The NY Times just printed this piece about surveillance in England and how far officials are permitted to go to make sure everyone obeys not only the laws, but also school and council rules. Is there no such thing as personal privacy anymore? While there are some in the US who might say such invasions of privacy are fine as long as it keeps people on the right side of the law , I doubt there would be many who would permit what happened to the woman in this story.

How are the average residents responding to all of these surveillance techniques? Is it just accepted or are there, as I would hope, extensive protests?

i wonder what martyn will have to say

for the most part, people don't take any notice. There isn't wide spread protest, that's for sure.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/may/06/ukcrime1

alberr and i watch a police soap (The Bill) and in that every crime is solved by cctv

this would seem to be current regulation in the uk.

it seems the lib dems are the only people concerned. There's a surprise

To put it into context, you don't have to travel far in the English countryside to find places where people have illegally dumped rubbish that is not just ugly but, in some cases, potentially toxic; dog fouling prevents kids from using green spaces safely for play in many urban areas; people are injured every year by fireworks that are sold illegally; and there are children who have to travel miles to school, because people are dishonest about their place of residence in order to get places at popular schools that are consequently oversubscribed, and therefore fail to provide an education for all who should be able to attend them (to be fair the root cause of this is the variation in the perceived quality of state schools).

In all of these cases, people are behaving in ways that are anti-social to say the least, and breaking the law - but not, crucially, the criminal law. So it is left to local authorities to enforce these rules and that means gathering evidence, which may involve infringing privacy to an extent. And on the whole, I'd say that, because some people fail to show consideration for their fellow citizens and the environment, that's acceptable.

The whole 'surveillance state' argument also ignores the extent to which the use of personal information is constrained by legislation: the Data Protection Act makes it very difficult for the state to use information about individuals. There are problems with the security of data storage and transfer, but that's as true in the commercial sector as the public services (car insurance companies and banks will hold as much 'sensitive' information about individuals as any government agency).

As for CCTV, its impact on crime levels will be limited because it is impossible to apply it to many potential crimes (domestic burglary, domestic violence, fraud et cetera); but it has almost certainly made the public safer. The perpetrators of some very nasty crimes have been caught through its use, and it almost certainly deters quite a lot of crime, though that is difficult to prove).

And finally, the idea that there is something new about surveillance is false: the security services were spying enthusiastically on lots of people throughout the Twentieth Century to counter various kinds of supposed subversion; the only thing that has really changed is the technology.

Having been a member of the communist party and worked in an industry where the staff are under constant surveillance i tend to find it quite normal to be observed.

I am a bit more wary of the collection of personal data, on ID cards etc, because that is much easier to get wrong and very liable to end up in the wrong hands.

Then I suppose we are coming at this from very different perspectives. Personal freedom is very important to me and I don't like having my every movement photographed or taped. This is a personal freedom that I am not willing to give up for the "better good". It's too easy for it to be misused or at the least misconstrued.

Perhaps it's the libertarian in me (not to be confused with Libertarian), but I believe in personal responsibility and distrust the powers elite when it comes to surveillance cameras in most areas. I understand if it is a high crime area or an area where scofflaws continually run stop lights. Those are areas where such evidence is necessary for the protection, for example, of the public at large and failure to do so can end tragically. But the idea of using cameras to catch people who don't clean up after their dogs (and everyone in the neighborhoods knows who they are and should present their own observations to the appropriate officials) or litters the walk seems overkill.

Don't get me wrong. Few things make me angrier than finding dog poop that belongs to a neighbor's dog in my yard or having to clean up the many bits of paper, food bags, and soda cans that seem to make their way onto the street in front of the house. But to install cameras to catch these "public enemies" smacks too much of Brave New World for me.

(edited for clarity and typos)

Just as an aside.... It wasn't CCTV cameras that showed the police attacking demonstrators in London this year. Mobile phones and you tube are a potent presence.

Arrgghh! Much as I love technology, I think I may consider becoming a Luddite!

Yup! I could join you on the luddite trail but I think it is too late. This CCTV technology is already installed and most of us in the UK hardly notice it. Almost everyewhere we go there is some underpaid mercenary bluebottle studying us and our habits. I understand there is a roaring trade in illicit copies of CCTV footage of people having sex behind pubs and clubs. Sort of sums it all up for me.

As Beryl said, if you are active in the Labour movement in this country, no matter what your politics may be, then you are being watched. We always have been and before CCTV we had Royal Mail overseeing the secret opening of our post while their Telecoms sector, (now BT), oversaw the listening-in to our telephone conversations. They stilll do. Sometimes we turned this to our advantage, (Heh! Heh!), but mostly it was just one of those things going on in the background, and it was up to us to be on our guard.

Now they sit around and record us having a pee against the railings in Hyde Park. Soon they will be recording our thoughts and desires. What a thought!

if you go on a demo they don't rely on cctv they stand there with high powered cameras and photograph you directly!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/25/p...estic-extremism

Yes, it's certainly a matter of personal opinion; a few years ago I was involved in a community development project in an inner city area. As part of it, we asked local primary school kids what the biggest problem was in their neighbourhood; the majority told us that it was dog-fouling because it meant they couldn't use their local park... I also get very angry about what we call 'fly-tipping' over here, though I'd be much less happy (for example) that council officials were taking covert photographs of a taxi driver having a cigarette in his/her vehicle whilst noone else was in it so that they could prosecute them.

There is also a cultural difference, in that I think that 'Freedom' is much more of sacred cow in the USA; I find the idea of living (let alone bringing up children) in a country where the right to bear firearms is enshrined in the constitution quite terrifying....

I am actually more ambivalent (and more concerned) about the issues that relate to terrorism/security (ID cards, detention orders et cetera) but to argue that the lower level state activity that is designed to prevent anti-social behaviour is all part of some kind of drift towards 1984 seems to me to be over the top.

The real point about CCTV is that it's used as a cheap substitute for a police presence in areas where people are vulnerable to crime.

And as has been pointed out by others, the 'Intelligence Services' have been monitoring the Left (and indeed the Far Right) for decades.

Beryl et Alberr, I didn't see your pictures among those mug shots. I reckon you two are too careful to allow them to snap a shot! Your cover is still safe!

Jboyd, I agree with you on the issue of firearms. It's a growing problem here, but the culture of the wild west dies hard in the US. It's one thing to carry a gun for protection from bears and cougars in the back country, quite another to carry one on the city streets. Yet there are those who argue that protecting oneself from armed thugs is every bit as legitimate as protecting oneself from bears!

Yes, failure to clean up after one's dog in the park is a nuisance problem, but it is not a felony. If personal attacks have taken place in the park and the cameras are there to help prevent future attacks or to identify the attackers, then fine. But to use them for such minor, although disgusting, offenses as failure to clean up after your dog borders on improper usage to me.

Yes, I do believe that 1984 is not so far fetched. While we haven't reached that point yet, I don't doubt that at some point in the future nearly every movement will be recorded either by government or by private cameras. While I don't believe that that necessarily means that there will be a totalitarian regime such as that in Orwell's book, I can certainly anticipate the use of such films for citing citizens for many minor offenses. Besides, I don't want the image of me picking my nose or scratching my ass unobtrusively preserved for posterity!

I believe that some of the reasons most people are not uncomfortable with the surveillance include the fact that the cameras are so unobtrusive as well as the desire to let hired officials enforce what should probably be social mores rather than municipal laws. They allow us to duck our responsibility to remind scofflaws that what they are doing is antisocial or to contact officials when illegal behavior is observed.

I think you have it in a nutshell there, Pam.

Americans, by and large it seems to me, are not afraid to tell a wanker that they are behaving like a wanker.

Brits, and I am ashamed to have to include myself in this, are generally averse to drawing attention to someone else's bad behaviour for fear of getting ones head kicked in.

I once threw a crisp packet back through the open window of a car form which it had been hurled.
Then I had to muster all my rugby and squash playing speed and stamina to outrun the fuckers who leaped from the car with words akin to "you're going to die for that you speccy cunt" upon their lips.

On another occasion when I attempted to elicit an apology from a man who had missed knocking me from my motorcycle by millimetres - he was on his way to a pub and I decided to have a quick sarcastic exchange on the pub car park - he invited me to remove my helmet so he could punch my lights out.

I declined and rode off somewhat demoralised. But returned about a minute later and let down all his tyres.

Maria takes no prisoners as an obnoxious twat on a flight we were taking from Eugene to San Francisco discovered. I'll let her tell the story if she wishes.

Or maybe it's a gender thing.

Perhaps women are less likley to be threatened by a man if they remonstrate with a guy about his bad behaviour, whereas another guy is just seen as a challenge to be overcome in the testosterone - fuelled world of littering and being an anti-social numpty.

No Martyn, I really think it is a cultural difference. Age may also have something to do with it as my experience here is that young men are more apt to fight back when reminded of civic responsibilities than older men. I suspect that may be true in England, too, but apparently to a greater extent than on this side of the pond.

Oh. I hadn't even considered the age factor. Now that I think of it all my attempts at shaming arseholes into behaving responsibly were done in my late teens and early twenties.

My abject failure on each occasion resulted in me not ever bothering again and, indeed, avoiding all such confrontation to the extent of suffering miserably at the hands of some self obsessed, obnoxious bastard.

It's hard being bloddy goody two shoes.

If you hit back you're behaving as antisocially as they do. If you say nowt, they win and feel free to continue with their particular brand of disgusting behaviour.

What's the answer Pam?

Ah, Martyn, if i knew the answer there would be world peace! I'm a peace loving person. I won't even swat a spider as long as I'm not in eminent danger of being bitten. But I have to admit to fantasies of luring all the annoying and hateful people into a huge stadium set to implode in the middle of whatever entertainment I used to lure them there. But I'd probably be "caught on tape"! Uh oh. Now I'm going to be in trouble. Someone else espoused such a "solution" here and ultimately was banned!

Agreed - though I find the idea of shooting bears and cougars pretty abhorrent..




At the risk of labouring the point, I think that the health and safety of pre-school kids is more at risk from diseases that can be transmitted from Dog faeces or the broken glass left by someone in the play area of a park than they are from a physical attack (if only because the victims of physical assaults tend to be adults).





I understand the privacy point; but it seems to me that 'minor offences' should either be policed because they affect the community, or (if they don't) they should not be offences!


That's probably true as well, but a lot of the minor offences that surveillance techniques are intended to deal with (dog-fouling, fly-tipping, et cetera) or deliberately committed when noone else is around...

Just a coincidence but I watched an old eposide of 'The Bill' (London cop drama series) before struggling with the necessity of getting out of bed this morning. It was built around the use of CCTV by the local council. The local council had a sophisticated control centre with banks of monitors which could switch across several locations. Story lines concerned a highly committed woman operator who used the CCTV to monitor her husband whom she suspected was having an affair, tracking a security guard at a shopping mall who had just completed a three stretch for violence, a lonely 'care in the community' man who was taking out the cameras with a paint gun, and the retaliation of a couple of youngsters who hit back at the cameras with two fingered salutes and simulated bottom exposures, (well, it was early morning TV!)

I think my point is that this episode was made a year or two ago and was probably responding to a more active public debate on the use of CCTV at that time. The debate appears to have died down in the UK.

But if the portrayal of the Council control centre was anything near realistic then our locally elected representatives have very sophisticated '1984' style observation abilities. It makes sense, from a central government viewpoint, to give the local Councils the responsibility, (and to find the money!) for installing, maintaining and manning all this kit. Central government keep their own hands clean of charges of interfering with our privacy locally, where it is happening. A lot has changed since the episode was made and we now have all the technical and legal extras added into the pot of public surveillance by the Blair anti terrorist legislation. And I bet the police, at all levels and in all areas of policing, plus all of the intelligence services have direct links into this local council network 24 hours a day.

No wonder some local councils are trying to find justifications for using their kit, and I personally don't mind them using it to identify dog foulers and fly tippers or grafitti 'artists' or any other anti-social behaviour, and think it might go some way towards improving life. But there is a much darker side to it.

Exactly. And as I thought about this, I have come to the conclusion that my real arugment is not so much using the video to catch illegal and anti-social behaviors, as the risk of how it can be used (and is in some societies). With some creative editing, some fairly innocent behaviors can appear to become downright diabolical.

At any rate, while I believe that some cameras are useful, I'm not sure the risk for misuse outweighs the good in other instances.

I think that the portrayal of the CCTV control room in 'The Bill' sounds about as realistic a depiction of CCTV control rooms as 'Midsomer Murders' is of rural policing.
The reality is probably a bored temp occasionally glancing up from sudoku puzzles and 'texts' to their significant other, to see a bank of screens, most of which are blank because the technology's broken.




And I'd bet that they're not, and even if they were that the links don't work....

The real role of CCTV is inevitably going to be retrospective evidence gathering, if only because nobody could afford to monitor their output all the time.

They talk about facial recognition a lot on 'the bill'. I imagine that isn't too sophisticated yet.. but can .. as they say .. only get better

I think it is probably a mix of what you see on the telly and how JB depicts it. Either way it just goes to show that we don't really know what big brother is actually up to!

But I enjoy being paranoid!

I share your cynicism about the technology though, and if I were still in the IT bus' I might set my sights on maintaining all that lovely junk down at City Hall. Not only could I overcharge them, just think of the blackmail perks I could pick up.

I've just watched a current episode of The Bill for the first time in ages and all the policemen look so old Makes me feel bloddy ancient

...and it never gives a true picture.

I did jury duty once and the evidence was cctv footage of a couple of kids kicking cars and appearing to be looking for a fight, which he eventually got and resulted in him getting the kicking of his lifetime.
Based on the cctv footage the chap with the football skills got let off - and only after that did we find out he'd been up before the judge on similar charges but had the 'good fortune' not to have been recorded on that instance either.

If you were delivering what are referred to as 'IT solutions' (a phrase which I assume is someone's idea of irony) to local government, you wouldn't need to resort to blackmail to make a fortune.

And since you started off with a reference to implausible TV depictions of real life, I will just add that 'The IT Crowd' is a rare example of realism (though they tone it down a bit....)

I'll look out for 'The IT Crowd', is it a TV thing?

It's a sitcom set in an IT office by the makers of 'Father Ted'....

The frightening efficiency of the police....

For those of you who have received those unpleasant summons' and fines for speeding when you KNOW you were within limits, this might be the reason. As I have been in charge of a local folk festival, I am on some mailing lists from various folk performers. This letter appeared in one such newsletter from Joe Stead. (Do any of you know him? Never seen him, but am curious based on some things he writes.)

bloddy hell pam! that was scary

I'm going to make a request under the Freedom of Information Act in the New Year to find out why my car appears on the database even though I've never actually driven in the County in which the alleged 'offence' took place.

If (or rather when) the so-called 'Go-Go Hamsters' make their move for world domination, this is exactly the sort of system that they'll be able to hack into in order to subjugate us.

squiggles is innocent!

He may look innocent, but that's all part of his fiendish cunning...

free the go-go 3

So I've just been informed that this is a hoax site. Mea culpa! I'm usually much better than this at recognizing hoaxes and I didn't click the link. Apologies for not checking it out.

I'm with JBoyd, nothing innocent about these fuckers. They've even reached Ireland. I found this bastard helping himself to my (albeit overcooked) New Year's Day roast. The cheese-eating, plague-spreading, pointy-faced twat. I squashed him dead, faster than you can say 'pied piper of Hamlyn', but be sure to know that his mates are everywhere, and coming to a place near you. We need a European-wide emergency strategy to deal with them. This will be bigger than swineflu.
Click to view attachment

JBoyd, Pams link was a hoax.

i think he knows that squiggles is harmless

So the little swine are setting up hoax websites as well now, are they? I can't say I'm surprised.

If you try to run an internet search for Go-Go Hamsters and the CIA, Go-Go Hamsters and the Roswell Incident or Go-Go Hamsters and the Freemasons, there is absolutely nothing to arouse suspicion; so 'someone' has clearly carried out a very effective cover-up operation.

And can it be coincidence that the Soviet Union survives for more than 70 years, and then these creatures flood the world just a couple of decades after its collapse?

Does nobody else see the analogy with the film 'Westworld'? One minute Yul Brynner is scampering around in a plastic ball looking cuddly, the next he's gone berserk and is shooting people (well, more or less).

And what about the 'Terminator' films? I understand that the psychopathic cyborg in those is now the Prime Minister of one of these Central American republics.

Mark my words, civilisation is facing a grave threat here.

you mean I am harbouring a tourist .....




What about the children ........


Is nowhere safe

i think the conspiricy theorists are on to something ...

Click to view attachment