<$BlogRSDURL$>

Official development blog for the PARANOIA roleplaying game. No description is available at your security clearance. The Computer is your friend.

Wednesday, October 08, 2008

PARANOIA in the real world: British IMP surveillance 

Having no particular pressing worries about its balance sheet in these prosperous times, the British government is spending 12.4 billion pounds (US$20 billion) on an awe-inspiring "Interception Modernisation Programme," a central database of every single phone call, e-mail, and web session in the UK.

Science fiction writer Charles Stross -- who, by the way, got his start writing for AD&D (he created the githyanki in a 1979 White Dwarf "Fiend Factory" column) -- tracks the many proliferating UK surveillance initiatives and offers a "big picture of life on Airstrip One in 2013":
When you leave your home you remember to take your mobile phone (which the government is tapping, as they do, and logging the location of to within 50-100 metres at all times) and your ID card (because if you're stopped by a police officer without it you can be fined, heavily). As you walk to your car, you are being recorded by the CCTV network, and ID'd by your gait or facial features. Your emotional state may also be monitored at this time for crude signs of aggression or depression that affect your posture or movement. When you get in your car and drive somewhere, your vehicle is tracked. You arrive at your place of work, where you are under CCTV surveillance by your employers' security staff, and your internet usage is both filtered and monitored by the government. Any email you send is cc'd to the big government database and scanned for suspicious content that may indicate criminal or terrorist (or just plain weird) activity. And when you get home again in the evening and slump in front of your laptop to surf the net, remember that our lords and masters have decided that the 1950s vintage Obscene Publications Act applies to fanfic, the definition of illegal 'extreme' pornography is so vague that you can be jailed for looking at images of sex acts that are legal, and you can be banged up for years if you accidentally stumble across a web site containing network monitoring tools or information useful to terrorists (a term with no set boundary, as Gerry Adams and Nelson Mandela can attest).

Stross adds, "And don't look to me for help; I'm either in prison or I fled the country some time ago."
Posted by: Allen Varney / 12:51 PM

Comments: Post a Comment

Copyright © 2004-2013 by Greg Costikyan and Eric Goldberg. All your rights are belong to us. No bloody Creative Commons here! Bwahahaha!
No, seriously. If you make non-commercial use of stuff here, that's fine, but we reserve all commercial rights, and all rights to prepare derivative material on things posted here. In addition, posters of comments must be aware that we reserve the right to use whatever material they post here, and/or derivative works therefrom, in PARANOIA, supplementary products, licensed products, or derivative work, without any compensation whatever, for all time to come and throughout this universe and any alternate universes that may be discovered. At our discretion, and without obligation, we may, if it strikes our fancy, make a good faith effort to credit you for stuff we use, but we can't promise it won't slip our minds, in the hurly-burly of meeting deadlines. (Actually, we intend to do that, but it's possible we'll screw up.) By posting comments, you grant us a non-revocable, perpetual, non-exclusive license to use whatever you post, in whatsoever fashion we deem useful, here or in any other forum, in PARANOIA or in any and all future products, including but not limited to derivative works, and specifically but not exclusively including the microbrewery beer, ale and porter; salty and sugary snack; and tattoo design rights deriving therefrom. Woohoo! Is that enough legalese for you? The Computer is Your Friend.

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?