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EU Surveillance Studies Disclosed By Pirate Party
Spliffster writes "The German Pirate Party has disclosed some secret documents on how the EU is planning to monitor citizens. The so called INDECT Documents describe how a seamless surveillance could (or should) be implemented across Europe. The use of CCTV cameras, the Internet (social networks), and even the use of UAVs are mentioned as data sources. Two of the nine documents can be downloaded from the German Pirate Party's website (PDFs in English)."
I wonder if forcing every single human being to read George Orwell's 1984 would prevent this sort of thing from happening.
Perhaps it's just that people don't realize what could go wrong with an Orwellian government in place. Perhaps they just don't see it, they don't think anything can go wrong if the government watches your every step.
Then again, perhaps people just don't care. As long as it's not them (and by "them" i mean the generations that currently live) who suffer it, they just don't give a damn.
I can tell from personal experience that many people don't care about stuff like that even if you tell them the consequences. Perhaps Big Brother is precisely what we, as a civilization, need in order to realize that it's a horrible thing to live like that. After all, experience is a good teacher.
I've skimmed through the first pdf. It looks like they are trying to build an Event Control system. Designed to control and identify people at large events, like soccer games. Some countries in Europe have a real problem with soccer hooligans. Or just plain riots, like the ones in France last year. It's the cops who want a system to identify the rioters. Seems logical to me, Jim.
But the government could mis-use it for anything they want. And that scares me, as a E.U. citizen.
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/EU_social_network_spy_system_brief,_INDECT_Work_Package_4,_2009
Some deep ip, friend of friend of friend hunting software triggered by phrases, word use and IM connections.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I don't see how you can equate CCTV in the UK with the mess that the US has got itself into. Firstly, the oft-quoted 4 million cameras is a figure made up by one of the far-right tabloid newpapers based on the number of cameras in about a quarter mile of the main street of a fairly rough part of London. If that figure was even remotely accurate, you'd pass a CCTV camera every 50 metres or so on every road in the UK right down to farm tracks.
Here's the kicker. Every major city in the US has got just as much CCTV surveillance as London! Yes, you're "spied on" just as much in New York as you are in London, and you've got armed police ready and willing to shoot you, too. It must be awful living in the US, with that constant threat over you all the time.
What happened to innocent until proven guilty? A system like this makes anyone a suspect (a potential criminal), this is very 1984 like!
My government is not allowed to survey me until a judge order so. The described goals are to survey everyone. The authors of INECT are absolutely aware that they would trump human rights (and they see it more as an annoyance than an problem), this is why INECT is trying to keep this shit secret.
To some of the commenters above; this has not much to do with Germany itself but the EU. It was just the German Pirate Party which leaked the documents.
-S
I live in China. This week, a friend of a friend left a large sum of money in a taxi. My friend's staff went down to the police station and came back with a record of surveillance video, all the stops the taxi made, a route the taxi took in Google Maps style format, the taxi driver's home address, ID card scan, and mobile phone number. This is coming to a nation near you, if it's not already there. It's funny, one of the ways you can tell if street construction is almost finished is when they install the surveillance cameras on poles.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!