ntouk.com - Jerry Fishenden's technology policy blog

I can't be alone in observing that the attitude of political parties towards information technology (IT) is increasingly providing us with insight into their underlying libertarian or authoritarian instincts. More interesting perhaps is the extent to which their approach to IT might influence the outcome of the next election.

We don't seem to inhabit a particularly attractive landscape. Failed projects, overspent budgets, intrusive databases and the surveillance state. Indeed, the mere mention of "information technology" or "computers" and "government" in the same sentence brings to mind a cynical list of negative headlines.

And this technology does not come cheap -- over 17bn GDP will be spent this year alone on IT in the UK's public sector. Exactly how our money is being spent on technology, and the impact it will have on our democracy, is something that should concern us all.

Technology is not only a significant budget item. IT is also proving to be one of the biggest game changers in town, particularly if its current tendency towards helping build an intrusive authoritarian state, at odds with our common law, liberal democracy, continues unchecked.

In the 1780's the philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham originated the concept of the panopticon, a prison designed to allow the central observation of all prisoners without them knowing when, or even whether, they were being watched. Bentham envisaged his panopticon as "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example." But today, technology empowers the state to go well beyond Bentham's modest proposals, enabling an entire nation to be observed rather than just the inmates of a single prison.

In the USA, the "total information awareness" programme aimed to use technology to track over 300 million American citizens, but was later apparently abandoned. Here in the UK however similar plans to monitor the UK population, or even subsets, such as our children, continue to be proposed. The aim of using technology to provide, in that Orwellian phrase, a "single source of truth" about every UK citizen requires potentially every citizen to be tracked and monitored by the state throughout their daily lives. It seems as if we are all regarded as latent offenders now, to be tagged 24/7.

There is a far-reaching transition taking place here that it is important we understand: the digital age has taken us into an unchartered political landscape. Never before has it been possible for a state to accumulate and utilise such large volumes of our personal information so quickly and so effectively and to do so without our consent. Technology amplifies and accelerates the impact of political policies on the UK's democracy.

If we were able to continue muddling through in some ill-defined middle-minded hinterland that was neither utopian nor dystopian, perhaps this would be of little concern. But the former UK Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, is one of many commentators to have observed that we are increasingly becoming a surveillance society and that the UK's approach has exposed citizens and the wider well-being of the UK itself to unnecessary risks:

"The more databases that are set up and the more information exchanged from one place to another, the greater the risk of things going wrong. The more you centralise data collection, the greater the risk of multiple records going missing or wrong decisions about real people being made. The more you lose the trust and confidence of customers and the public, the more your prosperity and standing will suffer. Put simply, holding huge collections of personal data brings significant risks."

The government has increasingly treated IT in a distinct way from the way it regulates other forms of communication and interaction. It seeks to give the state sweeping new capabilities of a kind we have never witnessed before. The state does not, for example, routinely snoop upon our letters sent and received via Royal Mail (when working), or our networks of family, friends and colleagues with whom we interact on a daily basis.

Yet when it comes to the Internet, the state continues to push to give itself powers specific to this new medium: powers that could enable it to know about our every online interaction, including our daily interactions with family, friends and colleagues.

The idea that our routine, daily lives should be monitored and stored in leaky, state-mandated databases represents a fundamental shift in the relationship between the citizen and the state, one that effectively places us all inside a digital panopticon and treats us all as guilty until proven innocent. It also risks squandering large amounts of public expenditure on technology at a time when targeted resources invested in effective human intelligence might be more appropriate.

Every investment in technology as a kind of golden bullet to protect the state has a significant opportunity cost elsewhere. It also helps erode the necessary trust between citizen and state on which our democracy depends. This is not a zero sum game. But the glitter of that gold seems to have blinded many minds that should know better.

Other ambitious, technology-driven programmes, such as ID cards and the associated "deep-truth" state-sponsored databases, the ubiquity of CCTV cameras and the ambiguity of the DNA database, are all further evidence of a tectonic shift between the citizen and the state. If the current political course is maintained, these changes will become, as one government official has boasted, irreversible. We will, as Dominic Raab states in his book "The Assault on Liberty", be left with

"...a few remnants of our fundamental freedoms as lonely exceptions to the commonplace exercise of intrusive power by the state. What once seemed unthinkable now looks possible and, if it goes unchecked, will soon start to look increasingly probable."

There is of course a potential counter-balance: the role of information technology does not have to be negative. It can help support our fundamental liberties such as freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, personal privacy and freedom of movement. Whilst technology may currently be tarnished by association with authoritarian, state-centric ideals, in reality it can act equally well as a means of reinforcing the UKs tradition of a common law, liberal democracy.

Grass roots initiatives on the Web such as theyworkforyou.com and mySociety.org demonstrate another, more positive dimension of technology, its ability to help provide better access to our political representatives and developments in Parliament, and to reinforce and reinvigorate our democratic traditions in the process.

"Sousveillance" has become the technological riposte to surveillance, the idea that we as citizens can instead use technology to monitor, control and bring to account the actions of the state, rather than vice versa. That we can use technology to rebalance trust. Technology is already transforming the way that access to information is happening, changing the way in which popular debate takes place. Technologies such as the Internet and the Web, blogs and social networks, imperfect as they may be, have all opened up new channels of communication, interaction and access, providing the potential to strengthen both our fundamental right to freedom of speech and to hold our political representatives better to account.

This is all well understood at the grass roots level and amongst technologists, but I'm not convinced how pervasive the understanding of these changes has become at the senior levels of policymaking. To understand the reality of what any political party will deliver once it is in power, we should look as much at what they say about the role of technology as we do their more overtly expressed political ambitions. Technology is no longer just an operational or administrative tool. It has become a lever of policymaking itself -- for good, or ill.

If we are to make an informed decision at the next election about the sort of future UK that we want to see develop, we need to learn how to decipher and interpret the various parties' technology policies. They can reveal as much about their underlying authoritarian or liberal philosophies as anything claimed in their more general manifesto pledges.

We will only fully understand the implications of their upcoming manifestoes -- and whether they will ultimately strengthen, or undermine, our liberal democracy -- when we also understand whether they plan to use technology to strengthen the role of the citizen or the state.

And whether they plan to place us all inside the panopticon, or to use technology to protect and strengthen our collective, democratic, common law values.

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