Public officials, who see themselves as rulers of neofeudal fiefdoms, don’t want their nefarious and corrupt activities to be recorded while private citizens going about their daily business are being increasingly surveilled and taxed through the panopticon network which is actually a cash cow for these politicians and their cronies. If this doesn’t disturb you, then you are completely lost.
PW
Big Brother in the Big Apple
by Bob Barr (former Republican congressman of GA)
Washington Times | Aug 7, 2007
Though the lion’s share of publicity surrounding Tony Blair’s recent departure as Britain’s prime minister focused on his legacy as George W. Bush’s top foreign cheerleader, a more lasting legacy for Mr. Blair’s lengthy tenure as Britain’s chief “decider” will be that he greatly accelerated Great Britain’s ascendancy to the position of the “most surveilled” society in the world. Still, Michael Bloomberg, the Democrat-turned-Republican-turned-independent mayor of New York is giving Mr. Blair a run for the money as the most surveillance-hungry public official in the world.
Even though officials in other cities are embracing and installing surveillance cameras in huge numbers — Chicago, Detroit and Washington, D.C., to name a few — the latest plan unveiled by Mr. Bloomberg and his equally surveillance-enamored police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, leaves these other American cities in the surveillance dust. Truly what we are witnessing being created here is a 21st-century Panopticon.
The Panopticon, as envisaged by British philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), was a society (initially proposed as a prison) in which surreptitious surveillance of the citizenry was always possible and ever-known. Control was exercised not by being surveilled continuously but by each person knowing they might be under surveillance at any time, or all the time.
Bentham was a man ahead of his time. His pet project was never fully carried out because the technology available at the time, relying as it did on direct, physical surveillance (electricity as a harnessable force, with which Benjamin Franklin was just then beginning to experiment, was still more than a century away) made creation of a workable Panopticon infeasible. Were Bentham alive today, he probably would be the most sought-after consultant on the planet.
The key to the surveillance society foreseen by Bentham more than two centuries ago was control. Crime was rampant in late 18th-century and early 19th-century London. Controlling the populace by modifying behavior became the central problem for Bentham and other social scientists of the day.
Of course, the notion that surveillance is key to control was not new with Bentham; centuries before, the Greek philosopher Plato had mused about the power of the government to control through surveillance, when he raised the still-relevant question, “Who watches the watchers?”
More recently, of course, George Orwell gave voice to the innate fear that resides deep in many of our psyches against government surveillance, in his nightmare, “Big Brother is Watching You” world of the novel “1984.”
Whether in Bentham’s world, or Plato’s or Orwell’s, the central task is to modify behavior by convincing people that the government — that entity with power over their lives — may be watching them all the time or at any particular time. As 20th-century American philosopher and advocate of personal freedom Ayn Rand noted, taking away a person’s privacy renders to the government the ability to control absolutely that person.
In fact, studies by Bentham and others have established that individuals do in fact modify their behavior if they believe they are being watched by authorities.
Mayor Bloomberg and his Unconstitutional Camera Law
Whether learned of these philosophical treatises or not, Mayor Bloomberg and former Prime Minister Blair epitomize the almost mindless, unquestioning embrace of surveillance as the solution to problems — real, manufactured or exaggerated — that pervades government post-September 11, 2001. Fear of terrorism as much as fear of crime is the currency by which government at all levels convinces a fearful populace that a surveilled society is a safe society.
Bloomberg freedom of the press subway ride
Of course, Messrs. Bloomberg and Blair have one benefit available to them that was largely denied Bentham — money. Lots of money. “Homeland security” money taken from the wallets of taxpayers, but treated by government appropriators as theirs by right, is eagerly ladled out for cameras to surveill all. Add the magic words “for fighting terrorism” to your request for federal money and the chances of securing those dollars are made many times greater.
Not only is money readily available for government agencies to install, monitor and expand surveillance systems, but the cameras themselves are magnificent generators of money. Already in London, vehicle owners are billed for using their cars and trucks in certain areas and at certain times, through use of surveillance cameras that photograph, record and track vehicle license plates. The multimillion-dollar system being set up by Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Kelly will almost certainly be similarly employed down the road.
With more than 4.2 million closed-circuit television surveillance cameras now operating in Great Britain (the vast majority in and around London), Mr. Bloomberg has a long way to catch up to his British counterparts. Yet the eagerness with which he is approaching this challenge, coupled with the easy money available to him and a largely ignorant and compliant citizenry willing to surrender their privacy in the vain hope that thousands of surveillance cameras will guarantee their safety, bodes well for the Gotham City to overtake London as the most surveilled city on the planet. Somewhere, Jeremy Bentham is smiling; and George Orwell is saying, “I told you so.”
Bob Barr is a former Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia and a former U.S. attorney there.
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3 responses so far ↓
Robert H. // August 9, 2007 at 12:05 pm
I completely disagree with this guy. I think a saturation of public surveillance cameras creates not only an effective psychological deterrent to criminal behavior but also creates a physical record that can be referred to when crimes have been committed. Also, in 1984 the fear of the people was manifested through private surveillance by the state in individual’s homes and the following of all people’s behavior throughout their day. Is there a belief that we have the desire or the resources to track 8 million people every day. Come on. The allusion to the book made here is reactionary and ridiculous. Orwell would agree.
pjwalker911 // August 9, 2007 at 1:22 pm
Not so long ago, Britain was a pretty safe place to live. Crime was low. The people were much friendlier and polite than they are today. Even the police, the Bobbies, were incredibly polite, helpful and respectful. I know because I have family there and have visited there in the 60s, 70s and 80s. It was a very pleasant place to visit. They didn’t call it “Jolly Ol England” for nothing you know. And guess what, there wasn’t a single camera to be found except later in banks and a few other places.
But today, the UK has the highest saturation of government CCTV cameras in the entire world and yet its crime rate has gone through the roof and keeps climbing. The society is getting paranoid. Stasi snitches are watching people to make sure they don’t smoke. All kinds of auxilary patrols are running around minding people’s behavior. Cops are rude and bully people around. They do “stop and search” at increasing levels and treat everyone as guilty until proven innocent. Rudeness and cruelty is at an all time high and in this climate of social breakdown, criminal behavior is flourishing.
So that theory that cameras make you safe is completely wrong. There is almost no crime prevention. There is a record of SOME crime, but not enough to justify creating total surveillance society. If you trade freedom for socalled security, you end up with neither. That was always true and it remains true today. And if you follow the real “improvments” to these camera systems, you will notice that they just keep getting more and more sophisticated. Here are some of the newer features: microphones that listen in on conversations hundreds of feet away. lip-reading soft-ware, face-scanning, license-plate scanning, thermal imaging, loudspeakers that tell you what to do, backscatter to look under your clothing, behavior prediction and they can even monitor your gait and how you move your facial features. They want to put the latter in the seatbacks of airplanes to tell if you shift your eyes too much or if you are sweating. And there is much more coming with these things. This stuff is not there to keep you safe. It is there to tell you that you are the slave of the government and that you better not scratch your ass the wrong way, or the government might take you down to the interrogation chamber. Another word for it is technocratic neofeudalism.
Oh, you can bust SOME criminals (the dumber ones) with video after the crime has been committed, but at what cost to society? The cost is in the climate of fear, distrust and the tyranny of always being watched by “Big Brother”. Also the real criminals are always thinking about how to overcome any barriers to their crimes. They will find ways to circumvent security systems because that is part of the tricks of the trade. So overcoming or outwitting surveillance systems, biometric IDs and so forth is part of their study at which they excell.
Now, that is talking at the level of the conventional paradigm, but it goes way beyond that. The fact of the matter is that most of the terrorism in the world, from CIA bombings in Iran to remove Mossedeq, to Operation Northwoods, to P-2 Gladio in Italy, to the first WTC bombing, and OKC up to 9/11, 3/11 and 7/7 – ALL of these were false-flag operations. That means govenments have carried out terror to implement policies that people would not otherwise accept. Thus, we are led like sheep into the surveillance society grid system that includes cameras, biometrics, microchip IDs, GPS tracking, total information dossiers on everybody, wiretapping, increased policing, indefinite detentions, allowance of torture, less-lethal weapons for control (like tasers, sonic canons, microwave weapons, “puke guns” etc) and on and on and on as more and more diabolocal technologies are brought into service and the economic base gets increasingly turned towards supporting this control-freak system. Vast amounts of money is going into this, so don’t kid yourself. They intend to have this grid set up that will make 1984 look like a model A Ford. And they are setting up everywhere all around the world.
Now, if you think this surveillance grid is not going to go into private homes, you would be fooling yourself. Its going into the public transport and they want to put in into the private cars as well while they also track cars by satellite to tax as they do in Britain. The goal is absolutely no unmonitored space and no unmonitored persons, or animals for that matter.
To have a problem with all of this is natural and normal. There is nothing “reactionary” or ridiculous about it. And no, Orwell would not agree. He would be horrified to see that his nightmare vision was not only coming true, but that it was to be a hundred times worse than anything he could come up with.
PW
Ishereal // August 10, 2007 at 12:49 am
I thinnk I might marry your mind PW (lol)