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Harriman House > Our books > Current affairs books > The Road to Southend Pier by Ross Clark

 

The Road to Southend Pier One man's struggle against the surveillance society by Ross Clark ISBN: 1905641443 ISBN-13: 9781905641444 Format: Hardback Pages: 176 Published: 22nd October 2007 Edition: 1st RRP: £9.99  from our bookshop - only £5.99!

Extracts

I am standing on the end of Southend pier because of Richard Thomas. Mr Thomas says we are living in a surveillance society. As it happens there are many people who might easily say that, not a few of them in the advance stages of paranoia, who are cowering in their bedsits expecting any moment to be zapped by the same bunch of aliens who spirited Elvis Presley off the Earth some 30 years ago. But for Richard Thomas to say it is another matter. He is Britain's 'Information Commissioner', a public official appointed by the Government to act as an advocate on privacy issues and represent the concerns of the public over growing surveillance.

"My anxiety," he said in 2004, "is that we don't sleepwalk into a surveillance society where much more information is collected about people, accessible to far more people shared across many more boundaries than British society would feel comfortable with." And since he said that? The Government has passed a Parliamentary Act which will soon oblige Britons to own an ID card, a million more people have had their DNA added to a national register and several thousand more CCTV cameras have been switched on.

So why am I on Southend Pier? Before Mr Thomas is snatched from his bed in the middle of the night, stabbed with an umbrella on Westminster Bridge or whatever other fate Big Brother might have in mind for him, I wanted to see whether he was right. So I set myself a task: could I travel 50 miles without being snapped by a camera; without leaving any data trail of my big day out? I wanted to leave no CCTV footage, no trace of banking transactions, no mobile phone trail; absolutely no means for officialdom to detect that I had ever left home. I chose Southend because I knew it was about as far as I could possibly go: there was no point in venturing to London where, according to an often-quoted statistic, the average citizen is caught on camera 300 times a day. But to go to Southend from my home in East Anglia: surely I would have a sporting chance...Read more

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Jacket text for The Road to Southend Pier

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 4.2 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 whom should we fear most: the government agencies who are spying on us - or the criminals who seem to prosper in the swirling fog of excessive data-collection.

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.

- 2,700 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.

- It will take 905 man-years to issue every British citizen with an ID card.

Chapter headings for The Road to Southend Pier

1. The Talking Lamp-Post
2. My Big Day Out
3. Me and My Mug
4. A Brief History of Surveillance
5. Me and My Genes
6. Me and My Good Name
7. Me and My Secrets
8. Me and My ID
9. Me and My Pockets
10. Me and My Travels
11. Me and My Computer
12. Me and My Car
13. Me and My Home
14. Me and My Money
15. Me and My Shopping
16. Me and My Job
17. Me and My Health
18. Me and My Paranoia
19. Me and My Conclusions
Appendix

About Ross Clark

Ross Clark is a journalist who has written extensively for The Times, The Sunday Telegraph and the Mail on Sunday. He is the author of 'How to Label a Goat" The Silly Rules and Regulations that are Strangling Britain', also published by Harriman House, and 'The Great Before', a satire on the anti-globalisation movement - www.greatbefore.com As for his private life, he isn't giving anything away because he can't be sure the book won't fall into the hands of the narks at some nosey government agency.

More about Ross Clark

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