What Does Being Innocent Mean?

I would like to postpone Video of the Week to talk about something that if successfully integrated will affect everyone across the UK. The controversial new ISP Internet Monitoring Bill has been passed on to be debated. If it becomes law, that means the government will have full access to your internet history without having to file a warrant. If they found you suspicious, they would have to request a warrant before going snooping through your history, whereas now, if this new law is passed, they wouldn’t have to. In fact, they would keep tabs on your ISP (Internet Service Provider) all the time and if they found you suspicious, they could access and snoop whenever they want, and you wouldn’t know anything about it until the Men in Black come knocking on your door.

Catching someone who is committing an offense, or before they commit an offense is what they want. If they are downloading illegal content, viewing illegal content, or purchasing illegal content; it’s understandable that they want to nip that in the bud as soon as possible, but is snooping on everyone’s history really the right way of going about it? There are several reasons why I believe this won’t work, and one of the main reasons is due to the amount of people on the internet at any one time.

They say that if you are innocent, then you have nothing to hide. Fair enough. But do the innocent want to be watched? The population of the UK as of 2015 is 64.5 million people. 87.9% of adults, (roughly 45.9 million people) had recently used the internet in the last 3 months in 2016 compared with 86.2% in 2015. Only 10.2% of adults have never used the internet, which has decreased since 2015 with 11.4%. 99.2% of those adults were aged between 16-24 years old. Every single day, 46 million people are on the internet. How many of those people do you reckon will commit suspicious activity over the next couple of months? We don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, but it’s safe to predict that less than a quarter, probably even considerably less, will be committing serious crimes or conducting suspicious activity. That’s a lot of innocent people, and out of those innocent people – the ones who know how to protect themselves from prying eyes – will set up the necessary barriers simply because they wish not to be stalked by the government. Those that are actually committing the crimes will also attempt to hide themselves, but if there’s a strong chance that they will conduct reverse psychology. By not protecting themselves, they may actually be labelled as innocent from the system because they act as if they have nothing to hide, but those that are innocent and are protecting themselves because they wish not to be monitored will be targeted by the system and labelled as innocent. When the authorities have finished investigating the innocent and found nothing, they would have wasted valuable money instead of going after those that are the guilty ones.

By always having prying eyes on your internet history limits what you can search for, essentially limiting your right to free speech. We don’t know what filters the system will have, and how strict it will be when looking for anything suspicious. How many laws are we unknowingly breaking because the internet has evolved, but the laws haven’t. For a very long time after the introduction to upload your songs onto iTunes, it was illegal. The government overlooked that because so many people were doing it, it would be impossible to manage, and so they extinguished the law. How many laws have they not updated yet, and with the new system installed, there are going to be many flags consisting of people constantly breaking the law popping up, overloading the system and making it unmanageable once again. Sifting through all the innocents’ data and finding nothing is only going to allow the guilty to continue going about their ways. By not catching them at the right time, they could set up some defence against the system. All the innocent has to do is say something or do something that the system flags and suddenly everyone who isn’t doing anything remotely illegal will be targeted, fined, or even arrested with some serious conditions. Is that fair. We might as well do nothing, say nothing, and not use the internet at all.

That’s equivalent to always having a Police Officer outside your window and if you draw the curtains they arrest you for being suspicious, or if you keep the curtains open, they’ll arrest you for indecent exposure when all you’re doing is getting ready for a shower – which is a perfectly innocent outcome and a waste of the Officer’s time and your time, the system’s money. Is that fair?

It’s understandable that with the amount of internet activity nowadays, it is increasingly difficult to monitor, but there has to be another way instead of watching your every move. Just update the already integrated system. Plenty of people have been caught before, and with a newly updated system than what we have before, they won’t have to watch everyone, just be smarter with catching the guilty people.

I wonder how many innocent people who are complaining about the system being watched will be caught because it believes that they have something to hide? They simply don’t want to be watched every second of every day. Why is the taxpayer paying for something to keep tabs on themselves?

Not only is it a flawed system, but it has to be secure. Literally millions of people’s personal data will be flowing through it every single day, all one person has to do is find a way through their defences and leak all the data out into the open. Now that I’ve stated that possibility, do you reckon that I’m not going to be called out for being suspicious. For all the system knows, I could be planning to hack into the system, when in reality, I’m not at all and never will.

Below is the source where I got the statistics about internet usage across the UK

https://www.ons.gov.uk/businessindustryandtrade/itandinternetindustry/bulletins/internetusers/2016

Thanks for reading

Antony Hudson

(TonyHadNouns)