One thing about London, and two about Italy, that kind of creeped me out

[xiphias]

Of course, not everything in Europe was wonderful.

London: is there any square inch of London you can be in where you're NOT being taped by a closed-circuit television? MAN, that's creepy. How do y'all get USED to it? I really loved the city, but I couldn't live there, just for that reason alone. WAY too much surveillance. Just. . . creepy, man. Orwell was a Brit, after all. . .

Italy: um. Doors that need a key to unlock from the INSIDE. See, I guess it's just a cultural difference, but, here in the United States, we have this thing called "fire". . . sometimes we accidentally get "fire" on our buildings, and then we need to get out of the buildings. And so, we like to be able to get out of buildings pretty easily. So we do things like have doors that you lock and unlock with a key from the OUTSIDE, but, from the INSIDE, you just use a knob or something, so that you can get out easily.

Freaked me out some, it did.

The other thing that I didn't quite get was the caribinieri. There's something creepy about having your civilian policing done by your military. I just don't like it -- rubs me the wrong way. They seem like perfectly nice, competent people (and the impression I was getting is that they're among the ONLY competent authority figures around -- c.f. my story about the woman fainting on the train to get an idea about the competence of all non-caribinieri first responders in Rome. . . ), but still -- the military is the military and the civilian is the civilian and it seems kind of worrisome to have one group do both.

Comments

[deathboy.livejournal.com]

I'm very tinfoil hat and objected to the all-pervasive cameras, but once you realise that they don't, in fact, use them to read your sweet, delicious brainmeats, and actually have used them quite effectively to solve particularly horrid crimes, I (at least) loosened on the paranoia front a little and (scarily given my general outlook) feel marginally safer that if I disappeared somewhere, they'd jolly well find me (or catch an assailant, etc) by tracing back my last movements.

from a scientific angle: they don't have the man/computer-power to analyse the VAST quantity of footage they have, *except* when they know what they're looking for (when a crime occurs). they seem to use it quite pragmatically and justly.