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Erasing David

Sunday January 17, 2010 at 10 pm ET/PT on CBC News Network

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In today's security conscious world, just how much does the government and private companies know about you?

British filmmaker David Bond wants to find out if it's possible in the digital age to slip under the surveillance grid and disappear. He sets up a challenge hiring Britain's top private investigators to track him using whatever information they can find in the public domain. He wants to find out if privacy is dead.

David Bond with his family

Disappearing is not going to be easy particularly in Britain, where more data is collected about residents than anywhere in the world except for Russia and China. The average British adult is now registered on more than 700 databases and is caught daily on one of the four million CCTV cameras located on nearly every street corner.

Igniting Bond's decision to escape is the news he receives that his young daughter is among 25 million residents whose details have been lost by the government's Child Benefit Office. During Bond's journey, he's hounded across Europe and uncovers some alarming truths about what the government and private companies already know about ordinary citizens - some of whom have been caught in the crossfire of the database and had their lives shattered.

Throughout the film viewers will also hear from former British home secretary David Blunkett, author Timothy Garton-Ash and author and political columnist Henry Porter, who explain how the mountain of data being accumulated and centralized by the government is epic in scope and can be devastating when misapplied. Erasing David is a wake-up call to those of us interested in guarding our civil liberties in an increasingly invasive digital age.

Directed by David Bond for Channel 4 in the UK.