The Guvmint - or perhaps more accurately the Civil Service - are probably already regretting setting up this e-petition thing. The BBC made a Freedom of Information request to the Government asking for Cabinet papers relating to the Hillsborough disaster 20 years ago. Was our Guvmint happy and eager to release these papers? You guessed it. The FoI Commissioner had to step in and rule in the BBC's favour, and the Guvmint were minded to appeal - until the e-petition on the subject soared above the 100,000 signature mark, thus potentially earning the matter a Parliamentary debate, not to mention getting it well onto the media/blogger/Twitter radar.
It seems the resistance to releasing the papers was from the Cabinet Office rather than our elected
The second story in this little collection was the report of the website on which people post pictures of men they fancy that they've spotted on the London Tube and have surreptitiously photographed. Turns out that there's nothing illegal about this, since the Tube is deemed a public place, and only a tiny number of men have asked to have their pix removed.
The question arises: are we now fairly relaxed about the idea that our picture might be taken and posted without our knowledge or permission on the intertubes, for the whole world to see? Evidently quite a few British men are, and the idea has crossed the big pond and is taking off in the US of A too.
Linked to the BBC story hotlinked above was an older story in which an academic made this interesting comment: "If you look at privacy in law, one important concept is a reasonable expectation of privacy. As more private lives are exported online, reasonable expectations are diminishing."
If he's right, as many of us put more and more information about ourselves online - or permit it to be put there by others - the old norms of an expected degree of privacy and the legal rights to it will diminish.
Thirdly, Sally Bercow, wife of the Speaker of the House of Commons, entered the Big Brother house, prompting a fair old storm of comment. Critics accuse her of being a media junky, demeaning the office that her husband holds and generally making an undignifed prat of herself. Supporters point out that she's giving a large proportion of her fee to charity, and repeat her own comment that she may be the Speaker's wife but she isn't the Speaker and is thus free to do whatever she wants. You will doubtless make up your own mind on this point.
Point of order...
Big Brother is by design and definition an almost total loss of privacy and secrecy, willingly accepted by the participants. While this was once shocking, and made the show a runaway hit, it's lost much of its impact as that loss of privacy doesn't carry the same weight any more.
So what do we Observers weave from these threads?
It seems to me that loss of privacy for the individual is inevitable given the increasing link between life and the internet. What will be interesting is to what extent society will demand a concomitant loss of State secrecy. My generation grew up behind lace curtains and D-notices, in the shadow of the Cold War with memories of the Second World War very much alive. Although automatic deference to authority was waning rapidly, there was still a fairly wide acceptance of the need for authority to have secrets. Times have changed. Young people today seem to be comfortable with less personal security, far more ready to put information about themselves out there online. But with that comes far less ingrained, unthinking respect for 'national security' and a 'need to know' attitude from authority. Given that our political parties are now so closely aligned in much of their thinking, I suspect that a party's willingness to really live and work under 'open government', rather than lip-service to that concept, could make a real difference to their electoral chances. Their biggest challenge may be taking the Civil Service along with them. "Knowledge is power" goes the old adage, so perhaps it's time for mature democracies to share a bit more of it.
I still like to draw the curtains, and I run this blog anonymously, but it could well be that we're moving in a healthy direction. Much of the above could of course apply equally to most of the West, and the Arab Spring suggests that the same could be true over much more of the world. If we hide less from each other, and our governments hide less from us, it might be that we all find we have more in common than we think; and where there are differences, they're better understood. I like to believe so, anyway.
And on that optimistic if alcohol-fuelled note, I bid you goodnight.
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