Big Brother really is watching
George Orwell might be surprised at the level of watching that "big brother" in the UK is doing. Then again, maybe he wouldn't be surprised.Is the rule of law suffering in the UK? Will the public continue to accept the expansion of surveillance? Should courts be more involved in supervising that surveillance? In 2002, the BBC reported that "The average citizen in the UK is caught on CCTV cameras 300 times a day."
CNET news reported that "The United Kingdom has the most surveillance cameras per capita in the world." Follow that with the report that "UK CCTVs don't cut crime rates," and the seeds of a controversy are sown.
Ever-Present Surveillance Rankles the British Public
It has become commonplace to call Britain a “surveillance society,” a place where security cameras lurk at every corner, giant databases keep track of intimate personal details and the government has extraordinary powers to intrude into citizens’ lives.
A report in 2007 by the lobbying group Privacy International placed Britain in the bottom five countries for its record on privacy and surveillance, on a par with Singapore.
But the intrusions visited on Jenny Paton, a 40-year-old mother of three, were startling just the same. Suspecting Ms. Paton of falsifying her address to get her daughter into the neighborhood school, local officials here began a covert surveillance operation. They obtained her telephone billing records. And for more than three weeks in 2008, an officer from the Poole education department secretly followed her...
It turned out that Ms. Paton had broken no rules... Her case, now scheduled to be heard by a regulatory tribunal, has become emblematic of the struggle between personal privacy and the ever more powerful state here...
"Under the law, the localities and agencies can film people with hidden cameras, trawl through communication traffic data like phone calls and Web site visits...
Do you know What You Need to Know?
Labels: civil society, rule-of-law, UK
posted by Ken Wedding @ 6:39 AM
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