James To: bugged by surveillance.
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Don’t
you meddle with me, and I won’t meddle with you.
George
Eliot,
British novelist
(1819-1880)
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A
renegade legislator introduces Hong Kong to the “luxury” of privacy
James To is convinced
his telephones are tapped. A policeman tipped him off but To feels neither paranoid
nor outraged, simply resigned. For the past ten years, he has relentlessly monitored
the surveillance tactics of Hong Kong’s rulers—British and Chinese—and phone-tapping
has been on top of his list.
“My interest is very simple: it’s about Big Brother. The government should have the
minimum amount of information about citizens,” says the Democrat Party legislator.
“I don’t want the government to be my friend. It should leave us alone and then we
will have the potential to develop ourselves into what we want to be.”
To’s strong views were forged by experience. He was first elected at the age of 28
in 1990—a pivotal moment in Hong Kong’s history when British administrators sought
to reassure a population panicked by the 1989 violence at Tiananmen Square and the
return to Chinese rule in 1997. The colonial powers sought to calm public fears by
introducing a Bill of Rights to locally enshrine the International Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights.
After examining the much-touted law, the young To found little in the way of privacy
protection, which was not surprising. “Even in the mother country, Britain, there
is no Bill of Rights or mechanism to ensure privacy,” says To, aside from jurisprudence.
Ironically, it was a British lecturer, Raymond Wacks, who first introduced him to
the concept as a law student at the University of Hong Kong in the 1980s. Since then,
academic curiosity has become a personal commitment.
The colonial authorities paid little heed to To’s warnings. But they could not ignore
the European Union’s threats in 1994 to prohibit its member countries’ banks from
dealing with their counterparts in Hong Kong without legal data protection. A year
later, the legislature passed the Personal Data Ordinance. Once again, To uncovered
a major loophole: the law did not apply to the Telecommunications Ordinance that
gave the government extensive wiretapping powers. He introduced his own bill requiring
a judge to oversee the process, but the British authorities rejected it.
Today his battle against phone-tapping covers wider ground. New laws permit the police
to create an extensive DNA database by collecting samples from anyone suspected or
convicted of a serious crime. Immigration officials are also spearheading efforts
to install a national system of “smart” cards, embedded with microchips, to replace
the paper identity cards. Residents must now carry these paper documents at all times
and apply for identification numbers for the most banal tasks, like getting a phone
line installed, visiting a residential building after hours or even booking a tennis
court.
The
omnipresent “smart” card
The
smart cards are supposed to offer more efficient services, but privacy advocates
fear they could do far more. By centralizing the most personal and minute details—from
the title of a book borrowed from a library to medical data—any “card-reading” authority
could use these profiles to exert leverage over the individual by, for example, passing
sensitive information to an employer.
Yet as To pushes for legal protection, his fellow citizens seem uninterested. The
entrenched habit of carrying identification papers, he says, has made surveillance
seem normal in Hong Kong. People are willing to tolerate intrusion so long as it
doesn’t hinder their attempts to make money, according to the legislator. And if
the situation becomes difficult, they are prepared to emigrate overseas. “Privacy
is viewed as a luxury,” he says. “It’s not part of Chinese culture,” which privileges
the collective over the rights of the individual. But for To, the opposite is true:
the wellbeing of the group depends on the security of each and every one of its members. |
