For the past three years Elahi has flooded the feds with personal information. On his website he has more than 20.000 pictures showing them everywhere he goes, from restaurants to toilets. On top of that he calls the FBI - who interrogated him once - everytime he goes abroad.”I’ve discovered that the best way to protect your privacy is to give it away. The government monitors your movements, but it gets things wrong. You can monitor yourself much more accurately.”
He might be right, because how can you hide in say, England. In England there are well over four million surveillance cameras. An average person in a large city is filmed three hundred times every day*. The new Identity Cards Act 2006 (which passed, but still has to enter procurement) specifies fifty categories of information that the NIR can hold on each citizen, including up to 10 fingerprints, digitised facial scan and iris scan, current and past UK and overseas places of residence of all residents of the UK throughout their lives and indices to other Government databases - which would allow them to be connected. Intelligent bots are supposed to scan through all these data, looking for abnormalities (But they are still fairly basic).
In a big Mygov Survey 71% of the English people expressed the fear that the database could contain errors that would harm them. Errors will be made, that is for sure.
So what can you do? Hide? I don’t think you can. I agree with Elahi’s strategy, he does not believe in the adagium: ‘the more they know about you, the more control they have over you.’ It is the other way around, or in his own words: “It’s economics, I flood the market.”
More on Elahi: here.
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to really feel what it means to be ‘watched’ in england (in this case ireland) i suggest you watch red road. this film shows some very interesting characteristics of this ’surveillance culture’. not all bad, but certainly very different from what i consider pleasant.
after seeing this film i am not more or less opposed to this type of surveillance. but it all depends on the integrity of the people on the surveillance teams. and the (legal) protection of the people being watched. i don’t think ‘we’ are strong enough to not use this material where we now think it is unethical. i think the ethics will change. i have no idea how.
The famous response to privacy/ surveillance issues is:”If you are not doing anything wrong, you don’t have to worry.” Implying that if you are against these measures, one has something to hide. The problem lies more in the fact taht what happens when what is wrong starts to shift. In the USA people have a very different attitude towards this subject than in Europe. Whether that is the result of ‘our’ WWII or ‘their’ crime-level or terrorist threat I don’t know… but a typical US-citizen would reply: “If a company abuses your privacy than you will simply never buy a product anymore and they will be out of business soon.” Europeans will often refer to the Second World War… Again, what happens if the definition of what is wrong changes?! — let’s say if you ever watched porn on your PC, you are not allowed to work in a public office anymore — ridiculous… sure but the argument is more what if?
Another interesting subject is the fact whether WHAT YOU DO (like teh post above) or WHAT YOU THINK is most related to privacy invasion. This guy just let’s you know his movements… not his thought… More and more internet applications are used to express opinion. What would happen if this guy would not hsow everything he DOES but what he THINKS… ?
You see similar discussions now with job-applications. Employers check your Hyves page and see your stupid drunken face (and those of your friends) etc etc… Or they read your thoughts in comment on a more extreme blog (hackers, politics, geenstijl.nl) etc. Unions try to make sure that it is forbidden to use material (Hyves, Youtube etc) that has nothing to do with the work… difficult subject I find.