If
there was any doubt left, it seems the British government has finally
given up all pretense of trying to balance civil liberties and
security. A plan has been revealed by The Guardian newspaper
for a national strategy for surveillance by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
(UAVs). And we are not just talking the micro-helicopter UAVs used by
many UK police forces already, but 22m-long airships, the G22, which can stay airborne for many hours. The military drones will require special certification for civilian use.
[ubisurv.wordpress.com] And of course, these devices are supposed to be in place for the
2012 Olympics, but even in the documentation secured under the Freedom
of Information Act (FoIA), it is made very clear that the drones will
be used for a multiplicity of ‘routine’ operations, including from
orders and fisheries activity to conventional policing and even
“[detecting] theft from cash machines, preventing theft of tractors and
monitoring antisocial driving… event security and covert urban
surveillance” as well as all the kinds of activities that the already
controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) covers,
including “fly-posting, fly-tipping, abandoned vehicles, abnormal
loads, waste management”.
If this wasn’t bad enough, the whole thing has been developed in
secret with the British governments favourite arms manufacturer, BAe
Sytems, is projected to run as a public-private partnership due to the
massive expense, and it has even been suggested that the surveillance
data could be sold to private companies, according to The Guardian.
And the ’selling’ of this to the public has already begun. Some
suggestions of the use of high-flying drones had been made by Kent
police, who had claimed it would be to “monitor shipping and detect
immigrants crossing from France”. However, as The Guardian
goes on to show this was a ruse which was part of long-term PR strategy
to divert attention away from civil liberties issues. One 2007 document
apparently states, “There is potential for these [maritime] uses to be
projected as a ‘good news’ story to the public rather than more ‘big
brother’.”
It’s really hard to say anything polite about these plans, the way
they have been developed, and the complete lack of interest in or
concern for the British public’s very real and growing fear of a
surveillance state in the UK.
A footnote: almost as soon as this news was revealed, the British government raised the terrorist threat level to ’severe’,
without providing any indication that was any specific threat. Now,
this may be entirely coincidental (and there are a couple of high-level
meetings on Yemen and Afghanistan strategy in London next week), but if
the threat level was much higher, the British public might suddenly be
more amenable to the introduction of something to protect them from
this ’severe’ threat, like, say, flying drone cameras, don’t you think?
Source: http://ubisurv.wordpress.com/2010/01/23/uks-secret-national-flying-camera-strategy/
