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BEWARE LITTLE BROTHER
(Daily Mail Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)AN ENGLISHMAN'S home is his castle, but that does not mean that once he steps outside the moat, his life and movements become a free-for-all.
In this country, we take the ability to lose ourselves in a crowd for granted.
Keep your head down, stay out of trouble, and your movements, utterances and actions are surely no one's business but your own.
Twenty years ago, this was maybe the case, but, sadly, not any more.
For in the past few years a littlementioned revolution has taken place which has changed entirely the concept of what it means to be a private person in a public space.
We all know about CCTV cameras, of course. There are four million of them in the UK, that's one for every 15 people.
A few years ago it caused a stir when Bournemouth Council decided to hide cameras in the shrubs on the cliffs to keep an eye on the beach; today we take such surveillance for granted.
Pick your nose, steal a kiss, fumble in your pockets, drop your keys or lose your handkerchief - all those moments that we might wish to keep to ourselves are being scrutinised by someone, somewhere, for purposes that are not always entirely clear.
It is all 'in the interests of security', of course, that ghastly 21st-century catchall phrase used to justify prying, blocking and making your life miserable. The suspicion is that robot policemen are being used as a cheap substitute for the real thing.
But the problem is about to get a lot, lot worse than CCTV cameras.
Like bad weather, the latest development in surveillance technology comes from the United States. Over there, CCTV is not nearly as common as over here - even speed cameras are almost unheard of.
The threat in the U.S. comes instead from private surveillance, the use of cheap, modern microchip and tracking technology to monitor the position and movements of individuals at all times and in all places.
So dramatic is the potential use - and abuse - of this technology that last weekend at the American Association for the Advancement of Science festival, geographer Jerome Dobson of the University of Kansas warned of the relentless rise of 'geoslavery' - the tyranny of being unable to escape surveillance wherever you are.
'The cost of continuous surveillance of an individual has come down from several hundred thousand dollars a year, 30 years ago,' he points out, 'to $500 or so.' And the people doing the surveillance are not, for the most part, the traditional 'Big Brother' suspects - the state, the shadowy security agencies and so forth; instead, we are seeing the emergence of a myriad 'little brothers'.
Employers, wives, husbands, parents, lovers, as well as greedy retailers, stalkers and other criminals are - or soon will be - able to take advantage of new techniques to monitor whoever they want 24 hours a day.
Bosses love this new technology. Already, in the U.S. more than 50,000 employees are tracked on a routine basis, using mobile phone locaters.
But the capability is available right now to extend this to millions more, and in Britain, too.
The ability to do all this comes from the sudden maturing of several technologies.
Mobile phones, when they are switched on, emit a constant signal allowing them to lock on to the nearest base station.
This means the operating company is able to track the movement of the phone.
It is how Hussain Osman, the London bombing suspect, was tracked as he moved across Europe this summer, until he was eventually arrested in Rome. But not just the police can use this technology.
You can go to websites and, with a bit of hacking, turn any mobile phone into a tracking device - without its owner's knowledge. Armed with this technology, any suspicious husband or wife can become their own private detective.
Then there are little gizmos called RFIDs - or radio frequency identification tags.
These are the smallest, simplest, cheapest - and therefore most dangerous of tracking devices.
Tiny unpowered radio transmitters, they can be smaller than a grain of rice, and work by sending a signal to a receiver when they pass within a few yards of a fixed scanner.
These chips were invented for the retail industry as a sort of 'super barcode' - incredibly useful for tracking the movements of objects, in warehouses and so on. But now they are also being used to track people.
In Ohio, a company called CityWatcher has implanted the chips into the arms of two employees - to allow them access to secure areas.
This operation - a simple injection under local anaesthetic - was done only after the workers volunteered for it.
But it is easy to see how this sort of surveillance could become compulsory in all but name: 'If you want a job with us, you'll have to get tagged.' You don't even need to wait until someone wanders past a scanner to find out where they are.
You could enlist the Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites. These send out signals that GPS receivers - like those in cars - can use to find out exactly where they are.
But these receivers can now be made not much larger than a postage stamp.
With a combination of these, radio chips and the right sort of mobile phone you would find it easy to keep tags on someone day and night, anywhere in the world.
Not surprisingly, these gadgets are now being offered for uses that have nothing to do with their inventors' intent. In Minnesota, a company called Digital Angel has produced a range of tiny devices that can be tracked by GPS.
In surreal terms, the company website proclaims: 'Applications for our products include identification and monitoring of pets, humans, fish and livestock.' In a recent poll by broadcaster CNN, 24 per cent of American parents said they would like a chip like this inserted under their children's skin.
Britain's proposed ID cards will be equipped - naturally - with radio chips, so your movements can be tracked, should you pass near any detectors.
True, this technology has undoubted benefits. Paranoid parents will be able to see exactly where their teenage offspring are at all times. It is surely a good idea for, say, delivery firms to know where their drivers are.
Surveillance also has the potential to improve efficiency and customer service. It can undoubtedly improve our security - the police can use this new technology to identify potential terrorists and other criminals after analysing their movements, their racial and social profile, as well as their spending history.
But there is a very thin line between improved security and the risk to our civil liberties if this technology is abused.
And when you add it all up, you have to wonder who really benefits.
Supermarket loyalty cards (another form of surveillance - this time allowing a computerised analysis of your spending habits) benefit only the supermarkets.
Employee tracking benefits the employers. Domestic tracking benefits only suspicious minds. The problem is, as I have said, that none of this is rocket science.
It is simple and cheap technology. That is why resisting it will be difficult - and difficult to justify. And, as Jeremy Crampton, another geosurveillance expert who spoke at the American conference, says: 'It is hard to be "against" security.' But not impossible. If you have any suspicions that you are being tracked, then turn your phone off when you are not using it. Throw away your 'loyalty' card.
And pray that we never get to the stage when any boss even contemplates putting a chip in the arm of a British employee.
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