Move Over, Big Brother
1.Living without privacy, even in his bedroom, was no problem for Louis XIV. In fact, it was a way for the French king to demonstrate his absolute authority over even the most powerful members of the aristocracy. Each morning, they gathered to e the Sun King get up, pray, perform his bodily functions, choo his wig and so on.
韩国留学条件whateveryoulike2.裙子的英文怎么说Will this past—life without privacy—be our future? Many futurists, science fiction writers and privacy advocates believe so. Big Brother, they have long warned, is watching. Clod-circuit television cameras often track your moves; your mobile phone reveals your location; your transit pass and credit cards leave digital trails. Now there is the possibility that citizens are being watched.
3.But in the past few years, something strange has happened. Thanks to the spread of mobile phones, digital cameras and the internet, surveillance technology has become far more widely available. Bruce Schneier, a curity guru, argues that a combination of forces—the miniaturisation of surveillance technologies, the falling price of digital storage and eve
r more sophisticated systems able to sort through large amounts of information—means that “surveillance abilities that ud to be limited to governments are now, or soon will be, in the hands of everyone.”
4.Digital technologies, such as camera phones and the internet, are very different from their analogue counterparts. A digital image, unlike a conventional photograph, can be quickly and easily copied and distributed around the world. Another important difference is that digital devices are far more widespread. Most people take their camera phones with them everywhere.octavia
5.The speed and ubiquity of digital cameras lets them do things that film-bad cameras could not. In October, for example, the victim of a robbery in Nashville, Tenne, ud his camera-phone to take pictures of the thief and his getaway vehicle. The images were shown to the police, who broadcast descriptions of the man and his truck, leading to his arrest ten minutes later.
6.The democratisation of surveillance is a mixed blessing, however. Camera phones hav方面的英文
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e led to voyeurisms and new legislation to strengthen people’s rights to their own image. In September, America’s Congress pasd the “Video Voyeurism Prevention Act”, which prohibits the photography of various parts of people’s unclothed bodies or undergarments without their connt. The legislation was prompted both by the spread of camera-phones and the growing incidence of hidden cameras in bedrooms, public showers, toilets and locker rooms. Similarly, Germany’s parliament has pasd a bill that outlaws unauthorized photos within buildings. In Saudi Arabia, the import and sale of camera-phones has been banned, and religious authorities have denounced them for “spreading obscenity”. South Korea’s government has ordered manufacturers to design new phones so that they beep when taking a picture.
7.There are also concerns about the u of digital cameras and camera-phones for industrial espionage. Sprint, an American mobile operator, is now offering one of its best-lling phones without a camera in respon to demands from its corporate customers, many of which have banned cameras in their workplaces. Some firms make visitors and staff leave camera-phones at the entrance of rearch and manufacturing facilities—inclu
ding Samsung, the South Korean company that pioneered the camera phone.
8.Cheap surveillance technology facilitates other sorts of crime. Two employees at a petrol station in British Columbia, for example, installed a hidden camera in the ceiling above a card reader, and recorded the personal identification numbers of thousands of people. They also installed a device to “skim” account details from urs as they swiped their plastic cards. The two men gathered the account details of over 6,000 people and forged 1,000 bank cards before being caught.
姚明的翻译9.But the spread of surveillance technology also has its benefits. In particular, it can enhance transparency and accountability. More and more video cameras can be found in schools, for example. Web-bad rvices such link to cameras in hundreds of American child-care centers, so that parents can e what their offspring (and tho looking after them) are up to. Schools are also putting webcams in their classrooms. And tech firms such as Google have put webcams in their staff restaurants, so employees can delay going to lunch if they e a long queue.
10.Steve Mann, a professor at the University of Toronto, calls the spread of citizen surveillance “sousveillance”—becau most cameras no longer watch from above, but from eye level. Instead of being on top of buildings and attached to room ceilings, cameras are now carried by ordinary people. The video images of Rodney King being assaulted by police officers and the horrific pictures of prisoner abu from the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq are the best known examples.
11.情人节的英语Camera-phones could have a profound effect on the news media. Camera phones make everyone a potential news photographer. Unsurprisingly, old media is starting to embrace the trend. The San Diego Union-Tribune recently launched a website to gather camera-phone images of news events taken by their readers, and the BBC also encourages urs of its website to nd in pictures of news events.
desperate houwives12.Companies and governments will have to assume that there could be a camera or a microphone everywhere, all the time, argues Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future. Unsafe conditions in a factory or pollution at a chemical plant are harder to deny if they ar
e not just described, but shown in photos and videos. Animal-rights activists, for instance, operate online multimedia archives where people can store and view graphic images from chicken farms, slaughterhous and fur factories. Such material can cau outrage among consumers, as was the ca with videos of dolphins caught in tuna nets.
