- “The Surveillance Society” by Adam L. Penenberg
Dec. 2001 – Wired Magazine

A few more relevant quotes:

“If all this raises the specter of Big Brother, well, that’s understandable. But it’s also wrong. Even as we trade privacy for security and convenience, we’re hardly headed toward totalitarianism. Orwell’s greatest error, says Peter Huber, author of Orwell’s Revenge, was his view that the government had a monopoly on surveillance technologies. Says Huber: “If the Thought Police use telescreens, so can others – that’s just the way telescreens work, if they work at all.”
Indeed, citizens have already learned to use surveillance tools to keep government accountable. When motorist Rodney King was beaten by Los Angeles police officers in 1991, a bystander caught the incident on video…”

it ends with a bit of naivite, though: “The Constitution itself, therefore, stands in the way of Big Brother. OK, privacy is eroding. But liberty, and the safeguards inherent in due process, remain strong. The government can collect megabytes of information about us, but where and when they do and how that information is used is still subject to the laws designed to keep the state from abusing its power.”

Still, like it or not, there are people walking the streets now recording every minute of their lives on video and posting it online. The technology and expense of that is going to be insignificant in a VERY short time. We willingly give up a tremendous amount of personal info about ourselves now on the internet (social media is all about sharing personal info and we eat it up) — info that would have seemed very scary to divulge so freely 20 years ago. How much will our attitudes change in another 20 years?

I’m paraphrasing Charlie Stross here, but facial and voice recognition tech is getting better constantly and combined with a good search algorithm and ubiquitous audio/video, you have a complete redefinition of the word “history” with every moment of most people’s lives not only recorded, but googleable. Setting aside privacy concerns for a second, I want that! I want to be able to have Google for my life. That’s a valuable tool.

I’m saying we ought to consider these crazy infringements on our privacy through a lens of responsible futurism rather than frightened ludditism. Yes, if I was on the Lancaster city council, I’d campaign strongly against this idea, but I don’t know that it’s a necessarily *worse* idea than only having police monitor the ubiquitous CCTV cameras.

Dystopia is now: Bill Simmon takes a good, hard look at reports that Lancaster, PA, will soon be putting in so many security cameras that it will take a volunteer Stasi comprised of local busybodies to watch them all and determines that this may be the least worst alternative for our privacy-robbed future. Frankly I think Bill’s got this one wrong: open-source surveillance is a police state, just one with slightly better branding. Call me Sisyphus Q. Luddite if you must but I don’t think panoptic surveillance is some historical inevitability; it can and should be resisted, not embraced.

Friends don’t let friends be contrarian for contrarianism’s skae.