When it comes to civil liberties, the SNP is an anomaly

I have a friend who, for years, insisted on sticking a piece of blu-tack over his laptop webcam when he wasn’t using it. 

It wasn’t that he believed anyone was watching him, he said, it was just that he couldn’t be sure.

I laughed at this, called him paranoid and then promptly forgot about it. 

Then, late last year a disturbing story broke. Hackers had been accessing webcams in Scottish homes and uploading them to the internet. STV claimed to have found footage from homes across Scotland.

Reacting, Simon Rice, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) group manager for technology, said: “This is a threat that all of us need to be aware of and be taking action to protect against.” 

Privacy is an issue that runs right to the heart of politics – as demonstrated by the strength of feeling surrounding the creation of a national identity database.

This brought the ICO back into the news, warning that using postcode information on the database “would be a shift away from the current consensual model” on collecting data, that the proposals may breach UK and EU data protection laws, and that use of a “unique identifier” – the number assigned to each individual – is the first step towards an ID card.

While the Government pointed out the database already exists (it has done since the 1950s) and that the records were needed to stop tax avoidance, critics questioned why the plans would give 120 public agencies access to it, including organisations like VisitScotland and Quality Meat Scotland. 

'If anything did go wrong with a database that size, if the information was lost or stolen, the consequences would be very serious indeed'

And while the Lib Dems’ motion to force the plans into being treated as primary legislation was defeated, the party succeeded in uniting the opposition.

The SNP won the vote but it had to drag Aileen Campbell back from maternity leave to do so.

The debate can be a technical one, but it is interesting because of the questions it raises. After all, political parties can be defined by their position on civil liberties. 

The Lib Dems are famously the party of individual freedom. The Labour Party and the Conservatives too can be understood by their ideas over how big, and how powerful, the state should be. Their views on the place of privacy flow from that.

But the SNP are an anomaly. The party thinks Scotland should be its own state, but belief in independence does not carry with it any hard and fast rules on what that state would look like, how big it should be, or where its power should end. 

The party opposed New Labour’s plan for a national identity database in 2005 and if this was a UK Government plan, it is easy to imagine nationalist politicians lining up to attack it.

The SNP can be an ideologically eclectic bunch and given that every opposition party backed Willie Rennie’s motion, including the independents, it seems unlikely every SNP member is completely comfortable with the plan. So it will be interesting to see how the Government responds.

Of course, none of this means that any organisation will go over the top the second it is able to access information about me.

But if anything did go wrong with a database that size, if the information was lost or stolen, the consequences would be very serious indeed.

And as Jackson Carlow put it: “I might have doubts about what the botanic gardens could do with the information that would be of insidious danger to individual citizens, but that argument misses the point.”

When it comes to handing over private information to the state, the question should always be ‘why?’ rather than ‘why not?’ Because as history has shown, whether you are sticking blu-tack to a webcam or handing over demographic information to government agencies, it can pay to be paranoid.