I'm old enough to remember when my colleagues were vigourously expressing concern about the potential for Oyster cards to be used to track who was protesting where.

What remains astounding about the UK is how few people benefit from this enormous scale privacy invasion. David Cameron, while leader of the opposition, managed to get his bike stolen twice, and neither time did CCTV being literally everywhere help to find who did it. Given things like that you really have to wonder what is all the surveillance for exactly?

This news from the UK is concerning and the UK is slowly turning into a dystopia but still your reasoning is flawed.

The cameras are there to discourage crime and for use in court as evidence. Solving a crime still requires time and energy. Policing is a resources game.

So of course petty crimes are still going to be committed because it’s resource intensive to have someone monitor all the cameras. That is until it isn’t and you have a backlog of video footage of crimes and AI powerful enough to detect crimes being committed in real time. Even then though police work is still required if AI isn't using face or gait detection and/or these systems aren’t hooked up to a database that has linked identifiers to real people. But even those can be defeated with a bally and a limp.

There isn’t the resources to watch all of this cctv. Sure someone could spend weeks watching all the feeds in the city to track the thief down. But the cost quickly exceeds the value of the bike.

Something that’s changing with computer video and AI powered video search tools. I’m very in two minds about it. Being able to solve bike thefts would be great, but a lot of evil could come from a system that actually can monitor and sort through all this video.

> David Cameron, while leader of the opposition, managed to get his bike stolen twice, and neither time did CCTV being literally everywhere help to find who did it.

Are we talking about flock cameras and the disapparence of Nancy Guthrie?

Did that risk materialise? I suppose it would be only the same as credit cards. With a valid warrant authorities can gain access to information. But that's within a legal system designed by an elected parliament. I'm more concerned about ensuring the legal powers are checked and balanced, and stay that way.

Bugger Oyster and bugger CCTV! How well protected do you think all those video doorbells are?

Your comment is right minded but miss-guided.

You are right to insist on privacy but you failed to note that your neighbours are not twitching their curtains beyond noting your cat is crapping on their veg. To be fair, they probably are but those door cams are probably available in forn parts, way beyond Gladys at no 9's wildest dreams.

I'm old enough to remember Badgers flying across the UK! Those are fucking huge Russian four engined plodders, wheezing across at high altitude in an attempt to cow us into ... some sort of submission. Invariably a flight of Phantoms or Starfighters would whizz on up. In the good old days we'd strap a decent chap onto a firework called a Lightning. I did see a pair do that job - spectacular and I'm sure the pilots probably ended up swallowing their teeth.

Russia does steam punk in some bloody odd ways.

Anyway, I would avoid worrying about our state watching you and worry about other states instead.

I’m sure we can find a better anecdote than a bike being stolen…

Omniscient government surveillance in practice will be of far more use for harassment and suppressing political dissent than it ever will be used for the public good.

Illusion of Control. Oct 7th, 9/11, Snowden, Epstein are all examples of illusion being broken. The reactions are to restore illusion. But its getting harder and harder as things changes faster than reactions can happen. So we get Moises Naims prediction on the End of Power - power is easier to get, harder to use, easy to loose.