Nothing to Hide
How much easier would it be for the government to monitor your mobiles, constantly scanning for hate crime
If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear, or so goes the old adage. All the while your country's government is benign, I suppose that may be true, but when it adopts an altogether more authoritarian stripe, what then?
I ask having just read an article at BBC News reporting that Apple will be introducing technology allowing them to scan pictures being uploaded to iCloud. The technology is to be used with the very best of intentions, attempting as it does to prevent the circulation of illegal and sickening images.
The worry however is how such technology will be used in the future. If Apple's scanning system works there will be a good many governments who will insist the technology is made available to them, to allow them monitor their own populations. China is an obvious example of a country that would adopt such a system when it becomes available (assuming they're not already doing so), but one does not have to look too far to find other countries that would find this technology useful.
Take Scotland for example. In March 2021 the devolved government passed the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Bill. The Bill creates a new crime of stirring up hatred against certain protected groups, which is defined as behaving in a threatening or abusive manner, or communicating threatening or abusive material to another person.
It has been argued that the definition of stirring up hatred is too vague and open to interpretation and will have a chilling effect on free speech.
Furthermore, offences can now be committed even in private, and there are many who believe this is an example of interference in private and family life. To quote from the BBC article,
Why should any government, they ask, decide what can and can't be said in the privacy of one's home?
Rather than having to rely on friends and family to dob in transgressors, how much easier would it be for the government to monitor your computers and mobiles, constantly scanning for hate crime.
In such circumstances, and fearing one could be accused of stirring up hate, no one would dare speak out against the prevailing left-wing orthodoxies. That really would be the end of critical thought and free speech.
19th August 2021