I write a lot of letters to the press. They are usually edited for length by the letters pages subs, and often improved thereby. If you can say something shorter it is usually better. However, occasionally it goes wrong. This week the London Evening Standard mangled something I wrote so badly as to remove most of the point.
The original may not be the most eloquent piece, but it should be published somewhere. I have added a few links to give blogospheric readers the context:
Sirs,
A man is held without charge at the instance of a foreign power and a visit from his MP is secretly recorded on the instructions of police acting without a warrant. A decade ago this would have been Britain only in a science-fictional parallel-world. David Davis is quite right (Article, 5 February) to condemn it. But things are still getting worse. Surveillance powers – most of which date from 2000, before the “War on Terror” was declared – are old hat.
The Government obsession now is “information sharing”, connecting the numerous databases now kept on us by various departments. This “Transformational Government” multiplies the attack on privacy and liberty many-fold. Its shadow falls on almost all new legislation. The Counter-Terrorism Bill currently before parliament, for example, would allow information to be disclosed to and passed on by the Intelligence Services, regardless of how it is obtained and despite confidentiality or privilege. Meanwhile the Ministry of Justice has been given a programme to weaken in general the existing controls on information in government hands, and the National Identity Management Scheme (ID cards), the means to join it all up, is being pressed forwards on a new schedule.
We are facing not just a surveillance state, but the building of a new phenomenon, the database state.
Yours faithfully
Guy Herbert
General Secretary, NO2ID
I find the database state far more worrisome. With the right kind of data mining, you can infer a great deal you never actually witnessed.
This reminds me of when Brian Micklethwait had to fisk his own article when it was published by the Times to clean up the distortions to his actual meaning that the Times’ editor made. At the time he said:
I propose a new term for the Samizdata glossary:
auto-fisking or self-fisking – a defensive fisking (qv) of a published newspaper article by its original author in order to correct editorial changes which alter the substance of what the original author was trying to say.
Can we seee the published version to compare?
I occasionally write to the local rag. When I wised up to their arbitrary editing that sometimes improved it but frequently left points unsaid, I just started publishing what I originally wrote on my blog, sometimes with the missing bits highlighted.
Let them choose the header title though, that is one of the joys of being a sub-editor (and being a blogger, for that matter…)