The truth about the ‘surveillance society’
I want to put forward two arguments today. The first is that the increased use of surveillance by the British government, and its singular determination to collect and share data on everyone who lives in the UK, are desperate attempts by the government to make a connection with its citizens. Feeling themselves increasingly estranged from the public, government officials have become obsessed with finding out who we are and what we do, and with monitoring and measuring every aspect of our lives. The second argument I want to make is that in the very process of developing the ‘surveillance society’ and new forms of ‘information governance’, the government is actually degrading what it means to be a citizen. It is denigrating the traditional ideal of citizenship, and it is chipping away at the free society and weakening community bonds. This, I believe, is the double tragedy of the rise of a surveillance/database society in the UK: it is a technical solution to a profoundly political problem, born of the government’s desire to reconnect with the public - and yet its impact has been to corrode public life and space, and to undermine the public good. <snip> Likewise, one of the justifications put forward for the government’s ID card database is that it will help the authorities to keep track of criminals. Yet, as Jo Herlihy has pointed out, only 2.4 per cent of the British public has a criminal record, and a miniscule 0.6 per cent of Britons have received a custodial sentence for committing a criminal offence. The government says it wants to have more than 40million British adults carrying ID cards partly to keep a check on a few thousand criminals. It is this unthinking, blanket application of surveillance measures - covering all of us, all of the time - which makes people wonder what is really going on here, and whether there might be a more sinister motive behind the government’s actions.
In truth, the real driving force behind the surveillance society is not a practical one at all; it is a political one. It is underpinned by an existential crisis, if you like, by a powerful and palpable sense amongst government officials that they are increasingly cut off and disconnected from the public. The surveillance and database society is an attempt by officialdom to reconfigure a relationship with the public, to engender a direct, functional relationship to replace the political, citizenship-based relationship that has eroded in recent years.
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http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5112/
I want to put forward two arguments today. The first is that the increased use of surveillance by the British government, and its singular determination to collect and share data on everyone who lives in the UK, are desperate attempts by the government to make a connection with its citizens. Feeling themselves increasingly estranged from the public, government officials have become obsessed with finding out who we are and what we do, and with monitoring and measuring every aspect of our lives. The second argument I want to make is that in the very process of developing the ‘surveillance society’ and new forms of ‘information governance’, the government is actually degrading what it means to be a citizen. It is denigrating the traditional ideal of citizenship, and it is chipping away at the free society and weakening community bonds. This, I believe, is the double tragedy of the rise of a surveillance/database society in the UK: it is a technical solution to a profoundly political problem, born of the government’s desire to reconnect with the public - and yet its impact has been to corrode public life and space, and to undermine the public good. <snip> Likewise, one of the justifications put forward for the government’s ID card database is that it will help the authorities to keep track of criminals. Yet, as Jo Herlihy