Is it 1984? Is it Germany 1936 again? I keep asking this and the answers get more depressing every time.

The front page of the Guardian today (19 May 2006) has an article on a plan to give council staff access to police intelligence to monitor criminals. The council staff include a huge swathe of people, inclluding park keepers, housing officers and community support officers. (Park keepers? Are there any left?)

Apart from people that you expect to have problems with this, such as the organisation Liberty, even the Police Federation are understandably disturbed, according to the Guardian article. Their spokesman pointed out that the data protection issues are huge. The police are trained to observe high standards in keeping their information secure. Leaks are traceable and should be dealt with seriously. Not only will the myriad council employees not have the training to evaluate information, they will not have the same constraints on their divulgence of it.

When this gets put into operation together with the implementation of the Identity Card fiasco, no one will have anything resembling privacy. It will also be impossible to obtain redress against people spreading malicious tales about you because it will be well nigh impossible to know who is responsible.

If a police officer misbehaves – as of course they sometimes do – you can hold them accountable. If a bin collector or school dinner worker misuses information about you, what possible redress can you have? It won’t even be in their job description that they can’t misuse personal information. Is there reason to think that police training and accountability are a complete waste of time and that networks of neighbourhood spies would be much more efficient?

Diidn’t this sort of thing used to be the responsibility of the STASI or the KGB in what were supposed to be the bad old days before freedom came to Eastern Europe?

To anyone, who served in World War II on the Allied side – my deepest and most sincere apologies. We seem to have thrown away the lives of the people who died then just so that we could set up our own proto-fascist state sixty years later, and under a “Labour” government no less.