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FROM BLETCHLEY PARK TO A BRAVE NEW WORLD 549
Such ominous warnings from the Director of Public Prosecutions
are rare, and should give us real pause for thought.
GCHQ has travelled a long and winding road. That road stretches
from the wooden huts of Bletchley Park, past the domes and
dishes of the Cold War, and on towards what some suggest will
be the omniscient state of a Brave New World. As we look to
the future, the docile and passive society described by Aldous
Huxley in his Brave New World is perhaps a more appropriate
analogy than the starkly totalitarian predictions offered by
George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Bizarrely, many British citizens
are quite content in this new climate of hyper-surveillance,
since it is their own lifestyle choices that have helped to create
it. GCHQ and its partners at NSA did not invent our current
'wired world' - or even wish for it, for as we have seen, the
new torrents of data have been a source of endless trouble for
the overstretched secret agencies. As Ken Macdonald rightly
points out, the real drivers of our wired world have been private
companies looking for growth, and private individuals in search
of luxury and convenience at the click of a mouse. The sigint
agencies have merely been handed the impossible task of making
an interconnected society perfectly secure and risk-free, against
the background of a globalised world that presents many unpredictable
threats, and HOW has few boundaries or borders to
protect us.
Who, then, is to blame for the rapid intensification of electronic
surveillance Instinctively, many might reply Osama bin
Laden, or perhaps Pablo Escobar. Others might respond that
governments have used these villains as a convenient excuse
to extend state control. At first glance, the massive growth of
security activity, which includes not only eavesdropping but also
biometric monitoring, face recognition, universal fingerprinting
and the gathering of DNA, looks like a direct response to new
kinds of miscreants. However, the sad reality is that the Brave
New World that looms ahead of us is ultimately a reflection of
ourselves. It is driven by technologies such as text messaging