March 19, 2024 - 4:30pm
Since the inception of the internet, technological advances intended to benefit mankind have been turned on the population in order to benefit the state. In recent years, investigatory powers laws have sanctioned the state to collect information about us in bulk, retain our internet connection records and intercept our personal messages, all through digital proxies. Now, this concept of the corporate actor being used as an arm of the state for the purposes of surveillance is being extended to the financial sphere.
Tomorrow, a bill is returning to the House of Lords which could grant the Government extraordinary new financial surveillance powers. Amendments to the largely under-scrutinised Data Protection and Digital Information Bill were announced in November of last year, giving banks powers to monitor the accounts of private citizens under the premise of searching for fraud and error in the welfare system. Banks would then be compelled to flag individuals who meet unspecified criteria to the Government. Given the outrageous scale of the proposals, there is good reason why Conservative legislators would hope that they might fall under the radar.
Tackling fraud and welfare fraud is a legitimate aim, yet the Government has measures at its disposal to combat this problem at a targeted level, based on suspicion under existing powers. These proposals perpetuate what is becoming a growing trend when it comes to surveillance powers — that the state sees compromising the privacy of millions of innocent people as a legitimate means to an end, only this time the end is not combating terrorism but the maladministration of benefits.
Meanwhile, reversing the presumption of innocence — the democratic principle that you shouldn’t be spied on unless the authorities suspect you of wrongdoing — sets a deeply damaging precedent. Yet by the Government’s own account, these powers would only recoup around 3% of all fraud in the welfare system, making the population-wide financial intrusion entirely disproportionate to the problem it sets out to solve.
The net is cast wide and the guardrails are non-existent. It is hard to see that the banks would be happy with their newly appointed responsibility as the state’s own financial spies and yet the Government presses on. Saddled with this new responsibility, banks will be forced to use automated systems to carry out a surveillance which brings problems of its own. If scanning over 20 million bank accounts, even a remarkably low error rate of 1% would lead to 200,000 people’s accounts being wrongly flagged to the Department for Work and Pensions. Perhaps no lessons have been learnt from the Horizon scandal.
Within the context of CBDCs, “debanking” and financial censorship, it is clear that the next frontier in the battle to protect civil liberties will be monetary. In the coming weeks, the House of Lords will scrutinise these powers, which MPs were given a chance to look at. Unless our revising chamber steps in, the surveillance ratchet will crank up another notch.
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SubscribeThe Right contorting itself between the Trump/Farage Populist types and proper responsible politicians not a new theme and will play out over next few years. Little signal there though for the Populist form – it ain’t as popular as you think because people grasping Populists all hot air and about themselves first and foremost. Taken a while but it’s registering.
On the 2nd and 3rd stories – the Muslim world has it’s dangerous conspiratorialist streak as much as the Alex Jones nutjobs in the West. It’s the same psychology at work. Bedfellows.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that not very many people in the free world want the United States to be led by a moron. It is shocking to me that so many Americans do!
True Tories are Uniparty liberal globalists so of course they want KH to win.
They are also finished as a political entity.
Of course the swivel eyed loons at Reform would prefer Trump!
Anyone else, especially after watching Trump’s trainwreck last night, would prefer Harris as leader of the free world.
and endless wars
Who Brits (or any other non-US citizens) want to win the election is entirely irrelevant.
Indeed…this is a typical MSM filler piece, which UnHerd shouldn’t be running…
Not a lot more irrelevant than who US citizens want. After all they are going to get who they are given.
Most Brits haven’t been to the USA. Very few have been in the last few years. A negligible number of Brits have any reliable basis whatsoever to judge who is the best candidate. It’s like asking us who we want to win the next Indian general election.
True, but the US President is still the “Leader of the Free World”, so people in a lot of other countries do take the trouble to form a view.
Not quite. Whilst the number who take a broader interest may be small the US election has much more impact on us than the Indian. Although the latter is rapidly increasing in importance.
In terms of who has a Vote that is self-evident. But in who has a stake in the outcome and should be interested then Brits, and the western world per se should have a fundamental interest/concern.
The US Election gets so much coverage here because it has so much impact. The reverse of course is not true.