Saturday, April 09, 2005

The Big Brother Awards

The Big Brother Awards?! Held next week in Seattle?!

I must have been asleep at the switch. How is it possible I'd missed the nominating period, which ended April 5? Here are the categories:
  • The Most Invasive Proposal
  • Greatest Corporate Invader
  • Worst Public Official or Department
  • Lifetime Menace Award
Clearly Texas has potential nominees in all four categories. (They also give the "Brandeis Award" each year to a privacy advocate.) Hopefully others have filled in the gap, because Texas deserves to be significantly represented. Offhand I can think of at least four Lone Star initiatives I hope made it into the "Most Invasive Proposal" nominations:
Can you think of other Texas suggestions, or will they be trumped by Big Brother nationally and beyond? Choicepoint seems a shoo-in for corporate abusers, but I can think of dark horse candidates. Indeed, there are a large variety of legitimate choices in every category, one notices. A sign of the times.

Oh, and if there's a Big Brother photo essay contest, Freedom is Slavery has an entry.

2 comments:

Travis Fell said...

Interesting post. I wish I could attend.

It's a bummer they do not have a category for "Worst Orwellian Doublespeak by a University Official". There are some Texas examples of that, as well.

Anonymous said...

So - The Texas police want to have a database of biometric data so that they can retrieve fingerprints and pictures anytime they want it?

At best, to give the police such power is to throw away so much civil liberty that we might as well be robots coming off the conveyor belt at the Honda Corporation. "Charge me up and I vote for you" seems to be the desired motto.

At worst - when the state REALLY goes awry - we might as well have given them our pickup information for the train to Auschwitz.

In Georgia, the state repealed a statute that required fingerprints from drivers. The database of millions of fingerprints was destroyed.