Interesting report from the NY Times about government snooping on British subjects.
Evidently it’s not enough to have CCTV cameras on every street corner tracking the movements of people out & about. Local governments have the right to run “directed surveillance missions” on their citizens—including tailing, tapping phones & going through all sorts of records—for what I can only characterize as the most trivial rumors of infractions.
(& like the US Patriot Act provisions, they can do it without that pesky impediment of jumping through any sort of legal hoops. Like obtaining a warrant.)
& what sorts of high crimes are they investigating, you ask? Why—such felonious pursuits as failing to recycle, putting trash out too early & letting your dogs bark too loud. Apparently all that’s needed to set the wheels a-spinning is some accusation of wrongdoing. & the data collected on the miscreants doesn’t go away even when they’re not found guilty. It goes into some central repository.
Am I the only fan of the tradition of Anglo-American law creeped out by this?
You have to wonder about the use of public resources for this sort of thing. At the very least, I’d like to hear about surveillance on persons suspected of something more than failing to pick up poop after their dogs. Like bombing the London Tube or torturing & murdering young Yorkshire women over the course of several years.
The story doesn’t say what these activities cost the local governments, or what services they have to cut back on in order to mount them. Whatever it is, it can’t possibly deliver value in terms of a safer society that outweighs the financial & civic confidence in elected leaders.
2 comments:
Xie, it was you who made me aware, some years ago, of the astounding downward trend in British civil liberties (combined with a comparable rise in enforced political correctness) and it remains a marvel to me that there hasn't been more commentary on it. Therefore a tip of the hat to the NYT for reporting what seems to me as sharp a decline in British jurisprudence as, say, the revival of sharia law in parts of Nigeria and Afghanistan. I have nevertheless praised the institution of public CCTV monitoring in Britain as a crime reduction and safety promotion measure and I THINK I still wish we had comparable systems here. But this reported misapplication of CCTV and other crime-fighting technology to PC enforcement is so appalling as to make me wonder if ubiquitous CCTV constitutes a slippery slope that we should avoid.
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