I don’t see what all the complaining is about; have a revolution, establish the people as sovereign, run things your way, fine. But don’t whinge (excellent word!) because the people you let run you are running you their way.

Some in Britain have tried to make issue of the extent of public CCTV monitoring – we exceeded an estimated 4 million public CCTV cameras several years before 9/11. The cameras are widely accepted, perhaps because the implications were not widely appreciated and the cameras have become very inconspicuous. Casual observation and hearsay also suggest that few folk appreciate how trackable are the locations of the mobile phones which they regularly carry around even though the location of phones has featured as evidence in several high profile criminal trials.

On balance, public reaction to the Congestion Charge applied to motor vehicles in central London (which depends on similar technology to speed cameras) has been favourable despite the campaigns of some tabloids. The prospect of road pricing by satellite surveillance of all motor vehicles has been mooted without so far provoking appreciable adverse reaction. The popular claim to have been working late at the office will soon cease to function as an alibi for anything unless supported by vehicle tracking evidence.

Given the extent of public acceptance of privacy-invasion by all this monitoring, survelliance and tracking, I am a bit puzzled at the uproar about the proposals for ID cards with biometrics. Personally, I regard the threat to the confidentiality of personal medical records by a national database for the NHS a more serious issue. Given the surge in the incidence of STDs in recent years, I would suppose the loss of confidentiality for medical records could generate blackmailing opportunities.

For an ancient historic nation with one of the great traditions in libertarian writing and commitment – Magna Carta, John Locke, Adam Smith, John Wilkes, Tom Paine, Edmund Burke, JS Mill, Isiaih Berlin – we are now well on the way to being the most monitored, tracked, surveyed and officially tabbed, supposedly on Dr Goebbel’s infamous rationale: Those who have nothing to hide, have nothing to fear. Despite or possibly because of that, we now have a prison population at record levels and the largest per capita prison population in Western Europe:

“More people are jailed in England and Wales than in any other western European country – and more, per capita, than Libya, Malaysia and Burma.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3059183.stm

Naturally, it swells my heart with patriotic fervour to know that we have proportionally more in prison than those beacons of libertarian democracy: Libya, Malaysia and Burma. Moreover, violent crime is still increasing steadily and relentlessly; although Siddiq Khan, the group leader of the London bombers of 7/7, had been previously identified and monitored by MI5, the internal security service, they discounted him as likely to pose a serious threat and dropped the surveillance. Rather like the recently proposed high-tech ID cards intended to preserve both security and our civil liberties, the heavy monitoring infrastructure evidently doesn’t actually prevent terrorist outrages.

The second factor is that this state of affairs has been driven through by a government claiming to be left-centred and liberalising, committed to open, cleaner government and freedom of information about government as well as habitually given to denouncing the centralising and controlling agendas of preceding Thatcherite tendencies.

We might draw the appropriate logical conclusions from all the conjunctions.

As seen in The Independent and Crooked Timber yesterday, The Telegraph reports on the scheme to monitor the movements of each and every car in the country. A massive increase in the number of roadside cameras able to identify and

It’s been nearly fifteen years since I worked for the NHS, but the word on the street back then was that GPs fear the computerisation of medical records because their funding depends on how many patients they have registered. A full-on computerised patient record system would cost them money by forcing them to clean up inactive and duplicate records.

I was working in a hospital, though – and it appears that hospitals and GPs are natural enemies.

(Note also that there were plans for a full-on computerised patient record system fifteen years ago, but it still hasn’t materialized. This is because relatively few people want it and no one wants to pay for it. And because the NHS Information Services Committee of the time were both largely powerless and largely useless, of course.)

On the other hand, everyone involved seemed to be aware of at least some privacy issues. Apparently, some health and life insurance companies will pay cash with no questions asked for medical records.

Possibly because I no longer own and drive a car, I am less concerned about the tracking of all motor vehicle movements than I am about the threat to the confidentiality of personal medical records from the massive National Health Service (NHS) project now underway to spend £6.2 billions creating a national computer database of the records:

“Doctors fear the computerisation of medical records could threaten patient confidentiality. In future records will be stored on a national database, which will allow staff to access information wherever someone is treated. However, doctors are concerned the system, part of the NHS’s £6.2bn IT upgrade, could be open to abuse. . . ”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4633213.stm

Personally, I am of an age when I have no special cause to worry unduly about who knows the details of my medical history but that is not true of everyone. It seems to me probable that women are particularly vunerable to blackmail. My GP - or any hospital consultant I might visit – has the great convenience of being able to call up my medical records on screen at a mouse click. Doubtless, the records are password protected but I once asked my GP if he knew where the records are actually located and he had no idea.

Dozens of computer developers will likely be working to create the national database and they will probably find it possible to access personal records. I am quite willing to believe that there are valuable benefits of convenience in having a comprehensive national database of personal medical records accessible by any number of interested parties but how do so many other countries manage healthcare without them?

It makes it sound like, starting January 1st, every car journey in GB will be tracked beginnig to end. I bet this is no where near likely. Are there already CCTVs pointed at every cottage on the moor, every shack in the forest, every cul-de-sac in suburbia? If so, why do they need an agreement with the private business using the cameras? The infrastructure isn’t there yet by a long shot (not that it won’t be sometime in the future.)

Once every car, van, lorry and motorbike in the land is linked by satellite to a Big Brother computer, they’ve got us.

They can track us, control us, fine us and snoop on us.

This is still a free country. Let’s keep it that way.
vs

IDENTITY cards are an excellent idea but they will be pointless if they’re watered down.

Shurely shome mishtake?

Now, it’d be an error to mistake Sun editorials for public opinion, but you can see the same sort of contrast in straw polls on the BBC, for instance.

I’d love to know why tracking people’s every move is OK, right up to the point when they get in a car.

Now, if you’re paranoid, you might worry about this being used to track your out-of-state movements and cover it for that reason, too, not just the financial ones.

If you’re really paranoid, like me, you might at least wonder if the mylar actually blocks the signal, or just changes it to not deduct, while still recording your vehicle’s passage through the checkpoint…

Driving ain’t going to be what it used to.

Tim MCVeigh, was driving car without a license because he felt that registering a car was an unreasonable burden.