Mohamed Jama
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09:22:54 am on November 22, 2007 | # |
Disabuse yourself of any notion that those nice people who wrote the Magna Carta are any more concerned about personal freedoms and privacy than are U. S. border collies. Whether it’s to show us that anything we can do they can do better or simply creeping authoritarianism, the British government is putting into effect a hugely expensive plan ($2.5 billion over the next 10 years, the cost to be passed on to travelers) to collect a wide variety of data on every traveler daring to enter or leave those sceptered isles, whether by air, sea or ground (the Chunnel).
How wide? Well, everything from name, rank and serial number to your rap sheet, FBI file, automobile license plate and credit card number. And who knows, probably your FaceBook page and that New Year’s-party video your neighbor posted on YouTube. Up to 53 different pieces of information, which will be recorded when you buy a ticket to or from the UK. And the Brits will keep the information for as long as they please.
Got an outstanding traffic ticket or any other court fine? Go back home or pay it. You were once arrested for peeing beer in a dark parking lot and it got turned into a sex-offense charge? Don?t even bother to pack. Involved in a messy child-support case that hasn’t been settled? Stay home. Somebody has a file on you because you were thrown out of a Bush rally? Go to France instead.
Oh wait, the French might do it too.
The European Union’s Justice Commissioner, one Franco Frattini, last week came up with a plan to collect and store such data on anyone flying into or out of the entire European Union, thus creating a vast no-fly list. Though as one opponent of the expense pointed out, “political activities like opposing the Iraq war lead to people getting on no-fly lists [in the U. S.].” There you go.
Granted, the offenses and penalties I listed before the jump are far-fetched, and initially, at least, the plan will only ding travelers who raise the usual border-crossing red flags — narcotics arrests, military awols and the like — but we’re getting used to seeing the outer limits of personal freedoms and civil rights pushed, extended and ignored.
The United Kingdom plan is called Project Semaphore, and it involves the creation of an “e-border” ringing the UK — e for electronic. The people patrolling that electric fence say that “all data that we are currently legally able to obtain when a passenger enters the UK will be collected,” and that the data will be “captured prior to the passenger’s arrival.”
Identifying potential terrorists is a valid pursuit. But somehow, using that intent to also target every other variety of malfeasance bothers me. “Data searches have already led to the tracing of persons wanted for murder and other serious crimes,” the UK’s Border and Immigration Agency says. “[It] has identified several sex offenders. Alerts have led to the seizure of large quantities of cocaine, cannabis and tobacco [and] have led to the identification of persons traveling on forged documents, suspected asylum abuse and facilitators. Successful trials of the new system have already led to more than 1,000 criminals being caught and more than 15,000 people of concern being checked out by customs, immigration or the police.”