Monday, April 26, 2010

Movie Review: Erasing David

David Bond lives in Britain (London I think) and one day got a letter saying the Child Benefit Office had lost some records of 25 million Britons and his were among them. Bond got fairly obsessed over how many agencies and organizations had records of him and what was the risk to his privacy. Erasing David is a documentary about him finding out this information and putting things to test by trying to disappear for a month. He also hired investigators to try to find him. The film switches between "chase" scenes and flashbacks to David research the extent of Britain's surveillance state.

This Times article from a week ago is pretty complete and had some details I'd wondered about but didn't remember from the film, Can you disappear in surveillance Britain?:

"Before going on the run, he made 80 formal requests to government and commercial organisations for the information they held on him. He piled the replies on his floor, appalled by the level of detail. The owners of the databases knew who his friends were, which websites he’d been looking at, and where he had driven his car. One commercial organisation was even able to inform him that, on a particular day in November 2006, he had “sounded angry”. It was more than he knew himself."

"And what if the information about us is wrong? Bond found that the DVLA still keeps on record a youthful driving offence that should have been expunged years ago. He waved it grimly at his uncomprehending daughter: “This is Daddy’s drink-driving record.” Worse was the case of a woman he met, falsely identified by the Criminal Records Bureau as a convicted shoplifter, who’d taken a year to prove her innocence. Or the man who, after someone pinched his credit card details and used them to pay for porn, was arrested, then sacked without notice; when Bond met him, he still hadn’t been able to clear his name."

Two things in particular struck me about the film. First was that paranoia that overcame David. He was always looking over his shoulder worried that he was being followed. This was even when he was off in the woods with no one around and that being followed wasn't part of the plan. If the investigators were there they would just come up to him, they wouldn't "follow" him. The other thing was about how wrong he was. He spent a lot of time taking odd routes and being difficult to follow while on the way to his mother's house. The investigators had no idea where he was, but they did have someone staking out his mom's house in case he went there.

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