March 3, 2008

The Last Enemy: A New BBC Thriller

Peter Tatchell of The Guardian reviews the BBC1 series The Last Enemy, finding it a cautionary tale.
Like millions of other viewers, I was gripped last night by the latest plot twists in BBC1's thriller series The Last Enemy, which depicts the dystopian future of a complete surveillance society, where everyone is data-based, ID-carded and CCTV-monitored 24/7. It is Big Brother writ-large, with all-pervasive remote sensors, facial recognition software, iris scans, vehicle tracking and eavesdropping.

Through an integrated Total Information Awareness surveillance system, state agents can know almost everything about everyone at the tap of a keyboard: their movements, purchases, emails and phone calls - even their diet, income and house value.

Far-fetched? Only by degrees. What is really scary about The Last Enemy is that it features monitoring technologies that the government, police and intelligence services are already using or considering using.


Read the entire review here.

[Cross-posted to the Seamless Web].

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