Rude awakening

You can wake a sleeping animal if you stare at them intently enough. A cat, a dog, or even a slumbering husband, will start to twitch under your eyes, and then spark into wakefulness. It is an instinct from the days when eyes on your skin in the night meant someone had come to get you. And how often have you, when awake, known that someone was staring at you, and turned around to check who it was?

Vision is more like touch than we give it credit for. Touching someone else without their consent is a criminal offence, varying in magnitude according to the force used or the body part visited, but staring at someone is not yet a crime '“ although it might earn you a thump in the kisser in an insalubrious hostelry.

Our instincts tell us that being watched is intrusive; yet we are watched all the time. Visual surveillance has become so much a part of our lives that most of us no longer notice it, no longer mind much, and harbour various woolly and inaccurate thoughts about how CCTV deters crime, catches criminals, and does not affect those who have nothing to fear.

Big brother is watching you

Surveillance of our vehicles, and therefore where we go, is consistent and perpetual. Automatic Number Plate Recognition systems read over 10 million drivers a day '“ not just serial murderers on their way to their next killing or mad people driving at 120 mph, but anyone who potters down the M4 to see their auntie. And if you were so foolish as to turn off into a certain service station, and linger too long, ANPR, plus the link it gives a private commercial company into the DVLA, means they can come after you for extra car park charges.

Access to the DVLA '“ and to information about your car, your address, your parking tickets, your insurance records and your speeding offences '“ is open to private firms if they can link themselves into crime reduction: making off without payment is of course what terrorists would do, so is ample justification for handing over intrusive powers to Esso and Shell.

Police cars have ANPR technology installed which can read numbers from 600 yards away, linked to other databases which tell them not only if the car is stolen, but if it is taxed and insured '“ or 'otherwise of interest'. There is a plan, and the technology exists, to have chips inserted into number plates, so that every journey every car makes can be logged '“ like ospreys tagged to find how they migrate, we can be watched every step of the way.

Surveillance of our most private medical data will be open to any one of the half million NHS workers who have 'smart cards' and can type in a code if the National Programme for IT (NPfIT, otherwise known as the NHS Spine) gets under way. Happily, its back may be broken by the sheer weight of technological problems '“ it is years late and struggling '“ but the principle is alive and well.

Surveillance of our finances: what we earn, what we spend, and what we do with the gaps between is recorded and held by innumerable different agencies. Go on a demonstration and, even if the FIT teams' retention of material is controlled a little more because of R v Wood, cameras on the ground and helicopters in the sky can, and will, still capture your face. Go on more than one demo, and police are highly likely to recognise you and stick your description or name into a wonderful system they call 'crimintel'.

Often when 'crimintel' is disclosed to defence lawyers (often by mistake as they are notably careless with their information), it turns out to be just gossip. W was seen with X and X was seen with Y and Y was once a friend of Z and, glory be, his cousin was a terrorist... and if you know W then perhaps, after all, you do have something to fear.

Sleepwalking into surveillance

Richard Thomas, the information commissioner, said some time ago that we were sleepwalking into a surveillance state. According to Privacy International, we have already got there. In their 2007 rankings, the UK together with America, China, and the old Russian republics were 'endemic surveillance societies'.

At the end of March 2009, a report on information retention commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust surveyed all the existing UK databases. They found that ten, including the DNA Register and the National Identity Register, were graded red, meaning almost certainly illegal under human rights law or data protection law. Twenty-nine databases, including a ludicrous one called the National Childhood Obesity Database, were amber, meaning they had significant problems and may be unlawful.

Of all the databases surveyed, there were only six green awards; you will be pleased to know that TV licensing, despite those scary adverts, does not infringe your civil liberties.

And if those databases got together, as is intended, what then? We are stumbling into a future where everything we do, say, learn, suffer from medically, mentally or emotionally, buy, visit, protest about, bitch about, support or dislike is capable of being recorded; and is capable of being combined together with other information and being used by people we know nothing about and to whom we have given no consent to rummage in the totality of our lives.

It is high time we all took a stand and started minding this, and saying we mind it loud and clear. Time to refuse to give consent to the NHS spine. Time to demand what information is held on us. Time to demand civil servants stop losing our data. Time to support Liberty's privacy campaigns in their 75th year of protecting our rights. And certainly time to wake up before the intensive stare of the state jolts us from our slumber.