The Stepford
Society
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William Rees-Mogg
(The Times, Jan 16) pointed out that the UK has 25% of all the worldÕs CCTV
cameras, and commented on the civil liberties effects of the increasing use of
surveillance technology by government. BT has for some time been concerned
about the potential for an anti-technology backlash if technology intrudes too
heavily into peopleÕs lives. Speed cameras are already a source of heated
debate but likely to be replaced after 2009 by the use of the Galileo
positioning system, which will be used to collect road tolls, detect speed on
sections of all roads, help to track ŌcriminalsÕ and detect other examples of
Ōbad drivingÕ in conjunction with CCTV and number plate recognition systems.
The positioning system is likely eventually to be linked to the engine
management system in your car to prevent your car from exceeding the speed limit.
However, this will
only affect generally law-abiding people, who will have valid number plates on
properly equipped and fully registered cars. Professional criminals wonÕt, so
they will still be able to drive at will, spoofing genuine number plates at random
using plates that are actually LCD or e-ink displays so that they donÕt get
caught by tolls, speed cameras or Ōcriminal tracking systemsÕ. Meanwhile,
extensive surveillance of internet use will make sure you donÕt access illegal
sites, and monitoring of electronic messages will make sure you donÕt breach
sexual harassment or Ōhate crimeÕ legislation. Equal access for disabled people would benefit from all
public meetings being audio and video recorded, or even broadcast live on
community TV, so this might well become law soon too. But this will also make
it easy for both police and pressure groups to use automated parsing to
automatically pick up any cases of language or gestures that could cause
potential offence? So public meetings will be very effectively censored under
the banner of equal access.
Thanks to the
recent vote in favour of national identity cards (for which the arguments in
favour were primarily the reduction of terrorism and crime), we should expect
them to become effectively compulsory for anyone who wants to lead a normal
life, and they may be used in almost all significant transactions, possibly
backed up by biometric systems. We should expect that all financial
transactions will be checked to police money laundering and tax evasion.
However, the biometric system they will rely on do not work well for people
from some ethnic groups, who will therefore effectively be exempted from crime
or terrorist control, opening up significant career opportunities for them. If
their biometrics canÕt easily be used, they could apply for many different
identities without being discovered. So we should expect identity theft to
increase, amplified by the increased reliance on ID cards. Immigrants who want
to hide their true identities often destroy their papers on the way to Britain
and get a totally clean new identity, and if they are from certain ethnic
groups, they could do this repeatedly, changing ID every time they get caught.
Terrorists coming into the country from other countries wonÕt have identity
cards of course, so wonÕt be affected at all. So such cards will have no means
of reducing terrorism, and are likely to increase identity theft, but for the
majority law-abiding community, will work fine as a means of preventing many
trivial offences. Worst of all, we cannot assume that the staff in the civil
service are any less corrupt than the host community. If we assume very
favourably that only 1% are corrupt, that means that 25,000 criminals will have
access to your personal data and could use it for their own purposes or sell it
to other criminals. I for one will not feel safer!
Even our public
services are overusing technology to micromanage our everyday behaviour. We are
seeing the emergence of rubbish police, monitoring how much rubbish is produced
by households, and the proportion recycled, with proposed fines for people
generating too much.
The over-use of
upcoming technologies to reduce trivial crime will soon make it almost
impossible to commit a wide range of offences without getting caught. But
criminals will carry on using identity theft, spoofing, encryption and
anonymity servers to hide while they commit crime.
Sadly, although
surveillance systems such as these are being sold to us under the banner of
crime reduction, it is the criminals who will actually be least affected by
them. Only the stupidest and laziest of criminals will be caught by such
systems, just as thugs and shoplifters can easily use hoodies today to avoid
being identified by CCTV systems. It is law-abiding people who will suffer the
inconvenience and cost.
We are heading
towards a Stepford Society, where conforming people wonÕt be able to commit
even trivial offences without penalty, and will have no choice but to live clean
lives, their free will effectively taken away by technology. Meanwhile there will be a parallel
underworld of career criminals who just ignore a wide range of laws so that
they can hide, ignoring all these constraints with a low risk of being found,
using false identities, e-ink or LCD number plates, and stolen credit cards,
then presumably use loopholes in legislation to minimise their punishments if
they are caught. The film Demolition Man portrayed this kind of society for
2030 Los Angeles. It may happen much sooner in the UK. It is certainly a
strange society where criminals are free to do as they wish, while law-abiding
people are constantly monitored, effectively imprisoned, their freedom greatly
impeded.
The sanctimonious
keep repeating the same expression Š Ōyou have nothing to fear if you obey the
lawÕ. And so the Stepford society will roll out. ItÕs not just that punishment
would be inevitable. Unless you are a hardened criminal, you wonÕt even be able
to break the rules.
But unless we have
the freedom to do wrong, surely we have no freedom at all!