Big Brother's PC will be watching you

I suspect that one of the things that George got right in 1984 was the poverty of state; having to pay all those people to surveille all the rest would have been a major drain on the economy. The biggest defence of liberty in the era of human mental workers was cost. However, current technology could change all of that, bringing the cost of surveillance right down by digitising it.

In this article, George Monbiot outlines a very believable set of scenarios leading to a normalisation of surveillance. Believable because based on tech that is already 'out there' and the human reactions to the first steps have been muted [an image of a frog boiling to death in water only gradually heated, comes to mind]. So I feel vindicated in my opposition to a national ID database by this.

if the muted response to the ID card is anything to go by, we will gradually submit, in the name of our own protection, to the demands of the machine. And it will not then require a tyrannical new government to deprive us of our freedom. Step by voluntary step, we will have given it up already.

George Monbiot � Children of the Machine:
Filed in: ID_cards, biometric, RFID, technology