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Surveillance Nation

Posted by Paul Miller at 10:52am on Wednesday, 19th March 2003

MIT (the University not the new cop show on telly) have an excellent magazine called Technology Review. This article about the growth of surveillance technologies certainly got me thinking. "Ultimately," says the article, "surveillance will become so ubiquitous, networked, and searchable that unmonitored public space will effectively cease to exist."

Comments

1
Is it really democracy? Or is it more about opinions being pushed in a public forum by those who understand lobbying? There's an ideological twist to this kind of thing that can be hard to counter-argue but there has to be a line between the private and the public, somewhere.
Posted by jackdalton jackdalton  at 6:53pm on Wednesday, 19th March 2003
2
It is also a classic case of people expecting their leaders to solve their problems for them, and politicians pretending that they can. In reality, by absolving people of the responsibility to tackle these issues for themselves, it tends to make the problem worse in the long-run. CCTV kills civic spirit and with it, in the long-run, democracy.
Posted by Paul Paul  at 7:55pm on Thursday, 20th March 2003
3
democracy by its very design is there to be worried about. Need we mention the tyranny of the majority in the case of Nazism, or the current tyrannies of the minority of Bush and Blair; two democratic leaders, neither of whom can claim consent from the majority of their electorates. It is civil rights that protect the agency of the individual. Democracy may represent choice, but it does not guarantee freedom.
Posted by Luke Luke  at 4:57pm on Friday, 21st March 2003

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