"PRIVACY IS DEAD—GET OVER IT"

"This is an age which happily invades its own privacy," writes Charles Nevin in "Taking liberties" an alarming feature in the summer issue if Intelligent Life. We have become so cavalier about our privacy (on Facebook and Twitter, for example) that we don't seem to mind that the British government is constantly watching us, recording everything we do--in shops, classrooms and on the street. The cameras are everywhere. (The quote of the title came from Scott McNealy, of Sun Microsystems, after September 11th 2001.)

Julia Belluz crunches the numbers:

SURVEILLANCE:

44 Percentage of Britons who said most people can be trusted in 1981

31 in 2006

41,900 Number of stop-and-searches in England and Wales to prevent acts of terrorism in 2006/2007

480 resulting arrests

45 Number of criminal justice laws introduced by the British government since 1997--more than the total passed in the previous century

3,000 Minimum number of criminal offences these laws have created

£110,000 Cost of removing a one-man anti-war protest against Britain’s operations in Iraq in 2006

6 Number of days a student at the University of Nottingham was detained in 2008 after his college monitored his downloading of al-Qaeda material for a dissertation on terrorism

2 Number of days suspects can be detained without charge in the US

5 in Russia

6 in France

7 in Turkey

28 in Britain

42 Number of days Gordon Brown has pressed for

CCTV:

1 Britain’s position in 2007 among surveillance societies in Europe

£4 billion Estimated minimum cost to the public of CCTV camera installation and maintenance in Britain, excluding monitoring, from 1994 to 2004

14 Percentage of CCTV systems that showed a statistically significant reduction in recorded crime, according to a 2005 Home Office report. Conclusion: “Most systems revealed little overall effect on crime levels.”

1 Number of cities with public-area CCTV systems in 2008 in Norway

30 in Germany

500 in Britain

3 Percentage of crimes in London solved by CCTV, based on a sample of 2006 robberies in London, according to the head of the CCTV department at the Metropolitan Police

IDENTITY CARDS:

50 Minimum items of personal information required to renew a British passport under the Identity Cards Act 2006. Information will be stored on a database, and possibly shared across government departments

£4.74 billion Estimated cost of ID card scheme over ten years, according to the British government in 2008

£14.5 billion Estimated median cost of ID card scheme over ten years, according to independent research in 2005

700 Number of major databases the average economically active adult in the developed world appeared in as of 2005

3,400,000 Number of DNA profiles on Britain’s DNA database at the end of 2005, making it the largest of any country with 5.2% of the population accounted for (compared with 0.5% in the US)

25,000,000 Number of child-benefit records (including name, address, birth date, National Insurance number, and bank details) on two computer discs lost by civil servants at HM Revenue & Customs in 2007