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CCTVs Don't Work in the UK
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed May 07, 2008 12:14 PM
from the your-rights-offline dept.
from the your-rights-offline dept.
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?"
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An anonymous reader writes to tell us that it seems the UK is trying make up for their judicious use of surveillance cameras that, according to recent research, do not actually deter crime, by using the surveillance network to prosecute petty crimes. "Conjuring up the bogeymen of terrorists, online pedophiles and cybercriminals, the U.K. passed a comprehensive surveillance law, The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, in 2000. The law allows 'the interception of communications, carrying out of surveillance, and the use of covert human intelligence sources' to help prevent crime, including terrorism. Recent reports in the U.K. media indicate that the laws are being used for everything but terrorism investigations."
[+]
China's All-Seeing Eye 213 comments
Greg Walton brings us a lengthy story from Rolling Stone which describes China's comprehensive surveillance project, dubbed Golden Shield. The 'Great Firewall of China,' which we've discussed in the past, is but one aspect of Golden Shield. It also includes national ID cards, CCTV networks, and face-recognition software. This investigation showcases just how massive an undertaking it truly is. When finished, it will dwarf London's surveillance system. Quoting:
"Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city. Many are in public spaces, disguised as lampposts. The closed-circuit TV cameras will soon be connected to a single, nationwide network, an all-seeing system that will be capable of tracking and identifying anyone who comes within its range -- a project driven in part by U.S. technology and investment. Over the next three years, Chinese security executives predict they will install as many as 2 million CCTVs in Shenzhen, which would make it the most watched city in the world. (Security-crazy London boasts only half a million surveillance cameras.) ... This is the most important element of all: linking all these tools together in a massive, searchable database of names, photos, residency information, work history and biometric data. When Golden Shield is finished, there will be a photo in those databases for every person in China: 1.3 billion faces."
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At the risk of being arrested... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:At the risk of being arrested... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:At the risk of being arrested... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's the same reason to be happy about RIAA strategy. They fail so badly their tactics will be much harder to use anywhere else.
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Re:At the risk of being arrested... (Score:5, Interesting)
I envision a system where every person has a personal recorder that they carry around, and all the output of public cameras is mirrored and shared in a fashion that made it difficult to tamper with. Something along the lines of Freenet, except simplified by the fact that you don't have to anonymize the sources.
Any time there was a contested event, it would be possible to examine the footage from the CCTVs and from the personal data recorders of both parties. Barring a sophisticated attack, this would give you the facts right away. And, if someone tried to tamper with the public record and there were any anomilies, then you could start looking at where they came from with lots of forensic data available.
This would have all sorts of rewards... we would be able to watch the watchers, and we would be able to clearly see those ill conceived laws that are being casually broken all over the place so we could remove them from the books. This would protect us from selective enforcement of laws that aren't meant to be obeyed, but only grant power to the rulers.
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Re:At the risk of being arrested... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the same reason to be happy about RIAA strategy. They fail so badly their tactics will be much harder to use anywhere else.
You're optimistic. In politics, results do not feature strongly in the feedback cycle; politicians are not typically looking to see whether a policy achieves its purported end, but rather that it will be tolerated by the people.
That is: experiments test feasibility to a politician, not utility.
The politician's mode of thinking is not strongly connected to any kind of scientific reasoning, but rather to correct intent ("evil" must be "fought against") and, to some extent, social theory. They understand democracy as a check upon the excesses of "theory", but they do not consider theory in the scientific sense, but rather in the social science sense.
Is it any wonder that politicians and their kin in management talk of the "difference between theory and practice"?
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Re:At the risk of being arrested... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:But they DO work in Philadelphia (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me quote the article:
So are you suggesting we use news choppers for surveillance? That article has NOTHING to do with CCTV.
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Re:But they DO work in Philadelphia (Score:5, Insightful)
It means, you can not exceed speed-limit by 1 mile/h, nor drop a candy-wrap on the street, nor ask for money on subway. You will also not be beaten by a cop, nor will they be able to treat fire-hydrants as special parking spots reserved for "the force". Etcaetera...
Do we want the laws obeyed and enforced 100%, or do we want to live some "wriggle-room" for the dystopian future, when it will be needed to fight some kind of oppression?
I would say that yes, we want laws to be 100% enforced. But we need to get rid of 99% of the laws. The alternative is laws that everyone is guilty of violating, and enforcers who can immediately find a reason to arrest and convict anyone they see fit.
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Uninformed paranoia, for the most part (Score:5, Informative)
Of the remainder, the vast majority of them are traffic-cameras at junctions, in speed-cameras (yes, these count, for some reason), etc. What's left are the police-owned ones which watch people in high-crime areas or (usually in partnership with the businesses) high-people-traffic areas (eg: Regent St., Oxford St. in London).
I lived in London for ~15 years before moving to CA. I don't feel any less "observed" here than I did in London. I'm on-camera in CA if I get money from an ATM; if I drive across a junction (try looking up once in a while); if I get on the BART; if I get on Caltrain; if I go to a bank;
I really wish people would stop pandering to the tabloid press trying to sell copy. Sure, there are cameras. Everywhere(*). Deal.
Simon
(*)Well, every country I've been to, anyway.
Re:Uninformed paranoia, for the most part (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:Uninformed paranoia, for the most part (Score:5, Informative)
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!
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Another obvious Answer? (Score:5, Funny)
All hail our great overseers!
Re:Another obvious Answer? (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, I grew up in Belfast. For those of you who are unaware, we've had a spot of trouble there over the last few decades. It's not as bad these days as it has been, but still to this day there are certain areas you simply don't go near in case something happens.
One of these "flash points" was just down the road from me, it was at a bridge that linked a Protestant estate with a Catholic one. Naturally, people who tried to cross this bridge were usually targeted by those waiting at the other side.
Unfortunately, there wasn't really an alternative route to get from one side to the other, that was less than 90mins in the opposite direction.
Naturally, there was always fighting and/or rioting on this bloody bridge (which went over a motorway - I'm sure you can imagine the potential risks of falling bricks and bottles there) and more than a couple of people got seriously injured on it - some even died.
Then one day they put a CCTV camera there. Actually, they put a big post there for the CCTV camera to be attached to and it IMMEDIATELY stopped nearly all violence on and around this bridge. Even before the camera was attached, it was enough to scare the little shits that started all of this away and now it's relatively safe to walk by there.
That alone is enough for me to have faith in the CCTV systems. They may not help in solving crimes, but they definitely do help PREVENT them, which I think is much more important.
This is just my experience, though, yours may differ.
Parent
I have no problem with CCTVs (Score:5, Funny)
I have however had one objection; I caught one blatantly checking me and one ex-girlfriend "making out" (let's say) in a park once. The dirty bastard on the end even nodded the camera at me in recognition I'd caught him watching it all.
Re:I have no problem with CCTVs (Score:5, Insightful)
But, that doesn't seem to be the case. People aren't concerned about it:
That doesn't sound like people are worried about the eye in the sky at all. It sounds like they're ignoring it, and the police are finding the system too damned awkward to actually retrieve the useful images.
First off, kudos for the public shag.
But, how can you on the one hand say you don't mind the eye in the sky, and on the other hand be somewhat surprised that the bored operator wouldn't zoom in on that if he saw you doing something naughty in a park? If you know they're watching, why would you be surprised they actually did watch?
I mean, it's not like the police are swamping the operators with requests for the images. In all likelihood, he and a bunch of guys pass around copies of all the public nookie they observe. I'm sure there's a whole underground trade in CCTV porn -- from what I hear, there should be a lot of material in the UK.
Cheers
Parent
Oh please (Score:5, Insightful)
3% of what? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm skeptical that the system brings benefits to outweigh the cost, but we should at least argue honestly about the system's alleged efficiency.
CCTV helped end the English Disease (Score:5, Insightful)
But then again I don't really have a problem with being filmed while in public
Heathrow (Score:5, Interesting)
At Heathrow, my laptop needed re-charging. So, I found a power socket, and sat down and started inserting my power converter/adapter into it. The thing looks like an ordinary wall-mounted brick adapter.
Within 5 minutes, I was surrounded by three guys in uniform asking me what I was doing.
I said I am just trying to charge my laptop.
They looked at the adapter, then at the laptop, then at my face. They just stood there looking confused not saying anything. I picked up my stuff, said thanks and just walked away. They didnt follow me or anything.
Weird.
Having surveillance is fine but having smarter people who know how to analyze what they see is even more important.
Re:Exagerate much? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wasn't a major point of 1984 [amazon.com] that only a tiny amount of unusually sensitive people would recognize a totalitarian state for what it is? There was no hope in the proles in Orwell's future England because their lives were just as miserable before as after and they didn't have time to ruminate on things like Winston Smith and Julia. When Smith tried to ask an old man about former days, he couldn't seem to make any argument against the current state of things. Thanks to Smith's own work in the Ministry of Truth, the population couldn't actually read about how bad things really were.
In this instance, I agree England is not yet an Orwellian dystopia. However, dystopias have a way of establishing themselves without many noticing.
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Re:Exagerate much? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Exagerate much? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Exagerate much? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or perhaps you are basing your comment on the headline from a year or two ago that took the number of security cameras (including private ones) per mile on the busiest shopping street in the UK and multiplied it by the number of miles of roads in the UK?
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Re:The elemental fallacy (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:I think... (Score:5, Insightful)
You seem to be operating under the notion that companies install CCTV systems to protect victims of crimes that occur on company property.
This, however, is business and not altruism. Businesses need CCTV to protect themselves from prosecution and to ease the insurance claims process. For example, they need to know that some guy in a hoodie ran up to that old lady, threw her on to the ground and ran off, not that she slipped on the wet surface left by an employee. They definitely care about that. The identity of the attacker? Not so much. So the expenses surrounding the recording and storage of high-resolution images is simply overkill for the company's needs.
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