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Video Surveillance and ID Cards I often hear the argument in favour of video surveillance, ID cards etc as being “If you are not doing anything wrong you have nothing to fear”. This is far from the truth. There are many cases of innocent people being accused of crimes because an automated system has identified them incorrectly. One story concerns A Teenage Boy Faces Decades in Prison For Visiting Sexually Explicit Web Sites but didn’t actually do what he was accused of. If you are accused of, for example rape through DNA testing and a prosecution lawyer tells the jury that there is a 50 million to one chance of it not being you, what jury is not going to convict? Even if the DNA was processed incorrectly and you have an alibi. Of course far more innocent people are cleared through DNA evidence but the problem is not with the technology, it is with the mechanical application of the technology without proper human intelligent intervention. You may be innocent now but laws change. For example, in Australia it is not illegal to vilify a group unless by so doing “it encourages others to threaten, hate, abuse or strongly react against you or a group of people”. Now suppose the law changes and any vilification becomes illegal? Suddenly the seemingly innocent remarks you made in the privacy of your own home become illegal. For example, there are moves to make smoking in your own home illegal if you have children. Most importantly, automated surveillance and monitoring do not look for activity that is illegal, they look for activity that is different. For example there is an automated system that runs on CCTV systems and alert an operator when any behaviour out of the ordinary occurs. The system is initially run in learning mode, where it monitors patterns, for example of people moving through a station. Once it has learnt normal behaviour for various times of the day it then constantly monitors people movements and alerts an operator when people move in ways that are different. An example that was explained to me was a group of people meeting up in a station foyer, staying together for a period then dispersing. This is exceptional: groups usually either meet in a foyer and move off together or they arrive together then disperse. The pattern of meeting up then dispersing could indicate a group of terrorists. Each person in the group can then be tracked individually through the system. Of course in most cases these people would be innocent but suppose one of them has a backpack, is Arab looking and appears to act suspiciously on the train? He could find himself suddenly accosted even though he is quite innocent. The growing trend towards increased surveillance encourages conformity and people who think different are treated with suspicion. Empires grow because people are prepared to take risks and act according to their inner core values rather than to an imposed set of ideas. When a country loses that it loses its soul and decline is only a heartbeat away. Such is happening in the USA and to a lessor extent in the UK.