If you ask a politician assigned to security matters today what he or she thinks about the surveillance techniques used to prevent crime, there’s a good chance that you’d be told about the benefits of closed circuit camera systems. You’d here convincing arguments about the additional safety in their vicinity because they act as a crime deterrent, Or you might here about the virtue of being able to track terrorists, by filing information about airline passengers, or by enforcing the use of biometric passports. Maybe you’d find out how trusted computing protects you from malicious software and viruses. Or how scanning emails and eavesdropping on phone calls helps the police find potential criminals of all kinds. It would probably all sound great, because the idea is that you should start thinking of these techniques as being the cream of the crop. But let’s face the not quite so obvious but nevertheless omnipresent downside of this. While public cameras may actually help these defined criminals, modern CCTV systems like the ones used in London, are even today able to lock onto any person the operators wish to track using automatic facial identification, thus enabling the police to create a detailed database of say all of your movements. The keeping of records about airline passengers flying to the U.S. and in addition the obligation for everyone to submit biometric passports, are supposed to help fight terrorism. But this also allows the secret services to gather explicit information about the nationality of every traveler. Explicit information such as your fingerprints, the color of your eyes, and a high resolution picture of your face. Information you would usually expect to be taken from suspected criminals.

Trusted computing promises to enhance security on your PC, by only allowing certain trustworthy software to run on your machine. What you’re not told is that the person who decides which software you can trust, and are therefore allowed to install on your PC, will certainly not be you. On the one hand, scanning emails and wiretapping emails for ominous keywords, could convict a few small time criminals, but on the other it allows all sorts of people involved in this monitoring process to retrieve all sorts of private information. Information you just might not want to share with the staff of your local police station.

These symptoms can all be taken as evidence of the slow but steady conversion of our western societies into police states. Our western societies, claiming to be liberal democracies, but our leaders try to enforce more and more pressive laws and instrumentalize public fear of terror to justify them.

Stop the big brother state.