Dr Strangelove does data protection

CONSPIRACY THEORISTS will be foaming at the mouth after the UK's privacy guardian revealed it had asked US military advisers to review Europe's data protection laws.

The Information Commissioner's Office said it had been forced to act on " growing fears that the current European [Data Protection] Directive is no longer fit for purpose". Security hawks in London and Washington have been saying as much for the last couple of years since data protection law slows up their deployment of hi-tech surveillance apparatus in the home front of their 'war on terror'.

Data protection is thus maligned because it has got wedged awkwardly in the gap that describes one of the defining problems of our age: where the balance lies between freedom and security.

The ICO has outlined a beautiful proof of this problem in the paranoid logic, by asking the RAND Corporation, a US think tank with a name as shady as Darth Vader's boot polish, to consider whether EU data protection law is indeed fit for purpose.

RAND is infamous for having provided the paranoid ideology that drove the nuclear arms race during the cold war. And for being lampooned outrageously in Stanley Kubrik's 1964 film. Dr Strangelove.

The logical basis of the ideology, known as the prisoner's dilemma, went roughly, 'everyone's out to get you, so build shed-loads of nuclear weapons so you can get them first'. It is of a kin to the thinking of Britain's inner city yoofs who have started carrying knives in case they get attacked by someone with a knife. So more kids are getting stabbed.

It is likewise reminiscent of the scene in The Empire Strikes Back were Yoda tells Luke Skywalker that he shouldn't take his weapons into the domain of evil because he will meet only what he takes with him. So he ends up in a fight to the death with himself dressed as Darth Vader. Yoda, incidentally, is a nickname used in military circles for the guru of modern US military stra tegy and information warfare, a RAND founding father called Andrew Marshall.

His Jedi, as his acolytes in the US government are known, include the RAND alumni who planned and executed the US invasion of Iraq: Messrs Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz: it is only in the movies that Yoda said that Jedi only use the force for knowledge and defence - never for attack.

RAND won the ICO contract to review EU data protection law fair 'n' square in a competitive tender with 19 other bidders. Nevertheless, a logic similar to that of RAND's cold war strategy has informed the latest arms race, conducted in the name of the 'war on terror' and ushered along by RAND advisers. It has crystallised paranoid politics into its most divisive form yet. It asserts that 'no-one can be trusted, so watch everyone and nab anyone who looks like they are up to no good'.

It has had the US, UK and EU administrations paying the military industry billions to develop sci-fi surveillance systems for watching civilians, on the basis that the 'war on terror' has blurred the old distinctions between the home front and the theatre of war. Since data protection has sought to to inhibit such systems, the UK and US governments have complained that data protections and human rights are too restrictive.

Michael Chertoff, boss of the Homeland Security department, told the European Parliament last year, for example, that it might be better that one innocent be wrongly convicted than a thousand guilty go free. "You must ask yourself this question - whether you would be satisfied to be constrained by slow-moving processes if the consequence would be to allow an attack to go forward that would kill thousands of people or perhaps millions of people, including ones own children," said Chertoff.

Or as RAND told a Homeland Security Committee of the US Congress last year, the government could only carry out more surveillance of civilians if it adopted, "a less bureaucratic approach to the ownership of intelligence information". Or as the UK's Information Commissioner said in the brief for RAND's report on EU data protection law, "It reflects a growing feeling that the Directive is becoming... more bureaucratic and burdensome than it needs to be".

The ICO's own bureaucrats, along with their peers in other EU data protection bureaus, have struggled to ensure that emerging civil security systems are burdened with even cursory rights, to lessen the chances innocent people don't get fingered. These are the kind of preposterous things that might haunt our minds if we used RAND's own cold war logic to assess its commission to review whether EU data protection law can 'meet the technological and social challenges of the 21st century'.

It's a pointless, cynical exercise because the paranoid logic can only ever conclude the worst. RAND, after all, has also advised the US government not to temper its homeland security. That advice may have been founded on realism rather than human rights. And it may be that RAND gets roughly half its income from advice to the military and security services.

But RAND today advises on civil government matters as well. It's not populated entirely by cynics. It advises on arts policy, even, as well dropping bombs - freedom and security, you might say. µ