Control freaks the world over, including most recently Tony Blair, have called for the introduction of a Chinese style Internet, where the World Wide Web is tightly regulated and free speech stifled on the whim of a government censor.
Schools are to get the go-ahead to fingerprint pupils as young as five, in new measures to be approved by the Government. Ministers will issue guidance telling schools they have the right to collect biometric data and install fingerprint scanners.
When English soccer fans take to the terraces next season, there’s every chance they won’t just be watching the game, they’ll be being watched watching the game too. In the latest addition to what civil liberties campaigners have dubbed Britain’s “surveillance society,” a British company is in talks to supply wireless closed-circuit television technology to a Premier League soccer club’s security staff.
Even George Orwell would be shocked. He described the sinister machinations of a totalitarian police state in his novel, 1984, and laid bare the danger of eroding our basic civil liberties, including the right to freedom of speech and the right to privacy. Although he famously coined the phrase ‘Big Brother is watching you’, even Orwell cannot have foreseen just how prescient those words would prove to be.
