Should we track our young children by Global Positioning System for their own safety, with microchips locked on the wrist or implanted under the skin?
Seventy-five per cent of British parents say they are willing to buy such electronic gadgets, BBC News reported, quoting think-tank research. Well, why not? The technology could protect the children from predators, and find them if they get lost.
But there is a gap between talk and action. Few people have bought the GPS or wireless tracking devices that are already on the market.
We send a social signal when we reject the distant-oversight hardware. We admit we are scared of the surveillance world. We confess that we can’t see any landmarks, as events push us deeply into that world.
Nervous quarrels about electronic tracking and surveillance keep bubbling up on the Internet, and in the political arena.
Opposition by civil libertarians and some parents put an end to an elementary-school experiment in the small town of Sutton, California, where all pupils were fitted with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) badges to keep track of class attendance.
Many Americans are angry about the U.S. Patriot Act and the power of national security officers to shortcut legal safeguards in the name of fighting terrorism. They pry into private lives without court permission, and eavesdrop on millions of phone calls.
Fear of attack stirs actions that provoke further attack. Violence spirals into a seemingly unstoppable tornado. Attackers do not wear identifying arm bands; therefore the guardians feel they must keep watch on almost everybody. The increasing sophistication of technology makes this easier to do.
Debate continues to boil in Britain about the New Labour government’s proposed national data registry, with its connection to passports and smart identity cards. On these documents, every one of Britain’s 60 million people could ultimately have his/her fingerprints, eye iris shape and colour, and other biometric data stored for instant response by pattern-recognition machines.
“The National Identity Register will allow police to add the entire adult population of the UK to their suspect list,” online critic John Lettice complained, “giving them the opportunity to check fingerprints left at scenes of crime against those collected from ID card and passport applicants.”
If you have not committed any crime, why should you worry? Because of the danger of mistaken identity, maybe. The machines do make errors.
Breaches of privacy are another problem. A pattern-recognition machine, reacting to a medically-primed identity card, might have blocked the flight of that patient suffering from a virulent form of tuberculosis, who touched off panic when he flew across the Atlantic and exposed fellow passengers to possible infection.
But suppose the identity card had pin-pointed the traveller as a recovering alcoholic. Could the airline place him on a “no fly” list?
In deciding what information should be on the smart identity card, where do you draw the line, and how do you stay off the slippery slope that drops you into serious violations of human rights?
Bank machines in several countries, including Saudi Arabia, Colombia, Japan, and parts of India, respond to biometric cues that include fingerprints, shape of face and irises, pattern of blood vessels, and tone and rhythm of voice. Some researchers are looking for a way to add body odour.
Most of the world’s ATM bank machines have not converted to biometric. Users still gain access to them through PIN numbers. Engineers are working to make biometric-key systems faster, more sensitive and more efficient, and build in safeguards against fraud and identity theft; but even if they raise bio-reading to a level of robotic perfection, many of us still won’t like the biometric idea.
Our objections are mainly psychological and intuitive, not technical, but we mistrust the technology, for good reason.
The biometric apparatus is part of a box of tricks that includes distantly focused eavesdropping microphones, surveillance cameras and speed cameras, which can be intimidating as well as useful and life-saving. It includes spyware that enables spooks to infiltrate and enslave our personal computers and get to know our past and future behavioural patterns better than we know them ourselves.
Orwell was an optimist. When all the parts of the 21st-century snoop machine are connected, the machine is more invasive than anything Orwell imagined. Winston, the central character in “1984,” could duck away from Big Brother’s eye and take refuge in a blind corner, but we are moving into territory where there truly is no place to hide.
A faint hope shines through this gloomy scene.The new information and communication machinery, including the Internet, can be wielded to mobilize citizen consensus, rather than strengthen elite domination.
This turns the surveillance society upside down. The reversal has no precedent in history. It allows people to confer without hiring a hall, reach agreement, keep close watch on the old-line politicians — national, provincial and local — and persuade them to make plans and policies in the general interest, rather than serving those who have the loudest voices and the strongest political muscles.
