Month: March 2009
The British Library are housing a new exhibition titled Taking Liberties, which examines current debates about vital rights and freedoms in society: detention without charge, the right to privacy, devolved government, free speech and so on.
One important feature of Taking Liberties is an interactive activity available both in the gallery, and online here. You are placed right in the centre of current debates about vital rights and freedoms in society: detention without charge, the right to privacy, devolved government, free speech and so on.
Taking Liberties Interactive is the online part of the exhibition.
Telegraph: Only incompetence will save us from Orwell’s surveillance state
The vast amount of data now being generated, and the impossibility of looking at it all, is, together with bureaucratic incompetence, the best guarantee we have that we’re not going to wake up one morning and find we are living in a version of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
True to an extent but the worry is that eventually when the state realises that the flaw in the system is the human element they will move towards more and more automated systems that can’t be bargained with, can’t be reasoned with and doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear.*
Seriously though, the failures of major IT projects like the NHS database might be the one thing that prevents the implementation of the National Identity Register and if they don’t then I can guarantee that Britain will end up with one hell of a flawed database with people being misidentified as benefit cheats or fraudsters or in extreme cases terrorist suspects due to the incompetence of the data entry.
* The Terminator (1984)
Charlie Brooker vents in his inimitable fashion about the state of British politics. To politicians, we’re little more than meaningless blobs on a monitor.
My personal snapping point was reached last week, at the precise moment Jack Straw announced the government was vetoing the Information Tribunal’s order for the release of cabinet minutes relating to that whole invasion-of-Iraq thing
I agree that many of the British people will reach their own snapping point with regard to our government sometime soon and that perhaps the state of the economy will be the metaphorical straw that causes them to stop rolling over and accepting the ongoing series of government malfeasance.