In addition to inventing the ethical system of utilitarianism, English philosopher Jeremy Bentham designed a prison, the Panopticon, which allowed every prisoner to be watched at all times by a guard they could not see (and did not even know was there), creating a "sentiment of an invisible omniscience". Now the UK seems to be trying to turn its society into a panopticon. They already have more surveillance cameras per head than anywhere else on the planet. Now they're planning to use them to track everyone's travel:
The police are to expand a car surveillance operation that will allow them to record and store details of millions of daily journeys for up to five years, the Guardian has learned.Full and strategic exploitation means data mining. Not only is there enormous potential for abuse - e.g. police officers snooping on their families - there is also enormous potential for false positives. And in a surveillance society on edge from the threat of terrorism, that means tragic consequences. Meanwhile, law abiding citizens will have their every movement stored for five years, just waiting for a broke administration to sell the data to Americans for marketing purposes. That is if they don't just lose it...A national network of roadside cameras will be able to "read" 50m licence plates a day, enabling officers to reconstruct the journeys of motorists.
Police have been encouraged to "fully and strategically exploit" the database, which is already recording the whereabouts of 10 million drivers a day, during investigations ranging from counter-terrorism to low-level crime.
