Erasing David: Does Nothing To Hide Mean You Have Nothing To Fear?

Erasing David looks at surveillance Britain. There are an estimated 4.2 million CCTV cameras in the U.K., one for every 14 people, and a fifth of all such cameras worldwide. Now there are 32 cameras outside the house where George Orwell lived. This is part of a wider problem. The state collects vast amount of information on its citizens and collates them into databases. With more and more data stored in fewer but larger databases which are then accessible by more people than ever before, is this the stuff of nightmares? Or if you have nothing to hide, is there nothing to fear? What happens if you happen to become one of the ‘false positives’, someone mistakenly picked up by the surveillance system as a threat to the state?

David Bond decides to find out how much private companies and the government know about him by putting himself under surveillance and attempting to disappear for a month. He is tracked across the database state by private investigators using legitimate tracking tools. The result is the documentary Erasing David.

Other documentary makers have been investigating this loss of civil liberties. Chris Atkins’ Taking Liberties looks at how the Blair government galloped merrily along an authoritarian road. Another interesting documentary in this field is Harvard academic Peter Galison and film-maker Rob Moss’ Secrecy . In one recent year, the U.S. government classified more pages of information than that which was added to the Library of Congress. This documentary looks at the world of government secrecy and explores the tension between safety as the state views it and liberties.