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Spooks: promoting the human face of recognition software

16.10.07
at 22:44

tagged with:

surveillance state

Hmmm. I've just been watching the new Spooks series. I won't give too much away but I was interested to see that they portrayed the security services using CCTV in London with facial recognition software to identify people they wanted to get to hospital for life-saving tests and vaccination.

I guess this is supposed to make us feel that such software and equipment has benign uses. But of course for this method to work, it needs a databank of facial images as large as the ID cards biometric database.

Does the Home Office use BBC drama to get its points across? Or is this genuinely independent fiction? Either way, it seems to promote more creep, creep, creep in our lives...

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Of course I've noticed

On 18.10.07 at 09:32 Jock said:

Of course I've noticed similar "messages" on many other shows - often soaps. But I always got the impression that the Spooks lot might actually be quite anti-stablishment - certainly in the way they seem to portray the security services as often the only thing that keeps us safe from our political masters' wanton stupidity anyway...:)

Does the Home Office use BBC

On 17.10.07 at 14:55 Matt (not verified) said:

Does the Home Office use BBC drama to get its points across?

I was an IT security consultant for many years, so was basically paid to be paranoid (a cynic might say paid to sell paranoia), and I've wondered the exact same thing for many years.

Spooks was perhaps the most obvious of these on UK TV, but I've seen the same types of things on Australian and American shows. The shows 24, Threat Matrix and E-Ring spring to mind (the last 2 of which I was a fan of) - and all are part of the new breed of post-9/11 "national security" shows that have a heavy "invasive technology is actually good" or "we have to do bad things to stop the bad guys" content that I'm inclined to think is meant to sway viewer opinion on things like Extraordinary Rendition and other "ends justify the means" activities.

Or maybe I spent too long working in security...