Big Brother is watching more closely than ever

By ROGER FRANKLIN

NEW YORK - You had to live; did live, from habit that became instinct; in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

That was the way George Orwell described the world of Winston Smith, the doomed hero of 1984, whose petty rebellion against the all-seeing state brought down the terrible wrath of Big Brother.

Grim? By the yardstick of 1948, when the dying Orwell penned his last and most famous novel, the idea of a society that controlled its citizens by means of constant surveillance was a frightening prospect, almost an unthinkable one.

By today's standards, however, Smith had it easy.

Almost unnoticed, by small and intrusive degrees, the eyes of the modern state and its corporate allies have been peeling back the layers of privacy that once gave the individual a sporting chance of living a life, legal or otherwise, beyond the purview of the authorities.

After all, in Orwell's imagined world, the mere coming of night was enough to blind Big Brother to the nefarious activities of his less subservient siblings.

Today, on the sidewalks of Seventh Ave in Tampa, neither night, nor sunglasses, nor even a false beard can stop the local police knowing who you are, where you are, and what you are up to. That's because of three dozen remotely controlled video cameras that constantly scan and swivel to survey the action on the Florida city's often rambunctious nightlife strip.

Now there is nothing unusual about surveillance cameras, which have been in common use for at least three decades. According to the Electronic Privacy Information Centre, a US civil liberties group, anyone walking the streets of a city like New York, San Francisco or Boston can expect to be routinely photographed at least 30 times every day by cameras in places such as banks, convenience stores, even churches.

No, the reason that Big Brother would be tickled pink to observe developments in Tampa is because of what happens to those images once they have been beamed from the street to a video control room, where a squad of police officers feeds them into a computer linked to a database of known felons.

There, a programme called FaceIt makes a series of 80 or more facial measurements and compares them with similar readings derived from a national archive of mug shots. If a person has ever been arrested - even if never convicted - the police, quite literally, will have his or her number.

This certainly makes for lower crime rates, as has happened in the London suburb of Newham, where authorities credit a similar, though less sophisticated, system with forcing muggers, purse-snatchers and junkies to abandon former haunts.

But is the gain worth the cost? Before answering that question, consider a second example of privacy's erosion; another new technology now being introduced in America, and one which is also being pitched to the public as a small price to pay for safety and security.

It works like this. If you rent a car, particularly on America's East Coast, the contract may well include a fine-print clause giving the company the right to impose a hefty financial penalty if you are observed breaking the speed limit. And how, you may ask, would the rental company ever know?

Well, Connecticut travelling salesmen James Turner found out after dashing through seven states to attend to a business emergency in Virginia. Three days later, he discovered that the rental company had added $US450 ($1065) in speeding "fines" to his credit card bill.

When he queried the amount, he was told that his car had been equipped with a device that transmitted speed, position and direction to a satellite, which relayed the information to the rental car's office. Every time he exceeded the speed limit, another $US150 ($355) was removed from his bank account.

To their eternal shame, police officials seem to look kindly on the car-monitoring system, arguing that anything which makes drivers obey speed limits has to be for the best. In other words, the ends justify the means - even if it gives a humble rent-a-wreck outfit the power of police and judge combined.

If Turner, or the three dozen other drivers who have been "fined" in the past month, had been pulled over by the highway patrol, they could have insisted on having their day in court.

And if the sole consideration is public safety, then why not insist that every citizen be equipped with a microchip that transmits his or her whereabouts 24 hours a day. If scanning random faces on the street is okay, and tailing their cars by satellite is legal, why not reduce everybody to a blip on Big Brother's omniscient computer?

Just listen to Dr Peter Zhou, who yearns for the day when that happens. As the chief technical officer for Advanced Digital Systems, he is the brains behind a tiny transmitter called Digital Angel. When implanted under the skin, it draws electrical energy from muscle movements and transmits the subject's position to the same satellites now tracking American rental cars.

Zhou concedes that some people may take exception to the technology, but he predicts that the day is not far off when all infants will be routinely implanted with his device. That way, he says, if they fall down a crevasse while mountain climbing, rescuers will know where to look.

Another advantage: When buying goods over the internet, they will be able to scan their arm with something akin to a bar-code reader and eliminate all possibility of fraud.

The Digital Angel "will bring peace of mind and an increased quality of life for those who use it, and for their families," the patent application claims. Peace of mind?

Only for those who have read neither 1984 nor Chapter 13 of the Book of Revelation, the one with the verse that says: "Receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads, and that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark."

Big Brother or the Mark of the Beast - that's some choice.