Some modest proposals • June 8, 2013 6:01 AM
Given that it is now apparently OK that the state, out of benign concern for the risks we face from “terrorism”, maintains that it is in our interest that we should sacrifice privacy for “100% security”, perhaps we should consider some other programmes for helping protect us from risks?
Of course the risk from terrorism is actually tiny, so perhaps we should focus on other risks which are much more significant? I’m thinking of perhaps cars and obesity?
Perhaps we can have a “war on car death”. My basic proposal is that all cars, roads, filling stations, car parks, drivers, and garages and car production factories would be covertly instrumented in a secret programme by the state. It would not be in our interest that we know this or that there should be oversight over the programme. We should trust the state. Every journey, every turn, who is in the car, where they start, where they go, how much fuel is used, the kind of car, the various accelerations, the other cars they were near, what is loaded into the car and what is taken out, the use of the controls, the lights, the indicators and so on would all be recorded. A secret department of the state would monitor all of this information, to calculate who was a risk to themselves and to others. We could not be told that this is happening, because it might reduce the effectiveness of the programme. Agencies of the state could detain drivers who were thought to be a risk to themselves or others, they could be prevented from driving on motorways for instance, or they could be subject to detention, or denied a driving license. This could save thousands of lives a year. Deaths though road traffic accidents hugely outweigh those from terrorism, so this seems like a very sensible approach.
On the “War on obesity”, this would unfold in a similar way. A secret programme of surveillance, all bathroom scales, weighing machines, etc. would be instrumented and feed data to a central repository. All food items would be RFID tagged with a unique identifier. All public places, would be instrumented with photographic recording systems which would covertly identify people from the images, identify body mass index deviations. All purchases in shops would be logged and recorded, and correlated against a means of payment. All health systems would be required to be integrated with portals that allow the state to extract records of medical examinations and any data e.g. height, body mass etc. A huge data centre and various correlation mechanisms could then be constructed to harvest all the data, and alerts triggered when people were thought to be either risking their own health or that of other people. These people who are a risk to themselves and others could be collected together and detained for re-education, compulsory exercise classes, and training in how to cook healthy meals. This could save many thousands of lives every year and reduce our requirement for doctors, nurses, hospitals, medication etc saving huge sums of money.
These two programmes could save many orders of magnitude more lives than the state surveillance that protects us from terrorism. Something should be done, and this is something, so let’s get on with it and accept that if we want to be 100% safe in our cars and 100% not at risk from an early death through obesity, then we should welcome this benign intervention by the state to protect us.