South Africans travelling to Britain may soon have more than possible visas to worry about. The British government is pressing European governments to help it collect the personal data of every traveller entering, or leaving, the island state - including credit card and mobile phone numbers.
The Guardian newspaper recently reported the British government wants to keep this information for 13 years to help them "profile terrorists".
A lawyer says, should Britain or the European Union (EU) implement this, there's nothing South Africans can do about it, except not travel. Buys Inc lawyer Reinhardt Buys says a South African citizen's constitutional rights end at the board gate. "If you don't like the application of UK law... don't go there!
"It all boils down to a direct clash between a constitutional right (privacy) and a state duty (to provide security)," Buys explains. "And politics determine whether or not the scales tip towards the one or the other. After 9/11, governments and citizens seem to accept a reasonable violation of privacy rights if it would improve security."
19 pieces of information
The Guardian newspaper reports EU officials are already considering controversial anti-terror plans that would collect up to 19 pieces of information on every air passenger entering or leaving the community. In Europe, that information is already being collected by airlines for the US Department of Homeland Security for all passengers flying between the two continents.
Britain wants the system extended to sea and rail travel, and also aims to apply it to domestic flights and those between EU countries. It also would like to use the information for "more general public policy purposes" than fighting terrorism and organised crime. Britain also wants to be able to exchange the information with third parties outside the EU.
The paper notes the "so-called passenger-name record system, proposed by the commission and supported by most EU governments, has been denounced by civil libertarians and data-protection officials as draconian and probably ineffective".
Britain is pushing for the system because of its experience with "Operation Semaphore" that has been monitoring flights from Pakistan and the Middle East for the last three years. The paper says that scheme "has been highly successful and has resulted in hundreds of arrests".
Oops!
The negation of privacy is not the only concern. The British also have a tawdry record of keeping data safe.
In January, for example, thieves stole a laptop that contained the personal details of 600 000 potential military recruits. The notebook was stolen from a Royal Navy officer in the central city of Birmingham, The Associate Press reported, and also contained the banking records of 3 500 people. In a separate incident, Britain's Ministry of Justice confirmed that four CDs containing the personal details of witnesses and victims had gone missing.
In December, British Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly admitted that a disk drive containing the personal information of three million driving test candidates had been stolen from a storage facility in Iowa.
The month before, the British equivalent to the SA Revenue Service, Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC), lost two CDs containing the personal and banking details of 25 million people receiving child benefits.
ITPro reports the loss resulted in the resignation of HMRC head Paul Gray. "It is the UK's worst security breach and one of the world's biggest ID protection failures," the B2B site reports. "The CDs have never been found."
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