Comment: Is the government spying on your Facebook account?

Wednesday, 25, Mar 2009 11:17

By Ian Dunt

Is the government spying on your Facebook account? The short answer is: no, not yet. But they want to.

It transpires that home office minister Vernon Coaker intends to find ways for the government to add messages on Facebook, Bebo and MySpace to the long list of methods of communications it wants to keep track of. Apparently, secret service officials believe social networking sites provide a loophole terrorists or subversives could make use of.

The government's approach to the issue of privacy is not unlike a rat hooked on heroin. It just can't get enough of our personal information.

It began with EU Directive 2006/24/EC, which, it's worth mentioning, the UK helped spearhead. This brought telephone communication into a mandatory data retention scheme which came into force in October 2007. But member states shied away from throwing things like email, web traffic and peer-to-peer filesharing information into the scheme. The British government did not.

The upcoming communications data bill is still an opaque and embryonic bit of law, and the varied comments from government through its life indicate that serious conversations are still being had about how far it wishes to go with it. It will include telephone calls, emails and texts. And those records may have to be retained by private companies providing the communication service, or held in a central government database.

The general reticence of phone and internet firms to retain and provide our data is part of what brought the bill about. Seven hundred or so bodies are forced to provide the government with our records under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), with security services making about 500,000 requests last year. But the companies hate doing this and the Home Office will want to either firm up their commitments in legislation or throw everything into a database. For his part, Facebook's chief privacy officer, Chris Kelly, described the proposal as "overkill".

There's a strong chance the government will throw the social networking idea into RIPA. RIPA is an ugly, ugly thing. Among the many pitiful and objectionable actions it has prompted are all those local council stories you hear about and shake your head, wondering what the country is coming to: Poole Borough Council used it to check the address of a three-year-old child applying for a primary school place. Derby City Council, Bolton, Gateshead and Hartlepool used it to investigate dog fouling. Conwy Council used it to spy on a person who was working while off sick.

The government promises not to look at the content of messages themselves, and restrict itself to who communicates with whom. This seems ludicrous. If two terrorist suspects are emailing each other frequently, on Facebook or anywhere itself, it's difficult to believe security services won't try to discover the content of the messages. Somewhere in the legislation - either in an amendment to RIPA or a clause of the communications data bill - there will be a power, in 'exceptional circumstances' to read content. And 'exceptional circumstances' tend to become much less exceptional than originally intended.

The government simply cannot be stopped. It craves more and more information about us, and appears entirely unable to control itself. The secret service argument - that Facebook could provide a loophole - applies to any form of communication. Having a chat on the street is a potential loophole. I'd like to think the government would only spy on my chats on the street with good reason.

The government may have dropped the phrase 'war on terror' from its rhetoric, but terrorism is still used to justify all sorts of intrusions into the lives of ordinary law-abiding Britons. The reason it will never stop enveloping more and more forms of communication into its surveillance systems is because it never accepted the argument for privacy in the first place. The decision was made early on: there are no votes in privacy, but there are votes to be lost in a successful terrorist attack.

We all want a government that is proactive in stopping terrorism. But we all need a government that respects our privacy as well.