Privacy Is Dead

Privacy is already dead in the UK. I guess I have mixed feeling about this. I hate state power in nearly all its forms, but I have the better part of my life posted online. You'd need no special surveillance tactics to capture my every move. My windows are open, and I walk about completely exposed. Perhaps I still feel comfortable doing so because surveillance here doesn't feel like it has become quite so pervasive. Of course, it's possible that the real difference between the US and UK is merely the visibility and acknowledged coordination of the surveillance systems. In the UK, cameras and microphones are everywhere; everyone sees them; everyone knows who is watching and listening. In the US, the cameras appear to be the property of private industry; people assume that $11/hour rentacops are passively monitioring the cameras. Behind the scenes, AT&T works with the NSA, TSA, and CIA to monitor every email, every file transmission, every blog post, and every porno download; no one sees it happening though, so no one but the EFF seems to care. A few highlights from the above article:

The Terrorism Act of 2000 allowed 35,000 people to be stopped in 2005. None of them were terrorists. Nearly 100 people a day enjoyed the intrusion of the government into their private lives.

UK has 20% of the world's cameras trained on 0.2% of the world's population.

"The Government has told us that we must lay down our freedoms for our lives. Perhaps it has forgotten the millions of people from past generations who have laid down their lives for our freedom. I think we owe it to those people to turn this tide."

Jonathan 6/13/2007 08:24:00 AM