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Surveillance on a unimaginable scale

Posted on | October 1, 2009 | No Comments

As if London wasn’t already the most surveyed (or should that read ‘paranoid’?) city in the world, new heavily EU-funded surveillance development measures are under way in Britain that will exceed our wildest imagination.

So far, it has been reassuring for us laymen to know that even if CCTV-systems monitor and record our every move in London as well as all other larger cities across the globe, the amount of this footage being scrutinized by humans was minimal due to the simple fact that watching it requires time in a 1:1 scale – thus making it way too expensive to watch pretty much anything other than crime (and perhaps shopping habits). This may soon change, however, as artificially intelligent systems are being developed that can record and watch actions in real time and point out “threats and abnormal behaviour or violence“.
This is not only scary in terms of diminishing citizen privacy in general, but perhaps more significantly because humans will then be able to decide what the machine should consider suspicious. All of a sudden an immense power is assigned to public authority agencies as well as private corporations that can now monitor employees, customers and citizens on a whole new scale. Who is to restrict them from entering totally different alarm parameters into the machine? Number of times you pick up coffee at the office? Number of visits to the bathroom? (slacker?) Number of visits to political gatherings? Etc.

Read the story here and the following discussion at Slashdot.

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