Sleepwalking Into A Surveillance Society
January 14, 2007 (4 Responses)
EVER GET THE FEELING that you were being watched? Well – these days that itchy feeling at the back of your neck is no longer just instinct, it’s fact. If you live in the USA or Britain in particular, you are being watched, monitored, recorded and filtered every day, in every way… and it looks like it will only get worse.
Think about it. Right now you are probably carrying a cellphone which can pinpoint your location, you use credit cards which are used to track your funds and financial transactions, you have ID cards which ‘remember’ personal data, everytime you browse the Internet you are almost certainly tracked and you are probably monitored pretty much everywhere you go by street cameras and CCTV installations.
Big Brother isn’t coming, it’s already here.
The same thing is happening elsewhere, but for now the two biggest exponents of implementing a ‘Big Brother’ society of constant surveillance “for our own good” are the USA and Britain. The usual arguments in favour of such moves are to make life more ‘convenient’ for us, to help us become ‘more efficient’ and of course that old faithful, to make things ‘more secure’. The problem is that what happens in the USA and Britain is usually just a forerunner of what happens everywhere else eventually.
In the US Bush & Co. seem intend on turning the country into a police state, and thus far the only opposition they have met has been legal and political stumbling blocks brought about by organisations like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). If you think I’m exaggerating just consider for a moment the key facts: Patriot Act, Abandonment of due process, Domestic Spying, the Pentagon’s “Total Information Awareness” program… the list goes on and on although here’s one you may not yet be aware of. After signing a postal reform bill called H.R. 6407, the “Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act,” Bush issued a “signing statement” that declared his (Bush’s) right to open the private mail of American citizens without a judge’s warrant. Nothing is safe from monitoring or tampering in the USA at the moment.
By comparison, another State which once aspired to monitor and hold such amounts of information on its citizens was in fact the Communists in Germany between the end of World War 2 and the fall of the Wall in Berlin; they had a file on every single individual citizen, but I’m not sure even they could compare to the job that Bush & Co. seem intent on doing.
Right now this process of implementing Big Brother continues in the USA. Only this week Civil Rights groups came together to oppose the implementation of an additional 50 surveillance cameras in San Francisco; note the word ‘additional’ here. Believe it or not, the USA is lagging behind Britain in this respect – surveillance is already firmly established in Britain and has been for years now, what the British Government seems to be focused on now is the implementation of massive databases and filtering systems to enable them to process all that data they collect. Back in 2005 it was estimated that the average person in Britain is captured hundreds of times per day on various CCTV cameras – how’s that for an invasion of privacy?
All of this is of course being done for our benefit – if you believe the hype. Better security. Enhanced public services. More currency of information. More convenient for us. Safer, smarter, better…
It’s all a crock of shit!
The only thing a surveillance society delivers is control. State control. Moves to push the USA towards a surveillance society were already underway long before 9-11 happened, but of course Bush & Co. have been using the so-called “war on terror” as an excuse for encroaching on personal and corporate privacy ever since then. In Britain the same is true and if they manage to perfect the back end systems to sift through all the data that is being generated, well then they pretty much have a full Big Brother solution in place without any real opposition.
The very same process has begun to happen here in Ireland, but to a lesser extent and thus far the only opposition is a legal challenge by Digital Rights Ireland.
It’s time to wake up people. It’s time to quit sleepwalking through life and watching other people make a stand on your behalf. Get off your collective arses and do something.
You need to shake yourself awake, open your eyes and realise that Big Brother and the “Surveillance Society” it implies is not some far off concept, some borrowed ideal from a futuristic novel; it’s a reality and if you live in the USA or Britain – it’s already here and it’s only going to get worse unless you do something about it.
It’s not just about personal or data protection and privacy; it’s about personal freedom. Find the nearest opposition group and get involved, start lobbying for your information rights in a digital world or find some other way to make a difference, but do something before it’s too late.
Probably mostly in consequence of the fact that the UK is a much smaller country than the US, but also, undeniably, in consequence of the fact that the UK has had to deal with the IRA and Provos and various other para-military groups for years, the UK is under a far greater degree of surveillance via CCTV than is the US.
Recently experienced the truth of said observation while waiting for a bus in Derry/Londonderry, Northern Ireland. I was sitting around in the station, waiting for the next bus to Belfast, reading a book and minding my own business. Presently a group of three young school-girls came and sat beside me on the bench. They looked to be about 15-17 years old and were wearing school uniforms that, had I been a local, would have easily identified them as either Prods or Catholics. (As an American, I didn’t give a shit about their sectarian affiliation. Whatever. I was raised Catholic myself, but I’m an atheist now.)
The girls were loud there on the bench for about five minutes, talking and giggling and irritating me, when suddenly, out of nowhere, a uniformed law enforcement man walks up to them and quietly says something like, “you were caught writing graffiti on CCTV. Come with me please.”
And there they went. All three of ‘em.
Well. I’d been told. While it never would have occurred to me to write any kind of graffiti in Northern Ireland, I should have been even less inclined to do so had I known that virtually all public spaces there are monitored 24-7 by CCTVs.
And that’s the truth. As bad as we have it here in The States, it’s much worse across the pond in the UK.
Still, do not be afraid. Fear is the first step on the road to capitulation. We will win in the end no matter what our governments do. We are not afraid and we will fight.
Please note: above reproduced from comment on reddit.com by serpentjaguar [because I believe it's relevant to the points being made here]
Nice pages here. Great information. Will visit again and recommend.
That’s an extreme invasion of privacy. I would not want someone to have all of my personal information right before them whenever they wanted it.
We need to elect someone who will stop that nonsense. I believe if Ron Paul were to be elected, he would definitely put an end to that.
Very interesting indeed. Just one thought on the side-issue of stop’n’searches: it’s a little dangerous to argue that a system should be abandoned because it isn’t “fairâ€. For example, DNA testing is less likely to pin a crime on an identical twin than a non-twin. Does this mean we should abandon it? Given how many ways one can evalute “fairnessâ€, most things are unfair in some sense. If we stopped doing everything that was arguably unfair, we wouldn’t do much.