Jonathan Raban On Open Source Last Night

Christopher Lydon's Open Source did a show last night, "One Nation, Under Surveillance," partially inspired by Jonathan Raban's new book Surveillance and his article in the Guardian, "We have mutated into a surveillance society -- and must share the blame."

If you missed KUOW's broadcast, you can check out the MP3.

You can also check out Raban's contributions to the show's comment thread, including this wrap-up:

An afterthought: we need to treat the word “surveillance” with care, and be alert to its many nuances. In “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” Jane Jacobs pointed out the value of a limited degree of surveillance. The safest streets are the ones with other people on them–potential witnesses, and, if you’re very lucky, rescuers. Surveillance ain’t all bad. The CCTV camera in the bank or the 7-11 serves a justified deterrent purpose, and so does the video monitor of the front doorstep in an apartment block. Search engines like Google are a wonderful boon when used properly. Adam spied on Eve and Eve on Adam. The limitless capacity of databases and the increasing ingenuity of dataminers are taking surveillance to unprecedented levels, and of course we need to control it with data protection acts of the kind that the European Union has passed, but which Britain stubbornly refuses to comply with. But surveillance per se is not to blame; it’s a useful tool, but dangerously easily adapted to immoral and illegal uses, whether by governments or individuals. To go back to the car analogy in my earlier post, it’s like handing over a fleet of Aston-Martins and Lotus Elises to a bunch of preteens…oh, the carnage! the carnage!