1984 versus 2014, what's 30 years when you are writing about society nearly 40 years in the future?
From
Bruce Schneier we get
this news:
Britain is to become the first country in the world where
the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national
surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.
Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing
number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements
so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a
driver has made over several years.
The network will incorporate thousands of existing CCTV cameras which
are being converted to read number plates automatically night and day
to provide 24/7 coverage of all motorways and main roads, as well as
towns, cities, ports and petrol-station forecourts.
By next March a central database installed alongside the Police
National Computer in Hendon, north London, will store the details of 35
million number-plate "reads" per day. These will include time, date and
precise location, with camera sites monitored by global positioning
satellites.
Already there are plans to extend the database by increasing the
storage period to five years and by linking thousands of additional
cameras so that details of up to 100 million number plates can be fed
each day into the central databank.
And that's just the beginning. Here's
the future:
The new national surveillance network for tracking car
journeys, which has taken more than 25 years to develop, is only the
beginning of plans to monitor the movements of all British citizens.
The Home Office Scientific Development Branch in Hertfordshire is
already working on ways of automatically recognising human faces by
computer, which many people would see as truly introducing the prospect
of Orwellian street surveillance, where our every move is recorded and
stored by machines.
It's a slippery slope. The government takes the guns
away "to reduce crime" and when that doesn't work they conclude more
government power over the people is needed and when that doesn't work
they need still more power. They never give consideration that giving
power back to the people could be a good idea. As Lyle points
out, only when government involved do people conclude that their
failures mean we should give them more money. It's a classic
When Prophecy Fails case. It's also an extreme failure of the
Jews in the Attic Test.
This is extremely scary stuff. I gives me shivers and just drains the energy from me.