The Road to Big Brother 212
brothke writes "In The Road to Big Brother: One Man's Struggle Against the Surveillance Society, Ross Clark journals his struggles to avoid the myriad CCTV cameras in his native England. That's difficult given the millions of cameras in public locations there. Before going forward, the use of the term 'Big Brother' in both the title and throughout the book is erroneous. Big Brother has its roots in George Orwell's novel 1984 and refers to an omnipresent, seemingly benevolent figure representing the oppressive control over individual lives exerted by an authoritarian government. The term has been misappropriated to describe everything from legitimate crime-fighting, to surveillance cameras, to corporate e-mail and network usage monitoring. Localities that deploy CCTV cameras in public thoroughfares in the hope of combating crime are in no way indicative of the oppressive control of Orwell's Big Brother. Should we be concerned that such a scenario play itself out in Ross Clark's UK or in the US? Likely no, as US government agencies are widely decentralized and isolated. Just getting the networks within a single federal agency unified is a daunting task; getting all of the agencies to have a single unified data sharing mechanism is a pipe-dream. Look at it this way: the US Department of Defense has more networks than some countries have computers." Read below for the rest of Ben's review.
The Road to Big Brother details Clark's attempt to be invisible to the millions of CCTV cameras in Britain, and details other types of national & agency databases and how they can be misused. Clark notes astutely that while much data is being gathered, often the most important clues are missed, and a lack of proportion often is the result.
| The Road to Big Brother: One Man's Struggle Against the Surveillance Society | |
| author | Ross Clark |
| pages | 200 |
| publisher | Encounter Books |
| rating | Powerful topic, but poor delivery and answers. |
| reviewer | Ben Rothke |
| ISBN | 978-1594032486 |
| summary | One man's account of how to dodge Britain's million of CCTV cameras and other forms of surveillance |
Some of the books observations are flawed. In chapter two, Clark writes that VeriChip markets its RFID chips with the aim of speeding the passage of authorized people through security checks. But its Verimed chip is made for patient identification and emergency patient management in hospitals. In Chapter 11, Clark comments that Facebook is essentially a forum for drunken college students who cannot conceive that any harm could come from disporting themselves in semi-naked poses for everyone to see. There is no indication that the comment was meant to be humorous, and there are many legitimate sober uses for Facebook.
Perhaps the worst distortion of the Big Brother hysteria, of which the book provides no source, is the claim that the CIA and FBI appears to know what airline meals a person chooses when they cross the Atlantic. Terrorists do their best to be stealthy, and will likely opt to bring their own special meal, rather than stand out and request a special one. It is not clear what the CIA and FBI hope to gain with such data.
The book documents numerous CCTV failures, from Brighton, England to Baltimore, Maryland. Chapter 3 has a 2005 quote from the Maryland Attorney General stating that CCTV's had yet to solve a single crime. The book also repeats the problem of fuzzy CCTV images and highlights other technology failures as far back as 1998. Surveillance technology has significantly advanced in the last 3 years, let alone decade. Focusing on failures from a decade ago is in no way indicative of the state of the art, nor does it do anything to solve the problem Clark addresses.
In the last 60 days alone, CCTV has been used to identify the alleged Craigslist Killer and shooter at Wesleyan University. While Clark may not realize it, CCTV and other related technologies has indeed revolutionized law enforcement. The underlying problem is that Britain's millions of cameras were deployed in the hope that they could magically solve crime. Cameras alone achieve nothing; but CCTV combined with trained humans and other crime prevention and detection methods are a powerful set of tools that many police departments are embracing.
The book notes that two CCTV schemes were sold to UK police in 2001 with the premise that they would eliminate crime and increase the number of visitors by 225,000 a year. Any police department that would believe such a marketing claim, without pilot testing and proof of concept should themselves be arrested for ineptitude.
The book would be better off quoting this year's CCTV successes, rather than those of obsolete equipment. As to the fuzzy image problem; newer, more powerful and often inexpensive cameras easily and quickly solves that predicament.
All is not lost on the book. Chapter 8 — Me and My ID, in which Clark documents how ineffective national identification cards are. National ID cards are all the rage and are being deployed in the hope that they will reduce terrorism, illegal immigration and other of society's ills. Clark notes that even if national ID cards were able to identify everyone correctly, and that is a huge assumption, it is still not clear what they would achieve. National ID's have been touted to reduce insurance fraud, but medical insurance fraud is often executed not by false identification, rather by patients lying about their circumstances.
The book touches upon, but does not really answer, nor go into enough details on why people allow such pervasive use of electronic surveillance technologies to seamlessly enter society. Be it CCTV cameras that film public parks or attempt to catch speeding drivers; many are deployed with little to no protestations.
While Big Brother achieved oppressive control over individuals, the real danger of surveillance systems is that they can easily be misused. Rather than achieving their crime fighting goals, they will mislead police with myriad false positives. Part of Clark's frustration is likely that the UK Police believe in some sort of CCTV Kool-Aid that their collogues in the US have not consumed. Why that is so prevalent in the UK is something that Clark doesn't address.
The Road to Big Brother: One Man's Struggle Against the Surveillance Society should have been a book that details the problems with a surveillance society, but often reads like it emanates from the ministry of misinformation.
Ben Rothke is the author of Computer Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should Know.
You can purchase The Road to Big Brother: One Man's Struggle Against the Surveillance Society from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
big brother (Score:1, Insightful)
was this review written by a cop?
Worse than Big Brother: Big Bureaucracy (Score:4, Insightful)
Even worse than Big Brother would be what is described in the summary: A set of decentralized agencies full of politics/bureaucracy that have rules with little or no unification and no compassion or human oversight. Suddenly, instead of a force seeking only power there is a "force" that is simply a mass of rules and surveillance with the illusion of trying to control when in fact it only creates massive inconvenience for people ala Brazil.
Basically: Given the choice I would almost rather be imprisoned/watched by an entity with an agenda rather than a decentralized, inept morass of bureaucracy. I fear that is what we are moving toward, however. See Red Light Cameras as an example.
Re:Wow. (Score:1, Insightful)
My first thought on reading the summary wasn't about the book but how defensive the reviewer was.
Of course most legitimate surveillance are small steps towards the Big Brother you're saying they're not.
Just from the summary... (Score:2, Insightful)
Use of Example/Metaphor... (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think the author of this entry is entitled to define exactly when and how the 'Big Brother' example/metaphor can be applied in language.
Yes, the Big Brother in Orwell's 1984 has specific definitions, but in reference/example/metaphor, people apply abstractions and generalizations that are not necessarily definitive of the original context. In such context, only elements or small aspects of the original concept may apply and it is usually up to the reader to bridge the relationship through active thought.
Samzenpus (the Big Brother in this case) is trying to tell us all how to live!
Big Brother as an archetype (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:big brother (Score:4, Insightful)
Both the book and the review are wildly biased, though obviously in opposite directions. I think it's safe to say that the truth lies somewhere in the wide area between the two. For what its worth, I'd guess the truth is in the area of "Politicians legitimately trying to do what they think is right but screwing it up badly by not realizing the unintended consequences of their actions".
Re:big brother (Score:1, Insightful)
Judging by its piss-poor empty arguments against the book and all the spelling/grammar mistakes, I'd say yes.
Of course it's still Big Brother! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:CCTV cameras scare me a bit (Score:4, Insightful)
a single incident of a single "bad guy" does not a case for public policy make.
Hello, TheCarp, I'd like to introduce you to the sad state of legislation in the US for the past few decades or so. :(
Re:big brother (Score:4, Insightful)
It is a terrible review. Totally biased in favour of Government and anti-privacy. He's basically bloated full of security-theatre koolaid.
If he's British, he must be the last man standing that supports the Government right now. Maybe they paid him with expenses money.
Re:big brother (Score:5, Insightful)
Arguments of the form "group X doesn't want to hurt you, therefore technology Y is not dangerous to your freedom" completely miss the point; once technology Y is in place, it is waiting, ready for use by group Z which does want to restrict your civil rights.
The apparatus of a police state is dangerous even in a democracy because it makes it so much easier for some rogue element to end democracy by imposing a police state without free assembly, free speech, free practice of religion, etc.
Objecting To the Use of "Big Brother" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:There aren't "millions" of CCTV cameras. (Score:3, Insightful)
CCTV cameras are not solely the domain of the government. The term CCTV is just an acronym for Closed-Circuit Television - i.e. practically any connected set of cameras and recording devices. Practically every store will have at least one, any store larger than the average cornershop is going to have many of them. Include ALL of those and I'm sure there are millions of CCTV cameras in the UK.
This Book Review: Poorly Conceived, Poorly Written (Score:4, Insightful)
Starting with a specious criticism concerning the "erroneous" use of the term Big Brother, this review wanders through to the useless conclusion that this book should have been about something other than what it was about. What the review thinks that the book should have been about is immaterial, and making that point the conclusion of the review just marks it as a bad review.
There may be some accurate and useful criticisms here, but it is impossible to tell. The review is a disorganized mess of anecdotes from the books, which are rebutted with little to support the reviewer's case. What is needed is first to portray a useful summary of the book and its thesis, and then make criticisms based on that. There is no useful exposition of the book's theme, only a laundry list of criticisms that seems more like an extended whine.
To examine one specific criticism, it does not seem reasonable to expect a book to cover events that happen after it is written, let alone those that happen after it is typeset, printed, and bound. By citing only the apprehension of the (alleged) Craigslist killer and the Wesleyan University bookstore killer, the reviewer actually suggests that there are no significant successes for CCTV within the timeframe of the book. Is that the case? The audience is left to guess, because the reviewer does not seem to know.
To sum up, this review is simply a collection of specific points made about the subject book. The reader is left with little idea of the scope of the subject book, its themes, or any thesis that Mr. Clark presents. But it was not for naught; now I know that I should probably avoid Computer Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should Know.
Re:i always find this topic humorous (Score:5, Insightful)
You only need the government to realise every young person totting around with cellphone cameras etc is a threat and then your main point starts to fall down. You also misunderstand that these things can also become part of the surveillance mechanism itself. Just what is happening to those pictures you send over a mobile network?
George Orwell did paint a fanciful worst case scenario, but very few academics come out and say it's outright poppycock, because it still has some plausibility. I also think you forget history, Gestapo, Cold war anti-communism in the united states. Yes the west has spent some time scrabbling for traction on the slippery slope.
Today's CCTV + Wiretapping world is far removed from Big Brother, yes, and a lot would have to go wrong for it become reality, but that doesn't make it OK nor not worth fighting.
I suggest Cory Doctorow's Little Brother as further reading: http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/ [craphound.com]
Don't mess with slashdot hysteria. Oh and get off my lawn.
There is no humor here. (Score:4, Insightful)
The proliferation of government surveillance systems is not amusing. It is disturbing. The fact that persons such as yourself dismiss the potential negative implications of omnipresent authority as paranoia is frightening.
In the novel 1984 Orwell described a government (the Party) that used ubiquitous surveillance as an instrument to consolidate power and oppress the populace. In reality, governments are installing cameras, creating databases and using technology to invade privacy on a massive scale. The correlation is obvious.
Furthermore, even if the cameras are, as you argue, only going to be used for legitimate law enforcement purposes, is that an acceptable practice? Can a society be free when there is 100% enforcement of the laws?
I guess that would depend on the laws, now, wouldn't it? Though, given some of the more insane laws on the books, and the barrage of new ones poured forth that target the "worst" in our societies (think sex offenders and terrorists), I would venture that "perfect" law enforcement is no more a legitimate function of government than maximizing tax revenue.
Also, your argument concerning "Little Brother" is flawed. Rodney King's tormentors were not convicted of any crime. Indeed, episodes of police brutality, wrongful prosecution and judicial misconduct rarely end with the offenders being punished. A citizen with a cell phone tends to be outmatched by the power of the government.
1984 is fiction. But many in power act like it's an instruction manual.
Rothke Writes Another of His (Score:1, Insightful)
Right-wing control-freak apologies. "Localities that deploy CCTV cameras in public thoroughfares in the hope of combating crime are in no way indicative of the oppressive control of Orwell's Big Brother"
Right. Assertion based on facts not in evidence. Sell it to the f-ing Israelis, Mr. Mossad.
Re:big brother (Score:5, Insightful)
Ancient example:
Under the democratic Republic of Rome, the stadium games served as a way for Group X (the Senators) to entertain the people. Just for fun. But once group Z (the emperors) arrived on the scene, the games devolved into a way to kill undesirables like criminals, slaves, and Christians/Jews.
"This job would be a lot easier if instead of a Republic, we had a dictatorship. Ha, ha, ha." - G. Dubya Bush
Re:PUBLIC places and Privacy (Score:3, Insightful)
The difference? There's no enduring record of your activities if there's just a cop on the corner. With a CCTV and sufficiently large storage, someone could go back and count exactly how many times you pass by certain places. Now what if those certain places are deemed "unseemly" such as drug hangouts, or fronts for illegal activities. They now have evidence that could be used in a warrant against you. "Your honour, the defendant was repeatedly seen in the vicinity of the smuggling warehouse, it seems only logical that we can now search his home for anything linking him to the smuggled goods." And you don't get to argue against a warrant while it's being requested. So now the cops have a foot in the door. Why would they focus on you? You trod on the foot of an off-duty officer, and didn't grovel enough for his liking, thus causing a petty vendetta. Cops have abused their power before, this would just expand the scope, if it wasn't properly set up with checks and balances.
Re:PUBLIC places and Privacy (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Cost. When surveillance is labor intensive, it is necessarily only used in exceptional circumstances(against specific high-profile enemies of the state). The only way to use it broadly is to consume an unsustainable portion of the available economic output(as in East Germany). In effect, the expense and inconvenience of low-tech surveillance function, for the vast majority of people, as a de-facto set of protections from state intrusion. Furthermore, since it is expensive and uncommon, people are much less likely to see it as normal, and more likely to question its use without clear justification.
2. Retention. Humans have fairly poor memories, on the whole. If you see me in public(and thousands of people have) you will have only the fuzziest recollection of me a short while later, unless I was doing something abnormal, interesting, or alarming at the time. Again, for anyone who isn't notable enough to have a team of feds submitting written reports, the limitations of low tech surveillance create a fairly short de-facto "document retention period" after which witness memories are useless or nonexistent.
3. Access. Recalling the results of manual surveillance is a gigantic pain in the ass. Best case scenario is well kept records. Worst case is having to plaster the town with notices, asking witnesses to come forward and be interviewed, and all the hassle that that entails. The larger the query, the worse the hassle. This creates a de-facto protection against fishing expeditions.
Increasingly, automated surveillance is free of these limitations and, to the degree that it is not, there are easily plausible projections of how it might become so. Cameras are cheap, and getting cheaper, and there are many, many more of them being put up for various individual and commercial purposes, which could be aggregated for intelligence purposes; but don't count as a direct cost the way cops do. Data storage and retrieval are getting ever cheaper, and search technology is getting ever better. As the cost of surveillance declines the threshold of "not that important" does as well.
The other factor is the symmetry of surveillance. Historically, even in the most heavily surveiled places(small towns and villages, for instance) surveillance was symmetric. If you can see me, I can see you seeing me. I might not actually do so 100% of the time, and a sufficiently skilled agent might be pretty good at infiltration and tailing; but, on the whole, you could see them just as easily as they could see you. With high tech, by contrast, you can generally infer that surveillance is possible in a given situation(and it almost always is); but whether or not it is happening, and who is conducting it, is almost entirely opaque. That changes the matter considerably.
Re:Logistically impossible (Score:3, Insightful)
If there were millions of cameras, how many analysts would be needed to go through the videos?
Not as many as you might think. You don't need to analyze every second of every video, just whenever something of interest occurs. And things like facial recognition further reduce that human requirement.
Re:big brother (Score:5, Insightful)
That was exactly my thinking.
"We LOVE our government surveillence. It's legitimate and good. Don't listen to those laughable studies showing that massive surveillence has absolutely no benefit in preventing crime, and no effect on crime rates, and only serves as a tool for Intelligence organizations to collect information about citizens, so as to quell dissent, and spy on any political opposition, with such an extreme opportunity for abuse, even beyond the invasion of privacy aspect, that such a crazy system should have no place in ANY civilized society. Your government loves you. They want to play catch with your children, and buy you a beer. If you don't have anything to hide, why is there a problem? We're just the friendly Government come to make your life better"
And as for the US. The reviewer obviously hasn't been paying attention in the last few decades, as the power has been centralized more and more, taking power from the states putting it into the Federal government's hands, consolidating agencies one after another directly beneath the executive branch, federalizing the police, integrating the military with police for domestic operations against citizens, and on and on and on.
As for the UK. I've always wanted to visit, but I wouldn't be caught dead in that "Brave New World". Sounds like the reviewer would have had a great time in Nazi Germany.
Let's asume that magically all of the sudden massive surveillance into the lives of every citizen did anything good for the population (and not for the Beurocrats keeping the population under their thumb of control). Even if having a chip implant up your anus and your own personal police officer to to follow you around and arrest you if your rectal temperature deviates to rapidly made the world crime free, is it really worth it? I'd rather live in the middle of a crime ridden cess pool, than in an Orwellian Surveilance State.
The government should get back to what it's supposed to do, and micromanaging the lives of it's citizens is NOT one of those purposes.
Brothke: People like you piss me off. Go move to China. I much prefer that whole "freedom" model, even if though it's hard to come by in the suposed "free world". At least the criminals on the street don't have massive amounts of power, infastructure and resources behind them. The government criminals certainly do.
Re:Worse than Big Brother: Big Bureaucracy (Score:1, Insightful)
Far from it. Centralized power has no checks and balances.
Power corrupts: Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Look at it in the light that every seperation of power that you introduce just throws the wrench into the machine of tyranny. It's precicely the reason why it's been taking a lot longer for the US to turn into Nazi Germany, whereas some of the EU countries are going that way very rapidly (post WWII).
People have gotten used to being told there is nothing to worry about and their government loves them to understand that if they don't kick the government's ass every time they get out of line or try to consolidate their power, they're going to wind up in a nightmarish dystopia.
I'm not so sure that I want an efficient government. If they are all incompitent bafoons, or everything is so decentralized that they can't get anything done, how would they even enforce a tyrcannical policy? Look at Canada. I used to live there, and their massive inefficiency made it a better place to live as the Burocratic class were too busy chasing their rubber stamps than to get around to terrorizing the population.
Nazi Germany was a very efficient government. No thanks.
I give this review zero stars (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, it's not a review at all--it's an op/ed piece, and a badly written one at that.
How about reviewing the book as given, and leaving your attitude for your OWN book?
Re:Rothke Writes Another of His (Score:5, Insightful)
Take a look at where CCTV is mostly deployed, e.g. Great Britain, and what you find are left-wing control freaks.
One of the more entertaining features of Slashdot is the self-delusional lefties who blame anything they don't like, even perfectly typical lefty behaviour, on "right wing ..."
It's modern urban liberals that are the first to insist that the government "do something" whenever reality bites. Modern liberal governments are only too happy to oblige. Ubiquitous CCTV is "doing something."
Re:Keep an "eye" out for these guys: (Score:5, Insightful)
See everyone thinks that 1984 is about Big Brother, Thought Police, and telescreens. It is not.
Yes, 1984 is about the erosion of self-expression, but those tools are only a means, not the end. The end is the stupification of society through the destruction of language and the altering of history. When you destroy the human faculty of expression through the use of DoubleThink and DoubleSpeak, then you can exercise control of not just the masses, but individuals. Those 'other things' are just a net to cull those who see through the charade.
Look at Big Media. If you're really looking for someone to lynch, it ought to be them. They can feed you bigger lies that stink more than any cockamamie the government can give, if only because we're so willing to feed upon it.
Re:Rothke Writes Another of His (Score:3, Insightful)
You are calling the current Labour government liberal?
The UK government is right wing. Their policies are mostly right wing. Remember the upset caused when they announced a higher top rate of tax a couple of weeks back? Anything remotely left wing is a big deal for them.
Mass surveillance is classic right wing conservative policy. Forget civil liberties, freedom and privacy, all they want to do is "crack down" on criminal scum. If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. Kettle the tree hugging hippy protesters whenever they threaten to disrupt business in the capital.