Hundreds of years ago, with the passage of the Magna Carta, Great Britain took a bold step in outlining basic civil liberties for the common man. Unfortunately, over the past few years, the UK has switched from being a basic rights trend-setter, to a surveillance innovator. What ever happened?<\/p>\n
Last year, a troubling new law came into effect which makes it a criminal offense to refuse to hand over one’s encryption key to law\u00a0 enforcement engaged in a ‘legitimate’ investigation. This was tested out in court a couple weeks ago, and unfortunately, the right to privacy lost. As Ars Technica described<\/a>:<\/p>\n The Court stated that although there was a right to not self-incriminate, this was not absolute, and that the “public interest” can supersede this right in some circumstances.fd<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Just last week, the British government floated a proposal<\/a> to require that a passport be shown in order to purchase a mobile phone or SIM card. After all, whats the point in spending all that money recording calls<\/a> and real-time location information<\/a> if you can’t be sure who is speaking on the other end of the line.<\/p>\n Finally, the latest nail in the privacy coffin has been announced: Starting in 2009, British police will be issued hand-held fingerprint readers<\/a>, connected to a central server via a wireless\/cellular connection. Given the existing (and troubling) powers that police have to arbitrarily stop and question people in the street<\/a> due to “terrorism” concerns, this’ll allow them to immediately determine someone’s identity on the spot, with or without a national ID card.<\/p>\n Thankfully, it isn’t yet a crime to not have working fingerprints. Thus, it’s quite quite easy to imagine the privacy-aware crowd turning to acid, glue or other techniques to erase the ridges and swirls from their own fingertips.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hundreds of years ago, with the passage of the Magna Carta, Great Britain took a bold step in outlining basic civil liberties for the common man. Unfortunately, over the past few years, the UK has switched from being a basic rights trend-setter, to a surveillance innovator. What ever happened? Last year, a troubling new law […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1961,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3407,279,3408],"class_list":["post-4","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-fingerprints","tag-privacy","tag-surveillance-state"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/surveillance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/surveillance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/surveillance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/surveillance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1961"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/surveillance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/surveillance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/surveillance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/surveillance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/surveillance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}