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| Uploaded on Monday 2 April, 2018 to the erosion of liberty |
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| Closed-circuit television in the surveillance society |
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In the Simpsons cartoon, in episode #461 entitled 'To Surveil With Love', the fictional town of Springfield decides, in a forum by majority vote, on hiring the services of British security consultant Nigel Bakerbutcher to install talking surveillance cameras all around the town after an unattended gym bag containing plutonium sparked pandemonium for being blown up inside a train station, thus causing a nuclear explosion.
Talking closed-circuit television cameras (CCTV) with megaphones prying into people’s lives exist in the real world. Such devices that tell off people for dropping litter, or committing acts of anti-social behaviour, were first tried out in the Netherlands, and subsequently in other countries, as an effective cost-cutting measure of policing the streets, leading some critics to cry foul over the scheme on points of civil liberties. The vast majority of surveillance infrastructure today consists of mundane spy technologies.
British society is the most surveyed in Western Europe; however, its levels are dwarfed by China's infrastructure, whose CCTV output is estimated to exceed half a billion by 2020. China has invested vast sums of money on deploying smart cameras equipped with facial recognition technology which can read faces, estimate age, ethnicity and gender. In 2018, China has rolled out facial recognition sunglasses to police officers, thereby mobilising the range beyond static positions. With the trend unfolding of where we are moving towards as a surveillance society, who knows what tomorrow brings? |
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