Vodafone's law: mass surveillance = mass apathy

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/06/vodafone-mass-surveillance-apathy-mobile

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To care about civil liberties over the past 13 years has been to wake up next to some strange bedfellows. "Bedfellows", on reflection, doesn't really cover the brain-mashing disorientation of the experience: there have been moments it felt like opening one's eyes to find oneself halfway up Sugarloaf mountain with a couple of Mötley Crüe band members, sporting a new DO NOT RESUSCITATE tattoo and thinking: "Eh? I started the evening in Haslemere."

The old my-enemy's-enemy-is-my-friend principle has tumbled down the rabbit hole and gone places that were simply inconceivable in what may well come to be regarded as the idyllically free years of Thatcher and Major. In the Blair era the high court judges, once the default punchline to numerous jokes, were suddenly the last line of principled defence against a government whose assault on ancient liberties was so unprecedentedly intense that, had they remained in power, there would by now literally be a law against locking your bathroom door. Then it was David Davis, a rightwing Tory who would not exactly have been to my tastes in days of yore, whose crusade against the erosion of liberties should mark him out as one of the political heroes of the age.

Even by those standards, though, waking up to find Vodafone unilaterally revealing the secret wires that allow agencies to listen to live phone conversations, and calling for an end to the unwarranted intrusion, is a new standard in what-the-heckery.

Vodafone, if you please! I know people have been saying Thursday night's the new Friday night for ages, but there aren't enough mind-altering substances in the world to explain how it was that this Friday we found ourselves reading disapproving phrases like "without a lawful mandate", and hearing rallying cries like "push back against the agency" – then realising they were coming from the tax-avoiding twazzocks of the telecoms high seas (with whom – and we'll return to this shortly – I have been in a relationship for 17 years out of nothing more than total and unprincipled indolence). What next? A Richard Littlejohn column headlined: "You didn't vote to be spied on, so don't stand for it"? Rupert Murdoch donating a billion pounds to Liberty?

Still, Cheggers can't be boozers, as one of Rupert's headlines once had it, and if Vodafone is being hailed for this "brave step" by the head honcho of Privacy International, then a place must be made for it in the rebels' camp.

In fact, this may well be the spur I need to finally carry on doing nothing about changing my service provider, on the basis that Vodafone now chances to appear to stand for some stuff I deem vastly important. Yet that, alas, feels telling in its way. Isn't there something of my dysfunctional relationship with Vodafone in the great British public's engagement with the past year's revelations of mass surveillance?

The almost unutterably disappointing truth about the tidal wave of spying stories that have characterised the past 12 months is that insufficient numbers of people have been swept away by it. I wondered whether the exposure of the Optic Nerve program, which targeted and retained the webcam images of 1.8 million UK internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, would be the detail that finally humanised the story in a previously unrelatable way, with people deeming it their this-will-not-stand moment. But it wasn't; and, for all the horrifying, already operational details of the "nightmare scenario" Vodafone has revealed, I suspect too many people will continue to sleep easily.

There is no unignorable public revulsion over mass surveillance, however righteously irate the comment sections of some newspapers, including this one, may appear. The story has never found – to use the questionable phrase of the times – its Milly Dowler moment.

Over the past few years, Britain has appeared far more concerned with who did or didn't listen to some celebrities' voicemails than with what should be the epoch-defining question of who can listen to all of ours, and watch us at home via our webcams, and now listen in on our live calls.

But the comparatively minuscule issue of scummy hacks listening to a comparatively minuscule pool of victims is what we had our judicial inquiry into. It is that for which people are on trial at the Old Bailey. Meanwhile, the iniquities of the state don't just go unscrutinised, but increase beneath the cover of the diversion. There is a point at which one of our foremost national characteristics – the absolute insistence on looking at the wrong thing – begins to look like a form of madness; and this, perhaps, is it.

I found it difficult to see Friday's coverage of the 70th anniversary of D-day, and of the Vodafone story, and not to reflect on one of the greatest tricks pulled in recent years: convincing people that the former sort of story has nothing to do with the latter sort of story. And in many ways it doesn't do to overstate the point, when what was at stake on D-day was the survival of an entire country. But it's almost quaint to think that mass surveillance once felt so un-British. What was the fight against totalitarianism about, if it wasn't the freedom to do such an anodyne thing as communicate in peace without some unfettered state snoop in Cheltenham or Maryland being empowered to listen in?

marina.hyde@guardian.com