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The Road to Big Brother
brothke writes "In The Road to Big Brother: One Man's Struggle Against the Surveillance Society, Ross Clark journals his struggles to avoid the myriad CCTV cameras in his native England. That's difficult given the millions of cameras in public locations there. Before going forward, the use of the term 'Big Brother' in both the title and throughout the book is erroneous. Big Brother has its roots in George Orwell's novel 1984 and refers to an omnipresent, seemingly benevolent figure representing the oppressive control over individual lives exerted by an authoritarian government. The term has been misappropriated to describe everything from legitimate crime-fighting, to surveillance cameras, to corporate e-mail and network usage monitoring. Localities that deploy CCTV cameras in public thoroughfares in the hope of combating crime are in no way indicative of the oppressive control of Orwell's Big Brother. Should we be concerned that such a scenario play itself out in Ross Clark's UK or in the US? Likely no, as US government agencies are widely decentralized and isolated. Just getting the networks within a single federal agency unified is a daunting task; getting all of the agencies to have a single unified data sharing mechanism is a pipe-dream. Look at it this way: the US Department of Defense has more networks than some countries have computers." Read below for the rest of Ben's review.
The Road to Big Brother: One Man's Struggle Against the Surveillance Society
author
Ross Clark
pages
200
publisher
Encounter Books
rating
Powerful topic, but poor delivery and answers.
reviewer
Ben Rothke
ISBN
978-1594032486
summary
One man's account of how to dodge Britain's million of CCTV cameras and other forms of surveillance
The Road to Big Brother details Clark's attempt to be invisible to the millions of CCTV cameras in Britain, and details other types of national & agency databases and how they can be misused. Clark notes astutely that while much data is being gathered, often the most important clues are missed, and a lack of proportion often is the result.
Some of the books observations are flawed. In chapter two, Clark writes that VeriChip markets its RFID chips with the aim of speeding the passage of authorized people through security checks. But its Verimed chip is made for patient identification and emergency patient management in hospitals. In Chapter 11, Clark comments that Facebook is essentially a forum for drunken college students who cannot conceive that any harm could come from disporting themselves in semi-naked poses for everyone to see. There is no indication that the comment was meant to be humorous, and there are many legitimate sober uses for Facebook.
Perhaps the worst distortion of the Big Brother hysteria, of which the book provides no source, is the claim that the CIA and FBI appears to know what airline meals a person chooses when they cross the Atlantic. Terrorists do their best to be stealthy, and will likely opt to bring their own special meal, rather than stand out and request a special one. It is not clear what the CIA and FBI hope to gain with such data.
The book documents numerous CCTV failures, from Brighton, England to Baltimore, Maryland. Chapter 3 has a 2005 quote from the Maryland Attorney General stating that CCTV's had yet to solve a single crime. The book also repeats the problem of fuzzy CCTV images and highlights other technology failures as far back as 1998. Surveillance technology has significantly advanced in the last 3 years, let alone decade. Focusing on failures from a decade ago is in no way indicative of the state of the art, nor does it do anything to solve the problem Clark addresses.
In the last 60 days alone, CCTV has been used to identify the alleged Craigslist Killer and shooter at Wesleyan University. While Clark may not realize it, CCTV and other related technologies has indeed revolutionized law enforcement. The underlying problem is that Britain's millions of cameras were deployed in the hope that they could magically solve crime. Cameras alone achieve nothing; but CCTV combined with trained humans and other crime prevention and detection methods are a powerful set of tools that many police departments are embracing.
The book notes that two CCTV schemes were sold to UK police in 2001 with the premise that they would eliminate crime and increase the number of visitors by 225,000 a year. Any police department that would believe such a marketing claim, without pilot testing and proof of concept should themselves be arrested for ineptitude.
The book would be better off quoting this year's CCTV successes, rather than those of obsolete equipment. As to the fuzzy image problem; newer, more powerful and often inexpensive cameras easily and quickly solves that predicament.
All is not lost on the book. Chapter 8 — Me and My ID, in which Clark documents how ineffective national identification cards are. National ID cards are all the rage and are being deployed in the hope that they will reduce terrorism, illegal immigration and other of society's ills. Clark notes that even if national ID cards were able to identify everyone correctly, and that is a huge assumption, it is still not clear what they would achieve. National ID's have been touted to reduce insurance fraud, but medical insurance fraud is often executed not by false identification, rather by patients lying about their circumstances.
The book touches upon, but does not really answer, nor go into enough details on why people allow such pervasive use of electronic surveillance technologies to seamlessly enter society. Be it CCTV cameras that film public parks or attempt to catch speeding drivers; many are deployed with little to no protestations.
While Big Brother achieved oppressive control over individuals, the real danger of surveillance systems is that they can easily be misused. Rather than achieving their crime fighting goals, they will mislead police with myriad false positives. Part of Clark's frustration is likely that the UK Police believe in some sort of CCTV Kool-Aid that their collogues in the US have not consumed. Why that is so prevalent in the UK is something that Clark doesn't address.
The Road to Big Brother: One Man's Struggle Against the Surveillance Society should have been a book that details the problems with a surveillance society, but often reads like it emanates from the ministry of misinformation.
Ben Rothke is the author of Computer Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should Know.
You can purchase The Road to Big Brother: One Man's Struggle Against the Surveillance Society from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Some of the books observations are flawed. In chapter two, Clark writes that VeriChip markets its RFID chips with the aim of speeding the passage of authorized people through security checks. But its Verimed chip is made for patient identification and emergency patient management in hospitals. In Chapter 11, Clark comments that Facebook is essentially a forum for drunken college students who cannot conceive that any harm could come from disporting themselves in semi-naked poses for everyone to see. There is no indication that the comment was meant to be humorous, and there are many legitimate sober uses for Facebook.
Perhaps the worst distortion of the Big Brother hysteria, of which the book provides no source, is the claim that the CIA and FBI appears to know what airline meals a person chooses when they cross the Atlantic. Terrorists do their best to be stealthy, and will likely opt to bring their own special meal, rather than stand out and request a special one. It is not clear what the CIA and FBI hope to gain with such data.
The book documents numerous CCTV failures, from Brighton, England to Baltimore, Maryland. Chapter 3 has a 2005 quote from the Maryland Attorney General stating that CCTV's had yet to solve a single crime. The book also repeats the problem of fuzzy CCTV images and highlights other technology failures as far back as 1998. Surveillance technology has significantly advanced in the last 3 years, let alone decade. Focusing on failures from a decade ago is in no way indicative of the state of the art, nor does it do anything to solve the problem Clark addresses.
In the last 60 days alone, CCTV has been used to identify the alleged Craigslist Killer and shooter at Wesleyan University. While Clark may not realize it, CCTV and other related technologies has indeed revolutionized law enforcement. The underlying problem is that Britain's millions of cameras were deployed in the hope that they could magically solve crime. Cameras alone achieve nothing; but CCTV combined with trained humans and other crime prevention and detection methods are a powerful set of tools that many police departments are embracing.
The book notes that two CCTV schemes were sold to UK police in 2001 with the premise that they would eliminate crime and increase the number of visitors by 225,000 a year. Any police department that would believe such a marketing claim, without pilot testing and proof of concept should themselves be arrested for ineptitude.
The book would be better off quoting this year's CCTV successes, rather than those of obsolete equipment. As to the fuzzy image problem; newer, more powerful and often inexpensive cameras easily and quickly solves that predicament.
All is not lost on the book. Chapter 8 — Me and My ID, in which Clark documents how ineffective national identification cards are. National ID cards are all the rage and are being deployed in the hope that they will reduce terrorism, illegal immigration and other of society's ills. Clark notes that even if national ID cards were able to identify everyone correctly, and that is a huge assumption, it is still not clear what they would achieve. National ID's have been touted to reduce insurance fraud, but medical insurance fraud is often executed not by false identification, rather by patients lying about their circumstances.
The book touches upon, but does not really answer, nor go into enough details on why people allow such pervasive use of electronic surveillance technologies to seamlessly enter society. Be it CCTV cameras that film public parks or attempt to catch speeding drivers; many are deployed with little to no protestations.
While Big Brother achieved oppressive control over individuals, the real danger of surveillance systems is that they can easily be misused. Rather than achieving their crime fighting goals, they will mislead police with myriad false positives. Part of Clark's frustration is likely that the UK Police believe in some sort of CCTV Kool-Aid that their collogues in the US have not consumed. Why that is so prevalent in the UK is something that Clark doesn't address.
The Road to Big Brother: One Man's Struggle Against the Surveillance Society should have been a book that details the problems with a surveillance society, but often reads like it emanates from the ministry of misinformation.
Ben Rothke is the author of Computer Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should Know.
You can purchase The Road to Big Brother: One Man's Struggle Against the Surveillance Society from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
From an article in the San Diego Reader:
Last week in a Spring Valley business park, a tower nearly 100 feet tall sprang up seemingly overnight...I approached three men, dressed as though they might be engineers, who were standing in the parking lot outside NSM Surveillance on Via Orange Way. When I asked them what the tower was for, one of them responded with the joke, "We can't tell you. We'd have to kill you."...By Wednesday afternoon the tower had disappeared.
Though that particular product was probably just a communications tower, the article describes how easy it is to set up an Orwellian society, especially with a systems integrator such as NSM Surveillance.
Some book reviewer really woke up on the "sniveling apologist bootlicker for incipient fascism" side of the bed this morning.
That figure was made up by a lazy tabloid hack writing for the Daily Telegraph, who counted the number of CCTV cameras in about a quarter mile of the main street of a particularly unpleasant part of London, and then multiplied by the total distance of roads in the UK.
It's not even believably wrong - it's so mind-buggeringly flawed that it defies human comprehension as to how anyone could possibly think it's even nearly right. If that figure was correct then you would pass a CCTV camera every 20 metres on every road in the UK. My driveway alone would have three or four cameras on it.
I really wish people would stop spouting such patent nonsense.
Perhaps the reviewer may also wish to check out the Home Office Research Study 292, 'Assessing the impact of CCTV cameras' (http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs05/hors292.pdf) before attempting to explain how useful they are to us, and maybe also have a read of Database State (http://www.jrrt.org.uk/uploads/Database State.pdf) to check the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust's report. Then there's the recent House Of Lords publication Surveillance, Citizens And The State (http://publications.parliament.uk).
Actually, I am not so sure of the real value of these cameras. I mean, yes, in many circumstances they are helpful, but in all?
Sure the craigslist killer may have been harder to catch, but men like him have been caught without any use of CCTV cameras before. Had he not been caught yet, some more lives may be lost or damaged, However, we are talking about overall policy of society... a single incident of a single "bad guy" does not a case for public policy make.
With the advent of a DHS, with the successes, its not hard to see how creeping centralization can happen. I know that some police departments are often given direct access to private security cameras in many buildings, and particularly of the outward facing cameras that overlook city squares etc.
It may be hard to centralize them now, but technology only makes it easier.
Then look at the CORI system here in MA. A recent study found many accesses that were probably unauthorized. As far as they can tell, a significant portion of local police will think nothing of using the system to look up famous people's information. Of course, thats only been identified by looking for searches on famous names. An ex-girlfriend, Wife's new boyfriend, etc, there is no telling.
Tehcnology gives new abilities. However, when you build infrastructure that has the potential for abuse, you have to build in proper checks and balances, or trust not just its designers, but the operators of the system, now...and into the future.
the new Big brother will not run on a platform. He is quite happy to "creep on in" on the backs of otherwise good intentions. Like the recent no fly list issue. A plane that merely flew threw US airspace was detained and a reporter questioned... because someone put him on the secret no fly list, and somehow the US government got ahold of the passenger manifest. Was he put on the list as a mistake? Or was he put on because someone didn't like what he had to say and wanted to harass him? Where are the checks and balances?
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Arguments of the form "group X doesn't want to hurt you, therefore technology Y is not dangerous to your freedom" completely miss the point; once technology Y is in place, it is waiting, ready for use by group Z which does want to restrict your civil rights.
The apparatus of a police state is dangerous even in a democracy because it makes it so much easier for some rogue element to end democracy by imposing a police state without free assembly, free speech, free practice of religion, etc.
It has, perhaps, been some time since the reviewer read Nineteen Eighty-Four. In my mind, and that of many others, the salient feature of Big Brother was that he was watching you. Everywhere. The telescreen panel in your apartment is two-way. You have no privacy. Citizens of Oceania fear that some innocent action could be misconstrued resulting in a one-way trip to the Ministry of Love for a bit of Q&A with the Thought Police. Whether Big Brother actually existed was immaterial. Someone was watching you; always. To use Big Brother as a metaphor for omnipresent surveillance is both appropriate and suitably cautionary.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
You rang? :-)
I remember your eyes, on the twelfth of July...
Ancient example:
Under the democratic Republic of Rome, the stadium games served as a way for Group X (the Senators) to entertain the people. Just for fun. But once group Z (the emperors) arrived on the scene, the games devolved into a way to kill undesirables like criminals, slaves, and Christians/Jews.
"This job would be a lot easier if instead of a Republic, we had a dictatorship. Ha, ha, ha." - G. Dubya Bush
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
-- Lyndon Johnson, former President of the U.S.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
That was exactly my thinking.
"We LOVE our government surveillence. It's legitimate and good. Don't listen to those laughable studies showing that massive surveillence has absolutely no benefit in preventing crime, and no effect on crime rates, and only serves as a tool for Intelligence organizations to collect information about citizens, so as to quell dissent, and spy on any political opposition, with such an extreme opportunity for abuse, even beyond the invasion of privacy aspect, that such a crazy system should have no place in ANY civilized society. Your government loves you. They want to play catch with your children, and buy you a beer. If you don't have anything to hide, why is there a problem? We're just the friendly Government come to make your life better"
And as for the US. The reviewer obviously hasn't been paying attention in the last few decades, as the power has been centralized more and more, taking power from the states putting it into the Federal government's hands, consolidating agencies one after another directly beneath the executive branch, federalizing the police, integrating the military with police for domestic operations against citizens, and on and on and on.
As for the UK. I've always wanted to visit, but I wouldn't be caught dead in that "Brave New World". Sounds like the reviewer would have had a great time in Nazi Germany.
Let's asume that magically all of the sudden massive surveillance into the lives of every citizen did anything good for the population (and not for the Beurocrats keeping the population under their thumb of control). Even if having a chip implant up your anus and your own personal police officer to to follow you around and arrest you if your rectal temperature deviates to rapidly made the world crime free, is it really worth it? I'd rather live in the middle of a crime ridden cess pool, than in an Orwellian Surveilance State.
The government should get back to what it's supposed to do, and micromanaging the lives of it's citizens is NOT one of those purposes.
Brothke: People like you piss me off. Go move to China. I much prefer that whole "freedom" model, even if though it's hard to come by in the suposed "free world". At least the criminals on the street don't have massive amounts of power, infastructure and resources behind them. The government criminals certainly do.
Take a look at where CCTV is mostly deployed, e.g. Great Britain, and what you find are left-wing control freaks.
One of the more entertaining features of Slashdot is the self-delusional lefties who blame anything they don't like, even perfectly typical lefty behaviour, on "right wing ..."
It's modern urban liberals that are the first to insist that the government "do something" whenever reality bites. Modern liberal governments are only too happy to oblige. Ubiquitous CCTV is "doing something."
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.