Monday 15 March 2010

The Anti-Surveillance Pledge

CCTV is an affront to our essential dignity and freedoms. To be kept under constant surveillance is to be held effectively in an open-prison. To combat this scourge of civil society, we would ask you to take the anti-surveillance pledge:

1) I shall work by lawful means and the appropriate democratic channels to safeguard society's inherent civil liberties.

2) I shall be willing to whistleblow against any misuse of public surveillance.

3) I shall not install or operate a CCTV system in any place where the public is at liberty freely to conduct their business (allowing exceptions for the insides of bank vaults, certain zones of MOD premises, warehouses closed at night etc.)

4) I shall not profit from the proceeds of this trade in human liberty.

5) I shall never work in the CCTV industry or for public safety partnerships that promote the use of routine public surveillance, save to subvert their illiberal aims.

6) I shall refuse to comment on CCTV images captured as part of routine surveillance of the general public and admitted as evidence into the trial proceedings.

7) I shall not watch television shows composed primarily of CCTV images used for entertainment and instructive purposes (including cop chase shows, rogue traders, dangerous streets) as these have the effect of inducing a fear of crime and normalising in the public's mind mass surveillance of society.