Digital Mass Surveillance as a Hallmark of Failed Societies
The Cyber Show has just published this article about a "small leap forward in tech ethics" and it alludes to the Lampard investigation. To quote:
While clearly seen in the pharmaceutical trade it's also endemic in the infosec business, and we see a more widely repeated pattern of harm around security, medicine and defence, where aggressive vendors push defective and harmful niche wares upon uninformed bean-counters. These execs lack sufficient technical knowledge, access to independent research and guidance, but are 'keen to make savings'. Procurers are bedazzled by marketing, PR and outright disinformation peddled by the vendors using their own research as if it were objective.[...]
Pervasive, gratuitous, continuous surveillance is the hallmark of a failed society with low care and trust values. It is a sign of failed institutions where there is little or no humanity. It signifies disdain for human relations, and suggests pockets of unaccountable, paranoid power. Whereas it gained a foothold in supermarkets from the 1970s, as a bulwark against shoplifting, CCTV metastasised into the general environment under largely unexamined assumptions around its benefits to crime prevention and public space management, mainly as a tool of the lazy and cowardly.
[...]
The Lampard investigation is welcome as an opportunity to open up public conversation on surveillance. We need to re-establish the fundamental undesirability of surveillance, especially where claims are made that it saves money and so on.
[...]
We need to change perceptions and incentives in this game. Local councils, public venue management, schools, and hospitals should pride themselves (and be judged) on how little CCTV they deploy, not how much. Deployment of surveillance should be considered a failure of operational professionalism, of policing, of care, of intelligence, of human presence, capability and wit, because it ought to be a position of last resort.