How do you mean? someone said and we all turned to watch her "Whenever that happens, we are often vastly relieved to find that it was all captured on closed-circuit TV. We have come to believe that there is nothing wrong with being filmed on CCTV. And yet if that isn't the world of Big Brother, what is?""The power of surveillance is much exaggerated, if you ask me," said the Major. "Oh, yes, there are plenty of cameras around in the brightly-lit parts of the cities, and in the big stores, but where else?""On every bloody side road in the country, as far as I can make out," said the man with the dog. "There are more speed cameras in Britain today than there are policemen. There are more little spy boxes on poles, and more nasty little tittle-tattle cameras, and...""Yes, yes, we know how you feel about that," said the Major "But speed cameras won't catch child-kidnappers. If you were abducting or kidnapping children, you wouldn't be breaking the speed limit That's the last thing you'd be doing. It's the golden rule of criminals, you know: Don't break the law; you'll only draw attention to yourself.
So speed cameras wouldn't help then.""Sometimes," said the lady with the purple hairdo, sipping her matching purple sloe gin, "sometimes I wish I really was under surveillance.""How do you mean?" someone said, and we all turned to watch her."Well, there used to be a conspiracy theory that we were all having our phones tapped," she said "And I was glad of that. Because very often I can never remember what I have promised to do on the phone, or I fail to write down an address, or something, and it was nice to feel that someone, somewhere, tapping my phone, had got all of the details if I really needed them."There was a silence as her words were weighed, and found wanting."Of course, "said the Welshman, "people will tell you that as we already have all our details stored by credit companies, and hire companies, and service providers, and so on, an identity card won't be doing anything worse It'll just be getting it all organised. But what's all this about having it linked to your eye patterns? An ID card that depends on a corneal identity process? That doesn't even happen with passports! Are we going to have lasers shone in our eyes every time we are identified? I don't like the sound of that.""Will it be able to identify blind people?" said the man with the dog. "Can corneal identification work with people who haven't got any corneal activity?""Good point," said the Welshman. |
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