UK Surveillance Society
Interesting article from the Jubilee Centre this morning:-
Guy Brandon
Last week the BBC reported that a national network of cameras and computers to log car number plates would be up and running within months. The technology is not new; automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) has been used for years. The new development is that the thousands of cameras will now be linked centrally by one computer, enabling police to record and store details of every journey we make.
This has clear potential to reduce and detect crime and improve road safety. But the system also has its critics, who are concerned about the extent of police surveillance and its implications for personal freedom. Add to the ANPR network the national DNA database, which holds data on millions of people (many innocent), proposed national ID cards and existing measures (including but not limited to CCTV cameras, RFID tags, mobile phone records, Oyster cards, credit card transactions, and internet cookies†) and suddenly you start to realise just how much you are being, or can be watched. Evoking images from Steven Spielberg’s futuristic thriller Minority Report, another TV programme this week, The Gadget Show, even demonstrated new iris-recognition technology that means a CCTV camera will soon be able to recognise you from your eye pattern from a distance of 1.5 to 2.5 metres as you walk along the street.
Campaigners against the ‘surveillance society’ usually state their case in terms of the risk to their civil liberties – a concept alien to the Bible, which tends to focus more on responsibilities than personal rights and freedoms. Although many of us feel uncomfortable about the degree to which we can be tracked and the amount of data about us that is recorded and kept, justifying those anxieties with biblical principles is not straightforward.
One shared theme between the modern-day campaigners and the biblical worldview is the cynicism about absolute, centralised power. When Israel first asks for a king in 1 Samuel 8, God warns them through the prophet Samuel that forsaking him as king and choosing a human ruler will actually result in reduced freedom, including higher taxes and forced labour. The rule of the king in Deuteronomy 17 was intended to limit the amount of power held by the king, who was not to be above the law and was not to accumulate wealth or possessions. Solomon’s excesses and the split between the northern and southern kingdoms after his death were among the consequences of disregarding this law.
Throughout the Bible, from the story of the tower of Babel to the allegories of Revelation, imperialism is viewed with scepticism. The implication is not just that such centralised power might lead to evil, but that it inevitably will; as Lord Acton famously remarked, ‘power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ Handing so much power over to a non-divine authority is asking for trouble. Although the current authorities might be benign, there is always the risk of future ones being less so, and the near-certainty of missing or stolen data being misused at some point.
Much has been made of the ‘mark of the beast’ (666) in Revelation 13, and the warning that no one would be able to buy and sell without such a mark on their forehead or hand. In applying this prophesy to today’s society, some have gone so far as to suggest that the ‘mark’ will be an implanted chip or tattooed bar code – perhaps not such a stretch of the imagination given the rise of RFID tags. However, it is likely that the original number referred to the emperor Nero, the letters of whose name total 666 when written in Hebrew/Aramaic characters (each of which is ascribed a numeric value); the restrictions in buying and selling may allude to coinage bearing his image, or contracts prefaced with a declaration of allegiance to the Roman gods (including the emperor).
The warning is that the concentration of power with one individual or government results in reduced personal freedom and a rival for our loyalty. There is also a misplaced trust in technology, which risks being given an almost messianic status: “If we could just spend enough on the new resources, if we could gather enough information, if we could only track and record every individual movement and every transaction, we would be safe.”
None of this provides an answer to the problems of crime or an alternative to ANPR and other surveillance methods. But it does raise some objections and caution against placing too much trust in the centralisation of power inherent in the surveillance society.
† For a description of each of these, see BBC: How we are being watched
For more on the ethics surrounding RFID technology, also see: IEEE Spectrum: RFID inside: The murky ethics of implanted chips