As I leave Liberty, the next frontier is an online world that respects human rights

The rights of ordinary Britons are under serious threat by the challenge to the Human Rights. But the internet knows no international borders.

Do we learn the lessons of history, or are we for ever condemned to repeat our mistakes? I believe human rights to be as much a way of looking at the world as a box of legal protections for the vulnerable against the powerful when all else has failed.

On 10 September 2001, I came to Liberty to help transform a first-rate law center into a broader modern campaign. I had barely 24 hours before the twin towers atrocity robbed me of any opportunity for "blue sky thinking". The challenges of the coming years were to be set elsewhere.

Two years later, I became director - a privilege I will soon hand on. The lessons of the intervening period have been surprisingly simple. When fear stalks the land, blank cheques become all too easy and ever more dangerous. 

Once upon a time, clever lawyers told a former US president that indefinite internment would be acceptable in a great modern democracy, if it applied only to foreign nationals and only off-shore. British prime ministers followed suit, with their own experiments in detention and then punishment without trial, and a general pandering to nationalism, on occasion even xenophobia, to replace post-war human rights for all human beings with citizens' privileges - bestowed by the mighty and withdrawn at whim.

ID cards were mooted and enacted, but first and most as an immigration tool, though unsurprisingly extended (before they were repealed) to all of us. Summary extradition laws were passed in 9/11's after-shock. They were supposed to allow "foreign" jihadis (for surely none were homegrown?) to be passed across the world without delay. But inevitably, British hackers like Gary McKinnon and businessman accused of being an enemy of another state can resemble Abu Qatada to fearful "foreign" eyes.

Alongside the fear came the internet revolution: an innovation as significant as the printing press before it. This brought enormous opportunities for activists and democrats, but also for conspirators and powerful corporate interests to monitor, collect and hack every inch of our lives.

I have always sympathized with those charged with security rather than liberty. But this trade-off simply no longer works. What is "national security" in the 21st century if not the personal and (increasingly) cyber-security of millions of people?

Yesterday, the home secretary (my sixth in this job), went before parliament to defend the post-Edward Snowden investigatory powers bill. It's easy to brand him a traitor, but there wouldn't even be a new bill, let alone an international debate about the balance between proportionate surveillance and personal privacy, but for the whistle be blew on practices developed - on both sides of the Atlantic - without public knowledge, political engagement or legal constraint.

My concerns about this bill are well-known, and the debate rages on. All I say here is that the fact that something was happening behind closed doors, and without democratic consent, is no argument for ex-post facto ratification. It should be the argument against blank cheques.

And how was it all possible? How did public servants so long persuade themselves that blanket surveillance was lawful? Again, it was the divide between "over there" and over here". As in the US, British privacy protection was far laxer in relation to foreign communications. But in the internet age, borders become such a moving goalpost as to be non-existent. So millions of Britons were surveilled without protection - because the internet has no nationality. When you trade away other people's rights, it becomes ever harder to protect your own.

That is the ultimate lesson in my human rights story. It's hardly original, but no less valid. We all love our own rights and those of friends, family and people like us. Other people's freedoms seem cheaper until it's almost too late.

The existential threat to rights and freedoms in this country remains the challenge to our Human Rights Act. That said, I take some comfort from the growing cross-party and cross-jurisdictional coalition in its defence. 

The arguments for scrapping it? Government says foreigners and suspects shouldn't be protected - but we are all foreign and even a suspect sometime and somewhere. Government says the MoD should't be troubled by human rights challenges - so should we leave the Deepcut deaths and that of Corporal Anne-Marie Ellement buried without question alongside Iraqi detainees? We are even foreign in our own UK homes when living online within the reach of international corporations and foreign powers.

Maybe that's my successor's task. To take the battle for rights and freedoms to the next frontier; an online world that's as truly international as human rights and human beings themselves. Why should universalism just be for money and markets and criminals and governments, and not for ordinary people and the values I believe we all hold dear?