According to Wired.com, following up a Sunday Express report, the British government plans to install and monitor CCTV cameras in 20,000 British homes. The government will spend 400 million pounds (the equivalent of $688 million) on the project.
The purpose? To monitor families, ensuring that the kids are doing their homework, going to bed early, and eating right. Moreover, according to the same report, the government will maintain a private army to be “sent round to carry out home checks.” Kids and parents will be forced to sign “behavior contracts” which will “set out parents’ duties to ensure children behave and do their homework.”
Ed Balls, long-time adviser to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Britain’s Secretary of State for Children, Schools, and Families, is behind the effort, which is to target antisocial families. His idea is that if children have more stable home lives, they will be less likely to get involved with drugs or become criminals.
There are already some 2,000 family homes with CCTV cameras monitoring the comings, goings, and daily doings of their inhabitants.
George Orwell’s 1984 featured telescreens that operated as windows into the homes of the subjects of the totalitarian government. Privacy had become a thing of the past.
The long and the short of it: George Orwell was right — about Great Britian, at least. He just had the date off by a quarter century. One can only wonder how long it will be before the Department of Homeland Security proposes something like that in the United States — to monitor “rightwing extremism,” of course.
