Surveillance and Human Freedom
Moral Maze
BBC
4.5 • 609 Ratings
🗓️ 18 July 2019
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Big Brother is watching you. George Orwell’s chilling words are now a reality. In China’s Xinjiang province, Uyghur Muslims have been described by one official as laboratory mice in an experiment of “advanced, predictive, algorithmic surveillance”. The comments were made to an undercover film-maker, whose documentary, “Inside the Chinese Digital Gulag”, airs this week. The film depicts a society based on phone surveillance apps and a vast network of cameras tracking individuals and even reading their body language to determine their ‘threat level’. The Chinese authorities insist these are necessary security measures; human rights watchers say they are inhuman. Closer to home, civil liberties campaigners are unhappy that several UK police forces are trying out facial recognition cameras. What level of state surveillance is morally acceptable in a liberal democracy? While we’re busy pondering that question, let’s not ignore the fact that most of us accept being spied upon in our own homes by our smartphones and computers. Some of us believe it is a price worth paying for convenience and inter-connectedness. Others warn that information is power and power corrupts. The recent eruption of dystopian drama on our TV screens could point to a deeper unease about the current threats posed to human freedom. Are we giving away too much control to artificial intelligence? Are we sleep-walking into our own Orwellian nightmare? And do we care?
Producer: Dan Tierney
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You are listening to a programme from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:03.4 | Good evening. There's a new-ish statue of George Orwell outside Broadcasting House, |
| 0:08.3 | looking for all the world like he's just popped out for a fag in the middle of a particularly miserable day. |
| 0:13.2 | It wasn't just working for the BBC that made him gloomy, though he didn't like it much. |
| 0:18.0 | He had a thoroughly dystopian view of humanity's future, |
| 0:20.6 | which he distilled |
| 0:21.5 | into that most chilling novel about the triumph of totalitarianism, 1984. It's taken several |
| 0:27.8 | decades longer than he thought, but if a documentary aired this week is to be believed, much of what |
| 0:33.0 | he feared and foresaw has come to pass in Xinjiang, a remote province in northwest China. |
| 0:39.0 | There, the Chinese have created a surveillance state to control and suppress the Muslim |
| 0:43.5 | Uyghur people. |
| 0:45.2 | It's armed with all the apparatus. |
| 0:46.8 | 21st century technology can provide facial recognition CCTV everywhere, an ecosystem of security apps, phones constantly monitored, movements |
| 0:56.9 | tracked, even barcodes on people's doors, so the ever-present security police can check |
| 1:02.3 | who is where. According to the Chinese state, it is necessary to counter terrorism. In echoes |
| 1:08.6 | of Orwell's Doublethink, they also say it's to improve human rights. |
| 1:14.0 | If we're shocked, we should look at ourselves. We have, without much demur, allowed, even encouraged. |
| 1:20.7 | Internet companies like Facebook to know more about us than any repressive regime of the past. |
| 1:26.4 | Even the Stasi, the KGB or the Gestapo, has known |
| 1:29.6 | about its citizens. Our phones now grass us up every minute of the day. Our state has been |
| 1:35.7 | trialling facial recognition software here. It all helps catch criminals, protect us from |
| 1:41.8 | terror. There are checks and balances here, but what level of |
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