An opening think-piece about the 'surveillance state'
Before reading on, is this post pertinent to security and safety?
No … and yes.
Is this professional?
As this blog is in early development and needs many different types of content, to trial different aspects of potential future functionality, sort of. It will be used to test how such a long post is handled in different formats and also opens the issues of appropriateness with regard to security and safety.
A child looks up to his father and says, ‘Dad, why are we on this planet?’
What could the father say back?
A bit like that child, this blog from the earliest days of its infancy will, through a mix of nature and nurture, slowly evolve its personality. It is too early to determine what kind of character its will take on, but like the girl-infant that declines the opportunity to play with dolls, some early traits, which may in due course be ‘grown out of’ are starting to show.
Naturally, first and foremost, this site needs to be able to convey a very easy to use reference source for key UK security and safety information to individuals, organisations and businesses. Various experiments into how to best do this will be run over the coming weeks. To keep the site dynamic and vibrant it will also need regular updates with news on different aspects of security and safety, relevant to its target audience. As part of this and to ease its accessibility it will have to deploy many more graphics, and a much more professional-looking design. It will also need to relate to associated content in Twitter Facebook and elsewhere to lift its profile.
Beyond the above, in trying to find itself, the blog also needs a personality. People engage with personalities, not machines. Facets will reveal themselves over time, sporadically, as and when things happen that trigger an action. Sometimes these facets may glint only one or a few times before they are ‘grown out of’, but slowly, some sense of the site’s life-defining values, aspirations and social traits will emerge. Something happened today; something that might shape this blog’s future personality. However, before looking at this in more detail we need to get back to how the father above could have answered his son’s question.
Particularly given that such questions are often ‘out of the blue’ and likely to be followed by a succession of further ‘Whys?’ they are incredibly difficult to answer. If, however, this father was aware he might be asked such a question and he had researched and prepared, your view of what his best answer might then be, will reflect much about your own views on the world. One possible (if wordy) answer could be along the following lines (presuming the child was not too young to be confused and not too old so as to want to argue the toss over it) ..
“Son, we are here by the grace of the universe, some say God, to respect and rejoice in the delicate bountifulness of our world and our humanity and to bring warmth and joy to each other through whatever hard work and love we can offer during our limited life-times. Some of us are born into difficulty and our main contribution will be to welcome the love and help nurture empathy in others. Many of us will ascend to great things only to then fall into need in our later years and we have to graciously accept this fate and our transitions from ‘givers’ to receivers: appreciating in our wisdom that sometimes ‘receiving’ can be the most noble form of ‘giving’. There are also some, born into riches, that whilst never experiencing ‘need’, choose to be ‘takers’ to enrich themselves even more at the expense of others. Whilst sharing our physical traits and planet, within a universal context, these loveless people exist in parallel realities with different values. Whilst these people may be so much richer and sometimes also meaner than others, they are disabled too and, without true love, live the poorest lives of all humans. The universe that gave us our planet and our humanity, also gave us these loveless people, so that the rest of us could appreciate love as the most precious gift of all.”
Such an answer might at least preempt further ‘Whys’ and hopefully even encourage the son to quickly change topics to something easier. At the same time the father might hope that elements of his answer would 'sink in' at the very least, to be reflected upon later. The world is complex with good and bad people, who, knowingly or otherwise can, rightly or wrongly be perceived as both good and bad by others at the same time. That said, there are a few that are out and out bad, and very few that are virtually all good. Hopefully the father helps equip his son with a desire to critically question everything claimed by others as either fact or right or wrong and both a hunger for lifelong learning and a preparedness to revise his opinions based on this. Things change. There are no easy answers and the best, simple maxim, is to strive to ‘give’ or ‘receive’ with love, rather than to ‘take’.
So what has this got to do with security and safety?
Today it was announced in the press that emergency legislation was being rushed through to give police and other security services more powers to intercept and analyse our online activities for the benefit of our protection. Whilst there may be a sound underlying rationale, there is also a slight whiff of a psychopathic state machine being assembled here: something not too dissimilar to the era of the Stasi in East Germany. Life under constant self censorship for fear of being mislabelled either false-positively or false-negatively, a potential trouble-maker is only a half-life. This is all the worse when one acknowledges that society comprises multiple interlocking groups, cliques, and so on, that co-exist in parallel realities. What may be perceived as potential trouble for one of these groups may be seen as necessary or even ‘righteous’ by others. Where to ‘draw the line’ that divides good from bad depends on multiple perspectives, yet only some are considered. Inspite of the Internet and possibly even because of the ocean of noise it generates, that drowns out much considered opinion, many valid voices are lost and debates about matters such as our surveillance-state are dominated by the few of our self-preserving elites (many of whom are more 'takers' than 'givers' and 'receivers').
As we advance to a planet of nearly 10Bn souls from the roughly 7.2Bn now, and this is coupled with converging issues of ageing, inequality, poverty and potentially cash-starved public services, intolerance and strife, what seems like the infrastructure for a future Stasi will take on new meaning. We cannot allow broad conversation about what are good and appropriate security and safety measures to apply to society to be drowned by the voices of a privileged few. Lines and laws is one thing: infrastructure to identify and pre-empt transgressions, another. Then, on top of these, things start to get real messy with the executive and legal mechanisms to punish transgressors and compensate the transgressed. Already, it seems that if you are from certain sections of society you can ‘do things’, including fiddling expenses, avoiding tax liabilities and other stuff. On the ‘other side of the tracks’ even 'non-transgressions', such as a ‘blog post’ or an 'imperfect' LinkedIn profile (Many, like various Wikipedia entries for politicians are 'doctored') can blight an entire career. We are to a large extent, already in an era of 'enlightened' self censorship: of repression.
What other kind of society would allow people to be sent letters from public authorities weeks after often forgotten events, demanding money for claimed driving or parking transgressions, picked up by CCTV and linked to them via ANPR? What kind of society would not only do this but threaten to demand twice as much if people tried to appeal the demands? What other kind of society would allow credit reference agencies to charge people to view the detailed files they maintain on them, so as to ensure they do not have any mistakes? If anything, credit reference agencies should be paying users for every mistake they correct, and sometimes these payments should be huge, because unknown to them, many people are woefully maligned by incorrect data that falsely paints a bad credit picture of them. What other kind of society allows appallingly managed utilities companies and others to threaten to undermine such credit reports before getting their own financial records in order? And so on.
In addition to being a reference and news source on security and safety information, this site therefore also needs to nurture conversation about what are good and bad practices within the national apparatus: that we should either encourage or change.
The little something that happened today that led to this think-piece: and also led to the view that this site could not in due course simply re-publish police or other wanted posters, etc., as the law is NOT always right, was the following. This was one of hundreds of comments to today’s Guardian (NB also read other papers, so no stereotyping please) piece on the ‘Emergency surveillance law to be brought in with cross party support’ It ‘stood out’ and ‘spoke to me’ ..
The comment, from ‘bullingdonmorons’ (Do not approve of name!) is copied below in full
One day, in the not so far off future, I shall be awoken by the alarm in my bedroom shouting at me it is time to get up. I shall prepare myself for the day whilst listening to the radio as it barks out the Governments latest ‘austerity’ measures and anti-terrorist legislation.
The camera outside my front door will record my time of departure, whilst the street camera/microphones will pick up my muted ‘hello’ to the neighbour. I will drive to the rail station, passing beneath the numerous number plate recognition camera’s, my entire journey being recorded for posterity. At the station, the chip in my arm will register my arrival, opening the gate to admit me. I shall find a seat amongst the impassive passengers, all sitting in silence, ear phones in place.
The posters on the carriage walls tell us that all activity is filmed and recorded.
For our own safety, of course.
As I leave the train, the chip in my arm will record the destination and automatically deduct the cost of my journey from my bank account. I look up at the CCTV cameras that follow my every move. On entering my place of work, the chip releases the security doors and I am scanned, to make sure I carry no weapons, so they say. I then sit down at my computer. 7 turgid hours will pass, because all e-mail, conversation and time away from desk are monitored.
All conversation must be work based, any other topic is a sack-able offence.
Several e-mails remain unseen, because they are accompanied by a message, ‘ This mail has been blocked for your own protection’, and you while away the day wondering what monstrous evil they contained, so bad that I am not allowed to view them.
At the end of my shift, I shall return home, once more in silence, eat a revolting meal of processed shit and then watch several hours of mindless television, consisting of celebrity game shows, a sealed house harbouring 20 people in straight-jackets who keep trying to head butt each other, and ‘documentaries’ about multi millionaires leading empty, vacuous lives.
The news will inform me of how the latest Government anti-terrorist legislation has led to yet another terrorist plot being foiled, will inform me that there is yet another faceless enemy from a middle eastern country who threatens our very way of life and so must be destroyed, and finally they will release the latest results from the Governments ‘happiness’ survey, telling us how wonderful our lives are.
Then, just as I get up to retire for the night, I will tell the camera that is built into the set to go “f**k itself”.
I shall then go to bed, and cry myself to sleep, saying ‘How did we ever let them do this to us?’
