Overlooked - Liberty

II
Overlooked: Surveillance and personal privacy in modern Britain
Notwithstanding, the casual legislative attitude to privacy in recent years, the British public is rather
more troubled. A YouGov poll commissioned by Liberty in September of 2007 showed 54 per cent of
those questioned did not trust government and other public sector authorities to keep their personal
information completely confidential. Forty-eight per cent think that these authorities hold too much of
their personal information and 57 per cent think that “the UK has become a surveillance society”.
One problem with privacy protection in this country is perhaps that too much has been left to the
courts and not enough delivered by our politics. A two-sided litigation battle may be a good
protection of last resort for the torture victim or the prisoner detained without law. Our courts have
been strong and right in protecting individuals suffering the gravest violations of fundamental rights
from policies based on overblown communitarian rhetoric. They have proved less effective in
conducting the complex balancing acts necessary when personal privacy is at stake. When a young
man appears in court complaining that his DNA is to be held indefinitely on a national database
though he has never been charged, let alone convicted of a criminal offence, our courts have been
too ready to see this as a matter of irritation rather than intrusion, when set against public interest
arguments relating to crime detection. We would argue that the value of privacy is as much a
societal interest as public protection. Behind the young man in this example sit thousands of others
and an important aspect of the flavour of our democratic society itself. In a legal system essentially
without “class actions”, to view the argument as involving a light touch interference with one person
versus sweeping societal benefit, is to miss the value of privacy and to set up a David and Goliath
struggle with, in the absence of divine intervention, privacy and dignity as inevitable losers.
Gareth Crossman is the Policy Director of Liberty (the National Council for Civil Liberties), and one
of the foremost experts on the law, ethics and practice of privacy protection in the United Kingdom.
My outstanding colleague has completely transformed Liberty’s policy reputation and influence in
Westminster, Whitehall, and broader civil society. His background as a solicitor and journalist have
produced an ethical brain which neither fears nor indulges the twin evils of legal and technological
jargon that stand between so many people and proper debate about how best to protect their
personal privacy. This work has been four years in the making. It is reasoned, reasonable and wellresearched.
Liberty and the Civil Liberties Trust are proud to present this as a powerful piece of
advocacy of a democratic value that has been overlooked for too long.
Shami Chakrabarti
Director of Liberty
October 2007