LONDON: 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 four million CCTV cameras in operation.
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.
Technology offers unprecedented ways to track criminals down.
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 a business magazine lists the ways in which we can be uniquely identified from DNA and radio frequency identification tabs (RFID) to body odour, breath or saliva.
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 by blackmailing someone.
If George Orwell were alive now 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. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service
