The Tribune

THE GOVERNMENT is considering the Interception of Communications Bill, commonly and accurately nicknamed the ‘Spying Bill’.

Government argues that it is necessary because other countries are doing it and those countries have issued instructions that the Bahamas must follow suit, fall in line and comply.

We strongly disagree. In fact, we go so far as to say this is one of the most dangerous bills we have ever seen proposed in the history of this country, either before Majority Rule or after Independence.

The right-to-spy bill violates every human’s right to privacy and has the potential to invade, disrupt and even destroy the lives of the most innocent among us, lumping the law-abiding with the terrorist.

If enacted as proposed, the spy bill would give almost unlimited powers to law enforcement to monitor every sentence, every account, every spoken or electronically delivered word of every citizen or resident or visitor who speaks with a citizen or resident, every business in The Bahamas. That includes listening in on journalists, including their important conversations with sources they agree to protect in order to gain important information that the public has a right to know.

The attorney-client privilege would vanish. The privacy between a medical professional and his or her patient would evaporate. Fewer people who may fear they are ill or are carrying a disease would be likely to seek medical or laboratory testing if they knew their conversations could be monitored, recorded and end up in bulk data storage whether on the cloud or on a server or on some imbalanced person’s laptop.

The potential danger of the spying bill is so vast that, at its best, it could erode trust and, at its worst, lead to autocracy and even dictatorship. That is not an exaggeration. Dictators get away with what they get away with for one reason and one reason only - silence. When no one has the courage to stand up to authority, authority has no need to curtail its power. Thus, the power, like bacteria in darkness and moisture, grows. The galloping greed for greater power races ahead and the greater the power, the more fearful the people become.

When the United Kingdom enacted similar legislation almost without notice, shockwaves followed. Journalists, You Tubers, others took to social media decrying the contents. One critic noted that information is power and anyone who has it can get plenty of it.

We urge The Bahamas not to make the same mistake. We fully understand the increasing importance of learning what terrorists are planning before an attack that could wipe out a whole city takes place. But enacting legislation that blankets everyone in a society and threatens their privacy in order to find a terror cell is comparable to giving everyone in the nation chemotherapy to wipe out cancer in those who will someday get it. And there is no evidence that monitoring every individual, every conversation between a doctor and patient, a lawyer and client, a journalist and source, will stop that lone wolf terrorist who is lurking the bush.

What it will do is cause all of us to live in fear and retreat even further from human contact. It will make us more insular at a time when this nation, more than any other time in our history, needs to be our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. If we are to solve our real problems - crime, establishing economic stability, full employment and fiscal responsibility, better education for all - we need to take steps that bind us, not divide us.

We need to encourage trust, not plant the seeds of distrust.

If the bill were to pass in its current form, it could make each of us fearful to attend a forum in which new or politically unpopular ideas are discussed. It could make us fearful to gather.

We appreciate that steps have to be taken to curb and someday wipe out terrorism, but spying on every single person and every business is not the right step. For those of us who grew up in an age when privacy was so respected we would not have dreamed of opening a letter addressed to someone else in the family, the right-to-spy bill sends shivers down our spine. To pass such legislation without knowing how bulk data collection with be protected is a thought so horrific as to render the entire bill worthy of File 13.

But we are also practical enough to know that some measures have to be taken. We urge government to open the spy bill to public consultation before moving forward. It is surprising how smart the public can be.