http://www.openrightsgroup.org/wp-content/uploads/2981847938_958a214a92_m.jpg

A new yellow speed camera at the end of your road. A fingerprinting system installed at your child's school, or your medical records uploaded to central government computers from your local GP practice. If you're lucky, your daily experience of the database state will, so far, be limited to developments such as this.

But what's the big picture? Put together, these creeping changes constitute a wholesale shift towards a society predicated not on freedom, but on fear. A society of total surveillance. Everyone watched. No one trusted.

What is the Big Picture?

On 11 October 2008, thousands of images of the database state sent in from around the UK by ordinary citizens fed up with Government's cavalier attitude to their civil liberties, privacy and personal security were combined to show Parliament what will happen if it continues to allow itself to be frogmarched away from freedom.

"The Big Picture" was part of a worldwide day of protest dubbed "Freedom Not Fear", and citizens from Buenos Aires to Zurich spoke out against state and corporate surveillance.

The Big Picture lives on

We want the Big Picture to live on beyond Freedom Not Fear day, so we invite you to download it and turn it into whatever you can think of - T-shirts, screensavers, posters, mugs, duvet covers, curtains, tablecloths, even boat sails (it's big enough).

Download the image

Small Size (240px × 195px, 51.43 kB)
Medium Size (500px × 406px, 303.8 kB)
Large Size (1024px × 831px, 1MB)
Super Size (3427px × 2781px, 5.4MB)

A higher quality (17.2MB) image is available on request - email info [AT] openrightsgroup [DOT] org for details.

Give something back

All we ask in return is that you keep the credits we've embedded in the image, and share your work the way we've shared ours (read the terms of the license we're offering the image under here). If your use of the Big Picture is online somewhere, please leave a link and a short description of it by editing this wiki page.

The Big Picture was co-ordinated by Open Rights Group and NO2ID, two non-profit organisations fighting to protect your rights in the digital age. Please visit the Big Picture Honesty Box page on the main ORG website to leave a donation.

The Big Picture features in The Database Rag animation by eclectech
It's now adorning my laptop
Describe your use of the Big Picture here and [leave and link]
Describe your use of the Big Picture here and [leave and link]