Good Morning Citizen, and welcome to Airstrip One. Please remember to keep a neutral expression about your face, and walk calmly so as not to trigger the terrorist-detecting Gait Recognition cameras. Late sunday, I found I was unable to access a page on Wikipedia about the Scorpions’ album ‘Virgin Killer‘. Funny, that. I don’t remember ever asking for my internet connection to be censored. Whatever happened to the idea of innocent until proven guilty, hmm? The thing that really gets up my nose is that every time I mention one of these issues to my friends they pull the old “But I’ve got nothing to hide, they’ll never come after me“. These are the same friends who are Hare Krishnas or pot smokers or people who prefer to do cash only work. None of them realise that they are precisely the kind of people our lawfully elected government will come after next. Readily available processing power and ease of surveillance makes it almost harder to not watch everyone, all the time.
The problem here is that people don’t see the Database State as such a big affront on their civil liberties. Those in power make sure to always have unassailable targets when building the databases. Paedophiles, Terrorists, Sex Offenders. There’s absolutely no arguing against implementing a system which provides the possiblity of locking up more perverts. If you even try to argue, you’re immediately told you’re either Paranoid or Probaby A Terrorist Sympathizer Anyway If You Like Afghanistan So Much Why Don’t You Go Live There.
But just wait, Wait until every one of us has our location tracked by our mobiles (”For your safety so the emergency services can find you if there’s an accident”), our working, medical, and living history tracked in a giant database (”So we can keep you safe from paedophiles and terrorists”). Where were you last night, Citizen? Oh, you forgot your phone at home? and you forgot to update the goverment database as to where you live? tut tut tut. I guess you’ll need to come down to the station until we can verify your story. Don’t worry, we’re not allowed to keep you longer than 42 hours, and we don’t ship people overseas to where they could be executed.
“Oh yes”, you think, “we’ve heard all this before, Jambo’s just being another one of those paranoid internet people who worry about things that never affect anyone we know”.
I really wish that were the case.