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Britain is the World's Surveillance Leader
hax0r_par writes "It seems that in Britain, surveillance on the general public is happening and being recorded 24/7. They are playing the angle that this is allowing for criminal surveillance, which seems justified by the article. But it really is something to take into paranoid consideration now that we've got the technology to make this possible."
I would welcome rather than fear more cameras on the streets in the UK. There is one thing that privacy advocates are forgetting, for there to be an impact on your privacy there needs to be either a person at the other end of the camera, or an automated consequence.
With so many cameras, I doubt there is the manpower or the interest for someone to look at them all, only the ones that are really relevent - where a crime or suspicious behaviour has already been reported. After this the cameras are simply pointing out the facts of the situation, and are we really that afraid of facts and consequences of our actions (if those actions are illegal or suspicious)?
At the moment I feel that I trust the British government enough that this is an acceptable situation, look at the impact the congestion charges (and enforcement cameras) have had on London traffic for example.
-- Pete.
Monochrome - Probably the UK's largest internet BBS
Having just moved to London From New Zealand, I found the amount of CCTV cameras a little surreal. They are everywhere. But non-the-less; it is nice to know that perhaps even if just a placebo, they cameras tend to make things a bit safer. However, as my flatmate found out, cameras don't protect your household.
The streets may be safer, but your possesions still arent - Perhaps thats is why insureance is so high over here.
You are entitled to see any footage recorded of you at any time - not that this is (yet) commonly done, but there was a politically/comedy-orientated issues show (forget the name, could have been Gorman) where a host filmed his attempts to get the camera footage that he knew he was caught on.
You can't just walk into the records office and say "I want all camera footage of me at any time in any place", but you can obtain footage if you're more specific - how specific I don't know. Perhaps if more people did this (and then sued if the footage wasn't forthcoming) the authorities would be less likely to be so keen on them...
I've said it before and I'll say it again, the only way I'll be happy with continual surveillance of such overwhelming magnitude is if *all* the footage from *all* the cameras are available online - the average MP is going to be a lot less happy about cameras being used left, right, and centre if he knows he'll be caught speeding at 4:00am by some anorak
That said, the vast majority are in London (which visitors to the country think is typical - it couldn't be farther from the truth!), and a huge percentage of the headline figure are the CCTV cameras in shops that point at the counter, all privately owned and I don't have a problem with them if they help prevent robbery.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
I walked into the small unassuming police station at the end of O'connel street in Dublin a few years back to find out about my passport. I was totally shocked by the back wall of the room, which was covered in around 50 or more colour screen surveillance monitors. OK, it's a capital city, and it has a lot of crime (so i would be for these installations), but that's not what shocked me.
what shocked me was that these monitors covered almost every inch of that sector of dublin, i could see every last spot of the street outside, all in perfect crystal clear quality. It was something to be amazed at. I doubt a single person in the street outside would have realised how much they were being watched.
Correction: Echelon is the name of NSA's communication surveillance system. It has nothing to do with the British government or cameras.
I live in the UK, and a good sensible measure that I've taken to recently is to line not only my hat with tin foil, but my shoes, socks, trousers, shirt and jacket too. As far as I can tell, it seems to stop the cameras from looking at me.
Ok.. UK Data Protection Act states that fixed cameras are ok, but if they can zoom or move, then you must comply with the act. To comply with the act you must have a nominated data-protection manager in your company (responsible for cycling tapes, answering public enquiries, etc), you must not place cameras where you shouldn't (toilets/etc), you must display the necessary signs (you are not (meant to be) allowed to record anyone without their knowledge) with contact details as to who is responsible for the cameras and who the 'data-protection manager' is, and if you operate cameras of a non-fixed kind any member of the public is entitled to make an enquiry, and providing they give reasonable information (time, location, description of appearance, what you were doing, who else was present, etc), and pay a handling fee of no more than £15(?) then you must either invite that person in to the company to inspect the footage, or (and?), make it available on standard playable video cassette -- and they have to block out the distinguishing features (black strips, mosaic fuzziness, etc) of anyone else who was present in the footage, but not immediately involved with the person in question.
I might've missed something, but I think that pretty much covers it. You can get advice and template letters for making such enquiries from a variety of places on the net, including (i think) from the UK government's DPA website.
It's all fairly serious stuff, lots of businesses (particularly night-clubs and restaurants) don't fully comply with the act (no visible signs in recording areas), and I'd be certain that they'd be unable to produce the required video footage if it were requested.
It sucks really.
Shit -- must dash, some of my tinfoil is more than 24hrs old, and needs replacing.......
ECHELON (capitalisaion is correct) is actually a joint venture by the USA, UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. The UK and USA consider each other as participants of equal importance.
The point about 1984 is the whole world is under the control of three powerblocks, and we are given to understand that they are all pretty much the *same* (give or take local cultural differences) in their attitude to personal liberty. (This assumes that the documents that Winston finds are true and not merely the thought police playing mind games with him, of course).It could well be argued that you could change "Winston Smith from England" to "John Doe from Idaho" or "Ivan Ivanovitch from Russia" and the message would be the same.
It's 20 years since I read the book, so my memory might be playing tricks. But I have actually bothered to read the book.
Some references from the Trafficmaster web site that confirm that the Blue Poles do read number plates.
http://www.trafficmaster.co.uk/page.cfm?key=networ k
http://www.trafficmaster.co.uk/page.cfm?key=networ k_ptfm-network
Most people caught on CCTV only get in trouble if they are caught live and reported to the cops, who then race to the scene[/sarcasm] and clobber'em. Recorded images are of such low quality less than 1 in 500 recording can give a reliable ID.
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Criminals no longer fear CCTV - its just an expensive way to spread BB's influence further, and get free footage for . .
"Worlds ______ ______, on camera!"
There's a similar story over at the reg today on satelite tracking of criminals in the UK.
One guy interviewed was annoyed that a camera was pointed at his window most of the time. One stage someone on the street was getting mugged and it took the police 20 minutes to turn up, while the camera filmed the whole thing.
Annoyed, he created a suit that made him look like Predator (very impressive). He then went out and walked around outside where he knew the camera scanned.
Within 5 minutes the whole road was full of cops.
Makes you wonder if they have a special divsion for aliens like they do for vampires. ;)
Extortion. Intrusion by employers.
No it wasn't. It was set in Oceania. Great Britain does not exist in the novel. It's set in London, in the country of Oceania. Not Great Britain. Easy, see? So, yes, when the entire of North and South America, Australia, South Africa, and Great Britain become one massive superpower, the book will become more relevant.
TOTALLY agree. Attempting a citizen's arrest on a greater number of anti-social youths is asking for either (a) an assault on your person, or (b) an unfounded accusation against you.
Of course, this may be different in other countries, but in the UK I'd definitely leave it to the people paid to take risks.
This is where the serious fun begins.
Handguns were banned in Britain after a middle-aged hand-gun enthusiast walked into a school and shot most of the kids. At the time handguns were incredibly rare, mainly owned by handgun sporting enthusiasts, olympic competitors, etc. I don't have the figures but I would reckon one houshold in a thousand had one. Hardly a deterrent to burglars. It has nothing to do with the recent rise in gun crime which is being caused by hand guns illegally smuggled in from the Carribean by drugslords. The rise in gun crime is nearly all crimnal-on-criminal killing. I've not heard of a gun being used in a house burglary.
It doesn't matter which ape activates the Monolith
The comedian either used the corporate policies or corporate misunderstanding to make his program.
Note that burgulary has dropped by about half in the UK since 1995 **, mainly due to more alarms and window locks etc. but partly due to police targetting persistant burgulars personally rather than trying to solve individual crimes.
** Figure obtained from the British Crime Survey available at http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/crimeew0304.html
The BCS is generally regarded as reasonably accurate since it relies on a large survey (e.g. asking 'have you been burgled in the last year?') rather than relying on police figures which fluctuate depending on recording methods and willingness of victims to report the crime.
I'm not going to get into an extended debate about speeding here, but since you're offering the standard and ill-informed counter-argument, I'll suggest to you the reasons why the argument does not hold for long.
That argument ignores the fact that the law has been changed, dramatically, and not to improve road safety. This is why it has lost the respect of the motoring public. For example, the government in the UK reduced the legal speed limit from 70 to 50mph for several miles along a major trunk road around the capital city. At the same time, they installed dozens of speed cameras, many of them carefully concealed behind road signs, to enforce the new limits. The result was a massive increase in fines on that stretch of road, along with many drivers travelling at speeds that were perfectly legal yesterday being issued with penalty points today. Would you like to guess what happened to the accident figures after those cameras went in, though?
It's also a fact that when drivers are forced to drive absurdly slowly because someone setting the limit has paranoia, then driver concentration is dramatically reduced, which in turn dramatically increases the likelihood of an accident in the first place. This is the problem with giving local authorities the ability to set their own limits: central government guidelines based on science and research are frequently ignored in favour of local political expediency, resulting in blanket 20mph limits on roads that should be 30 because the locals (who quite happily do 30 in everyone else's backyard) asked for it. Motorways -- our safest roads -- are stuck at a limit they were given decades ago, in spite of recent advances in car design and driver training; the accidents are often caused by idiots driving about 2cm from the vehicle in front or changing lanes incorrectly, not because of the high speed itself, yet "speed kills" is all we hear from the government puppies.
We all hate idiotic drivers who think they're better than they really are and assume they can therefore exceed all speed limits without consequences. The point here is that an awful lot of people who are better informed than the government disagree with them. Motoring groups have done their own studies, which don't always agree with the government's research lab. Statisticians have looked at the government's conclusions from their figures, and flown 747s through the holes in the arguments. The government made up a TV ad intended to show the difference that driving at 35mph makes over driving at 30mph; what it actually showed was a car driven at 30mph stopping well short of a child stepping into the road, while a car that would have been illegal to have on the road because its brakes didn't work correctly skidded way further down the road and hit the child. There is a large number of police advanced drivers who disagree with the way cameras are used instead of real traffic police (whose numbers have been reduced by something like 2/3 in recent years, leading to increases in the numbers of drivers dangerous through drinks, drugs, lack of concentration, and various other categories all of which contribute to more accidents than excessive speed). Even the most senior police officer in the land has stated bluntly that speed cameras should be used to increase road safety and not to raise revenue.
So, before you go around advocating sticking to speed limits and admonishing those who don't, you might like to take a step back and consider whether those limits are actually set with road safety in mind at all.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.