U.K. Surveillance ‘Worse Than Orwell,’ Says U.N. Privacy Chief

[marmar]

Joseph Cannataci, the newly appointed U.N. special rapporteur on digital privacy, has called the U.K.’s oversight of surveillance “a rather bad joke at its citizens’ expense,” describing the abuse of privacy rights as worse than anything George Orwell imagined in his dystopian novel “1984.”

Speaking to The Guardian, Cannataci said: “... at least Winston [a character in Orwell’s ‘1984’] was able to go out in the countryside and go under a tree and expect there wouldn’t be any screen, as it was called. Whereas today there are many parts of the English countryside where there are more cameras than George Orwell could ever have imagined. So the situation in some cases is far worse already.”

The article continues:

Appointed after concern about surveillance and privacy following the Edward Snowden revelations, Cannataci agreed that his notion of a new universal law on surveillance could embarrass those who may not sign up to it. “Some people may not want to buy into it,” he acknowledged. “But you know, if one takes the attitude that some countries will not play ball, then, for example, the chemical weapons agreement would never have come about.”

Cannataci came into his new post in July after a controversial spat involving the first-choice candidate, Katrin Nyman-Metcalf, who the Germans in particular thought might not be tough enough on the Americans.

But for Cannataci – well-known for having a mind of his own – it is not America but Britain that he singles out as having the weakest oversight in the western world: “That is precisely one of the problems we have to tackle. That if your oversight mechanism’s a joke, and a rather bad joke at its citizens’ expense, for how long can you laugh it off as a joke?”

He said proper oversight is the only way of progressing, and hopes more people will think about and vote for privacy in the UK. “And that is where the political process comes in,” he said, “because can you laugh off the economy and the National Health Service? Not in the UK election, if you want to survive.” ..............(more)

http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/uk_surveillance_worse_than_orwell_says_un_privacy_chief_20150825

[Octafish]

1. Hannah Arendt spells out the 'Goal of Wholesale Surveillance.'

The goal of wholesale surveillance, [font color="green"]as (Hannah) Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” is not, in the end, to discover crimes, “but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.” [/font color]And because Americans’ emails, phone conversations, Web searches and geographical movements are recorded and stored in perpetuity in government databases, there will be more than enough “evidence” to seize us should the state deem it necessary. This information waits like a deadly virus inside government vaults to be turned against us. It does not matter how trivial or innocent that information is. In totalitarian states, justice, like truth, is irrelevant.

Chris Hedges, The Last Gasp of American Democracy

So, it isn't so much they don't want any Guy Fawkes wannabes running around, wot. They know where they live. It's the liberals and especially socialists they'd like to track as needed. For the royal feudalists, what's really dangerous are their ideas.