The world at ten 2


Wendy Grossman writes in her net.wars blog about the long-term impact of the West’s response to the events of 11th September 2011:

The UK in particular has spent much of the last ten years building the database state, creating dozens of large databases aimed at tracking various portions of society through various parts of their lives. Some of this has been dismantled by the coalition, but not all. The most visible part of the ID card is gone – but the key element was always the database of the nation’s residents, and as data-sharing between government departments becomes ever easier, the equivalent may be built in practice rather than by explicit plan. In every Western country CCTV cameras are proliferating, as are surveillance-by-design policies such as data retention, built-in wiretapping, and widespread filtering. Every time a new system is built – the London congestion charge, for example, or the mooted smart road pricing systems – there are choices that would allow privacy to be built in. And so far, each time those choices are not taken.

She concludes:

They say that a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged. By analogy, it seems that a surveillance state is a democracy that’s been attacked.


2 thoughts on “The world at ten

  • Tom Welsh

    An aspect of the database state that is too often ignored is that it is very much in the commercial interest of the IT industry.

    Civil liberties – other people’s, or even our own – don’t usually swing as much weight as the chance to make pots of money, build a secure and prosperous career, and become indispensable to the working of government.

  • Tom Welsh

    An aspect of the database state that is too often ignored is that it is very much in the commercial interest of the IT industry.

    Civil liberties – other people’s, or even our own – don’t usually swing as much weight as the chance to make pots of money, build a secure and prosperous career, and become indispensable to the working of government.

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