Fergus Cassidy

Richard drew my attention to an interview with Vincent Browne on Marketing.ie.

Browne goes into detail on the tapping of his telephone by the State in the late 1970s. How the tapping started because: "The State regarded it as legitimate to tap my phone because I was in touch with paramilitaries at the time".

But when he saw the transcripts in 1980, he reveals that security was NOT the reason for tapping his phone. "It might have been initially – but it expired pretty quickly – it was for political reasons." 

Data Retention provides even greater possibilities for such criminality.

© Clay Bennett/The Christian Science Monitor. Used with permission.

Enough is enough. When private and personal information is compromised by reckless management of that information, the last people to find out are those most at risk. The latest investigation involving Bank of Ireland laptops involves everybody except those who have most to lose from identity theft.

This won't stop until it becomes MANDATORY to report such breaches. The law needs to be changed urgently, with massive fines and immediate public reporting of errant data controllers. Enough of this 'after the horse has bolted' damage control.

MORNINGS don't come easy to me. They never have. My body wakes fine but my senses are usually an hour behind.

A shock can align the two pretty quickly, and that's what happened one morning as I slumped into my chair in a small newspaper office.

There was post for me on the desk. The letters had no envelopes. They had been opened by someone else and discarded. Must be a mistake I thought. I checked discretely with a colleague and post addressed to him had also been opened.

Now I was wide awake. I quietly asked a manager what was going on and was told that it was company policy to open ALL letters. I was told that if I didn't want them opened, then I should have them sent elsewhere.

There was no such thing as personal in that workplace.

A number of years previously, when I was staff with a national newspaper, a document was circulated requiring employees to sign up for email monitoring. No signature, no company email address. Telephone extension PIN numbers were also sought.

The document explicitly stated that all computer equipment, telephones and desks etc were owned by the company and it was therefore within its rights to control access and use of such equipment.

Individual rights were an afterthought or were negotiated into history.

Since then web monitoring and letter-opening has been joined in the workplace by drug testing (including alcohol), fingerprinting and other biometric data gathering and CCTV cameras. And there's more to come.

In a way, these developments are about more than privacy. They are about control.

The employers who use surveillance methods believe that because they own the company, the plant and pay they wages they have rights which trump individuality.

In short: 'we own your ass'. If you don't like it, you know where the door is.

The primary purpose of surveillance is ostensibly to protect a company's interests. But it has the added-value (a beloved concept) of policing and enforcing behaviour.

It's all about power. To question that is to question authority.

You can be an individual, so long as it's outside of work hours.

For the time being.

IN his previous life, Pat Carey, minister of state with responsibility for drug strategy, was a teacher and deputy principal.

And there's more than a whiff of his former occupation when he lays out his attitude to a compulsory national register of mobile phones.

For the benefit of those not paying attention at the back, the minister said: "If you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear. There may well be confidentiality or civil liberties issues but there are lives of people at stake as well, which I believe overrides any of those."

Class dismissed.