Surveillance Nation
by Paul Miller
MIT (the University not the new cop show on telly) have an excellent magazine called Technology Review. This article about the growth of surveillance technologies certainly got me thinking. "Ultimately," says the article, "surveillance will become so ubiquitous, networked, and searchable that unmonitored public space will effectively cease to exist."
jackdalton jackdalton
Is it really democracy? Or is it more about opinions being pushed in a public forum by those who understand lobbying? There's an ideological twist to this kind of thing that can be hard to counter-argue but there has to be a line between the private and the public, somewhere.
Paul Paul
It is also a classic case of people expecting their leaders to solve their problems for them, and politicians pretending that they can. In reality, by absolving people of the responsibility to tackle these issues for themselves, it tends to make the problem worse in the long-run. CCTV kills civic spirit and with it, in the long-run, democracy.
Luke Luke
democracy by its very design is there to be worried about. Need we mention the tyranny of the majority in the case of Nazism, or the current tyrannies of the minority of Bush and Blair; two democratic leaders, neither of whom can claim consent from the majority of their electorates.
It is civil rights that protect the agency of the individual. Democracy may represent choice, but it does not guarantee freedom.
it seems scary, but apparantly one of the most regular demands of MPs from constituents is to place more CCTV cameras around esp because of fears of child abduction. This is democracy, so why worry about it?