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| English: Maher Arar campaign button for the Security With Human Rights campaign of Amnesty International, USA. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| They know everything worth knowing about YOU! Barack Obama, President of the United States of America, with Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
I am sorry I missed that one, but
his week’s offering carried on the Big Issues theme with an absorbing
documentary by an Argentinian director,
Juan Manuel Biain, called Article 12:
Waking Up in a Surveillance Society.
This is one of those ill-defined problems that confront the human race --- climate
change, poverty, and the pressure of human populations on the Earth’s finite
resources are others ---- all of which
are central to the future of every human
on the planet. All of these have in common that they have crept up on us almost
by osmosis, so silently that they have not yet awakened most of us to their
long-term threat.
Biain’s film was completed in
2010, a co-production of the director’s company Junco, and the London-based
DocFactory, and they have been busy showing it around at special events,
conferences and the like ever since. Nothing in it has been made irrelevant
with the passing of four years: the only major change has been that thanks to
the work of Julien Assange, Chelsea Manning and, pre-eminently of Edward
Snowden, the scale of information gathered by today’s all-powerful States has
been made public for the first time, and
has slowly begun to throw tremors of shock into our complacent populations.
As Biain says on his Web site:
“In the West…the public doesn’t have any fear or connection with any kind of
negative consequences since the end of WW2….The only connection they have is that
it will make them safe.” That is not true of Argentina, where a brutal military
government not so long ago violated every possible human right. So to the
director, this is not a theoretical discussion.
But, he adds, “advances in
technology are leading to greater use of surveillance….At the moment technology
is leading us. How far do we allow this trend to develop without our consent?
To what extent can we live our lives under these new forms of surveillance and
government? ….Can we continue to build a safe and secure society without undermining
our civil liberties? And if so, how?”
That is the dilemma investigated in
this provocative film, which, I have to say, first of all, struck me as being
an amazing work of research. Some 64 global experts in philosophy, privacy law,
cryptography, defence analysis, hacking, political activism and many other
disciplines were interviewed, and their views melded together brilliantly by
editor Guillermo Nieto to present a complete picture. The message is clear:
this trend has already gone far enough, and should be brought to a halt. As one
of the interviewees said: in these days no one can communicate anything to
anyone, by any means, with any assurance that the information therein will not
be gathered by the authorities, and possibly used against you, or someone else,
if the State chooses. People like myself, who communicate something to someone
every day of my life, my main means now being e-mail, continue to believe that,
since we are not doing anything wrong, we should be safe: it doesn’t always
work out that way.
While the film was running I kept
thinking about the four Canadians of Middle Eastern origin who were either handed
over by the Canadian authorities to the United States, who quickly transferred
them to Syria for torturing, or were detained directly by Syria on visits back
to their native land, where they were imprisoned for several years. These four,
Mahar Arar, Abdullah Almalki, Muayyed Nureddin, and Ahmed El Maati, are now
back in Canada, but only Arar has succeeded in winning compensation for the
wrong done him. Their cases illustrate that information gathered by one government
can be, and is, handed on to other governments who can make what use they wish
of it. And these cases have illustrated also how very reluctant governments are
to admit to error.
In another case, Abousfian
Abdelrazik visited his mother in Sudan, was tortured and interrogated by the
local government, which eventually decided there was no reason to hold him, and
thereafter was held in Sudan for years because the Canadian government would
not give him the papers he needed to travel. They went to amazing lengths to
avoid facing the obvious, even refusing to honour a ticket bought for him by
the contributions of Canadians, and resisted until forced by a judgment of a
Canadian court to bring him home. Once he arrived back, they began to make his
life impossible ---- no charges were ever laid against this man --- by freezing
his assets, refusing him help to get his name off a UN no-fly list, and other
measures. In other words, even in Canada, this question of the powers
governments gain through their collection of information about their citizens
is no theoretical matter. That the information gathered is very often wrong is
almost beside the point: if privacy is to be respected, governments have no
right to most of this information.
One other interviewee said it had
been established that high schools in the United States had handed over
information about their pupils to the government, a direct violation of the
right to privacy that once was taken as part of one’s heritage as citizen of a
free country.
That citizens are becoming
inflamed about this and other matters dealing with their relationships with the
power structure is shown by coming films in the CP schedule which deals with
rebellions around the world, the uses and misuses of violence, attacks on
minority peoples and secret trials of so-called dissidents.
Biain’s film was built around
Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document passed in
1948 which bore considerable input from Canadian diplomats. That article reads:
No one shall be
subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or
correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the
right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Canadians should know, almost above other people in the
world, that this Declaration has played a formative role in measures taken in
the 1950s and 1960s that first eliminated discrimination shown against
minorities of various kinds, then established many new rights for citizens both
at work and in their ordinary lives. It is because of the Declaration that
Canada is called to account for its behaviour on human rights, particularly
towards its indigenous people, a matter of embarrassment to our government that
they would, I am sure, rather avoid if possible.
But the message of this film is
that the current collection of detailed knowledge about every citizen goes far
beyond what anyone imagined it could, just a few years ago. This is one of the
dangers of a technology that in these days is running out of human control, a
danger that many distinguished Canadians have warned about --- one I have
personal knowledge of is the late Professor Bruce Trigger, of McGill University,
who warned of this in a prescient lecture he gave on Archaeology and the Future many years ago.
It was disappointing that last
night no one was available to lead the audience in a discussion of the issues,
because this is one issue that really needs to be ventilated to the general public
at every opportunity.
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