What's up in England ?! "Total surveillance", this time ?

[Skybird]

Imagine a scenario were a native right or left terror group or an Islamic terror group manages to set off a nuclear bomb in Frankfurt, or London. Or worse, a possible attack with an epidemic biological agent that got stolen from a high-sec lab.

Not only would such data krakening measurements be intensified - people would even call for and embrace a tighter police state.

And business does not become tired to tell us how great it would be if we would have iris scanners everywhere so that personalised adverts pop up on your display/cellphone/eye-visor/holographically on the pavement whenever you pass that corner of the street, or enter that building and pass the entrance barrier at the shop. Fan-tas-tic!

I have just ordered for a telephone barrier that allows me to sort out all numbers I want to block because callcenter terror has become so intense for me that it is worth for me to pay those additional 3 bucks per month (I use hardwire telephone, no voice-over IP, when my computer is not running, my modem does not run, too). In the end I got called 2-4 times per day. For Germany, this is not the rule and certainly an extreme, but what help is that for me - I am one of the lucky guys anyway. Complaints, mails, calls, emails, nothing helped, and starting lawcases I could not afford nor is it worth the effort to me. These companies violate existing laws in Germany - but they obviously do not care. The panlties that threaten them if sentenced by far get outclassed by the potential benefit of just continuing. - And please - always keep a balanced view - consider callcenters' business interests, too! they made it their business to harass people, so let them - else it costs (bad quality) jobs in these callcenters! Lovely logic.


People too easily prefer not to care for the small symptoms of data krakening and the softening of privacy protection laws. Or using legal options is too expensive or too much of a hassle. The result is the creeping exploitation of that laziness or these hurdles that make existing options for resistance practically unavailable, an exploitation meant to install according surveillance mechanisms without resistence from the public.

On the other hand, rivalling economic countries or openly hostile factions would not stop to turn technology against us just because we call their technological measurements illegal. The highest spy activity against German industry is coming from China - second highest intensity in industrial espionage comes from our close friends and allies: the Americans, who also overhear practically all our private communication traffic as well. So...?!

Our dilemma is not the implementation of surveillance, but that the possiblities of technology get exploited by our own side, against the people, as well as that we have no reason to trust our own authorities anymore. They are not in our defence and on our side - they are in defence of their own careers, and ambitions to claim power and influence. In other words, not technology is our problem, but the rottening from inside, the corruption, and the movement back to aristocratic, neo-feudal power structures in our societies' "elites" and governments.

The bigger the opportunity for abuse and the bigger the chance to get away with it, the bigger the resulting abuse that actually takes place. Where there is no deterrance, there is no deterrance. Not difficult, isn't it. What to do? I honestly don'T know.

More and more often I end up concluding on the present state of the world and the situations we find ourselves in, that it compares to the story of the magician's apprentice who started more than he could handle. I indeed think that in a way we have lost control. Our technical intelligence raced ahead, our hands create like crazy. Our ethical ripening, our morality lags behind, is left behind in the dust.