Today we are being spied on most of the time. For
instance, when I am on line, many web pages I visit have advertisements urging me
to follow Dutch language courses. Why do they think that I might be interested
in it? Because they have sent “cookies” to my computer in order to find out who
I am and what my interests are. In this case it is quite an unintelligent way of
spying, for why should a native speaker of Dutch want to learn Dutch? But it is
an illustration that espionage or rather being spied on has become an intrinsic
part of our lives.
The best known way of such espionage is the use of
surveillance cameras, also called, CCTV cameras (CCTV = Closed Circuit TV). You
find them everywhere. For instance, when I am going to make a run in the wood
behind my house, the first steps after I have left my street are on the grounds
of a psychiatric institute and the first thing I see is a CCTV camera. In the
past sometimes I met a security guard on his round. Then he greeted me, but the
camera says nothing.
Obviously, cameras are not employed without reason. People
want to keep an eye on their properties. Authorities want to watch the public
space hoping that it will become safer and more secure. And there are many other good (and
also bad) reasons for installing cameras. Does it work? Studies show it hardly
does.
The first CCTV system was installed seventy years ago.
Before there were other ways to spy on, of course. However, these systems were
personal in some way, for the watching agent was a person of flesh and blood.
In a certain sense it is still so: Behind a surveillance camera there is
someone who looks on a screen seeing what is happening. But more and more the
systems are automated and systems of automatic face recognition exist already.
The science fiction novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (first published in 1924) was a source of
inspiration for George Orwell. People there lived in a kind of see-through
houses where everybody could observe what everybody else was doing. If you wanted
to have a few private hours for yourself, for instance for passing an evening
with your sweetheart, you had to apply for an official permit to close your
curtains. George Orwell has replaced this quite primitive system by telescreens
in each house and on all public places with hidden microphones and cameras. The
leader of the state where all this happens is called Big Brother, and
everywhere there are posters of him with the caption “Big Brother is watching
you”.
Today gradually Orwell’s novel seems to become
reality, and, how cynical, in Orwell’s country Britain in the first place. An
article on the Internet from the London
Evening Standard from 2007 tells me that there were already 4.2 million
CCTV cameras in Britain in that year, or one for every 14 people in the country
and 20 per cent of cameras globally. “It has been calculated”, so the article,
“that each person is caught on camera an average of 300 times daily.” And where
do we find these spy cameras? Around Orwell’s former home in North London, for
instance. Within less than 200 metres from this flat, where Orwell lived until
his death in 1950, there are 32 CCTV cameras, “scanning every move”, so the
article. And it continues: “Orwell's view of the tree-filled gardens outside the flat is under
24-hour surveillance from two cameras perched on traffic lights. The flat's
rear windows are constantly viewed from two more security cameras outside a
conference centre ... In a lane, just off the square, close to Orwell's
favourite pub ... a camera at the rear of a car dealership records every person
entering or leaving the pub. Within a 200-yard radius of the flat, there are
another 28 CCTV cameras, together with hundreds of private, remote-controlled
security cameras used to scrutinise visitors to homes, shops and offices.”
If George Orwell would still have been alive, he would
have been continuously within the vision fields of our modern big and little
brothers and sisters, with all advantages and risks that it involves (and I am afraid
that the risks are bigger than the advantages, as I have tried to explain in previous
blogs). Big Brother is watching you, also, or maybe just, when you are George
Orwell.
The article from the London Evening Standard:
An interesting report on the risks and other issues
related to camera surveillance:
http://www.raeng.org.uk/news/publications/list/reports/dilemmas_of_privacy_and_surveillance_report.pdf
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