Who's Watching You?

As they said every week on The Six Million Dollar Man (what kind of cyborg would that buy you these days?), we have the technology. And once we have the technology, it is going to be abused. Why? Because, with the possible exception of the electric toaster, new technology always is. Richard Bilton's almost light-hearted documentary Who's Watching You? was not a warning against a future Big Brother state but a description of the one that already exists. In a sense it is a brave new world. CCTV, drone cameras, number plate recognition devices and the web's ability to link up and cross-reference digitally managed databases is producing better clear-up rates for violent crimes, litterless town centres, joined-up public services and neighbourhoods in which people feel safer.

The problem, as Marshall McLuhan so nearly wrote, is the medium is the mess-up. With every innovation there is a new opportunity for it to be applied unfairly, bulgingly or carelessly. Bilton yesterday produced a genuine scoop with his revelation that there had been a cover-up over the seriousness of the loss of personnel information from RAF Innsworth last year. The 500 files contained details of affairs, debt and drug use; “excellent material,” as an internal MoD memo admitted, “for foreign intelligence services and blackmailers”.

It ill behoves a journalist, of course, to bemoan the coming of a more transparent society. Most good journalism, as well as plenty of bad, is intrusive. But journalists work within the law and consent of their readers. The state seems to be making it up as it goes along. In Middlesbrough a disembodied voice commanded a young woman scattering leaves from a pile of Yellow Pages to place them in a bin (she lowered her trousers at the camera). In Brighton, police using number plate recognition flagged down a couple travelling to a protest. In North London a 16-year-old girl who looked 20 was paid by trading standards to buy a carving knife from a local shop (“There's no such thing as entrapment,” said the head of trading standards merrily.) In Lancashire undercover dog walkers appeared to be on a mission to spy on an eccentric who liked to take his nine dogs walking on to the beach. Talk about sledgehammers and nuts. But most strikingly of all, in Dorset Tim Joyce, Jenny Paton and their children were put under surveillance by Poole Borough Council for more than two weeks. Their plan was to catch them only pretending to live in the house they had moved to in an attempt to “play” the school catchment areas system. These abuses were carried out under the auspices of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. A grim RIPA indeed.

Bilton's conclusion to a programme itself a little in love with the new tech (he did not go anywhere without the accompaniment of Spooks-style beeps and fuzzy screen grabs) was that that the march of surveillance was unstoppable but we needed to know who was watching us. I think he underestimated the enormity of what he had discovered and the different kind of Britain it was producing. No wonder we citizens are now fighting back by snapping Big Brother's bossy, clumsy backside on our mobile phones. The solution may be mutually assured observation.

Going Postal

Lionel Shriver's excellent novel We Need to Talk About Kevin propagated the bad seed view of high school massacres. Some kids were just born bad. Going Postal was a long, not entirely coherent documentary by Paul Tickell determined to look in another way at a phenomenon that started in the early Eighties when disgruntled postal workers started shooting at their colleagues and continued spraying blood into the commercial and educational worlds. It identified numerous triggers that could turn the mentally unstable into mass killers, among them the prevalence of guns, a culture where violence is celebrated, the rough justice of Reaganomics where more loyal workers lost their jobs with less compensation and static, insular communities - cosy if you fitted in to them, hellish if you failed to. What was not examined was the copy-cat effect generated by media attention. Although it was irresistibly interesting to hear Michael Carneal, the killer of three fellow students in 1997, describe what was passing through his addled mind at the time, you wondered if someone who had killed in a frantic search for status should later be rewarded by the sympathetic attentions of television. Carneal hoped this “life-defining moment” did not “define him”. Huh?

Bank Holiday Mondays, bringing a gap where Newsnight usually lies, allow BBC Two to take more considered views of our strange world. Both last night's documentaries made full use of the opportunity. The channel, under Janice Hadlow, is generally regaining some of its clout, intelligence and confidence. Friday's Off By Heart poetry recital contest was a case in point, although I mention it again mainly because the winner's father, Massoud Qafouri, has kindly written pointing out that his family is from Iran not Afghanistan. My apologies to him, but my congratulations too, on his inspiring son, Yazdan.

andrew.billen@thetimes.co.uk

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