London 2006, Meet 1984

London 2006, Meet 1984: "By tim Slashdot reports this morning on disturbing news from the UK, the front lines of the surveillance society, under the title London 2006, Meet London 1984: 'Shoreditch TV is an experiment[al] TV channel beaming live footage from the street into people's homes. According to the Telegraph, U.K. television will broadcast from 400 surveillance cameras on the streets, into peoples homes. For now they are only showing it to 22,000 homes, but next year they plan on going national with the 'show'. They fly under the flag 'fighting crime from the sofa'.' 1984 indeed. I don't know whether to be horrified by the rise of the surveillance society, or excited by the headlong rush to a future long imagined by science-fiction. There's a part of me that always regards news from the future with excitement, whether its good or bad, because times of change are interesting times, times when we are called on to act. David Brin's book , or Simson Garfinkel's Database Nation are both appropriate re-reads in the face of this trend. "