CCTV

EVERY car coming into Manchester is being snapped by a new network of police spy cameras. Each day, 600,000 motorists' journeys are being captured, and the data will be stored for five years.

This is how this Golden Shield will work: Chinese citizens will be watched around the clock through networked CCTV cameras and remote monitoring of computers. They will be listened to on their phone calls, monitored by digital voice-recognition technologies. Their Internet access will be aggressively limited through the country's notorious system of online controls known as the "Great Firewall." Their movements will be tracked through national ID cards with scannable computer chips and photos that are instantly uploaded to police databases and linked to their holder's personal data. This is the most important element of all: linking all these tools together in a massive, searchable database of names, photos, residency information, work history and biometric data. When Golden Shield is finished, there will be a photo in those databases for every person in China: 1.3 billion faces.

Imagine a world of streets lined with video cameras that alert authorities to any suspicious activity. A world where police officers can read the minds of potential criminals and arrest them before they commit any crimes. A world in which a suspect who lies under questioning gets nabbed immediately because his brain has given him away. Though that may sound a lot like the plot of the 2002 movie "Minority Report," starring Tom Cruise and based on a Philip K. Dick novel, I'm not talking about science fiction here; it turns out we're not so far away from that world. But does it sound like a very safe place, or a very scary one?

"The Technocratic Age is slowly designing an every day more controlled society. The society will be dominated by an elite of persons free from traditional values (!) who will have no doubt in fulfilling their objectives by means of purged techniques with which they will influence the behavior of people and will control and watch the society in all details". "... it will become possible to exert a practically permanent watch on each citizen of the world". - Zbigniew Brzezinski, Illuminati and co-founder of Trilateral Commission

The US and UK governments are developing increasingly sophisticated gadgets to keep individuals under their surveillance. When it comes to technology, the US is determined to stay ahead of the game.

New York City's Lower Manhattan Security Initiative -- which includes plans for 3,000 surveillance cameras -- is modeled after London's network of street-viewing cameras, which, along with roadblocks and other measures, is dubbed the Ring of Steel. It is intended to deter terrorist attacks or to help with capture if an attack occurs.

PY cameras should be installed at two Worcester play areas to help defeat the blight of vandalism, says Worcester MP Mike Foster. Mr Foster is worried play areas in Great Oaty Gardens, Warndon, and Whitmore Road, St John's, are quickly becoming easy targets for yobs and says the city council has Government cash to tackle it.

Britain's Home Office is reportedly pursuing lip reading technology to augment the capabilities of the millions of closed circuit television cameras (CCTVs) in the country.

IT'S like something out of James Bond - but Lancashire police are among the first forces in the country to use pioneering facial recognition technology. Police are piloting a scheme that takes high-tech images of suspects and stores them on a national database.