"Surveillance is really getting under my skin"

[buckthesystem]

Just came across this article about the police state that UK is turning into and thought it would be interesting to hear your comments on it.

Does anyone have an opinion:

"This unique human chip implant was supposed to protect me - but it just makes me more vulnerable

Henry Porter

Sunday November 19, 2006

The Observer

The most shocking part of Britain's frantic rush towards a fully fledged surveillance society is not so much the threat to personal liberty, although that is important; it is the lack of security in the systems that are confidently held up to be the solution to the problems of 21st-century crime and terrorism.

While each of us is required to give more and more information about ourselves to the government's various centralised databases, and submit to increasing surveillance in our daily lives, almost no one seems to consider the risk to us if these systems are breached.

For some time now, I have been warning about the menace that these systems may come to represent in the hands of future governments, the nature of which we cannot know. But having spent the last few months making a film, Suspect Nation, with the director Neil Ferguson - about the growth of surveillance since 9/11 - I realise that the threat exists in the present. Both of us were astonished at the gaps in security that we found and the insouciance of government.

It is difficult to know whether this comes from ignorance or a failure of imagination, but as the barriers are swept away by science, ministers, few of whom have the slightest technical knowledge, place increasing faith in surveillance technologies.

What they do not grasp is that when you pool records on a national database, you are also creating a very attractive target. And sooner or later, someone will find the unmarked back door.

We spent some time in America investigating these new technologies with a sentence from Jay Stanley of the American Civil liberties Union ringing in our ears. 'There is a lot of room,' he wrote, 'for the United States to become a meaner, less open and less just place without any radical change in government. All that's required is the continued construction of new surveillance technologies and the simultaneous erosion of privacy protections.' That seems to describe perfectly the process that is underway in Britain.

One of these new technologies is RFID (radio frequency identification), which are inexpensive microchips that give out information when activated by a scanner. They are used by shops to track their products and now increasingly in identification of all sorts, from building entry cards to driving licences. The problem is that it is difficult to protect the chip you are carrying from transmitting your personal details.

Take the new passport. Pressed by the US, countries around the world are introducing a passport containing an RFID chip which transmits all the particulars of your passport together with your photograph when it is scanned at a national border. But these new, 21st-century passports may be rather less secure than the 20th-century version".

(article continues - go to http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/sto...1951707,00.html