Spy Drones Take to the Sky in the UK

Novotny writes to tell us The Guardian is reporting that the UK's has launched a new breed of police 'spy drone'. Originally used in military applications, these drones are being put into use as a senior police officer warns the surveillance society in the UK is eroding civil liberties. In the UK, there are an estimated 4.2 million surveillance cameras already, and you are on average photographed 300 times a day going about your business. Is there any evidence to suggest that this increasingly Orwellian society is actually any safer?"

To quote a recent movie...

[XxtraLarGe]

"ENGLAND PREVAILS!" (V for Vendetta [imdb.com] in case you're curious...)

Video of it in action

[Maddog Batty]

Not very exciting but the Beeb has a video here [bbc.co.uk]

Re:Is there any evidence that's what this is about

[ookabooka]

everyone photographed hundreds of times a day

What they didn't mention is that with all those video cameras each frame counts as an individual photograph, so standing in view of a 30fps camera for 4 seconds counts as 120 individual photographs. Not as scary once you do the math.

Add compulsory reporting

[Misch]

Is there any evidence to suggest that this increasingly Orwellian society is actually any safer?

The UK is adding laws requiring compulsory reporting of people who might be criminals. [bbc.co.uk]

It really is falling into order, comrade. This is doubleplusungood.

Possibly effective

[PIPBoy3000]

Early studies seem to suggest that crime isn't reduced (BBC [bbc.co.uk] and NYCLU [nyclu.org]).

A comprehensive British study, published in 2002, found that the presence of closed circuit television (CCTV) surveillance had little or no effect on crime in public transportation or city centers, and had no effect on violent crimes.3 Researchers examined twenty-two controlled and peer-reviewed scientific studies that analyzed the use of surveillance cameras in British and North-American cities. Of the five studies conducted in American cities, including two in New York City, not one found a reduction in crime attributable to video surveillance.4

In a more recent study [aic.gov.au], it seemed to help deter crime.

A review (Welsh & Farrington 2006) of high quality evaluations of the effectiveness of CCTV as a crime prevention measure concluded that there was an overall eight percent reduction in crime in the experimental areas where CCTV was installed compared with a nine percent increase in crime in the control areas. The review included evaluations of 19 sites in the UK and the USA. Other findings from this meta-analysis concluded that CCTV interventions were more successful in car parks than in other settings such as city centres or housing estates, and that CCTV interventions were generally more successful in the UK than in the USA.

Re:We didn't get surveillance by democratic proces

[Tim Ward]

We never voted for those cameras in the UK

They might not have done round your way, but they do round here. We lose votes every time we don't install enough new cameras fast enough in my council.

Re:The #1 rule of being in public

[untaken_name]

Something I haven't seen very much of ITT and which this thread could really use: truth about the cameras they're using. I used to work for a security company - not guards and such, but implementing card/badge readers, cameras, gates, alarms, etc. Most of our customers wanted the psych benefit of having cameras everywhere, but they didn't want to shell out the huge bucks for GOOD cameras. Criminals (and employees) can't tell the difference. However, those same companies got really ticked when there was a theft and they couldn't identify the perpetrator. "Well this guy's face is just a blob and we can only tell he was wearing a t-shirt and jeans! This camera's useless!" Of course, we'd show them the job sheet where we recommended the expensive cameras and they shot them down. Just like with everything else, you get what you pay for. I would be EXTREMELY surprised if most government-purchased cameras were very good. Obviously, they'll shell out for the goods in some areas, but for the most part, I'd bet you could get away with just about anything if you were wearing oversized, drab clothes, a baseball cap pulled low, and avoided looking directly into any camera (that you could see). Now, I wouldn't personally bet on it, but I wouldn't be afraid that some cop was watching me pick my nose on the street and annotating some file on me or anything. Unless you're shelling out the giant bucks for really good cameras and facial recognition hardware/software, you're probably getting the same crappy cameras convenience stores use. I hope I don't have to explain that you can't take a small part of the image from a camera and 'enhance' it to get facial features, etc. If the camera doesn't have a high enough resolution to start with, you can't make the picture much better than it is normally.

image

[Scrameustache]

This is the image of four suicide bombers before they blew up the London subway.

http://img508.imageshack.us/img508/364/bombersje7. jpg [imageshack.us]

Now with actual linkage goodness.

New and radical concept

[Charcharodon]

Using an arial drone to look down by the police, what a novel concept. Oh wait we've been using helicopters to do the same for the past thirty years in most major cities in the US. A drone is cheaper to fly and can stay on station for the better part of half of a day at a time, and the pilot doesn't have to land to grab a donut and hit the bathroom, he just high-5's the back-up pilot and walks out of the room.

When I was a kid I always thought it was the coolest thing when ever the St Louis police helicopter (aka the Brown Hornet, it was brown, duh) landed in the parking lot of the Wendy's down the street. They'd kick the observer out to grab a bag of burgers.

I moved to the UK last year for work, and the only difference between the US and the UK is the fact the CCTV camera are labeled in the UK and typically not so in the US. Other than that there don't seem to be any more or less of them. What you don't see much of is the police. They don't "Fly the flag" near as much as they do in the US.

The only other thing that cracks me up is the radar cameras, most of which seem to have had every possible form of vandalism done to them. From being painted over to being blown up. I even saw one funny picture of a guy with a porky pig mask on with an fireman's emergency gas powered saw making short work of the post one was mounted on.

Re:Wait...

[jinxidoru]

Freakonomics [amazon.com] actually addresses the drop in crime in a fairly rigorous fashion. It's a very interesting read and ends with some very interesting conclusions, such as a correlation between the legalization of abortion and the decrease in crime.

Re:Wait...

[pwainwright]

Yes, someone voted them in.
About 22% of the electorate, I believe.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/vote_2005/c onstituencies/default.stm [bbc.co.uk]
(see the "share of electorate" graph based on British Electoral Facts by Rallings & Thrasher)

Re:Wait...

[daveschroeder]

"The man who would choose security over freedom deserves neither." ~Thomas Jefferson

Ugh. Where to begin.

First of all, you got the quote wrong. It's:

"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Second, it's Benjamin Franklin, not Thomas Jefferson. (Wow.)

Anyway, note essential liberty...a little temporary safety.

Not that it's somehow never right to sacrifice any liberty for any amount of safety - we do it every day. It's called the rule of law and is necessary for collectively maintaining order and stability in society.

I can't believe how much this quote is bastardized and misinterpreted as it is continually trotted out in opposition to anything the "government" does in a free society in an attempt to fulfill its obligation to its citizens.

You kind of topped them all by completely misattributing it, though. Good job.

Re:New and radical concept

[Charcharodon]

I was moved to the UK for work. Aim high Air Force!

I'd be silly to pass up an assignment overseas. Most people pay to visit UK/EU.

Quality of life is very subjective. I like it, it reminds me of what most cities where like in the States 20-30 years ago (with 5x times the population), before all the mega-stores and chains blighted the landscape. Most shops and resturants are of the local variety. Wages for middle income and lower income are pretty bad and the unemployment rate is well into the double digits. Quite a few Brits I've met seem to work 2-3 jobs. If you are a teenager good luck finding a job, even the local pizza delivery boy is in his early fifties. If you are at the top end of the pay scale, high-tech, global corp, multi-lingual type jobs then the pay is wonderful, but those are usually US companies paying those wages. The Brits making the big $$'s are usually overseas themselves. Exchange rate makes things very weird so to say pay has caught up is not accurate, it all depends on your situation.

Everything is badly overpriced and the VAT makes it even worse. I just try no to think about how many dollars I'm spending when I drop 100 quid on something (~$200) I've noticed that most things are price the same as the states they just swap the pound for the $, so you end up paying twice as much. Food and beer are the only things cheaper, but then again I'm right in the middle of the UK farmland. The beer isn't actually cheaper, but it's sold by the pint and has quit a bit more alcohol in it, so it ends up being cheaper per unit. Housing is like being in the popular places in California. The prices are start around $150,000 for a one bedroom apt and work their way up.

It's not all bad there are some things about living over here I like, and some that just makes me shake my head and wonder what the hell the locals are thinking. The roads and parking situation is pretty bad practially where every you go. I will say this it is 10 times better than most of the areas I've lived or visited in California, except maybe Monterey, and the odds of bumping into someone who speaks some form of English alot better. You may not understand their English, but it is English. I crack myself up when a linguistic difficulty arrises. I just apologize and say that I'm an American and that I don't understand English. It usually gets a laugh. The people are very friendly here.