Insecure Beneath the Lidless Eye of Sauron ? - it is now time to license CCTV surveillance camera operators
The Home Office, especially under NuLabour, is always scrabbling about with new legislation, and toying with unproven technological magic fixes to social problems.
Instead of grinding on with NuLabour's expensive, intrusive and ineffective against terrorists, centralised compulsory biometric identity database and ID card plans, and instead of hinting at a new "acts preparatory to terrorism" offence, rather than using the existing draconian Terrorism Act legislation, there is an area of legislation which the Government could be more usefully pursuing.
Now is the time for the licensing of public CCTV surveillance camera systems and operators.
It is self evident that the thousands of CCTV surveillance and spy cameras on the London Tube, on the Buses and in streets and buildings along the number 30 Bus route, were of no use whatsover in acting as a deterrent against this weeks's bomb attacks in London.
This is despite years of public taxpayers subsidies and endless propaganda campaigns such as the creepy "Secure Beneath the Watchful Eyes" campaign.
It is now two days since the bomb attacks. We doubt if the CCTV footage available to authorities has been analysed properely yet.
We doubt if all the available CCTV footage has even been identified yet.
Presumably the investigators are concentrating on what they already control in the Tube and Bus systems, and the large commercial systems that they are aware of, but eventually, every passenger on the Bus route 30 will also be considered to be a suspect until they are "eliminated" from the investigation.
It is at this point that the current lack of a regulated license scheme for CCTV camera surveillance systems is harming the hunt for the bombers.
The Bus bomb went off about 9.17am. By 10am the police should have been able to print out a list of CCTV cameras and the contact details of the operators along the Route 30, in order to contact them and to get copies of any tapes or hard disks that they are using, to preserve any possible intelligence or judicial evidence.
We do not want a repeat of the abuse of public CCTV monitoring, which occurred in two recent, still unsolved murder cases in South West London, of Amelie Delagrange and Marsha McDonnell, both of whom were recorded on Bus CCTV cameras, shortly before alighting and then being murdered a short distance away from the bus stops.
Instead of publicising images of an actual suspect, thy technology was abused to hunt down "witnesses" who almost certainly had no view of any potential attackers lurking in the area - it is almost impossible to see very far through a Bus window at night. None of this CCTV hunt for "witnesses" resulted in any arrests or in anyone being charged with either of these two brutal nurders, and the "witnesses", looked, to a casual obsever, as if they were "wanted in connection with a murder", when they of all people, actually had cast iron alibis, as they were still on the bus that had just dropped off the murder victims, being transported away from the murder scenes.
We do not want to see a repeat of this sort of behavior by the authorities, in a few weeks time, where possible "witnesses" who might or might not have seen a "terrorist suspect" boarding a bus etc. are hunted down, on the off chance, because they have been captured on CCTV, but have not yet come forward as witnesses, probably because they have not actually witnessed anything that they can now remember.
People overseas will be astonished to learn that there is a massive centralised database of television recivers, in order to finance the BBC via the controversial licence fee, which is ruthlessly enforced through a system of inspections and fines, but there is absolutely nothing comparable for CCTV cameras and monitors, which are allegedly installed for "the purposes of the prevention or detection of crime", in order to be exempt from the Data Protection Act.
Apart from not knowing where all the relevant available CCTV camseras are, without having to waste police manpower and , crucially, time after the event, by knocking on every door, ther eis the question of minimum standards of maintainance.
After every major terrorist incident, such as the Real IRA bomb outside the BBC White City complex, or the Soho/Brixton nail bombs, the Metropolitan Police end up advertising and appealing to operators of CCTV systems to do basic maintaince like cleaning the lenses and making sure that they were not re-using the videotapes too often. There is no legal requirement for the operators of CCTV systems to do so.
How long should CCTV video tapes or hard disk footage be kept for, before being wiped out and resused ? The NuLabour Government has been very prescriptive in its attempts, under the Anti-terrorism Crime and Security Act 2001, to introduce volunatry / mandatory Data Retention for telecommunications or internet communications data, and is even policy laundering this sort of scheme through the European Union. Why have they not made any attempt to mandate that public CCTV footage should kept for, say a week before being overwritten or erased ?
There are various voluntary Codes of Practice which some of th epublically funded CCTV schemes try to obey, but there is no consistency or minimum standards throughout the country, where terrorists or criminals may operate.
CCTV cameras which invade our privacy, on the promise of a trade off
with security, should be operated under an enforcable central registration and inspection scheme. CCTV technology itself is relatively cheap and reliable, it is the large scale management of this technology which is badly lacking.
A centralised registration and licensing scheme , should not be used as the basis for building a centralised panaopticon, actually linking lots of disparate CCTV systems together in real time, literally as in George Orwell's 1984
"The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and except in darkness, every movement scrutinised."N.B. Todays CCTV cameras use infrared technology and can see in the dark and can zoom in beyond normal human visual range, and no longer need a wired infrastructure, but can work over mobile phone networks. The video and audio signals can be processed electronically to automatically attempt to pick out your face from a database of suspects. There is even research ongoing into classifying "suspicious" behaviour automatically from video images. Such CCTV systems have already been linked to automatically fire military weapons systems
If NuLabour want to respond to the lessons from the 7th July 2005 attacks in London, then they should legislate and fund such a public CCTV surveillance licensing and inspection scheme, instead of wasting money on expensive and unproven technology like biometric ID databases or Passive Millimetre Wave "see through your clothes" scanners etc.
Comments
The Observer reports
"However, the investigation has been set back significantly by the discovery that the closed circuit television camera in the number 30 bus, which exploded on Tavistock Square 56 minutes after the tube blasts, had not been working since June, a senior security source has admitted. Investigators are combing images from thousands of CCTV cameras mounted on buses or at stations in the hope of identifying the bombers."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/attackonlondon/story/0,16132,1525481,00.html
Posted by: wtwu | July 10, 2005 7:05 AM
Just throw the ring back into the fire and all will be right with the world again, right?
Posted by: Spy Blog | July 18, 2005 8:07 AM
Here's an American view (New York Times) on the London CCTV menace:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/23/international/europe/23cameras.html
Posted by: A Tench | July 23, 2005 8:33 AM
Re: my last post. You have to register (free) with NY Times to view the article. In case you don't want to register, here's the text in full. I particularly agree with the last sentence of the article.
Cameras in Britain Record the Criminal and the Banal
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: July 23, 2005
The cameras of the London Underground never sleep.
Yesterday, the London police released images of four men they were "urgently" seeking in connection with the attacks on Thursday.
The images showed four men in subway stations and on a bus shortly before detonators on four bombs went off, though the bombs themselves failed to explode.
The police did not identify the men, but Assistant Police Commissioner Andy Hayman said, "It is crucial that detectives are able to question them about yesterday's events."
How did the images appear so quickly?
"It's very easy," said a spokesman for the London transportation system, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under British civil service rules. "We have 6,000 cameras across the network," with 9,000 planned by 2010. About 1,800 are installed in London's train stations, and some on its buses as well.
They constitute a small portion of the estimated 4.2 million closed-circuit television cameras, or CCTV, across the country. It is commonly estimated that the average Briton crosses the line of sight of a security camera 300 times each day.
The result is that when the attacks occurred, cameras were recording. The network is moving toward all-digital recording, said the spokesman, with some of the images stored on hard drives, some burned onto DVD's and some on videotape. All of the images from the day of the attacks in their various formats were gathered and given to the police.
A spokeswoman for the London police, who also asked that her name not be used under the same civil service rules, said no high-tech wizardry, like facial recognition software, was used to examine the video record for images of suspicious-looking young men with backpacks.
"We certainly had lots of CCTV to look at," she said, but "we had lots of officers" to look at the video. "People are drafted in," she added, though she declined to say how many.
The video sentinels were originally proposed to prevent crime according to the theory of the panopticon of Jeremy Bentham, the 18th-century philosopher. The panopticon was a prison designed to keep the inmates under constant scrutiny, which would theoretically reduce bad behavior because of the likelihood of getting caught.
In modern Britain, the cameras have proved more useful as a tool for investigating crimes, because no one can keep up with the millions of hours of video recorded daily, said Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University who specializes in privacy and has studied the British surveillance system.
"The fact that the bombers struck in the most heavily surveilled city in the world, the city with more CCTV cameras than any other, reminds us of the chilling but obvious truth: suicide attacks, are by their nature, very difficult to prevent," he said. "Nevertheless, the London bombings suggest that cameras may be one of many useful tools in investigating attacks after the fact."
The National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders, a crime prevention charity in Britain, published a study in 2002 that said the growing network of cameras was not as effective in reducing crime as its proponents had claimed.
"The extent of CCTV coverage and the government's funding of new systems has increased dramatically over the last decade," the group wrote, "with very little substantive research evidence to suggest that CCTV works." The study suggested that low-tech measures, like money for better street lighting, could have a more pronounced effect.
Professor Rosen said the effectiveness of cameras, despite their popularity with governments, should be weighed against the benefits of measures like money for more police and intelligence officers. "Spain and Germany, after all, have identified suspects in major terrorist attacks without CCTV cameras," he said.
Posted by: A Tench | July 23, 2005 1:26 PM
Seen this? Thought it was worth adding here: http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2005/07/psychovideography-fortress-urbanism.html
Posted by: C Chamberlain | August 4, 2005 4:00 PM
Another example of the apparent failure of CCTV surveillance where one would have expected it to have been available. - the shooting of the innocent Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell Tube station on the day after the July 21st attacks - apparently there is no CCTV footage available from the multiple cameras at the Tube station.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/focus/story/0,6903,1548808,00.html
With London Transport allegedly on a high state of alert after the July 7th bombs, why were the CCTV cameras at Stockwell Tube station not working on the 22nd of July ?
No mention is made of any CCTV on the No 2 Bus either.
There needs to be complete transparency about these issues, or else people will assume that the CCTV images are actually being covered up in case they are too embarassing for the authorities.
Posted by: wtwu | August 14, 2005 2:09 PM
Posted by: Vilyamuf | October 1, 2007 11:05 AM