In 1692 began a series of indictments and executions known as the Salem Witch Trials. During the trials, around 30 people were executed by the Court for the crime of witchcraft.

The trials and their surrounding circumstances were documented in Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible. In it, a love-stricken and sociopathic Abigail Williams exploits the hysteria of the trials to accuse the wife of John Proctor and have her killed. Eventually, not even she is able to control the actions of the court as it executes John Proctor, a pious and hard-working family man.

Miller wrote his play during the era of McCarthyism, the “Red Scare” in 50s America during which suspected communists were harassed, intimidated and imprisoned in the name of national security. During a witch-hunt of his own time, Miller showed in the Crucible how fear could spiral out of control and lead to a mob mentality in which none were safe from persecution.

Today, it is not the threat of witchcraft that threatens our homes but the threat of terrorism, and the agencies set up to protect us request greater powers to do their jobs at the expense of our privacy. This erosion of civil privacy is something which history teaches us to fear. If the courts of the Salem Witch Trials had had access to each person’s Facebook profile or text messages, their internet browsing history and personal details, the death toll of the trials could have been much higher.

The main reason why campaigners oppose increased surveillance powers is the potential for governments or individuals to abuse those powers. It is not surveillance that they oppose; rather it is the threat of political manipulation of those powers, or their corruptibility that should cause us all to fear increased authoritative powers.

Proponents of our intelligence services often give the explanation that “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” This sentiment is reiterated by Judge Danforth in The Crucible in the following extract:

Hale: I may only fear the Lord, sir, but there is fear in the country nevertheless.
Danforth (angered): Reproach me not with the fear in the country; there is fear in the country because there is a moving plot to topple Christ in the country!
Hale: But it does not follow that everyone accused is part of it.
Danforth; No uncorrupted man may fear this court, Mr. Hale! None!

Danforth’s message is one of incorrigibility; that the court cannot be wrong.

In hindsight, we know that there were no witches in Salem, but at the time the officials acted in a genuine and sincere attempt to maintain public order in the face of satanic threats. Parallels can be drawn here between the sincere and honest work of our intelligence agencies to protect us from the threat of terrorism, and the potential injustices that could be carried out in that same aim.

Terrorists do target our nation, and it is essential that we take reasonable precautions against them. Like we take precautions against thieves by locking up our valuables, we should wherever possible thwart the plots of terrorists who seek to commit atrocities. Similarly however, we need to pay due diligence to the threats of tyranny at home.

People have a tendency to put their heads in the sand when it comes to imagining such powers being abused. We live in a thankfully fair and tolerant society, and it is true that I have nothing to fear from our intelligence services at the moment. But we all have things to hide, whether it is our one-night-stand with a receptionist, or that we like to wear clothing of the opposite gender in the bedroom. The question is whether we would like any governments of the future to have access to that wealth of information.

With access to the internet and telephone activity of every person in the UK, GCHQ and MI5 could, if they chose to, rapidly produce a database of most Arabic speaking individuals in the country. Or a database of homosexuals. Or a database of atheists. We all regularly give our demographic details to companies, political parties or our employers. Some of us may opt not to appear on the edited electoral register, but the unedited register is still regularly accessed by private companies like Experian and Equifax for the purpose of credit checks.

It doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to realise that therein lies the potential for mass systematic abuse of our open society, in which most people own a social networking account and use e-mail and smartphones. While Britain has been a stable democracy for a few centuries, to presume that it will always remain so is dangerous. When George Santayana said that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”, he was talking about exactly this kind of inattentiveness. And those who think that such a thing cannot happen in a modern Western democracy should remember the Nixon era and the Watergate scandal.

Politicians who remark that there are serious threats to our country had better remember that those threats come from all angles; not just from terror-networks in Pakistan or North Korea but from ambitious individuals; people with agendas and a desire for power.

As Edward Abbey remarks “it is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government.” That is why, despite the good intentions of our intelligence staff, we as citizens must continue to resist the intention of our government to increase its grip over our private lives.