Surveillance and the City

They might not get your best angle, but chances are it’ll be a natural pose. From snatching a glance at your reflection to scratching an inconvenient itch, a real-time record of your every move is being taken, tracked and logged in any urbanized area of the modern-day UK. As a nation, we are turning into the unsuspecting Stars of CCTV. With an estimated four million cameras in this country alone – that’s one for every fourteen inhabitants – this is about more than the right to have a bad hair day.

In fact, CCTV (television of the closed-circuit variety rather than the equally pervasive Christian Community channel) is only one extremely visible sign that we are, in the ominously Orwellian words of the Information Commissioner Richard Thomas, sleepwalking into a "surveillance society". Take the ostensibly open-handed offer of club card points from your supermarket of choice. While this small sign of altruism may be a welcome act of kindness on the part of big business, it also enables a precise record of your shopping history and habits to be collected. Not just by that pimple-faced boy behind the deli counter. Every time you type a request into a search engine, the data is similarly stored and often sold to third parties.

If you’ve got nothing to hide, so runs the well-worn adage, then you’ve got nothing to fear. If you ask me, this is a hop, skip and jump from justice. There is a distinct difference between privacy, a basic human right, and the sort of secrecy adopted to hide activity that is actually illegal. Whereas the term privacy describes the altogether innocent quality of being protected from the voyeuristic view or prying presence of others, secrecy entails unjustly concealing or hiding something at the expense of others. To take a topical example, Madeline McCann's parents should be permitted privacy from the press but not allowed to keep secrets from the Portuguese police.

If you allow me to get constitutional for a moment, our freedom is supposed to be safeguarded by the ancient writ of habeas corpus and the less cryptic sounding assumption of innocence until actually proved guilty. Ay, there’s the rub! This amalgam of mass surveillance and research into DNA may have proved priceless on the counter-terrorism and crime-catching fronts, adding a degree of scientific certainty to courtroom evidence.

The point is that such measures are undiscerning; they don’t only catch the criminals on film; in the age of the eye in the sky, we are all default deviants.

Then there’s the government’s National Identity Scheme soon to be introduced in the land of hope and glory, which will amass a database of fingerprints, eye and facial scans by 2010. Conspiracy theories are perhaps best left to the sort of blog-devouring hermit who sits in his dressing gown glued to his computer screen all day, but there are an increasing number of people who are concerned about the law of unintended consequences. The card itself is not the issue. After all, most students are required to carry a university card at all times and any fresh-faced revellers out there will be only too familiar with the practice of proving their age.

The aspect of the scheme that has caused Guardian readers to spit out their muesli over the morning papers centres on the unprecedented volume of information stored in one place. Never mind the hackers, computer crashes will suddenly take on a new degree of severity. As far as the maverik mayoral candidate Boris Johnson is concerned, the most practical use for the card would be to use it to clean your car windscreen on a frosty morning or to cut the cake if you’re having a picnic and forget to pack a penknife. More to the point, is the scheme fit for purpose? For that matter, what is its purported purpose? Answers to fit on the back of a small postcard please.

With our wallets resembling the plastic equivalent of a deck of playing cards, the ID card is in increasing danger of looking like the joker in the pack.

On becoming leader of the Labour Party, Gordon Brown solemnly avowed, "The party I lead must have more than a set of policies – we must have a soul." It was as if the late, great African American entertainer James Brown were speaking from beyond the grave through the famously severe Scotsman. Shouting vocals and hectoring speeches aside, the men appear to have more in common than you might at first imagine. Those familiar with the techno tune We Want Your Soul will, however, be forgiven for feeling there more cause for cynicism than toe tapping at such a pledge from a political leader.

"Cynicism is often seen as a rebellious attitude in western popular culture," writes Alex Steffen in his self-styled manual for modernity Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century, "but in reality, our cynicism advances the desires of the powerful: cynicism is obedience."

To my mind, this is a powerful criticism of the sort of armchair activist whose bark is laudable but bite is laughable. Tempting as it may be for the cynic to cast the men in suits as some sort of serial surveyors, the culpability must surely be placed on a population either too apathetic to notice or too busy posting and publishing their innermost thoughts, feelings and expressions of intimate individuality on sites such as MySpace and Facebook (what about Warwick Blogs?). In the end, do we actually dislike the idea of our lives being tracked, logged and recorded or are we, on some subconscious level at least, a little bit flattered?

The problem is, as with that elusive best angle or natural pose, once lost, civil liberties are tricky to recapture. The coming months will show whether Gordon Brown is a viable candidate to become the next "Godfather of Soul" or whether he will cut an altogether more authoritarian figure as the Big Brother that may be muted but cannot be turned off. Either way we, the people are not as helpless as we might think.

The choice is simple and the choice is ours: be afraid or do something about it.

Andrew Bradley : 05 Jun 2008 13:05 |  Tags: ID Liberty Politics Surveillance |  Comments (1) |  Report a problem