Britain is ’surveillance society’

[jason]

Ex-Lemmingworks. ##.

I know one of the authors slightly through some work I did with Barry and Steve on Sousveillance/Surveillance in a paper Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments, and though it is not really my field, I’m very curious about how children’s information is collected and used, and the sort of world they’re growing up into. I think this is something to be rather bothered by, especially if it doesn’t bother you.

Britain is ’surveillance society’

Fears that the UK would “sleep-walk into a surveillance society” have become a reality, the government’s information commissioner has said.

Researchers highlight “dataveillance”, the use of credit card, mobile phone and loyalty card information, and CCTV. Monitoring of work rates, travel and telecommunications is also rising. There are up to 4.2m CCTV cameras in Britain - about one for every 14 people.

But surveillance ranges from US security agencies monitoring telecommunications traffic passing through Britain, to key stroke information used to gauge work rates and GPS information tracking company vehicles, the Report on the Surveillance Society says.

It predicts that by 2016 shoppers could be scanned as they enter stores, schools could bring in cards allowing parents to monitor what their children eat, and jobs may be refused to applicants who are seen as a health risk….

The report’s co-writer Dr David Murakami-Wood told BBC News that, compared to other industrialised Western states, the UK was “the most surveilled country”.

[Surveillance society - full report]

Comments

[roger-kuin.livejournal.com]

This is horrible, even though in the countryside where my kids and grandkids live you wouldn't notice it. But T*ny Bl**r dreams of having gene databases for every citizen. Pray he is removed from office yesterday if not sooner, and all his beastly minions with him. What this comes from is the old canard of behavioural social engineering: we can, and therefore we must (note the logical progression), improve people's citizenship whether they want it or not. Citizenship is too important to be left to citizens. Big Brother Knows Best. And the British, for once in their pleasingly bloody-minded history, are going along like cattle (or, as John LeCarré puts it, like pigs in clover), meekly processing, not to the slaughterhouse but to the battery farm. Charles Morgan the novelist sounded the alarm back in 1948, showing how easy it was, using wartime legislation never repealed, to turn Britain into a totalitarian state virtually overnight; but no one was listening. Now it's happening by the back door.

[complicittheory.livejournal.com]

You'd think that Britain would be one place where people could think critically about such socially important issues. Love the battery farm metaphor. It just occurred to me this fall, with help from peers, that this whole post 60s decline in education was intended to dumb down the critical faculties of the children of the the radicals so that they would stop getting in the way of industry and government plans. As I look at my students, I see a lot of 'deer in the headlights' when it comes to thinking critically, BUT it seems rather easy to 'flip the bit' and get them into problematizing their taken for granted assumptions about how they interact with the world around them. It is taking a lot of bertrand russell, strangely enough.