Slashdot Mirror
UK Government To Demand Data On Every Call, Email, and Tweet
judgecorp writes "The UK government is proposing a law that would require phone and Internet companies to store information on all communications, and hand it to the security services when required. The Communications Capabilities Development Programme (CCDP) abandoned by the last government is back on the table, proposed as a means to increase security, and likely to be pushed through before the Olympics in London, according to reports."
did you just compare CCTV inside of stores to CCTV in public spaces... seriously?
You know all those statistics you hear about how many cameras there are in the UK -- originally they said 4.2 million, but more recently that figure has been debunked and replaced with one around 1.5 million -- you do realise they include store cameras, right? In fact, that almost all of them are store cameras.
There are only around 60,000 public cameras in the UK. The largest deployment is London's (10,000 cameras - similar to the size of the deployment in Chicago, with a population less than a quarter the size of London's). The remaining 50,000 are scattered across around 800 smaller deployments. Most towns don't have any.
It's harder to find information on US deployments. Chicago, as mentioned, has about 10,000, with the mayor expressing a desire to "put one on every street corner". New York also has a large deployment (3,000 - larger than any in the UK outside of London). Beyond these, figures become scarce. A number of cities published figures for trial installation sizes in the region of 30-50 cameras, but it isn't clear whether these deployments were increased in size beyond this. It seems likely that there are similar numbers of public cameras in the US versus UK (although probably not on a per-capita basis).