Every so often I catch a talk radio show on the civil liberty infringement du jour, and on these programmes you can always rely on at least one caller who feels compelled to phone-in the opinion “If you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve nothing to fear from CCTV / ID Cards / DNA databases / Blunkett / Judgment Day etc…”. While I have to admire this sunny-minded, Panglossian faith in one’s masters, these people are just naïve idiots. Upon these Big Brother apologists I just find myself wishing horrible things. Please, ironic fate, bestow upon them a false accusation, something juicy – child porn, terrorism, money laundering perhaps, and allow them the joy of the subsequent visit with search warrants. Then see how this might change their opinion of state powers and civil rights.

Lesson learned No 2 – There is no such thing as “innocent until proven guilty”.

The first thing they took were my computers. They said I would have them back “soon”, which turned out to mean two years later. Because of what I do for a living, I had to replace them immediately, at great expense (the cost of which is up to the accused to foot apparently). And to be really irritating, not only did they take my computers, they also took all my peripherals, cables, thingummies and doo-dads, so I had to replace all of those too. They took these items not because they thought they might have relevance to their investigation, but because they didn’t know what they were. If in doubt, impound it. Even after politely telling them that were unlikely to find incriminating data on a router, a monitor, or a CD copy of PhotoShop, I still wasn’t allowed them back. A few hundred quids worth of letters from my lawyer; might as well have been talking to a wall.

They took all my software, which meant my only option was to source pirate copies of software I’d legally paid for. They also took all my back-up discs, without which I had no access to my previous 6 years of work, which made things difficult. They took my address book so I lost everyone’s phone numbers, a stack of unopened mail which I would get the chance to respond to two years later, all my photos, and the contents of my filing cabinet, including all my invoices and tax information, which became the start of a two year battle with a not-so-understanding tax office as to why I couldn’t file a tax return.

Between my computers and discs they had every byte of data I had generated or stored in the last 15 years. They had data going back to when I was young and stupid and probably were doing illegal things and probably bragging to my mates about them in writing too. They had email arguments with my loved ones, juvenilia, god-awful attempts at fiction and lyrics, unpublished rants about the state of the nation, and jpgs of me and my wife in the kind of situations you might only capture when drunk with a digital camera. And in my imagination they had much worse than this, as I didn’t remember what I had stored, I had never needed to. I was a paranoid wreck, wondering what they were looking at, what they were looking for and what they might find by accident.

They also announced they would be enquiring of search engine records to get a list of everything I had ever googled, to see if that turned up anything interesting. Which it’s very likely it would. Would you remember everything you had ever googled? Would there be anything in that deep well of data perhaps that could be used to misrepresent you, if someone so chose?

Lesson learned No 3 – If you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve everything to fear.

Obviously, had I known this was going to happen I would have protected my privacy a little better. As would a guilty party, someone who had got something to hide. But like the idiot caller to the radio show, I considered myself an “innocent”, and never expected there’d be a day when my possessions would be simply taken from me, because an authority figure had decided to make me a target.

Because this is what that caller doesn’t appreciate: we live in a system designed to ensure that we are all guilty of something. The law is a mess of unenforceable, illogical statutes, which only come into play when you are looking for something to convict someone of. Take copyright law as an example; in the digital age, with the ease of data reproduction, it is difficult not to infringe copyright, be it unintentional or not. If you were forced to prove your legal right to every mp3 or jpg on your hard-drive, would you be able to? And this would be the least of offences you could be charged with. Under our “prevention of terrorism” laws you can be detained simply on a misunderstood search term. And, speaking from experience, misunderstanding is something the police excel at.

This is why there is no such thing as innocent until proven guilty, because there is no such thing as innocent. Whether by intention or by accident, we are all criminals just waiting to be found out. For this reason, you do have something to be afraid of, whether you’ve done something wrong or not. We should fear our state, and oppose its power at every opportunity, not apologise for it.

After two years of impotent paranoia, it turned out none of what the police took had any relevance to their case, and nothing from the possessions impounded was referred to in court. They had simply sat on it all for two years, the majority of it hadn’t even been taken out of the sealed evidence bags it arrived in. Apart from the computers, which, rather than just leave sitting there while they halved in value, they took apart and then returned to me broken. The kind of service our tax money pays for.

To be continued …
Previously: Pt 1, Pt 2.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 12:01 am and is filed under criminal justice, introspection, philosophy, society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.