The British Love Big Brother

I had just posted my essay on stoplight cameras when David from Ultima Thule e-mailed me this from Jolly Olde England:


'Big Brother' scolds scofflaws in Britain
By Al Webb
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
April 9, 2007
LONDON -- In the land that gave birth to "Big Brother," the future has
caught up with a present in which drunks, hoodlums, litterbugs and other
wrongdoers are being yelled at and lectured to -- as well as watched --
from lampposts.
Britain has 4.2 million surveillance cameras -- a fifth of
the world's total -- hanging off its infrastructure, and loudspeakers
with microphones are being fitted to them in a government attempt to
strike more fear into the hearts of miscreants.
In the northeast England city of Middlesbrough, disembodied
voices bark out orders to "pick up that cigarette butt" or "put that
candy wrapper in the bin," shocking people caught on camera in the act
of crossing to the wrong side of the law.
Prime Minister Tony Blair's government is spending nearly $1
million to link microphones and loudspeakers to its vast network of
closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras as part of its "Respect"
offensive to try to control the burgeoning anti-social behavior that
plagues the nation's cities, towns and villages.
It works like this: When a CCTV camera spots someone
breaking a window, say, or tossing a crumpled cigarette package to the
sidewalk, the deed is monitored by local government officials based in
control rooms who then bark a warning to the erring party to clean up
their act, or else.
A dozen talking cameras have gone into service in
Middlesbrough, and the Home Office -- Britain's interior department --
is ecstatic.
Over past few weeks alone, it said, "fights have been broken
up, litterers have sheepishly picked up their rubbish, and skateboarders
have stopped rolling through traffic when told to do so" by the nearest
loudspeaker.
In dealing with litterbugs, says Middlesbrough Council
security manager Jack Bonnar, the talking cameras have "proven to be a
100 percent success." Drunkenness and fighting are more difficult to
address, he said, but even then, "the speakers are coming into their
own, and we're recording about a 65 percent to 70 percent success rate
for those kinds of offenses."
Officials said a verbal warning suffices most of the time.
If it doesn't, the videotape from the camera becomes evidence for arrest
and prosecution.
So pleased is the government with the results of the
Middlesbrough experiment that it will hang loudspeakers and microphones
to CCTV cameras in another 20 designated trouble spots across the nation
in the next few months.
Others argue that the whole business sounds like Big
Brother, the sinister system in George Orwell's novel "1984," with its
vision of talking screens being used to control the downtrodden populace
around the clock.
"It's just not right that Britain should become a society
where some anonymous official in an invisible room can bark instructions
to you," said Simon Davies of the British-based civil rights
organization Privacy International. "It is psychological warfare on the
population."
Some leaders in the opposition Conservative Party dismiss
the government initiative as "scarecrow" policing, while 90 percent of
real police officers sit at desks filling out government-ordained forms.
There also are suggestions that the brains behind the
talking cameras don't understand the nature of Britain's hoodlums and
hooligans, whose likely response to being told to pick up an errant
burger bag or to cease throwing chairs through plate-glass windows is a
rude gesture to the cameras.
Home Secretary John Reid is undeterred, either by concerns
over naughty gestures or by accusations that the talking cameras are
"Big Brother gone mad."
Some folks are likely to be "concerned about what they claim
are civil liberties intrusions," Mr. Reid said, but "the vast majority
of people find that their life is more upset by people who make their
life misery in the inner cities because they can't go out and feel
safe."
"What really upsets people," the home secretary insists, "is
their night out being destroyed or their environment being destroyed by
a fairly small minority of people who get involved in drunk and
disorderly behavior or gangs, or whatever."


No wonder Britain is having such a tough time resisting the Moslem horde; a people who will allow their government to watch them at all times does not have the willingness to defend their freedom. It`s a sad thing what has happened to the once iron-spined Brits!

Oh, and it should be remembered that George Orwell (Eric Blair) was British.