MyGlobalCity

British Big Brother: He Knows When You’ve Been Good Or Bad November 5, 2006

So be good for goodness sake… The year 1984 was a symbolic date that had everything to do with George Orwell’s 1949 novel of the same name. But Big Brother surveillance societies already are here, have been here, and will continue to be here. We’ve let it happen.

And it’s not just China, a country that actually wants all of their bloggers to register with the government, as if they were some sort of diseased creature harmful to the populace. (Websites there already have to be registered, legally speaking.) Privacy International, a civil liberties watchdog group, has put the UK and the US on a list, categorized [Information Week] as “endemic surveillance society” and “extensive surveillance society”, respectively. That is, they’ve put the UK in the same list as China and Russia. The U.S. is in a list with Thailand and the Philippines.

The group surveyed 37 countries and applied “13 criteria ranging from constitutional protections to visual surveillance and phone-tapping.” The InfoWeek article indicates that “Canada and Germany scored the best marks for civil liberties safeguards.”

Part of the activities that put the UK so high on the “surveillance” list must be the fact that “the average Briton is captured about 300 times a day on film.” Three hundred. Smile, and stop picking your nose. Then you also have Scottish schools that make every child pay for their lunch by having their palm veins scanned, under the guise of offering free lunches for students of low-income families. (Though all students must have their palm vein patterns scanned and stored.)

Then there are the American companies, Digital Angel and their financially-related VeriChip Corp., whose top dogs are pushing for every human being to be chipped like household pets already are, concocting reasons that are flawed. They’ve even put forth the notion to the current US Administration (who they are in good odour with) that all soldiers should be microchipped, under some false premise that the historical soldiers’ “dog tags” are not sufficient, and that even an RFID-enabled wristband isn’t sufficient. It has to be implanted - or at least, that’s the conclusion to be drawn. And with the Governator, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger who is in very good odour with the Administration despite who he’s married to, killing an RFID bill that might have afforded some protection against misuse, it’s hard to believe that anyone in power in the US (at present) really, truly has your security at heart.

Maybe George Orwell did not write fiction; rather, tapping in to some government source back in the late 1940s who knew the way the world was going to go if certain parties had their way in government.