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Why Do Brits Accept Surveillance?

78 points by lelf 13y ago

epscylonb 13y ago
I'm not convinced by the idea that surveillance in Britain is worse than in America or other first world countries. Yes there are a lot of CCTV cameras, there are a lot in most American cities too, in both cases most of them are operated privately. What is different is that Britain has a much higher population density, so the surveillance appears more obvious, and makes for some skewed stats. As for GCHQ, I would be surprised if they were notably worse than the NSA when it comes to snooping.
ris 13y ago
Answer: if I decided to point a camera out into the public street from my window and record everything I would expect to be allowed to do so. And as such, I extend the right to anyone else, so that when I'm in a public place, I'm fair game. There's nothing anyone can do about it, so it's pointless worrying about or trying to control it.
rwmj 13y ago
We don't. We also know the committee meeting was a whitewash and the ISC is not doing their job. And at least some of us will punish MPs for this at the next election.
basicallydan 13y ago
I think it's because it rarely directly affects the majority of people in a negative way, so it's hard to notice what the problems with over-surveillance might be. Also, we hear about the good that comes from surveillance - such as preventing and punishing crimes - more than we hear about the bad that comes from it.
- devx 13y ago
  That will always play a role in situations like these. However, you can see things are turning around in US, at least with the population. I think the issue in UK is the old "boiling the frog" theory. They've gotten used to it, they've embraced it, so now they aren't particularly in a rush to throw stones at it. But that's the population. The article already mentions why nobody in the Parliament says anything bad against it - the opposition started all of this, and the others are in power. I do think the lack of a proper Constitution is also a major problem for UK. For example, in US, whenever someone tries to stop you from speaking, you can easily point to the 1st Amendment and say it's your damn right to say anything you want, even if it's scary law enforcement people. In UK, you don't really have anything like that, so people may "feel" something is wrong - but in comparison to what?! They haven't really put the principles on paper. It's all pretty vague and it's hard to get angry at a vague target.
  - Silhouette 13y ago
    This is a a classic tyranny of the majority situation. One way to think of it is the difference between a mere democracy and a principled, civilised society. The former is two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner. To get to the latter, you need three animals to decide on the dinner arrangements before they know which of them is the sheep.
  - audiodesigndan 13y ago
    There is exactly something like that in the UK. Freedom of speech has long been a Common Law, with centuries of precedence. Not only that, Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights guarentees freedom of expression, which was incorporated in the UK as part of the Human Rights Act 1998. Learning more on the subject will help you greatly.
oracuk 13y ago
Some of the commentators on the original article also pointed this out. We've been facing domestic and foreign terrorism for a very long time. We found our societal balance for freedom and security some time ago. If anything the Internet and commercial surveillance for marketing purposes are the things that have disturbed the balance rather than the previously accepted concept that we are surveilled by the state in every public and private forum. Written down it sounds terrible but it works in practice.
- walshemj 13y ago
  Yep there are places in the uk (NI) even today civil servants and others considered "crown" agents have personal protection weapon licenses.
Silhouette 13y ago
Many of us don't willingly accept the level of surveillance that we now know is happening. Unfortunately, our electoral system is very much an all-or-nothing proposition, and therefore who holds power tends to be dominated by how the major parties deal with a very small number of issues that can each have a big effect on a lot of people. Other than right after an event like the 7/7 bombings, neither national security nor civil liberties get anywhere near the top of most people's lists. Those people are too busy hoping they have a job next week, or trying to get the best possible education for their kids, or worrying about the quality of care that sick or elderly family members are receiving, or wondering if they'll ever be able to buy a home somewhere they really want to live. All the main political parties in the UK obviously understand this, and that means policy on other issues is dominated by concerns other than the immediate will of the electorate. In some cases, it's special interest groups. In this particular case, there's probably some of that going on, but there's also the politics of fear, where no-one wants to be the guy who didn't vote for something security-related if the next horror happens on their watch. This is a horrible situation if you are a citizen who believes the threats are overstated or the privacy concerns are dangerous, but it's a rational response -- indeed, it's probably the only rational response -- under our current political system, and that's why basically every major party here is reluctant to oppose these kinds of infringements too strongly.
sturd 13y ago
It really embarrases me, as a Brit, that the majority seems so apathetic about the surveillance in place. Though nobody I know seems to understand the sheer scale of what's going on. Personally, any attempts I've made to try and explain things have fallen on deaf ears...
DanBC 13y ago
It depends on the surveillance. GCHQ slurping all my data doesn't have much negative effect. But some of the surveillance the Americans go through isn't okay here - drug testing in the workplace is limited for example. And GCHQ's slurped data is tricky for law enforcement to use, which is why there's been a debate about changes to the law to allow (or not) collection of metadata by domestic law enforcement agencies.
- UnoriginalGuy 13y ago
  Drug tests and credit checks in the workplace always struck me as being screwed up.
  - walshemj 13y ago
    Yes its only really jobs requiring DV clearance that do the drug test thing - though Amazon is requiring it for warehouse workers which is taking the piss they really need to lose a court case over that.
    - richardjordan 13y ago
      Really? Not in my experience. I lived in Texas a few years and every job seemed to require drug testing and often credit checks. I always wondered why folks just didn't say fuck you but once I'd lived there a while I learned that in those parts of the country where people like to talk about freedom and independence they sure like to accept their obedient roles when it comes to companies telling them to jump.
codex 13y ago
Mass surveillance is the natural state of man. When humans lived in clans and tribes, everybody knew everyone else's business, including the leaders. Today, that social surveillance network still exists (tips given to police, etc.) but in a degraded form now that people live more individually. People instinctively dislike spying because they want to be in control of their own PR (social status), and secrecy gives them advantage even while it hurts society as a whole due to information asymmetries. Gossip networks tend to distort the true picture as well. This, humans evolved to protect their own secrets while simultaneously snooping and gossiping on their neighbors. However, living in an organized society involves compromise for the greater good, and community surveillance is one of those compromises. One might as well ask why the Brits accept paying taxes. Instinctively, you hate to part with your money, but you must do it.
- recuter 13y ago
  Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Mass surveillance is a terrible idea not because of the potential for personal embarrassment but rather for the countless ways it can go very wrong.
  - ne0codex 13y ago
    Other ideas have the potential of going very wrong, it's in the implementation, which sounds like a challenge worth attempting to take
    - recuter 13y ago
      What for? A tiny bump in crime fighting efficacy? I assure you, there are many other more cost effective ways to do that.
- Silhouette 13y ago
  Mass surveillance is the natural state of man. So is beating up your weak neighbour to take his food for your dinner. We're supposed to be more civilised than that by now.
iuguy 13y ago
The article completely glosses over the fact that the reason for the media silence is the D-Notice (officially DA-Notice but no-one calls them that) in effect. This is a 'voluntary scheme' in which the government asks the media not to cover a story on the grounds of national security, but really it's only voluntary if you don't mind having your access to government more or less killed off, which for most news outlets is a no-no. Only the Guardian has the balls to stand up on this one, and you've seen what's happened with shadowy goons destroying laptops, people detained at airports and the attempts at intimidating the editor.
- walshemj 13y ago
  And the fact that the media have been grossly hacking and spying on the public - the media in the uk dont have the rosy view of "journalists" that the USA has. People are more concerned about shady media moguls and the importation of invasive hr practices that for example amazon are doing in the uk. And we dont have the paranoid style that infects the USA political discourse.
KaiserPro 13y ago
Its because of many things. One thing for our american cousins to note is that up until recently we were regularly being bombed because of our (in)actions in Ireland. THis is why there are no bins on the underground, and why there are only hand full of ways to drive into the city of london. another problem is that our media is on the whole sympathetic, or apathetic to spying. The mass hysteria surrounding paedophiles is a wondrous tool for ill thought out laws. The public don't really like being spied on, but assume if you are against, you must be up to something.
firegrind 13y ago
they don't. foiling curtain twitchers is as much part of british culture as tea.
Tzunamitom 13y ago
What a trite article. To claim that the British are complacent about state surveillance because we all perceive ourselves as "royal subjects" smacks of fire-starting by a Guardian columnist desperately trying to draw attention to his newspaper's position to gather more readers. There are a number of factors why this is less of an issue in the UK than it is here in North America, including: 1. Brits fundamentally trust their government more - not politics, but the concept that a state government exists first and foremost for the good of the people is more prevalent in the UK. 2. The influence of special interest groups and corporate electioneering is much more muted in the UK. 3. As someone else mentioned, CCTV cameras in themselves are not bad - most are privately operated and NOT linked to a central government data store. 4. As someone mentions in the article comments, the UK has been a target of terrorism for much longer than the US. 5. Increased education levels in the British armed forces, garner more confidence in the military to do the morally correct thing given a tough decision. 6. Britain is institutionally far more liberal than the US with less interference in policy from religious extremists and a history of judges making activist decisions in order to preserve civil liberties where legislation threatens to undermine established convention tantamount to constitution (given the choice I'd rather have a country that is self-restraining and no constitution than a constitution that restrains, but a government that looks for ways to usurp it). This is not to say that there is not a worry about civil liberties in the UK - you only have to look at the furore about the proposed introduction ID cards a couple of years back to see that the Brits care a lot about civil liberties, they just see the threats in different terms.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- objclxt 13y ago
  I agree with most of your points, except for these two: > Britain [has] less interference in policy from religious extremists [than the US] This seems a slightly rose-tinted view of British history. I would argue Britain actually has more interference in policy from religious extremists than the US. What would you call the Lords Spiritual (the 26 seats in the House of Lords reserved for Anglican Bishops) if not religious interference in policy? Or how about Section 28, which was proposed and pushed through primarily by religious groups? US government policy is frequently influenced by religion, but the separation of Church and State tempers this, and the Supreme Court has frequently overturned legislation that has been drawn up with religious influence (and indeed, directly overturned legislation that actively promotes religion in state institutions). In the UK the church is the state. You only have to look at the recent issues surrounding gay marriage (versus civil partnerships) in the UK to see there is religious interference in governmental policy. > a history of judges making activist decisions in order to preserve civil liberties where legislation threatens to undermine established convention I would argue the US has an equally strong history of this, and the current Supreme Court system in the UK owes a lot to the US. Indeed, I think the etymology of the phrase 'activist judge' stems from the US, not the UK.
makmanalp 13y ago
I had heard that during the peak of the conflict with the IRA, more brits came to view surveillance as necessary to safety, and then it remained that way. Don't know how true this is. It's eerily similar to the 9/11 situation and the Patriot Act though.
JulianMorrison 13y ago
I think the fundamental difference UK versus USA, is that it is very hard to inflame passions in the UK about abstractions. Concrete examples of abuse are needed to arouse our ire, and we only get angry at the actual abuse, not the potential for it. So for example, we get more annoyed about police undercover spies having sex under false pretences, than about the fact that there were police undercover spies in peaceful protest groups (despite the fact that is clearly egregious overkill and bad for democracy).
jsmcgd 13y ago
I think a major reason for the indifference is ignorance. Many people here in the UK are not well informed on this issue. I'm shocked at how many people I've spoken to about this and they're only hearing it for the first time. Apart from the Guardian no major news outlet that I have seen has given this scandal any prominence. They have mostly acquiesced with the recommendation from our security services that they don't report on this issue. In my opinion another scandal in itself. Another factor may be that people in this country don't think the risk of tyranny returning as credible. They don't believe that the danger posed by mass surveillance will ever be anything but hypothetical, that somehow a free society is our national destiny. This shocking complacency manages to both totally ignore human nature and the lesson from almost every history book ever written. As a country I really hope we get real about these issues and that we stop taking our hard won civil liberties for granted. Ultimately they're the only things that can be trusted to truly protect our democracy.
- richardjordan 13y ago
  I think to the contrary that Brits, an Europeans in general are vastly more sensitive to the threat of nazi-style or communist-like government - and corporate - oppression than Americans who are, by and large, complacent on this topic despite all the anti-government rhetoric you hear. As a result governments can't get away with as much because people watch closely. Combine this with the greater sense that the government runs the provision of critical services like healthcare and people have a better relationship with their government so fight over what matters, and there tends to be a good sense of what that is. Also the British political system is far more responsive to the electorate than is the US system which famously has less churn among elected officials than the old soviet politburo. This means that the electorate has more confidence in its ability to effect change.
cma 13y ago
The US was never attacked in WWII. The UK was. Look at how extreme September 11th made us, even 12 years later, and you can imagine what WWII did to Britain.
- gwern 13y ago
  > The US was never attacked in WWII. Pearl Harbor comes to mind.
  - cma 13y ago
    You are right, though remember Hawaii wasn't a state at that time. Anyway, it had nowhere near the psychological impact on the broader US public than the blitz did on Britain.
    - bazzargh 13y ago
      There was one lethal attack on the mainland - a fire balloon bomb. 6 people were killed. But yes, not on the same scale. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_balloon#Single_lethal_attack http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_balloon#Single_lethal_atta...
    - 27182818284 13y ago
      >You are right, though remember Hawaii wasn't a state at that time. I had to interview a lot of elderly people on their thoughts about hearing WWII for a high school exercise. Overwhelmingly they said their initial response was "Where is Pearl Harbor?" but it didn't matter because it was US military attacked by the proper military of a foreign empire If that doesn't say act of war to people, nothing will. The second thought reported to me most often was one of rage. Comments like "It was a dirty rotten trick!!!" and such.
ballooney 13y ago
This is disappointingly poor for Jonathan Freedland. The most remarkable thing about the session he cites was how unremarkable it was; no one expected any great revelations and no one got any, as even Freedland himself said in a radio interview on the BBC after the session. It was just a bit of theatre. The argument about CCTV cameras as evidence of complacency about surveillance seems silly and tired to me, as silly as an article would be in a British newspaper that concluded that Americans are obsessed with killing each other on the basis of gun ownership rates vs the UK. They're not, of course, the overwhelming majority of gun owners do not buy them with the intention of killing another person. Likewise, the one camera per 11 people crops up a lot and (as far as I know, having a small interest in the actual figure) no groups trying to find evidence for it since have managed to do so, in fact the most high profile study that investigated the number concluded that there were 1.85 million CCTV cameras in the UK, of which 1.7M were privately owned, 0.03M were fixed and publicly owned, and 0.12 were on public transport. [1] That's 92% of them under private ownership. They exist, by and large, to deter criminals from breaking into and stealing from stores and commercial premises, just as you might be put off from robbing a convenience store in the US in the knowledge that the store-owner might be armed, here it's completely normal to see signs outside a shop saying "These premises are protected by CCTV" - note the use of the word protected - and indeed most hardware shops will have this sign in stock right next to the 'no smoking' signs. They're there so you can give something to the insurance company and if lucky there will be something to help the police get an ID. I find their presence as much a threat to civil liberty as dash-cams are to the civil liberty of the average russian. Likewise stuff is called 'Her Majesty's $FOO' for entirely vestigial, historical reasons. When Obama says 'God Bless America' at the end of every speech we don't honestly think that he's designed a policy whose success is contingent upon divine intervention, jokes about healthcare.gov aside. There are differences in the relationship between people and their state in the UK vs other places just because of different evolutionary paths (socially rather than biologically!). For instance, an American economist friend expressed surprise that we didn't have a legal separation of church and state, and how dangerous it was, and how we should get one like in America. Well, people here are just not that religious in comparison to the US, and my experience of the US is that the church has enormously more influence over US politics than it does in the UK anyway, despite the law. It's just not really a thing here. I'm sure if a modern British Prime Minister were to say 'God Bless the UK' at the end of a speech he'd be sectioned under the mental health act, and the PR people would go into overdrive to explain that he didn't really mean it. Similarly, If UK employers were to switch to a policy of only allowing two weeks holiday per year, and why not add random drugs tests while we're at it, there would be riots at the outrageous and dangerous attempt at enslavement of the population, and the government would likely be overthrown if it failed to act. I use these just as an example to illustrate the differences in what's considered important, and of what people are vigilant, between the two nations. "Many Brits accept the old securocrat formulation: If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. " Do they? I don't think I've met that many people who think that - maybe I just move in the wrong circles - but my most prominent encounter with that sentiment was as an argument whose flaws we had to point out in a Critical Thinking class homework at secondary (ages 13-18) school, as part of one of the national school syllabuses. I'm very worried about state surveillance, it's a constant fight, and while I'm thankful that the most egregious proposals of recent years - national I.D cards and 90 days detention without trial - were rightly defeated, I'm under no illusions about winning a battle vs winning a war. But you have to pick your battles, and the reason I think this article is guff is because it misidentifies what to fight, and plays up to superficial and lazy observations of the UK from outside, as if to appeal to its intended audience. All that's missing is a reference to bad teeth. Like I said, surprisingly bad from Mr Freedland, who otherwise has been quite eloquent on the subject, I think. [1] http://www.politics.co.uk/reference/cctv http://www.politics.co.uk/reference/cctv Edit: typo.
rudin 13y ago
I would just like to point out that many British people find the word Brit pejorative and that you shouldn't use it unless you want to offend.
- shocks 13y ago
  Brit here, since when do we find that offensive? Being 'offended' is bollocks.
  - richardjordan 13y ago
    I've never heard this in my life. I don't know a single Brit who finds the term offensive. Unless you're talking the. Brit Awarss. Now there's some bollocks.
    - rudin 13y ago
      I understand if you are fine with it. It has lost most of its meaning with history but I still cringe a little whenever I read it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_names_for_the_British#Brit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_names_for_the_Briti... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Brit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Brit
      - shocks 13y ago
        I think the keyword here is historically…
- stuartd 13y ago
  What nonsense.
- nly 13y ago
  So by 'many British people' you're referring to the Scots? ;)
- boredstat 13y ago
  It does happen for San Fran.
stuartd 13y ago
Because we're craven.
vacri 13y ago
It helps that Britain ... has a curiously complacent attitude to civil liberties These would be liberties like universal healthcare? Or perhaps the right to roam? Or what about when Britain made it a moral point to get its citizens out of Guantamo? How about concepts like "Police don't need to carry guns day-to-day to do their jobs"? I've spoken here on HN about getting out of the car during a traffic stop because I was tired of the subtle power play where the police talk down to you while you're sitting. I had several responses, serious responses, from Americans saying that I was crazy because I was likely to be shot. Even after clarifying that I'm not being aggressive, just getting out of the car and even proactively handing over my license, they were resolute that such actions could lead to me being shot. Is this, as the author claims, the result of a population that expects their government serves them? What a citizen should expect, rather than a subject, to be so fundamentally afraid of being murdered by their own police despite having done no wrong? There are things that are 'civil liberties' that are not listed in the first ten amendments to the Constitution of the United States. 'Civil liberties' are a grab-bag of things, and the US has nowhere near a monopoly on them, and while the CCTV surveillance is bad in the UK, it's not the be-all and end-all of 'civil liberties'. Similarly, counter to the article's statement that US citizens expect their government to serve them and UK 'subjects' expect to serve their government, this simplistic statement is entirely undone by the attitude towards healthcare - a fundamental part of human life, where the expectation of the individual is the opposite of the author's statement. In healthcare, the UK citizen expects the government to serve them, the US citizen doesn't. It's not just healthcare - there are plenty of fields where if something is not ideal, the UK expectation is for the government to fix it, and the US expectation is for private enterprise to fix it. Hell, even the phenomenon of welfare dependence, rife in some areas of the UK, comes from the expectation that the government owes the individual something. They violate no Bill of Rights or written constitution because Britain has neither. A British lawyer put me to rights very clearly on this point: the UK does have a constitution. It's in an arrangement of documents that all together describe how the country is run - there just isn't a document with the title 'The Constitution of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland'. Americans put an unusual highlight on the citizen's rights provided by the constitution - usually a nation's constitution is mostly how the political apparatus is arranged: there are two political houses, upper and lower; representatives are elected this way; judicial system has these powers and is selected that way; so on and so forth. The UK definitely has documents describing how it is run politically. Keep in mind also that if you worship in particular the US Bill of Rights, you're missing out on the amendments that outlawed slavery and allowed universal suffrage. The US Bill of Rights is far from complete. Given also that constitutions don't usually go into human rights in detail, all this kind of criticism boils down to is sensationalism.
e12e 13y ago
I think it's more that Brits have been subject to massive (CCTV) surveillance for so long that these new revelations doesn't seem as shocking. Additionally, all of us from Europe have assumed the US have been spying on us ever since the first Carnivore/Echelon rumours -- I mean what did we think all those NSA listening stations in the UK and Germany were for, if not monitoring communications? We don't have any protection from spying by the US constitution (or against being killed by drones, for that matter) -- the favourite trite semantic straw man of US "libertarians"[1] (We the people, but not, you know foreign people - they we can assassinate and spy on even if they're our allies -- and that's certainly not a legal or moral issue -- it's only an issue when the private-government military-industrial terrorcomplex are actually turned on US citizens it's a problem...)). After the intelligence agencies got away with incompetence/malfeasance regarding Iraq, contributing to hundred thousands of civilian deaths in an illegal war (arguably for the benefit of Big Oil and military contractors), without anyone being prosecuted or even fired -- why would we assume they didn't play fast and loose with moral grey areas that fall within their legal charter (spying on foreign nationals, ie: us) ? Anyway, the title of the story brought to mind this story from 2008: The Get Out Clause, Manchester stars of CCTV" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/1938076/The-Get-Out-Clause-Manchesters-stars-of-CCTV-cameras.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/1938... [1] Note the quotes, there are of course many individuals and groups in the US that do good and important work for privacy and other rights-issues.
boredstat 13y ago
I don't really like this phrasing: "1.85 million CCTV cameras in the UK, of which 1.7M were privately owned, 0.03M" And the later argument about proportions: "That's 92% of them under private ownership. They exist, by and large, to deter criminals from breaking into and stealing from stores and commercial..." I'm curious about the distribution of the 0.03M (30,000) cameras apparently "fixed" and publicly owned. If they are concentrated in certain regions, which is more like what I think I've read about before, then you really do have surveillance centers.

78 points by lelf 13y ago

I'm not convinced by the idea that surveillance in Britain is worse than in America or other first world countries. Yes there are a lot of CCTV cameras, there are a lot in most American cities too, in both cases most of them are operated privately. What is different is that Britain has a much higher population density, so the surveillance appears more obvious, and makes for some skewed stats. As for GCHQ, I would be surprised if they were notably worse than the NSA when it comes to snooping.

ris 13y ago

Answer: if I decided to point a camera out into the public street from my window and record everything I would expect to be allowed to do so. And as such, I extend the right to anyone else, so that when I'm in a public place, I'm fair game. There's nothing anyone can do about it, so it's pointless worrying about or trying to control it.

rwmj 13y ago

We don't. We also know the committee meeting was a whitewash and the ISC is not doing their job. And at least some of us will punish MPs for this at the next election.

basicallydan 13y ago

I think it's because it rarely directly affects the majority of people in a negative way, so it's hard to notice what the problems with over-surveillance might be. Also, we hear about the good that comes from surveillance - such as preventing and punishing crimes - more than we hear about the bad that comes from it.

devx 13y ago
That will always play a role in situations like these. However, you can see things are turning around in US, at least with the population. I think the issue in UK is the old "boiling the frog" theory. They've gotten used to it, they've embraced it, so now they aren't particularly in a rush to throw stones at it. But that's the population. The article already mentions why nobody in the Parliament says anything bad against it - the opposition started all of this, and the others are in power. I do think the lack of a proper Constitution is also a major problem for UK. For example, in US, whenever someone tries to stop you from speaking, you can easily point to the 1st Amendment and say it's your damn right to say anything you want, even if it's scary law enforcement people. In UK, you don't really have anything like that, so people may "feel" something is wrong - but in comparison to what?! They haven't really put the principles on paper. It's all pretty vague and it's hard to get angry at a vague target.
- Silhouette 13y ago
  This is a a classic tyranny of the majority situation. One way to think of it is the difference between a mere democracy and a principled, civilised society. The former is two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner. To get to the latter, you need three animals to decide on the dinner arrangements before they know which of them is the sheep.
- audiodesigndan 13y ago
  There is exactly something like that in the UK. Freedom of speech has long been a Common Law, with centuries of precedence. Not only that, Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights guarentees freedom of expression, which was incorporated in the UK as part of the Human Rights Act 1998. Learning more on the subject will help you greatly.

oracuk 13y ago

Some of the commentators on the original article also pointed this out. We've been facing domestic and foreign terrorism for a very long time. We found our societal balance for freedom and security some time ago. If anything the Internet and commercial surveillance for marketing purposes are the things that have disturbed the balance rather than the previously accepted concept that we are surveilled by the state in every public and private forum. Written down it sounds terrible but it works in practice.

walshemj 13y ago
Yep there are places in the uk (NI) even today civil servants and others considered "crown" agents have personal protection weapon licenses.

Silhouette 13y ago

Many of us don't willingly accept the level of surveillance that we now know is happening. Unfortunately, our electoral system is very much an all-or-nothing proposition, and therefore who holds power tends to be dominated by how the major parties deal with a very small number of issues that can each have a big effect on a lot of people. Other than right after an event like the 7/7 bombings, neither national security nor civil liberties get anywhere near the top of most people's lists. Those people are too busy hoping they have a job next week, or trying to get the best possible education for their kids, or worrying about the quality of care that sick or elderly family members are receiving, or wondering if they'll ever be able to buy a home somewhere they really want to live. All the main political parties in the UK obviously understand this, and that means policy on other issues is dominated by concerns other than the immediate will of the electorate. In some cases, it's special interest groups. In this particular case, there's probably some of that going on, but there's also the politics of fear, where no-one wants to be the guy who didn't vote for something security-related if the next horror happens on their watch. This is a horrible situation if you are a citizen who believes the threats are overstated or the privacy concerns are dangerous, but it's a rational response -- indeed, it's probably the only rational response -- under our current political system, and that's why basically every major party here is reluctant to oppose these kinds of infringements too strongly.

sturd 13y ago

It really embarrases me, as a Brit, that the majority seems so apathetic about the surveillance in place. Though nobody I know seems to understand the sheer scale of what's going on. Personally, any attempts I've made to try and explain things have fallen on deaf ears...

DanBC 13y ago

It depends on the surveillance. GCHQ slurping all my data doesn't have much negative effect. But some of the surveillance the Americans go through isn't okay here - drug testing in the workplace is limited for example. And GCHQ's slurped data is tricky for law enforcement to use, which is why there's been a debate about changes to the law to allow (or not) collection of metadata by domestic law enforcement agencies.

UnoriginalGuy 13y ago
Drug tests and credit checks in the workplace always struck me as being screwed up.
- walshemj 13y ago
  Yes its only really jobs requiring DV clearance that do the drug test thing - though Amazon is requiring it for warehouse workers which is taking the piss they really need to lose a court case over that.
  - richardjordan 13y ago
    Really? Not in my experience. I lived in Texas a few years and every job seemed to require drug testing and often credit checks. I always wondered why folks just didn't say fuck you but once I'd lived there a while I learned that in those parts of the country where people like to talk about freedom and independence they sure like to accept their obedient roles when it comes to companies telling them to jump.

codex 13y ago

Mass surveillance is the natural state of man. When humans lived in clans and tribes, everybody knew everyone else's business, including the leaders. Today, that social surveillance network still exists (tips given to police, etc.) but in a degraded form now that people live more individually. People instinctively dislike spying because they want to be in control of their own PR (social status), and secrecy gives them advantage even while it hurts society as a whole due to information asymmetries. Gossip networks tend to distort the true picture as well. This, humans evolved to protect their own secrets while simultaneously snooping and gossiping on their neighbors. However, living in an organized society involves compromise for the greater good, and community surveillance is one of those compromises. One might as well ask why the Brits accept paying taxes. Instinctively, you hate to part with your money, but you must do it.

recuter 13y ago
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Mass surveillance is a terrible idea not because of the potential for personal embarrassment but rather for the countless ways it can go very wrong.
- ne0codex 13y ago
  Other ideas have the potential of going very wrong, it's in the implementation, which sounds like a challenge worth attempting to take
  - recuter 13y ago
    What for? A tiny bump in crime fighting efficacy? I assure you, there are many other more cost effective ways to do that.
Silhouette 13y ago
Mass surveillance is the natural state of man. So is beating up your weak neighbour to take his food for your dinner. We're supposed to be more civilised than that by now.

iuguy 13y ago

The article completely glosses over the fact that the reason for the media silence is the D-Notice (officially DA-Notice but no-one calls them that) in effect. This is a 'voluntary scheme' in which the government asks the media not to cover a story on the grounds of national security, but really it's only voluntary if you don't mind having your access to government more or less killed off, which for most news outlets is a no-no. Only the Guardian has the balls to stand up on this one, and you've seen what's happened with shadowy goons destroying laptops, people detained at airports and the attempts at intimidating the editor.

walshemj 13y ago
And the fact that the media have been grossly hacking and spying on the public - the media in the uk dont have the rosy view of "journalists" that the USA has. People are more concerned about shady media moguls and the importation of invasive hr practices that for example amazon are doing in the uk. And we dont have the paranoid style that infects the USA political discourse.

KaiserPro 13y ago

Its because of many things. One thing for our american cousins to note is that up until recently we were regularly being bombed because of our (in)actions in Ireland. THis is why there are no bins on the underground, and why there are only hand full of ways to drive into the city of london. another problem is that our media is on the whole sympathetic, or apathetic to spying. The mass hysteria surrounding paedophiles is a wondrous tool for ill thought out laws. The public don't really like being spied on, but assume if you are against, you must be up to something.

firegrind 13y ago

they don't. foiling curtain twitchers is as much part of british culture as tea.

Tzunamitom 13y ago

What a trite article. To claim that the British are complacent about state surveillance because we all perceive ourselves as "royal subjects" smacks of fire-starting by a Guardian columnist desperately trying to draw attention to his newspaper's position to gather more readers. There are a number of factors why this is less of an issue in the UK than it is here in North America, including: 1. Brits fundamentally trust their government more - not politics, but the concept that a state government exists first and foremost for the good of the people is more prevalent in the UK. 2. The influence of special interest groups and corporate electioneering is much more muted in the UK. 3. As someone else mentioned, CCTV cameras in themselves are not bad - most are privately operated and NOT linked to a central government data store. 4. As someone mentions in the article comments, the UK has been a target of terrorism for much longer than the US. 5. Increased education levels in the British armed forces, garner more confidence in the military to do the morally correct thing given a tough decision. 6. Britain is institutionally far more liberal than the US with less interference in policy from religious extremists and a history of judges making activist decisions in order to preserve civil liberties where legislation threatens to undermine established convention tantamount to constitution (given the choice I'd rather have a country that is self-restraining and no constitution than a constitution that restrains, but a government that looks for ways to usurp it). This is not to say that there is not a worry about civil liberties in the UK - you only have to look at the furore about the proposed introduction ID cards a couple of years back to see that the Brits care a lot about civil liberties, they just see the threats in different terms.

deleted 13y ago
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objclxt 13y ago
I agree with most of your points, except for these two: > Britain [has] less interference in policy from religious extremists [than the US] This seems a slightly rose-tinted view of British history. I would argue Britain actually has more interference in policy from religious extremists than the US. What would you call the Lords Spiritual (the 26 seats in the House of Lords reserved for Anglican Bishops) if not religious interference in policy? Or how about Section 28, which was proposed and pushed through primarily by religious groups? US government policy is frequently influenced by religion, but the separation of Church and State tempers this, and the Supreme Court has frequently overturned legislation that has been drawn up with religious influence (and indeed, directly overturned legislation that actively promotes religion in state institutions). In the UK the church is the state. You only have to look at the recent issues surrounding gay marriage (versus civil partnerships) in the UK to see there is religious interference in governmental policy. > a history of judges making activist decisions in order to preserve civil liberties where legislation threatens to undermine established convention I would argue the US has an equally strong history of this, and the current Supreme Court system in the UK owes a lot to the US. Indeed, I think the etymology of the phrase 'activist judge' stems from the US, not the UK.

makmanalp 13y ago

I had heard that during the peak of the conflict with the IRA, more brits came to view surveillance as necessary to safety, and then it remained that way. Don't know how true this is. It's eerily similar to the 9/11 situation and the Patriot Act though.

JulianMorrison 13y ago

I think the fundamental difference UK versus USA, is that it is very hard to inflame passions in the UK about abstractions. Concrete examples of abuse are needed to arouse our ire, and we only get angry at the actual abuse, not the potential for it. So for example, we get more annoyed about police undercover spies having sex under false pretences, than about the fact that there were police undercover spies in peaceful protest groups (despite the fact that is clearly egregious overkill and bad for democracy).

jsmcgd 13y ago

I think a major reason for the indifference is ignorance. Many people here in the UK are not well informed on this issue. I'm shocked at how many people I've spoken to about this and they're only hearing it for the first time. Apart from the Guardian no major news outlet that I have seen has given this scandal any prominence. They have mostly acquiesced with the recommendation from our security services that they don't report on this issue. In my opinion another scandal in itself. Another factor may be that people in this country don't think the risk of tyranny returning as credible. They don't believe that the danger posed by mass surveillance will ever be anything but hypothetical, that somehow a free society is our national destiny. This shocking complacency manages to both totally ignore human nature and the lesson from almost every history book ever written. As a country I really hope we get real about these issues and that we stop taking our hard won civil liberties for granted. Ultimately they're the only things that can be trusted to truly protect our democracy.

richardjordan 13y ago
I think to the contrary that Brits, an Europeans in general are vastly more sensitive to the threat of nazi-style or communist-like government - and corporate - oppression than Americans who are, by and large, complacent on this topic despite all the anti-government rhetoric you hear. As a result governments can't get away with as much because people watch closely. Combine this with the greater sense that the government runs the provision of critical services like healthcare and people have a better relationship with their government so fight over what matters, and there tends to be a good sense of what that is. Also the British political system is far more responsive to the electorate than is the US system which famously has less churn among elected officials than the old soviet politburo. This means that the electorate has more confidence in its ability to effect change.

cma 13y ago

The US was never attacked in WWII. The UK was. Look at how extreme September 11th made us, even 12 years later, and you can imagine what WWII did to Britain.

gwern 13y ago
> The US was never attacked in WWII. Pearl Harbor comes to mind.
- cma 13y ago
  You are right, though remember Hawaii wasn't a state at that time. Anyway, it had nowhere near the psychological impact on the broader US public than the blitz did on Britain.
  - bazzargh 13y ago
    There was one lethal attack on the mainland - a fire balloon bomb. 6 people were killed. But yes, not on the same scale. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_balloon#Single_lethal_attack http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_balloon#Single_lethal_atta...
  - 27182818284 13y ago
    >You are right, though remember Hawaii wasn't a state at that time. I had to interview a lot of elderly people on their thoughts about hearing WWII for a high school exercise. Overwhelmingly they said their initial response was "Where is Pearl Harbor?" but it didn't matter because it was US military attacked by the proper military of a foreign empire If that doesn't say act of war to people, nothing will. The second thought reported to me most often was one of rage. Comments like "It was a dirty rotten trick!!!" and such.

ballooney 13y ago

This is disappointingly poor for Jonathan Freedland. The most remarkable thing about the session he cites was how unremarkable it was; no one expected any great revelations and no one got any, as even Freedland himself said in a radio interview on the BBC after the session. It was just a bit of theatre. The argument about CCTV cameras as evidence of complacency about surveillance seems silly and tired to me, as silly as an article would be in a British newspaper that concluded that Americans are obsessed with killing each other on the basis of gun ownership rates vs the UK. They're not, of course, the overwhelming majority of gun owners do not buy them with the intention of killing another person. Likewise, the one camera per 11 people crops up a lot and (as far as I know, having a small interest in the actual figure) no groups trying to find evidence for it since have managed to do so, in fact the most high profile study that investigated the number concluded that there were 1.85 million CCTV cameras in the UK, of which 1.7M were privately owned, 0.03M were fixed and publicly owned, and 0.12 were on public transport. [1] That's 92% of them under private ownership. They exist, by and large, to deter criminals from breaking into and stealing from stores and commercial premises, just as you might be put off from robbing a convenience store in the US in the knowledge that the store-owner might be armed, here it's completely normal to see signs outside a shop saying "These premises are protected by CCTV" - note the use of the word protected - and indeed most hardware shops will have this sign in stock right next to the 'no smoking' signs. They're there so you can give something to the insurance company and if lucky there will be something to help the police get an ID. I find their presence as much a threat to civil liberty as dash-cams are to the civil liberty of the average russian. Likewise stuff is called 'Her Majesty's $FOO' for entirely vestigial, historical reasons. When Obama says 'God Bless America' at the end of every speech we don't honestly think that he's designed a policy whose success is contingent upon divine intervention, jokes about healthcare.gov aside. There are differences in the relationship between people and their state in the UK vs other places just because of different evolutionary paths (socially rather than biologically!). For instance, an American economist friend expressed surprise that we didn't have a legal separation of church and state, and how dangerous it was, and how we should get one like in America. Well, people here are just not that religious in comparison to the US, and my experience of the US is that the church has enormously more influence over US politics than it does in the UK anyway, despite the law. It's just not really a thing here. I'm sure if a modern British Prime Minister were to say 'God Bless the UK' at the end of a speech he'd be sectioned under the mental health act, and the PR people would go into overdrive to explain that he didn't really mean it. Similarly, If UK employers were to switch to a policy of only allowing two weeks holiday per year, and why not add random drugs tests while we're at it, there would be riots at the outrageous and dangerous attempt at enslavement of the population, and the government would likely be overthrown if it failed to act. I use these just as an example to illustrate the differences in what's considered important, and of what people are vigilant, between the two nations. "Many Brits accept the old securocrat formulation: If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. " Do they? I don't think I've met that many people who think that - maybe I just move in the wrong circles - but my most prominent encounter with that sentiment was as an argument whose flaws we had to point out in a Critical Thinking class homework at secondary (ages 13-18) school, as part of one of the national school syllabuses. I'm very worried about state surveillance, it's a constant fight, and while I'm thankful that the most egregious proposals of recent years - national I.D cards and 90 days detention without trial - were rightly defeated, I'm under no illusions about winning a battle vs winning a war. But you have to pick your battles, and the reason I think this article is guff is because it misidentifies what to fight, and plays up to superficial and lazy observations of the UK from outside, as if to appeal to its intended audience. All that's missing is a reference to bad teeth. Like I said, surprisingly bad from Mr Freedland, who otherwise has been quite eloquent on the subject, I think. [1] http://www.politics.co.uk/reference/cctv http://www.politics.co.uk/reference/cctv Edit: typo.

rudin 13y ago

I would just like to point out that many British people find the word Brit pejorative and that you shouldn't use it unless you want to offend.

shocks 13y ago
Brit here, since when do we find that offensive? Being 'offended' is bollocks.
- richardjordan 13y ago
  I've never heard this in my life. I don't know a single Brit who finds the term offensive. Unless you're talking the. Brit Awarss. Now there's some bollocks.
  - rudin 13y ago
    I understand if you are fine with it. It has lost most of its meaning with history but I still cringe a little whenever I read it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_names_for_the_British#Brit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_names_for_the_Briti... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Brit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Brit
    - shocks 13y ago
      I think the keyword here is historically…
stuartd 13y ago
What nonsense.
nly 13y ago
So by 'many British people' you're referring to the Scots? ;)
boredstat 13y ago
It does happen for San Fran.

stuartd 13y ago

Because we're craven.

vacri 13y ago

It helps that Britain ... has a curiously complacent attitude to civil liberties These would be liberties like universal healthcare? Or perhaps the right to roam? Or what about when Britain made it a moral point to get its citizens out of Guantamo? How about concepts like "Police don't need to carry guns day-to-day to do their jobs"? I've spoken here on HN about getting out of the car during a traffic stop because I was tired of the subtle power play where the police talk down to you while you're sitting. I had several responses, serious responses, from Americans saying that I was crazy because I was likely to be shot. Even after clarifying that I'm not being aggressive, just getting out of the car and even proactively handing over my license, they were resolute that such actions could lead to me being shot. Is this, as the author claims, the result of a population that expects their government serves them? What a citizen should expect, rather than a subject, to be so fundamentally afraid of being murdered by their own police despite having done no wrong? There are things that are 'civil liberties' that are not listed in the first ten amendments to the Constitution of the United States. 'Civil liberties' are a grab-bag of things, and the US has nowhere near a monopoly on them, and while the CCTV surveillance is bad in the UK, it's not the be-all and end-all of 'civil liberties'. Similarly, counter to the article's statement that US citizens expect their government to serve them and UK 'subjects' expect to serve their government, this simplistic statement is entirely undone by the attitude towards healthcare - a fundamental part of human life, where the expectation of the individual is the opposite of the author's statement. In healthcare, the UK citizen expects the government to serve them, the US citizen doesn't. It's not just healthcare - there are plenty of fields where if something is not ideal, the UK expectation is for the government to fix it, and the US expectation is for private enterprise to fix it. Hell, even the phenomenon of welfare dependence, rife in some areas of the UK, comes from the expectation that the government owes the individual something. They violate no Bill of Rights or written constitution because Britain has neither. A British lawyer put me to rights very clearly on this point: the UK does have a constitution. It's in an arrangement of documents that all together describe how the country is run - there just isn't a document with the title 'The Constitution of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland'. Americans put an unusual highlight on the citizen's rights provided by the constitution - usually a nation's constitution is mostly how the political apparatus is arranged: there are two political houses, upper and lower; representatives are elected this way; judicial system has these powers and is selected that way; so on and so forth. The UK definitely has documents describing how it is run politically. Keep in mind also that if you worship in particular the US Bill of Rights, you're missing out on the amendments that outlawed slavery and allowed universal suffrage. The US Bill of Rights is far from complete. Given also that constitutions don't usually go into human rights in detail, all this kind of criticism boils down to is sensationalism.

e12e 13y ago

I think it's more that Brits have been subject to massive (CCTV) surveillance for so long that these new revelations doesn't seem as shocking. Additionally, all of us from Europe have assumed the US have been spying on us ever since the first Carnivore/Echelon rumours -- I mean what did we think all those NSA listening stations in the UK and Germany were for, if not monitoring communications? We don't have any protection from spying by the US constitution (or against being killed by drones, for that matter) -- the favourite trite semantic straw man of US "libertarians"[1] (We the people, but not, you know foreign people - they we can assassinate and spy on even if they're our allies -- and that's certainly not a legal or moral issue -- it's only an issue when the private-government military-industrial terrorcomplex are actually turned on US citizens it's a problem...)). After the intelligence agencies got away with incompetence/malfeasance regarding Iraq, contributing to hundred thousands of civilian deaths in an illegal war (arguably for the benefit of Big Oil and military contractors), without anyone being prosecuted or even fired -- why would we assume they didn't play fast and loose with moral grey areas that fall within their legal charter (spying on foreign nationals, ie: us) ? Anyway, the title of the story brought to mind this story from 2008: The Get Out Clause, Manchester stars of CCTV" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/1938076/The-Get-Out-Clause-Manchesters-stars-of-CCTV-cameras.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/1938... [1] Note the quotes, there are of course many individuals and groups in the US that do good and important work for privacy and other rights-issues.

boredstat 13y ago

I don't really like this phrasing: "1.85 million CCTV cameras in the UK, of which 1.7M were privately owned, 0.03M" And the later argument about proportions: "That's 92% of them under private ownership. They exist, by and large, to deter criminals from breaking into and stealing from stores and commercial..." I'm curious about the distribution of the 0.03M (30,000) cameras apparently "fixed" and publicly owned. If they are concentrated in certain regions, which is more like what I think I've read about before, then you really do have surveillance centers.