Orwell Was Right: A Cautionary Tale for a New Age of Surveillance:

“What Britain’s surveillance experiment can teach us about our coming security state.” New York Times [name: “FMHreader”, password: “FMHreader”] Alarming description of the complacent acceptance of pervasive surveillance even coupled with the recognition that it directly shapes public behavior in chilling ways. Rationalized as a response to Britain’s terrorist threat, the slippery slope of surveillance has been quite a swift ride downhill into monitoring a multiplicity of more prosaic social activities. The article estimates that the average Briton appears on a surveillance camera no lesss than three hundred times a day. Apparently, not one terrorist has been caught yet by the system, authorities concede, although it has identified a handful of scofflaws and petty thieves. There has been no control over whose data gets into the authorities’ databases; and the profiteer of an entrepreneur who has developed the predominant face recognition system they are using (seen here sewing seeds of public panic about terrorist threats with no scruples) attempts to assure the reporter that Britain could not abuse the database without going through him first. The essay suggests that because the British, in contrast to Americans, have traits such as a greater degree of craving for social class distinction and thus classification, and less litigiousness, we might not accept such surveillance as readily as they do. And, oh yes, we should feel reassured because those sitting in front of the monitors have a tendency to turn their cameras on large-breasted women. Whistling in the dark, I fear…

As we embark on the latest war to “protect our freedoms”, we should be careful what freedoms we are protecting. They include, apparently, the freedom to be unresisting subjects in the greatest experiment in the perfection of subtle transparent unrecognizable social control in the history of the world, all the while convinced we are fighting against the authoritarian regimes.