Surveillance

Wednesday

Ross Clark

The authoritarianism of British Transport Police

When our freedoms are being taken away we are like the proverbial frog boiled alive in water where the temperature is slowly brought to boiling point. Who batted an eyelid in June when it was reported that rail companies are drawing up plans to abolish paper rail tickets and have us all travel with e-tickets instead? Who picked up on today’s story that explains one of the reasons why the police are so keen to switch us to e-ticketing? Lucy D’Orsi, chief constable of the British Transport Police, says her force wants access to data from passengers’ mobile phones and bank cards so that it can track us around the

Thursday

Sam Leith

Pre-crime has arrived in China

The idea of ‘pre-crime’ was popularised by Philip K. Dick’s story ‘The Minority Report’ and the 2002 Steven Spielberg film based on it. Here was a vision of a shudderingly paranoiac technological dystopia in which you could be arrested for something you haven’t even done yet. Not so science-fictional as all that. ‘Pre-criminal’ is the phrase — apparently one in official currency — that’s used of the protagonist of the story with which Darren Byler begins his chilling short book. Vera Zhou was a student of Byler’s at the University of Washington. A member of the Chinese Muslim Hui population, she was walking through a crowded street in her home