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Mass surveillance is the surveillance of all or a substantial fraction of, the entire population. Mass surveillance may be done either with or without the consent of those under surveillance, and may or may not be in their interest. For example, the monitoring of the population for disease in epidemiology, would generally be viewed as a benign form of mass surveillance, but a network of secret police informers would not.
1 Involuntary mass surveillance
Amongst the western democracies, the United Kingdom is perhaps the country subject to the most surveillance. Indeed, in 2004 the Government's own Information Commissioner, talking about the proposed British national identity database stated, "My anxiety is that we don't sleepwalk into a surveillance society." Other databases causing him concern are the National Child Database, the Office for National Statistics' Citizen’s Information Project , and the Department of Health's NHS database.
In 2004 it is estimated that the country is monitored by some four million CCTV cameras, some with a facial recognitionA facial recognition system is a computer driven application for automatically identifying a person from a digital image. It does that by comparing selected facial features in the live image and a facial database. It is typically used for security systems capacity, with practically all town centers under surveillance. The British PoliceThe British Police Police services in the United Kingdom. History While constables had existed since Saxon times the creation of a police force comparable to modern structures did not come about until the early 19th century, with the introduction of a nat hold records of 5.5 million fingerprints and 2.5 million DNADeoxyribonucleic acid DNA is a nucleic acid which carries genetic instructions for the biological development of all cellular forms of life and many viruses. DNA is sometimes referred to as the molecule of heredity as it is inherited and used to propagate samples. In LondonLondon is the capital of the United Kingdom and of England, and with over seven million inhabitants in the Greater London area, is the second-most populous conurbation in Europe (after Moscow). From being Londinium the capital of the Roman province of Bri, the Oyster cardThe Oyster card is a new form of electronic ticketing, designed for use on Transport for London services and National Rail services within the Greater London area. Oyster cards can be used to store both period travelcards (of one week or more) and a pay-a payment system [1] tracks the movement of individul people through the public transporttaxi serving as a bus Public transport comprises all transport systems in which the passengers do not travel in their own vehicles. It is also called public transit or mass transit . While it is generally taken to mean rail and bus services, wider definit system, while the London Congestion Chargeroundabout can learn which places have congestion charges by reading the signs. The London Congestion Charge is a fee that is charged to motorists entering the Central London area. London was not the first city to adopt congestion charging, but it is curr uses computer imaging to track car number plates. There are also plans to track all road vehicles nationally using vehicle telematics systems for road charging; see vehicle excise duty.
