The Wardman Wire

In the film Minority Report Tom Cruise’s (clearly non-Japanese) character, having had a backstreet eye transplant to avoid detection by retinal scanners, walks through a shopping mall. The advertising billboards, who retinally scan passers by, start to talk to him: “Welcome back to Gap, Mr Yakamoto”.

Minority Report sets retinal scanning and mass surveillance by marketing and security services in 2054 - nearly fifty years away.

However, current Sunday night drama The Last Enemy fast forwards this to the (almost) present day. The programme homepage has various cautionary facts and figures about CCTV, fingerprinting and ID cards. It is a drama with a message, a cautionary tale about how much personal information we allow the state to hold, and how far we allow surveillance to invade our personal space.

Whose side are they on?

With the demise of the surveillance states behind the Iron Curtain, we have turned the microscope on our own society.

Film and TV mythology give us 2 alternative pictures. These 2 interpretations both seem to strike a chord, and it’s hard to quantify how much we absorb these issues through the stories we tell ourselves in the visual arts, or think about them in opinion columns and blogs.

Are they Saviour spies?

In one future side we have Spooks/James Bond - the saviour spies who use technology and surveillance information to thwart evil and protect the world.

Or surveillance spies?

In the other possible future is The Last Enemy/Bourne trilogy, (and a host of other surveillance thrillers - e.g. Will Smiths Enemy of the State), where rogue elements within the security services use surveillance information to suppress the truth, manipulate people, and perpetrate evil.

Despite well intentioned governments passing security laws and ratcheting up the surveillance for our own protection, there will always be someone (so runs the story) who will get their hands on the information and use it against us. Personally I’m more worried that it will be Disney or Tesco rather than Jack Straw, but it’s always the one you least expect.

Who do we trust?

Matt blogged earlier this week on the key question: how many freedoms are we prepared to deny ourselves in pursuit of security? It’s not an isolated question: the ’surveillance society’ debate is related to the “Sharia debate”, as both are linked in people’s minds with militant Islam - and the need to be protected from it.

The more threatened we feel, the more freedom we’ll be prepared to sacrifice in order to be protected.

And so much of this comes down to trust. For example, the US system of government is based on a fundamental mistrust of the human nature of those in power; hence the careful checks and balances between Federal and State government, the two houses of Congress, Congress and President, and between the whole legislative machinery and the judiciary. The UK is much less complex, and has a much more ambiguous attitude towards state power.

Which matters more - competence or character?

There are two questions of trust here:

The first is of simple competence . Recent news that a confidential Home Office CD was found in a laptop sold on Ebay is the latest in a series of bungles by government officials who seem incapable of taking care of sensitive information. Keep your eyes open long enough, and you’re bound to find a memory stick with the MI6 payroll details, or a box of confidential papers blowing across a nearby roundabout.

The second -and deeper - question, is about character . Are those in power, and people in general, the sort who can be trusted with information about my DNA, fingerprints, bank accounts, electronic transactions, pay records, car location, CCTV footage from one of 5m cameras, retinal profile, and how many points are on my Tesco Clubcard?

Will they use information about me with my interests at heart, or their own?

Do we trust ourselves?

A couple of weeks ago, the Church of England General Synod (wake up now, you at the back), voted by 235 votes to 2 against the extension of detention without charge. The report they debated concludes like this:

In reflecting on these topics, Christian faith has no privileged insight which circumvents the hard work of analysis and moral deliberation. What it has is an understanding of human nature before God as embracing the best and the worst. On the one hand, it is aware of men and women created in the image of God, carrying a claim to just and respectful treatment which no so-called political necessity or security crisis can abolish. On the other, it is aware – supremely through the event of the crucifixion of the Lord of glory – of the destructive acts of which people are capable when driven by hatred, fear, self-righteousness and self-deception.

In other words, the debate we really need to have is about human nature. This debate cuts both ways.

1. If people are basically ok, then we can entrust them with power. But if people are basically ok, then we don’t really need much protection from those in power in the first place, because the threat level from other people is so low.
2. Alternatively, the worse we are, the more we need to be protected from ourselves or one another. But that also means that those doing the protecting are themselves imperfect people. The more ’sinful’ humans are, the more of a threat they are, whether as potential terrorists or agents of government.

And another Easter thought about power is this:

Our actions will be more extreme if we are afraid of losing control, or afraid of losing our lives.

And would we be having this surveillance debate at all if we weren’t so afraid?

Wrapping-up

So which came first - Big Brother or the need to be protected by a Big Brother?

What do you think? I’ll keep an eye on the comments for any responses to this article.

Tags: big brother, database state, surveillance society, cctv[tags]big brother, database state, surveillance society, cctv[/tags]