More than 2,000 10 and 11-year-olds will see a short film (http://www.lancashiretelegraph.co.uk/news/blackburn/4425941.East_Lancashire_youngsters_see_film_on_ter rorism_danger/), which urges them to tell the police, their parents or a teacher if they hear anyone expressing extremist views.

One commenter remarked with the following Orwell quote:"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."What's also scary is that children are incredibly effective spies.

http://ayonae.com/img/secure_london.jpg

In East Germany, family members were cajoled into informing on their parents like this. My ex was from Cuba, where turning in your parents was honored by the government. Other countries that did this include the Soviet Union (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlik_Morozov) and the Third Reich.

In the movie Brazil, one background poster that shows up a few times is "Be a Good Citizen, Turn in a Friend."

And we'll see a lot more repetition of the McMartin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial) and Cleveland (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_child_abuse_scandal) scandals where the false memories surfaced into modern day witch hunts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_care_sex_abuse_hysteria).

I expect (or would hope I could expect) to hear some form of outcry against this, at least from the ACLU types in the world. And, seeing that it is being made common knowledge, aren't they now placing childrens' lives in danger if they should happen to be in close proximity to a "real-life" terrorist? Would the terrorist now be more inclined to silence any children that he, or she, may be concerned was spying on him, or her, due to the coaching to do so?

Parents should be storming the local government offices protesting this idiocy.

This has nothing to do with terrorism, for so many reasons, not the least of which being the statistical probability of any child seeing a terrorist is effectively zero. This is a national "rat out your family" effort right out of the Stasi's operating manual, and I have no idea how Britons are accepting this absurdity.

Time for Halo to raise up. So I can turn him in! bwahaha.

Similar things were encouraged of children here in the USA during Reagan and the war on drugs.

'More than 2,000 10 and 11-year-olds will see a short film, which urges them to tell the police, their parents or a teacher if they hear anyone expressing extremist views. '

- ROFL, well I do think you can blow this out of proportion. Showing 2000 kids a video as *part* of a 'safety' day, including messages about bullying, and crossing a road safely, is nothing too seriously Big Brother, IMO. Throwing in terrorism is, of course, odd (though perfectly understandable as its the West's new 'buz' word), but I don't see these kids plugged in to a system brain washing them to spy for the state, for godsake. If you've been to Lancashire, the odds of seeing a non-white British citizen are slim, to none! Which makes this more odd, than worrying.

In regards to the poster of cameras on the London buses - remember, London buses were blown up a couple of years ago in a serious terrorist attack. Since then there's been an outcry for better security on London public transport. That's...kinda understandable.

'“Officers also introduce the issues surrounding terrorism at a very basic level, which forms part of the wider presentation encouraging children to report any concerns around safety to their parents, teachers, or local police.”'

Same thing happened here much like Rover said, turn your parents in if you find their dope stash.

Similar things were encouraged of children here in the USA during Reagan and the war on drugs.

Hopefully the Brits will shit-can the notion as we have here in subsequent years.

'More than 2,000 10 and 11-year-olds will see a short film, which urges them to tell the police, their parents or a teacher if they hear anyone expressing extremist views. '

- ROFL, well I do think you can blow this out of proportion. Showing 2000 kids a video as *part* of a 'safety' day, including messages about bullying, and crossing a road safely, is nothing too seriously Big Brother, IMO. Throwing in terrorism is, of course, odd (though perfectly understandable as its the West's new 'buz' word), but I don't see these kids plugged in to a system brain washing them to spy for the state, for godsake. If you've been to Lancashire, the odds of seeing a non-white British citizen are slim, to none! Which makes this more odd, than worrying.

In regards to the poster of cameras on the London buses - remember, London buses were blown up a couple of years ago in a serious terrorist attack. Since then there's been an outcry for better security on London public transport. That's...kinda understandable.

'“Officers also introduce the issues surrounding terrorism at a very basic level, which forms part of the wider presentation encouraging children to report any concerns around safety to their parents, teachers, or local police.”'

I think the British love affair with the CCTV camera goes well beyond just covering buses and goes well into 1984 style surveillance, at least in London.

If the subject program is limited to just 2000 kids, then it isn't a big deal. Such programs have a way of going nationwide though if complaint isn't raised. Here is your chance to "just say no" to an informer state before someone gets the bright idea it needs to be standardized and spread throughout the country.

CCTV, and worse, are becoming *extremely* pervasive in Great Britain; London has the greatest number of CCTVs per square mile in the world. This seems to have been accepted by most of the adults with scarcely a whimper, usually sold under the auspices of 'protecting the public', and at a public school there recently, it fell to the students to make a fuss about CCTV being installed in their classrooms, the teachers having gone down without a fight, as this article a friend linked this week indicates:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/jun/03/cctv-classroom

Not only are CCTVs being installed in classrooms all over the country there, but the schools have used biometric (fingerprint) scanners for both their school lunchrooms and libraries since the early 2000s:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/jun/11/school-cctv-fingerprints

Because you know, terrorists might want your kid's chicken nuggets!

The irony is that while the use of these biometric and CCTV systems are resulting in the educational experience in England being that of being in a perpetual surveillance state, the de facto motive for pushing all this technological surveillance isn't 'protecting the children', or accounting for school resources, or even surveillance for its own sake - it's profit. Contracts for school districts are lucrative and there's piles of grant money to be had, on both sides of the pond, for 'technology in the classroom' initiiatives, regardless of whether it actually provides any benefit to the students and 'keeping kids safe' almost always sells.

It's a terrible shame that Britain doesn't realize what they are selling off, what sort of chilling and generational effect all this surveillance has/will have on the populace, and there isn't that far to slide from where y'all are now to the expectation of *non* privacy and the recruitment and acknowledgement of informants as part of the fabric of life.

Regards,
Nydia

It's easy to point at the Brits and scoff (for so many reasons!), but the level of surveillance in any densely populated area here is fairly appalling as well.

I could certainly do without quite so many revenue generators, er I mean automated traffic cameras at intersections.

Actually, this isn't happening 'without a whimper'. It's been a controversial topic since at least 2001.

Here, for example, is a report from 2006:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/02_11_06_surveillance.pdf

I'll find another link I have in mind, from 2008, that reported camera surveillance was actually incredibly ineffective. I'll have a nose around.

I'll find another link I have in mind, from 2008, that reported camera surveillance was actually incredibly ineffective. I'll have a nose around.

Camera surveillance is incredibly ineffective at its stated purposes, but stupendously good at a lot of other ones.

I've tried to explain this before, but try to find rare events with mass surveillance is pointless. If you're looking for 5 people out of 10 million, you'll never find them (or more specifically you will find so many false positive matches as to ruin the results). On the other hand, if you're trying to build heuristic information on LOTS of people, or compile a database of the commons activities of nearly everyone to be analyzed later on a case by case basis, it's every Junior Stalin's wet dream.

There is pretty much no good that can come of these things. Even the most libertine agency out to give everyone sunshine and buttercups is never going to be able to resist the insidious utility of it (to think of the children, of course).

The charter school I worked for had camera's in all the classrooms watching 90% of the angles so that everything was recorded during the work day. The last project I was working on before we ran into an issue with the State Grade Reporting system was to put biometrics in all of the rooms for attendance purposes. We also were putting them at the restroom and office area's to track the amount of time the kids were spending in the classroom or out and about. The parents of our students appreciate the fact that we can tell them where their kid is at almost any given point of the day, and we have had alot less theft and tagging go on since we have installed them. Now if only we could get these kids to pass the damned standardized test, stop doing drugs, stop being wannabe gang bangers, and become productive members of our society the school would be accomplishing their mission.