John Malloy is not making this up ...

The Surveillance Society. The New Authoritarianism. The Age of Paranoid Politics. These are just a few of the ways writers and thinkers describe the age we’re now living in. The signs of anxiety and fear in this post 9-11 era are all around us. School lock-downs are called the new fire-drill. Recently, many schools boards in Canada made rehearsing the lock-down mandatory. The number of security staff in schools is increasing every year. By 2010 for example, there will be more security guards than teachers in American schools. But, the uniforms aren’t just being worn by security staff. More and more American public schools have adopted uniforms for students. Meanwhile the U.S. army is embedding itself in schools - targeting younger and younger students for recruitment. In Canada recruitment comes through video games that inform, entertain and seduce “action-focused males starting at 17 years old”.

British Goverment poster outside a Metro station in London.

Military symbols and myths are gaining prominence in western societies. In Britain, a recent report recommended that military personnel continue to wear a uniform in their daily life as citizens to boost support for themselves. One of Canada’s military boosters is Prime Minister Stephen Harper. In April, 2007, he told us that the Battle of Vimy Ridge is Canada’s creation story. Military Heroics. Bunker politics. Us against Them. The world, indeed seems more dangerous than ever, in the most intimate of environments. In daycares within Canada, the US, Britain and Australia, there is now video surveillance of very young children, easing we’re told, parental anxieties. Never mind cameras at intersections, in elevators. Cameras everywhere. In Baltimore, they’ve gone further. Based on an idea from Glasgow, Scotland, blue flashing lights have been installed around Baltimore - to signal: this is a high-crime neighbourhood.

A grant worth millions of dollars from the United States Department of Homeland Security has helped pay for Baltimore’s video fortress. That video is streamed into the Baltimore Police Depatments “Watch Centre”. In New York City and London, England similar surveillance is called, “The Ring of Steel”.

Britain has 4 million cameras trained on it’s citizens. The country’s information commissioner has publicly stated the British are sleepwalking into a surveillance society. One study revealed a single person in London, going about their business would be filmed about 300 times in one day. But what are we to make of all of this? We know that video cameras can, in specific situations, help solve crimes but must everybody be watched all the time? And what’s at stake?

listen to the show at...
www.cbc.ca