Surveillance in England

Résumé du document

In his novel, 1984, George Orwell, points out: "Big brother is watching you". He spoke about a society where each house was in surveillance and where the political parties controlled every situation. He also added, "In the past, no government had the power to maintain the citizens in a permanent surveillance and now, the mind's police control everybody, constantly." By "surveillance", we mean the act of observing or the condition of being observed. It is also any collection and processing of personal data, identifiable or not, for the purposes of influencing or managing those whose data have been garnered. We adopt close observation of a person or a group, especially one under suspicion, to obtain information about his nature, position, movement, using electronic means. One of the aims of this net of surveillance is the social control which refers to social mechanisms that regulate individual and group behavior, leading to conformity and compliances to the rules of society.

Extraits

[...] Such surveillance is a key feature of modern life. A fear policy peculiar to Occidental Countries The Occidental Countries are characterized by the notions of risk, security; we are living in “risk surveillance societies” which has allowed the emergence of a safety State. Our societies are obsessed about risk, safety, stability and the main element of the organizational activities is the risk management. This growth surveillance had especially appeared after the 11 September attacks, in order to institute a more secure world. [...]

[...] Until where can we go in this surveillance? Are there ways to guarantee our private life? Consequently we will analyse in a first part the different forms of surveillance and their roots, in the second part we will analyse the dangers and the regulations of these systems. A huge growth of the surveillance in many areas of our life due to a “fear policy” The different ways to control people's behaviour Everything started by the army surveillance which is a world-wide phenomenon. [...]

[...] Surveillance involves care and control. The dangers of the surveillance are frequent and touch many innocent people. Firstly the major problem is the diversion, often the personal datum that we give is not used to fill only one aim, it is used back for ends that we ignore. So we have an invasion uncontrolled in our private life beyond that was understood at the beginning and that is socially, juridical acceptable. In the case of the transport card Oyster in London[3], the datum is collected in a commercial goal but often the police use that in there investigation thanks to the technologies which allow a faster circulation of data! [...]

[...] Now, our activities, conversations, likes and interest centres leash traces in many computing systems which manage our daily life. These data are collected to be centralized, matched, retrieved, processed, marketed and circulated by some organizations which can know our profile at every moment. Credit-cards, mobile phone, fidelity-card, internet are the means by which we are supervised. All these new communication systems are known as “information technologies” allow to relate modern desires for efficiency speed control, coordination . The telecommunication allows to control the contents of the exchanges, to know from where we phone, with that the NSA company in the USA can filter all the traffic of one State thanks to key words. [...]

[...] For the private places we enter in the competence field of the CNIL which protects the personal information, the private interests. Moreover we can observe that the public can influence and influence the debates. Population can insist for the regulation in vigour to be respected, putting in cause the system by many actions. In a company some syndicates are intervened to constrain the employer to put a term at his abusive control policy. In general we see that the population used to be control and don't struggle with that. But assert that we accept the surveillance? [...]