Orwell Cometh: A Look Inside the Surveillance Society
From security cameras to DNA databases, Big Brother is watching you.
BC: You mention the Stasi, East Germany’s secret political police, and their 90,000 agents. Obviously, the Stasi’s humans were very successful at spying. Given this eventuality, can machines ever replace men in terms of effective surveillance?
Ross Clark: The point I was making was that CCTV cameras and other forms of electronic surveillance are not synonymous with authoritarianism. The most authoritarian societies the world has known exerted their grip not by cameras but via human surveillance: they recruited vast numbers of people to spy on their fellow citizens. Obviously I am not advocating authoritarianism; I am merely arguing that human eyes and ears are highly effective surveillance tools in themselves. If you want to reduce crime, plastering a city with CCTV cameras is not necessarily the best way of achieving it. Far better to create public spaces where people feel comfortable and engender a community spirit where people feel it their duty to take an active part in fighting crime, by witnessing incidents, cooperating with police, and so on. CCTV cameras, I feel, detract from this objective. If a street is full of cameras it is too easy to walk on by, thinking that I don’t need to witness or report that group of louts breaking into a shop; that’s what the cameras are for.
BC: How much has political correctness debilitated policing in modern Britain?
Ross Clark: Political correctness has certainly been a problem. On one level it has led to police stopping and searching people for no reason other than to fulfill some ethnic quota. On another level senior officers of the Metropolitan Police in London seem to spend much of their time suing each other for alleged racial discrimination.
But a greater problem, I think, is health and safety culture. CCTV cameras have in so many cases been used as an excuse to reduce police presence on the streets. There is a tendency to think that if we put cameras on the streets, we can use them to do the laborious, dangerous bits of policing. Officers can retreat to the safer environment of CCTV control rooms and do their policing by remote control. This is folly.
The presence of real, living policemen has a far greater effect on crime reduction than does the presence of cameras. In Northampton, one of the towns I visited for my studies, the installation of 400 CCTVs had been accompanied by a rise in crime and anti-social behavior. In the run-up to Christmas 2005, on the other hand, the local constabulary experimented by putting police horses on the streets late at night to contain revelers. Crime and disorder fell by a quarter during the time they were deployed.
BC: “Mission creep” is an interesting notion. Is government’s natural tendency to control and expand its own power something we’re seeing now with surveillance states?
Ross Clark: The prime example of this is Britain’s DNA database. This was established in 1995 to hold DNA samples of convicted criminals. But over time the police have added to it everyone they have arrested or questioned. There are now some five million Britons in it, including a pair of girls caught by police for playing hopscotch on the sidewalk.
At some point, no doubt, it will become a tidying-up exercise to add everyone to it — effectively treating us all as criminal suspects. It is not just overbearing; it is counterproductive. The vast majority of crime is committed by a few repeat offenders, yet having everyone’s DNA in the database creates a fog of data which makes it harder to pick out the samples you want. Data in the database is also being used in order to conduct research into a possible genetic basis for criminality. If we are not careful we will be back to eugenics, labeling children as potential criminals from the moment they are born. I don’t recall this being part of the mission when the database was launched.
BC: You cite Justice Lord Goddard who, in 1952, ruled that laws established due to the exigencies of war and continued in peacetime turn “law-abiding subjects into lawbreakers, which is a most undesirable state of affairs.” Haven’t we seen precisely that occur during government’s advance on liberty over the last fifty years?
Ross Clark: Yes, we have. One of the effects of surveillance is to create offenses. If you pass a law obliging everyone to carry an ID card — the subject on which Lord Goddard was talking — you immediately turn those who refuse to carry a card into criminals. There is something very alienating about the way in which surveillance is used to enforce law. Authorities now set out to trap people rather than guide them. One small example: Passengers used to be allowed to hop onto London buses, then pay the conductor as he came round. Now, they must present a prepayment card which they have bought before they board. If their prepayment card turns out not to have been loaded with enough money for their journey they are stiffly fined. It is a system which catches out the forgetful and confused as much as it does the genuine fare-dodger — which promotes alienation.
BC: What would George Orwell say about the England of 2009? I’m partially joking here as you answered the question in your appendix.
Ross Clark: I think he would have been astounded that so many of the tools of surveillance which he imagined would have come to fruition in societies which remain — essentially — democratic. He might also have been amused at how badly some of the surveillance equipment functions. The National Health Service has spent billions on a computer database which is supposed to make everyone’s health records available on computer, but it still doesn’t work. Winston Smith would quite likely have been accidentally deleted from Big Brother’s database.
BC: England will hold elections in the near future. Is there any chance that should the Conservatives emerge victorious they will cut back the size of the Leviathan? Or, rather, are they every bit as devoted to statism as the Labour Party?
Ross Clark: They have promised to abandon ID cards, but I doubt whether there will be much of a change in attitude towards surveillance generally. The Conservatives were in government between 1979 and 1997 when a lot of surveillance systems were introduced. Labour has just carried on when they left off.
BC: Are people in England content with their nanny state? Socialism has inevitably resulted in misery everywhere it has been practiced, but do the British citizenry believe that their colossal debt is something that need not ever be paid?
Ross Clark: It is very hard to excite the British on issues of liberty. Few have lived in authoritarian countries and cannot imagine what it is like living under a malign regime. CCTV cameras are very popular — in a few cases it has been the police who have been opposing their installation and the public demanding them. There is, on the other hand, growing disgust at the way in which taxes are being misspent. The British state will simply have to contract over the next few years — or else it will go bust.
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Bernard Chapin wrote Women: Theory and Practice and Escape from Gangsta Island, along with a series of videos called Chapin’s Inferno. You can contact him at veritaseducation@gmail.com.
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20 Comments
1. whataloadacrap08:It’s almost to the point where Big Brother knows how many times you fart before lunch these days! With cable Internet, TV and radio your “online” habits are easy enough to document. With GPS in your car your location is easy enough to pinpoint. With credit and/or store cards your buying habits can be studied. Now they want to implant a chip into everyones arse with your complete medical history there for all to see.
May 21, 2009 - 11:52 pm 2. anton:And they still can’t keep track of the thousands of terrorists that are in the UK. I guess they just need more cameras. And more/better ID cards, maybe a GPS tag on everybody’s ear.
What a way to live.
May 22, 2009 - 6:10 am 3. Brian Richard Allen:The point, it seems, of all of this, is that most of what not so long ago was fairly accurately described as — and called itself — The Free World” and which included those very few countries in which the stupendous superiority of the benefits of being a part of Judeo-Christian/Western/Human Civilization were celebrated — and jealously guarded — were indeed free.
What has quite recently occurred, though, in such places as Washington DC and Canberra ACT, in Ottawa and at Westminster, in part because of the negative influences of unassimilable third-world migration and as the dead and decadent Euro-peons’ Neo-Soviet’s Triffids — merged with those from long long long latently-fascistic Berlin — blow in on the breezes from Brussels and from Strasbourg – is that, by a process of degeneration (in which evolution has been gotten rid of and/or has been reversed) an entirely new and essentially fascistic sub-species, essentially a Permanently-Parasitical Bureaucratic Class(less) has devolved.
That fascistic sub-species — now well into its fourth and fifth and sixth generation of control of the macinery of government — suffers endemically from a mental derangement whose effect includes a state of pathologically-denied personal inferiority that manifests in its sufferer’s deluded perception of the moral and intellectual inferiority of everyone who is not a member of his sub-species. Couple that with that when reality very very occasionally intrudes into the tiny worlds inhabited by the sufferers of that derangement, its effect is to fuel its every sufferer’s latent Paranoia.
And it is that Paranoia, institutionalized by the increasingly self-anointed, self-appointed, self-perpetuating and permanently-parasitical ruling elite that works so assiduously and so very insidiously to maintain its sufferers’ delusionally-fantasized elitist superiority over all of the rest of us mere mortals.
And to keep an authoritarian’s ear and a totalitarian’s eye on us all.
Hence the Statists’ ever growing network of the machinery of state surveillance
All of it — and this is especially so in ever-increasingly totalitarian Australia and in ever-more fascistic America — without there ever having been a single bill introduced and/or piece of legislation passed in either country, to permit the creation of the obscenely expensive and intrusive state information-gathering apparatuses.
And no-one, it seems, ever asks: Who and/or what gave the State the bloody authority?
Brian Richard Allen
May 22, 2009 - 6:37 am 4. Delia:Los Angeles Califobambicated 90028
And the Far Abroad
Robocop 2035!
May 22, 2009 - 11:39 am 5. JED:The US has already mandated the largest potential violation of privacy with the Medical Electronic Records passed in the $750 billion stimulus package. All of everyones’ once confidential medical records are available for data mining by our friendly fed. The potential of that information is enourmous and not always for patient benefits. One of the first criterion for rationing health care will be pre-existing condition. The rest is just personal.
May 22, 2009 - 11:40 am 6. Oscar Wao:Spyware is everywhere on the net. This PJM site has at least 6 adware and spyware gismos hooked on to your computer right now. What are they finding out about us? Who wants to know? Are they friendly?
You idiot. The Bush administration surveilled your every email. I’m sure you thanked him daily for it.
May 22, 2009 - 12:12 pm 7. Delia:5. JED
“This PJM site has at least 6 adware and spyware gismos hooked on to your computer right now.”
~
HUH? I have Kaspersky Internet Security 8 and any website with ad-ware/spyware pops up a warning form Kasp… Never, ever had that happen on PJM!
Do you have evidence of that? *gulp*
May 22, 2009 - 12:44 pm 8. JED:Delia:
May 23, 2009 - 7:48 am 9. Dave Goin:I have Webroot Spyware with Virus and if I go only to this site with before and after sweeps I pick up the same little bunch:questionmarket,specificclick,adrevolver,realmedia, and 9 other of the usual suspects. Webroots keeps them in quarantine with their found locations. I think of it as my own little Gitmo. Last month I hauled in 27 viruses, and those were from legitamate sites, not mail. Buggy eh?
Oscar, your lack of intelligence is showing.
Unless you were emailing some raghead outfit, slling dope or laundering money then they weren’t interested in, nor did they have the resources to read every email sent worldwide. They have a pretty good idea of what to look for and where to look for it. Flagged words and phrases would trigger a closer look and then get a warrant to fully investigate. They don’t have time for that.
Do you really believe GWB gives a rats Arse what pinheaded liberals are writing to each other. The Web is public and open to the world.
May 23, 2009 - 8:29 am 10. JIMV:If I don’t want anyone to listen in or read my mail then I speak in person or not at all.
[i]Is England a police state? It’s hard not to think so given that the nation’s public spaces brim with 4.2 million surveillance cameras.[/i]
Remember, the UK a few years ago changed the rules on double jeopardy letting the government to keep trying a person until they get the result they like and they banned almost all guns to reduce violent crime and gun crime, resulting in exactly what gun owners claim, a more than a doubling of the violent crime rate and an 80% increase in gun crimes. Freedom is long gone in the UK…look up their thought crime laws….shudder.
May 23, 2009 - 9:40 am 11. D. Grant Chee:The guvmint, in watching us, demands we watch them. County, state and federal bureaucrats are
May 23, 2009 - 3:34 pm 12. D. Grant Chee:granted authority to steal our privacy, place us on rosters and declare broad segments of (we the people) liabilities; while elected leaders exercise no authority to protect us.
ATTN Bureau-rats: We know who you are, where you are and what you have done and plan to do.
What you don’t know is that your misconduct and abuse of undeserved authority is your undoing.
We, tha sheepple, have big bro surrounded! Baa
May 23, 2009 - 3:41 pm 13. JED:Bhaaaa, baaaah baaaaaaaaaaaaahh
If you want to soar to new levels of paranoia, rent the movie “Eagle Eye”. The joke is on us, because we are paying for this security.
May 23, 2009 - 4:21 pm 14. Oscar Wao:“They have a pretty good idea of what to look for and where to look for it. Flagged words and phrases would trigger a closer look and then get a warrant to fully investigate. They don’t have time for that.”
I don’t understand the distinction you’re making. Here you are defending an article about surveillace. You do realize that the problem of surveillance isn’t that THEY ARE actively looking at you, its THAT AT ANY MOMENT THEY COULD BE. Some douchebag might read all or none of your emails. Its up to him. That’s the whole point of right to privacy–you don’t put that power in the hands of the government. I can’t believe I’m actually explaining this to somebody. God, I was prepared for some low IQs here, but I feel like I need an express elevator back up to the surface.
May 23, 2009 - 8:07 pm 15. Warren Bonesteel:If the truth were but known, neither party/ideology gives a rip about freedom. Their narrative and meme is about control. Your favorite and least favorite politicians are the problem. Hell, you elected them – and keep on re-electing them – so you’re a part of the problem.
Google: ‘Beyond Conspiracy: Police State America.’ There are numerous
references and resources at the first three links.
see also: ‘An Open Letter to American Politicians: On “Right-Wing Extremists”.
by Warren “Bones” Bonesteel’
see also: ‘Economic Depression, Civil Unrest and the breakdown of order in America.’
see also: ‘On Proper Government in a Republic.’
U.S. Constitution.
http://www.usconstitution.net/declar.html
http://www.usconstitution.net/const.html
State Constitutions
http://www.findlaw.com/11stategov/indexconst.html
Commentary and letters by Founding Fathers.
http://www.constitution.org/liberlib.htm http://oll.libertyfund.org/
Whether you realize it or not, you only have two choices left: Submit to tyranny or prepare to fertilize a certain metaphorical tree.
May 24, 2009 - 3:24 pm 16. Well Educated Cad:Who was it who said ” Those who would give up their freedom for security will soon have neither”? Jefferson? or Franklin?
May 24, 2009 - 7:04 pm 17. burntjohn:Google crawls the entire internet every couple of weeks and has recently started to keep track of who is linked to whom on social networks, blogs and just about every page they crawl. This new service is called Google Social Graph.
May 24, 2009 - 7:31 pm 18. wadosy:these invasions of privacy are wildly successful, which explains why the FBI has to manufacture its own terrorists, then bust them with weeks of 24/7 media hysteria.
despite all the data mining, they still cant find al qaeda.
…so it becomes necessary to ask ourselves: who’s the government really afraid of?
May 25, 2009 - 10:03 am 19. wadosy:nevermind.
the situation’s under control.
we manufacture terrorists, who are blamed for crimes we commit to justify our project, then torture our ersatz terrorists into confessing to our crimes.
it works like a charm… except for the dawning suspicion (in the general population) that the whole thing’s a crock…
…which explains why massive data mining is necessary.
.
May 25, 2009 - 10:08 am 20. Dblade:it’s the cold civil war, dont you know?
The problem though is that people aren’t honest and willing to accept more crime for less surveillence. The police are zero-sum, they can only do so much, so things like this are an effort to try and increase protection by supplementing it with mechanical means.
I mean, stores use cctv too, mostly because its impossible to afford a full-time detective team. If they didn’t, crime would increase, simply because there is less of a deterrent.
If you want small government, you have to accept the reduction in services it will bring. You can’t have both-if you want more freedom from observation, you have to accept the increase in crime it may bring.
May 25, 2009 - 10:33 pm