Only incompetence will save us from Orwell’s surveillance state
Alasdair Palmer writes in the Telegraph:
The vast amount of data now being generated, and the impossibility of looking at it all, is, together with bureaucratic incompetence, the best guarantee we have that we’re not going to wake up one morning and find we are living in a version of Nineteen Eighty-Four. The biggest threat contained in the Government’s proposal to introduce identity cards is not that it will create an all-knowing state which will crush each and every one of us. It is that officials will bungle when they enter the data, or misread it, so that the wrong people will be identified as benefit cheats or as terrorists (accurate identification of both being the main purpose of ID cards).
