Web 2.0 is all very well but what about Web 1984? We were discussing how long it would be before the whole of Britain reached the number-plate recognition camera tipping point: the moment at which all everybody's movements would be tracked every minute of every day. We all had different timescales, but agreed that it would certainly be by 2015. The wearied cry of the aged springs to the lips: "Thank God I won't be alive to see it." But (probably) I shall be and so will you.
The opposing cry of the terminally smug also leaps to mind: "The innocent have nothing to fear". It's the cry of the idiot through the ages -- idiot, that is, in the ancient Greek sense of one who absents himself from public life. And at its core lies a category mistake: that there is a direct link between "innocence" and "freedom". Not, I would argue, the case. There is a link between certain sorts of guilt and the removal, temporary or permanent, of freedom. But is "innocence" the necessary precondition for freedom? No. The necessary precondition is, as Thomas Jefferson observed, eternal vigilance.
Jefferson's remark may, in our present context, seem cynical. But government -- all government -- is less concerned with preserving our liberties than with extending its powers. Power is what drives individuals to put themselves forward as our rulers. As the late Auberon Waugh wrote, the desire to hold political office should in itself be enough to disqualify a man from holding it. This is not cynicism but experience.
Over the last decade or two, and under various propositions of allegedly unarguable benefit -- reducing road accidents, reducing crime, safeguarding "homeland security", deterring paedophiles, increasing our health, saving money, protecting intellectual property, maximising investor return -- we have allowed our freedoms to be eroded to the point, I suspect, of no return. Facial recognition technology coupled with search engines, data mining, data aggregation, communications interception, numberplate recognition technology, biometric ID cards, mobile phone triangulation, ATM and credit card tracking, just for starters, have led us to the point where cradle-to-grave, 24/7 monitoring of individual private citizens is an achievable reality. The only individuals who can remain outside the system are those who... remain outside the system. The very individuals who, according to the PR, these measures are designed to monitor.
It is the condition of the infant to be subject to continuous surveillance. Web 1984 is the web from a different angle: not the web we travel, bringing with it infinite riches in a little room, but the web as the fly sees it: a monitored reticulation which can trap when it chooses, the fat black spider of Government poised in a corner, calibrating the vibrations and poised to spring.
Privacy is now more endangered than ever before. We need to reconsider what we mean by it. Is privacy a fundamental right, or is it a privilege which may be rescinded incrementally by governments? At the moment we are losing it by default, nor is it from our failure to make ourselves heard, because we are not even shouting.
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