How do you fight a surveillance state?

Beyond Today

BBC

News

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 10 October 2019

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We have never lived in a more closely monitored world. Facial recognition technology is being rolled globally, including across the UK. Data can be acquired without a person’s knowledge, let alone their consent. There is a creeping paranoia and concern among human rights experts that advanced surveillance technology could fall into the wrong hands. We speak to Lokman Tsui, a tech expert and university lecturer in Hong Kong, who is living the midst of an increasingly violent protest movement paranoid about surveillance. We also catch up with Newsnight’s Gabriel Gatehouse, who has just got back from Hong Kong, where he met the young people willing to sacrifice their lives to fight against what they believe to be the oppressive application of technology from mainland China. They both explain why there are lessons from Hong Kong for all of us about the kind of technological future we want to live in.

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:04.6	Ella, I'm Tina Dehealey.
0:08.0	Welcome to Beyond Today from BBC Radio 4,
0:10.8	a space to ask one big question about one big story.
0:15.0	Today, how do you fight a surveillance state?
0:27.0	We've never lived in a more closely monitored world where our every move is being tracked.
0:37.0	Facial recognition technologies being rolled out across the UK,
0:41.0	the police national database now contains around 20 million faces.
0:47.6	Data can be acquired without a person's knowledge, let alone their consent.
0:52.4	Six million CCTV cameras in the UK.
0:56.0	Almost all of them are online and if they're online...
0:59.0	They can be hacked.
1:00.0	Doesn't seem like any of this bothers you.
1:02.0	I don't surprise me. Doesn't seem like any of this bothers you.
1:02.8	I don't surprise me.
1:04.8	The brother's watching us.
1:06.8	He's not just watching.
1:10.8	There's a creeping paranoia that advances in surveillance technology
1:16.3	could get into the wrong hands. So what happens when you live in a country where that paranoia is justified?
1:27.0	In a city full of cameras where the trust between the authorities and the public has completely broken down.
1:36.0	In my bag I'm going to put water in a towel and extra battery for a phone, right?
1:40.0	And an umbrella for sure because it protects us against rain, sunshine, tear gas.
	...

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