On Mass Surveillance In Singapore

On Why I Travel On

A "Normal" Route

To Counter

Governmental &

Corporate Snooping


Those of us who are harshly and reluctantly entrapped in the system of political control undertaken by our elected government -- through its employment of modern surveillance techniques and technologies --often try to escape from its ensnaring and suffocating restrictions by thinking in terms of fighting the authorities through legal means -- namely, by employing, certainly foolishly, the official services of our compromised and beholden Members of Parliament (elected lawmakers), and by making use of the professional services of our timid and equally compromised lawyers (trained specifically to understand the intricacies -- and also vulnerabilities -- of governmental actions responding to, and confronting the challenges and criticisms posed by opponents and critics of the government, with reference to universal principles of human rights and to international laws and regulations guiding precisely such governmental actions and behaviour).

Such official methods of legal recourse, admittedly, may prevent some of the worst excesses of a surveillance society, but such solutions also DO NOT WORK if THE POLITICAL WILL TO IMPLEMENT SUCH SOLUTIONS -- EFFECTIVELY AND NOT JUST COSMETICALLY -- IS NOT PRESENT.

Without detailed public knowledge of surveillance techniques and technologies, and of the EXTENT to which they are being deployed, the groundswell of public opinion necessary to drive a DEMAND for such solutions will remain lacking.

The main concern of dissident bloggers like me, who write outside of the intellectual and political (and "systematic") confines set by mainstream snoopers and manipulators of targetted victims in our surveillance society here, is to learn as much as we can about (and to reveal bravely and publicly about the results of such learning) the AMOUNT and EXTENT of data (not data collection itself) that are being collected by the authorities and their COLLATION within ever-more-massive databases!

Question: What are the safeguards (will they be observed and followed in the first place?), should our society ever demand them, to ensure privacy principles are respected and to allay other important privacy concerns? Thus, citizens who are dissident bloggers like me, have a real concern, and it is about widespread INSTITUTIONAL surveillance of individuals and/or groups in a society!

Such massive surveillance efforts by the government is the result of The Party's desire to collate and form national databases -- and this is extremely disturbing.

The system of "due process of law" is long embodied in the laws of the United Kingdom, the United States of America and Canada (and in the systems of jurisprudence derived from them). Such a system is relied upon by most citizen-victims of governmental surveillance to protest against such humiliating and oppressive forms of control over their lives -- including their moments of privacy.

That is the reason why non-mainstream bloggers and political critics resort to other (shall we say, un-systematic?) forms or methods of countering the restrictive or constraining influences from the ubiquitous surveillance officers who, normally, with an unknowing, unknowledgeable and unaware -- and hence supine and acquiescent -- citizenry at their feet, will exploit their advantages (in terms of logistics, finances, and knowledge and information -- based precisely on the formation of national databases, etc.) and also their awesome, comprehensive legal and juridical powers, to subjugate and suppress the controlled population (although they would never admit to doing so openly!).

Dissident bloggers like me have this part of a bigger picture of covert control over the population by stealthy and manipulative surveillance officers in mind when we blog or write about corporate or governmental snooping and manipulation (which are never discussed or covered here -- and also never denied either -- by journalists, editors and commentators in the obsequious local mass media).

As Mark Weiser, Chief Technologist at Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC), said (in 1991), on the danger of an ubiquitous technological environment:

"The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it."

Fellow citizens and attentive readers, you have now been duly informed and fore-warned.

Please do take care!