The cameras are going to be placed in Darlington as a means to combat littering. What would happen if you didn’t listen to the warnings?

Competitive Enterprise Institute Policy Analyst Alex Nowrasteh debates the proposal to assign all U.S. workers a national I.D. card to combat illegal immigration.

If you don’t understand what the problem is with ID cards, I suggest you go and read 1984.

Shami Chakrabarti, the director of human rights group Liberty, described the introduction of such mass surveillance techniques as a “sinister step” for any country, adding that it was “positively chilling” on a European scale.

Stephen Booth, an Open Europe analyst who has helped compile a dossier on the European justice agenda, said these developments and projects such as Indect sounded “Orwellian” and raised serious questions about individual liberty.

“This is all pretty scary stuff in my book. These projects would involve a huge invasion of privacy and citizens need to ask themselves whether the EU should be spending their taxes on them,” he said.

“The EU lacks sufficient checks and balances and there is no evidence that anyone has ever asked ‘is this actually in the best interests of our citizens?’”

Of course it’s not in the best interests of the citizens.  It’s in the best interest of those who stand to profit and gain from the information collected.

Miss Chakrabarti said: “Profiling whole populations instead of monitoring individual suspects is a sinister step in any society.

But, it’s okay if we do it “in the name of the children” or to protect the citizens from some, as yet unknown, bad guy.

According to the official website for Project Indect, which began this year, its main objectives include “to develop a platform for the registration and exchange of operational data, acquisition of multimedia content, intelligent processing of all information and automatic detection of threats and recognition of abnormal behaviour or violence”.

It talks of the “construction of agents assigned to continuous and automatic monitoring of public resources such as: web sites, discussion forums, usenet groups, file servers, p2p [peer-to-peer] networks as well as individual computer systems, building an internet-based intelligence gathering system, both active and passive”.

In plain English, this means, “We are going to watch every single thing you do, put it in a database somewhere, and use it against you at the first opportune moment.”

Another interesting diary, also now being posted online, is the diary of Samuel Pepys.