More and more is America becoming a surveillance society. Only Great Britain is ahead of us in its Orwellian fantasy. With the fear of terrorism and a paranoid focus on security, we are allowing our privacy and civil rights to be compromised. We are not only spied upon and our personal data collected by our government, but by businesses for their use to manipulate us to buy their products. Massive databases have been created to hold all of this information and its uses are not open to public knowledge. How do we fight it? If we are to live in a surveillance society it must be a two way street.
We have the weapons in the form of digital still and video cameras easily available to all. Only we can protect ourselves. We can't trust the government and its operatives to protect us. Freedom and justice is our responsibility. Recent uses of citizen video surveillance of police malfeasance against protesters in many legal actions has caused such cases to be dismissed. Justice has been served. So why shouldn't we be always ready to surveill government actions? Shouldn't our politicians, bureaucrats, police - all public employees - be subject to our inspection to be sure that they fairly do their jobs? We have a right to know what they're doing. I could propose that 24/7 surveillance cameras be installed in all government offices and the ouptut be made publicly available.
Of course, in this surveillance paradigm we lose much privacy, and we must weigh the costs of that loss, but only openness is the remedy to a powerful institutional secrecy that may be used against us. Whatever policy we choose to follow, surely our society will be radically changed.
Carry your camera. It may save your life.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment