[Clips] Knowing me, knowing you

[R.A. Hettinga]

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 Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2005 15:08:12 -0400
 To: Philodox Clips List <clips at philodox.com>
 From: "R.A. Hettinga" <rah at shipwright.com>
 Subject: [Clips] Knowing me, knowing you
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 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5254923-103572,00.html>

    Guardian |

 Knowing me, knowing you

 George Orwell would be shocked at the popular support for the spread of
 surveillance technology, writes Victor Keegan
 Victor Keegan
 Thursday August 4, 2005

 Guardian Unlimited
 There is not much doubt now that the world has entered the age of
 surveillance - with the UK at the leading edge. Britain now has over 4
 million CCTV cameras in operation, the guardian angels of a secular
 society. If a referendum were to be held in the wake of the terrorists'
 attacks recommending cameras on every street it would probably be carried
 overwhelmingly. This is slightly surprising, not just because of the
 long-term implications for civil liberties, but because video cameras do
 not seem to have acted as a deterrent to terrorists, even though they have
 made it easier to identify them afterwards, whether dead or alive.

 The main means of tracking terrorist suspects down has been the monitoring
 of mobile phone conversations. Not only can operators pinpoint users to
 within yards of their location by "triangulating" the signals from three
 base stations, but - according to a report in the Financial Times - the
 operators (under instructions from the authorities) can remotely install
 software onto a handset to activate the microphone even when the user is
 not making a call. Who needs an ID card when they can do that already?

 On top of all this official scrutiny, there is a growing fashion for mutual
 personal surveillance from the millions of "smart" phones with built-in
 cameras and video functions that are getting more powerful by the week. It
 won't be long, doubtless, before miniaturised cameras will be embedded in
 spectacles enabling footage to be sent on the hoof to a remote website for
 archival purposes.

 Technology has undoubtedly helped terrorists get organised. The internet is
 a source for fundamentalist proselytising, information about activities
 such as bomb making and links to like-minded people, while mobile phones
 provide constant communication and, in some instances, detonators.

 Technology also offers unprecedented ways to track criminals down. But each
 advance in technological detection produces a counter-reaction from
 terrorists. Just as there has been a move away from laundering money
 through the international banking system (towards cash transactions)
 because of improved governmental monitoring, so the events of the past
 month could persuade terrorists to abandon mobile phones in favour of more
 primitive forms of communication such as one-to-one conversations.

 As technology continues to advance at a breathtaking pace, the future scope
 for finding out who we are is quite awesome. The current issue of Business
 Week lists the ways in which we can be uniquely identified from DNA and
 radio frequency identification tabs (RFID) to body odour, breath or saliva.
 There are even scientists working on "gait recognition" so future video
 cameras can pick us out from the way we walk in a crowd.

 The danger from all this is that few people will object as long as there is
 a serious threat of terrorism. But once (if?) the threat subsides, the
 infrastructure of surveillance will remain. Then it might not be the police
 reconstructing a fuzzy image from a crowd to catch a terrorist but an
 employee of the imaging company extorting money from someone found in a
 compromising position. As one Business Week contributor observed: "We get
 most of our security from liberty." If George Orwell were alive now (21
 years after the London he depicted in 1984) he would be astonished by the
 fact that the sort of surveillance he feared is supported not by a
 government imposing it from above on an unwilling population but by a
 groundswell of popular support. That's not a problem at the moment. But it
 will be in future, either if we sign away civil liberties permanently in
 response to a temporary emergency or if the cost of installing the
 infrastructure becomes so huge that it erodes our personal prosperity.
 Either way, Bin Laden would have won.

 --
 -----------------
 R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
 The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
 "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
 [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
 experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
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-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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