Devil's Advocate: Here comes 1984

Are you prepared to accept government surveillance of your every move? Martin Brampton isn't, despite what looks like the coming of a truly Orwellian society.

Maybe I'm paranoid but that doesn't prove they aren't out to get me. These days, it seems as if the government plans to get us all well and truly under its thumb. If the ID cards are not enough, then the anti-terrorist legislation will be.

Authoritarians like to dismiss the 'civil rights industry'. Odd really, since we know exactly what happens in countries like Uzbekistan where people don't have civil rights: arbitrary arrest, torture and imprisonment. Are the victims guilty? No one can ever know but probably not in many cases. Lack of proper legal procedure encourages false reports based on grudges.

Even in this country, while most police officers behave well, there has always been a strand of corruption that has emerged in high-profile miscarriages of justice. The same thing happens on a daily basis in trivial cases where a minority of policemen abuse their powers simply to assert superiority over some hapless individual.

So it is both astonishing and frightening that government is rushing to limit our rights. And it is not as if the complaints are coming from the hoi polloi. No less a person than the UK's Information Commissioner is sounding warnings about the trend towards a surveillance society. He objects to the insistence that we must all record information such as everywhere we have ever lived and then keep updating it until we die.

Moreover, all this is likely to be linked to CCTV face recognition and automatic number plate recognition. George Orwell's novel 1984 was inspired by the fear that a Stalinist communist regime would come to dominate people's lives. It seems as if, with the threat of Kremlin domination long gone, we are going to allow our own government to create 1984 for us.

It is also astonishing and frightening that such an enormous change is being rushed through with little sign of serious thought. Over centuries, we evolved a situation where the individual citizen did not have to account for themselves unless there was evidence of wrongdoing. We do not have to tell anyone where we live or what we are doing. All that seems about to end.

One thought that occurred to me was that I could keep out of at least some of these government computers now that I travel much less. More and more, I am able to work in my office, a hundred yards from home. There are no CCTV cameras in the small town where I live, and quite a few days go by without the use of a car. Inevitably, I depend heavily on communication through the internet.

While at present, most of what I do is in more or less plain text, I started thinking that perhaps more use of encryption would be appropriate - not because I am engaged in law breaking but simply because I would like to assert my right to communicate with who I like and not with anyone else.

But then it occurred to me that the US counted encryption as 'munitions' because it could be used in connection with doubtful activities. It might seem, therefore, that in the government's obsession with terrorism, use of encryption might be seen as tantamount to carrying a bomb in a backpack. Merely exchanging harmless messages with friends and colleagues might be seen as suspicious activity and subject to months of imprisonment without trial.

That leads me to a simple conclusion. I do not want an ID card or to be obliged to constantly feed government computers with details of my life. While I no more wish to be blown to bits than anyone else, I would rather take my chance on it than give up any of my civil rights. Surely life is an adventure in which we have to accept some risks.