Slashdot Mirror
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."
The Principality of Monaco (Monte-Carlo) has always had cameras, gvt informers and can legaly tap any conversation anytime. They can send cops inside your appartment anytime they see fit also. There isn't much you can do because of the medieval legal system.
I know that to keep the dialogue alarmist, they mention that ONLY the UK has been a victim of the 1984 school of thought (hey, Tony Blair's socialism is very social hey?! The Torries would have never been allowed this. Oh well, good one Tony.)
There's another article on the Guardian today about this kind of topic, though this one is only about tracking criminals. Welcome to the prison without bars.
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.
You trust the government at the moment. Well, that's nice. What about the next government which you don't trust. I guess they'll just go and remove all the cameras then since you don't trust them.
And also, why do you cite the conjestion charges? They were implemented by Ken Livingston, who was voted in despite the Labour party rigging their internal elections so he wouldn't run under their name. He was in fact kicked out of the party as a result of running for (and becoming) tha Mayor (reinstated now, since it makes the Labour party look good to have a guarnteed winning candidate). So your example of a good government which you trust with speed cameras is actually something independend of the government set up by someone expelled from the ruling party.
Well, I'm glad you trust that. I don't.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I chased him about 600 meters but he ran into a dark council estate and was not that stupid, the guy still had a knife/friends and I had neither.
The police came. Lots of them. Ordinary bobbies and 5 pairs of CID. I retraced the route. There were 10 CCTV camera along the route that I chased him, and NONE of them were pointing the right way to capture this guy, over 600m. The only footage was from a Sainsburies private CCTV that he ran in front of. The police say Camden is one of the most surveilled areas in London.
Just not that bit.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
On a side note, and in total agreement with your mistrust of out current administration..
During this years peace rally, for some reason the cameras in central london stopped workign for the duration...
this served 2 purposes IMHO..
1, makes it easier for the government to tell us only 500k attended (even police put it at over 1 million),
2, no footage to support any potential claims of police aggression.
bah!*@%!
Two weeks ago I witnessed an act of vandalism at Mansion house tube station. Two female youths threw a bottle at a train waiting on the platform, spraying glass along the platform and the train.
.uk :))
There were two camera filming them. I also photographed them with my camera phone. I reported the problem to a station worker, who was not interested in dealing with it, so I reported it to British transport police (after 3 failed attempts, but that's another story about law enforcement in
After a week, they came back to me and said that they were unable to take any action as the footage from the CCTV wasn't clear enough to ensure that the people I took the picture of were actually the people throwing the bottle.
This is the second or third time I've seen CCTV fail miserably.
If a crime happens somewhere close to where you are, and you match the vauge description given by witnesses to that crime? Then you are guilty. At very least, you'll be explaining why you were there, and trying to explain that you didn't do the crime.
When I was in high school, a teacher did an exercise with us. A person walked into the classroom screaming, and "hit" the teacher (a fake punch). The teacher fell down, and the guy ran out of the room. The teacher then stood up and said, "Now write down what you just saw, including a description of the other guy". There were 30 students in the classroom, and none of them wrote an accurate description of him. To prove the point, the guy came back in, and everyone read their descriptions of him to him.
Most people are terrible witnesses, unless they are focused on details rather than reacting to the situation. Almost nobody focuses on details of the person.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Whereabouts did you live? I've lived in London for about 10 years, in various areas, studying and working in Central London the whole time, and I've seen maybe one accident (cyclist hit by a bus).
Sure, I've seen a lot of traffic james - when I lived in Clapham Junction, for example, in the mornings I'd regularly beat the bus walking to the station (10 minutes walk, give or take) even when starting out at exactly the same time (ie it was right there when I started walking), but my overall experience couldn't be more different than yours.
a toll that's really not that great compared to parking charges
That's a good point, and one I've not seen made before - parking fees in Central London are *insane*. You can easily pay 4 or 5 times the congestion charge to park for a day, depending on the area.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
And of course, when the government controls all the cameras, they can conveniently be switched off for maintenance when, say, a few hundred people are illegally held for several hours by the police on May Day. Then again, this is the government who brought you Iraq's WMD and the "Speed Kills" compaign, and which now wants to set up a national database of terrorist suspec^W^Wbiometric identity information, so of course we should trust them.
In some specific cases, cameras do work well. The congestion charging example wasn't bad, although even in that case, there have already been some quite spectacular abuses. I'd say the cameras in police traffic cars are a better example.
However, those advocating widespread use of cameras should really check the facts. We also have town centre cameras that just push crime into harder-to-police outlying distracts, without actually lowering it. We have speed cameras, which have a far from conclusive track record in increasing road safety but have raised a fortune for government and taken hundreds of thousands off the roads, with numerous local authority idiots cynically repeating the party line in spite of all the informed criticism. We have people being convicted on CCTV "camera evidence" where you can barely even see their faces. Hell, we have a small but significant number of camera operators who turn the CCTV units around to watch girls getting changed in their bedrooms.
The problem with surveillance cameras, like big national databases, is that the system is never perfect. Somehow it never quite brings the benefits it ought to, and yet the abuses (or genuine mistakes) are often widespread, and there is rarely an adequate mechanism in place to protect you if you are unfortunate enough to become a victim. All the while it costs the tax-payer a fortune and runs all the usual civil liberties risks. If Big Brother is watching us, it's about time Big Mother and Father gave him a spanking and told him to behave like a mature adult.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
So many flaws in your post I really dont have time to address them all.
There are 10,000 gun related crimes in the UK - there are 500,000 in the USA where you say "Personal ownership of fire arms is a much easier and, in my opinion, much more effective way of preventing crime".
The UK has a fifth the population of the USA yet has 50 times less gun crime.
So.. yes you are talking out of your ass.
Bush and Blair ate my sig!