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Total surveillance state takes giant leap in Britain
By Stephen Soldz
12/30/05 "ICH"
-- -- The headline in the Independent tells it all:
Britain will be first country to monitor every car journey:
From 2006 Britain will be the first country where every journey by
every car will be monitored
”Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every
passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of
vehicle movements so that the police and security services can
analyse any journey a driver has made over several years.”
”By next March a central database installed alongside the Police
National Computer in Hendon, north London, will store the details of
35 million number-plate "reads" per day. These will include time,
date and precise location, with camera sites monitored by global
positioning satellites.”
Such tools, once built, naturally, and quite easily expand:
"Already there are plans to extend the database by increasing the
storage period to five years and by linking thousands of additional
cameras so that details of up to 100 million number plates can be
fed each day into the central databank.”
Will the next step be to integrate in face recognition capability?
Why not? And what then?
This decision in Britain is especially ironic in light of the
headlines this week in the United States, which announce that the
Bush administration has been illegally wiretapping unknown numbers
of people and, separately, spying on peaceful protesters, all in the
name of fighting terrorism. Especially important to keep in mind is
the fact that Bush emphatically asserted in 2004 that no one was
being wiretapped without a court order. Surveillance tools, when
built, are always only going to be used within clear limits. And
then…
While it may be justified, and fun, to demonize Bush and his gang,
we have to remember that the Bush administration is hardly the first
to use illicit means to crush opposition. Many articles this week
have made connections to Watergate and other actions of the Nixon
administration. But Democratic administrations have certainly
engaged in their share of dirty tricks when facing opposition. The
infamous
Cointelpro program, the attempt to provoke Martin Luther
King Jr. to commit suicide, and many other attacks on protestors and
dissidents occurred largely during the Johnson administration.
Over a hundred years ago Lord Acton understood that the danger to
liberty does not reside mainly in bad individuals, but in the power
available to those in positions of authority: “Power tends to
corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” This is why it is
essential to put absolute limits on the tools available to those in
authority. If we trust our leaders to use the tools available to
them wisely, we are simply being fools. Further, if these tools are
used prudently now, there is absolutely no guarantee that future
leaders will continue to wield them judiciously. Some tools should
never be built, and the total surveillance system being constructed
in Britain is one of those.
One can only imagine what will be done with these tools once they
are built. Unfortunately, the land of the Magna Carta is rapidly
moving toward becoming the land in which privacy is a quaint relic
of the past. While the pretense of freedom will undoubtedly remain,
real freedom may soon be gone. The next step may very well be to
keep tabs on the movements of every individual. GPS systems make
such a totally surveillance state a likely possibility, indeed, a
certainty, unless current trends are rapidly reversed. Already, such
systems are being used to control prisoners. Proposals exist to use
them with visitors, to make sure they don’t overstay their visas.
How far is it from these uses to a society in which everyone’s
location is monitored at all times? Such an outcome may seem
outrageous now, but so would this Independent headline have seemed
so 10 years ago. The issue of the creeping, or rather galloping,
total surveillance state is one of the most important ignored issues
of modern times. Modern technology makes possible types of
monitoring, and control, undreamed of by Orwell. And, with little
discussion or opposition, these techniques are being implemented. If
we don’t act now, it will soon be too late to turn the tide.
Cointelpro
COINTELPRO is the FBI acronym for a series of covert action
programs directed against domestic groups. In these programs, the
Bureau went beyond the collection of intelligence to secret action
defined to "disrupt" and "neutralize" target groups and individuals
http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointelpro/churchfinalreportIIIa.htm
SUMMARY:
Britain is constructing a system of surveillance cameras that will
be able to record and store for years every trip taken by every
driver. This step toward the total surveillance state is unwise in
light of governments’ habitual tendency to abuse whatever tools are
available to them.
Stephen Soldz - ssoldz@bgsp.edu
Copyright Stephen Soldz
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