The lack of public awareness about the nature of surveillance troubles me. UK public must wake up to risks of CCTV.
The man who made the announcement in the submitted article - Tony Porter (the English surveillance commissioner) has previously said similar things as you.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/06/tony-porter-sur...
> The increasing use of surveillance technology – including body-worn video, drones and number plate recognition systems – risks changing the “psyche of the community” by reducing individuals to trackable numbers in a database, the government’s CCTV watchdog has warned.
> In his full first interview as surveillance commissioner, Tony Porter – a former senior counter-terrorism officer – said the public was complacent about encroaching surveillance and urged public bodies, including the police, to be more transparent about how they are increasingly using smart cameras to monitor people.
Opinion polls differ, but it seems that most people in England just don't care about CCTV and that is worrying.
It's not a shame, his post was entirely void of actual content. It's easy to make statements like his, it's a lot harder to make posts like yours with real data to nuance the argument (I'm not being sarcastic in regards to your post).
A lot of these avenues of privacy were only really enabled by the growth of large metropolitan areas.
In smaller districts, you can't go to the inn and sleep with another woman because the innkeeper went to highschool with you and will tell your wife.
For the vast majority of human society, you had to try a lot harder to hide your activities if you wanted to go against the current social mores. It's not really clear to me that the level of privacy we can easily attain today, even if it is a social good, is not outweighed by the group benefits of social cohesion, and newly found benefits of catching criminals after the fact that CCTV would provide/encourage.
Only if all CCTV were to become publicly viewable at all times by everyone could we speak of it as a force for social cohesion, rather than a mechanism for amplifying differences in power.
Even in the case where CCTV is owned by the government, its operated by individual city districts.
It's not a singular invisible omniscient organization.
So, while the UK isn't an authoritarian police state it does have too many CCTV cameras and a large segment of the public likes them. This thread has had people asking for more CCTV; other threads suggested the local authorities using CCTV and human surveillance to check that people applying for a school place lived in the catchment area for that school.
We have a very large police DNA database and we see people resist attempts to scale it back. You even sometimes see large groups of people volunteer to have their DNA taken to rule themselves out of a high profile crime. And that's even though we know that a DNA database should probably have as many profiles of criminals as possible, and a s few profiles of non-criminals as possible, just because data handling.
The UK is a turnkey fascist state. Just waiting for the right psycho.
Until then, they are being used to solve serious crimes, like the very recent murder of Hanna K. in Berlin.
The doesn't even go to show how many people were shamed into doing things other than quit their job... Or stand down as a political opposition... or shut up. That's just part of it.
These things are happening and you just don't think about them, or hear about them, because for the most part people have short term memories or are completely complacent. Hell, look at the celebrities whose accounts were hacked, and embarrassing, personal photos leaked, not by the govt in this case, but our governments have this same information. You don't think they'd use it to get you to spy on someone, or inform on others?
When you have a surveillance state, everyone is an agent of oppression.
> someone who works in a high government office is
> slut-shamed out of their position because their
> personal email was gobbled up