The phrase ‘surveillance society’ entered the public consciousness six years ago when the Information Commissioner (no, I didn’t know there was such a person either) suggested that there was a danger that we were in danger of sleepwalking into it. More recently it seems to have dipped out of the headlines and this is a shame for two reasons. First, it seems the Commissioner was remarkably prescient and second, cameras are only the most visible manifestation of a wider trend. In 2006 the UK was described as 'the most surveilled (!) country' among the industrialized Western states. In February 2009 a report by the House of Lords Constitution Commission, no less, suggested that “The expansion in the use of surveillance represents one of the most significant changes in the life of the nation since the end of the Second World War.”
Even as recently as November of that year the then government confirmed plans to continue with a £2 billion project designed to create a giant database that would monitor all telephone numbers dialed, websites visited and addresses to which e-mails are sent by every UK citizen. Crazy!
Now, I’m no Luddite, I know that there are potential law and order benefits to CCTV and other monitoring mechanisms; what I’m arguing for is moderation. Figures from Privacy International suggest that we are in the bottom five nations in the world in a league table of what they term as "endemic surveillance", not that much better than China and Malaysia. The question I’d like to ask is has the balance between protecting freedom and being able to enjoy it got out of kilter? It’s an important issue and one that deserves being re-aired as things could be about to get a lot worse. Technology has now reached a stage where not only can individuals be identified by automatic face recognition software, and their movements subsequently tracked, but even individual items in a shop carry their own tags that can send messages back to a central point – do we really want that? Do we really need that? And don’t get me started on mobile phone tracking.
As seems to be a growing trend, there’s a real danger here of the technology – of what’s possible – superseding the practical: what’s desirable; and that, dear readers, is a slippery slope. If we don’t start to challenge this trend there’s a significant chance that one day we’ll wake up from the sleepwalk the Information Commissioner warned us about and find out that what we were really in the middle of was a nightmare!
