Slashdot Mirror
The UK's Total Surveillance
Budenny writes "The Register has a story in its ongoing coverage of the UK ID Card story. This one suggests, with links to a weekend news story, that the Prime Minister in waiting has bought the idea that all electronic transactions in the UK should be linked to a central government/police database. Every cash withdrawal, every credit card purchase, ever loyalty card use ... And that data should flow back from the police database to (eg) a loyalty card use. So, for example, not only would the government know what books you were buying, but the bookstore would also know if you had an outstanding speeding ticket!"
And we ALL have many things to hide.
Abuse of the info will happen, so let it never be allowed, anywhere!
"I have a right to buy those, but please officer don't tell my boss or my wife or my kids!"
Help end the use of Sigs. Tomorrow
And who's guilty of this all?
Terrorists!
And I do mean it. They're bad, bad folks who use scare tactics and incite the fear of getting blown up to control the population into obeying their demands.
Yeah, that's right. Your beloved government fills all the requirements for the word "terrorists". Just like the other side of the pond.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
If this database could be linked to myspace!!
I'll never have to write my own boring blogs ever again, this could do it for me!
11am bought donuts at krispy kreme
11:15 incurred speeding fine on South eastern freeway
11:30 purchased petrol
I myself am living through the hell of a family member's minor criminal infraction being repeatedly mishandled and miscoded by the 2 courts and 3 police departments that have some jurisdiction. Now on a daily basis there are cops at my house with one kind of arrest warrant or another for a charge that was dropped months ago.
So yeah let's give the cops more power and more data to peer into and let's give them more of an excuse to wave a piece of paper in my face and tell me "I don't care what you say, this piece of paper says I'm right and you're going to jail.." Yeah let's do that.
I know you're being sarcastic, but it's not information being free - it's information being collected to control the masses - thus being a complete solution for the removal of freedoms.
A total surveillance society is a mere 10-20 years away. Every traffic light I approach I am taped. My face is scanned every time I go to a baseball game. The SCOTUS already upheld that I do indeed have to provide ID to a police officer even if I am not suspected of any wrong doing, at their whim.
Biometrics are the rage. Biometrics and RFID will be on my passport, in my license. The REAL ID act officially creates a national ID in the US. And so on...
While the US is behind the UK in terms of true overall survellance, it's not that far. 20 years from now, when facial recognition is perfected - or some new technology that can ready our DNA from a small distance exists - you won't need customer loyalty cards anymore.
And people will accept it all - because it will all happen slowly, over time, and add seeming convenience to everything. Why carry an ID or a credit card? The police car will instantly recognize you, know exactly where you've been in public in the past few days, weeks, months... Everywhere your car travels, RFID tags or your cell phone will give away your location and be recorded.
See, aside from the DNA sniffer... all of this is reality now. 1984 was a little ambitious - we needed a few more years to totally accept living in a police state, but that's because there was no MySpace back then to distract us from the realities of government total awareness.
Yeah, lable me a tin foil hat person, but I'm going to hold out as long as I can - no EZPass, no customer loyalty cards, a new non-RFID passport, etc., etc. I may go down, but not without some degree of a fight.
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
The oft used trick in the UK for getting the population to swallow whatever crap the government wants to hurl their way, i.e.
1) Announce insanely over the top version of whatever it is you want to do
2) Sit back while the population freaks out for a while and make a token defence of it
3) Back off to the point you originally intended and watch the population sigh in relief your "capitulation" in the face of their protests.
Generally, if there's one thing to realise about New Labour it's that things don't leak from a source close to anyone in the government unless there's an agenda behind it.
Hmmmmmm..... Deep fried and look like Squirrel.
BARMAN: You're a cab.
DRUNK: The old ones are the best. Hic!
DRUNK FALLS OFF BAR STOOL.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
To be fair it's not like the UK is the most worrying place for that sort of thing. If you're talking about going abroad then a lot of countries gather far more information on you than the UK does or likely ever will. This type of thing is never going to go live as much as the media likes to sensationalise these type of things, although it's arguable of course that media sensationalism is why it wont go live - people just wont accept it. Even if somehow it did get put into practice the European human rights courts would crush it within seconds (yes Europe IS good for something ;)).
When I went to the US last year they insisted on taking my fingerprints and photograph (retina scan I think? Looked like a normal webcam though!) as well as a record of where I was going to be throughout my entire trip there, how much currency I had with me, where I worked, where in the UK I lived etc. I'd never seen a gun before except for in the army cadets, certainly never in a non-military setting for 23 years and a police officer at heathrow with an MP5 (i.e. my whole life to that point) however when I went to the US. In 4 weeks in the US travelling from Sacramento down through California and to Arizona back up to the grand canyon I saw 2 individuals with guns as well as 5 incidents (2 in Sacramento, 3 in Phoenix) of police officers with guns pulled on people in cars - that's 6 more in 4 weeks than I've ever seen in 23 years of living in the UK outside a military setting. Of course, gun crime there is a lot higher also as we well know.
I'll note also that whilst I've seen no display of firearms by anyone in the other countries I've been to I must note that arguably the worst for information gathering and general nastiness of customs officials when I went on holiday was ironically Canada, a country that is supposedly full of friendly people. When I landed in Ottawa and got to immigration I was told to step into the customs office where I was interrogated for 3hrs and asked everything from the password to my laptop which I had in my case through to the amount of money in my bank account, whether I had a criminal record, what my job was, how long I'd worked there, whether I had a girlfriend/wife, why I had two shavers in my suitcase and whether I had any beastiality images on my laptop or digital camera (no seriously, it was hard to keep a straight face on that one). After they realised I really was just there on holiday and not a multi-billionaire, unemployed, shaver murderer importing a hoarde of beastiality porn on my laptop and camera to Canada they let me go on with my holiday, again not without however recording every little detail of my planned trip. Now I'll accept I was probably unlucky, that immigration was looking for someone specific after a tip off maybe (they did pull one other person aside but only for an hour) however again, I'm pretty sure Canadian immigration now still holds far more information on me than they probably should.
The only country I've ever been to that hasn't bothered with personal details was Norway which was a weird experience, it was literally straight off the plane in Narvik and onwards with my whale watching trip.
What I'm getting at here isn't that the UK is some innocent country where the authorities treat us really nicely or that America is a land of spying gun toting maniacs but simply that the parent comment is just simple paranoia, it's worth noting that Europe as a whole has refused to let many countries retain information on European citizens unless said country adheres to European data protection laws so there's a lot more protection out there than articles like in TFA would have you beleive.