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Letter to the Daily Telegraph: security measures on board aeroplanes
July 1, 2010 1:00 PM
SIR - You report (June 28) that the EU is funding research at Reading University on development of cameras and microphones designed to detect suspicious on-board behaviour by airline passengers.
Automated CCTV looking for "unusual" behaviour would alarm civil liberties campaigners. I am unimpressed by the record in the last decade of the European Commission in championing the protection of privacy. This is despite copious European law on the subject.
A recent Brussels green paper on "naked" bodyscanners failed to reassure me that safeguards to prevent an image escaping to the internet would be strong enough. I fear the capture and storage of CCTV pictures of airline passengers will lead to abuse, including a "guilty until proved innocent" culture and potential trouble for people wrongly identified as suspicious.
The installation of explosive sniffers in aircraft lavatories designed to detect explosives and the assembly of a bomb may have some validity, though surely it is better to concentrate on making existing airport security checks effective. The Christmas Day bomber should have been stopped, at the latest, at pre-boarding stage. He should have been prevented from ever getting an American visa by US officials acting on warnings from his father.
It is not being soft on, or cavalier about, terrorism to prefer the enforcement of traditional intelligence, policing and border controls to a further extension of mass surveillance. The Government, which has started so admirably with the abolition if the ID card system, will surely be cautious about Big Brother projects.
Baroness Ludford MEP (Lib Dem)
London N1
(This letter was published by the Daily Telegraph on 29 June 2010.)
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