Thursday, June 07, 2007

Blair's legacy For This Green And Pleasant Land




Discounting Iraq of course.

Observed by over 4.2 million closed circuit – or CCTV – cameras across the country, Britain is already the most surveilled industrialized state in the Western world. It was recently estimated that the average Briton is captured by electronic eyes more than 300 times on a typical workday.

Yet the country’s surveillance network, which boasts one camera for every fourteen citizens, is no longer merely facilitating observance: It has now begun talking back. In a scene eerily reminiscent of Orwell's dystopian vision of 1984, loudspeakers in one small-town center in northern Britain scold anyone they catch engaged in “anti-social behaviour,” including littering, drunkenness, or fighting. more

Previous.



Not everyone is taking things lying down, activists are out there raging against the machine.

Apart from surveillance cameras the country is littered with speed trap cameras, in some locations it wouldn't be unusual to see them sited every two hundred yards.

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