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This has upset me more than anything I remember reading recently. Excerpt:
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Bond might never have thought of running away if he’d not received a
letter, some months earlier, informing him that his daughter was among
25 million Britons whose records had been lost by the Child Benefit
Office, along with bank details and other private information.
He “became obsessed”, Katie remembers, about the amount of information
on him and his family that was already out there. As he looked into it,
he found that the UK, once a bastion of freedom and civil liberties, is
now one of the most advanced surveillance societies in the world,
ranked third after Russia and China. The average UK adult is now
registered on more than 700 databases and is caught many times each day
by nearly five million CCTV cameras. Increasingly monitored, citizens
are being turned into suspects. Within 100 yards of Bond’s home, he
discovered, there were no fewer than 200 cameras.
Before going on the run, he made 80 formal requests to government and
commercial organisations for the information they held on him. He piled
the replies on his floor, appalled by the level of detail. The owners
of the databases knew who his friends were, which websites he’d been
looking at, and where he had driven his car. One commercial
organisation was even able to inform him that, on a particular day in
November 2006, he had “sounded angry”. It was more than he knew
himself. [Full]
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stephen h
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