By Sean Healy
In George Orwell's novel 1984, every move you made was caught on camera. In the Hollywood blockbuster Enemy of the State, satellites watched where you went and heard what you said. And in Gattaca, your DNA was tested, diagnosed for anti-social conditions (alcoholism, propensity to violence, obesity) and used to determine your course in life. These works of fiction have started to look like documentaries.
Closed circuit television cameras trained on the citizenry are becoming more widespread in Australia, especially in busy city centres (like Brisbane's Queen Street Mall or Sydney's George Street cinema strip), in shopping malls and on public transport. According to a 1998 survey by accounting firm Price Waterhouse Cooper, 56% of employers also use hidden cameras, to prevent shoplifting and watch employees.
Satellites allow spy agencies (including Australia's) access to any telephone conversation, fax transmission or e-mail message through top-secret systems like Echelon, which allow enormous quantities of electronic data to be automatically searched for key words (e.g., "bomb", "gun", "demonstration") and then handed on to authorities.
And the Australian government is building itself a national DNA database. The governments of the Northern Territory and Victoria have given themselves the power to collect DNA samples from criminals, and the NSW government wants to join them.
New technologies have rapidly expanded the ability of states to monitor, document and control the populations they rule over. In nearly all cases, this has been a surreptitious process developed under the cloak of "government efficiency" or "preventing crime". We confront a severe threat to our civil liberties and a leap towards the total surveillance society.
DNA profiling
Such technologies and powers, when first introduced, generally have limited uses and target populations, but it never stops there.
On January 23, NSW police minister Paul Whelan announced that the state Labor government will present legislation to parliament this year to allow the compulsory collection of DNA samples from the state's 2000 prisoners serving sentences of more than five years.
The samples would be fed into a computer database and would be matched against DNA samples taken from the scenes of the more than 5000 major unsolved crimes in NSW. Samples would also be collected from those who have previously served time for serious offences. Whelan claimed that such a program would make the job of solving crime much easier and more effective.
The federal government's 1999-2000 budget included $50 million to fund a national DNA database as part of the national crime database, CrimTrac. CrimTrac will link the databases of all state police forces around Australia.
Civil libertarians and prisoners' rights advocates have condemned the proposal as an invasion of privacy and a dangerous precedent. Sarah Hopkin, secretary of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, told Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, "The community must be careful not to get duped by this kind of proposal. This type of thing is arbitrary and tips the balance far too far away from privacy and towards police powers to investigate crime."
Hopkin said the council does not oppose DNA testing of those under suspicion of a particular crime, but it is "opposed to this kind of blanket policy, which invades the privacy of the whole prison population. This is nothing more than a genetic fishing expedition, throwing the net in and seeing what they can pull out."
Brett Collins, the spokesperson for Justice Action, is sceptical about Whelan's claims that DNA testing would help find the guilty and free the innocent. "What this will do is massively increase the amount of circumstantial evidence that police hold", he told Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly. "DNA evidence is not foolproof; it can be altered, misused or swapped very easily. This kind of proposal gives complete control to those who control the database — we're supposed to just trust the police."
Collins also suggested that increased reliance on DNA evidence would give police greater opportunities to "fit up" suspects and noted, "They use these technologies first on prisoners, who are the most vulnerable, then they extend them to other vulnerable groups: military personnel, immigrants, social security recipients. And then giving a DNA sample becomes something you have to do to get your drivers' licence."
Karen Fletcher from the Prisoners' Legal Service in Queensland agrees. "Governments will use the argument, 'If you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to hide'", she told Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly. "But that can be used to justify just about anything and, in time, what started out as a limited program, aimed at only the 'worst' and most 'anti-social', starts applying to everyone."
US and Britain
This certainly seems to be the experience in Britain and the United States, where DNA databases are growing rapidly.
Britain holds the DNA records of 650,000 people. British police can take samples from anyone suspected of, charged with, reported for, or convicted of a recordable offence, and check them against DNA evidence from other crime scenes. An individual's profile is supposedly kept only if they are convicted or cautioned.
In the same month, home secretary Jack Straw announced that police would retain the DNA profiles provided by mass screening exercises, albeit on a separate database. There have been 120 mass DNA screens in Britain, in which entire communities have been "voluntarily" screened to find one local suspect. In September, British Labour prime minister Tony Blair announced that an extra £34 million would be invested in the database so that it can hold the profile of "all active criminals".
In the US, all states collect DNA samples from at least some convicted felons (mostly serious, violent offenders or those convicted of sex crimes). In August, New York's state legislature mandated the collection of samples from all people convicted of any of a long list of offences. Within weeks of this legislation being passed, New York police chief Howard Safir called for the program to be extended to all people arrested for any offence.
In November, at Safir's initiative, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, which represents 12,500 police agencies in 112 countries, called for DNA samples to be collected from all people arrested.
Commenting on the trend, the associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union, Barry Steinhardt, giving evidence to the US National Commission on the Future of DNA Evidence, said: "In less than a decade, we have gone from collecting DNA from convicted sex offenders — on the theory that they are likely to be recidivists and that they frequently leave biological evidence — to data banks of all violent offenders, to all persons convicted of a crime, to juvenile offenders in 29 states and now to proposals to DNA test all arrestees."
Steinhardt argues that it won't stop there. "There have even been proposals to permanently preserve blood samples of newborns that have been obtained to detect rare congenital diseases and to store them for law enforcement and research purposes", he said.
On December 17, New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani backed just such a proposal, saying it could be used not only for law enforcement but to track down "deadbeat" fathers who didn't pay child support. "I don't remember a constitutional amendment that gives you the right not to be identified", Giuliani said.
A similar scheme already exists in Australia. More than 2 million DNA samples are taken from newborn babies each year in NSW, checked for congenital diseases and kept at the New Children's Hospital. Police are currently negotiating access rights, which are at present limited to identifying bodily remains when no other method of identification is possible.
Government
More mundane operations of government also threaten privacy and liberty.
Steinhardt calls the slow, steady conquest of growing amounts of information on citizens "function creep": governments collect pieces of information on citizens which mount up, are filed and then cross-referenced.
The advance of computer technology has revolutionised governments' information resources. Filing systems that were previously separate can now be interconnected by computer, the information shared and easily accessed by different departments.
The information can also be "data matched": social security and tax records can be cross-checked to catch tax evaders and immigration records can be accessed to ensure people aren't paid welfare while overseas. Policing those who use government services becomes increasingly easy.
The federal government's tax file number system allows the Australian Tax Office (ATO) access to an enormous range of information: bank records and financial transaction data, credit histories, land titles, and boat and car ownership details as well as information from other government departments, such as social security and veterans' affairs. Tax officials can even access information from private sources, such as health insurance companies or employers, simply by quoting the relevant section of the act. Other government authorities, such as Centrelink, the police or ASIO, also have certain powers to access tax records.
Chris Connolly, the director of the Financial Services Consumer Policy Centre, told Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly: "There is no doubt that, when all this information is combined, it is a large-scale invasion of individual privacy. Before, maybe one public servant knew a little bit about you, but that was all. Now that's completely changed."
Connolly believes this process was in part accidental, the result of attempts to prevent fraud, for example. But, he added, "There has been a deliberate watering-down of individual rights. Any time a new technology gets introduced, police agencies, for instance, ask for and receive exemptions from any privacy regulation that's drawn up." The federal government's new privacy law includes a page of exemptions for police agencies. ASIO is also exempt.
Roger Clarke, a spokesperson for the Australian Privacy Foundation and an electronic commerce consultant, agrees. "It's absolutely deliberate", he told Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly. He gives the example of NSW's Safe-T-Cam scheme, set up to monitor long-distance truck driving. The scheme's cameras are now being combined with new licence-plate recognition and matching technologies. "They're sneaking it in as a means of private surveillance", Clarke alleged.
Corporate interests
Big corporations also have an interest in encroaching on privacy. Providing the technology is, in itself, worth millions of dollars. "The technology providers ... have to sell these things", Clarke said. "They're not worried about what impact the technology will have on privacy."
But detailed, personal information is also becoming more important to businesses, which are accumulating vast databases of their own, claiming that this will improve their customer service.
Corporate invasions of privacy were initially driven by marketing, Connolly said. "There was a shift from broadcast marketing to one-to-one marketing — and that involves a greater need to intrude."
Today, in the US, some large companies listed on stock exchanges trade entirely in personal information, selling it to direct marketers. The giant corporation Acxiom says its databases cover 95% of US households, or 330 million people.
Credit reference agencies, insurance companies and banks are also building up their data stores. They use some of this information for their own purposes and sell the rest to the direct marketers and data warehouses. In August, the US 10th circuit court of appeals ruled that it was perfectly legal for telecommunications companies to sell data, such as the location, duration and frequency of customers' calls, to telemarketers.
In December, Acxiom announced a joint venture with Kerry Packer's PBL to set up a data store in Australia. The database will be built from telephone directories, property titles, legal judgments, drivers' licences and motor vehicle registration, as well as data on consumers' spending patterns garnered from companies' transaction histories, customer surveys and other sources.
Corporations and governments are increasingly sharing the information they gather. Local councils, for instance, in order to balance their budgets, sell information on dog ownership to pet stores and home ownership to real estate agents. In August, an Australian National Audit Office report criticised Centrelink's information privacy regime, including the downloading of client data for possible sale.
In November, Australia Post's Family Lifestyle survey, sent to 5 million households, asked about respondents' medical histories, their drinking, driving and sleeping habits, and all sorts of other questions. Although Australia Post says the survey was voluntary and that 90% didn't respond, a detailed database of 500,000 households is a significant commercial asset.
In December, the Health Insurance Commission outlined its intention to sell Medicare information to a range of potential buyers which included insurance companies, lawyers and health service providers. On January 27, the Queensland Criminal Justice Commission announced that it was launching an inquiry into allegations that confidential police information had been sold to private investigators.
On the same day, Australian Doctors' Fund chairperson Dr Bruce Shepherd warned of the risks inherent in the national database of patient information proposed in the December Health Online report. The databank would have unique lifetime patient identifiers and smart cards for doctors to access the information. "A lot of people out there want your personal data very badly — commercial organisations, marketing departments, government and researchers", Shepherd said. "The implications for patients are terrifying."
Government outsourcing is also putting more personal information in the hands of private corporations. Centrelink has already sold its debt to private firms for collection and the ATO plans to do likewise. The firms are supposed to keep this information separate from the rest of their databanks and not use it for other purposes. However, as Connolly told Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly: "The information collected by government agencies is bound by their statutory obligations, which is at least some protection. But these firms are governed only by the terms of their contracts, which are probably commercial-in-confidence and so you can't see them anyway."
The relationship between governments and corporations is two-way. "If a company sets up a database that could be of interest to police or the tax office", Connolly argued, "they'll find a way to access it, either through arrangement or through warrants".
Privacy bill
The danger of these developments is not simply that you'll be flooded with personally addressed direct-mail fliers or phone calls offering you medication for your ulcer or help for refinancing your debts. The more information companies hold on you, the more power they have over you: to refuse you credit, to jack up your insurance premiums, to mess you around.
While the federal government has extended its power to pry into every corner of its citizens' lives, it has shown no such enthusiasm to place businesses' use of personal information under similar surveillance. When it was elected in 1996, the Coalition promised to introduce privacy legislation which would cover private sector operations. Under pressure from the companies it shelved the plans, then brought them back in a milder form last year.
The Privacy Amendment (Private Sector) Bill, which was due before parliament in December but was again delayed, is based on industry codes of practice and contains significant exemptions, including small businesses, and no restrictions on "related companies" sharing information. Australian Medical Association president David Brand said on January 24 that under the legislation, information about people's health, political beliefs and sexual preferences could still be released to the private sector without patients' consent.
Despite all the talk about how rapid advances in computer technology have allowed us all onto the "information superhighway" and thereby democratised society, the fact is that the monopoly on information, knowledge and power is not being broken down. On the contrary, it's being built up, quietly, surreptitiously and deliberately.
States and corporations are strengthening their ability to track, monitor and control their populations, and to channel their behaviour — away from being troublesome dissenters, towards being happy shoppers.