Have We Become a Big Brother Society?

[jimmydasaint]

The story about Britain being touted for even more surveillance does not make happy reading for me. We are already an information poor, entertainment rich society like the U.S. This makes many of us more likely to accept entertainment instead of real 'reality' We tend to passively accept the Government's suggestions for surveillance in order to aid security in this great nation. If push comes to shove, do we just quietly agree to be surveilled using Terahertz technology (not X-rays) which can see through clothes, invasive audio and visual surveillance technology and finally microchipped for I.D.? I cannot see the Americans being so receptive to being treted in this way.

 

Tories push for more surveillance

 

In a sign the Conservative party may be moving away from the civil liberties ideals of former shadow home secretary David Davis, the Tories have announced a push to make it easier for police to launch surveillance operations against non-terrorists.

 

New shadow home secretary Dominic Grieve wants to get rid of the system for authorising surveillance on suspected criminals, claiming one officer spent 13-and-a-half hours completing paper work so he could follow a burglar with previous convictions.

 

"Revising the act's framework so that authorisation - and all the paperwork that goes with it - is not required for basic police work is just one way the party will cut red tape to free more police onto our streets," Mr Grieve continued.

 

That kind of change would open up an array of surveillance options to the police, including video or audio surveillance, thermal and X-ray imaging, the use of CCTV cameras, on-site watching of public locations and uniformed or plain-clothed patrols.

 

The party denies amendments to the act would result in an interference with people's privacy, saying the type of surveillance operation covered by the act could not "reasonably" be seen to constitute an invasion of privacy.

[ParanoiA]

Well, yeah but you forgot about big brother telling us what we can or can't eat, drink, smoke or ingest by any other creative means. Watching me? Big deal. Yeah that sucks, but it doesn't compare to coercively restricting me from simple, basic human liberties - like paying for intimacy or eating a transfat infested oreo cookie.

 

So yeah, we'll buy it hook, line and sinker. Incrementally, we'll sell out every liberty we have left. All you have to do is redirect problems away from their source and pin them down on some arbitrary element, make it illegal - declare war on it, something like that. That way, the sheeple continue the behavior, poor decision making, thus enabling the coercive machine that feeds off of them.

 

Or maybe I'm just cynical.