Slashdot Mirror
CCTVs Don't Work in the UK
ShakaUVM writes "People who give up a little bit of liberty for a little bit of security deserve neither, the saying goes. But what happens when people give up so much liberty their entire country resembles an Orweillean dystopia — but the pervasive monitoring doesn't help to solve any crimes? That's what is happening in the United Kingdom today. While the Guardian tries to put a good spin on the entire fiasco, the fact remains that CCTVs only help with 3% of all street robberies, the very crimes they were supposed to be best at protecting.
Should England finally move to eliminate its troubling state surveillance program?"
Well said sir. And, as the article explains -- far more even handedly than slashdot's biased summary -- the reason that CCTV footage doesn't help solve crimes is because no-one ever looks at it.
Yes folks, slashdot's latest evidence that the UK is a surveillance society is a report that states that no-one ever looks at the CCTV footage. But our summarisers have never let the facts get in the way of a good knee jerk.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Yes folks, slashdot's latest evidence that the UK is a surveillance society is a report that states that no-one ever looks at the CCTV footage
Don't forget that the oft-reported massive figure for the number of CCTV cameras in the UK is *completely made up*. It's a fake figure. It was concocted by looking at the number of CCTV cameras on a section of the main street of a particularly rough part of London which was deliberately chosen because of the high numbers of CCTV cameras covering things like pawn shops, bookies, off-licences and cheque-cashing shops. Then this already artificially high figure was scaled up by multiplying by the amount of road in the whole of the UK. So, the number would be accurate if *every inch* of the UK's roads was like the middle of a particularly shitey area of London.
It's not, though.
Did you know that in the US, because it's legal for people to walk around with guns, *every single American* is robbed at gunpoint *every day*? No, you didn't did you? But it's true! It said so on the Internet!
In my part of the UK, the spy cameras were installed under the pretext of protecting the people, only the idiots bought that excuse, and they've been proved to be mostly useless for that proported use.
April 2008, the law in the UK was changed by the government which now allows any official spy camera to be used for "traffic enforcement" (more easy money).
Lo and behold one week into this new scheme, in my local area a woman was attacked and sexually assaulted at a bus stop while waiting for a bus. What happened we'll never 100% know, because the camera operator was more interested in catching motorists going in a wrong lane, then to record video of tha assault and catch the guy that did the assault (what the camera was installed for in the first place).
The whole camera installation nationwide is for state surveillance of you, and it feels really uncomfortable knowing you are being filmed walking or driving around, whilst criminals remain untouchable and don't give a damn about the cameras.
Resist the cameras in your country, or suffer the surveillance fate of the UK.
Take Nobody's Word For It.