Surveillance Society And The Next Step.

Surveillance cameras are everywhere these days but our friends across the Atlantic have led the way with unleashing Big Brother technology on their citizens. They have recently admitted that their cameras may record the actual crime but thousands of criminals escape detection simply because nobody is able to identify the perpetrators. The Brits are working overtime to find out ways to improve their ever growing crime problem that’s been fed by draconian gun bans that provided better working conditions for muggers, rapists and killers. We seems to follow every British trend since the day that the Beatles landed in New York.

What is the next step you ask? Why the National ID Card will soon roll out complete with RFID technology alerting every camera with the personal data of those within the cameras range. Of course this too will fail too as criminals make sure their ID cards are not in their pockets while doing their deeds. The fun part of this technology will be in the form of fines people will have to pay when police on patrol using sensors discover people without the mandated cards. What a great new source for revenue! Of course this will also fail and then governments will next try implants on their citizens similar to those used to locate lost pets.

American ID cards began with the first driver’s licenses and until about 30 years ago they did not contain photographs. Before driver’s licenses Americans simply used the cards that came with every wallet sold to neatly print their names, addresses and other personal information. Stores gave credit to their local trustworthy customers. In those days you’d never find an avalanche of credit card offers in your mailbox. Americans soon traded their privacy for credit convenience and now demand to wear the mark of Cain. As Karl Malden would say, “ Don’t leave home without it!”

Earlier wallets contained a place to store money and another place to keep a few family snapshots. There were no credit cards so slots for them were not needed. Identification was nothing more than the information to help honest people finding the wallets return them to their rightful owners.

Do you call this inevitable evolution of security measures far fetched? Liberty loss in any country can best be described as incremental as citizens are led to believe that the additional measures are necessary and only people up to no good would object.

We all lose a little liberty in the name of security as each day passes. Folks it’s really coming and as that Unabom fellow they called a mad genius, Theodore Kaczynski warnned us in his manifesto, it won’t be pretty.

Americans have gotten by just fine for the first 200 years without wholesale privacy abuse and it seems the more privacy and liberty we surrender the higher the crime rate climbs.

Governments have a history of plundering from and then murdering their own citizens. Sooner or latter every good government goes bad. Will Theodore Kaczynski someday say, “I told you so!”