cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/34575435
It is kinda nuts that the alleged warnings of the past were just priming us into thinking it is all ok for them to do.
Brits need to wake up to the fascism in their country, it’s much more quieter than the US but no better.
I remember hearing about how Britain had so many cameras that it was a privacy nightmare as early as 2000 or 2001. The more time passes and the worse it gets and when Snowden even revealed that the UK government was trying to build a master database of all UK citizens internet activity as early as the mid 2000s it became EXTREMELY evident to me where and how Orwell got his ideas for 1984. While it might have seemed unthinkable to many, the ideas that would lead to that kind of surveillance is a lot older than many people think.
And the reason why they didn’t do it earlier is because… well, how do you do it at a time when recording equipment was costly to setup and extremely obvious AND posed no obvious benefit to the person it was being targeted at. Things like wire tapping phones has been possible since the earliest days of telephones (wire tapping became a known police/spy technique as early as 1928 in Olmstead v. United States), but in practice wiretapping all phones at the time was impossible. You couldn’t record all calls and those calls had to be listened to by a human. It was not possible. But today it is absolutely possible to do all that and more.
At least smart phones and the internet are both extremely useful and highly critical things. Having a camera in your home that doesn’t let you use it does not… but you can also use your ring camera that you set up in your home.
The privacy of being on CCTV seems almost quaint now that everything is internet connected and could follow you around forever.
Absolutely disgusting. It’s like Labour wants to make sure they lose the next election… But to who would they lose? The conservatives who like this stuff too?
England is off my list to visit, as a Canadian, I take pride in the fact that facial recognition is illegal in most instances *here.
I am Canadian, too (naturalized citizen) and can I have the legislation that banned facial recognition?
https://idtechwire.com/alberta-court-upholds-ban-on-clearview-ai-facial-recognition-services/
Reaffirmed last year that it violates PIPA in Alberta.
10 years ago i would have never believed UK would have their own Schutzstaffel, and that it would be AI
today i’m not surprised by literally any shitty thing that happens
I hate to say it, but I remember around 2000 the UK being called the most surveilled country in Europe due to massive numbers of cameras. I thought it was bad back then, but I had no idea how much worse it would be.
Until Flock, the vast majority of those cameras were privately owned and not integrated into any larger network. If the police wanted camera data, they had to ask businesses or homeowners, and there was no regulation of data retention, so if they wiped their recordings after 48 hours, there was nothing the police could do about it.
It’s the aggregators of that data that are the real risk, not doorbell cams or shopkeepers trying to limit shoplifting or vandalism.
Yeah, that was the thing. Most people still used VHS tapes back then and many would just reuse the same few tapes over and over, meaning footage from one day would be gone in a few days and since tape degrades eventually the footage will look like shit anyway.
We need a string of national web cams covering all areas of the country where each citizen has access to at anytime of the day or night. Wouldn’t be hard. Now the authorities and the citizenry can both keep their eye on each other.
Nope. You are watched. They watch you. Remember their shit about banning encryption for everyone but politicians and the military? That is the point.
So you disagree that surveillance can be a two-way street? Seems extreme. If we only had some sort of trustworthy group, who we elect, managing affairs on our behalf. /s
“nationwide”
“England and Wales”
