Net Resuts:First it was the Mosquito, the high-pitched whining device that only teenagers can hear, designed to keep them from "loitering" (an activity that used to be referred to by their elders in their day as "hanging out with your friends" but which, from the vantage point of middle class and middle age has become a covertly threatening activity).
Now, from Britain, we are promised closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance devices that shout at those same teenagers for the same crime of "annoying adults who wish to shop". For this is one undercurrent of the CCTV mania that has swept over Britain in particular - not so much watching the adult criminals as watching the youths.
Fill your tabloids with stories of hoodie gangs and happy slapping and what you get is a society afraid of its own children. But that's another story and the home turf of the sociologist.
I'm more interested in the fact that we feel spying on our every movement is a beneficial use of technology. And I do mean "our" - because the broad use of CCTV is the ultimate mass surveillance device where, for the sake of finding random needles, the haystack must be scrutinised.
So your stroll up a major thoroughfare has to be recorded on the slight chance that you might do something suspicious. But wait: it isn't just the major thoroughfares. It's the corner shop, filming your purchase of a pint of milk; it's the suburban home bristling with cameras that record you walking past; it's the quiet neighbourhood grown fearful with cameras mounted in preparation for a vague "what if".
In Ireland, there is even a Department of Justice-supported scheme to get funding for neighbourhood CCTV schemes through a community group called Pobal (www.pobal.ie). Putting local residents under mass surveillance is, to my mind, one of the most ill-conceived ways to "benefit" communities.
Why have we grown so comfortable with the thought of being constantly watched in the name of our "safety"?
We have an odd tolerance for such things done by government and widely accessible to law enforcement. If a neighbour was filming your back garden all day, every day, people would find this a creepy invasion of personal space. Yet we apparently must have neighbourhood CCTV to stop "the risk of anti-social and criminal activity", according to Pobal.
CCTV is not as beloved elsewhere. In the security-obsessed US, community CCTV schemes are seen as one of the worst privacy encroachments.
But, in this area at least, it seems we wish to be more like Britain, officially the most under-surveillance society in the world. More than 4.2 million CCTV cameras are in place there - one for every 14 people (ironically, 32 are within a few hundred yards of George Orwell's old London home).
Not everyone in Britain is happy with the way things have been going. Later this year, a House of Commons select committee is to review the extent to which they are used. Britain's information commissioner, Richard Thomas, has warned that the UK "risks sleep-walking into a surveillance society".
Last year a report (read it here: http://tinyurl.com/yjjlf5) was presented at the International Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners' Conference in London, warning of Britain's creep towards a worrying level of "dataveillance" (human rights group Privacy International puts Britain at the bottom of 36 countries, alongside China and Malaysia, for privacy violations and "endemic surveillance").
This is part-driven by CCTV and exacerbated by the fact that Britain - like Ireland - has weak laws to protect personal data.
Here, we have a Government offering funding to introduce more cameras through the back door of a not-for-profit organisation, Pobal, which supposedly has "a mission to promote social inclusion, reconciliation and equality through integrated social and economic development within communities".
Go figure. Better yet, go protest at this appalling state of affairs and use of your taxes. And consider supporting Irish digital civil rights group Digital Rights Ireland (http://www.digitalrights.ie/), which is fighting against mass surveillance.
weblog: www.techno-culture.com
