Some time ago I spent a couple of days in London together with Adelina and a few good friends. Despite the fact that London is huge and most people seems to be very busy I was still impressed by the care and hospitality of the average Londoner. There was only one small detail I wasn’t quite happy with. Coming from a small country (Norway) where you can go unnoticed almost anywhere I was stunned when I discovered all the CCD cameras. As a matter of fact, you will have a hard time finding any part of central London where you are not a “movie star”! An internal Metropolitan Police report was released in August 2009 that admitted less than 1 crime was solved per year for every 1000 CCTV cameras in London. This comes as a major blow to the UK police who spent £500 million between 1996 and 2006 installing 4 million cameras nationwide, with 1 million in London alone. Despite claims that each citizen might be seen on 300 cameras a day, perhaps half of all CCTV camera footage is unsuitable to convict criminals in court. The British public is crying foul, the police force is scrambling to access the problem, and everyone is watching to see what the worlds most recorded country is going to do next.

Some time ago I wrote about Police set to step up hacking of home PCs where the average British police officer can brake into your PC if he is suspecting that you might be doing something unlawful. He doesn’t need a court order, not even the approval of his superiors.

A couple of new laws has been passed lately, laws that force your Internet provider to monitor all traffic and keep the records for two years. They claim it is for our safety, yours and mine, to protect us from all kinds of terrible threats.

Have you ever been surfing the net utilizing the free services provided by your local coffee store or gasoline station or hotel or any other place where some friendly person want to give you free access to the rest of the world? Or maybe you stumbled over a private WiFi connection where the owner didn’t bother to secure it and thereby granted you free access? According to UK legislators this practice has to be banned and the people providing free access to the Internet should be treated as criminals. According to the same legislators the unprotected WiFi hot-spots are being used by copyright pirates and therefore has to be banned! Don’t you just love those legislators who have nothing better to do than to deprive the rest of us from free access to the net?

The Norwegian police will be given a few billion kroner (local currency, 8 kroner= 1€) as funding for a new computer system. Nothing strange about that, even the cops has to be upgraded from time to time, right? Well, not quite. This new system is not only improving the capabilities of the Norwegian police to look for criminals, it actually takes every incident where the police is involved or informed about and makes pictures and information available to every police officer in Europe! And the Norwegian police have access to the same kind of information from their colleagues throughout the European continent! According to the Norwegian Ministry of Justice the civil rights of the individual person will be better protected with this new system!?! And maybe, just maybe they will be able to capture a criminal from time to time, just in time to defend their Orwellian system!

9/11 was a tragedy, just like the ongoing slaughter of civilians in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan are local tragedies. But there are a couple of differences; like the number of casualties and the global effect on these terrible situations. 9/11 was confined to a small area and ended the lives of 3000+ lives; the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan is ongoing throughout these countries and the death toll is well beyond 100 000. But the most significant effect on the global population is caused by 9/11; it gave the authorities the best possible excuse to impose all kinds of restrictions and surveillance on their population. Maybe we should read George Orwell one more time, maybe we should tell the politicians to slow down, or maybe we have to implement our own systems that not only protect us from criminals but even from our own government? Not to commit a crime but simply to prevent that the authorities jump on the wrong conclusion based on a private conversation where certain key words was used, words that was picked up by the automatic listening systems installed by the local Intelligence Agency at every ISP throughout your country.

Knowledge, Uncategorized