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They LOVE Big Brother
1/24/2007
There's a passage in George Orwell's 1984 where a character hiking in the woods is reluctant to utter any "inappropriate" speech for fear that he might be overheard by a hidden government microphone. I distinctly remember reading that section years ago and being amused at its improbability.
Oh ye of little faith. Read of the new "aggression detectors" in the U.K.:
The system works by putting microphones in CCTV cameras to continually analyze the sound in the surrounding area. If aggressive tones are picked up, an alarm signal is automatically sent to the police, who can zoom in the camera to the location of the suspect sound and investigate the situation.
It will only be a matter of time before computers armed with voice recognition software will be scanning day and night thru public conversations captured by such mics for "inappropriate" speech -- if they aren't already. We can label those the "dissent detectors" I suppose...
1/24/2007 | Permanent Link
