Cancel "Big Brother"

"It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time...You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."

- George Orwell, 1984

Undoubtedly it's a little cliché and over-the-top to go running to Orwell's 1984 every time the issue of intrusive government monitoring comes about. But, hey, if the shoe fits...

A poll released yesterday shows that Americans support the increased use of public surveillance cameras by a nearly 3-to-1 margin. This disturbing data, if the poll is to be believed, shows that people are fast losing their appreciation for individual privacy.

The standard argument I hear--even from my mom--is that if you're not doing anything wrong, then what harm is there if you are being watched? Well, you might not feel so comfortable if you knew that your every movement and every interaction was being recorded and stored, perhaps in perpetuity, and you couldn't be sure who was using that information and in what way. If you're not worried about abuses from the people currently collecting the info, what about those whose hands it could fall into at any point in the future?

"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face… was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime…"

Admittedly, for the moment this sounds fantastical and paranoid, but since my aim is to caution about potential misuse, let me clarify two things:

First, I promise I'm not one of those privacy wieners that whine about everything. You could find out a great deal about me through Google and Facebook and this blog and myriad other sources, all of which I'm aware markedly decrease my own privacy. My very use of such sources decreases my own expectations of privacy, as would the increased use of surveillance cameras. But the latter is not something I'm entering into voluntarily and is something I feel much less comfortable with.

Second, this isn't some far-off, "someday the robots will turn against us issue". Such a system already exists in central London (the "ring of steel"), and a similar setup is currently being installed in New York City. There are already plans to expand the system to other major American cities.

For some reason, I don't hear too many people bring up the obvious folly of such a public surveillance system. Namely, that roadside cameras don't prevent crime, they relocate it. Obviously then, if criminals aren't plotting and executing crimes out in the open, they'll do so elsewhere. Do we then stick cameras in every workplace, every restaurant and movie theater, and finally, in every home? I see people being a lot more uncomfortable (I hope) with the implications of a surveillance system if they think it through.

Our society is predicated on a guarantee of the individual's rights, perhaps foremost among those being his freedom from unnecessarily being interfered with by the government. Before everyone decides to pursue security at any cost, we should all carefully consider the value of what we're giving up.