"Sheepdom" hardly seems apt -- what sheep polices the other sheep, after all? That's the dog's job, and in this case the dog wasn't doing it. This is an inevitable result of ubiquitous surveillance. As YouTube proves, we are far more adept at watching each other than the government could possibly be. In the future, it's not "Big Brother" that will be watching us, but millions of Little Brothers. Maybe that's a little creepy. On the other hand it can work both ways. And if the surveillance extends to the halls of government (and those who work in government) then we will have an unprecedented level of transparency into the workings of our democracy. We've already got C-SPAN -- what we need now are a hundred thousand webcams all over Washington. Especially in our representatives' offices. -- Dylan Tweney writer/editor dylan@tweney.com http://dylan.tweney.com David Farber wrote:

Begin forwarded message:

From: Greg Brooks <gregb@west-third.com> Date: August 4, 2006 1:36:42 AM EDT To: dave@farber.net Subject: When suburban moms embrace the surveillance society Reply-To: gregb@west-third.com

Dave, for IP if you wish.

There's an interesting piece in the Riverside (CA) Press-Enterprise [1] about a woman who got her house toilet papered and decided to hunt down the culprits. She didn't want to involve the police, reasoning that they had better things to do, so she took the following steps:

* She canvassed local stores to see which one had a run on toilet paper.

* She then got the manager of the store to show her surveillance videos, allowing her to see the personalized letterman's jacket of one of the purchasers, as well as the license plate of the vehicle they got into.

* Finally, she used a high school yearbook (matched to the school based on the letterman's jacket) and online databases to get the names, phone numbers and addresses of all the teens spotted in the store tapes.

To me, this is a bit more than a "talker" feature. One takeaway, IMHO, is that we're pretty far down the road to sheepdom when average citizens start thinking "well, everything's monitored all the time anyway - let's see if I can make use of that."

Warm Regards, Greg Brooks West Third Group

[1] http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/toilet_paper_caper

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