Where will it end ?
I would hope somewhere similar to where this started because there are things we could all do about it. But knowing what we can do requires we understand the problem, and our paths of least resistance are our own worst enemies. My own view is that to achieve anything we need to change our own attitudes towards privacy starting with the semantics of 'us' and 'them' because the enemy is staring at us whenever we look in a mirror.
Every move someone could have made in 1948 when Orwell's 1984 was written was covertly observable. Your letters could be steamed open and your telephone could be monitored 24x7. Everywhere you went, who you met and everything you purchased could have been known in detail. But this level of surveillance against a single individual was expensive, requiring round the clock teams involving 3-4 agents active on all shifts, perhaps a team of 12 to carry out full surveillance of one individual. So the state surveills few to this degree. Tyrannies with larger secret police forces do it more, and extend cheaper surviellance to everyone, by making it impossible to live without committing minor crimes with major penalties. Those caught are coerced into spying on their neighbours, relatives and friends through the threat of prosecution. But informant networks based on coercion and fear tend to report what the hearer wants to hear.
The problem concerns how many people state surveillance can affect in practice, and how much it costs the state to do it. It also concerns the centralisation of access to data which many of us collect on each other.
E.G I keep logs of email transactions on my server for myself and 4 other people. Theoretically I could be asked to hand these over, and if I neglected to keep data for the required period I could be in breach of current law. But it is implausible that the state will go after records on tiny systems like mine unless I have very good reason to want to cooperate, because someone looking after the email logs of millions of users is less likely to squeak or obstruct. Also if it costs much securely to tap directly into a single email server for the purpose of automated and remote data collection without needing prior warrant, the state will pay to do this at the largest ISPs only. If they want data from the smaller ISPs they will have to ask which takes time and costs more.
The same applies to videocameras. Someone around the corner (let's call him Joe) may have installed a webcam looking at his own front path after he got burgled. While Joe keeps most of the data on his own disk, perhaps he uploads a still to his public facing website every minute or so. Chances are the local police might google his public facing website if something happens in his street. If they can do it is because Joe has deliberately put the stills where everyone and anyone can see. That's Joe's choice, but it arose from the behaviour of 'us' and not 'them'. The police are still unlikely to go after what Joe keeps on hard disk unless there is a serious local crime, in which event Joe will probably want to assist anyway. (A privately installed camera just round the corner from where I live caught someone recently putting a live cat into a wheelie bin and closing the lid on it).
So how do 'we' ensure that 'they' have the information we really want them to have at a cost sufficiently high so it is available for purposes we think are appropriate (our definition) and not for purposes we think inappropriate (e.g. use of RIPA to catch dog foulers) ? The Data Protection Act was one such attempt. Data collected for one purpose should not be used for another (with certain exceptions). As far as ANPR cameras are concerned, these systems have such great potential for abuse that limiting this needs politics as usual: campaigning, vigilance, letter writing etc. But the effects of ANPR could be mitigated if we preferred neighbourhood car pools instead of private cars most of the time, as knowing who was driving a particular car at a particular time and place would then also require a visit to the car pool record keeper. But it's very unlikely we'd choose to use car pooling mainly for this as opposed to for other reasons.
So use and setup smaller ISPs, use community currencies, run your own mailservers and VPNs etc, pool your cars and encrypt opportunistically whenever and wherever you can. But it's unlikely we will without other incentives because privacy tends always to be a secondary consideration and our willingness to have personal data collected about us is our own enemy here.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
