Mass surveillance

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.

Involuntary mass surveillance

Amongst the western democracies, the United Kingdom is perhaps the country subject to the most surveillance. Indeed, in 2004 the 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 recognition capacity, with practically all town centers under surveillance. The British Police hold records of 5.5 million fingerprints and 2.5 million DNA samples. In London, the Oyster card payment system tracks the movement of individul people through the public transport system, while the London Congestion Charge 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.

See also

• RFID
• Data retention
• HUMINT
• SIGINT
• Telephone tapping
• Vehicle telematics
• Nineteen Eighty-Four novel by George Orwell