Last year, Sanctus 1 ran a 'Two' event in Manchester's Cord Bar based on the theme of surveillance, the funniest bit being me sampling Cris's conversation about fancy cars with a rifle mic, running it through some effects gizmos, and incorporating his voice into the music that was playing.
Courtesy of the Letter To America blog, here is a wonderful animation about a campaign called Stop The Big Brother State. It presents one side of the argument about a perceived compromise of our privacy for the greater good.
Now, I do get a bit het up when it comes to civil liberties. I know the bible says stuff about the mark of the beast in Revelation something-teen. It has a whole lot more to say about freedom.
So what do you think? Comments please!
(Note - this video contains some not-safe-for-work moments, namely small sillhouettes doing naughty things to each other)
2 comments:
Their argument is based on the premise that people are generally interesting enough for the authorities to *want* to gather lots of information about them.
Sure, they can train a camera on a person and track them across london or manchester. Why would they? 'The suspect entered the city at 3:15, walked around for 30 minutes looking in shop windows, then bought a cheeseburger. Then boarded a bus and went home.' Riveting stuff... lookout crimewatch! Meanwhile while they're spending the time recording the cheeseburger incident someone got mugged just around the corner because the camera was tied up elsewhere.
It can be abused, and we need to be watching for that constantly. The debate needs to focus on what is being done with all this information (and whether it makes sense to gather it eg. in the case of potentially tracking the movement of every car - to my mind that has no purpose, would generate so much data there's no way it could be processed properly anyway, and is just a stupid idea overall).
OTOH Tescos for example have a huge database of peoples spending habits right down to the addresses of everyone who bought a bottle of milk last week. That's what 'loyalty points' are all about - and that data isn't subject to any public scrutiny beyond the provisions of the DPA. All of that is given voluntarily, and few talk about how much data could be derived from that (it wouldn't be too hard to work out who is in the house, approximate ages, employment status, etc.).. because it isn't the 'state' doing it then nobody cares.
The benefit of CCTV is that if a crime is committed, as long as you have a reasonable timeframe, you can look at the footage to identify the culprit and then use it as evidence. We've just put it on one of my estates and I'm interested to see what effect it has. I do believe in protecting my tenants from drug-dealers, vandals and other criminals. It's a pragmatic response, but it is a way to respond to some of the problems on the estate.
However, I do have issues with ID cards withbiometric data on and loads of other information available to loads of different people - what medical problems I have and what library books I borrow. And some doubts about the government's desire or ability to protect that data.
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