BECAUSE IT’s THERE

Oh dearie me, how the world has changed in my lifetime. When I was no’but a lad, a line you heard in the playground every few minutes or so was “mind your beeswax”. This was universally considered to be an unanswerable rebuke. Those thus apostrophized would back off at once, almost certainly displaying a degree of shamefacedness. To be a “nosey parker” (possibly an allusion to a 16th century Archbishop of Canterbury who kept stringent tabs on the clergy toiling under his auspices, according to Brewer) was to be as much a pariah then as being a paedophile is now (being a paedophile then was considered little more than a harmless joke).

Nowadays, everybody is employed fulltime minding everyone else’s business. It is already established as a Fact known to us all that Britain has more CCTV cameras per head of population than any other nation on earth. Relatively large audiences – including among their number some otherwise evidently intelligent individuals – apparently watch dry-mouthed as people they do not know interact artificially in an artificially created and manipulated television environment for hours on end. And necessarily sedentary and hence overweight journalists – or their outsourced delegates -– listen jadedly to hour upon hour of mobile phone traffic between inarticulate “celebrities” gossiping about others without benefit of the protection afforded by being conscious of any need to observe the laws of libel.

Data-collection, surveillance, eavesdropping, flies on the wall – it’s the polar opposite to the world in which I grew up, where privacy and confidentially were sacrosanct, where what adults did behind closed doors was only of interest to anyone else if the law of the land was being egregiously broken and where there were certain things one just didn’t talk about in public: sex, money, mental problems, insecurity, the failings of relatives and the workings of the human body in particular.

Now the Murdoch press has been “exposed” – there’s a resonant term – as having paid a king’s ransom to hush up the evidently multitudinous occasions on which it broke the law by hacking into the private phone calls of public individuals. I fall to wondering how much salary I would require to be paid for the task of listening to the off-duty conversations of, say, Vanessa Feltz or Alan Shearer. I don’t choose to listen to such people when what they have to say is planned, edited, scripted and (theoretically, at least) to some point. How bearable could it be to take on an indefinite listening brief as they bitch about Arsène Wenger (Feltz) or decide what to eat at Pizza Hut (Shearer; I think I have that the right way round)?

This indeed raises one of the most perplexing aspects of all this surveillance: it’s so expensive. The capital investment is minimal. What it must be really heavy on is that most costly of ingredients, man power. Some mutt has to trawl through all that closed circuit footage trying to find the car that might match the car that might be in another camera’s collection. Some other mutt has to wade through all the empty but serrated-edged bean tins and the swine flu-infected tissues in the celebrity’s rubbish bin to find that clinching receipt that confirms that the celebrity recently paid the Priory. It’s a dirty job and … um … nobody actually has to do it.

Here’s another aspect of this depressed, depressing and depressive culture that addles the brain. The British are uniquely useless at maintenance. We install things with a flourish and then disappear five minutes before they cease to function (Terminal 5, anyone?). You only have to clock the public clocks that stopped or became unreliable years ago and never got corrected to see how lackadaisical we are in this area. Or listen to the “music” – almost impenetrable pop or synthesised baroque – that telephone systems inflict upon you while you’re on hold. You listen but nobody from the enterprise on whose system you are held has bothered to listen to the “music” loop since it was installed, so they have no idea how distorted the sound has become. The chances are that when you walk past a CCTV camera, the image of you that it harvests will reveal only a fuzzy shape who could be you or equally could be the Incredible Hulk.

So, put together the ingredients of the hacking of a phone call by The News of the Screws. The celebrity – relaxed, unguarded and believing the only pair of ears into which the chatter goes belongs to a trusted friend – talks (shall we say?) loosely. The hacker is exhausted and bored and, being a journalist, almost certainly the worse for drink. The equipment on which he listens is unreliable, the signal distorted and fitful. The editorial pressure is on him to deliver something in some way juicy. Who imagines this to be a worthwhile, dependable, authoritative, let along a legitimate exercise?

And even if the whole shebang were not festooned with incompetence, how dare, how bloody dare these low-lives watch and listen as we go about our innocent – and even our not so innocent – business. It’s not as if much of this nosing is for any particular purpose. They do it on the off chance and because they can. We have let this happen because we have lazily collaborated in our own subjugation, by not protesting vigorously and continuously against the growth of databases and electronic checks, spying devices and so-called security sweeps. “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil” Burke should have observed, though never quite did, “is that good men do nothing”.

We can get back at them if we bend our minds to it. Rupert Murdoch – I say nothing here that is not already in the public domain – has a fondness for a drink. Any journalist will tell you that the quickest way to get under a quarry’s guard is to give him a drink. To hack into Murdoch’s inner sanctum of communications ought to be a relatively simple matter. Go to it, boys. But don’t ask me to come too.