We’ve all heard of the creepy NSA surveillance done by the U.S. government, which gathers electronic bits by the bucket load, apparently without any legal standing. We should all be absolutely furious at our government, and we should make our displeasure known at the ballot box. It’s not likely that will happen of course, we Americans are turning into fat, bloated, apathetic remnants of our forefathers, content to sit on the sofa and mindlessly watch the next episode of whatever it is we are hooked on this month.
Even more ubiquitous are those cameras that are nearly everywhere. If you are in an office building or a department store, look up. Do you see them?
Sometimes they don’t even look like a camera. They are just dark glass bumps protruding from the ceiling.
Next time you are at a stop-sign or a red-light, look up. All 4-corners of the intersection likely have cameras perched on high, recording you, your vehicle and your license plate. Some jurisdictions have rules that require this data be kept for only short-periods, but others have no limits, and your travel can be tracked from intersection to intersection for years to come.
Then there are the cameras at the gas station, the bank, in the ATM machine, and yes, some private residences also now have cameras. I happen to have three of them at my home. One of them is on the back deck, gazing it’s unblinking eye at the rear-service door to the garage. Another is actually high up in the corner of the sunroom, with a nice view of all the floor-to-ceiling windows and doors. A third is on the front of the house, looking down on the front door and the drive, and it actually will catch movement on the street and a teensy corner of the neighbor’s front yard.
It is unlikely that you can go anywhere in the United States and not be on camera in one, or more likely a dozen places. Some private, most public and taxpayer funded, and mostly with few rules that govern who can view the camera footage, under what circumstances, and for how long any recordings can be kept.
It’s not just the United States. Many countries of the EU have cameras in place, although over their they are often referred too as “CCTV”. Closed Circuit Television.
There now appears to be an uprising among some of the citizenry to randomly destroy these cameras, and it is spreading to the United States. I’m actually tempted to form my own local posse. It’s been named “Camover”, as in “Camera Over”. The linked news report reports on some cameras that were destroyed in Puget Sound, Washington.
I was raised by my parents to be a law-abiding citizen, with respect towards policemen and other authority figures. But I’m seeing a world beginning to run amok, and some of those fantastic Science Fiction books I read as a kid, that told of societies where there was no privacy, where your daily activity was tracked and monitored by nameless governments, is apparently no longer Science Fiction. George Orwell was right, and we, the citizens are indeed sleeping through it, letting it happen to us.
Joseph de Maistre wrote in 1811 “Every Nation gets the government it deserves”. I have always taken that to mean that if the citizens of a country, or a state, county or town are not diligent, then even a democracy can become polluted as the people we elect turn to enriching themselves instead of their electorate. We see that in our Congress – most of whom are concerned mainly with being re-elected instead of governing.
We see that with our local officials, who perhaps genuinely are attempting to curb costs by placing cameras everywhere, have allowed those cameras to be used for far more than their original intent.
Perhaps it is inevitable. When I was a kid, people for blocks around me knew who I was, who my parents were, and I was fully aware that any misbehavior on my part was sure to get back to my parents, or my grandparents in short order. Today, people often are not even on a first-name basis with their next-door neighbor, and their nearest relative may be several states away. We no longer have any trust of our neighbors, we no longer take the responsibility of governing even our own neighborhoods on ourselves – instead, we leave it up to “the government” to dictate to us on the smallest level how we should behave.
I don’t think our sacrificing our privacy is a good thing. I think, in most public places, that Cameras should be removed, or at the very least that strict oversight should be in place with regard to what they are used for, who can view them, and how long any data is kept on hand.