Surveillance society?

David Aaronovitch has this reasonably balanced piece on the arguments for and against a national DNA database in today's Times.

My gut instinct is to oppose such a database; I suspect the disbenefits would outweigh the advantages, and I'm not sure government, the police or any other public body are up to managing it effectively or cost-effectively.  At the same time, I struggle to fully identify with what Aaronovitch terms the 'intelligencia default position'  that we are 'sleepwalking into a surveillance society'.

As I wrote last year, my biggest concern about such initiatives is that by using technology to address the symptoms of deep social problems, rather than tackling the roots causes, the incentive to build a better society is steadily diminished.

There's currently a rather scary vision of what society might look like a few years hence on BBC1 each Sunday evening, in the thriller The Last Enemy, in which the government is trying to introduce a system called TIA (Total Information Awareness) which would enable the powers to be to track our every move. 

It's going to be a while before the technology makes this possible, and even when it does, I'm not sure how the state would fund the necessary investment.  Although if things continue as they are, and society and the economy continue to morph into a mechanism principally geared to the consolidation of minority wealth and privilege, then the state would presumably have no problem finding private backers for such an Orwellian scheme.

There are worrying problems of crime and insecurity facing society today, but would we not be better advised to examine and address the roots causes, rather than using technology to mitigate the symptoms.  The current BBC drama does not make for comfortable Sunday evening viewing.

Comments

[Jock]

It might scare you a whole lot more to know that TIA is already a project of the IAO - the "Information Awareness Office" of the DoD in the US setup after 9/11 (although admittedly "defunded" a year or so later as a single entity).