New legislation could mean a powerful Irish Big Brother will be watching us all soon, writes Alan Ruddock

TRY as he might, Michael McDowell cannot be allowed to flick carelessly to one side a report that he is considering introducing legislation so illiberal, and so invasive, that it threatens the very principles of personal freedom that are meant to be enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and which should be the basis of any civilised society.

A report in The Irish Times last week claimed that Mr McDowell, the Minister for Justice, was planning to force telephone companies and Internet service providers to store information about their clients us for up to four years. On the surface, that may not sound like much.

In reality it means that information on every phone call you make, every email you send, every web page you access and even, thanks to the latest technological advances, your every movement with a mobile phone, will be available to the State.

The idea that you can live a law-abiding life unbothered by the State and its institutions is being stripped away. In its place we will have a regime that can pry and probe to its heart's content: your most intimate thoughts as well as your most trivial, your interests and your contacts will be an open book.

Article 8 of the ECHR (European Charter on Human Rights) which states that "everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence" might as well be torn to shreds.

Mr McDowell, in an interview on RTE's News at One, was casually dismissive of the report. The implications of his legislation, which he didn't bother to spell out, would be far less frightening than The Irish Times would have us believe. Trust me, I'm a minister.

No, thanks, Mr McDowell.

Defending personal freedoms in a society where the State becomes ever more intrusive is neither easy nor popular. The get-out phrase for every Justice Minister and for every government is security. Whether it is the international threat posed by the perpetrators of a Bali, a Mombasa or a September 11 or the local threat of an Omagh bomber or criminal gang, governments can and will use those threats to trample on the rights of every one of us.

The old catchphrase that "those with nothing to hide will have nothing to fear" is trotted out to justify these invasions of our privacy, as if every State has a clean record when it comes to dealing fairly with its own citizens.

The logic of Mr McDowell's legislation will be that we have to trust the State to use the information available to it wisely and only for the common good. We will have to trust that its security measures are so sound, its access so limited and its intentions so pure that none of the information falls into malign hands, or is abused by over-zealous or unscrupulous public servants.

Most worrying of all in The Irish Times report was the revelation that Mr McDowell's department was modelling its new legislation on the United Kingdom's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act which allows a plethora of State agencies access to information which should be private. It is, by quite some stretch, the most illiberal piece of legislation in these islands and reflects the authoritarian leanings of Tony Blair's New Labour.

The context for Mr McDowell's proposed invasion of our privacy is undoubtedly complex. The State has always been able to monitor our communications if it had good reason to believe that we were up to no good: old-fashioned interception of our mail and telephone tapping have been used and abused, so why worry about its modern equivalent? It is a logical consequence, he will argue, of technological progress. That progress, particularly in the past two decades, has created global surveillance of communications that is mind-boggling in its reach. Big Brother really is watching and listening.

There can be no argument that some of the surveillance does serve a purpose in fighting crime and terrorism, but it is also used for less pure purposes, particularly industrial espionage.

The central issue Mr McDowell should be addressing is how to protect the citizens of this State from those who would invade their privacy, and not how best to join the invaders. He still has time, if we are to believe his protestations that his legislation is still in its infancy, to change tack.

HIS first concern must be the security of any information that is stored about us for any length of time: encryption the secret coding of information that can only be unlocked by those who possess the code is an option, particularly since encryption techniques have kept pace with other technological advances.

Democratic scrutiny and accountability is also essential: who can access the information, and why, must be tightly regulated and open to challenge. And he must justify every single erosion of our privacy why four years, or two, or three months? Why web pages? Why emails? Why location records on mobile phones? Why, indeed, any of it?

Of one thing we can be certain: the very criminals and terrorists who will be invoked as justification for these measures will be the ones who quickly establish how to circumvent them and also how to access and abuse them.

The people who will be most vulnerable to its use and abuse will be normal people, the people that Mr McDowell will claim to be protecting. The political climate favours Mr McDowell, and favours the relentless erosion of personal privacy.

People worry about crime, about public disorder, about terrorism and about corruption. Any measure that promises to crack down on any or all will, most likely, be welcomed and those who oppose it will be painted as political eccentrics who cherish ideas above safety. That is dangerous nonsense. We should be able to lead our lives without interference from the State so long as we abide by its laws.

We cannot be expected to trust in the innate goodness and honesty of the State and its servants, because it simply is not trustworthy.

Our private lives, our passions and our communications are ours, and ours alone. The State has no right to pry, and no right to store information about us.

Mr McDowell must be challenged at every opportunity. His first response to a direct challenge and that challenge was merely the revelation of what he was about was disingenuous and uninformative.

Surveillance and information storage are clandestine operations when the European Union's Council of Ministers adopted a resolution in 1995 to facilitate the interception of communications the resolution was not published for nearly two years but we must ensure that this latest legislation is hammered into a shape that conforms with freedom and privacy, not invasion and erosion of both.