Integration of Surveillance Technology into Strategies of State Control by Public Order in the UK - Essay Example

How are surveillance technology integrated into strategies of control by public order in UK? How are surveillance technology integrated into strategies of state control by public order in UK? Journalism involves observing people’s action then reporting their activities using the right channel of communication. Journalism relates to surveillance largely because there is observation from a distance then transmitting the information to a particular common point. Surveillance involves monitoring the behaviour of people for the purpose of influencing, directing or protecting these people. Therefore, this paper presents the integration of surveillance of technology into the strategy of the state control in UK. It will unravel the extent to which, the public influence the integration process of surveillance technology in the UK. Surveillance technology distinguishes itself from other security by ensuring that the state can control its strategies on the people using remotely managed facilities from anywhere around the world (White, 2007, p. 63). The technology integration offers an unmatched parts and labour warranty at no additional cost. The public influences the state in its control strategy to integrate surveillance technology. A public order through mass media is a platform that journalist can create to help communicating the benefits of adopting surveillance technology. Monitoring employees’ productivity, loss prevention, vandalism and shoplifting just to mention but a few, are some of the benefits surveillance can achieve. In addition, the state can also use surveillance technology to control and protect the occurrence of crime (Freifeld et al, 2014, p. 343). Therefore, integration of surveillance technology has more benefits than dangers and this gives a justification in its adoption by the state. Over the years, there have been enough evidence that most state controls agencies relies on mass surveillance technologies to facilitate control of citizen’s behaviour. As asserted by Uke and Thool (2014, p. 22) software enable the state to spy on their citizens in order to protect, influence, direct or manage their activities within the measures containable. The use of mass surveillance is at broad reach to the UK government. This is because the government has a variety of technologies to use in tracking the movement of its citizens. All the entire information received goes through scrutiny before organizing it into a massive scale, which spy on every person in the entire country (Omtzigt, 2015, P. 5). The argument on whether to adopt the use of surveillance in state control in UK was justified by the public complains over fraud cases, which become rampant. In a study conducted by the University of Florida, they found out that retail security managers attributed more than 50 percent of their losses to thefts from works. This percentage loss is a combination of losses from both the shoplifters and employees. In addition, the UK retailers report an internal theft of over $ 15 billion annually to shoplifters and employees. Because of this, the affected public retailers demanded for the adoption of surveillance technologies to monitor citizens’ movements. The demand by the public for the adoption of mass surveillance technology was a justification for its integration into state control activities. The uses of Surveillance technology have no limitation (Freifeld et al, 2014, p. 344). They have been important in problem –oriented policing especially in preventing crime. In addition, the installation of such devices in traffic cars help to identify traffic laws violators. All these instances qualifies surveillance technologies to be very important and hence their relevance adoption into use. Integration of surveillance technology into State control The surveillance technologies uses the closed circuit television (CCTV) systems to provide monitoring services to citizens’ activities. The installation of CCTV system is at various places to provide a watch over to citizens by surveillance technology. The systems are in many commercial and semi-public establishments, which include banks, stores, casino, shopping malls and any other relevant point. The CCTV systems fall under video surveillance technology, which has other very important devices that aim at providing surveillance services. As asserted by Freifeld et al (2014, p. 345), during surveillance, observation is by means of electronic equipments such as CCTV cameras, internet traffic and phone calls among others. The adoption of surveillance by the government it is important in intelligence gathering, investigating a crime, preventing a crime and protection of a process. In as a much as surveillance is a violation of privacy, there is need to put up policies that oppose its integration especially opposition from civil liberties groups and activists. On the matter of surveillance, the government need to be authoritative to limit circumstances where liberal democracies try to challenge the laws by advocating for the public privacy. The potential of integration of surveillance technology is broad. There are potential ways and devices that the government can use to ensure safety during surveillance. The UK government can listen to phone calls, read emails, use of voice recognition to scan the area of device network, censor web pages and use of GPS. The combination on the use of all these devices ensures a good surveillance that aim to protect people, combat crime and identify law violators from various department. Surveillance technology integration have quite a number of benefits to the state in its role of controlling various activities within the government. The state need to control activities of its citizens as well as the industrial activities its people and this is achievable by integrating surveillance technologies (Freifeld et al, 2014, p. 347). Strategies of state control can be simpler with the use of surveillance technology. The state through the parliamentary system, need to formulate policies that protect those companies that are selling mass surveillance equipments. However, there should be steps to ensure that the state is not assisting other foreign governments in committing gross human rights violation against their own people. In order to achieve full integration of surveillance, there is need for various departments in UK to work in close consultations with technology providers such as Cisco systems. Cisco Systems is one of the well-known technology firms for dealing with quality surveillance equipments. However, the UK government need to streamline her political system in order not to protect the human rights activist. For example, in many countries where the adoption of surveillance has been successful, human rights activist have sued Cisco Systems on claim of selling surveillance equipments, which violates people basic rights (Reitman, 2011, p. 1). Development in Surveillance technology There are many reports written by government and the surveillance society on development of the technology since its inception (Kakachia, Pataraia & Cecire, 2014, p. 276). The report tries to gauge the changes between the original report during the installation of the original of the technology devices and the present day. The report gives an authoritative account of the modern trends and the development in surveillance in UK. Thereafter, the report provide a conclusion on the implemented regulations because of the developments in surveillance. The report gives a description of the information collected on an individual and government databases on increased use of CCTV and other allied technology (Kakachia, Pataraia & Cecire, 2014, p. 278). It is very evident that there is increase in sophisticated combination and analysis as well as sharing the gathered information among people. There are technicalities in sorting out individuals into different categories because of the presence of privacy risks, which increases personal information more widely. This is mainly due to significance of challenges that social networking creates thereby challenging the development of surveillance technology. Therefore, in order to have a full achievement on adoption of surveillance technology, the government need to take full control and become authoritative on the surveillance information. The development analysis of surveillance has an impact of host privacy and human right issues. The increased analysis of information and profiling of individuals has given rise to these two impacts issues. The two issues tries to undermine transparency and accountability of information gathered hence worsening still the boundary between private and public sectors. This is because the regulators who work on surveillance information have limited powers at their disposal to keep up with the influence on the outcome. Therefore, there is need to allow independency on surveillance regulators in order to expect good work from them. In addition, surveillance regulators need much attention to look into how the regulatory landscape has transformed now and how likely it will change in future. It is true that the quality of debate from parliament surrounding surveillance integration and development is hampering the right consideration. This results into a constant challenge in anticipating and controlling new surveillance development. The enclosure of surveillance issues pose a challenge and continue to be more difficult due to claims and counterclaims on the dangers and benefits of surveillance. Therefore, in order to improve integration of surveillance technology, the parliamentary and regulatory bodies need to improve with less exaggeration of the potential dangers as well as benefits of surveillance technology. It is worth noting that to improve surveillance technology into a better level, there is need to put effort of convening debate among the public, media, journalist and political representative. This is because surveillance technology integration is becoming an election issue and every incoming government would want to address (Kakachia, Pataraia & Cecire, 2014, p. 266). There are several other areas where surveillance technology needs intensification and expansion. For example, other technologies that the government and the public used to speculate have moved into mainstream use. The adoption of these other technology came because of linking and sharing of data from different database gathered on surveillance. There is also development of facial recognition and private date gathering, analysis and increased sharing of information has made the adoption of surveillance technology integration possible. There is need to put much efforts in developing ubiquitous computing, deployment of sensing equipments, and more use of analytical tools. This will improve the integration and more use of surveillance technology to predict human behaviour (UK defence and security report, 2015, p. 321). Achieving this will continue to challenge the existing regulatory selection and traditional assumptions that thwarted much the adoption of surveillance technology in UK. High use technology devices will increase information gathering on surveillance among the private and public sectors including the government. High information gathering among UK citizens and the government will improve the adoption and integration of the surveillance technology in UK. The regulation in surveillance technology and the awareness of the public, need to keep in pace with surveillance development. Both public and private sectors affected by lack of surveillance technology around them need to join and together to reduce the powers within regulatory bodies that are thwarting surveillance technology integration. Efforts of public and private sectors are very important in changing the culture in personal information practices. Their incorporation will positively affect other proactive assessments thereby increasing the interest of surveillance use (ICO, 2014, p. 6). There should be government intervention to help solve the questions of current legal instrument on data protection, gathering and human right have the robust enough to thwart surveillance. There is need to solve a number of pending issues with the domestic and European level on excessive collection of data on surveillance. Solving all the pending issues will clear unnecessary restrictions on data gathering hence the use of surveillance technology. Journalist role in surveillance technology adoption Journalism plays a very important role in ensuring the full integration of surveillance technology. They can create awareness to the public, private sectors and citizens at large on the importance of using surveillance. Journalist through the media can communicate to the public on the need why the state should integrate surveillance technology to control people’s behaviour. The media has a sole role of convincing the public how use of surveillance technology will not infringe into their human rights and privacy but instead a very important way of protecting the citizens from criminal activities (Lowenthal, 2015, p. 1). Through media intervention, it is easy for the citizens to accept the principle that the process of state control on people’s activities requires the process of innovation of new control system. The use of these new control systems require both social that is represented by the public and political that is represented by the parliamentary to ensure transparency. The media on behalf of the journalist acts to mediate between the social and political systems on the different interactions of the people on surveillance technology integration be the state (Uke & Thool, 2014, p. 34). There should be efficient communication between the parliament, public and private sectors on issues of surveillance technology (UK defence and security report, 2015, p. 325). This kind of communication is only achievable by the media. The media need to give consideration to various committees as well as relevant procedures that are need to ensure that the UK citizens have the right information on the issues relating to technologies (Rush et al., 2013, p. 54). The journalist may research upon the mode of informing the citizens in order to ensure swift flow of information on state control on particular issues. The media can provide the right platform of providing civil education on behalf of the state to control citizens’ movements. They are also capable of convincing the public why there is need to have such education. As explained by Uke and Thool (2014, p. 39) through coming up with relevant programmes on how to educate the public, journalists need to explain exhaustively to the public the difference between civil liberty, human rights and whether these two aspects signifies oppression. In doing this, the state will achieve its desire to control surveillance technologies. Therefore, the use and development in surveillance technologies, which include data-veillance, CCTV cameras, electronic eavesdropping, human recognition and other tracking devices, will become achievable. In conclusion, mass media plays a very big role in ensuring the full integration of surveillance technology into state control. The mass media acts as a connection between private and public sectors with the state. The achievement of mediation is through provision of a platform where the public and the government can exchange information on surveillance technologies. The public also has a role in influencing the state decision and other regulatory bodies of the state on the dangers and benefits of surveillance. Therefore, for successful surveillance technology integration into state control strategies, there is need of the public involvement in influencing the course of action on surveillance technologies adoption. Bibliography Freifeld, C, Brownstein, J, Menone, C, Bao, W, Filice, R, Kass-Hout, T, & Dasgupta, N 2014, Digital Drug Safety Surveillance: Monitoring Pharmaceutical Products in Twitter, Drug Safety, 37, 5, p. 343-350, Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost, viewed 29 April 2015. Information Communication Office (ICO). 2014. In the picture: A data protection code of practice for surveillance cameras and personal information. Web. April 30, 2015. 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