Investigative reporter Duncan Campbell reflects how 9/11 has torpedoed resistance to intrusion and undermined privacy rights born of earlier struggles. It may, irreversibility, have changed the way we think.
9/11 was a savage nightmare that took too long to happen for some in the West.
For 12 fallow years, from the fall of the Wall to the fall of the Towers, there was a brief golden period in which no great common enemy menaced all unseen beyond the distant horizon. There was no simple spectre of fear on which to construct, fund and operate surveillance platforms, or reason to tap data funnels into society's communications and transport arteries.
Through the '90s, in debates about the control of communications and electronic security measures – amid a US-led hue and cry for government control of all cryptography (remember the "Clipper Chip"?) – the "what if" question hung always in the mouths of the proponents of more control. What if terrorists had a nuke? A new virus to plague civilisation?
But the bad guys largely stayed off stage. The inter-Irish conflict that had dogged the UK had subsided into a peace process. There was a global terrorist shortage.
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