Monday, September 01, 2008

Da Ge

I remember reading an article in the NYT a few months back about how China, ostensibly to provide security for the Olympics, was being permitted to purchase state of the art gadgets like facial recognition software from the world’s biggest defense contractors, mostly American and European.  The general thrust of the article is that while providing security for the games was a completely legitimate enterprise, what will the government do after the games are over?  They could implement damn near 24-hour surveillance of the entire city area.

A minute ago I remembered that the next Olympics are in London and it dawned on me, they already have this system in place.  They use it to spy on their own citizens in the name of crime control.  Here’s a chilling article from last year. 

According to the latest studies, Britain has a staggering 4.2million CCTV cameras - one for every 14 people in the country - and 20 per cent of cameras globally. It has been calculated that each person is caught on camera an average of 300 times daily.

Use of spy cameras in modern-day Britain is now a chilling mirror image of Orwell’s fictional world, created in the post-war Forties in a fourth-floor flat overlooking Canonbury Square in Islington, North London.

On the wall outside his former residence - flat number 27B - where Orwell lived until his death in 1950, an historical plaque commemorates the anti-authoritarian author. And within 200 yards of the flat, there are 32 CCTV cameras, scanning every move.

Orwell’s view of the tree-filled gardens outside the flat is under 24-hour surveillance from two cameras perched on traffic lights.

Remember, folks.  Britain is one of the world’s premiere democracies, a bastion of freedom and individual rights the world over.  And they have more surveillance cameras than fucking China.  To put it another way, the Chinese have only just now gotten to the point of spying on their own citizens with CCTV cameras that Britain has had for quite some time.

I don’t know about any of you, but this scares the piss out of me.  I’m far more worried about this sort of thing than I am about terrorism.