-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- .............................................................. >From the New Paradigms Project [Not Necessarily Endorsed]: Conspiracy Shopping Cart: http://a-albionic.com/shopping.htmlFrom: Taylor, John (JH) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength, The Government knows what is right Date: Friday, January 21, 2000 1:12 AM The London Times January 20 2000 top FEATURES Line On the 50th anniversary of George Orwell's death, Richard Morrison says his predictions have come true Is Big Brother already watching us? I read Nineteen Eighty-Four again last week. The future of Britain, as imagined by George Orwell in 1948, is frightening, isn't it? It is a society whose people are spied on, indoors and out, by 400,000 TV cameras. A society whose citizens have little choice but to accept that the most intimate details of their lives are relentlessly monitored and stored in enormous databases. A society where employers routinely tap the phones and read the private mail of their employees, and global corporations have access to dossiers about millions of people. A society where even shopkeepers build up secret files on their customers. A society whose rules are made by a sinister Minister of Internal Repression, who assures the population that trading "some rights to privacy" for "increased security" is "a price worth paying". Actually, as any A-level EngLit student should have twigged by now, this isn't quite what Orwell describes in Nineteen Eighty-Four. But it is Britain, for real, in the year 2000. Except that Jack Straw is called Home Secretary, not Minister of Internal Repression. Oh yes, and after the new Data Protection Act comes into force in March you have the right to stop companies from using any information about you they may have stored on computer. The only catch? If you exercise this right, you may find it difficult to get a credit card, a mortgage or a job. It's your choice. Tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of George Orwell's death. Nineteen Eighty-Four was his last novel, written as tuberculosis took a fatal grip. As Orwell's biographer Bernard Crick regularly points out, the book is not prophecy but black satire. It imagines how a brutal totalitarian regime of Orwell's own time - recognisably Stalin's Soviet Union - would sit in a country that was, equally recognisably, postwar Britain, with its rationing and bombsites. In short, Nineteen Eighty-Four was probably intended as a sardonic caricature of life as it already was for millions of people, rather than a forecast of how things might become. But that hasn't stopped this awesomely pessimistic masterpiece from being regarded as classic futurology. Its very title invites the comparison between Orwell's conjecture and our reality. We know that he was wrong in many respects. Britain is not a totalitarian State ruled by a ruthless party machine; it just seems that way when the Opposition is so pathetic. The Prime Minister does not lead Two-Minute Hates against those deemed "enemies of the State"; except, of course, when we are at war with Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic. There is no "Ministry of Truth" pumping out mendacious government propaganda; Mr Blair's new "Knowledge Network" will, of course, pump out absolutely truthful propaganda. And, unlike in Nineteen Eighty-Four, our politicians don't talk in Newspeak, a language invented "to narrow the range of thought". No, they talk in Soundbites, a language invented to eliminate thought altogether. So you see, Britain is nothing like the repressive society imagined by Orwell. Except, perhaps, in one respect. You don't need to be a conspiracy theorist to get the distinct feeling that someone, somewhere, is watching you all the time. How does Orwell describe Big Brother's all-pervasive surveillance in Nineteen Eighty-Four? "They could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and except in darkness, every movement scrutinised." Yes, that sounds familiar. Except that Orwell never imagined that the infra-red surveillance cameras of our age would be able to scrutinise everybody's movements in the dark as well. Last year the American science-fiction writer David Ross listed 137 "total-surveillance predictions" in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and decided that more than 100 had come true. Pure paranoia? Well, let's look at some of the organisations that like to play Big Brother with our private lives and judge for ourselves. First, there are those 400,000 closed-circuit TV cameras, ceaselessly probing our streets, shops, pubs, stadiums, car parks, stations, roads and parks. In the curious art form of spying on innocent people, Britain leads the world - and that is an achievement which our Home Secretary is not going to relinquish. Last November he pledged £150 million to extend this vast surveillance network. This week he conjured another £33 million for the same purpose. You are now likely to be captured on CCTV camera 500 times a week. No legislation governs this operation (frequently by private companies on behalf of local councils) or controls what happens to the tapes. A man whose attempted suicide was captured on his local council's CCTV was aghast to see his passing moment of despair broadcast for the edification of millions on BBC TV without his consent. The Home Secretary and police love CCTV because it is said to reduce crime dramatically (a claim that yesterday's crime figures, and some independent research, do not support). And the latest cameras are very smart. Some can recognise facial characteristics, or target those of a certain skin colour, or alert security staff to "deviant conduct", which may mean a person who walks round a park in a different direction from everyone else. And they can be hidden anywhere. Last month the Environment Agency - a quango not immediately associated with high-tech surveillance techniques - boasted that it had concealed a tiny camera in a discarded Coke can (at a cost of £3,500) to catch people dumping rubbish. Good grief, what next? Spy satellites to detect schoolchildren smoking behind the cycle shed? Surveillance in the workplace is now common, particularly to see how long employees spend in rest areas or the washroom. A sensible precaution to stop company time being wasted or a paradise for voyeurs? Well, you know your company's security guards better than I do. The only certain thing is that you won't know where they have hidden the cameras. But look up the online shopping website of a company called Security and More if you want a few clues. I was particularly intrigued by its "covert camera hidden inside a non-functioning thermostat" (a snip at $280), if only because I seem to have acquired a non-functioning thermostat at home. I shall investigate it with a screwdriver tonight. All this Orwell predicted. But what he never anticipated was the lifestyle revolution brought about by the credit card and the personal computer - and the vast opportunities for Big-Brotherism that they created. The average British adult can expect their personal details to be held on at least 300 databases. To what purpose? Usually, an irritating but harmless one: sophisticated computer systems will "interrogate your data" - decide which categories you fit as a consumer and how wealthy you are - and then sell the information to people keen to bombard you with junk mail. But the huge amount of information you are required to disclose if you wish to play a part in the modern consumerist society could easily be used for more sinister purposes. Perhaps you received a mailshot recently from the American bank Morgan Stanley, offering you a platinum card. If you did, I don't expect you ploughed through the (extremely) small print to the clause that read: "In processing transactions, we may incidentally collect some limited personal data about your racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or other similar beliefs, physical or mental health, sexual life or criminal record. You agree that we may use, disclose and transfer those personal data as described in this Condition." Creepy, or what? But that's trivial compared with the covert surveillance that goes on in cyberspace. If you use the Internet or e-mail at work, your employer almost certainly has the technology to keep tabs on you, perhaps through software such as WebSpy, which tells them which websites you are looking at, or Mailguard, which can vet your e-mails for "keywords". In theory the new Data Protection Act will ban employers from doing this covertly; in practice, you will sign an agreement allowing them to continue, or find alternative employment. If you can. Perhaps such workplace surveillance is justified. After all, you are using your employer's equipment. More worrying is the snooping that goes on when you surf the Net at home. Many commercial websites now greet new visitors with a "cookie": a file, covertly slipped into your computer, which will tell the website owner exactly where you go on the Net. That way, an "online profile" of you can be built up. Similarly, Intel's ubiquitous Pentium III processor contains a chip which monitors your every move in cyberspace. Why? "Nothing to worry about," say the billionaires in California. "Your private life is safe in our hands." But we never gave them permission to have it in the first place. Who else tracks our communications? Well, how paranoid do you want to get? Our ever-vigilant Home Secretary, it is said, wants one in every 500 Internet connections to be intercepted. As usual, "the innocent have nothing to fear". But already, if civil rights groups are to be believed, the innocuous sounding Menwith Hill Signals Intelligence Base in Yorkshire is using a grid of super-computers known as Echelon to search millions of e-mails each day for our old friends, "keywords". And it is well known in paranoid circles that GCHQ in Cheltenham scans all mobile phone calls. How many is that - 100 million a day? I'm glad that taxpayers are getting such industrious spooks for their money. So does all this add up to the Big Brother imagined by Orwell? The only rational answer is "don't be bloody daft". Tony's cronies can be tiresome, meddlesome, nannysome - but their aim is not generally perceived to be the demolition of liberty, independent thought and the human spirit. What has happened is something more subtle. We have been seduced. Every invasion of privacy seems enticing at the time. Credit cards, computers, mobiles - these things have immeasurably enhanced our lives. Even those 400,000 CCTV cameras are said to make people feel "safer". Cheerleaders for these innovations describe them as "technologies of freedom", because they liberate us from many tedious tasks. But what sort of freedom forces us to renounce our privacy? Perhaps the answer was provided by the man who coined the phrase: "Freedom is slavery." Now, where did I read that? Oh yes, I remember. It was one of Big Brother's slogans in this great novel by a guy called Orwell ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------- T hese days we do have 2 minutes of hate- against all racism, nationalism,and people who are intolerant. Against these people we must remember that war is peace Shop for Cars On-Line: http://a-albionic.com/ads/srch.html Forwarded for info and discussion from the New Paradigms Discussion List, not necessarily endorsed by: *********************************** Lloyd Miller, Research Director for A-albionic Research (POB 20273, Ferndale, MI 48220), a ruling class/conspiracy research resource for the entire political-ideological spectrum. Quarterly journal, book sales, rare/out-of-print searches, New Paradigms Discussion List, Weekly Up-date Lists & E-text Archive of research, intelligence, catalogs, & resources. 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