Transcript for David Bond on His Own Disappearing Act

Jim Fleming: Shortly after the birth of his daughter, David Bond got a letter from the British government saying they’d lost her data. Information about her address, her date of birth, medical records and other pertinent information; alarmed, David Bond wondered that if they could lose all that information about a newborn what could they lose about him? And how much do they really know about him? So he decided to find out by putting himself under surveillance and attempting to disappear. The result is the documentary Erasing David.

David Bond: Well what we did was my producer hired the two best private investigators in the UK to come and find me and he gave them my name and a photograph of me and that was all they had. And at noon on January the 10th last year I went on the run, leaving from my house and at that same instant they began to look for me, starting at their offices which is about four miles away and they gave us our word that they wouldn’t do any pre-tracking and any of the rest of it so it was a pretty fair contest.

Jim Fleming: And you were tracking this by film on both ends, you had a camera person with you?

David Bond: No, no, I was filming myself. I had a tiny high-def camera that I took with me while I was on the run so I filmed myself. I was alone, effectively, for the period while I was on the run and we had a small crew following the private investigators. So the resulting film kind of cuts between the two sides of the chase, which is what kind of gives it its energy and you know, makes you want to find out what’s going to happen.

Jim Fleming: Did they know anything about you?

David Bond: No. But they were very quickly able to identify which of the 50 odd David Bonds in the UK I am, because they discovered that there’s one who makes films and so that didn’t take them long and then from that they very, very quickly found my address and then found an enormous amount of stuff online. But not just online, they have access because they pay subscriptions to credit checking agencies. They also have people who access to things that are probably considerably less acceptable than credit checking agencies. In other words, they have people who work for them who are able to access databases that they probably shouldn’t. Now, we were limited in what we could show on the screen cause they did break the law on occasion and obviously, you know, it was difficult for us to show that without getting them into trouble. But they very quickly knew exactly who I was, what I’d done in the past and then from that they were able quickly to build up a kind of profile of how I might behave in the future, which of course is the Holy Grail.

Jim Fleming: What was the first thing you did?

David Bond: I took the view that I should get out of the country straight away. I wanted to leave a cold trail. I thought that if I sort of stuck around in London, or even in the UK that there was just a chance they might pick up a scent. So I immediately went to King’s Cross and got on a Eurostar and just got the hell out. There were some people I wanted to meet and interview around the place and I guess that’s what I meant by living a normal life. I wanted to carry on making the film and actively talk to people who understood the dangers of an increasingly all-pervading database state. So I kind of went and did that but it took them a while to pick up my trail as a result but when they did, as I’m sure you’ve seen form the film, it was pretty disturbing for me.

Jim Fleming: Well and they played a few tricks on you, they set up a Where’s David? website at one point, to lure you into finding it so that they could see where you accessed it?

David Bond: That’s right, yeah. They sent me an e-mail. They did a number of things that we didn’t show in the film. One of the things they did was write to me pretending to be my best friend and producer with a kind of fake e-mail address and I nearly opened that but I suddenly smelled a rat and thought they wouldn’t normally write that kind of language so I didn’t open that one. But yeah, the one you’re referring to is where they set up a website called whereisdavid.co.uk which I think is still up actually and on it they put a bunch of maps with crosses on where they said this is where we think you’ve been and they were very accurate. They’d identified a whole bunch of stuff. Now at the time I had no idea how they’d managed to achieve that, of course I smelled a rat when they sent me this website so having quickly accessed it on my Blackberry while I was on the road. I then switched my Blackberry off, carried on driving somewhere else thinking well even if they’ve tracked my phone they won’t be able to know where I am and I went to an internet cafe and I looked at it in [d cell]. Now of course that showed up, they knew I’d been in that internet cafe, but I was pretty confident that by the time I’d had a good look at this website I’d be able to be long gone, which I was. So I think it was a safe tactic, but what was clever was that it was a double-edged thing from then. Not only did they find out that I’d been at this internet cafe at this time at this date, but in addition they really set my nerves on edge because it was very accurate. They knew that’d I’d been in Brussels at this particular time, that I’d been in Dover at this particular time. That I’d been, you know, and this stuff kind of built up into this horrible sense that began to dawn on me that they were just everywhere and that they were just toying with me.

Jim Fleming: Yeah

David Bond: That they were deliberately letting me get away and that actually they knew exactly where I was.

Jim Fleming: Well you began to feel a little, um, lonely, I suspect. That, uh, really cut off and watched and we should say your wife was what? Seven months pregnant when you went on the run?

David Bond: She was, yeah and it looks like the most callous piece of decision making on my part to go and abandon her in that state but the honest truth is that we’d planned the pregnancy rather less well than we’d planned the film. And um-

Jim Fleming: [laughs]

David Bond: And we kind of, we had everything in place for the, for the, forth making of the film and then this second baby came along. Anyway, she was very understanding, and, but it was very difficult to be away at that stage of her pregnancy and as you saw she actually got ill during the pregnancy and then when I heard about that it was even more difficult. So yeah, I was very much missing my family and I was also in a state of quite unusual high tension and those things combined to send me slightly off the rails

Jim Fleming: Well, sure. So you, you continued to run. You knew by this time how well they were able to track where you had been, did that change your decision making about where you were going to go next?

David Bond: It, it made me move faster and faster whereas earlier on in the chase I would stay someplace for a night or two. Suddenly one night didn’t seem enough. I’d stay for half a night and then I’d move on. Then it was getting to the point where I’d sort of stay somewhere for an hour or two and think I should move on, I should move on. I should keep moving, keep moving. The feeling that was building within me was that if I’d stayed still for more than just a few minutes there’s the possibility that somehow they’d be able to put a cross on the map, get there and grab me.

Jim Fleming: In, it’s clear in the movie that they didn’t know where you were, although they were closing in on you all the time. All this time you were thinking about this very personally, very, in a very paranoid matter, you must also have maintained your, your debate about privacy in general, about what it means to live in modern society. Did, did your feelings about all of the databases and the ability to track you change as you went along, as you began to realize how quickly they were catching up to you?

David Bond: I think what really struck me was how difficult it was to move around the modern world without leaving a trace. Every, certainly every piece of public transport we use in the UK tracks us. Every time we use a card or, or, quite often use a, even a cash transaction now is recorded on CCTV. We are the most surveilled country in the west by a long way. I mean the States is so much more privacy enhancing a country to live in than the UK is. I mean, Privacy International is a big group, they rate us the third most surveilled country in the world after China and Russia. So I’ve began to realize that I was living and bringing kids up in a country that routinely checks, monitors, profiles and on occasion tries to control its citizens through data. That, that sense was really growing in my while I was on the run.

Jim Fleming: Now on the other hand, it can be interpreted as a way to feel safer about the world. You know the caring government is keep track of everybody so not only are you of course giving up some privacy in being tracked but those who presumably might be out to hurt you are being tracked and surveilled in the same way.

David Bond: that’s right and I think that argument would be exactly the one I would’ve made before I went on this experience and I would distance myself so far from it now. I simply don’t believe it, the idea that we can give up elements of our privacy in order to gain security. The idea that those two things are on some sort of seesaw that if you take more of one, you’ll get less of the other, I just don’t think it’s true. I don’t think that by being watched all the time we can make the world safer in any meaningful way. I think all we can do is reduce our liberty. You know, the clearest example of that is that the country would be a much safer place if we had a camera in every living room, in every bedroom. It would be, but we simply know that that’s gone past a line that we’re prepared to accept. So the question is where should the line be? And my view is that Britain has drawn it in a place that is too far in the favour of surveillance and government control and too far away from the heart of individual freedom.

Jim Fleming: Well back to your story, they did in fact find you before the 30 days was up. Was that a fluke do you think or was that because of all of the surveillance that’s available?

David Bond: I think that the actual way they caught me was lucky. Um, my wife got ill and I ended up visiting her at a hospital appointment where we were wanting to check out the new baby and this was a hospital appointment that hadn’t been planned, so I assumed that, well, if it hasn’t been planned how can they possibly find out about it? But you know, without going into too much detail, they did. So I think they were lucky.

Jim Fleming: Was the way they found out about it legal?

David Bone: No, it wasn’t. No, they, um, they made a pretext phone call to the hospital pretending to be me and they got information about the appointment that Katie had. Katie, my wife, had. So no, it wasn’t, but having said that, pretext phone calls are incredibly common. Very commonly used by identity thieves, by newspapers and they’re very rarely does anybody get prosecuted for making them. So it is a kind of, I guess it’s an example of how, that the health service in the UK have this wonderful database that had information about when I was going to be where and when Katie was going to be where and also, by the way, lots of information about our medical history. And the weak point of that system turned out to be a very nice and kind receptionist who worked at the hospital who, when she received a call from a very plausible gentleman pretending to be me, basically opened up that database to him.

Jim Fleming: Yeah. So when you walk out the door now, you walk down to catch the bus, or to take a cab, do you look around? You see the cameras? You think about who’s watching you?

David Bond: I do. I would say though, that I’m less worried about CCTV. I think it’s a crime how much we have in this country, how many cameras we have in this country. 5 million and the latest report says that they have little or no effect on prevention or detection. So, why do we do it? Why do we, you know, cause people to feel surveilled when actually it’s not really making any difference? So I object to that, but much more worrying to me is the way that we are routinely followed almost by our own carelessness, you know. We shop online; we give all this information out there about our preferences, what films we like to watch, what books we like to buy, the sites we like to visit, the Google searches that we choose to make and all of this stuff is squirreled away. And although at the moment it’s not being brought together in any great, grand way to control us, it could be. And I fear that it will be.

Jim Fleming: David Bond is the director and subject of the documentary film Erasing David.