Surveillance Culture

I've recently read an interesting article by Nick Rosen about ways to attempt to live "off the grid" or, in other words, how to to avoid being spied on in everything we do.

Here's the link to said article:

Living Off The Grid

Who's Watching You?
It would appear that we Brits are the most paranoid, surveillance-obsessed people in Europe. As well as the fact that we can all be traced every time we use the internet (like I'm doing now, and so are you!) or use our mobile phones (which are GPS trackers), we have more CCTV cameras on our streets than any other country excepting the U.S.A.

Here's a nice quote:

Four years ago there were an estimated 4.2 million CCTV cameras – the exact figure is unknown as there is no central registration system – but there are probably nearer 6 million cameras now. There are up to ten on every bus and dozens at every station, so avoid London Transport if you want to evade the cameras. Most CCTV runs from speed cameras, which are less prevalent in the countryside. Maps of them are available on car websites

Note that figure: 6 million cameras. That's roughly one camera for every ten people in the country. That's a lot of cameras, and yet so many of us want to get on telly - including me!

There's also a total lack of legal registration dealing with these cameras except one simple rule - the height. You can put up a camera and legally point it just about anywhere you like as long as it's 8 feet or more above the ground so nobody can bang their head on it.
The way we pay our bills is recorded and so is the stuff we buy with our debit cards, our credit cards, our store loyalty cards. Such figures, particularly the ones from store loyalty cards are sold to marketers in order to sell us more stuff. Social networking sites are notorious for doing this sort of thing. Facebook has by far the worst reputation.

• Suggestions in order to live off the grid include:
  
  Wearing brimmed hats in public (because cameras are above head height)
  Tinting your car windows
  Using an infra-red light to illuminate your registration plate at night
  Swap store loyalty cards with friends
  Swap cards for cash
  Use the Freecycle Networks
  Email via companies that send messages through a "data cloud" (such as Xerobank)
  Living in such a way that the use of public utilities is minimized or removed altogether, such as buying a houseboat.

These are pretty good ideas when you find a lack of privacy a problem. My problem is whether or not all these security measures fulfill their specified purpose which is to protect us all from crime.

Let's have a look and see what we can find
In an article published here the police admit that CCTV has had almost no effect on street crime.

Only 3% of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV images, despite the fact that Britain has more security cameras than any other country in Europe

According to this really useful website the country with the least public surveillance in Europe is Greece. Greece has annually about 31 assaults per 10,000 people, we have 745! Similarly the UK gets about 157 robberies per 10,000 people, Greece has about 8. Even with mucked-about and massaged figures the discrepancy is obvious.

What To Do?
Frankly all this extra security is proving pretty pointless, but because people are paranoid and (despite the evidence) think more laws and security measures mean less crime it isn't going to go away. So what can we do about it?

One way is to attempt to live off the grid, which is difficult but possibly not such a bad idea. There is an alternative, though, inspired by those wonderful people, M@ and holly from HUMANWINE in their song Big Brother. The chorus, very simply put goes:

Big brother is watching. Let him watch!

I've forgotten where the reference is but there's some more inspiration from one of my favourite American heroes, Justin Boland (see the links to Brainsturbator, Skilluminati and Hump Jones). The point he's made goes something like this: If we are under constant surveillance which we cannot but accept then we need to turn that to our own advantage. Our lives are no longer private because we are being watched and the way to take control of that is to make one's life a performance.
We could try to escape our spy-on-you culture but we're fighting a losing battle, so instead (as in Tai Chi and Akido) we use the enemy's strength against him. We make the surveillance cameras see what we want them to by performing for them. This has it's occult element also in being an exercise in consistent self-awareness.

In other words AN IT HARM NONE DO WHAT YOU WILL. Do what you believe is absolutely the right thing to do, because to do otherwise would be to become less that yourself, and if the cameras are watching - let 'em.

What more can we do other than our true will, regardless of who's watching? The question now (with the greatest sympathy for those who live under totalitarian regimes like China and the US) is are we brave enough?

Love,
Seán