The London cabbie took us from Heathrow airport to our digs by way of a cash machine, so we could access our pathetically weak dollars, turn them into half as many pounds sterling and pay him his fare.

As we waited at the curb, the driver said something that surprised me: He could hardly use the ATMs on a work day anymore.

Sally Kalson is a columnist for the Post-Gazette (skalson@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1610).

"All the streets have no-parking signs. If I leave my cab just long enough to get some cash, the camera will take my license plate and they'll send me a 60-pound fine in the mail. It's like another tax on earnings."

Ah yes, the cameras. They are everywhere. The real London Eye isn't the mammoth Ferris wheel on the south bank of the Thames; it's the ubiquitous CCTV, or closed circuit television, that keeps a constant watch on, well, everything.

Stand on any corner and look up, and there they are, the all-seeing, all-knowing camera eyes, recording every move of every passerby, Big Brother on a scale almost as pervasive as the one posited by George Orwell in his 1949 book "1984."

And it's not just London; every major city in the United Kingdom has video surveillance systems in the city center -- about 4 million cameras, one for every 14 citizens, according to researchers at the University of Hull. If you live in London, by some estimates you could be caught on CCTV 300 times a day.

Some systems automatically read, recognize and track cars by their license plates, some use face recognition software, and some have loudspeakers so that monitors can yell at offenders to stop spitting or jaywalking. I am not making this up.

The Brits have chosen to live this way for a host of reasons, from fear of terrorism and crime to a desire for orderliness. But as the cabbie's lament demonstrates, once a society has the apparatus in place to surveil its people for some of the big things, the temptation to surveil them for every little thing is hard to resist.

What is the world coming to when you can't commit a tiny parking violation without getting nailed? Who among us hasn't risked a ticket at an expired meter or a yellow line and felt that little surge of victory when we escape undetected? What kind of society robs its citizens of even that small, harmless taste of beating the system? Is a nation of rule-whipped drones really so desirable?

That's what I was thinking, and then I opened the Sunday Times to find this story:

"Southend Council in Essex is pioneering a project called Rubbish Watch, deploying cameras that can be moved from street to street where householders are suspected of breaking rules on rubbish collection.

"The scheme reflects a growing tendency among councils to conduct surveillance operations to catch people breaking environmental laws or who are engaged in anti-social behavior."

The number of such operations has nearly doubled in the past year, the story said, from roughly 7,000 to 12,500.

Trevor Bell, who helped develop the Essex project, said the cameras would serve as a deterrent.

"If rubbish is left on the streets, not only is it an eyesore but it is a health hazard. Rats and foxes will rip into the bags and we end up with litter and waste scattered across the streets."

Ian Robinson, the councillor in charge of waste management in Southend, said the point wasn't levying fines but changing the culture. "If you've got nothing to hide, there's nothing to worry about," he said.

If that argument sounds familiar, it should -- it's what the House Un-American Activities Committee used to tell people who refused to testify about the political activities of their friends.

Some residents of Southend weren't too happy about this. "I'm sure they must have better things to do than sit there and monitor video tapes of people putting out rubbish," a school teacher complained.

Last year, the story noted, a woman from Exeter became the first person prosecuted for failing to recycle her rubbish, but she was cleared for lack of evidence. Videotape might have made the difference in meting out justice to such a desperate criminal.

Britain is the most surveilled nation in the world, and its citizens seem OK with that. But it's hard to look at how far they've bored into the minutia of everyday life without wondering if the United States eventually will follow suit. We've already got an administration conducting warrantless wiretaps and a Congress too weak and cowed to stop it. Lord only knows where a nationwide network of surveillance cameras would lead us.

Watching out for predators and terrorists is a sensible thing to do. But a society that allows local officials to spy on their recycling habits and yell at them for crossing against the light has none to blame but itself.

A country where nobody has anything to hide might sound nice and neat, but I'm not sure I'd want to live there.