Product Description

A chance encounter with a talking lamp-post got Ross Clark thinking: is there any escape from Britain's growing surveillance society? He set himself a challenge: could he get to Southend without Big Brother knowing where he had gone? In this entertaining and highly revealing account of his attempt to dodge Britain's 4.3 million CCTV cameras and other forms of surveillance, Ross Clark lays bare the astonishing amount of data which is kept on us by the state and by commercial organisations, and asks what it all means.Among his discoveries are: an information company in Nottingham seemed to know he has cherry trees in his garden; if he flies to New York, the FBI will keep a record of what he had for lunch; 2700 people are wrongly recorded as criminals on Britain's Police National Computer - 70 Americans have been implanted with microchips to help identify them if they become lost and confused; British companies are routinely vetting potential employees by searching MySpace for evidence of drunken antics and sexual perversion; and it will take 905 man-years to issue every British citizen with an ID card.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #432331 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 168 pages

About the Author
Ross Clark is a journalist who has written extensively for The Times, The Sunday Telegraph and Mail on Sunday. For some years he wrote a column in The Spectator entitled 'Banned Waggon' which exposed, week by week, the Government's obsession with stopping us doing things. He also writes a regular column for Real Business Magazine, looking at the impact of regulation on business.Ross's previous books include How to Label a Goat - The Silly Rules and Regulations that are Strangling Britain and The Great Before, a satire on the anti-globalisation movement - www.greatbefore.com

Customer Reviews

OK, but not quite what it first appears to be
A cursory glance at this little book and you might understandably be expecting a sort of subversive travelogue in which the protagonist attempts to make his way around the country - to Southend pier in fact - whilst evading the ever encroaching eyes and ears of the much-vaunted surveillance society. In reality, the author's account of his stealth journey is dealt with early on across just a handful of pages and in very little detail. The rest of the book is a category by category overview of the increase in surveillance and data collecting which is currently making almost daily headlines and bogging the state down in reams of mostly useless information. Chapters on transport, computers, banking, policing, the workplace, the NHS and shopping form a lineup that'll be already familiar to anyone who regularly reads around this subject and adds nothing new to the debate. It is, however, an easy and fairly enjoyable read that can be digested in one sitting.

Interesting and Informative, Big Brother is watching you!
`The Road to Southend Pier' covers everything to do with the surveillance society in which we live from CCTV to DNA profiling, ID cards, how Google saves your searches through to supermarket club cards, the drawbacks of using websites such as Face Book and My Space and stop and search powers. It is incredibly interesting and deeply worrying, especially as it deals with how useless much of the information actually is and how we are becoming increasingly open to fraudsters abusing this data with no repercussions.

When I initially read the blurb, I was expecting something a little more along the lines of a Dave Gorman or Charlie Connelly book, involving Ross Clark creeping around trying to evade cameras. The book wasn't quite like that, it is much more journalistic in its approach but it isn't completely devoid of humour, for example:

`In George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith was rudely interrupted during his morning exercises by a voice from his television screen telling him to put in more effort. It could have been worse. He could have had a Tesco Clubcard.'

This is a book that will certainly give you food for thought....I'm off to cut up my credit cards.

Opened my eyes
As an American living in London I have long wondered about the cameras and all the security checks in Britain. The book answered the question I most wanted to ask: if all these cameras stop crime, how come I have to watch my step from the British 'hoodie' every time I walk back from the subway to my apartment? Mr Clark sets out on a mission to see whether he can duck the cameras -- and comes to the conclusion that while he can't escape being caught, the cameras are pretty useless anyway. This book is very funny in places, which endeared me to a subject which could otherwise be very dry