Wednesday 13 July 2005

London bombers on video

I read that the police reckon they've identified the London bombers as young men born in England to Pakistani families.

I don't think it makes much difference whether this was an attack by foreign enemies or by British enemy sympathizers. What interests me more is that the four bombers were apparently recorded on video as they assembled at King's Cross. I think this will happen more and more in the future: we'll be constantly watched and recorded everywhere, so that whenever any criminal incident occurs, police can just rewind the tape to see exactly what happened.

Initially the surveillance is mostly of urban public places and commercial premises, but already some security-conscious people are starting to monitor their own homes, and this will become routine in time. In the end I suppose even wild areas of countryside will be monitored somehow, perhaps by satellites.

It's believed that at least three of the bombers blew themselves up along with their victims — which seems remarkably unnecessary. All they had to do was to leave the explosives on a short fuse and jump out at a station as the doors were closing. Either they were very stupid, or they valued their own lives no more than they valued other people's.

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