Devil's Advocate: Aren't we more than just a number?

There are all sorts of good reasons for CCTV, mobile phone tracking and a national database of citizens and their DNA, the government tells us. Martin Brampton has his doubts…

Before long, everybody will be a number. Tony Blair has announced that we are making a start by giving a number to every child in Britain. Once that is done, it will seem a logical move to number all the adults. Or, if you are patient enough, you could just wait for the children to grow up.

We all know that a good database has a unique key for each piece of information. Government has been storing more and more information about people, but finding a unique key has been a problem. Even the National Insurance number apparently is not quite up to the job, not being absolutely guaranteed unique.

Meanwhile, the police think it would be useful to have a sample of DNA from every person in the country. The slightest trace of organic material at the scene of a crime would then lead quickly to the miscreant, even one who was previously unknown to the police.

The Home Office is popping up with other ideas to keep us all on the straight and narrow. David Blunkett is still agitating to have records kept of every email, phone call and internet session. That adds a whole new dimension to the familiar phrase about anything one says being used as evidence. And if 3G phones take off, anyone with a phone will be locatable all the time it is switched on. ID cards for everyone are regularly proposed.

CCTV is increasingly present in our public places, with vehicle monitoring now commonplace. The effectiveness of face recognition is growing as technology develops. Soon it will be possible to keep track of everybody pretty much wherever they go - especially in the cities, which used to be the places where it was easy to be anonymous.

Can we really be comfortable with such a scenario? The government emphasises some reasons why such moves might be beneficial. Collating information about children from different agencies is done with the hope that tragic cases of child abuse might be averted more readily. That contemporary bogeyman, the international terrorist, is another reason often cited in favour of greater government powers.

If we are cynical about use of technology by authorities, then it all has an air of inevitability. As soon as it is technically feasible to integrate all the data held on citizens, it seems only a matter of time before it is done. There may be some disastrous projects along the way to spice the news pages but progress will ultimately be made.

Sadly, the cynical view seems to be an accurate portrayal of current government trends. Trouble is, the same cynicism is able to suggest further developments. Governments seem to have a natural inclination to be more and more prescriptive about the legitimate ways in which we should be permitted to conduct ourselves.

Yet a bunch of isolated facts about an individual can always be interpreted in different ways. Casual internet browsing can be seen as part of a plot. Theories that link chromosomes with particular forms of behaviour can be used to make accusations based only on an individual’s DNA.

Moreover, government has limited remedies at its disposal. We all applaud the principle of removing children from hazardous situations. But children have in the past frequently been removed into even greater moral and physical danger, sometimes with quite inadequate justification. There is always a question of judgment that needs to be applied to supposed facts.

It has been claimed that an important reason computing ought to be treated as a profession was the need for professional ethics. Is it very likely that IT companies will take an ethical stance over the development of potentially totalitarian technologies? Personally, I rather doubt it. Time to read Brave New World again.

** Martin Brampton is a director and founder of Black Sheep Research (www.black-sheep-research.co.uk ), an independent consultancy providing research, writing and speaking services on a wide range of business and technology subjects. Martin was previously a director at Bloor Research, and has worked with IT as a user and analyst for over 20 years. He can be contacted at silicon@black-sheep-research.co.uk.

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