A Voice for Freedom

There are over 4.2 million CCTV cameras in the United Kingdom. That's twenty percent of the world's security cameras in less than two percent of the world's land area. There's currently no regulation CCTVs in the UK, and the power-happy Labour Party is more concerned with building John Twelve Hawks' "virtual Panopticon" than with protecting individual rights. But of course, you knew all that. What I'm here to tell you today is that technology has recently taken another leap that will have terrifying consequences for personal privacy: major advances are being made toward creating programs that will allow computers connected to CCTVs to read the lips of people seen on the cameras. Intel has recently begun developing lip-reading software and distributing it as open-source, meaning that anyone can use it for free. UK policing authorities, who have been working on this type of technology on their own, are undoubtedly jumping at the chance to get their hands on software that will add eavesdropping on tens of millions of people to their list of capabilities.

There will of course be the usual arguments: "It's for our own good!", "If you're not doing anything wrong, you don't have anything to worry about!", etcetera etcetera. To those people, I offer two pieces of advice: get your heads out of the sand and start giving a bloody damn about your freedom before it's gone for good. Oh, and actually one more: don't breed. The next generation doesn't need you dragging down its collective IQ.

See, intelligent people will actually worry about the fact that anyone in the police or the government might someday in the very, very near future have the ability to call up every conversation you've ever had in a public place. Some CCTV systems already identify people demonstrating "unusual behavior" and track them using facial recognition software. A year from now, an unusual behavior tag could mean a computer tracking your every move and recording your every conversation for days. And a year past that, someone will ask why we're not recording all conversations, just in case. And somewhere in Whitehall there will be a large grey box filled with hard drives containing every conversation ever had on a bus or train, in front of an ATM, at a traffic light, or anywhere else a camera can watch you. And if they have the records, they will use them. The doors on that grey box will have the hardest-worn hinges in Britain.