Surveillance in the UK

July 11th, 2009

One of my friends recently brought a new house.  It took them ages to get it all sorted but that happened 2 weeks ago now.  The first thing they did was go out and buy lots of nice new things for the house, like a new TV, microwave, DVD player, and other electrical appliances and kept them in the house.  The other day she got a phone call at work, some one had broken in and taken everything.  She had no insurance yet so could claim nothing back.

I have never been burgled myself, but I have seen the effect it has had on her.  She no longer feels secure in her house and when she is away is always thinking if anyone has broken in.  It must be a horrible feeling to not feel safe in your own home.  What makes it worse is that they know who did it and there is nothing they can do about it.

With reports about Britain’s surveillance society getting worse, is that really a bad thing.  I know I have written in the past about how it is bad that we can now be tracked by our mobile phones or listening in to phone calls.  But if it can be used to stop things like burglaries then it is needed.  It is sad because it is a reflection on the state of our society.  I was talking to a teachers about this and she was saying that it is obvious about how bad society is by looking at the pupils.  She said that teaching has changed a lot because there are children out there with absolutely no respect for anyone.  I find a lot of it amusing, the school is full of small people with massive amounts of attitude, trying to act cool using words like ‘Blud’.  As a technician I don’t have anything to do with them really, but I would hate to have to teach them.  You can see how bad schools are getting because they are installing CCTV systems everywhere to stop pupils damaging school property and to protect teacher, I just wonder how long it will be until they bring in security companies like schools in America.

What it comes down to is that we need CCTV, because you really can’t trust people.  The one thing I do not like with surveillance is companies recording phone calls, I never trust companies to use them for what they say, training purposes.   I always think that they are going to use it to catch you out on something (but that’s probably just my untrusting outlook on life), unless they mess up and then the recording will probably disappear.  I have always wondered what would happen if when making a complaint or dealing with a difficult company you told them you were recording the call for training purposes.

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