1984 is Here

[STEED]

Is business the real Big Brother?
By Adam Harcourt-Webster
BBC Money Programme

Monitoring and surveillance of employees and customers by big business is now commonplace.


It's increasingly a feature of our daily lives, because businesses have found that it makes good business sense. But is corporate snooping out of control?
In Britain, we are all familiar with the CCTV cameras that have sprung up across our city centres and transport networks.
We generally accept that they are there to counter crime and help monitor traffic flows on our busy roads.
But how many of us realise that when we travel about, each of us is captured, on average, 300 times a day on CCTV, and should we be concerned?
Of course, if we look up, we can see the CCTV cameras. We know they're there.
But are they just the visible tip of a much larger and more deep-rooted surveillance society?
'Surveillance capital'
Dr Kirstie Ball of the Open University certainly thinks so. She believes that most of the surveillance and monitoring of our movements is hidden.
"It's everywhere, absolutely everywhere," she says.
"As we move throughout cities, throughout our jobs and lives, there are technologies and devices everywhere which capture our movements, capture our activities, which are then stored on databases as evidence of what we've been doing."
She is far from being alone in this view. "In Britain, we are saturated in a world of surveillance," says Simon Davies, director of Privacy International and a fellow of the London School of Economics.


"Britain has to be the surveillance capital of the Western world."
For most of us, surveillance conjures up images of spies in trenchcoats standing in the rain on gloomy street corners, and of Big Brother government telling us how we should think and behave.
But the kind of surveillance that worries privacy campaigners today concerns us as customers of big business. Customers are constantly monitored and tracked, mostly without realising it.
Secret devices
Take the Oyster card, for example, which millions of us use each day to pay for our journeys when travelling on London's tubes and buses. Not only do the cards record payment, but they can also track travellers' journeys across the city.
At the RAC's national breakdown centre, callers can be accurately located within seconds, thanks to the signals transmitted by their mobile phones.
An RAC patrolman reveals that many hire cars are now fitted with secret tracking devices, allowing rental companies to follow the movements of their customers.

Businesses have always watched over their employees



"It used to be that surveillance was a bolt-on feature of society," says Mr Davies. "Now surveillance is part of the infrastructure. It's a design component."
For business, monitoring can mean greater efficiency in the work place. Bosses can see what is happening in real time and thereby identify what can be improved - or even, if they choose to, which employees are doing their job well and which ones are not.
A prime example of the highly-monitored work place is the call centre, where sophisticated software is used to log and analyse every second of agents' working lives.
Rufus Grig - who runs Callmedia, a company that makes computer software for call centre operations - explains to the Money Programme the extent of workplace monitoring. The call centre, he says, "can be a terrifically highly-monitored environment".
Efficiency check
In the warehouse operations that supply products to shops and supermarkets, more and more workers are required to wear computers which instruct them on the tasks they need to perform, as well as monitoring and recording every step they take.
Wincanton, one of Britain's biggest logistics companies, uses computer technology in many of its big distribution centres across Britain.


The firm has found that if properly used, the technology can bring big benefits for the company and workforce. But this has not been the experience everywhere.
Eddie Gaudie, from the GMB union, explains that some businesses closely monitor the productivity of their workers all day long.
He says: "At any time of the day, it's monitored down to the last minute, even in seconds."
Companies insist that these tracking technologies help to boost efficiency and cut costs, which is all to the customers' benefit.
"You can buy this argument that this is all for our own good," says Mr Davies. "I don't. Because what I believe about surveillance is that ultimately it is used against individuals, not for them."
No privacy
One new technology could mean there will soon be nowhere to hide for any of us. The big high street retailers are experimenting with putting tiny computer chips in their merchandise.
These chips are called Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. Potentially, they could be used to track the products and the people who buy them, out of the shops and into their homes.


One day, RFID chips could be on everything we buy, and it may not stop there.
Similar chips are also being implanted in patients in American hospitals, to act as minute ID cards and to track them through the medical system.
A world where everything and everybody can be tracked at any time, day or night, is a prospect which fills some observers with horror.
"You won't be able to hide from the system by closing your door or closing your curtains or hiding behind a wall," says privacy campaigner Christopher McDermott.
"The X-ray eyes of the state and of big corporates will be able to see through those, and will be able to see right into your very personal and private life."
Has business become the real Big Brother? The Money Programme: The Real Big Brother, BBC Two at 7pm on Friday 26 May.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...ss/5015826.stm

Published: 2006/05/25 15:19:34 GMT

© BBC MMVI

Are freedom is slowly going down the drain and most people just don't see or choose not to see it. The few control the majority looks like the nightmare world of George Orwell is coming true.

[bradclark1]

I believe that it will be corporations running countries in the future. Hell, it's happening now. You can buy american politicians by the handfull.

[STEED]

Originally Posted by bradclark1

I believe that it will be corporations running countries in the future. Hell, it's happening now. You can buy american politicians by the handfull.

No thanks got to many bloody useless politicians here, where the heck would we put them.

[STEED]

Gadgets make people easy to track
Devices send location when power is on
ROBERT S. BOYD / Knight Ridder | May 27 2006
WASHINGTON - For better or for worse, it's rapidly getting easier for others to know where you are, sometimes 24/7.
Thanks to the explosive spread of wireless technology -- particularly cell phones, car navigation systems and global-positioning systems (GPS) -- parents, employers, detectives and government agents can track your movements, with or without your being aware of it.
Many people don't realize that a cell phone, Blackberry or wireless laptop computer is constantly broadcasting its location whenever its power is on, whether or not a call is in progress.
This has led to "a new, unique ability to automatically identify somebody's location," Jed Rice, vice president of Skyhook Wireless Inc., a three-year-old location-system provider based in Boston, told a group of congressional aides last week. "This obviously raises privacy issues."
"The type of location tracking possible in the 21st century is quite different from anything previously available to government agents," the Washington-based Center for Democracy and Technology warned in a February report.
More than 214 million Americans are wireless subscribers, according to the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association, the wireless trade organization.
More than a million cars and trucks are equipped with on-board location devices, such as the OnStar system that's available on many General Motors and some Acura and Isuzu vehicles. OnStar provides drivers with navigation maps, handles phone calls and sends signals if vehicles are involved in emergencies.
Several state transportation departments are beginning to monitor wireless devices in moving cars to detect traffic slowdowns and issue advisories.
Three basic techniques can be used to determine the location of a wireless phone or laptop within 20 or so yards:
• GPS compares the timing of radio signals from three or four satellites in space.
• Triangulation collects directional signals from two or three cell phone towers.
• Wi-Fi local area networks track high-frequency radio signals from millions of transmitters in urban areas.
"There are 40 million Wi-Fi access points -- 500,000 in downtown Chicago alone," Rice said. "We know where they are, (but) we have no record of who you are. The information is anonymous."
A growing number of companies sell tracking services.
In April, WaveMarket launched a "Family Locator" service that lets a parent pinpoint the whereabouts of a child using Sprint or Nextel cell phones.
Sprint sells a "Mobile Locator" service that it says can "monitor employee location in real-time, either singly or within a group, on a zoomable online map."
Trucking companies use GPS technology to track the movements of their drivers. The boss knows when a driver takes a break, violates the speed limit or departs from his unauthorized route.
John Morris, a privacy expert at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told about a rental van company that tracked a driver going 80 miles per hour. "They charged him three $150 fines," Morris said.
In its report, the center acknowledged that location information is valuable for law enforcement and intelligence purposes.
"With newer technologies, tracking can be done automatically by a remote computer, making it possible for law enforcement to monitor the movements of many more people for longer periods of time," the report said. But it cautioned that tracking "reveals sensitive information about a person that may have no relation to criminal activity."
The federal privacy laws that cover common carriers, which handle traditional telephone calls over landlines, don't cover most wireless communications. Wireless companies set their own privacy policies.
"There are no (government) rules that apply to us," said Skyhook's Rice. "We're not a common carrier."
An exception is emergency calls to a 911 number. Federal regulations require that a wireless company be able to locate callers who dial 911 so they can be helped.
Some labor unions and privacy experts have objected to the Big Brother implications of location tracking.
"One might think it does not matter if their employer knows that he goes to Starbucks every morning before work or that they spend Sundays at his girlfriend's house," the National Workforce Institute, a nonprofit training organization based in Austin, Texas, declared in a recent policy paper.
"If someone has the ability to know the real-time location of a person around the clock," the statement said, "they learn everything about that person, much of which is highly personal and private in nature."

Well nothing much new there but at this rate the last safe place the bathroom will soon be under control of Big Brother and the age of 1984.

[Rose]

CCTV in England, NSA phone tapping in America. Geez, what is the world coming to?

[joea]

*Thread recorded and flagged*

*Thread orginators and posters IPs recorded*

*users identified, addresses and personal details matched*

*appropriate measures initiated*

[Konovalov]

I'll just say that I'm relieved. I thought you were inferring that 1984 fashions have returned such as tight jeans and skivvies. Yikes, thank goodness it was only a false alarm. I was about to run into my 1980's MAD style nuke bomb shelter and watch the disaster film The Day After.