Hey Guys,
To wrap up our visit to London, John invited this fellow named Simon Davies to come and give a little talk to our class. Simon a member of Privacy International, a human rights watch-dog group that tries to keep tabs "on surveillance and privacy invasions by governments and corporations." (As quoted from their information page) Simon is somewhat of a professional scholar. What he seems to do is try to find out as much as he can about what governments and corporations are doing to restrict privacy and infringe on various rights, and raise awareness of them. He started the class with a 45 minute lecture of what he does, which I assume he gives everywhere he goes. He was quite good at convincing me that big brother is coming to get me. After his initial schtick, it became a class discussion in which we tried to see his view on different aspects of privacy in surveillance. This is a pretty hot issue in general in England, as London is the most heavily surveilled city in the entire world. You don't notice it at first, but there are literally one or two CCTV cameras at nearly every corner in central London. He through statistics at us saying that CCTV doesn't actually deter crime by any considerable margin, and that if not stopped there won't be anything that we do in our private lives that the government won't know. While this may be a bit of an exaggeration, that's where he was going I think. It was all and good, and for the most part I believed what he said. The most impressive aspect, however, was how forceful and concise he was in his speech. I can see that he's quite good at what he does.
After that we had the next day and a half to ourselves to do whatever. I spent the time to go get some last minute gifts for my friends and family while I was still in England, and went to packing for the flight to Amsterdam. Apparently, the airline restricts each passenger to a single bag that can't weigh over 44 pounds, or else you get fined rather strongly. In any case, we had a pretty nice farewell dinner hosted by our friends at IES. I had a vegetable curry that was pretty tasty, and it was followed up by a delicious fruit sponge dessert (pictured). Well, London was a load of fun, but it's time to move on. I'll write again when I'm in Amsterdam.
.:August
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