h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

There are 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain, one for every fourteen people. But that figure is already woefully out of date. As I write this, more CCTV cameras are being installed in shops, blocks of flats, on street corners and over motorways, so that figure rises by the day. In an average one of those days, you & I will be recorded over 300 times.

Why?

The big argument that CCTV cuts crime is hollow. Never mind the argument that cameras deter crime, which is rather spurious in any case, a constant feature of crime reports on the TV is that "Police are examining CCTV footage". But over 80% of crimes still go unsolved. Surely criminals are also filmed 300 times. If CCTV met the claims put forward, the UK should have the lowest crime rate in the world. Of course CCTV is a vital tool in the "War on Terror"(c) as the mantra goes. After 7/7, the public eagerly awaited the release of the CCTV footage and when, with a fanfare, it finally was released there was a great collective sucking of teeth and nodding of heads in a wise fashion as people said "See - without CCTV we would never have seen this". So what? Did it stop the bombings? Was there anything in the film that enabled other loonies to be caught?

I think the great CCTV scam is designed to scare the public into accepting ever more draconian laws. If we see real crime being perpetrated by real criminals 24/7, how can we argue against the need for more police, more CCTV, more invasion into our lives by faceless civil servants. Is it any coincidence that reality shows, video clip shows, police car chase shows and Crimewatch are the some of the most viewed programmes in the UK. We are obsessed with watching other people do wrong.

Occasionally we hear people protest about this invasion of privacy, but really, we don't care. How can people seriously object to ID cards when the phenomenon of the 21st century has been sites such as Facebook and Bebo. These are sites where people display the inane minutaie of their petty lives for anyone and everyone to see. Even message boards like this one - it isn't hard to get a helluva lot of personal information on the people here. Freely offered.

Government in the 21st century has more information on the population at it's fingertips than any other in history. And it wants ever more. Not content with knowing your every movement and financial transaction, it wants your DNA on file. Not just yours either, it wants EU-wide access to the personal information of over 700 million people. Why? Has this increase in available information made things better for anyone? Are Govt policies so much better now that decisions are made with the benefit of so much information?

And there is just so much information held by government that there is no way on earth it can ever be fully utilised. Trillions of hours of CCTV held in limbo that will never, ever be seen by the human eye. Skyscrapers of computer servers stuffed with every detail of our lives that will shuffle endlessly in an electronic loop. All this has to be managed - an army of clerks interminably sifting and sorting to no visible result. Each year the Government hires more and more people to sift more and more information in it's insatiable desire for "more Input". Where does it stop? Will every room of every building have it's own CCTV suite? Will every foot of every pavement and road be scanned constantly? Will every tree have a UAV hovering above with it's glinting Zeiss eye recording?

Is this navel-gazing on a societal scale?

My biggest fear is that most people are just stupid enough to think these sort of measures are for the best. The problem then becomes one of waiting for someone evil enough to come along and take advantage of the situation. It's bound to happen. In the U.S. the FBI got unlimited phone tapping capability, without court consent. And given the track record of mistakes and mis-use, one would think that the public would scream. But they use that term "homeland security" and call you a traitor if you complain. The truth is most people are sheep. Not terribly complimentary, but it's what I've seen to be true.

You can be traced by your cell-phone, too, once they've got the mind to follow you in particular. You'd need to remove the battery to shut it down, turning it off isn't enough. Cars with the newest on-star technology can be stopped dead in their tracks by someone in an office half a world away if they wanted to detain you. Much of this we do to ourselves, and with little or nothing to show for it as you said.

Oddly enough, what gets us into these messes also gets us out of them. The people in government are every bit as inept as the ones on the street. Fear not, they're probably too stupid to manage any long-term damage with all this technology. I'm afraid that's as encouraging as I can be.

That's the point - it's all pointless.

And in today's news - every e-mail you send and every phone call you make will be stored by the government on a database.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/telecoms/article3965033.ece

"A massive government database holding details of every phone call, e-mail and time spent on the internet by the public is being planned as part of the fight against crime and terrorism. Internet service providers (ISPs) and telecoms companies would hand over the records to the Home Office under plans put forward by officials."

People call me paranoid, but I'm fond of responding with a quote from long ago "Paranoia is nothing but common sense when the whole world is after your arse".

I'm not a fan of CCTV. I'm the sort of person who, while walking in the woods, takes a moment to enjoy the thought that absolutely no one knows where I am. And, like you, I don't think it's very effective.

But I'm used to the thought that Internet usage isn't private, so the thought of the government monitoring e-mails and text messages doesn't trouble me much. On the other hand, I do wonder why they'd bother.

TRiG.

A good question, which makes me think that they are even more paranoid than I am. Tsk tsk.

Now, this may sound paranoid too, but I think they just can't resist the desire to control us all...

What annoys me more (as a Canadian) is that "they" are the elected folks that we put in there. They don't care, they just follow the flow of the polls. How-ever, these changes are instituted by the non-elected folks. Reguardless of which governing party gets into the bigger chairs, it's the same career folks that really run the country. Clerks and managers that only have to keep their noses ethically clean but not otherwise at all answerable to you or me.

I do believe it is somewhat. There are similar things going on in my own country.
But in a slightly different yet overlapping form.