroachment can seem inconsequential or even justifiable if the reasons given are sufficiently seductive, but taken as a whole a pattern begins to emerge which should leave none of us feeling sanguine” (op.cit, pp3-4). The ID card should not be viewed in isolation: “The Home Secretary sees the fixed penalties as a crucial way of bearing down on all sorts of low-level crime and is now considering giving security guards, neighbourhood wardens and community support officers the power to hand them out. The failure to give proper names and addresses will strengthen his arguments for identity cards. Every encroachment leads to another” (op.cit, pp73-4).
Kennedy also highlights the current “weather vane” style of governance so fashionable at the moment: “People are easily alarmed by the idea that barbarians are at every gate, including their own, in the form of asylum seekers and criminals. As a result they are prepared to sacrifice a significant level of freedom and privacy in exchange for greater security. The temptation is for governments to read expressions of public fear and the willingness of citizens to make sacrifices as giving them carte blanche to rewrite underlying principles of law. Instead of making the political weather, devising policies for which they then seek public endorsement, governments increasingly see citizens as consumers, to be listened to through the marketing device of focus groups and to whom policy must be tailored. Government-as-product-supplier means pursuing market share, redesigning the brand and purveying policy on a ‘what works’ basis rather than principle. But there are some areas of our lives, including the justice system, which are not susceptible to market forces, where to rely on economic drivers or populist desires creates distortions, injustice and outcomes which take no account of the ‘common good’. The move towards a market state may be unsettling but the move towards a market society, where all human interaction takes on a quasi-commercial spin, is even more alarming” (op.cit, p7).
Crossman demolishes another of the favourite pooh-poohing tactics of the government: “To say ‘if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear’ is to mistake the crucial difference between hiding criminality and respecting privacy. Unwillingness to share information about ourselves does not imply criminal behaviour, but simply a desire for privacy”. I concur with him that the “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” rhetoric comprises an insidious form of muzzling, a cheap tactic to discredit opponents – if you raise your voice in defiance the taint of suspicion clings to you: you are placed on the defensive and have to insist that your record is unblemished for your arguments to gain (and retain) any plausibility. I have never incurred so much as a parking fine and would never dream of bringing the machinery of repression down upon me and I have carried an ID card since 1991.
I do not consider myself overtly political. Politics are a turn-off and for the most part I ignore the self-aggrandising pronouncements of mud-flecked career politicians, as they grunt and squeal, squirming to dip their snouts in the trough. I seek escape in the realm of science-fiction (the experimental sociology of the future). There are, however, certain fundamental principles, which I espouse:
Full equality for women as regards remuneration, opportunity and status.
Student grants as opposed to loans to prevent access to education from degenerating back into the preserve of the well-heeled elite.
The reward of excellence instead of birth (Prince Charles’ statement to the effect that the lower orders should not get ideas above their station and daydream idly of fame and fortune betraying the continued prejudices of the upper class).
Regenerating areas of urban decay and offering hope to poor communities.
Provision of decent public services, such as health care affordable to all.
The preservation of mobility in an open, democratic and tolerant society.
I could add to the list, but my antipathy towards entrenched privilege ought to be clear. Yes, I deplore the erosion of solidarity, the reduction of all human life to a cost-effectiveness calculation. Yes, the ID card does elicit a visceral emotional reaction within me.
In Orwell’s nightmare vision, Winston is happy to embrace oblivion, to renounce his individuality in an ecstasy of submission. Like him we are expected to connive at our own destruction and feel gratitude for being accorded the privilege.
[I would warmly recommend to any reader interested in immersing themselves in the topic that they not be put off by the name and consult the excellent David Blunkett is an Arse, which contains a rich seam of source material and valuable analysis]
