1984 Has Officially Arrived
Here’s a quote from an article on the use of more surveillance webcams in the fight against crime and terrorism:
“In general, I think we’re getting used to cameras,” said Roy Bordes, who runs an Orlando, Florida, security design consultant firm. Hey, that’s just the way the world is.”
The article in wired is entitled “‘Step Up Surveillance,’ U.S.A.”
Here’s another excerp from the same article about how stepped up things have become recently:
“Consider these recent developments:
• Chicago now has at least 2,000 surveillance cameras across its neighborhoods, after leaders last year launched an ambitious project at a cost of roughly $5 million. Law enforcement says they’ve helped drive crime rates to the lowest they’ve seen in 40 years.
• In Philadelphia, where the city has increasingly relied on video surveillance, cameras caught an early morning murder which ultimately led to the capture of a suspect. Police say the accused is now a suspect in an unsolved murder from 1998.
• Homeland Security officials last week announced they would install hundreds of surveillance cameras and sensors on a rail line near the Capitol at a cost of $9.8 million, months after an effort by local officials to ban hazardous shipments on the line.
In most cases prior to the last few years, street crime — not terrorism — was the driving factor behind the cameras. There has also been a boom in traffic-monitoring cameras, and huge reliance on surveillance cameras in private business, especially in retail establishments like convenience and department stores. ”
George Orwell was right on track, just had the date off by about two decades. I wonder how long until it’s legal to install these inside private residences without the inhabitant’s knowledge in order to ‘fight terrorism’. We seemed to be more bent on further planting seeds of hate overseas that I doubt in our lifetime (next 20-30 years) that we’ll see a great decrease in terrorism unless we seriously change who we elect to make the peace.
Creating peace by killing 100s of thousands of civilians in a state war as a result of a non-state (terrorist) act against us is just nonsense no matter how you slice it in my opinion. Let’s hope for the best and that this bluder begins seeding democracy and that in the end things turn out well. I am not going to hold my breath on the possibility of creating peace in the middle east this way, however, if we finally put into power those that correct the wrongs of the past, meaning bad foreign policies, then maybe we’ll see peace in a generation or two.
Well that’s all for now, have a great day and rest of the week. I’ll probably start posting more often as the flow of webcams & interactive online technology is a neverending source of interesting news.
