Loss of Privacy

New York says that you need a warrant to place GPS units on people vehicles.  Wisconsin says you don’t.

Britain is working hard to maintain its place as a leading surveillance society. Building on the massive “success” of its widespread use of CCTV cameras, police are now installing a system that will use the cameras to track and log car journeys. CCTV cameras across the UK are being added to the system, which automatically recognizes and stores license plate numbers, then adds them, and the location in which they were spotted, to a central database. Police, of course, say the system’s great at reducing and solving crime, and one police bigwig says that arrests are up 40% in his area since cops started using the system. But just because arrests have increased, it doesn’t necessarily mean crime has been reduced. He further defends the system by saying “innocent people have nothing to fear from the way we use it” — which all too often is used as an attempt to justify pretty nasty governmental intrusions on privacy and liberty. This system sounds like another part of Britain’s attempt to record the lives of its subjects in databases, alongside its database of info on every child in the country, and details of all the internet and phone traffic there. Will people there get up in arms over all this government surveillance, or are they saving their ire only for the likes of Google Street View?

Read more about it at the BBC.

I’m not sure where this photo came from, but a friend sent it to me and I thought I’d share it.

These are the types of signs I wish we’d see in the United Kingdom.

Instead, we get to see these ones.

The House of Lords has published a report detailing the fact that the pervasiveness of CCTV is undermining the fundamental right to privacy.

The report, Surveillance: Citizens and the State, by the Lords’ constitution committee, says Britain leads the world in the use of CCTV, with an estimated 4m cameras, and in building a national DNA database, with more than 7% of the population already logged compared with 0.5% in the America.

The peers say privacy is an “essential prerequisite to the exercise of individual freedom” and the growing use of surveillance and data collection needs to be regulated by executive and legislative restraint at all times.

Finally, the aristocracy that is left in Britain are starting to speak up.  When they realize what is happening, it’s time for the rest of the British public to do so also.  Those who were already aware of the increasing limits on privacy should not be called kooks and conspiracy nuts.  This is real.  And it needs to be dealt with.