Big Bother [Article about CCTVs in Britain]

[LMSx]

I thought this was an interesting read. It was published in September, but a search didn't turn up anything in this forum.

Link

Islington is a fashionable neighborhood in North London, a gentrified residential area described, if only by real estate agents, as the new Notting Hill. In 1944, however, many of its characteristic four-story eighteenth-century townhouses had been broken into flats for working-class families, and it was into one of those, on the top floor of 27 Canonbury Square, overlooking a small preserve of green, that George Orwell moved with his wife and son after a V-2 rocket demolished their previous home. The space was drab, drafty, and leaky, but proved, in its way, inspiring. Descriptions in his next novel of an apartment, where “the plaster flaked constantly from ceilings and walls, the pipes burst in every hard frost, the roof leaked whenever there was snow,” and of its occupant’s wearying climb up the staircase, which he took “slowly, resting several times on the way,” show that 1984, the visionary novel about life in an all-seeing totalitarian state, began taking shape in those rooms. It is no small irony that today, across the square from Orwell’s home, two traffic cameras operate all day; and that the rear windows of his building are in the frame of security cameras set outside a conference center; and that there’s a camera at a car dealership by Orwell’s pub, and three more at the local grocery. All told, there are thirty-two closed-circuit television cameras (CCTV) running twenty-four hours a day within 200 yards of the place where the chilly thought of the perpetually watching Big Brother had its incubation.

Ironic to find so many, but not unexpected; you could have picked any Briton from Shakespeare to Sid Vicious, and odds would favor finding cameras near his stomping grounds. For the last quarter century, under Conservative and Labor governments alike, the United Kingdom has conducted a living experiment on the use of cameras to conduct domestic surveillance that would have made Stasi operatives green with envy. There are roughly 4.3 million cameras in the UK—a million of them in the city of London alone, according to the Metropolitan Police Service. They are operated by the Metropolitan Police and by the London Underground, by private security firms and local governments, by schools and hospitals and parking lots and chip shops. They survey busy intersections, Tube platforms, and significant buildings, but also the entrances to pubs, apartment buildings, and health clubs. In some parts of London, they are literally everywhere. Walk in any direction in Westminster, for example, where Parliament and the government buildings are collected, and you’ll see cameras prominently poking out from the sides of most buildings, large, gray, boxy sentinels forming part of the so-called Ring of Steel that monitors all traffic in and out of the most iconic, target-rich part of London. At Canary Wharf, the sprawling, shiny, pulsating business complex on the south bank of the Thames, the cameras are smaller, subtler, architecturally integrated into the design but nonetheless visible, reassuringly present but not so obvious as to disrupt the money making. But in poorer East London, you have to look long and hard to see more than the humble traffic cam. And one’s reactions vary with the coverage: in the face of a massive deployment of cameras in a bustling, prosperous part of town, one feels slightly crimped by the awareness of being watched. But when one is a stranger in a strange place where the environment is a bit seedy and there are no cameras, one feels just a little bit more alone.

And one thing is sure: more are coming. Right now there is one camera for every fourteen people in the UK, and if they keep being installed as fast as they have been, they will one day outnumber people. The trend has also caught on in the United States, with growing numbers of CCTV cameras popping up in cities from Los Angeles to Chicago. The proliferation of CCTV and other surveillance tools strikes many as sinister. “Two years ago I warned that we were in danger of sleepwalking into a surveillance society,” said British Information Commissioner Richard Thomas in 2006. “Today I fear that we are in fact waking up to a surveillance society that is already all around us.”

There are indeed emerging surveillance technologies worth worrying about—from “data mining” systems employed by the Bush Pentagon to a host of security measures advocated by Britain’s Labor government, such as mandatory tracking devices on all cars. But when it comes to CCTV, the great Orwellian fears haven’t come close to being realized. The cameras have not become appendages of an all-seeing, all-powerful government. Perhaps because bureaucracies in the UK are mighty forces for inefficiency and inaction, perhaps because abuses have been reined in by good English common sense, the cameras have been deployed in a largely benign way. And despite the fact that the most extensive study of the cameras’ effectiveness—one commissioned by the Home Office of the British government—found no evidence to support the claim that CCTV cameras actually deter crime, surveys show most UK citizens welcome them. The reason for their popularity seems to be the sense of security they offer and their unquestionable usefulness in catching criminals once crimes have occurred. Orwell, it seems, was prescient about the coming ubiquity of surveillance cameras, but when it comes to their effects on individual liberty he missed the mark.

Some of the most gripping images of the last few years were shot beginning at 12:26 p.m. on July 21, 2005, on a subway car just short of the Oval station on the Tube’s Northern line. Captured in intervals every few seconds by CCTV cameras positioned at opposite ends of the car, recorded in dim light that creates a kind of milky filter, the scenes show a group of passengers, most prominent among them a stocky young man with a knapsack wearing a navy sweatshirt that says NEW YORK on the front. In the first image, he is standing there, hand in his pocket, unremarkable; in the next, everybody is scrambling away from him, trying to get out of the car. The next image, taken from the other end of the car, shows a tall man in a white T-shirt helping a woman with a baby, wrestling her into the next car. Then he turns, and from a distance of eight feet or so he begins speaking to the young man in the sweatshirt. The conversation wasn’t recorded, but later, testifying at trial, the man in the T-shirt—a fireman named Angus Campbell—said, “I was shouting at him, ‘What have you done? What have you done?’ I was probably quite vociferous. I was telling him to lie down.” Then the train reaches the station and the doors open and the passengers flee, the man in sweatshirt included. His name is Ramzi Mohammed, and cameras follow him in his distinctive New York sweatshirt as he races through the glossy white-tile corridors of the station and out onto the street.

Those pictures, and similar pictures of three fellow conspirators, who on two other subway cars and a bus had also tried to explode bombs that turned out to be duds, were in the hands of the police within hours, were published in the late editions of the newspapers, and were splashed across television screens that night. “I was struck by how normal [the men] looked,” said Tim O’Toole, then the managing director of the London Underground. “That’s what’s creepy about it. The guy didn’t look extraordinary in any way, and there he was, on his way to what he thought would be his death.”

O’Toole is a professional railroad man and attorney born and raised in Pittsburgh who ran the Tube from 2003 until his resignation in February 2009. He’s been called the best public servant in London, and thirty-five years ago he was my college roommate. Two weeks before the stillborn attacks of July 21, O’Toole was one of the key officials coordinating the response to the deadly attacks of July 7, in which suicide bombers on three subways and one bus set off explosions that killed fifty-two passengers and injured at least 700 more. Working out of the Underground’s operations center near St. James’s Park, O’Toole had his team shut down the system, evacuated to safety a quarter-million people who were on the trains, and then succeeded in getting the deserted system up and running in time for the next morning’s commute.

The prompt appearance of the CCTV images on the 21st was a tremendous relief to a city where dozens of police officers were still reviewing hundreds of hours of CCTV images taken on the 7th, trying to tease from vague faces on crowded platforms the identities of that crime’s perpetrators. “Seeing those pictures took away all the tension,” says O’Toole, “because the message we were able to send, subliminally, was ‘Okay, now we know who those guys are, and we’re going to find them.’ Without that ability to project control, everybody would have been afraid.” Indeed, within days, the suspects were in custody.

Fear, control, normalcy: concepts that have dominated in the West since the attacks of September 11, concepts never really out of discussion. CCTV emerged as a tool for public control in the 1980s during another period of unease. British life was marked by rising crime, labor unrest, and strapped resources, and Michael Howard, who was John Major’s home secretary—a job that involves overseeing law enforcement and security, among other responsibilities—latched onto the idea of CCTV as a reasonably cheap and effective tool for reexerting a sense of control and restoring a sense of normalcy. Calling it “a real asset to communities, a great deterrent to crime and huge reassurance to the public,” Howard began funding CCTV systems in towns and villages. Although there was no research to back up Howard’s assertions, a lot of local governments thought that the presence of cameras would reassure people that it was safe to go shopping, and installed some systems.

Then came the incident that supercharged the adoption of CCTV. In the afternoon of February 12, 1993, a two-year-old boy named James Bulger disappeared from a shopping center in Liverpool. Investigators eliminated the family as suspects, and then focused on reports that an older man with a ponytail had been hanging around. Sometime after midnight, police, hoping to spot this putative pedophile, reviewed the videotapes from the security cameras at the shopping center. What they saw shocked the world: a shot of little James being led away by two older boys. The following afternoon James’s body turned up. Although the identity of the abductors could not be discerned from the pictures, police soon received an anonymous tip naming two ten-year-olds, who were later found guilty of the crime. From this senseless, disturbing incident, CCTV acquired a powerful, visceral, illogical justification: anyone against CCTV must be for child murder. “You see that picture everywhere now,” says one observer. “It’s the modern image of the devil, the contemporary image of danger in our midst.” In the aftermath of the Bulger murder, and over the decade that followed, funding for the systems exploded.

Which is how there got to be so many, not from any centralized initiative, but in an ad hoc, incremental, decentralized accumulation, to the point that someone working in Central London is seen by an estimated 300 cameras a day. It seems like an alarming number, but the practical effect on a person’s behavior is negligible. “I’ve got news for you,” says one man, shrugging off the significance. “While you’re being seen by 300 cameras, you’re also being seen by 25,000 people.” The cameras are not located in places where people have an expectation of privacy, and in many cases you would probably not notice them were you not alerted to their presence by one of the large yellow signs that the law mandates be placed in plain view in proximity to the camera. It’s also true that in a lot of places, while an individual may be on camera, it’s not even an individual who is being watched. At the big modern Whitehall Station, one person monitors eight screens that get feeds from more than eighty cameras; the images on the screens change every ten seconds or so, and monitors are trained not to see people per se, but to see situations, and to recognize among a tide of images of normal traffic that person or object or situation that is abnormal. The monitors aren’t really seeing people; they’re seeing crowds.

And while London’s million cameras are just a dizzying number, it’s important to realize that they are not linked in an omni-observant panopticon. The cameras are in many different hands, so while it is possible, after a great crime like the July 7 bombings, for police to reconstruct a perpetrator’s trail through banks and service stations and ultimately into the Tube, police could not continuously track a suspect from one point to another across more than one system in real time. That doesn’t prevent the public from believing that it can be done. “We have a show called Spooks,” says Kevin Clack, one of the Tube’s security managers, talking about a BBC drama about MI-5, the government’s internal security agency (the show was called MI-5 when it ran in the U.S.): “We let them use the stations to film in, and in one episode, one of the agents chased a guy into the Whitehall station, and then ran into our CCTV operating center and began downloading information from MI-5 and sending images from the CCTV cameras to his chums and so on. Well, it was all made up. We’re not linked to MI-5, but I’m sure many viewers believe we are now.”

So elevated are the expectations for CCTV, says Clack, that when people are the victims of a crime on the Tube, they expect the incident to have been captured, and are often angry if it has not been.

But if it’s surprising that there is no amazing linkup between the cameras and Scotland Yard and Interpol and the Justice League of America, here’s something even more astonishing: there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of interest on the part of police to use the things, at least not preemptively. From the beginning, the Home Office set up the systems with town councils and other civilian authorities; for whatever reason—disdain for new methods, wariness of a technology that would invite allusions to Big Brother—the Association of Chief Police Officers declined to get involved. Later, after the cameras were set up to facilitate traffic control and parking enforcement, many police departments got involved on an ad hoc basis to get some law enforcement benefit. But the return influence on police practices seems small. “There was no evidence of any significant or systematic attempt by the police to incorporate CCTV into their existing information or surveillance networks,” writes Oxford criminologist Benjamin Goold in his 2003 book CCTV and Policing. “None of the stations had made any effort to establish a system whereby information collected by CCTV could be made available to other police divisions or departments ... Nor had any provision been made for keeping CCTV operators informed of ongoing police surveillance operations being carried out in their local area.” In a lot of places, Goold writes, they didn’t even adjust the patrols to complement the coverage they got from CCTV. It’s hardly surprising, then, that studies have found the cameras do little to deter crime. Apart from any palliative feelings they generate among the public, the major benefit of these contraptions seems to lie in their ability to help the police find out who did what and how after a crime has occurred.

Instead of the problems and issues that come from a centralized authority exploiting an integrated system, then, you get the problems and issues that come from human foibles set free to operate under loose control. There are guidelines for CCTV use that have generally worked, but there are the stories about the camera that was pointed at somebody’s bedroom window; about prejudiced operators who called in the cops to question people the operators thought undesirable; about the operator who caught a couple having sex against a wall, and burned a disk of the event to show his mates; about the parking lot guards at a university who were reviewing tapes for evidence of break-ins, discovered instead two teachers going at it in a car, and then gossiped about it, humiliating the teachers. And while it’s possible that some motivated leader could order up the construction of the IT infrastructure that would link all these eyes, that would be an expensive upgrade unlikely to happen soon. Consider: in this day of powerful servers that connect computers around the globe, the link between the London Metropolitan Police’s communication system and that of the Tube’s Transport Police is a pleasant police officer named Vanessa, who reads reports of crimes in progress off of one system and inputs that news into the other. This is because the communication system of the Metropolitan Police is based on a Commodore 64 computer, which may be out of date and incompatible with the Windows operating system but it works fine and everybody in the department knows how to use it, and no one is going to invest the time or money to upgrade.

So what is there to worry about? The technology’s not all that, the police don’t seem all fired up to exploit the cameras’ potential, and the public seems to like them. Well, there’s just no getting around what one might call the philosophical problem. “With CCTV, everyone becomes an object of suspicion, just by virtue of being filmed,” says Brendan O’Neill, a commentator and the editor of Spiked-online.com. “During the Enlightenment, the assumption was that you are a free citizen and should be left alone unless you have done something wrong. Now the assumption is turned completely on its head. Now you have to perform your innocence. You have to prove that you are good, rather than for the state to prove that you are not.”

O’Neill makes an interesting point. There has always been the recognition that one has more freedom to act in private than in public, that there are things you can do indoors that would be socially unacceptable, if not actually illegal, in public. But in practice, who among us has always observed that distinction? Almost all of us have followed the urge to do something foolhardy but most likely fun—smoking a joint in an alley, drinking in a parking lot, having sexual congress in a dark and deserted corner of a park—that we as autonomous free people chose to do, and, crucially, thought we could get away with doing. It is interesting that the most direct resistance to the implementation of CCTV has come in the rural areas where the cameras are used to catch speeders on lightly traveled country roads—people alone on a highway who felt capable of deciding for themselves how fast they could go. Out there, the cameras get broken.

Of course, most of us have never lived a moment of our lives as wholly autonomous individuals, and we are for the most part happy that some ancestor swapped his autonomy for the protection of some big strong guy on a horse. Governments may often be dangerous, but people are scary, a point which was brought home not long ago to Johann Hari, a columnist for the Independent, when he witnessed an early-morning street incident in which a well-dressed chap was beating a homeless person. The homeless man ran away and his assailant claimed self-defense, and that might have been the end of it, except that the incident was caught on CCTV, and it showed the banker initiating the conflict. “After that, I began thinking about CCTV,” Hari says. “The July 7th bombers were identified through CCTV. The July 21st conspirators were caught through the use of CCTV. The Soho nail bomber, who killed three people in 1999, was caught through CCTV. Cameras didn’t identify the Ipswich Ripper, a man who murdered six prostitutes, but they tracked three of his victims, which helped the police focus on a suspect. Now, you can say that CCTV somehow inhibits your freedom, but those people who did not get blown up in the next attack of the Soho nail bomber are now more free. Prostitutes in Ipswich are now more free. Homeless people in my neighborhood are now more free. The fact that these cameras could be abused by an oppressive government in the future is an argument against having an oppressive government, not against the technology.”

Which brings us to the future. The performance of CCTV in Britain has been generally benign, but as we all know, past performance is not a guarantee of future results. The next generation of cameras will be far more capable; planners are experimenting with cameras that have facial recognition software and voice recognition capability, so observers can identify when people are getting angry or are using words associated with criminal activity. (Think of all the nasty things you have said about Vice President Cheney over the years, and how much time you’d like to spend explaining to authorities that no, really, you’re just a blowhard.) Perhaps most creepily, developers are also trying out cameras that will tell you to put out your cigarette or pick up the candy wrapper you’ve just dropped.

These inventions are just part of what might be waiting on the near horizon. In the aftermath of 9/11 and 7/7 the British government has pushed other programs, like instituting a national biometric ID card, a national DNA database, a program to track all electronic communications, and a plan to put a locating device on all automobiles. The public views these initiatives with far greater suspicion than it sees CCTV, thanks in part to a drumbeat of news reports about diskettes containing secure documents and sensitive records being left by government officials in taxicabs, and articles about local officials using antiterrorism legislation passed after 9/11 to mount surveillance operations to catch people suspected of littering, dumping, fishing illegally, and applying to a school outside their district. With no one giving Gordon Brown’s government much chance of surviving the 2010 elections, and with the Conservative Party having already expressed its opposition to a national identity card and promising to eliminate funding for some of these other programs, the drive to implement the programs is apt to be stalled—or at least continued under other auspices. After all, the government may not be able to locate you, but the phone company can, and the government may not have a central ID card, but the Tesco grocery chain has an affinity card that knows how much oatmeal and ketchup and booze and condoms and Wellbutrin its customers have bought. The coming generation is far more comfortable with technology; it expects institutions to be equipped and up-to-date, and having lived so much of its life so far on Facebook and MySpace, it has a far more relaxed view of privacy than its parents possess (there are stories of guys who’ve been caught brawling on CCTV asking cops to burn them a copy of the fight). When that generation has its Bulger murder or July 7 attack, these capabilities will be waiting. And as we saw with CCTV, events, more than people, were the driving force behind its adoption.

So, Orwell had it wrong. His apartment isn’t under the view of one oppressive Big Brother but thirty-two mostly harmless Little Brothers. Technological creep has become technological flood, too powerful to be stemmed and far too beneficial to be stymied by potential risks. The UK’s experience with CCTV cameras ought to give us at least some faith that democratic governments can handle these new technologies. But as with nuclear power or weapons of mass destruction, surveillance is a phenomenon where the costs of mistakes or abuses are beyond calculation. The history of the future may well be determined by whether those who are supposed to benefit from surveillance cozily nestle under its blanket of protection, or stare back at it as unblinkingly as it stares at us.

As a foreigner I had a considerably more impressive image of the cameras then the evident reality. Any Brits here want to comment on life under BIG BROTHER?

[NecronLord]

It's not Big Brother; see, Big Brother is a paragon of effectiveness; the Ministry of Love is presented as always getting the right people and knowing everything. Gilligam's Brazil is far closer to the likely reality of such a regime.

And this is what we see in reality. There are zillions of cameras; and for the most part, they collect utterly useless data. I can't imagine any government pulling off 'a real Big Brother' - even with this technology.

And I find detention without charge and "extraordinary rendition" far more worrying than cameras.

[Psychic_Sandwich]

As a foreigner I had a considerably more impressive image of the cameras then the evident reality. Any Brits here want to comment on life under BIG BROTHER?

Nobody pays cameras any attention. They're just part of the scenery, and like the article says, it's not like you aren't going to be seen by hundreds of other people while you're walking on a London street anyway. Just about the only time it might become an issue is when shopping centres and stores stop people wearing hats or hoodies indoors, because it hides their face from the cameras. On the other hand, its their property, so they can make the rules.

[Winston Blake]

The cameras have not become appendages of an all-seeing, all-powerful government.

Perhaps because bureaucracies in the UK are mighty forces for inefficiency and inaction, perhaps because abuses have been reined in by good English common sense, the cameras have been deployed in a largely benign way.

And despite the fact that the most extensive study of the cameras’ effectiveness—one commissioned by the Home Office of the British government—found no evidence to support the claim that CCTV cameras actually deter crime, surveys show most UK citizens welcome them.

The reason for their popularity seems to be the sense of security they offer and their unquestionable usefulness in catching criminals once crimes have occurred.

Orwell, it seems, was prescient about the coming ubiquity of surveillance cameras, but when it comes to their effects on individual liberty he missed the mark.

Sentence by sentence:

1. The cameras have not become a complete totalitarian nightmare (implied: therefore they never will be abused).

2. Inefficient bureaucracy is the only thing blocking the potential of systematic abuse; + some flagrant abuses have been caught and publicised, therefore all abuses are caught and publicised.

3. CCTV does not deter crime.

4. Citizens welcome them because (A) they make them feel safer and (B) help in catching criminals after the act. According to sentence 3, you're still just as likely to be murdered, but hey, don't worry, they'll probably catch the guy (B). That makes it all better, hence (A), right? Right?

5. Public acceptance, welcome and popularity do not imply liberty. People will accept a loss of liberty in exchange for security. Consider that if an Outer Party member opposed the presence of telescreens, it would obviously have been an extremely unpopular proposal.

It seems like an alarming number, but the practical effect on a person’s behavior is negligible. “I’ve got news for you,” says one man, shrugging off the significance. “While you’re being seen by 300 cameras, you’re also being seen by 25,000 people.”

Cameras don't just 'see', they watch. They surveil. People are very poor at surveiling. Can you watch thousands of people, 24/7/365, remembering every face, every gesture, and where every person went? CCTV can. There's a reason why police use traditional surveillance methods - because it lets them learn things about people they could not have known otherwise. That is, it allows them to intrude upon privacy much more effectively. 'People can see you too lol' is a bogus argument.

(Note I'm not talking about legal privacy, but privacy as a primitive concept. If I was to record every public conversation you had, without your knowledge, those conversations could have been heard by anyone, yet your privacy would have been intruded upon by me.)

And while London’s million cameras are just a dizzying number, it’s important to realize that they are not linked in an omni-observant panopticon. The cameras are in many different hands, so while it is possible, [...]

[snip current limitations of CCTV system]
[snip current poor usage of CCTV system]

So what is there to worry about? The technology’s not all that, the police don’t seem all fired up to exploit the cameras’ potential, and the public seems to like them.

The technology isn't all that right now, yet this very article later mentions the impressive capabilities in development. It's basically saying 'the only thing really stopping full integration is a few upgrades and some habits of the public service'. Also, people will like anything if you give them a choice between 'something' vs 'a big steaming pile of terror'.

Well, there’s just no getting around what one might call the philosophical problem.

[snip 'Innocent until proven guilty']

O’Neill makes an interesting point. There has always been the recognition that one has more freedom to act in private than in public, that there are things you can do indoors that would be socially unacceptable, if not actually illegal, in public. But in practice, who among us has always observed that distinction? Almost all of us have followed the urge to do something foolhardy but most likely fun—smoking a joint in an alley, drinking in a parking lot, having sexual congress in a dark and deserted corner of a park—that we as autonomous free people chose to do, and, crucially, thought we could get away with doing.

This is absurd. Does the author honestly believe that people oppose CCTV because... they might get caught doing fun illegal things in public? That's what 'civil liberties' means to this author?

“After that, I began thinking about CCTV,” Hari says. “The July 7th bombers were identified through CCTV. The July 21st conspirators were caught through the use of CCTV. The Soho nail bomber, who killed three people in 1999, was caught through CCTV. Cameras didn’t identify the Ipswich Ripper, a man who murdered six prostitutes, but they tracked three of his victims, which helped the police focus on a suspect. Now, you can say that CCTV somehow inhibits your freedom, but those people who did not get blown up in the next attack of the Soho nail bomber are now more free. Prostitutes in Ipswich are now more free. Homeless people in my neighborhood are now more free. The fact that these cameras could be abused by an oppressive government in the future is an argument against having an oppressive government, not against the technology.”

This could be used to justify ANY expansion of government powers. Replace 'cameras / technology' above with 'unlimited new powers', and it reads the same. Every civil liberty is an obstacle to security. The essence of civil liberties is that there are some freedoms which are worth sacrificing security for.

Which brings us to the future. The performance of CCTV in Britain has been generally benign, but as we all know, past performance is not a guarantee of future results. The next generation of cameras will be far more capable; planners are experimenting with cameras that have facial recognition software and voice recognition capability

[snip heaps of impressive capabilities in development]

Note that one of this article's earlier points was 'Don't worry about CCTV! Hey, it can't even do much!'.

Now it says 'Ain't CCTV great! Look how much it will be able to do soon, all to keep you safe!'

Pick one, you fool.

So, Orwell had it wrong. His apartment isn’t under the view of one oppressive Big Brother but thirty-two mostly harmless Little Brothers. Technological creep has become technological flood, too powerful to be stemmed and far too beneficial to be stymied by potential risks. The UK’s experience with CCTV cameras ought to give us at least some faith that democratic governments can handle these new technologies. But as with nuclear power or weapons of mass destruction, surveillance is a phenomenon where the costs of mistakes or abuses are beyond calculation. The history of the future may well be determined by whether those who are supposed to benefit from surveillance cozily nestle under its blanket of protection, or stare back at it as unblinkingly as it stares at us.

Summary: 'So, Orwell had it wrong, CCTV is A-OK... but don't hold me to that position, things might go bad in the future, maybe, and I'm not being indecisive.'

[Simon_Jester]

It's not Big Brother; see, Big Brother is a paragon of effectiveness; the Ministry of Love is presented as always getting the right people and knowing everything. Gilligam's Brazil is far closer to the likely reality of such a regime.

And this is what we see in reality. There are zillions of cameras; and for the most part, they collect utterly useless data. I can't imagine any government pulling off 'a real Big Brother' - even with this technology.

And I find detention without charge and "extraordinary rendition" far more worrying than cameras.

Rightly so.

The cameras are at worst a potential threat, and that only if they receive a very thorough, systematic upgrade to their networking and software analysis capabilities. One that Her Majesty's Government probably isn't going to pay for any time soon. Probably.

The troubling bit from my point of view is that once the physical hardware is in place, upgrading the software to the point where everyone can be tracked will be something that mostly occurs behind office doors if it happens at all. The public won't have as much influence and interaction with the process as they would have had with the decision to install the cameras in the first place. Thus, I have this image of the new Arthur Dent waking up one morning to discover he lives in a panopticon... and that the notice alerting him to the fact that the government was setting up servers capable of integrating all the camera footage was in “the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’“.

No, I don't predict that it will happen. But governments have done stranger and stupider things in the past.

[Akkleptos]

If all private cameras were to be connected by law to a government-controlled network, THEN we could speak of a Big Brother, Orwellian kind of surveillance.


And speaking of Orwellian, as of today (AFAIK), not even the Chinese governemnt has forced cameras inside the homes of ordinary private citizens. Then, you could be afraid of a tele-screen telling you to try harder when doing your morning sit-ups.

EDIT: Not that it would be necessarily a bad idea, given the rates of domestic violence.

[Psychic_Sandwich]

Cameras don't just 'see', they watch. They surveil. People are very poor at surveiling. Can you watch thousands of people, 24/7/365, remembering every face, every gesture, and where every person went? CCTV can. There's a reason why police use traditional surveillance methods - because it lets them learn things about people they could not have known otherwise. That is, it allows them to intrude upon privacy much more effectively. 'People can see you too lol' is a bogus argument.

(Note I'm not talking about legal privacy, but privacy as a primitive concept. If I was to record every public conversation you had, without your knowledge, those conversations could have been heard by anyone, yet your privacy would have been intruded upon by me.)

So what? You've got no right to privacy in public places, or on other people's private property if they've chosen to install their own CCTV systems. These are not cameras positioned so as to see through every window of people's homes. I'm perfectly within my rights to set up CCTV to watch for the yobs that like vandalising my front garden on my own, if I could afford it.

The troubling bit from my point of view is that once the physical hardware is in place, upgrading the software to the point where everyone can be tracked will be something that mostly occurs behind office doors if it happens at all. The public won't have as much influence and interaction with the process as they would have had with the decision to install the cameras in the first place. Thus, I have this image of the new Arthur Dent waking up one morning to discover he lives in a panopticon... and that the notice alerting him to the fact that the government was setting up servers capable of integrating all the camera footage was in “the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’“.

There's a lot more preventing 'Big Brother' from becoming a reality than a simple need for software updates. Starting with the fact that the Government doesn't own all, or possibly even a majority, of CCTV cameras.

[Starglider]

Existing CCTV is fairly harmless. It just means a bored underpaid chair-filler at the control centre has a 1% chance of staring at you at any given moment. So what; you're in public, lots of people stare at you regularly anyway. Yes you're being recorded, but 99.999% of that material is discarded, and even when it is reviewed (due to a crime) it's frequently useless. Most cameras still record at quarter-resolution low-speed VHS, with output that can charitably be described as 'blurry crap'.

However this will not be the case indefinitely. Technology marches on. Cameras will soon be 1080p full-motion, with a 20 megapixel still once per second, with filtered audio and a month of solid state recording. They will be cheap enough to be disposable, they will be wireless (and optionally solar powered) so that they can be installed anywhere without running cable, and they will be connected to advanced vision recognition systems and merged databases. It will be possible for minor civil servants to say 'show me everything that LMSx did between 10am and 2pm ten days ago', and instantly get a montage of you wandering around the city, focusing on the most 'suspicious' actions, with nice high-quality zooms on that package you handed to a friend, and a complete transcript of your speech with the 'dangerous' keywords highlighted.

Pervasive mass surveillance isn't scary, but effective mass surveillance will be.

[Simon_Jester]

Yes; this is what I was getting at. And once you've established the principle that it is perfectly acceptable and just for the government to have a camera network covering everything in sight, it's going to be hard to win the bureaucratic war against the people who want to upgrade it to the point where it's actually effective.

[[R_H]]

What about introducing legislation that requires the footage be deleted/destroyed a certain number of days (or months) after it was recorded?

[Starglider]

What about introducing legislation that requires the footage be deleted/destroyed a certain number of days (or months) after it was recorded?

Good luck getting that passed. It's more likely to be the other way around; just look at efforts to make telecoms companies keep logs for years in case law enforcement want to dig through them.

[Serafina]

As long as these records are just used for crime persecution, there is nothing wrong with it. Rejecting technology just because it CAN be abused is, in my oppionion, stupid.

We already have laws under which circumstances law enforment can search homes, get information about your bank data etc. We just need similar laws for these cameras (and all the other Orwellian technology).

Edit: Let me stress my point: The purpose of these laws would be to define what you can use this data for, and punish abuse of this data.
Just like a law officer searching your house without permission is punished (and the data may not be permissible at court).

So, if anyone pulls of the stunt Starglider described (following you around via camera) without a legit reason, he should be punished.

[Starglider]

We already have laws under which circumstances law enforment can search homes, get information about your bank data etc. We just need similar laws for these cameras (and all the other Orwellian technology).

Well yes, that's the point that most of the 'sleepwalking into a surveillance society' commentators are trying to make. There's effectively zero chance of CCTV actually being banned (or even significantly retarded), and only a few fringe lolbertarians and other anarchists suggesting it anyway.

[[R_H]]

Good luck getting that passed. It's more likely to be the other way around; just look at efforts to make telecoms companies keep logs for years in case law enforcement want to dig through them.

Interesting. Here in the train stations (for example), the footage gets deleted something like 48 hours after it's recorded. Surveillance cameras are a hot button issue.

[Simon_Jester]

As long as these records are just used for crime persecution, there is nothing wrong with it. Rejecting technology just because it CAN be abused is, in my oppionion, stupid.

Persecution... Freudian slip?

Seriously, though, this is a case where we're talking about a specific application of a technology, not the technology itself. CCTV is fine. Ubiquitous CCTV? Could be a problem. If you can come up with an effective place to draw the line on ubiquitous CCTV technology short of the panopticon, I'm all for it; my problem is that I, personally, cannot.

[Ryan Thunder]

Seriously, though, this is a case where we're talking about a specific application of a technology, not the technology itself. CCTV is fine. Ubiquitous CCTV? Could be a problem. If you can come up with an effective place to draw the line on ubiquitous CCTV technology short of the panopticon, I'm all for it; my problem is that I, personally, cannot.

What is wrong with the public panopticon if you aren't doing anything illegal in public?

I mean I can see problems when they start putting them in your house or whatever but the streets are public property, are they not?

[Simon_Jester]

Seriously, though, this is a case where we're talking about a specific application of a technology, not the technology itself. CCTV is fine. Ubiquitous CCTV? Could be a problem. If you can come up with an effective place to draw the line on ubiquitous CCTV technology short of the panopticon, I'm all for it; my problem is that I, personally, cannot.

What is wrong with the public panopticon if you aren't doing anything illegal in public?

I mean I can see problems when they start putting them in your house or whatever but the streets are public property, are they not?

Are you familiar with the phrase "chilling effect?"

A true public panopticon is functionally equivalent to assigning everyone a police tail at all times. Typically, that would require a warrant to do to individuals. Moreover, it forces everyone to submit to the knowledge that they are effectively being tailed by police; if they behave anomalously they may be harassed for it, and any anomalous behavior will be detected by vigilant, humorless computers.

Think about the environment at airport security checkpoints. You can't make a joke about it, you can't act silly, you can't really even ask the authorities questions without getting into trouble. If there's anything funny about you, you are liable to be pulled aside for searches and questioning, whether you deserve it or not. You are being watched, and you have no de facto right to act in a way that displeases your watcher.

To make matters worse, you don't have much input over how the security people do their job. If they think it's a good idea to build terahertz radiation scanners that can see through your clothes, or to scan your shoes for demolition charges, they will. And it's going to be damnably hard to stop them from a practical standpoint, never mind if people don't really want someone looking through their trousers or making them take off their shoes every time they get on a plane, and never mind if it's cost-effective.

Imagine if everywhere outside your home was like that. That's a public panopticon.
_________

In my opinion, your argument reduces to "the innocent have nothing to fear." Which may very well be true... but if it is true then that's one for the record books, because it usually hasn't been true before.

[Winston Blake]

Cameras don't just 'see', they watch. They surveil. People are very poor at surveiling. Can you watch thousands of people, 24/7/365, remembering every face, every gesture, and where every person went? CCTV can. There's a reason why police use traditional surveillance methods - because it lets them learn things about people they could not have known otherwise. That is, it allows them to intrude upon privacy much more effectively. 'People can see you too lol' is a bogus argument.

(Note I'm not talking about legal privacy, but privacy as a primitive concept. If I was to record every public conversation you had, without your knowledge, those conversations could have been heard by anyone, yet your privacy would have been intruded upon by me.)

So what? You've got no right to privacy in public places, or on other people's private property if they've chosen to install their own CCTV systems. These are not cameras positioned so as to see through every window of people's homes. I'm perfectly within my rights to set up CCTV to watch for the yobs that like vandalising my front garden on my own, if I could afford it.

I was going to write a direct reply to this, but Simon_Jester's description of 'chilling effect' makes essentially the same point in fewer words. I agree that watching your front garden, or a bank watching its ATMs, are reasonable applications. However, you have to agree that those applications have a very limited scope. The UK government wishes for surveillance with a scope so vast, and with capabilities so impressive, that I consider it qualitatively different.

As long as these records are just used for crime persecution, there is nothing wrong with it. Rejecting technology just because it CAN be abused is, in my oppionion, stupid.

If the UK really believed this, they would permit their citizens to earn firearms licenses. Dismissively accepting technology, just because it CAN be useful is, in my opinion, stupid. Weighing the costs against the benefits would be the smart thing.

[Darth Wong]

5. Public acceptance, welcome and popularity do not imply liberty. People will accept a loss of liberty in exchange for security. Consider that if an Outer Party member opposed the presence of telescreens, it would obviously have been an extremely unpopular proposal.

Surveillance is not a loss of liberty. You are just as free to do things after cameras as you were before. What do you think "liberty" means, exactly?

You might argue that privacy is an absolute right, even in public (even though that doesn't really make sense), but the idea that public surveillance reduces your "liberty" seems completely unjustified. Unless, of course, you just mean that "liberty" = "good" and "public surveillance" = "bad".

[Starglider]

You might argue that privacy is an absolute right, even in public (even though that doesn't really make sense), but the idea that public surveillance reduces your "liberty" seems completely unjustified.

Recording makes a big difference, to a lot of people. Being in public inherently means being seen by other people, so very few people are bothered by simple watching. However if you take out a video camera and film random people with it, a sizable fraction will demand to know what you're doing. Just look at the objections to Google Streetview, even after they implemented the face blurring. Future technology will combine pervasive recording with a global search capability, so that organisations with the appropriate access rights will be able to pull up recordings of people doing specific things as easily as you can pull up someone's Internet comment history given a username and a topic. In the UK, mass deployment and networking of numberplate recognition cameras is already in progress, and Labour have made repeated attempts to get all cars fitted with government-monitored GPS trackers. Integrated surveillance capabilities of this kind are something even the communist police states could only dream of. They are something new, dangerous and do require special legal attention.

[Darth Wong]

You might argue that privacy is an absolute right, even in public (even though that doesn't really make sense), but the idea that public surveillance reduces your "liberty" seems completely unjustified.

Recording makes a big difference, to a lot of people. Being in public inherently means being seen by other people, so very few people are bothered by simple watching. However if you take out a video camera and film random people with it, a sizable fraction will demand to know what you're doing.

Yeah, because they're assholes and they don't want their assholery caught on film. It doesn't mean they have lost their "liberty". AFAIK, the only time amateur video of private individuals becomes news is when they're caught doing something terrible.

Just look at the objections to Google Streetview, even after they implemented the face blurring. Future technology will combine pervasive recording with a global search capability, so that organisations with the appropriate access rights will be able to pull up recordings of people doing specific things as easily as you can pull up someone's Internet comment history given a username and a topic. In the UK, mass deployment and networking of numberplate recognition cameras is already in progress, and Labour have made repeated attempts to get all cars fitted with government-monitored GPS trackers. Integrated surveillance capabilities of this kind are something even the communist police states could only dream of. They are something new, dangerous and do require special legal attention.

The fact that people dislike it does not substantiate the claim that it removes peoples' "liberty". Those are still separate propositions. Why do people insist on turning everything into a "freedom" issue? It's like this magic word, and if you can attach it to your pet cause, then you win.

[open_sketchbook]

Seconded. Privacy means "license to be a douche" to a lot of people, who hate the idea that their mistakes might be on public record. The fact of the matter is, private citizens record untold amounts of information every day. I take pictures when I go on vacation, and you'd be an absolute douchecock to demand I delete a photo because I captured somebodies face on it.

This is not to say there should be no such thing as privacy. People shouldn't have the interior of their house monitored. People shouldn't be allowed to take pictures up a women's skirt without asking. But when you step outside your own home, privacy, beyond aforementioned invasions of the upskirt nature, becomes rather irrelevant. The only difference between being seen by a bum on the street and a CCTV camera is quality of the memory; the difference between a bum spotting a robbery and the camera doing so is that the camera is going to give more reliable information and be more useful as evidence in court. In fact, the camera isn't going to spread rumours or notice things people might; honestly, the electronics are much more benign then most people are.

[Starglider]

However if you take out a video camera and film random people with it, a sizable fraction will demand to know what you're doing.

Yeah, because they're assholes and they don't want their assholery caught on film.

Not just assholes; lots of perfectly normal people have this reaction. They are probably worried about being made to look bad somehow, or in support of a position they don't agree with, or in a for-profit venture they won't benefit from etc. In my experience video cameras are significantly more provocative than still cameras, I'm not sure why. I am not supporting this reaction, I am just saying that it is a major reason for opposition to CCTV, along with general distrust of government.

AFAIK, the only time amateur video of private individuals becomes news is when they're caught doing something terrible.

Or just amusing (usually embarassing); YouTube is full of such cameraphone clips.

The fact that people dislike it does not substantiate the claim that it removes peoples' "liberty". Those are still separate propositions. Why do people insist on turning everything into a "freedom" issue?

That is technically true, but improved survellience makes it easier for a government to restrict liberties, either by more zealous enforcement of existing laws, or by passing new laws that the new technology makes feasible to enforce. 'Privacy in public' as a right is something of a canard, the real connection between pervasive surveillance and loss of liberties is the fact that some real liberties come from the inability of governments to enforce restrictions, rather than any special legal protection. Obviously it would be better if all worthwhile civil liberties were given explicit legal protection - people trying to directly protect liberties via restrictions on surveillance have implicitly conceded the real legal battle. However even after recognising that, there are still two arguments for restricting surveillance to less than total deployment; the potential for abuse by (corrupt) individuals and the potential for abuse by the whole government, should the democratic process fail to keep it serving the interests of the people.

[Darth Wong]

However if you take out a video camera and film random people with it, a sizable fraction will demand to know what you're doing.

Yeah, because they're assholes and they don't want their assholery caught on film.

Not just assholes; lots of perfectly normal people have this reaction. They are probably worried about being made to look bad somehow, or in support of a position they don't agree with, or in a for-profit venture they won't benefit from etc. In my experience video cameras are significantly more provocative than still cameras, I'm not sure why. I am not supporting this reaction, I am just saying that it is a major reason for opposition to CCTV, along with general distrust of government.

So? There are major reasons for a lot of irrational fear. If millions of people are being videotaped, one can bet that one won't become an overnight Internet or news video sensation unless he's doing something outrageous.

AFAIK, the only time amateur video of private individuals becomes news is when they're caught doing something terrible.

Or just amusing (usually embarassing); YouTube is full of such cameraphone clips.

And you generally don't become notorious as a result of them. The fact that there are so many examples is why; you need to do something extraordinary in order to gain serious notoriety as a result of an amateur video on Youtube.

The fact that people dislike it does not substantiate the claim that it removes peoples' "liberty". Those are still separate propositions. Why do people insist on turning everything into a "freedom" issue?

That is technically true, but improved survellience makes it easier for a government to restrict liberties, either by more zealous enforcement of existing laws, or by passing new laws that the new technology makes feasible to enforce.

Are you saying that lousy and inconsistent enforcement of existing laws increases liberty? In reality, inconsistent enforcement of existing laws just means that you only get nailed for them when a cop has a grudge against you, or you have the wrong skin colour in the wrong neighbourhood. Greater surveillance would only mean that enforcement is more uniform, and that police favouritism would be easier to identify.

'Privacy in public' as a right is something of a canard, the real connection between pervasive surveillance and loss of liberties is the fact that some real liberties come from the inability of governments to enforce restrictions, rather than any special legal protection. Obviously it would be better if all worthwhile civil liberties were given explicit legal protection - people trying to directly protect liberties via restrictions on surveillance have implicitly conceded the real legal battle. However even after recognising that, there are still two arguments for restricting surveillance to less than total deployment; the potential for abuse by (corrupt) individuals and the potential for abuse by the whole government, should the democratic process fail to keep it serving the interests of the people.

See above.

[PeZook]

What exact laws would reduce liberties if they were more strictly enforced? I don't buy the argument that cameras will make the government abuse you if it turns into a dictatorship ; If democracy fails this badly, you will have problems with secret police rounding you up in the streets with or without cameras. Only an idiot thinks that corrupt dictatorships opress people by zealously enforcing victimless crimes.