There has been a number of news items in the past week or so that involve camera phones. They range from stories of global interest such as the hanging of Saddam Hussein, to provincial politics with the hit-and-run scandal in Nova Scotia.

Earlier in the week I discussed this on the Newsworld show CBC News Today, and this morning I had a longer discussion with my friend Jeff Goodes on his CBC Radio show Fresh Air (a recording of which is available below).

The primary metaphor I was trying to convey was an inversion of George Orwell's vision of a surveillance society from his book 1984. Rather than a central bureaucratic Big Brother, what I see emerging is a culture of Little Brothers and Little Sisters who provide pervasive, spontaneous, and autonomous surveillance that is far more efficient and totalitarian than any Big Brother could be.

While as a society we're still experimenting with the technology, so far we're spending far too much time exploring the technical ease of surveillance rather than discussing the moral and ethical implications of the elimination of privacy.

Perhaps there are some who would believe that I'm getting carried away with my analysis, however much like Pandora's Box, the speed at which our culture is changed by something as simple as a camera embedded in a phone is quite remarkable.

While on the one hand we celebrate it's use in capturing the bad behavior of politicians and celebrities, once the tables turn, and we're all subject to spontaneous surveillance, well, the climate fostered by this new surveillance regime will shift dramatically. I suspect this is already happening, and will rise to the foreground in 2007 as more victims of indiscriminate invasions of privacy emerge.

Personally I support a more open and transparent society, however I feel it's important such a world emerges out of conscious dialog and consent, rather than via the invisible impacts of technology that arise out of ignorance rather than knowledge.

Jeff and I discussed these and related issues this morning, and you can listen to a recording of the segment below: