Big Bro Data Base Called 'a Step Too Far'

by Len Hart, the Existentialist Cowboy

When London is already the world's most surveilled city, there are plans afoot to implement a 'Big Brother' society that even Orwell could not have imagined. In a global economy, the consequences will not be confined to the British Isles. The good news is that a proposal to create a huge database of phone call details, e-mails and internet use has kicked up a firestorm of controversy. The name George Orwell comes up repeatedly.

In London, the Information Commissioner Lord West warns that such a database could be a "step too far for the British way of life".

The most 'Orwellian' aspect of this threat to person hood itself it that not even Orwell might have imagined its implications. The technology exists right now to enslave the entire world. Every movement by every single individual could be monitored 24-7 with implanted chips implanted at birth. Your every movement, perhaps your feelings now and, later, your very thoughts, could be monitored via satellites and a world wide network of super computers. If Google can spider every web site on the world wide web, a network could monitor the implanted, dynamic profiles of every person on earth. There is no place you could go and nothing you could do that could not be traced and documented. In such a society, you could be executed remotely.

Proposals for a central database of all mobile phone and internet traffic have been condemned as "Orwellian".

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said the police and security services needed new powers to keep up with technology.

And she promised that the content of conversations would not be stored, just times and dates of messages and calls.

But the Lib Dems slammed the idea as "incompatible with a free country", while the Tories called on the government to justify its plans.

Details of the times, dates, duration and locations of mobile phone calls, numbers called, website visited and addresses e-mailed are already stored by telecoms companies for 12 months under a voluntary agreement.

The data can be accessed by the police and security services on request - but the government plans to take control of the process in order to comply with an EU directive and make it easier for investigators to do their job.

--BBC, Giant database plan 'Orwellian'

As the British government debates how and whether it should monitor every aspect of a citizens life until death, other interests, primarily corporate, are studying the creation of a computerized 'Big Bro' against which to measure your resume.

There is evidence of a growing concern regarding the authenticity of qualifications presented at interviews. Today's computer software makes it simple to edit documents, thereby allowing falsification of information by the unscrupulous. The use of sophisticated document scanners, printers and copiers further complicates the issue. The research revolved around an investigation of the need for authentication of education qualifications and the establishment of the feasibility of doing this by using information technology to allow for efficient and effective verification that an education qualification was attained that the results were accurately reflected. The research concluded that there is a growing incidence of and concern regarding qualification fraud, that there was a need for authentication of qualifications by Human Resource practitioners as part of the recruitment process and presented a model that met all the research objectives - an innovative model deemed to offer an efficient, effective and feasible technology solution to the problem of qualification fraud in South Africa

--The feasibility of using the world wide web to authenticate higher education qualifications issued by universities and technikons

Some people do make inflated claims on resumes, some tell bald-faced lies. So what? Corporations tell much bigger and more harmful lies to the entire world every minute of every day of every year. In fact, most corporations --perhaps the very concept of 'corporation itself -are themselves deliberate frauds. Enron is the most famous example. The recent financial melt down was the result of numerous frauds by both government and corporations. The resulting bailout is --itself --a hoax!

Government and corporations apparently believe that they have a right to hoax you, lie to you and cheat you! Neither 'computers' NOR 'organizations/corporations' are people. Yet, it is believed as a principle of law that 'corporations' are 'persons' that have rights. As a result, machines are given priority over living, breathing human beings because a small percentage of them may be incipient 'terrorists' or might have fibbed about a degree they almost got but didn't.

This is absurd!

Government thinks it has a right to 'shakedown' a portion of your income every year to finance the campaign of lies and hoaxes that it perpetrates upon you. In other words, you pay for the privilege of being lied to and hoaxed. Government is a shakedown.

Government andl corporations operate only at the collective will of the people. Perhaps the time has come to abolish and bury the idiotic idea that corporations have rights, that corporation are people!

Unless human beings re-assert their sovereignty over both the machines and the 'souless organizations' of their creation, we will have been enslaved by them in the end.

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