Big Brother Costs Households £800 a Year
Jul 8th, 2008 • Category: News In Brief
Contractor UK is amongst those highlighting a new report that shows the annual cost of the surveillance state to be around £800 per household:
http://www.contractoruk.com/news/003867.html
That’s a lot of money we pay for the “privilege” of being spied on. The full report can be downloaded from the TPA website:
http://tpa.typepad.com/waste/files/the_cost_of_big_brother_government.pdf
Related posts:
•A Bad Day for Big Brother
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I think you’ve made an important mistake in your note. The very first bullet point of the report says, “This is not an annual cost”.
That is a highly partial report. E.g. its reporting of the NPfIT scheme is blatantly dishonest and it presents a biased picture of government IT schemes in general. It uses the example of a Dutch metro card to imply that the encryption for the UK ID card has already been broken, whereas the problem with the Dutch scheme (and the London Oyster card, which uses the same technology) is that it is based on the flawed premise of “security through obscurity” rather than proper peer review. And it lumps “chip-and-bin” in with ID cards and CCTV, which is just silly.
The cost of all this technology is an important issue, but this is not a terribly good report. And I certainly don’t agree that the way to protect our liberty is to pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Thanks Dave, I managed to miss that point about it not being an annual figure. Whatever the current annual cost is I expect it to increase.
Like you I don’t agree with a lot of the report - for instance there seems to be an implicit criticism of the costs of legal appeals, which are an essential part of a fair justice system. And I certainly don’t think we should pull out of the ECHR though I would like to renegotiate it to allow deportation of convicted serious criminals to their country of origin even if that posed a risk.
For me the cost of the ID scheme is the least important criticism of it, unfortunately it seems to be the one that gets people interested.