White Rose is a protest blog collective focusing on civil liberties in the UK.
It was set up to point a finger at the erosion of personal freedom in the UK.
Government's active measures introduce new means of control such as identity cards and surveillance cameras, the passive measures such as weakening of double jeopardy and presumption of innocence.


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White Rose contributors are those bloggers and non-bloggers who oppose restrictions on personal liberties.

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Monday, July 07, 2003
The democratisation of surveillance
Brian Micklethwait (London)
(0)   Surveillance

I just caught a snippet news item on the BBC about how magazines are complaining about people browsing through their mags in the shops, and photoing favourite pages with their camera-portable-phones and immediately phoning them to their friends. Information theft! Couldn't find anything about this on the BBC website, but maybe someone else can.

I think this presages the moment when it won't only be Big Brother who wields surveillance cameras in the street. Everybody will be able to! And they'll be able to phone in the footage to – I don't know – their personal websites or something. It'll get even more fun, if that's the word, when the cameras are in people's buttons or glasses and you won't even know that someone is doing it.

This kind of thing is probably happening already, on the quiet. The real excitement happens when doing it becomes a teen fad, and it starts being known about, and argued about by people saying they have a right to do it. Which maybe they do. After all, the government does it.

What happens then? What will White Rose make of that.

I've always been better at questions than at answers.


Comments

Sounds like a clever bit of PR to me. Remember when mobile phones first came out? There were loads of stories in the press about how lives had been saved etc because someone had a mobile.

The mobile telcos are desperate to get people to use expensive picture messaging - a solution looking for a problem. Over the last few weeks I've noticed a rash of "news" stories that all somehow relate to the wonderful things people can do with these new devices and how everyone today wants one. Call me a cynic - you'd be right.

That said, it doesn't detract from the worries about these things. A number of clubs and other places already ban them, but it's difficult to enforce.

Posted by: Trevor Mendham on July 7, 2003 08:48 AM

obDavid_Brin/The_Transparent_Society:

Chapters 1 to 4 are on his own web-site, and if your local library doesn't have a copy and can't get one in, it should be available from a real or on-line book-store.

I'd venture this should be Recommended Reading for this blog.

Posted by: Adrian Ramsey on July 7, 2003 03:54 PM

David Brin's writings are fascinating. I'm reminded also of the novel The Light of Other Days by Stephen Baxter and Arthur C. Clarke, in which are explored the consequences of ubiquitous surveillance available to all.

Posted by: Rob Fisher on July 8, 2003 11:55 AM

We're deluding ourselves if we think there's ever going to be any degree of equality in information collection between the government and the (no-longer) private citizen. 1) The government has the money, the power, the inclination and - increasingly - the ability to carpet the nation with surveillance. 2) Forms of counter-surveillance proving to be effective will be declared illegal - in the interest of public security, of course - and forced underground. (That'll be interesting.)

We're fighting a rear-guard action.

Read Noah Shachtman's current article in the Village Voice, "Big Brother Gets a Brain".

Posted by: grace on July 13, 2003 09:27 PM
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