GPS Tracking for Cars – Could this happen to the US? WOuld you care? Do you care?
CHRIS ATKINS
UK Daily Mail
Wednesday June 13, 2007
Even George Orwell would be shocked. He described the sinister machinations of a totalitarian police state in his novel, 1984, and laid bare the danger of eroding our basic civil liberties, including the right to freedom of speech and the right to privacy.
Although he famously coined the phrase ‘Big Brother is watching you’, even Orwell cannot have foreseen just how prescient those words would prove to be.
Today, in Tony Blair’s Britain – which I naively voted into power ten years ago – we have witnessed a breath-taking erosion of civil liberties.
The truth is we are fast becoming an Orwellian state, our every movement watched, our behaviour monitored, and our freedoms curtailed.
Between May 1997 and August 2006, New Labour created 3,023 new criminal offences – taking in everything from a law against Polish potatoes (the Polish Potatoes Order 2004) to one which made the creation of a nuclear explosion in Britain officially illegal.
Then there has been the incredible number of CCTV cameras – a total of 4.2 million, more than in the rest of Europe put together.
And, yesterday, we learnt that the Government has agreed to let the EU have automatic access to databases of DNA (containing samples of people’s hair, sperm or fingernails) in order to help track down criminals, even though many thousands of those on record are totally innocent
How did all this happen? Who allowed it? To try to answer these questions, I have made a film, Talking Liberties, about the attack on our freedoms.
I uncovered a disturbing roll call of ancient basic rights which have been systematically destroyed in the self- serving climate of fear this government has perpetuated since the 9/11 attack.
First there was the Act which banned the age- old right of protest within half-a-mile of Parliament without special police authorisation.
And who can forget Walter Wolfgang, the pensioner who was dragged out of the Labour Party Conference for daring to heckle the Home Secretary? He was detained under the Terrorism Act 2000, which gives the police unprecedented stop and search powers.
In 2005 alone, this law was used to stop 35,000 people – none of whom was a terrorist.
But this is only the thin end of the wedge – our civil liberties, enshrined in British law since the Magna Carta, are being whittled away.
There has been an unprecedented shift of power away from the individual towards the state – but now this power is being used not to defeat terrorism, but to keep tabs on ordinary citizens. As well as a raft of repressive anti-terror legislation, there are the more insidious infringements of our freedom and privacy.
We will soon see the introduction of the vast National Identity Register, linking all databases such as the DNA database to which the EU will soon have access.
The tentacles of these networks will intertwine until they form a vast state surveillance mechanism, which can track every detail of your life: what books you borrowed from the library as a student, your sexual health, your DNA profile, your spending and your whereabouts at any given moment in time.
Ministers are even creating a children’s database, which will record truancy, diet, and medical history.
And, of course, ID cards will be issued in 2009 – to be used every time we carry out routine tasks such as visiting the dentist. Soon, biometric data – your iris scan, fingerprints and DNA, will help to identify you further.
And, all the time, there are those CCTV cameras – 20 per cent of the global total, even though Britain only has 0.2 per cent of the world’s population.
New Labour has an absolute obsession with these devices. Soon, more sophisticated cameras will be able to recognise your face and the information matched to one of the national databases.
All cars will eventually be fitted with a GPS chip, officially to simplify road tax payments but they will also allow government agencies to track every vehicle in the country.
There are, of course, more alarming implications to being constantly monitored – as Orwell understood. Soon, we will be living in an open-air prison.
Some may ask: why does all this matter? The answer is that to surrender our identity and privacy so comprehensively is to give up something we will never get back.
Although New Labour says its mania for data-gathering is all part of its plan to protect us, there’s no guarantee that future governments (who will be inheriting a nationwide surveillance machine and the National Identity Register) won’t use it to more malign ends.
Totalitarian regimes have, after all, always collected information on their citizens. Hitler pioneered the use of ID cards as a means of repression. The Belgians left Rwanda with a bloody legacy by implementing an ID card system which divided the population into Hutu and Tutsi.
When the 1994 genocide began, these cards proved a device for horrific ethnic cleansing, with one million people dying in 100 days. The Stasi secret police in Soviet East Germany kept millions of files in order to keep track of everyone in the country.
Of course these examples are the extremes – but basic liberties such as privacy and free speech have been hard-won over centuries and history shows that we should not allow them to be brushed aside.
This shift away from individual freedom towards state power has happened slowly, and almost without us noticing.
Like so many others, I was proud to put a cross against the box next to New Labour in 1997 as a first-time voter. But now I have become shocked at the vast swathe of new laws which had been introduced, most of them in response to terrorism.
We are told that this is all for the good – these laws, and the surveillance cameras and ID cards will stop terrorists. Is that the case? Sadly not.
The London bombers carried ID and were observed on CCTV – of course it did not stop them committing their terrible crime.
Intelligence experts say that most information leading to genuine breakthroughs come from informants, not through random tracking or surveillance of the general population.
In any case, liberty and security aren’t balanced on some delicate equilibrium, as John Reid, the Home Secretary, and Tony Blair would have us believe. History has shown us that it is precisely when you undermine people’s basic rights that they mobilise towards radical groups.
After all, one of the greatest recruiters for the IRA in Northern Ireland was the policy of internment, under which people were imprisoned without trial. Have we learnt nothing from our past?
Stop and search laws applied to Britain’s Muslim communities will simply polarise those groups. Instead, we need them to help us protect the country from terrorism.
It’s not all doom and gloom, of course – as I hope my film reflects. The sheer absurdity of the bewildering array of idiotic new laws has given us an abundance of bizarre and hilarious situations for our documentary.
But behind this dark comedy is something much more disturbing. Faced with the threat of terrorism, the Government has told us that we must lay down our freedoms for our lives.
Perhaps it has forgotten the millions of people from past generations who have laid down their lives for our freedom. I think we owe it to those people to turn this tide.
Best Answer: I have never been a big bible advocate, however I firmly believe in a one world society that will eventually have one ruler dictating the future for the masses. In america its about the same way we have been led to believe that we are free while we cant drive down the street without being videotaped? Whos watching the video tapes accross the world. I mean whos watching the videos of the US alone? It gets deep in the next 8-10 years life as we know it will sadly change and it will be for the worse. All the world leaders, and political figures know what time it is, the elect their own persons to positions of power, and authority to keep the upper hand while deceiving the masses who are to ingnorant to realize what just went down in front of their eyes. SAD
- While the writer does have some valid points, you are taking what is essentially an opinion piece and accepting it as news. You owe it to yourself to research the true facts, and formulating your own opinion.
- Those things mentioned are not a erosion of civil liberties but ways to protect society. Cameras in public places keep people safer. Would you park you car late at night in an area with security cameras or a desolate area with no cameras?
As far as the DNA contrary to how that article made it seem, that actually helps the innocent. Many people are arrested and convincted to later be found innocent thanks to DNA. If when a crime is commited DNA can be used to find a person before any arrests are made this will cut down on people falsely accused. What do I care if the government has my DNA, if I don’t commit a crime they will never even look at it.
GPS on all cars, think about how that would cut down on car theft? My car is missing from a parking lot, I call the police they pull up my GPS and find my car before it is lost for good. Why do you need to worry about the government seeing where you car is if you aren’t doing anything illegal.
You cannot use what happened in Rwanda as an example of what would happen in England or here in the US. That government is a corrupt evil government who would’ve brought havoc to its people reagarless.
Finally you point to while the information may be used today for good purposes what would a corrupt or specifically totalitarian government may do. A totalitarian government will enact these measures or worse for their won purposes regardless of whether they already exist. These measures enacted today could actually stop a totalitarian government from ever taking hold. The only way a totalitatarian government could take a country like England or the US is through invasion which seems horribly unlikely or uprising which seems unlikely also. But these preemptive escurity measures could be used to keep a home grown totalitarian government from ever coming to power, and keeping a foreign government with their own agents in our coutry from helping the opposing force.
Here in the US thanks to different forms of surveillence we have stopped 2 potential terrorist acts, long before they would even be carried out, within a matter of a couple weeks of each other. The Ft. Dix and JFK targets.
In conclusion the innocent have nothing to fear from greater surveillence while only the guilty do. These measures like others including, seat belts, ban on illegal drugs, helmets for children, ect. ect. may hinder the complete freedom of a few but help the safety of all.
- Blair’s behind the scene right wing agenda is breathtaking -and actually explains why he and bush got along so well -while the world ignored what he was really up to.
Thank goodness he was finally driven from office. - Let’s hop so. I am Inner Party material all the way!
Minitruth, here I come!
- Yes. I fight the right and their anti-freedom, anti-privacy insanity on a daily basis.
I miss the old conservatives.
- I don’t care who or what government is doing these, or what their purposes are, we MUST stop them. We all know that ALL government is corrupt and evil only varying by degree. As long as PEOPLE are in government, it will ALWAYS be corrupt and evil. It’s time for another revolution. Seriously. I don’t care who’s in office, the government is evil, corrupt and incompetent until it proves otherwise. Why do you think governments give contracts to private sector companies? Because it can’t do anything right, duh.
- some of it is happening.
I personally believe what Ben Franklin said:
“Those Who Sacrifice Liberty For Security Deserve Neither”
- I am so sick and tired of people saying…If your not doing anything wrong then why care about big government invading your privacy.I bust my butt every day at work,I pay my bills,I pay unconstitutional taxes,I abide by the law…..I dont drink alcohol,I dont do drugs,And I dont try to control others.
Once i leave my driveway,I drive in a world of issues…People arguing,getting cut off,tailgaiters…….When I get home this is MY world,its beautiful,quiet,I can do and say what i want.I can invite anyone i want to visit,I have the freedom to just be me!!!!My own little world.But once Im out of my world it gets alittle crazy.So many people out there believe our government is looking out for our best interest….Gotta tell ya—they dont care about us.They just want POWER over us.
Bit by bit were losing our rights.The more we lose the more government wins.Where is the liberty and justice for all..!!!
Remember the constitution?Well its ending up as just a memory!!Enjoy it while you can!!!!And when things really get out of control,I want you to look into the nearest morror and just say thankyou to the person looking back at you!! - Thank you for trying to educate the masses! keep it up.
- We’re heading toward a National ID Card. I have inalienable rights because I’m a human being, not because I have the proper paperwork.