Over-surveilled Brits build giant picture of their leader out of CCTV cameras

Becky Hogge from the Open Rights Group sez,


I've just come back from Parliament Square in London, where about 30 of us have spent the morning building a giant picture of Prime Minister Gordon Brown out of photos of CCTV cameras and other surveillance state ephemera. Take a look at some of the photos of the day (http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=FnFBigPicture&m=tags) – it looks fantastic (and the great weather helped!)

Last week, Boing Boing helped us put out a call for people to capture the database state on their cameras.

Today, to celebrate an international day of action for democracy, privacy and free speech, we put those images together into a huge 4m x 6m collage, depicting a very Big-Brother-esque Gordon Brown against a background of barbed wire, handcuffs and double helices. Our message was that although as individuals we only see incremental invasions of our privacy, put together, these creeping changes constitute a wholesale shift towards a society predicated not on freedom, but on fear.

As you can see from the photos of the event, despite the seriousness of our message, we had a lot of fun delivering it to Parliament. Thanks to Christopher Scally for artwork and Tom Ackers for coordinating the collage, and to everyone who contributed photos of surveillance state ephemera, or turned up the day to help us build the "Big Picture".

Freedom Not Fear: the Big Picture unveiled on Parliament Square

(Thanks, Becky!)